MB Civic

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070101&s=featherstone

Great article – here’s some good parts…

Citizens Energy spokesman Brian O’Connor says his organization has asked every major oil company and every OPEC nation to provide such assistance to poor Americans; Citgo and Venezuela have been the only ones to agree…

Though most of the US media remain hostile to Chávez, the fuel-assistance program is showing some Americans another side of the man and his government. Patrice White, a vocational counselor to the disabled who lives with her husband and three daughters in the Bronx’s Mount Hope neighborhood, which began receiving Venezuelan oil last winter, is impressed that Chávez delivered on his promise to help poor Americans. “It was refreshing,” she says. “Hugo Chávez is not an American politician. With our politicians, it seems like 80 percent of what they say doesn’t happen.” White was also impressed by the program’s efficiency: “You’d think there would be lots of red tape.”

…Venezuela’s reasons for running this program seem varied. Undeniably, it represents a bit of self-promotion on Chávez’s part. More important, there is the delicious opportunity to insult the Bush Administration, which has close ties to leaders of the 2002 coup that briefly unseated the democratically elected Chávez, and to befriend those Americans who have the least reason to support conservative Republicans like Bush. But the program makes an even broader statement than that: By showing that the richest nation on earth requires foreign “assistance” to meet its citizens’ basic needs, Venezuela reveals our most profound failure as a system. As Patrice White says, “It could be seen as a slap in the face to American capitalism. But I digress!”

RodStarz of Rebel Diaz, who lives in the building next door to Spofford Hills, is working with Petrol Bronx to organize a hip-hop delegation to Caracas. “Young people here are being incarcerated at an alarming rate,” he tells me, gesturing at the prison across the street. “The system in the United States is built for people like us to fail. Venezuela’s trying to build something better.”

…Annie Simoneau, a homeowner in rural Vermont and a mother of six (four of her own and two foster children) who received Citgo’s assistance last winter, also went on the April trip to Venezuela, with her husband, an apprentice electrician. She was moved by the respect they enjoyed–an unusual feeling for working-class people in the United States. “They [Venezuela] put us up at the Hilton and made us feel on top of the world,” she recalls. “I’m not so much into politics–I just went over to thank him [Chávez].” But Simoneau says she also wanted to see the country’s social programs and meet its citizens. She expected that Venezuelans might be hostile to American visitors, given relations between Chávez and Bush, but found none who were. “It was person-to-person. They entertained us, gave beautiful speeches, and for who?” She pauses, and marvels. “The poor people of America.”

But … he’s a TERRORIST!!!