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In reply to the discussion: Traders Are 'Scared As Hell' Of What's Happening In Venezuela [View all]Lydia Leftcoast
(48,217 posts)They needed to be shaken up. They have had income inequality worse than ours for hundreds of years, with the European-descended people blatantly lording it over the people of Indian, African, and mixed descent.
Have you ever seen the movie "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"? I recommend it, even if you think it's "Marxist propaganda."
The filmmakers did not know the coup was going to take place when they went to Venezuela, and they went around filming reactions to Chavez from various types of people. They filmed a group of wealthy people who essentially complained that Chavez had made their servants uppity. As I remarked to another DUer who happened to be at the screening, "Did you ever see such a bunch of country club Republicans in your life?"
I doubt that the Venezuelan government is telling the poor that "people with money are evil." They've already figured out for themselves that people with money (there and sometimes here) think of themselves as a better breed of human being and consider it their right to treat the poor like dirt. Remember: the poorer Latin American countries have long lived in a "libertarian paradise" of no restrictions on business or social safety net. Many of the wealthy there ARE evil.
The elites of such countries are like fundamentalist Christians claiming "persecution" when they don't get to run things.
You must be reading the National Review or the Wall Street Journal or something like that if you think a capital strike is anything except the equivalent of holding your breath till you turn blue. You sound like the American oligarchs saying that can't invest in America because of "uncertainty."
Well, I've been self-employed for twenty-one years, so I know that business is one "uncertainty" after other. It's a bullshit excuse by people who are so accustomed to making scads of money all the time that the thought of ANY reduction in their net worth infuriates them.
By the way, when the unsuccessful coup occurred in 2002--with the plotters "restoring democracy" by arresting the legally elected president, dissolving the national legislature, and abolishing the supreme court--the Bush administration, alone of all the Western nations, practically fell over its own feet to grant diplomatic recognition the illegal action.
Is Maduro the sharpest tool in the drawer? No, but the wealthy of Venezuela are REALLY poor sports and have been trying--with U.S. encouragement--to undermine the legal, internationally recognized government of their country ever since a dark-skinned man (Chavez) had the gall to be elected president.