Word: oiling
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...which raises the question: If Chávez can keep donating fuel even as his oil revenues tumble, why can't any U.S. oil companies step up to do the same? (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...left-wing Chávez caught Washington by surprise in the fall of 2005 when he announced that Citgo - the Houston-based subsidiary of Venezuela's state-run oil firm, Petróleos de Venezuela - would give millions of gallons of heating oil at half price, and eventually free, to struggling households in the American Northeast and Midwest. By this year, the service has expanded to more than 200,000 families in 23 states. The partisan controversy around it has also grown. Republicans grouse that taking fuel from Chávez, America's chief antagonist in the hemisphere, is unpatriotic...
...responding to members of Congress who had made a public plea for oil companies to provide lower-cost home-heating oil to U.S. families squeezed by the rising price of fuel. No U.S.-owned firm stepped forward; Citgo did. (Sunoco has since set up a program that provides free heating oil to 1,100 residents in the Philadelphia area.) Admittedly, it was a chance for Chávez to showcase "one of our revolution's most important principles," as then Venezuelan Ambassador to the U.S. Bernardo Alvarez told TIME in 2006: "the redistribution of oil revenues, especially for the poor...
...plummeting price of crude forced Chávez, who controls the hemisphere's largest oil reserves and is a major U.S. supplier, to turn off the Citgo spigot this week and focus more of his aid resources at home. Critics of Chávez point out that his need to shore up domestic funds is even more urgent because he's trying to win support for a national referendum, probably to be held next month, on whether to eliminate presidential-term limits and let him run again...
With or without Chávez's oil, U.S. homeowners are facing lower heating costs this winter: about $2.25 per gal. of heating oil, compared with a record high of more than $4.50 last year. Still, those households are also confronting the worst economic crisis since the Depression and the unemployment and precarious finances that come with it. As a result, politicians like Democratic U.S. Representative Chaka Fattah, many of whose Philadelphia constituents have received the Citgo fuel, wonder why U.S. oil giants like ExxonMobil - which saw a record $40 billion profit in 2007 and probably broke that...