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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   23888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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The PSUV, under both Chavez and Maduro, basically transitioned Venezuela from a democracy to a one-party state before democratic backsliding was cool. This included thing like taking over opposition media, banning opposition politicians, and so on. This is bad for democracy, yes, but also pre-cluded a democratic transition of power towards anyone less anti-American.

Remember the days when Chavez was deemed cool and much-admired for what he was doing in Venezuela? I guess anti-democracy is okay as long as it's our guy (or someone we would like to adopt as our guy) doing it!

An anti-American communist being admired by NPR is a day ending in a Y. It doesn't really mean anything.

True, that is a "rain is wet" story. But there were a lot of online admirers, I seem to recall, who were praising him for things like shipping oil to other countries at steep discounts and even as a publicity stunt to the USA. The usual suspects, of course, felt that the oil was behind US opposition from the start:

Maria Corina Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, started a group called Sumaté (“Join Up”), which placed a recall referendum on the ballot. About 70% of the registered voters came to the polls in 2004, and a large majority (59%) voted to retain Chávez as the president.

But neither Machado nor her US backers (including the oil companies) rested easy. From 2001 till today, they have tried to overthrow the Bolivarian process – to effectively return the US-owned oil companies to power. The question of Venezuela, then, is not so much about “democracy” (an overused word, which is being stripped of meaning) but about the international class struggle between the right of the Venezuelan people to freely control their oil and gas and that of the US-owned oil companies to dominate Venezuelan natural resources.

I think oil as a resource is important to all kinds of interests, but it's not the only reason for the problems with Venezuela, and the government there seems to have managed the trick of taking an abundant resource, running it into the ground, making the economy and all the social programmes dependent on revenue from it, and blowing up that revenue by making the oil too difficult to extract and process.

It really might be better for Venezuela for the greedy US corporations to come back and run the oil business, even if they do cream off most of the profits. An idea I never thought I would voice!

and the government there seems to have managed the trick of taking an abundant resource, running it into the ground, making the economy and all the social programmes dependent on revenue from it, and blowing up that revenue by making the oil too difficult to extract and process.

Yeah, that's Communism for you. The joke used to be that if the Communists took over Saudi Arabia, nothing would happen at first but there'd be an oil shortage in 5 years. Venezuela managed to make that not a joke.

(The original version is that if the Federal Government took over the Sahara, there'd be a sand shortage in 5 years. Fortunately the Feds aren't that ambitious)

It really might be better for Venezuela for the greedy US corporations to come back and run the oil business, even if they do cream off most of the profits. An idea I never thought I would voice!

I expect this is the plan. The US companies may take more than is "fair" in some ideal sense, and certainly more than various international watchdog groups will say is fair, but what remains to the Venezuelans will be more than it is now. Assuming things follow the good path... there's still plenty of room for total screwups.

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