"By showing that the richest nation on earth requires foreign "assistance" to meet its citizens' basic needs, Venezuela reveals our most profound failure as a system" (Liza Featherstone. "Chavez's Citizen Diplomacy." The Nation, Jan. 1, 2007: 22-24).

"... social programs known as misiones, or mission... has delivered concrete benefits to Venezuela's poor...

"A mission that brings doctors to live in poor neighborhoods, towns and villages... so popular that in 2004 alone it loggged more visits than the entire public and private healthcare systems combined over the previous five years. There is a job-training mission, and a mission that provides food subsidies and soup kitchens. These and other missions offer much-needed services and dramatically increase the quality of life for millions" (Chesa Boudin. "The Land of Chavismo." The Nation, Dec. 4, 2006: 18-21).

"...the economy is growing at close to 12 percent... So naturally the United States wants him out... Chavez was re-elected in 2000...

"A US-backed coup against him was badly botched in 2002" (Alexander Cockburn. "Venezuela: The Gang's All Here!" The Nation, July 12, 2004: 12).

Chavez, Good Governments, PR as news

"In fact, President Chavez had been kidnapped" (Greg Palast. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. NY: Plume, 2003: 192).

"In Caracas, Chavez minister Miguel Bustamante Madriz explained it to me. "America can't let us stay in power. We are the exception to the new globalization order. If we succeed, we are an example to all the Americas"...

"..Bush had played footsy with the coup plotters... Bush's White House is quoted as saying that Chavez's election by "a majority of voters" did not confer "legitimacy" on his government. (How appropriate from the victors of Florida)" (194).

"Chavez's crimes go beyond giving milk and housing to the poor. His real sin was to pass two laws... the new land law that promised to give unused land to the landless.. [and] the petroleum law that doubled the royalty taxes paid by Exxon/Mobil.." (195).

"..the World Bank's.. strategy.. [was] cutting works programs, smashing union rules and lsicing real wages. Contrast that with Chavez's first act after defeating the coup: announcing a 20 percent increase in the minimum wage...

"Chavez moved to renationalize oil and rejected the sale of Venezuela's water systems" (198).

"Chavez is an old-style social democratic reformer..." (Greg Palast. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. NY: Plume, 2003: 199).

"...Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution... Despite Chavez's often radical discourse, the government has not engaged in mass expropriations of private fortunes, even agricultural ones, nor plowed huge sums into new collectively owned forms of production... What the government has done is spend billions on new social programs... As a result, 1.3 million people have learned to read, millions have received medical care and an estimated 35-40 percent of the population now shops at subsidized, government-owned supermarkets. Elementary school enrollment has increased by more than a million as school have started offering free food to students. The government has created several banks aimed at sall businesses and cooperatives, redeployed part of the military to do public works and is building several new subway systems around the country. To boost agricultural production in a country that imports 80 percent of what it consumes, Chavez has created a land-reform program that rewards private farmers who increase productivity and punishes those who do not with the threat of confiscation...

"But for the moment, the Venezuelan battle against poverty is possible only because oil prices have been at record highs for several years, and the state owns most of the petroleum industry. All of Venezuela's oil and mining and most of its basic industry were nationalized in the mid-1970s. On average, oil sales make up 30 percent of Venezuelan GDP, provide half of state income and make up 80 p[ercent of all Venezuelan exports...

"...the wealthier classes [are] driven apoplectic with rage by the fact that their president looks like a construction worker or cab driver.

"For six years Chavez and his supporters have battled this opposition, an enemy that Chavez has nicknamed los escuálidos, or "the weaklings." But the opposition has not always been so weak. It includes the privately owned mass media, which have been virulently and propagandistically hostile to the government, devoting days at a time to commercial-free attacks on it as "totalitarian" and "Castro communist"" (Christian Parenti. "Hugo Chavez and Petro Populism." The Nation, April 11, 2005: 15-21).

"...the Bolivarian revolution of President Hugo Chavez...

"Something amazing has been taking place in Latin America in recent years that deserves wider attention. The chrysalis of the Venezuelan revolution led by Chavez, often derided as the incoherent vision of an authoritarian leader, has finally emerged as a resplendent butterfly whose example will radiate for decades to come...

"The Chavez government... has forged ahead with various spectacular social projects, assisted by the huge jump in oil prices, from $10 to $50 a barrel over the past six years. Instead of gushing into the coffers of the already wealthy, the oil pipelines have been picked up and directed into the shanty towns, funding health, education and cheap food. Foreign leaders from Spain and Brazil, Chile and Cuba have come on pilgrimage to Caracas to establish links with the man now perceived as the leader of new emerging forces in Latin America, with popularity ratings to match. This extensive external support has stymied the plans of the US government to rally the countries of Latin America against Venezuela. They are not listening, and Washington is left without a policy.

"Chaves, himself, a youthful former army colonel of 51, is now perceived in Latin America as the most original political figure to have emerged since Fidel Castro broke on to the scene nearely 50 years ago. With huge charisma, he has an infinite capacity to relate to the poor population of the continent. A largely self-educated intellectual, the ideology of his Bolivarian revolution is based on a handful of exemplary figures from the 19th century, most notably Simón Bolivar, the man who liberated most of South America from Spanish rule. Chavez offers a cultural as well as a political alternative to the prevailing US-inspired model that dominates Latin America.

"So, what does his Bolivarian revolution consist of? He is friendly with Castro yet he is no out-of-fashion state socialist. Capitalism is alive and well in Venezuela--and secure. Chavez seeks to curb the excesses of what he terms "savage neoliberalism," and he wants the state to play an enabling role in the economy, but he has no desire to crush small businesses, as has happened in Cuba. International oil companies have fallen over themselves to provide fresh investment, even after the government increased the royalties that they have to pay. Venezuela remains a golden goose that cannot be ignored.

"What is undoubtedly old-fashioned about Chavez is his ability to talk about race and class, subjects that have long been taboo, and to discuss them in the context of poverty. In much of Latin America, particularly in the coutries of the Andes, the long-suppressed native peoples have begun to organise and make political demands for the first time since the 18th century, and Chavez is the first president in the continent to have picked up their banner and made it his own" (Richard Gott. "Chávez shows how to lead." Guardian Weekly, June 3, 2005: 5).

"On the second scow day in the Bronx, it did not escape the notice of tenants that a foreign government stepped in after Congress did not...

"Last week Citgo bought full-pagge ads in the Washington Post and the New York Times, lauding Venezuela's role in heating the homes of the nation's poor" (Michelle Garcia. "Bronx warmly receives Venezuelan oil." Guardian Weekly, Dec. 16, 2005: 7).

"The rhetoric reflected a rapid deterioration in relations between the two countries after Venezuelan spying allegations against the US and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.

"The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, used her harshest language to date in testimony to Congress last week in which she called Venezuela and Cuba "sidekicks" of Iran, and launched a campaign to rally international opposition to the Chavez government...

"Larry Birns, dirctor of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, said the "inoculation strategy" was too late to stop the rise of leftwing and anti-American politics in Latin America" (Julian Borger. "Chavez pledges to resist US 'inoculation strategy.'" Guardian Weekly, Feb 24, 2006: 7).

Chavez Interview

But our President has basically told Chavez to tak his cheaper oil and stick it up his pipeline...

"But the ascendance of Venezuela within OPEC necessarily means the decline of the power of the House of Saud. And the Bush family wouldn't like that one bit. It comes down to "petro-dollars." When George W. ferried than-Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah of Saudi Arabia around the Crawford Ranch in a Gold cart it wasn't because America needs Arabian oil. The Saudis will always sell us their petroleum. What Bush needs is Saudi petro-dollars. Saudi Arabia has, over the past three decades, kindly recycled the cash sucked from the wallets of American SUV owners and sent much of the loot right back to New York to buy US Treasury bills and other US assets.

The Gulf potentates understand that in return for lending the US Treasury the cash to fund George Bush's $2 trillion rise in the nation's debt, they receive protection in return. They lend us petro-dollars, we lend them the 82nd Airborne.

"Chavez would put an end to all that. He'll sell us oil relatively cheaply--but intends to keep the petro-dollars in Latin America. Recently, Chavez withdrew $20 billion from the US Federal Reserve and, at the same time, lent or committed a like sum to Argentina, Ecuador, and other Latin American nations.

"Chavez, notes The Wall Street Journal, has become a "tropical IMF." And indeed, as the Venezuelan president told me, he wants to abolish the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, with its brutal free-market diktats, and replace it with an "International Humanitarian Fund"...

"Politically, Venezuella is torn in two. Chavez's "Blivarian Revolution," a close replica of Frankin Roosevelt's New Deal--a progressive income tax, public works, social security, cheap electricity--makes him wildly popular with the poor. And most Venezuelans are poor. His critics, a four-centuries' old white elite, unused to sharing oil wealth, portray him as a Castro-hugging anti-Christ...

Q: How do you respond to Bush's charge that you are destabilizing the region and interfering in the elections of other Latin American countries?

Chavez: "Mr. Bush is an illegitimate President. In Florida, his brother Jeb deleted many black voters from the electoral registers. So this President is the result of a fraud. Not only that, he is also currently applying a dictatorship in the US. People can be put in jail without being charged. They tap phones without court orders. They check what book people take out of public libraries. They arrested Cindy Sheehan because of a T-shirt she was wearing demanding the return of the troops from Iraq. They abuse blacks and latinos. And if we are going to talk about meddling in other countries, the the US is the champion of meddling in other people's affairs. They invaded Guatemala, they overthrew Salvador Allende, invaded Panama, and the Dominican Republic. They were involved in the coup d'etat in Argentina thirty years ago" (Greg Palast. "Hugo Chavez." Progressive, July 2006: 35-39).