CNN: Race against time for Venezuela recall drive

[Imperialism Inc.]

Race against time for Venezuela recall drive
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/americas/05/29/venezuela.recall.ap/

Manuel Cova, head of Venezuela's largest labor confederation and a leader of the Democratic Coordinator opposition coalition, said turnout was high at polling stations despite some incidents of intimidation and technical glitches.

The pictures I've seen looked like a pretty pathetic turnout but they were from yesterday I think. I've linked to them below from vheadline.

--cut--
At stake is whether Chavez will serve out the remainder of a six-year term marked by massive public spending for Venezuela's majority poor, a brief 2002 coup, a general strike that failed to topple Chavez but crippled Venezuela's oil-based economy, and bitter political polarization.

--cut--
In Caracas, reporters for Globovision television and Notitarde newspaper were beaten Saturday near a polling station by pro-government activists, said Globovision director Alberto Federico Ravell.

--cut--
"There are people interested in creating violence and they always involve opposition sectors," Rangel Avalos said on government TV.

--cut--
Most complaints centered on polling stations opening late and some citizens being prevented by soldiers from entering because they carried expired national identification cards. The council said all voters could participate regardless of their cards' status.

a very serious charge in my opinion


Pics from this article(letters to editor): http://vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=21390

[camero]

1. US complicity in the recall effort

http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc4550.html

The United States is using a quasi-governmental organization created during the Reagan years and funded largely by Congress to pump about a million dollars a year into groups opposed to Venezuela President Hugo Chávez, according to officials in Venezuela and a Venezuelan-American attorney.

Some 2,000 pages of newly disclosed documents show that the little-known National Endowment for Democracy is financing a vast array of groups: campesinos, businessmen, former military officials, unions, lawyers, educators, even an organization leading a recall drive against Chávez. Some compare the agency, in certain of its activities, to the CIA of previous decades when the agency was regularly used to interfere in the affairs of Latin American countries.

“It certainly shows an incredible pattern of financing basically every single sector in Venezuelan society,” said Eva Golinger, the Brooklyn, NY-based attorney who helped obtain the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. “That’s the most amazing part about it.”

One organization, Sumate, which received a $53,400 grant in September, is organizing the recall referendum against Chávez, Golinger said. The head of another group, Leonardo Carvajal of the Asociación Civil Asamblea de Educación, was named education minister by “dictator for a day” Pedro Carmona, a leading businessman who briefly took over Venezuela during an April 2002 coup against Chávez, she said. A leader of a third group assisted by the National Endowment for Democracy and its subsidiary organizations, Leopoldo Martínez of the right-wing Primero Justicia party, was named finance minister by Carmona, she said.


Might shed a little light on the subject.

[rwheeler31]

2. good god do we need oil so bad

we will destroy democracy.

[Imperialism Inc.]

3. For much much less than oil.

Just look at Haiti.

[AP]

7. Yeah. We'll destroy a country for cheap labor costs for Levis. That's sick

[camero]

4. This is about neo-liberalism economics

Nothing more. Here's another excellent article about democracy in Latin America

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau05222004.html

One doesn't need to conduct a survey to discover that since 2000, four elected presidents have left office before the end of their terms. Last October, prolonged economic stagnation provoked rage among Bolivians who forced President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada to flee to Miami in fear. In Argentina and Ecuador, elected presidents also recently left office because their economic policies produced political hatred. Aristide's departure had more complex reasons, but certainly the failure of the free market model loomed large in Haiti.

And in Peru, Alejandro Toledo, who won wide appeal by trumpeting democracy in his campaign, has watched his approval rating dip to 7 percent. He had promised voters that he not only meant free speech and politics, but the creation of jobs to address Peru's super high unemployment rate. Now Peruvians know that democracy means US-backed "free market" economics

The UN study doesn't ask those interviewed what they mean by democracy. Nor does it ask the State Department, which has reserved its blessings for governments that adopt free market policies. And no wonder! The balance of trade falls favorably on the U.S. side. The investments receive protection, the World Bank and IMF hand out loans at substantial interest rates of course and the elected governments then take the heat, as they should.

In 1989, Venezuelan Social Democratic President Carlos Andres Perez ordered troops to quell an anti-IMF riot in Caracas. Estimates of those killed by their own army ran as high as 2,000. Then, when the Social Democrats lost the next election, the Christian Democrats replaced them and followed the same failed economic policy. When anti-free market Hugo Chavez won in 1998, Washington withdrew its approval.

[porkrind]

21. We have many times in the past, and we will in the future

If you haven't read the Chomsky link below, please read it for a good explaination: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-contents.html


IMHO, this Chomsky article should be required reading by all Americans.

---

Read about the Right-Wing "Master Plan": http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-contents.html

Have you read "War is a Racket"?: http://lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Maybe you can provide a link to articles discussing slacking off

and getting the same income as a hardworking neighbor in Venezuela. You'd be doing everyone a favor.

On edit:

My idea of something really rotten is a fat piece of crap like Rush Limbaugh sitting on his huge butt while he spends his entire life trying to destroy the lives and careers of his betters through screeching into his microphone to his mentally impaired followers, and getting paid a strangely large salary for his "effort."

[AP]

8. Socialism for the wealthy is what Venezuela has been closing the door on.

What they're starting is real capitalism.

[Judi Lynn]

10. All but the intellectually handicapped can grasp what's happening

It's always an event, isn't it, AP, when a visiting poster tries to 'splain reality to people who have actually been taught in school, not at a right-wing survivalist's home!

[jdj]

9. Yeah, really. Bush slacked off his whole life

and he got to be president.

Viva la socialism.

[AP]

11. Seriously. Bush failed his way to the top.

His seed money for the rest of his career came from selling stock in a failing company before the market figured out it was falling apart. (And that company was built on investments from his daddy's friends.)

That ain't working.

[Judi Lynn]

12. Here's working for you

MIning for #### gold!


Schlepping out to the woods to do photo ops:

[Sideways]

13. Your point is muddled buddy

"when he can slack off and get the same income as those that do the same."

So all slackers are equal? I understand your uninformed point only because I can read between the lines but you should take an English and a logic class.

Sorry if English is your second language but I'm even more apologetic if it is your first. Rush and Sean don't translate well poor dear.

[Judi Lynn]

15. Great post.

Right on target.

[daleo]

14. You mean like George Bush, the world class C student and drunk?

I agree, this sort of thing has always troubled me. It seems to me that the qualifications should for president should be higher.

[Judi Lynn]

18. The qualifications for Democratic Presidents are FAR higher!

Not only must their personal records be beyond reproach, even superior, they apparently are expected to be guys you'd like to go have a beer with, it seems.

Without developing that "good ol' boy" act, Democrats really have to hustle to get the attention of the media, the gateway to the public.

Democrats are going to have to work harder on acting dumb as mud, and keeping their real qualifications a secret.




~~Our next Repub. pResidential pool~~

It gets you thinking about Republican candidates, and if you go back as far as Eisenhower, you realize that Republicans have always preferred men of moderate intelligence, with Richard Nixon as the only exception (he was smart but crazy.) Neither Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan were capable of threatening anyone in a duel of wits.

http://www.spectacle.org/0900/democracy.html

[leftistagitator]

16. For the benefit of society as a whole

You see, some of us actually care about other people, so we don't make others do the work we should be doing ourselves. I know this concept may be foreign to you, actually having any concern at all for anyone but yourself, but it's the backbone of such familiar institutions like family, community, Christianity, and egalitarian based societies. Maybe someday you'll understand.

[Imperialism Inc.]

17. One thing that kinda statement makes me wonder about is...

If that is the case then what exactly is driving all the multi-millionaires and billionaires who stay active in the business community and/or stock market? I mean they have absolutly enough to live on and never work a day if they choose, but yet they wake up every day trying to make more and more and more. Are only poor people lazy? Or is it just pure evil driving the rich? Is the freedom to be pure evil a freedom we care about? How about the freedom to live in unimaginable wealth while others starve to death? On the scale of important freedoms I personally put it very close to the freedom to murder others (yeah, I'm a 'zero-sum-ist').

Besides, socialism is dead. They call it "participatory society" now-a-days.

ParEcon: Life After Capitalism.
http://ParEcon.org

[sandnsea]

19. Ask the "investor class"

Their whole life is "slacking off" and nobody has a problem with that.

[camero]

20. Ah, the" keeping up with the Jones" mentality

Sorry bud, there's more to life than just getting more stuff.

[Darranar]

22. Chavez is not a socialist, he seems more of a...

left-wing populist.

He does stand up to corporate imperialism and US hegemony, so if we were back in the Cold War it would make him an evil tyrannical communist selling his soul to the Soviets, but I thought we were past that. Now we're in the enlightened age, where anyone who commits the crime of not bowing to US-based transnational corporations is just a plain old anti-American dictator.

[Zhade]

23. Poster's been tombstoned. As I suspected, s/he was a disruptor.

Funny how easy it is to tell - and scary how a few of them here have managed to 'evade security' and get past 1000 posts...

Not you, of course. Your posts rock.

:)

[Darranar]

24. Thanks! n/t