If that's
so, then why, in my computer check last week of the lowest gasoline
prices within a 20-mile radius of downtown, did only one Citgo
station show up among the nine best bargains?
And why,
if you live in Pilsen, a lower-income Hispanic community, do you
have to motor to somewhere else to find a Citgo bargain? Doesn't
he care as much about Pilsen's reverse commuters who have no choice
but to drive to the suburban job market?
The questions
are rhetorical, of course, and probably aren't needed to further
muck up what, even for Chicago, is a confusing and weird episode.
Chavez has offered similar bus and heating oil largesse in other
cities, and they've been gladly accepted, with the usual media
fanfare. But Chavez wasn't counting on Chicago being Chicago,
where the CTA initially turned down the offer. And set off the
usual outbreaks by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and others from
the we're-more-compassionate-than-everyone-else set. A few even
insisted that the $15 million would allow the CTA to roll back
its recent fare increase.
It wouldn't.
The $15 million would cover less than 1.5 percent of the CTA's
$1 billion in expenses this year. OK, but why not just take the
money anyway? The CTA said it had reasons, including the fact
that the Citgo credit was for fuel incompatible with CTA buses.
Never mind, Gutierrez said; swap it for a compatible fuel. More
appealing than a credit, though, is the CTA's suggestion that
perhaps the money should directly subsidize the poorest riders.
Of course, you'd probably spend all $15 million studying how to
identify the riders most in need, designing an implementation
program and then tracking down the cheats and usual insider contractors.
Then again,
some people simply might not want to take money from a bully like
Chavez. The unlikely mixed chorus of his critics includes the
Bush administration, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Election fraud, persecution of political opponents, corruption
of the judiciary and the suppression of free expression, dissent
and the press are among his human-rights violations.
Like a Fidel
Castro sitting on the hemisphere's largest oil reserves, Chavez
uses Venezuela's big oil profits to foment unrest among that country's
neighbors and to reward like-minded anti-democrats with huge debt
bailouts and cut-rate oil deals. In effect, motorists buying Citgo
products are not just providing jobs for the thousands of Citgo
workers in the Chicago area, but also are contributing a subsidy
to Chavez's vision of an oppressor state.
Exactly how
long those workers will be employed by Citgo is anybody's guess,
as Chavez periodically threatens to sell off as many as eight
refineries the company operates in the United States. It's all
part of his bash-America rhetoric, which includes threats to divert
oil sales from the U.S. (and his own U.S. refineries) to China.
His hatred of America is almost as clear as Osama bin Laden's.
Naturally,
that's enough for the usual chumps to rush to his praise. That
includes singer Harry Belafonte, actor Danny Glover, Princeton
University professor Cornel West and farm-worker activist Dolores
Huerta, who conducted a pilgrimage to Venezuela. In ludicrously
asserting that millions of Americans support Chavez's socialist
revolution, Belafonte intoned: "We respect you, admire you
and we are expressing our full solidarity with the Venezuelan
people and your revolution."
Such folks,
in their cavorting with Chavez, put aside their usual loathing
of "Big Oil" and its "obscene" profits. Citgo's
revenues more than doubled over five years, to almost $30 billion,
not including the post-Katrina price run-up. Profits run about
half a billion dollars. Although Citgo is based in Houston, it
is owned outright by Venezuela's state oil giant Petroleos de
Venezuela, which collects those profits. Chavez says they go to
benefit Venezuela's poor, but a few courageous folks, including
a Catholic archbishop, criticize Chavez for neglecting his own
people while pouring the money into his foreign intrigues, including
Gutierrez's publicity stunt.
Citgo recently
paid a $3.6 million fine for air pollution and an oil spill at
a New Jersey Citgo refinery that killed hundreds of birds, turtles
and fish in a nearby national wildlife preserve. When Gutierrez
is elected Chicago's mayor, I guess his foreign policy will simply
overlook all this.
