The

The Hello and welcome to behind the news. My name is Doug Henwood.

In a world of constant disruption,

this show is a rock of stability, two guests, two segments. Alejandro Velasco will talk about Venezuela,

and we'll hear a brief reprise of a 2018 interview with him, and then Eric Blanc returns to

defend the sewer socialist Victor Berger against charges of racism.

Stunning news has become a regular feature of life, but even by those standards,

Trump's kidnapping of the president of Venezuela and his apparent theft to the country's

oil really stand out. Here to clarify what's going on is Alejandro Velasco, associate

professor of history at NYU, and former editor of NACLA's report in the Americas.

What have things been like in Venezuela over the last couple of years? How serious were the

economic and social problems? Well, what we'd seen over the last couple of years, interestingly,

was a kind of recovery from the depths of what had been the catastrophic years of 2017, 18, and 19 when what we saw was the combination

of strangling sectoral sanctions against the oil industry from the first Trump administration,

coupled with what had already been a declining economy because of corruption and mismanagement

under the Maluta government. And so what had happened over the last two to three years was first a de facto and then a

formal dollarization of the economy, which helped to bring what had been hyperinflation

of upwards of 60,000 percent in check.

And also spurred a little kind of economic recovery in terms of remittances coming

from the massive amounts of Venice, ones who are abroad in other parts of the world.

And so there had been some sense of at least economic, not in development for sure, but

improvements.

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