No subject

in accord with the IMF, drew the conclusion that they
should further open their countries to foreign
business interests and advocated this policy as the
best way to more national wealth. The foreign
participation in the extraction of raw materials and
the business with agricultural exports, in Venezuela
especially the partially nationalized oil industry,
was again reorganized in favor of the multinational
companies in order to fetch more foreign capital for
the development of raw material extraction in the
country, to maintain creditworthiness with the private
and official international financial institutions and,
last but not least, to secure the goodwill of the USA,
the supervising power of the world market and world
finance. Additionally, the remaining state-owned
enterprises were privatized; the water and electrical
supply, as well as telecommunications and banks were
turned into investments for North American and
European multinationals – under conditions which
guaranteed them a profitable business, guarantees for
the monetary value of their profits and free foreign
exchange operations.

Those countries indeed realized some billions of
additional revenues and new credits, but they only
found themselves soon again, and on a new level, in
the debt trap and this sped up the conflicts within
them. The privatization of the public utility
companies turned into only one long list of demands on
the governments: to ensure higher prices and profits,
indifferent to the poverty of the masses, so that a
large part of the population can no longer afford
water and electricity. Mass protests were put down
partly by force, partly by delaying tactics.

The arrangement of the concessions and the modalities
with the tributes, also in Venezuela, led to the
situation that the national revenue did not grow,
although the prices for crude oil and natural gas were
rising, whereas the multinationals, together with the
management of the national oil industry, made huge
profits and shifted the increasing dollar funds into
foreign countries, to the disadvantage of the national
foreign currency account.

This internationally demanded and nationally
implemented “neoliberal” program of the countries of
Latin America - to prosper as an investment place for
foreign businesses, to make the debt service the
leading priority of budgetary policy and to manage the
drastic consequences for the country and people by
force - Chávez finds intolerable. Impoverishment and
forced oppression of growing parts of the population,
on the one hand, and domestic and foreign enrichment
on the other hand, proves to him that politics lacks a
proper national conviction.

In the poverty of the masses he detects the
subjugation of his country to foreign demands to
wealth and power and sees this as a betrayal of its
people. And it is also clear who is meant in
particular: the USA with their multinationals
companies, which claims Latin America as their
economic and political backyard.

Chávez is emphatic on the point of view that the
realities of the world market are not “inherent
necessities” that have to be used to make the most out
of them, but rather interests that harm people and
nation, and which should be fought against.

The ex-military man who has close ties to the people
does not want to accept that the vast majority of the
population has to be kept in poverty by force because
it is - according to the hitherto valid criteria - a
capitalistically useless overpopulation. He wants to
eliminate the capitalistically produced and
governmentally supervised pauperism in his country:
out of a sump of social misery and suject of state
repression they should become a proper people
recognized in their life needs and requirements. The
masses, until now excluded from all the achievements
of civilization, should be granted what they deserve,
the right to a life in “dignity.”

The means for such a social development program should
come from the money that the government gets from
world market relations. Instead of subjecting the
whole country to a terms and conditions which condemn
the vast majority to being a crowd without work and
income, the first man in Caracas agitates and acts for
the opposite: with the money from the raw materials
trade he wants to organize living conditions in which
his population can reproduce itself.




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