Blogging the democratic revolution
Final Thoughts Before the Elections By Alex Beech Political marches induce hope in the best cases, and hysteria in the worst. During the referendum, I noticed how a march can beintoxicating – to see all those people in one place, to feel the energy. But at the end of the day, millions stay home, and you never know how those millions are going to vote in the privacy of their voting booths. There is a reality Venezuelans who oppose Chavez need to face if we’re going to move forward as a nation, and that is that Chavez may win on…
The Manuel Rosales presidential election rally in Caracas Saturday Source: Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis The size and depth of the crowd at the Rosales rally in Caracas Saturday Source: Daniel Duquenal at Venezuela News & Views Venezuelan flags at the Rosales presidential rally in Caracas Saturday Source: Anonymous, via Venezuela Today The babe count was high in Caracas on Saturday Source: Miguel Oser at 11 Abril (whose album shows many babes) Note the ‘duh’ look on Chavez’s face, probably his real expression over this Source: Martha Colmenares, citing Globovision More Venezuelan babes at the rally in Caracas Saturday Source: AP,…
This time, avalancha in Barquisimeto, Venezuela Source: Aleksander Boyd, VCrisis How does one explain this? The huge ‘avalancha’ crowds of Venezuelans from end to end of the vast South American nation the size of three Texases, all seeking an end to Chavismo is the rainbow swirling edge of pure democratic revolution. The photos – and there are a ton of them in Alek’s new photo album from several cities here signal that people are tired of tyranny, they are tired perpetual warfare, they are tired of hostility to free trade, they are tired of economic horror shows. They want peace,…
Inflation, as Milton Friedman said, is a monetary phenomenon. The only way you get inflation is to print out money like there’s no tomorrow. Because when you do that, there IS no tomorrow, money-printing destroys savings and with it, future investment. Which would have great implications for a nation’s stability and passage to or from democracy. Slobo of Yugoslavia, for instance, achieved his greatest repression, after he triggered the worst money-printing orgy in history, printing literally at the speed of inflation for a 313,000,000% rate. A dark curtain of tyranny descended over the country after that. You can read about…
The mind of Hugo Chavez is like a compost heap. It’s full of layer upon layer of muck, and when he gets to spreading it out through what comes out of his mouth, you never know what will come up to the top. Greg Wilpert, a Chavista agent who edits a prominent Chavista Web site, wrote an amazing piece about Chavez’s relations with the West and his own view of himself for Political Affairs, the official magazine of the Communist Party USA. He had a long rambling chat with Chavez, who proves he’s congenitally unable to keep his mouth shut.…
Monday the trade Neanderthals in Congress rejected endorsement of Vietnam’s entry into the World Trade Organization. It was slopped through a lame-duck committee and Congressional Republicans and Democrats voted against bringing Vietnam into the world trading system. They wanted to shut Vietnam out. And keep all the trade to themselves. Problem is, it takes two to trade, so we all are dimished by keeping a good trading partner out. Vietnam went from zero trade ten years ago to our 16th largest trading partner. What a lousy way to treat a country we’ve made money off of and they’ve done the…
Alek Boyd has taken some photos of Puerto Cabello’s refineries, showing all how Hugo Chavez is painting the entire industrial complex a bright communist red. Rather than the ethereal white of the Long Beach refineries, it’s this rage-inducing comrade red, Chavez’s own color. The only othe place I’ve seen this done is Tijuana, Mexico, where the ruling PRI party has begun painting the flimsy corrugated metal border fence their own vulgar PRI red. No wonder everyone hates the border fences. No wonder everyone hates Chavez’s ugly paint job on refineries. It’s really gross. This may surprise you, but taking those…
What’s gotten into Brazil’s supposedly decent president, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva? He flew up to Venezuela and openly endorsed Hugo Chavez for president, hugging and kissing him, and openly meddling in an election for a country that’s not his own. Oddly enough, Chavez did not do the same for him, which is to say meddle, as he openly and shamelessly did in Peru and Mexico. Meanwhile, the lovefest between the Brazilian and Venezuelan leaders comes a day after Peru’s leader, Alan Garcia, paid a visit to Lula and then openly declared verbal war on Chavez, calling him the scum…
Alan Garcia, out to break Hugo Chavez Source: Libardo Buitrago Meet Hugo Chavez’s worst nightmare: President Alan Garcia of Peru, who blasted Hugo Chavez as a thug, meddler, briber and intimidator yet again, in an interview with a big Venezuelan newspaper, El Universal. The nightmare Hugo Chavez didn’t foresee: Alan Garcia of Peru Source: AP, via Yahoo! News Garcia, as we all know, is no poodle of George Bush. In fact, he’s a leftist in his own right, a nationalist – as in wanting Peru to be sovereign from all foreign interference – and once gave Ronald Reagan all kinds…
As Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez prepares to “win” a new election with Jimmy Carter’s renewed collaboration, suspect “polls” executed with Chavista funding, are preemptively declaring Chavez the runaway winner. That’s funny because Chavez sure isn’t acting like a winner. He’s acting like a dictator who’s running scared. Like Robespierre staring down Danton, fearful of losing power, lashing out and ultimately unleashing terror. Check out what Gustavo Coronel, writing in Venezuela Today, has to say about this. He says what’s going on is a slow coup d’etat to consolidate total power and it’s happening right now under the Organization of American…
I have had long running arguments with naivos even close to the oil industry that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela intended to turn not just Venezuela’s state oil company into a worker-ant collective but Western oil majors’ Venezuelan operations into them as well. Today, I stand vindicated. Today, workers from Chevron, Repsol, Shell, Exxon, Total and others must put on red t-shirts and stand at attention, worker-ant-style, wave their fists and shout pro-Chavez slogans for their new Chavista masters, who’ve taken over their firms in broken contracts. No wonder Venezuelan oil production is a mess. They have to have Chavista indoctrination…
Christmas season in Venezuela and nothing upsets Santa Chavez more than a little competition. That’s why the Venezuelan strongman, who’s famous for doling out pork-barrel goodies has made it abundantly clear that there won’t be any Santa Claus, any lighted Christmas trees, and certainly not Frosty the Snowman in his Castroite fiefdom. After all, HE’S the Santa around Venezuela, not some North Pole-dwelling invader! Isn’t he the man who wears red in the family? Can’t have any graybeards from faraway lands taking from his trademark regalia in the name of some holiday. I was in Caracas last year around Christmas…
Urrrrghhhhh! Wonder why. UPDATE: Chavez is just beaming at Rumsfeld’s resignation. Rumsfeld, you may recall, compared Chavez to Hitler. Alex Beech sent me some additional thoughts here: What Hugo Chavez Could Learn from Bush 08.11.06 ö There is no one celebrating the Republicans’ defeat today more than President Chavez, who said on Wednesday that the defeat was a “whipping that they’ve given the US president???????which means that US citizens do have a mind and a conscience.” Rather than celebrate, Mr. Chavez could learn a lesson about why many Americans switched their votes to the Democratic party on Tuesday throughout the…
I just got this note in from Alex Beech: Censorship in Venezuela official Begins; Live Broadcasts are Forbidden On Tuesday afternoon, a National Guard major notified the country’s private television networks in Venezuela that requests for live broadcasts would have to be submitted to the National Guard twenty four hours prior to transmission. According to Globovision News Channel Director Federico Ravell, National Guard Major Rafael Medina prevented private networks from performing technical alignments necessary for live transmission. Ravell said that the communications regulatory agency (CONATEL) denied any knowledge of the measure. Globovision, which broadcasts opposition campaigning events, will be prevented…
America is the strongest single country in the world, and in this position it has made many enemies of those who oppose such things as democracy and the free market. Kim Jong-il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hugo Chavez, just to name a few. But these three especially are bent on the destruction or obsolescence America itself as well as what it stands for. It stands to reason then that such people would do anything possible to make this happen; from building nuclear weapons to clearly subverting American elections. Hugo Chavez is exactly the kind of man that would do such a…
As Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez continues to crash in the polls, we are seeing a growing campaign of what can be summed up in short as lies and intimidation, explicitly centered around the Venezuelan oil company, Chavez’s own cash-cow. Over the weekend, Chavez’s energy minister, Rafael Ramirez, explicitly threatened oil workers at the state oil company with firing if they didn’t vote for Hugo Chavez. That’s illegal. But it’s also a sign of desperation. That’s a sign of trouble brewing. But It didn’t stop him. “We are here supporting Chavez, who is our leader, who is the top leader of…
Half a million people marched against Hugo Chavez in a campaign rally for rapidly rising challenger Manuel Rosales in Caracas on Saturday Alek Boyd of VCrisis, who was obviously at the gigantic 15-mile rally, has taken some spectacular photos of the gargantuan march against Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who vows to Cubanize the country and force anyone with brain in Venezuela to flee to Miami. His 28 or so photos are bigger and more vivid than the TV screen-grabs I posted yesterday. Go see them all here. Daniel Duquenal at Venezuela News & Views has a fascinating discussion of which…
One heck of a campaign rally! 500,000 marched for Manuel Rosales, who’s challenging Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez for the presidency in Caracas Saturday Source, all photos: Globovision, which has more here UPDATE: OK, it’s not millions. It’s half a million. (My original headline said ‘millions’) But it’s more than expected and it’s still huge, at least as big as the Los Angeles illegal immigrant rally last March. Caracas only has 6 million people, so this crowd represents about one out of every twelve caraquenos. This story might speak for itself through its photos – what looks like millions of people…
Violence in Oaxaca, on Tuesday Source: Agencia EFE Venezuela dictator Hugo Chavez’s fingerprints are all over the leftist violence and insurrection going on in Oaxaca, Mexico right now. That’s not my conjecture but what’s running in the mainstream Mexican press. Like here. The past weekend, President Vicente Fox sent in the troops to the troubled region, where Zapatista ‘Otra Campagna’ far-leftists are battling PRI dinosaur leftists. It began as a teachers’ strike for higher wages but now has turned into a full blown insurrection, with neither group willing to give an inch. President Vicente Fox (of the center-right PAN party)…
Isn’t there a leftwing site somewhere that devotes itself to watching Fox News “so you don’t have to”? I think there is, and it’s an entertaining thing. Venezuela has its own TV-watcher, doing yeoman’s work, watching the Chavistas in action on the television – our own dear Daniel Duquenal of Venezuela News & Views. Daniel takes us through the latest Chavista television appearance on privately owned Globovision and entertains us with the Chavista performance of one Chavista operative named Calixto Ortega, trying to make sense of the world on that independent medium. Daniel advises us that Chavistas only go on…
Alek Boyd has been doing some fantastic reporting on the state of poor society in Venezuela, actually talking to people and seeing what it’s like in their often ignored world. Are you aware that Venezuela’s poor are poorer than any other western hemispheric nation’s poor? I mean places like Haiti, Nicaragua, Brazil and Bolivia? I sure wasn’t. But apparently, it’s true. And it’s not surprising. Take a huge oil economy that drives out all other trade. Couple it with unchecked illegal immigration, rendering millions of people without legal papers. Add onto it layers of socialism which preceded Chavez, which taxes…
The U.S. government launched a federal probe of Smartmatic, the Venezuelan voting machine company affiliated with the Venezuelan government, whose machines were instrumental in all the electoral fraud committed in Venezuela since 2004. The company claims the probe, first broke by the Miami Herald on Saturday, was all their idea but ahead of U.S. elections, under unfavorable media spotlight, I do not believe them at all. Following its role in the recall referendum that entrenched Hugo Chavez in power, the company has since taken its kooka-profits (in the neighborhood of $120 million) from the crime against democracy, and bought up…
Recently, there was a Zogby poll that came out, claiming Hugo Chavez had a commanding lead over his opposition. Who paid for it is unknown, but Alek Boyd has a new item up indicating that the signs point to Hugo himself. After all, hasn’t Hugo set up phony polling firms of his own, for the express purpose of ginning up his poll numbers? Alek has exposed that he has on that, too. KA has an item showing it here, and so does Alek. Image-conscious Chavez has a long history of phony polls. Enter John Zogby. Turns out Zogby has a…
Doctor Zin at Regime Change Iran has found a megatrend piece that’s so arresting it can’t help but make you stop and think. World oil prices right now are dropping like a stone. If they go below $50 a barrel and stay there, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are in for hard times. They won’t be able to maintain their political popularity because in all case, that popularity is derived from pork-barrel spending and government handouts. If they lose popularity, will that make them more, or less, aggressive against their own internal opposition and the…
ANSWER Coalition anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan Source: Susan Forrest, Indymedia Los Angeles Today I went to the antiwar protests, over in Hollywood, to check out the scene. Compared to other antiwar rallies, this was small. It might have been put together hastily – I did not learn about it until yesterday. Still, ANSWER tends to attract many more people than this and they did have Cindy Sheehan as their headliner. Without prejudice, I estimated there were only about 650 people at this one – I’ve been to the last three and this was the smallest of all. The ANSWER procession…