Hugo Chavez offers inexpensive gasoline to USA’s poor

by
Hector Carreon
La Voz de Aztlan

Caracas, Venezuela - August 29, 2005 - (ACN) The Mexico City newspaper that has been covering the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s visit to Venezuela, El Universal, is reporting that President Hugo Chavez is offering gasoline and heating fuel at very low and affordable prices to the poor and needy in the USA. Hugo Chavez said yesterday that he will be apportioning 1.5 million barrels of oil daily at 40% less than market price through the Venezuelan government owned "Citgo" in the USA. Citgo will refine the oil into gasoline and heating fuel and make it available to the unemployed, the poor and old folks who find it difficult to heat their homes in the winter. Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the national oil company of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , purchased Citgo in the 1990’s.

The "Jesus like" offer by Hugo Chavez came after USA televangelist Pat Robertson called for the assassination of the Venezuelan president and after Chavez said he may insist on "extraditing" Robertson to Venezuela. Not many Americans know that Robertson , the former US presidential candidate, is a failed "wannabe oilman" who squandered millions of his followers dollars in the purchased of a run-down oil refinery . This information is mostly known to the citizens of Santa Fe Springs, California where Pat Robinson lost an expensive battle to startup the highly polluting refinery he purchased from a savvy business group that essentially dumped the old and useless refinery on the televangelist. The refinery is now a rotting pile of iron junk and an ugly eyesore in the City of Santa Fe Springs. Pat Robinson is not very smart and the financial disaster represented by "The Oil Refinery Folly" in Santa Fe Springs may have led to the mental derangement of the televangelist. The Pat Robertson’s oil refinery is located on the corner of Florence and Bloomfield Avenues in the City of Santa Fe Springs, California. La Voz de Aztlan has a Google Earth satellite photograph of the rotting refinery below.

President Hugo Chavez said that he estimates that his offer will benefit from between 7 to 8 million needy Americans. He added that his embassy in Washington D.C. has already received 140 applications for the program because Americans are being "defrauded" and "gouged" by greedy US oil companies like Chevron and others. Chavez plans to implement the program through 8 refineries and 14 thousand gas stations that Citgo (Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A.) owns in the USA.

Meanwhile, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who is visiting Venezuela, said that the suggestion by Pat Robertson to "assassinate" Hugo Chavez is a criminal act. Jackson also believes that it is "immoral and un-Christian". In July 2002, Robertson was presented with The State of Israel Friendship Award by the Chicago chapter of the Zionist Organization of America.

The Reverend Jackson also condemned comments that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made recently concerning President Hugo Chavez. Rumsfeld said that Chavez represented " a destabilizing influence in the region". The Reverend Jackson commented that these were the same kind of remarks that were being made against Saddam Hussein to justify a war against the oil rich country of Iraq.