In Venezuela, the 1% won yesterday-there's nothing else you can say.
With the "opposition" controlling the legislature, Venezuela will no longer be an independent country, but once again an American colony.
Social services will be cut to nothing. The oil will be privatized(meaning the people of Venezuela will no longer benefit at all from their country even having oil) and the rich and the Americans will swagger around again as if they are the natural, eternal rulers.
Hopefully, the people's movement will learn and recover.
But for the next few years, there can be nothing but misery.
Everything humane and democratic and empowering for the people, for the time being, will stop. The economy will be "diversified"
i.e., once again subordinated to Wall Street). The community councils(the only voice the poor and the workers of Venezuela ever had, since the poor and the workers can never have a real say under "representative democracy"
The people voted...but they voted under crushing pressure from outside.
And the anti-chavistas here, all of whom have lived lives of nothing but privilege and comfort, will tell us we should be celebrating this. As if "Scandinavian social democracy" can ever be built out of a fire sale of a nation's resources and dignity.
Sickeningly, the "Socialist International" which is clearly no longer socialist in any sense now)was happy about the victory of the Venezuelan Thatcherites and their leader, Henry "the Marco Rubio of Venezuela" Capriles.
Maybe someday, Venezuela will be free again.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Eva Golinger?
Telesur?
Maduro?
And after the people of Eastern Europe overthrew Stalinism(which did deserve to die, and whose death I will never mourn), nonviolently and entirely on their own, the capitalists who came in brought nothing but ugliness, corporate theft and years of mass unemployment and hardship when they came in and imposed a completely unnecessary "shock therapy". Nobody should end up losing everything they have as a reward for courageously standing up to tyranny. Poland now has a "democratic capitalist" government veering toward's nationalist Catholic/antisemitic dictatorship, Hungary does as well, adding insane hatred of the Roma to the toxic mi
and pretty much all capitalists in both countries are cheering this on) and the former DDR is now part of a Germany that is trying to impose permanent right-wing austerity on all European countries(while continuing to punish the people of Greece for debts caused mainly by the greed of Goldman-Sachs. Only the Czech Republic, of all the former Warsaw Pact states, retains any humane, egalitarian values in its governance. By you this is "progress"? Just because they've got stock exchanges and Starbucks?
The ideals of socialism are not the cause what Stalin and his lackeys did. Tyranny can emerge under any economic system or any other ideology or religion (capitalism and nationalism inevitably gave birth to Naziism-Fascism, distorted Christianity mixed with capitalism and nationalism helped fuel the Crusades, the Inquisition and much of the imperial vision that created the Atlantic slave trade and the genocide inflicted on indigenous people in the Americas and the Antipodes) and given the Slavic world's history of turning to supposed "great men", it's quite likely that someone like Stalin would have emerged and committed the crimes Stalin was able to
And Hugo Chavez and his supporters had nothing in common with the Stalinists.
Have been unjustly used to demonize all forms of socialism, and, by extension, any effort to defend humane and compassionate values in any society at all.
There has been a despicable lie spread relentlessly over the past ninety-eight years now...the lie that ANY attempt to create a society run by any means other than greed and egotism, any effort to make a world in which all people are treated with dignity and respect and where no one lives in want and fear MUST end up replicating the Soviet Union under Stalin or Mao's China-that the only way to be free is to let the wealthy become more and more arrogant and demanding, and for everyone else to either just accept their lot or seek to change it solely by becoming a better selfish bastard than the existing selfish bastards.
It doesn't have to be that way.
And, in fact, we can't LET it be that way.
If we do, we're doomed as a planet.
If we are to survive, if life is to be, for the vast majority of the human race, anything on any higher level than eating, sleeping, reproducing and dying, we must keep alive the idea of running life on some sort of democratic cooperative model, because if we let that die, all we have left are "market values", and as the last thirty-four years prove, a world in which short-term gain for the few is the only model will inevitably become more and more brutal, unequal, environmentally unsustainable(capitalism will NEVER stop playing "Climate Chicken"
and personally soul-crushing.
Much of the writing is about left critiques of where the USSR went wrong(for myself, it went off the rails when they crushed the Krondstadt Uprising in 1921, a rebellion led by Red Army soldiers and sailor on the military island of Krondstadt, which is in the harbor of St. Petersburg(or Leningrad, as it was called at the time. The soldiers and sailors were fighting to preserve the autonomy of the soviets(the workers councils, which originally operated democratically and actually reflected the will of the workers in those communities, before Lenin reduced them to being powerless "transmission handles" of Party control.)
A lot of us don't want to live in a world where nothing can ever really change for the better. And I don't want my grandchildren to get that world as our legacy to them.
In the OP itself, I said I accepted the result. A person can accept a tragedy and still mourn it.
We both know capitalism has nothing to offer the poor anywhere in the world. The story of "microcredit" i.e., micro usury) proves that.
The shortage of consumer goods and rampant inflation are not recent problems. The drop in oil prices is.
from someone who has relatives in Venezuela, ITS PARTY TIME down there. From every single one and every person they know. Yep back to chains.
“Venezuela is going through the worst economic, social and cultural crisis ever recorded,” Adrian says, explaining that her agenda includes giving visibility to the problems that the Venezuelan LGBT community systematically faces. “We have to talk about the rights of couples and families, about the gender identity Act, about the mutilation of intersex children, and about discrimination, which includes hate crimes, bullying, workplace harassment, and access to housing and healthcare.”
Before becoming a candidate, Adrian had already been leading the fight towards civil rights for the LGBT community. In 2014, she introduced a project for a marriage equality act that was never addressed. “In the past 17 years the topic of LGBT rights was never seriously discussed,” she says. Adrian, who has not been able to attain legal recognition as female under Venezuelan law, says that an important number of representatives from her political party, Voluntad Popular, and across the opposition coalition are already aware of her proposals, and that it is just a matter of time before the issues finally reach national debate.
Too bad she's a right-wing stooge like Caitlyn.
that's the whole point of the OP.
