Trump Demanded $100bn — Oil Firms Called Venezuela Uninvestable

Trump has demanded massive investment in Venezuela’s oil and promised protection — and the oil companies have refused, calling it uninvestable. Right, so a US president has just told oil companies to pour a hundred billion dollars into another country and take its oil, as if ownership is already settled and paperwork is an afterthought and they’ve told him where he can stick it instead. Donald Trump did the pitch. The art of the deal as he loves to call it. He promised protection. He promised safety. He promised the oil would be theirs. And the companies who are supposed to make money from American power, through oil, didn’t bite. They called Venezuela uninvestable instead and walked. And here’s why, aside from the fact they aren’t as stupid as Caligula Trump is. Because when the firms that normally cash in on US pressure won’t touch the deal – and let’s face it, these companies have done well out of this before - something is clearly different this time. The threats still exist, the sanctions still land, the seizures still happen, but the payoff doesn’t show up. It isn’t there. This isn’t a safe bet. And the oil giants have said thanks, but no thanks. Right, so Donald Trump has been doing that thing he always does, where he talks like the state is a personal repo man and the world is a warehouse. Venezuela’s oil will be “ours”, Venezuela’s oil will “rebuild” itself under American control, and the only thing standing between him and a trophy-barrel photo op is the small technicality of reality. Except this time reality has turned up wearing a suit and calling itself “capital discipline”, and it has told him, in front of everyone, that Venezuela is “uninvestable”. Uninvestable. That word is the story in itself. Because it isn’t a moral objection, and it isn’t even a political objection in the principled sense. It’s a profit objection. It’s the industry saying: if you want us to do the physical work of extracting, shipping, insuring, financing, contracting, and standing behind the paper that makes all of that tradable, then you need to give us something we can sell to boards, insurers, banks, and courts. And right now, you can’t.