Podcast
Drilling for oil in Lake Maracaibo in 1950. Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty
How US oil workers made Venezuela rich
The Trump administration’s claim that Venezuela’s oil industry is “rightfully theirs” is obviously wild and incendiary, says Anatoly Kurmanaev on The Daily. But it does contain “a grain of truth”. The boom that followed the discovery of masses of crude oil in Venezuela in 1922 was driven by American oil workers. These immigrant oilmen built US-style towns – “American grids, suburban houses, schools, baseball, social activities, churches” – and the locals they hired became the backbone of a new middle class. The country’s oil capital, Maracaibo, was known as “the Houston of Venezuela”. By the 1950s Caracas was the world’s largest exporter of crude and making “tremendous amounts of money”.
This arrangement suited everyone. The proceeds were poured into infrastructure and Venezuela became one of the richest countries in Latin America. When President Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalised the oil industry in the 1970s, he sensibly took a “relatively conciliatory path”, compensating the US oil firms and offering them juicy new contracts. Again, this arrangement worked well. The state-owned oil company, PDVSA, became an effective, modern outfit, “at the cutting edge of technology”, and much of the oil wealth was put into education and alleviating poverty. But when the oil price plummeted in the 1980s the economic model fell apart: money was scarce, corruption scandals grew and Venezuelans became disillusioned with the status quo. That paved the way for the socialist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who won power in 1999 claiming PDVSA had become a “country club for the rich and privileged”. He replaced its top executives with “radical Marxists”, and forcibly nationalised joint ventures with foreign companies including the US oil giants that would become ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. Those firms took the Chávez government to court and were awarded billions in damages. They’re still waiting for their payouts.
🛢️😱 President Trump has said US companies will rebuild Venezuela’s crumbling oil industry, says Rogé Karma in The Atlantic. He’s delusional. Yes, it has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. But most of that is “thick, low-quality” stuff that costs about $80 a barrel to extract and process – a big problem when the price of oil is only about $60 a barrel. And rebooting the dilapidated industry would require a “herculean effort” costing hundreds of billions of dollars. In the words of ExxonMobil’s CEO, Venezuela is currently “uninvestable”.
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Property
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Heroes and villains
Watch out, international fugitives. The Chiswick Calendar
Heroes
The Chiswick branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, for inadvertently collaring a fugitive on the run from Interpol. Volunteer James Anthony says he was surprised that Colombian Zulma Guzman Castro showed little gratitude after he and his team pulled her out of the Thames in December, but was less surprised after he later learned that she was wanted for murder. “You might outrun Interpol,” he wrote, “but you’ll never outpace Chiswick lifeboat.”
Villains
The Met Office, for issuing the extremely babyish advice to “waddle like a penguin” during the icy conditions last week, preferably while clinging on to a “waddle buddy”. That’s right, says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times, a waddle buddy. There are times when I feel like a well-adjusted member of society. And there are times when I feel like “joining ISIS and brewing up some ricin”. This is one of the latter occasions.
Might want to check what’s in that sauce. Instagram/@ynyshirrestaurant
Villain
The only restaurant in Wales with two Michelin stars, which has been awarded a one-star hygiene rating by food safety officers. Ynyshir Restaurant and Rooms, where meals start at £468 a head, was told its cleanliness and food safety practices needed improvement. Chef patron Gareth Ward says the inspectors clearly weren’t au fait with his cutting-edge approach to raw fish and salted meat. Or perhaps he just forgot to take the bins out.
Hero
Sholto David, an amateur scientific sleuth in Oxford, who has earned almost £2m by exposing the use of dodgy data at one of America’s top cancer research institutions. The 34-year-old, who spends his spare time trawling scientific papers for errors and fraud, sued the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute after spotting that it had cited manipulated data to secure a federal research grant. The institute has agreed a $15m settlement, $2.63m of which will go to Sholto.
Villain
Samuel Pepys, after pupils at his alma mater voted to remove his name from one of the school’s houses because of his “abusive and exploitative” behaviour towards women. Around 60% of students at Hinchingbrooke School in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, supported renaming Pepys House after a study last year found that the diarist wrote in shorthand about rape fantasies and physically assaulting his wife and maids.
Inside politics
Bill Pugliano/Getty
The feisty Democrat taking the fight to Trump
Gavin Newsom has “always, always wanted to be president”, says Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. And soon he may get the chance. According to early polling, the California governor is the Democrats’ front-runner for 2028, with obvious advantages over the likely competition. As a heterosexual white man from a Catholic background, nothing about his identity is “electorally risky”; he’s 6ft 3in and appropriately good-looking; and in a political arena now dominated by podcasts, “he can talk until he’s hoarse”. Crucially, unlike his fellow Democrats he isn’t held back by “paralysing caution”. Given the choice, he’d far rather be “strong and wrong” than “weak and right”.
In this respect, Newsom is strikingly similar to Donald Trump. He is more than willing to fight dirty, “going lower than Barack Obama could ever imagine”. His combative social media accounts bristle with memes about Trump’s advancing age, AI-generated images of the president as Marie Antoinette and pictures of him with Jeffrey Epstein. His merchandise store has a page touting MAGA-branded kneepads for “all your grovelling to Trump needs”. Much of it, he says, is holding up a mirror to show America what has been normalised. And when he wants to, he can still sound like any other Democrat – his response to Trump’s military operation in Venezuela called for “democracy, human rights and stability”. Newsom is betting that the next election will be fought on “good vibes and naked aggression”. And he is more than prepared to play Trump at his own game: “Be vulgar, be trivial, be offensive. Just don’t be weak.”
The Knowledge Crossword
Zeitgeist
Lucy Punch after attacking the booze at a school event in Motherland (2021)
Sorry New York, Londoners are having way more fun
Back when I lived in New York, says Ashley Baker in The Times, wellness was a religion. And as a “card-carrying member of Generation Goop”, I threw myself head-first into it all, from collagen coffees and salmon sperm injections to microdosed ketamine and $100 Pilates classes. Weekends were spent curling up with Woody Allen films rather than getting plastered at dinner parties, and if I did ever sip on a vodka soda, I’d never fail to “sweat it out” at Barry’s Bootcamp the next morning.
Then, in 2022, I moved back to London, and after a few painful months of being the “No-Groni lady” who washed down social events with overpriced mocktail mixers, I realised that over here you’re all still having tons of fun. There’s always an excellent excuse to get smashed: a two-year-old’s birthday party, a thrilling rugby match, a boring cricket match, “it’s a Wednesday”. And “acting like a hot mess” is totally encouraged. I’ve seen a captain of industry fall out of a lift and toddle off, giggling, to close a deal. At my child’s sports day, everyone found it hilarious when one parent OD’ed on Pimm’s and forgot where they’d parked the car. The Christmas period, which apparently starts in October, often involves a glass of fizz for breakfast and at parties guests are “mainlining caipirinhas in the conga line”. When I asked my builder if we could squeeze a sauna into the house renovation, she laughed and told me to make space for a wine fridge instead. London, it seems, never got the memo that the good times are in the rear-view mirror. Quite right too.
Weather
Quoted
“We are here on Earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for I do not know.”
WH Auden
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