Chavez’s greatest offense was to offer assistance to other Latin American countries by use of oil wealth. He offered loans and direct assistance without strings, allowing some countries to get out from under the jackboot of the IMF.
Swede loves to run on fumes, assertions without evidence stated with arrogant assurance. That’s a long-winded way of saying he’s a right winger. The Cuban hospital quip was meant to say, in his way, that Cuban health care is inferior to American health care. He has no way of knowing that, of course. If he is an insider here, that is, one who actually has access to our health care system, he might have a point. If he is an outsider, and has access only through emergent care, he’s full of shit.
This much I can say with some certainty: Chavez was surely better off in a Cuban hospital than an American one. The US government, which tried to overthrow him in 2002, still wants him gone gone gone, and American health care might well have been his demise. He surely knew this.
Piece of Mindful 
I heard the CIA planted cancer causing heavy metals in his favorite parrot.
http://pacoenterprises.blogspot.com/2011/06/hugo-chavez-death-watch.html
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Ah, the ugly hatred crops up. Creepy. Swede, I know what everyone else thinks, I know what you are supposed to think, but I have no idea what actually goes on in your brain. It’s almost as if you are a … what’s the word … parrot?
Swede – goddammit I opened it up here for you, laying a hanging curve on you, and you whooshed. I’ll call it strike one. You’ve got two to go. I claim that you are a thoughtless right winger who repeats talking points and mines the internet for words by others to say what you think is the right thing to think.
It’s right out there for you. Swing batter!
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But conservatives and insurance industry lobbyists defeated Bill Clintons efforts by claiming the plan would socialize medicine and arguing that there was no health care crisis. The result is predictable higher and higher costs for a health care system that leaves out more and more people. .Since 1994 the cost per person of American health care has more than doubled with an annual growth rate regularly more than twice that of inflation.
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Your buddy Chomsky has had a change of heart.
**Alas it seems the love affair has ended. Chomsky is now set to release an open letter denouncing Hugo for his “assault” on democracy:
“Concentration of executive power, unless it’s very temporary and for specific circumstances, such as fighting world war two, is an assault on democracy. You can debate whether [Venezuela’s] circumstances require it: internal circumstances and the external threat of attack, that’s a legitimate debate. But my own judgment in that debate is that it does not.”…
Speaking from his home in Boston, Chomsky said Chávez, who has been in power for 12 years, appeared to have intimidated the judicial system. “I’m sceptical that [Afiuni] could receive a fair trial. It’s striking that, as far as I understand, other judges have not come out in support of her … that suggests an atmosphere of intimidation.”
He also faulted Chávez for adopting enabling powers to circumvent the national assembly. “Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo [authoritarianism] and it has to be guarded against. Whether it’s over too far in that direction in Venezuela I’m not sure, but I think perhaps it is. A trend has developed towards the centralisation of power in the executive which I don’t think is a healthy development.**
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Chomsky has never liked Chavez. I look at him as the lesser of evils, with the US-backed oiligarcy a hindrance to human rights, decent standard of life and a chance for democratic governance. Your way is the way of thugs.
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Why don’t you tell me what you think? YouTubes are hard in our 1.5 mmbs system.
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By the way, I’ve read just about everything he’s written, so there are no surprises for me. Because you are a black/white thinking-type, as I see it, you have reduced this to either/or, Chavez or the oiligarchy. Because you are a Randian, you assume that the wealthy classes are the achieving classes, and that if by chance some of that wealth trickles down below, then free market economics has done its job.
It’s totally gray. Education raises boats only if people have boats. Chavez invests in education and health care, which turns people into self-sufficient and free humans, as opposed to mere factory cogs. Education is the best investment in the world. The oiligarchy sends its kids to the finest schools, but hates paying for public education.
Chavez himself is not the best man for that job, but he’s freely elected. But the country is better off with this government than when it was a fascist state run by the oiligarchy, If someone better takes his place, so be it. If it has to be him, I’ll take it.
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