Spinning Chávez

http://www.newstatesman.com/200711260004

Spinning Chávez
Hugh O'Shaughnessy

Published 26 November 2007

Hugh O'Shaughnessy argues the West's media and politicians will continue to try to undermine Hugo Chávez - despite the successes of his Bolivarian revolution


On Sunday 2 December 16 million Venezuelans vote in a referendum: all the signs are that they will approve constitutional reforms proposed by President Hugo Chávez.

Popular as ever for having put a big dent in the shocking gap between rich and poor in an oil-rich country, he wants a chance to bury 19th century Leninist shibboleths, strengthen already rumbustious local democracy and stand for election again.

It is very likely that the electors will give Chávez what he wants: it is certain that spinners in Washington, London and elsewhere will do their best to pull the process to pieces.

The spinners blench at the idea that US nationalism could be challenged by nationalism of some South American. Nor can they abide the feeling that Chávez’s star is waxing, despite his injudicious outbursts.

At the same time the feeling that the US star is waning - consequent on a floundering Wall Street and a foundering dollar, George Bush’s military defeats in the Third World, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and a global kidnapping scheme – cannot be contemplated.

Now those who have fawned on Saudi Arabian kings, indulged the Israelis’ atom bomb and their criminal mistreatment of Palestinians, and quietly backed every Latin American dictator from Somoza and Pinochet to the Argentine and Brazilian generals will attempt to portray the Venezuelan leader as anti-democratic.

They will also try to bury the European Commission’s high praise for last year’s presidential elections in Venezuela - "the high turnout, and peaceful atmosphere in which they were held, together with the acceptance of results by all those involved".

Chávez won that poll having in 2002 had to fight his way out of a brief coup by a dim but authoritarian businessman who was lustily cheered on by Bush and the then minister Dr Denis MacShane on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government.

The stage is set for the undermining of Chávez. On 19 November BBC2’s This World screened 'The Trillion Dollar Revolutionary', programme which would never have been permitted about, say, Begin or Olmert.

Its combination of culpable ignorance and sneering superciliousness produced what must be the worst “documentary” of the decade.

With slightly more sophistication, Chatham House four days earlier had staged a conference on fighting social inequality in Latin America aided by the Foreign Office and DIFID and funded by the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank.

Toe-curlingly, it was inaugurated by Shaheed Malik, a junior minister at DIFID, who contented himself with sad little jokes about Lancashire and Yorkshire but, to the relief of all, soon rushed off.

Despite the fact that Chávez has distinguished himself in the fight for a fairer society the day included no speakers from Venezuela and attempted to avoid any reference to that country. It refused to accept the words last month of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America which commented: "Thanks to rapid GDP growth and the ongoing implementation of broad social programmes, in 2006 alone the poverty rate was lowered from 37.1% to 30.2% and the indigence rate from 15.9% to 9.9%." Venezuela was, the UN said, well on the way to reaching its first Millennium Development Goal.

Meanwhile at the top end The Economist, which has for long made money out of laughing at poor people, forms a plangent Greek chorus who forlornly hope that wicked Venezuela’s oil, the country’s prop, will run out or the price collapse. But with Venezuela’s growing reserves the magazine’s writers might as well dream Osama bin Laden will become the next editor of Vogue.

With Chávez gaining strength, a spinner’s life in Britain is not a happy one.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200711260004

I can't wait until Sunday, when the spoiled brats get slaughtered again. I hope the next project Chavez enbarks on is doing something about the liars in his corporate media! They have been nothing but a right-wing proganda machine. Venezuela needs a respectable media. Chavez should just nationalized them!

Bushites and global corporate predators.

They wouldn't dare put their corporate resource war and their slaughter of a million people to get their oil, to a vote.

Oh, you say they did? Har-har. You haven't been paying attention. I'm talking about TRANSPARENT vote counting--that is, REAL vote counting--like they have in Venezuela, which uses electronic voting, but it is an OPEN SOURCE CODE system--anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they handcount a whopping FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the vote, as a check on machine fraud, even so.

I'm not talking about unreal vote counting, like we have here--whose outcomes are not only twisted toward fascism with billions of dollars in filthy campaign money, and by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies, who are the chief beneficiary of those billions, but are now directly controlled by rightwing corporations, with electronic voting machines run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls (handcount of ZERO votes in many states, and a meager, inadequate 1% even in the best of states, as a check on machine fraud).

This is why we have 70% of the American people opposed to the Iraq War, and a Congress that ESCALATES the war, and lards $100 billion MORE of our non-existent tax dollars into Bush/Cheney's coffers, to keep killing Iraqis until they sign over their oil rights.

And they call Chavez a "dictator"!

:wow: :wow: :wow: :wow: :wow:

:banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

(Laughter is the best medicine.)

But only when it reaches a decision they disagree with. Ever heard the term "tyranny of the majority"? It's an earnest Publican belief that the are oppressed by the methods of Democracy, in that those they disagree with are allowed to voice and vote just as surely as they are. It's quite threatening from their perspective.

It is the progressives--who believe in a strong middle class, upward mobility for the poor, maximum citizen participation in government and politics, collective action for the common good, clean government, open government, equal rights--who are conservative. They want to preserve the capitalist system as it was when the "social contract" was made between business and the workers and the general citizenry. Business invests its capital in enterprises that create prosperity, behaves responsibly and legally, and shares the wealth--in good wages and benefits--and the citizenry will provide well-educated, well-trained, healthy, loyal, productive workers.

It was a good social contract. I was born as it was being made (1945), and benefited throughout my early life from its provisions. It created a good society--a society that attended to the common good, with free public libraries and parks, free public education often through university, downtown areas as public squares, Social Security for the elderly, low cost medical care (medicine as an "act of mercy" not as an act of plunder), a progressive tax (the richest pay the most), strong Savings & Loan institutions (protecting small savings), anti-usury laws, reasonably priced housing and other goods, virtually no homeless, hungry people, strong unions, public officials held to high standards of conduct, strong belief in the Constitutional "balance of power" and the rule of law, fairness to all people, the beginnings of the black's, women's and other civil rights movements, and the environmental movement (which came to fruition in the '60s), with everyone--even big business, it seemed--focused on the common good and on upward mobility.

These radical fascists have broken that social contract--and I don't just mean Bushites. The Democratic Party leadership has played a big role in the bleeding of jobs out of the country, and in many other corporate/fascist policies (not least of which is the war, also 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY vote 'counting' controlled by rightwing corporations).

This is also why you find DEMOCRATS chiming in with BUSHITE "talking points" about Hugo Chavez. They KNOW they have acted in bad faith, that the contract is over--they broke it!--and that Hugo Chavez puts them to shame, as a real progressive, trying to repair all the fascist damage in HIS country, while the fascists in THIS country do everything thing they can to topple his popular and legitimately elected government.

The rats! Hardly a one of them is this Congress can prove that they were actually elected. They are as illegitimate as Bush/Cheney, and it shows.

But to get back to "conservatism." The alternative to real conservatism--of the kind I described above--was violent revolution. That is why big business, in the '40s through '70s, played along with the social contract. They had the specter of the Russian and Chinese (and Cuban, Vietnamese and other) communist revolutions in their nightmares. They purged our unions of "communists" (often just leftists), but they did make a pact with the remaining labor movement not to treat American labor as slave labor, which was their want, but to bow temporarily to the majority view that workers are human beings and entitled to fair compensation and decent working conditions. This was the foundation of the "good society"--fear of violent communist revolution.

Now that the Soviet Union is gone, and the Chinese have turned into some kind of weird communist/ fascist/capitalists, big business can--and did--go for broke. Their preferred form of labor is young women and girls from dirt poor areas of Asia, indentured for their passage to places like Saipan, and enslaved in sweatshops. Their notion of the "common good" is that they own everything, including our voting machines, and make us pay billions for our own infrastructure. This is a RADICAL departure from the assumptions of American society for the last 80 years, and some assumptions that are 200+ years old, such as democracy and the sovereign power of the people.

It is radical. It is NOT conservative. Assaults on Social Security, for instance (including their borrowing against it, to pay for tax cuts for the rich, and for a heinous, illegal war) are RADICAL departures from the past. And they create a radically unbalanced society--with violent revolution as one of the most likely outcomes.

Venezuela has suffered this imbalance of rich and poor throughout its history, as have most Latin American countries. And violent revolution has never been far beneath the surface, for desperately poor people, and has occasionally erupted. But also, every time they have tried to solve the problem democratically--as with the socialist Allende government in Chile in the '70s--the U.S. has violently interfered.

More recently, the Clinton regime, in cahoots with global corporate predators and World Bank/IMF loan sharks, promised them American-style middle class prosperity through "neo-liberalism" (basically, global corporate control of their economies, or "free trade")--to disastrous results. The poverty in Latin American has gotten even worse. Whole countries went down in ruins (such as Argentina). Millions of small farmers were driven off their lands, and into urban shantytown squalor. Social programs--bootstrapping, education--vanished, as first world financiers squeezed every last peso out of the poor, the starving, the homeless and the jobless. And corporations like Bechtel bought up the infrastructure, and, in Bolivia, for instance, started jacking up the price of water to the poor, even charging the poor for collecting rainwater! (That got the Bolivians--they revolted, and elected Evo Morales, a Bolivarian, as president--and threw Bechtel out of their country.)

When you look at things this way, you realize that Hugo Chavez and the vast Bolivarian revolution that he is a spokesman for, is actually the MIDDLE way. It could even be called conservative. It is a peaceful, democratic revolution--to attempt to CORRECT this imbalance in a way that harms no one, and improves everything for everyone, even the rich. It is the middle way between the fascist greed and U.S. control of the past, and inevitable, chaotic, violent revolution, when people are so oppressed that they have nothing to lose.

And THAT is what our fascist Bushites and their corporatist Democratic brethren are flirting with here--pushing us to the point where we have nothing to lose, and we are closer to that point than most people realize (which is why all these fascist repression laws and precedents are being put in place). WE have a good society in living memory. WE have a long tradition of the success of labor and social movements, and a long history of democracy and steady--if sometimes difficult--progress toward a better society. The question in Venezuela is whether they can hang on to the real democracy that the people of Venezuela have established, and keep it steady on its feet, as it attempts to solve "Great Depression"-scale problems. The question here is whether we can RESTORE our democracy to fend off ruin, or to implement structural changes, democratically, if ruin is upon us.

What is radical is the ruination of countries, and the impoverishment of millions of people. Restoring balance, social order, and fairness is conservative.

Monopolist". I can't find a copy of it anywhere but have only read others takes on it. The author (Howe) cites how these "limited government" monopolists are all for central government as long as they are in control of the government (read: the puppetmasters). That is why these "rabid anti-communists" backed the Bolsheviks and the German fascists at the same time. It was a big puppetshow.

It's not a black and white issue--as our corporate media tried to make it seem, when Chavez denied a license renewal to one TV station, a routine action of governments and often done for a lot less cause than Chavez had. (The station that the Venezuelan media commission denied a license to, RCTV, had actively participated in the violent rightwing military coup attempt in 2002, among other violations of their license.)

The airwaves are PUBLIC property, and every government in the world--good, bad or indifferent--regulates them and licenses them. The best governments have rules for licensing of the public airwaves that encourage diversity, wide spectrum political discussion, public service and no harm to public discourse or to peace and civil order.

These are difficult matters to judge--to find the right mix and private and public-run broadcasting that enhances free speech and democracy, and gives everyone a voice--and to create rules that promote the public good, without overly-restricting content or being too punitive, or too lax.

Print media and the internet are entirely different matters. Sans corporate monopolies of either, they are equivalent to the old "soapbox" and pamphleteering--individual free speech--that our 1st amendment was designed to protect. And Thomas Jefferson considered these so important that he even proposed government subsidies to newspapers--with no content regulation--to free them from big business interests and to insure variety.

When broadcasting over the airwaves was invented, immediate questions arose over the sheer power of this sort of media, to lie to and hoodwink, and propagandize and brainwash, the public. Reading a newspaper is a choice. 24/7 fascist crap in your living room, and on all radio stations, is NOT really a choice. Almost no one wanted government to have total control over it, but the other alternative has turned out to be equally bad--if not worse, because there is so little mechanism for accountability. And, although the corporations won that battle, and began to create big media monopolies to control it all, various tactics in this country have been tried to encourage variety and public access, especially for political opinion. One was the Fairness Doctrine (which the Reaganites got rid of)--requiring all stations to provide "equal time" to opposing political views and on issues of public concern. Another was public broadcasting (which the corporations have taken over as "sponsors," as the fascists have reduced--and certainly want to kill-- government funding). Another are the powers of the FCC, if they were really attending to the public interest (which they haven't done since the Reagan era). And various government powers to bust up monopolies (also unenforced during this fascist period--1980 to now).

There is really much reason to bust up corporate news monopolies--and even to, in some cases, pull their licenses, pull their corporate charters, dismantle them and seize their assets for the common good.

We now have, basically, five far rightwing, billionaire CEOs, controlling all news and opinion in this country. They control the airwaves (TV/radio), newspapers, news magazines, books, movies, and are absolutely out-of-control in pushing self-serving, self-enriching, pro-war, pro-fascist news and opinion. They are HARMING us.

They have a similar situation in Venezuela. Chavez's denial of a license to RCTV, and creation of a public broadcasting network, have helped somewhat. The RCTV airwave was given over to small, independent producers, and it was given the mandate to provide access to minority and excluded groups who have never before been represented in TV content. But, overall, MOST TV/radio is still very dominated by virulent rightwing news and opinion, dictated by large multi-national corporations.

I think private enterprise should remain part of mix, but it needs to be strongly curtailed, to widen and enhance REAL free speech--the speech of the people, of individuals--in a competitive "marketplace of ideas."

We don't have that now, except on the internet (--which, of course, the corporations want control of). Our town squares are gone. The corporate broadcasters simply don't permit free speech, and they control EVERYTHING (newspapers, wire services, books, etc.) And the FCC, as a regulator in the public interest, is a joke.

Another important point is that corporations have no "right to free speech" on our public airwaves. Use of the public airwaves is a privilege, not a right, and is subject to meeting licensing conditions. And, frankly, I think that free speech in this country would be greatly improved, if we got rid of all the corporate broadcasters. Let small, creative, competitive producers have the airwaves. Make small and non-monopolistic be the conditions for these licenses. And increase government funding for public broadcasting, with "no corporate sponsors" as the condition for funding.

In this sense, I would support "nationalization" of "the media"--that is, re-nationalization of our public airwaves, re-assertion of public control over them, busting up of print/other media monopolies, and increased overall support for many different kinds of public access.

from having free rein on the airwaves. This a big problem when you the US breathing down your neck and salivating over your oil.

Venezuela is in the cross hairs of the Neo-Conservatives. Lots of oil there. So, the propagandists are gonna vilify HUGO. Corporate news media along with Fox News are gonna tell you about a not existent police state. That being said, Hugo is no Che! He has crypto-Stalinist tendencies. Some of us on the anti-authoritarian left find his actions distasteful. However, is what we are learning about Chavez the truth? Who is reporting news about Venezuela? If we still had the: Liberation news service, then the news would be more credible.

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in common with he and Chavez.

He is DE-centralizing power down to the community council level, and wants to enhance this de-centralization with several of the amendments that his government has proposed. This policy is, in fact, an anti-Stalinist policy--devised to COUNTER Stalinism (too much power concentrated at the top levels of government, in too few hands). Local community councils encourage participatory democracy with maximum citizen participation, and they have real power. THEY decide how federal money is spent in their communities. The constitutional amendments formalize community councils and guarantee funding for them. This is a means of BY-PASSING corrupt local elites, who would use the money to line their own pockets and produce nothing useful for the community, and a means to insure that federal funds are spent on real needs. Another amendment cuts the work week. Stalin would never do that. He wanted slave labor. Another amendment provides benefits to workers in the informal business sector (big in Venezuela), which will HELP a variety of small businesses, and they already have a program of grants and loans to small businesses and worker coops.

Chavez and his government certainly have some of the same problems that Stalinist/communist Russia faced--for instance a prior oligarchy that had completely neglected the nation's manufacturing sector. Venezuela's automobile and tractor factories were begun and then abandoned in favor of imports. Venezuela imports many of the machine parts and materials used by its oil industry, and generally imports all the things it should be, and could be making, and imports much of its food as well. These are signs of a completely IRRESPONSIBLE ruling class. But Chavez is NOT centralizing control and commandeering labor to force industrialization, as Stalin did. His government has a much more creative, multi-pronged approach, which is why they've shown such dramatic growth with the greatest growth in the PRIVATE sector.

Here's an excellent article on the Chavez government and industrialization...

The Struggle to Industrialize Venezuela
October 5th 2007, by Chris Carlson – Venezuelanalysis.com
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2689


And here's an article that rips the NYT for its lies about Chavez management of Venezuela's oil...

NYT's Tina Rosenberg Goes to School on Venezuela's Oil, and Flunks
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2808

If you think of an economy as a machine, I would say what Chavez is doing is greasing all the wheels, and replacing some old and rusty parts, and trying to get it to GO, meanwhile trying to redesign and modernize it, WHILE it is working. You can't force a broken machine to go. Well, you can do what Stalin did, and kick it, and rage at it, and force its rusty parts to turn over, but there is no smoothness and precision, and it will eventually get overburdened and break down (as happened with the Soviet economy). The Chavez government is trying to do that kind of quick industrialization with worker happiness and democracy built into it from the beginning. It's quite a balancing act. Some things DO need to be centrally directed, but if you want creativity, enterprise, variety and worker- and citizen-control, you have to be flexible, you have to yield, you have to trust in people. I think this is the line that separates socialist economic engineering, of the kind we are seeing in Venezuela, from Stalinism (which resembles fascism in so many ways): trust in people, in their native desire to be enterprising and innovative. The grease is, literally, oil profits, but it is also trust, faith in people, belief that, given a chance--with education, with loans, with help--they WILL build a healthy economy.

The people are also demanding it. It's not all up to Chavez. It is a grass roots driven movement. This is what people do in a REAL democracy: they demand that the country's resources be used to benefit everyone, that real needs be met, that problems be solved, and that peoples' natural creativity and energy not be dissipated--by greed, by corruption, and by elitist rule. And I think it's ironical and amusing, this CIA "talking point" that Chavez is a "dictator"--supposedly "dictating" to this determined and headstrong, and passionately democratic, people. They got rid of the dictators! This is THEIR government, in ways that we will never see here in our lifetimes, sad to say.

"Crypto-Stalinist"? No, I don't see that at all. And Venezuelans wouldn't tolerate it. I see a largely self-educated man, risen from poverty and out of a military background (--a rather different kind of military than we know, in which he would talk politics and philosophy late into the night with his LEFTIST military buddies), and who has strongly identified with "the man in the street"--ordinary, poor people. So his talk is not polished and diplomatic--it is blunt, practical and to the point. He is not speaking to, or for, the smooth-talking elites of this world. He is speaking to, and for, those who never get a say--the ignored, marginalized majority. I don't see any of the deviousness, or paranoia, or viciousness, or violence of Josef Stalin. Wanting power is not inherently bad. You can't do anything without it--certainly not rebuilding a broken economy (ask FDR!). Where does the power come from?--that is the question. From the secret police? From violent purges? From imprisonment, torture and assassination? In the case of Chavez--as with FDR--the power does not come from these dark sources; it comes from the PEOPLE. And you can see that in Chavez's face, just as you can see Stalin's dark disease in his--in so far as one can make a judgment of people from a distance, in photographs. I do not see "dictator" in Chavez's face, nor has that accusation been borne out in ANY of his actions. I see stubbornness and strength in Chavez, but I get NO fear vibes at all. I would be terrified to be near Stalin. He was a scary vicious man. Chavez, on the other had, is someone I would like to have over for dinner. I wouldn't fear him at all. I think he would be interesting to talk to, and humorous and entertaining.

Phrases like "crypto-Stalinist" and "dictator" evoke horrors, such as those committed by Stalin, and by RIGHTWING dictators in South America. Where is the horror in Chavez? There is simply no evidence to support it, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I would be careful about tossing out phrases like this ("crypto-Stalinist"), especially with that smeary word "tendencies" ("crypto-Stalinist TENDENCIES"). What does that mean? And how can anyone counter such an accusation--that he has "tendencies"? We ALL have "tendencies." It's what we DO that matters. So, what has Chavez DONE to deserve such a phrase? Has he "tended to" assassinate his friends? Has he "tended to" force tens of thousands of people into slave labor camps? What? What horrors has he committed, or even threatened to commit, that provide even the slightest indication that he "has tendencies" to become a crazy, blood-drenched Stalin? I can think of some people closer to home who are crazy and blood-drenched, and not just "tending" toward it. And, oddly, it is they who are calling Chavez a "dictator."

I pray the Bolivrian Reforms migrate to El Norte!

The author really has their number.

Some facts which NEVER get acknowledged by our own media, appeared in his remarks:

....words last month of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America which commented: "Thanks to rapid GDP growth and the ongoing implementation of broad social programmes, in 2006 alone the poverty rate was lowered from 37.1% to 30.2% and the indigence rate from 15.9% to 9.9%." Venezuela was, the UN said, well on the way to reaching its first Millennium Development Goal.
(snip)

There's a line the "spin" has actually crossed along time ago. Right now, it's more like simply lying out their arses, with no resistance from a gullible bunch of easily led buffoons who are all too ready to hate whomever they attack.

They don't seem to realize this happens again, and again, and again, using different targets, and that they've been duped. Idiots! It's all about maintaining right-wing fascist dominance EVERYWHERE, at all costs.

arguments playing down who is getting what from this "dictatorship". A dictator that reduces poverty and decentralizes government control? Centralized control, and its associated terrorist networks, is the hallmark of dictators.
Chavez is No dictator.