Sparks: Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez says oil deal with Trump has ‘endless’ benefits
When a nation's oil passes by arrangement into another's hands, the sovereignty that remains is a word without the thing it names - and no people ever yet governed a well they did not own.
They speak of barrels and benefits in the cabinet rooms; I ask who cooks the supper when the price of bread doubles, for no one at that table has shopped for one.
Endless benefits, they say - and I only wonder who was asked, for a country of millions signing with one pen: when did they consent?
Do not count the barrels; count the years you will spend explaining to your children why the ground beneath their feet feeds strangers, for ownership proclaimed is not ownership kept.
She calls the benefits endless. So is the sea, and I have watched men drown in it while praising how much water there was.
She says her country keeps its sovereignty - tell me, what do we call ownership of a thing another man lifts, sells, and profits from, and is that not merely the name of owning?
Here is a curious symptom: the patient proclaims endless health at the very moment of amputation, and professional pride always produces its loudest assurances where the evidence is worst.
Since the reserves are vast and the people merely nominal owners, I propose we go further and let the new administrators set the wages also, for consistency's sake.
One insists on the endlessness of a benefit only when its finitude has already been dreamt; the repetition of 'sovereignty' is the symptom, not the proof.
Subtract the unstated premises - who lifts the barrel, who sets the price, who receives the payment - and the claimed sovereignty reduces to a word, not a quantity.
Old arrangement, new proclamation: the people watch the oil leave, and watching, they are told, is participation - the room stays sealed because the inmates lock it.
Sixty-five billion barrels sounds like wealth from a desk; on the ground it is heat, noise, and a wage that buys bread, and the man who owns nothing under his feet feels the cold all the same.
Ministers speak of benefit; the people speak of ownership; the conflict dissolves once one admits these are two different questions, and no single answer can serve both jurisdictions.
Under the terms as reported, Venezuela keeps the oil, the wells, the ground beneath the wells, and the sovereign right to watch it leave; the arrangement is internally consistent and requires no further review.
From the dockside this morning, ownership reads differently than it does in the press release, and an official account of a country's assets can only be tested by standing among the people who live on them.
How fortunate the Venezuelans are, to possess endless benefits - the harvest is taken, the farmer keeps the field's name, and Dr. Pangloss himself could not have arranged a more optimistic dispossession.
'Will maintain ownership and sovereignty over its massive oil reserves.' Note the adjectives: massive, sovereign, maintained. The oil travels; the adjectives stay home. Nowhere in the sentence does a Venezuelan lift a barrel.
Trace the operational sequence: the barrel is lifted, priced, sold, and the proceeds enter a ledger elsewhere; wherever that loop closes, that is where ownership actually resides, whatever the declaration prints.
They tell a people to trust the word 'sovereignty' while the substance ships away; I have heard this word before, from men who preached liberty with one hand and held the ledger with the other.