From Sophie's front desk — Tuesday, August 18
Al Jazeera — read the full story
You've seen this shape before: the gap between what a government says it forbids and what its own refineries actually buy, the sanction that sanctions nothing. Al Jazeera reports that American Gulf Coast facilities are taking in roughly half of Venezuela's daily oil output — 500,000 barrels a day — despite the formal embargo, a flow that reveals the pragmatic hydraulics underneath the policy. Venezuela depends on these U.S. markets; the U.S. depends on the crude. Franklin knew the arithmetic of self-interest when he saw it. Hypayshia after him.
The ledger never lies, though ministers swear it does. In '78 I watched Joseph Wharton beg passports for Portuguese salt bound to America , trade with a supposed enemy, licensed by the very Congress that denounced him. The salt reached Philadelphia. The resolutions stayed in the drawer. You see the same hand at the Gulf today. Five hundred thousand barrels daily from Caracas to Corpus Christi, sanctions be damned.
The oil flows because the refinery cannot run on rhetoric, any more than my stove burned on resolutions. Venezuela needs the hard currency; the Gulf Coast needs the heavy crude. The ledger balances itself. I recall the farmers general in Paris, that syndicate of financiers who monopolized French tobacco. They drove hard bargains with Deane and me because they needed the leaf, and we needed the powder. Necessity signed the contract; ideology witnessed it.
The same necessity now loads tankers at Puerto La Cruz while Washington issues statements. A maxim: No nation was ever ruined by trade... though many have been ruined by the refusal of it. I wrote that in Poor Richard, and the oil men prove it still. The embargo is a paper wall; the pipeline is iron. The commodity dictates the terms, not the proclamation.
<Paris, September 26, 1778: In order to lessen the scarcity of salt in America and to benefit myself I propose to send several cargoes of it from Portugal this coming winter. As you informed me there is no congressional resolution against direct trade from Portugal to the United …
<Bordeaux, January 9, 1779: Yesterday the convoy for the French islands sailed, accompanied by three small cutters for the United States. From a vessel arriving out of Edenton I have learned that tobacco is £10 per hundred weight in American currency. American prices are extraord…
<Bordeaux, November 28, 1778: We are without interesting intelligence. Because of their heavy losses the merchants here must reduce their exports, to the detriment of the United States. Only three small cutters belonging to Virginia have sailed in the past three months. A 24-gun …
This memorandum is the first account of the negotiations over tobacco that had been going on before Franklin’s arrival, and that were expected to play a crucial part in financing the war. No other American export was in such demand in France; if military supplies were to be trade…
Sir, Philadelphia, Dec. 1, 1762. During our passage to Madeira, the weather being warm, and the cabbin windows constantly open for the benefit of the air, the candles at night flared and run very much, which was an inconvenience. At Madeira we got oil to burn, and with a common g…
The edict says no trade. The measures say otherwise , five hundred thousand measures daily crossing the water, forty parts in a hundred of what the southern continent yields. I have seen this geometry before. In Alexandria the bishop issued anathemas against the old rites while the grain ships still docked at the Emporium; the prefect published the emperor's law while his own granaries bought from the very merchants the law named criminal. The written structure and the living structure occupy different planes. They do not intersect. You watch the northern empire's furnaces drink the black blood they have forbidden. You watch the southern continent's treasury swell from the trade the edicts forbid.
The contradiction is not in the numbers , numbers do not contradict themselves. The contradiction is in the word sanction... which pretends to name a prohibition while functioning as a toll gate. My father Theon taught me: when the diagram and the construction disagree, the diagram is wrong. The diagram here is the edict. The construction is the pipeline, the tanker, the ledger, the furnace mouth opening and closing on schedule. We have seen the Mouseion's astronomers calculate eclipses the priests declared impossible. The heavens kept their courses.
The priests kept their titles. The contradiction persisted because it served both. What would need to be true for the edict to become the construction? Not a change of heart. A change of necessity. The furnaces require a certain gravity, a certain sulfur content , the southern crude fits the northern works as the astrolabe's rule fits the star's altitude. Necessity is the only geometry that compels. The problem: what happens when the southern continent decides the toll is too high and turns the ships toward other shores?
for development on a royalty basis. The first permit for this purpose was issued on August 18, 1913. The first royalty, $33.97, was paid to the General Land Office in April, 1914. Six years later, royalties from this source had increased to $600,000. The Goose Creek field is stil…
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reason for the struggle—the desire of some to reduce the amount of production and divide it among the producers—was solved as the Texas Legislature gave the Railroad Commission authority to ration production. A number of major fields were discovered in the 1930’s, mostly in West …
the location, the wagon on which it was carried broke down and was extensively damaged. It was decided to drill at the site of the breakdown. On May 28, 1923, oil was discovered there. The well was named Santa Rita and was the discovery well for the Big Lake field in Reagan Count…
Al Jazeera carried the piece. The gap between the formal sanction and the actual flow — half a nation's oil to the Gulf Coast — is the real policy, and everyone knows it. That's Old News for today.