Western Media's Venezuela Smear & Neoliberal Policy

On Monday, March 27, I received a message from a Bloomberg reporter asking me about a very nice compliment that the President of Venezuela and Secretary General of the Non-Aligned Movement, Nicolás Maduro, had said about me.

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The reporter, Christine Jenkins, asked if I knew President Maduro or could explain what he found of value in my writing. I said that I thought he probably was referring to my discussion in Killing the Host of a September 2014 Harvard Business Review article by William Lazonick, “Profits without Prosperity,” calculating that for the decade 2003-2012, the 449 companies publicly listed in the S&P 500 index spent only 9% of their earnings on new capital investment. They used 54% to buy back their own stock, and 37% to pay dividends. I told the reporter that I thought the President’s point was that the financial sector was not financing capital formation and employment to increase output.

I told her that I had not followed Venezuela’s economy closely in recent years. I did say that I had discussed how Argentina and Greece were subjected to austerity as a result of foreign debt, and my belief that no sovereign nation should be obliged to impose austerity on its population to pay foreign bondholders. That has indeed been the problem confronting Latin America for decades, and is a central theme of all my books since Super Imperialism in 1972.

And to cap matters, of course, U.S. foreign policy has mobilized the World Bank and IMF to back creditor interests, foreign investment and privatization – while isolating countries from Cuba through Venezuela (and now Greece) to demonstrate that neoliberal diplomacy will make such a country a pariah if it makes a serious attempt to oppose austerity and financialization.

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If you are inevitably going to default on sovereign debt, it’s best to stop paying now and keep what foreign exchange you have, and try to renegotiate the debt to bring it within the ability to be paid. Otherwise, you will end up suffering the legal tangle of default, but be stripped of funds needed by the domestic economy to survive.

  Michael Hudson

That is exactly what happened to Greece, and exactly the advice the ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis was giving his country in negotiations with the EU and was ultimately ignored.

I haven’t studied the legal status of Venezuela’s foreign debt, or what alternatives the government might have had open to it in the face of strong opposition from its domestic oligarchy as well as foreign pressure.

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On Wednesday, [Jenkins] got back to me, and said that she was going to write up an article for Bloomberg.

I asked for a copy, and she wrote back that “Hi – so we actually aren’t allowed to send articles before publication!” That’s what raised a red flag in my head. My impression is that every serious reporter checks back with his or her source to ascertain that the report is accurate. This seems to be basic journalistic ethics.

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[The article] was nothing at all like what I had said. It made me appear to be criticizing Venezuela’s politicians and, by implication, President Maduro. But at no point had I criticized Venezuela’s attempts at reform. Rather, I had criticized the problem of neoliberal opposition to countries trying to uplift their populations along the lines that Venezuela had done, using debt leverage to force countries to impose austerity. It looks to me like Venezuela is getting the “Greek treatment.”

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I was appalled to find the article a hit-piece on Venezuela, and to make me appear to criticize President Maduro by implying that the country is not helpable. I never said that I was not “a fan of the socialist leader.” I applaud his attempts to maneuver as best he can within the corner into which Venezuela has been painted.

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None of my beliefs are what Bloomberg [...] implied.

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As I wrote to the Bloomberg reporter after reading her story: “The problem is that I AM sympathetic with the AIMS of Chavez etc. The problem is the hostility all around him that is undercutting the economy. That’s what makes the problem insolvable.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.