Communi-whahh?

If we really are all born equal into this world, wouldn’t that mean we all 'own' one-seven-billionth of its resources?  Yet we don’t all seem to be getting our share of the bounty.  I just read that the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales

“soon after taking office in 2006, moved against the foreign- owned natural gas and petroleum companies to take 50% of the revenues, and to make the state-owned petroleum company the administrator and, in some cases, a co-investor. Similar deals have been made with transnational capital in the iron-mining sector, and the government is in the process of negotiating state-dominated agreements for the exploitation of Bolivia´s huge lithium deposits.

“While it is true that Morales has not launched a full assault on capital, his government along with the other New Left governments in Latin America have ended the neo-liberal era in which the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank imposed free market policies, severely curtailing social spending, and enabling transnational corporations to gain unprecedented control of the region’s nonrenewable resources. 

"Now many of these governments are using the state to exert greater control of the economy and are renegotiating the terms of investment in order to capture a greater portion of the revenue for social programs and to facilitate internal development and industrialization.”

Morales calls this 'communitarian socialism.'  A convoluted-sounding name,  but this idea of having 50% of the revenues from schemes that use or consume resources that we all own, come back to the people for social programmes sounds good to me. What about our oil and gas industry--are you getting any?

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