Venezuela passes 'windfall' oil tax

[bemildred]

Source: Al Jazeera/Agencies

The Venezuelan parliament has approved a "windfall" tax on oil firms to boost its revenues from record world prices.

The tax would take 50 per cent of oil revenues above $70 per barrel and an additional 60 per cent of revenues over $100 per barrel.

The law requires a second approval by the National Assembly before it takes effect.

Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, has already nationalised part of the country's oil industry - a move that has led to an international legal battle with US oil giant ExxonMobil.

Read more: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/86489A3B-542A-4335-A7BF-D6BE49C73121.htm

[Vincardog]

1. How dare he use the natural resources of his country to help the people of his country?

Doesn't he know that the oil company executives have mistresses and male prostitutes to keep in style?

[bluesmail]

2. K&R Courageous Hugo Chavez and the government

of Venezuela, power to the people.

[JohnnyCougar]

3. What a terrorist.

Anyone who taxes our oil from their own country is a dictator/terrorist.

Oh, and I almost forgot, they hate freedom, too.

[and-justice-for-all]

4. If I was Hugo...

I would kick all their evil corperate asses out of my country.

[DCKit]

5. Some companies have chosen to renegotiate...

The American oil companies, on the other hand, seem to think they have a God-given right to the oil under another country's sovereign soil and would prefer the contracts they had with previous, friendlier governments - those concerned more with lining their own pockets than the welfare of their country and people.

Who'd a thunk?

[Judi Lynn]

7. Your remarks lead me to look right into a book I got for Christmas, which discusses an earlier

"President" of Venezuela, dictator Juan Vicente Gomez, who had power from 1908 to 1935. Describing the conditions leading up to Gomez:

The euphoria began in the 1920's. Around 1917, oil co-existed in Venezuela with traditional latinfundios, those enormous extensions of thinly populated or idle land where hacendados kept up production by whipping their peons or burying them alive up to the waist. At the end of 1922 the La Rosa well started gushing, 100,000 barrels a day, and the petroleum orgy was on. Lake Maracaibo sprouted rigs and derricks and was invaded by helmeted men: peasants swarmed in to build plank-and-oilcan huts on the bubbling ground and offer their muscles to petroleum. Plains and forests resounded for the first time with Oklahoma and Texas accents, and in the bat of an eye seventy-three companies were born. The carnival king of the concessions was Juan Vicente Gomez, an Andean cattleman who spent his twenty-seven years as dictator (1908-1935) making children and business deals......

Gomez handed out petroleum shares to anyone he favored:

"relations, and courtiers, the doctor who looked after his protate, the generals who served as his bodyguards, the poets who sang his praises, and the archbishop who have him a special dispensation to eat meat on Good Friday."

He sold concessions to Shell, Standard Oil, Gulf.

"The petroleum law of 1922 was drafted by representatives of three U.S. firms. The oilfields were fenced in and had their own police. No one could enter without a company pass, and even the roads on which the oil was transported to the ports were barred to other traffic."
(snip)

Tax cuts in 1954 afforded Standard Oil $300 million in additional profits. A U.S. businessman had said in Caracas in 1953: "Here you have freedom to do what you like with your money; for me, this freedom is worth more than all politicial and civil freedoms put together." When dictator Maracos Perez Jimenez was overthrown in 1958, Venezuela was one huge oilwell, surrounded by jails and torture chambers and importing everything from the United States: cars, refrigerators, condensed milk, eggs, lettuce, laws, and decrees. In 1957, the biggest of Rockefeller's enterprises, Creole, had declared profits equaling almost half of its total investment."

He wrote, of Caracas:

Caracas chews gum and loves synthetic products and canned foods; it never walks, and poisons the clear air of the valley with the fumes of its motorization; its fever to buy, consume, obtain, spend, use, get hold of everything leaves it no time to sleep. From surrounding hillside hovels made of garbage, half a million forgotten people observe the sybaritic scene. The gilded city's avenues glitter with hundreds of thousands of late-model cars, but in the consuming society not everyone consumes. According to the census, half of Venezuela's children and youths do not go to school.

Every day Venezuela produces 3.5 million barrels of petroleum to move the capitalist world's industrial machinery, but four-fifths of the concessions owned by Standard Oil, Shell, Gulf, and Texaco are untouched reserves and over half the value of the exports never returns to the country........ No country has yielded as much for world capitaism in so short a time: the wealth drained from Venezuela, according to Domingo Alberto Rangel, exceeds what the Spaniards took from Potosi or the English from India.

From:
Open Veins of Latin America

five centuries of the pillage of a continent

by Eduardo Galeano
Copyright 1973

[Vidar]

6. Go, Hugo, go!

[Acadia Blue]

8. We need one here to pay for Bush's grand war.

[fascisthunter]

9. America Could Learn from this Guy

That realization frightens fascists everywhere I'm sure.

[Zorra]

10. Yes, and yes. The First Commandment of Anti-Fascism, in the

Queen Jane's Bible:

Protect thee thy national natural resources from fascist waste and exploitation, and developeth thee alternative resources, lest thou run out of resources, causing thee to become dependent upon foreign masters, and subservient to them.

[Judi Lynn]

11. Venezuela's Congress OKs "windfall" oil tax

Venezuela's Congress OKs "windfall" oil tax
Reuters
Thursday April 3 2008

CARACAS, April 3 (Reuters) - Venezuela's Congress on Thursday gave initial approval to a windfall oil tax that extends leftist President Hugo Chavez's campaign to increase government revenue from the OPEC nation's oil industry.The tax will tap into private company profits amid record oil prices above $100 per barrel, giving Chavez additional funds to shore up his self-styled socialist revolution and stepping up his confrontation with global energy giants.

A statement on the legislature's Web site said the measure will "readjust the excessive benefits of foreign investors that are above the reasonable levels of profitability."

The legislation, called the Tax on Extraordinary Hydrocarbons Prices Law, taxes 50 percent of oil revenues between $70 per barrel and $100 per barrel and 60 percent of revenues above $100 per barrel.

The tax will be levied on oil and refined product exports based on average monthly prices of benchmark Brent crude. The Chavez-controlled Congress is all but certain to give final approval to the legislation, most likely by next week.

It will apply to private companies and state oil company PDVSA, which controls the vast majority of Venezuela's oil production.
But the draft law would allow PDVSA, the financial engine of Chavez's social development efforts, to deduct billions of dollars in certain social spending contributions from the payment of the tax.

Companies will be able to deduct windfall tax payments from their income taxes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/feedarticle?id=7435275