May Day: International Worker's Day

Happy belated May Day everyone!

Did your town have a May Day celebration?  Ours did!  We had music, speakers, a maypole, facepainting, a capitalist pig piñata and lots of good eats and good people.  The organizing committee really outdid themselves.  If you didn't get to go to a cool May Day festival like this, maybe consider organizing one in your town next year  The folks at the Civic Media Center would have lots of resources and advice to get you on the way.

And in honor of May Day, Chavez has "nationalized" the oil industry!  No, not really but if we call it that it will sound conveniently scary and socialistic.  That's what I think the mainstream media must be thinking with headlines such as this.  (To be fair Chavez uses the term "nationalization" also).  But he didn't really nationalize anything, he just re-negotiated the state's contract with the foreign oil companies so that the state gets a larger share of control.  The companies are still privately owned but Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA now holds 60% of the shares instead of something like 40%.  This should help them keep more of the income generated from such ventures instead of having most of it drain off to other countries.  All the foreign companies agreed to the deal because it's still more profitable for them to mine for oil there in Venezuela than it is to go somewhere else.  This was explained by an analyst on Radio France Internacional (I love RFI!).  You can read the full story here.

So yay Chavez!  Good for you.  Así se gobierna!  (That's the way to govern!)