Many years ago I worked for a textbook company that was producing a middle-school social studies textbook on countries in the Western Hemisphere that are not the U.S. This was long enough ago that my 46-year-old daughter used that textbook in her middle school classes. Most of the book focused on Central and South America, obviously. I remember spending an inordinate about of time trying to determine if the animals in the photos were llamas or alpacas. I still can’t tell. But what made the book really challenging is that several countries being covered in the book had revolutions and overthrew their governments while we were trying to put the book together. This called for scrapping lots of pages and starting over. I wanted to send someone a sternly worded memo to stop having revolutions until the books were printed, at least. (At which point they were a sales/marketing problem, not mine.)

I thought of that today when I read that Venezuelans are furious at Trump’s takeover of their oil.  Julie Turkewitz reports for the New York Times;

Many Venezuelans suspected that there was going to be a price to pay for President Trump’s brazen capture of their autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, who was arrested by U.S. forces in January.

On Friday, that cost became clear when Mr. Trump announced that the U.S. would be taking majority control of a vast part of Venezuela’s oil reserves — national resources long considered by many in the country to be a birthright.

By Saturday, many Venezuelans were grappling with whether they were willing to pay that price. So far, the U.S. ouster of the autocrat has done little to change the country — Mr. Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, remains in power, while millions of everyday Venezuelans remain in poverty, electricity blackouts continue to plague the nation and no date has been set for an election.

The new deal could bring major investment. But many Venezuelans want overall economic and political change. The accord guarantees neither and could deepen the relationship between Mr. Trump and Ms. Rodríguez, further entrenching her in power.

Further entrenching her in power? Or marking her for overthrow?

The article goes on to say that Venezuelans want democratic reforms. If they’re expecting democratic reforms from Trump — well, peeps, don’t hold your breaths.

There’s still a lot about this alleged deal that isn’t clear to me. Turns out it’s not clear to a lot of people. There’s a good background article on the deal at al Jazeera, What’s behind the US deal to seize control of Venezuelan oil reserves? Indeed, some people are questioning whether there’s a deal at all.

But some analysts have questioned the 65-billion-barrel total Trump announced. With no fixed terms released, there has been speculation that Trump may have made a splashy announcement to help jumpstart the US economy.

“The 65 billion barrel number is a red herring and will have little relevance to any actual deals — the real relevant details of which are still almost entirely unknown,” oil market researcher Rory Johnston said in a social media post.

“It’s just a classic big number that Trump was sure to jump all over and will repeat ad nauseam going forward.”

It’s also the case that Trump and his people believe all the oil in Venezuela rightly belongs to the U.S. “Trump and his allies advanced an argument that Venezuela’s oil supplies belonged to the US, due to a history of early fuel exploration in the country,” al Jazeera says. “His adviser, Stephen Miller, separately called the nationalisation of Venezuela’s oil industry ‘the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property’.” However, International law says the oil is Venezuela’s.

The deal isn’t a complete fantasy, however, because President Rodríguez made a statement about it on Saturday.

“The agreement is based on a very simple premise,” she said. “Each party contributes what it does best. Venezuela contributes oil, its industry and the experience of its workers accumulated over more than 100 years. The United States contributes the capital and technology needed to recover and develop those assets.”

Rodríguez added that in return, “Venezuela receives production, jobs, investment in infrastructure, increased revenue for the government and productive linkages for domestic industry.”

So she’s expecting the U.S. to invest a lot of money into rebuilding and upgrading the oil field infrastructure that can pump super-heavy Venezuelan crude out of the ground and ship it to refineries. And Trump is saying that this deal won’t cost taxpayers anything. Right.

Trump is also acting as if our strategic oil reserve shortage problem is now solved. But as I noted yesterday, Venezuela lacks the infrastructure to extract all but a trickle of oil at a time. Most of that oil that Trump thinks is his is going to be in the ground for a while.

See also Venezuela vowed not to ‘hand over’ its oil. Trump aims to grab a windfall. by Samantha Schmidt and Helena Carpio at the Washington Post.

As I mentioned in the last post I do need to do a small fundraiser to get me through some extra expenses that will be coming due soon. These include a medical bill and some other irregular costs that are all ganging up at once. So I’ve set up a Gofundme . If you don’t like Gofundme the donate links in the upper right hand column to go Paypal. All help is deeply appreciated.