CITGO: Not even bothering to be subtle about it

If there were any of these around where I live, I'd go protest them. As it is, they ought to be run out of the country on a rail. I feel sorry for the franchisees, but dudes, wake up and smell the sulfur:

Citgo, which Venezuela bought two decades ago to market its hard-to-refine heavy oil, now has a different focus: feeding cash to Mr. Chávez's program to build socialism in Venezuela.

In recent years, while other U.S. refiners have invested heavily to take advantage of historically wide profit margins in the business, Citgo has been slimming down. It has slashed its investment and sold off U.S. assets, most recently by agreeing last week to shed a unit that turns crude oil into asphalt. ... Citgo has sent the extra money to its sole shareholder, the Venezuelan government. Citgo has raised its annual dividend to more than $2 billion, from $225 million in 2000.

The changes at Citgo are altering the U.S. fuel landscape. Citgo owns 5% of U.S. refining capacity, a significant chunk at a time when U.S. demand for fuel is growing faster than domestic production, and no new refinery has been built in three decades. Citgo's production will stagnate, adding to pressure on pump prices and fuel imports.

The Citgo brand ought to be marketing poison by now, and they ought to be hard-pressed to find anyone to work for them. As it is, Citgo is swearing employees to secrecy:

Citgo has a new board that includes, besides Mr. Boué, a cousin of Mr. Chávez and a French-born Marxist mathematician.

This board has become the key policy-making body, keeping U.S. managers in the dark about long-term strategy, say some current and former employees.

When Venezuela relocated Citgo's headquarters to Houston from Tulsa, Okla., in 2004, nearly half of the employees chose not to move. Almost all high-ranking American executives have since left. When they go, they must sign agreements promising not to criticize Citgo in public, former executives say, in accord with what some describe as a growing culture of secrecy at the company. "It's like a police state," said one, a Venezuelan.

Taking its cue from PDVSA, Citgo has increased its social spending. Last winter, Citgo provided cut-rate heating oil to 1.2 million low-income Americans. The program enabled Mr. Chávez to score political points about continuing poverty in one of the world's richest countries.

He wasn't the only one trying to score political points.

UPDATE: Oh, hell:

Kennedy's energy-assistance program has won praise from some Republicans, including former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is running for president.

In 2005 Romney extended his thanks to "all of those around the world working to get lower-priced energy to us," but refused to answer a question about the propriety of doing business with Chavez.

A spokesman for Romney said he is a staunch critic of Chavez, noting Romney denounced Chavez as a "cartoon character" in a TV interview in August.

Chavez is "trying to play politics, of course, with oil prices," Romney said in that interview. "The reality is we buy a lot of oil from Venezuela. We ought to get as much oil we can for as cheap a price as we possibly can and suck it dry if we possibly could."