There's a new Congressional Report on Venezuela...

It's in pdf so I can't post it.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL32488.pdf

It's amazing how the fascists can still find time to fuck with Chavez. You would think with all that's on their plate right now they would have BETTER THINGS TO DO!

The purpose of our foreign policy is to make sure that NO alternative to our economic system is successful. To that extent, a successful Chavez represents a failure to U.S. foreign policy and a threat to crony capitalism.

:hi:

on human rights, on open government, on public participation in government, on elections, on a lively political culture, on fairness and justice, on medical care, on educational advances, on proper use of resources, on inclusiveness, and other social and political criteria, with the U.S. record of the last six years on these same matters.

I happen to know that Venezuela would shine on every score--it has the most vibrant democracy in South America, the most transparent vote counting process, and has made great strides on social justice--while the U.S. has shown serious decline, has a dead and deadening political culture at the top, with egregiously non-transparent elections, and has shown not just neglect of the poor, but murderous neglect (Katrina), and is characterized by new policies of torture, indefinite detention without charge, unjust and heinous war, looting by the rich, and the inability of the people to get their will implemented. In the U.S., the government is shredding the Constitution, while the opposition Democrats stand by and haplessly watch. In Venezuela, the people have all read their Constitution, are very proud of it, and came out by the tens of thousands to defend Constitutional government, when the violent military coup attempt occurred in 2002. In the U.S., the government attacked and invaded another country to get their oil. In Venezuela, the Chavez government has fought to insure that the nation's oil resource benefits all of the people, not just the rich.

Venezuela may be poor, except for their oil riches, after decades and centuries of brutal exploitation by the rich elite and by US multinationals and US-dominated institutions like the World Bank. But as for improvement, and its near miraculous establishment of democracy, lawful rule and maximum participation, it puts the U.S. to shame. We may be richer, but we are not better off--most of us. We are the victims of a sick and dying fascist empire. They are the future of social justice, environmental wisdom (which they are learning from the indigenous tribes), and the rebirth of true democracy in our hemisphere.

know where to begin. Why bother? What a disgrace of a report--to come from our so-called Democratic Congress! It buys into every Bush State Department and corporate news monopoly "talking point" and disinformation tactic.

Utterly disgusting.