Sow’s Ear

Joe Kennedy has a new radio commercial touting his Citizens Energy “non-profit” company. He extols Venezuela’s Citgo for donating million of dollars worth of oil to the poor people of Massachusetts to help them heat their homes. I know I am beating a dead horse here, but first, let me point out again … Citizens Energy is not a non-profit company. It is an energy trading company (like Enron was) which has a small eleemosynary section. Joe Kennedy pulls down hundreds of thousand dollars a year in salary from this ersatz “charity.” Secondly, Joe says in this ad that this oil was donated by Citgo which is “owned by the Venezuelan people.” This is a genteel way of saying that Citgo was nationalized by Venezuela in the 1990’s (other U.S. oil companies been nationalized there more recently) … in other words, Citgo was stolen from us. How’s that for turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse? And this is a silk purse from which the Kennedy clan extracts more of its ill-gotten lucre. (I wonder why we Bostonians insist on keeping that huge Citgo sign behind the Green Monster in Fenway Park? Is it a monument to Hugo Chavez? Or, to this Kennedy charade?)