Hugo Chavez, RIP

Don't have an issue with that, just it seems to be attack the messenger day and mostly frm people apparently not reading all the articles posting before commenting(which is why Ive not commented, I didnt bother reading anything the MSM had to say or whatever wave red flag fanatic pro chavez groups said either)

dp

6079_Smith_W wrote:

I have heard some talk as if they might catch plague from it, though - or that it makes one an active supporter.

Don't you just have to laugh at all the rich people in capitalist countries around the globe that spend big bucks to control the media. Boy are they ever stupid.

Love his smile, and my Spanish isn't that good, but that wasn't quite a full translation. His aide was practicing diplomacy.

(edit)

Come to think of it, more than any of their other offensive shit, it is astounding that FOX doesn't send a bilingual reporter to cover htis. And yes, I know no one is surprised, but from a news standpoint it is jaw-dropping.

6079_Smith_W wrote:

I won't post it here, but I'd actually recommend reading The Economist's assessment published today.

Why not post it?

Here you go.

Gwynne Dyer has weighed in as well: Venezuela after Hugo Chavez

Quote:

. . .

 

Venezuela never stopped being a democracy despite 14 years of Chavez’s rule. He didn’t seize power. He didn’t even rig elections, though he used the government’s money and privileged access to the media to good effect. He was elected president four times, the first three with increasing majorities—but the last time, in 2012, he fell back sharply, only defeating his rival by 54 percent to 44 percent.

That is certainly not a wide enough margin to guarantee that his appointed successor, Nicolas Maduro, will win the next election. Maduro will doubtless benefit from a certain sympathy vote, but that effect may be outweighed by the fact that Chavez is no longer there in person to work his electoral magic. If his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) were to lose that election, it would not be a tragedy.

Chavez was an unnecessarily combative and polarizing politician and a truly awful administrator, but he has actually achieved what he went into politics for. Twenty years ago Venezuelan politics was a corrupt game fought out between two factions of a narrow elite. Now the task of using the country’s oil wealth to improve the lives of the poor majority is central to all political debate in the country.

 

In last year’s election, the Venezuelan opposition parties managed to unite behind a single presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles, whose political platform was basically “Chavismo” without the demagoguery.  In previous elections, the opposition had railed against Chavez’s “socialism” and Marxism, and lost by a wide margin. Capriles, by contrast, promised to retain most of Chavez’s social welfare policies, and lost very narrowly.

Over the past dozen years Chavez’s governments have poured almost $300 billion into improving literacy, extending high school education, creating a modern, universally accessible health-care system, build housing for the homeless, and subsidising household purchases from groceries to appliances. What made that possible was not “socialism”, but Venezuela’s huge oil revenues.

 

. . .

.

Actually, Fidel didn't take money from the rich and give it directly to the poor, either...he used the money Cuba gained from expropriating the large gringo corporations to fund health care and free university education for the people.

In fact, to my knowledge, "socialism" was never about direct wealth transfers from the rich to the poor.

Anybody else ever hear of any "socialist" system that worked even remotely like what Dyer sees as "socialism"?

.

That wasn't his point. If he meant to say that socialism only works when it has money behind it, he would have said that. His "point", (to use the term loosely) is exactly what he said: It was money that caused progress, NOT socialism, which of course makes no sense at all. Socialism is about how you use money. To try to set these things as opposing concepts is total gibberish. Just another example of how the Western media ties itself in knots trying to discredit Chavez.

Jacob Two-Two wrote:

That wasn't his point. If he meant to say that socialism only works when it has money behind it, he would have said that. His "point", (to use the term loosely) is exactly what he said: It was money that caused progress, NOT socialism, which of course makes no sense at all. Socialism is about how you use money. To try to set these things as opposing concepts is total gibberish. Just another example of how the Western media ties itself in knots trying to discredit Chavez.

What he said could have just as easily been lifted out of the reactionary media comment sections and slightly paraphrased, which is likely what occurred with this transcription.  Socialism works great when you're using other people's money.  Money that belongs to bankers and oilmen that is.  Money = Capitalism after all, meaning that Socialism wouldn’t survive without either.  Ditto for journalism as we know it.

@ laine

Never mind that pointing my finger at someone else doesn't excuse any of my transgressions, pointing out NGO bias doesn't completely invalidate the issues they raise, either.

I went through wikipedia's page on criticism of HRW. and strangely enough much of it is devoted to those who think Israel gets excessive attention from that propaganda arm for western powers.

I guess those on the left aren't alone in wishing they had the power to write the definitive story themselves, without any pesky interference.

..a toast to hugo chavez. he will be missed.

re: bush at the un.

Hugo Chavez, President, Venezuela:
"Yesterday the devil was here in this same place where it still smells like sulphur. This table where I have to talk from."

Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle

The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains

No, Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.

For instance, according to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez’s brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its “extreme poverty” rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America. Additionally, as Weisbrot points out, “college enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.”

When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter – and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on.

For a flamboyant ideologue like Chavez, that meant him being seen by the transnational elite as much more than an insignificant rogue leader of a relatively small country. He came to be seen as a serious threat to the global system of corporate capitalism.

That, of course, is considered a high crime by the American political illuminati – a high crime prompting a special punishment.

As evidenced by the treatment of everyone from Martin Luther King to Michael Moore to Oliver Stone to anyone else who dares question neoliberalism and economic imperialism, that punishment is all about marginalization – the kind that avoids engaging on substance for fear of allowing the notion of socialism to even enter the conversation in the first place. Instead, the non-conformist is attacked and discredited with vapid invective and caricature, becoming a cartoon villain whose ideas, performance and record are ignored before they can be considered on the merits. He becomes, in other words, the Hugo Chavez we so often saw in American political ads.

Stating this, mind you, is not to claim that Venezuela’s economy under Chavez was perfect. As The Week correctly put it, while “Chavez’s policies of redistribution and nationalization of oil assets endeared him to Venezuela’s working class” and produced many laudable results, the country’s “oil-centric economy has taken away resources from other areas that are badly in need of development.”

However, it is to argue that at a moment when America faces a pivotal debate about taxation and the size of government in specific and free market fundamentalism in general, Chavez’s passing should prompt as much reflection on the individual iconoclast as on the overarching economic ideas he came to embody.

To start, that means asking important questions.

For example, the United States has adamantly rejected the concept of nationalization and instead pursued a bailout/subsidy strategy when it comes to rapacious banks and oil companies – and those firms have often gone on to wreak economic havoc. Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s decision to avoid that subsidization route and instead pursue full-onnationalization?

Likewise, in a United States whose poverty rate is skyrocketing, are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s policies that so rapidly reduced poverty?

And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chavez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?

No doubt, there are few absolutely clear answers to those uncomfortable questions, if those questions are assessed honestly. Most likely, in fact, the answers are murky. But such questions need to be asked. The problem is that even gently raising them typically gets one tarred and feathered as a communist and then inevitably called a Hugo Chavez pal (even if Chavez’s overall record is also being criticized!). At the moment Chavez’s name is invoked, the conversation is inevitably terminated, ending any possibility of discourse.

That is by design – it is what the longtime caricaturing and marginalizing of Chavez was always supposed to do. But maybe now that the iconoclast is dead, the cartoon will end. Maybe now Chavez’s easily ridiculed bombast can no longer be used to distract from Venezuela’s record – and, thus, a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin.

CBC:  Former PM Chretien in Caracas for the Chavez funeral.

ETA: CBC doesn't make clear whether Chretien went by himself, or part of Canada's delegation with two officials from Foreign Affairs.

Those who think Chavez was so popular that he became an unbeatable elected democratic dictator are over simplifying.

Venezuela has 23 states. Chavez supporters govern 19 of them. Four have opposition governors: Miranda, Amazonas, Lara and Bolívar.

He survived a recall referendum in 2004, and was re-elected in 2006, but suffered a significant defeat in 2007 with the narrow rejection of a constitutional referendum.

And he made a big change for the worse in their voting system.

The 1993 parliamentary election was the first held under their new MMP system, the German and Scottish model so many want to see in Canada. The 1988 election had been dominated by the traditional rivals, Democratic Action (social democratic centre-left) and Copei (Christian democrats), who won 82% of the seats between them. A left alliance won 9% of the seats, and a local left party elected 3 MPs. But massive public discontent on many fronts with unsuccessful neoliberal reforms led to the two coup attempts in 1992. The decades-old two-party system was replaced by an MMP voting system with 50% local MPs and 50% top-ups.

So in 1993 five main parties emerged. Two left parties won 32% of the seats. As well, a new reform alliance of 17 smaller parties that included the Communist Party and three other left parties won another 13% of the seats, and the presidency.

In the 1998 parliamentary election Chavez' new party, the Fifth Republic Movement founded in 1997, won 17% of the seats (Maduro was first elected then) as the second largest of eight major parties; three others were leftist. The next month Chavez won the Presidential election.

But the 1999 constitution changed the MMP system. First, it cut the number of "top-up" seats to 40%. And it permitted the National Assembly to make further changes, so later it turned them into parallel seats rather than top-up, and cut them to 30%, leaving the country with a weakly proportional semi-proportional system. So by 2010 the country was back to a two-party system.

Is Mulcair attending? Or would that be bad for polls?

ETA: I don't know why I even bothered checking, but has anyone seen a single statement by a single NDP MP honouring (or mentioning) Chavez?

[url=http://meganleslie.ndp.ca/node/514131]Megan Leslie[/url] at least had the dignity to advertise a memorial event on her website - an event where the NDP doesn't figure among the co-sponsoring organizations. That's all I could find.

They are really a shameful obsequious bunch.

Oh wait, maybe it's provincial jurisdiction, like the student strike?

My bad.

ETA again: Ok, for completeness, here's a tweet I found from Paul Dewar:

Quote:

Condolences to President Chavez’s family and the people of Venezuela. We reaffirm the enduring bonds between our two countries.

A fucking tweet and not a word of tribute.

Aristotleded24 wrote:

I'm not sure what the protocol is for the leader of the Opposition to attend funerals for foreign heads of state, but yeah, the silence from the NDP (and Green Party, for that matter), is discouraging.

Yes it is discouraging but predictable.

Mulcair was being interviewed on P&P as news of Chavez' death broke, and he was the very first Paliamentarian I know that expressed sincere condolences to the Chavez family and the country. Then Jean Cretien phoned in and gave a long expression of his memories with Chavez, meeting with him, and that Chavez wanted Chretien to come to Caracas and play a round of baseball with the Venezuelan leader.

So, Mulcair was first, Chretien second, and that shitty statement from Harper came a little later.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Aristotleded24 wrote:

I'm not sure what the protocol is for the leader of the Opposition to attend funerals for foreign heads of state, but yeah, the silence from the NDP (and Green Party, for that matter), is discouraging.

Yes it is discouraging but predictable.

As Boom Boom said, Mulcair said nice words about Chavez on P and P. Maybe you should watch that instead of continuing your ridiculous crusade against Mulcair and the NDP.

knownothing wrote:

Mulcair said nice words about Chavez on P and P.  Maybe you should watch that instead of continuing your ridiculous crusade against Mulcair and the NDP.

According to the stature of Chavez in the world, this was...how do the Capitalists say it?.....'nothingburger.'