He Speaks From Experience

[T]hugo Chavez is back in the news. He thinks that the US needs a new constitution because the current one doesn't quite work.

Speaking to reporters in Lisbon on the last leg of a tour that included visits to China and Russia, he said: "I think the United States should start a constituent process to create a constituent assembly, a new truly democratic model."

A constituent assembly is a body elected to draft and sometimes adopt a new constitution.

"It was capitalism that caused the ruin" in the United States, said Chavez, who is one of Washington's fiercest critics, calling the financial crunch "the worst financial crisis in history".

"Let the U.S. empire end and let a great nation and great republic rise from the ruin ... It's time to shout 'Liberty!' again in the United States," Chavez said, calling for a new government to be free of the "dictatorship of the elite" such as big banks and corporations.

Critics accuse Chavez of running an authoritarian, Cuban-style regime in oil-rich Venezuela.

Chavez, who has signed various deals from weapons to energy this week in China and Russia also signed an agreement with Portugal's Socialist government on Saturday to buy 1 million ultra-cheap laptops for schools and 50,000 pre-fabricated houses in deals worth $3 billion.

Chavez is an expert on this.

He tried to rewrite the Venezuelan constitution, coerce the legislature into giving him more power, and has used and abused what power he has to usurp capitalists in his country by nationalizing one industry after another.

Chavez is a socialist. Constitutions are useful only inasmuch as they enable accumulating still more power.

It's still more ironic to see that he's looking to foreign countries to buy laptops and pre-fabricated houses.

The entire computer industry was built by capitalists who invented the technologies in the US, promulgated companies that would expand and move the technology to the forefront so that you can now find low cost computers in every corner of the planet.

Henry Ford capitalized on the assembly line to reduce costs and standardize products so that the masses could buy one of his cars. Other capitalists took those lessons and now churn out prefab homes.

Yet, Chavez slams capitalism at every turn. Without the capitalists building the infrastructure and technology he craves, he would have nothing but a big puddle of oil on which his nation rests.