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"They’re Running the Economy Into the Ground"
Discrediting Neoliberal Alternatives
By Kevin Young
Washington policy makers and their loyal press corps have a well-developed toolkit for discrediting foreign governments that oppose U.S. policies. One important strategy, which has been increasingly apparent since the global economic crisis hit the headlines in late 2008, is to assail their economic policies as foolish, naive, and devastating. In particular, the U.S. corporate media have taken aim at Latin American economic policies that diverge from Washington’s neoliberal prescriptions—despite those prescriptions’ contribution to the financial crisis.
Venezuela is a favorite target. Reporter Juan Forero of The Washington Post wrote in April that while energy blackouts cause problems in Venezuela, “the economy is flickering and going dark, too, challenging Venezuela’s mercurial leader, Hugo Chávez, and his socialist experiment like never before.”
(SNIP)
Editorial pieces in the Post and other papers have been even more indignant. In February The Miami Herald editors declared that “Mr. Chávez has run the economy, and the country, into the ground.” The Venezuelan government’s policies, according to the editors, have done nothing good for the economy...
(SNIP)
Venezuela’s economic reality is quite different from what these images imply. The Venezuelan economy has grown significantly for most of Chávez’s tenure in office, thanks in part—as Chávez’s detractors are quick to point out—to high oil prices on the world market. But government economic policies have also brought results rarely or never publicized in the U.S. corporate media. Economist Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research comments that “for five and a half years from the first quarter of 2003, when the Chavez government first got control of the state-owned oil company, the real economy grew by 95 percent.” He adds: “Poverty was cut in half and extreme poverty by more than 70%, social spending per person more than tripled, and access to health care and higher education rose sharply.” (5)
Increased government social spending, resource nationalization, and tighter regulation of private corporations are the same policies that the U.S. government and international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have usually discouraged or prohibited in underdeveloped countries. Although rich countries have long relied on extensive state involvement in their economies and massive deficit spending, they have imposed very different policies on poorer nations <6>. The social gains of the past decade in Venezuela have been possible in large part because Chávez’s government has rejected the policy prescriptions of neoliberal economists.(MORE) (my emphasis) http://www.zcommunications.org/they-re-running-the-economy-into-the-ground-by-kevin-young -------------------------------- The next two paragraphs make a particularly good point. They provide the first good explanation that I've seen for the Chavez government's recent devaluation of the bolivar. After debunking the common misconception that Venezuela is a "socialist" state, the writer describes the Chavez government's recent adoption of "neo-liberal" policies that it had previously rejected. In short, the Chavez government, though it had the wherewithal, didn't inject enough stimulus into the economy. While Bolivia and Ecuador did follow anti-neo-liberal policies, to good effect, Venezuela's economy has not recovered its growth rate (which was a quite sizzling growth rate from 2003 to 2008) fast enough. Then Young says: In the last year the Chávez government has taken several steps to reverse this, such as devaluing the overvalued currency and combating speculation, hoarding, and over-priced food products <9>."Another quite important point in this article is Young's discussion of the extremely biased writing about the Chavez government in the corpo-fascist press. --- According to (the corpo-fascist press) narrative, the only reason that leaders like Chávez and Morales have maintained any popularity is that they have used export earnings to buy support among the irrational, gullible poor, who are “largely blind to results” <18>. The left-leaning governments’ larger economic programs are actually wildly unpopular: Chávez, as Pérez-Stable of The Miami Herald told readers in May, “has been working hard to make Venezuela into another Cuba against the wishes of Venezuelans.” But now, she reports optimistically, “social programs alone no longer sway the Chavista base” <19>.
Public opinion polls, which offer a closer look at attitudes than national elections, tell a very different story. According to surveys conducted in 2008 and 2009 by the Chilean polling company Latinobarómetro, more than 80% of people in Latin America think that schools, hospitals, water, electricity, and other basic services, as well as major industries like oil and natural gas, “should be mainly in the hands of the State.” Only 34% report “satisfaction with privatized public services.” Although Latin Americans tend to agree that private enterprise should play a role in their economies, they strongly reject the free-market fundamentalism that continues to shape economic policy in much of the region, particularly in Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and other nations closely allied to the United States <20>. The omission of these poll results from the Post, the Times, and virtually all other corporate publications is telling <21>. Journalists like Forero and Barrionuevo have presumably seen the results, since they have both cited Latinobarómetro before. But they cited the reports very selectively and superficially: Although each report consists of 113 pages, they focused on those poll questions which asked people to self-identify as leftist, centrist, or right-wing, while ignoring almost all of the more substantive questions.http://www.zcommunications.org/they-re-running-the-economy-into-the-ground-by-kevin-young------------------------ This article goes into many issues of importance including a good discussion of Bolivia. It is well-documented and footnoted. It is the sort of even-handed reporting and analysis that is so completely lacking from the entirety of corporate-run press.
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