A Manufactured Crisis: Venezuela is Not Occupy
March 12, 2014
A Manufactured Crisis
Venezuela is Not Occupy
by ROGER D. HARRIS
With demonstrating students in the streets confronting state security forces, the recent unrest and violence in Venezuela superficially bears a resemblance to the Occupy Movement that began in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 2011. But there the similarity ends.
Manufactured Crisis
The overwhelming character of Occupy was its spontaneity, unpredictability, and certainly its independence from corporate or government influence. Occupy appealed to and was supported by the disposed and marginalized. The Venezuelan unrest has been the opposite. Building on genuine popular discontent in an already highly polarized context, the recent violence in Venezuela has all the elements of a manufactured crisis.
To find a script for the violence to come in Venezuela, one need only go to the Brookings Institute’s January 23rd memo1 to President Obama suggesting “inciting a violent popular reaction” could “oust the radicals and president.” In the polite doublespeak of the Washington consensus, the memo deplores violence at the same time it welcomes its possibilities including a “traditional coup” in Venezuela.
The source of this memo is not a fringe right-wing nut-shop. The Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute is funded in major part by the U.S. government and is ranked as the most influential think tank in the U.S. and in the world.2 Some 98% of Brookings’s employees’ political donations went to Democrats.3 The positions of the Brookings Institute are generally considered reflective of official U.S. policy, which is to achieve regime change in Venezuela despite the democratic will of its people.
Sabotage by the Wealthy
Venezuela is experiencing serious problems: rampant inflation, scarcities of basic consumer goods such as toilet paper, and one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. Crime and consumer product shortages are complex problems deeply rooted in Venezuela’s history and the predominant role of oil in its economy. Neither President Chavez nor President Maduro’s governments have been fully able to resolve these problems; both committed missteps as well as had their efforts blunted by individual corruption within state agencies. But in major part, the Venezuelan people have been victims of deliberate sabotage by elite domestic elements backed by the U.S. Unlike the under-funded Occupy Movement, the opposition in Venezuela has enjoyed hundreds of millions of U.S. aid dollars according to WikiLeaks documents.4
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/12/venezuela-is-not-occupy/
