"....More than 25,000 communal councils have been set up in parallel to the old, corrupt local bureaucracies. Many are spectacles of raw grassroots democracy. Spokespeople are elected, yet all decisions, ideas and spending have to be approved by a community assembly. In towns long controlled by oligarchs and their servile media, this explosion of popular power has begun to change lives in the way Beatrice described.

It is this new confidence of Venezuela’s “invisible people” that has so inflamed those who live in suburbs called country club. Behind their walls and dogs, they remind me of white South Africans. Venezuela’s wild west media is mostly theirs; 80% of broadcasting and almost all the 118 newspaper companies are privately owned. Until recently one television shock jock liked to call Chávez, who is mixed race, a “monkey”. Front pages depict the president as Hitler, or as Stalin (the connection being that both like babies). Among broadcasters crying censorship loudest are those bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA in spirit if not name. “We had a deadly weapon, the media,” said an admiral who was one of the coup plotters in 2002. The TV station, RCTV, never prosecuted for its part in the attempt to overthrow the elected government, lost only its terrestrial licence and is still broadcasting on satellite and cable.

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Originally posted by fellowtraveller:
What makes me most uneasy about Chavez is his constant promotion of a personality cult.
We've seen how that goes far too many times in far too many places.

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Wait sorry that's Bush. Tell me what if not a personality cult is a Presidential election in the Excited States. The problem is that in the US the personalities are Bush and Gore. Hard to start a cult around them even with the biggest propaganda machine on the globe. Plus to get a really top notch personality cult going it helps to do something for the citizens not just the corporate lobbyists who paid for your campaign.

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Originally posted by quelar:
go look at the facts, he's not popular because he's self promoting, he's popular because the people like what he's doing.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
It's easy to be popular when you have massive oil revenues flowing in and all you have to do is throw money around

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[ 24 August 2007: Message edited by: Brendan Stone ]

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
I'm glad he is trying to distribute oil wealth equitably. But I'm also saying that without all that oil wealth his popularity would probably vanish because he wouldn't have the money to do anything progressive.

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So what?

Are you saying that Chavez' popularity doesn't count since he leads a country with a lot of natural resources? Does a left government always have to have degree of difficulty points to overcome?

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Originally posted by fellowtraveller:
Yeah, no need to be concerned about this: Chávez Calls for Broad Changes to Venezuelan Constitution

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Chávez also proposed ending the autonomy of Venezuela's central bank, which would give him access to billions of dollars from the bank's reserves; creating new types of property that would be managed by cooperatives; and creating "a popular militia" that would form part of the military.

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Originally posted by ceti:
War On Democracy, his latest doc and first to be released in cinemas just aired on ITV. Hopefully, it will come here soon.

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It's a must-see for all socialists.

Watch the 2-minute trailer.

Read Pilger's description of the genesis of his movie.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
It's easy to be popular when you have massive oil revenues flowing in and all you have to do is throw money around (ask Ralph Klein). I wonder how popular he would be if the world price of oil collpased?

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[ 05 October 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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marckb: I guess I would feel more comfortable with Chavez's motives if, instead of cutting media licences for his enemies, he simply ensured that the opposing views had equal airtime. In a country as wealthy as Venezuela, surely the solution could easily have been more voices, rather than less.

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Opposing views have more than equal airtime. The anti-government propaganda spewed by RCTV will simply be available on cable. It's not much of a change. However, what is important and worth mentioning is that if media in this country, much less the U.S. which is blatantly interfering in Venezuelan political and social life, was involved in supporting a coup d'etat, there would be a lot more done than simply refusing to renew a license. People would have been arrested and probably executed if such activities, sponsored by the U.S., took place in the U.S.A. Media in Venezuela is awash with a striking amount of venom directed towards the government that would surprise outsiders.

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Perhaps the most misrepresented and demonized figure in the media today, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, recently became a symbol of peace and diplomacy at the Rio Group Summit in Santo Domingo this past March 7. Chávez’s diplomatic, affectionate tone and his call to peace between sister nations calmed tensions between Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which just hours before had been on the brink of war after Colombia unilaterally violated Ecuador’s territory without permission or notification in order to bomb and assassinate a leader of the Fuerzas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) who was camped with a group of visiting Mexicans on the Ecuatorian side of the border....

Debunking the Chávez myth is not as easy as it should be. Coverage of President Chávez and Venezuela is negative and distorted in 90% of major media outlets in Europe, Latin America and the United States. An analysis of the Washington Post editorial page during the past year shows that of the twenty-three editorials or OpEds specifically written about Venezuela, only one – written by Venezuela’s Ambassador to the US – presented a balanced vision of the South American nation’s political and economic situation. President Chávez was labeled as a “dictator”, “autocrat”, “strongman” or “despot” on ten occasions and references to his government as “dictatorial”, “authoritarian” or “repressive” were made in almost every article. Even worse, the Washington Post perpetuated the falsehood of Venezuela’s relationship with terrorism in almost a dozen editorials during the last year.

None of these claims about Venezuela and President Chávez’s slippery slope towards a terrorist dictatorship have ever been seriously substantiated with real evidence. In fact, a frightening parallel can be drawn between the Bush-Cheney lies about weapons of mass destruction in Sadaam Hussein’s Iraq and the false allegations about Chávez’s Venezuela funding and arming Colombian terrorists and facilitating drug trafficking and money laundering.

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