|
Edited on Sat Jul-28-07 08:08 PM by Peace Patriot
In the exchanges between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, on who they will or will not directly negotiate with, as president, I have heard them characterize Venezuela as a "renegade state" and its democratically elected president as a "dictator."
It is galling to me to have Democratic presidential candidates so stupid and uninformed, or so malevolent, that they would group Venezuela with a failed state like North Korea, or a frightened, socially repressive, patriarchal state like Iran--Venezuela, a 100% democracy, with a 100% Constitutional "rule of law" government, elected last year with 63% of the vote in elections that are many orders of magnitude more transparent than our own, and a government that is many orders of magnitude more democratic, more just, more tolerant and more committed to serving its people than any government in South America has ever been--a government so far superior to this malignancy in Washington DC that dares to call itself the government of the United States, that it is ludicrous to compare them.
Our government has slaughtered half a million people in Iraq, and has tortured thousands. Who has Venezuela killed? Who have they tortured? Who have they even put in jail unfairly?
The rule of law in our government is in shreds. Bush and Cheney have blatantly broken many laws, including laws that go the heart of our democracy, and are asserting dictatorial powers--while a Democratic Congress stands by and does nothing. What laws has Hugo Chavez broken? How has he acted unconstitutionally?
Our war profiteering corporate news monopolies are a disgrace to journalism. We all know this. Basically, five billionaire rightwing CEO's control our public airwaves, and all news and opinion in this country. Viewpoints that are in the interest of the majority of Americans cannot be heard--except on the internet. This is not "free speech." This is corporate brainwashing.
But Venezuela...ah, Venezuela, they dare to deny a license renewal to a corporate broadcasting company that actively participated in the violent military coup attempt against the legitimate government, and their president must be a "dictator." This is a ludicrously unbalanced and unreasonable view. All other commercial TV/radio stations in Venezuela continue to broadcast exclusively rightwing views, newspapers of all kinds flourish, in the liveliest political culture in Latin America, and one of their public airwaves is now open to independent broadcasters and to previously excluded voices, such as the poor, the indigenous and minorities. Do we have any such wide open national broadcasting company here in the U.S., open to new creative producers, and to leftist (majority) opinion and alternative views?
In Venezuela, people protest vociferously and often and with big crowds. When anti-Chavez students recently protested that license non-renewal, the National Assembly (Congress) invited the students to come before them and debate the issue. Here they "cage" protesters in "no free speech zones," and arrest them when they try to make their views heard to deaf officials. Which country has more "free speech"?
In Venezuela, the government engages in vigorous efforts, and has established programs, to maximize citizen participation in government and politics, and in important decisions about the use of resources. It's not "them and us," as it is here--where we write letters, and they ignore them; and where our tax money is being used for evil purposes that most Americans (70%) disagree with, and we have no say in the matter ("taxation without representation" once again!); and where the government does everything it can to suppress votes and prevent citizen involvement. Who has a more democratic, participatory system? Who has a real democracy? Would a "dictator" be encouraging maximum participation, citizen empowerment, local control of resources in community councils, voting, vote count monitoring, outreach to excluded groups such as the indigenous, the inclusion of indigenous land rights in the Constitution, the inclusion of a recall-of-the-president provision in the Constitution? Are these the actions of a "dictator"?
And how does this compare with our state and federal government practices of secrecy, lack of accountability, limiting the public to 2-minutes of "public in-put" in official meetings where everything is decided behind closed doors, lack of access to public documents including election data, refusing to allow public election monitors to ever LOOK AT the computers that are secretly tabulating the votes, abandonment of the poor, not just during Katrina, but every day in our inner cities, criminalizing the poor, imprisoning huge numbers of the poor for petty crimes, and larding taxpayer money and tax breaks on the rich and the corporate?
Who are our Democratic candidates serving in making statements like this--that Venezuela is a "renegade state," that its duly elected and hugely popular, and entirely law-abiding, president is a "dictator"?
They are not serving us. They are not serving the vast majority of Americans--workers, labor unions, the poor, small business, the middle class, minorities, teachers and other progressive professionals! They are not serving world peace or social justice. They are not serving the ideals of the Democratic Party, or this country.
They are serving global corporate predators and first world loan sharks, in lockstep with George Bush and Dick Cheney, who want to make Venezuela and the other new leftist democracies in the Andes region their next "theater of war"!
And when they repeat these Karl Rove and Condi Rice "talking points," they are helping global corporate predators and war profiteers keep the American people stupid about these things, so that when the fascists make their next move against Venezuela and the Andes democracies, we'll have our heads in the sand, as we did in the 1980s, during Reagan's atrocities.
The Bushites' goal: To rob the gas, oil, minerals and other rich natural resources of that region--which the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador dare to think of as belonging to the people who live there--and to enslave these free people in corporate sweatshops and with World Bank loans, on pain of death and dismemberment.
My stomach hurts and I want to vomit at the deaths and tortures and chainsawings and shootings of union leaders, peasant farmers, environmentalists and political leftists, that the U.S. has been responsible for in Latin America, and that are going on TODAY, in a South American country that our Democratic candidates DO support, Colombia--a rightwing government with intimate ties to these paramilitary murderers and drug traffickers. Yes, they pour billions of our taxpayer dollars into the corrupt Colombian government, while demonizing the democracy next door, Venezuela, and trying to set it and its neighbors up for the same kind of horrible repression.
The Chavez government and the people of Venezuela, and the brave and determined people of the Andes region, could teach the Democratic Party a thing or two about democracy. What is wrong with our candidates? What is wrong with our party leaders? Arrogant, oblivious, stupid, ignorant? Or bought and paid for?
I don't know the answer to this. I am appalled by their statements. Back in the 1980s, the Reagan regime not only instigated an illegal war on Nicaragua, it also was complicit in the slaughter of TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND Mayan villagers in Guatemala. In Latin America, our government has condoned horrors beyond belief. What is happening now in Latin American countries--with Guatemala among the last, because it was so devastated--is a birth of democracy such as we not seen in the western hemisphere since our own revolution. It is a peaceful revolution, and a remarkable achievement of the people of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Nicaragua (and soon Paraguay, this year; then Peru, possibly followed by Mexico). The vast poor population of Latin America is at last coming into its own as a political force--after decades and centuries of brutal repression often backed by the U.S. Hugo Chavez is ONE of the leaders of this revolution, and Venezuela is ONE of the countries where this revolution has been sweeping elections and taking power.
The United States should be celebrating this peaceful revolution and supporting it. But no, our leaders pal around with Prince Bandar and Colombia's Uribe and Mexico's Calderon and Vladimir Putin. And the wannabe Democrats seem to have the same "friends' in mind. They don't seem to identify with ordinary people in the U.S., let alone with ordinary people who are pulling off a political miracle in South America. They act like they dread real democracy.
Chavez is a colorful and irrepressible speaker. He is a man of the people, born poor. He is not diplomatic. He sometimes says intemperate things. Not polite. Not measured. Not smooth-tongued. The other day he said that he wanted to throw a Mexican official out of Venezuela, because the Mexican official--parroting Bush--called Chavez a "dictator." Of course it is Mexico's rightwing president Felipe Calderon who just brutally repressed a peaceful teachers union-led protest in Oaxaca (where the rightwing governor has been using paramilitaries to kidnap, torture, rape and kill union and community organizers). Chavez no doubt felt insulted. He had every right to be. But he has harmed no one. He has expelled no one. He has silenced no one. He has invaded no one. On the contrary, he has good and close relations with most South American countries, and has been an inspiration to all of them, and to the vast poor population in the region, with his government's vigorous and innovative programs for the poor, while presiding over an economy in which the PRIVATE sector has shown the most growth.
When the Venezuelan people rose up, by the tens of thousands, and poured into the streets, and peacefully defeated the Bush/US backed violent military coup against their democratic government and president, in 2002, they held copies of their Constitution in their hands, and it was "our Constitution" that was on everybody's lips, even before the name of their kidnapped president.
Nowhere in living memory is there a people more passionately devoted to the rule of law, or more proud of their achievement of peaceful change. Bush and the fascist elite in Venezuela, in league with the rightwing paramilitaries who are operating in Colombia and on the border with Venezuela, and in the rural Venezuela states with large rich land holdings (where the oil and other resources are located), have done everything they can to destroy this peaceful revolution and topple this democratic government. Bush has poured millions of our taxpayer dollars into the fascist opposition, through the USAID/NED, and no doubt through black budgets. (He did not make John "death squad" Negroponte Undersecretary of State for Latin American for nothing!) This opposition cannot win fair and open elections, and cannot regain its former unfair and repressive power except through conspiracy and violence.
Bolivia--which elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, a friend and close ally of Chavez and Venezuela--has similar conditions, with the rightwing big landowners now trying to split the resource-rich rural provinces off from the central government, to deny the vast poor urban population any benefit from their country's wealth. Similarly in Ecuador, which just elected US-educated, leftist economist Rafael Correa as president--also a friend and close ally of Chavez and Venezuela--is facing very corrupt and entrenched rightwing forces, and is trying to peacefully and democratically empower the poor majority for the first time. This is after decades of dislocation of small peasant farmers, by the big landowners, by US corporations, such as Drummond Mining and Chiquita Banana, and by the murderous US "war on drugs" (which all of these governments oppose), to drive them off their small plots of land, which their families owned and farmed for hundreds of years, with unregulated pesticide spraying, which is killing animals and food crops, and damaging human DNA, and other violence. This is why the urban areas are crowded with shantytowns. This is the problem that Drummond, and Chiquita, and Monsanto, and Exxon-Mobile, and their local fascist allies have created, that the Bolivarian Revolution is trying to solve.
Chavez has other friends and allies as well--Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Vasquez in Uruguay, also Ortega in Nicaragua--all of whom defied orders from the Bushites to "isolate" Chavez and Venezuela. In reply to this directive, Kirchner said, "But he is my friend!" Even Uribe in Colombia felt obliged to distance himself from the plots against Chavez (as did the opposition candidate in Venezuela, in the December election--to his credit). Chile is a little iffy on Chavez and ended up abstaining on the US Security Council seat for Venezuela. But Venezuela went on to earn a seat on OAS human rights commission, over Bush/U.S. objections. The Bushites have about as much credibility in South America as they do in the Middle East. MOST of the leaders in Latin America know that this social revolution's time has come, that it is beneficial, and that Venezuela and Chavez have done much to strengthen their own hands in dealing with the despised giant of the north.
Why aren't our Democratic candidates and party leaders cheering this amazing, peaceful, democratic transformation on? Why are they joining Bush, Cheney and cabal in treating Venezuela like a pariah? For the same reasons, I fear, that they have done so little to curtail the real dictator, Bush and his overlord Cheney, have re-funded instead of de-funded the war on Iraq, have permitted our election system to fall under the power of rightwing Bushite corporations and their "trade secret" vote tabulation code, and so rarely get to the heart of any matter, or speak bluntly and undiplomatically, as Chavez sometimes does. They do not really represent the American people.
What's behind all this, I suspect, is more than the oil and other resources in the Andes, but a combination of financial motives regarding one of the Bolivarians' main goals--Latin American self-determination--including creation of the Bank of the South (to replace the World Bank/IMF), regional trade integration through Mercosur, and a potential South American "Common Market" and common currency, rejection of US "free trade" deals and rejection of the US "war on drugs." The transformation of South America is not too strong a word. It's a whole new game. And the Democrats seem to be making the same mistake the Bushites have made--turning to dirty plots, and militaristic modes, sneakily trying to "divide and conquer," and utterly ignoring the justice of this movement. The upshot is that most Latin Americans despise Bush, and overwhelmingly support Chavez. Evo Morales said it best, in regard to renegotiation of corporate resource contracts: "We want partners, not bosses." He also has famously said, "The time of the people has come." And he is so right. This movement is huge and unstoppable. It is an historic transformation.
Bush doesn't want "partners." Bush wants to be the Biggest Boss of all--the ONLY Boss. We know this. But what of the Democrats? Do they want to deal with South America on fair terms, or continue the brutal military and economic policies of the past, and end up being as much of a pariah as the Bush Junta is. It is not Chavez who will end up the pariah. It is us.
One final puzzle: In Venezuela, they use an electronic voting system, but it is an open-source code system--anyone may review the code by which votes are tabulated--and they handcount 55% (!) of the ballots, as a check on machine fraud. Here we have a closed, privatized, corporate "trade secret" vote counting system, and many states don't do any audit at all--zero handcount--as a check on machine fraud, and the best states count only 1% (very inadequate).
It seems ironic that office holders who were elected in an almost entirely non-transparent vote counting system should be criticize as a "dictator" a man who was actually, provably, verifiably elected to his office. The rightwing in this country called FDR a "dictator." And you have to wonder whose side our Democrats would have been on, back then.
|