Classic Interview with Hugo Chavez

By Greg Palast

The Progressive, July 2006

You’d think George Bush would get down on his knees and kiss Hugo Chávez’s behind. Not only has Chávez delivered cheap oil to the Bronx and other poor communities in the United States. And not only did he offer to bring aid to the victims of Katrina. In my interview with the president of Venezuela on March 28, he made Bush the following astonishing offer: Chávez would drop the price of oil to $50 a barrel, “not too high, a fair price,” he said—a third less than the $75 a barrel for oil recently posted on the spot market. That would bring down the price at the pump by about a buck, from $3 to $2 a gallon.

But our President has basically told Chávez to take his cheaper oil and stick it up his pipeline. Before I explain why Bush has done so, let me explain why Chávez has the power to pull it off—and the method in the seeming madness of his “take-my-oil-please!” deal. [more]

No more voom-voom!

By Hugo Chavez
The Drawbridge, Issue 2, Summer 2006

During my recent visit to London, I discovered that Mayor Livingstone has put a tax, a charge, on motorists which, in my opinion, is a wise measure. Why?

Whenever I visit either a world capital or a major city, I make a survey; a survey of cars. You know, a president is like a prisoner: you get off the plane - welcome, welcome, welcome - shuffled into a car, voom, straight to the hotel, you get to see the streets, jump out, into a room, wait, you have ten more minutes, off you go, voom, you've arrived. From one place directly to the next, and then in the evening back to the hotel, and that's it. You end up like a prisoner being taken from place to place in voom-voom fashion.

So, what do I do? I look out and I count the other cars, across the world, in New York, in Washington, in Vienna. In every big city it seems that 96% of vehicles on the streets are standing in long lines like worms, going at the speed of a morrocoy, of a tortoise, burning who knows how many litres per kilometre because they're barely moving. They're stuck, and they can't turn the engine off because they'd only have to restart it yet again. And they're only trying to travel three or five kilometres within the same city. Again, in 96% of vehicles, vehicles for six people or the smallest ones for four, you see only one person travelling: the one behind the wheel. And this vehicle is three metres long by two wide, roughly speaking. This is the extreme of capitalist individualism. Everyone wants to have a car and drive around the streets like an idiot: alone in their car, burning litres and litres of fuel, contaminating the atmosphere.