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From The Progressive
By Greg Palast
You'd think George Bush would get down on his knees and kiss
Hugo Chavez's behind. Not only has Chavez 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: Chavez 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 Chavez to take his cheaper
oil and stick it up his pipeline. Before I explain why Bush has done so, let me explain why Chavez has the power to pull it
off -- and the method in the seeming madness of his "take-my-oil-please!" deal.
Venezuela, Chavez
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 More...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 Chavez'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.
Chavez
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,
Chavez 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.
Chavez, 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,
Chavez 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. Chavez'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.
Chavez's
government, which used to brush off these critics, has turned aggressive on them. I challenged Chavez several times over charges
brought against Sumate, his main opposition group. The two founders of the nongovernmental organization, which led the recall
campaign against Chavez, 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 Chavez has been a mix
of hostility and provocation. Washington supported the coup attempt
against Chavez 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 Chavez 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 Chavez as the New Abdullah of the Americas. First,
the unattractive option: Cut the price of oil below $30 a barrel. That would make Chavez'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
Chavez: 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?
Chavez: 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?
Chavez: 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'etat in Argentina thirty
years ago.
Q: Is the U.S. interfering in your elections
here?
Chavez: They have interfered for 200 years. They have tried to prevent us from winning the elections, they supported
the coup d'etat, 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?
Chavez: 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?
Chavez: 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?
Chavez: 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?
Chavez: 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"?
Chavez: I do wish that the IMF and the World
Bank would disappear soon.
Q: And it would be the Bank of Hugo?
Chavez: 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.
Chavez: 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?
Chavez: 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?
Chavez: 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 Chavez simply collapse because there's no
money to pay for the big free ride?
Chavez: 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?
Chavez: He would like to, but what you want is one
thing, and what you cannot really obtain is another.
*******
Greg Palast is the author of the just-released
New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches
from the Front Lines of the Class War" from which this is adapted. Go to www.GregPalast.com.
For Media Requests contact: interviews (at) GregPalast.com
In the free trade system, the resources are in corporate hands, the profits flow to the owners of corporations, and
the income from the national resources are dispersed accordingly. There is a
trickle down benefit for the people of the nation. With a government ran economy committed to first serving the public weal, much more of the income is used for humane ends--jk.
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