that's great, ace..
putting aside this strawman of yours----let's go against my better judgment and continue.
so this from the morning's guardian:
Quote:
Chávez opens his wallet wider to boost Latin American influence
· £1.4bn for Buenos Aires as regional tour starts
· Socialist leader strives to break IMF's grip on area
Rory Carroll in Caracas and Uki Goni in Buenos Aires
Thursday August 9, 2007
The Guardian
President Hugo Chávez has launched an intensive tour of South America to shore up Venezuela's influence over the region and to loosen the grip of western creditors. The socialist leader promised to buy up to $1bn (£500m) of Argentinian bonds and to help fund a $400m gas plant, bolstering his reputation as a benefactor of Buenos Aires's economic recovery.
Mr Chávez was expected to announce other economic and energy deals during visits to Uruguay, Ecuador and Bolivia, underlining his ambition to forge a common Latin American front under his leadership.
"We need to unite and the north American empire doesn't want us to unite," the president told reporters in Buenos Aires. "It is a battle of interests, but we will win this battle."
The four-nation tour, which started on Tuesday, is an attempt to flex Venezuela's muscle after a series of setbacks in South America, including stalled or diluted initiatives by Caracas for a pan-regional bank and a gas pipeline.
Flush with oil revenues, Mr Chávez said his government had bought $500m of Argentinian bonds and would buy $500m more in coming months, bringing to more than $5bn the amount of Argentinian bonds bought by Venezuela in two years.
It confirms Venezuela's position as one of Argentina's prime lenders and will permit Buenos Aires to meet its foreign commitments this month, which total $2.5bn, just when it was having difficulty attracting foreign investment and credit.
The deal will also help Mr Chávez to soak up some of the liquidity in Venezuela, which has pushed the country's inflation rate close to 20%, the region's highest.
It has also cast Mr Chávez as the man who helped a proud ally recover from a 2002 economic crash which had threatened to make Argentina a basket case at the mercy of organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, both widely loathed in Latin America as instruments of western domination.
"This is a big effort for Venezuela, but we are doing it because we know what is at stake. Argentina is freeing itself from Dracula, it is cutting ties with the IMF," said Mr Chávez.
In January 2006, Argentina repaid its entire remaining $9.6bn debt to the IMF, giving President Néstor Kirchner kudos at home for restoring national pride and sovereignty.
Mr Chávez's latest cash injection was a reminder to Mr Kirchner's politician wife, Cristina, that she too will owe Caracas if she wins the presidency in October's election after her husband steps down.
Some critics say the first couple have merely swapped one master, the IMF, for a more radical and controversial one. Argentina was now "Chávez-dependent", said Joaquín Morales Solá, a columnist with the daily La Nación.
Critics in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have made similar accusations against their own governments.
Mr Chávez's oil diplomacy has also earned him influence in Cuba.
However, Michael Shifter, of the Inter-American Dialogue thinktank, said the Venezuelan leader might be disappointed if he expected unquestioning loyalty from Argentina and other beneficiaries.
"It is doubtful if he will be able to solidify his anti-US coalition in South America through his largesse," Mr Shifter said. "There are questions about how much he can actually deliver on so many promises to his allies. And there are signs that countries like Argentina, driven by pragmatism, are looking increasingly to expand and diversify their economic and political relationships."
In setbacks for Mr Chávez, his dreams of building a gas pipeline from the Caribbean to the South Atlantic have stalled, Brazil is dragging its feet over his plan for a Bank of the South, to rival the World Bank, and Venezuela's bid to join Mercosur, a regional trade bloc, has run into the sand.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, a friend but also rival of Mr Chávez, is touring the region this week to promote his country's leadership in biofuels.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/venezuela/...144693,00.html
here's what is self-evident:
ace is simply recycling the logic of neoliberalism.
of course it has no name so there is no reason to expect or even hope that he'd relativize it.
so let's start looking at the ideology.
first, it is simply not the case in places which are not the united states, that this ideology has no name, nor is it assumed that a worldview structured by this ideology corresponds to reality. in most of the southern hemisphere, neoliberalism is transparently what it is: simply a mask for new forms of american domination (see above).
if you endorse this ideological framework, it follows that you have to endorse its consequences....that is the whole of ongoing efforts to maintain subordination in south america by way of the imf/world bank "structural adjustment" pathways to debt peonage and social disaster in the name of "free trade" or "market liberalization..." generally, the way of doing this is to invoke the "long view" as if neoliberalism has some monopoly on it.
so you'd have to endorse the actions of the imf in south america, for example-----that institution that has been turned on an adhoc basis from its functions in the context of bretton woods into a kind of nozzle for spraying the pseudo-logic of neoliberalism abroad in the world, generating social and economic crisis in the name of resolving social and economic crisis, reinforcing and solidifying neocolonial economic arrangements in the name of freeing southern hemisphere countries from neocolonial economic arrangements, conflating openning commercial contexts with enabling american domination.
it's easy to believe that the imf/worldbank/bank of the americas system functions in ways that are consistent with the claims of neoliberal ideologues if you refuse to look at actual information about the *consequences* of these policies and actions, preferring instead to wrap yourself in the internal rationale for implementing them in the first place. but if your thinking about neoliberalism extends only as far as the ideology itself, and does not extend to thinking consequences--and this is all too routine for the free-marketeers in general--it is hard to imagine the basis for claims to monopolize "the long view"...
fact is that the imf/world bank/bank of the americas system had engendered little but the exacerbation of the worst features of capitalism. the twist is that these features are now firmly aligned with the image of the united states itself simply because american policies opened these spaces up to/for them.
the only difference between this an earlier forms of neo-colonial domination is that this time the americans sell their domination as freedom itself, and in the process reduce that language to ash.
so chavez undertakes a pretty ambitious project outlined above--working to break the domination of these american institutions that by default have for the past 30 years set the ideological tenor for the delerium that is globalizing capitalism by breaking the hold exercised over southern hemisphere countries using the instrument of debt.
and while the longer-term consequences of this debt transfer are not evident at this point (e.g. whether there are strings attached as there always are from us sourced loans), the move itself is a real threat to the primary mechanism the us has been using to enforce its regime in south america and as such is a blow directed at one of the primary bases of american political and economic power in the region.
**that** is why the american right hates hugo chavez.