In the midst of this festive atmosphere, reinforced by the announcement that yearly grants to to students in "communal" medical programs would go up by 500 bolivars (U$ 230), Chavez could not resist taking a dig at those doctors who choose to leave the country to find work. He said these doctors had "sold their souls to the Devil," no doubt in allusion to the capitalist benefactors of these medical personnel.
Chavez went on to say that "wealth is a sin" and that the Vatican "supports my position." He said that the message of Christ was vindicated in socialism because it was the system that eliminated poverty whereas capitalism was the system that created poverty. He mentioned the whip of Isaiah which came down upon those with too much wealth as a viable moral road.
Apparently, these admonitions are meant to rally the poor to his side. Chavez knows that there is still a huge pool of voters who are likely to vote for his cause based on their condition of poverty. However, there is a significant number of these poor that are beginning to blame Chavez for the palpable erosion of their purchasing power due to inflation, the horrendous levels of criminal violence fed by police permissiveness, and a the obvious gap between promised goals and results.
Chavez must continue to use his trusted method of blaming the rich, the middle classes, the former political classes of the "Fourth Republic," and, of course, the imperialists to the north, for all of what ails Venezuela. His problem is that he is going on his tenth year of Revolution and not all is roses and wine for this OPEC nation wallowing in the midst of the highest oil prices in history.
More serious still for Chavez - and for his style of socialism - is that he insists on playing a zero sum game. For his ilk of revolutionary bathed in the fiery rhetoric of the sixties, there are only two historical players: the bloodthirsty capitalists and the noble poor. Capitalists simply have lots of things but don't work for them, preferring instead that the underfed, overworked, illiterate masses tend to their latifundias and clean their palaces. That is to say, it appears that they missed the Industrial Revolution and simply superimpose the Feudal State upon the last five hundred years.
In this cosmology, each extra loaf of bread eaten by the oligarchy is a loaf taken from the hands of a poor child. And, in a country that relies more on oil revenues for survival than on the investment in productive industries, this may make sense. But it denies the obvious: that capitalism has revolutionized the the world by distributing wealth to those enterprises that make the best use of available resources regardless of geographical location or class.
