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Writings by Greg Palast
Armed Madhouse /
Screwed: the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class
/
Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Terror Incorporated /
Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an
American President
* * * *
*
Writings on the Caribbean
African Civilizations in the New World
(Roger Bastide) /
Caribbean
Slave Society and Economy (Beckles & Shepherd, eds.)
Caribbean
Freedom: Post Slave Society and Economy
(Beckles & Shepherd, eds.) /
Caribbean Slavery
in the Atlantic World
( Beckles & Shepherd, eds.)
Women
Race and Class
(Angela Davis) /
The Wretched of the Earth
(Fanon) / There is a River
(Harding)
/
Black Jacobins
(James)
Slaves Who Abolished Slavery: Blacks in
Rebellion
(Hart)
/
A Different Drummer
(Kelley) /
Slave Society in Cuba During the 19th.
Century (Knight)
Puerto
Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean
(Lewis) /
Nightmare Overhanging Darkly : Essays on
Culture and Resistance
(Lynch)
Praise Song for The Widow
(Marshall) /
Slavery and Social Death
(Patterson) /
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
(Rodney)
The Story of The
Jamaican People (Sherlock and Bennett) / Eric.
From Columbus to Castro: The History of the
Caribbean, 1492 -1969 (Williams)
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*
Greg Palast Interviews
Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela
By Greg Palast You’d think George Bush would get
down on his knees and kiss Hugo Chávez’s behind. Not
only has Chávez delivered cheap oil to the Bronx and
other poor communities in the United States. And not
only did he offer to bring aid to the victims of
Katrina. In my interview with the president of Venezuela
on March 28, he made Bush the following astonishing
offer: Chávez would drop the price of oil to $50 a
barrel, “not too high, a fair price,” he said—a third
less than the $75 a barrel for oil recently posted on
the spot market. That would bring down the price at the
pump by about a buck, from $3 to $2 a gallon.
But our President has basically told
Chávez to take his cheaper oil and stick it up his
pipeline. Before I explain why Bush has done so, let me
explain why Chávez has the power to pull it off—and the
method in the seeming madness of his
“take-my-oil-please!” deal.
Venezuela, Chávez told me, has more
oil than Saudi Arabia. A nutty boast? Not by a long
shot. In fact, his surprising claim comes from a most
surprising source: the U.S. Department of Energy. In an
internal report, the DOE estimates that Venezuela has
five times the Saudis’ reserves.
However, most of Venezuela’s
mega-horde of crude is in the form of “extra-heavy”
oil—liquid asphalt—which is ghastly expensive to pull up
and refine. Oil has to sell above $30 a barrel to make
the investment in extra-heavy oil worthwhile. A big dip
in oil’s price—and, after all, oil cost only $18 a
barrel six years ago—would bankrupt heavy-oil investors.
Hence Chávez’s offer: Drop the price to $50—and keep it
there. That would guarantee Venezuela’s investment in
heavy oil.
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 then-Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah
of Saudi Arabia around the Crawford ranch in a golf 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 U.S. Treasury bills and
other U.S. assets.
The Gulf potentates understand that
in return for lending the U.S. 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.
Chávez 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, Chávez
withdrew $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve and,
at the same time, lent or committed a like sum to
Argentina, Ecuador, and other Latin American nations.
Chávez, 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,” an IHF, or more
accurately, an International Hugo Fund. In addition,
Chávez wants OPEC to officially recognize Venezuela as
the cartel’s reserve leader, which neither the Saudis
nor Bush will take kindly to.
Politically, Venezuela is torn in
two. Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution,” a close replica
of Franklin 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.
Chávez’s government, which used to
brush off these critics, has turned aggressive on them.
I challenged Chávez several times over charges brought
against Súmate, his main opposition group. The two
founders of the nongovernmental organization, which led
the recall campaign against Chávez, face eight years in
prison for taking money from the Bush Administration and
the International Republican [Party] Institute. No
nation permits foreign funding of political campaigns,
but the charges (no one is in jail) seem like a heavy
hammer to use on the minor infractions of these pathetic
gadflies.
Bush’s reaction to Chávez has been a
mix of hostility and provocation. Washington supported
the coup attempt against Chávez in 2002, and Condoleezza
Rice and Donald Rumsfeld have repeatedly denounced him.
The revised National Security Strategy of the United
States of America, released in March, says, “In
Venezuela, a demagogue awash in oil money is undermining
democracy and seeking to destabilize the region.”
So when the Reverend Pat Robertson, a
Bush ally, told his faithful in August 2005 that Chávez
has to go, it was not unreasonable to assume that he was
articulating an Administration wish. “If he thinks we’re
trying to assassinate him,” Robertson said, “I think
that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole
lot cheaper than starting a war . . . and I don’t think
any oil shipments will stop.”
There are only two ways to defeat the
rise of Chávez as the New Abdullah of the Americas.
First, the unattractive option: Cut the price of oil
below $30 a barrel. That would make Chávez’s crude
worthless. Or, option two: Kill him.
* * *
* *
Q: Your opponents are saying
that you are beginning a slow-motion dictatorship. Is
that what we are seeing?
Hugo Chávez: They have been
saying that for a long time. When they’re short of
ideas, any excuse will do as a vehicle for lies. That is
totally false. I would like to invite the citizens of
Great Britain and the citizens of the U.S. and the
citizens of the world to come here and walk freely
through the streets of Venezuela, to talk to anyone they
want, to watch television, to read the papers. We are
building a true democracy, with human rights for
everyone, social rights, education, health care,
pensions, social security, and jobs.
Q: Some of your opponents are
being charged with the crime of taking money from George
Bush. Will you send them to jail?
Chávez: It’s not up to me to
decide that. We have the institutions that do that.
These people have admitted they have received money from
the government of the United States. It’s up to the
prosecutors to decide what to do, but the truth is that
we can’t allow the U.S. to finance the destabilization
of our country. What would happen if we financed
somebody in the U.S. to destabilize the government of
George Bush? They would go to prison, certainly.
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?
Chávez: 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 U.S. People can be put in jail without being
charged. They tap phones without court orders. They
check what books 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, then the U.S. 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’état in Argentina thirty years
ago.
Q: Is the U.S. interfering in
your elections here?
Chávez: They have interfered
for 200 years. They have tried to prevent us from
winning the elections, they supported the coup d’état,
they gave millions of dollars to the coup plotters, they
supported the media, newspapers, outlaw movements,
military intervention, and espionage. But here the
empire is finished, and I believe that before the end of
this century, it will be finished in the rest of the
world. We will see the burial of the empire of the
eagle.
Q: You don’t interfere in the
elections of other nations in Latin America?
Chávez: Absolutely not. I
concern myself with Venezuela. However, what’s going on
now is that some rightwing movements are transforming me
into a pawn in the domestic politics of their countries,
by making statements that are groundless. About
candidates like Morales [of Bolivia], for example. They
said I financed the candidacy of President Lula [of
Brazil], which is totally false. They said I financed
the candidacy of Kirchner [of Argentina], which is
totally false. In Mexico, recently, the rightwing party
has used my image for its own profit. What’s happened is
that in Latin America there is a turn to the left. Latin
Americans have gotten tired of the Washington
consensus—a neoliberalism that has aggravated misery and
poverty.
Q: You have spent millions of
dollars of your nation’s oil wealth throughout Latin
America. Are you really helping these other nations or
are you simply buying political support for your regime?
Chávez: We are brothers and
sisters. That’s one of the reasons for the wrath of the
empire. You know that Venezuela has the biggest oil
reserves in the world. And the biggest gas reserves in
this hemisphere, the eighth in the world. Up until seven
years ago, Venezuela was a U.S. oil colony. All of our
oil was going up to the north, and the gas was being
used by the U.S. and not by us. Now we are diversifying.
Our oil is helping the poor. We are selling to the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, some Central American
countries, Uruguay, Argentina.
Q: And the Bronx?
Chávez: In the Bronx it is a
donation. In all the cases I just mentioned before, it
is trade. However, it’s not free trade, just fair
commerce. We also have an international humanitarian
fund as a result of oil revenues.
Q: Why did George Bush turn
down your help for New Orleans after the hurricane?
Chávez: You should ask him,
but from the very beginning of the terrible disaster of
Katrina, our people in the U.S., like the president of
CITGO, went to New Orleans to rescue people. We were in
close contact by phone with Jesse Jackson. We hired
buses. We got food and water. We tried to protect them;
they are our brothers and sisters. Doesn’t matter if
they are African, Asian, Cuban, whatever.
Q: Are you replacing the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund as “Daddy Big
Bucks”?
Chávez: I do wish that the IMF
and the World Bank would disappear soon.
Q: And it would be the Bank of
Hugo?
Chávez: No. The International
Humanitarian Bank. We are just creating an alternative
way to conduct financial exchange. It is based on
cooperation. For example, we send oil to Uruguay for
their refinery and they are paying us with cows.
Q: Milk for oil.
Chávez: That’s right. Milk for
oil. The Argentineans also pay us with cows. And they
give us medical equipment to combat cancer. It’s a
transfer of technology. We also exchange oil for
software technology. Uruguay is one of the biggest
producers of software. We are breaking with the
neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. We
believe in fair trade and exchange, not competition but
cooperation. I’m not giving away oil for free. Just
using oil, first to benefit our people, to relieve
poverty. For a hundred years we have been one of the
largest oil-producing countries in the world but with a
60 percent poverty rate and now we are canceling the
historical debt.
Q: Speaking of the free market,
you’ve demanded back taxes from U.S. oil companies. You
have eliminated contracts for North American, British,
and European oil companies. Are you trying to slice out
the British and American oil companies from Venezuela?
Chávez: No, we don’t want them
to go, and I don’t think they want to leave the country,
either. We need each other. It’s simply that we have
recovered our oil sovereignty. They didn’t pay taxes.
They didn’t pay royalties. They didn’t give an account
of their actions to the government. They had more land
than had previously been established in the contracts.
They didn’t comply with the agreed technology exchange.
They polluted the environment and didn’t pay anything
towards the cleanup. They now have to comply with the
law.
Q: You’ve said that you
imagine the price of oil rising to $100 dollars per
barrel. Are you going to use your new oil wealth to
squeeze the planet?
Chávez: No, no. We have no
intention of squeezing anyone. Now, we have been
squeezed and very hard. Five hundred years of squeezing
us and stifling us, the people of the South. I do
believe that demand is increasing and supply is dropping
and the large reservoirs are running out. But it’s not
our fault. In the future, there must be an agreement
between the large consumers and the large producers.
Q: What happens when the oil
money runs out, what happens when the price of oil falls
as it always does? Will the Bolivarian revolution of
Hugo Chávez simply collapse because there’s no money to
pay for the big free ride?
Chávez: I don’t think it will
collapse, in the unlikely case of oil running out today.
The revolution will survive. It does not rely solely on
oil for its survival. There is a national will, there is
a national idea, a national project. However, we are
today implementing a strategic program called the Oil
Sowing Plan: using oil wealth so Venezuela can become an
agricultural country, a tourist destination, an
industrialized country with a diversified economy. We
are investing billions of dollars in the infrastructure:
power generators using thermal energy, a large railway,
roads, highways, new towns, new universities, new
schools, recuperating land, building tractors, and
giving loans to farmers. One day we won’t have any more
oil, but that will be in the twenty-second century.
Venezuela has oil for another 200 years.
Q: But the revolution can come
to an end if there’s another coup and it succeeds. Do
you believe Bush is still trying to overthrow your
government?
Chávez: He would like to, but
what you want is one thing, and what you cannot really
obtain is another.
* *
* * *
Investigative reporter Greg Palast,
who interviewed President Hugo Chávez for the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), is the author of “Armed
Madhouse: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class
War,” from which this is adapted.
Source:
http://www.progressive.org/mag_intv0706
posted 23 September 2006 |
