chavez (Photo credit: iarantzabal)
I enjoy many of the writings from Paul Craig Roberts, but in this one he was so expansively wrong on a subject that means something to me personally, because my wife is from Honduras. He lifts up Hugo Chavez, oppressor and dictator of Venezuela, and a pusher of leftist dictatorships across Latin America, who was stopped cold when he tried to take over Honduras for the richest people on the planet, the clique that put him in power. (You thought he financed his own ascendancy to power?)
http://www.thedailybell.com/28151/Paul-Craig-Roberts-Dont-Vote-for-Evil
Maybe Bush was an undercover emissary of Satan, but Paul Craig Roberts saying that Chavez “helps the people” shows he does not know what he’s talking about! Chavez has run 99% of Venezuelans into the ground worse off than they were before, and the 1% are the ones that rode his coat tails into confiscating all the wealth they could get from the ahem, “rich” to give to his friends, like he did when he swept his cronies into the Venezuelan oil company and the workers and the unions went on strike to protest.
My wife is from Honduras, and my ex-wife is from the Dominican Republic. I lived as a missionary in three different countries and visited three others. I have spent a lot of my time with people in the by-ways and the highways and helping the poor.
I followed the Hondurans’ brave blow back against tyranny in July, 2009 even as the world press LIED KNOWINGLY about them and the whole world condemned them. They called it a congressional-judicial “coup”. (If there is no “legitimate” way to remove a president from power that has become a dictator, it is already a “coup” and dictatorship, which Zelaya’s rule was).
They changed history and pushed back at the onslaught of leftist tyranny then. El Salvador saw it (after what I call Honduras’ cleanest, most-watched elections in its history) and their former guerrilla president said “Thanks anyway but no thanks” to ALBA and Chavez.
Now also Paraguay has removed their leftist demagogue dictator-wannabe by constitutional vote by the representatives who also were elected, hello!
Democracy is a meaningless term if the people elect a temporary king and absolute ruler every presidential term. If “democracy” is anything good, it is not a “divine right rule” by any “elected” president!
That’s why some great writers have said democracy is “two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner”!
From the article by Paul Craig Roberts:
Chavez is one of the
American right-wing’s favorite bogyman because Chavez helps the people instead of bleeding them for the rich, which is Washington’s way. While Washington has driven all but the one percent into the ground, Chavez cut poverty in half, doubled university enrollment and provided healthcare and old-age pensions to millions of Venezuelans for the first time.
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I seriously, very seriously, doubt Chavez has “cut poverty in half” except by his own government’s cooked-up numbers. I have seen analyses of the voting numbers in his elections that show strong evidence that there are more voters on the rolls there than are feasible for the population. It reminds me of the counties in the United States where there were more votes cast than there are registered voters, Florida in 2000 and 20008, and Ohio in 2009, favoring both sides of the two-party power cartel.
Latins are not so gullible as Americans. But Americans are waking up. But they are awakening to the hubris of justifying American military expeditions and interventions by trumpeting how much better political and economic freedoms are treated in the US compared to other nations.
But liberty-minded writers in America should not blind themselves to any rights violations anywhere. And appreciating Chavez for saying what many Latin Americans believe about American dominance in the sphere, even in demagoguery, is not the same as misunderstanding the economic and literal beatings that the poor have received in his country.
Some of the illusory wealth is not just from oil, but from drug trafficking. Venezuela’s government take would plunge big-time if the U.S. were to decriminalize drugs. It’s instructive to note that once upon a time the Medellin Cartel offered to pay off the entire national debt for Columbia and quit the trade if they would just leave them alone.
Columbia has handed over its own citizens for charges brought in Chavista courts, but Venezuela has refused to do anything about one Columbian warrant for the arrest of one Venezuelan general for drug trafficking, even posted to Interpol. The Chavista government has not bothered to respond in any way at all.
Little wonder he was elected to a fourth term as president despite the many millions of dollars Washington poured into the election campaign of Chavez’s opponent.
Who knows whether Chavez was “elected” in any fair count of the votes, because his government manufactures the electronic voting machines they use. A lot of those touch-vote machines were caught red-handed rigging the vote many places here in the States were made by that company, or a subsidiary, as revealed by Bev Harris, of Black Box Voting. Check out that site.
While Washington and the EU preach neoliberalism － the supremacy of capital over labor － South American politicians who reject Washington’s way are being elected and reelected in Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia.
Those countries also rejected free market solutions and freedoms, and they embraced top-down command dictatorship with Chavez, and FOUGHT AGAINST HONDURAS’ REJECTION OF FASCIST SOCIALISM when Honduras removed its dictator auto-coup caudillo piti-Chavez wannabe in 2009.
Chavez offered $3 million (dollars) to Micheletti, poured so much money into the country to pay anti-freedom protestors that the Honduran lempira rose TEN PERCENT! against the American dollar! And of course the corrupt piti-Chavez Zelaya is opposing Michael Strong’s attempt to help Honduras –AND THE ELECTED CONGRESS- with the special economic zones inside Honduras.
It was the Ecuadoran government, not Washington, that had the moral integrity to grant political asylum to
WikiLeaks‘ Julian Assange. The only time Washington grants asylum is when it can be used to embarrass an opponent.
The one bright light among this cartel of dictators is the granting of asylum to Julian Assange, but you can bet every dollar you have without risk, that this loose leftist alliance will not grant asylum to anybody that might embarrass them, except the ones that would, don’t want to anyway. If Comandante Zero were alive and asked for asylum, do you think they would grant it? If Zelaya seized power again in Honduras, you think they would grant asylum to Micheletti?
A bold Venezuelan media personality and journalist exposed a plot for serial assassinations or reporters and politicians in Honduras to be blamed on the Honduran post-election government (of 2009). It has happened as she predicted. Hondurans still don’t like the would-be caudillo or the brains of his operation, Patricia Rodas.
They should be embarrassed by the de-facto asylum of hundreds of Venezuelans and others from those regimes that have escaped to the United States and other places.
Like hundreds of Cuban doctors after Zelaya lost his dictatorship and who quietly asked Honduras for asylum when they were pulled out when Zelaya’s coup was stopped.
Who wants asylum in Venezuela?
In contrast to the leadership that is emerging in South America as more governments there reject the traditional hegemony of Washington, the US political elite, whether Republican or Democrat, are aligned with the rich against the American people.
It’s time smart people start realizing that the hegemony of some of “the rich” in America has a divide and conquer plan. George Soros, billionaire from manipulating currencies and market around the world that drove more millions into poverty that would have been, for example, supports that gang of leftist thugs that want to take over the Americas.
I’ve seen good stuff by this Paul Craig Roberts guy and what he’s saying about Latin America makes no sense at all!
The Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, has promised to cut taxes on the rich, taxes which are already rock bottom, to block any regulation of the gangsters in the financial arena and to privatize Social Security and Medicare.
That’s right, but Obama’s taxes are already proving a worse burden than what you would imagine Romney doing. He’s not only raising taxes on the people who invest in businesses that provide jobs for people like my wife and our children, he forced down our throats the biggest “regressive” tax increase against the POOR and middle class of all history with the abominable stepwise medical industry nationalization fiasco!
Sure, there are a precious few jobs doing software to handle all the thousands of rules in tens of thousands of pages of commands from the imperial capital of D.C. but it’s pulling resources from the free market. It’s outrageous to just talk about Romney helping this clique of rich, we all can see the obvious, that Obama helps them more because the middle class is shrinking faster under these measures than even with Bush and TARP –which Obama pushed for too!
Privatizing Social Security and Medicare means to divert the people’s tax dollars to the profits of private corporations. In Republican hands, privatization means only one thing: to cut the people’s benefits and to use the people’s tax dollars to increase the profits in the private sector. Romney’s policy is just another policy that sacrifices the people to the one percent.
SS and Medicare are a mess financed by a Ponzi scheme idea and depends on the whims of politicians and soon, health care panels that get the older folks free counseling on making sure they know how to die with a false “dignity”. I want the investors of private corporations to be free to make good profit for products they sell to people who want them instead of products forced down our throats from the imperial capital of anti-capitalist D.C.
Unfortunately, the Democrats, if a lesser evil, are still an evil. There is no reason to vote for the reelection of a president who codified into law the Bush regime’s destruction of the US Constitution, who went one step further and asserted the power to murder US citizens without due process of law and who has done nothing to stop the exploitation of the American people by the one percent.
Lesser evil? The Democrats are the party of slavery, Jim Crow, the socialist plantation, racist demagoguery, robbing their neighbors, two world wars, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Great Depression, economy-crippling tax hikes, the Federal Reserve, prenatal infanticide, religious suppression, free speech opponents, the United Nations! It’s the Republicans I’d call a “lesser evil”. The Dems are even bigger into the crony of crony capitalism, which they cover up by yelling louder about the poor and populating the traditional news sources with 97% Democrat-party as registered, even!
And remember, that government-media complex has been uplifting the war themes all along.
Yes, God blessed them somewhat during the earlier half of the 20th century because a lot of them sincerely wanted to help the poor. But then they became
As Gerald Celente says in the Autumn Issue of the Trends Journal, when confronted with the choice between two evils, you don’t vote for the lesser evil. You boycott the election and do not vote. “Lesser or greater, evil is evil.”If Americans had any sense, no one would vote in the November election. Whoever wins the November election, it will be a defeat for the American people.An Obama or Romney win stands in stark contrast with Chavez’s win. Here is how Lula da Silva, the popular former president of Brazil summed it up: “Chavez’s victory is a victory for all the peoples of Latin America. It is another blow against imperialism.” Washington, making full use of the almighty dollar, was unable to buy the Venezuelan election.
Chavez’ purported election victory, lifted up by the same ex-president who said it wasn’t worth it trying to help the North Koreans get relief from their tyrant rulers, and gave Zimbabwe to Mugabe, is not a victory for all Latin America.
Hondurans hates him with a passion pretty much, except for a handful that knows how to make a lot of noise and get a lot of press.
And how do they get so much coverage? Because BIG, REALLY BIG MONEY finances them that’s why.
My wife when younger, when they saw her as a popular poll watcher, was once offered one of those plush and lavishly paid leftist-activist jobs, a chance to travel to conferences around the world, expenses paid, nice hotels, if she just joined them.
Better the kind of expanded free zone idea that the Honduran Congress just voted for.
