Just a quick note to say that Hugo Chavez has won the referendum in Venezuela. This is great news, and an excellent step toward making the revolution in Venezuela permanent. Now the people will be free to re-elect Chavez if they wish.
Congratulations, Venezuela.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Funny how has come to this - the great Bolivarian Revolution rests entirely on one man.
ReplyDeleteIs it really that shallow and completely lacking in any institutional depth? I thought this was supposed to be a broad popular movement and not a personality cult; surely there must be *someone* else qualified to take over in 2013.
What's funny is that Chavez has pulled out all the stops (and violated virtually every election law in the process) to win this referendum but it has only made his downfall more likely to come from within as the folks in the PSUV who could have succeeded him realise they'll never have a shot at office while he sticks around.
Care to back that up with a single fact? Perhaps a link to the election laws you claim were broken, and the specific provisions you claim were infringed.
ReplyDeleteChavez is a leader who is more democratic than any contemporary western leader. He has faced more votes per year in power than any leader that I can think of in the history of the world. Those that he has lost, he has accepted the result. He faced a coup cheer-led by the capitalist media, and didn't take a single one of them off the air, or try any of the editors for sedition. If there had been an attempted coup in Canada cheer-led by Global and CTV, you can bet your ass their news editors would have been up on sedition charges so fast it would make your head spin.
Chavez has brought meaningful democratic change to Venezuela, empowering local government bodies, and spreading power horizontally. He has democratized the economy, giving workers the power to control their factories, and guess what: the workers didn't hoard wealth for themselves, they dispersed it back into their communities, building schools and hospitals. Chavez and his policies have allowed Venezuelans to take back control of their economy, and make it serve people not profit. Most importantly, he did it without violence, at the ballot box.
I laugh at concern trolls like you, since you get so worked up over one of the most democratic governments in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world, while ignoring your own right-wing bully-boys running death squads in Mexico and Colombia. Or your morally and intellectually bankrupt ideology that brought only suffering and death to Latin Americans in the form of the juntas all over Central and South America.
The right has no business talking about democracy. The right brought us such lovely people as Augusto Pinochet, George W. Bush, Filipe Calderon, Franciso Franco, Margaret Thatcher and the grand-father of them all, Adolph Hitler. Sure, the left has its demons. It's Stalins and its Pol Pots, but the right produces violent dictators or elected leaders that abuse civil liberties and human rights in the name economics with such appalling regularity that it can't be considered an aberration, but the rule.
So before you try to make shit stick to Chavez, clean out your own Augean Stables first.
I see you subscribe to the George W. Bush school of "you're either with us or against us". Someone utters one criticism of Chavez and suddenly they're a right-winger who bears responsibility for Hitler. Nice.
ReplyDeleteIf you want people to take your commentary seriously, I suggest you lay off on the hysterics. Heck, at the very least actually address some of the points that were made - what happened to Chavez's broad people's revolution? Are we supposed to believe that he's the only one capable of leading it? If he chokes on a pretzel tomorrow and dies, are they going to have to just the cancel the whole thing?
Social gains? The poorest 20% of Venezuelans still earn the same share of income they did in 1981 - about 3%.
(http://go.worldbank.org/U0FSM7AQ40)
Violations of the Constitution? Look up Article 67.
Empowering local governments? Chavistas have prevented the newly elected mayor of Caracas (Ledezma) from taking office because he is a member of the opposition.
But don't worry, I won't expect you to back your claims up with even a single fact. I'm not going to ask the impossible.
If the shoe fits...
ReplyDeleteYou seriously expect me to accept World Bank numbers? The World Bank is one of the most morally bankrupt institutions in the world, and has deliberately induced economic collapses in the name of capitalist purity and profit. For evidence, see the exhaustively researched and fact-checked book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. She lays out, in depressing detail and supported by a plethora of citations, the extent to which the right has lied, repressed and tortured it's way to economic purity since the rise of Friedmanite economics. So I won't be taking the World Bank's word for anything. I wouldn't believe them if they said the sky was blue, I'd have to check for myself.
Why would I want a concern troll to take my commentary seriously? You clearly showed up only to take a stab at someone who is trying to make the lives of the ordinary people better. Something the right just can't stand, since it always means less profit for corporate parasites.
And yes, looking at the language you have used, you are a right winger, or at least brainwashed by the lies of the capitalist media. You spout the talking points well.
I would prefer that the revolution not be dependant on one man. I would prefer the model in Bolivia in which Evo Morales governs clearly on the sufferance of the movement that put him there. But Chavez's role is necessary in the Venezuelan context. Before Chavez, the Venezuelan left was scattered and divided, dozens of fractious, tiny, parties fighting amongst themselves over purity of doctrine and other relatively meaningless matters. Chavez has unified the left, and led it to electoral victory, bringing a democratic revolution to Venezuela. It is the power of his charisma that holds the left-coalition together. And while it is under threat from anti-democratic forces like the Venezuelan military that has already tried once to depose Chavez and install a dictatorship, his presence is necessary to ensure the unity and cohesion of the revolutionary parties.
Beyond the corrupt motivations of the World Bank, their numbers don't reflect changes to the quality of life because the quality of life increases aren't being gathered by individuals and hoarded, they are being gathered by communities, through free healthcare and education, through properly functioning water and sewage systems. Rightists don't grasp this because it doesn't lead to an accumulation of personal wealth. The World Bank's frame of reference prevents it from grasping that.
The Human Development Report, published by the United Nations Development Programme, now ranks Venezuela #61 in the world, and in the category of high human development. This is contained in the Statistical Update for 2008, and is already an increase from the Human Development Report of 2007/2008 in which Venzela was listed at #73, and only medium human development. The Human Development Reports are readily available online. As can be seen in the 2008 Human Development Indices (http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDI_2008_EN_Tables.pdf), Venezuela's level of human development has been increasing steadily for years. In 2003, the level of human development was 0.800. In three years since then, the HDI of Venezuela has risen to 0.826. This 0.026 jump is bigger than that for any of the other countries in the category of high human development, and is pretty damn good for only three years. The HDI is a much more effective measure of well-being than any of the World Bank's numbers.
As for Ledezma, is it really your contention that Chavez is responsible for the acts of his supporters? It's not like Chavez sent troops to keep him from taking office. Using soldiers for political purposes seems rather to be a favoured past-time of the opposition, when they launched a military coup against Chavez in 2002 and proceeded to suspend the constitution and dissolve the National Assembly and Constitutional Court.
Chavez's reforms have given local governments dramatically more power, and stripped the old colonial aristocracy of much of its capability to run and loot the nation.
As to Article 67, did you actually read it? It bans the use of state funds for "associations for political purposes." Care to demonstrate how that one was infringed? And please, no links to any of the transparent American proxies like Reporters Without Borders and such. Further, the article relates to elections for public office. It says nothing at all about referenda, so I doubt it even applies in the current circumstances.
That's one article of the Constitution. If you'll look up thread, you'll see that you claimed that he violated "virtually every election law". The Constitution, while important, is not "virtually every election law." So how about some proof.
Now that I've answered your questions, how about you answer mine. Why no concern about right wing governments that actually violently repress their people, like Calderon in Mexico and Uribe in Colomiba? No point to make about the fact that the right routinely produces governments that abuse human rights and civil liberties? I shouldn't need to provide a source for this, recent experience with governments like those of Bush Jr. Tony Blair (the man who destroyed the Labour Party), or the well-known abuses of American-back dictatorships throughout Latin America in the 1970s-1980s should be something that you know about. Why nothing to say about the leniency displayed toward elements in Venezuelan society that backed the coup, particularly the cheer-leading private media?
I've backed up what I had to say. Now it's time for you to do the same. As the saying goes, put up or shut up.