In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.
What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.
On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?
I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: "Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews."
My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?
Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.
The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.
Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or - I hope - to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.
We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land?
My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: "I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice, anti-oppression."
But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?
People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.
Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.
We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers.
Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission. This address was given at a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, earlier this month. A longer version appears in the current edition of Church Times.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Friday, December 22, 2006
Hugo Chavez Landslide Tops All In US History
Well almost, as explained below. Hugo Chavez Frias' reelection on December 3 stands out when compared to the greatest landslide presidential victories in US history. Except for the close race in 1812 and the electoral deadlock in 1800 decided by the House of Representatives choosing Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr, the very earliest elections here weren't hardly partisan contests at all as the Democrat-Republican party of Jefferson and Madison was dominant and had everything its own way. It was like that through the election of 1820 when James Monroe ran virtually unopposed winning over 80% of the vote. A consistent pattern of real competitive elections only began with the one held in 1824, and from that time to the present Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide victory beat them all.
The nation's first president, George Washington, had no party affiliation, ran unopposed twice, and got all the votes. His "elections" were more like coronations, but Washington wisely chose to serve as an elected leader and not as a monarch which Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and the nation's first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay preferred and one aligned with the British monarchy. They also were nationalists believing in a militarily strong central government with little regard for the rights of the separate states.
Most of them were dubious democrats as well who believed for the nation to be stable it should be run by elitists (the way it is today) separate from what Adams arrogantly called "the rabble." And John Jay was very explicit about how he felt saying "The people who own the country ought to run it." Today they do. Adams showed his disdain for ordinary people (and his opposition) when as president he signed into law the Patriot Acts (I and II) of his day - the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to protect the country from dangerous aliens (today's "terrorists") and that criminalized any criticism of his administration (the kind George Bush calls traitorous).
Jefferson denounced both laws and called the Sedition Act an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right of free expression. It helped him and his Democrat-Republicans beat Adams in 1800 that led to the decline of the Federalists as a powerful opposition and their demise as a political party after the war of 1812. It meant that from 1800 - 1820, after Washington's two unopposed elections, presidential contests were lopsided affairs (except for the two mentioned above), the "loyal opposition" was hardly none at all, and the Democrat-Republicans weren't challenged until the party split into factions and ran against each other in 1824. Then Democrat party candidate Andrew Jackson beat National Republican John Quincy Adams in 1828. It's only from that period forward that any real comparison can be made between Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide on December 3 and presidential contests in the US. And doing it shows one thing. In all US landslide electoral victories from then till now, Chavez outdid them all, but you won't ever hear that reported by the dominant corporate-controlled media.
Earlier, there might not have been a basis for comparison had Washington chosen to be president for life as the Federalists preferred. If he'd done it, he could have stayed on by acclamation and those holding office after him might have done the same. Wisely, however, he decided eights years was enough and stepped down at the end of his second term in office setting the precedent of a two-term limit until Franklin Roosevelt went against tradition running and winning the presidency four times.
The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1951 settled the issue providing that: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."
The US Constitution specifies that the president and vice-president be selected by electors chosen by the states. Article Two, Section One says: "Each state shall appoint, in a Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress." The electors then meet in their respective states after the popular vote to choose a president and vice-president.
That's how it's been done since George Washington was first elected president in 1789 with John Adams his vice-president. The method of choosing state electors changed later on, but the US system choosing presidents and vice-presidents by the Electoral College (a term unmentioned in the Constitution) of all the state electors has remained to this day, to the distress of many who justifiably believe it's long past time this antiquated and undemocratic system be abolished even though it's unimaginable a state's electors would vote against the majority popular vote in their states - at least up to now. Until 2000, it was also unimaginable that five members of the US Supreme Court would annul the popular vote in a presidential election to choose the candidate they preferred even though he was the loser - but they did, and the rest is history.
Hugo Chavez Frias' Electoral Victory Majority Greater Than For Any US President - Since 1820
Amazing but true. On December 3, 2006, the people of Venezuela voted in what hundreds of independent observers from around the world, including from the Carter Center in the US, called a free, fair, open and extremely smooth and well-run electoral process. They chose the only man they'll entrust with the job as long as he wants it reelecting Hugo Chavez with a majority 62.87% of the vote with the highest voter turnout in the country's history at almost 75% of the electorate. No US president since 1820, when elections here consistently became real contests, ever matched it or has any US election ever embraced all the democratic standards all Venezuelans now enjoy since Hugo Chavez came to office.
The Venezuelan Bolivarian Constitution Hugo Chavez gave his people states: "All persons have the right to be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public documents constituting evidence of the biological identity, in accordance with law." To see this happened Chavez established an initiative called Mision Itentidad (Mission Identity) that's now a mass citizenship and voter registration drive. It's given millions of Venezuelans full rights of citizenship including the right to vote for the first time ever.
As glorious and grand a democratic experiment as the US Constitution was and is, it had and still has lots of flaws including who's empowered to vote and what authority has the right to decide. It's the reason through the years many amendments and laws were needed and enacted to establish mandates for enfranchisement, but even today precise voting rights qualifications are left for the states to decide, and many take advantage to strike from their voter rolls categories of people they decide are unfit or that they unjustly wish to exclude from the most important of all rights in a democracy no citizen should have taken away.
It shouldn't be this way as millions in the US have lost the right to vote for a variety of reasons including for being a convicted felon or ex-felon in a country with the highest prison population in the world (greater than China's with four times the population). It exceeds 2.2 million, increases by about 1000 each week, one in every 32 adults in the country is either imprisoned, on parole or on probation, half the prison population is black, half are there for non-violent crimes, half of those are for mostly minor drug-related offenses, and most of those behind bars shouldn't be there at all if we had a criminal justice system with equity and justice for all including many wrongfully convicted because they couldn't afford or get competent counsel to defend them.
Virtually all citizens in Venezuela have the right to vote under one national standard and are encouraged to do so under a model democratic system that's gotten the vast majority of them to actively participate. In contrast, in the US, elections are especially fraud-laden today, but in the past many categories of voters were unjustly denied the franchise including blacks until the 1865 13th amendment to the Constitution freed them from slavery, the 1870 15th amendment gave them the right to vote, but it still took until the passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s abolishing the Jim Crow laws in the South before blacks could exercise that right like others in the country could. Earlier, it wasn't until the 19th amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, before women got the right to vote they'd been fighting for over 70 years to get.
Back at the republic's birth, only adult white male property-owners could vote. It took until 1810 to eliminate the last religious prerequisite to voting and until 1850 before property ownership and tax requirements were dropped allowing all adult white males the franchise. It wasn't until 1913 and the passage of the 17th amendment that citizen voters could elect senators who up to then were elected by state legislatures. Native Americans, whose land this was for thousands of years before the settlers arrived and took it from them, couldn't vote until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted all Native peoples the rights of citizenship, including the right to vote in federal elections. It didn't matter that this was their country, and it's they who should have had to right to decide what rights the white settler population had instead of the reverse.
In 1924, the 24th amendment outlawed discrminatory poll taxes in federal elections, and in 1966 the Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections ended poll tax requirements in all elections for the four remaining southern states still using them including George Bush's home state of Texas. In 1971, the 26th amendment set the minimum voting age at 18, and in 1972 the Supreme Court in Dunn v. Blumstein ruled residency requirements for voting in state and local elections were unconstitutional and suggested 30 days was a fair period.
This history shows how unfair laws were and still are in force in a country calling itself a model democracy. The most fundamental right of all, underpinning all others in a democratic state, is the right of every citizen to exercise his or her will at the polls freely and fairly without obstructive laws or any interference from any source in the electoral process.
That freedom has been severely compromised today in the US, and unless that changes, there's no possibility of a free, fair and open democratic process here for all citizens. That happening is now almost impossible with more than 80% of the vote now cast and counted on easily manipulated electronic voting machines with no verifiable paper trail. The process is secretive and unreliable, privatized in the hands of large corporations with everything to gain if candidates they support win, and based on what's now known, that's exactly what's been happening as seen in the 2000 and 2004 fraud-laden elections.
The Six Greatest Landslide US Presidential Elections Since Contests Began After 1820
Six US presidential elections stand out especially for the landslide victories they gave the winners. Hugo Chavez's December 3, 2006 reelection topped them all.
1. In 1920, the first time women could vote in a federal election, Republican Warren Harding got 60.3% of the vote to beat Democrat James Cox getting 34.1%. This election was particularly noteworthy as Socialist Eugene Debs ran for the high office from prison getting over 900,000 votes. He was sentenced and was serving 10 years by the Wilson administration for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 that along with the Sedition Act of 1918 were the Patriot Acts of their day like the earlier Alien and Sedition Acts were under John Adams. Debs was found guilty of exercising his constitutional right of free expression after making an anti-WW I speech in Canton, Ohio. He served about 2.5 years before Harding commuted the sentence on Christmas day, 1921.
Harding capitalized on the unpopularity of Woodrow Wilson who took the country to the war he promised to keep us out of. The economy was also in recession, the country and Congress were mainly isolationist, and the main order of business was business and the need to get on with it and make it healthy again. It turned out to be the start of the "roaring twenties" that like the 1990s "roared" mainly for the privileged. It also was a time of scandal and corruption best remembered by the Teapot Dome affair of 1922 that involved Harding's Interior Secretary Albert Fall's leasing oil reserve rights on public land in Wyoming and California without competitive bidding (like the routine use of no-bid contracts today to favored corporations) and getting large illegal gifts from the companies in return that resulted in the crime committed.
Harding was dead (in 1923) and Coolidge was in the White House before everything came to a head with Fall eventually found guilty, fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison making him the first ever presidential cabinet member to serve prison time for offenses while in office.
2. In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover defeated Democrat and first ever Catholic to run for the presidency Al Smith with 58.2% v. 40.8% for Smith. It wasn't a good year to be a Democrat, especially a Catholic one at that time. The 1920s were "roaring," including the stock market (again only for the privileged), and Republicans were tough to beat as long as, at the macro level, the economy was strong. Coolidge was president but declined a second term (fortunate for him as it turned out) and Commerce Secretary and capable bureaucrat Hoover got the nomination winning big. As things turned out, fate dealt him a bad hand as the stock market crashed less than a year into his term, but bad administration and Federal Reserve policy turned what only should have been a stiff recession for a year or two into the Great Depression. It swept Republicans from office and ushered in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who won impressively in 1932, not one of our big six, but was reelected in 1936 and included in our select group with the second greatest landslide victory ever on our list. Number one is after the FDR years.
3. The Great Depression 1930s weren't good years to be Republicans, and in 1936, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was reelected overwhelmingly with 60.8% of the vote to 36.5% for Republican Alf Landon who had no chance to convince the electorate the New Deal was corrupt and wasteful when it was helping a lot of desperate people. Roosevelt asked for and got a mandate from the public to continue his progressive agenda that included the landmark Social Security Act (now in jeopardy in the age of George Bush) and other important measures that included establishing the FDIC, insuring bank deposits, the SEC, regulating the stock exchanges, and the NLRB with the passage of the Wagner Act that was the high water mark for labor rights. It guaranteed labor had the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management, something that began eroding badly with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over Harry Truman's veto that began reversing the hard-won rights gained that now have nearly vanished entirely in a nation dominated by corporate giants and both Democrat and Republican parties supporting them including their union-busting practices.
4. In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the greatest landslide presidential victory on our list, unsurpassed to this day. He got 61.1% of the vote to 38.5% for Republican Barry Goldwater who was portrayed as a dangerous extremist in a still-remembered TV "Daisy Girl" campaign ad featuring a little girl picking petals from a daisy in a field, counting them and then segueing to a countdown and nuclear explosion. Ironically, the ad only ran once in September that year on NBC, but it stirred such a controversy all the broadcasters ran it as a news story giving it far greater prominence than it otherwise would have gotten.
From the Great Depression through the 1960s, Republicans had a hard enough time competing with Democrats (Dwight Eisenhower being the exception because of his stature as a war hero and the unpopular Korean war under Harry Truman), and Goldwater made it worse by being a conservative before his time and a hawkish one advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam at a time the war was still in its early stages but would be an act of lunacy any time.
5. In 1972, most people would be surprised to learn (except those around to remember it) Republican Richard Nixon trounced Democrat George McGovern getting 60% of the vote to McGovern's 38%. The main issue was the Vietnam war (that drove Lyndon Johnson from office in 1968), and Nixon managed to convince the public he had a plan to end it and peace was at hand. McGovern was strongly anti-war, but had to replace his running mate Thomas Eagleton after it was learned he hadn't revealed he'd undergone electroshock therapy for depression.
It proved a decisive factor in McGovern's defeat, but oddly as things turned out, Nixon was popular enough at that time to sweep to a landslide win only to come a cropper in the Watergate scandal that began almost innocently in June, 1972, months before the election, but spiralled out of control in its aftermath along with growing anger about the war. It drove Richard Nixon from office in disgrace in August, 1974 and gave the office lawfully under the 25th amendment to Gerald Ford. It made him the nation's only unelected president up to the time five Supreme Court justices gave the office to George Bush violating the law of the land they showed contempt for.
6. In 1984, Republican Ronald Reagan won a decisive victory getting 58.8% of the vote to Democrat Walter Mondale's 40.6%. The "Reagan revolution" was in full swing, and the president was affable enough to convince a majority of the electorate his administration's large increases in military spending, big budget deficits run up to pay for it, tax cuts mainly for the rich, slashed social spending and opposition to labor rights were good for the country. Mondale was no match for him and was unfairly seen as a candidate supporting the poor and disadvantaged at the expense of the middle class.
In 1980s America, Hugo Chavez might not have stood a chance against the likes of Ronald Reagan even though Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution serves all the people while Reagan's ignored and harmed those most in need including the middle class, mostly helping instead those in the country needing no help - the rich and powerful, at the beginning of the nation's second Gilded Age, serving an empowered plutocracy that reached full fruition with the dominance of the privileged class under George W. Bush.
One Other Landslide Win for Chavez Unreported
Time Magazine just voted this writer and all others communicating online their "Person of the Year." In their cover story they asked who are we, what are we doing, and who has the time and energy for this? Their answer: "you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." Strange how underwhelming it feels at least for two reasons, but it must be stressed we beat the pros before they're even out of bed in the morning doing one thing they almost never do - telling the truth communicating real news, information and honest opinion on the most important world and national issues affecting everyone and refusing to genuflect to the country's power establishment.
While Time was honoring the free use of the internet, its importance, and the millions of ordinary people using it, it's parent company Time-Warner has for months been part of the corporate cabal trying to high-pressure the Congress to end internet neutrality and destroy the freedom the magazine praised so effusively in their disingenuous annual award just announced. If the cable and telecom giants win their lobbying effort, the public Time calls "YOU" loses. They want to be self-regulating, to be able to charge whatever they wish, to choose wealthier customers and ignore lesser ones, to have a monopoly on high-speed cable internet so they can take over our private space and control it including, at their discretion, the content on it excluding whatever portions of it they don't want in their privatized space. They want to take what's now free and open and exploit it for profit, effectively destroying the internet as we now know it.
Time also failed to report they held an online poll for "Person of the Year" and then ignored the results when they turned out not to their editors' liking. "Time's Person of the Year is the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year." It turned out Hugo Chavez won their poll by a landslide at 35%. Second was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at 21%. Then came Nancy Pelosi at 12%, The YouTube Guys 11%, George Bush 8%, Al Gore 8%, Condoleezza Rice 5% and Kim Jong Il 2%. For some reason, the magazine's December 25 cover story omitted these results so their readers never learned who won their honor and rightfully should have been named Time's Person of the Year. An oversight, likely, in the holiday rush, so it's only fitting the winner be announced here - in the online space the magazine rates so highly:
Venezuelan President Hugo is Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year.
Venezuela under Hugo Chavez v. the US Under Republican or DLC Democrats Little Different From Republicans
The age of social enlightenment in the US, such as it was, lasted from the election of Franklin Roosevelt through the years of Lyndon Johnson and began heading south thereafter in the 1970s and ending with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. For the past generation, the US has been run for the interests of capital while the standard of living of ordinary working people, including the middle class fast eroding, had an unprecedented decline.
It shows in how wide the income disparity is between those at the economic top and ordinary wage earners. When Reagan was elected in 1980, average corporate CEO earnings were 42 times the average working person. The spread widened to 85 times in 1990 and skyrocketed to 431 times in 2004 as average top executive pay rose to about $14 million a year after the election of George Bush plus enormous benefits adding to that total, including huge ones at retirement, compared to working Americans who now earn less, adjusted for inflation, than they did 30 years ago.
This disparity is highlighted in tax data released by the IRS showing overall income in the country rose 27% adjusted for inflation from 1979 to 2004, but it all went to the top. The bottom 60% of Americans (earning less than $38,761 in 2004) made less than 95% of what they did in 1979. The 20% above them earned 2% more in 2004 than in 1979, inflation adjusted, and only the top 5% had significant gains earning 53% more in 2004 than in 1979. The largest gains of all went to the top 1% as expected - one-third of the entire increase in national income that translates to about 350% more in inflation adjusted dollars in 2004 than in 1979.
It all means since Ronald Reagan entered office, his administration and those that followed him, including Democrat Bill Clinton's, engineered a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary working people to the top income earners in the country while, at the same time, slashing social benefits making it much harder for most people to pay for essential services at much higher prices with the lower inflation-adjusted levels of income they now receive.
Especially hard hit are the 20% of workers on the bottom earning poverty-level wages - below $11,166 a year. The IRS definition of a taxpayer is either an individual or married couple meaning the 26 million poorest taxpayers are the equivalent of about 48 million adults plus 12 million dependent children totaling around 60 million Americans in the richest country in the world with incomes of about $7 a day (per capita) in a state of extreme destitution with the official poverty line in 2004 being $27 a day for a single adult below retirement age and $42 a day for a household with one child. The data excludes all public assistance like food stamps, medicaid benefits and earned-income tax credits, but since the Clinton administration's "welfare reform" Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) ended welfare payments after five years, that loss is much greater for the needy than the benefits remaining also being reduced.
It's hardly a testimony to the notion of "free market" capitalism under the Reagan revolution, the first Bush presidency following it, and eight years under Bill Clinton governing by Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) "centrist" principles eschewing the enlightened progressive party tradition, selling out instead, like Republicans, to the interests of wealth and power at the expense of ordinary people left far behind.
It all seemed like a warm-up leading to the election of George W. Bush in 2000 characterized by outrageous levels of handouts to the rich in the form of huge tax cuts for top earners and giant corporations; larger than ever corporate subsidies (aka socialism for big corporations) at taxpayer expense; and endless wars and all the bounty from them to well-connected corporate allies, some literally getting a license to steal, that never had it so good but getting it at the public's expense this president shows contempt for and is forced to follow the rules of law-of-the-jungle "free market" capitalism.
Today, under Republican or Democrat rule, the country is run by and for a rich aristocracy, in a rigidly structured class society promoting inequality and destroying the founding principles of the nation's Framers. In the last generation, the great majority of ordinary working people have been abandoned and are sinking lower in their losing efforts to make ends meet and survive in a heartless society caring only about the interests of capital. This writer will explore this issue more fully in a year-end review and outlook article due out shortly.
A Different Enlightened Way in Venezuela Under Hugo Chavez
Things are much different in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez that showed up in the overwhelming electoral endorsement he got from his people on December 3. Until he was first elected in December, 1998 taking office in February, 1999, the country was run by and for rich oligarchs, in league with their counterpart dominant interests in Washington and corporate America. They ignored the needs of ordinary people that left most of them in a state of desperate poverty. Hugo Chavez pledged to his people he'd ameliorate their condition and did it successfully for the past eight years, to the great consternation of the country's aristocracy who want the nation's wealth for themselves and their US allies.
Following the crippling US and Venezuelan ruling class-instigated 2002 - 03 oil strike and destabilizing effects of their short-lived coup deposing him for two days in April, 2002, Hugo Chavez's enlightened Bolivarian economic and social programs cut the level of poverty nearly in half from around 62% to where it is today at about one-third of the population, a dramatic improvement unmatched anywhere in Latin America or likely anywhere in the world. Along with that improvement are the essential social benefits now made available to everyone in the country by law, discussed below.
The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was created democratically by popular referendum and adopted in December, 1999. It established a model humanistic social democracy providing checks and balances in the nation's five branches of government instead of the usual three in countries like the US where currently all branches operate unchecked in lockstep under the Bush administration and will change little when the DLC Democrat-controlled 110th Congress convenes in January.
In Venezuela, in addition to the executive, legislative and judicial branches, the country also has independent electoral and prosecutorial ones. Chavez controls the executive branch, and his supporters control the four others because they democratically won a ruling majority in the legislature. They in the National Assembly have the authority to make appointments to the other three branches independent of the executive while Hugo Chavez has no authority to appoint to or remove members from the other four branches or have any power to dictate what they do. Today in the US, George Bush has a virtual stranglehold over all three government branches that mostly rubber stamp his agenda without opposition including the most outrageous and controversial domestic and foreign policy parts of it.
In Venezuela, the Constitution also stipulates that all the people are assured political, economic and social justice under a system of participatory democracy guaranteeing everyone a legal right to essential social services and the right to participate in how the country is run. The services include free high quality health and dental care as a "fundamental social right and....responsibility....of the state," housing assistance, improved pensions, food assistance for the needy, job training to provide skills for future employment, free education to the highest level that eliminated illiteracy and much more including the full rights of citizenship for everyone including the right to vote in free, fair and open democratic elections, now a model for the world and make a sham of the fraud-laden ones in the US.
While the ruling authority in Washington systematically destroyed democracy and deprived people most in need of essential social services, Hugo Chavez built a model democracy growing stronger by enhancing already established socially enlightened policies further using the nation's oil revenue to do it. Much in the country is happening from below, and it's planned that way by the government in Caracas. Community organizing in councils has been promoted that includes all sorts of committees around the country involved in urban land development and improvement, health, the creation of over 100,000 cooperatives outside of state or private control, and the revitalization of hundreds of bankrupt businesses and factories put under worker control.
In addition, Hugo Chavez aggressively pursued a policy of putting underutilized land to use by redistributing more than two million hectares of it to over 130,000 families in a country with the richest 5% of landowners controlling 75% of the land, the great majority of rural Venezuelans having little or none of it, and Chavez wanting to change that imbalance and do it fairly. He also established over 5,000 Urban Land Committees representing almost 20% of the population (CTUs). The law governing them stipulates Venezuelans who live in homes they built on occupied land may petition the government for title to it to be able legally to own the land they live on. This is in addition to the government's goal to build thousands of new and free public housing units for the poor without homes.
These are the kinds of things going on in Venezuela in that country's first ever age of enlightenment, but it's only a beginning. Chavez wants to expand existing programs and advance his Bolivarian Project to the next level implementing his vision of a social democracy in the 21st century. His landslide electoral victory now gives him a mandate to do it, and during the pre-election campaign in September announced he wanted to move ahead in 2007 with the formation of a single united political party of the Bolivarian Revolution to further "consolidate and strengthen" the Bolivarian spirit.
Post-election in mid-December, Chavez addressed his followers and party members at a celebratory gathering at the Teresa Carrena theater repeating his September announcement calling for the establishment of a "unique (or unity) party" to replace his Movement for the Fifth Republic Party (MVR) that brought him to power in 1998, has been his party until now and will end in January. Chavez surprisingly announced the MVR is history and will be replaced by a United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) hoping to include the MVR and all its coalition partners that wish to join. He wants it to be a peoples' party rooted in the country's communities created to win the Battle of Ideas that will move Venezuela ahead to become a fully developed social or socialist democracy for all the people.
Chavez has enormous grassroots support for his vision but faces daunting obstacles as well, not the least of which is a hostile administration in Washington committed to derailing his efforts and removing him from office by whatever means it chooses to use next in another attempt sure to come at some point.
He'll also likely get little help from the Democrat 110th Congress arriving in January with the likes of newly empowered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a member of the US aristocracy, shamelessly calling Chavez an "everyday thug" and the US corporate-controlled media spewing the party line by relentlessly attacking him with tirades of venomous agitprop at times strong enough to make some old-line Soviet era aparachiks blush calling him an autocrat, a dictator, another Hitler and the greatest threat to US interests in the region in decades. It's the same kind of demonizing Chavez undergoes at home by the dominant corporate media that includes the country's two largest dailies, El Universal and El National, and the three main TV networks - Venevision (owned by arch-Chavez enemy and 2002 coup plotter billionaire Gustavo Cisneros), Radio Caracas Television and Globovision.
The only charge against Chavez that's credible, for quite another reason, is that he's indeed the greatest of all threats the US and Venezuelan oligarchs face - a good example spreading slowly through the region inspiring people throughout Latin America to want the same kinds of social benefits and democratic rights Venezuelans now enjoy. The powerful interests of capital in Washington, Venezuela and throughout the region are determined to stop him, but the momentum in Latin America is with Chavez if it can advance it. He has the power of the people behind him and a growing alliance of populist or moderate leaders emerging in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Chile and for almost half a century in Cuba either wanting an end to savage capitalism, Washington-style, or a significant softening of it, along with the old-style military-backed entrenched elitism that denied long-oppressed people all the rights they now enjoy or are beginning to demand.
The people in the region yearning for freedom and demanding governments address their rights and needs are in solidarity with him, a modern-day Bolivar, a hero and symbol of hope that they, too, may one day get the equity and justice they deserve like the people of Venezuela have, if they can keep it, and help Hugo Chavez fulfill his vision to take it to the next level.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
The nation's first president, George Washington, had no party affiliation, ran unopposed twice, and got all the votes. His "elections" were more like coronations, but Washington wisely chose to serve as an elected leader and not as a monarch which Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and the nation's first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay preferred and one aligned with the British monarchy. They also were nationalists believing in a militarily strong central government with little regard for the rights of the separate states.
Most of them were dubious democrats as well who believed for the nation to be stable it should be run by elitists (the way it is today) separate from what Adams arrogantly called "the rabble." And John Jay was very explicit about how he felt saying "The people who own the country ought to run it." Today they do. Adams showed his disdain for ordinary people (and his opposition) when as president he signed into law the Patriot Acts (I and II) of his day - the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to protect the country from dangerous aliens (today's "terrorists") and that criminalized any criticism of his administration (the kind George Bush calls traitorous).
Jefferson denounced both laws and called the Sedition Act an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right of free expression. It helped him and his Democrat-Republicans beat Adams in 1800 that led to the decline of the Federalists as a powerful opposition and their demise as a political party after the war of 1812. It meant that from 1800 - 1820, after Washington's two unopposed elections, presidential contests were lopsided affairs (except for the two mentioned above), the "loyal opposition" was hardly none at all, and the Democrat-Republicans weren't challenged until the party split into factions and ran against each other in 1824. Then Democrat party candidate Andrew Jackson beat National Republican John Quincy Adams in 1828. It's only from that period forward that any real comparison can be made between Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide on December 3 and presidential contests in the US. And doing it shows one thing. In all US landslide electoral victories from then till now, Chavez outdid them all, but you won't ever hear that reported by the dominant corporate-controlled media.
Earlier, there might not have been a basis for comparison had Washington chosen to be president for life as the Federalists preferred. If he'd done it, he could have stayed on by acclamation and those holding office after him might have done the same. Wisely, however, he decided eights years was enough and stepped down at the end of his second term in office setting the precedent of a two-term limit until Franklin Roosevelt went against tradition running and winning the presidency four times.
The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1951 settled the issue providing that: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."
The US Constitution specifies that the president and vice-president be selected by electors chosen by the states. Article Two, Section One says: "Each state shall appoint, in a Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress." The electors then meet in their respective states after the popular vote to choose a president and vice-president.
That's how it's been done since George Washington was first elected president in 1789 with John Adams his vice-president. The method of choosing state electors changed later on, but the US system choosing presidents and vice-presidents by the Electoral College (a term unmentioned in the Constitution) of all the state electors has remained to this day, to the distress of many who justifiably believe it's long past time this antiquated and undemocratic system be abolished even though it's unimaginable a state's electors would vote against the majority popular vote in their states - at least up to now. Until 2000, it was also unimaginable that five members of the US Supreme Court would annul the popular vote in a presidential election to choose the candidate they preferred even though he was the loser - but they did, and the rest is history.
Hugo Chavez Frias' Electoral Victory Majority Greater Than For Any US President - Since 1820
Amazing but true. On December 3, 2006, the people of Venezuela voted in what hundreds of independent observers from around the world, including from the Carter Center in the US, called a free, fair, open and extremely smooth and well-run electoral process. They chose the only man they'll entrust with the job as long as he wants it reelecting Hugo Chavez with a majority 62.87% of the vote with the highest voter turnout in the country's history at almost 75% of the electorate. No US president since 1820, when elections here consistently became real contests, ever matched it or has any US election ever embraced all the democratic standards all Venezuelans now enjoy since Hugo Chavez came to office.
The Venezuelan Bolivarian Constitution Hugo Chavez gave his people states: "All persons have the right to be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public documents constituting evidence of the biological identity, in accordance with law." To see this happened Chavez established an initiative called Mision Itentidad (Mission Identity) that's now a mass citizenship and voter registration drive. It's given millions of Venezuelans full rights of citizenship including the right to vote for the first time ever.
As glorious and grand a democratic experiment as the US Constitution was and is, it had and still has lots of flaws including who's empowered to vote and what authority has the right to decide. It's the reason through the years many amendments and laws were needed and enacted to establish mandates for enfranchisement, but even today precise voting rights qualifications are left for the states to decide, and many take advantage to strike from their voter rolls categories of people they decide are unfit or that they unjustly wish to exclude from the most important of all rights in a democracy no citizen should have taken away.
It shouldn't be this way as millions in the US have lost the right to vote for a variety of reasons including for being a convicted felon or ex-felon in a country with the highest prison population in the world (greater than China's with four times the population). It exceeds 2.2 million, increases by about 1000 each week, one in every 32 adults in the country is either imprisoned, on parole or on probation, half the prison population is black, half are there for non-violent crimes, half of those are for mostly minor drug-related offenses, and most of those behind bars shouldn't be there at all if we had a criminal justice system with equity and justice for all including many wrongfully convicted because they couldn't afford or get competent counsel to defend them.
Virtually all citizens in Venezuela have the right to vote under one national standard and are encouraged to do so under a model democratic system that's gotten the vast majority of them to actively participate. In contrast, in the US, elections are especially fraud-laden today, but in the past many categories of voters were unjustly denied the franchise including blacks until the 1865 13th amendment to the Constitution freed them from slavery, the 1870 15th amendment gave them the right to vote, but it still took until the passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s abolishing the Jim Crow laws in the South before blacks could exercise that right like others in the country could. Earlier, it wasn't until the 19th amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, before women got the right to vote they'd been fighting for over 70 years to get.
Back at the republic's birth, only adult white male property-owners could vote. It took until 1810 to eliminate the last religious prerequisite to voting and until 1850 before property ownership and tax requirements were dropped allowing all adult white males the franchise. It wasn't until 1913 and the passage of the 17th amendment that citizen voters could elect senators who up to then were elected by state legislatures. Native Americans, whose land this was for thousands of years before the settlers arrived and took it from them, couldn't vote until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted all Native peoples the rights of citizenship, including the right to vote in federal elections. It didn't matter that this was their country, and it's they who should have had to right to decide what rights the white settler population had instead of the reverse.
In 1924, the 24th amendment outlawed discrminatory poll taxes in federal elections, and in 1966 the Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections ended poll tax requirements in all elections for the four remaining southern states still using them including George Bush's home state of Texas. In 1971, the 26th amendment set the minimum voting age at 18, and in 1972 the Supreme Court in Dunn v. Blumstein ruled residency requirements for voting in state and local elections were unconstitutional and suggested 30 days was a fair period.
This history shows how unfair laws were and still are in force in a country calling itself a model democracy. The most fundamental right of all, underpinning all others in a democratic state, is the right of every citizen to exercise his or her will at the polls freely and fairly without obstructive laws or any interference from any source in the electoral process.
That freedom has been severely compromised today in the US, and unless that changes, there's no possibility of a free, fair and open democratic process here for all citizens. That happening is now almost impossible with more than 80% of the vote now cast and counted on easily manipulated electronic voting machines with no verifiable paper trail. The process is secretive and unreliable, privatized in the hands of large corporations with everything to gain if candidates they support win, and based on what's now known, that's exactly what's been happening as seen in the 2000 and 2004 fraud-laden elections.
The Six Greatest Landslide US Presidential Elections Since Contests Began After 1820
Six US presidential elections stand out especially for the landslide victories they gave the winners. Hugo Chavez's December 3, 2006 reelection topped them all.
1. In 1920, the first time women could vote in a federal election, Republican Warren Harding got 60.3% of the vote to beat Democrat James Cox getting 34.1%. This election was particularly noteworthy as Socialist Eugene Debs ran for the high office from prison getting over 900,000 votes. He was sentenced and was serving 10 years by the Wilson administration for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 that along with the Sedition Act of 1918 were the Patriot Acts of their day like the earlier Alien and Sedition Acts were under John Adams. Debs was found guilty of exercising his constitutional right of free expression after making an anti-WW I speech in Canton, Ohio. He served about 2.5 years before Harding commuted the sentence on Christmas day, 1921.
Harding capitalized on the unpopularity of Woodrow Wilson who took the country to the war he promised to keep us out of. The economy was also in recession, the country and Congress were mainly isolationist, and the main order of business was business and the need to get on with it and make it healthy again. It turned out to be the start of the "roaring twenties" that like the 1990s "roared" mainly for the privileged. It also was a time of scandal and corruption best remembered by the Teapot Dome affair of 1922 that involved Harding's Interior Secretary Albert Fall's leasing oil reserve rights on public land in Wyoming and California without competitive bidding (like the routine use of no-bid contracts today to favored corporations) and getting large illegal gifts from the companies in return that resulted in the crime committed.
Harding was dead (in 1923) and Coolidge was in the White House before everything came to a head with Fall eventually found guilty, fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison making him the first ever presidential cabinet member to serve prison time for offenses while in office.
2. In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover defeated Democrat and first ever Catholic to run for the presidency Al Smith with 58.2% v. 40.8% for Smith. It wasn't a good year to be a Democrat, especially a Catholic one at that time. The 1920s were "roaring," including the stock market (again only for the privileged), and Republicans were tough to beat as long as, at the macro level, the economy was strong. Coolidge was president but declined a second term (fortunate for him as it turned out) and Commerce Secretary and capable bureaucrat Hoover got the nomination winning big. As things turned out, fate dealt him a bad hand as the stock market crashed less than a year into his term, but bad administration and Federal Reserve policy turned what only should have been a stiff recession for a year or two into the Great Depression. It swept Republicans from office and ushered in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who won impressively in 1932, not one of our big six, but was reelected in 1936 and included in our select group with the second greatest landslide victory ever on our list. Number one is after the FDR years.
3. The Great Depression 1930s weren't good years to be Republicans, and in 1936, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was reelected overwhelmingly with 60.8% of the vote to 36.5% for Republican Alf Landon who had no chance to convince the electorate the New Deal was corrupt and wasteful when it was helping a lot of desperate people. Roosevelt asked for and got a mandate from the public to continue his progressive agenda that included the landmark Social Security Act (now in jeopardy in the age of George Bush) and other important measures that included establishing the FDIC, insuring bank deposits, the SEC, regulating the stock exchanges, and the NLRB with the passage of the Wagner Act that was the high water mark for labor rights. It guaranteed labor had the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management, something that began eroding badly with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over Harry Truman's veto that began reversing the hard-won rights gained that now have nearly vanished entirely in a nation dominated by corporate giants and both Democrat and Republican parties supporting them including their union-busting practices.
4. In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the greatest landslide presidential victory on our list, unsurpassed to this day. He got 61.1% of the vote to 38.5% for Republican Barry Goldwater who was portrayed as a dangerous extremist in a still-remembered TV "Daisy Girl" campaign ad featuring a little girl picking petals from a daisy in a field, counting them and then segueing to a countdown and nuclear explosion. Ironically, the ad only ran once in September that year on NBC, but it stirred such a controversy all the broadcasters ran it as a news story giving it far greater prominence than it otherwise would have gotten.
From the Great Depression through the 1960s, Republicans had a hard enough time competing with Democrats (Dwight Eisenhower being the exception because of his stature as a war hero and the unpopular Korean war under Harry Truman), and Goldwater made it worse by being a conservative before his time and a hawkish one advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam at a time the war was still in its early stages but would be an act of lunacy any time.
5. In 1972, most people would be surprised to learn (except those around to remember it) Republican Richard Nixon trounced Democrat George McGovern getting 60% of the vote to McGovern's 38%. The main issue was the Vietnam war (that drove Lyndon Johnson from office in 1968), and Nixon managed to convince the public he had a plan to end it and peace was at hand. McGovern was strongly anti-war, but had to replace his running mate Thomas Eagleton after it was learned he hadn't revealed he'd undergone electroshock therapy for depression.
It proved a decisive factor in McGovern's defeat, but oddly as things turned out, Nixon was popular enough at that time to sweep to a landslide win only to come a cropper in the Watergate scandal that began almost innocently in June, 1972, months before the election, but spiralled out of control in its aftermath along with growing anger about the war. It drove Richard Nixon from office in disgrace in August, 1974 and gave the office lawfully under the 25th amendment to Gerald Ford. It made him the nation's only unelected president up to the time five Supreme Court justices gave the office to George Bush violating the law of the land they showed contempt for.
6. In 1984, Republican Ronald Reagan won a decisive victory getting 58.8% of the vote to Democrat Walter Mondale's 40.6%. The "Reagan revolution" was in full swing, and the president was affable enough to convince a majority of the electorate his administration's large increases in military spending, big budget deficits run up to pay for it, tax cuts mainly for the rich, slashed social spending and opposition to labor rights were good for the country. Mondale was no match for him and was unfairly seen as a candidate supporting the poor and disadvantaged at the expense of the middle class.
In 1980s America, Hugo Chavez might not have stood a chance against the likes of Ronald Reagan even though Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution serves all the people while Reagan's ignored and harmed those most in need including the middle class, mostly helping instead those in the country needing no help - the rich and powerful, at the beginning of the nation's second Gilded Age, serving an empowered plutocracy that reached full fruition with the dominance of the privileged class under George W. Bush.
One Other Landslide Win for Chavez Unreported
Time Magazine just voted this writer and all others communicating online their "Person of the Year." In their cover story they asked who are we, what are we doing, and who has the time and energy for this? Their answer: "you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." Strange how underwhelming it feels at least for two reasons, but it must be stressed we beat the pros before they're even out of bed in the morning doing one thing they almost never do - telling the truth communicating real news, information and honest opinion on the most important world and national issues affecting everyone and refusing to genuflect to the country's power establishment.
While Time was honoring the free use of the internet, its importance, and the millions of ordinary people using it, it's parent company Time-Warner has for months been part of the corporate cabal trying to high-pressure the Congress to end internet neutrality and destroy the freedom the magazine praised so effusively in their disingenuous annual award just announced. If the cable and telecom giants win their lobbying effort, the public Time calls "YOU" loses. They want to be self-regulating, to be able to charge whatever they wish, to choose wealthier customers and ignore lesser ones, to have a monopoly on high-speed cable internet so they can take over our private space and control it including, at their discretion, the content on it excluding whatever portions of it they don't want in their privatized space. They want to take what's now free and open and exploit it for profit, effectively destroying the internet as we now know it.
Time also failed to report they held an online poll for "Person of the Year" and then ignored the results when they turned out not to their editors' liking. "Time's Person of the Year is the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year." It turned out Hugo Chavez won their poll by a landslide at 35%. Second was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at 21%. Then came Nancy Pelosi at 12%, The YouTube Guys 11%, George Bush 8%, Al Gore 8%, Condoleezza Rice 5% and Kim Jong Il 2%. For some reason, the magazine's December 25 cover story omitted these results so their readers never learned who won their honor and rightfully should have been named Time's Person of the Year. An oversight, likely, in the holiday rush, so it's only fitting the winner be announced here - in the online space the magazine rates so highly:
Venezuelan President Hugo is Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year.
Venezuela under Hugo Chavez v. the US Under Republican or DLC Democrats Little Different From Republicans
The age of social enlightenment in the US, such as it was, lasted from the election of Franklin Roosevelt through the years of Lyndon Johnson and began heading south thereafter in the 1970s and ending with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. For the past generation, the US has been run for the interests of capital while the standard of living of ordinary working people, including the middle class fast eroding, had an unprecedented decline.
It shows in how wide the income disparity is between those at the economic top and ordinary wage earners. When Reagan was elected in 1980, average corporate CEO earnings were 42 times the average working person. The spread widened to 85 times in 1990 and skyrocketed to 431 times in 2004 as average top executive pay rose to about $14 million a year after the election of George Bush plus enormous benefits adding to that total, including huge ones at retirement, compared to working Americans who now earn less, adjusted for inflation, than they did 30 years ago.
This disparity is highlighted in tax data released by the IRS showing overall income in the country rose 27% adjusted for inflation from 1979 to 2004, but it all went to the top. The bottom 60% of Americans (earning less than $38,761 in 2004) made less than 95% of what they did in 1979. The 20% above them earned 2% more in 2004 than in 1979, inflation adjusted, and only the top 5% had significant gains earning 53% more in 2004 than in 1979. The largest gains of all went to the top 1% as expected - one-third of the entire increase in national income that translates to about 350% more in inflation adjusted dollars in 2004 than in 1979.
It all means since Ronald Reagan entered office, his administration and those that followed him, including Democrat Bill Clinton's, engineered a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary working people to the top income earners in the country while, at the same time, slashing social benefits making it much harder for most people to pay for essential services at much higher prices with the lower inflation-adjusted levels of income they now receive.
Especially hard hit are the 20% of workers on the bottom earning poverty-level wages - below $11,166 a year. The IRS definition of a taxpayer is either an individual or married couple meaning the 26 million poorest taxpayers are the equivalent of about 48 million adults plus 12 million dependent children totaling around 60 million Americans in the richest country in the world with incomes of about $7 a day (per capita) in a state of extreme destitution with the official poverty line in 2004 being $27 a day for a single adult below retirement age and $42 a day for a household with one child. The data excludes all public assistance like food stamps, medicaid benefits and earned-income tax credits, but since the Clinton administration's "welfare reform" Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) ended welfare payments after five years, that loss is much greater for the needy than the benefits remaining also being reduced.
It's hardly a testimony to the notion of "free market" capitalism under the Reagan revolution, the first Bush presidency following it, and eight years under Bill Clinton governing by Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) "centrist" principles eschewing the enlightened progressive party tradition, selling out instead, like Republicans, to the interests of wealth and power at the expense of ordinary people left far behind.
It all seemed like a warm-up leading to the election of George W. Bush in 2000 characterized by outrageous levels of handouts to the rich in the form of huge tax cuts for top earners and giant corporations; larger than ever corporate subsidies (aka socialism for big corporations) at taxpayer expense; and endless wars and all the bounty from them to well-connected corporate allies, some literally getting a license to steal, that never had it so good but getting it at the public's expense this president shows contempt for and is forced to follow the rules of law-of-the-jungle "free market" capitalism.
Today, under Republican or Democrat rule, the country is run by and for a rich aristocracy, in a rigidly structured class society promoting inequality and destroying the founding principles of the nation's Framers. In the last generation, the great majority of ordinary working people have been abandoned and are sinking lower in their losing efforts to make ends meet and survive in a heartless society caring only about the interests of capital. This writer will explore this issue more fully in a year-end review and outlook article due out shortly.
A Different Enlightened Way in Venezuela Under Hugo Chavez
Things are much different in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez that showed up in the overwhelming electoral endorsement he got from his people on December 3. Until he was first elected in December, 1998 taking office in February, 1999, the country was run by and for rich oligarchs, in league with their counterpart dominant interests in Washington and corporate America. They ignored the needs of ordinary people that left most of them in a state of desperate poverty. Hugo Chavez pledged to his people he'd ameliorate their condition and did it successfully for the past eight years, to the great consternation of the country's aristocracy who want the nation's wealth for themselves and their US allies.
Following the crippling US and Venezuelan ruling class-instigated 2002 - 03 oil strike and destabilizing effects of their short-lived coup deposing him for two days in April, 2002, Hugo Chavez's enlightened Bolivarian economic and social programs cut the level of poverty nearly in half from around 62% to where it is today at about one-third of the population, a dramatic improvement unmatched anywhere in Latin America or likely anywhere in the world. Along with that improvement are the essential social benefits now made available to everyone in the country by law, discussed below.
The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was created democratically by popular referendum and adopted in December, 1999. It established a model humanistic social democracy providing checks and balances in the nation's five branches of government instead of the usual three in countries like the US where currently all branches operate unchecked in lockstep under the Bush administration and will change little when the DLC Democrat-controlled 110th Congress convenes in January.
In Venezuela, in addition to the executive, legislative and judicial branches, the country also has independent electoral and prosecutorial ones. Chavez controls the executive branch, and his supporters control the four others because they democratically won a ruling majority in the legislature. They in the National Assembly have the authority to make appointments to the other three branches independent of the executive while Hugo Chavez has no authority to appoint to or remove members from the other four branches or have any power to dictate what they do. Today in the US, George Bush has a virtual stranglehold over all three government branches that mostly rubber stamp his agenda without opposition including the most outrageous and controversial domestic and foreign policy parts of it.
In Venezuela, the Constitution also stipulates that all the people are assured political, economic and social justice under a system of participatory democracy guaranteeing everyone a legal right to essential social services and the right to participate in how the country is run. The services include free high quality health and dental care as a "fundamental social right and....responsibility....of the state," housing assistance, improved pensions, food assistance for the needy, job training to provide skills for future employment, free education to the highest level that eliminated illiteracy and much more including the full rights of citizenship for everyone including the right to vote in free, fair and open democratic elections, now a model for the world and make a sham of the fraud-laden ones in the US.
While the ruling authority in Washington systematically destroyed democracy and deprived people most in need of essential social services, Hugo Chavez built a model democracy growing stronger by enhancing already established socially enlightened policies further using the nation's oil revenue to do it. Much in the country is happening from below, and it's planned that way by the government in Caracas. Community organizing in councils has been promoted that includes all sorts of committees around the country involved in urban land development and improvement, health, the creation of over 100,000 cooperatives outside of state or private control, and the revitalization of hundreds of bankrupt businesses and factories put under worker control.
In addition, Hugo Chavez aggressively pursued a policy of putting underutilized land to use by redistributing more than two million hectares of it to over 130,000 families in a country with the richest 5% of landowners controlling 75% of the land, the great majority of rural Venezuelans having little or none of it, and Chavez wanting to change that imbalance and do it fairly. He also established over 5,000 Urban Land Committees representing almost 20% of the population (CTUs). The law governing them stipulates Venezuelans who live in homes they built on occupied land may petition the government for title to it to be able legally to own the land they live on. This is in addition to the government's goal to build thousands of new and free public housing units for the poor without homes.
These are the kinds of things going on in Venezuela in that country's first ever age of enlightenment, but it's only a beginning. Chavez wants to expand existing programs and advance his Bolivarian Project to the next level implementing his vision of a social democracy in the 21st century. His landslide electoral victory now gives him a mandate to do it, and during the pre-election campaign in September announced he wanted to move ahead in 2007 with the formation of a single united political party of the Bolivarian Revolution to further "consolidate and strengthen" the Bolivarian spirit.
Post-election in mid-December, Chavez addressed his followers and party members at a celebratory gathering at the Teresa Carrena theater repeating his September announcement calling for the establishment of a "unique (or unity) party" to replace his Movement for the Fifth Republic Party (MVR) that brought him to power in 1998, has been his party until now and will end in January. Chavez surprisingly announced the MVR is history and will be replaced by a United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) hoping to include the MVR and all its coalition partners that wish to join. He wants it to be a peoples' party rooted in the country's communities created to win the Battle of Ideas that will move Venezuela ahead to become a fully developed social or socialist democracy for all the people.
Chavez has enormous grassroots support for his vision but faces daunting obstacles as well, not the least of which is a hostile administration in Washington committed to derailing his efforts and removing him from office by whatever means it chooses to use next in another attempt sure to come at some point.
He'll also likely get little help from the Democrat 110th Congress arriving in January with the likes of newly empowered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a member of the US aristocracy, shamelessly calling Chavez an "everyday thug" and the US corporate-controlled media spewing the party line by relentlessly attacking him with tirades of venomous agitprop at times strong enough to make some old-line Soviet era aparachiks blush calling him an autocrat, a dictator, another Hitler and the greatest threat to US interests in the region in decades. It's the same kind of demonizing Chavez undergoes at home by the dominant corporate media that includes the country's two largest dailies, El Universal and El National, and the three main TV networks - Venevision (owned by arch-Chavez enemy and 2002 coup plotter billionaire Gustavo Cisneros), Radio Caracas Television and Globovision.
The only charge against Chavez that's credible, for quite another reason, is that he's indeed the greatest of all threats the US and Venezuelan oligarchs face - a good example spreading slowly through the region inspiring people throughout Latin America to want the same kinds of social benefits and democratic rights Venezuelans now enjoy. The powerful interests of capital in Washington, Venezuela and throughout the region are determined to stop him, but the momentum in Latin America is with Chavez if it can advance it. He has the power of the people behind him and a growing alliance of populist or moderate leaders emerging in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Chile and for almost half a century in Cuba either wanting an end to savage capitalism, Washington-style, or a significant softening of it, along with the old-style military-backed entrenched elitism that denied long-oppressed people all the rights they now enjoy or are beginning to demand.
The people in the region yearning for freedom and demanding governments address their rights and needs are in solidarity with him, a modern-day Bolivar, a hero and symbol of hope that they, too, may one day get the equity and justice they deserve like the people of Venezuela have, if they can keep it, and help Hugo Chavez fulfill his vision to take it to the next level.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
CIA and Italian-American and Cuban mafia groups that do Washington’s dirty work may really have killed Robert Kennedy
Robert Kennedy, also victim of a conspiracy?
• New graphic evidence shows that the CIA and Italian-American and Cuban mafia groups that do Washington’s dirty work are related not only to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but also to that of his brother Robert
BY GABRIEL MOLINA
THE BBC in London and The Guardian newspaper announced sensational film footage and photos depicting three high-ranking CIA agents at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where the presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.
The former attorney general had just won the Democratic Party presidential nomination on June 5, a few months before the election that polls showed he was likely to win.
The high-ranking agents held positions of authority in the CIA’s gigantic secret operations against Cuba during the 1960s, based at of the JMWave station in Miami, the agency’s largest at the time. Those identified include Gordon Campbell, who was chief of maritime operations for that crusade; George Joannides, chief of psychological warfare operations, and David Sanchez Morales, chief of special operations.
The report released is the result of three years of investigations carried out by filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan which revealed that in 1963 those high-ranking agency were assigned to the secret war against the government of Fidel Castro, with one of their objectives being to assassinate the Cuban leader.
The evidence has put the CIA/Cuban-born mafia group back in the limelight, and according to the U.S. Congressional committee investigation, that same group may have been involved in the assassination of the president in Dallas.
The report by Shane O’Sullivan, broadcast on September 20 on the BBC “Newsnight” program, revealed that the agents and four non-identified associates were at the Hotel Ambassador moments before and after the attack. Their presence is suspicious because “the CIA does not have domestic jurisdiction, and some of the agents were based in South East Asia and had no reason to be in Los Angeles.”
Kennedy had just won the Democratic primary elections in California with a platform against the war in Vietnam and was assured as Richard Nixon’s rival in the presidential elections when he was assassinated. The supposed mastermind of the crime, Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested with a weapon in hand in the kitchen/pantry where Kennedy was killed. During that process, psychiatrists brought in by the defense agreed that Sirhan, 24, was in a trance at that moment and may have been under a state of hypnosis. The sentence “RFK must die,” found in a notebook in Sirhan’s possession, may also have been written in the same hypnotic state.
Doctor Herbert Spiegel, an international authority on hypnosis at the University of Columbia, believes that Sirhan may have been programmed to act as a decoy for the real assassin.
Under interrogation, Sirhan said he recalled that a girl had taken him to a very dark place, where a gang shocked him. He added that he did not remember having shot Kennedy.
In December 1998, his lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, requested a new trial for Sirhan based on several pieces of evidence. One of these was the autopsy, retained by prosecutors during the trial, showing that the fatal bullet came from behind the senator and was shot from a distance of two to three inche. Sirhan was facing Kennedy and the gun in his hand was from one-and-a-half to five feet away from the favorite for the presidency.
Subsequent investigations showed that there were more bullet holes in a doorjamb at the scene of the crime and that the shots were fired by Sirhan’s gun, which led to the suspicion that there was more than one shooter. The doorjamb in question was destroyed, as was a second weapon confiscated by the Los Angeles Police. It was alleged that there was a court order, but the defense was not advised of this step.
In addition, a security guard – who was far from being a Kennedy supporter – admitted that he was standing in direct contact with Kennedy’s back, and that he ducked when the shots rang out and pulled out his revolver. A witness ignored by the police – according to Teeter – stated that he saw the guard shoot. His weapon was never examined, even though the autopsy also revealed that “the perforations in the body describe an upwards angle, as if he had been shot from below.” At that exact moment, photographer Jaime Scott Enyert was brusquely assailed and arrested at gunpoint. His camera containing the photos was confiscated.
The most important of the agents to appear in the photos and videos identified by some witnesses is Morales, a habitual drinker, who once said to his close friends, “I was in Dallas when we got the son-of-a-bitch, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.”
Morales is described by Tom Clines, another chief at JM Wave, as a legend in almost all of the CIA’s covert operations, always linked to the main actors in that dirty-work crew, particularly Ted Shackley, who was CIA deputy director for special operations when George Bush Sr. was CIA director, and David Atlee Phillips, head of operations against Fidel Castro and against Salvador Allende.
The sinister group had been formed in 1954 to overthrow Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz. Morales was in Cuba with Philips from 1958 to 1960, where he supported Batista and fought against Fidel Castro. He also participated in the military coup in Chile in 1973. In Santiago, he helped Pinochet in his campaign to overthrow Allende, and afterwards in the brutal repression.
Along with being one of the leaders of the JM Wave station that organized the Bay of Pigs invasion, according to CIA agent Tom Clines, Morales participated with Félix Rodríguez in the pursuit and assassination of Che Guevara and in Operation Condor, where he was involved in other important assassinations.
Investigator Gaeton Fonzi revealed that Morales may have been the man of Latino appearance who was seen with Lee Harvey Oswald in the home of Silvia Odio in New Orleans, according to testimony by former CIA agent Paul Bethel, who was working for Philips. Fonzi and other investigators also implicate Carl E. Jenkins, Chichi Quintero, William Pawley, Roy Hargraves, Edwin Collins, Herminio Díaz, Tony Cuesta, Eugenio Martínez, Virgilio GonzálezFelipe Vidal Santiago, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch in the assassination of the president.
O’Sullivan was able to identify Morales based on a photo of this individual taken in Cuba in 1959.
One of the CIA agents at the JM Wave station, Bradley D. Ayers, identified Sanchez Morales, Campbell and Joannides in the film footage and charged in a 1994 letter that those three and many others from JM Wave station had “intimate operational knowledge of the circumstances that surrounded the assassination of President Kennedy.”
He also citied Theodore Shackley, Félix Rodríguez, Thomas Clines, Grayston Lynch, Rip Robertson, Edward Roderick and Tony Sforza.
Morales, who feared an attempt on his life by “his own agent,” died of a suspicious heart attack days before testifying before a House of Representatives Select Committee that was investigating the Kennedy assassination. The extremely long list of deaths under mysterious circumstances during that process also include mafia capo Sam Giancana, John Rosselli, Rip Robertson businessman and agent William Pawley, either before or after being summoned to testify at the Commission.
Paul Schrade, who was walking behind Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated, believes that the fresh evidence is important and should be investigated.
“I find it very strange that those individuals were present at one of Robert’s celebrations. Why were they there? What were they doing?” Schrade asked when interviewed about the revelations in the company of Max, one of Robert Kennedy’s sons, at the old Ambassador Hotel. On that date, the 81st birthday of the assassinated presidential candidate was commemorated, and the two were visiting the work underway to turn the hotel into a high school.
Key CIA documents have yet to be declassified, and according to the 1978 Congressional investigation, they would prove the theory of the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.
Now the evidence points to the same suspects in the case of Robert Kennedy, 43 years after the president’s assassination. It corroborates that the event was a genuine coup d’état, and that the masterminds are still being protected.
Despite – or perhaps precisely because of – President Bush’s particular myopia with respect to terrorism.
• New graphic evidence shows that the CIA and Italian-American and Cuban mafia groups that do Washington’s dirty work are related not only to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but also to that of his brother Robert
BY GABRIEL MOLINA
THE BBC in London and The Guardian newspaper announced sensational film footage and photos depicting three high-ranking CIA agents at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where the presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.
The former attorney general had just won the Democratic Party presidential nomination on June 5, a few months before the election that polls showed he was likely to win.
The high-ranking agents held positions of authority in the CIA’s gigantic secret operations against Cuba during the 1960s, based at of the JMWave station in Miami, the agency’s largest at the time. Those identified include Gordon Campbell, who was chief of maritime operations for that crusade; George Joannides, chief of psychological warfare operations, and David Sanchez Morales, chief of special operations.
The report released is the result of three years of investigations carried out by filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan which revealed that in 1963 those high-ranking agency were assigned to the secret war against the government of Fidel Castro, with one of their objectives being to assassinate the Cuban leader.
The evidence has put the CIA/Cuban-born mafia group back in the limelight, and according to the U.S. Congressional committee investigation, that same group may have been involved in the assassination of the president in Dallas.
The report by Shane O’Sullivan, broadcast on September 20 on the BBC “Newsnight” program, revealed that the agents and four non-identified associates were at the Hotel Ambassador moments before and after the attack. Their presence is suspicious because “the CIA does not have domestic jurisdiction, and some of the agents were based in South East Asia and had no reason to be in Los Angeles.”
Kennedy had just won the Democratic primary elections in California with a platform against the war in Vietnam and was assured as Richard Nixon’s rival in the presidential elections when he was assassinated. The supposed mastermind of the crime, Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested with a weapon in hand in the kitchen/pantry where Kennedy was killed. During that process, psychiatrists brought in by the defense agreed that Sirhan, 24, was in a trance at that moment and may have been under a state of hypnosis. The sentence “RFK must die,” found in a notebook in Sirhan’s possession, may also have been written in the same hypnotic state.
Doctor Herbert Spiegel, an international authority on hypnosis at the University of Columbia, believes that Sirhan may have been programmed to act as a decoy for the real assassin.
Under interrogation, Sirhan said he recalled that a girl had taken him to a very dark place, where a gang shocked him. He added that he did not remember having shot Kennedy.
In December 1998, his lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, requested a new trial for Sirhan based on several pieces of evidence. One of these was the autopsy, retained by prosecutors during the trial, showing that the fatal bullet came from behind the senator and was shot from a distance of two to three inche. Sirhan was facing Kennedy and the gun in his hand was from one-and-a-half to five feet away from the favorite for the presidency.
Subsequent investigations showed that there were more bullet holes in a doorjamb at the scene of the crime and that the shots were fired by Sirhan’s gun, which led to the suspicion that there was more than one shooter. The doorjamb in question was destroyed, as was a second weapon confiscated by the Los Angeles Police. It was alleged that there was a court order, but the defense was not advised of this step.
In addition, a security guard – who was far from being a Kennedy supporter – admitted that he was standing in direct contact with Kennedy’s back, and that he ducked when the shots rang out and pulled out his revolver. A witness ignored by the police – according to Teeter – stated that he saw the guard shoot. His weapon was never examined, even though the autopsy also revealed that “the perforations in the body describe an upwards angle, as if he had been shot from below.” At that exact moment, photographer Jaime Scott Enyert was brusquely assailed and arrested at gunpoint. His camera containing the photos was confiscated.
The most important of the agents to appear in the photos and videos identified by some witnesses is Morales, a habitual drinker, who once said to his close friends, “I was in Dallas when we got the son-of-a-bitch, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.”
Morales is described by Tom Clines, another chief at JM Wave, as a legend in almost all of the CIA’s covert operations, always linked to the main actors in that dirty-work crew, particularly Ted Shackley, who was CIA deputy director for special operations when George Bush Sr. was CIA director, and David Atlee Phillips, head of operations against Fidel Castro and against Salvador Allende.
The sinister group had been formed in 1954 to overthrow Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz. Morales was in Cuba with Philips from 1958 to 1960, where he supported Batista and fought against Fidel Castro. He also participated in the military coup in Chile in 1973. In Santiago, he helped Pinochet in his campaign to overthrow Allende, and afterwards in the brutal repression.
Along with being one of the leaders of the JM Wave station that organized the Bay of Pigs invasion, according to CIA agent Tom Clines, Morales participated with Félix Rodríguez in the pursuit and assassination of Che Guevara and in Operation Condor, where he was involved in other important assassinations.
Investigator Gaeton Fonzi revealed that Morales may have been the man of Latino appearance who was seen with Lee Harvey Oswald in the home of Silvia Odio in New Orleans, according to testimony by former CIA agent Paul Bethel, who was working for Philips. Fonzi and other investigators also implicate Carl E. Jenkins, Chichi Quintero, William Pawley, Roy Hargraves, Edwin Collins, Herminio Díaz, Tony Cuesta, Eugenio Martínez, Virgilio GonzálezFelipe Vidal Santiago, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch in the assassination of the president.
O’Sullivan was able to identify Morales based on a photo of this individual taken in Cuba in 1959.
One of the CIA agents at the JM Wave station, Bradley D. Ayers, identified Sanchez Morales, Campbell and Joannides in the film footage and charged in a 1994 letter that those three and many others from JM Wave station had “intimate operational knowledge of the circumstances that surrounded the assassination of President Kennedy.”
He also citied Theodore Shackley, Félix Rodríguez, Thomas Clines, Grayston Lynch, Rip Robertson, Edward Roderick and Tony Sforza.
Morales, who feared an attempt on his life by “his own agent,” died of a suspicious heart attack days before testifying before a House of Representatives Select Committee that was investigating the Kennedy assassination. The extremely long list of deaths under mysterious circumstances during that process also include mafia capo Sam Giancana, John Rosselli, Rip Robertson businessman and agent William Pawley, either before or after being summoned to testify at the Commission.
Paul Schrade, who was walking behind Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated, believes that the fresh evidence is important and should be investigated.
“I find it very strange that those individuals were present at one of Robert’s celebrations. Why were they there? What were they doing?” Schrade asked when interviewed about the revelations in the company of Max, one of Robert Kennedy’s sons, at the old Ambassador Hotel. On that date, the 81st birthday of the assassinated presidential candidate was commemorated, and the two were visiting the work underway to turn the hotel into a high school.
Key CIA documents have yet to be declassified, and according to the 1978 Congressional investigation, they would prove the theory of the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy.
Now the evidence points to the same suspects in the case of Robert Kennedy, 43 years after the president’s assassination. It corroborates that the event was a genuine coup d’état, and that the masterminds are still being protected.
Despite – or perhaps precisely because of – President Bush’s particular myopia with respect to terrorism.
Bolivar's Second Coming? Inside Venezuela's Controversial Revolution By Brian Fitzpatrick, M.S.
Maria raised a gangster. She didn't plan on it, but Venezuela's slums tempted her son Mauricio with the drugs he needed to numb his anger. By age 14, he had fallen into a life of theft and violence, trying to pry himself out of the squalor and hopelessness in which he was trapped.
I've been a high school history and Spanish teacher, a Fulbright scholar, and a Latin American aficionado for 30 years. I've been suspicious of the media's one-sided coverage of Venezuela, so when I had an opportunity earlier this year to attend the World Social Forum in Caracas and meet people like Maria and Mauricio, I jumped at the chance. I wanted to see for myself the social, economic and political changes that are bubbling in Venezuela and causing so much controversy.
Maria told me that her priorities have never changed. She has always wanted education, health and dignity for her children. Every day she awoke in her shack, prepared breakfast, ironed laundry, kissed Mauricio and sent him off to school. Then Maria swept the sidewalk and scrubbed the laundry. Unfortunately, at the age of 12, Mauricio began playing hooky and learning lessons in the streets. He learned how to fight and wield a knife. He also learned that money made the world spin. He watched his mother slave away and scrimp on necessities. He vowed that some day he'd free her from poverty. But before that day came, Mauricio got busted for dealing drugs and was hustled off to juvenile jail. Maria cried and cried. How could she have been so blind? Kids in their neighborhood generally grew up – if they lived that long – to be dealers, addicts, pimps, prostitutes or pregnant.
So Rich Yet So Poor
Per capita, Venezuela is one of the richest countries in the world. Twice the size of California with far fewer people, Venezuela floats on a sea of oil and gas. Its mountains drip with a lucrative coffee crop. Grass sprouts faster than cattle can chew it. Exotic fruits bend boughs and litter the ground. Biodiversity explodes under the Amazonian canopy. Caribbean beaches entice tourists. Its hydroelectric potential could illuminate the continent.
With such abundant wealth, why do Venezuelan workers earn only $5 to $10 per day? Why are 80 percent of the people poor? Why are there so many broken-hearted mothers like Maria?
At the 2006 World Social Forum, I heard President Hugo Chávez and his supporters answer that question over and over. To them, Venezuela is poor because US imperialism and repression intimidate and kill union leaders and funnel national profits through an elite class to US corporations. They expand that accusation beyond Venezuela and insist that throughout the third world, rich countries use a privileged class to control the domestic population while national wealth disappears into banks in New York, London and Geneva. Chávez and his followers point to Iraq to prove their point. They insist that the US invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction but rather the installation of a regime that would pass oil profits to US and British oil companies. The populist Chávez is now drawing heat because he is implementing initiatives to keep national wealth at home and using it to mitigate the ubiquitous poverty that Venezuelans have long suffered.
Right-leaning media outlets vilify Chávez and, subsequently, the people's movement that stands behind him. The leftist press lauds him as a Bolivarian messiah. What is the truth, and what is going on in Venezuela?
At the World Social Forum, I saw red... lots of it. Parades and rallies teemed with red-shirted Venezuelans who were as fanatical about Hugo Chávez as they were about baseball. Their fervor and his mystique lured me to his rallies, which gave me a taste of the mass movement that is being embraced as a second Bolivarian revolution. Chávez and His Charisma
Born in 1954 to two school teachers, Chávez graduated from the national military academy, abandoned his baseball aspirations and began jumping out of airplanes (as a paratrooper). He made a career in the military, and in 1992 led a failed coup d'état, which landed him in prison for two years. After the coup attempt, Chávez founded the Movement for a Fifth Republic (MVR), a political party promising social transformation.
Chávez was elected president in 1998 and re-elected in 2000. His flamboyant charisma has captured a majority of Venezuelan hearts; Chavista rallies regularly throb with hundreds of thousands of red-shirted supporters. As a young man, Chávez crooned mariachi ballads, and his compelling voice continues to captivate audiences. At the World Social Forum, Chávez, wearing a blood-red shirt, took the podium and hushed the crowd. Before he took the stage, musicians had primed the audience with songs and riffs on social justice and a salsa number that sent 30,000 hips gyrating. The joint was literally jumping; I had never seen anything close to its intensity. I found myself in the midst of a frenzied group of young Afro-Venezuelan students chanting impassioned MVR slogans. I caught the Chavista fever and began making new friends left and left.
I didn't know how long-winded Chávez could be; he can and does speak for hours. After two hours, I heard him hit his stride. I was never bored. He wove history, geography, philosophy, economics, ecology, music, and humor through an extemporaneous speech that demonstrated his eclectic erudition.
In the midst of his discourse Chávez spun off on a riff vilifying "Mr. Danger," otherwise known as George W. Bush. Chávez punctuated this by quoting the grand liberator himself, Simon Bolivar, who said in 1825 that "the United States of North America is destined by providence to plague the people of the Americas with hunger and misery in the name of freedom." Chávez has elevated Bolivar's prophecy to a national mantra.
At the end of three hours, he pulled the threads taut and his words cohered into a vivid tapestry. As he left the stage, the crowd chanted "El pueblo unido jamás será vencido" (a united people will never be defeated), and I felt 30,000 hearts pulse as one.
Revolution and Its Discontents
When Chávez does something, he does it with bravado. His reforms affect every aspect of the status quo. He promises to provide universal free education and health care and eradicate malnutrition and poverty - but critics ask, "Where will the money come from?"
One of his reforms, an agrarian land-reform program, has antagonized many rich landowners. Chávez's program sets limits on the size of landholdings; taxes unused property to spur agricultural growth; redistributes unused, government-owned land to peasant families and cooperatives; and, lastly, expropriates fallow land from large, private estates for the purpose of redistribution. Landowners would be compensated for their land at market value.
At a panel discussion, I heard Chávez supporters lauding his land-reform proposals, which offer the poor life-sustaining parcels and put to use vacant plots in a nation that imports most of its food. Other reform programs offer the poor subsidized grocery markets at prices far lower than commercial outlets.
But a cabbie who drove us through downtown went ballistic when we started mentioning Chávez. "He's a fool!" he shouted and pushed the accelerator to the floor. "He wants to give away everything! They should have shot him when they had the chance. He's making a mess out of the country."
During a forum event I overheard two young men arguing. One of the men asserted that the Chávez opposition had contaminated birthing rooms so that the infant mortality rate would climb and make the government look inept. This extreme rumor made it patently clear that I was in the third world and that Venezuela was locked in a life-and-death struggle over the future of the country. I squeezed into that conversation and met Mauricio Lugo, Maria's son, a former ne'er-do-well and now a community organizer and fervent supporter of President Chávez and his populist movement.
"Amigo," Mauricio said to me as he explained how things work in Venezuela under the Chávez government, "Look at the words: socialism values society, people, and capitalism values money, a thing. Don't you get it? You gringos are getting ripped off by the corporate machine."
Chávez is a lightning rod standing at the center of a political storm, both domestically and internationally. He has courted controversy by visiting Iran and inviting it to open factories in Venezuela. He wants to buy military hardware from the Russians, and he speaks openly about a US invasion of Venezuela. He reminds people of Latin American history lest they forget that the US has invaded Latin America dozens of times. And he takes every opportunity to lampoon Bush, going so far as to refer to him at the UN podium as the sulfur-scented Devil.
Even some who are convinced of Chávez's altruism are wary of the hero-worship he has cultivated. A Venezuelan psychiatrist has commented that "the love of the people is a narcotic to him. He needs it the same way he needs his coffee."
Chávez is also accused of concentrating too much power in the presidency. (A criticism levied against Bush as well.) He has packed both the military and the courts with MVR supporters, and has said that he wants to call a referendum in which people can vote to overturn presidential term limitations and retain him in office until 2031.
Opposition leaders fear the authoritarian direction they see the government taking. They allege that government contracts are assigned with favoritism and that media intimidation has decreased criticism of the administration. They also raise the concern that Chávez's policies are insufficiently focused and require constant infusions of oil money.
Yet millions of poor and disenfranchised Venezuelans are now actively participating in the political process. Academicians attentively watch Chávez's progress, hoping that he will continue to deliver on his promises. Much of the middle class is happy to accept the health care benefits and entrepreneurial incentives his administration bestows. But there are a significant number of discontents. Although a minority, these tend to be the economic elite who prefer the status quo and fear the fundamental changes Chávez endorses.
In the Trenches
After the forum ended, I tagged along with Mauricio on a bus filled with MVR activists headed to Mauricio's hometown of Guacara. Unfortunately, Mauricio hadn't cleared me with the higher-ups. On the outskirts of Caracas, when the bus stopped so that everyone on board could shower and eat, the party leaders pointed at the 60-year-old gringo and asked, "Who's he?"
Mauricio turned out to be more trusting than the higher-ranked officials. They looked me up and down and began to whisper. Why would an American want to visit tawdry Guacara? Is he a spy? While they debated, I pulled up a soft concrete bench, opened a book and slid into a siesta. I awoke to a nudge, Mauricio shouting, "Vámonos (Let's go!), to Guacara." I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or if it was really happening, but Mauricio and I wedged our way onto a dilapidated public bus amidst bundle-wielding grandmothers, screaming babies and squawking chickens and rumbled west toward Guacara.
Soon after arriving in Guacara, Mauricio and I sat in his mother's kitchen while she reminisced about the day a woman wearing a red shirt knocked on her door. The woman had said that her name was Rosa and that she was a community organizer. She asked if Maria and her son wished to return to school. Maria stared at the woman as if she were a lunatic. Maria told Rosa that she had dropped out of school in the third grade to work, and that she still has no money and therefore couldn't return to school. Rosa insisted that she'd arrange everything, so Maria accepted. Rosa filled out the forms and enrolled Maria and Mauricio in night school.
On the first night of class, Rosa arrived and whisked Maria and Mauricio off to school. Maria said that she felt like Cinderella. Free history, math, language arts and English books were distributed. Maria told me that she fingered the pages as if they were gold; finally, after 40 years, she was getting the one thing she most desired, an education. Maria and Rosa are good friends now, and Rosa guides her through the maze of federal social programs that have been instituted under Chávez's leadership.
Mauricio sheepishly admitted that he had flunked an early class in community organizing. The final exam consisted of a simulation exercise that addressed the rehabilitation of maras (gang members). He failed the exam because he insisted that all the maras should first be shot – and thereafter the community established. Aghast, his teachers suggested he modify his social strategies. Mauricio followed their advice and now works as a community organizer. His experiences as a drug dealer have enabled him to empathize with and help adolescents who are on the dead-end street of gang life.
A Well Oiled Revolution
Over the next two weeks, Mauricio and Maria took me to visit adult education classes, computer centers, health clinics, senior centers, child care facilities, primary schools, food distribution centers and government-subsidized markets in Guacara, a formerly decaying industrial town now being revitalized by community programs.
I visited several community kitchens in which women open their homes daily to serve hot lunches to up to 150 of their neighbors. When I approached one lunch kitchen, Gloria, the barrio's grandmother, dashed into the blinding sunlight and grabbed my hand. She greeted me as if I were the king of England and dragged me past seniors dining on an aromatic pork stew. In the kitchen, I met four other women who stirred, simmered and smiled over their edible art. Five days a week, Gloria, a lonely widow, opens her home to the community and, with the help of several friends, serves delicious hot lunches. Gloria no longer suffers from loneliness; far from it. She's too busy preparing government-provided food and chatting with hungry neighbors. Mauricio winked at me and whispered, "Nourishment comes in many forms."
Throughout Venezuela, hundreds of kitchens like Gloria's add meaning to life, feed friends and vivify squalid neighborhoods. I've been a teacher for over three decades, and I can't forget the primary school that I visited in Guacara. Above the entrance was emblazoned Jose Marti's dictum: "Only the educated are free." In the school, I felt a communal thread weaving together the teachers, administrators, students, janitors, parents and volunteers. The principal glowed when she spoke of the altruism of her staff. I eavesdropped on classes and was impressed with the quality of instruction and the attentiveness of the students.
The school's bonneted cafeteria cooks personified the contagious positive attitude; the cooks glowed with delight when the second graders marched off with plates full of chicken, rice, beans, cantaloupe, strawberries and juice. No longer do students dizzy and dumb with hunger languish in classrooms. With full bellies and open hearts, they devour the education deprived their parents. The federal government views education as a national priority and backs its rhetoric with cash. I couldn't help but reflect on the impasse in US education, in which public schools have to beg for adequate funding and parry a privatizing lobby.
In night schools, I saw adults who didn't finish grade school savoring the sweet taste of knowledge previously deprived to them. The students were alert and dedicated; like dry sponges, they absorbed every comment the teacher uttered. No one knows better than an uneducated adult how much she missed when circumstances denied her an education. One man close to tears told me that not having an education felt like someone had cut off his arm; he lacked something constant and vital. Now, his smile reveals involvement, purpose and dignity.
Free computer centers encourage young and old, poor or rich, to enter and surf the wonders of the Internet and learn computer technology. In the centers, I saw technology foster literacy and literacy foster technology; the intoxicating spiral glued adults to computers they could never afford to own.
Sitting with Maria in her kitchen one day, I met the nurse who came to check on her arthritis. Prior to 1999 and the Chávez presidency, health care was a luxury only the rich enjoyed; now free health care is universal. Clinics sprout out of refurbished buildings and form natural hubs for community action. Neighborhoods revolve and are organized around medical care. Doctors and nurses respond to house calls 24 hours a day and know their patients personally; in a pedestrian barrio, patients constantly bump into their medical professionals. People, not profits, are the focal point.
The physical rehab center I visited used a gamut of therapies; a spirited and inquisitive doctor proudly showed me ultrasound, electromagnetic, and electric muscle-stimulating machines. The modest but busy clinic buzzed with treadmills and limping ladies pumping iron. The doctor then guided me through rooms that offered alternative therapies such as acupuncture and therapy from the smoke of the artemisia plant.
Geriatric community centers foster mental health by offering activities that pull seniors together. At the senior center I visited, old men slapped down dominos and bantered baseball with traditional Caribbean flair. Everywhere I went community spirit embellished health care procedures.
I learned from Mauricio that Chávez's MVR party revolves around small neighborhood groups called UBE's ("Electoral Battle Units"). The UBE's are the grassroots base of Venezuelan participatory democracy; I attended a couple of meetings and was astonished by the community involvement. More and more of the marginalized, aged, apathetic and angry are joining the progressive parade. Gangs, the most vicious manifestation of alienation, are losing their allure because UBE's provide a channel for participation. Adolescents now feel more connected and empowered and less susceptible to gang violence.
I was stupefied when Mauricio told me that stay-at-home moms receive a monthly stipend of 80 percent of the minimum wage for their service to their families and subsequently to society. During my stay in Guacara, retirement benefits were increased and a boost in the minimum wage was planned. "Amigo," Mauricio said to me as he explained how things work in Venezuela under the Chávez government, "Look at the words: socialism values society, people, and capitalism values money, a thing. Don't you get it? You gringos are getting ripped off by the corporate machine." I stared deep into his eyes; I was amazed at Mauricio's personal evolution from gang member to impassionedcommunity organizer.
A New Day in Latin America?
If Venezuelans are to be successful with their reformation movement, they must overcome a formidable array of obstacles. Systemic inertia, popular apathy, endemic corruption, a consumption-blinded populace, wealthy opposition, coups d'état, assassination and even invasion threaten to derail the changes that are sweeping across the country.
These daunting obstacles challenge the movement to continually reaffirm its commitment to change. Can Chávez or anyone else navigate through the maze of obstacles? Venezuela has aggressively grabbed the role of leadership to spur systemic change in Latin America, which is drifting leftward. Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay have leftist presidents. Resurgent left-leaning popular movements in Mexico, Ecuador and Nicaragua seem poised for power. Venezuela is not an aberration nor is it treading the leftist path alone.
Proposals for transnational oil pipelines, TV stations, banking systems, a single currency, and other unifying projects would make Simon Bolivar dance in his grave. Bolivar recognized that Latin America is united by a common language and religion; Chávez recognizes that if an incredibly diverse Europe can form a union, so too can Latin America. The people know that their land is rich and that they have more than enough resources to fund prosperity for all classes of society. Real hope is emerging that Latin America may soon make great strides in economic, political and social development.
Chávez's "Bolivarian Revolution" keeps rolling along. Expectations and dignity have been raised, but the specter of foreign intervention casts a huge shadow over the future. Venezuelans expect the US press to begin a campaign to demonize President Chávez, and in fact, the campaign has already begun. Last year Pat Robertson announced that the US should assassinate Chávez, and Donald Rumsfeld has compared Chávez to Hitler. Tensions mount daily.
Opposition forces inside and outside Venezuela try to demonize Chávez and by doing so condemn the entire national movement and the great work being done by millions of Venezuelans. Apathy, the plague of all democracies, has been replaced by hope, dedication and an involved citizenry. All leaders have their personal foibles – and Hugo Chávez is brash enough to wear them on his sleeve. But before demonizing Chávez and subsequently the social movement he has inspired, we should look more closely.
Before I left Venezuela, Mauricio reminded me of his vow to liberate his mother from poverty and to see her living with dignity. He brags that next year she will graduate from high school. He again shows me around the "hood." We walk past the new clinic, computer center, senior center, improved library, and school. In the plaza, voter registration hums daily. Mauricio tells me that six years ago Guacara was totally different – depressed, apathetic, squalid – and that now the people are involved and taking the driver's seat to transform the city.
Then he changes his tone and shifts from political to personal commentary. With a soft voice and a big smile, he admits to me that his anger has been replaced by gratitude to the new Venezuelan government for providing hope and dignity to millions of families like his. With a huge grin, he tells me, "I didn't have to free my mom from poverty; the government did it for me."
I've been a high school history and Spanish teacher, a Fulbright scholar, and a Latin American aficionado for 30 years. I've been suspicious of the media's one-sided coverage of Venezuela, so when I had an opportunity earlier this year to attend the World Social Forum in Caracas and meet people like Maria and Mauricio, I jumped at the chance. I wanted to see for myself the social, economic and political changes that are bubbling in Venezuela and causing so much controversy.
Maria told me that her priorities have never changed. She has always wanted education, health and dignity for her children. Every day she awoke in her shack, prepared breakfast, ironed laundry, kissed Mauricio and sent him off to school. Then Maria swept the sidewalk and scrubbed the laundry. Unfortunately, at the age of 12, Mauricio began playing hooky and learning lessons in the streets. He learned how to fight and wield a knife. He also learned that money made the world spin. He watched his mother slave away and scrimp on necessities. He vowed that some day he'd free her from poverty. But before that day came, Mauricio got busted for dealing drugs and was hustled off to juvenile jail. Maria cried and cried. How could she have been so blind? Kids in their neighborhood generally grew up – if they lived that long – to be dealers, addicts, pimps, prostitutes or pregnant.
So Rich Yet So Poor
Per capita, Venezuela is one of the richest countries in the world. Twice the size of California with far fewer people, Venezuela floats on a sea of oil and gas. Its mountains drip with a lucrative coffee crop. Grass sprouts faster than cattle can chew it. Exotic fruits bend boughs and litter the ground. Biodiversity explodes under the Amazonian canopy. Caribbean beaches entice tourists. Its hydroelectric potential could illuminate the continent.
With such abundant wealth, why do Venezuelan workers earn only $5 to $10 per day? Why are 80 percent of the people poor? Why are there so many broken-hearted mothers like Maria?
At the 2006 World Social Forum, I heard President Hugo Chávez and his supporters answer that question over and over. To them, Venezuela is poor because US imperialism and repression intimidate and kill union leaders and funnel national profits through an elite class to US corporations. They expand that accusation beyond Venezuela and insist that throughout the third world, rich countries use a privileged class to control the domestic population while national wealth disappears into banks in New York, London and Geneva. Chávez and his followers point to Iraq to prove their point. They insist that the US invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction but rather the installation of a regime that would pass oil profits to US and British oil companies. The populist Chávez is now drawing heat because he is implementing initiatives to keep national wealth at home and using it to mitigate the ubiquitous poverty that Venezuelans have long suffered.
Right-leaning media outlets vilify Chávez and, subsequently, the people's movement that stands behind him. The leftist press lauds him as a Bolivarian messiah. What is the truth, and what is going on in Venezuela?
At the World Social Forum, I saw red... lots of it. Parades and rallies teemed with red-shirted Venezuelans who were as fanatical about Hugo Chávez as they were about baseball. Their fervor and his mystique lured me to his rallies, which gave me a taste of the mass movement that is being embraced as a second Bolivarian revolution. Chávez and His Charisma
Born in 1954 to two school teachers, Chávez graduated from the national military academy, abandoned his baseball aspirations and began jumping out of airplanes (as a paratrooper). He made a career in the military, and in 1992 led a failed coup d'état, which landed him in prison for two years. After the coup attempt, Chávez founded the Movement for a Fifth Republic (MVR), a political party promising social transformation.
Chávez was elected president in 1998 and re-elected in 2000. His flamboyant charisma has captured a majority of Venezuelan hearts; Chavista rallies regularly throb with hundreds of thousands of red-shirted supporters. As a young man, Chávez crooned mariachi ballads, and his compelling voice continues to captivate audiences. At the World Social Forum, Chávez, wearing a blood-red shirt, took the podium and hushed the crowd. Before he took the stage, musicians had primed the audience with songs and riffs on social justice and a salsa number that sent 30,000 hips gyrating. The joint was literally jumping; I had never seen anything close to its intensity. I found myself in the midst of a frenzied group of young Afro-Venezuelan students chanting impassioned MVR slogans. I caught the Chavista fever and began making new friends left and left.
I didn't know how long-winded Chávez could be; he can and does speak for hours. After two hours, I heard him hit his stride. I was never bored. He wove history, geography, philosophy, economics, ecology, music, and humor through an extemporaneous speech that demonstrated his eclectic erudition.
In the midst of his discourse Chávez spun off on a riff vilifying "Mr. Danger," otherwise known as George W. Bush. Chávez punctuated this by quoting the grand liberator himself, Simon Bolivar, who said in 1825 that "the United States of North America is destined by providence to plague the people of the Americas with hunger and misery in the name of freedom." Chávez has elevated Bolivar's prophecy to a national mantra.
At the end of three hours, he pulled the threads taut and his words cohered into a vivid tapestry. As he left the stage, the crowd chanted "El pueblo unido jamás será vencido" (a united people will never be defeated), and I felt 30,000 hearts pulse as one.
Revolution and Its Discontents
When Chávez does something, he does it with bravado. His reforms affect every aspect of the status quo. He promises to provide universal free education and health care and eradicate malnutrition and poverty - but critics ask, "Where will the money come from?"
One of his reforms, an agrarian land-reform program, has antagonized many rich landowners. Chávez's program sets limits on the size of landholdings; taxes unused property to spur agricultural growth; redistributes unused, government-owned land to peasant families and cooperatives; and, lastly, expropriates fallow land from large, private estates for the purpose of redistribution. Landowners would be compensated for their land at market value.
At a panel discussion, I heard Chávez supporters lauding his land-reform proposals, which offer the poor life-sustaining parcels and put to use vacant plots in a nation that imports most of its food. Other reform programs offer the poor subsidized grocery markets at prices far lower than commercial outlets.
But a cabbie who drove us through downtown went ballistic when we started mentioning Chávez. "He's a fool!" he shouted and pushed the accelerator to the floor. "He wants to give away everything! They should have shot him when they had the chance. He's making a mess out of the country."
During a forum event I overheard two young men arguing. One of the men asserted that the Chávez opposition had contaminated birthing rooms so that the infant mortality rate would climb and make the government look inept. This extreme rumor made it patently clear that I was in the third world and that Venezuela was locked in a life-and-death struggle over the future of the country. I squeezed into that conversation and met Mauricio Lugo, Maria's son, a former ne'er-do-well and now a community organizer and fervent supporter of President Chávez and his populist movement.
"Amigo," Mauricio said to me as he explained how things work in Venezuela under the Chávez government, "Look at the words: socialism values society, people, and capitalism values money, a thing. Don't you get it? You gringos are getting ripped off by the corporate machine."
Chávez is a lightning rod standing at the center of a political storm, both domestically and internationally. He has courted controversy by visiting Iran and inviting it to open factories in Venezuela. He wants to buy military hardware from the Russians, and he speaks openly about a US invasion of Venezuela. He reminds people of Latin American history lest they forget that the US has invaded Latin America dozens of times. And he takes every opportunity to lampoon Bush, going so far as to refer to him at the UN podium as the sulfur-scented Devil.
Even some who are convinced of Chávez's altruism are wary of the hero-worship he has cultivated. A Venezuelan psychiatrist has commented that "the love of the people is a narcotic to him. He needs it the same way he needs his coffee."
Chávez is also accused of concentrating too much power in the presidency. (A criticism levied against Bush as well.) He has packed both the military and the courts with MVR supporters, and has said that he wants to call a referendum in which people can vote to overturn presidential term limitations and retain him in office until 2031.
Opposition leaders fear the authoritarian direction they see the government taking. They allege that government contracts are assigned with favoritism and that media intimidation has decreased criticism of the administration. They also raise the concern that Chávez's policies are insufficiently focused and require constant infusions of oil money.
Yet millions of poor and disenfranchised Venezuelans are now actively participating in the political process. Academicians attentively watch Chávez's progress, hoping that he will continue to deliver on his promises. Much of the middle class is happy to accept the health care benefits and entrepreneurial incentives his administration bestows. But there are a significant number of discontents. Although a minority, these tend to be the economic elite who prefer the status quo and fear the fundamental changes Chávez endorses.
In the Trenches
After the forum ended, I tagged along with Mauricio on a bus filled with MVR activists headed to Mauricio's hometown of Guacara. Unfortunately, Mauricio hadn't cleared me with the higher-ups. On the outskirts of Caracas, when the bus stopped so that everyone on board could shower and eat, the party leaders pointed at the 60-year-old gringo and asked, "Who's he?"
Mauricio turned out to be more trusting than the higher-ranked officials. They looked me up and down and began to whisper. Why would an American want to visit tawdry Guacara? Is he a spy? While they debated, I pulled up a soft concrete bench, opened a book and slid into a siesta. I awoke to a nudge, Mauricio shouting, "Vámonos (Let's go!), to Guacara." I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or if it was really happening, but Mauricio and I wedged our way onto a dilapidated public bus amidst bundle-wielding grandmothers, screaming babies and squawking chickens and rumbled west toward Guacara.
Soon after arriving in Guacara, Mauricio and I sat in his mother's kitchen while she reminisced about the day a woman wearing a red shirt knocked on her door. The woman had said that her name was Rosa and that she was a community organizer. She asked if Maria and her son wished to return to school. Maria stared at the woman as if she were a lunatic. Maria told Rosa that she had dropped out of school in the third grade to work, and that she still has no money and therefore couldn't return to school. Rosa insisted that she'd arrange everything, so Maria accepted. Rosa filled out the forms and enrolled Maria and Mauricio in night school.
On the first night of class, Rosa arrived and whisked Maria and Mauricio off to school. Maria said that she felt like Cinderella. Free history, math, language arts and English books were distributed. Maria told me that she fingered the pages as if they were gold; finally, after 40 years, she was getting the one thing she most desired, an education. Maria and Rosa are good friends now, and Rosa guides her through the maze of federal social programs that have been instituted under Chávez's leadership.
Mauricio sheepishly admitted that he had flunked an early class in community organizing. The final exam consisted of a simulation exercise that addressed the rehabilitation of maras (gang members). He failed the exam because he insisted that all the maras should first be shot – and thereafter the community established. Aghast, his teachers suggested he modify his social strategies. Mauricio followed their advice and now works as a community organizer. His experiences as a drug dealer have enabled him to empathize with and help adolescents who are on the dead-end street of gang life.
A Well Oiled Revolution
Over the next two weeks, Mauricio and Maria took me to visit adult education classes, computer centers, health clinics, senior centers, child care facilities, primary schools, food distribution centers and government-subsidized markets in Guacara, a formerly decaying industrial town now being revitalized by community programs.
I visited several community kitchens in which women open their homes daily to serve hot lunches to up to 150 of their neighbors. When I approached one lunch kitchen, Gloria, the barrio's grandmother, dashed into the blinding sunlight and grabbed my hand. She greeted me as if I were the king of England and dragged me past seniors dining on an aromatic pork stew. In the kitchen, I met four other women who stirred, simmered and smiled over their edible art. Five days a week, Gloria, a lonely widow, opens her home to the community and, with the help of several friends, serves delicious hot lunches. Gloria no longer suffers from loneliness; far from it. She's too busy preparing government-provided food and chatting with hungry neighbors. Mauricio winked at me and whispered, "Nourishment comes in many forms."
Throughout Venezuela, hundreds of kitchens like Gloria's add meaning to life, feed friends and vivify squalid neighborhoods. I've been a teacher for over three decades, and I can't forget the primary school that I visited in Guacara. Above the entrance was emblazoned Jose Marti's dictum: "Only the educated are free." In the school, I felt a communal thread weaving together the teachers, administrators, students, janitors, parents and volunteers. The principal glowed when she spoke of the altruism of her staff. I eavesdropped on classes and was impressed with the quality of instruction and the attentiveness of the students.
The school's bonneted cafeteria cooks personified the contagious positive attitude; the cooks glowed with delight when the second graders marched off with plates full of chicken, rice, beans, cantaloupe, strawberries and juice. No longer do students dizzy and dumb with hunger languish in classrooms. With full bellies and open hearts, they devour the education deprived their parents. The federal government views education as a national priority and backs its rhetoric with cash. I couldn't help but reflect on the impasse in US education, in which public schools have to beg for adequate funding and parry a privatizing lobby.
In night schools, I saw adults who didn't finish grade school savoring the sweet taste of knowledge previously deprived to them. The students were alert and dedicated; like dry sponges, they absorbed every comment the teacher uttered. No one knows better than an uneducated adult how much she missed when circumstances denied her an education. One man close to tears told me that not having an education felt like someone had cut off his arm; he lacked something constant and vital. Now, his smile reveals involvement, purpose and dignity.
Free computer centers encourage young and old, poor or rich, to enter and surf the wonders of the Internet and learn computer technology. In the centers, I saw technology foster literacy and literacy foster technology; the intoxicating spiral glued adults to computers they could never afford to own.
Sitting with Maria in her kitchen one day, I met the nurse who came to check on her arthritis. Prior to 1999 and the Chávez presidency, health care was a luxury only the rich enjoyed; now free health care is universal. Clinics sprout out of refurbished buildings and form natural hubs for community action. Neighborhoods revolve and are organized around medical care. Doctors and nurses respond to house calls 24 hours a day and know their patients personally; in a pedestrian barrio, patients constantly bump into their medical professionals. People, not profits, are the focal point.
The physical rehab center I visited used a gamut of therapies; a spirited and inquisitive doctor proudly showed me ultrasound, electromagnetic, and electric muscle-stimulating machines. The modest but busy clinic buzzed with treadmills and limping ladies pumping iron. The doctor then guided me through rooms that offered alternative therapies such as acupuncture and therapy from the smoke of the artemisia plant.
Geriatric community centers foster mental health by offering activities that pull seniors together. At the senior center I visited, old men slapped down dominos and bantered baseball with traditional Caribbean flair. Everywhere I went community spirit embellished health care procedures.
I learned from Mauricio that Chávez's MVR party revolves around small neighborhood groups called UBE's ("Electoral Battle Units"). The UBE's are the grassroots base of Venezuelan participatory democracy; I attended a couple of meetings and was astonished by the community involvement. More and more of the marginalized, aged, apathetic and angry are joining the progressive parade. Gangs, the most vicious manifestation of alienation, are losing their allure because UBE's provide a channel for participation. Adolescents now feel more connected and empowered and less susceptible to gang violence.
I was stupefied when Mauricio told me that stay-at-home moms receive a monthly stipend of 80 percent of the minimum wage for their service to their families and subsequently to society. During my stay in Guacara, retirement benefits were increased and a boost in the minimum wage was planned. "Amigo," Mauricio said to me as he explained how things work in Venezuela under the Chávez government, "Look at the words: socialism values society, people, and capitalism values money, a thing. Don't you get it? You gringos are getting ripped off by the corporate machine." I stared deep into his eyes; I was amazed at Mauricio's personal evolution from gang member to impassionedcommunity organizer.
A New Day in Latin America?
If Venezuelans are to be successful with their reformation movement, they must overcome a formidable array of obstacles. Systemic inertia, popular apathy, endemic corruption, a consumption-blinded populace, wealthy opposition, coups d'état, assassination and even invasion threaten to derail the changes that are sweeping across the country.
These daunting obstacles challenge the movement to continually reaffirm its commitment to change. Can Chávez or anyone else navigate through the maze of obstacles? Venezuela has aggressively grabbed the role of leadership to spur systemic change in Latin America, which is drifting leftward. Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay have leftist presidents. Resurgent left-leaning popular movements in Mexico, Ecuador and Nicaragua seem poised for power. Venezuela is not an aberration nor is it treading the leftist path alone.
Proposals for transnational oil pipelines, TV stations, banking systems, a single currency, and other unifying projects would make Simon Bolivar dance in his grave. Bolivar recognized that Latin America is united by a common language and religion; Chávez recognizes that if an incredibly diverse Europe can form a union, so too can Latin America. The people know that their land is rich and that they have more than enough resources to fund prosperity for all classes of society. Real hope is emerging that Latin America may soon make great strides in economic, political and social development.
Chávez's "Bolivarian Revolution" keeps rolling along. Expectations and dignity have been raised, but the specter of foreign intervention casts a huge shadow over the future. Venezuelans expect the US press to begin a campaign to demonize President Chávez, and in fact, the campaign has already begun. Last year Pat Robertson announced that the US should assassinate Chávez, and Donald Rumsfeld has compared Chávez to Hitler. Tensions mount daily.
Opposition forces inside and outside Venezuela try to demonize Chávez and by doing so condemn the entire national movement and the great work being done by millions of Venezuelans. Apathy, the plague of all democracies, has been replaced by hope, dedication and an involved citizenry. All leaders have their personal foibles – and Hugo Chávez is brash enough to wear them on his sleeve. But before demonizing Chávez and subsequently the social movement he has inspired, we should look more closely.
Before I left Venezuela, Mauricio reminded me of his vow to liberate his mother from poverty and to see her living with dignity. He brags that next year she will graduate from high school. He again shows me around the "hood." We walk past the new clinic, computer center, senior center, improved library, and school. In the plaza, voter registration hums daily. Mauricio tells me that six years ago Guacara was totally different – depressed, apathetic, squalid – and that now the people are involved and taking the driver's seat to transform the city.
Then he changes his tone and shifts from political to personal commentary. With a soft voice and a big smile, he admits to me that his anger has been replaced by gratitude to the new Venezuelan government for providing hope and dignity to millions of families like his. With a huge grin, he tells me, "I didn't have to free my mom from poverty; the government did it for me."
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Chavez Landslide Tops All In US History - by Stephen Lendman
Well almost, as explained below. Hugo Chavez Frias' reelection on December 3 stands out when compared to the greatest landslide presidential victories in US history. Except for the close race in 1812 and the electoral deadlock in 1800 decided by the House of Representatives choosing Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr, the very earliest elections here weren't hardly partisan contests at all as the Democrat-Republican party of Jefferson and Madison was dominant and had everything its own way. It was like that through the election of 1820 when James Monroe ran virtually unopposed winning over 80% of the vote. A consistent pattern of real competitive elections only began with the one held in 1824, and from that time to the present Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide victory beat them all.
The nation's first president, George Washington, had no party affiliation, ran unopposed twice, and got all the votes. His "elections" were more like coronations, but Washington wisely chose to serve as an elected leader and not as a monarch which Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and the nation's first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay preferred and one aligned with the British monarchy. They also were nationalists believing in a militarily strong central government with little regard for the rights of the separate states.
Most of them were dubious democrats as well who believed for the nation to be stable it should be run by elitists (the way it is today) separate from what Adams arrogantly called "the rabble." And John Jay was very explicit about how he felt saying "The people who own the country ought to run it." Today they do. Adams showed his disdain for ordinary people (and his opposition) when as president he signed into law the Patriot Acts (I and II) of his day - the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to protect the country from dangerous aliens (today's "terrorists") and that criminalized any criticism of his administration (the kind George Bush calls traitorous).
Jefferson denounced both laws and called the Sedition Act an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right of free expression. It helped him and his Democrat-Republicans beat Adams in 1800 that led to the decline of the Federalists as a powerful opposition and their demise as a political party after the war of 1812. It meant that from 1800 - 1820, after Washington's two unopposed elections, presidential contests were lopsided affairs (except for the two mentioned above), the "loyal opposition" was hardly none at all, and the Democrat-Republicans weren't challenged until the party split into factions and ran against each other in 1824. Then Democrat party candidate Andrew Jackson beat National Republican John Quincy Adams in 1828. It's only from that period forward that any real comparison can be made between Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide on December 3 and presidential contests in the US. And doing it shows one thing. In all US landslide electoral victories from then till now, Chavez outdid them all, but you won't ever hear that reported by the dominant corporate-controlled media.
Earlier, there might not have been a basis for comparison had Washington chosen to be president for life as the Federalists preferred. If he'd done it, he could have stayed on by acclamation and those holding office after him might have done the same. Wisely, however, he decided eights years was enough and stepped down at the end of his second term in office setting the precedent of a two-term limit until Franklin Roosevelt went against tradition running and winning the presidency four times.
The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1951 settled the issue providing that: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."
The US Constitution specifies that the president and vice-president be selected by electors chosen by the states. Article Two, Section One says: "Each state shall appoint, in a Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress." The electors then meet in their respective states after the popular vote to choose a president and vice-president.
That's how it's been done since George Washington was first elected president in 1789 with John Adams his vice-president. The method of choosing state electors changed later on, but the US system choosing presidents and vice-presidents by the Electoral College (a term unmentioned in the Constitution) of all the state electors has remained to this day, to the distress of many who justifiably believe it's long past time this antiquated and undemocratic system be abolished even though it's unimaginable a state's electors would vote against the majority popular vote in their states - at least up to now. Until 2000, it was also unimaginable that five members of the US Supreme Court would annul the popular vote in a presidential election to choose the candidate they preferred even though he was the loser - but they did, and the rest is history.
Hugo Chavez Frias' Electoral Victory Majority Greater Than For Any US President - Since 1820
Amazing but true. On December 3, 2006, the people of Venezuela voted in what hundreds of independent observers from around the world, including from the Carter Center in the US, called a free, fair, open and extremely smooth and well-run electoral process. They chose the only man they'll entrust with the job as long as he wants it reelecting Hugo Chavez with a majority 62.87% of the vote with the highest voter turnout in the country's history at almost 75% of the electorate. No US president since 1820, when elections here consistently became real contests, ever matched it or has any US election ever embraced all the democratic standards all Venezuelans now enjoy since Hugo Chavez came to office.
The Venezuelan Bolivarian Constitution Hugo Chavez gave his people states: "All persons have the right to be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public documents constituting evidence of the biological identity, in accordance with law." To see this happened Chavez established an initiative called Mision Itentidad (Mission Identity) that's now a mass citizenship and voter registration drive. It's given millions of Venezuelans full rights of citizenship including the right to vote for the first time ever.
As glorious and grand a democratic experiment as the US Constitution was and is, it had and still has lots of flaws including who's empowered to vote and what authority has the right to decide. It's the reason through the years many amendments and laws were needed and enacted to establish mandates for enfranchisement, but even today precise voting rights qualifications are left for the states to decide, and many take advantage to strike from their voter rolls categories of people they decide are unfit or that they unjustly wish to exclude from the most important of all rights in a democracy no citizen should have taken away.
It shouldn't be this way as millions in the US have lost the right to vote for a variety of reasons including for being a convicted felon or ex-felon in a country with the highest prison population in the world (greater than China's with four times the population). It exceeds 2.2 million, increases by about 1000 each week, one in every 32 adults in the country is either imprisoned, on parole or on probation, half the prison population is black, half are there for non-violent crimes, half of those are for mostly minor drug-related offenses, and most of those behind bars shouldn't be there at all if we had a criminal justice system with equity and justice for all including many wrongfully convicted because they couldn't afford or get competent counsel to defend them.
Virtually all citizens in Venezuela have the right to vote under one national standard and are encouraged to do so under a model democratic system that's gotten the vast majority of them to actively participate. In contrast, in the US, elections are especially fraud-laden today, but in the past many categories of voters were unjustly denied the franchise including blacks until the 1865 13th amendment to the Constitution freed them from slavery, the 1870 15th amendment gave them the right to vote, but it still took until the passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s abolishing the Jim Crow laws in the South before blacks could exercise that right like others in the country could. Earlier, it wasn't until the 19th amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, before women got the right to vote they'd been fighting for over 70 years to get.
Back at the republic's birth, only adult white male property-owners could vote. It took until 1810 to eliminate the last religious prerequisite to voting and until 1850 before property ownership and tax requirements were dropped allowing all adult white males the franchise. It wasn't until 1913 and the passage of the 17th amendment that citizen voters could elect senators who up to then were elected by state legislatures. Native Americans, whose land this was for thousands of years before the settlers arrived and took it from them, couldn't vote until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted all Native peoples the rights of citizenship, including the right to vote in federal elections. It didn't matter that this was their country, and it's they who should have had to right to decide what rights the white settler population had instead of the reverse.
In 1924, the 24th amendment outlawed discrminatory poll taxes in federal elections, and in 1966 the Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections ended poll tax requirements in all elections for the four remaining southern states still using them including George Bush's home state of Texas. In 1971, the 26th amendment set the minimum voting age at 18, and in 1972 the Supreme Court in Dunn v. Blumstein ruled residency requirements for voting in state and local elections were unconstitutional and suggested 30 days was a fair period.
This history shows how unfair laws were and still are in force in a country calling itself a model democracy. The most fundamental right of all, underpinning all others in a democratic state, is the right of every citizen to exercise his or her will at the polls freely and fairly without obstructive laws or any interference from any source in the electoral process.
That freedom has been severely compromised today in the US, and unless that changes, there's no possibility of a free, fair and open democratic process here for all citizens. That happening is now almost impossible with more than 80% of the vote now cast and counted on easily manipulated electronic voting machines with no verifiable paper trail. The process is secretive and unreliable, privatized in the hands of large corporations with everything to gain if candidates they support win, and based on what's now known, that's exactly what's been happening as seen in the 2000 and 2004 fraud-laden elections.
The Six Greatest Landslide US Presidential Elections Since Contests Began After 1820
Six US presidential elections stand out especially for the landslide victories they gave the winners. Hugo Chavez's December 3, 2006 reelection topped them all.
1. In 1920, the first time women could vote in a federal election, Republican Warren Harding got 60.3% of the vote to beat Democrat James Cox getting 34.1%. This election was particularly noteworthy as Socialist Eugene Debs ran for the high office from prison getting over 900,000 votes. He was sentenced and was serving 10 years by the Wilson administration for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 that along with the Sedition Act of 1918 were the Patriot Acts of their day like the earlier Alien and Sedition Acts were under John Adams. Debs was found guilty of exercising his constitutional right of free expression after making an anti-WW I speech in Canton, Ohio. He served about 2.5 years before Harding commuted the sentence on Christmas day, 1921.
Harding capitalized on the unpopularity of Woodrow Wilson who took the country to the war he promised to keep us out of. The economy was also in recession, the country and Congress were mainly isolationist, and the main order of business was business and the need to get on with it and make it healthy again. It turned out to be the start of the "roaring twenties" that like the 1990s "roared" mainly for the privileged. It also was a time of scandal and corruption best remembered by the Teapot Dome affair of 1922 that involved Harding's Interior Secretary Albert Fall's leasing oil reserve rights on public land in Wyoming and California without competitive bidding (like the routine use of no-bid contracts today to favored corporations) and getting large illegal gifts from the companies in return that resulted in the crime committed.
Harding was dead (in 1923) and Coolidge was in the White House before everything came to a head with Fall eventually found guilty, fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison making him the first ever presidential cabinet member to serve prison time for offenses while in office.
2. In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover defeated Democrat and first ever Catholic to run for the presidency Al Smith with 58.2% v. 40.8% for Smith. It wasn't a good year to be a Democrat, especially a Catholic one at that time. The 1920s were "roaring," including the stock market (again only for the privileged), and Republicans were tough to beat as long as, at the macro level, the economy was strong. Coolidge was president but declined a second term (fortunate for him as it turned out) and Commerce Secretary and capable bureaucrat Hoover got the nomination winning big. As things turned out, fate dealt him a bad hand as the stock market crashed less than a year into his term, but bad administration and Federal Reserve policy turned what only should have been a stiff recession for a year or two into the Great Depression. It swept Republicans from office and ushered in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who won impressively in 1932, not one of our big six, but was reelected in 1936 and included in our select group with the second greatest landslide victory ever on our list. Number one is after the FDR years.
3. The Great Depression 1930s weren't good years to be Republicans, and in 1936, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was reelected overwhelmingly with 60.8% of the vote to 36.5% for Republican Alf Landon who had no chance to convince the electorate the New Deal was corrupt and wasteful when it was helping a lot of desperate people. Roosevelt asked for and got a mandate from the public to continue his progressive agenda that included the landmark Social Security Act (now in jeopardy in the age of George Bush) and other important measures that included establishing the FDIC, insuring bank deposits, the SEC, regulating the stock exchanges, and the NLRB with the passage of the Wagner Act that was the high water mark for labor rights. It guaranteed labor had the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management, something that began eroding badly with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over Harry Truman's veto that began reversing the hard-won rights gained that now have nearly vanished entirely in a nation dominated by corporate giants and both Democrat and Republican parties supporting them including their union-busting practices.
4. In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the greatest landslide presidential victory on our list, unsurpassed to this day. He got 61.1% of the vote to 38.5% for Republican Barry Goldwater who was portrayed as a dangerous extremist in a still-remembered TV "Daisy Girl" campaign ad featuring a little girl picking petals from a daisy in a field, counting them and then segueing to a countdown and nuclear explosion. Ironically, the ad only ran once in September that year on NBC, but it stirred such a controversy all the broadcasters ran it as a news story giving it far greater prominence than it otherwise would have gotten.
From the Great Depression through the 1960s, Republicans had a hard enough time competing with Democrats (Dwight Eisenhower being the exception because of his stature as a war hero and the unpopular Korean war under Harry Truman), and Goldwater made it worse by being a conservative before his time and a hawkish one advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam at a time the war was still in its early stages but would be an act of lunacy any time.
5. In 1972, most people would be surprised to learn (except those around to remember it) Republican Richard Nixon trounced Democrat George McGovern getting 60% of the vote to McGovern's 38%. The main issue was the Vietnam war (that drove Lyndon Johnson from office in 1968), and Nixon managed to convince the public he had a plan to end it and peace was at hand. McGovern was strongly anti-war, but had to replace his running mate Thomas Eagleton after it was learned he hadn't revealed he'd undergone electroshock therapy for depression.
It proved a decisive factor in McGovern's defeat, but oddly as things turned out, Nixon was popular enough at that time to sweep to a landslide win only to come a cropper in the Watergate scandal that began almost innocently in June, 1972, months before the election, but spiralled out of control in its aftermath along with growing anger about the war. It drove Richard Nixon from office in disgrace in August, 1974 and gave the office lawfully under the 25th amendment to Gerald Ford. It made him the nation's only unelected president up to the time five Supreme Court justices gave the office to George Bush violating the law of the land they showed contempt for.
6. In 1984, Republican Ronald Reagan won a decisive victory getting 58.8% of the vote to Democrat Walter Mondale's 40.6%. The "Reagan revolution" was in full swing, and the president was affable enough to convince a majority of the electorate his administration's large increases in military spending, big budget deficits run up to pay for it, tax cuts mainly for the rich, slashed social spending and opposition to labor rights were good for the country. Mondale was no match for him and was unfairly seen as a candidate supporting the poor and disadvantaged at the expense of the middle class.
In 1980s America, Hugo Chavez might not have stood a chance against the likes of Ronald Reagan even though Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution serves all the people while Reagan's ignored and harmed those most in need including the middle class, mostly helping instead those in the country needing no help - the rich and powerful, at the beginning of the nation's second Gilded Age, serving an empowered plutocracy that reached full fruition with the dominance of the privileged class under George W. Bush.
One Other Landslide Win for Chavez Unreported
Time Magazine just voted this writer and all others communicating online their "Person of the Year." In their cover story they asked who are we, what are we doing, and who has the time and energy for this? Their answer: "you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." Strange how underwhelming it feels at least for two reasons, but it must be stressed we beat the pros before they're even out of bed in the morning doing one thing they almost never do - telling the truth communicating real news, information and honest opinion on the most important world and national issues affecting everyone and refusing to genuflect to the country's power establishment.
While Time was honoring the free use of the internet, its importance, and the millions of ordinary people using it, it's parent company Time-Warner has for months been part of the corporate cabal trying to high-pressure the Congress to end internet neutrality and destroy the freedom the magazine praised so effusively in their disingenuous annual award just announced. If the cable and telecom giants win their lobbying effort, the public Time calls "YOU" loses. They want to be self-regulating, to be able to charge whatever they wish, to choose wealthier customers and ignore lesser ones, to have a monopoly on high-speed cable internet so they can take over our private space and control it including, at their discretion, the content on it excluding whatever portions of it they don't want in their privatized space. They want to take what's now free and open and exploit it for profit, effectively destroying the internet as we now know it.
Time also failed to report they held an online poll for "Person of the Year" and then ignored the results when they turned out not to their editors' liking. "Time's Person of the Year is the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year." It turned out Hugo Chavez won their poll by a landslide at 35%. Second was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at 21%. Then came Nancy Pelosi at 12%, The YouTube Guys 11%, George Bush 8%, Al Gore 8%, Condoleezza Rice 5% and Kim Jong Il 2%. For some reason, the magazine's December 25 cover story omitted these results so their readers never learned who won their honor and rightfully should have been named Time's Person of the Year. An oversight, likely, in the holiday rush, so it's only fitting the winner be announced here - in the online space the magazine rates so highly:
Venezuelan President Hugo is Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year.
Venezuela under Hugo Chavez v. the US Under Republican or DLC Democrats Little Different From Republicans
The age of social enlightenment in the US, such as it was, lasted from the election of Franklin Roosevelt through the years of Lyndon Johnson and began heading south thereafter in the 1970s and ending with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. For the past generation, the US has been run for the interests of capital while the standard of living of ordinary working people, including the middle class fast eroding, had an unprecedented decline.
It shows in how wide the income disparity is between those at the economic top and ordinary wage earners. When Reagan was elected in 1980, average corporate CEO earnings were 42 times the average working person. The spread widened to 85 times in 1990 and skyrocketed to 431 times in 2004 as average top executive pay rose to about $14 million a year after the election of George Bush plus enormous benefits adding to that total, including huge ones at retirement, compared to working Americans who now earn less, adjusted for inflation, than they did 30 years ago.
This disparity is highlighted in tax data released by the IRS showing overall income in the country rose 27% adjusted for inflation from 1979 to 2004, but it all went to the top. The bottom 60% of Americans (earning less than $38,761 in 2004) made less than 95% of what they did in 1979. The 20% above them earned 2% more in 2004 than in 1979, inflation adjusted, and only the top 5% had significant gains earning 53% more in 2004 than in 1979. The largest gains of all went to the top 1% as expected - one-third of the entire increase in national income that translates to about 350% more in inflation adjusted dollars in 2004 than in 1979.
It all means since Ronald Reagan entered office, his administration and those that followed him, including Democrat Bill Clinton's, engineered a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary working people to the top income earners in the country while, at the same time, slashing social benefits making it much harder for most people to pay for essential services at much higher prices with the lower inflation-adjusted levels of income they now receive.
Especially hard hit are the 20% of workers on the bottom earning poverty-level wages - below $11,166 a year. The IRS definition of a taxpayer is either an individual or married couple meaning the 26 million poorest taxpayers are the equivalent of about 48 million adults plus 12 million dependent children totaling around 60 million Americans in the richest country in the world with incomes of about $7 a day (per capita) in a state of extreme destitution with the official poverty line in 2004 being $27 a day for a single adult below retirement age and $42 a day for a household with one child. The data excludes all public assistance like food stamps, medicaid benefits and earned-income tax credits, but since the Clinton administration's "welfare reform" Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) ended welfare payments after five years, that loss is much greater for the needy than the benefits remaining also being reduced.
It's hardly a testimony to the notion of "free market" capitalism under the Reagan revolution, the first Bush presidency following it, and eight years under Bill Clinton governing by Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) "centrist" principles eschewing the enlightened progressive party tradition, selling out instead, like Republicans, to the interests of wealth and power at the expense of ordinary people left far behind.
It all seemed like a warm-up leading to the election of George W. Bush in 2000 characterized by outrageous levels of handouts to the rich in the form of huge tax cuts for top earners and giant corporations; larger than ever corporate subsidies (aka socialism for big corporations) at taxpayer expense; and endless wars and all the bounty from them to well-connected corporate allies, some literally getting a license to steal, that never had it so good but getting it at the public's expense this president shows contempt for and is forced to follow the rules of law-of-the-jungle "free market" capitalism.
Today, under Republican or Democrat rule, the country is run by and for a rich aristocracy, in a rigidly structured class society promoting inequality and destroying the founding principles of the nation's Framers. In the last generation, the great majority of ordinary working people have been abandoned and are sinking lower in their losing efforts to make ends meet and survive in a heartless society caring only about the interests of capital. This writer will explore this issue more fully in a year-end review and outlook article due out shortly.
A Different Enlightened Way in Venezuela Under Hugo Chavez
Things are much different in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez that showed up in the overwhelming electoral endorsement he got from his people on December 3. Until he was first elected in December, 1998 taking office in February, 1999, the country was run by and for rich oligarchs, in league with their counterpart dominant interests in Washington and corporate America. They ignored the needs of ordinary people that left most of them in a state of desperate poverty. Hugo Chavez pledged to his people he'd ameliorate their condition and did it successfully for the past eight years, to the great consternation of the country's aristocracy who want the nation's wealth for themselves and their US allies.
Following the crippling US and Venezuelan ruling class-instigated 2002 - 03 oil strike and destabilizing effects of their short-lived coup deposing him for two days in April, 2002, Hugo Chavez's enlightened Bolivarian economic and social programs cut the level of poverty nearly in half from around 62% to where it is today at about one-third of the population, a dramatic improvement unmatched anywhere in Latin America or likely anywhere in the world. Along with that improvement are the essential social benefits now made available to everyone in the country by law, discussed below.
The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was created democratically by popular referendum and adopted in December, 1999. It established a model humanistic social democracy providing checks and balances in the nation's five branches of government instead of the usual three in countries like the US where currently all branches operate unchecked in lockstep under the Bush administration and will change little when the DLC Democrat-controlled 110th Congress convenes in January.
In Venezuela, in addition to the executive, legislative and judicial branches, the country also has independent electoral and prosecutorial ones. Chavez controls the executive branch, and his supporters control the four others because they democratically won a ruling majority in the legislature. They in the National Assembly have the authority to make appointments to the other three branches independent of the executive while Hugo Chavez has no authority to appoint to or remove members from the other four branches or have any power to dictate what they do. Today in the US, George Bush has a virtual stranglehold over all three government branches that mostly rubber stamp his agenda without opposition including the most outrageous and controversial domestic and foreign policy parts of it.
In Venezuela, the Constitution also stipulates that all the people are assured political, economic and social justice under a system of participatory democracy guaranteeing everyone a legal right to essential social services and the right to participate in how the country is run. The services include free high quality health and dental care as a "fundamental social right and....responsibility....of the state," housing assistance, improved pensions, food assistance for the needy, job training to provide skills for future employment, free education to the highest level that eliminated illiteracy and much more including the full rights of citizenship for everyone including the right to vote in free, fair and open democratic elections, now a model for the world and make a sham of the fraud-laden ones in the US.
While the ruling authority in Washington systematically destroyed democracy and deprived people most in need of essential social services, Hugo Chavez built a model democracy growing stronger by enhancing already established socially enlightened policies further using the nation's oil revenue to do it. Much in the country is happening from below, and it's planned that way by the government in Caracas. Community organizing in councils has been promoted that includes all sorts of committees around the country involved in urban land development and improvement, health, the creation of over 100,000 cooperatives outside of state or private control, and the revitalization of hundreds of bankrupt businesses and factories put under worker control.
In addition, Hugo Chavez aggressively pursued a policy of putting underutilized land to use by redistributing more than two million hectares of it to over 130,000 families in a country with the richest 5% of landowners controlling 75% of the land, the great majority of rural Venezuelans having little or none of it, and Chavez wanting to change that imbalance and do it fairly. He also established over 5,000 Urban Land Committees representing almost 20% of the population (CTUs). The law governing them stipulates Venezuelans who live in homes they built on occupied land may petition the government for title to it to be able legally to own the land they live on. This is in addition to the government's goal to build thousands of new and free public housing units for the poor without homes.
These are the kinds of things going on in Venezuela in that country's first ever age of enlightenment, but it's only a beginning. Chavez wants to expand existing programs and advance his Bolivarian Project to the next level implementing his vision of a social democracy in the 21st century. His landslide electoral victory now gives him a mandate to do it, and during the pre-election campaign in September announced he wanted to move ahead in 2007 with the formation of a single united political party of the Bolivarian Revolution to further "consolidate and strengthen" the Bolivarian spirit.
Post-election in mid-December, Chavez addressed his followers and party members at a celebratory gathering at the Teresa Carrena theater repeating his September announcement calling for the establishment of a "unique (or unity) party" to replace his Movement for the Fifth Republic Party (MVR) that brought him to power in 1998, has been his party until now and will end in January. Chavez surprisingly announced the MVR is history and will be replaced by a United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) hoping to include the MVR and all its coalition partners that wish to join. He wants it to be a peoples' party rooted in the country's communities created to win the Battle of Ideas that will move Venezuela ahead to become a fully developed social or socialist democracy for all the people.
Chavez has enormous grassroots support for his vision but faces daunting obstacles as well, not the least of which is a hostile administration in Washington committed to derailing his efforts and removing him from office by whatever means it chooses to use next in another attempt sure to come at some point.
He'll also likely get little help from the Democrat 110th Congress arriving in January with the likes of newly empowered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a member of the US aristocracy, shamelessly calling Chavez an "everyday thug" and the US corporate-controlled media spewing the party line by relentlessly attacking him with tirades of venomous agitprop at times strong enough to make some old-line Soviet era aparachiks blush calling him an autocrat, a dictator, another Hitler and the greatest threat to US interests in the region in decades. It's the same kind of demonizing Chavez undergoes at home by the dominant corporate media that includes the country's two largest dailies, El Universal and El National, and the three main TV networks - Venevision (owned by arch-Chavez enemy and 2002 coup plotter billionaire Gustavo Cisneros), Radio Caracas Television and Globovision.
The only charge against Chavez that's credible, for quite another reason, is that he's indeed the greatest of all threats the US and Venezuelan oligarchs face - a good example spreading slowly through the region inspiring people throughout Latin America to want the same kinds of social benefits and democratic rights Venezuelans now enjoy. The powerful interests of capital in Washington, Venezuela and throughout the region are determined to stop him, but the momentum in Latin America is with Chavez if it can advance it. He has the power of the people behind him and a growing alliance of populist or moderate leaders emerging in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Chile and for almost half a century in Cuba either wanting an end to savage capitalism, Washington-style, or a significant softening of it, along with the old-style military-backed entrenched elitism that denied long-oppressed people all the rights they now enjoy or are beginning to demand.
The people in the region yearning for freedom and demanding governments address their rights and needs are in solidarity with him, a modern-day Bolivar, a hero and symbol of hope that they, too, may one day get the equity and justice they deserve like the people of Venezuela have, if they can keep it, and help Hugo Chavez fulfill his vision to take it to the next level.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
The nation's first president, George Washington, had no party affiliation, ran unopposed twice, and got all the votes. His "elections" were more like coronations, but Washington wisely chose to serve as an elected leader and not as a monarch which Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and the nation's first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay preferred and one aligned with the British monarchy. They also were nationalists believing in a militarily strong central government with little regard for the rights of the separate states.
Most of them were dubious democrats as well who believed for the nation to be stable it should be run by elitists (the way it is today) separate from what Adams arrogantly called "the rabble." And John Jay was very explicit about how he felt saying "The people who own the country ought to run it." Today they do. Adams showed his disdain for ordinary people (and his opposition) when as president he signed into law the Patriot Acts (I and II) of his day - the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to protect the country from dangerous aliens (today's "terrorists") and that criminalized any criticism of his administration (the kind George Bush calls traitorous).
Jefferson denounced both laws and called the Sedition Act an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right of free expression. It helped him and his Democrat-Republicans beat Adams in 1800 that led to the decline of the Federalists as a powerful opposition and their demise as a political party after the war of 1812. It meant that from 1800 - 1820, after Washington's two unopposed elections, presidential contests were lopsided affairs (except for the two mentioned above), the "loyal opposition" was hardly none at all, and the Democrat-Republicans weren't challenged until the party split into factions and ran against each other in 1824. Then Democrat party candidate Andrew Jackson beat National Republican John Quincy Adams in 1828. It's only from that period forward that any real comparison can be made between Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide on December 3 and presidential contests in the US. And doing it shows one thing. In all US landslide electoral victories from then till now, Chavez outdid them all, but you won't ever hear that reported by the dominant corporate-controlled media.
Earlier, there might not have been a basis for comparison had Washington chosen to be president for life as the Federalists preferred. If he'd done it, he could have stayed on by acclamation and those holding office after him might have done the same. Wisely, however, he decided eights years was enough and stepped down at the end of his second term in office setting the precedent of a two-term limit until Franklin Roosevelt went against tradition running and winning the presidency four times.
The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1951 settled the issue providing that: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."
The US Constitution specifies that the president and vice-president be selected by electors chosen by the states. Article Two, Section One says: "Each state shall appoint, in a Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress." The electors then meet in their respective states after the popular vote to choose a president and vice-president.
That's how it's been done since George Washington was first elected president in 1789 with John Adams his vice-president. The method of choosing state electors changed later on, but the US system choosing presidents and vice-presidents by the Electoral College (a term unmentioned in the Constitution) of all the state electors has remained to this day, to the distress of many who justifiably believe it's long past time this antiquated and undemocratic system be abolished even though it's unimaginable a state's electors would vote against the majority popular vote in their states - at least up to now. Until 2000, it was also unimaginable that five members of the US Supreme Court would annul the popular vote in a presidential election to choose the candidate they preferred even though he was the loser - but they did, and the rest is history.
Hugo Chavez Frias' Electoral Victory Majority Greater Than For Any US President - Since 1820
Amazing but true. On December 3, 2006, the people of Venezuela voted in what hundreds of independent observers from around the world, including from the Carter Center in the US, called a free, fair, open and extremely smooth and well-run electoral process. They chose the only man they'll entrust with the job as long as he wants it reelecting Hugo Chavez with a majority 62.87% of the vote with the highest voter turnout in the country's history at almost 75% of the electorate. No US president since 1820, when elections here consistently became real contests, ever matched it or has any US election ever embraced all the democratic standards all Venezuelans now enjoy since Hugo Chavez came to office.
The Venezuelan Bolivarian Constitution Hugo Chavez gave his people states: "All persons have the right to be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public documents constituting evidence of the biological identity, in accordance with law." To see this happened Chavez established an initiative called Mision Itentidad (Mission Identity) that's now a mass citizenship and voter registration drive. It's given millions of Venezuelans full rights of citizenship including the right to vote for the first time ever.
As glorious and grand a democratic experiment as the US Constitution was and is, it had and still has lots of flaws including who's empowered to vote and what authority has the right to decide. It's the reason through the years many amendments and laws were needed and enacted to establish mandates for enfranchisement, but even today precise voting rights qualifications are left for the states to decide, and many take advantage to strike from their voter rolls categories of people they decide are unfit or that they unjustly wish to exclude from the most important of all rights in a democracy no citizen should have taken away.
It shouldn't be this way as millions in the US have lost the right to vote for a variety of reasons including for being a convicted felon or ex-felon in a country with the highest prison population in the world (greater than China's with four times the population). It exceeds 2.2 million, increases by about 1000 each week, one in every 32 adults in the country is either imprisoned, on parole or on probation, half the prison population is black, half are there for non-violent crimes, half of those are for mostly minor drug-related offenses, and most of those behind bars shouldn't be there at all if we had a criminal justice system with equity and justice for all including many wrongfully convicted because they couldn't afford or get competent counsel to defend them.
Virtually all citizens in Venezuela have the right to vote under one national standard and are encouraged to do so under a model democratic system that's gotten the vast majority of them to actively participate. In contrast, in the US, elections are especially fraud-laden today, but in the past many categories of voters were unjustly denied the franchise including blacks until the 1865 13th amendment to the Constitution freed them from slavery, the 1870 15th amendment gave them the right to vote, but it still took until the passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s abolishing the Jim Crow laws in the South before blacks could exercise that right like others in the country could. Earlier, it wasn't until the 19th amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, before women got the right to vote they'd been fighting for over 70 years to get.
Back at the republic's birth, only adult white male property-owners could vote. It took until 1810 to eliminate the last religious prerequisite to voting and until 1850 before property ownership and tax requirements were dropped allowing all adult white males the franchise. It wasn't until 1913 and the passage of the 17th amendment that citizen voters could elect senators who up to then were elected by state legislatures. Native Americans, whose land this was for thousands of years before the settlers arrived and took it from them, couldn't vote until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted all Native peoples the rights of citizenship, including the right to vote in federal elections. It didn't matter that this was their country, and it's they who should have had to right to decide what rights the white settler population had instead of the reverse.
In 1924, the 24th amendment outlawed discrminatory poll taxes in federal elections, and in 1966 the Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections ended poll tax requirements in all elections for the four remaining southern states still using them including George Bush's home state of Texas. In 1971, the 26th amendment set the minimum voting age at 18, and in 1972 the Supreme Court in Dunn v. Blumstein ruled residency requirements for voting in state and local elections were unconstitutional and suggested 30 days was a fair period.
This history shows how unfair laws were and still are in force in a country calling itself a model democracy. The most fundamental right of all, underpinning all others in a democratic state, is the right of every citizen to exercise his or her will at the polls freely and fairly without obstructive laws or any interference from any source in the electoral process.
That freedom has been severely compromised today in the US, and unless that changes, there's no possibility of a free, fair and open democratic process here for all citizens. That happening is now almost impossible with more than 80% of the vote now cast and counted on easily manipulated electronic voting machines with no verifiable paper trail. The process is secretive and unreliable, privatized in the hands of large corporations with everything to gain if candidates they support win, and based on what's now known, that's exactly what's been happening as seen in the 2000 and 2004 fraud-laden elections.
The Six Greatest Landslide US Presidential Elections Since Contests Began After 1820
Six US presidential elections stand out especially for the landslide victories they gave the winners. Hugo Chavez's December 3, 2006 reelection topped them all.
1. In 1920, the first time women could vote in a federal election, Republican Warren Harding got 60.3% of the vote to beat Democrat James Cox getting 34.1%. This election was particularly noteworthy as Socialist Eugene Debs ran for the high office from prison getting over 900,000 votes. He was sentenced and was serving 10 years by the Wilson administration for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 that along with the Sedition Act of 1918 were the Patriot Acts of their day like the earlier Alien and Sedition Acts were under John Adams. Debs was found guilty of exercising his constitutional right of free expression after making an anti-WW I speech in Canton, Ohio. He served about 2.5 years before Harding commuted the sentence on Christmas day, 1921.
Harding capitalized on the unpopularity of Woodrow Wilson who took the country to the war he promised to keep us out of. The economy was also in recession, the country and Congress were mainly isolationist, and the main order of business was business and the need to get on with it and make it healthy again. It turned out to be the start of the "roaring twenties" that like the 1990s "roared" mainly for the privileged. It also was a time of scandal and corruption best remembered by the Teapot Dome affair of 1922 that involved Harding's Interior Secretary Albert Fall's leasing oil reserve rights on public land in Wyoming and California without competitive bidding (like the routine use of no-bid contracts today to favored corporations) and getting large illegal gifts from the companies in return that resulted in the crime committed.
Harding was dead (in 1923) and Coolidge was in the White House before everything came to a head with Fall eventually found guilty, fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison making him the first ever presidential cabinet member to serve prison time for offenses while in office.
2. In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover defeated Democrat and first ever Catholic to run for the presidency Al Smith with 58.2% v. 40.8% for Smith. It wasn't a good year to be a Democrat, especially a Catholic one at that time. The 1920s were "roaring," including the stock market (again only for the privileged), and Republicans were tough to beat as long as, at the macro level, the economy was strong. Coolidge was president but declined a second term (fortunate for him as it turned out) and Commerce Secretary and capable bureaucrat Hoover got the nomination winning big. As things turned out, fate dealt him a bad hand as the stock market crashed less than a year into his term, but bad administration and Federal Reserve policy turned what only should have been a stiff recession for a year or two into the Great Depression. It swept Republicans from office and ushered in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who won impressively in 1932, not one of our big six, but was reelected in 1936 and included in our select group with the second greatest landslide victory ever on our list. Number one is after the FDR years.
3. The Great Depression 1930s weren't good years to be Republicans, and in 1936, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was reelected overwhelmingly with 60.8% of the vote to 36.5% for Republican Alf Landon who had no chance to convince the electorate the New Deal was corrupt and wasteful when it was helping a lot of desperate people. Roosevelt asked for and got a mandate from the public to continue his progressive agenda that included the landmark Social Security Act (now in jeopardy in the age of George Bush) and other important measures that included establishing the FDIC, insuring bank deposits, the SEC, regulating the stock exchanges, and the NLRB with the passage of the Wagner Act that was the high water mark for labor rights. It guaranteed labor had the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management, something that began eroding badly with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over Harry Truman's veto that began reversing the hard-won rights gained that now have nearly vanished entirely in a nation dominated by corporate giants and both Democrat and Republican parties supporting them including their union-busting practices.
4. In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the greatest landslide presidential victory on our list, unsurpassed to this day. He got 61.1% of the vote to 38.5% for Republican Barry Goldwater who was portrayed as a dangerous extremist in a still-remembered TV "Daisy Girl" campaign ad featuring a little girl picking petals from a daisy in a field, counting them and then segueing to a countdown and nuclear explosion. Ironically, the ad only ran once in September that year on NBC, but it stirred such a controversy all the broadcasters ran it as a news story giving it far greater prominence than it otherwise would have gotten.
From the Great Depression through the 1960s, Republicans had a hard enough time competing with Democrats (Dwight Eisenhower being the exception because of his stature as a war hero and the unpopular Korean war under Harry Truman), and Goldwater made it worse by being a conservative before his time and a hawkish one advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam at a time the war was still in its early stages but would be an act of lunacy any time.
5. In 1972, most people would be surprised to learn (except those around to remember it) Republican Richard Nixon trounced Democrat George McGovern getting 60% of the vote to McGovern's 38%. The main issue was the Vietnam war (that drove Lyndon Johnson from office in 1968), and Nixon managed to convince the public he had a plan to end it and peace was at hand. McGovern was strongly anti-war, but had to replace his running mate Thomas Eagleton after it was learned he hadn't revealed he'd undergone electroshock therapy for depression.
It proved a decisive factor in McGovern's defeat, but oddly as things turned out, Nixon was popular enough at that time to sweep to a landslide win only to come a cropper in the Watergate scandal that began almost innocently in June, 1972, months before the election, but spiralled out of control in its aftermath along with growing anger about the war. It drove Richard Nixon from office in disgrace in August, 1974 and gave the office lawfully under the 25th amendment to Gerald Ford. It made him the nation's only unelected president up to the time five Supreme Court justices gave the office to George Bush violating the law of the land they showed contempt for.
6. In 1984, Republican Ronald Reagan won a decisive victory getting 58.8% of the vote to Democrat Walter Mondale's 40.6%. The "Reagan revolution" was in full swing, and the president was affable enough to convince a majority of the electorate his administration's large increases in military spending, big budget deficits run up to pay for it, tax cuts mainly for the rich, slashed social spending and opposition to labor rights were good for the country. Mondale was no match for him and was unfairly seen as a candidate supporting the poor and disadvantaged at the expense of the middle class.
In 1980s America, Hugo Chavez might not have stood a chance against the likes of Ronald Reagan even though Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution serves all the people while Reagan's ignored and harmed those most in need including the middle class, mostly helping instead those in the country needing no help - the rich and powerful, at the beginning of the nation's second Gilded Age, serving an empowered plutocracy that reached full fruition with the dominance of the privileged class under George W. Bush.
One Other Landslide Win for Chavez Unreported
Time Magazine just voted this writer and all others communicating online their "Person of the Year." In their cover story they asked who are we, what are we doing, and who has the time and energy for this? Their answer: "you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." Strange how underwhelming it feels at least for two reasons, but it must be stressed we beat the pros before they're even out of bed in the morning doing one thing they almost never do - telling the truth communicating real news, information and honest opinion on the most important world and national issues affecting everyone and refusing to genuflect to the country's power establishment.
While Time was honoring the free use of the internet, its importance, and the millions of ordinary people using it, it's parent company Time-Warner has for months been part of the corporate cabal trying to high-pressure the Congress to end internet neutrality and destroy the freedom the magazine praised so effusively in their disingenuous annual award just announced. If the cable and telecom giants win their lobbying effort, the public Time calls "YOU" loses. They want to be self-regulating, to be able to charge whatever they wish, to choose wealthier customers and ignore lesser ones, to have a monopoly on high-speed cable internet so they can take over our private space and control it including, at their discretion, the content on it excluding whatever portions of it they don't want in their privatized space. They want to take what's now free and open and exploit it for profit, effectively destroying the internet as we now know it.
Time also failed to report they held an online poll for "Person of the Year" and then ignored the results when they turned out not to their editors' liking. "Time's Person of the Year is the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year." It turned out Hugo Chavez won their poll by a landslide at 35%. Second was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at 21%. Then came Nancy Pelosi at 12%, The YouTube Guys 11%, George Bush 8%, Al Gore 8%, Condoleezza Rice 5% and Kim Jong Il 2%. For some reason, the magazine's December 25 cover story omitted these results so their readers never learned who won their honor and rightfully should have been named Time's Person of the Year. An oversight, likely, in the holiday rush, so it's only fitting the winner be announced here - in the online space the magazine rates so highly:
Venezuelan President Hugo is Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year.
Venezuela under Hugo Chavez v. the US Under Republican or DLC Democrats Little Different From Republicans
The age of social enlightenment in the US, such as it was, lasted from the election of Franklin Roosevelt through the years of Lyndon Johnson and began heading south thereafter in the 1970s and ending with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. For the past generation, the US has been run for the interests of capital while the standard of living of ordinary working people, including the middle class fast eroding, had an unprecedented decline.
It shows in how wide the income disparity is between those at the economic top and ordinary wage earners. When Reagan was elected in 1980, average corporate CEO earnings were 42 times the average working person. The spread widened to 85 times in 1990 and skyrocketed to 431 times in 2004 as average top executive pay rose to about $14 million a year after the election of George Bush plus enormous benefits adding to that total, including huge ones at retirement, compared to working Americans who now earn less, adjusted for inflation, than they did 30 years ago.
This disparity is highlighted in tax data released by the IRS showing overall income in the country rose 27% adjusted for inflation from 1979 to 2004, but it all went to the top. The bottom 60% of Americans (earning less than $38,761 in 2004) made less than 95% of what they did in 1979. The 20% above them earned 2% more in 2004 than in 1979, inflation adjusted, and only the top 5% had significant gains earning 53% more in 2004 than in 1979. The largest gains of all went to the top 1% as expected - one-third of the entire increase in national income that translates to about 350% more in inflation adjusted dollars in 2004 than in 1979.
It all means since Ronald Reagan entered office, his administration and those that followed him, including Democrat Bill Clinton's, engineered a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary working people to the top income earners in the country while, at the same time, slashing social benefits making it much harder for most people to pay for essential services at much higher prices with the lower inflation-adjusted levels of income they now receive.
Especially hard hit are the 20% of workers on the bottom earning poverty-level wages - below $11,166 a year. The IRS definition of a taxpayer is either an individual or married couple meaning the 26 million poorest taxpayers are the equivalent of about 48 million adults plus 12 million dependent children totaling around 60 million Americans in the richest country in the world with incomes of about $7 a day (per capita) in a state of extreme destitution with the official poverty line in 2004 being $27 a day for a single adult below retirement age and $42 a day for a household with one child. The data excludes all public assistance like food stamps, medicaid benefits and earned-income tax credits, but since the Clinton administration's "welfare reform" Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) ended welfare payments after five years, that loss is much greater for the needy than the benefits remaining also being reduced.
It's hardly a testimony to the notion of "free market" capitalism under the Reagan revolution, the first Bush presidency following it, and eight years under Bill Clinton governing by Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) "centrist" principles eschewing the enlightened progressive party tradition, selling out instead, like Republicans, to the interests of wealth and power at the expense of ordinary people left far behind.
It all seemed like a warm-up leading to the election of George W. Bush in 2000 characterized by outrageous levels of handouts to the rich in the form of huge tax cuts for top earners and giant corporations; larger than ever corporate subsidies (aka socialism for big corporations) at taxpayer expense; and endless wars and all the bounty from them to well-connected corporate allies, some literally getting a license to steal, that never had it so good but getting it at the public's expense this president shows contempt for and is forced to follow the rules of law-of-the-jungle "free market" capitalism.
Today, under Republican or Democrat rule, the country is run by and for a rich aristocracy, in a rigidly structured class society promoting inequality and destroying the founding principles of the nation's Framers. In the last generation, the great majority of ordinary working people have been abandoned and are sinking lower in their losing efforts to make ends meet and survive in a heartless society caring only about the interests of capital. This writer will explore this issue more fully in a year-end review and outlook article due out shortly.
A Different Enlightened Way in Venezuela Under Hugo Chavez
Things are much different in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez that showed up in the overwhelming electoral endorsement he got from his people on December 3. Until he was first elected in December, 1998 taking office in February, 1999, the country was run by and for rich oligarchs, in league with their counterpart dominant interests in Washington and corporate America. They ignored the needs of ordinary people that left most of them in a state of desperate poverty. Hugo Chavez pledged to his people he'd ameliorate their condition and did it successfully for the past eight years, to the great consternation of the country's aristocracy who want the nation's wealth for themselves and their US allies.
Following the crippling US and Venezuelan ruling class-instigated 2002 - 03 oil strike and destabilizing effects of their short-lived coup deposing him for two days in April, 2002, Hugo Chavez's enlightened Bolivarian economic and social programs cut the level of poverty nearly in half from around 62% to where it is today at about one-third of the population, a dramatic improvement unmatched anywhere in Latin America or likely anywhere in the world. Along with that improvement are the essential social benefits now made available to everyone in the country by law, discussed below.
The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was created democratically by popular referendum and adopted in December, 1999. It established a model humanistic social democracy providing checks and balances in the nation's five branches of government instead of the usual three in countries like the US where currently all branches operate unchecked in lockstep under the Bush administration and will change little when the DLC Democrat-controlled 110th Congress convenes in January.
In Venezuela, in addition to the executive, legislative and judicial branches, the country also has independent electoral and prosecutorial ones. Chavez controls the executive branch, and his supporters control the four others because they democratically won a ruling majority in the legislature. They in the National Assembly have the authority to make appointments to the other three branches independent of the executive while Hugo Chavez has no authority to appoint to or remove members from the other four branches or have any power to dictate what they do. Today in the US, George Bush has a virtual stranglehold over all three government branches that mostly rubber stamp his agenda without opposition including the most outrageous and controversial domestic and foreign policy parts of it.
In Venezuela, the Constitution also stipulates that all the people are assured political, economic and social justice under a system of participatory democracy guaranteeing everyone a legal right to essential social services and the right to participate in how the country is run. The services include free high quality health and dental care as a "fundamental social right and....responsibility....of the state," housing assistance, improved pensions, food assistance for the needy, job training to provide skills for future employment, free education to the highest level that eliminated illiteracy and much more including the full rights of citizenship for everyone including the right to vote in free, fair and open democratic elections, now a model for the world and make a sham of the fraud-laden ones in the US.
While the ruling authority in Washington systematically destroyed democracy and deprived people most in need of essential social services, Hugo Chavez built a model democracy growing stronger by enhancing already established socially enlightened policies further using the nation's oil revenue to do it. Much in the country is happening from below, and it's planned that way by the government in Caracas. Community organizing in councils has been promoted that includes all sorts of committees around the country involved in urban land development and improvement, health, the creation of over 100,000 cooperatives outside of state or private control, and the revitalization of hundreds of bankrupt businesses and factories put under worker control.
In addition, Hugo Chavez aggressively pursued a policy of putting underutilized land to use by redistributing more than two million hectares of it to over 130,000 families in a country with the richest 5% of landowners controlling 75% of the land, the great majority of rural Venezuelans having little or none of it, and Chavez wanting to change that imbalance and do it fairly. He also established over 5,000 Urban Land Committees representing almost 20% of the population (CTUs). The law governing them stipulates Venezuelans who live in homes they built on occupied land may petition the government for title to it to be able legally to own the land they live on. This is in addition to the government's goal to build thousands of new and free public housing units for the poor without homes.
These are the kinds of things going on in Venezuela in that country's first ever age of enlightenment, but it's only a beginning. Chavez wants to expand existing programs and advance his Bolivarian Project to the next level implementing his vision of a social democracy in the 21st century. His landslide electoral victory now gives him a mandate to do it, and during the pre-election campaign in September announced he wanted to move ahead in 2007 with the formation of a single united political party of the Bolivarian Revolution to further "consolidate and strengthen" the Bolivarian spirit.
Post-election in mid-December, Chavez addressed his followers and party members at a celebratory gathering at the Teresa Carrena theater repeating his September announcement calling for the establishment of a "unique (or unity) party" to replace his Movement for the Fifth Republic Party (MVR) that brought him to power in 1998, has been his party until now and will end in January. Chavez surprisingly announced the MVR is history and will be replaced by a United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) hoping to include the MVR and all its coalition partners that wish to join. He wants it to be a peoples' party rooted in the country's communities created to win the Battle of Ideas that will move Venezuela ahead to become a fully developed social or socialist democracy for all the people.
Chavez has enormous grassroots support for his vision but faces daunting obstacles as well, not the least of which is a hostile administration in Washington committed to derailing his efforts and removing him from office by whatever means it chooses to use next in another attempt sure to come at some point.
He'll also likely get little help from the Democrat 110th Congress arriving in January with the likes of newly empowered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a member of the US aristocracy, shamelessly calling Chavez an "everyday thug" and the US corporate-controlled media spewing the party line by relentlessly attacking him with tirades of venomous agitprop at times strong enough to make some old-line Soviet era aparachiks blush calling him an autocrat, a dictator, another Hitler and the greatest threat to US interests in the region in decades. It's the same kind of demonizing Chavez undergoes at home by the dominant corporate media that includes the country's two largest dailies, El Universal and El National, and the three main TV networks - Venevision (owned by arch-Chavez enemy and 2002 coup plotter billionaire Gustavo Cisneros), Radio Caracas Television and Globovision.
The only charge against Chavez that's credible, for quite another reason, is that he's indeed the greatest of all threats the US and Venezuelan oligarchs face - a good example spreading slowly through the region inspiring people throughout Latin America to want the same kinds of social benefits and democratic rights Venezuelans now enjoy. The powerful interests of capital in Washington, Venezuela and throughout the region are determined to stop him, but the momentum in Latin America is with Chavez if it can advance it. He has the power of the people behind him and a growing alliance of populist or moderate leaders emerging in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Chile and for almost half a century in Cuba either wanting an end to savage capitalism, Washington-style, or a significant softening of it, along with the old-style military-backed entrenched elitism that denied long-oppressed people all the rights they now enjoy or are beginning to demand.
The people in the region yearning for freedom and demanding governments address their rights and needs are in solidarity with him, a modern-day Bolivar, a hero and symbol of hope that they, too, may one day get the equity and justice they deserve like the people of Venezuela have, if they can keep it, and help Hugo Chavez fulfill his vision to take it to the next level.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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