Re: [Marxism] Trecherous and bourgeois Bolivian regime...

["rrubinelli" <rrubinelli@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oh, and one more thing...

We shouldn't be making too much of the Repsol-YPF write down-- seeing in
this, as the center-right does,  a confirmation in the negative of the
"positive" progressiveness of  Morales' program, intention, action.

This write down has been a long-time in coming and long overdue as
Repsol has had some of the poorest reserve/replacement ratios in the
business.  The chairman of Repsol-YPF, Antonio Brufau assumed his
position in November 2004, and as the Financial Times reported on
January 27 2006, "talk that the company's proven gas reserves in Bolivia
and Argentina were overstated or in doubt because of legislative
uncertainty had been circulating in Madrid well before Mr. Brufau took
the helm...."

509 million of the 1.2 billion barrel of oil equivalent write down is a
write down of Argentinian assets, based on difficulties in profitable
recovery.

Again from the FT:  "Mr. Brufau set up a special audit committee to
reassess the viability of the company's proven reserves according to the
strict criteria set out by the Securities and Exchange Commission in New
York. ...The result was worse than most had imagined-- a 25 percent
reduction in the book reserves that Repsol or the SEC would consider
recoverable with 90 percent certainty."

An analyst at Wood Mackenzie was quoted as saying:  " This reserve
restatement has less to do with political and fiscal changes in Latin
America than the fact that Repsol has been very aggressive in booking
its reserves in the past."

I think the analyst is only half right.  The point of class struggle, on
both sides of the line, is that the conflict between means and relations
brings "economics"  directly forward as social struggle.  So how
convenient, seredipitous, fortuitous that Repsol writes down these
reserves-- in effect, devalues "its" assets at just the point when the
ownership of such assets is at stake for tax/royalty purposes; at just
the point  when devaluation can justify, mandate, reduction in
investment and capital expansion; at just the point where bankruptcy,
liquidation, abandonment, corporate lock-out on a grand scale, is not an
idle threat, but the threat of idlement, deployed against the Bolivian
workers and poor.

rr


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