Here's a twist on an old winter carol: "I saw three ships come sailing in…." And what was in those ships? Heating oil for from Venezuela for poor, freezing Americans. A Merry Christmas from our friend Hugo Chavez.
Last week, just after the gift from Chavez arrived, we had U.S. Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Quincy) announcing his intention to form a Congressional delegation to travel to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Mexico and petition state-owned oil companies in those countries to follow Venezuela's example and donate oil to our impoverished citizens.
Imagine a holiday card with a picture of Delahunt shaking hands with the heads of the Kuwaiti, Saudi and Mexican petroleum industries, and note the paradoxes here. Americans would be going with their hands out to what used to be called Third World countries, begging for oil for their cold fellow countrymen.
And in an even more bizarre turn of events, Delahunt and his colleagues would be going to countries with nationalized (socialist! Communist! Bolshevik!) oil companies, because—because what?
Because highly profitable corporations have no incentive, in the Dodge City of neocon-style capitalism, to keep heating oil affordable?
Because in a country that calls itself the richest on earth, people are freezing in the dark over Christmas and New Year's?
Here in the Valley there are people choosing between food and heat, keeping the house just warm enough to be sure their pipes don't freeze, not warm enough to ward off bronchitis and asthma. Not warm enough to keep them from trying to heat with stoves or unsafe space heaters that might malfunction and cause house fires. That alone is one reason we want our neighbors to get heating assistance: it's not safe to live next door to (or above, or below) someone who's using a makeshift heat source.
Here's a big part of the reason some Americans are taking for help from unlikely patrons: our president has rebuffed requests to expand the federal heating assistance budget and vetoed the bill that would have appropriated money for it. The program, acronymed LIHEAP, has an annual budget of $2.16 billion. (If it had been funded to keep pace with inflation or rising fuel costs since its inception in 1981, that budget would be over $4 billion by now.) The president wants that cut to $1.78 billion in fiscal 2008, which began in October.
The heating assistance program is not a helping of gravy for the middle class. About two-thirds of the households that use it have incomes of less than $20,000 a year. According to a figure published by the office of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the appropriation Congress requested for 2008 could be paid for with what the U.S. spends in Iraq in one week.
The administration doesn't want to rein in the profitability of the energy companies; the administration doesn't want to increase fuel assistance for needy families. With the price of heating oil up more than 20 percent this year, the math alone shows that people will be up against the wall.
Or maybe not; the White House sees a longterm solution moving in like a weather front. Global warming is healthy, presidential press secretary Dana Perino said in October, because "many people die from cold-related deaths every winter." Not only is the syntax vintage Bush; so is the lame parody of what many hoped, even after the controversial election of 2000, might turn out to be compassionate conservatism.
