Hugo Chave's Oil Gift To America's Poor

Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, is offering free heating oil to the United States—but not for altruistic reasons.

Chavez claims he is only helping America’s poor to heat their homes this winter. Certainly many of us could use a little relief with our rising heating bills, but it’s not as if anybody is going to freeze this winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes. Here in Milwaukee the local power company—WE energies—is prevented by law to cut off heat or electricity during the cold months. Yes, too many Milwaukeeans are going to have big heating bills to pay next spring, but nobody will freeze this winter.

But Chavez is a leftist and a populist. His support and popularity reside in his image as an advocate for Venezuela’s poor. As a quasi-dictatorial leader leftist, Chavez naturally stands in strong opposition to the capitalist Yankees. Indeed, soon after being elected Chavez went out of his way to stick his finger in America’s eye, meeting with Saddam Hussein and hob-knobbing with other anti-American dictators and regimes. Recently at the Summit of Americas in Argentina Chavez made one of his typical vitrolic speeches against America:

Chavez, who U.S. leaders have said is a source of instability in the hemisphere, condemned what he called U.S. imperialism while demonstrators opposed to the Iraq war and U.S.-led trade policies called Bush a "fascist" and a "terrorist."

Not surprsingly violent riots follwed Chavez’s venomous remarks. Clearly the man is no friend of America.

So why the humanitarian gesture of good will? Because Chavez hopes to embarrass America and president George Bush by cynically aiming a spotlight on our dirty laundry—on the fact that there are poor people in America.

Yes, unfortunately there are poor people in America. Most countries have their share of poor citizens. In fact, Venezuela has poor people—a lot of them. Proportionally, there are far more poor people in Venezuela than in the United States. And the poor in Venezuela live in grinding poverty. To be poor in Venezuela is a totally different ballgame than being poor in the United States.

And so it curious that Chavez, leader of a Third World country, is so happy to spend millions of dollars to aid the wealthiest country on earth. I wonder if the poor people of Venezuela are just as altruistic as their president? I wonder how they feel about tens of milions of their oil revenues being diverted to help Americans?

Viva la Revolucion!