Joe Kennedy on $100 Oil and His Deal with Hugo Chávez

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We've had a pretty mild winter in the Northeast. How strong is demand by lower-income people?
[Citizens Energy] is assisting probably something on the order of 250,000 families. You know we have strictures in this country that do not allow your electric company or your gas company to shut people off in the middle of winter. But heating oil customers get shut off left, right, and center because they get served by Ma and Pa dealers that may have a few thousand customers. So if they have a gas stove, they will open the broiler door and turn the burners on to keep warm. You're from New York, so you know that after the end of a very cold night in January or February, the next day you'll see there were all sorts of fires in poor areas of the city. There is no reason in the world why the price of oil has doubled in a year. And, you know, that creates a bit of an inconvenience if you're rich. It creates some hardship if you're middle class. But when you talk about the poor, the impact this has on 20% of the American public is just heartbreaking. And no one talks about it. No one cares. No one recognizes the devastation energy prices have on low-income, vulnerable people, particularly the elderly.

With the housing slump, and credit drying up, do you foresee demand climbing even higher?
Demand for assistance is skyrocketing. These families get to a point where they've taken out an adjustable-rate mortgage and their interest rate gets jacked up no matter what [Ben] Bernanke does, and it just snowballs on them.

Will oil companies eventually face a windfall tax?
I would certainly hope so. Addressing our energy problems is going to mean breaking some eggshells in Washington.

The heating oil you distribute is provided at a deep discount by Citgo, the national oil company of Venezuela, whose President, Hugo Chávez, has been a fierce critic of the U.S. How do you respond to criticism that Citizens is being used as a propaganda tool by Chávez?
You know, I wrote to every oil company and asked them to provide us with just a little bit of heating oil so that we could assist the poor. I do it every year. I did the same thing with every OPEC nation and every major crude oil exporter in the world. The only country and only company that wrote me back and actually provided us with over $100 million worth of assistance was Citgo and the Venezuelan people. Now somebody gives me $100 million to try to help a lot of poor people...I'm going to thank them and acknowledge what they did. Listen, 10% of all gasoline that people in the U.S. use comes from Venezuela. A huge portion of the heating oil we use on the East Coast comes from Venezuela. So people should hold themselves to the same moral standard they're going to hold the poor to. If Chávez is an enemy, then anyone who believes that shouldn't use his oil. Now the question is: Is he any more of an enemy than Saudi Arabia, where a woman gets arrested for being raped and is sentenced to 200 lashes? Is that what we think is rational and normal?

Is there ever a line Chávez can step over where you would say: "You know what? We can't take your oil."
Of course. And that would go not just for Chávez but for anyone who began to take serious actions against the interests of the U.S. But my goodness gracious, Hugo Chávez can quote Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln by heart. The American public's view of President Chávez was formed by the speech at the U.N. [denouncing Bush], which was, in my opinion, a huge mistake. And I've told him that directly.

What was his reaction?
He gets it, but he feels very strongly that the Bush Administration illegally tried to throw him out of office and put a puppet regime of the U.S. in place. So it's definitely personal.

Who's going to be the next President?
I think it's going to be Barack Obama. It has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton's competence. I think so many women in America have had to deal with the glass ceiling, and it's just heartbreaking when she was so close to winning. If she wins in Ohio and Texas, I think that this campaign will not be over, and it will go into a much more divisive and difficult fight. But you asked me a direct question about who I thought was going to win.

Maria Bartiromo is the anchor of CNBC's Closing Bell.