Internet chatter: Hugo Chavez is dead

[c1ue]

Re: Internet chatter: Hugo Chavez is dead

how do you suppose it would have played out if chavez had died after being elected but before being inaugurated? not that i have any idea, mind you. just wondering what you think. any possibility of instability? i have no idea if they "bernied" chavez, btw, but i find it amusing to contemplate.

I think it would have played out identically with how it has played out so far: a canonization of Chavez followed by a swift attempt to fill his shoes.

Another reason I have difficulty believing a 'bernie' is that the reports of Chavez going to Cuba for cancer treatment were quite public. I do clearly recall that his healthy situation even in December was clearly noted as being at grave risk. It doesn't follow then that such potentially destabilizing news would be released if in fact stability was an issue.

The rumor of Chavez's demise provided a two month headstart for those inclined to consider likely post-Chavez relations between Venezuela and the rest of the world as stated in my original post.

Nice try, but the reality dictates that fact must exist. As my Bandar example notes - rumors based on fiction are not the same as rumors based on fact - and it is far from clear that the original rumor was fact.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Internet chatter: Hugo Chavez is dead

Nice try, but the reality dictates that fact must exist. As my Bandar example notes - rumors based on fiction are not the same as rumors based on fact - and it is far from clear that the original rumor was fact.

So the fact that Chavez was dying, rather than dead makes my queries about a post Chavez Venezuela irrelevant?

Hmmmm...sounds like another needless windup.

[reggie]

Re: Internet chatter: Hugo Chavez is dead

This was my thought, too. He could have died weeks ago for all we know.

Yup, we really have no way to validate any of the "media reports" or Internet "chatter" that we've heard regarding Chavez. Hence, we not only have to ask ourselves what is true, but also why these reports now?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Internet chatter: Hugo Chavez is dead

Yup, we really have no way to validate any of the "media reports" or Internet "chatter" that we've heard regarding Chavez. Hence, we not only have to ask ourselves what is true, but also why these reports now?

The big thing for me since Chavez's health began to decline sometime ago is:

*What's the future for Venezuela?

*What's the future of diplomatic relations between Venezuela/US and from the local/regional perspective, Venezuela/Columbia(with Venezuela supporting the likes of FARC)?

[don]

Paul Craig Roberts on Hugo Chavez

Hugo Chavez

Paul Craig Roberts


On March 5, 2013, Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela and world leader against imperialism, died. Washington imperialists and their media and think tank whores expressed gleeful sighs of relief as did the brainwashed US population. An “enemy of America” was gone.

Chavez was not an enemy of America. He was an enemy of Washington’s hegemony over other countries, an enemy of Washington’s alliance with elite ruling cliques who steal from the people they grind down and deny sustenance. He was an enemy of Washington’s injustice, of Washington’s foreign policy based on lies and military aggression, bombs and invasions.

Washington is not America. Washington is Satan’s home town.

Chavez was a friend of truth and justice, and this made him unpopular throughout the Western World where every political leader regards truth and justice as dire threats.

Chavez was a world leader. Unlike US politicians, Chavez was respected throughout the non-western world. He was awarded honorary doctorates from China, Russia, Brazil, and other countries, but not from Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford.

Chavez was a miracle. He was a miracle, because he did not sell out to the United States and the Venezuelan elites. Had he sold out, Chavez would have become very rich from oil revenues, like the Saudi Royal Family, and he would have been honored by the United States in the way that Washington honors all its puppets: with visits to the White House. He could have become a dictator for life as long as he served Washington.

Each of Washington’s puppets, from Asia to Europe and the Middle East, anxiously awaits the invitation that demonstrates Washington’s appreciation of his or her servitude to the global imperialist power that still occupies Japan and Germany 68 years after World War II and South Korea 60 years after the end of the Korean War and has placed troops and military bases in a large number of other “sovereign” countries.

It would have been politically easy for Chavez to sell out. All he had to do was to continue populist rhetoric, promote his allies in the army, throw more benefits to the underclass than its members had ever previously experienced, and divide the rest of the oil revenues with the corrupt Venezuelan elites.

But Chavez was a real person, like Rafael Correa, the three-term elected president of Ecuador, who stood up to the United States and granted political asylum to the persecuted Julian Assange, and Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia since the Spanish conquest. The majority of Venezuelans understood that Chavez was a real person. They elected him to four terms as president and would have continued electing him as long as he lived. What Washington hates most is a real person who cannot be bought.

The more the corrupt western politicians and media whores demonized Chavez, the more Venezuelans loved him. They understood completely that anyone damned by Washington was God’s gift to the world.

It is costly to stand up to Washington. All who are bold enough to do so are demonized. They risk assassination and being overthrown in a CIA-organized coup, as Chavez was in 2002. When CIA-instructed Venezuelan elites sprung their coup and kidnapped Chavez, the coup was overthrown by the Venezuelan people who took to the streets and by elements of the military before Chavez could be murdered by the CIA-controlled Venezuelan elites, who escaped with their own venal lives only because, unlike them, Chavez was humanitarian. The Venezuelan people rose in instantaneous and massive public defense of Chavez and put the lie to the Bush White House claim that Chavez was a dictator.

Showing its sordid corruption, the New York Times took the side of the undemocratic coup by a handful of elitists against the democratically elected Chavez, and declared that Chavez’s removal by a small group of rich elites and CIA operatives meant that “Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.”

The lies and demonization continue with Chavez’s death. He will never be forgiven for standing up for justice. Neither will Correa and Morales, both of whom are no doubt on assassination lists.

CounterPunch, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, and other commentators have collected examples of the venom-spewing obituaries that the western presstitutes have written for Chavez, essentially celebrations that death has silenced the bravest voice on earth. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/...r-hugo-chavez/
http://fair.org/take-action/media-ad...f-media-scorn/

Perhaps the most absurd of all was Associated Press business reporter Pamela Sampson’s judgment that Chavez wasted Venezuela’s oil wealth on “social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs,” a poor use of money that could have been used to build sky scrappers such as “the world’s tallest building in Dubai and branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.”
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/03/06/ap-chavez-wasted-his-money-on-healthcare-when-he-could-have-built-gigantic-skyscrapers/

Among the tens of millions of Washington’s victims in the world--the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Mali, with Iran, Russia, China, and South America waiting in the wings for sanctions, destabilization, conquest or reconquest, Chavez’s September 20, 2006 speech at the UN General Assembly during the George W. Bush regime will stand forever as the greatest speech of the early 21st century.

Chavez beards the lion, or rather Satan, in his own den:

“Yesterday, the devil himself stood right here, at this podium, speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulfur.”

“We should call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: ‘the Devil’s Recipe.’”

The UN General Assembly had never heard such words, not even in the days when the militarily powerful Soviet Union was present. Faces broke out in smiles of approval, but no one dared to clap. Too much US money for the home country was at stake. [A reader pointed out that although Chavez's speech was not interrupted with clapping, he received a healthy round of applause at the end.]

The US and UK delegations fled the scene, like vampires confronted with garlic and the Cross or werewolves confronted with silver bullets.

Chavez spoke about the false democracy of elites that is imposed by force and on others by “weapons and bombs.” Chavez asked, “What type of democracy do you impose with Marines and bombs?”

Wherever George W. Bush looks, Chavez said, “he sees extremists. And you, my brother--he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there’s an extremist. Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him. The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It is not that we are extremists. It is that the world is waking up. It is waking up all over and people are standing up.”

In two short sentences totaling 20 words, Chavez defined for all times early 21st century Washington: “The imperium is afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices. It calls us extremists, but they are the extremists.”

Throughout South America and the non-western world, Chavez’s death is being blamed on Washington. South Americans are aware of the US congressional hearings in the 1970s when the Church Committee brought to light the various CIA schemes to poison Fidel Castro.

The official document presented to President John F. Kennedy by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, known as the Northwoods Project, is known to the world and is available online. The Northwoods project consisted of a false flag attack on American citizens in order to blame Cuba and create public and world acceptance for US-imposed regime change in Cuba. President Kennedy rejected the proposal as inconsistent with morality and accountable government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

The belief has already hardened in South America that Washington with its hideous technologies of death infected Chavez with cancer in order to remove him as an obstacle to Washington’s hegemony over South America.

This belief will never die: Chavez, the greatest South American since Simon Bolivar, was murdered by Washington. True or false, the belief is set in stone. As Washington and globalism destroy more countries, the lives of elites become more precarious.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that security for the rich required economic security for the underclasses. Roosevelt established in the US a weak form of social democracy that European politicians had already understood was necessary for social cohesion and political and economic stability.

The Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes set about undermining the stability that Roosevelt provided, as Thatcher, Major, Blair, and the current prime minister of the UK undermined the social agreement between classes in the UK. Politicians in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also made the mistake of handing power over to private elites at the expense of social and economic stability.

Gerald Celente predicts that the elites will not survive the hatred and anger that they are bringing upon themselves. I suspect that he is correct. The American middle class is being destroyed. The working class has become a proletariat, and the social welfare system is being destroyed in order to reduce the budget deficit caused by the loss of tax revenues to jobs offshoring and the expense of wars, overseas military bases, and financial bailouts. The American people are being compelled to suffer in order that elites can continue with their agendas.

The US elites know what is coming. That is why they created a Nazi-style Ministry of the Interior known as Homeland Security, armed with enough ammunition to kill every American five times and with tanks to neutralize the Second Amendment rights of Americans. http://www.informationclearinghouse....ticle34259.htm
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphben...-conversation/

Pistols and rifles are useless against tanks, as the Branch Davidians found out in Waco, Texas. The protection of a small handful of elites from the Americans they are oppressing is also the reason the police are being militarized, brought under Washington’s control and armed with drones that can assassinate the real leaders of the American people who will be, not in the legislative, executive, or judicial chambers, but in the streets. http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-mil...police/5326303

Internment camps in the US appear to be real and not a conspiracy theory. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfkZ1yri26s
http://info.publicintelligence.net/U...settlement.pdf

The threat that the US government poses to its own citizens was recognized on March 7, 2013, by two US Senators, Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY), who introduced a bill to prevent the US government from murdering its own citizens: “The Federal Government may not use a drone to kill a citizen of the United States who is located in the United States” unless the person “poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to another individual. Nothing in this section shall be construed to suggest that the Constitution would otherwise allow the killing of a citizen of the United States in the United States without due process of law.” http://www.cruz.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=339952

The “indispensable people” with their presidents Bush and Obama have begun the 21st century with death and violence. That is their only legacy.

The death and violence that Washington has unleashed will come back to Washington and to the corrupt political elites everywhere. As Gerald Celente says, the first great war of the 21st century has begun.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/

[c1ue]

Re: Paul Craig Roberts on Hugo Chavez

So the fact that Chavez was dying, rather than dead makes my queries about a post Chavez Venezuela irrelevant?

Given that it was open knowledge that Chavez was going to Cuba for cancer treatment - I fail to see why a death rumor was in any way relevant unless grounded in fact.

The world already knew he was in trouble, and people do die in treatment all the time.

Thus I again point out that a completely unfounded rumor is quite a different story than a rumor based on fact. The former is just muckraking a la the National Enquirer, the latter is a leak.

Arguing that the rumor helped people think about post Chavez is ridiculous, as you know full well (as I do) that there are any number of people in the US State department (and other US government agencies) dreaming of this event even before he went to Cuba, though after he got elected for the first time.

[jk]

Re: Paul Craig Roberts on Hugo Chavez

immanuel wallerstein on chavez' death:

Commentary No. 349, Mar. 15, 2013

"After a Charismatic Leader, What?"



Pres. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has died. The world press and the Internet have been swamped with assessments of his achievements, ranging from endless praise to endless denunciation, with a certain number of persons expressing somewhat more guarded or limited degree of praise or denunciation. The one thing on which everyone seems to agree is that Hugo Chavez was a charismatic leader.


What is a charismatic leader? It is someone who has a very forceful personality, a relatively clear political vision, and capable of great energy and persistence in pursuing this vision. Charismatic leaders attract great support, first of all in their own country. At the same time, the very features of their persona that attract support are the same that mobilize deep opposition to their politics. All this has surely been true in the case of Chavez.

The list of charismatic leaders over the history of the modern world is not that long. Think Napoleon and De Gaulle in France, Lincoln and F.D. Roosevelt in the United States, Peter the Great and Lenin in Russia, Gandhi in India, Mao Zedong in China, Mandela in South Africa. And of course Simon Bolívar. As soon as one looks at a list like this, one realizes several things. These persons were all controversial leaders during their lives. The evaluation of their merits and faults has constantly shifted over historical time. They never seem to disappear from historical view. And lastly, they were not at all identical in their politics.

The death of a charismatic leader always creates a void of uncertainty, in which his supporters try to ensure the continuance of his policies by institutionalizing them. Max Weber called this the "routinization of charisma." But once routinized, the policies evolve in directions that are always hard to predict. To estimate what may happen in the immediate future, one has to start of course with an appreciation of Chavez's achievements. But one also needs to make an assessment both of the internal rapport de forces and of the larger geopolitical and cultural contexts in which Venezuela and Latin America find themselves today.

His achievements seem clear. He used the enormous oil wealth of Venezuela to improve significantly the living conditions of the poorest strata of Venezuela, expanding their access to health facilities and education, and thereby reducing the gap between rich and poor quite remarkably. In addition, he used the enormous oil wealth to subsidize oil exports to a large number of countries, especially in the Caribbean, which has enabled them to survive minimally.



Furthermore, he contributed substantially to building autonomous Latin American institutions - not only ALBA (the alliance of Bolivarian countries) but UNASUR (the confederation of all states in South America), CELAC (all states in the Americas except the United States and Canada), and Mercosur (the confederal economic structure that included both Brazil and Argentina), which he joined. He was not alone in these efforts, but he played a particularly dynamic role. It was a role for which former President Lula of Brazil constantly praised him. The very large number of presidents of other countries at his funeral (some 34), especially from Latin America, attest to their appreciation. In seeking to create strong Latin American structures, he was of course playing an anti-imperialist role, essentially an anti-United States role, and he was therefore not at all appreciated in Washington.

One should note in particular the positive appreciation of Chavez by the conservative president of neighboring Colombia. This was because of the important and very positive role Chavez had been playing as a mediator between the Colombian government and its long-time guerilla movement enemy, the FARC. Chavez was the one possible mediator acceptable to both sides, and he was seeking a political solution to end the warfare.

His detractors charged him with fostering a corrupt regime, an authoritarian regime, and an economically incompetent regime. There has no doubt been corruption. There always is in any regime where there is abundant money. But when I think of the corruption scandals in the past half-century in the United States or France or Germany, where there is even more money, I cannot take this argument too seriously.


Has the regime been authoritarian? Certainly. This is what one gets with a charismatic leader. But again, as authoritarian leaders go, Chavez has been remarkably restrained. There have not been bloody purges or concentration camps. Instead, there have been elections, which most outside observers have considered as good as they come (think again of the United States or Italy or...), and Chavez has won 14 of 15 of them. Nor should we forget that he confronted a serious coup attempt supported by the United States, which he survived with difficulty. He survived on the basis of popular support and support within the army.

As for economic incompetence, yes he has made mistakes. And yes, the current income of the Venezuelan government is less than it had been earlier. But remember we are in a worldwide depression. And almost every government in the world is facing financial dilemmas and calls to austerity. It is not at all obvious that a government in the hands of his opposition would have done better in terms of optimizing economic revenue. What is certain is that a government in the hands of his opposition would have done less to redistribute wealth internally to the poorest strata.

The one area in which he has not shone is his continuing support for an extractivist economic policy, overriding the protests of indigenous peoples about both ecological damage and their rights to autonomous control of their locations. But he shared this fault with every single government in the Americas, whether of the left or the right.


What is likely to happen now? For the moment, both the Chavistas and the opposition have closed ranks, at least for the forthcoming presidential elections. Most analysts seem to agree that Chavez's chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro, will win them. The interesting question is what will happen thereafter, first of all in terms of internal alignments. Neither camp is without its internal divisions. I suspect there will be some reshuffling of the cards, with defections in each camp to the other side. In a few years’ time, we may have a different array of forces.

What will then happen to "21st-century socialism" - the vision that Chavez had of what needs to be pursued in Venezuela, in Latin America, and throughout the world? There are two words in this vision. One is "socialism." Chavez sought to rescue this term from the opprobrium into which it had fallen because of the multiple failures both of real-existing Communism and post-Marxian social-democracy. The other term is "21st-century." This was Chavez's clear repudiation of the socialism of both the Third and the Second Internationals, and his call for rethinking the strategy.

In both these tasks, Chavez was scarcely alone. But he sounded a clarion call. For me, this effort is part of the larger task we all face during this structural crisis of historical capitalism and the bifurcation of two possible resolutions of the chaos into which our world-system has fallen. We need to debate what is the nature of the better world we, or some of us, are seeking. If we can't be clearer on what we want, we are not likely to win the battle with those who seek to create a non-capitalist system that nonetheless reproduces the worst features of capitalism: hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization.

[don]

Re: Paul Craig Roberts on Hugo Chavez

Some feel this may be capitalism's highest stage of development.

Global dominance by monopolies/oligopolies.

A long-lasting military, and subsequently political, dominance by one great power.

The financialization of the leading characteristics of capitalism.

The once inconceivable de-industrialization of the capitalist core.

The concomitant victory over industrial labor in the core centers.


This stage may last for some time, interminable in subjective time.


If and when change comes it may very well be from the periphery.

[reggie]

Re: Internet chatter: Hugo Chavez is dead

The big thing for me since Chavez's health began to decline sometime ago is:

*What's the future for Venezuela?

*What's the future of diplomatic relations between Venezuela/US and from the local/regional perspective, Venezuela/Columbia(with Venezuela supporting the likes of FARC)?

Suppression of pretroleum-based energy production. We're in a resource-starved phase of humanity, real or imagined is irrelevant.