Today only 20% of Venezuela oil money goes to the state. 80% disappears. 
In 1974 it was the reverse.

I have not seen these 2 facts anywhere else in the world's media. Please forward widely. This is the reason for the continual coup attempts this year in Venezuela. The corporate media and the corporate coup plotters want to overthrow the elected government to prevent the January 2003 implementation of economic legislation that will change all of this.

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http://www.narconews.com/Issue26/article556.html

The Narco News Bulletin
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Why Are the Coup Plotters So Impatient? …And How Venezuela Can Defeat Them Legally By Heinz Dieterich Steffan Rebelion.org December 8, 2002 [Snip. Excerpt from article:] The second reason for the pro-coup haste is the entrance in vigor of various important laws that come into effect on January 1, 2003, that touch vital interests of the economic elite: Among them, the Land Law that affects not just the large plantation owners in the country but also real estate speculators and vacant lots in urban zones. The Hydrocarbon law is even more important because it will permit the dismantling of the meta-State of the petroleum business PdVSA, the corrupt oil group that controls the economic life of the country and that is an integral part of the New World Energy Order of George Bush. Today, only 20 percent of the income of this mega-company goes to the State. Eighty percent goes to “operating costs” that enrich secret accounts of the beneficiaries of this economic cancer. The power of this petroleum “steal-ocracy” has become propped up progressively during recent decades. In 1974, the company delivered 80 percent of its income to the State and kept 20 percent (“operating costs”). In 1990, the ratio tied at 50 to 50 percent and in 1998 it reached the ratio of 80 to 20 percent. It’s logical that they are going to fight to the death – of the nation – to defend “their” black gold. Today, only 20 percent of the income of this mega-company goes to the State. Eighty percent goes to “operating costs” that enrich secret accounts of the beneficiaries of this economic cancer [Snip. end of excerpt]

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The Narco News Bulletin

Christmas Comes Early in Caracas, Venezuela

Mid-December:
The Oil Sector Sabotage

http://www.narconews.com/Issue26/article571.html

[snip. Excerpt begins]

There was, this month, one sector of oil company executives that claimed they were on “strike,” but who in fact have spent this month actively working to lock-out rank-and-file employees and, according to their own public statements, to facilitate the sabotage, including eco-terrorism, of oil facilities.

According to public records at the Venezuela Secretary of Mining and Energy (MEM, in its Spanish initials), these were the annual salaries of the 22 major oil “strike” leaders, including their bonuses, paid vacations, and other benefits, at the trough of the state-owned oil company, Petroleum of Venezuela, or PdVSA:

Edgar Paredes makes 837 million bolivars a year ($643,000 U.S. dollars).

The lowest paid of these 22 ringleaders, Luis Ramírez, makes 310 million bolivars a year ($238,000 U.S. dollars).

The highest paid, Karl Mazeika, makes 990 million bolivars a year ($761,000).

The average annual salary of these 22 “strike” leaders is $426,000 U.S. dollars a year; almost 100 times the per capita income of the average Venezuelan citizen of $4,760 dollars per year. In the Venezuelan economy, $426,000 gives somebody more buying power than people who make millions of dollars a year in the United States.

Check out the rest of their salaries in the Venezuelan currency of Bolivars (at 1,300 bolivars to the dollar), here they are, the annual booties of the oppressed “vanguard” of The Strike That Wasn’t:

Luis Andrés Rojas: 688 million
Vincenzo Paglione: 979 million
Raúl Alemán: 687 million
Horacio Medina: 320 million
Juan Fernández: 399 million
Edgar Rasquin: 668 million
Rogelio Lozada: 410 million
Luis Matheus: 533 million
Carlos Machado: 542 million
Iván Crespo: 498 million
Luis Aray: 530 million
Andrés Riera: 508 million
Maria Lizardo: 444 million
Armando Izquierdo: 501 million
Luis Pacheco: 542 million
Gabriel García: 322 million
Francisco Bustillos: 643 million
Salvador Arrieta: 596 million
Armando Acosta: 471 million

Each of these oil executives, of course, had their own team of highly-paid middle managers underneath them: controlling the paperwork, the computers, the hiring and firing, and all other aspects of the company.

In recent weeks, they locked out the workers, and installed their own men at key strategic points where sabotage has been committed to facilities under their watch.

The “opposition” complains about graffiti on the wall of a Commercial TV station and calls it “vandalism” or “violence.” These guys, meanwhile, have presided over the destruction of pumps, pipelines, tankers and other ships, trucks, and other key points in the flow of oil from the ground to the consumer, including to the United States.

If they had tried anything like this inside the United States, we would see the White House calling them terrorists, locking them up in Guantanamo Bay, and suing them for the millions of dollars of losses that they have caused. Some of the members of the “oil-igarchy” have made public statements that some oil supplies have been contaminated, and some facilities have been booby-trapped to cause environmental disaster if they are re-started.

Between the oil drilling facility and the gas pump there are many stops along the road. Shut down or sabotage one of those points, and you shut down the entire pipeline. That has certainly happened at various points. But to hear the U.S. and British press correspondents, the language of distortion always uses these events to claim that there is somehow universal compliance with the strike at every point in the pipeline. That is not the case, nor has it been the case at any point during December 2002.

As the government is now firing these petrol-terrorists and retaking tankers and other facilities, it has had to bring in licensed foreign inspectors to make sure that environmental disaster doesn’t occur once the facilities are inevitably re-started, and to make sure that the oil that is sent to the U.S. and elsewhere meets safety and quality standards. Thus, the delays and the shortages in certain regions: but none of the true facts reveal anything close to a “strike” or “work stoppage” by the eco-terrorists who claimed to be rank-and-file oil workers.

Even with so much sabotage, five tankers have already left for the United States with crude oil. Hundreds of tanker-trucks have been shipping gasoline to service stations all over Venezuela.

It’s going to take a few more weeks to restore the situation to normal; that will happen sometime in early 2003.

But what is unforgivable by the U.S. and British correspondents, like the corrupt Commercial Media in Venezuela, is how they abused the facts of these delays, withheld the true reasons for them from the readers, to create the false impression that there was a “strike” (when there was nor is none), that it was “growing” (when it was not), and that the problems “increased” (when they did not) for the democratically elected government.

When the final history is written of December 2002, it will be known as the month that the Venezuelan democracy took its oil industry back from a clique of over-paid and corrupt coup-plotters after the executives tried to sabotage it. (Just as April 2002 is now remembered as the month that the people brought the Armed Forces back under democratic control; a fact that is underscored by the events of December, in which the military, now purged of most of its “School of the Americas” trained terrorists from previous administrations, has behaved in an exemplary manner.)

To repeat: In April, the problem of military coup was solved by a creative popular movement and its democratically elected leaders; in December, the last gasp of elitist control of a nation’s oil has played itself out and the petrol-terrorists have been sent packing.

Also in December 2002, for the first time in history, the nations of the entire hemisphere stood up to the United States executive branch through the Organization of American States Permanent Council. There were still games being played by the OAS secretary general Cesar Gaviria and by the White House in continued efforts to destabilize democracy in Venezuela, but they now have much less maneuvering room today than they had a month ago or ever before. As reported: Gaviria has already run from the scene of the crime. And come January, with Brazil and Ecuador inaugurating popular presidents smart and savvy enough to stand up to foreign intervention, this is already not Bush’s father’s América.

This is history in the making. In the middle of the simulated “War on Terrorism” and its Twin Tower, the “War on Drugs,” being used by cynical Power to get its way on every front, a grassroots democracy movement in Venezuela, related to similar movements throughout our América, has beaten the empire’s advances.

[snip. End of excerpt]

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