Let's see; Venesuela sends us cheap fuel oil for the poor, bad guys. Saudi Arabia sends us 15 highjackers with box cutters, good guys. That said it is more than propaganda that the FARC ( F...ing A..holes Ruining Colombia) hides out in Chavez's turf ! lf Chavez has faith in his people and his revolution he should be willing to step down and pass the baton. Our founding fathers felt that change of of leadership is necessary to keep a system from becoming stagnant.

Mr. Weisbrot,
Your webpage states what follows:
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)…"CEPR conducts both professional research and public education. The professional research is oriented towards filling important gaps in the understanding of particular economic and social problems or the impact of specific policies. The public education portion of CEPR's mission is to present the findings of professional research, both by CEPR and others, in a manner that allows broad segments of the public to know exactly what is at stake in major policy debates. An informed public should be able to choose policies that lead to an improving quality of life, both for people within the United States and around the world."
In my view, in your article: "Will Obama Change U.S. Policy Toward Latin America?" or "Venezuela, an imaginary threat" you neither fill gaps in understanding the situation in Venezuela nor present the findings in a manner that allows broad segments of the public to know exactly what is at stake, what is more any basic research work would have views from multiple sources and points of view, but clearly you only present the views of the government and its allies.
With regard to President Obama's accusation that Chavez has been "exporting terrorist activities.", I cannot believe that you haven't read the information about the computer files found in Ecuador's FARC Guerilla's camp which, and I don't expect you to believe this source, but at least it should make you doubt, "A cache of controversial computer files closely tying Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez to communist rebels seeking to topple Colombia's government appear to be authentic, U.S. intelligence officials say." "The files that have been made public so far have largely confirmed Mr. Chavez's well-known sympathy for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But a review by The Wall Street Journal of more than 100 new files from the computers suggests that Venezuela has broader and deeper ties to the FARC than previously known. (MAY 9, 2008 Chavez Aided Colombia Rebels, Captured Computer Files Show).
I think that your assertion that "The charge that Venezuela is "exporting terrorism" would not pass the laugh test among almost any government in Latin America." is taking the matter very lightly.
When you say that "Nor do the other Latin American democracies see Venezuela as an obstacle to progress in the region", you only refer Mr. Lula who with Chavez is member of the Foro de São Paulo, a conference of left-wing and nationalist political parties and social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean and that "Lula was in Venezuela's oil producing state of Zulia where he emphasized his strategic partnership with Chavez and their common efforts at regional economic integration", clearly, unconstitutionally, campaigning for Chavez for the recent referendum to eliminate term limits. You also name Bolivia, a country which has received millions of dollars from Venezuela as well as military support and whose president would probably not be there had it not been for Chavez intrusion in the internal affairs of Bolivia. Now, you fail to mention the opinion of Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Panama, etc. So I think that there is further research to be done in this matter.
You go on to say that "the Associated Press ignores the attacks from Washington and portrays Chavez's response as nothing more than an electoral ploy on his part.", have you not heard the verbal abuse Chavez has expressed about your elected and appointed officials, calling President Bush: Mr. Danger, a donkey, a drunk, a coward, a genocide, a murderer, an assassin the devil (at the U.N.), and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice an illiterate and a sexually frustrated woman?, you may not agree with the past administration, but as a citizen of the U.S you should not be happy about such language from the president of another country, He has accused Barack Obama, whom he has nicknamed 'el negro', of supporting the Venezuelan opposition and wanting to see him removed from office and furthermore that Barack Obama has the same "stench" as President Bush, so lets not talk about Chavez being restrained.
About the opposition dominating the media in Venezuela, take a second look, and see where the power of the media is. Just one network TV Globovision is in the opposition; RCTV, he closed down and "robbed" them of all of their equipment; Venevision and Televen, do not talk about politics; the rest of the TV media is in the hands of Chavez. In the most recent referendum, which by the way was unconstitutional, according to Prof. Allan Brewer-Carias" in a recent interview for the Council on Foreign Relations "There was a massive and incredible amount of public money used by the government in promoting this referendum in these last months. The use of the public media in favor of Chavez and the limited access of the opposition to those media of course helped produce this result"
And for you to research and find out he and many other say that: "We have a country where there is no check and balances, no separation of powers at all. The executive controls the assembly, and through the assembly it controls the Supreme Tribunal, the attorney general, the prosecutor general, the defender of the people, the comptroller general."… and I would add the Electoral Council (CNE)…" So all the branches of government are completely controlled, and the power concentrated in the executive. So in this sense we are already in a totalitarian regime."
Sometimes people are so biased to what they believe, that they are incapable of seeing other viewpoints, and sometimes the truth.

bligh4

Well, for better or worse- Venezuela is stuck with Ol' Hugo.

I will be interested to see how he pulls off getting the country out of it's inflation/crime spiral.

Why have threads been removed from here?

All comments relating to FARC have been censored!

actually the majority of the venezuelan economy is not oil.

oil sales only account for about 40 to 50 % of the economy.

the private sector has grown more than the public sector

oil is nationalized in venezuela

please get your facts straight

Bring America Back !!!! Prior to his Inauguration, over 3500 members of Latin Akmerican Nations, including Chavez, sent a gracious letter to Obama offering their hands of friendship, and to become co-equal global partners with his new Administration, as opposed to King Georges policy that the Third World were second class citizens.

* All Obama and his Team have to do is embrace South America in the very spirit of co-operation and friendship they are holding out !!

** To do otherwise defies any kind of Change we are promised, defies the New Global posture we want to achieve, and profiles us as enemies not as friends.

Apparently Obama's recent speech was way out of line !!!! Where Venezuela is concerned we need to see a handshake of friendship and not a clenched fist !!!

Wake up America !!

Pan

Not venezuela idiots , But Grenada is the real threat . Wake up befor it is to late.

Is Venezuela, through Citgo, still providing discount heating oil for poor USers?

Oh, the horror!

Americans cannot see beyond their own beliefs. Had America valued it's Native Peoples at home, it may have a clue as to the deeper meanings of the South American revolution. It is a revolution to overthrow five hundred years of Euro/American dominion. Unlike America, much of South America is populated by Indigenous Peoples. In 2007 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That document specifically spells out the rights of Indigenous Peoples worldwide. Only four nations refused to sign it, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Great Britain.

The people of Venezuela, the majority being Indigenous, are seeking to restore their right to live their culture, control their lands and resources, and elect their own leaders. The Euro and American elites are opposed to these efforts and are working actively to demonize the democratically elected leaders like Chavez, Di Silva, and Morales, all of whom have Indigenous blood and understand the Indigenous culture.

Marxism is a western belief system. The Indigenous belief system is twelve to fifteen thousand years older than Marxism. The Indigenous belief system celebrates respect, cooperation, reciprocity, and not the Western values of individualism and competition. So it is not Marxism that is being elevated there but instead that of their historic culture. It is their right to live as they choose, electing whom they choose, unencumbered by the continuing genocidal policies of the West launched by the Papal Bull Inter Caetera of 1493, and the Euro elites who have grown accustomed to imperial power.

This is an Indigenous revolution against the five hundred year genocide imposed upon them by Euro/Americans that cost the lives of over one hundred million Indigenous Peoples representing the worst genocide in the last five hundred years anywhere in the World. Yet not one comment in this string even eluded to this critical information. Yet this information is central to understanding what is happening in Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Equador, and an expanding number of South American and Central American countries.

It is not Marxism it is the rebirth of Indigenous culture.

Any nation or people who oppose US must surrender or die.

US will rule, US will dominate, US will exploit, US will murder and steal because that is the nature of US.

All that is non-US must cease to exist or join US.

Submit to US or be exterminated.

Hail US! Hail US! Hail US!

I'm sorry if I seem rather silly for asking this question but why is the U.S. so anti-South America? Why are they trying to "divide and conquer?"

I've just stumbled on this site--it really is an eye opener. Before this I was a victim of the captive media. Such wasted time...

At the present it is difficult in Venezuela for those who left Chile during the early 1970s as refugees from a dark era in Chilean and Argentinian history. More than anything, those (which are many of the middle class in Venezuela) people who migrated to Venezuela were aspiring for stability and enough prosperity to allow their families to live without fear for their survival than what they knew in Argentina and Chile in the '70s. Still in places like Venezuela, the military was always waiting in the barracks for the opportune time to enter leadership, no matter what quasi democracy was in place. Whether the US needs to in any fashion intervene in Latin America is a moot point in light of the enormous economic trouble the US is experiencing currently and the fervent hope for Obama's team of finding a geopolitical balance and allies in neighboring Latin America (Venezuela being the nearest South American neighbor of our country here in the US). Chavez is not an educated man which makes him more vulnerable to myopia and popularism and his alliances in Venezuela are dependent on the well being of a mono-culture petroleum country which will be increasingly vulnerable to market forces in years ahead. The narco trade issues are enormously difficult for any leader in Latin America and there needs to be international dialogue on this issue; how to help farming families reliant on the coca culture to diversify to food crops is very difficult given the world economic depression and macroeconomic stress.

For the Venezuelans who years ago could go to the supermarket at will are now in ration lines to get their food and necessities. Still Venezuela is overall a very impoverished country and the effort to raise up such a country and it's economic development of the people is an enormous undertaking. Mao did this only under his own tyranny. Cuba represented an exercise which established nearly complete literacy as well as health care for its people under an often difficult influence of a totalitarian government. Venezuela's Chavez is seeking to replicate Cuba's experiment which is hopeful for the impoverished masses but not an easy existence for the ex patriots from other countries who are now aged and very tired of instability and survival worry. Crime is severe in Venezuela's cities and non-statist crime axiomatically diminishes in authoritarian regimes historically which infers that Chavez has not, at this moment, created such a state. The world is, in this modern era, interconnected intimately and back in the '80s, many political scientists believed that economic trade would stabilize governments and increase world security. The present economic world crisis will call on every leader throughout the world to seek dialogue of problem solving and learning to survive a very difficult epoch in human times.

For President Obama, he must balance the opinions of his team with historic and contemporary realities while treading a precarious path of ascertaining what geopolitical balance must mean in these contemporary, post Bush times: this is one of the most difficult periods in American history to lead and I believe that President Obama will continue to listen intently to words of wisdom.

Are we ALL not part of the HUMAN RACE?

in the night I hear the wailin
attack! attack by Venezuelan!

What a short memory you have.

"Obama started off with an unprovoked verbal assault on Venezuela."

In January Chavez said Obama had the "same stench" as his predecessor.

Does anybody fact check these articles?

Obama stands against racism and socioeconomic injustice in the US(somewhat, at least); and yet seems to side with the bigots and oligarchs in Latin America. Obama is portrayed a monkey/chimpanzee that should be shot in the New York Post. Chavez is called a monkey by well-to-do racists in Venezuela.

If Obama is really a progressive he must be brought to realize that our enemies are not the governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, etc., but rather the people in the US who promote imperialism: the Republican Party and DLC Democrats. He needs to wake up and extricate himself from their cancerous influence, and throw them out of his (our) government.

He needs to shut down the nefarious practices of the NED, IRI, USAID, & CIA which work to destabilize any government that does not please the multinational corporations

We need to continually tell him how we feel by contacting him at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact.

But, but Chavez uses his oil revenue to make life a little better for people other than the old feudal elite. What kind of democracy is that? All American media knows the rich need more more.

Thanks Mark Weisbrot:

If you get your information primarily from the MSM, then you'll likely see Chavez as head of a "criminal regime" (quoted from film below). If Obama was to have a less reactionary posture towards Venezuela, he would be going against the constant demonization by the American news media. Unless a person has gone out of their way to seek the truth about Venezuela, then Chavez is at best a buffoon or worst evil incarnate. I can't remember how many people, otherwise liberal or progressive, that I have talked to that have the same view of Chavez as any Neo-Con. Our corporate media remains a big part of the problem.

See John Pilger's excellent film: "The War on Democracy"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4221598130733050551

O'Bama supporters should not feel badly about their savior ditching his buggy into the extreme right gutter. There's enough room here on the far left for everyone. Walk on over. We don't need a savior over here.

Good article.

Probably Obama will push Venezuela in a Cuba-like direction. He's being his usual careerist self, attacking a whole country for his personal gain (political capital/re-electability), and the Venezuelans are responding by removing term limits.

This looks like the Cuba-Kennedy relationship in slo mo (remember that Fidel did not declare himself a "Marxist-Leninst" until December 2, 1961, 23 months after taking power, because of a cycle in which Kennedy tried to ham-handedly make Cuba submit to liberal ideology and the Cubans reacted with indignation). Chavez has been in power since 1998, so obviously it's taking longer than it did with Castro, but Chavez has already started to call himself alternately a "Trotskyist", a "Maoist", etc. (Which goes to show, I guess, that Chavez is pretty opportunist himself--since he is neither of these things).

Anyway, I hope Venezuelans are sufficiently angered by Obama's blustery, imperialist rhetoric against them, and that they become the spearhead of a movement of underdeveloped and exploited nations willing to stand up to the West. Their own slimy politicians are more than happy to collaborate with Western financial institutions in order to help sink their countries for personal gain, so there will have to be a popular upsurge in awareness of how things work, and anger about it.

Weisbrot sez: "The charge that Venezuela is "exporting terrorism" would not pass the laugh test among almost any government in Latin America."

***
It also fails the smell test.
The rancid odour of USAID, IMF, the World Bank and their assorted patrons hangs over this rhetoric like a toxic cloud.

Same you can believe in!

It is sad yet predictable to see owebama take this posture toward Chavez...
While WHISC (terrorist training camp formerly known as School of the Americas) continues to churn out Latin American military officers to train paramilitary squads to subjugate the campesinos and indigenous peoples and force them off their land, into cities...
To clear the way for loggers, ranchers, developers, industrial plantations, and pharmaceutical patents...
The rightwing meme that Chavez is exporting terrorists to Colombia is a lie to befuddle the truth... The paramilitaries, military contractors, marxist geurrillas, and Uribe's own syndicate are all narcotraffickers, competitors, yet do not want to end this racket...
Chavez orchestrated the release of foreign citizens held hostage by FARC in Colombia despite restance from the US and Uribe...
I knew that owebama was not the progressive populist he was made out to be based on his long time stance on Cuba and Chavez...

OBAMA FOLLOWS IN FOOTSTEPS OF DEMOCRAT TRIAGE DURING THE MCCARTHY PERIOD: RIGHT WING FOREIGN POLICY TO MAINTAIN ROOSEVELT-IAN DOMESTIC POLICY

As early as 1944 Republicans scored electoral gains on anti-Communist platforms; their goal then was not to attack Russia - then a US ally - but to debunk and roll back New Deal domestic reform. During the McCarthy Period and the Cold War, Democrats adapted right wing foreign policy positions not simply because they wanted a military buildup or nuclear war, but as a matter of triage - by getting on board the anti-Communist hysteria, they sought to protect themselves from right wing attack and, thereby, to preserve Roosevelt's New Deal domestic policies.

Obama is making the same foreign policy trade-off, based on a narrow domestic political calculation: indifferent to the actual issues, indifferent to the strategic question of how his right wing positions worsen relations with Latin America or foster a terrorist-friendly perception of US hostility, indifferent to how hostile world opinion plays into right wing US hands, he angles for short-term domestic gain - mouth hostile and aggressive right wing foreign policy garbage to score compromised domestic gain.

Not only is this wrong, it is counter-productive: as in the US, as in Orwell's 1984, a hostile world and a state of permanent war - whether against Reagan's "Evil Empire" or "terror" - locks in the right.

"Obama started off with an unprovoked verbal assault on Venezuela. In an interview broadcast by the Spanish-language television station Univision on the Sunday before his inauguration, he accused Hugo Chávez of having "impeded progress in the region" and "exporting terrorist activities".

Univision can be the Latin oligarchy's mouthpiece, angered by Chavez's giving homes, food, healthcare, education and other benefits to his people.

Steinberg can be the Zionist mouthpiece, angered by Chavez's friendship with Iran.

Shannon can be the oil company mouthpiece, angered by Chavez's oil nationalization.

Is President Obama Bush-lite or is he playing politics to stay alive?

I have been consistently disappointed w/ Obama's foreign policy, and this is at the top of the dung heap. I know he's no foreign policy powerhouse, but he's been terribly misguided on both Venezuela and Russia/South Ossetia. He's seemingly strongly influenced by someone with an outdated and hardened outlook--Biden perhaps? He's got to lose whoever it is.

It's convenient for the Obama administration to maintain a racist posture against Chavez because then more whites will get on the bandwagon.

There is no one more racist than he who denies his own race.