Saturday, June 25, 2005

Filling up for democracy: Buy your gas at Citgo.


I haven't checked enough to know whether this is legitimate, so I'm interested in hearing from anyone else who's on top of this:

Looking for an easy way to protest Bush foreign policy week after week? And an easy way to help alleviate global poverty? Buy your gasoline at Citgo stations.

And tell your friends.

Of the top oil producing countries in the world, only one is a democracy with a president who was elected on a platform of using his nation's oil revenue to benefit the poor. The country is Venezuela. The President is Hugo Chavez. Call him "the Anti-Bush."

Thoughts? (Note to Canadian readers: I'm not aware of how widespread Citgo stations are here in Canada.)

CAUTIONARY UPDATE: Just for clarification, no one here at CC HQ claims that Chavez is the perfect leader. If you check out this interview with Paul Krugman, Krugman makes it clear that he and many others consider Chavez to be "a goon and a dinosaur."

Regardless, he is the elected president and that has to stand until the next election, so whether or not you want to support him or not is your choice. I suspect the best way to describe this would be "the lesser of two evils."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, the CITGO station locator tells what I thought was true. There are none in Eastern Canada (including Ontario).

Anonymous said...

If I recall correctly, Citgo is also the only gas station listed on BuyBlue.org that donates more money to Democrats than to Republicans.

RossK said...

Looks real.

Buy Blue likes them*

Here on the Left Coast it's not far. There's one in Ferndale and a bunch in the Bellingham area....so - if you're gonna cross border gas guzzle might as well do it helping Hugo.

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*The one company they like even more, based on financial support for democrats (which is one of those very, very, very rare - read never - occurences in the oil business), is Hess Oil.

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