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« Bitter fight | Main | How About We Stop Trying to Find Ways to Blame the Victim? »

Venezuela

Some good discussion here.

This in particular was interesting, but it almost reaches conspiracy theory levels. IF it's true, it's pretty sick.

For a while it was, achieving impressive gains in health care, life expectancy, education, and social security; radically expanding political participation, bringing the excluded and marginal into the debate and giving diverse social movements access to political power; and charting a foreign policy independent from Washington. Now that model is in ruins. It's easy to criticize Chavismo for riding high oil prices. That critique, however accurate, captures only half the story: Chávez, and his cohort of oil diplomats, largely helped create those high oil prices, revitalizing OPEC, affirming Venezuela's commitment to OPEC production quotas and pricing, and working with non-OPEC energy-producing countries, like Brazil and Mexico, to reverse the neoliberal dream...

...saw high petroleum prices as a way to tax the First World, and then redistribute that revenue through equitable social programs, solidarity, and support for poor energy-importing nations, and an oppositional foreign policy. Thus many of Barack Obama's energy initiatives, especially when Hillary Clinton was at the State Department, were counterstrikes against this repoliticization of oil: promoting fracking, not just in the United States but worldwide; wooing of Mexico away from Venezuela while promoting the privatization of PEMEX, Mexico's state-run oil industry; turning Central America into one big biofuel plantation (that's one of the things the 2009 coup in Honduras was about). It worked.

By fnord12 | August 3, 2017, 5:24 PM | Liberal Outrage