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("If I were them, I wouldn't be buying so many weapons, and would worry instead about where their next meal is going to come from.") that I wondered whether to even reply to it. (Venezuela has one of the LOWEST defense budgets in South America--about ONE TENTH that of Brazil--and was forced to replace certain hardware--fighter jets, etc.--because the US/Bushwhacks wouldn't sell them replacement parts for their US purchases!) Your series of guesses about Venezuela's oil production also makes your analysis very iffy. And, finally, you ignore a number of important underlying facts: 1) While fully funding boffo social programs (free universal medical care, free education through college, wiping out illiteracy, providing grants and loans to small business, the first well-thought-out land reform program in the country and much more) the Chavez government saved $43 billion in international cash reserves--for just such a "rainy day" as Bush Jr. inflicted on the world last September--which gives Venezuela great flexibility in riding out the world economic crisis; 2) Venezuela is just coming off five straight years of sizzling economic growth (nearly 10% growth rate 2003-2008, most of it in the private sector, not including oil) and was/is due for a slowdown.
Upshot: Everybody's hurting. Those lucky enough to have transparent election systems and leaders who planned ahead (not us) landed on their feet, and Venezuela is prime among those countries. Brazil is another. Both of them, working together, also defied World Bank/IMF (i.e., US/Bushwhack) "advice" and kept tight reins on their banking/finance industries. Venezuela had furthermore created the Bank of the South, to elbow out ruinous World Bank/IMF loan sharks, and create regionally controlled development funds with social justice goals.
A third underlying fact, that you misrepresent and apparently misunderstand is Venezuela's help to other countries. ("If we correct for about 0.1 million bpd which Venezuela sends to ALBA members and doesn't get paid for..."). You apparently believe in a "dog eat dog" world in which everybody fucks everybody else and each of us goes to a lonely death full of sound and fury signifying nothing. This despairing rightwing/capitalist predator view of things is what is wrong with the world right now. The South Americans are creating a different model. Chavez (Venezuela) and Lulu (Brazil), for instance, have a quite different "raise all boats" philosophy, which they no doubt have worked out in their monthly meetings with each other, and which is now the "watchword" across the board in South and Central America--a quite new and excellent development. Thus, Brazil's president pressured the corporations who buy Paraguay's hydroelectric power (virtually its only export) to renegotiate those unfair (to Paraguay) contracts--after Paraguay elected its first leftist president--to give Paraguay a much fairer deal. Lulu stated that Brazil cannot, in all conscience--nor in practicality--prosper while its neighbor countries are so poor. Similarly, when the Bushwhacks attacked Bolivia's leftist government (the white separatist coup attempt in September 2008, funded and organized right out of the US embassy, and Bolivia's president Evo Morales threw the US ambassador out of Bolivia), Brazil and Argentina--Bolivia's chief gas customers--helped support Morales and defeat the coup by economic pressure on the coupsters. (who were trying to secede from Bolivia and take Bolivia's main gas resources with them.) Brazil and Venezuela also helped out, by pledging funds to build a highway from Brazil's Atlantic coast across South America to the Pacific, through Bolivia--which will turn Bolivia into a major trade route. Chile's leftist president also helped by settling a long term dispute with land-locked Bolivia, by granting Bolivia access to the Pacific.
You see how this works? Generosity is good economics! If you are kind to your neighbors, they in turn are kind to you, and all will benefit from the general prosperity. Venezuela's barter trade group, ALBA, is solely based on this principle. Thus, Venezuela provides Cuba with cheap oil, and Cuba in turn provides doctors from its excellent medical education program to Venezuela. (Venezuela is short on doctors because prior governments utterly neglected their country in every way, including the education of doctors and providing medical care for the poor.) Nothing wrong with barter trade. It may not show up on the balance sheets of corpo thinkers, but it has long term benefits that may far exceed those visible to "greenshade" accountants, banksters and Wall Street madmen. While the asshole US policy of embargoing Cuba continues on its asshole way, Venezuelans benefit from medical care, from Cuba's famous eye clinic, from Cuba's also well-known and highly regarded literacy program, from vacationing on Cuba's pristine beaches, and maybe from developing Cuba's big recent oil find.
(Speaking of that: Venezuela may be predicting its oil production higher than OPEC figures, based on its planning projects with France's Total, British BP, Norway's Statoil, China's oil developers, and others--that is, on more recent developments than OPEC figured in. You don't give the date of the OPEC report, nor provide the bases of either prediction, so it is impossible to tell which prediction is more accurate. Cuba's big oil find may be part of Venezuela's equation as well, though I don't think there is time for it to affect next year's production, and I don't know if they have a deal yet. My point is that Venezuela has been busy making deals and developing facilities. It may have more current information than OPEC.)
Your analysis is much like the views of other anti-left, anti-Chavez posters here and elsewhere, who simply don't--and maybe can't (are unable to)--credit the Chavez government for its many amazing accomplishments and its long term thinking, nor acknowledge the new cooperative atmosphere among the leftist leadership of South and Central America--Lulu's and Chavez's "raise all boats" philosophy. The future lay in cooperation, and in democratic consideration of the poor majority and the "will of the people" all across the region. While we suffer enormously from the "dog eat dogism" of our Corporate Rulers, the South Americans are way in advance of us in solving the inherent problems of the predatory capitalism that our rulers have tried to inflict on them. When the Bushwhack Financial 9/11 occurred, Lula da Silva said something like this: 'You (First World financiers, US-dominated World Bank/IMF) lectured us on privatisation and deregulation, but we knew best!" In other words, true leaders attend to the common good, not to the greed of the rich. That is the best policy for everyone.
The Chavez government, in negotiating oil contracts that favor Venezuela and its social programs, and in both spending money on social programs, and saving lots of money that would otherwise have gone into the pockets of Exxon Mobil oil executives, set up a situation in which they could ride out $60/barrel prices without touching their $43 billion in international cash reserves. The Bushwhacks struck, and so they have had to spend some of that money. This is partly the cause of their one big problem--inflation is too high. But they have been so truly conservative (in the best sense of the word) in their management of Venezuela's economy--as opposed to the radical Bushwhacks who wasted all of our money and resources, unto the 7th generation, on war and on enriching themselves--that I have confidence in the Chavez government's ability to solve inflation without inducing depression (as is happening here). (Inflation favors the poor, if it doesn't get too high. Deflation favors the rich. Depression favors almost no one. Ask FDR!)
I also have confidence in the direction of the region--toward more inclusive democracy, social justice and economic/political integration. If they continue in this vein of helping each other out, they will leave us in the dust.
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