Posted on 08/04/2009 9:47:05 AM PDT by bs9021
Venezuela Impasse
by: Alana Goodman, August 04, 2009
As Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s popularity plummets alongside oil prices, analysts warn that the socialist state could be veering toward disaster.
A recent poll by the Venezuelan Institute for Data Analysis found that “43.6 per cent of respondents would vote for the current president in the 2010 ballot, while 40.1 per cent would not” but two-thirds of Venezuelans would want Chavez out of office by 2012, according to the Angus Reid Global Monitor.
“This is a regime that is characterized by simultaneously putting all of its force [on] the accelerator and [on] the breaks,” said Moisés Naím, editor in chief of Foreign Policy, at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on July 27th. The contradictory procedures of the Chavez administration were a major theme of the Venezuelan policy discussion, as experts spoke about the conflicts plaguing the country’s oil industry.
Venezuela’s economy is heavily reliant on oil, but, according to Naím, government regulations imposed on the industry are getting in the way of profits. There is a “very systematic weakening of the oil industry, in a variety of ways, at the same time as the country is more dependent than ever on the oil industry,” he said.
“We have seen this in a variety of ways,” he continued. “This is an industry that has been forced to over diversify. It is an industry that is overstretched financially. It is an industry that is overburdened with all kinds of politically-imposed mandates that are very often unfunded.”
According to Naím, one of these political mandates is the requirement for oil companies “to provide oil for friends and family [of Chavez] around the hemisphere…it is a very important tool of President Chavez’s…influence in the region."....
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
Ah! So Hugo is really in it for himself...
In essence, he has betrayed his own people to provide oil to his friends around the Hemisphere. He is buying influence, and that kind of friendship lasts only as long as the bribes do. Venezuelans are getting the short end of the stick. If our government had an ounce of reason, it would be setting up “Radio Free Venezuela” stations right now and beaming truth to those benighted people. Everyone who can has already bailed and moved to Miami.
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frias (born July 28, 1954) is the President of Venezuela, an outspoken critic of neo-liberal globalization and other concepts nobody else besides U.S. college students and CNN analysts care about, and a d**k.
Simply put, Chávez isn’t really dangerous; he just wants a little attention. In fact, few people would care about Hugo Chávez were he not the head of an oil-producing country. As far as megalomaniacs go, Chávez is strictly small d**k potatoes, or, papas pingas pequeñas.
Over the years, Chávez has severely clamped down on both the press and civil liberties, and exhibited a propensity for talking smack about the Bush Administration any time anyone put a microphone in front of his mouth... He doesn’t even have a nuclear weapons program. Until such time, Chávez is destined to remain a poor man’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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