Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Cheap oil, dear Kennedy

Thousands of low-income Massachusetts residents will receive discounted home heating oil this winter under an agreement signed Tuesday with Venezuela, whose government is a political adversary of the Bush administration.

The American poor, who, by the way, have higher per-capita income than the Venezuelan middle class, should be very grateful to Joe Kennedy (or vice versa?):

So what is Citizen’s and Joe Kennedy’s role in all this? What about Bill Delahunt? I do not know for sure. To me, they are allowing themselves to be used by an uncouth tormentor of Human Rights, who is hell-bent not only on making life difficult for the U.S. Administration, but is also on record (on multiple occasions) rejecting everything the U.S. stands for. While trying to earn some political capital by “doing good” in their home turf cannot be considered a felony, doing so by becoming accessories to a self declared enemy of the U.S. falls well short of conscientious citizenship.

...over the last few years it has been maddening to observe Representative Delahunt acting as Hugo Chávez main cheerleader/apologist in the U.S. Congress. No matter how evident Mr. Chávez’s anti-U.S. designs and rhetoric have become, Delahunt was there ready to explain, to dump dirt on the Venezuelan opposition and to take pot shots at the Bush Administration. Just last week, after a hearing on Democracy in Venezuela in the House of Representatives a number of congressional staffers wondered aloud as to Delahunt’s REAL motivation. Now we all have the answer, and it is clearly partisan, self serving and therefore debased.

And finally, in a recent conversation I had with Joe Kennedy on this same subject he screamed at me that his only interest was to “help the poor folks in Boston”. I googled all these good intentions and found a story in the Boston Herald that stated that “entities related to his Citizens Energy Corp. paid him [Joe Kennedy] more than $400,000 in 2003, the last year for which records are available.” Not bad for a non-profit executive willing to lend his name to a $9 million foreign disinformation campaign.

Moral and financial corruption notwithstanding, reality always beats rhetoric; Venezuela and US "carnal" link is seems to be a strong as ever:

Una contradicción más se suma a la Cumbre de las Américas. Mientras el presidente Hugo Chávez pide la muerte del ALCA y condena a los Estados Unidos por el fracaso económico de su país y el de los pueblos de América Latina, las cifras oficiales del Instituto Nacional de Estadísitica (INE) de Venezuela señalan a los Estados Unidos como el principal socio comercial de la República Boliviariana.

¿Cómo se explica entonces esta contradictoria realidad de relaciones comerciales calificables como “carnales” entre Venezuela y los Estados Unidos y un discurso que incita a la región a “matar” al Acuerdo de Libre Comercio de las Américas. Una interpretación posible, la más evidente, es el uso del discurso anti-yankee como medio para cohesionar su base de poder interna y su influencia regional. Otra, un tanto más sutil, es que evitar que otros países de la región compartan el “noviazgo comercial ” existente entre la Venezuela de Chávez y los Estados Unidos.

Or both.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

An interesting post about the spanish sellers ti Chavez in the spanish blog Voto en blanco.
Bye, Captain.
Paolo di Lautreamont

Anonymous said...

It baffles me that you can find fault with someone providing discounted oil to people in Mass.

If you believe in freedom so much, why are you not ranting against Bush's threat to bomb an independant media outlet, or the arrest of people who peacefully protest against the current administration? As someone who speaks out against repressive regimes, you should be horrified by the current state of affairs in the USA.

Anonymous said...

Here is another editorial on this. It says 'cut the naivete.'