Venezuela Watch

Chavez lost the election, but I am willing to bet that he wont step down when his term is over.

Damn liberal students, always provoking the establishment.

Chavez Concedes Venezuela's Constitutional Reform Lost in "Foto Finish"
December 3rd 2007, by Venezuelanalysis.com

Caracas, December 3, 2007 - Venezuela's National Electoral Council Announced at 1:15am that the No vote against the President's constitutional reform proposal lost 49.3% to 50.7%, with 45% abstention. Chavez conceded that the reform proposal lost "for now."

The vote was divided into two blocks, whereby the first block included Chavez's 33 proposed article changes and the second block included changes proposed by the national assembly. The second block lost with a slightly higher margin, with 51.0% for "No" to 49.0% for "Yes".
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/2950

To those who voted against my proposal, I thank them and congratulate them... I ask all of you to go home, know how to handle your victory. You won it. I wouldn't have wanted that Pyrrhic victory...

I say to the workers of Venezuela, to men and women, including those who did not vote for the reforms, that the social proposal contained here is the most advanced in the world and one for which we will continue to work.

We make the greatest effort...to continue debating these issues in order to achieve the greatest social inclusion and social equality------HUGO CHAVEZ
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7124376.stm

Hugo had failed to enthuse the people who had not participated i(45 percent) but decent enough to concede the defeat

Venezuela: Not What You Think

By Robin Hahnel

12/01/07 "MRZine" - -- -In the case of Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution, the mainstream media and politicians in the United States have elevated their game of demonizing all who oppose US foreign policy and business interests to a higher level of absurdity than usual. According to the mainstream media, the only newsworthy stories in Venezuela are one sided diatribes lifted from the discredited, opposition-owned media in Venezuela. For example, we read about Chavez shutting down opposition TV stations. We hear that Chavez is rewriting the Venezuelan Constitution so he can be President for life. Chavez is a dictator, QED.

All the badly outgunned, alternative media in the US can do is try its best to rebut the bias in the storylines defined by the mainstream media. The tiny fraction of Americans who visit the alternative media discover that Chavez has submitted a proposal to change the Venezuelan Constitution in a number of ways, one of which is to eliminate term limits on the office of President. All changes will first have to be approved by the democratically elected Venezuelan National Assembly, and then also approved in a popular referendum before they become law. Only Americans who search out the alternative media discover that HugoChavez was elected President by a comfortable margin in 1998, survived an opposition-sponsored recall in 2004, and most recently was re-elected in December 2006 with more than 60% of the vote. International observers certified all three elections as fair and square. George Bush, on the other hand, was selected President by a partisan Supreme Court after losing the popular vote in 2000, and won re-election only because enough black voters in Ohio were disenfranchised by a partisan Republican official to keep the Buckeye State in the Republican column in 2004. Few observers believe Bush could survive a recall election today, but of course this basic element of democratic rule is not permitted by the US Constitution. Nonetheless, the only storyline ninety-nine percent of Americans hear remains: Hugo Chavez is a dictator and George Bush is the democratically elected leader of the free world.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18816.htm
"Nonetheless, the only storyline ninety-nine percent of Americans hear remains: Hugo Chavez is a dictator and George Bush is the democratically elected leader of the free world."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/

It's nice that some countries believe in limiting executive power. Now compare that with things like this:

The Senate joined the House in embracing President Bush's view that the battle against terrorism justifies the imposition of extraordinary limits on defendants' traditional rights in the courtroom. They include restrictions on a suspect's ability to challenge his detention, examine all evidence against him, and bar testimony allegedly acquired through coercion of witnesses.

And this:

The Democratic-controlled House last night approved legislation President Bush's intelligence advisers wrote to enhance their ability to intercept the electronic communications of foreigners without a court order.

The 227 to 183 House vote capped a high-pressure campaign by the White House to change the nation's wiretap law, in which the administration capitalized on Democrats' fears of being branded weak on terrorism and on Congress's desire to act on the issue before its August recess.

Maybe ballot referendums are the best way to stop Bush from doing whatever the hell he wants. A lot of the folks we elected to "represent" us sure don't seem to have much interest in doing so.^
http://sadlyno.com/

Quote from TH ECONOMIST

"Mr Chávez's reform proposes radical changes to 69 of the constitution's 350 articles. They put into effect his campaign promise to implement "21st-Century Socialism".
On the one hand, the economy is officially declared to be based on "socialist, anti-imperialist [and] humanist principles", with protection of private property weakened. On the other, yet more power would be centralised in the presidency."

The referendum may be decided by how many Venezuelans bother to vote. Those in the opposition who called for abstention in past elections (claiming that the electoral authority was not impartial) have this time called on their supporters to vote, whereas in the chavista camp, there are signs of apathy. How widespread this proves to be may determine whether or not Venezuela remains a democracy."
www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10214956
Venezuela had prooved beyond doubts that cultureless compassionate corporate dominated culprit politics had no place iin Venezuela.
The person who had risked his political image had prooved( by gracefully accepting the defeat) beyond doubt that he is a nybody other than BUSH of USA.
The world has more respect for that kind of DEMOCRACY .

The usual fear tactics and dirty tactics were used by the opposition and the Americans. The spread of disinformation, from the notion that Chavez was going to ban miniskirts to Chavez was going to take your firstborn, was pervasive. There were small-scale capital strikes, threats of a new coup, and other abuses. But the Bolivarians had defeated those tactics in the past and many of them had already been exposed by a much stronger Bolivarian media strategy than ever before.

What good can come of it? One of the best things that could happen in Venezuela, as unlikely as it is, is that it could make socialism, popular participation, and democracy seem like normal things, normal options for a society to choose - if not for elites or for the US, for Venezuelan and Latin American peoples. Instead, every time there is an electoral process, there is polarization, a sense that the whole revolutionary project is in the balance, the whole future is in the balance and imperialist violence is hanging overhead, and that voting against Chavez is to side with these reactionary imperialist forces. If, instead, this vote could be seen the way Chavez is presenting it, as a defeat of a specific proposal "for now" (one of his famous phrases), in the context of an ongoing process, that would be a very good thing.

There are two related weaknesses in Venezuela's revolution. The first is the absence of highly visible leaders with a national television profile and ideas of their own, that are in Chavez's league, that are a part of the revolutionary process, but that might have slightly different proposals or strategic ideas. This is something that revolutions have always had a hard time producing - it always seems to focus on a single person.

The second problem is the difficulty, again largely created by the US and imperialism, in having a space for dissent within the revolutionary process. Oh, it is true that the Bolivarians are incredibly tolerant of the opposition, allowing speech and acts against the government that would not be tolerated in the US or Canada. Much harder though, and unclear how to accomplish, is for there to be debate within the movement about specific proposals without one side or the other having to go over to the opposition. In a context where the opposition has some 3.5 million voters, plus tremendous media power, foreign financing, and ultimately military backing, that is very hard to do. But this referendum outcome could help. It could actually split the opposition voters, by showing that Chavez isn't a dictator and is willing to accept a democratic result, something the opposition has been unwilling to do.


Support for the Bolivarian process could well be deeper than support for this referendum, and potential support for it is even greater (given the high abstention rates and the outcome of the last presidential election). We've always known that the Bolivarians were the more democratic of Venezuela's two sides. Accepting this defeat and carrying on with the process is bound to demonstrate this to many.

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-12/04podur.cfm

All Venezuelan elections were judged scrupulously open, free and fair by international observers from the region, European Union and US-based Carter Center. About 100 representatives from 39 countries monitored Sunday's vote in a democratic process unimaginable in the US and in most other countries. The method used has voters cast ballots twice. They first register their vote on an electric machine that produces a paper receipt. It's then placed in a ballot box so the two records can be matched to avoid any allegations of fraud.



Further, Article 56 of the Bolivarian Constitution states: "All persons have the right to be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public documents constituting evidence of the biological identity, in accordance with law." To implement it, Chavez launched Mision Itentidad (Mission Identity) in 2003. It was a mass citizenship and voter registration drive that gave millions of ordinary Venezuelans national ID cards and full citizenship rights for the first time. In 1998 before Chavez was elected, less than half of eligible Venezuelans were registered to vote. In 2000, the number was 11 million and by September, 2006 it topped 16 million in a country of 27 million people, and Chavez urges all eligible citizens to vote.



Compare this to the tainted US system in which rolls are purged of the kinds of voters most likely to oppose leading candidates unsympathetic to their interests. Electronic voting machine manipulation compounds the problem. They provide no verifiable paper ballot receipts so recounts are impossible. In addition, millions of votes cast are uncounted that include "spoiled ballots," rejected absentee ones, and others lost, ignored or miscounted in the tabulations. It's because the electoral process was privatized, and large electronic voting machine companies got unregulated control over it with everything to gain if candidates they support win.



This doesn't happen under Chavez because the system was designed to prevent it. It's not perfect, but the National Electoral Council (CNE) is an independent body, separate from the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches or any private corporate interests. None of its members are appointed by the President to assure free, fair and open elections in the true spirit of democracy rarely as evident anywhere.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=14437

For those of the chatters here who had not find time to read the
Venezuela's Constitutional Reform
here is a link
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=14409
Pity that they had not voted in detail.
I mean (Reform )ariticle by article

In the case of Venezuela, the media is more pro-active, with lots of grossly exaggerated editorials and op-eds, news articles that sometimes read like editorials, and a general lack of balance in sources and subject matter.

But Venezuela is not Pakistan. In fact, it's not Florida or Ohio either. One reason that Chavez could be confident of the vote count is that Venezuela has a very secure voting system. This is very different from the United States, where millions of citizens cast electronic votes with no paper record. Venezuelan voters mark their choice on a touch-screen machine, which then records the vote and prints out a paper receipt for the voter. The voter then deposits the vote in a ballot box. An extremely large random sample - about 54 percent - of the paper ballots are counted and compared with the electronic tally.

If the two counts match, then that is a pretty solid guarantee against electronic fraud. Any such fraud would have to rig the machines and stuff the ballot boxes to match them - a trick that strains the imagination.

In 2007, Venezuelans once again came in second for all of Latin America in the percentage of citizens who are satisfied or very satisfied with their democracy, according to the prestigious Chilean polling firm Latinobarometro - 59 percent, far above the Latin American average of 37 percent.

It is not only the secure elections that are responsible for this result - it is also that the government has delivered on its promises to share the nation's oil wealth with the poor and the majority. For most people - unlike the pundits here - voting for something and actually getting what you voted for are also an important part of democracy.

The Bush Administration has consistently sought regime change in Venezuela, even before Chavez began regularly denouncing "the Empire." According to the U.S. State Department, Washington funded leaders and organizations involved in the coup which briefly overthrew Chavez's democratically elected government in April 2002. The Washington Post reported this week that the Bush Administration has been funding unnamed student groups, presumably opposition, up to and including this year.

Venezuela must be seen as undemocratic, and Chavez as the aggressor against the United States, in order to justify the Bush Administration's objective of regime change. As in the run-up to the Iraq war, most of the major media are advancing the Administration's goals, regardless of the intentions of individual journalists.
http://www.cepr.net/content/view/1383/45/

defiant, despite defeat

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez says the time has come for "profound reflection" following his first electoral defeat in nine years at the helm Sunday night.

"Did I make a mistake in choosing the strategic moment to present [the proposal for sweeping Constitutional changes]?" Mr. Chávez asked on state television Monday. "It could be. We still aren't mature enough to adopt an openly socialist project."

But Chávez's acceptance of the results has strengthened his democratic credentials, and analysts say he'll use that to push his socialist "revolution" just as fervently as he has been.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1206/p01s01-woam.html

Chávez Turns Bitter Over His Defeat in Referendum
Foes of Amending Charter Have 'Nothing to Celebrate'

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 6, 2007; Page A20

BOGOTA, Colombia, Dec. 5 -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on Wednesday used a four-letter expletive to dismiss the opposition victory in Sunday's referendum and pledged to press forward with plans to approve constitutional changes that would expand his power in one of the world's leading oil producing-countries.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/05/AR2007120502607.html?hpid=moreheadlines
" One of the world's leading oil producing countries"

"The referendum and its outcome (while important today) is merely an episode in the struggle between authoritarian imperial centered capitalism and democratic workers centered socialism."
http://www.counterpunch.org/petras12052007.html

Anyone who saw Chavez' speech accepting defeat last night (as I did here in Guadalajara with Mexican friends) will not be in any doubt regarding his commitment to a democratically embedded social process. That much is clear. One of the weaknesses of the movement in Venezuela has been the over-dependence on one person. It is dangerous for the person (one bullet can be enough) and it is unhealthy for the Bolivarian process. There will be a great deal of soul-searching taking place in Caracas, but the key now is an open debate analysing the causes of the setback and a move towards a collective leadership to decide on the next candidate. It's a long time ahead but the discussions should start now. Deepening popular participation and encouraging social inclusion (as envisaged in the defeated constitutional changes) should be done anyway.

The referendum defeat will undoubtedly boost the Venezuelan opposition and the Right in Latin America, but they would be foolish to imagine that this victory will automatically win them the Presidency. If the lessons of the defeat are understood it is the Bolivarians who will win.
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_25583.shtml

I hope you are enjoying the monologue. The last 10 or so posts are by you, with no interjection by others at all.

Can't imagine why ?

My job here is neither to attract nor to distract the audience.
My way is different from that of others and that is
politely, patiently pouring forth the uncongenial, critical views without stooping to the banal level( personal villification and vituberation.)
I will react to other threads only if I can contribute some critical views with apt cut and paste.
Hope you have some views about the subject of this thread.
Thanks

Who gave you "a job" here? Are you engaged in a mission ordained by a higher power?

You can find my views on the matter back in the earlier pages - before the dialogue was killed by your numbingly pedantic pasted screeds.

My Collage partner was from there. Here in Trinidad we don't like the watchers out there sadly.

Once again sir
i with all my repect beg you to air your views about the subject of this thread.
I am too small to get offended