What Can Be Worse Than Gift Of Cheap Heating Oil From Venezuela? Try Broken Pipes And Frozen Kids/Elders

See this op/ed piece by Joe Kennedy (1-800-Joe-4Oil) of the much respected Citizens Energy in the Christmas Eve edition of the Boston Globe. [Thanks to Kirby Mountain for the link.]

One of the ways rightwing extremists manage to keep warm in the winter is to harnass their righteous indignation and aim it directly at anyone who threatens the great American system of making the rich richer and the poor even more downtrodden. Thus, it's come as no surprise that extreme righties turn purple whenever the subject of Hugo Chavez's efforts to bring Venezuelan heating oil at a big discount to low income Americans.

I mean, how dare Chavez do for America's affluent when the Bushies already have this really neat system in place to make sure those who can't donate millions at a time to his presidential library (as someone pointed out sometime ago, just how many copies of "My Pet Goat" does one library need?) suffer as much as humanly possible.

But I've both read of and heard from some of those who have been able to take advantage of Venezuela's gift. For these people, it's assistance from Venezuela or risk freezing to death because they know for damned well sure the Bush Administration isn't going to help them out. For this and other reasons (such as that I'm growing weary of staging wars in the Middle East so I can afford to drive my little Suzuki), I buy my gas almost exclusively from Citgo, owned by Venezuela.

Strange that the minimum wage has stayed the same for a decade while fuel prices have done nothing but increase in volatility. But hey, who needs heat when it's a toasty -3 degrees outdoors?