The increase of state-controlled resources is ulitmately bad news for American consumers, says Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contrarian Profits. Not only are state-run resource companies inefficient compared to private sector firms but also many of them are hostile to US interests.

Last week, Russia and Venezuela finalized their deal to bolster cooperation in the oil and gas markets. Russia’s state gas monopoly OAO Gazprom and Venezuela’s Petroleos de Venezuela SA have inked a memorandum of understanding that allows for greater cooperation between the companies.

To help seal the deal, Russia is granting Venezuela a $1 billion credit for the purchase of Russian weaponry. After all, you never know if ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) and ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP) will get the Bush administration to invade in an effort to take back their investments in Venezuela.

And it could get worse for American companies as they inadvertently build out energy infrastructures that are appropriated by emerging nations that have petro-fascists sitting on the throne.

A recent article in The Economist questioned whether high oil prices will stimulate “resource nationalism.” In addition to Venezuela’s seizure, Bolivia and Ecuador forced international companies to make similar concessions.

At about the same time, TNK-BP, a Russian subsidiary of BP, had to sell a major stake in its oil business to the national gas monopoly Gazprom. And in 2006, Royal Dutch Shell was forced to sell a 50%-plus-one-share stake in the Sakhalin-2 oil field to Gazprom.

A consortium including ExxonMobil, Total, Shell and ConocoPhillips has already invested $17 billion in developing the Kashagan Field in Kazakhstan. But over the past two years, Kazakhstan has escalated its demands, forcing these international oil companies to reduce their stake in order to give state-owned KMG a larger share.

This trend is bad news for US consumers. Since most of these regimes are openly anti-American, they could push up the price of gas at the pump.

And politics aside, the management of energy facilities by these state-owned agencies is downright inefficient compared with the more experienced Western companies - in turn achieving the same effect as political price gouging.

As The Economist explains, most national appropriations took place in the 1970s, when oil hit historically high levels. Once the oil price came down in the 1980s and 1990s, the move to nationalize “virtually disappeared and re-emerged only in the last decade when oil prices climbed back to 1970s’ levels.”

We can only expect this trend to continue unless there is a collapse of oil prices. In the mean time, we find that the US oil companies find themselves as accidental Communists.