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And life has never been better for most Venezuelans, who have seen poverty cut in half, extreme poverty cut by 70%, illiteracy virtually eliminated, a doubling of high school and college enrollments, and sizzling economic growth (10% economic growth during the 2003 to 2008 period, with the most growth in the private sector, not including oil), while the government accumulated $50 billion in international cash reserves, giving them flexibility in riding out the Bushwhack Financial 9/11 of September 2008, while they continue fully funding huge new social programs such as free universal medical care, land reform and food and educational support for the poor.
You don't know what you are talking about. You are reading the Milton Friedman handbook without looking at the facts. For instance, you say, "We've seen this happen over and over again in the history of Latin America and it never actually results in making things better for the people and instead nationalizations end up chasing off badly needed foreign investment."
The oil in Venezuela was nationalized by prior governments--NOT the Chavez government. What the Chavez government did was to IMPROVE the oil contracts to benefit Venezuela and its social programs. Prior, rightwing governments were giving the oil away, in a 10/90 split of the profits favoring the multinationals, with the rightwing elite raking off the top for themselves and utterly neglecting the poor majority and the good of the country. The Chavez government renegotiated the contracts, for a 50/50 split of the profits, favoring Venezuela and its social programs, and 60/40 control of the projects, to establish Venezuela's sovereign control of their own resource. Exxon Mobil--the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful corporation on earth--walked out in a snit, and went into a "first world" court to try to seize $12 billion of Venezuela's assets, and lost. The other oil corporations--including Chevron--agreed. And corporations like the Italian ENI were thrilled to get the business and said so in the press conference. They will benefit from the biggest oil reserve on earth--twice Saudi Arabia's--and Exxon Mobil will not, unless, as with Iraq, Exxon Mobil hijacks the U.S. military again, to steal the oil.
It's called COMPETITION--a REAL market! And it is utter bullshit that countries with rich natural resources have to bend over for the likes of Exxon Mobil in order to develop and benefit from their own resources.
You also know absolutely NOTHING about the impacts on the poor majority in Latin America of Milton Friedman's horrors. The so-called "free market"--a lying term if there ever was one--has IMPOVERISHED millions of people and DESTROYED their sovereign control of labor laws, environmental regulation, land use, public services and their entire governments and democracies. Enforced "neo-liberalism"--rule by giant U.S./EU corporations--has further resulted in MASS MURDER of union leaders, political leftists, human rights workers, journalists, peasant farmer organizers and others, and mass displacement of peasant farmers, millions of whom have been driven from their farms by the likes of Chiquita, Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum and the local fascist landlords. The poor end up in urban squalor, unable to feed their families--a big, helpless, desperate labor pool for U.S. corporate sweatshops. These horrors are on-going in the countries where the U.S. still dominates the government--Colombia, Honduras, Peru and Mexico.
Nationalized oil--as in NORWAY--is not a bad thing at all. The oil profits are used to benefit Norwegians. But, prior to the current massive leftist democracy movement in Latin America, the CIA would not tolerate true nationalization in this hemisphere, and destroyed democracy after democracy, to prevent Latin Americans from controlling their own resources and governments. It is a new day in Latin America for many reasons, one of them being the Iraq War, which delegitimized U.S. foreign policy (corporate rule); another being the awesome grass roots movements that have persisted in establishing honest, transparent elections and organizing political campaigns. Thus, they now have REAL leaders, attending to the interests of the majority of the people and the good of the country, instead of "bought and paid for" shills of Washington DC and its corporate puppetmasters and war profiteers, with their lying bullshit about "free markets."
Another thing you know nothing about is World Bank/IMF loan sharks in "third world" countries--how the rightwing elites in countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and many others, incurred World Bank/IMF debt, raked off the money and left the poor to pay the debt on draconian terms, including the looting of all social programs, the "privatization" (corporate profiteering) of public services, the establishment of sweatshops and the rape of the country's natural resources. Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, is a U.S.-educated economist and knows damn well what these loans are about. They were GIVEAWAYS of Ecuador's sovereignty, deliberately designed to impoverish and disempower the people of Ecuador. And the people of Ecuador do not have to tolerate this, to please the corporate dragons of the U.S. and Europe.
Ecuador is now in the driver's seat and we shall see how they do--and that is the case in MANY Latin American countries now, especially the Bolivarian countries--Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador. It's interesting how they have influenced other countries. For instance, Brazil's president--a close ally of Hugo Chavez--imposed sovereignty restrictions on Brazil's new oil find, that are very like Venezuela's--insistence on Brazilian majority control and use of the resource to benefit the poor. The ALBA countries--a trade group organized by Venezuela, mostly Central American/Caribbean, but also including Ecuador (which just joined)--is using barter trade, among other things, to strengthen the collective clout of the smaller countries, in opposition to U.S. "free trade for the rich." There are two new concepts that unite most of Latin America--both generated by the people of Venezuela and THEIR government--the first democracy revolution of this era in Latin America--and they are: 1) the sovereignty of Latin American countries, and 2) collective strength in developing their own countries and in dealing with the armed bully to the north. Latin America is, in fact, heading toward a Latin America "common market," while the U.S. State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon are doing everything they can to stop it. As Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, has said, "We want partners, not bosses." But the only thing that our U.S. corporate puppetmasters know how to do is BOSS--BULLY, ARM-TWIST, BRIBE, UNDERMINE with "dirty tricks" and psyops, and if all that fails, INVADE. They DON'T WANT a level playing field. They OPPOSE "free trade"!
We see what "neo-liberalism" has done here--this absolutely phony "doctrine" of the "free market": It has BUSTED the U.S.A., produced millions of unemployed and homeless, ravaged our educational system and other social programs, and enriched the rich. That is what your economic philosophy, laid out in your comment above, leads to. When people bend over for the corporate rulers, and when these anti-democratic powers get their vulture talons in a government, the result is NOT prosperity; the result is POVERTY FOR MOST PEOPLE. What we need--and what many Latin American countries are experimenting with--is a mixed capitalist/socialist economy, with a TRUE "free market" (true competition) combined with social justice and attendance to the general welfare and "the commons" (--that which is owned by everyone, whether public services, public works or natural resources). The "free market" doesn't work with corporate giants gaining huge monopolies over markets and resources and running the government. And I will give you the very best example I know of, of the rampant danger of corporate monopolies.
During the 2002 to 2004 period, electronic voting was fast-tracked all over the U.S., using PRIVATE, CORPORATE electronic voting systems, run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code--code that you and I have no right to review--with virtually no audit/recount controls. This system is now everywhere, in every state. Half the states do NO AUDIT AT ALL, as a check on machine fraud. The other half do only a miserably inadequate 1% audit. (Experts whom I respect say that 10% is the MINIMUM audit necessary to detect machine fraud). But what is worse is that ES&S just bought out Diebold and now has an 80% MONOPOLY on these voting systems in the U.S. ES&S is even scarier than Diebold on far rightwing connections. So, a far rightwing corporation now basically controls all voting results in the USA.
That is so anti-democratic as to be UNFRIGGINGBELIEVABLE! And, frankly, we get what we deserve if you don't get rid of these PRIVATE voting machines and restore transparent vote counting.
By contrast, Venezuela has electronic voting but it is an OPEN SOURCE system--anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they do a whopping 55% audit (comparison of paper ballot to machine totals) as a check on machine fraud--more than five times the minimum needed to detect fraud. IF we were doing this, we would be able to elect a new FDR--as Venezuelans have done--a leader who will REGULATE the banks, slay the corporate dragons (monopolists), encourage small business and competition, attend to the interests of the MAJORITY and create prosperity for ALL--not just for the super-rich and the corporate elite. Venezuelans have gotten themselves a "New Deal." How they did it was TRANSPARENT vote counting.
And, believe me, the corporatists here knew what they were doing when they lobbied the Anthrax Congress to fund this PRIVATE electronic voting machine boondoggle in 2002. They now not only control what you see on TV, what you hear on the radio, what you read in every newspaper, what you are permitted to buy in stores and where and how it was produced, and what ALL of your tax money is used for, they control the results of every election with 'TRADE SECRET' code and you are not permitted to see how they do it!
THAT is NOT a "free market." THAT IS TYRANNY!
:patriot:
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