Zion, I missed this excellent article. You are to be commended for finding it. If I had seen it I would have added to your thread.
Yeah, but...why is he important? And why didn't you put this in the Tariq Ali...I mean the Glynch thread?
Hayes, never answered my question. Are you up for an invasion or perhaps a coup sponsored by the National Endowment for "Democracy"? After all, though Chavez seems to believe in democracy --and is that popular --94% turnout and he got 58%-- can you really be sure that, though Chavez isn't a Muslim, he might actually have some communistic tendencies? Couldn't he be an imminent threat or have a desire to get a wmd? After all it can't be proven that he doesn't have this desire.. so why take a chance. Besides we could do it because we love the Venezuelan people.
He is important because he is the only one who has been willing to stand up on the side of the poor and disenfranchised to give them a voice in how their country is run. Instead of the oil wealth of the nation going to line the pockets of a wealthy few, it is going to educate the illiterate and heal the sick. That isn't communist, fascist, or totalitarian, it is compassion.
Its a stupid question, and as your not so funny rant below shows, its not a serious one. The answer though, is not yet. He's not a good guy but I guess things will have to get much worse before that kind of action is called for. But when they do invade I'll try to give you advance warning so you can run off to Canada. Well, he is a communist. You know, the whole 'nationalize someone else's ****' thing. Hey - if he is the same caliber threat saddam was, or if he's killing as many people as saddam did, you bet your ass I'd be for removing him.
I think you would have to know Chavez's internal motivation to make that declaration. You obviously can't know that, so its a stretch. More likely he's pushing populist buttons to gain power.
Andy some excellent posts. Regarding Saudi Arabia, democracy cannot be allowed to happen in Saudi. Even if it takes Hayes, after being forced under pain of jail time, to go and try and stop it. A little story. My brother in law, retired US special forces, with 20 years told me about 6 years ago. . He is or was? a life long Republican who voted for Bush last time and used to talk him up, now claims "anybody but Bush" due to the Iraq War and Bush's screwing of military retirees. He tends to keep up on that. After getting out of the Rangers in about 10 years ago, he could only get pizza delivery jobs and so forth in the Fort Bragg. After about two years of that he went back to using his old skills. Was picked up by one of these CIA type front group companies and sent to Saudi Arabis where his job was to train Saudi combat medics, his specialty. After months or a year or so the troops starting trusting him more. When out in the desert on maneuvers, away from the citiies, he told me that the troops said they hated the Saudi Royal Family, a corrupt bunch who treat the country's treasury like their own bank account. As the Saudi population grows and they become more educated and get less of a handout from the Royals, their desire to have a real country with non-royal leaders grows. My brother in law's conclusion: we kept our troops in Saudi after Gulf War I to prevent the population from rising up against the King-- no doubt doing this in the name of "democracy" or love for the Saudis. As an aside many thought Osama wanted to become a politiciian in Saudi Arabia, which if you study history doesn't happen in the traditinal divine right of king's type system.
At worst, he could only be labeled a socialist right now. He has not talked about central price controls, nationalizing industries other than petroleum, or even equalizing pay for all citizens. He reclaimed the biggest resource his country had from people bent on sucking that industry dry to line their own pockets. BTW, it isn't "someone else's ****," I would argue that the oil belongs to the people of Venezuela as much as it does the wealthy who used to control it. If Exxon decided to keep all of the profits it makes, not pay taxes, and thumbed their nose at our democratically elected government, I would hope that we would b!tch slap them, too.
Maybe so, but haven't people done that in this country for a LONG time? The point that still remains is that Chavez has been democratically elected FOUR SEPARATE TIMES and has not done anything to harm anyone except the people who were sucking the country dry at the expense of the people. I say that they deserve what they are now getting.
Having lived over there a few years, I can comment on this subject. The US troops were kept there because the strategic location of the base, and to protect the Saudi's from an attack from the guys across the Persian Gulf or, as they like to call it, "Arabian" Gulf. There is no chance in hell that anyone would try to rise up against the leadership over there. If they cut off your hands for stealing, imagine what they'd do to people convicted of treason.
'At best' he's a socialist. Rarely do all of these controls come in at the same time. Start with the unpopular private concerns and go from there. That's what history tells us anyway. Yeah, it pretty much was someone else's property, no matter how you want to define it. But these battles aren't new in Latin America. Its pretty much the same cycle we've seen for the last 50 years. Its not 'reclaiming' resources. The people of Venezuela as a group never owned the oil, the private citizens have. All Chavez has done is to steal it and redistribute it. Taxes etc can be forced from the company sure, but you don't need to nationalize a company to do that.
Not relevant at all. I'm merely pointing out that you are propogating an image of Chavez you can't possibly back up. Haven't disagreed that Chavez has been elected. Not sure what that gets you. As for 'what they deserve,' I don't agree with that any more than I think we should nationalize the Fortune 500 because they're owned by rich people (mostly). That's not how capitalism works, and its vastly superior to socialism.
Then stop your "wolf" cries of communists in Venezuela until, i dunno, they suspend democratic elections or something egregious like that. If "history tells us" that nationalizing unpopular industries is the first step to a communist state, maybe you could point out some actual historical examples. AFAIK, that is not how it happened in either Russia or China, nor did it happen that way in Cuba. What "history" are you referring to? When the entrenched powers won't allow you to tax and the company refuses to pay, what else is there to do? Don't get me wrong, I don't think that nationalizing industries is the best way to go about things, but were I in his shoes, I would have done exactly what Chavez did for the good of my people. You know, the peasants who, for the first time, have access to education and opportunities that the previous government shut them out of for decades.
glynch & andymoon & zion, <a HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54913-2004Jun19.html">Chavez Tightening Grip on Judges, Critics Charge</a> <i> CARACAS, Venezuela -- Judge Miguel Angel Luna said he was sitting in his courtroom on Feb. 28 when prosecutors brought in two beer-truck drivers, who had been parked near an anti-government demonstration, and demanded that they be jailed. But there were no charges against them, Luna recalled. So he set the two men free. Three days later he was fired by the president of the Supreme Court without explanation. "The regime of President Hugo Chavez has turned our democracy into an autocracy," said Luna, 58, who has returned to his private law practice and believes that his only offense was to defy the political wishes of the president and his supporters. "Judicial autonomy has been lost, and that is the foundation of democracy." Luna's case illustrates how politics has eroded the judicial system, threatening the rule of law in one of the world's most important oil-producing nations. The loss of judicial autonomy could affect an Aug. 15 national referendum on whether to recall Chavez, according to political and legal analysts in Venezuela and a report released last week by the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch. The Chavez government presides over a judicial system where most judges can be fired at will. The National Assembly has also just passed a law that will allow Chavez and his allies to pack the supreme court with sympathetic justices who could end up deciding any challenges to the recall election, analysts said. The government argues that it is cleaning up a corrupt and inefficient judiciary it inherited when Chavez was elected in 1998, and trying to rein in the anti-Chavez groups who backed a coup in April 2002 and a strike at the national oil company last year that cost the country billions of dollars. The justice system in Venezuela has historically been corrupt and Chavez fired hundreds of judges immediately after his election, a purge that was widely seen as necessary. But critics said Chavez, a former paratrooper who led a failed coup in 1992, had gone beyond the changes needed to reform the judiciary. They said he was trying to silence dissent and create an authoritarian government in the style of Fidel Castro's Cuba. "This is a political assault on the judicial system," said Pedro Nikken, a constitutional lawyer in Caracas. "It's making the judiciary a branch of the executive. They are going to use this to attack the dissidents and guarantee the impunity of any abuses of human rights or acts of corruption by the government." In its report, Human Rights Watch said the "most brazen" challenge to the rule of law in Venezuela was a new statute pushed through the National Assembly by Chavez allies last month that expands the Supreme Court from 20 to 32 justices and allowed the Chavez-dominated assembly to fire and hire justices with a simple majority vote. Previously, firing a justice required a two-thirds majority. The report said the new law amounted to a "political takeover" of the court. It said the law would allow Chavez and his allies to "pack and purge the country's highest court," which is currently split 10 to 10 between judges seen as loyal to Chavez and those viewed as his opponents. The report called on the Organization of American States to investigate. "We are not talking about what could happen, we are talking about what is already happening," Jose Miguel Vivanco, head of the group's Americas division, said at a news conference. He noted that on Wednesday pro-Chavez legislators voted to fire one Supreme Court justice and to begin proceedings to suspend two more. All three were widely seen as opponents of Chavez and had ruled against his wishes in recent high-profile cases. Only 20 percent of Venezuela's 1,732 judges have tenure and job security; the rest are either provisional or temporary judges who can be fired at will by the Supreme Court's six-member administrative council, the report noted. The Chavez government responded to the report with ferocious rhetoric. The National Assembly's leadership said it would consider declaring Vivanco a "persona non grata" in Venezuela. Vivanco said he was detained briefly by federal political police at the Caracas airport as he left the country Saturday morning, which he described as an act of harassment and intimidation. Assembly President Francisco Ameliach Orta, quoted in local media, said the report reflected "total and absolute ignorance" and accused Human Rights Watch of "open and unpardonable meddling in the internal affairs of our country." He said the Supreme Court overhaul was passed by the National Assembly and represented the will of the majority of the Venezuelan people. Tarek William Saab, a key Chavez ally in the Assembly and head of the Foreign Relations Commission, said in an interview that critics failed to give the government credit for its efforts to "create an autonomous and independent judicial branch" and put an end to the "enormous impunity" that existed before Chavez took office. Saab said it was wrong to say that Chavez controlled the judiciary. If he did, Saab said, the leaders of the 2002 coup against Chavez and those who led the oil company strike would be in jail. "They have not been put in jail because of the lack of ethics on the part of judges linked to the opposition," Saab said. Still some analysts, including Alberto Arteaga Sanchez, a noted criminal attorney in Caracas, said Chavez and his allies were "using criminal law against their political adversaries." One of Arteaga's clients is an army general who was involved in the 2002 coup against Chavez. Arteaga said the Chavez government had proposed an overhaul of Venezuela's criminal code that called for up to six years in jail for "publicly or privately instigating disobedience of the laws or hatred among citizens." Arteaga said even a private discussion among friends could result in prison time. The reform calls for up to five years in jail for "causing panic" by disseminating "false information," even by e-mail. And it would jail anyone who "simply intimidates" or "pressures" public servants. Arteaga and Nikken said that would include the habit of harassing public officials by "casseroling" them: annoying them by banging a spoon loudly against a pot. "This government is starting to show signs, like we saw in Cuba, of criminalizing political dissidence," said Nikken, noting that last year the Cuban government sentenced 75 non-violent dissidents, including journalists and librarians, to long prison terms. Potential political influence in the judicial system is especially critical now because of the recall referendum scheduled for Aug. 15. After years of trying to oust Chavez, first by coup and then through the oil strike, his opponents finally managed to gather enough signatures on petitions to force the recall vote. Noting that Venezuela is deeply and passionately divided between those who support and those who oppose Chavez, Vivanco predicted that the referendum could be so close that it may ultimately be decided by the country's high court, just as the U.S. presidential election in 2000 was by the Supreme Court. Vivanco said it was critical that the court not be stacked with justices acting solely for political reasons. Luna, the fired judge, filed a written appeal and was reinstated on April 15. But three weeks later he presided over a procedural hearing involving the case of another Chavez opponent. Following standard practice, Luna granted the man's request to allow two new attorneys to represent him. A week later, he was again fired. Luna said he was one of nine children of a small-town merchant and the only person in his family to graduate from college. He said he worked as a lawyer for almost 25 years before becoming a judge four years ago. He said he had never been an opponent of Chavez. A soft-spoken man with gray hair and glasses, Luna said he was sad that his career on the bench had ended because of "pure revenge." "We are waiting for the recall election to change our direction," he said, "to take us toward a horizon of peace and democracy in Venezuela." </i> <hr color=red> Similar articles at <i>Human Rights Watch</i>. that we could discuss. <a HREF="http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=americas&c=venezu">Human Rights Watch: Venezuela</a>
The difference with the Fortune 500 in this country is that they actually DO pay the taxes that the government levies, unlike the companies in Venezuela. They have chosen to let those riches line the pockets of a wealthy few while MILLIONS of peasants have not had ANY access to education or healthcare for decades. They (the elites in Venezuela) allowed this discrimination to flourish while they were in power and now they are paying the price for that discrimination. Serves them right.
This was posted in the other Chavez thread and does not show anything even approaching communism. Chavez is solidifying his power base, particularly in the judiciary. BTW, this article was written before the recent recall election that Chavez won AGAIN. Looks like he DOES have a mandate from his people to do the things he is doing. It may not be popular in the US, but it is none of our business.
