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Paul,

"Wise up" ! Oooh, strong words.

There's rhetoric, but also reality, and I think (well, I hope) that any EU minister who's heard of the Ukraine knows the difference as well as any.

In our own small and very polite way, we in the UK are quite used to "nationalising" parts of the energy industry, and without compensation, when it suits.

But we call it windfall tax, which sounds perfectly fair and reasonable, and I'm sure is quite legal, but also amounts to a confiscation of assets from private companies to the Government.

And, on the whole, it's rather popular, I believe. Well, I enjoyed it !

Of course, Evo is a "madman" and Gordon is "Prudence". That's alright then.

I'm with Kim and Andrew, this all seems to be a jolly good show from where I'm standing.

On a slightly related topic, when Russia tried to recover the billions stolen from it by a handful of individuals I always found the cries of "state theft" from various quarters a bit puzzling. It all appears to be putting some much needed balance and fairness back into the system, or possibly I'm hopelessly naive.

You can't talk about coherently about the present without understanding the past ("those who forget history are comdemned to repeat it"). One of the most important witnesses to the truth about what the USA has meant to Latin America is the late USMC Brigadier General Smedley Butler, who served from about 1900 to about 1930. A good example of what he saw is expressed in statements of his such as "I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism.".
What the Monroe Doctrine really meant was that the southern border of the USA was not the Rio Grande but rather the southern tip of South America. For about 150 years, Latin America was in effect one big plantation under Corporate America masters, and Latin Americans were all either slaves or overseers for those masters.
Western criticisms of Latin American leftists are nothing but double standards and red herrings. Latin Americans are perfectly justified in turning to leaders who promise socialism and divorce from the vampire-nation USA.
To paraphrase Paul Krugman in his recent book "The Great Unravelling": speaking the truth sometimes requires saying some very rude things.

Almost all countries, certainly all poorer countries, depend on foreign investment and technological and commercial knowhow for economic development and higher living standards. The biggest negative for investors is sovereign risk, whereby the host government changes the rules and parameters on which investment decisions were made. With high sovereign risk, many investors will no longer consider your country as an option. The remainder will demand a high risk premium for any projects in that country - they will only invest with very high rates of return, which reduce the chance of serious losses. Bolivia's action is a recipe for lower living standrards.

There certainly is a lot more to come. Read 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman' which explains in some detail (as the author was one of those doing it) how the US/IMF/World Bank tried to get these economies seriously indebted so that they were under American control (and if that didn't work then fomenting a coup or as a last resort invading like they did with Panama).

With the US bogged down in Iraq, and weaker than it has been for some time in terms of its ability to apply military force to ensure it gets its way, the countries that have suffered for years under these policies have a better chance than they have had for ages to do something about it. The US cannot take on Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia and Russia all at the same time. My prediction is that we will see more countries joining the 'energy nationalisation' party whilst they feel they can.