Brass Knuckles

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey sheds some light on an American investment in off-shore drilling.

Wait — did I say American resources?  That’s true, but only in the South American sense (via Gateway Pundit):

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a “preliminary commitment” letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas. …

But it still doesn’t allow the U.S. to explore in Alaska or along the East and West Coasts, which could be our equivalent of the Tupi oil fields, which are set to make Brazil a leading oil exporter. Americans are right to wonder why Mr. Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won’t allow at home.

I’ll say it again – the president’s energy policy is not about “energy independence”; tax impediments to oil & gas production that are in the budget make that pretty clear. 

So what’s it really about? In the long term, I believe that it’s about the regulation and rationing of energy as it’s done in Europe, where gasoline is sold by the liter.  This concept was preached by liberal professors when I was in college in the early 1980s as being good for the country under the guise of treating petroleum as a strategic national resource.  The benefit of course, was an America that looked more like Europe; with the bicycles, town squares and planned green belts through our cities where the citizens could stroll care-free in the warm spring afternoons.  Unfortunate consequences like urban gentrification and the dislocation of the poor to the outer rings of hell where they’d be punished by the high energy cost of a long commute back into the city?  I don’t think that’s been an issue for the elite urban liberal illuminati – they love the poor, at least in the abstract, and the plight of the downtrodden would be another cause they could take up from their coffee shop off the platz.

In the short-term, you can always follow the money; and as sure as GE builds windmills, you can smell the pork from here.

Who else besides Obama has taken an interest in Petrobras?  Hmmmmmm:

His New York-based hedge-fund firm, Soros Fund Management LLC, sold 22 million U.S.-listed common shares of Petrobras, as the Brazilian oil company is known, according to a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Soros bought 5.8 million of the company’s U.S.-traded preferred shares.

Soros is taking advantage of the spread between the two types of U.S.-listed Petrobras shares, said Luis Maizel, president of LM Capital Group LLC, which manages about $4 billion. The common shares were 21 percent more expensive than preferred today, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. …

Petrobras preferred shares have also a 10 percent additional dividend, said William Landers, a senior portfolio manager for Latin America at Blackrock Inc.

“Given that there will most likely never be a change in control in the company, I see no reason to pay a higher price for the common shares.” Brazil’s government controls Petrobras and has a majority stake of voting shares.

UPDATE: This was via a Michelle Malkin post.  Sorry I didn’t credit her in the original post.

UPDATE 2:  Petrobras also has a joint venture with the Cuban national oil company – how can we be sure our money isn’t funding that joint venture as well?