Double standard?

Music: Chavez, "The Guard Attacks"

You really get a sense of where the US's priorities are, given the recent squirming over Hugo Chávez's drive to nationalize telecomm and other industries in Venezuela, and the insistence of fair compensation for nationalized industries.

It's funny to me, because the privatization movement is always about getting public resources at the lowest possible price, plundering state resources for private profit. And many of Venezuela's previously public assets were privatized in the 90s. I know that "buy low, sell high" is the essence of business, but I find it funny how the minute nationalization of an industry is considered, the companies in question cry foul. Of course they will.

Never mind that privatization doesn't deliver any actual benefits to the consumers; privatization is about getting something valuable for cheap. The actual delivery of services is almost incidental to the process, because privatized industries are usually utilities that people have to make use of, regardless of who owns it.

Anyway, death squads can roam freely in Latin America without comment (or worse, with complicity by the Right, who fund them), but the minute there's talk of nationalizing an industry, then their attention is riveted to the country considering it. I hope Chávez have plenty of bodyguards, and sets up a provision where the changes he's proposing aren't just flowing through him, given the tendency of socialists to be shot in Latin America.