Opportunity only knocks once...
for the oil scramble
Carlos Mendoza Pottellá - May 28, 2019
In previous
works I have exposed the oil tragedy that the Nation is living, a result, in
part, of the terrible planning of “pregnant birds” around the Orinoco Belt and
the supposed "greatest oil reserves of the world", the technical
disability, especially political-economic, management increasingly less
professional and the overwhelming corruption, factors whose perverse effects
are accentuated in a hostile geopolitical environment, blockade and sanctions
exercised by the most powerful world power. [1]
The
following graph, which I have reproduced in previous works, and in which the
path of 103 years of oil production is recorded, confirms the seriousness of
the aforementioned circumstances.
If
attention is focused on the last two decades, the following can be observed:
The oil
production, recovered from the 2002-2003 sabotage, when it sank at specific
levels of up to 300 thousand barrels per day and an average for all of 2003 of
2.8 mbd, rose by 469 thousand bd to reach, in 2005, the 3 million 269 barrels
per day in the annual average.
From that
year-precisely the one during which the new expansion plans were formulated up
to 5 million barrels per day, heirs of the failed and open expansive plans of
1994-1998-the average production began to fall, until landing at 2 million 894
thousand bd in 2013. That is, a decrease of 375 thousand barrels per day in
eight years.
In spite of
everything, and as I have mentioned in the works cited, in the following years,
from 2012 to 2016 the PDVSA planners continued to present projects with goals
dissociated from reality, from 5, 6 and even 7 million barrels per day by 2021
, supported by budgets impossible to finance, at any price predictable then for
the oil barrel.
In the
2015-2019 investment budget, $ 234,357 million were programmed in 5 years, only
for exploration and production, and a total investment of 302,316 million.
And much
less feasible were those disbursements for an industry with financial results
such as the following:
On the
contrary, and as can be observed in the first mentioned graph, production fell
to 1 million 911 thousand barrels per day in 2017, five million barrels per day
less than the goal that was intended to be reached two years later.
From then
on, and with the downward trend exacerbated by the application of the policies
established in the "America First
Energy Plan" of Donald Trump against the "outlaw states" of
Iran, Russia and Venezuela, the collapse precipitated up to 800 thousand
barrels newspapers registered in April of this year, after the sanctions provided
in that plan became effective.
In spite of
everything, in a year of planning default, and as recorded in the same chart,
at the end of 2018 PDVSA's new goal was published: to produce 5 million barrels
per day in 2025. Do you need comments?
This reiterated
diagnosis has always been animated by the will to find ways of solution, means
for the preservation of the main national mining patrimony. Of this I leave
testimony in the references of this note. [2]
But the
evidence of the current tragic circumstances has stimulated a new proliferation
of proposals and perverse solutions, loaded with the ancestral privatist will:
that which promotes the dispossession of the collective patrimony for the
benefit of the most qualified sectors to obtain great benefits of the free
market.
Regarding
the sustenance and seniority of this debate and my arguments in this regard, I
am forced to insert other personal references that I consider pertinent:
"... today it is
fashionable to stop being rentiers and to stimulate productive scenarios where
the private sector leads the baton, as in any capitalist society that prides
itself on being so.
Overcoming the obstructions generated by
the state property over the oil resource, the real collective interest, in this
sector, would be in the multiplying effects that private businesses would have
in the reactivation of the supply and aggregate demand of goods and services,
which, in turn, they will stimulate the growth of production and employment in
the rest of the national economy. " [3]
"Many compatriots
have been touched by the opinion matrix according to which, the privatization
of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. PDVSA) can be the cure of all our economic
evils. We will pay the external debt and we will continue expanding our oil production.
The development of non-oil activities will come later. The serious
circumstances in which the immense majority of Venezuelans live, located
between chronic poverty and extreme poverty, make the privatization route
urgent. Nationalist positions in this area are equated to attitudes of the
miser, who dies of indigence in a bed of golden morocotas. " [4]
The main
instrument of these proposals is based on a distorted interpretation of our
history and an intentional confusion of concepts such as State, Nation,
government, republic, collective heritage and citizenship, from which a
fallacious discourse is devised, according to which Citizens, true owners of
oil resources, are dispossessed by the State when it "appropriates"
the benefits -the rent- generated by the industry that converts these minerals
into products for the market.
"Exactly, the confusion between the terms government, State and Nation, are part of the discursive arsenal of those who postulate the primacy of private property over public property, privatization as synonymous with liberal democratization. When they condemn the "statist" policies that maximize what the government "intends to take", they obviate the fact that that government and that State are temporary entities that represent the rights of the eternal Nation, that is, the concept that encompasses all Venezuelans, alive and unborn, whose heritage must be managed with criteria of maximum present and future use. " [5]
A sample of
that manipulative discourse was delivered to us more than three decades ago by
a prominent epigone of the kindness of American liberalism, ashamed of our
"absolutist" legal tradition and distorting, incidentally, the
Bolivarian spirit that was expressed in its 1829 decree, which reserves the
mines of any kind to the Republic and has been the foundation of the Venezuelan
mining right until our days:
... our republican
history shows the transition from the sovereign-king to the sovereign-civilian,
be it the dictator-despot before or the dictator-political parties now.
Influenced by the
Marxist-Leninist and fascist doctrines, equally absolutist, many of our
thinkers turned away from the liberal ideas of Bolivar and Sucre, taking the
notion that sovereignty rests in the State or the people as a whole ...
... the United States
flourished because, in truth, they gave sovereignty to the individual
... They did not
reserve to the State any material good (except for some natural parks), or
industrial, commercial or service activities. Each one would produce primarily
for himself and his family, and subsidiary for the community. Great distinction
with absolutism! For in this work belongs first to the sovereign-king, to the
sovereign-State or to the sovereign-people and only later to the worker and his
family. [6]
From that
fallacy has been promoted, and is still proposed today, the most demagogic and
anti-national proposals: distribute annually a substantial part of the profits
and all the dividends of the oil industry among citizens, that is, the largest
of 18 years old. [7]
Antinational,
unambiguously, because it is a proposal that strips the eternal Nation, that
is, all living and unborn people in this country until the moment it disappears
as such entity, for causes such as foreign conquest or nuclear cataclysm.
The inhabitants
of Venezuela over 18 years, estimated at 20 million at the end of this year,
constitute 60% of the total population, estimated at 32 million people for the
same date.
At the time
of such distribution of dividends, the portion thus privatized would be devoted
largely to fuel the consumer market and the realization of investments that
will burn in the great fires of the processes of centralization and
concentration of capital characteristic of any free market, but even more when
it comes to hungry people stimulated as the Pavlov’s dog towards the immediate
consumption, in which spreads the massive propaganda of purchases by Amazon and
investments "from only 500 thousand dollars" to obtain the Visa EB-5
of business in the United States.
Consequently,
over time, the participation directly received by the majority of those twenty
million "privileged" will be concentrated in the hands of
entrepreneurs and another large part of them will be added to more than 10
million of the " minors "who will automatically be disinherited from
their heritage. Given the current population growth rates, by the year 2050
another 8 or 9 million new disinherited will have been born in this country.
Beyond, we
can not venture anything, especially if the forecasts on the change of the
energy matrix are met in terms of the decrease in the use of hydrocarbons in
the next three decades, which would lead to the facilities to extract oil in
the following 600 years to become the dreaded "stranded assets" that
today terrify the shareholders of Exxon Mobil and its corporate oil sisters.
The fallacy
of these proposals is immeasurable, when it is intended to compare an annual
dividend distribution fund with other transgenerational savings funds, such as
Norwegian or Kuwaiti, which are precisely designed for "the new
generations" and to postpone the consumption of income. extraordinary,
which otherwise would cause perverse effects in their respective economies,
such as those that gave rise to the so-called "Venezuela effect"
(just as well characterized by the Norwegians and predicted in 1930 by Alberto
Adriani) or the most recent, and popular among our novelists economists
unfamiliar with the national economic history, "Dutch disease".
And it is
about privatizing, not "de-statistizing", because it is about making
private what is a public good, which must have a destination of collective
benefit, of public service, of investment to increase the patrimony of all, of
the Nation everything.
The media
manipulation of these concepts, makes even the person hesitate before using the
word "public", because it can be interpreted as "belonging to
the State".
This
manipulation led to extremes such as those of a well-known oil manager of the
70s, Shell-Maraven, when he proclaimed: "If
I am a shareholder of Shell, why can not I be one of PDVSA?"
And that,
precisely, was one of the first proponents of the distribution of shares of
PDVSA among those over 18 years, always founded on the same argument:
"- By not resolving the differences
between the State and the nation, it will leave the State the property of the
oil fields when these should be the property of the nation. That is, of all of
us. The State is its regulator, but not its owner. " [8]
Already by
then, I was immersed in the debate of the "oil
opening", and responded:
The opening is just
the contemporary chapter of a policy that has always had the same sign: the
expropriation of the collective heritage for the benefit of transnational big
capital and the creole exploiting elites, whose spearhead is today, and for 20
years, the managerial domes of privatization
mentality entrenched in the command posts of the state company. [9]
Over the
years, now faced with the critical situation referred to in the first lines,
the neoliberal matrix is now reborn, now institutionalized in centers that
promote this doctrine, such as CEDICE:
"It is
necessary to review the relationship between the State and Society with respect
to the income produced by hydrocarbon activity, so that it goes directly to
citizens. The economic surplus that originates in the oil activity, which
corresponds to the Nation, will be entirely destined to the creation of a FUND,
which will be the Savings, Patrimony and Investment Fund of the Venezuelans.
Your performance will be delivered directly to each Venezuelan through
individual accounts.
...
It will be necessary
for PDVSA to stop being an operator and turn it into an excellent administrator
of the Production Sharing Agreements, on behalf of the owners of the
resource, all citizens. " [10]
Right now,
at critical moments for the Nation and starting from this matrix CEDICE, we
reached the future, and appears a new privatization proposal, wrapped in the
attractive gift role of "democratize
the oil income".
The decoys,
are the same as always: Maximize oil and gas production, diversify the economy,
sustainable development and environmental balance. The best of all possible worlds. [11]
Starting
from an affirmation that can be generalized to all the governments that have
been in this country, according to which the groups that control the political
power privatize the profits of the oil industry by appropriating them and that
the rest of the Venezuelans always assume the losses, they propose a "new distributive scheme" on
which they base their "oil democratization" project:
"We propose that
part of the oil income be deposited in individual accounts of each Venezuelan
adult without distinction of any kind and for this we propose to account clearly
and separately the part of the oil revenue that corresponds to the State and
that which corresponds directly to them to the citizens ..." [12]
Although it
is a much more elaborate proposal than those of its predecessors, regarding the
restriction of the destiny that each citizen will give to his portion of the
oil income, when establishing that it will be applied to the saving of a
pension, the financing of education , the acquisition of housing, hospital
medical care and productive investment, the mere mention of these items
prefigures a future in which health, education, social security and even
retirement pension will be matters of which each individual should be provided,
reducing the role of the State to the police, administrator of justice, guard
of the borders and monopolist of the limited arms of the Republic. The ideal of
liberal extremism.
Everything
else can and will be privatized: schools, universities, hospitals, airports,
parks, highways, pension funds, issuance of coins, jails and asylums. And all
this for the benefit of its most capable citizens, entrepreneurs and survivors
of the vortex of free competition.
The
theoretical and ideological justification of the very recent López-Baquero
proposal is the same and old one of Quiroz Corradi-Monaldi, Sosa Pietri,
Giusti, Espinaza and others: It is the citizens, those with the right to vote according
to civil codes, those over 18 years, the real owners of land rent and not the
State. That is to say, we will reiterate until we are tired, not the Nation.
Depart as
already referred, from the confusion of the State with the Nation and the
reduction of this to its citizen portion, over 18 years:
"... we propose
that the oil income generated by the sale of oil be divided between the State
and the citizens. ...
The inheritance and
the current framework define that the ownership of oil belongs to Venezuelans;
however, this property must be extracted and sold to distribute it. Property
acquires value beyond the legal formalism that belongs to all of us. It is for
this reason that we consider that it is the oil income and not the deposits in
the subsoil that we must distribute. [13]
From these
postulates defines the portions that will make up the "Citizen Petroleum
Income" and that must be deposited annually in the individual accounts of
each citizen, in a "Patrimonial Fund of the Venezuelans":
… All the royalty,
the surcharge of 16% of Income Tax applied to hydrocarbons and all dividends
declared by PDVSA.
That is to
say, all the rentistic surplus, the oil rent, rent of the land, which is
perceived by the ownership of the subsoil, of its mines of any kind, including
"bitumen and juices of the earth", which "corresponds to the
Republic" from the Decree of the President of Colombia in 1829, it will be
assigned to 60% of the current living population.
Of course,
this Patrimonial Fund "will manage
an important amount of resources that can be based on strict criteria of
efficiency and transparency, guarantee a safe and reasonable return on the
investments of these funds ..."
In other
words, instead of being the republican State, legally, constitutionally and
historically constituted as guarantor of the permanent interests of the Nation,
it will be the entrepreneurs-administrators of a partial Fund, that of citizens
older than 18 years, who will decide the fate of the ancestral and future
collective heritage of all Venezuelans.
And none of
this has to do with the funds created in other latitudes - Norway, Kuwait - to
which is falsely referred to as alleged paradigms for the establishment of a
privatizing contraband.
The bloody
irony of the authors of this proposal expropriating the future inhabitants of
the country is in its dedication:
"We dedicate this book to the new
Venezuelan generations" [14]
May, 2019
[1] Recursos, reservas, Faja y lutitas, https://petroleovenezolano.blogspot.com/2019/02/recursos-reservas-faja-y-lutitas.html?spref=bl
[2] Petróleo y Geopolítica, en Nacionalismo Petrolero Venezolano en Cuatro Décadas, pág. 628.
Venezuela: Potencia o botín,
Política petrolera a la manera de los músicos del “Titanic”,
Citgo, la Internacionalización revisitada,
[3] C. Mendoza P. “Privatizar
PDVSA ¿vender el sofá”? en Crítica petrolera contemporánea, Crónicas
Disidentes Sobre la Apertura y el Poder Petrolero (1996-1999)
Publicaciones FACES-UCV, Caracas, 2000.
[4] C. Mendoza P. “¿La privatización
petrolera hará el milagro?” ABC Petrolero, FUNDAPATRIA, 22 de julio
1998.
[5] C. Mendoza P. Ignorancia
Petrolera y Neocolonialismo, en Crítica petrolera
contemporánea. Op. Cit.
[6] Andrés Sosa Pietri "Apertura petrolera, soberanía y la
parábola de los talentos". El Universal, pág. 2-2/ 6 de enero de
1996.
[7] A precedent of
transparent electoral demagoguery was the promotion, made in 2006 by the
presidential candidate Manuel Rosales, of a card, "Mi Negra", where
each citizen would receive a share in the profits of the oil industry as a
contribution to the initial payment of his home.
[8] Alberto Quirós
Corradi, “XX Aniversario, PDVSA en la encrucijada”. El
Universal, 14 de septiembre de 1995. Pág. 2-2.
[9] C. Mendoza Pottellá, 1996. “Apertura
petrolera: Nombre de estreno para un viejo proyecto antinacional”. Inserto
en varios capítulos de Nacionalismo Petrolero en Cuatro Décadas. Op.
Cit.
[10] Diego González Cruz. Propuestas para Venezuela. Cómo rescatar a
la industria petrolera nacional. CEDICE Libertad, Caracas 2016
[11] Leopoldo López, Gustavo
Baquero: Venezuela Energética. Propuesta
para el bienestar y el progreso de los venezolanos. pág.
166.
[12] López-Baquero, Op. Cit.
[13] López-Baquero Op. Cit.
Págs..256-262.
[14] López-Baquero Op. Cit. Pag. 11.
[14] López-Baquero Op. Cit. Pag. 11.
