Word: crudeness
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...traders tell me the principal market for stolen crude is Basra, Iraq's only access to the Gulf. Fadhila, the strongest Shi'a militia in the city, pretty much monopolizes the trade. Fadhila currently offers pilfered oil for $10-12 a barrel. Buyers have to arrange for small freighters to ship it to Dubai, where it is sold at the dock for around $30 a barrel. The oil is sold on the international markets, commonly using a false certificate of origin or blended with other oil to disguise its origin. More and more frequently, however, co-opted employees in Iraq...
Then there's oil. As Thomas Friedman has noted, the price of crude and the tide of freedom tend to move in opposite directions. Before 9/11, the price per bbl. fluctuated between $20 and $30. Now it hovers between $50 and $65. And that's not likely to change anytime soon, given rising demand from China and India. That gives oil-producing autocracies such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Sudan and now Nigeria more money to crush or buy off internal dissent. And it makes it easier for them to win friends and influence people around the world. A decade...
...fields to foreign investment - in some cases handing the multinationals deals that even conservative Venezuelans considered too sweet. Chavez has just as steadily, and stridently, reversed that policy, paring down the multinationals' ownership while ratcheting up their taxes and royalties. And because Venezuela is America's fourth-largest foreign crude supplier - providing the U.S. with almost 15% of its oil imports - each turn of his nationalization screw tends to provoke outsized alarm...
...only Venezuela but other countries can export, and hence the price we pay for it. The lack of new investment in Mexico's oil fields, for example, has led to some of that nation's steepest production drops ever. The drilling ventures Chavez expropriated today involve tar-like heavy crude in Venezuela's Orinoco belt - perhaps enough to add some 300 billion barrels to the country's reserves, which would move it ahead of Saudi Arabia. But to make that heavy oil refinable requires billions of dollars, capital that Chavez's critics fear he may now have alienated - especially...
...eastern Venezuela today - May Day, the leftiest day of the year - and announced his government's takeover of the nation's lucrative heavy oil industry, it sent the usual panic through Washington and the international media. "It's national power!" shouted Chavez, who controls the hemisphere's largest crude reserves. "We can't have socialism if the state doesn't have control over its resources...