oil reserves – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

_{South Paris, Maine}

A lightning U.S. military attack on January 3 succeeded in capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, National Assembly member Cilia Flores. They are now lodged in a New York prison, awaiting trial on narcotrafficking and weapons changers.

Speculation based on the historical record suggesting that the U.S. military might overturn Venezuela’s government has not materialized. Until recently, the U.S. government has, in fact, worked strenuously to destroy Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, the political project led by President Hugo Chavez from its onset in 1999 until his death in 2013, and afterwards, until January 3, by President Maduro.

Under that banner, Venezuela’s government has taken on U.S. imperialism, collaborated with revolutionary Cuba, promoted regional unity, and moved toward socialism. Responding, the United States supported or financed a failed military coup in 2002; a strike against the state-owned oil company in 2003; violent, recurring street demonstrations; and countless dissident organizations. U.S. economic sanctions have been devastating. The U.S. in 2019 named Juan Guaidó as a puppet Venezuelan president.

Now, for the U.S. government, reaction to revolutionary stirrings in Venezuela fades into the background. The mission now is that of propping up U.S. economic hegemony in the world. This rests on the U.S. dollar continuing to serve as the world’s dominant currency. That lofty position is maintained through the dollar’s role in the marketing of oil.

Venezuela harbors vast oil reserves and is, therefore, an object of U.S. strategizing. U.S. planners, it seems, are relying upon an intact Venezuelan state – which is the case now, given an annual growth rate recently of close to 9%. The specter looms of regime change in the chaotic style of U.S. endeavors in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of Libya. In the case of Venezuela, the stakes are high and risk is to be avoided.

As 2025 closed, the destruction of small boats, the killings of crewmembers and a great U.S. naval fleet hovering off the coast did suggest the possibility of regime change. But narcotrafficking charges against Venezuelan leaders and the labeling of Maduro as a dictator qualify more as flimsy pretexts for the capture of Maduro than for replacing a
government.

That vast U.S. military presence still lingering in the area surely has use now in frightening Venezuelans into compliance with an evolving U.S. plan. They would be dreading horrendous consequences.

Moving toward collaboration

Evolving public statements of the U.S. president and of Venezuelan acting president Delcy Rodríguez suggest Venezuela’s government is safe. Rodríguez served as vice president in Maduro’s government. She is the daughter of a founder of the Marxist-oriented and long defunct Socialist League and sister of the current president of Venezuela’s National
Assembly.

In remarks on January 3 at an emergency meeting of the National Defense Council, Rodríguez turned to themes appropriate to the occasion. “There is only one president in this country and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros,” she declared. She called for the liberation of Maduro and of Cilia Flores. Taking note of pro-government, anti-U.S. demonstrations, Rodríguez insisted Venezuela “will never go back to being the colony of anyone.” She decried “regime change” aimed at “capturing our energy, minerals, and natural resources.”

President Donald Trump speaking on January 4 declared that, “We’re going to take our oil back” and “ “[W]e’re going to run everything. We’re going to run it, fix it.”

The next day, Rodriguez declared, “We extend an invitation to the government of the US to work jointly on an agenda of cooperation, aimed at shared development … [one] that strengthens lasting peaceful coexistence.” Even so, on Venezuelan TV she soon insisted that, “No external agent governs Venezuela,” and that, “Venezuela is on a painful course through the aggression we suffered.”

The two heads of state spoke on the telephone on January 14. Trump reported that, “This partnership between the United States of America and Venezuela will be a spectacular one FOR ALL” and “Venezuela will soon be great and prosperous again.” Rodríguez stated that, “I had a long, productive, and courteous telephone conversation with the President of the
United States, Donald Trump, conducted in a framework of mutual respect.”

Two days later, speaking before the National Assembly, Rodríguez indicated she would “continue shaping energy cooperation” with the United States and that she and Trump were developing “a working agenda for the benefit of both peoples.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe conferred with Rodríguez in Caracas. Washington officials had been talking with interior minister Diosdado Cabello prior to January 3. U.S. State Department officers visited in Caracas on January 9 “to conduct technical and logistical assessments aimed at a potential reopening of the US embassy in Caracas.”

The impression here is of Venezuela being assigned a job description and of the United States applying pressure so that Venezuelans comply and cooperate. For what’s ahead, the United States needs partnership, specifically a cohesive and functioning Venezuelan government.

A plan in the works

President Trump has repeatedly declared that the United States wants Venezuela’s oil. Why would the world’s largest oil producer want more oil?

According to misionverdad.org, “The main target was not [Venezuela’s] oil reserves … but rather the currency in which they are traded. By breaking the commercial and financial blockade and negotiating crude oil outside the dollarized system, Venezuela opened a real breach in the petrodollar monopoly that had existed since 1974.”

A report from Francisco Delgado Rodríguez states that the United States “had no choice but to leave the entire [Venezuelan] government intact” and claims too that “controlling the world’s main oil reserve, in Venezuela, serves to sustain the dominance of petrodollars. Without that, everything else will go downhill sooner rather than later.”

According to middleeastmonitor.com, “Venezuela holds the highest proven oil deposits in the world, with a reserve of about 303 billion barrels, or about 17 per cent of world reserves, far surpassing Saudi Arabia.” Plus, the fact of “Maduro selling oil in and avoiding the use of the dollar was a direct threat to the Petrodollar system, which had been the foundation of the American global economic hegemony over the past five decades.”

Realities intrude. One is that the U.S. government after 1971 was no longer setting the dollar’s value in terms of gold. Inflation emerged, and in 1974 Henry Kissinger struck a deal with Saudi Arabia, the world’s major oil producer and exporter. The U.S. government would protect the Kingdom militarily and require that Saudi Arabia demand dollars in payment for the oil it sells, also that Saudi Arabia invest 80% of its oil revenue in U.S.
Treasury and corporate securities and bonds.

The requirement that nations buy Saudi oil with dollars stimulated demand for dollars. Increased demand has enabled the U.S. government to borrow money at lower interest rates than do other borrowers.

Most importantly for purposes here, the dollar, the world’s dominant currency, fuels the commercialization of petroleum. The linkage of one to the other, the so-called petrodollar system, accounts for U.S. power over the world economy.

According to economist Michael Hudson, “Control over oil is one of its key methods for achieving unipolar control over the world’s broad trade and dollarized financial arrangements” He adds that “Venezuela … has been supplying 5% of China’s oil needs.”

Analyst Kasper Bjørkskov explains that, from 2018 on, “Venezuela has sold 100% of its oil exports to China, with transactions settled in yuan, not dollars. Moreover, Venezuela became an official BRICS+ partner nation in 2024, gaining access to the bloc’s alternative payment systems.”

As of January 2025, Saudi Arabia itself was selling oil to China in exchange for yuan.

Bjørkskov concludes that, “Venezuela represents an existential threat to the petrodollar system, and by extension, to American global power itself. … This is about the slow-motion collapse of the architecture that has supported American power for half a century: the dollar’s role as the world’s dominant reserve currency. And Venezuela, improbably, has become ground zero in the fight to preserve it.”

Ultimately, the U.S. government has every reason to promote a setting that favors the production and export of oil in great quantities – oil that will be sold in dollars. It will stick with Venezuela’s current government. The task of keeping a historically-disobedient Venezuela in line is left for another day.

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.}

_{^{Darna, Libya after dams collapsed in the wake of storm Daniel. (Photo: AP/Jamal Alkomaty)}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Prodigious rainfall and the failure of long-deteriorated earthen dams caused a rush of waters through Derna, in Libya, on September 11. Thousands of residents died, infrastructure was destroyed, and buildings ended up in the Mediterranean. Failure to protect residents, maintain the dams, and sustain the lives of all Libyans point to societal collapse.

There is also the environmental crisis. Climate change provoked the enormity of storm Daniel that had drenched the eastern Mediterranean area ahead of the disaster. The association of climate change and terrible storms is known and so too is the role of human activities in causing great amounts of greenhouse gases to be released into the atmosphere.

The focus here is on the social disruption that transformed Libya. That’s because predisposing factors may not be clear. There are lessons to be learned. The two crises are actually joined by virtue of both having developed out of a single impulse for domination.

Nationalist rebels led by Muammar Gaddafi deposed the embattled Libyan regime of King Idris on Sept. 1, 1969. Between 1973 and 1977, a Yugoslavian company contracted by the new government built two dams on the Wadi Derna River for the sake of flood control and irrigation. Maintenance of the dam would be lax.

A 1998 study revealed cracks and deterioration. After delays, a Turkish company began repairs on the dams in 2010. When the Gaddafi government was ousted in the following year, the work stopped. Some $2.3 million was on hand for finishing the project. It disappeared.

Anti-government protests ─ the Arab Spring ─ had broken out throughout the region in 2010. An anti-Gaddafi insurgency making headway in early 2011 prompted the military forces of the United States France, Great Britain, and a host of other countries to carry out a self-styled humanitarian intervention in March. Gaddafi’s murder seven months later ended the intrusion.

U.S complaints had centered on an “opaque political and economic system,” widespread corruption, and Gaddafi’s autocratic proclivities. There had been mutual, and occasionally lethal, provocations. Gaddafi’s increasing financial and banking influence in Africa raised eyebrows.

Gaddafi had offended by nationalizing 51% of oil companies’ assets in 1973. According to one expert, “in 2006 the oil sector in Libya … made up ninety-five percent of export earnings, ninety-two percent of government revenue, and seventy-three percent of GDP.”

The foreign assailants could not have overlooked the reality that a government with tight control over oil was in trouble with an insurgency. It was no mean prize. Libya’s oil reserves now rank first in Africa and nineth in the world.

Their forces carried out air operations, inflicted civilian casualties, assisted with the rebels’ ground actions, blockaded ports and embargoed weapons deliveries. They had a convenient tool.

Writer Eve Ottenberg a decade later accuses NATO, instrument for intervention, of “fattening the wallets of war profiteers and weapons moguls and wreaking havoc in places like Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, now Ukraine.” Today France , Holland, and the United States are looking at French Guyana as a “forward-operating base for NATO” in Latin America, reports Guyanese activist Maurice Pindard.

In its own review of “past and present” missions, NATO, with planetwide ambitions and unlimited potential for destruction, is, as expected, bereft of even a hint at repairing places left in chaos after its wars.

NATO departed from Libya, and ever since a government in the West of the country has been vying with a militarized counterpart in the East, where Derna is located. Cities have been bombed and occupied; Derna was subject to Islamic State rule from 2014 to 2016. Mercenaries, militias, and tribes jostle with one other. Milita groups control oil fields and extort vast sums. There’s “pillage on a vast scale,” plus drug-trafficking and exploitation of migrants heading to Europe.

Now one third of Libyans live in poverty; 13% of them require humanitarian aid, according to one estimate. By 2016, oil production, the source of social spending, had fallen to 75% below Gaddafi-era levels. It’s risen recently.

The troubles experienced by Libya’s people were new. The Ghaddafi government had achieved much. The 2010 UN Human Development Index, a composite measure of health, education and income, ranked Libya 53rd in the world and first in Africa. By then, Libya was registering the highest per capita income in Africa, the lowest infant mortality, and the highest life expectancy. Schooling and healthcare were provided without Libyans having to pay.

Under Gaddafi, more than 95% of Libyans were adequately nourished; the government had abolished taxes on food. Literacy increased from 25% to 87% during the Gaddafi era. Almost 10% of Libya’s youth received scholarships for study abroad. Beginning in 1983 the government developed a massive water-delivery system with 1,100 new wells and 4,000 kilometers of pipelines.

Had the Gaddafi government not disappeared, the social advances and protection might have remained. Some of the progress might have continued under another government, if there had been no intervention.

What’s certain is that previous arrangements for sustaining the population disappeared following NATO’s military action. Adverse conditions now allowed for the dams to disintegrate and for Libya’s people to not be rescued.

Pointing to a planetary “double crisis,” an ecological crisis and a social one, analyst Jason Hickle insisted recently that the two crises be dealt with simultaneously: “Attempting to address one without the other leaves fundamental contradictions entrenched.” He adds that, “the two dimensions are symptoms of the same underlying pathology … [which is] the capitalist system of production.”

Derner is witness to Hickle’s double crisis. The unprecedently heavy rainfall reflects climate crisis. A decade of turmoil and neglect of the dams attests to social crisis. The two share the same root cause.

Capitalism requires perpetually increasing production of goods, which led to overuse of fossil fuels, which has translated into climate change. Under capitalism, natural resources in the world’s peripheral regions are plundered. Popular forces may be suppressed. Devices like NATO come into their own. If it had occurred a little earlier, Jason Hickle could have used the catastrophe to illustrate the main point of his article.

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}