Whose oil?

Found this on Yahoo News, entitled "Venezuela Takes on Exxon Mobil in Oil Play". It tells how the Venezuelan government is telling Exxon-Mobil that they need to share more of their revenues with the state or get the hell out. Bravo! Now, I am intrigued by the whole Hugo Chavez phenomenon. I try to be objective, but when corporate America and our current government continually demonizes this guy, I suspect he must be doing something right.
Now, part of the problem with us on the left is that some of us are inclined to fawn over revolutionaries just because they are revolutionaries. How many alt-coffee house types have you seen with a Che Guevara shirt? How many of them are aware of his Stalinistic tendencies and how many deaths he is responsible for? Or how many fawn over Castro while ignoring his abysmal human rights record (Jenni had a teacher who was like this once)? Just because our government is opposed to someone doesn't necessarily discredit the notion they are proposing. Sometimes there is the case of the gov't opposing the person for its own motives, yet there is also some truth to it, independent of the motives. Like Castro.. our gov't opposes him for reasons of pride and ideology, yet it is true that he is a totalitarian dictator with an abysmal human rights record. Now, it may sound like I'm contradicting what I said about Chavez in the first paragraph, I just want us to be aware of it.
Apparently, one of the reasons Chavez is so popular with his people is that he is committed to using the country's oil-rich revenues to help alleviate poverty. According to an article in the St. Petersburg Times,

"Under Chavez, the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA spent more than $3.7-billion last year on social and agricultural programs, housing and other projects - about a third of its earnings.

Chavez has promised to keep up the spending.

The state oil company is paying to build medical clinics and support government "missions," ranging from adult education programs to state-run markets. The government says oil money helped build 15,000 homes for the poor in 2004, and 120,000 more are planned.

Across the country, oil proceeds are flowing to about 130 centers with agricultural and industrial cooperatives. One center, built at an abandoned fuel depot in Caracas, has a sign over the gate that reads, "Venezuela: Now It Belongs to Everyone." It includes a farming cooperative, shoe factory and textile plant."

Now of course there are those that see this as a colossal mistake, and argue that things have not improved, with unemployment still hovering at 14 percent. I'm not sure what to believe.
Now, my point of this is not to support or demonize Chavez. I really don't have enough information to make that judgement. But it begs the question...when it comes to our nation's natural resources, who should benefit the most from them, the citizens of the country, or the company who spends the money to extract and process them?

This is not an easy question to answer. The United States leases mining and oil rights for ridiculously low costs to the companies. Throw in all of the crazy tax breaks and subsidies, and it seems to be quite a sweetheart deal for the companies. Combine that with the loosening of environmental regulations and regulatory processes, underpayment of royalties, and you really are left wondering who these resources belong to. To make matters worse, our gov't is ready to give away another $7 billion dollars in royalty 'relief'. And we're also gonna have $3.00+ a gallon gas again very shortly.

Now before you bite my head off for what I am about to say, I want it to be clear that I am disgusted by this nation's addiction to oil. I feel that these tax breaks and subsidies given to Big Oil should be redirected to the mainstream development of non-polluting, renewable energy production. That said, I am not an idealist who thinks we should do nothing about our current oil system; it is what is the norm, so, lacking the ideal, we should still work towards getting the maximum benefit out of the current sytem until we get our better one in place.

Now, admittedly not knowing much about economics or oil production, for that matter, my gut is telling me that our oil policy should be based in maximizing the profit to all Americans. We should be making the most money off of this, not Exxon Mobil. Hell, it could pay for healthcare. Or if our windfall of profit from extraction on federal lands actually went back into federal lands, our parks and forest wouldn't be in such a state of disrepair. Better yet, use that money to get the new, above-mentioned sustainable energy infrastructure in place. Call it some kind of socialism, I don't give a shit. It makes sense and puts the common good above corporate good, which, contrary to what we're always led to believe, are not the same thing.

Although quite heavy in the statistics, Greenpeace has a report here from a few years ago detailing costs, subsidies, tax breaks, and potential solutions. Some of the great ideas include:

-Include subsidy reform as an integral element in strategies to mitigate the impacts of climate change
-Decouple oil subsidies from rural economic development
-Internalize oil-related defense costs into market prices

Another idea is the idea of a 'federal oil trust'. For a take on this, read this here from Raymond J. Learsy. Learsy:

"The profits from the national oil trust's enterprise would ideally go to funding alternative fuel programs, mass transportation, hydrogen technology, hybrid car credits and whatever would help us distance ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels. After all, these natural resources are part of the heritage that belongs to all Americans, and the benefits from their development should flow to us, not just to the oil patch and their "K Street" hires.

A federal oil trust would not be unique in concept nor experience. It could be patterned on the successful Tennessee Valley Authority, which was created by Congress in 1933, at another time of national crisis, to develop the Tennessee River system. The TVA, an independent government corporation was founded to promote navigation of inland waterways, to control flood waters of the Tennessee River by building dams, generating electricity which was made available to the region at affordable prices. It gave an enormous boost to the economies of the seven states bordering the Tennessee River Basin, which in the years of the TVA's founding were the most disadvantaged in the nation.

While promoting the development of alternative fuels the national oil trust could fund the development of both an economically viable and environmentally sound program to unlock the more than one trillion barrels of petroleum (according to the U.S. Department of Energy) in the oil shale deposits of the Western United States (deposits greater than those acknowledged by Saudi Arabia by a factor of at least four). Here is a project that would be a worthy challenge to American ingenuity whose successful solution would accord us full energy independence, regain our self respect and permit us to conduct our national and foreign affairs free of the threats our oil dependency engenders."

I'm sure Bushco. would love that one. Once again, in a perfect world, we would be already well into the age of clean, renewable resources. But I live with one foot in the world we have, not both feet in the world we'd like to (read my last post for more on that). Whatdya all think?