and they don't read, like you and me--as are obviously the case with our resident rightwinger. He (she?) still hasn't read the article I cited, "Venezuela's Agrarian Land Reform: More like Lincoln than Lenin."
The malfeasance and corruption, and utter neglect of their own society, that characterized the oil elite running Venezuela before Chavez simply don't exist for rightwingers or for the corporate media whom they echo or for the 1% whom they serve. They don't want to know the truth, or, rather, they don't want you and me to know it.
The oil elite created a tinselly urban culture utterly dependent upon imports--from imported foods to imported Gucci bags and imported musak--a culture for the 1% flushed with oil profits who could afford imported items. They were destroying their own country with contempt and neglect, and never is this more evident than in their land policies, by which huge areas of tillable land, controlled by absent owners or with no clear owners, as well as public lands, were allowed to remain fallow while children starved and cities filled up with displaced peasants, farmers and farm workers, who could not feed themselves or their families, and were condemned to lives of dire poverty with no hope of education, training, jobs or upward mobility.
It was "Marie Antoinettte" all over again--"let them eat cake." In this case, let them eat Gucci bags and caviar.
The Chavez government addressed this massive malfeasance of the oil elite with a well thought out land reform program, designed not only to entice small farmers back to the land but to require the production of food as a condition for gaining title to the land. They also proceeded conservatively and legally, as to land reclamation, with a minimum of conflict. And they have provided training (since generations of farming knowledge had been lost), and other agricultural help such as support in creating markets.
They also addressed other aspects of oil elite malfeasance, such as their giving away most of the oil profits to entities like Exxon Mobil while skimming off the top for themselves, and utterly failing to address the needs of the massive urban poor who could not go back to the land. The Chavez government re-negotiated the oil contracts to give Venezuela a much better deal, and began pouring the profits into education, health care and other benefits for the poor majority, while also stimulating sizzling economic growth in the private sector with high employment and good wages and benefits, AND embarking on important infrastructure projects, including the opening of the new Orinoco Bridge to Brazil, housing for flood victims and for the poor, a funicular up steep hillsides for barrio communities, construction of many new schools, colleges, community centers and medical centers, construction of a grand new concert hall for Venezuela's Children's Orchestra, and many other people-friendly and trade-friendly projects. One of their most interesting projects was the new requirement that radio stations broadcast certain percentages of locally produced music, and their encouragement of indigenous music-makers (which has led to the rediscovery of neglected--and some very old--musicians).
Food security is one of the most difficult social and governmental problems to turn around, after decades of malfeasance and neglect--since farming knowledge is lost, the farming population is lost, farmer's markets disappear, rich speculators gobble up the land and let it sit there unused and of no use to anybody, and the entire society is geared toward imports. You can turn an uneducated population into an educated one in one generation. Not so a farming crisis. Reversing Venezuela's food insecurity could take half a century. But they would never have had any hope of reversing it, if the oil elite had continued to rule Venezuela.
You have to CARE--care about the poor majority, care about the society, care about the country, care about the land. The oil elite never did--their dreams were of mansions in Miami. Their goal now is to overturn all of these beneficial policies and sell the country back to Exxon Mobil, so long as they get to skim off the top. They are as bad as our "Mad Tea Party" Republicans for outright lying, disdain for the truth and fronting for transglobal corporations, banksters and war profiteers. What we get from our resident rightwingers here at DU is their "talking points," which of course ignore--completely "black hole"--what the pre-Chavez oil elite did and what the Chavez government has faced in trying to reverse decades of corruption, malfeasance, neglect, profiteering, violent repression, and oblivious and godawful greed.
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