Shut Up (about) Chavez
- Thread starter darkbeaver
- Start date
I feel obliged on a humanitarian basis logic. No need to thank me. Thank-you Logic 7
I’ll be back Then again, this is just a skirmish in a very long battle. Chavez, even in defeat, emerges as the leader of a true democratic republic (even people in France are comparing him favorably with Bonapartist Nicolas Sarkozy). Chavez will take the package to Parliament approval and may call another referendum after 2010 (the new presidential election is in 2012). Washington also won’t quit. The CIA didn’t have to deploy Operation Pincer – at least for now.
As usual the CIA was relying on bad HUMINT: the agency was counting on a Yes victory by 57%, with 60% abstention. Anyway the US destabilization effort this time was way more subtle than in 2002 when, after the US and Spain-supported coup against the elected Chavez government, the local elites forced an oil industry shutdown in which US$ 10 billion of the Venezuelan economy went up in smoke.
Chavez remains so popular all across the developing world because he’s the man who spells out what everyone is thinking. Take, for instance, the recent OPEC summit in Riyadh, where he was side by side with another “devil”, Islamic revolutionary and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad: “The empire of the dollar is crashing”. The next day, in Paris, after he discussed with Sarkozy his mediation in the Colombian hostages drama, he says that “Iran is a power and Venezuela is becoming one. We want to create a bipolar world. We don't want a single power.”
Most of all Chavez is so dangerous for Washington and right-wing comprador elites in Latin America because he is pushing, no holds barred, towards democratic socialism. For Washington and Wall Street elites this is way worse than the spectre of totalitarian communism branded throughout the Cold War. Everyone in Latin America remembers how Allende in the early 1970s was demonized as a Stalinist dictator by a CIA-funded propaganda campaign. But it was Henry Kissinger who got the whole point, when he told then President Nixon how Allende had to be taken out because he was such a bad example for the rest of the developing world. Chavez is the 21st century Allende. He has already survived a US-backed coup, in 2002. And he knows others – the sons of Operation Pincer - are in the works. Still, even if the Yes had won, he would not have as much institutional power as George Bush.
Meanwhile, expect the (red) devil to be routinely pillored by global corporate media. Of course there is crime, corruption and government waste in Venezuela – like anywhere else. But the most important point, from a global perspective, is to examine how the Chavez experiment evolves, as a trial-and-error revolutionary process, and if and how social justice is spreading.
According to the UN, in 2006 alone poverty in Venezuela fell from 37.1% to 30.2%. Extreme poverty fell from 15.9% to 9.9%. Venezuela is on the way to reach its first Millennium Development Goal. The No vote has not reversed what eminent US Latin American expert James Petras describes as “the most promising living experience of popular self-rule, of advanced social welfare and democratically based socialism.” The resistance – or micro-resistances, on individual and small collective levels – continues. That’s how the liliputians will eventually topple the neoliberal Gulliver. You cant’ beat a (red) devil that easily.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times (www.atimes.com). He's the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com
As usual the CIA was relying on bad HUMINT: the agency was counting on a Yes victory by 57%, with 60% abstention. Anyway the US destabilization effort this time was way more subtle than in 2002 when, after the US and Spain-supported coup against the elected Chavez government, the local elites forced an oil industry shutdown in which US$ 10 billion of the Venezuelan economy went up in smoke.
Chavez remains so popular all across the developing world because he’s the man who spells out what everyone is thinking. Take, for instance, the recent OPEC summit in Riyadh, where he was side by side with another “devil”, Islamic revolutionary and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad: “The empire of the dollar is crashing”. The next day, in Paris, after he discussed with Sarkozy his mediation in the Colombian hostages drama, he says that “Iran is a power and Venezuela is becoming one. We want to create a bipolar world. We don't want a single power.”
Most of all Chavez is so dangerous for Washington and right-wing comprador elites in Latin America because he is pushing, no holds barred, towards democratic socialism. For Washington and Wall Street elites this is way worse than the spectre of totalitarian communism branded throughout the Cold War. Everyone in Latin America remembers how Allende in the early 1970s was demonized as a Stalinist dictator by a CIA-funded propaganda campaign. But it was Henry Kissinger who got the whole point, when he told then President Nixon how Allende had to be taken out because he was such a bad example for the rest of the developing world. Chavez is the 21st century Allende. He has already survived a US-backed coup, in 2002. And he knows others – the sons of Operation Pincer - are in the works. Still, even if the Yes had won, he would not have as much institutional power as George Bush.
Meanwhile, expect the (red) devil to be routinely pillored by global corporate media. Of course there is crime, corruption and government waste in Venezuela – like anywhere else. But the most important point, from a global perspective, is to examine how the Chavez experiment evolves, as a trial-and-error revolutionary process, and if and how social justice is spreading.
According to the UN, in 2006 alone poverty in Venezuela fell from 37.1% to 30.2%. Extreme poverty fell from 15.9% to 9.9%. Venezuela is on the way to reach its first Millennium Development Goal. The No vote has not reversed what eminent US Latin American expert James Petras describes as “the most promising living experience of popular self-rule, of advanced social welfare and democratically based socialism.” The resistance – or micro-resistances, on individual and small collective levels – continues. That’s how the liliputians will eventually topple the neoliberal Gulliver. You cant’ beat a (red) devil that easily.
Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times (www.atimes.com). He's the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com
He's avery entertaining speaker and a fair singer and he likes ice-cream and Kalishnikovs. That's my kind of Prime Minister.:smile:
She DID ask if he was single. He did say he had blood coursing through his veins.....no viagra for me, SI!
Hmmm.....I wonder what went on before and after the show. I think deep down Barbra likes a strong man. Someone that guns down students for the love of their country.