I actually hear you pretty well.  You know, I met my wife through American and Chilean folks who first came together in response to the Pinochet coup in Chile, just about 40 years ago to the day.   One of them is now a law partner of mine and she's one of my closest friends in the world.   Another new lawyer in my office was just talking to me yesterday about Buenos Aires, where my son studied (before spending a year in Tuxtla Guttierez in Chiapas, Mexico) and where this lawyer spent time helping Argentines who were trying to turn bankrupt factories in Buenos Aires into workers' coops.  We both agreed that we can learn quite a bit from our brothers and sisters down south.

 Around these parts, while we might disagree about this or that issue and while folks like me sometimes blow a gasket or two over schmaltz, most of us are all too familiar with the very dark and ugly underbelly of American foreign policy.  AA, for one, cut teeth back at the UW in the 1960s.

This article aside, I think there is a strong tendency among the leadership in Venezuela to perpetuate hostilities with the United States--and I'm not saying there's not a background that most Americans either don't know or couldn't care less about.  Maduro has no simple task in trying to translate the good that comes from some of the centralized economic measures he and his predecessors are committed to, with quite a bit of the bad.  I hate equivalence memes, because I think they're cop-outs too often, but sometimes they're apt.  You can't ignore the propensity of Maduro, and Chavez before him, to trample civil liberties and then forget that Caracas has one of the highest murder rates in the world.  

At some point it becomes the duty and responsibility of the Venezuelas of the world--in this case a country that truly is blessed with abundant natural resources--to take charge of their own destinies and move forward.  I'm all for the right kind of American assistance in that respect--the right kind.  And I kind of believe--perhaps naively so--that President Obama would agree with me.

I guess I agree with you that Americans are fairly ignorant about the role that our corporate leaders have played with the lives of our neighbors.  But, you know, another partner of mine sends his daughter to Calhoun High School, right by where I live in the nerdy UWS of Manhattan, and their textbook is Zinn in their American History class.  I kind of think that, nonetheless, those kids are going to turn out to be not very different than the kids in neighboring schools who read classic rah rah American history books.   We'll see.

Peace.

Bruce