Joe Kennedy was running Citizens’ Energy since 1979, long before Chavez took power. When we *liked * Venezuela and Citgo. Please, people. :rolleyes:
Why isn’t it charity? Was it propaganda before Chavez, or was it PR?
One man’s progaganda is
So what?
If that’s the case, and I don’t mean this about you personally but those that are offended-
Contact social services in your area and offer to someone’s oil bill. It’s fine for Evil Joe to be offended if he isn’t the one in a house without heat.
another man’s PR, and I have no idea how that got truncated.
:smack: :o investment, of course. That was my spanish brain pushing through.
My life is my cite, I am afraid. There have been lots of uncompensated (or sub-) expropriations. They have mostly hurt the upper class though. They hide behind the noble facade of taking unused lands and giving them to the needy. The problem with those was that they took prime productive lands from people who had other unused lands and the needy came in the form of Chavez’s family and friends.
Middle class was certainly disappearing before Chavez, but with the turbulent years that surrounded his arrival to power, consumer confidence went through the floor and that caused many small businesses to go under. A quick walk through any small mall or commercial street showed you close to half of the shops closed.
The you have the rampant climb of violent crime on the street. That made most people with the means to leave the country. Those who stay are either the richest, who can afford private security, or the poorest, who cannot go anywhere.
To his credit, he hasn’t created too many new problems for Venezuela. Whatever he has done is mostly an “improvement” over previously existing maladies (except for the erosion of democratic institutions, but he still has to cash on that one)
I strongly recommend finding the Hugo Boss article on Foreign Policy magazine. If someone can find a linkable version, please post. Otherwise I can email it to whomever is interested.
Disclaimer: I left Venezuela before Chavez, precisely because the country was going in the wrong direction, already. I believe the true collapse of democracy came with the reelection of Perez and Caldera. The sign of a total lack of leadership and a new generation on the traditional parties. I also believe that Chavez is, at heart, just one more in a succession of bad presidents, not really any departure from the established. The crash of the middle class and the surge of a new wave of newly rich is just a rerun of the rise of Accion Democratica a few decades ago. This opinion gets me very little sympathy from my strongly anti-Chavez friends and family, of course.
@Sapo, If I were in your parent’s shoes, I would have given the land and built the infrastructure - there is nothing like having your own private army.
@All, I’ve seen a few mentions of The Sudan a few times in this thread.
I have been there, for a very short period of time, and what I saw made me wonder.
Unlike most of Africa they are not a basket case, they have two insurgency problems, one of which is now quiet despite the helicopter crash. The other has spilt over into Chad.
The Sudanese might be nuts about the Koran, but my brush with them made me think that they have talent.
Dangerous combination.
Just a thought - perhaps Joe’s mention of “the good people of Venezuela” is a condition of the cheap oil price? I remember those ads from a year or two ago, and I don’t recall hearing that line before…