Chavez Wins Again

Yahoo News: Chavez Wins Re-Election

The man our press often refers to as a dictator was just re-elected, and seeing as he had a 61 to 38% victory he sees this as the people wanting him to do even more. Its like in 2004 when Bush somehow got re-elcted (Diebold) by a massive 50.73% to 48.27% which was the closest re-election in US history but thats good enough for a Mandate from the masses, and incintive to increase his right-wing stance, so like wise Chavez who actually did win by a large margin is feeling re-affirmed. I find it interesting that his socialist revolution has pretty much consisted of using the funds from a state-owned oil company (buy CITGO) to help the poor, hes put billions of dollars into social programs, and now with this big win he's looking at nationalizing the Utlities. In most of the US the utlities are either government owned or extremely tightly regulated (when the aren't you get rolling blackouts in Cali, thanks Enron) and we put billions into social programs. Their is a big difference in that in Venezuela the state controls the oil industry, in the US the Oil industry controls the state, its a subtle but important difference. The other huge difference is that the US had all of these programs in place while the right-wing president tries to get rid of them, in Venezuela they did not have these programs and their left-wing president is trying to create them. At this point there society may be quite similar to ours in its structure, they may still be a ways behind us, but the important thing is the direction, our country is subsidising the richest while theres is subsidising for the poorest.