Trump Is Making Sh*t Up About Venezuelan Oil To Avoid Epstein Scandal
After bombing Venezuela this morning and kidnaping their president, Trump was preening like a peacock. “They’re not going to do that again. We had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back,” he said. Which, of course is bullshit. Via the Washington Post:
But U.S. companies never owned oil or land in Venezuela, home to the world’s largest proven reserves of crude, and officials didn’t kick them out of the country.
“Trump’s claim that Venezuela has stolen oil and land from the U.S. is baseless,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver.
Nationalization was the culmination of a decades-long effort by administrations of both the right and the left to bring under government control an industry that an earlier leader had largely given away.
The right-wing strongman Juan Vicente Gómez, the military dictator who ruled Venezuela from 1908 until his death in 1935, granted concessions that left three foreign oil companies in control of 98 percent of the Venezuelan market. The country became the world’s second-largest oil producer and largest exporter; oil accounted for over 90 percent of the country’s total exports.