Hugo Chavez: Socialist? George Bush: Socialist!

Charges against Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez have been leveled for years. These include, “Chavez has won a loyal following among the poor through multibillion-dollar social programs including subsidized food, free university education and cash benefits for single mothers. " Shocking crimes against humanity, right? Almost up to the Abu Ghraib level. And now that nasty Chavez is talking about, gasp, nationalizing the oil leases of Exxon-Mobil. Where will this madman stop? You can almost see Bush getting out his road map and squinting down at it, tracing the route through Mexico. Wrong turn there, Georgie, that is the way to Canada. Think towards your non-extradition hide out in Paraguay.

The quote continued, "Chavez insists he is a democrat and will continue to respect private property - though he has boosted state control over the oil industry and has said he might nationalize utilities.”

As Jon Stewart and other prominent American critics point to Venezuela and the actions of Hugo Chavez, re-elected by an overwhelming majority to the office of President, accusations that Chavez is, gasp, horrors, a socialist, also abound.

Ignorance is so exasperating, especially from those who should know better. Chavez himself makes this mistake, using the dreaded“S” word. How could they all be so wrong? But wrong they are. Chavez is not a socialist, but socialists lurk all across the United States and it is time to expose them.

Let's begin by defining our terms. What is a socialist? Thanks to the Internet, this is a question easily answered.

“An "economic, social and political doctrine which expresses the struggle for the equal distribution of wealth by eliminating private property and the exploitative ruling class. In practice, such a distribution of wealth is achieved by social ownership of the means of production, exchange and diffusion." (7)


The programs provided to poor Venezuelans are funded through income generated through the Venezuela Petroleum Corporation, a corporation owned by that nation. Venezuela nationalized the petroleum industry in the mid 70s, long before Hugo Chavez had anything to say in the matter. The programs he provides pay for education, housing, subsidies on food for the poor, and aid to single mothers. The list may strike you as familiar; America funds similar programs, the difference being that here they are funded through the seizure of private property through taxation. Is America therefore a socialist state? The short answer is yes, we are – though we carefully disguise this fact through rhetorical flights of fancy that employ the images of a free people who are still handling social needs locally. We all actually know that these programs were seized by the Federal Government beginning in the 1920s and then the taxes collected explicitly to fund such programs as Social Security were cheerfully converted to making the State even bigger and more oppressive. The term for this is Bait and Switch. Those who have encountered con men before will understand.

What Chavez is doing in Venezuela is not socialism. He is taking the money generated from something no one earned and using it to improve the condition of those who otherwise would continue to exist in poverty. This is artful use of found money. The oil will not last but the benefits of education and better infrastructure will last, lifting Venezuela out of the condition that has existed since Europeans arrived to begin grabbing and selling off their resources.

The source of the money matters. Today Alaskans receive money from the State of Alaska as a share of the money generated by the Alaskan oil production. Is Alaska a socialist state? No, because it is found money shared out as those in the State agree is best.

The definition of socialism hinges on the source of the wealth. It is not socialism when the property is 'found' and not the product of those who happen to be in possession. Private property is that property that is the creation of an individual using their energy, intelligence, and innovation. Such property is justly earned when it is acquired without deceit, manipulation or violence. Property not justly earned is stolen, by definition. No one who knows the history of the oil industry can have any illusions about how their wealth was acquired. All oil is stolen property, pretty much.

Naturally, as a life-long Republican and Libertarian I am opposed to socialism, but this is not socialism. It looks like spending the money on one good, services for poor Venezuelans, instead of other potential goods, for instance secreting the money in a Swiss bank account or buying their own private islands. Hugo Chavez was duly elected as CEO of this country; it is difficult to see why it is any concern to anyone else; the people of other nations do not owe us an explanation of what they do with their own resources.

Additionally Chavez reportedly is investing significant R & D money to ensure that an alternative to the use of oil becomes available to Venezuelans so they will not be caught up short. Hard to argue with this kind of forward thinking.

The oil was under that chunk of real estate before anyone now living was there; before they were never HUMAN. But as individuals who live on specific pieces of land we all understand that living someplace may bring hazards or rewards for which we are not responsible. Naturally occurring events are defined by insurance companies as, “Acts of God.” Living in Pompeii in A. D. 79 turned out to be hazardous. Living in an area that experiences subsidence due to the extraction of the underlying reservoir of oil may also prove to be hazardous but a human element of causality has been introduced. We know that oil is a naturally occurring substance. Extracting it from the layers of the Earth in which it is found may have a long term impact not now understood and subsidence of the land covering it is always a possibility. Its extraction is cheap; selling it turned small bands of Arabs without two camels to rub together into an international power, all through the accident of location. However, location, occupying the land where the oil is being extracted, does make those living there vulnerable to the potential problems of subsidence, toxic spills, and potential incineration, for instance if the oil blows up, which has been known to happen.

Curiously enough, those living there, for instance in Venezuela before that industry was confiscated by the government, benefited least from the presence of the potentially harmful oil being extracted. As a matter of tradition we observe the practice of ceding control of resources to those with a valid claim on the land where those resources are located or, at their option, to the government who orders the business of the people who entrust them with governing. The oil therefore seems to belong to all of the people who live in Venezuela although for a good long time only a small percentage of those people were allowed to profit from its presence. Should those who got the lion's share for so long make restitution? Probably. But that is up to those involved. Perhaps other residents of Saudi Arabia should take note of this curious oversight.

If someone is going to assert a right to profit from pumping oil, which arguably belongs to everyone occupying the land under which the oil sits, then you would think that those individuals would recognize an obligation to ensure that those who do not profit would not pay the costs of potential liabilities, such as having their children incinerated by faulty piping necessitated by the transport of such oil, as in the case of Koch Industries. But in fact those who are most likely to profit from pumping out oil are likely to demand that those in power, for instance Congress, cancel any potential liability if damage is done. In America, oil companies often pay those in Congress to zero out their potential liabilities, for instance in the case of the Liquid Natural Gas they are so eager to import.

Responsible capitalism and private property means accepting full liability for costs extracted from those who do not directly benefit from profits. Alabama recently received a 3.5 billion dollar judgment against Mobil-Exxon for diddling on royalty payments. Presumably, if a corporation can be held liable for cheating in its bookkeeping it should be liable for other damages even to the full extent of the damages done.

Hugo Chavez thinks he is a socialist. He is wrong. But the case can be made that BushCo and their core constituents are a new species of socialist as yet unidentified. Is it socialism when you are stealing all the marbles and using rhetoric to disguise the fact? Perhaps what we need to a simplification of the language that ignores the rhetoric employed and only notices the actions and outcomes.

Transfer of wealth from the many into the pockets of the few using any existing rhetoric = Criminal Class

BushCo funds programs through the confiscation of private wealth; they use legislation to dictate their own 'social agenda,' and they have been working on wresting away control of the means for real production for generations. Eliminating the use of words like, 'socialist' makes this clearer to all of us. Remember, they pretend to do the right thing for us to amass the goods. Words lie; Actions speak truth. Or as the Bible says, “By their fruits shall you know them.”

Right now BushCo would just love to invade Venezuela. It is close, they have no expertise in military arts, unlike Iraq; and all that lovely oil is there for the taking. Perhaps Hugo Chavez should contact Lloyd's of London about Invasion Insurance. If I were him I would have already called.

April 22, 1970 – Oil Day: Wake up and smell the fumes.

Written for the Iconoclast

The National Geographic, Vol. 138 No. 6 December 1970 - “We are astronauts, all of us. We ride a spaceship called Earth in its endless journey around the Sun. This ship of ours is blessed with life-support systems so ingenious that they are self-renewing, so massive that they can supply the needs of billions.”

But for centuries we have taken them for granted, considered their capacities limitless. At last we have begun to monitor the systems and the findings are deeply disturbing.”

Scientists and government officials of the United States and other countries agree that we are in trouble. Unless we stop abusing our vital life-support systems they will fail. We must maintain them or pay the penalty. The penalty is death.”

A successful take over of the then nascent environmental movement by big oil began during the months from late 1966 until the end of 1967. At that point in time the issues of clean water and accountability for those who pollute were non-partisan, the present partisan divisions did not exist. Clean air and water were things that everyone agreed were necessary; liability for polluting must be exacted. “If you pollute, you pay,” was the first point on the agenda intended for consideration at the 1972 Stockholm Conference for the Environment according to Helen Garland, an early activist. That agenda changed in the back halls of the United Nations before the conference was gaveled into order.

It was a change that alarmed and bewildered people like Garland, representative to the Environmental Movement at the UN in 1971. John McConnell, originator of the real Earth Day said, “the agenda of Peace, Justice and the care of Earth, were sidelined for something very different.” Howard Baker, Jr., a Republican Senator from Tennessee, headed the first Environmental Protection Agency. Clean air and water seemed as imminent as social justice.

The forces that changed our direction are one in the same, Big Oil.

The bottom line for oil companies was to ensure that their profits from the only thing they had to sell continued. In the last 30 years, that has come to trillions from those continued sales by Big Oil, today amounting to one quarter of the entire GNP for the entire globe. Additionally, oil companies have received from “US federal government energy subsidies and incentives over the past 50 years – $644 billion. It shows that the federal government has subsidized the energy industries – nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas, renewables – using different budget and off-budget funding techniques.” This is according to The International Journal of Global Energy Issues.

Money talks and motivates. The losses to Big Oil if the original agenda for the environment had been enacted would be literally incalculable. Ensuring that did not happen was not a conspiracy, it was simple corporate policy.

According to Helen Garland, one of the original surviving founders of both the Earth Society and its present CEO, the wording for the first reference to the conference on the subject in the records from the United National Library on the environment changes over the three year period from 1967 – 1969. In 1967 the subject is clearly, “Pollution.” The point is obviously the impact of human action on the earth in specific locations. The next year the wording has changed to, “Environment.” This term redirects the focus from both the liability and accountability for specific human action to a broad category with no specific focus. A year later it has changed again, the text becoming "Human Environment." This term bifurcates what is actually a closed system, dividing humanity from the Earth. To win you must divide your enemy. “The enemy” the oil companies confronted was very direction of humanity for a clean environment and social justice.

By 1972 the Environmental Movement, now firmly under the control of Big Oil, first by the careful reworking of the agenda and resulting laws and the hijacking of what had been intended to be the yearly focus of that movement, Earth Day, was complete.

The hijacking of Earth Day had been accomplished through an overt show of public relations muscle, powered with 4 million dollars fed into the hands of Dennis Hayes, a sallow undergraduate who got the name, “Earth Day” from John McConnell and the older generation of environmentalists that included Helen Garland and Margaret Mead.

The conception of one day to highlight the agenda of, “Peace, Justice, and care of the Earth,” had been carefully thought out to encapsulate the whole agenda for that movement. The moment chosen, the second of the Spring Equinox, marked the moment of time when the Earth shifted between summer and winter in its Southern and Northern Hemispheres. The term was first used when the idea was presented by McConnell to a few members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and other community leaders early October 1969 at a UN meeting.

Today, if you visit the site for the April 22^nd Earth Day you will find much rhetoric but nothing that enables you to easily or inexpensively accomplish what those aware of the issues in the early 70s expected; the ability to get off the grid of energy dependence. The original idea of accountability is nowhere in sight.

Big Oil had found a useful tool with Richard Nixon. Nixon's tenure in office, January 1969 to August 9, 1974 overlays many of the events that so impacted the cited changes in the Environmental Movement. According to Garland Nixon assured environmentalists that clean air and water were priorities. Jimmy Carter, with a strong background in engineering and economics, was elected in 1976, and represented a problem for Big Oil. Big Oil removed him from office through the simple expedient of sharply increasing oil prices during the critical period of the election.

The original wording for the Clean Water Act, passed in 1967, is today unavailable as is the poll of Americans done by Senator Baker that was published but never distributed around 1968. According again to Helen Garland these laid down standards and expectations that were then rewritten by Maurice Strong, an ambitious oilman from Canada who moved into the United Nations through a series of introductions, first serving, from November 1970 until December 1972 as Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. After a long and lucrative career at the United Nations Strong went on to involvement in the Food for Oil debacle and from there to Peace University in Puerto Rico, where he used that institution to train paramilitary. He is now reported to be working in China.

After the initial take over the work of vilifying the United Nations and environmentalism guaranteed that the chasms of distrust would reinforce the divides first forged among Americans in the early 70s. Those who did the work profited mightily, many finding careers in politics and nonprofits funded by Big Oil.

Today a new generation of environmentalists and innovators are taking stock and coming together to provide the means for Americans to get off the grids of dependence. John Sturbine, a businessman and investor, and others from that earlier movement, including Helen Garland, are founding what they call The Earth Project, intended to make off grid alternatives cheaply available. Included among those involved are a non-oil engine for automobiles, a technology for reducing the cost of energy in homes by one half and a boat design that also eliminates the use of petroleum.

Sturbine said for this article, “there is no limitation to human innovation; Americans could be off the grids entirely in three years.”