Americans for Chavez provides a group of links to organizations that support defending Venezuela from US government attempts to overthrow the government there. I couldn’t help but notice that the local group CS Action is linked to on that site. Good work, CS Action!
The news links are helpful in getting news, also.
OK, the title to this commentary is so ridiculous that it invites scorn from the word GO. And yet?… this is exactly the refrain that The Gazette seems to constantly revel in.
They like to preposterously present themselves and others in the most reactionary portions of the US business community as defenders of the low income population of our nation. And their absurd thesis is always that we should oppose an increase in the minimum wage because that increase would hurt those it the new legislation would intend to help!
It is such a comical argument and one that nobody with a low income will ever buy. Do they take this sector of the population to be as stupid as the business community is? They are not. So the argument is really intended to persuade the well-to-do themselves that they really are being noble by being the selfish and backward thugs they actually truly are.
The argument really is, that the rich by opposing the increase in minimum wage are not just hoods robbing the poor, but are actually wonderful and decent people trying to help the poor out instead. Don’t laugh, that’s truly how they try to convince themselves to see it! But it makes us in the ordinary population of wage earners roll over laughing in response to the self image that the well-off have of themselves. What a bunch of charlatan clowns, are they not? Taking from the bottom to give to the top is noble endeavor! It’s truly celebrating their supposed virtue in being selfish as their ideologue Queen, Ayn Rand, once proposed in her writings as being the psychological key to supposed capitalist liberty making.
The argument that no minimum wage is freedom for the poor is once again raised as mantra in The Gazette on page 2 of the Business section of the Sunday paper in an article by Fred Crowley, a brainless professor over at the UCCS. He has a young, intense, and portly photo of himself there, too. No doubt that he is fully convinced of his arguments as week as silly as they actually are. No doubt that he also intensely and fully opposes the approach that Hugo Chavez is taking now in Venezuela in regards to increasing the minimum wage there. It just got increased 20%. Oh the horrors, he must be lamenting!
Yes, Dear Professor, the raise of the Venezuelan minimum wage violates all the supposed laws of economics that you and The Gazette preach so without end. How can Hugo Chavez not see that the economy must give profits to the rich and not to the poor? I guess such a nut deserves to be executed, does he not, Professor? He is a totalitarian trying to take liberty away!
Oh the humanity!
Instead of wishing well to Chavez and the poor of Venezuela, we should be listening to the concerns of The Gazette and Professor Crowley here at home. They just want to help the working poor out, by freezing their wages.
It’s nice to know that America is led by such an army of clowns like the editorial staff at The Gazette and the Economics Dept at UCCS when it comes to economic philosophy and economic planning. We should collect them all and shoot them out a giant cannon into areas where ‘The Terrorists’ are hiding! They would then roll over and die laughing. And then we could be nationally secure.
As a leader of Otpor (now called Canvas) meets with people in Colorado Springs and at Colorado College, it might be of interest to follow the trail of Otpor to Venezuela, and efforts of the US to overthrow Hugo Chavez there.
Contrary to how Otpor represents itself, it is not just a group of nice Serbian student leaders from Belgrade, that through Gandhi inspired tactics non-violently overthrew Milosevic in the wake of a very violent US war on Yugoslavia. The story is quite a bit more complex than that, so we follow their trail to Venezuela.
To understand the following Reuters report dated back in 2003, though, one must first realize that Otpor is connected with ‘The Albert Einstein Institute’ of which Colonel Robert Helvey is an integral part of. This is a US government run operation designed to link Gandhian methods of nonviolent protest to Pentagon and US State Department efforts to overthrow foreign governments. Hence, we move from Belgrade to Caracas as the US government goes after Hugo Chavez. It’s Gandhi in the service of the Pentagon to help make a coup!
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US democracy expert teaches Venezuelan opposition
By Pascal Fletcher
CARACAS, Venezuela, April 30, 2003 (Reuters) – Retired U.S. army colonel Robert Helvey has trained pro-democracy activists in several parts of the world so he knows something about taking on military regimes and political strongmen.
Now he is imparting his skills in Venezuela, invited by opponents of President Hugo Chavez who accuse the leftist leader of ruling like a dictator in the world’s No. 5 oil exporter.
Helvey, who has taught young activists in Myanmar and Serbian students who helped topple the former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, is giving courses on non-violent opposition tactics this week at an east Caracas university.
Secrecy surrounds the classes. A sign outside the door, apparently there to deflect the curious, reads: “Seminar on strategic marketing.”
But the strategies Helvey is sharing with some of Chavez’s foes focuses not on balance sheets but on how to resist, oppose and change a government without the use of bombs and bullets.
After initially declining to answer questions, Helvey, a former U.S. military attache in Burma and now a consultant with the private U.S. Albert Einstein Institution that promotes non-violent action in conflicts, told Reuters non-violence was the key to the tactics he taught.
“In every political conflict, there is a potential for violence, and it is incumbent on leaders to make sure they don’t cross the threshold of violence,” he said.
Organizers of the seminar did not welcome journalists. “This is a private meeting of friends,” one said.
The attendees included representatives of Venezuela’s broad-based but fragmented opposition, who are struggling to regroup after failing to force Chavez from office in an anti-government strike in December and January.
Chavez, a fiery populist first elected in 1998, survived a brief coup last year by dissident military officers who now form part of the opposition movement, which also includes labor and business chiefs, politicians and anti-Chavez civic groups.
CHAVEZ, DEMOCRAT OR DICTATOR?
Opposition sources said Helvey was invited to Caracas by a group of businessmen and professionals. They in turn organized the course involving a broad cross-section of the opposition.
Helvey’s presence comes at a time when a debate is raging inside and outside Venezuela about whether Chavez is a democrat or a power-hungry autocrat. That debate is important for the United States, which is a major buyer of Venezuelan oil.
Chavez’s critics portray him as a dangerous, anti-U.S. maverick who has extended his personal political control of the country’s political institutions, judiciary and armed forces.
They say he has strengthened his country’s ties with anti-U.S. states like communist Cuba, Iran, Libya and — until the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein — Iraq.
Since the April 2002 coup that briefly overthrew him, Chavez’s relations with the United States have remained edgy. The U.S. government has fiercely denied accusations from some Venezuelan officials that it encouraged or supported the coup.
Chavez fiercely condemned the invasion of Iraq. But Venezuelan oil shipments to the U.S. have kept on flowing.
The Venezuelan leader, who was elected to office six years after failing to seize power in a botched coup, denies he is a communist, says his government is democratic and regularly pillories his opponents as “terrorists” and “coup-mongers.”
His foes have staged huge, anti-Chavez street protests over the last 18 months. He portrays them as a wealthy, resentful elite opposed to his self-styled “revolution” which he says aims to benefit the oil-rich nation’s poor majority.
Neither Helvey nor the organizers of the Caracas seminar would give details of exactly what opposition tactics were being taught. But in his work in Serbia before Milosevic’s fall, Helvey briefed students on ways to organize a strike and on how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime.
In the mid 1990s, he traveled to the Thailand/Myanmar border to give classes in non-violent resistance to exiled Burmese students opposing the military junta in their country.
His former students remember him as “Bob.”
“He used his military skills in strategic planning for non-violent protest methods … Everybody was fascinated by Bob, because he was a military man and was applying that to non-violence,” Aung Naing Oo, former foreign secretary for the All Burma Students Democratic Front, told Reuters.
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Caracas told Reuters the embassy knew nothing about Helvey’s visit and had nothing to do with the secretive seminar.
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Oh, yes, for sure. lol… This article, interestingly enough, is from ‘Burma Related News’. It’s a small world it does appear.
http://www.burmalibrary.org/TinKyi/archives/2003-05/msg00000.html
Ecuador has just broken the back of the traditional 2 party corporate system there, by voting 83% in favor of constitutional changes that will destroy the ability of the Conservative Party and the Radical Liberal Party to have the oligarchs continue to rule in that country. They have joined with constitutional changes in Venezuela that did exactly the same, taking away the dominance that the corrupt 2 traditional parties there had over the Venezuelan people.
Viva Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez, presidents of the 2 countries! Now lets do the same in the US, too! We don’t need 2 corporate dominated parties here while having none for the people. That’s not democracy at all, but is a colossal fraud. Time to get rid of both of them. Dump the Democrats and Republicans both! They’re destroying our country.
Now that Bush is back from Latin America, it’s time to post Bush’s Funniest Moments. And on to Argentina to see the rally where Hugo Chavez tore apart Dubya. This is a long video in Spanish, but watch the first 5 minutes at least to see the Argentinian Mothers of the Disappeared introduce Chavez. An education in itself.
And then we also learn that Bush took his charade to Guatemala talking up the supposed benefits of CAFTA and ‘free trade’, just several miles down the road from where a factory was full of Guatemalan children working in terrible conditions producing frozen broccoli for American school cafeterias and the US military. See Tuesday night’s Democracy Now on that one.
Our Prez is truly a winner! American Empire built on child labor and death squads certainly must have impressed Latin America. Another one of Bush’s funniest moments. ‘El perro que es’, in the words of the spokewoman of the Madres de los Desaparecidos.
The bankruptcy of US foreign politcy in Latin America will become highlighted later this week when Bush deploy’s himself into Latin America with a Navy ‘floating hospital’ in tow. What the world will see is Top Gun military doctor Dubya diplomat in action, and it is assured ahead of time, to underwhelm rather than ‘shock and awe’.
The gigantic US navy war vessel accompanying the donkey is to perform surgeries at high cost to the US taxpayer, and minimal real long term medical value (if any) to the chronically malnourished and ill of Latin America.
Meanwhile, Cuban doctors quietly and with little fanfare continue to run medical clinics in country after country when allowed to do so, and Hugo Chavez continues to offer low cost fuel supplies to the not so well off, in addition. The main tool the dumbest ass neo-con gringo rulers have to provide in response, is an creased militarization everywhere in the region using the drug war as excuse. Cops, soldiers, prisons, death squads, and neo-liberal imperialist inforced privatization is DC’s way to winning ‘hearts and minds’! What a formula for success!
Eventually Washington’s war on many fronts will turn into defeat on many fronts. Nowhere is that day nearing faster than in Latin America. Imagine the ridicule that this Pentagon ‘floating hospital’ will arouse. The US is widely known as providing inadequate medical care to its own population(to children in Texas, for just one example), let alone to other nations. While the Pentagon is most noted for its constant ‘collateral damage’ to innocents, not being any angel of mercy.
Latin America will watch as Bush hobnobs with ruling elites that the mass of people despise rather than considering them as potential saviours from their economic insecurity. People need help, and America offers up a clown and a media circus. What a contrast to the Cuban doctors doing real work. US elite intellectual bankruptcy at its finest.
The Miami Herald has just published an interesting interview with Evo Morales, Bolivia’s new president, and it looks like Che Guevarra might have succeeded after all.
If I had a dollar for all the times I have heard people say that socialism or communism doesn’t work I would be rich. These people never complain about capitalism not working though when they spout off their Western World shopping mall common horse sense. opinions. But can anybody really say that capitalism has worked well for the indigenous people’s of the Americas, or the indigenous people of anywhere for that matter? We could go on here, too. Did capitalism work for Europe’s Jewish population? Awe blame it on the Muslims’ though, that’s the new vogue!
These new South American leaders like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales are about the brightest rays of hope we have in the world today. Thank God that Bolivia has a leader now that wants to take Bolivia out of the US orbit. There’s nothing to be gained by continuing down that dead end alley followed for so long in the past. Viva Sud America Libre!
Now if we could only begin to liberate the brain dead zombies of the USA, too. We have to do it before they eat the rest of the planet alive.
Slick did the sax, Dubya does Dumbo the Elephant, and many of America’s rich, famous and sleezy have appeared on David Letterman and Jay Leno doing the small talk. Still, I think that Hugo Chavez has them beat with the beat in this video. La Corte Negra
The collection of CIA operatives down in South Florida are just waiting to celebrate the death of Fidel Castro with a big party, but oops!, Fidel’s dream of fully liberating Latin American from US imperialism lives on in the personage and politics of Hugo Chavez. The collection of rif-raf that will come to the Miami stadium to dance and sing about Fidel’s death when he passes away, are not representative of how most Latinos feel about Castro. To many millions he is a great hero. Fidel with Hugo Chavez is worth watching for the first 9 minutes even if you don’t speak a word of Spanish. Otherwise, well worth watching all 19 minutes as the later 10 minutes present a very interesting discussion of Venezuela in the world today.
“I believe that capitalism is the road to destruction of the world.” That was Chavez’s message last Friday to South American leaders convening at the Mercosur summit, a trade bloc in opposition to NAFTA. To those that think that Hugo Chavez is undemocratic, here is a film, The Revolution, about the US coup attempt against him in 2002, filmed by an Irish TV crew. One hour long, it is an incredible film, that filmed both the coup ringleaders in action alongside of the people they attempted to take power away from. A free documentary on your computer, and a great one at that!
For even the hopeful, Fidel Castro’s imminent mortality has for decades presaged the end of a dream. But Castro lived to see a successor. Not brother Raul, indeed neither an island-bound disciple nor a private-school Marxist, nor (but for this photo) a khaki’d comrade, but a veritable everyman Simon Bolivar to deliver the indigenous Americas to autonomy.
Though Fidel and Che could not bring the revolution out of the jungle, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is poised to overrun Latin America, sitting on a mountain of oil wealth, telling Uncle Sam’s banker goons where they can stick it. It’s Capitalism’s domino theory come home to roost.
Chavez won with over 60% of the vote in last Sunday’s presidential election in Venezuela. The US government is getting thumped hard in the northern regions of South America.
Washington’s man in Ecuador went down in defeat, too, just a week previous to Chavez winning his new 6 year term in office. And Colombia’s US puppet, Uribe, is facing a major scandal, as it seems that his party’s politicos are being exposed as being more death squad connected every other day now in the country’s press. Colombians are getting fed up with this murderer. Peru is unstable, and Bolivia also has gone with Evo Morales and the ‘Indians’ in the hills. What’s Washington to do?
It seems that for the moment, that Bush has decided not to go with another coup attempt in Venezuela. They would be flaming that kettle of gusanos from a position of weakness. Even Cuba looks as stable as ever. Castro is still in power, though it might be a Raul, and not a Fidel. The only area where it looks like D.C. is hanging on, is Mexico, as unstable as the current ‘dedazo’, Felipe Calderon, might be. President Fecal with his buddy Chente The Fox seems to have brutally suppressed the current rebellion in Oaxaca. And the north of Mexico appears too frozen in its shopping spree at Walmart, to raise much of a voice forward in favor of change.
Still, with Dubya in charge, Latin America will continue to disintegrate outward from US orbit. As the gringos go bankrupt, there’s not much for ‘Merica to offer in the days ahead. Viva Chavez! And the Zapatistas and APPO still are presente just south of us, too. All eyes seem focused on the Middle East, but meanwhile…. others are looking for liberation from the US, too.
The Associated Press, which is hardly a tool of Hugo Chavez, says that Chavez is set to win big in the approaching Dec. 3 elections. Per their most recent poll, Chavez has a 2 to 1 lead over his challenger, Manuel Rosales. This is easy to understand why. The latest figures show the Venezuelan economy growing at a 3rd quarter 10% rate. Plus, the social programs that his government has launched have been widely popular amongst the less fortunate sectors of the population. So why the danger of a coup attempt now?
Simply put, the opposition is calling the elections fraudulent beforehand. They are planning to demonstrate against the results, even before the election is held. The US has been funding this Right Wing opposition, directing it, and even dictating the strategy being currently used. The Venezuelan upper classes know that, alone, they might never regain their position of being able to totally run the country once again. And to run it into the ground further to enrich themselves more, as they had done previous to Chavez coming into office.
They are dependent on the US government to get themselves back into running the local show, and they do what they are asked to do most willing, and exactly as they are told by the White House. Their allegiance is more to Miami and D.C., than it is to their fellow citizenry. Without US government support, their ability to impoverish the nation’s poor will continue to erode, and they might have to move in with their Cuban friends in South Florida.
Plus, that’s a lot of oil for the likes of Dick Cheney to just write off. What better way to capture Chavez and probably murder him than to have their Caracas based stooges cause turmoil by claiming electoral fraud? The Bush league gringos have a lot of dollars to buy traitors off within the Venezuelan military, too. We can expect more US play made in this direction in the following days and weeks, and the Democratic Party would hardly be any opposition to such plans. They support the sulfuric stink of Bush, the Devil, versus the thug, as the Democrats recently were labeling Chavez. And Mr Danger, as Chavez calls our beloved Dubya, needs some sort of foreign policy ‘success’. Recapturing Venezuela for the US oil magnates would give him a much needed boost. And the Democrat Party jefes would be front line applauding it, too.
Oliver North is in Nicaragua advising voters there not to vote for Daniel Ortega for President this November 5. He is one of a series of benevolent GOP thugs who have gone down there the last couple of weeks to help ‘bring democracy’ to that country. And part of democracy, according to the GOP, is to intervene in the affairs of foreign, and supposedly sovereign, states.
Here is what MSN says that he told Nicaraguans…. Ollie told them that they had suffered enough from the influence of outsiders! Now that’s Bizarro World! He was referring to Hugo Chavez, and not the GOP of the USA, of course. But it’s too bad that the Nicaraguans can’t arrest this war criminal and have him shot. In fact, it’s too bad that Americans can’t do the same. Our national security certainly is not helped by allowing terrorists like Ollie to run loose.
Can you make the argument that Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel are above all politicians, or diplomats shall we say, who like their political discourse to be civil? Hugo Chavez referring to Bush as a devil who behaves as if the world belongs to him may have been, in their minds, undiplomatic, shall we say?
That sort of logic would have Hans Christian Anderson’s courtiers reluctant to tell the emperor he had no clothes for fear it would be undiplomatic to make the emperor feel naked.
Pelosi resorted to name-calling herself, labeling the several-time democratically elected, survivor or two US coup attempts, liberator of Venezuela’s poor, Mr. Chavez, an “everyday thug.” Considering Chavez rose from poverty himself, Pelosi’s remark comes off bigoted as well.
There’s a simpler explanation. Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel are not what we want them to be. They are not in true opposition to the ruling party. Like their Democratic Party, they are imposters.
House Minority Leader Pelosi may have stood up for the American people once, not once-upon-a-time, but one time, having to do with the election. Charles Rangel I’m sure will champion something one day. But that is all, and it’s sufficient I guess. It gets politicians noticed by the press and gives the party apparent credibility. But, critically, it doesn’t allow a momentum of support to build because it’s only ever one diplomat at a time. When Pelosi speaks out about something, where are the others? When Boxer speaks out, where’s Pelosi? When Murtha speaks out, where are Boxer and Pelosi? Ad dystopium.
Who do you know around you that’s only a single issue person? Activists and scholars and intellectuals seem to be able to advocate for several things at a time. Good leaders certainly do to. So does your neighbor I bet. It’s inadvertent isn’t it? Can you picture an advocate of universal health care saying: oh, never mind about civil liberties? Have you met an antiwar protestor who is not also concerned about immigrant rights? It’s not just that social justice issues are interrelated, they have a common urgency and they affect us all.
Single episode politicians are imposters. They are not advocates for the people, they are but actors who speak the lines given them and no more. Something for the camera please, but do not upset the applecart.
Approach your local candidate, even for the teeniest, least promising office. Ask them to say something of consequence, even just to you. If they belong to a party, they cannot say a thing. That’s what it means to be accepted by the party and to have its endorsement. You can’t speak. And when you get to be House Minority Leader you get to tell others not to speak, even a leader of another nation. In this case the little boy who is saying you people are butt-naked and ugly too.
While everyone was looking for Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to seize the headlines, our Chimp-in-Chief receives a dressing down from Venezuelan upstart Hugo Chavez like no one has ever dared address the Emperor before. Not just calling Bush the Devil, but fleshing it out, “it still smells of sulphur in here.”
These words come of course from one of the axis of evils. Evil here being confused for the global justice movement, which seeks equitable rights for all human beings. To an industrialist landlord such a prospect probably does sound evil.
The most successful purveyors of this evil ideology in the last century were Mahatma Gandhi, Fidel Castro, and Nelson Mandela, among others, and most recently Subcommandante Marcos, Hugo Chavez and Eva Morales. There have been more who have been unfortunately crushed like flies.
Hugo Chavez fashions himself after the great populist liberator of the Americas, Simon Bolivar.
That’s about as boastful as, say, George W. Bush telling us the W stands for Washington. But Venezuela’s got the oil, and Hugo Chavez has the love of his people. A liberator for the Americas he may be. Let’s hope he means to save our America as well.
Google it. “Ernesto.” See what you get: Ernesto the hurricane and Ernesto Che Guevara. This season’s brightest prospect for an action weather spectacular has been given a decidedly un-American name.
To me it’s reminiscent of the 2004 season when the National Weather Service would not conceal its election year partisanship. The 2004 hurricane names alluded to three countries which led the opposition to our planned Iraq invasion. Frances, Ivan, Karl. Not to say anything about last year’s villain, invoking a perennial nemesis, “Katrina.”
It’s coincidence no doubt, but as Hurricane Ernesto was downgraded to a Tropical Depression, Jeb Bush still kept Florida in a state of emergency because as he said, “a hurricane is a hurricane.” Doesn’t it sound like he’s talking about a commie?
The boogeyman looming in this hemisphere is the growing Latin American sovereignty movement led by Castro, Chavez and Morales. It’s the Red Menace at our shores.
What next from our Minutemen at the National Weather Service? Hurricane Fidel? Tropical Depression [Subcomandante] Marcos?
The alliance of Chavez, Morales and Castro is not surprising. It is the South American revolution which Castro and Guevarra hoped to ignite 45 years ago. Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba are united by purpose and philosophy, reclaiming power for the common people, emerging from colonial oppression under which they have suffered since the arrival of the Spanish 500 years ago.
Though they fight their Spanish-blooded overlords, their greatest foe has become the United States. American businesses, banks and investors want to preserve their spheres of influence. In addition, the super-rich families which lost their lands in Cuba, or who struggle to retain their power in Venezuela, have taken refuge in the U.S. and have engaged our government to help them regain their fiefdoms.
While Cuba never posed so much of a threat on its own, Venezuela’s oil power threatens to unite the rest of the Americas. Castro has even been emboldened to ask Britain to return the Falkland Islands to Argentina, their rightful owners.
Fidel Castro’s recent overtures to Iran’s outspoken president have alarmed many and ignited renewed talk of the “Axis of Evil.” But the secular socialist state of Cuba has little in common with the theistic nation of Iran. Their governments are diametrically opposed in this regard. However they have a common enemy. Us.
With this possible alliance, it should become clear who is the axis around which these contrarian states are attempting to unite. It is us.
Can we be the axis of evil? The notion that America’s enemies were “evildoers” was pure silliness from the lips of our president. But evil may indeed be an apt description for the axis we provide. I leave you with the American Heritage definition of evil:
evil: n.
1. The quality of being morally bad or wrong; wickedness.
2. That which causes harm, misfortune, or destruction.
3. An evil force, power, or personification.
4. Something that is a cause or source of suffering, injury, or destruction.