Coming just a week or so after Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) publicly said the U.S. government should nationalize the nation’s oil refineries, echoing a similar earlier threat by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) to nationalize the entire industry, it is instructive to see what has happened in Venezuela where a Communist wannabe dictator, Hugo Chavez, nationalized that nation’s oil industry.

One would think it was bad enough that Sen. Barack Obama and the Democrats want to enact a windfall profits tax on U.S. oil industry, the same action that in 1980 effectively has reduced exploration and production in the U.S. by nearly sixty percent, but Venezuela’s takeover of its oil industry is a case history example of why so many of the world’s national oil companies are badly managed and under-performing.

Venezuela has a long history of problems with its various governments dating back to the 1800s when Simon Bolivar fought for its independence from Spain. What followed “was characterized by coups, civil wars, and battle after battle,” says Kyle D. Guerrero, an academic who has lived in both Venezuela and the United States.

The June issue of Energy Tribune is devoted to Venezuela because, as its editor Michael J. Economides points out, it has the Western hemisphere’s largest oil reserves. Don’t bother looking for Newsweek or Time to provide the real story because they are still telling Americans that global warming is real and “fossil fuels” are bad, bad, bad.

Consider instead that, aside from its oil, Venezuela with a population of twenty-six million, most of whom reside in its cities, could comfortably fit its 352,145 square miles into the State of Alaska’s 663,267 square miles. Despite the billions president Chavez is spending on arms for its army of 120,000 soldiers, claiming that the U.S. intends to invade, the truth is that the U.S. is wisely waiting for the inevitable ouster of this jackass.

 Economides says that “Hugo Chavez is in free-fall” and warns that “the uncertain transition that will follow him bodes ill for the stability of the country.” This is worrisome for the United States because by 2006 our Venezuelan crude oil imports amounted to about eleven percent of our needs. They represent 60 percent of Venezuela’s total exports. This mutual dependency stands in vast contrast to the diplomatic relationship between our two nations. “Chavez,” says Economides, “would be a comical character were it not for the $100-plus oil prices which have papered over his shortcomings and prolong the eventual day of reckoning.” It is astonishing to see the way he has devastated the industry that permits him stay in power. In 2003 he fired more than 18,000 highly trained oil workers who went on strike against him. This set in motion a huge brain-drain as ten thousand of them have left the country. An estimated two-thirds of the rest of the population wants to leave as well. Proving once again that Communism is the worst possible political and economic system known to man, Chavez’s only friends these days are people like Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and thugs like Iran’s Mamoud Amadinejad, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, and the FARC guerillas in neighboring Colombia. The one thing they have in common is the way they have destroyed their nation’s economies and spread misery among their captive citizens.  In 1992 Chavez led a military coup against the government of Carlos Andres Perez. In 1994 he was pardoned and, in 1998, he was elected president of Venezuela. If that sounds improbable, one has to consider the long history of coups and other difficulties endemic to the governments and economies of South American nations. The Chavez platform was one of “change” that would redistribute the wealth of the nation based on a variety of “free” programs of medical care, price controls, and other giveaways. It this sounds a lot like a certain Democrat candidate, it is not a coincidence. The result has been the highest rate of inflation in Latin America, 23 percent last year and still increasing. The breakdown of society is reflected in the way Venezuela in 1988 had 4,500 murders and, during the Chavez regime from 1999 to 2007, this increased to over 105,000. There is virtually no foreign investment and domestic businesses have suffered. Its health system reflects his “reforms” as childbirth mortality rates rise and cases of malaria have doubled.  Poverty is the only growth industry in Venezuela. Aside from oil, its position as a place for illegal drug transit keeps the money flowing, but only for those in charge. This is a nation that choose Communism at a time when the Soviet Union had already collapsed, whose citizens preferred a typical Latin American “strongman” over democratic reform, and who will suffer far more as the price of a barrel of oil inevitably and eventually returns to a more realistic level.  The real question will be what kind of transition will follow the fall of Hugo Chavez and his followers and the odds are the answer will be very ugly. Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com. He blogs at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. 

-By Warner Todd Huston

In yet another example of why the west could be too weak to fight the sort of global terrorism that takes the form of Islamofascism, a textbook monitoring group is charging that American textbooks have been cleansed of mentioning the violence inherent in the Islamic “Jihad.” Now, our children will not be taught what “Jihad” truly means, nor that it has been used as an excuse to kill their fellow citizens because our schools have sanitized Islam of all outrage and violence. Will the media follow this story and report that our children are being exposed to Islamic propaganda like this?

According to the New York Examiner, the American Textbook Council reports that textbooks approved for middle and high schools students have caved in to a politically correct cleansing of Islam and dumbed down history critical to a fuller understanding of Muslim history — one that reflects on our own times.

“Textbook editors try to avoid any subject that could turn into a political grenade,” wrote Gilbert Sewall, director of the council, who railed against five popular history texts for “adjust[ing] the definition of jihad or sharia or remov[ing] these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths.”

According to Sewall, several new textbooks, such as Houghton Mifflin’s “Across the Centuries,” have gone through an “amazing cultural reorchestration” to erase the history of violence associated with the word “jihad.”

Sewall fears that a political process has replaced an academic process where it concerns the production and approval of our textbooks.

Sewall’s report blames publishing companies for allowing the influence of groups like the California-based Council on Islamic Education to serve throughout the editorial process as “screeners” for textbooks, softening or deleting potentially unflattering topics within the faith.

“Fundamentally I’m worried about dumbing down textbooks,” he said, “by groups that come to state education officials saying we want this and that - and publishers need to find a happy medium.”

Sewall is correct, of course, but it isn’t just a whitewashing of the violence inherent in the history of Islam that has infected our textbooks. For years the books our children are exposed to have seen our own history erased from their pages.

Naturally, Islamic groups decry Sewall’s concerns claiming he is wrong that “jihad” is necessarily defined by violence. In the textbook, “jihad” is defined as a struggle “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.”

Islamic scholar Reza Aslan agrees with the definition. “But that is, literally, the translation of jihad,” he said. He added that violence is in the interpretation, not really the definition.

“How you interpret [jihad] is based on whatever your particular ideology, or world viewpoint, or even prejudice is,” Aslan said. “But how you define jihad is set in stone.”

Strictly speaking, Mr. Aslan is correct. However, to leave the definition of jihad at that would be dishonest. After all, jihad has been used to excuse violence for nearly as long as the word has been in existence. Even if, strictly speaking, the word itself does not necessarily portend violence, to ignore that is has been used that way for generations is a misreading of history. And by leaving that real, true history out of their books textbook manufacturers do a disservice to our children.

Further, when violent jihad is the prime motivation in a day when it is used to kill Americans by the thousands is dangerous in the extreme and leaves our future generations vulnerable. To bring our children up to be caught unawares by the truth because of the sanitized, nonsense they are taught is self-defeating and will more easily lead to the success of radical jihadis everywhere.

Another question needs to be raised about this, as well. Where is the national media to highlight this discussion? We need a national debate that has been denied the nation and the media has so far run away as quickly as they can from the vexing and important questions of the fight between civilization and murderous Islamofascism.

Like the dumbing down of our textbooks, the media has added to this national amnesia and put us all in danger.