Peace Patriot
Peace Patriot's JournalVenezuela: RW plan to cut social programs, deregulate banks and privatize...
...privatize, privatize.
This analysis of what the rightwing in Venezuela would do--a platform that was not part of the public record but was leaked--indicates, in reverse, what Venezuelans' "New Deal" is all about--what they have voted FOR over the last decade--for instance, everybody gets food, housing and health care, banks are strictly regulated and required to serve the society and the most vulnerable groups get extra help, for instance, children under 4 and the elderly ride free on buses, and all elderly people get pensions (even if they worked in the informal sector before--say, as street vendors--and were excluded from the pension system). These and other Chavez government policies not only created sizzling economic growth (10%) during the 2003 to 2008 period, and a quick recovery from the Bushwhack-induced worldwide depression (Venezuela economic growth has climbed back to over 5%), they have created "THE most equal country" in Latin America (UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean).
Venezuela's rightwing--like the Reaganites and Bushwhacks and our own Democratic "neoliberals"--want to END Venezuela's "New Deal," create banks like we have here, that speculate unconscionably then hit the poor with their trillion dollar 'shortfall,' and kick the poorest people "off the island" in a sickening binge of greed, also like we have here.
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Venezuelan Opposition Economic Plan to Roll Back Public Services Revealed
8/24/2012
Barinas, August 23 2012 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – An internal document has been leaked to Venezuelan press revealing the economic policy of Venezuela's political opposition, the Roundtable of Democratic Unity (MUD), should they win the presidential elections in October. The plan includes the deregulation of banks, opening up the economy to private investment and the reduction of state funding for public services and communal council projects.
MUD candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski is standing against two-time incumbent President Hugo Chavez, with voting set for 7 October.
Referring to the current global financial crisis, the MUD document states that it would be unable to maintain the current social spending levels of the Chavez administration and predicts a decrease in the demand for oil from countries such as China and the USA – Venezuela’s largest trading partner.
The opposition document states that based on current spending levels, the government’s public sector deficit as a proportion of GDP (gross domestic product) will be 8% in 2013. The document classifies this figure as potentially dangerous in the event of a global economic downturn and states that the MUD would aim to reduce this figure to 3-4%.
In order to respond to the “crisis” caused by a potential decrease in the global demand for oil, the opposition says that it would take “concrete steps to decrease, in the medium and long term, the heavy load of goods and services” provided by the current government in a bid to reduce its social spending budget and in turn the public deficit.
Other steps to decrease the government budget for social spending would include the decentralisation of the provision of social services to municipal governments, who the MUD argues would make services “more efficient”.
The government’s social missions, including the Barrio Adentro health program and the children’s educational centers knows as “Simoncitos,” would also be transferred over to municipal government. Health and education missions, including the maintenance of school and hospital infrastructure and the provision of food, would be opened up to “private initiative”.
Charges for some of these services would also be implemented in a “controlled” manner, an action that the opposition argues would allow the new government to reduce the financial burden on the state.
This process of decentralisation would reverse actions carried out by the Chavez government to put the administration of services under the control of central government. The government argues that it has done this in order to minimise the possibility of corruption and to ensure that access to health and education is universal, regardless of geographical location or local government politics.
Ex-governor of Anzoátegui state, David de Lima, was one of those who received a copy of the document.
In comments to Venezuelan television on Wednesday, the political independent said “there are two discourses [in the Capriles campaign], there is the economic discourse that’s used to get votes, and the real one, that aims to place the economic policy of the country back in the hands of the two or three sectors that always controlled it”.
Other areas that would be affected by the opposition's proposed cutbacks are food, housing and transport. The document states that a governing MUD administration would put an end to current government subsidies on housing built as part of the Great Housing Mission, although those already receiving the subsidised housing benefit would not be affected by the measures.
Subsidised food sold through the government´s MERCAL scheme would be provided and delivered by private companies, whilst funding available to communal councils for the construction and renovation of housing would also be “gradually reduced”.
Overall, the opposition states that it would aim to decrease the amount of government food subsidies by 60% over the next 3 years or potentially sooner.
Equally, subsidised transport would be eliminated. The price of travel on the Metro in Caracas, Valencia, the Ferrocaril del Tuy and Maracaibo would be raised by 5% every 4 months, at least until the service is able to meet its running costs. According to the document, the same policy would also be applied to other forms of transport such as buses, where children under 4 and adults over 65 can currently travel for free.
Current government policies, such as universal access to social security, would be rolled back. Social security for old age pensioners, currently pegged to the national minimum wage and tending to increase each year, would be frozen from 2013.
Likewise, the new government would retract the current government policy which allows old age pensioners to access social security regardless of whether they have paid their social security contributions in full.
All expropriated land and property would be returned to their previous owners within a maximum of 2 years.
Energy, Oil and Mining Policy
Whilst there are few details relating to the opposition's proposed oil and mining policy, the document states that the MUD would create a new framework for these areas which would no longer be based on a “nationalist ideology”. The subsidised provision of electricity would also be cut and opened up to the private sector, and electricity rates would be raised.
At the end of the document, the MUD states that it will release a separate document outlining its new oil policy.
Banking and Price Controls
The document, titled First Ideas of Economic Actions to Take by the National Unity Government (2013), strongly criticises the current government for its “excessive regulation” of banks and interest rates, as well as a policy which requires banks to designate a certain amount of their profits to social programs.
The opposition argue that current regulation, which states that 25% of a bank’s profits must go towards agricultural projects, 15% towards housing, 3% to micro-businesses, 10% towards manufacturing activities and 2.5% towards investment in national tourism, adversely affects the profitability of banks and their ability to allocate credit to “profitable activities”.
MUD policy recommends the immediate establishment of a “Committee for Banking Sector Reform” in order to begin the process of eliminating the banks’ obligatory social contributions, with the possible exception of regulations on mortgages, which would be made more flexible.
The government’s price control measures, implemented in 2011 in order to combat the adverse effects of inflation and hoarding are described as “absurd” in the document, which states that the measures produce “fear and anxiety in the productive private sector”. All price control mechanisms would be eliminated within a year.
Finally, the plan says that it would consider using the power of presidential decree* in order to “dismantle the socialised and collectivised state model that has been created by the so-called revolution”.
Private bankers and members of Venezuela’s business association, FEDECAMARAS, will be invited to the next MUD meeting to discuss the party’s potential economic policy further.
The document can be read in full in Spanish here (LINK--see original).
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7198
(Creative Commons License. My emphasis.)
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*"using the power of presidential decree."
Funny, how the wingnuts get all nutty when Chavez uses powers of decree to build housing for the poor or to rebuild a town destroyed by floods, but intend to use it themselves to undo the equitable society that Venezuelans have voted for, by big margins, over the last decade.
For the record: presidential powers of decree are discussed and voted on by the National Assembly, are time- and issue-limited and are a common practice in Latin America. (Brazil's president, for instance, used powers of decree to protect a wide swath of the Amazon rainforest for an uncontacted Indigenous tribe.) These are beneficial and democratically conveyed powers--that is, if they are used lawfully, as Chavez has done.
The wingnuts in Venezuela are not great respecters of the law, however. In fact, in their coup attempt in 2002, they suspended the Constitution, the courts, the National Assembly and all civil rights--measures that were thought to be quite efficacious by the corporate media in Venezuela and by the Bush Junta. Venezuelans know all this--no thanks to the corporate media--and are not at all likely to put these fascists in power, in the coming elections, to undo everything. (Chavez is way ahead in the polls.) I point out the corporate media's role in the lawless, thieving, mind-boggling greed of those behind frontmen like Reagan, Bush Jr. and Capriles, to help the uninformed understand why Chavez has also sought to regulate the corporate media's use of the public airwaves--akin to our "Fairness Doctrine" regulation here, that the Reaganites dismantled.
Corporate media is how really bad leaders like Reagan get into power, without directly stealing elections, and how potentially good leaders like Clinton get blackmailed into ruinous policy (such as deregulating the banks). They also assist with outright election theft, here--but that is not a problem in Venezuela (which has an election system that is far, FAR more honest and transparent than our own). The corporate media in Venezuela has helped "launder" this rightwing candidate, Capriles, and won't be telling Venezuelans what he is really all about--dismantling their "New Deal." This is so similar to what happened with Reagan, here, that I thought I'd point it out. Venezuelan voters are not as clueless as our own, though, who got fooled, big time, by Reagan, which is how both our "New Deal" and our very democracy itself began to be dismantled.
Study of Polls Shows a Clear Lead for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela's Presidential Election Race
Study of Polls Shows a Clear Lead for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela's Presidential Election RaceBy VENEZUELA SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN UK, August 13th 2012
With just two months to go until Venezuela’s presidential elections on 7 October, a study of recent opinion polls has shown a clear lead for Hugo Chavez over his main rival Henrique Capriles Radonski.
The study shows Hugo Chavez has a lead of between 15-27% in each of the 8 polls examined (see table below).
The study is based on all polls published in July by the major polling companies that carry out polls in Venezuela (with data collected in the last week of June and during July 2012).
It includes pollsters that had some of the most accurate final predictions for the two previous elections that determined whether Hugo Chavez would be Venezuela’s President. These include: Consultores 30-11 and Hinterlaces (2006 Presidential elections) and Datanalisis (2004 Recall Referendum).
The strong lead for Hugo Chavez in these polls is consistent with the ongoing high satisfaction rating for his government which a range of polls have shown is regularly around 60%.
(MORE)
http://left-click.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1030&Itemid=30
Found at: http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7168
(My emphases.)
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Must be stupid Venezuelans planning to vote for Chavez what with all the terrible news about Venezuela from the Corporate Press duly reported here by some DUers.
Don't these peasants in Venezuela know that Chavez is, a) a dictator, and b) incompetent (an incompetent dictator?).
It's damn puzzling. His government keeps winning elections by big majorities but the Corporate Press and its DU echoheads NEVER SAY WHY. Why do people vote for this clown...er dictator?
Must be rigged elections, huh? Nope. Venezuela has one of the most honest and transparent voting systems in the world, certified by all the reputable election monitoring groups, and transparent on the face of the election system facts--far, FAR more honest and transparent than our own (like night and day).
Well, the last sentence above tells us part of the story that is blackholed in the Corporate Press: "The strong lead for Hugo Chavez in these polls is consistent with the ongoing high satisfaction rating for his government which a range of polls have shown is regularly around 60%."
Huh. How come those polls are NEVER EVER cited in the Corporate Press? How come studies like the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Carribean, which designated Venezuela "THE most equitable society in Latin America" are NEVER EVER cited in the Corporate Press?
Venezuela has problems, of course, like any country does. How come those are the ONLY things EVER reported by the Corporate News? And how come they are often reported without mentioning what the Chavez government is doing about them?
Our politicians would eat their hearts out for Chavez's poll numbers. How come this is NEVER reported?
The picture of Venezuela by the Corporate Press is so slanted as to be ridiculous! It is propaganda. And, what is more, it is a propaganda campaign that has been going on for a decade, and is monotonously negative often with the same "talking points" repeated almost verbatim from corporate news source to corporate news source.
And here we are again. Chavez way ahead in all polls and the ONLY thing we get from the Corporate News and its dittoheads is bad news about Venezuela.
Among other things--like the disgust I feel at being lied to time and again about the Chavez government--this long-standing, intense anti-Chavez campaign is worrisome. Does it mean a war is being planned? Another coup attempt? Or is it just that our Corporate Rulers simply don't want us to learn anything about an equitable society where most people like their government?
What a disaster it would be for our Corporate Rulers if our people found out the truth--that the Chavez government, though it certainly has its flaws, like any government does, is actually a good government, benefiting most Venezuelans, and with consistently high approval ratings over the decade! Venezuelans, not being stupid, have voted for fairness--for their own "New Deal"--for inclusion of the poor majority in the political process--for an expansion of civil and human rights and public participation. Our Corporate Press must bury this truth. And they do.
And this means what? They need the DEA, the AFT, the FBI, the DIA, the CIA, the DOJ, the Pentagon
and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in military aid "to stop the drug trade"?
Or is it that the New York Slimes had a hole to fill, it's election time in Venezuela and the DEA, the AFT, the FBI, the DIA, the CIA, the DOJ, the Pentagon and the State Department were more than willing to empty their trash cans onto the pages of the New York Slimes to ONCE AGAIN slime the most hated Latin American leftist president of all time--the one who booted Exxon Mobil out of Venezuela?
This gets not so funny after a while. Clearly, Venezuela needs a bloodbath (i.e., Mexico), lots of dead trade unionists and other advocates of the poor and FIVE MILLION brutally displaced peasant farmers (i.e., Colombia) and a fascist coup and lots of murdered leftists-- teachers, community activists, labor leaders--and journalists, and more U.S. military bases (i.e., Honduras), to solve the "drug problem."
I want to laugh some more--sometimes that's all you can do--but, in honor of the millions of victims of the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs," I will refrain from rofling. This smells too much like the WMDs that weren't in Iraq (um, Judith Miller, New York Slimes).
This is A WAR. And what you are reading, in this corporate/war profiteer trash bin, is WAR PROPAGANDA. Whether it becomes another U.S. shooting war or not, we don't yet know. It smells like Iraq (the Democrats prep the war, the Bushwhacks drop the bombs and torture the prisoners). But if Leon Panetta can keeps winning 'gold medals' (Panetta 2, Latin America 0) (um, the fake "constitutional crises" by which elected leftist presidents were removed in Honduras and Paraguay), maybe only trade unionists and peasants will die and not U.S. soldiers.
And they can always send the Secret Service in, to debauch Chavez.
Sorry, dead people. Even with mountains of dead bodies, murdered by the U.S. "war on drugs"--or maybe because of them--sometimes you just gotta laugh.
Go deeper! Are you not responding to "the Dream" born in the 1960s...
...in millions and millions of brains--a dream that only a few had dreamt before but that quite suddenly, it seems, "went viral"--that humankind could create its own future of social justice, equitable wealth, compassion and high scientific and intellectual and artistic achievement in which all of us, without exception, can participate?
NASA was part of that Dream. It is quite wrong to say that NASA and especially its program of putting men on the moon was created to defeat the Russian communists in space. That was the motive of the war profiteers for going along with it but it was NOT the motive of the engineers who pulled it off nor the motive of the millions of people who supported the effort and the billions who were inspired by it. CURIOSITY and WONDER were the REAL motives of those who did it and those who appreciated it as the most important event of the 20th century and perhaps of all time.
Suddenly, our viewpoint changed from an ant's point of view to the point of view of the great Cosmos, almost overnight. To compare it, say, to Europe's discovery of America, is the right idea but doesn't come near to grasping the magnitude of this human achievement of stepping off our own planet!--and furthermore, doing it as a collective effort! (The movie "Apollo 13" got that right!) (Many brilliant minds, putting their own egos aside, can solve insoluble problems by collective effort, that individuals cannot solve alone.)
We now could see the Earth as "one" and the necessity of including all of humankind in the social justice, equitable wealth, compassion and high achievement that millions were now dreaming of.
The bigger your Dream, the harder it is to see the "big picture," ironically. It is painful--so painful!--to see backsliding, to see war as a money sport return, to see the corruption of the rich and powerful get worse, far worse, to see democracy blockaded with items like corporate-run, 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, to see youngsters imitating the incredibly ugly leaders who are inflicted upon us--trying to get rich with a gun and drugs, or just going blewy and shooting people at random (how different is the Colorado shooting from the war on Iraq?). The lack of leadership. The lack of vision. The moral decrepitude. The evil. The demoralization and disempowerment of a great people--a people who did that, who put men on the moon and, at the same time, determined to end poverty and racism.
Painful, painful, painful!
But, I'll tell you, that torch--the torch of "the Dream"--has passed to a new generation elsewhere--in the unlikeliest of places, given its history. Latin America.
That is the "big picture" that is hard to see. We in the U.S. are not alone on this planet and those of us touched by "the Dream" in the 1960s are not the only dreamers. U.S. democracy may go down--we may have lost the opportunity ourselves to advance humankind to its next giant steps--of both social justice and achievement. But humankind itself will never lose those dreams. They will be reborn again and again, in inconspicuous places, and seem suddenly to burst upon humankind to renew and refresh human society and move it forward along its inevitable progressive path.
Those of us who have dreamt of peace find war so intolerable that we are almost paralyzed with anger that our "Dream" has been so violated. Those of us who have dreamt of social justice and high human achievement find the current repeat of the crimes that brought on the Great Depression so intolerable that we can barely speak for our anger and don't know where to begin to undo it. (Begin with the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, is my advice!) Those of us who also perceive the catastrophe of global warming and its cause, industrial society, and see the suicidal failure of our country to address it--or even to admit it!--feel paroxysms of despair and rage. We can hardly believe the stupidity of our national discussions.
Why? Because we expect better of ourselves and our country. Why? Because we saw "the Dream" born here!--the dream of the best of humanity throughout the Ages, formulated in fits and starts, through many struggles and "dark nights" over many centuries, then blossoming, suddenly, here, for reasons unknown, in a new generation of Americans, the inheritors of the post WW II world. Widespread; shared by many--and quite unprecedented in that respect. We saw the world in a new way at the same time that our friends at Caltech and M.I.T. were putting a camera on the earth from the moon!
And if you were not born at the time--are too young to have lived through it--you certainly hear its echoes in the background of the current horrors.
The JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and the Vietnam War ended that awakening of "the Dream" quite a few decades before Bush Jr. was inflicted upon us. But "the Dream" is alive and well in Latin America--just being born--and, if the truth were known, it is still alive here in places and among people whom the corporate news monsters quite deliberately ignore. Whether we can recover our democracy--and all our hopes and dreams--I do not know. It would be unusual as an historical precedent. Once a society goes in this bad, bad direction--of rule by the few for the profit of the few--swift decline is pretty much inevitable. But then, democracy--which is still alive here at least as an idea--is designed to do just that: to correct the wrong and disastrous courses of the rulers. (Thomas Jefferson said that we would need a revolution every twenty years--boy, was he right!) Given the mechanisms designed to defeat democracy here, it will be an uphill battle to restore it--but hey, if the Latin Americans can do it--given their history--so can we!
Don't despair! Go deeper!
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"If a more intelligent life form has been watching what is going on here, they just may decide to stop our disease from spreading beyond our planet...".
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That "more intelligent life form" is YOU. And the "disease" you speak of is something that YOU can help cure but NOT ALONE. And the glory of human life on Earth is that that collective "cure" is dreamable and therefore...maybe..we can never be sure...possible.
Why do hunters and self-defenders need assault rifles and fast-action clips that...
...can shoot dozens of bullets in seconds?
The lethality of the weapons that this shooter legally purchased gave the victims--a packed theater audience--little chance to escape or evade, and of course, no chance for those who died and will die from their injuries. His ability to kill many people quickly is why there are so many dead and injured.
It seems to me that--given a real democracy, not this "TRADE SECRET" code-in-all-the-voting-machines, corporate-run sham we're looking at--this could be the basis of a compromise as to regulating guns. You don't need an assault rifle to kill a deer. And you don't need multiple, high-powered weapons to defend yourself.
I've been in despair about this issue since I lost a loved one in the first such "senseless" mass shooting in this country--the Texas Tower sniper in 1966. NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE to prevent such horrors happening again and again--not as to the availability of mass murder weapons, nor as to health care especially for the young, nor on any other front including government/corporate fostering of a climate of fear, alienation, militarism and war, with the war on Iraq the most obvious example but perhaps the "war on drugs" the most sneaky--and yet more socially destructive--aspect of this propaganda.
Anyway, I put this forward as a basis for discussion, and--if we ever get our democracy back--a basis for serious, anti-mass murder regulation, between gun advocates and gun haters. I am in the latter camp. I want all guns and all weapons--and of course war--banned worldwide. But I have had at least one family member who disagrees (he lived in a violent urban area) and I live in a rural area where hunting is part of the culture for some and I cannot say that hunting with bullets is immoral and leads to mass murder although I wish they would use bows and arrows and other skilled means that give their game a chance. Why assault rifles? Why high-powered, mass killing cartridges? Why multiple, high-powered guns and rifles? Why scopes and other sophisticated technology that give the hunted no chance?
I also have some sympathy with 2nd Amendment arguments, although I think that our Founders would be absolutely appalled at what their approval of a "citizen militia" has turned into--the loss of civilization itself. They did not intend THIS.
The "framing" of this article's argument is odd.
Here is where it begins to go...strange.
"The specter of fraud looms especially large this year because the party that perfected the buying of votes and rigging of elections...," the PRI, "...is favored to return to the presidency...".
I expected the sentence to read, "The specter of fraud looms especially large this year because" millions of Mexicans protested the vote rigging of the last presidential election, when leftist Lopez Obrado was denied the presidency by only 0.05% of the vote. Indeed, the country almost came apart because of that fraud, which apparently was engineered at the top with electronic tabulators that were brought in allegedly with the help of the Bush Junta (which desperately wanted an administration in Mexico that would welcome the ruination of Mexico--an overly democratic people who have stubbornly resisted 'privatization' of their oil--by the corrupt, failed, murderous U.S. "war on drugs."
Uh, it ain't the PRI's "old ways" (corruption, cronyism) that is the main problem in Mexico these days--the problem is NEW; it is ELECTRONIC; and, just as here, control of the electronic tabulation makes it EASY, not only to steal elections but also to write pre-election "narratives" that fit the fraudulent results.
"Narratives" like this one--alleged news articles that slip in the corporate editors/owners view of leftist Lopez Obrador as "an unreformed erratic" by attributing this opinion to "numerous Mexicans" as follows:
"Numerous Mexicans have expressed near-existential dismay over the choices they have in this election; they chafe at the prospect of the PRI's return, can't stomach more of the current, discredited government, and see Lopez Obrador as an unreformed erratic." --from the OP
These are the 1%-ers having cocktails in their villas--these so-called "numerous Mexicans" in their "near-existential dismay." They (the rich, the corporate) have no candidate. PAN/Calderon (the Bush Junta's choice) has been discredited and was a disaster for Mexico on many fronts. The vast majority of Mexicans (the real "numerous Mexicans" nominated the two candidates that THEY wanted to choose between--the PRI representing the old system that was corrupt but worked versus the Left (Lopez Obrador) representing the new leftist democracy movement that has swept through South America into Central America and avows social justice and independence from the U.S. and its corporate/war profiteer masters.
What is odd is that the L.A. Times would dwell on election fiddling of long ago and ignore much more recent, massive and massively disruptive election theft--against Lopez Obrador! They describe Lopez Obrador's (and multi-millions of Mexicans') objection to that fraudulent count as "political grandstanding." But, by God, if those millions of people had been able to get their votes counted, Mexico would never have allowed the Bushification of the "war on drugs" and the horrible, bloody disaster that it has been and would be making progress on social justice to catch up with Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Peru, Nicaragua and other countries with leftist governments.*
And this is the problem with this article. The rich and the corporate have no candidate and they are going through paroxysms of no doubt drunken "existential" angst at the parties that corporate reporters attend. These parties are crammed with Mexicans of a particular type (thus, "numerous Mexicans" (was it at the embassy in L.A.?) And the corporate reporters SHARE their "near-existential dismay." The old corrupt regime or good leftist government on behalf of the 99%. Such a regrettable choice!
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*(This list would include two more countries with leftist governments--Honduras and Paraguay--but for the U.S.-supported rightwing coups in those countries--Honduras in 2008, Paraguay recently. Though the U.S. has not been nailed yet on the coup in Paraguay, I think we can be sure that it will be. It's what the U.S. does--supports 1%-er rule in Latin America by whatever means--election fraud, USAID funding of rightwing causes and candidates, CIA dirty tricks, vast propaganda and/or outright coup d'etats. The U.S. even personally conducts rigged elections, as in Honduras and Haiti. And when it can't bust a democracy, it sends in the DEA to smash up and bloody the society and make it more malleable.)
"Manufacturing Contempt" (the corporate press on Chavez vs. Capriles)
Excellent analysis of the totally screwed up, unreliable corpo-fascist press coverage of the Venezuelan presidential election.
The title of the article is actually, "Our Man in Caracas: The U.S. Media and Henrique Capriles," from Keane Bhatt's blog, "Manufacturing Contempt" (which mostly deals with this topic: corporate press vs. Chavez).
Found it at NACLA:
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/18/our-man-caracas-us-media-and-henrique-capriles
And at Venezuelanalysis:
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7065
Both of these sources provide some balancing analysis, information and dissent if you at all wonder why huge numbers of Venezuelan voters keep voting for an incompetent, buffoon dictator.
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(Note: I will be unavailable to reply to comments the rest of today, but will check out any replies tomorrow morning. I felt that this article needs immediate circulation--we have so few instances of up-to-the-minute analysis of corporate press bullshit on Venezuela.)
U.S.-backed thugs have tortured several of LatAm's top leftist leaders,
or have imprisoned, kidnapped, beaten and/or threatened them with coups and/or assassination plots.
Michele Batchelet, recent former president of Chile, imprisoned and tortured by U.S.-backed thugs, and her father murdered by them in the course of torture--their crime? being political leftists.
Lula da Silva, recent former president of Brazil, imprisoned and tortured by U.S.-backed thugs for union organizing (steelworkers union).
Dilma Rousseff, current president of Brazil, imprisoned and tortured by U.S.-backed thugs in truly horrible ways, during the same era, for activities related to a leftist guerrilla group who were fighting the U.S.-backed thugs who had taken over their country.
Jose Mujica, current president of Uruguay, imprisoned and tortured by U.S.-backed thugs for activities related to a leftist guerrilla group who were fighting the U.S.-backed thugs who had taken over their country (same era).
Evo Morales, current president of Bolivia, kidnapped and beaten by U.S.-backed thugs in collusion with the DEA, for union organizing (Indigenous coca leaf farmers union). He was also nearly overthrown by U.S.-backed thugs (white separatists) in 2008, organized and funded right out of the U.S. embassy.
Hugo Chavez, current president of Venezuela, kidnapped and his life threatened by U.S.-backed thugs in the 2002 coup attempt.
Daniel Ortega, current president of Nicaragua, never caught by the U.S.-backed thugs (Reagan's henchmen, the "contras" but saw many of his compadres and other lovers of social justice murdered, in their effort to defeat the brutal, hated, U.S.-backed Somoza regime.
Mel Zelaya, president of Honduras, overthrown in 2009, by U.S.-backed thugs who shot up his house, terrifying his family, dragged him out of bed, kidnapped him and flew him out of his own country at gunpoint, with a refueling stopover at the U.S. military base in Honduras.
The above U.S.-backed thugs, in every case, were funded, "trained," equipped and given every support by the U.S. government, most of them part of the "security state" (military, spies/covert operatives, police), and all of them fascists--the only political stance that the U.S. has ever supported in Latin America.
But "the times they are a-changing"! Are they ever! The above leaders of the leftist democracy movement that has swept South America and parts of Central America, have all been elected by their countries' voters, and are all very popular, and furthermore have joined together in individual alliances and in new institutions to assert their common goals of social justice and independence from the fascist-loving U.S. government.
You wonder what's happening in Latin America these days? Start with this: Something like half of the elected presidents of the region were personally brutalized by U.S.-backed thugs in their youths or more recently. And whatever activities of theirs got them noticed by U.S.-backed fascists, and targeted for torture, kidnapping, overthrow or death, those activities are now "badges of courage" in today's Latin America. THEY have been chosen, by big majorities of the voters in these countries, to lead this revolution.
Their commitment to peace is remarkable in the circumstances. But, really, it takes more courage to be peaceful when you have been harmed than when you have little or nothing at risk. These are very, very courageous people, and they are determined, as individuals and as an allied group, to end the horrific U.S. domination of Latin America and the brutal, bloody, monstrous exploitation of the people of Latin America to benefit the 1%, here and there.
The victims of U.S.-backed torture regimes are now running Latin America...
...and THEY know that--as Rousseff's predecessor, Lula da Silva, said, in his final speech as president, "The U.S. has not changed." He himself was jailed and tortured for union organizing during the same era of U.S. "training," funding and support of the torturers, as was the current president of Uruguay, José Mujica, as was the recent former president of Chile, Michele Batchelet (who also lost family members including her father to the U.S.-backed torturers).
Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, was kidnapped and beaten up by state agents in collusion with the DEA--and funded, equipped and "trained" by the U.S.A.--for organizing the Indigenous coca leaf farmers union. Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua, though Reagan's thugs never got hold of him, saw myriad compadres in the overthrow of the hated, brutal Somoza regime murdered by U.S. funded/"trained" death squads, in Reagan's illegal war on Nicaragua. Hugo Chavez was jailed for two years (though not tortured) by a U.S.-backed "neo-liberal" regime which had murdered hundreds of poor protestors--the event that launched the Bolivarian Revolution. (Chavez, a young military officer, rebelled against that slaughter, became a hero in prison and went on to be elected president.) He later suffered being kidnapped, as president, and his life threatened, by U.S.-backed rightwing coupsters who suspended the constitution, the national assembly, the courts and all civil rights, in their brief effort, in 2002, to overthrow Venezuela's democracy, peacefully countered by tens of thousands of Venezuelans who flooded the streets and demanded restoration of their constitution and their elected president--the event that launched the continent-wide leftist democracy movement of today in South America.
When Lula da Silva said that "The U.S. has not changed," he was speaking of the Obama administration, which colluded in the overthrow of Honduras' democracy in 2009. Now the rightwing death squads and U.S.-supported state agents--murderers, torturers, rapists--are active in Honduras and the Pentagon is expanding its military bases there--a haunting parallel to Reagan's war on Nicaragua which was launched from Honduras.
It truly is not possible to say that "the U.S. has changed" under Obama. Billions of our tax dollars are pouring into rightwing causes and brutal and oppressive militaries and police forces, in LatAm, as we speak. The U.S. never supports honestly elected leaders in LatAm. Where it can't rig the elections (many LatAm countries, these days, have far, FAR better election systems than our own), it allies with fascists and brutal thugs to plot coups and other disruptions. The only positive thing I can say about Obama, on LatAm, is that, if he has any decent intentions there (a possibility), he doesn't appear to have the power to act on them. U.S. policy on LatAm is run by the Miami mafia on behalf of war profiteers and transglobal monsters like Exxon Mobil. Clinton puts a cosmetic gloss on these brutal policies (for instance, staging a U.S. State Department-run phony election in Honduras, under martial law). And Obama doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. On the contrary, he seems to be dictated to, by the likes of John McCain (telecommunications interests in Honduras) and Jim DeMint (SC-Diebold)--not to mention Otto Reich and John Negroponte, the Bush Cartel and the big, protected drug lords.
Such a bloody shame! What an opportunity lost, to do the right thing, for once--to do the right thing after half a century of doing the wrong things--the worst things. Murder, torture, robbery, filthy oppression, brutal domination. The Latin Americans were ready to forgive--to forgive it all--with the election of the first black man as president of the U.S. Then they saw Honduras unfold--with Brazil in particular fighting like mad to prevent it--and they knew that "The U.S. has not changed." The U.S. is not its people. The U.S. is not even its president. It is something else. A vast, global, criminal gang comes to mind.
I hope that Dilma Rousseff's book gets published here. Perhaps it will begin to explain to our people, here, what is REALLY going on in Latin America. They aren't getting the truth from the Associated Pukes, the New York Slimes and the Miami Hairball, et al. It must be bewildering to people here who rely on the corpo-fascist 'news' organizations for their sense of the world, how/why REAL leftists are getting elected all over LatAm. They have been given little or no notion of what the U.S. did to Latin America for 50 some years and is still trying to do (with diminishing success). They have been particularly fooled by the Reagan-worship of the corpo-fascist press--Reagan, who was not only behind the illegal war on Nicaragua but also the horrendous carnage in Guatemala and other horrors. Latin Americans REMEMBER these horrible things, and their overwhelming desire for independence, sovereignty, social justice, use of their resources to benefit their own people, human and civil rights and REAL democracy, springs from those riveting memories. The U.S. has never meant well, in LatAm, in the modern era (since FDR) and it doesn't mean well now.
But perhaps the saddest part of all, from our point of view, is that, even with a well-informed citizenry, it is probably not possible to remove the malefactors who are actually running our country--or, in any case, it will not be easy. They have their vulture claws to our innards and intend to rip our society--once the most potentially progressive and powerful society on earth--to shreds. Their latest tool is the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines--all over the U.S., largely controlled by one, private, far rightwing-connected corporation (ES&S, which bought out Diebold). Our people for the most part don't even know about this control tool, so rotten is the corporate press corps.
To change the U.S., whether at home or abroad--to reverse that damning statement by Lula da Silva--"The U.S. has not changed"--we need to start with the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines and hold a REAL "Boston Tea Party." Yup, the British East India Company would have loved those machines and would have understood perfectly how it is that our taxes paid for them.
Douglass also solves the mystery and nails the CIA up to Richard Helms.
Douglass book is extraordinarily well-documented, well-written and well-argued, and he is extremely cautious about who he points the finger at. He cannot directly nail CIA Director Allen Dulles--the one whom JFK fired over the "Bay of Pigs" (the occasion for JFK's promise to break the CIA "into a thousand pieces" --but he gets as high as Richard Helms (CIA Operations Chief). There is no question in my mind who the perps were, after reading Douglass' book.
You are right that Douglass' particular excellence is that he explains (and fully documents) WHY the CIA murdered JFK. But I thought I would point out that he also solves the crime--in the course of which he disentangles all of the CIA's elaborate misdirections.
He does not finger LBJ, except for involvement in the coverup for which LBJ had some arguably valid reasons, huge mistake though it was. It seems, according to the evidence, that LBJ did not know who did it until a short time afterward when J. Edgar Hoover (FBI) informed him of the CIA misdirection to Russia. The CIA and MIC anti-communist "patriots" were fuming at JFK's refusal to nuke Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The CIA, the Joint Chiefs and the entire MIC were in favor of nuking Russia during that crisis. They believed that they had "missile superiority" and would "win" such a war with "only" 300,000 casualties on the east coast of the U.S. JFK thought they were insane and stood alone against them (with RFK as his only ally).
The CIA designed one of their misdirections to force his successor's hand (LBJ's) to nuke Russia in retaliation for the assassination. LBJ, though much more sympathetic with and tied to the MIC, did not want to be pushed into that horror and got involved in the coverup trying to suppress (false, CIA-planted) details of Russia's involvement. There was no likelihood that he would blow the CIA's cover. He was a "Cold Warrior" (while JFK, who began as a "Cold Warrior," was in the process of turning toward world peace and "detente" when he was assassinated--one of the most brilliant parts of Douglass' book; puts this murder in a whole new light, indeed, floods it with light). As a "Cold Warrior" and friend of war profiteers, LBJ had to satisfy the MIC. Three days after JFK's assassination, and after he was informed of the Russia misdirection, LBJ said, "Now they can have their war." He was speaking of Vietnam.
It is quite heartbreaking--having lived through it all--to contemplate the many ways that JFK was quickly changing from a "Cold Warrior" into peace lover. These included his backchannels to Krushchev and Castro (established to get around the CIA), the Turkey missile deal (withdrawing U.S. missiles from Turkey, which targeted Russia on its border, in exchange for Russia withdrawing its missiles from Cuba), the Russia wheat deal (Russians starving after a failed wheat crop; U.S. came to their aid), the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (first effort to control nuke weapons), his peace speech at American University (rarely cited), his expression of sympathy for Cuba's revolution (against the horrible Batista regime), his signed orders to start withdrawing troops from Vietnam (where the CIA was actively fomenting war and chaos and subverting his orders), and probably the Space Program ("hammering swords into plowshares" and much more--most of it vehemently opposed by the CIA and the MIC. Some of this was visible at the time; some of it not. Certainly JFK's isolation within the MIC was not visible. But the truth is that the American people would have backed JFK's peace platform with a big majority in the 1964 election.
LBJ won the 1964 election with one of the biggest victories in presidential history, running on a peace platform. I remember this well. It was my first vote for president. I voted for peace, like most other Americans. The trouble was that LBJ was lying. And the tragedy is that JFK would not have been lying.
That is OUR tragedy. We had a president who could see past the "Cold War" and who had balked at slaughtering millions of people and poisoning the earth (we now know it would have destroyed the earth) over economic ideology. A young man whose conscience about social justice and about the horror of nuclear warfare was awakening. A leader with a vision of directing the country away from militarism and into a better world. A REALISTIC leader and a POLITICIAN--no starry-eyed idealist--who was responding to the deepest desires of most Americans for peace and social justice. A hugely popular, winning politician.
Bang-bang, shoot-shoot.
Douglass' book is extremely painful to read. But we must face this, however late in the day it is to turn back toward democracy and good government. We, as a people, cannot make that "turn"--so like the turn JFK himself was making--unless we face these facts: who killed JFK and why.
Douglass has a trilogy planned. He has taken on the RFK and MLK assassinations for books 2 and 3. I believe, with the OP poster, that the same perps are lurking there, behind this decapitation of the progressive movement in the U.S. in the space of five years (1963 to 1968). I don't know if Douglass will be able to prove it as well as he does the JFK murder. The CIA had five years to perfect their misdirection techniques and their manipulation of the government, the press and our people. The latter two assassinations are, for me, still a matter of belief (i.e., same perps, the CIA) and many questions, not proof. As for JFK, Douglass proves it beyond any doubt. And that means that this country has been living a lie for half a century. Is it any wonder that we ended up with the horrors of the Bush Junta and the collusion of our political leadership in their many, many crimes?
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