So how does Chavez contribute to and help the world capitalist market? No doubt Micheletti and all those strident anti-Chavez conservatives in the US would like to know! Although Chavez has not as yet improved the condition of the poorest all that much he has given them some hope and some power: By the way where is Mike Lebowitz?
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/148
"The people have awakened. We will never go back to the past," said Josefina Corranil, 40, who works as a maid by day and a community organizer by night.
To see how Chavez's revolution has slowly begun to take effect, you need only visit Lopez's neighborhood in a poor section of Caracas.
Lopez had never considered trying to improve the tumble-down community around her until one day last year, when she watched Chavez announce his plan to give out land titles to those who participated in a government program.
Lopez was the first person in Venezuela to gain title to her home through the program. About 30,000 other property owners throughout Venezuela have followed suit, and an additional 310,000 are in the process. The titles come with one restriction: The homes can be sold only in case of emergency, with permission from the government -- to prevent speculators from buying up large chunks of land from the poor. ..... Getting at poverty's roots: In the past few months, more than half a million illiterate Venezuelans have received basic reading and writing instruction. Hundreds of thousands of poor children have begun attending school for the first time in their lives. Doctors imported from Cuba as part of a petroleum deal are paying house calls to poor neighborhoods.
Perhaps most important, tens of thousands of people such as Lopez have been given title to land that their families have been squatting on for generations, both in poor urban slums like this one and in vast rural tracts. Using new government credits, poor families are planting crops, organizing businesses, fixing up their homes and redesigning their neighborhoods.
"There is an incredible flowering of activity in the communities that are participating," said Gregory Wilpert, an American sociologist and freelance journalist living in Venezuela who is studying the effect of Chavez's reforms. The impact of the government's efforts is still haphazard and limited. But the measures have had a ripple effect that has left many of the poor feeling that for the first time in their lives the government is actually interested in aiding them.
Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html
--- On Thu, 10/1/09, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Gaddafi the liberator
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, October 1, 2009, 5:21 PM
> On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 4:00 PM,
> <dredmond at efn.org>
> wrote:
>
> > I think it's deeply important for a world political
> leader to raise the
> > issue of Empire and colonialism in 2009.
>
> I think it's more important for people who oppose Empire
> and
> colonialism to investigate how all world leaders, even and
> maybe
> especially those who criticize Empire and colonialism,
> contribute to
> and help perpetuate the worldwide capitalist market and its
> exploiting
> labor regimes and violent enforcement.
>
> > So Chavez shaking hands with the leader of a
> postcolonial state is fine by
> > me.
>
> Sure, he can shake hands with Hitler or Satan or even
> P*lanski. But it
> does nothing to alter the conditions under which
> Venezuelans and
> Libyans live. Though it does seem to make western leftists
> feel
> better.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>