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The
Venezuela Connection: Beating the Gas-Gouging Blues
By J.B. Borders
Could the recent outcry over a publicly aired death-wish directed at
Venezuela’s progressive president
result in relief at the gas
pump for black Americans? Stay tuned.
Pat Robertson is a fool, a total frigging
idiot (TFI) on the scale of George “The Great Prevaricator”
Bush.
But Robertson, the drawling neoconfederate
preacher/politician/huckster, may have inadvertently saved the
life of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez recently and opened
the door for lower gasoline prices in black America when he
publicly called for Chávez’s assassination.
The 75-year-old Robertson, a television
evangelist, said a couple of weeks ago on a broadcast of his
“700 Club” program that Chavez is a “dangerous enemy.”
He added that killing Chavez would be cheaper than going to war
to remove him.
“We have the ability to take him out, and I
think the time has come to exercise that ability,” Robertson
said.
His comments caused a firestorm of reaction
from U.S. politicians and other public figures who termed
Robertson’s act “inappropriate”, “irresponsible” and
“incredibly stupid.”
For months, however, the Chávez government
had been saying that its intelligences services had been
intercepting information about assassination attempts. Back in
February, Venezuela Foreign Minister Ali Rodriguez even raised
the issue at a meeting of the Organization of American States.
“The accusations levied against our
government would not bother us in the least if a multitude of
facts did not exist that prove that when such statements are
made, it's because, sooner or later, the attack will follow,”
Rodriguez said. “It is what happened with (Salvador) Allende
(in Chile). It is what happened in the Dominican Republic. It is
what happened in Guatemala and countless other cases. For the
same reason, we cannot
dismiss information from our intelligence services concerning
the physical liquidation of our president.”
Robertson’s outburst was prompted by
accusations Chávez made during an August visit to Cuba to meet
with the irrepressible revolutionary Fidel Castro. Chávez
reiterated his claim that the U.S. government was likely behind
attempts to assassinate him. Castro has survived some 39 known
CIA-supported attempts to rub him out. He is probably as good a
person as any to give Chávez advice on survival tactics.
In 2002, the Bush administration endorsed an
attempted coup against Chávez, but he was restored to power in
two days. The Chávez government then triumphed in a 2004
referendum, consolidating the support Chávez first won in his
1998 election to the Venezuelan presidency.
Like most normal black people, I suspected
that if a pea-brain right-winger like Robertson was so upset at
Chávez that he would deliberately mischaracterize him as a
“you know, small-time dictator” and urge the U.S. government
to “take him out” on national TV, then Chávez must really
be trying to do something good for oppressed and downtrodden
people.
In most cases of this sort, standing up for
the messed-over folks almost always means defying the existing
power structure, too. If you’re effective a tiny bit, they
call you crazy. If you’re moderately effective, however, they
call you dangerous. And when it becomes clear that you can’t
be bought off or otherwise stymied, the power structure seeks to
eliminate you.
That’s what I suspected had happened in the
Chávez case. So I did a little investigating.
It turns out my hunch was right. It also
turns out the situation in Venezuela, which has the largest oil
reserves in the Western hemisphere and is the world’s fifth
largest oil exporter, is potentially much more significant for
African-American economic development than we have been led to
believe.
The main reason people like Robertson want to
get rid of Chávez is that he has openly declared that United
States imperialism and manipulation are a threat to the world
and that new ways need to be found to help the poor and move
Venezuela toward socialism, under which more of the country’s
resources will be equitably utilized.
Chávez has also pointed out that he wants to
make his government less dependent on the United States, which
his currently its largest customer for oil sales. At the end of
August, the Chávez government signed a deal with China to
jointly develop new oil fields in eastern Venezuela, a
development that did not please the U.S.-based oil
conglomerates.
Chávez has also been a leading force behind
the development of the new South American Community of Nations,
which has a goal of creating a free trade zone among its
members: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador,
Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The group is also
creating its own television network, Telesur, to broadcast news
and information about Latin America from Latin America.
Venezuela and Cuba have also entered into an
agreement to swap Cuban medical services for Venezuelan oil.
Among the other key items on Chávez’s
agenda is selling gasoline and diesel directly to poor
communities in the U.S., according to a report by the Associated
Press. The Venezuelan president has already begun negotiations
with Jamaica and other Caribbean nations about selling petroleum
to them “under favorable terms.”
The state-owned oil company of Venezuela,
Petroleos de Venezuela S. A. (PDVSA), already operates 14,000
Citgo gas stations in the U.S. It could very easily begin
selling discount-price gasoline in predominantly black
communities and, with a little more effort, could start selling
some of these gas stations at reasonable prices to black
entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations.
That would really make some of Chávez’s
enemies even redder around the collar.
On the other hand, if the Chávez government
and black leaders from the U.S. got together to make these
relationships come to fruition, it would provide yet another
interesting link between Venezuela and Africans in the Americas.
An
Early Blow for Black Freedom
As fate would have it, Venezuela is the site
of what might have been the first black kingdom in the New
World. In 1552, 30 years after Spanish colonizers had asserted
their control over the territory, a rebellion led by an African
known as “El Negro Miguel” resulted in him proclaiming
himself king of thousands of enslaved black folk who fled their
European masters’ plantations and mines and established dozens
of free communities on defensible terrain.
El Negro Miguel’s kingdom was eventually
conquered, of course, and it wasn’t until 1854 that slavery
was officially abolished in Venezuela. Since then, Venezuela has
promoted itself as a place of racial harmony, though 47 percent
of its 25 million people live in poverty and most of them are
people of color.
Venezuela sits at the southern end of the
Caribbean Sea. Roughly two-thirds of its population is mixed
with Indian and European blood. Another 10 percent is of African
extraction; 3 percent are various Indian groups; and the
remaining 20 percent consider themselves to be pure Euro.
Chávez comes from the mestizo majority, but
guess who was running the country and guess who was getting the
shaft until he came along? Apparently, providing education and
health care and instituting land reform that gives acreage to
people of color rather than snatching it away from them is cause
for alarm in some quarters.
But as Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Ali
Rodriguez has pointed out, his government emphasizes “social
justice as a fundamental component of democracy.” He also
explains that “democracy in a country like Venezuela, whose
concrete reality is one of poverty, depends on giving the large
majority of the country the opportunity to participate, that is,
the overcoming of poverty becomes the government's first reason
for being.”
That kind of real-Christian philosophy
won’t win the Chávez government any friends among Pat
Robertson’s Christian Coalition, however. And perhaps more
troubling to some of the knee-jerk anti-communists in the United
States is the fact that, under Chávez, Venezuela has increased
its trade with Cuba and begun forming stronger ties to
progressive governments throughout Latin America.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, aka The
Devil’s Handmaiden, toured Latin America at the beginning of
the year in a deliberate attempt to smear Chávez’s reputation
and to induce (bribe) other Latin American leaders to condemn
and vilify him.
Her motivations appear to have both
professional and personal dimensions. It turns out that the
distinguished Dr. Rice has a direct interest in Venezuelan oil
through the ChevronTexaco Corporation, which signed an agreement
in 1995 to develop Venezuela’s major oil field for a 20 to
30-year period. Rice served on the Chevron board from 1991 to
1993 and a lot of her $10 million personal fortune was made
through Chevron stock.
In 1995, Chevron even named its largest oil
tanker in her honor, though it renamed the vessel after Rice
became National Security Advisor in 2001. Nevertheless, anybody
rocking her boat can expect to have a fight on their hands.
Fortunately, Rice’s ploy to destroy Chávez
in the eyes of his Latin American peers went nowhere.
So Robertson, aka El Loco Gringo Who Failed
in His Bid to Become POTUS (President of the United States),
apparently stepped into the breach and called for God-knows-who
to take out the democratically-elected Chávez, aka El Indio –
not The One, You Know, Small-Time Dictator.
But by calling international attention to
this desire on the part of the American establishment to rid
itself of Chávez, Robertson may have thwarted any
U.S.-instigated assassination attempts planned for the near
future.
In the meantime, Venezuela and black America
have a window of opportunity in which we can marry our interests
and strengthen our respective positions.
Imagine buying cheaper gasoline from
black-owned service stations. That would be revolutionary
indeed.
Carpe diem, negritos, carpe diem.
Borderline 9.05
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J.B. Borders is a social commentator
and cultural critic. He is also president of J.B. Borders &
Associates, a management consulting firm specializing in
strategic planning, fund development, and program implementation
and evaluation for nonprofit organizations. Borders was the
founding editor of the New Orleans Tribune and an erstwhile
editor of The Black Collegian Magazine. He has also served as
managing director of the National Black Arts Festival and
executive director of the Louisiana Division of the Arts.
Borders earned a bachelor's and a master's degree at Brown
University, where he co-founded Rites & Reason Theatre in
1969.
James B. Borders IV /
J.B. Borders & Associates /
3655 Piedmont Drive /
New Orleans, LA 70122-4775 /
504 945-7015, voice & fax
504 442-1645, mobile / jamesbborders4@cs.com
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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updated 3 November
2007
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