"Venezuelan Economy Keeps Strengthening Whilst Crisis Shakes the World"

[Peace Patriot]

President Chávez: Venezuelan Economy Keeps Strengthening Whilst Crisis Shakes the World

According to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the economic and political strategic alliances built and strengthened by Venezuela over the last 12 years will help the country to face the blows of the world economic crisis from a stronger position.

Whilst crisis is being unleashed throughout Europe and is generating chaos all over the world, Venezuela remains stable and will keep strengthening its economy every day, said Chávez from La Habana, Cuba.

“It caught my attention two days ago that the world press showed that the stock markets were falling, except for the Venezuelan one,” said Chávez , who is currently undergoing the second phase of his cancer treatment. The president added that Venezuela is economically independent from international financial organisations, and contrasted this with the situation in some European countries at the moment, such as in Spain and Greece, who are immersed in a financial crisis.

“The United States cannot escape from this situation”, affirmed Chávez, who added that it was vital to empower the Venezuelan armed forces and their national defensive capacity in order to protect Venezuela’s extensive oil reserves from possible attack.

“There, Obama is in his own labyrinth,” said Chávez, highlighting that the U.S. president had admitted that his administration was experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929 after the U.S.’s credit rating was downgraded last week.

Chávez remarked that U.S. Government representatives were “getting crazy, they are a huge military power and are acting like a wounded lion. We must be careful.”

(Chavez mentions that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on earth (--twice Saudi Arabia's, according to the USGS--my note), and states that Venezuela is free of the International Monetary Fund (U.S.-controlled loan sharks that have ruined LatAm economies--my note) due to its large credits from China and Russia. The article concludes with statements of Finance and Planning Minister, Jorge Giordani...

“We no longer depend on the Yankees’ who want to blackmail us, spying from within our military units and buying people off. We are free and we must salute and thank Russia*,” stated Giordani.

“They (the U.S.) will never divide again the FANB (Venezuelan military) as they have done in the past,” said the minister to members of the Venezuelan opposition, who have been meeting with Whitehouse officials in preparation for the 2012 presidential elections.

Venezuelanalysis Aug 16, 2011
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6429
(my emphasis)

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*(The U.S./Bush Junta put "sanctions" on Venezuela's purchase of repair and maintenance items for military hardware--including aircraft--that Venezuela had purchased from the U.S. Thus, they drove Venezuela elsewhere to equip and maintain its military. Venezuela's military budget still remains well below that of Brazil and, of course, not even in a league with the U.S.)

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This article is notable for many reasons. One I've highlighted--the Obama administration continuing the Bush Junta policy of collusion with the rightwing opposition in Venezuela (who tried to overthrow the government in 2002, including suspending the constitution, the courts, the national assembly and all civil rights).

Another is that Chavez smells desperation in Washington and is worried about--and warns about--a U.S. attack. There is reason to be worried about this, given the war assets that the Pentagon has put in place in a semi-circle around Venezuela's Caribbean oil coast and northern oil provinces, and given that Iran is well defended (Iraq wasn't) and has nuclear powers as allies and trade partners (China, Russia) (--thus, thirsty as they are for oil, the U.S. military brass balked at nuking Iran and, together with Bush Sr, his "Iraq Study Group" (of which Leon Panetta was a member), the CIA and others ousted Rumsfeld and curtailed Cheney during Junior's final two years as the "little emperor"). Where is our very thirsty war machine going to get oil and how are our transglobal oil corporations going to profit from it (including by hugely overcharging the U.S. military for it)?

One probable answer is right here in "our own back yard"--the biggest oil reserves on earth.

One other factor that I want to mention is that Miami mafia reps in the Scumbag Congress have already declared war on Venezuela--at a meeting they held just before Christmas--before the Scumbag Congress was even seated--slavering over the prospects for murder and mayhem presented by the far right takeover of Congress. Diebold/ES&S can easily--EASILY!--extend that takeover to the White House next year, and if Bush Junta II gets into the White House, Oil War IV (is it?) in South America will be high on their agenda. The Obama administration has not only kept U.S. war assets in place around Venezuela and LatAm, but it is building new U.S. military bases in Honduras--traditional stepping stool for U.S. aggression in the region--and a new Colombia/U.S. military base overlooking the Gulf of Venezuela, only 20 miles from the Venezuelan border--as we speak, and they have kept up the intense demonization campaign against Chavez (so very like the WMD lies about Iraq).

Our RW horn-tooters will likely toot in shortly, dragging all kinds of tin cans with them, about why Chavez is warning about a possible U.S. attack. I think we should ignore this rattle, and look at the facts.

U.S. multinational corporations and war profiteers hate Venezuela, as the first country to resist a U.S. coup and as the pioneer in the leftist democracy movement that has swept most of South America and half Central America. Among the goals of this movement are independence from the U.S., peace, cooperation, social justice, "south-south" trade and a "level playing field" in world trade (that is, foreign countries and corporations have to bid for LatAm resources and have to accept LatAm countries' terms for doing business there--for instance, contribution to social programs and local job creation).

Heretofore, the U.S. has dictated terms--and U.S. corps have extracted profit giving nothing back. Following Venezuela, leftist governments have been elected in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and in Honduras until the U.S.-supported coup, and even rightwing governments are beginning to see the advantages of this leftist program. Colombia, for instance, has made peace with Venezuela and is now greatly benefiting from "south-south" trade and from not being the pariah it was, under Bush Jr pal, Alvaro Uribe.

So it's not just the oil. It's the oil COMBINED WITH the U.S. need to destroy all this unity, independence and social justice in Latin America, and to re-conquer the region, to pad up the profits of U.S. corporations, banksters and war profiteers. U.S. predatory capitalism seems to have reached the point where it is incapable of producing anything but war. Chavez has always been a shrewd and candid observer of the U.S. And I think that the suggestion he is making here, about U.S. economic desperation generating another oil war, is not bluster or political grand-standing; it is a very real possibility and I have no doubt at all that the Pentagon has targeted Venezuela on its Big Dartboard and has a well-developed war plan.

Back in 2006, when the Bush Junta reconstituted the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean (mothballed since WW II), Lula da Silva, leftist president of Brazil said that the 4th Fleet was "a threat to Brazil's oil." (Everybody knew it was a threat to Venezuela's.) LatAm's new Leftist leadership is well aware of U.S. goals, and, as Lula said in his last speech in office, early this year, "The U.S. has not changed." Lula has been succeeded in office by his chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, who has an even rougher history at the hands of U.S.-supported dictators than he has. He was jailed for being a union organizer. She was jailed and horribly tortured for belonging to a leftist guerrilla group. These are the sort of leaders elected all over Latin America now--people who know the U.S. very well, indeed. It is not just Chavez who has this concern. He is just Mr. Candid--the bellweather.

It doesn't appear that Colombia would go along with such a war, at present. Warmonger (and Mob Boss) Alvaro Uribe has been replaced by a milder rightwinger and seemingly peace-minded president (Manuel Santos). The Washington Psst (CIA) has today admitted that U.S. military aid was used to commit crimes in Colombia. The one they mention is Uribe's vast, illegal domestic spying even on judges and prosecutors; but there have also been many death squad murders; Colombian military murders of civilians, etc. Some 70 of Uribe's closest political cohorts are under investigation or already in jail for ties to the death squads, drug trafficking, bribery, election fraud, illegal domestic spying, land theft, ponzie schemes and other crimes, and prosecutors are close on Uribe's tail.

However, Uribe is acting like he intends to regain power. This could be merely his inherent arrogance (very Rumsfeldian), or it could mean that he knows something we don't: for instance, that Bush Junta II will be installed next year and the war that he wanted, and tried to instigate, is on. (He did have vacation time with Bush Sr and Jr early this year--and has very clearly been under the protection of the U.S. (Obama, Panetta) government.) Uribe was chafing at the bit--up to his last weeks in office--to use the U.S./Colombia war machine against Venezuela. He hates Chavez for many reasons, including that he was unable to trick or bully Chavez into a hot war.

How he fares in the investigations and prosecutions going on in Colombia may well be a clue to how things go here, next year. If he avoids indictment (with all the U.S. help he's had--getting witnesses out of Colombia, etc.,--and help from his criminal network within Colombia--for instance, five members of the legislative commission investigating Uribe resigned, two of them admitting that death threats was the reason)--and he regains control of the rightwing political party (from Santos), both Colombia and the U.S. could be in for more horrors, with an oil war in South America among the likely possibilities. It's a war that the U.S. won't win, in my opinion--but the U.S. is capable of inflicting a whole lot of suffering, as it loses. Cooler heads prevailed on Iran. Will they on Venezuela?

[Judi Lynn]

1. So much depends upon next year's elections, regarding Latin America, as well as US human beings.

Ileana Ros-Lentinen must leave the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. That little mouthpiece for the right-wing elitists of South Florida, which absorbs the racist elitist fascists of all Latin America, Caribbean, has been able, with her cohorts to extend the Cold War long after it officially died. It's still a money-maker, a life's work for greedy, murderous materialists who refuse to evolve.

They just don't grasp you can't hold a gun on the human race forever. At some point, that grip will slip, and even though the bowels of hell should open beneath them, swallow them up, they will undoubtedly survive intact. They ARE going to lose control of the human race, however.

Sure hope we're still here when it happens.

Clearly Latin America is on its way to freedom.

[Bacchus39]

2. propaganda from Ven Anal unrecommending n/t

s

[Peace Patriot]

3. You prefer propaganda from the Associated Pukes or the Wall Street Urinal?

You a Murdoch guy or maybe you like a snooty touch to your propaganda--the New York Slimes? I don't imagine you care much for Rotters or the Economyths--too foreign I would guess; same spin, though (corporate; war profiteer). I know! The Miami Hairball! That's your cuppa tea, eh?

This Venezuela Analysis article is pretty straightforward reporting of what Chavez and other officials said. You don't want to know what they said? And, unlike the Associated Pukes and other so-called journalists of the corporate press, they don't use dodges--like "His critics said...".--to avoid naming sources and attributing quotes. We learn what was said and who said it. Since when is that propaganda?

We are advised time and again, in the article, who is speaking. There are no Associated Pukes-style tricks in the article, for instance, asserting something as fact that is merely opinion--lacking not only attribution but any sense of where the opinion came from, other than the reporter and his bosses--something I see quite often in the corporate press. The V/A article furthermore provides a very interesting "take" on Chavez and the Venezuelan government's views on U.S. economic woes, on the U.S. penchant for bullying and interfering in Latin America and on the U.S. war machine and use of that power to kill and coerce. It's a viewpoint we NEVER get from our own press--it is severely suppressed--yet it is a viewpoint shared by millions of people in LatAm and by numerous government leaders in LatAm.

Indeed, I am very grateful to Venezuelan Analysis and some other Internet sources for providing news that I would not otherwise get, and viewpoints that are being blackholed in the corporate media. I am particularly glad that V/A doesn't editorialize in the news articles, that they identify sources, that they identify opinion as opinion and that they provide criticism of Chavez, the Venezuelan government and the Bolivarian Revolution, which is particularly valuable when it comes from the Left (the Right is so knee-jerk and so USAID-influenced). They are in fact exercising good journalism, which the corporate media are not. Their corporate/war profiteer-loaded, so-called 'news' stories are ridiculous. That's why I give these 'news' horns funny, insulting names (Associated Pukes, Wall Street Urinal, et al). That's what they deserve. They long ago abandoned journalism for propaganda. They have entirely lost my respect.

One other thing V/A provides, which is unusual, is articles by or stories about ordinary Venezuelans. The corporate media mouths off about Chavez but they never, ever provide ANY information that would explain Chavez's extraordinary popularity in Venezuela. He's won three regular elections and one recall with big majorities, in an honest election system. This was one of the first reasons that I sought out Venezuelan Analysis. I wanted to know WHY. You apparently don't want to know that either. You seem to have shut your ears, your eyes and your mind. And you just keep rattling in with very short, uninformative comments, like this one, dissing a news/opinion site that actually goes to a great deal of trouble to inform people and give them food for thought. That's all you have to say: 'Don't inform yourselves, people! Don't go looking for anything but what your corporate masters tell you! Be stupid!'

[naaman fletcher]

4. Except

It's not strengthening

[Judi Lynn]

5. It's a real admission when the Obama invites a-holes from the oligarchy

to Washington in just the way _{George W. Bush} dragged up Maria Corrina Machado, who headed the US supported anti-Chavez crapfest which has trafficked so heavily in misinformation.

Damned pity, isn't it? Some brand of Democrat he turned out to be.d

Thanks again for this article. Of course it's o.k. to post information not written by the US operated professional liars club, our wire services.

We should have realized something really ugly was just around the corner years ago when the major newspapers informed us all (should we have believed even that from them!) that they were closing all their foreign bureaus, thereby having even less a chance any of the news would ever reach the media patrons.

Makes you want to swear like a pirate!

[Zorro]

6. Just when is this US invasion of Venezuela going to happen?

You've been predicting its imminence for the past ...oh....5 years or so.