At 09:05 PM 8/27/2005, Steve Schear wrote:
Here's a story that, if true, deserves a much wider hearing than the U.S. press is giving it:
While the US certainly has been interfering with Chavez and generally trying to mess around in Venezuela for a while, most of what's happening here is just that Chavez is running off at the mouth for domestic political reasons. (Pat Robertson was partly doing that also and partly just babbling.) Chavez is a leftist military strongman type, which in Latin America means he doesn't have a bleeding clue about economic reality, but has made enough good speeches about bread and circuses to get elected and stay in office for a few years, especially if he can avoid trashing oil production as badly as his corrupt predecessors did (not that he hasn't been trying to mess that up too.) The business about shipping oil to Jamaica is interesting; he'd previously been talking about selling cheap gasoline to poor US communities, which was high-grade political bullshit that he had no mechanism for implementing, and quite amusing. But fundamentally the US government's problem is that he's a leftist who hangs out with Castro and has oil and likes to do "land reform" and nationalize oil companies, which is not the kind of thing that right-wing industrialists like. Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Chavez