If
Guaidó comes to power and privatizes PDVSA, U.S. oil companies —
with Chevron and Halliburton leading the pack — stand to make
record profits in the world’s most oil-rich nation, as they did in
Iraq following the privatization of its national oil industry after
U.S. intervention.
by
Whitney Webb
Part
5 - Investing in a gung-ho president
Chevron’s
hopes for a continued U.S. government policy that favors its growth
domestically and globally have continued under the Trump
administration and have been visible for some time, as evidenced by
its $500,000 donation to Trump’s inaugural committee and their top
executive’s praise for the “pro-business environment”
cultivated by the Trump administration. Indeed, in March 2017,
then-Chevron CEO John Watson told CNBC that he had already met with
White House staff on “multiple occasions” in just the
first three months of the administration and had been “encouraged
by those meetings.” “We’ve seen a more pro-business
environment … I think the approach they’re taking toward business
— toward enabling our economy to grow again — is a real
positive,” Watson added.
Halliburton
too has long had high hopes for Trump given that the president held
between $50,000 and $100,000 in company stock up until December 2016,
when he sold his personal stocks to avoid “conflicts of
interest” during his presidency. However, some of
Trump’s earliest policy proposals were described by the media as
directly benefiting Halliburton, including his administration’s
push to open more publicly-held lands in the U.S. to oil drilling.
Furthermore,
the recent scandal that forced Trump’s secretary of the interior,
Ryan Zinke, to resign involved Zinke’s alleged corrupt dealings
with Halliburton chairman David Lesar, suggesting that the Trump
administration’s potential for a conflict of interest with
Halliburton did not magically dissipate following Trump’s sale of
his personal investments.
Since
the early days of the administration, both Halliburton and Chevron
have benefited directly from several Trump administration policies,
both foreign and domestic. For instance, Chevron and Halliburton
benefited substantially from the Trump administration’s tax cuts,
which were recently found to have had “no major impact”
on economic growth or company hiring practices but instead enabled
mega-corporations to buy back stocks en masse in order to increase
their companies’ stock prices. After the passage of those tax cuts,
Chevron executives urged governments around the world to implement
similar legislation.
In
addition, consider Trump’s 2017 decision to withdraw from the
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which Reuters
explained as “a global standard for governments to disclose
their revenues from oil, gas, and mining assets, and for companies to
report payments made to obtain access to publicly owned resources, as
well as other donations.” Bloomberg noted at the time that the
Trump administration’s decision to withdraw had followed “a
long lobbying battle waged by the American Petroleum Institute, Exxon
Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp.”
The
involvement of top U.S. oil corporations like Chevron in the
administration’s decision to withdraw from the EITI led Corinna
Gilfillan, head of the U.S. Office at NGO Global Witness, to state
that it was “Exxon and Chevron’s preference for secrecy that
[had] made it impossible for the U.S. to comply.” Gilfillan
then told Common Dreams: “When major Russian and Chinese oil
companies are disclosing more information about their deals around
the world than their U.S. counterparts, you have got to ask: what are
Exxon and Chevron so desperate to hide?”
However,
Chevron, for its part, has not agreed with every Trump policy, as the
company did lob considerable criticism at the Trump administration
last June over his imposition of steel tariffs during the first phase
of the ongoing “trade war” with China. Yet, that criticism
disappeared a few months later, when another Trump policy – his
draconian sanctions targeting Iran’s oil sector – took effect. As
the Washington Examiner noted this past November, Trump’s
sanction policy targeting Iranian oil “has proved a lucrative
one for the shareholders who own oil companies such as ExxonMobil and
Chevron,” resulting in a jump for those companies’
third-quarter earnings “that topped Wall Street expectations by
wide margins.”
The
Examiner went onto note that Trump’s sanctions on Iranian
oil exports led Chevron’s net income to more than double to $4.1
billion, with cash from operations reaching “the highest it has
been in nearly five years.”
However,
Halliburton’s reaction to Trump’s Iran policy is more mixed,
given its considerable business interests in Iran and the fact that
it had benefited from the Iran nuclear deal approved by the previous
administration of Barack Obama. Yet, if the Trump administration’s
regime-change policy targeting Iran succeeds, Halliburton will be
among the top beneficiaries of that policy as well, given its already
established presence in the country.
Now,
with Venezuela’s massive oil resources in the Trump
administration’s crosshairs, Chevron stands to gain once again from
Trump’s foreign policy, which has been guided by oil politics in
several instances.
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