[lbo-talk] chavez, bush, the devil and jon stewart

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 9/26/06, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> --- ylle521 at highstream.net wrote:>
> > 40 months max, according to Wikipedia.
> >
> > And it may be that the "live within capitalism"
> > approach of Chavez is
> > not the ultimate answer, but I'd argue that the
> > poorer (aka browner)
> > folk of Venezuela are doing better than right now
> > than they were
> > before.   And as is the case in Cuba: how can a
> > third world leftist
> > govt hope to survive on this planet without
> > exercising the controls
> > they do on their media, etc?   Isn't it plain that
> > the spontaneous
> > support of "the people" is not always enough to cut
> > it, to "safeguard
> > the revolution"?
> >
> > Maria
> ***********************************************
>
> While I appreciate the realities of expropriating surplus value and
> funneling it back to the workers, I would also think it possible
> to be able to do this within a civil libertarian context.  A worker should
> be able to say, "Chavez sucks" without being thrown in the slammer
> for an uttered thought crime.  After all, if we don't know why other workers
> might say, "Chavez sucks", we wouldn't be able to solve the problem or
> clear the air which generated such a thought.  If it is just, "Chavez sucks
> because
> my employer is unhappy or the religious authorties don't like seeing
> the women going to school (a la Afghanistan) then, we can ignore
> the comment.  But, if it is something akin to, "Chavez sucks because
> he is siphoning money into a secret Swiss bank account....."  well, that's
> another matter.

I've yet to hear of any worker getting charged with anything in
Venezuela for criticizing the President of Venezuela.

Chavez said in a recent interview with Diario Panorama:

<blockquote>Mucha gente me dijo, durante el golpe de abril, que
decretara emergencia, pero para qué, si eso es una emergencia que no
es emergencia, no tengo facultad, ni siquiera para intervenir un canal
de televisión, una emergencia no le da potestad al Estado para tomar
medidas extraordinarias como las que se necesitaban en el 11 de abril,
cuando generales uniformados salían en canales de televisión llamando
a la rebelión a apoyar el golpe.

Unos españoles que estaban conmigo por los días del golpe y que vieron
lo que pasaba por televisión con los generales llamando a desconocer
al Jefe de Estado, me decían: 'Presidente, perdóneme, soy un
demócrata, estoy contra la tiranía, pero en España ya ese canal habría
salido del aire, usted no puede permitir eso'.
<http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n83403.html></blockquote>

The media were so free in Venezuela that generals got on television to
call for a coup in 2002, which led some Spaniards visiting Miraflores
at that time to say, "President, excuse me, I am a democrat, I am
against tyranny, but in Spain that channel [on which the generals
called on people to refuse to recognize the head of state] would have
been taken off the air.  You can't allow this."

Even today, after the brief coup, Venezuela's media probably are among
the freest in the nations outside the West.  I can't think of any
country where all the major media except state-owned or -supported
ones are so _fiercely_ opposed to the government and remain free.  But
the Inter-American Press Association, the International Press
Institute, Reporters sans frontières, Freedom House, etc. give bad
marks to Venezuela on press freedom, which only testifies to their own
biases.  Conversely, all of them tend to be soft on Washington's
allies, giving higher marks to countries that have no free opposition
media to speak of but are allied with Washington than those that have
lively opposition media but are official enemies of Washington.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>