Iran Sees U.S. Behind Chavez's Venezuela Ouster

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran, which had built up friendly ties with deposed Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, said Saturday the fiery populist's ouster by the military was in part hatched by the United States.

State television said Washington was concerned that Venezuela -- the world's No 4 oil exporter and a leading supplier of petroleum products to the U.S. -- would heed a call by Iran to cut oil supplies for one month to countries that support Israel.

Noting that Chavez's foreign policies "were contrary to American interests in Latin America" it said the flamboyant ex-paratrooper's fall "reminds one of the American-backed coup by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973."

Chavez, whose mandate was due to end in 2006, was forced out of power Friday by the armed forces who blamed him for street violence against a huge opposition protest during a general strike in which 15 people were killed in central Caracas.

Elected in a landslide in 1998 with a pledge to lead a so-called peaceful revolution in favor of the poor majority of Venezuelans, Chavez had angered the U.S. government by his strident anti-American rhetoric and strong ties with Cuba.

He had visited fellow OPEC -member Iran and was warmly received in a country strongly opposed to Washington since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and recently labeled by President Bush part of "an axis of evil."

The White House, clearly pleased by Chavez's departure, said it did not consider his ouster a coup and said the Venezuelan people rose up for the protection of democracy.

But for Iranian television, "the most important reason for America's concern was the issue of oil...There was an increasing probability that Venezuela would also support the stoppage" of supplies, suggested by Tehran.

It provided no evidence however that Chavez's government was indeed considering a suspension of oil exports to countries allied with Israel in protest at its military incursion into Palestinian areas of the West Bank.

Iraq has banned oil exports for one month for that reason but non-Arab Iran said it would do so only if the move found unanimous support among Muslim countries.

"Some reports indicate the United States gave the green light for the coup d'etat and that Chavez was deposed because of his avowed anti-American policies," wrote Resallat, a conservative daily.

For Jomhooriye Eslami, widely seen as the mouthpiece of religious hard-liners, Chavez's ouster was "the culmination of a concerted effort in which the United States played no small part. The deposing of a government that favored a policy aimed at cutting the production and raising the price of oil is no accident."

Here's how to fight poverty in third world countries:

These people who write on third world development are so friggin' stupid, they haven't learned anything in 50 years. They've been coming up with magical thoughts for 50 years on "development". State planning was the solution. Exports were the solution. Democracy was the solution. World Banks loans to governments were the solution. Aid is still the solution according to Bush and his latest scheme. Now, they pretend that "globalization" was the solution.

But they are blind. They write about ending poverty, without ever talking about property.

Poverty = lack of wealth
Wealth = property
Ending poverty = getting property in the hands of the poor.

D'oh!

Here's the way to go about it. I recommend to everyone to read this book, it'll open your eyes and immunize you against the type of nonsense in this article.

Click Here for page at Amazon.com.

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
by Hernando De Soto, Hernando De Soto

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Paperback - 288 pages 1st edition (August 2002)
Basic Books; ISBN: 0465016154

In-Print Editions: Hardcover (1st)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: 23,363
Popular in: Latin America (#13) , Peru (#8) . See more

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
It's become clear by now the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in most places around the globe hasn't ushered in an unequivocal flowering of capitalism in the developing and postcommunist world. Western thinkers have blamed this on everything from these countries' lack of sellable assets to their inherently non-entrepreneurial "mindset." In this book, the renowned Peruvian economist and adviser to presidents and prime ministers Hernando de Soto proposes and argues another reason: it's not that poor, postcommunist countries don't have the assets to make capitalism flourish. As de Soto points out by way of example, in Egypt, the wealth the poor have accumulated is worth 55 times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including that spent on building the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.

No, the real problem is that such countries have yet to establish and normalize the invisible network of laws that turns assets from "dead" into "liquid" capital. In the West, standardized laws allow us to mortgage a house to raise money for a new venture, permit the worth of a company to be broken up into so many publicly tradable stocks, and make it possible to govern and appraise property with agreed-upon rules that hold across neighborhoods, towns, or regions. This invisible infrastructure of "asset management"--so taken for granted in the West, even though it has only fully existed in the United States for the past 100 years--is the missing ingredient to success with capitalism, insists de Soto. But even though that link is primarily a legal one, he argues that the process of making it a normalized component of a society is more a political--or attitude-changing--challenge than anything else.

With a fleet of researchers, de Soto has sought out detailed evidence from struggling economies around the world to back up his claims. The result is a fascinating and solidly supported look at the one component that's holding much of the world back from developing healthy free markets. --Timothy Murphy --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Industry Standard
"An increasingly important economist provides a fascinating lesson in why capitalism works by looking at the places where it doesn't." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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