Absentee Landlord

In yesterday's post I mentioned the huge Alberta tar sands and the role Canadian heavy oil will certainly play in our future.

However, Canadian heavy oil would cost a little more to extract and refine than the Venezuelan stuff -- $28/bbl versus $22/bbl, according to reporter Greg Palast.

I also don't know if the Canadians have a long-term exploitation plan. But El Presidente Hugo Chavez has plans galore, you bet.

When Palast interviewed him last month, Chavez said he plans to make the U.S. and other big oil importers an offer they can't refuse: a locked-in price of $50/bbl. This would tempt the oil companies into investing the 40 billion required for extracting and refining the heavy stuff. It would also cause Venezuela's oil profits to shoot up to 91 billion a year.

And Hugo has plans for all that money. Already he's loaning more money to Latin American countries than the U.S. -- 2.4 billion versus 1.7 billion last year. He also bought 2-1/2 billion in Argentine bonds last year, so that government could dodge the "austerity measures" the U.S.'s pet pit bull, the International Monetary Fund, wanted to lay on it.

Chavez wants to kill the IMF and replace it with something called the International Humanitarian Fund. Sounds nice anyway.

And he's also plotting to influence the U.S. economy in another way. Up until now, the House of Saud has sunk most of the oil money they've got from us back into the U.S., by buying T-bills and such and floating our debt. Chavez won't do that. He'll take his profits elsewhere. Last year besides showering other Latin countries with money, he withdrew 30 billions that Venezuela had invested in Federal Reserve banks.

If he's able to control the ebb and flow of America's economic destiny in the powerful and fundamental manner he has in mind, the socialist caudillo of Venezuela might well become the de facto head of our government. At the very least he'd be an absentee landlord.

On the one hand he'd be the U.S.'s primary supplier of the life's blood of the automobile economy because he'd be giving us a huge discount, 50-dollar oil equals two-dollar gas to keep the wheels of the retail and construction industries moving. On the other hand he'd refuse to underwrite our reckless and prodigal national credit-card habit, forcing Congress to live within its means at the same time it pays down the ruinous debts racked up by the Bush II regime.

George Bush and whatever unfortunate follows him into the White House might shit little bricks at Chavez's impertinent bid to dictate U.S. policy, but a war of wits between Bush and Chavez would be like pitting the Akron University Zips football team against the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Zips -- and Bush -- would be well advised not to show up.

And the same goes for any kind of policy confrontation between the socialist Chavez, who'd be using all that oil money he gets from us to invest in public sector schemes throughout Latin America, and the U.S.'s high priests and shamans of the Blessed Free Market and their Prophet (blessed be his name) Adam Smith. No contest.

As for the neocon war morons, who think the U.S. is the "New Rome" and possesses some sort of inherent right to global domination, they'll need to just fuck off and die, as we should have caused to happen when they first popped out of John Hurt's chest and reared their alien heads. We won't have the money for such foolishness when Chavez is dicating our economy. At least that's his plan.

As Immanuel Wallerstein has pointed out in "The Decline of American Power" and his other books, empires a) sap the vitality and resources of the societies who attempt to establish and maintain them, and b) are a sign of weakness rather than strength. Those in the know are smart enough to realize that you don't need to conquer a territory to dominate it, and you can save yourself the trouble and expense of invading by just economically dominating the target society, as the British did in Latin America in the 19th century, and as Hugo Chavez plans to do to us now.

He'd be doing us a favor. No more would we be able to act like global mafioso, sending our enforcers into those parts of the world who refused to knuckle under to our childish and ignorant dream of global domination. There'd be no more chasing of mideast oil, and Israel would have to fend for herself, meaning she'd finally have to cut a deal with the Arabs and stop demonizing them.

We'd be forced to pay our bills and play that game adults play called give-and-take. The big, bad U.S.A. would have to become just another one of the little Indians.

That's Hugo Chavez's long-term plan for us. And he'll know when he's accomplished it, because Hugo knows an Indio when he sees one. He's one himself.