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Exxon Mobil gets, as we know. They have command of the U.S. military.
The Chavez government bargained hard on this oil, on behalf of the people of Venezuela, and got them a very good deal--far better than previous governments could (or wanted to) accomplish (--a 60/40 split of the profits, favoring Venezuela and its social programs, vs. the previous 10/90 split, favoring the multinationals). Exxon Mobil couldn't abide this assertion of Venezuela's sovereignty. As we know, they like taking food out of the mouths of schoolchildren and books out of their hands, to stuff their own pockets, and buy themselves third mansions, second yachts, private jets and private armies, to be lords of the universe, richer than Croesus and more powerful than any country. They walked out of the talks, and into "first world" courts, demanding $12 billion of Venezuela's international cash reserves and assets, as compensation for being dicks. They lost the first round in a British court (--don't know the current status of the suit). Other multinationals--including France's Total, British BP, Norway's Statoil, etc.--agreed to the terms and have the concessions.
If you look at a map, knowing where Venezuela's main oil reserves and facilities are, and where the new Pentagon war assets in the region are, you see that the Pentagon is surrounding Venezuela's main oil reserves, facilities and shipping, in the Gulf of Venezuela on the Caribbean and in the northern oil provinces (adjacent to Colombia). One recent tipoff was the Colombian military's announcement that they are building a new military base on the tip of the Guajira peninsula, overlooking the Gulf of Venezuela, which they were very careful to state "will be paid for with Colombian taxes." We therefore can be fairly sure that it is being paid for by US taxes, that it will be occupied by the US military and that it is probably part of a harbor blockade strategy.
The Guajira base will be 20 miles from Venezuela's border. Venezuela owns a thin strip of land up the Guajira peninsula on the Gulf of Venezuela side. In addition to providing a highly strategic point from which to block off the rectangular shaped oil harbor and facilities, the Guajira base could be used by the US/Colombia to grab that strip of Venezuelan land, to give them a commanding position for a blockade.
The Bushwhacks reconstituted the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean in summer 2008. The US 4th Fleet had been mothballed since WW II. Even Lula da Silva said that this was a threat (--to Brazil's new oil finds, as well as Venezuela's). The US military has bases on the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curacao, off the coast of Venezuela, from which it has been conducting illegal overflights of Venezuelan territory, recently. The Pentagon also recently secured its military base and harbor facilities in Honduras, by cooperating with the Honduran military to remove the elected president, Mel Zelaya, from the country in a rightwing military coup. (The plane carrying the kidnapped Zelaya out of the country at gunpoint stopped at the US military base at Soto Cano, Honduras, for refueling. Zelaya had proposed converting that base to a commercial airport, much needed in Honduras. Honduras has often been used as the "lily pad" country for US aggression in the region--most notably for the Reagan 'contra' death squads sent into Nicaragua in the 1980s, to murder teachers, mayors and other leftists. Rightwing death squads are currently murdering anti-coup leftists in Honduras, with not a peep out of the US government.) The US military is also beefing up its presence in Panama (adjacent to Colombia).
The new US/Colombia military agreement--by which the Pentagon is treating Colombia like its slave (reminiscent of South Vietnam)--includes US military access to SEVEN military bases in Colombia, no limit on the number of US troops and US 'contractors' who can be deployed there, no limit on the diplomatic immunity for US troops and 'contractors' for what they do in Colombia, and US military access to ALL civilian airports and other facilities. A USAF document (uncovered by Eva Golinger) states that this US military buildup is for "full spectrum military operations" in the "Southern Cone" for dealing with drug trafficking (a ruse, if there ever was one), "terrorists" and "anti-US countries." (Apparently, this doc was recently purged from the site where she found it.) This US/Colombia agreement was negotiated in secret--from the Colombian people, the Colombian legislature and the other leaders of the region (who are outraged at this). It now has to come to the US Congress, where it will likely be rubber-stamped, as is everything that Exxon Mobil wants.
Oh, and there are now some 10,000 US troops in Haiti, brought in BEFORE medical supplies (according to Doctors Without Borders, while they were amputating limbs that could have been saved, without anesthetics, and people were dying for lack of those supplies), and the US military now has full control of Haiti's airport and the harbors. It is laudable that the US military got the airport and harbor up and running, in that dire emergency. But there is a reason why Brazil, France and Venezuela, Doctors Without Borders, the UN Food Program and other aid agencies have all criticized the US this week for intending to "occupy Haiti" at the cost of losing Haitians who needed medical supplies, food and water immediately. And that is the Pentagon's and the US State Department's ulterior motive in prioritizing infusions of US troops that were not immediately needed. They are elbowing out the 9,000 US peacekeepers who were already on the ground in Haiti, prior to the earthquake, under Brazil's command, and other aid givers. The USS Carl Vinson, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier--which arrived in Haiti with 19 helicopters and the ability to convert sea water to potable water--is part of the newly reconstituted US 4th Fleet.
So, look at a map. The 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, US military bases or occupation of Haiti, Honduras, Panama, Aruba and Curacao and Colombia (including the Guajira peninsula). The US military has Venezuela's main oil reserves, oil infrastructure, harbor facilities and shipping surrounded.
One other thing: Ecuador, adjacent to Colombia to the south, also has big oil reserves, is also a member of OPEC (like Venezuela), and also has a good leftist government. The Pentagon hates that government for throwing the US military out of the country last year. And Chevron-Texaco hates it because of the major Ecuadoran lawsuit against them for their huge oil spill in the Amazon. The Pentagon + a big oil multinational = war. Figure that they intend to net in northern Ecuador (where the oil is) in a move against Venezuela. (The US/Colombia bombed/raided Ecuadoran territory in March 2008--a mission intended to end all hope of peace in Colombia's 40+ year civil war with the FARC guerillas and also as a rehearsal?)
This is a plan at the very least for US domination of the Carribbean/Central America/upper South America region, with the ability to bully and coerce this region back into the "free trade for the rich" US fold, with a massive US military presence. Is it a war plan as well? Are we seeing war assets being put in place for Oil War II?
That is the question. I tend to think that it IS a war plan. There is still some work to be done on it--toppling of the leftist governments in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala (which I'm sure the State Department and the CIA are working on--they now have Honduras as their "lily pad" again), yet more "divide and conquer" to the south, to weaken the Bolivarian alliance (Venezuela's strongest allies, Bolivia and Ecuador), and to weaken the UNASUR alliance (all the other leftist governments in South America; Chile just got split off, and I strongly suspect that the CIA had a hand in that; Brazil would be the big prize.) The "liberals" in the White House and Congress are perhaps tasked with getting these preliminaries done. Then, with 'TRADE SECRET' control of the all the voting machines in the US by one far, far rightwing corporation (ES&S, which just bought out Diebold, and now has 70% control of US voting systems), they can evict the "liberals," install Bush Junta II and grab the major oil deposits in this hemisphere.
Is this what the very intense, long-standing, relentless psyops-disinformation campaign against Hugo Chavez is all about--a "BIG LIE" campaign such as we have never seen, throughout the corpo-fascist media with no exceptions, and including even the "liberals" at the Guardian, the BBC and the Christian Science Monitor? I think it is.
In fact, this unfriggingbelievable psyops-disinformation campaign is what first got me to thinking: Why? The Chavez government has increased high school and higher education enrollment by 45%, among other amazing educational statistics. It has cut poverty in half, and has cut extreme poverty by 70%. It has overseen great economic growth and low unemployment. Its financial management can only be described as conservative--low debt, good credit, high cash reserves, tight regulation and the recent devaluation of the bolivar (which upped Venezuela's status in the Standard & Poor Index). By almost every social and economic indicator, the Chavez government is doing a great job. And Venezuela furthermore has a transparent, honest and aboveboard election system, certified by every international election monitoring group. Why is Chavez relentlessly reviled as a "dictator"--and, as we have seen here at DU, as a clown, a fool, insane? And what sparked the interest of none other than Donald Rumsfeld, in his op-ed in the Washington Post of 12/1/07, "The Smart Way to Defeat Tyrants Like Chavez," a year after Rumsfeld's retirement from the Pentagon?
Rumsfeld said that the US should "act swiftly" in support of US "friends and allies" in Latin America? What did he mean--"act swiftly"?
There are two answers that come to mind: A "Gulf of Tonkin"-type, manufactured incident, on the Colombia/Venezuela border, or possibly in the Caribbean off Venezuela's coast, or activation of CIA cells in northern Venezuela (and northern Ecuador) where fascist politicians openly talk of a secessionist rebellion. We might see them declare their "independence" and request US/Colombia support of the "freedom fighters" (fascist death squads). Thus, as in Colombia, the US military would have an "invitation" to invade and occupy those regions and take control of the oil.
There is a nest of vipers in the US embassy in Colombia, centered on that evil Bushwhack, US ambassador Brownfield. Why hasn't Obama dislodged him? The same in Honduras (Bushwhack appointee as ambassador during the coup). Is Obama on their side, or is he just powerless? That has been a difficult question to answer, but when he trotted out the spawn-of-the-devil to oversee Haiti aid, with Bill Clinton, I felt any remaining "benefits of the doubt" about Obama slip away. That was bad. That was very, very, very bad. And it might mean that the Pentagon doesn't have to wait out this "liberal" placeholder until 2012, to fill up its thirsty war machine gas tank.
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