On 2/7/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
... Ironically, the state most defiant of the American empire -- Venezuela -- is also among the most dependent on the American market.
what does it mean here, "among the most dependent"? If the US stopped buying V's oil, couldn't V sell it to a lot of other places? It's not like when the US cut off Cuban access to the US market in 1960 or so: Cuba had a quota which allowed them to sell sugar above the world market price in the US. On the other hand, V gets no such subsidy from the US, so there's no such stick to use on V. Oil is in big demand all around the world -- and it's a world market. Now it's true that Citgo (owned by V) could be punished, while the US cut cut off V's imports in various ways, but we should be careful not to exaggerate V's dependence on the US. (The US can sabotage V's oil and the rest of V's economy, too -- if it's not doing so already.) BTW, traditional dependency theory -- about how the structure of the capitalist world economy distorts and stunts the economic development of countries that had been under colonialist and/or neocolonialist thumbs but are now formally independent -- is more sophisticated than simply saying that just because country A trades a lot with country B, country A is highly dependent on B. -- Jim Devine / "The truth is more important than the facts." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
