Here’s a little tale you won’t hear on the Clinton News Network — er, CNN — between commercials for erectile dysfunction pills and pharmaceutical lawsuits: the great American cold shoulder toward Venezuela may not have been as much about “protecting democracy” or “standing up to dictators” as it was about some Bush-league business dealings—literally.
Let’s go back a bit. Venezuela, once the darling of oil-rich nations, was sitting on a golden toilet of crude. And who came sniffing around with big cowboy boots and Texas swagger? The good ol’ Bush family. Yes, THAT Bush family.
Turns out, according to seasoned steamfitters I spoke with, who worked firsthand on this gargantuan mess, the Bushes bought up a bunch of Venezuelan offshore oil rigs. Problem was—they were about as seaworthy as a rusty trampoline in a hurricane. Built to standards that wouldn’t pass a backyard BBQ inspection, these rigs needed a helluva lot more than spit and duct tape to be viable.
So, what did they do? Sent in American labor. Real workers. Steamfitters. Welders. Pipe gurus. The folks who actually make things function while the suits sip fine bourbons and whisper about “capital gains.” These guys were tasked with turning third-world rust buckets into offshore operations that wouldn’t sink faster than Bush approval ratings post-Katrina.
And when the job turned out to be more of a salvage operation than a retrofit, and Venezuelan politics got messier than Dick Cheney’s quail hunts, guess what? Suddenly, Venezuela was “a threat to regional stability.” Suddenly, their democratically-elected government was “anti-American.” Suddenly, sanctions. Lots of sanctions. You know, the economic warfare kind that somehow always hurt the working class but leave the corrupt elite on both ends just fine. High-brow axe-grinding at its finest.
Why? Because the rigs were absolute junk, and the investment was a bust. And rather than take the “L” like normal businesspeople, they politicized it. The Bushes, with a little help from their friends in media and on Capitol Hill, turned a bad business deal into a foreign policy crusade. American exceptionalism, baby! We don’t lose—other people just cheat.
And let’s not pretend this wasn’t personal. You could practically hear the resentment oozing through those State Department briefings. The same energy as someone getting ghosted after buying an exclusive dinner—except instead of a date, it was Hugo Chávez, and instead of dinner, it was millions-and-millions of dollars sunk into ocean rust.
So, the next time someone tells you Venezuela is “hostile to American interests,” ask them, “Which American interests?” The oil barons who got burned? The politicians who got embarrassed? Or, possibly the workers who had to climb aboard those deathtraps with nothing but grit, wrenches, and the hope that management didn’t cheap out on the welds again?
No, the beef wasn’t about communism. It wasn’t about freedom. It was about failed investments, bruised egos, and political spin thick enough to grease an oil rig itself.
And that, folks, is how a Bush family boondoggle got wrapped in an American flag and sold to us as “foreign policy.”
Land of the free, home of the “rigged” — literally.