Grow Them Young, Pay Them Well - Venezuela's Anti-Chavistas, That Is

[Joanne98]

May 16th 2008, by Stephen Lendman
Who said crime doesn't pay? Read on.

The Washington-based Cato Institute is all about "Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Peace," or so says its web site. It's been around since 1977 preaching limited government and free market religion with plenty of high-octane corporate funding for backing. It better have it for the award it presented on May 15. It was to a 23 year old fifth year Venezuelan law student at Universidad Catolica Andres Bello. Yon Goicoechea was the fourth recipient of the "Milton Friedman Liberty Prize" in the amount of $500,000. For what? What else. For serving the interests of capital back home and leading anti-Chavista protests.

Goicoechea is leader of Venezuela's "pro-democracy student movement" that in Cato's words "prevented Hugo Chavez's regime from seizing broad dictatorial powers in December 2007." The reference is to the narrow defeat of Venezuela's reform referendum last December. Goicoechea led student-organized street violence against Venezuela's democracy, but don't look for Cato to say that.

It played up Goicoechea's "pivotal role in organizing and voicing opposition to the erosion of human and civil rights in his country (that) would have concentrated unprecendented political and economic power in the hands of the government." Instead, he chooses "tolerance" and the "human right to seek prosperity." He's been active since student and other opposition emerged against the Chavez government's refusal (with ample justification) to renew RCTV's VHF operating license last May.

Then, and in the run-up to last December's referendum, Cato says he stood down "ongoing death threats and continual intimidation due to his prominent and vocal leadership." He's been "indispensable in organizing massive, peaceful protest marches that have captured the world's attention." In fact, there were no death threats but plenty of hard right intimidation targeting Chavistas with tools like Goicoechea a part of it.

Cato founder and president Edward Crane said "We hope the Friedman Prize will help further his non-violent advocacy for basic freedoms in an increasingly militaristic and anti-democratic Venezuela." Far right novelist Mario Vargas Llosa added that "freedom is disappearing" in Venezuela, and "Goicoechea is a symbol of (a) democratic reaction when (it's) threatened."

Goicoechea received his award at a $500 a plate dinner at New York's Waldorf Astoria. Prominent corporate and government types attended, all representing far right interests. None explain how Bolivarianism works, its participatory democracy, its commitment to Venezuela's people, or how it's lifted millions in the country out of desperate poverty. Nor is there comment on a model process, impressive social reforms, supremely democratic elections, or Hugo Chavez's immense popularity. An April 24 - May 2 Venezuela Data Analysis Institute (IVAD) poll puts him at 68.8%. That compares to comparable George Bush ones with some of the lowest ratings ever for a US president.

No discussion either of how student opposition is funded or for what purpose. That their money comes from US agencies like the misnamed National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, the International Republican Institute, and other pro-business US and international agencies and organizations. CIA's part of it, too.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3445

[stillcool]

1. it's worked so well here...

I don't know why they don't have more success elsewhere. What's wrong with those people?
From Steve Kangas circa 1998 (?) Steve Kangas was found dead in the bathroom on the 39th floor of the offices of Richard Mellon Scaife, in Pittsburgh PA. at 11:30 PM on February 8 1999. Shot twice in the head, and 2000 miles from home his death was quickly ruled a suicide.

A Timeline of CIA Atrocities

By Steve Kangas

The following timeline describes just a few of the hundreds of atrocities and crimes committed by the CIA. (1)

CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists," but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.

This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious "School of the Americas." (It opened in Panama but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia.) Critics have nicknamed it the "School of the Dictators" and "School of the Assassins." Here, the CIA trains Latin American military officers how to conduct coups, including the use of interrogation, torture and murder.

The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html

The American Empire: 1992 to present
from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum
2004 edition

Following its bombing of Iraq in 1991, the United States wound up with military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
Following its bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the United States wound up with military bases in Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia.
Following its bombing of Afghanistan in 2001-2, the United States wound up with military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Yemen and Djibouti.
Following its bombing and invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States wound up with Iraq.
This is not very subtle foreign policy. Certainly not covert. The men who run the American Empire are not easily embarrassed.
And that is the way the empire grows-a base in every neighborhood, ready to be mobilized to put down any threat to imperial rule, real or imagined. Fifty-eight years after world War II ended, the United States still has major bases in Germany and Japan; fifty ears after the end of the Korean War, tens of thousands of American armed forces continue to be stationed in South Korea.
"America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind that we could not have dreamed of before," US Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in February 2002. Later that year, the US Defense Department announced: "The United States Military is currently deployed to more locations then it has been throughout history."

[Joanne98]

2. From The Shock Doctrine...

In his 2006 book Overthrow, the former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer tries to get to the bottom of what has motivated the US politicians who have ordered and orchestrated foreign coups d'etat over the past century. Studying US involvement in regime change operations from Hawaii in 1893 to Iraq in 2003, he observes that there is often a clear three-stage process that takes place. First, a US-based multinational corporation faces some kind of threat to its bottom line by the actions of a foreign government demanding that the company "pay taxes or that it observe labor laws or environmental laws. Sometimes that company is nationalized or is somehow required to sell off some of its land or assets," Kinzer says. Second, US politicians hear of this corporate setback and reinterpret it as an attack on the United States: "They transform the motivation from an economic one into a political or geo-strategic one. They make the assumption that any regime that would bother an American company or harass an American company must be anti-American, repressive, dictatorial, and probably the tool of some foreign power or interest that wants to undermine the United States." The third stage happens when the politicians have to sell the need for intervention to the public, at which point it becomes a broadly drawn struggle of good versus evil, "a chance to free a poor oppressed nation from the brutality of a regime we assume is a dictatorship, because what other kind of regime would be bothering an American company?" Much of US foreign policy, in other words, is an excercise in mass projection, in which a tiny self-interested elite conflates its needs and desires with those of the entire world.

Kinzer points out that this tendency has been especially pronounced in politicians who move directly from the corporate world into public office. For instance, Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, worked as a high-powered international corporate lawyer for most of his life, representing some of the richest firms in the world in their conflicts with foreign governments. Dulle's various biographers have concluded, like Kinzer, that the secretary of state was simply incapable of distinguishing between the interest of corporations and the interests of his country. "Dulles had two lifelong obsessions:fighting Communism and protecting the rights of multi-national corporations," writes Kinzer. "In his mind they were...'interrelated and mutually enforcing.'" That meant he didn't need to choose between his obsessions: if the Guatemalan government took an action that hurt the interests of the Untied Fruit Company, for instance, that was a de facto attack on America and worthy of a military response.

As it pursues its twin obsessions of fighting terrorism and protecting the interests of multi-national corporations, the Bush administration, packed with CEOs fresh from the boardroom, is subject to the same confusions and conflations. But there is a significant difference. The companies with which Dulles identified were multi-nationals with large international investments in foreign countries-in mining, agriculture, banking and oil. these companies generally shared a straightforward objective: they wanted stable, profitable environments in which they could do business-loose investments laws, pliant workers and no nasty expropriation sursprises. Coups and military interventions were a means to that end, not the goal itself.

As proto-disaster capitalists, the architects of the War on Terror are part of a different breed of corporate-politicians from their predecessors, one for whom wars and other diasters are indeed the ends in themselves. When Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld conflate what is good for Lockheed, Halliburton, Carlyle and Gilead with what is good for the United States and indeed the world, its a form of projection with uniquely dangerous consequences. That's because what is unquestionably good for the bottom line of these companies is cataclysm-wars, epidemics, natural diasters and resource shortages-which is why all their fortunes have improved dramatically since Bush took office. What makes their acts of projection even more perilous is the fact that to an unprecedent degree, key Bush officials have maintained their interest in the diaster capitalism complex even as they have ushered in a new era of privatized war and diaster response, allowing them to simultaneously profit form the diasters they help unleash.