President Hugo Chavez said a number of interesting things in his annual address to the Venezuelan National Assembly one month ago today. I just read this account of his speech, and am posting the main points of the article because Chavez and his government get NO opportunity to explain their side of things in our corpo-fascist press. Here are the main points of the article on his speech:
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/5077 --Chavez announced a 25% increase in the minimum wage this year.
--he promised that funding to health care, education, and other anti-poverty programs will not be cut.
--the national budget has been cut by 6%.
--domestic debt (note: very low to begin with) nearly tripled in 2009 because of the world economic crisis which caused a plunge in oil prices (note: oil prices are heading up now).
--he spoke of social programs as "temporary" and as intended to "channel people out of poverty."
"'There is an important, appreciable difference between the poor of the past and the poor who remain now. Now, they have food, medical care, and free medicines,' Chavez said, mentioning the expansion of primary health care coverage to nearly 100% of the population. 'Some day, they will get out of their situation, through these transitory programs.'”--the article sums up the recent, voluntary devaluation of the bolivar as intended to increase public investments in "non-oil exports and domestic manufacturing" and ultimately to wean the country off of oil dependence.
--the article notes that all the major labor union organizations agreed with these measures.
--the article says that inflation in 2009 was decreased by 6% ("although it remains the highest in Latin America").
--Chavez says his government doesn't have a "complex" about admitting errors, and rectified a faulty energy crisis response (crisis due to drought affecting hydroelectric plants) "in no more than 24 hours."
--regarding the world financial crisis, Chavez makes three important points: 1)
"What makes the current state of global affairs historically unique is that it represents all crises united into one... it is much more than an economic crisis; it is a moral crisis, a crisis of values, that engulfs the entire world; it is a financial, food, environmental, and climate crisis.” 2) This crisis is
"a demonstration that capitalism and neo-liberalism constitute the most horrifying perversion." And 3) Venezuela is responding to the crisis from a socialist perspective--a combination of Christianity and Marxism. In addition to the subject line quote, he says that
"Christ was more radical than all of us combined.”--two more points from the speech: He expresses disappointment in President Obama regarding the U.S./Colombia military agreement and describes the seven new U.S. military bases in Colombia as "seven stab wounds in the heart of Latin America" and also regarding U.S. support for the rightwing military coup in Honduras; and he says that, in addition to providing aid to post-earthquake Haiti, the world should also ask,
"Why is Haiti so poor?" He says that,
“Haiti is a net product of colonialism and imperialism over more than a century; of military interventions and the extraction of its riches.”---------------------------------
I am particularly interested in Chavez's remarks about Christ and Christianity. He basically says that Christ was more radical than Marx. Christ's message was quite simple: "Love thy neighbor." Not, compete with thy neighbor. Not, take care of yourself first and then your neighbor. Not, kill thy neighbor and take his oil. Not, torture thy neighbor because he might hurt you first. To be obvious. But also, not, drive thy neighbor out of business. Not "survival of the fittest." Not market madness. Not "derivatives." Not "trickle down economics" which never trickles down. Not, outsourcing jobs to the cheapest labor markets. Not, poisoning "the lilies of the field" with pesticides. And also, not inquisitions, not witchburnings, not wearing laced-trimmed, royal priestly robes and thinking you are "God's gift" (i.e., the particular sins of the Catholic Church hierarchy). In short, love is the first and only rule. And that is quite a bit more radical than Marx.
I have often puzzled about the unique influence of the Catholic Church in Latin America. Whether one is considering the horrors of the "conquest" and of colonial rule, and the role of Spanish Catholicism in those horrors, or the 20th-21st century struggle for democracy and social justice and the role of "Liberation Theology" priests in these more recent struggles--even to the election of a "Liberation Theology" bishop--the beloved "bishop of the poor," as he is called--as president of Paraguay--there is an entanglement of church and state that runs very deep in Latin America, and that may seem quite mystifying to us northerners who have been educated in the "wall of separation" between church and state that our founders--Jefferson and Madison in particular--built into the U.S. Constitution. There is also a third foundation of Latin American society--and of current struggles--that has been almost wiped out here, and that is the culture and religion of the Indigenous. I remember when I first learned that Mexico's religious patron, Our Lady of Guadalupe, was likely a transformation of the Mayan Goddess of Compassion, Ix Chel, into a Christian ikon. And I thought of this recently when Ecuadorans overwhelmingly voted in favor of their new Constitution which enshrines the rights of Mother Nature ("Pachamama") as the law of the land.
Something is going on here that we northerners may have difficulty in understanding: That is, a more integrated, more coherent view of the world than has occurred here in the U.S. The closest social phenomenon we have to this was probably Martin Luther King and the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s-1970s, which was so church-centered. That revolution was born in the black churches in the South. I was there in black churches in the South, as a civil rights worker in the 1960s, and saw and felt it happening. That movement had very distinctive and pervasive religious roots. And King spoke like Moses of going to the mountaintop and seeing "the Promised Land" and envisioning the future of an integrated society. He also, like Chavez and the other Bolivarians, was committed to economic justice. His last civil rights campaign was in support of a garbage workers' strike.
However, on the whole, as for our national political establishment, the sort of religion that is acceptable--that gets promoted-- is pro-war, pro-rich and corporate, extremely divisive and often racist--and represents only a small minority of the people. All the major religious leaders in the U.S., for instance, vocally opposed the war on Iraq and were completely ignored (as well the nearly 60% of Americans who opposed that war--Feb '03, all polls). Those who were promoted were pro-war "fundamentalists" who hold a minority and hardly Christian view on most issues. Most of our major religious leaders have often called for social and economic justice, and have been ignored on this as well. Further, our national political establishment largely adheres to the "dog eat dog" philosophy of the unregulated, addictive "market" gambling casino--which has no ethical basis whatsoever, religious or otherwise. 'Let the rich do what they will, and all will be fine."
Right. Well, we have been doing that for the last thirty years--letting the rich do what they will--and it is not fine. It has gotten us into the worst hole we have ever been in.
It seems to me that Chavez is fundamentally challenging this unethical sort of capitalism. He calls it "capitalism." I call it "
predatory capitalism"--the "dog eat dog" of bloated multinational corporations with too much power. I am not sure that capitalism itself is the problem--which, to me, is just a means for human beings to pool their resources to fund various enterprises. Nor do I have any dislike of "the marketplace," per se. Indeed, I think "the marketplace" is a fundamental human need, for its creation of variety and the mixing of cultures, ideas and people. What is bad--what Chavez calls "the most horrifying perversion"--is MONOPOLIES on wealth and power, which in fact blockade and undo the diversification of "the marketplace" and create all sorts of other distortions--just a for instance, the U.S. ag industry dumping cheap produce on "third world" markets to destroy a country's local food producers and addict the country to MacDonald's and Burger King. What is worse, these U.S. dominated globalisation distortions are killing the planet--Mother Earth--and no one seems able to stop this, because democracy here, in the U.S.--the center of global corporate power, and one of the two biggest polluters in the world--has become so atrophied, and our progressive majority, who are very pro-environment, no longer has a voice.
It may be ironical that this warning--the food and environmental component of the global capitalist crisis--is coming from a country, Venezuela, that is so dependent on oil production and sales--but there it is. It is the truth. And maybe it's another one of those complexities of Latin American society that some of us may have difficulty understanding. Though they are dependent on oil, the Bolivarians
see past the oil and other temporary resources, to a much bigger problem--the inequity in the world--and are, at least,
using the oil to address that inequity--as Chavez indicates, for temporary but vitally necessary bootstrapping of the poor. The U.S., on the other hand, is instigating heinous wars to
get more oil for its multinational corporations and its great war machine.
It seems to me that we are all in the midst of some excruciating ironies. And it really doesn't help to have our State Department and its corpo-fascist 'news' monopoly scribes constantly berating Latin American leftist leaders, Chavez in particular, when we--the human race--are all in this together, and MUST find solutions to this worldwide environmental and economic crisis. We know why this is so: Our corporate rulers don't want any "socialist" solutions here--and seem quite suicidal in destroying the prosperous "New Deal" society we once had here--and they DO want control of Venezuela's oil--the biggest oil reserves in the world--twice Saudi Arabia's. And that has to be one of the biggest ironies of all--that Saudi Arabia, THE most undemocratic and repressive country on earth is the closest of U.S. allies, while a vigorous, if not perfect, democracy, Venezuela, struggles with U.S. government and corpo-fascist defamation and hatred. While our politicians toady to the worst tyrants on earth, Venezuela has to worry about U.S. intentions in embedding the U.S. military at seven bases in neighboring Colombia, with U.S. war planes, U.S. navy ships, and U.S. soldiers and 'contractors' surrounding Venezuela's oil coast.
There is not a lot we can do about this, in the short term. (Long term, we must restore our own democratic institutions, especially transparent vote counting, or we will go the way of the Roman Empire, to swift decline and fall.) But at least we can try to see past all the propaganda--even Chavez's (he is a politician, after all)--to what is really happening in Venezuela, in Latin America, here and in the world.
What is happening in Venezuela--also Bolivia, Ecuador and other Latin American countries--is much deeper and wider than any politician embodies. It is much, much bigger than Chavez himself. It is the fruition of centuries of struggle against colonization, first mostly by Spain, and then by the U.S. And it has to do with a culture that has fundamental differences from our own, but which is--very strangely, ironically and wonderfully--similar to our own in its devotion to democracy at the grass roots level. Due to long hard work on their democratic institutions, most especially transparent vote counting, that grass roots devotion to democracy has risen to national power in many Latin American countries, first of all in Venezuela, with the 1998 election of the Chavez government and the 2002 popular and peaceful defeat of the U.S.-supported rightwing coup against the Chavez government. The grass roots has "arrived" in Latin America. The people are asserting their sovereignty and taking charge of their own affairs, and leaders like Chavez, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and others, serve at the will of this grass roots democracy movement. The leaders may be personified in our corpo-fascist press as their countries, but they are not their countries. They are the
products of this peaceful, grass roots revolution.
So, when Chavez renegotiates the oil contracts, and gets tough with the multinational corporations that want the oil, and demands a better deal for Venezuela and its social programs (and does so successfully--eight major corporations from as many countries just signed on, on Venezuela's terms), he is doing the will of the people who elected him. Exxon Mobil may hate him for it, but they are at the same time hating the Venezuelan people and democracy itself. This hatred should not surprise us but we should keep it in mind when we puzzle over our corpo-fascist media's depiction of Chavez as a "dictator." Who is he "dictating" to? And, who is he obeying?
We don't have Venezuela's option of using their vast oil resources to bootstrap the poor, but some of their other solutions--worker-controlled businesses, loans/grants to small businesses, land reform (help to small farmers), community councils (to bypass corrupt bureaucracies and politicians), government-funded primary health care centers spread throughout communities, and the emphasis on education--all may be relevant here and applicable here. Just a for instance: Why should a transnational corporation hold a U.S. community hostage, extracting tax breaks and other preferences, often destroying local businesses, and then abandoning the community anyway, to move its operations to cheaper labor markets abroad? Labor groups here should be looking into what works, and what doesn't, with worker-run businesses in Venezuela, and what is applicable here and what isn't. Or another for instance: Why should a college education cost a parents' life savings, or lifelong indebtedness? Is this good for our society? Maybe defund a few aircraft carriers, and a few of the hundreds of U.S. military bases around the world, and invest in our children, instead--as Venezuela is doing?
How about we have an intelligent discussion of our election system, vs Venezuela's, and our use of resources vs. Venezuela's, and our health and educational systems vs Venezuela's, and our attitude toward Mother Earth, vs. Venezuela's, Bolivia's and Ecuador's? Venezuela is not a "workers' paradise," but they are experimenting including the empowerment of workers in many ways that we don't see here. Workers and Democrats here should be learning about these experiments and encouraging their success, rather than falling for the corpo-fascist crapola that it's all bad and Chavez is a tyrant. I think the biggest irony is that he isn't. He is subject to constant constraints and criticism, among other things, from the labor unions. Was a big hike in the minimum wage wise, given the inflation problem? We'll see. The Chavez government is betting on productivity and consumer spending, as well as the rise in oil prices, to ride out Bush's economic disaster. Will it work? We should be hoping that it will instead of, as some DUers, crowing at every misstep or failure of the Chavez government, and promoting that corpo-fascist view, that a government that listens to its people, that serves its people and that is committed to social justice, must fail, and "dog eat dog" must win.
:patriot: --means I love my country enough to criticize it when it goes down wrong or disastrous paths.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
