I have had long running arguments with naivos even close to the oil industry that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela intended to turn not just Venezuela’s state oil company into a worker-ant collective but Western oil majors’ Venezuelan operations into them as well.

Today, I stand vindicated.

Today, workers from Chevron, Repsol, Shell, Exxon, Total and others must put on red t-shirts and stand at attention, worker-ant-style, wave their fists and shout pro-Chavez slogans for their new Chavista masters, who’ve taken over their firms in broken contracts. No wonder Venezuelan oil production is a mess. They have to have Chavista indoctrination sessions first!

Which is pretty creepy because it is so coercive. It’s one thing to make people do that at the Venezuelan oil company, to turn what essentially should be a government operation into a political one. Now they are forcing thought-control onto foreign investors at foreign firms. I am really appalled. I wonder if foreigners, like U.S. citizens, are being forced into doing this against their will.

What’s interesting is that Exxon, noble Exxon, which is the only company with the courage to stand up and openly defy Hugo Chavez, just got word that Chavez intended to expropriate yet another oil field, La Ceiba, breaking another contract, probably the only one Exxon has left.

And Anadarko Petroleum, an indy producer whose stock has been a star in recent months, reports that its losses from Chavista contract-breaking are so great that it will probably pull out of Venezuela altogether.

A great pullout is coming. And what’s bad for Venezuela is that it will cost them big to get these investors back when it needs them, and it will. They will have to cut their prices to rock bottom, due to all the risk that will be involved, no matter what the price of a barrel of oil. Like the Citgo brand name, whose value they destroyed – the Citgo signs are coming down all over America, they are now destroying the value of their production facilities. They are doing it solely to make a political point and hurting themselves most.

I am appalled as hell.