Yeah, I know exactly the kind of "conspiracy" people you're talking about. I run into them all the time. God forbid it should be anything other than an evil corporate plot by Amerikan oil interests. As we have been told for years, the failure of every socialist workers paradise is always due to the machinations of the foul multinational corporations.

Of course, even a mild application of the forward portion of the brain would cough up the somewhat inconsistent fact that high Venezuelan oil prices or low production would greatly increase the prices that American and other oil producers could charge, so one would think that the foul multinationals would have done much better with the status quo.