...THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT...
The staff of the Alaska Progressive Review, along with the populations of the majority of the countries of the World who have access to truthful news information mourn the passing from cancer Tuesday of President-elect Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela. This popular thrice elected left-leaning/progressive president was one of those rare, not just political leaders, but human beings, who had the courage to call things as he saw them, speaking what many people want to, but are afraid to say. Regardless of the consequences to his personal safety and well-being. Pay special attention to the first five minutes of this webcast from his famous 2006 speech at the UN, the day after US President George Bush appeared.
The staff of the Alaska Progressive Review, along with the populations of the majority of the countries of the World who have access to truthful news information mourn the passing from cancer Tuesday of President-elect Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela. This popular thrice elected left-leaning/progressive president was one of those rare, not just political leaders, but human beings, who had the courage to call things as he saw them, speaking what many people want to, but are afraid to say. Regardless of the consequences to his personal safety and well-being. Pay special attention to the first five minutes of this webcast from his famous 2006 speech at the UN, the day after US President George Bush appeared.
He was briefly deposed for a few hours in a US-supported right-wing coup in 2002, but popular support from the military and general populace prevailed. The corporate/oligarchic media in this country, and even his own (yes, they have always had and still do have freedom of the press in Venezuela), continually demonised his actions, policies, and even his personal appearance and background. His crimes? Using the vast oil-wealth of Venezuela, which is developed/maintained by a nationalised company, to help better the living conditions of the poor majority of his country, and helping to unify South America and move it away from US/multi-national corporate domination. He and his followers and the people of Venezuela acheived remarkable success in these aims during his political career from 1998-2012.
[Hugo Chavez and his two daughters, 2008]
The following article by the group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) documents the lies and distortions made by corporate media in this and other countries. When I took a russian language course my freshman year at the Univ. of Calif./Davis in 1982-83, my professor, who had studied in the USSR in the 1970s, said many people he met had a saying about their two official govt. news sources Pravda (Truth!) and Izvestia (News). The saying was "Pravda ne Pravda y Izvestia ne Izvestia," or roughly translated, there is no truth in Truth and no news in News. We think that's abundantly clear now for the US corporate media, in fact there are many interesting parallels between what is happening with and within the US, and what was happening in the old Soviet Union between 1980-85. But that's a subject for another time.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/03/06-12
Published on Wednesday, March 6, 2013 by Fairness
& Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
In Death as in Life, Chávez Target of Media Scorn
Venezuela's left-wing populist president Hugo Chávez died on Tuesday, March
5, after a two-year battle with cancer. If world leaders were judged by the
sheer volume of corporate media vitriol and misinformation about their policies,
Chávez would be in a class of his own.In Death as in Life, Chávez Target of Media Scorn
Shortly after Chávez won
his first election in 1998, the U.S. government deemed him a threat to U.S.
interests--an image U.S. media eagerly played up. When a coup engineered by
Venezuelan business and media elites removed Chávez from power, many leading U.S
outlets praised the move (Extra!, 6/02).
The New York Times (4/13/02), calling it a "resignation,"
declared that "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be
dictator." The Chicago Tribune (4/14/02) cheered the removal of
a leader who had been "praising Osama bin Laden"--an absurdly false charge.
But that kind of reckless rhetoric was evidently
permissible in media discussions about Chávez. Seven years later,
CNN (1/15/09)
hosted a discussion of Chávez with Democratic strategist Doug Schoen, where he
and host John Roberts discussed whether or not Chávez was worse than Osama bin
Laden. As Schoen put it, "He's given Al-Qaeda and Hamas an open invitation to
come to Caracas."
There were almost no limits to overheated media
rhetoric about Chávez.
There were almost no limits to overheated media
rhetoric about Chávez. In a single news article, Newsweek
(11/2/09) managed to compare him to Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. (Chávez had
built a movie studio, which is the sort of thing dictators apparently do.)
ABC (World News, 10/7/12)
called him a "fierce enemy of the United States," the Washington
Post (10/16/06) an “autocratic demagogue." Fox News
(12/5/05) said that his government was "really Communism"--despite the fact he
was repeatedly returned to office in internationally certified elections
(Extra!, 11-12/06)
that Jimmy Carter deemed "the best in the world" (Guardian,
10/3/12).
Apart from the overheated claims about terrorism and
his growing military threat to the region (FAIR Blog, 4/1/07),
media often tried to make a simpler case: Chávez wasn't good for Venezuelans.
The supposed economic ruin in Venezuela was a staple of the coverage. The
Washington Post editorial page (1/5/13)
complained of "the economic pain caused by Mr. Chávez," the man who has "wrecked
their once-prosperous country." And a recent New York Times
piece (12/13/12) tallied some of the hassles of daily life, declaring that
such frustrations are typical in Venezuela, for
rich and poor alike, and yet President Hugo Chávez has managed to stay in office
for nearly 14 years, winning over a significant majority of the public with his
outsize personality, his free-spending of state resources and his ability to
convince Venezuelans that the Socialist revolution he envisions will make their
lives better.
Of course, Venezuelans might feel that Chávez
already had improved their lives (FAIR Blog, 12/13/12),
with poverty cut in half, increased availability of food and healthcare,
expanded educational opportunities and a real effort to build grassroots
democratic institutions. (For more of this, read Greg Grandin's piece in the
Nation--3/5/13.)
Those facts of Venezuelan life were not entirely
unacknowledged by U.S. media. But these policies, reflecting new national
priorities about who should benefit from the country's oil wealth, were treated
as an unscrupulous ploy of Chávez's to curry favor with the poor. As the
Washington Post (2/24/13)
sneered, Chávez won "unconditional support from the poverty-stricken masses" by
"doling out jobs to supporters and showering the poor with gifts."
NPR's All Things Considered (3/5/13) told
listeners that "millions of Venezuelans loved him because he showered the poor
with social programs."
Though this is often treated as another Chávez
conspiracy theory--"A central ideological pillar of Chávez's rule over 14 years
has been to oppose Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington,
which he accuses of trying to destabilize his government," the Washington Post
(1/10/13)
reported--the record of U.S. support for the coup leaders is clear.
The front page of Time.com
The front page of Time.com
As a State Department report (FAIR
Blog, 1/11/13)
acknowledged, various U.S. agencies had "provided training, institution building
and other support to individuals and organizations understood to be actively
involved in the brief ouster of the Chávez government." The Bush administration
declared its support for the short-lived coup regime, saying Chávez was
"responsible for his fate" (Guardian, 4/21/09).
Of course, as with any country, there are aspects of
Chávez's government that could be criticized. U.S. media attention to
Venezuela's flaws, however, was obviously in service to an official agenda--as
documented by FAIR's study (Extra!, 2/09)
of editorials on human rights, which showed Venezuela getting much harsher
criticism than the violent repression of the opposition in U.S.-allied
Colombia.
In reporting Chávez's death, little had changed.
"Venezuela Bully Chávez Is Dead," read the New York Post's
front page (3/6/13);
"Death of a Demogogue" was on Time's home page (3/6/13).
CNN host Anderson Cooper (3/5/13) declared it was "the death of
a world leader who made America see red, as in Fidel Castro red, Venezuela's
socialist president, Hugo Chávez."
The fact that U.S. elite interests are an overarching concern is not exactly hidden. Many reports on Chávez's passing were quick to note the country's oil wealth. NBC's Williams asserted, "All this matters a lot to the U.S., since Venezuela sits on top of a lot of oil and that's how this now gets interesting for the United States." MSNBC's Rachel Maddow (3/5/13) concurred: "I mean, Venezuela is a serious country in the world stage. It is sitting on the world's largest proven oil reserves."
And CNN's Barbara Starr (3/5/13) reported: "You're going to see a lot of U.S. businesses keep a very close eye on this transition in Venezuela. They're going to want to know that their investments are secure and that this is a stable country to invest in." Those U.S. businesses would seem to include its media corporations.
© 2013 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Another good article detailing Chavez' biography and legacy, written by a man who met and admired him, can be found here.
BBC Investigative reporter Gregory Palast put out a short article as well, on the Truthout site, here.
It leads off thus:
"As a purgative for the crappola fed to Americans about Chavez, my foundation, The Palast Investigative Fund, is offering the film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, as a free download. Based on my several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, filmed for BBC Television. DVDs also available."
In addition, we highly recommend you watch the movie film-maker Oliver Stone produced in 2010, "South of the Border" in which he meets and talks extensively with Hugo Chavez, and many of the other former and current prominent progressive politicians in South America, such as Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), and Nestor Kirchner (Argentina).
Hugo Chavez may be gone, but his words, deeds, and legacy will not soon be forgotten. He will go down in history as the first South American politician who was able to help unify that continent and forge a political and economic destiny independent from US/multinational corporate domination. Inspiring a new generation of politicians and activists on that and other continents. We can't help but think that the incredible stresses involved from this and the constant threats to his personal well-being he was under helped to hasten the progression of his demise. Rest in Peace Hugo!
THOUGHTS FROM M.I.T.
We are proud to stand with Hugo Chavez in studying, admiring, and sharing the work of the prominent US and internationally-recognised MIT linguist and political analyst, Noam Chomsky.
And urge all to do likewise, as he writes compellingly but very analytically and in great detail. Describing how dangerous and destructive our current political and economic systems are to national and global health, which we have been saying here at the Alaska Progressive Review since our founding.
A recent article of his is no less informative. Coming from a source as eminent as this, the "elites", "ruling class", "corporatocracy/plutocracy", would be well to wake up from their-greed induced sociopathies before they destroy the ability of the planet to support "civilisation" as we know it, preceded by massive die-offs due to drought/flooding/wildfires and catastrophic sea level rises. Unless the vast majority of the people in the World are able to come together first and put an end to the excesses of our current political and economic system, successes in which so far have mainly been limited to parts of South America.
Noam Chomsky: Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?
March 5, 2013 |
The term “capitalism” is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, with substantial state intervention ranging from subsidies for creative innovation to the “too-big-to-fail” government insurance policy for banks.
The system is highly monopolized, further limiting reliance on the market, and increasingly so: In the past 20 years the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, reports scholar Robert W. McChesney in his new book “Digital Disconnect.”
“Capitalism” is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support – both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz.
Some might even use the term “capitalism” to refer to the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, America’s leading social philosopher, in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey
The truncated democracy that Dewey condemned has been left in tatters in recent years. Now control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority “down below” has been virtually disenfranchised. The current political-economic system is a form of plutocracy, diverging sharply from democracy, if by that concept we mean political arrangements in which policy is significantly influenced by the public will.
There have been serious debates over the years about whether capitalism is compatible with democracy. If we keep to really existing capitalist democracy – RECD for short – the question is effectively answered: They are radically incompatible.
It seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive RECD and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. But could functioning democracy make a difference?
Let’s keep to the most critical immediate problem that civilization faces: environmental catastrophe. Policies and public attitudes diverge sharply, as is often the case under RECD. The nature of the gap is examined in several articles in the current issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Researcher Kelly Sims Gallagher finds that “One hundred and nine countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable power, and 118 countries have set targets for renewable energy. In contrast, the United States has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy.”
It is not public opinion that drives American policy off the international spectrum. Quite the opposite. Opinion is much closer to the global norm than the U.S. government’s policies reflect, and much more supportive of actions needed to confront the likely environmental disaster predicted by an overwhelming scientific consensus – and one that’s not too far off; affecting the lives of our grandchildren, very likely.
As Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis report in Daedalus: “Huge majorities have favored steps by the federal government to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated when utilities produce electricity. In 2006, 86 percent of respondents favored requiring utilities, or encouraging them with tax breaks, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases they emit. Also in that year, 87 percent favored tax breaks for utilities that produce more electricity from water, wind or sunlight [ These majorities were maintained between 2006 and 2010 and shrank somewhat after that.
The fact that the public is influenced by science is deeply troubling to those who dominate the economy and state policy.
One current illustration of their concern is the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” proposed to state legislatures by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs legislation to serve the needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth.
The ALEC Act mandates “balanced teaching” of climate science in K-12 classrooms. “Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial, to “balance” mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the “balanced teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states.
Of course, all of this is dressed up in rhetoric about teaching critical thinking – a fine idea, no doubt, but it’s easy to think up far better examples than an issue that threatens our survival and has been selected because of its importance in terms of corporate profits.
Media reports commonly present a controversy between two sides on climate change.
One side consists of the overwhelming majority of scientists, the world’s major national academies of science, the professional science journals and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
They agree that global warming is taking place, that there is a substantial human component, that the situation is serious and perhaps dire, and that very soon, maybe within decades, the world might reach a tipping point where the process will escalate sharply and will be irreversible, with severe social and economic effects. It is rare to find such consensus on complex scientific issues.
The other side consists of skeptics, including a few respected scientists who caution that much is unknown – which means that things might not be as bad as thought, or they might be worse.
Omitted from the contrived debate is a much larger group of skeptics: highly regarded climate scientists who see the IPCC’s regular reports as much too conservative. And these scientists have repeatedly been proven correct, unfortunately.
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2011/04/alaska-fire-seasons.html]
The propaganda campaign has apparently had some effect on U.S. public opinion, which is more skeptical than the global norm. But the effect is not significant enough to satisfy the masters. That is presumably why sectors of the corporate world are launching their attack on the educational system, in an effort to counter the public’s dangerous tendency to pay attention to the conclusions of scientific research.
At the Republican National Committee’s Winter Meeting a few weeks ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal warned the leadership that “We must stop being the stupid party ... We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters.”
Within the RECD system it is of extreme importance that we become the stupid nation, not misled by science and rationality, in the interests of the short-term gains of the masters of the economy and political system, and damn the consequences.
These commitments are deeply rooted in the fundamentalist market doctrines that are preached within RECD, though observed in a highly selective manner, so as to sustain a powerful state that serves wealth and power.
The official doctrines suffer from a number of familiar “market inefficiencies,” among them the failure to take into account the effects on others in market transactions. The consequences of these “externalities” can be substantial. The current financial crisis is an illustration. It is partly traceable to the major banks and investment firms’ ignoring “systemic risk” – the possibility that the whole system would collapse – when they undertook risky transactions.
Environmental catastrophe is far more serious: The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species. And there is nowhere to run, cap in hand, for a bailout.
In future, historians (if there are any) will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions – actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival.
Those historians will observe that the richest and most powerful country in history, which enjoys incomparable advantages, is leading the effort to intensify the likely disaster. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called “primitive” societies: First Nations, tribal, indigenous, aboriginal.
The countries with large and influential indigenous populations are well in the lead in seeking to preserve the planet.
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2008/11/evo-si.html
The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing toward destruction.
Thus Ecuador, with its large indigenous population, is seeking aid from the rich countries to allow it to keep its substantial oil reserves underground, where they should be.
Meanwhile the U.S. and Canada are seeking to burn fossil fuels, including the extremely dangerous Canadian tar sands, and to do so as quickly and fully as possible, while they hail the wonders of a century of (largely meaningless) energy independence without a side glance at what the world might look like after this extravagant commitment to self-destruction.
This observation generalizes: Throughout the world, indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call “the rights of nature,” while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness.
http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/06/open-veins-of-latin-america-latest.htmlThis is all exactly the opposite of what rationality would predict – unless it is the skewed form of reason that passes through the filter of RECD.
(Noam Chomsky's new book is ``Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire. Conversations with David Barsamian.'' Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.)
