Hugo Chavez

Paul Craig Roberts
March 12, 2013
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/03/12/hugo-chavez-paul-craig-roberts-4

On March 5, 2013, Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela and world leader against imperialism, died. Washington imperialists and their media and think tank whores expressed gleeful sighs of relief as did the brainwashed US population. An “enemy of America” was gone.

Chavez was not an enemy of America. He was an enemy of Washington’s hegemony over other countries, an enemy of Washington’s alliance with elite ruling cliques who steal from the people they grind down and deny sustenance. He was an enemy of Washington’s injustice, of Washington’s foreign policy based on lies and military aggression, bombs and invasions.

Washington is not America. Washington is Satan’s home town.

Chavez was a friend of truth and justice, and this made him unpopular throughout the Western World where every political leader regards truth and justice as dire threats.

Chavez was a world leader. Unlike US politicians, Chavez was respected throughout the non-western world. He was awarded honorary doctorates from China, Russia, Brazil, and other countries, but not from Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford.

Chavez was a miracle. He was a miracle, because he did not sell out to the United States and the Venezuelan elites. Had he sold out, Chavez would have become very rich from oil revenues, like the Saudi Royal Family, and he would have been honored by the United States in the way that Washington honors all its puppets: with visits to the White House. He could have become a dictator for life as long as he served Washington.

Each of Washington’s puppets, from Asia to Europe and the Middle East, anxiously awaits the invitation that demonstrates Washington’s appreciation of his or her servitude to the global imperialist power that still occupies Japan and Germany 68 years after World War II and South Korea 60 years after the end of the Korean War and has placed troops and military bases in a large number of other “sovereign” countries.

It would have been politically easy for Chavez to sell out. All he had to do was to continue populist rhetoric, promote his allies in the army, throw more benefits to the underclass than its members had ever previously experienced, and divide the rest of the oil revenues with the corrupt Venezuelan elites.

But Chavez was a real person, like Rafael Correa, the three-term elected president of Ecuador, who stood up to the United States and granted political asylum to the persecuted Julian Assange, and Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia since the Spanish conquest. The majority of Venezuelans understood that Chavez was a real person. They elected him to four terms as president and would have continued electing him as long as he lived. What Washington hates most is a real person who cannot be bought.

The more the corrupt western politicians and media whores demonized Chavez, the more Venezuelans loved him. They understood completely that anyone damned by Washington was God’s gift to the world.

It is costly to stand up to Washington. All who are bold enough to do so are demonized. They risk assassination and being overthrown in a CIA-organized coup, as Chavez was in 2002. When CIA-instructed Venezuelan elites sprung their coup and kidnapped Chavez, the coup was overthrown by the Venezuelan people who took to the streets and by elements of the military before Chavez could be murdered by the CIA-controlled Venezuelan elites, who escaped with their own venal lives only because, unlike them, Chavez was humanitarian. The Venezuelan people rose in instantaneous and massive public defense of Chavez and put the lie to the Bush White House claim that Chavez was a dictator.

Showing its sordid corruption, the New York Times took the side of the undemocratic coup by a handful of elitists against the democratically elected Chavez, and declared that Chavez’s removal by a small group of rich elites and CIA operatives meant that “Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.”

The lies and demonization continue with Chavez’s death. He will never be forgiven for standing up for justice. Neither will Correa and Morales, both of whom are no doubt on assassination lists.

CounterPunch, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, and other commentators have collected examples of the venom-spewing obituaries that the western presstitutes have written for Chavez, essentially celebrations that death has silenced the bravest voice on earth:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/08/obituaries-for-hugo-chavez/
http://fair.org/take-action/media-advisories/in-death-as-in-life-chavez-target-of-media-scorn/

Perhaps the most absurd of all was Associated Press business reporter Pamela Sampson’s judgment that Chavez wasted Venezuela’s oil wealth on “social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs,” a poor use of money that could have been used to build sky scrappers such as “the world’s tallest building in Dubai and branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.”

http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/03/06/ap-chavez-wasted-his-money-on-healthcare-when-he-could-have-built-gigantic-skyscrapers/

Among the tens of millions of Washington’s victims in the world–the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Mali, with Iran, Russia, China, and South America waiting in the wings for sanctions, destabilization, conquest or reconquest, Chavez’s September 20, 2006 speech at the UN General Assembly during the George W. Bush regime will stand forever as the greatest speech of the early 21st century.

Chavez beards the lion, or rather Satan, in his own den:

“Yesterday, the devil himself stood right here, at this podium, speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulfur.”

“We should call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world. An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: ‘the Devil’s Recipe.’”

The UN General Assembly had never heard such words, not even in the days when the militarily powerful Soviet Union was present. Faces broke out in smiles of approval, but no one dared to clap. Too much US money for the home country was at stake. [A reader pointed out that although Chavez's speech was not interrupted with clapping, he received a healthy round of applause at the end.]

The US and UK delegations fled the scene, like vampires confronted with garlic and the Cross or werewolves confronted with silver bullets.

Chavez spoke about the false democracy of elites that is imposed by force and on others by “weapons and bombs.” Chavez asked, “What type of democracy do you impose with Marines and bombs?”

Wherever George W. Bush looks, Chavez said, “he sees extremists. And you, my brother–he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there’s an extremist. Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him. The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It is not that we are extremists. It is that the world is waking up. It is waking up all over and people are standing up.”

In two short sentences totaling 20 words, Chavez defined for all times early 21st century Washington: “The imperium is afraid of truth, is afraid of independent voices. It calls us extremists, but they are the extremists.”

Throughout South America and the non-western world, Chavez’s death is being blamed on Washington. South Americans are aware of the US congressional hearings in the 1970s when the Church Committee brought to light the various CIA schemes to poison Fidel Castro.

The official document presented to President John F. Kennedy by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, known as the Northwoods Project, is known to the world and is available online. The Northwoods project consisted of a false flag attack on American citizens in order to blame Cuba and create public and world acceptance for US-imposed regime change in Cuba. President Kennedy rejected the proposal as inconsistent with morality and accountable government:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

The belief has already hardened in South America that Washington with its hideous technologies of death infected Chavez with cancer in order to remove him as an obstacle to Washington’s hegemony over South America.

This belief will never die: Chavez, the greatest South American since Simon Bolivar, was murdered by Washington. True or false, the belief is set in stone. As Washington and globalism destroy more countries, the lives of elites become more precarious.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that security for the rich required economic security for the underclasses. Roosevelt established in the US a weak form of social democracy that European politicians had already understood was necessary for social cohesion and political and economic stability.

The Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes set about undermining the stability that Roosevelt provided, as Thatcher, Major, Blair, and the current prime minister of the UK undermined the social agreement between classes in the UK. Politicians in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also made the mistake of handing power over to private elites at the expense of social and economic stability.

Gerald Celente predicts that the elites will not survive the hatred and anger that they are bringing upon themselves. I suspect that he is correct. The American middle class is being destroyed. The working class has become a proletariat, and the social welfare system is being destroyed in order to reduce the budget deficit caused by the loss of tax revenues to jobs offshoring and the expense of wars, overseas military bases, and financial bailouts. The American people are being compelled to suffer in order that elites can continue with their agendas.

The US elites know what is coming. That is why they created a Nazi-style Ministry of the Interior known as Homeland Security, armed with enough ammunition to kill every American five times and with tanks to neutralize the Second Amendment rights of Americans:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34259.htm
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/03/11/1-6-billion-rounds-of-ammo-for-homeland-security-its-time-for-a-national-conversation/

Pistols and rifles are useless against tanks, as the Branch Davidians found out in Waco, Texas. The protection of a small handful of elites from the Americans they are oppressing is also the reason the police are being militarized, brought under Washington’s control and armed with drones that can assassinate the real leaders of the American people who will be, not in the legislative, executive, or judicial chambers, but in the streets:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-militarization-of-law-enforcement-in-america-use-of-military-technology-and-tactics-by-local-level-police/5326303

Internment camps in the US appear to be real and not a conspiracy theory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfkZ1yri26s
http://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-InternmentResettlement.pdf

The threat that the US government poses to its own citizens was recognized on March 7, 2013, by two US Senators, Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY), who introduced a bill to prevent the US government from murdering its own citizens: “The Federal Government may not use a drone to kill a citizen of the United States who is located in the United States” unless the person “poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to another individual. Nothing in this section shall be construed to suggest that the Constitution would otherwise allow the killing of a citizen of the United States in the United States without due process of law.”

http://www.cruz.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=339952

The “indispensable people” with their presidents Bush and Obama have begun the 21st century with death and violence. That is their only legacy.

The death and violence that Washington has unleashed will come back to Washington and to the corrupt political elites everywhere. As Gerald Celente says, the first great war of the 21st century has begun.

About Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.

Is This the End of ALBA?

W. Alejandro Sanchez, Council on Hemispheric Affairs
http://truth-out.org/news/item/14979-venezuelas-foreign-policy-without-chavez-is-this-the-end-of-alba

Hugo Chávez Frias, President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, passed away on March 5, 2013, due to severe health complications. For at least the past year and half, the Venezuelan head of state had been battling cancer that continued to appear in spite of several surgeries. He traveled to Cuba for a new round of treatment this past December 2012, naming his vice president, Nicolas Maduro, as his successor, should the worst happen.

Now, the question is whether Maduro will respect the country’s constitution and call for new presidential elections within the constitutional period of 30 days. The Venezuelan opposition has not yet elected a candidate, though all eyes are on Henrique Capriles Radonski, who ran for and lost to Chávez the presidency in the October 7, 2012 elections. He was reelected as governor of the state of Miranda in the recent December 16 regional elections.

Venezuela has had the same president since 1999, with Chávez creating a very particular foreign policy. A critical question will be how the post-Chávez Venezuelan government will organize its relations and initiatives with other states, and how vastly will they differ from Chávez’s vision.

ALBA

Regarding foreign policy, a critical question is what will become of Chávez’s pet project, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). This bloc is made up of nations, whose presidents were friendly to Chávez, such as Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. President Correa recently said that the revolution was larger than one man and would continue even in the event of Chavez’s death. Nevertheless, it is debatable whether any of ALBA’s heads of state, including Maduro, are charismatic enough and have the same interest in the alliance to keep it afloat. Correa was reelected last month, and Morales is scheduled to run for a new presidential term in 2014. It remains to be seen whether anyone will be able to carry out Chavez’s vision.

Oil and Petrocaribe

Chávez used oil recourses to not only improve the quality of life of poor Venezuelans, but also as an integral part of his foreign policy. After coming to power, he expelled Western oil companies operating in the country and replaced them with Chinese and Russian based companies. In addition, Venezuela donated millions of barrels of oil to needy Caribbean states, particularly Cuba, but also countries like Trinidad and Tobago.

Without Chávez, it is questionable how Venezuela’s oil will be extracted. Should elections be called for and Capriles Radonski comes to power, would he accept, once again, Western oil companies? Furthermore, even if Maduro continues to govern, will Venezuela continue to provide such high quantities of oil, essentially as gifts, to Cuba and other regional states?

The United States

Finally, an important consideration will be the Caracas-Washington relationship in the coming years, having been shaped mainly around the personalities of their leadership in the past decade. For example, U.S.-Venezuela relations were fairly strained, while Chávez and George W. Bush were in power. Chávez went as far as memorably calling Bush “the devil” during a United Nations conference in New York. When Barack Obama was elected president, there was a general feeling that relations would improve. Indeed, Obama and Chávez met during a Summit of the Americas, with both leaders shaking hands and Chávez giving the U.S. head of state a book as a gift. While relations during Chávez and Obama’s first presidential term did not worsen, neither did they improve as desired. One complicated factor was the U.S. maintenance of the Cuban embargo. Chávez regarded Fidel Castro as his mentor. The U.S. also prevented Cuba from attending the April 2012 Summit of the Americas in Colombia, with Cuba’s allies protesting the decision.

Without Chávez, how will Washington-Caracas relations be affected? Obviously, much will have to do with whether Maduro remains in power or Capriles enters the presidency. Maduro may end up not being as hardlined as Chávez, while Capriles may seek improved relations with Washington for economic reasons.

Conclusions

While Venezuela in the post Chávez era will certainly look different than when he was alive, the question is how different. Will Maduro, who rose up the ranks from bus driver to become foreign minister and vice president, remain faithful to his mentor’s socialist vision? Or will Capriles, or another opposition candidate, win the presidency and take the country in a different direction, potentially making it resemble Venezuela’s pre Chávez era?

A critical aspect of Venezuela’s post Chávez government is how its foreign policy will be structured. During his tenure, Chávez determined much of Venezuela’s foreign policies in accordance with his ideologies. It will be of interest to see whether the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its diplomatic corps will have more impact on future policies.

Chavez's death is a body blow for the poor

Hugo Chavez's death is a body blow for the poor and oppressed throughout Latin America
GEORGE GALLOWAY
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/hugo-chavezs-death-is-a-body-blow-for-the-poor-and-oppressed-throughout-latin-america-8521834.html

Under Chavez's revolution quality social housing became the norm and more than 90 per cent of Venezuelans ate three meals a day for the first time in the country's history.

The death of Hugo Chavez at just 58 is a body blow for the poor and the oppressed, throughout Latin America and the wider world. The most elected leader in the modern era, Chavez transformed Venezuela by the force of his will and a popular revolution which encompassed the marginal, the ethnic minorities, the workers, and key sections of the progressive intelligencia who saw in him a veritable Spartacus.

He rallied an army of not slaves, but those despised by the oligarchy as hewers of wood and drawers of the oil which previously made only the rich richer. Under Chavez' revolution the oil wealth was distributed in ever rising wages and above all in ambitious social engineering. He built the fifth largest student body in the world, creating scores of new universities. More than 90 per cent of Venezuelans ate three meals a day for the first time in the country's history. Quality social housing for the masses became the norm with the pledge that by the end of the presidential term, now cut short, all Venezuelans would live in a dignified house.

Chavez' ambitions were not limited to Venezuela alone. He fostered Latin American unity promoting democratic and socialist movements throughout the continent. He founded a Bank of the South, a University of the South, even a television station of the South - Tele Sur. And further afield he championed the Palestinian cause, giving citizenship to stateless Palestinian refugees. When Israel invaded Lebanon, from where I write, in 2006 he expelled the Israeli ambassador from Caracas - relations which remain severed. He stood up to North American hegemony and with the victims of imperial domination everywhere.

I knew him as a warm gregarious bear of a man, a force of nature.

My wife and I spent almost two weeks working in his presidential campaign late last year. It is heartbreaking to be writing what amounts to his obituary so soon after yet another of his great political triumphs. He will be remembered as a man who lived and died for his people, as a paratrooper, a tank commander, a president. Hasta siempre Comandante. Presente.

CHAVEZ: THE GLOBAL POVERTY CONSPIRACY

HUGO CHAVEZ AND THE GLOBAL POVERTY CONSPIRACY
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/hugo-chavez-and-the-global-poverty-conspiracy

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Television Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, "confidential".

London, February 2002. A tiny, dark and intense woman waited at the end of a lecture until I was alone, brought her face strangely close to mine and whispered, “President Chavez needs you. Right now. To Caracas. Right now. You must come to see him.”

President Who? All I knew about this Hugo Chavez guy was that he was an Latin-American jefe, led a bungled coup and was filled with a lot of populist bullshit and a lot of oil.

And I also knew that no one at BBC Newsnight was going to blow the budget for me to fly to South America to talk about a nation that 92 percent of our viewers couldn’t find on a map and wouldn’t want to.

“Send me an email.”

“There will be a coup. March 15.”

“The Ides of March. I like that. Aren’t there always coups down there?”

“They’ll kill him, undo everything. He needs you to stop it, he wants to explain it to you because he knows you understand.”

Actually, you’d be surprised at the amount I don’t understand at all. “So talk.”

She did – for four hours – and wore me down into submission. But back at Newsnight I looked like an idiot when March 15 came and went with just a little gunfire in Caracas.

Three weeks later, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was kidnapped and held hostage by the head of Venezuela’s Chamber of Commerce. Suddenly the BBC had to get me on a plane.

When I got to the Presidential Palace, Chavez was already back at his desk, though the bullet holes in the palace’s walls weren’t yet filled in.

Chavez told me that he'd agreed to be taken hostage by gunmen on the condition that his staff and their trapped children would be allowed to escape. He was bundled into a helicopter, and when it swerved out to sea he assumed he would be pushed out: “I was calm. I was ready.”

So who was behind it?

Chavez gave me information on US military attachés who had met with the plotters. While I couldn’t verify any specific US directive to seize him, I didn’t have to: I had grinning photos of George W Bush’s new US Ambassador, Charles Shapiro, congratulating Chavez’ kidnappers.

The question was, why? Why the need to eliminate Chavez, by coup, by bullet, by propaganda, embargo, or, as we later discovered, by screwing with Venezuela’s vote count?

No doubt that for Bush’s oil-o-crats, Chavez’ doubling the royalties paid by Exxon and Chevron was worth the price of a bullet; but it was no more than the amount that Sarah Palin would seize from the oil companies when she ruled Alaska. So what was it?

The answer was in the movie Network.

“AM I GETTING THROUGH TO YOU, MR. BEALE? The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now THEY MUST GIVE IT BACK!

“It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. You are an old man who thinks in terms of national and peoples. THERE ARE NO NATIONS. There are no peoples. There is only ONE HOLISTIC SYSTEM OF SYSTEM, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars. Electro-dollars. Multi-dollars. IT IS THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM OF CURRENCY which determines the totality of life on this planet. Am I getting through to you?”


Chavez had defied gravity, overpowered the tide. Venezuela earned billions in petro-dollars from the USA – but then, Chavez refused to “give it back”.

Third World nations are not supposed to keep the dollars paid to suck out their oil and mineral blood. For every dollar US consumers pay the Saudis for their oil, about $1.24 is given back as Saudis return the funds by purchasing US Treasury debt or hunks of US banks, CitiCorp for one.

In 2005, the US spent $227 billion in Latin America, sapping its properties and resources. But the money turned right around and, added to the funds sent to Miami by Latin America’s elite, immediately became a $379 million loan to the US Treasury and financiers.

Argentina leant the US at 4 percent interest, then had to borrow its own money back at 16 percent – the whirring wheel, this grinder, left school teachers in Buenos Aires hunting in garbage cans for food. Riots followed and – in Peru, Ecuador, Argentina and elsewhere – this led to tanks in the street, currency collapse, crisis and the “rescue” by the IMF.  Rescue meant forcing the mass sell-off of state industries, from oil to water systems, to the crushing of labour unions and to swallowing the whole bottle of poisons kept by the elite of the Northern Hemisphere for just such occasions.

And that was the plan. Literally. I've held the proof in my hands, about five thousand pages of financial agreements, all labelled “confidential” and “not to be distributed except by authorised persons”, which bore benign titles like “World Bank Poverty Reduction Strategy, Argentina.”

Why would the IMF, World Bank and the bankers not want to make their wonderful plans for reducing poverty public? It was for the same reason the finance ministers who signed the documents didn’t even tell their own presidents: they were in fact “reduce-to-poverty” plans, complete resource surrender.

For these deliberately bankrupted nations, it was sign or starve. Until Hugo Chavez came along. Early on, Chavez withdrew $20 billion of Venezuela’s money leant to the US Federal Reserve, to create a giant micro-lending programme for his citizens. Then he went a step too far, establishing what the Wall Street Journal called, “a tropical IMF”.

In 2000 and after, when the IMF and banks moved to financially strangle these nations by making their debts unsalable, Hugo Chavez would roll up in his oil-gilded chariot. He effectively underwrote Argentina’s debt, providing 250million dollars worth of loans, and assistance to Ecuador. After Enron seized Argentina’s water system and Occidental seized Ecuador’s oil fields, Argentina’s President Nestor Kirchner, followed by Ecuador’s Correa, told US banks to go fuck themselves. And the IMF, too.

Then there was the big one: Brazil. The World Bank/IMF “Poverty Reduction Strategy” for Brazil required the nation to close its publicly-owned banks, to sell off its vast oil properties, to give away its power industry and, to please the new foreign owners, slash wages and pensions. But with Chavez prepared to back up its new President, Lula Ignacio de Silva, the mighty little man from the Socialist Workers Party could tell the IMF to stick it where the free market don’t shine.

For the first time in contemporary history, resource states refused to give back the money received for their resource. At Chavez’ funeral, Lula, former President Ignacio de Silva of Brazil, praised this as Chavez’ most revolutionary act.

Now, instead of billions flowing North, Latin American capital was staying in Latin America. It is delicious irony that the European and American financiers, fleeing from the economic conflagration they’d ignited in their home countries, are loading their loot onto planes for Brazil. And that Venezuela’s central bank made a mint on its intra-continental loans.

And so, a coup was called for.

In 2002, Chavez’ oil company chief, Ali Rodriguez, told me: “America can’t let us stay in power. We are the exception to the New Globalisation Order. If we succeed, we are an example to all the Americas.”

That you were, Hugo Chavez. That you are, Venezuela. And all the Americas are ready.

Follow Greg on Twitter: @Greg_Palast

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 Palast's several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, filmed for BBC Television. DVDs also available.

Chavez: Another CIA assassination victim?

Dr. Kevin Barrett
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/03/06/292131/was-hugo-chavez-murdered-by-the-cia

The Venezuelan president himself, before he died yesterday, wondered aloud whether the US government - or the banksters who own it - gave him, and its other leading Latin American enemies, cancer.

A little over a year ago, Chavez went on Venezuelan national radio and said: “I don’t know but… it is very odd that we have seen Lugo affected by cancer, Dilma when she was a candidate, me, going into an election year, not long ago Lula and now Cristina… It is very hard to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some leaders in Latin America. It’s at the very least strange, very strange.”

Strange indeed… so strange that if you think Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Paraguayan Fernando Lugo, and former Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva - Latin America’s top anti-US empire leaders - all just happened to contract cancer around the same time by sheer chance, you must be some kind of crazy coincidence theorist.

Am I 100% certain that the CIA killed Hugo Chavez? Absolutely not.

It could have been non-governmental assassins working for the bankers.

But any way you slice it, the masters of the US empire are undoubtedly responsible for giving Chavez and other Latin American leaders cancer. How do we know that? Just examine the Empire’s track record.

Fidel Castro’s bodyguard, Fabian Escalante, estimates that the CIA attempted to kill the Cuban president an astonishing 638 times. The CIA’s methods included exploding cigars, biological warfare agents painted on Castro’s diving suit, deadly pills, toxic bacteria in coffee, an exploding speaker’s podium, snipers, poison-wielding female friends, and explosive underwater sea shells.

The CIA’s assassination attempts against Castro were like a Tom and Jerry cartoon, with the CIA as the murderously inept cat, and the Cuban president as a clever and very lucky mouse. Some might even argue that Castro’s survival, in the face of 638 assassination attempts by the world’s greatest power, is evidence that El Presidente’s communist atheism was incorrect, and that God, or at least a guardian angel, must have been watching over “Infidel Castro” all along.

Theology aside, the CIA’s endless attempts on Castro’s life provide ample evidence that US authorities will stop at nothing in their efforts to murder their Latin American enemies.

John Perkins, in his bestselling book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, supplies more evidence that the bankers that own the US government routinely murder heads of state, using private assassins as well as CIA killers.

Perkins, during his career as an “economic hit man,” gained first-hand knowledge about how the big international bankers maintain their empire in Latin America and elsewhere. Perkins’ job was to visit leaders of foreign countries and convince them to accept loans that could never be paid back. Why? The bankers want to force these nations into debt slavery. When the country goes bankrupt, the bankers seize the nation’s natural resources and establish complete control over its government and economy.

Perkins would meet with a targeted nation’s leader and say: “I have a fist-full of hundred dollar bills in one hand, and a bullet in the other. Which do you want?” If the leader accepted the loans, thereby enslaving his country, he got the payoff. If he angrily chased Perkins out of his office, the bankers would call in the “asteroids” to assassinate the uncooperative head of state.

The “asteroids” are the world’s most expensive and accomplished professional killers. They work on contract - sometimes to the CIA, sometimes to the bankers, and sometimes to wealthy private individuals. And though their specialty is causing plane crashes, they are capable of killing people, including heads of state, in any number of ways.

This isn’t just speculation. John Perkins actually knows some of these CIA-linked professional killers personally. And he has testified about their murders of Latin American leaders. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is dedicated to Perkins’ murdered friends Gen. Torrijos of Panama and President Jaime Roldos of Ecuador. Both were killed by CIA-linked “asteroids” in engineered plane crashes.

Do CIA-linked killers sometimes induce cancer in their victims? Apparently they do. One notable victim: Jack Ruby (née Jack Rubenstein), a mobster who was himself a professional killer, and whose last hit was the choreographed murder of JFK-assassination patsy Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department. Ruby begged to be taken to Washington to tell the real story of the JFK murder, but instead died in prison, of a sudden and mysterious cancer, before he could reveal what he knew.

Have the CIA-bankster “asteroids” ever tried to kill Latin American leaders with cancer? The answer is an unequivocal “yes.”

Edward Haslam’s book Dr. Mary’s Monkey proves what JFK assassination prosecutor Jim Garrison had earlier alleged: Child-molesting CIA agent David Ferrie, one of President Kennedy’s killers, had experimented extensively with cancer-causing viruses for the CIA in his huge home laboratory. The purpose: To give Fidel Castro and other Latin American leaders cancer. (Ferrie himself was killed by the CIA shortly before he was scheduled to testify in court about his role in the JFK assassination.)

To summarize: We know that the bankers who own the US government routinely try to kill any Latin American leader who refuses to be their puppet. We know that they have mounted thousands of assassination attempts against Latin American leaders, including more than 600 against Castro alone. We know that they have been experimenting with cancer viruses, and killing people with cancer, since the 1960s.

So if you think Hugo Chavez died a natural death, I am afraid that you are terminally naïve.

Chavez's cancer was an 'attack' by his enemies

Full Article:
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/05/17196733-venezuela-vp-chavezs-cancer-was-an-attack-by-his-enemies

Hours before Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died, his second-in-command accused enemies of giving him cancer and announced the expulsion of two U.S. diplomats for an alleged plot to destabilize the government.

"There's no doubt that Commandante Chavez's health came under attack by the enemy," Vice President Nicolas Maduro said in an address to the nation from the presidential palace.

"The old enemies of our fatherland looked for a way to harm his health,'' according to Maduro, drawing a parallel to the illness and 2004 death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which some supporters blamed on poisoning by Israeli agents.

He said a special commission would investigate how Chavez, 58, ended up with the unspecified cancer that months of chemotherapy and radiation and four surgeries failed to tame.

State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said in a statement it was "absurd" to suggest that the U.S. was somehow involved in Chavez's illness.

The allegation was made against a backdrop of diplomatic tension, with Caracas announcing that two American Air Force attachés had been given 24 hours to leave the country.

Maduro accused one of them, David Delmonaco, of spying and meeting with Venezuelan military officials for nefarious purposes. The expulsion of the second, Devlin Kostal, was announced soon after.

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said Delmonaco would be leaving Caracas and that Kostal was already in the U.S. and denied the allegations against them.

"We completely reject the Venezuelan government's claim that the United States is involved in any type of conspiracy to destabilize Venezuela government," he said.

Ventrell also dismissed the accusations.

"Notwithstanding the significant differences between our governments, we continue to believe it important to seek a functional and more productive relationship with Venezuela based on issues of mutual interest," he said.

"This fallacious assertion of inappropriate U.S. action leads us to conclude that, unfortunately, the current Venezuelan government is not interested in an improved relationship."

Venezuela's relations with the U.S. have been strained for years, and Chavez saw conspiracies everywhere.

In 2008, he expelled the American ambassador, claiming the U.S. was orchestrating a military coup. He had repeatedly claimed to be the target of assassination plots from domestic and international opponents.

Scoundrels Pillory Chavez Before He's Buried

Media Scoundrels Pillory Chavez Before He's Buried
By Stephen Lendman

His passing made no difference. Media scoundrels don't quit. They spent 14 years vilifying him. They did it unfairly. They haven't stopped.

They're called scoundrels for good reason. They violate fundamental journalistic ethics. They lie for power. They turn truth on its head.

They substitute managed news misinformation. They support wealth, power, privilege and dominance. They're in bed with wrong over right.

They spurn rule of law principles and democratic values. They're well paid to do so. They betray readers and viewers. They do so unconscionably. They don't give a damn, and it shows.

Why anyone follows them they'll have to explain. Tune them out. Ignore their publications. Choose reliable alternative sources.

Get informed. Stay that way. Why settle for manipulated rubbish. Real news, information and analysis is readily available. Use it daily. Know what matters most.

On March 5, Chavez passed. An era went with him. Venezuelans owe him much. They won't forget.

He transformed an oligarch-run nation into a model participatory democracy. America's sham one pales by comparison. Venezuelans get the real thing and much more.

They deplore what used to be. They won't tolerate going back. Chavismo lives! Bolivarianism is policy. Venezuelans won't let it die. It's too important to preserve. Not according to media scoundrels.

On March 5, The New York Times claimed Venezuela today is "bitterly divided." It's "in the grip of a political crisis." It grew "more acute" in recent weeks.

Times writer William Neuman lied. He's paid to do so. Venezuelans overwhelmingly support Chavismo. His death changes nothing.

Dallas Morning News editor Sharon Grigs headlined "Chavez's death: Now Venezuela can reclaim its lost democracy." She wouldn't recognize the real thing if it bit her on the rump.

The Washington Post did no better. It called Chavez "polarizing." An "institutional crisis" exists.

Other media scoundrels piled on. They pillory what deserves praise. Chavez institutionalized what won't change. Venezuelans won't tolerate their ugly past. They'll challenge dark forces to prevent it.

The Washington Times said "Chavistas' mourn dictator." White House/Capitol Hill reaction ranged from "cautious optimism" to "good riddance."

Obama vilified Chavez often. He scorned him unconscionably. He lied repeatedly. He's a serial liar.

He now says America "reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interests in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government."

He doesn't give a damn about ordinary Venezuelans. He never did and doesn't now.

Washington tolerates no independent leaders. Chavez was marked for removal. CIA rogues likely killed him. Perhaps he was poisoned or exposed to cancer causing elements.

Israel used polonium to murder Arafat. Perhaps something similar caused Chavez's death. It wouldn't be the first time America assassinated a foreign leader. It won't be the last. Its rap sheet includes many.

BBC said "Iconic Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez dies." He leaves behind an "economic muddle."

He achieved impressive economic growth and prosperity. Britain's government pales by comparison. It's lawless, corrupt, dysfunctional, and hugely unequal. BBC's its propaganda mouthpiece. Don't expect it to explain.

Media scoundrels attacked Chavez. They did so before he's buried. His state funeral is Friday. Have they no shame? They don't now and never did.

Murdoch's the worst of a bad bunch. His world reflects demagoguery, propaganda, predatory capitalism, warmongering and sleaze.

Journalist Mike Royko's (1932 - 1997) assessment bears repeating. "(N)o self-respecting fish would (want to) be wrapped in a Murdoch paper."

"His goal (isn't) journalism." It's bottom line priorities. It's "vast power, political power." He wields it unscrupulously. He's a world class predator.

He uses deception, intimidation, and bullying. He does so to get his way. He hires likeminded scoundrels. Do it his way or work elsewhere.

No middle ground is permissible. No independent journalists get hired. Truth tellers need not apply. No honest brokers wanted. No telling it like it is.

On March 5, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal headlined "Hugo Chavez: The lesson is to beware the rule of charismatic demagogues."

In December 1998, Venezuelans elected him. A dark era ended. Chavez made things "worse," said the Journal. It lied saying so.

"By 1998, the the Soviet Union was a memory, Latin American countries from Mexico to Chile were successfully adopting free-market policies, and Chavez's friend and role model - Cuba's Fidel Castro - was a discredited dinosaur."

Castro's a model leader. He transformed Cuba responsibly. He did so from police state harshness/casino/brothel corruption into an equitable socialist state.

He was Chavez's mentor and friend. Chavez called him his father and role model. They bonded. They stayed close until until his death.

Not according to WSJThink. "Chavez showed that it's possible to run against the tides of history, at least for a while, and at least if you happen to get lucky with an oil revenue bonanza."

Chavez used Venezuela's oil wealth "to purchase political support of Venezuela's poor, the army and a loyal nouveau riche."

"It also allowed him to become a classic petro-dictator."

"In 1999 he revised the Venezuelan constitution to give him expanded powers."

"He used a constitutional assembly under his control to appoint a chavista Supreme Court."

"He stripped independent TV and radio stations of their licenses and intimidated reporters with draconian libel laws."

Fact check

Murdoch lies need challenging. They're over-the-top and unconscionable.

Chavez used Venezuela's oil wealth responsibly. Everyone benefitted. Populism replaced neoliberal harshness.

Bolivarianism prioritizes vital needs. Living standards improved remarkably. Disadvantaged Venezuelans benefitted most.

Child mortality fell from 20 per 1,000 to 13. Unemployment dropped from 14.5% to 6.4%.

Income inequality is Latin America's lowest. Poverty was cut in half. Extreme poverty fell over 70%. Economic growth in 2011 was 4.8%. In 2012, it was 5.6%. Forecasts estimate 6% in 2013.

Hundreds of thousands of new homes were built. Commerce grew 9.2%. Communications advanced 7.2%. Manufacturing increased 2.1%. Oil sector production increased.

Growth created jobs. Millions got free healthcare and education. They did so for the first time. Pension eligibility tripled.

Pre-Chavez years were disastrous." From 1980 - 1998, per capita income fell. Chavez turned disaster into success. Venezuela's future looks promising. Give Chavez the credit he deserves.

Corporate owners dominate Venezuela's media. Censorship doesn't exist. Short of advocating sedition or treason, they're free to publish or air what they wish. They take full advantage. They vilify populist reform. They pilloried Chavez for institutionalizing it.

"Though elections were held on schedule, (Chavez) made sure to tilt the playing field….Public workers risked being fired if they voted against him. It was the sort of election only Jimmy Carter could bless."

Fact check

Carter Center representatives monitor Venezuelan elections. Jimmy Carter calls its process "the best in the world." He does for good reason. It's open, free and fair.

It shames America's sham process. Duopoly power runs things. Republicans and Democrats replicate each other. They're two sides of the same coin.

They're beholden to monied interests. They sold their souls for power.

People have no say. Voters get the best democracy money can buy. Neoliberal harshness, permanent wars, and police state repression follow.

Venezuelan democracy is genuine. Voters need no persuasion. Chavez instituted the real thing. Venezuelans want it no other way.

Expect what he began to continue. It's hardwired to stay. It's part of Venezuelan culture. It won't fade and die.

The Journal claims life for Venezuela's "bec(ame) worse." It lied saying so. It's never been better in generations.

"Chavez made his mark on the world stage by forging alliances with Bashar Assad in Syria and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, giving sanctuary to Colombia's narco-terrorist FARC movement, providing the Castro regime with free oil, and inveighing loudly against the United States."

"He succeeded in spawning political imitators in Ecuador and Bolivia."

Chavez governed responsibly. He allied with other independent leaders. He prioritized right over wrong. Journal editors can't tolerate his success. He represented the threat of a good example.

Venezuelans "have to fight to reclaim the democracy they once enjoyed….Let's hope Venezuelans seize the chance to bury the tragic legacy of Chavismo alongside its author's corpse."

Chavismo lives. Bolivarianism delivered democracy. Venezuelans got what they never had. They mourn their great loss.

They want Chavez buried alongside Bolivar. He's in Venezuela’s Panteon Nacional (Temple of all the Gods). It lies on Caracas' northern edge.

Its central nave is dedicated to Bolivar. It's adorned with his bronze sarcophagus and paintings reflecting his life. In 1883, an impressive crystal chandelier was installed. It was done on the centennial of his birth.

Expect Chavez be interned there. He belongs nowhere else. Both leaders stood tall. They supported what's right. Venezuelans won't ever forget.

America never had anyone like them. Its deplorable government reflects it. Today it's worse than ever.

It's corporatist, soulless, lawless, belligerent, and repressive. It's a hair's breath from tyranny. Don't explain media scoundrels to explain.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled "Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

http://www.dailycensored.com/media-scoundrels-pillory-chavez-before-hes-buried/

CHAVEZ: HE WON'T SELL OIL TO THE KOCHS

HUGO CHAVEZ TOLD ME HE WON'T SELL OIL TO THE KOCHS
Greg Palast
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/koch-brothers-hugo-chavez-and-the-xl-pipeline

I’ve been tracking a tube of black putrid ooze, a toxic viper slowly slithering 2,000 miles across the belly of America, swallowing all water aquifers, politicians and reason in its path.

The XL Keystone Pipeline.

As Nagini, the murderous snake in the Harry Potter tales, had its master Voldemort, I figured the Keystone XL Pipeline must also have its own dark lords.

And the Dark Lords of the Keystone Pipeline left clear clues: environmental horror, political payouts and the odour of sulphur stronger than explained by the stinking hot tar inside it. I smelled Koch.

David and Charles Koch are each worth $20 billion (£12.7 billion), and they’re quite certain that’s not enough. And so they need the XL Keystone Pipeline.

The XL Keystone will take Canadian tar-sands oil, the filthiest crude on the planet, and suck it down to Texas’ Gulf Coast refineries. Alberta’s oil-glop reserve, if it can get to the US market, will warm the planet by nearly 0.4°C all by itself.

Why in the world would America pistol-whip Mother Nature to bring oil to Texas? I mean, it’s just plain weird to suck heavy tar oil out of Canada to drag it across the entire middle of the USA and import it into the oil-exporting Lone Star State.

Here’s where a little lesson in oil chemistry comes in. You can’t just throw any old crude oil into an oil refinery. These giant filth factories are actually quite sensitive. The refineries of the Texas Gulf Coast are optimised for heavy crude.

It would cost billions of dollars to rebuild the giant Flint Hills Corpus Christi Refinery, owned by Koch Industries, to use the less-polluting Texas oil drilled nearby.

The Kochs need heavy crude. But the Brothers Koch have a problem. Heavy crude is controlled by a heavy dude – President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

In case you haven’t heard, the US Department of Energy now says Venezuela, not Saudi Arabia, has the world’s largest petroleum reserve – including the overwhelming bulk of the planet’s heavy crude.

And Chavez is not giving it away. “We are no longer an oil colony, Mr Palast,” Chavez told me during one of our meet-ups in Caracas.

He wasn’t kidding. Venezuela’s export price now averages around $100 (£64) a barrel.

So the Kochs have turned their gaze upward – to Canada, where Alberta oil men are selling their tar-sands gunk for a whopping $33 (£21) a barrel less than Chavez’s heavy. Do the maths: With 289,000 barrels a day refined at Corpus Christi, switching from Venezuela heavy to Canadian tar could put an extra $3 billion (£1.9 billion) a year into the pockets of the Kochs.

However, there’s a problem. Between Canada and Houston is the United States. At the moment, there’s no pipeline that can take all that cheap crude south. The southbound pipeline network now chokes at Cushing, Oklahoma, which is already blocked with 47 million barrels of crude sitting in storage tanks with nowhere to go.

So all the Kochs have to do is get the US government to agree to pop a pipe through Cushing to Houston: the Keystone XL. But that would require that the US government go stark raving mad, commit environmental suicide and reverse all policy to slow global warming – all to bring in foreign oil while the US itself is suffering from a major oil and gas glut.

Furthermore, approving the Keystone XL Pipeline will raise the price of heating oil and gasoline in the US.

Let me repeat: Approving the Keystone XL Pipeline will raise the price of oil and gasoline.

This is the nasty little secret of the pipeline lords and unknown to all but experts. Every Republican politician and not a few Democrats have promoted the fairy tale that the XL Pipeline will reduce gasoline and oil prices throughout the USA.

It’s bullshit, but it’s gospel – utterly unquestioned by the mainstream media. Most official opponents of the pipeline buy the lower-cost-oil line, repeating variants of the New York Times editorial that the economic “benefit from Keystone XL outweigh the certain damages” to the environment.

But the “benefit” is bogus. Prices for gasoline will rise by about 15 cents (nine pence) a gallon in the Upper Midwest if the pipe opens.

Here’s why. Normally, the supply of crude oil in the US doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the price of gas you put in your Humvee. Normally, Canadians could hose us down with hot tar and it wouldn’t change oil and gas prices by a penny.

That’s because the international price of oil is not set by supply and demand in the marketplace. Rather, the price is fixed by a dictator in a bathrobe, Abdullah, King of Saudi Arabia. He dictates, you pay.

But there are always anomalies.

As matters stand, with nowhere to dump their tar goo, Canadians have to sell at a $33 (£21) a barrel discount to nearby refineries in the US Upper Midwest.

American consumers are getting the benefit of this oil backup. Indeed, one angry Canuck, Cenovus Energy CEO Brian Ferguson, complains that the pipeline plug results in "subsidisation to the United States consumer by $1,200 (£764) per Canadian".

The XL Pipeline would act as an oil enema, releasing the impacted inventory, enriching the Gulf refineries.

The result of opening the spigot through the XL Keystone will mean that US Midwest retail heating oil prices will skyrocket and gasoline in the region, as the crude drains away to other refineries, will rise an estimated 15 cents a gallon.

True, cheaper crude oil will now flow south, but as Canadian economist Robyn Allan writes, “It's the refining sector that sees the benefit of lower-priced WCS [West Canadian Sands oil] in the form of windfall profits from low feedstock costs.”

The gusher of cheap crude from a new pipeline will enrich the refiners – none more so than refiners named Koch.

But how will the Kochs get Obama and the US government to turn against US consumers and their own green policies and promises? We'll get to that next week.

I’ve been tracking the Kochs for 18 years, first as a private investigator on a case of oil missing from a Native American Indian reservation.

One thing from that case sticks with me even today. The trail of missing oil led to Charles Koch himself, who (according to a secret recording), told a co-conspirator why he did it. The billionaire said,

“I want my fair share. And that’s ALL OF IT.”

And "all of it" now includes a pipeline filled with hot, cheap oil.

"The Assassination of Hugo Chavez"

Big Oil, Big Ketchup and "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez"
Greg Palast, Truthout
Wednesday, 09 January 2013
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13800-big-oil-big-ketchup-and-the-assassination-of-hugo-chavez

Venezuelan President Chavez once asked me why the US elite wanted to kill him. My dear Hugo: It's the oil. And it's the Koch Brothers - and it's the ketchup.

[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 here. Based on my several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, it was filmed for BBC Television. DVDs also available.]

Reverend Pat Robertson said:

Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.

It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush's State Department. Despite Bush's providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we'll get there), Hugo remained in office, re-elected and wildly popular.

But why the Bush regime's hate, hate, hate of the president of Venezuela?

Reverend Pat wasn't coy about the answer: It's the oil.

This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil.

A really big pool of oil. Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela holds a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia.

If we didn't kill Chavez, we'd have to do an "Iraq" on his nation. So the Reverend suggests,

We don't need another $200 billion war.... It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Chavez himself told me he was stunned by Bush's attacks: Chavez had been quite chummy with Bush Senior and with Bill Clinton.

So what happened to change Clinton's hugs-and-kisses policy to Bush's shoot-to-kill? Here's the answer you won't find in The New York Times:

Just after Bush's inauguration in 2001, Chavez's congress voted in a new "Law of Hydrocarbons." Henceforward, Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell Oil and Chevron would get to keep 70 percent of the sales revenues from the crude they sucked out of Venezuela. Not bad, considering the price of oil was rising toward $100 a barrel.

But to the oil companies, which had bitch-slapped Venezuela's prior government into giving them 84 percent of the sales price, a cut to 70 percent was "no bueno." Worse, Venezuela had been charging a joke of a royalty - just 1 percent - on "heavy" crude from the Orinoco Basin. Chavez told Exxon and friends they'd now have to pay 16.6 percent.

Clearly, Chavez had to be taught a lesson about the etiquette of dealings with Big Oil.

On April 11, 2002, President Chavez was kidnapped at gunpoint and flown to an island prison in the Caribbean Sea. On April 12, Pedro Carmona, a business partner of the US oil companies and president of Fedecamaras, the nation's chamber of commerce, declared himself President of Venezuela - giving a whole new meaning to the term, "corporate takeover."

US Ambassador Charles Shapiro immediately rushed down from his hilltop embassy to have his picture taken grinning with the self-proclaimed "president" and the leaders of the coup d'état.

Bush's White House spokesman admitted that Chavez was, "democratically elected," but, he added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not by just the majority of voters." I see.

With an armed and angry citizenry marching on the presidential palace in Caracas ready to string up the coup plotters, Carmona - the Pretend President from Exxon - returned his captive, Chavez, back to his desk within 48 hours. (How? Get The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, the film that expands on my reports for BBC Television. It's free for the next few days here, thanks to the generosity of donors to our foundation.)

Chavez had provoked the coup not just by clawing back some of the bloated royalties of the oil companies. It's what he did with that oil money that drove Venezuela's 1% to violence.

In Caracas, I ran into the reporter for a TV station whose owner is generally credited with plotting the coup against the president. While doing a publicity photo shoot, leaning back against a tree, showing her wide-open legs nearly up to where they met, the reporter pointed down the hill to the "ranchos," the slums above Caracas, where shacks, once made of cardboard and tin, where quickly transforming into homes of cinder blocks and cement.

"He [Chavez] gives them bread and bricks, so they vote for him, of course." She was disgusted by "them," the 80 percent of Venezuelans who are negro e indio (black and Indian) - and poor. Chavez, himself negro e indio, had, for the first time in Venezuela's history, shifted the oil wealth from the privileged class that called themselves "Spanish," to the dark-skinned masses.

While trolling around the poor housing blocks of Caracas, I ran into Arturo Quiran, a local merchant seaman, and no big fan of Chavez. But over a beer at his kitchen table, he told me,

Fifteen years ago under [then-President] Carlos Andrés Pérez, there was a lot of oil money in Venezuela. The 'oil boom' we called it. Here in Venezuela there was a lot of money, but we didn't see it.

But then came Hugo Chavez and now the poor in his neighborhood, "get medical attention, free operations, x-rays, medicines; education also," he said. "People who never knew how to write, now know how to sign their own papers."

Chavez's Robin Hood thing, shifting oil money from the rich to the poor, would have been grudgingly tolerated by the US. But Chavez, who told me, "We are no longer an oil colony," went further - too much further, in the eyes of the American corporate elite.

Venezuela had landless citizens by the millions - and unused land by the millions of acres tied up, untilled, on which a tiny elite of plantation owners squatted. Chavez's congress passed a law in 2001 requiring untilled land to be sold to the landless. It was a program long promised by Venezuela's politicians at the urging of John F. Kennedy as part of his "Alliance for Progress."

Plantation owner Heinz Corporation didn't like that one bit. In retaliation, Heinz closed its ketchup plant in the state of Maturin and fired all the workers. Chavez seized the Heinz plant and put the workers back on the job. Chavez didn't realize that he'd just squeezed the tomatoes of America's powerful Heinz family and Mrs. Heinz' husband, Sen. John Kerry (now, Obama's nominee for US Secretary of State).

Or, knowing Chavez as I do, he didn't give a damn.

Chavez could survive the ketchup coup, the Exxon "presidency," even his taking back a piece of the windfall of oil company profits, but he dangerously tried the patience of America's least-forgiving billionaires: the Koch Brothers.

How? Well, that's another story for another day. [Watch this space. Or read about it in the book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.

Elected presidents who annoy Big Oil have ended up in exile - or coffins: Mossadegh of Iran after he nationalized BP's fields (1953), Elchibey, president of Azerbaijan, after he refused demands of BP for his Caspian fields (1993), President Alfredo Palacio of Ecuador after he terminated Occidental's drilling concession (2005).

"It's a chess game, Mr. Palast," Chavez told me. He was showing me a very long and very sharp sword once owned by Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator. "And I am," Chavez said, "a very good chess player."

In the film The Seventh Seal, a medieval knight bets his life on a game of chess with the Grim Reaper. Death cheats, of course, and takes the knight. No mortal can indefinitely outplay Death who, this week, Chavez must know, will checkmate the new Bolivar of Venezuela.

But in one last move, the Bolivarian grandmaster plays a brilliant endgame, naming Vice-President Nicolas Maduro, as good and decent a man as they come, as heir to the fight for those in the "ranchos." The 1% of Venezuela, planning on Chavez's death to return them the power and riches they couldn't win in an election, are livid with the choice of Maduro.

Chavez sent Maduro to meet me in my downtown New York office back in 2004. In our run-down detective digs on Second Avenue, Maduro and I traded information on assassination plots and oil policy.

Even then, Chavez was carefully preparing for the day when Venezuela's negros e indios would lose their king - but still stay in the game.

Class war on a chessboard. Even in death, I wouldn't bet against Hugo Chavez.

Chavez Re-Election

Chavez Re-Election Shows How Media Does Not Like It When Washington Consensus Loses
Kevin Gosztola
Monday October 8, 2012
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/10/08/chavez-re-election-shows-how-media-does-not-like-it-when-washington-consensus-loses/

Hugo Chavez was elected to a fourth term on October 7. The victory immediately set off a flurry of United States media reports noting alleged inequities in Venezuelan elections that permit Chavez to continue to hold power. Through coded or overt language, the US media reported how the poor in Venezuela support Chavez but listed off what right wing free market conservatives or neoliberal centrists in think tanks in America consider to be the most dire issues facing Venezuelan society today. The impetus was, even if the elections were actually by some stretch free and fair, the poor do not realize they are voting for a socialist revolution that will plunge the country deeper into ruin.

The Carter Center, an organization founded by former US president Jimmy Carter, monitors elections in countries to help “enhance freedom and democracy.” The AFP reported on October 6, according to the Center, “Venezuelans have no reason to fear the secrecy of their ballots will be compromised by a new electronic voting system when they vote in presidential elections.” The Center “noted that many Venezuelans are concerned that the new electronic system might alert authorities as to how they voted, exposing them to retaliation if they vote against Chavez.” But there was “no basis” for the concern because the “software of the voting machines” were fully capable of guaranteeing “the secrecy of the vote.”

Carter stated before the election in Venezuela, “As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” Indeed, there have been a dozen elections while he has been the leader of Venezuela. One of the elections in 2004 was a referendum, an effort by the opposition to remove him from power that he survived.

Chavez won around 54% of the vote to defeat his challenger, Henrique Capriles Radonski, who won about 45% of the vote. Yet much of the coverage puts emphasis on the opposition with an eye toward investors in the richest one percent of America.

The Los Angeles Times report on the victory is indicative of the type of coverage so far:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez apparently won reelection by a convincing margin Sunday, with allegiance among poor voters to his socialist revolution trumping dissatisfaction with a stunted economy, rising crime and the increasing polarization of society.


First, it strikes a snooty tone with the word “apparently” inserted in the first line, as if the LA Times doubts that he actually won. The LA Times also lists off reasons for why there is opposition in Venezuela to Chavez and appears to suggest poor people put their loyalty to one man before the good of the whole society.

A blog post at the  Financial Times suggests there may be a mass exodus of people leaving the country before the economy experiences more “negative implications.” Matthew Hulbert for Forbes laments the re-election as a setback to the future of free trade in oil markets. And, the AP story uses the word “nevertheless” twice to make it seem like the population is just plain ignorant of political realities.

An opinion editorial in the Wall Street Journal, “Democracy, Chavez-Style,” is far more ideological in its smugness and rejection of Chavez. It comes from Mary O’Grady, a WSJ editor who mostly writes on Latin America and uses the newspaper to promote her free market views:

Thanks to Hugo Chávez, the legacy of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet as the only Latin American military dictator in modern times to voluntarily give up power through the ballot box is preserved this morning. Pinochet looks like more of a hero than ever.

Mr. Chávez “won” the Venezuelan presidential election Sunday by collecting 54% of the vote to 45% for challenger Henrique Capriles Radonski. But he did it with control of all of Venezuela’s government institutions and, more important, near total ownership of the Venezuelan economy. This gave the Venezuelan state the power to directly manipulate voter rolls and ballots and an open checkbook to influence—some would say “buy”—the vote. Mr. Capriles was never engaged in a fair fight.


The editorial is at first glance astounding because it simultaneously lauds the military rule of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet while contemptuously swiping at Chavez. Yet, if one knows world history, this is not surprising. Hero to free market ideologues, Milton Friedman, helped push Pinochet to carry out one of the first instances of economic shock treatment on a people for the benefit businesses and corporations.

Why Free Market Ideologues Celebrate a War Criminal

A group of Chilean economists that came to be known as the Chicago Boys trained under Friedman at the University of Chicago, as part of an initiative to influence the economic future in Chile so the country would not adopt socialist economic policies.

Journalist and author of The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein, wrote in 2010:

After the coup and the death of [Salvador] Allende, Pinochet and his Chicago Boys [including Friedman] did their best to dismantle Chile’s public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early 80s, Pinochet’s Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-industrialisation, a tenfold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns. They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in 1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key Chicago Boy advisers and nationalize several of the large deregulated financial institutions.


Chavez is a “dictator” to O’Grady and other journalists because he promotes policies that guard against any US effort to shock the country and turn it into an economic disaster zone. It is this governance by Chavez that induces people like O’Grady to write such preposterous things like, “Dictators don’t walk away from power. They hold it until they die. Pinochet was an exception. Mr. Chávez proves the rule.” Their zealous belief in liberal free markets is why they downplay torture or war crimes carried out by Pinochet.

Omitting the US-Backed Military Coup in Venezuela from Chavez’s Political History

It is important to note, although the reports recount much of Chavez’s history as leader of Venezuela, most of the reports gloss over or entirely omit the fact that the United States was likely behind a failed coup against Chavez in 2002.

The Washington Post’s coverage is one example:

After coming to prominence in the 1990s after a failed attempt to seize power, Chavez, a former army paratrooper, won a series of elections: referendums that led to a new constitution and ended term limits and a vote that turned back a recall referendum in 2004...


In 2002, The Observer reported, “The failed coup in Venezuela was closely tied to senior officials in the US government, The Observer has established. They have long histories in the ‘dirty wars’ of the 1980s, and links to death squads working in Central America at that time.” Declassified documents, reported on in 2004, indicated the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “knew dissident military officers were planning a coup in 2002 against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.” The US government did not inform Venezuela there was a planned coup and sanctioned the plan by dissident military officers.

The New York Times, in the midst of the failed coup, celebrated this attempt to remove him from power:

With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona. But democracy has not yet been restored, and won’t be until a new president is elected. That vote has been scheduled for next spring, with new Congressional elections to be held by this December. The prompt announcement of a timetable is welcome, but a year seems rather long to wait for a legitimately elected president.


Such is symptomatic of the Washington Consensus, the market fundamentalism that leaders in Washington believe should be implemented or prescribed for any country, especially countries in Latin America with popular leftist movements in power.

It is worth noting that a decade later Washington still engages in “democracy promotion” and, as Mark Weisbrot pointed out ahead of the election, was doing so during this election, as it spent “millions of dollars within the country in addition to unknown covert funds to undermine, delegitimize, and destabilize democracy in Venezuela.”

Washington has turned to this tactic because violence and economic warfare have failed. As Noam Chomsky outlined in his book, Hopes and Prospects, the recent history of interfering in elections in the country:

After a popular uprising restored the elected government, Washington immediately turned to funding groups of its choice within Venezuela while refusing to identify recipients: $26 million by 2006 for the new program after the failed coup attempt, all under the guise of supporting democracy. When the facts were reported by wire services, law professor Bill Monning at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, “We would scream bloody murder if any outside force were interfering in our internal political system.”


Venezuelans Much More Satisfied with Their Democracy Than Americans

Finally, Venezuelans are satisfied with their democracy—a reality that must deeply irritate those whose ideology leads them to oppose policies instituted by Chavez to help the poorest people in Venezuela. From a 2007 poll done by Latinobarometro:

When asked whether they were satisfied with their democratic system, 59 percent of Venezuelans said yes – second only to Uruguay and above the regional average of 37 percent.

On equality between the sexes, equality of opportunity, protection of private property, solidarity with the poor, equal distribution of wealth, and employment opportunities, Venezuela ranked first in the region.

When asked how they would describe the state of their country’s economy, 52 percent of Venezuelans described it as “very good” or “good,” the highest number in the region.

When asked how they predicted the economy would do over the next 12 months, 60 percent of Venezuelans claimed it would do “much better” or “a bit better,” the highest number in the region.

66 percent of Venezuelans expressed confidence in the government, the highest number in the region. The regional average was 39 percent.


Compared to Americans’ satisfaction with their “democratic system,” Venezuelans’ approval is likely much higher than Americans’ approval. Only four in ten, in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll in 2010, said they were “satisfied” with how “democracy was working” in the US. Three in ten, as of September 2012, were “satisfied” with the direction of the country, according to a Gallup poll.

Venezuelans appear to demand more of their government. They turnout to vote in far greater numbers than Americans (80% of Venezuelans voted in this election). In 2008, even with Barack Obama seeking to make history by becoming the first African-American president, only around 66% of Americans turned out to vote.

The country did not re-elect Chavez because poor people are waging a class war led by a leader intent to further decimate Venezuelan society. They re-elected him because, as Weisbrot has noted, “Poverty has been cut in half and extreme poverty by 70%. And this measures only cash income. Millions have access to healthcare for the first time, and college enrollment has doubled, with free tuition for many students. Inequality has also been considerably reduced.”

Neoliberal and/or free market policies have been soundly rejected. Those at the bottom are doing better. Americans should begin to ask whether Chavez and his movement have been doing something right.

Chavez wins re-election

Chavez wins re-election according to electoral council
SUNDAY, OCT 7, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/08/chavez_wins_re_election_according_to_electoral_council

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — President Hugo Chavez won re-election on Sunday, defeating challenger Henrique Capriles, Venezuela’s electoral council said.

With most votes counted, Chavez had more than 54 percent of the vote, and Capriles had 45 percent, National Electoral Council president Tibisay Lucena said. She said 81 percent of the nearly 19 million registered voters cast ballots.

It was Chavez’s third re-election victory in nearly 14 years in office. The victory gives Chavez another six-year term to cement his legacy and press more forcefully for a transition to socialism in the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

Fireworks exploded in downtown Caracas, and Chavez’s supporters celebrated waving flags and jumping for joy outside the presidential palace.

Chavez won more than 7.4 million votes, beating Capriles by more than 1.2 million votes, Lucena said.

'It's a war between people and capitalism'

Greek leftist leader Alexis Tsipras: 'It's a war between people and capitalism'
Greece's eurozone fate may now be in the hands of the 37-year-old political firebrand and his Syriza party
Helena Smith in Athens
guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 May 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/18/greek-leftist-leader-alexis-tsipras

Alexis Tsipras in his office at the Greek parliament building on Friday. He says Greece has been used as a guinea pig for the rest of Europe. Photograph: Martin Godwin

"I don't believe in heroes or saviours," says Alexis Tsipras, "but I do believe in fighting for rights … no one has the right to reduce a proud people to such a state of wretchedness and indignity."

The man who holds the fate of the euro in his hands – as the leader of the Greek party willing to tear up the country's €130bn (£100bn) bailout agreement – says Greece is on the frontline of a war that is engulfing Europe.

A long bombardment of "neo-liberal shock" – draconian tax rises and remorseless spending cuts – has left immense collateral damage. "We have never been in such a bad place," he says, sleeves rolled up, staring hard into the middle distance, from behind the desk that he shares in his small parliamentary office. "After two and a half years of catastrophe, Greeks are on their knees. The social state has collapsed, one in two youngsters is out of work, there are people leaving en masse, the climate psychologically is one of pessimism, depression, mass suicides."

But while exhausted and battle weary, the nation at the forefront of Europe's escalating debt crisis and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy is also hardened. And, increasingly, they are looking towards Tsipras to lead their fight.

"Defeat is the battle that isn't waged," says the young politician who almost overnight has seen his radical left coalition party, Syriza, jump from representing fewer than 5% of Greeks to enjoying ratings of more than 25% in polls.

"You ask me if I am afraid. I'd be afraid if we continued on this path, a path to social hell … when someone fights there is a big chance that he will win and we are fighting this to win."

Before Greeks went to the polls on 6 May, neither Tsipras nor his party were a name to be reckoned with. If anything both were the butt of vague mockery: a former pony-tailed student communist leading a rag-tag band of ex-Trotskyists, Maoists, champagne socialists and greens. Tsipras's assistants – wielding Louis Vuitton bags and fashionable sunglasses – readily admit they are signed up "militants" mostly of the anti-globalisation cause.

But today I am the third person to pass through Tsipras's second-floor parliamentary office. The others have been the German ambassador to Greece and the president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz. As Greeks prepare to head to the polls again on 17 June, Tsipras, the politician poised to win the greatest number of votes – after Syriza came in second place in this month's inconclusive election – is the man everyone wants to see. "He is not as dangerous as he appears on TV, but he does have some risky positions," says Schulz emerging form the talks.

"The [upcoming] vote in Greece will decide not just what happens here but what will happen internationally", adds the German before saying what he really wants to say. "If the memorandum [loan agreement] is cast in doubt, the payment [of rescue funds from the EU and IMF] to Greece is cast in doubt."

Tsipras, who turns 38 in July, wants me to know that the war is not personal. The enemy is not Berlin, until now the biggest provider of the monumental rescue funds keeping the debt-stricken economy afloat. "It is not between nations and peoples," he says. "On the one side there are workers and a majority of people and on the other are global capitalists, bankers, profiteers on stock exchanges, the big funds. It's a war between peoples and capitalism … and as in each war what happens on the frontline defines the battle. It will be decisive for the war elsewhere."

Greece, he says, has become a model for the rest of Europe because it was the first country to fall victim to the enforcement of hard-hitting "growth through austerity" policies pursued in the name of resolving the crisis.

"It was chosen as the experiment for the enforcement of neo-liberal shock [policies] and Greek people were the guinea pigs," he insists.

"If the experiment continues, it will be considered successful and the policies will be applied in other countries. That's why it is so important to stop the experiment. It will not just be a victory for Greece but for all of Europe."

Under the current rescue plan, which has subjected the nation to relentless austerity – the average Greek's purchasing power has dropped by 35% – the international financial system, and especially banks, are gaining most, he says. "Who is surviving, tell me?" he asks. "Greeks aren't … The loans are going straight to interest payment and banks."

The other point that Tsipras wants to make is that he is not against the euro or monetary union. Fears that the country is about to exit the eurozone are about terrorising people to keep the status quo, he claims. They are why the nation has seen "more then €75bn" of cash taken out of Greek banks since the outbreak of the crisis in Athens in December 2009.

But Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, should know she has "a huge historical responsibility" – a point he will be making when he holds talks with representatives of the German government in Berlin next week.

"We are not against a unified Europe or monetary union," he insists. "We don't want to blackmail, we want to persuade our European partners that the way that has been chosen to confront Greece is totally counter-productive. It is like throwing money at a bottomless pit."

Over the past two years, Athens had received two bumper bailouts from the EU and IMF: €110bn in May 2010 and then €130bn in March this year, but the stringent fiscal adjustment programmes demanded in return for the aid are clearly not working, he says.

If the emphasis is not now put on re-energising Europe's most moribund economy through development and growth, "in six months we will be forced to discuss a third package and after that a fourth," he predicts,

"European tax payers should know that if they are giving money to Greece, it should have an effect … it should go towards investments and underwriting growth so that the Greek debt problem can be confronted because with this recipe we are not confronting the debt problem, the real issue."

All this sounds remarkably toned down from the fiery rhetoric Tsipras has come to be associated with – until, that is, the mention of rescue funds drying up if (as seems likely) his party emerges as the governing force in a hung parliament.

The first thing Syriza will do in power is tear up the controversial "memorandum of understanding" Greece signed up to with creditors, which details the onerous conditions under which the country receives quarterly injections of cash.

The agreement, he says, was reached without the Greek people ever being consulted. And now in the wake of the 6 May vote, when more than 70% of those opposing the policies voted for "anti-bailout" parties, it is clear it has lost all legitimacy, he insists

It is a high stakes game but, he argues, Europe is holding the gun because ultimately, under European law, Greece can't be ejected from the 17-nation bloc.

"Europeans have to understand that we don't have any intention of pushing ahead with a unilateral move. We will [only] be forced to act if they act unilaterally and make the first move," he says. "If they don't pay us, if they stop the financing [of loans] then we will not be able to pay creditors. What I am saying is very simple."

And if Athens stops paying its creditors, the problem then takes on a different hue. Greece is in a much stronger position than most think.

"Keynes said it many years ago. It's not just the person who borrows but the person who lends who can find himself in a difficult position. If you owe £5,000 to the bank, it's your problem but if you owe £500,000, it's the bank's problem," he said. "This is a common problem. It's our problem. Its Merkel's problem. It's a European problem. Its a world problem."

With his good looks, raven black hair and propensity for rousing oratory, Tsipras comes across more as a pin-up (which is how many in Greece see him) than a saviour, which is how a great deal of others see him.

His aides add in passing that one of his heroes is Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, with whom he shares the same birthday. Nor does he believe in political tags "at this time of crisis".

But though he appears to be preparing for power and moderating his tone, he says the war will continue.

Venezuela Wins Against Exxon Mobil Frivolous Lawsuit

From LATimes.com:
Venezuela to pay Exxon Mobil only $255 million of ruling
State oil company Petroleos de Venezuela says debts and court action reduce an award of nearly $908 million by the International Chamber of Commerce.
Associated Press
January 2, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-exxon-20120102,0,5269113.story

Venezuela said Monday that it has successfully defended itself in an international arbitration case brought by Exxon Mobil Corp. and will need to pay only $255 million of nearly $908 million awarded to the company.

State oil company Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, said in a statement that debts and court action reduce what it owes under the ruling by the International Chamber of Commerce.

PDVSA said Exxon Mobil had previously used international courts to freeze about $300 million in Venezuela's U.S. accounts and that the company also has a debt of about $191 million related to the financing of an oil project in the country, as well as $160 million that the arbitration tribunal said was owed to PDVSA.

PDVSA called it a "successful defense" and said Exxon Mobil had initially demanded about $12 billion in compensation.

There was no immediate response from the Irving, Texas, oil company. It confirmed the international chamber's decision Sunday, saying the arbitration body found that PDVSA "does have a contractual liability to Exxon Mobil."

Exxon Mobil sought arbitration after President Hugo Chavez's government nationalized an oil project in the country in 2007.

PDVSA said that Exxon Mobil's compensation demands had been "completely exaggerated."

"After four years of arbitration, the real amount determined by the ICC tribunal indeed represents less than the exorbitant sum initially demanded," PDVSA said in the statement.

Exxon Mobil still has another arbitration case pending against Venezuela before the World Bank-affiliated International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes.

PDVSA said that Venezuela "will take all necessary steps to defend itself" in that case as well.

More than a dozen other arbitration cases involving Venezuela are pending as companies have sought billions of dollars in compensation in response to nationalizations by Chavez's leftist government.

Chavez on Libya

From the London Guardian:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Wednesday that Libya's crisis is just beginning with the fall of Moammar Gadhafi's government.

Chavez has been a staunch defender of Gadhafi throughout the conflict, and he condemned NATO airstrikes and killings of civilians.

"The drama of Libya isn't ending with the fall of Gadhafi's government. It's beginning," Chavez said. "The tragedy in Libya is just beginning."

Libyans hunting Moammar Gadhafi offered a $2 million bounty on Gadhafi's head and amnesty for anyone who kills or captures him as rebels battled Wednesday to clear the last pockets of resistance from the capital, Tripoli.

Asked about such efforts to hunt for Gadhafi, Chavez said they reflect a "madness let loose."

"What the Yankee empire and the European powers ... want is Libya's oil," Chavez said...

Chavez: Libya's tragedy begins with Gadhafi's fall
Wednesday August 24 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9813496

Adam Smith Murdered Mars

From Reuters:
Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday.

"I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day.

Chavez, who also holds capitalism responsible for many of the world's problems, warned that water supplies on Earth were drying up.

"Careful! Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts," Chavez said, sipping from a glass of water.

He added that the West's attacks on Libya were about water and oil reserves...

Chavez says capitalism may have ended life on Mars
Eyanir Chinea
Tue Mar 22, 2011
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/22/us-venezuela-chavez-mars-idUSTRE72L61D20110322

Oliver Stone and the politics of film-making

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jul/18/oliver-stone-chavez-wall-street

Oliver Stone and the politics of film-making
There's no let-up for Hollywod's most controversial director – the sequel to Wall Street, a documentary about Hugo Chávez and his most ambitious and personal project to date, the secret history of America
Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Sunday 18 July 2010

Oliver Stone is a man's man. Of this I have no doubt before meeting him. Not just because of his status as a sort of latter-day Ernest Hemingway, an action man with a reputation for women and drugs who won the Purple Heart for bravery in Vietnam, and then an Oscar for reproducing his experiences on celluloid. But because the most compelling sequences from his latest film, a documentary called South of the Border, show him hanging out with Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, chewing the cud about politics and war, talking very much mano a mano.

It's an impression that's reinforced moments before I meet him in his Los Angeles office when the photographer appears and shows me some of the portraits he's taken. They're slightly startling because Stone has a new moustache, a big, bristling, Zapata number, and in the tiny digital frame on the back of the camera, he looks like it's him who really ought to be dressed in military fatigues and running his own small South American regime.

Then he ambles in, distractedly. "Suzie!" he calls to his assistant. "Where are my glasses? I think I've lost my glasses."

We both look at him. He has one pair of glasses on the top of his head. And another pair on a piece of cord around his neck.

"They're on your head," says Suzie.

"Do you think you could go and look for them? They're very valuable to me."

Suzie hesitates and then, having seemingly witnessed this sort of situation before, says: "OK!" and disappears out the room. Two minutes later, Stone puts his hand to his head. "Suzie! I've found them! They were on my head!"

Suzie reappears at the door. "I know," she says. "I told you."

"Did you? Jesus! What, now I can't even hear?"

It's a rather nice surprise, this. The bumbling, the self-accusation, the absentmindedness. On paper, he's so much the alpha male that, as one interviewer put it: "One expects to find antler stubs under his thatch of suspiciously too-black hair." As well as his war record, there are his various arrests for possession of drugs, as well as his well-rehearsed views on monogamy ("unnatural"). But, mostly, there's the work.

There seems an almost hyper-masculinity to Stone's oeuvre. He's the director of Platoon, one of the most highly rated Vietnam films of all time, a film that was based on his experience. The war spawned a further two films, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth. He made one of the most violent and controversial films of the 90s, Natural Born Killers. And he's had a fascination with some of the most powerful men on earth, having made films about no fewer than three American presidents: the Oscar-winning JFK, Nixon and, most recently, W, about George W Bush.

In the flesh, however, he's more like an amiable professor. There's a sort of otherworldly air of distraction and he reminds me of one of those old-fashioned Marxist academics who have now all but disappeared. Although he's not a Marxist, he has a strictly Stoneist view of the world and to this end he has facts, figures, theses, arguments, names, dates, an entire view not just of contemporary politics but also history.

But one of the most appealing aspects of Stone is the sheer depth and breadth of his interests and ambition. In addition to tackling socialism (and how Chávez has fanned its flames across South America) in South of the Border, he has also, this year, taken on capitalism in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the much-awaited return this September of Gordon Gekko to a Wall Street where greed isn't just good, it's legal. Two films, two ideological systems, and yet this pales in the face of his next project: a 10-part documentary series for HBO, Oliver Stone's Secret History of America.

He's right in the throes of it. "It's my big project. It's something I want to leave behind. And we're now in the third fucking year of it," he says. "It's a war. They're in that room next door working on it right now. It's an ongoing odyssey."

It's a truly massive project, a personal mission, the encapsulation seemingly of all that Oliver Stone has thought and read and felt in the 63 years of his life so far, and by the end of the interview I feel slightly anxious about it on his behalf. After all, Stone's passion projects haven't always ended well. Platoon did. It was the film that he had to make, a heavily autobiographical account of his Vietnam war, "a grunt's-eye view", and won him his second Oscar (his first was for writing the screenplay of Midnight Express). But Alexander, his magnum opus, a biopic of Alexander the Great that he at one point calls "his life's work", was savaged by the critics.

The reception of South of the Border in the States is, I imagine, a small taste of what is to come. If Platoon was a grunt's-eye view of war, South of the Border is a leftie's-eye view of South America and he's spent the last few weeks fighting off criticism: that he's a patsy; a Chávista; that he didn't speak to any of the opposition figures. "But that wasn't what we set out to do!" says Stone. "I let him talk. That way you see him as he sees himself. It's a psychiatrist's technique."

It's interesting that he brings this up. He's been in analysis three times, he tells me later. But the biggest surprise about Oliver Stone, and perhaps his greatest contradiction, is that for somebody who is such a doer, who has such a relentless drive to work, who has done and accomplished so much, who started his career writing scripts for Scarface and Midnight Express and has gone on to direct nearly 20 feature films and several documentaries – is that he's also an introvert and a self-critical one at that.

He can quote, verbatim, unfavourable reviews he's received years after the event. More than this, there's an introspective aspect to his nature that is quite at odds with the macho persona. And, for all the argument and theorising, it becomes apparent that Stone is a creature of his emotions. He makes the films he does because he feels he has to. Many of his career decisions seem to be motivated not by good sense, money or the esteem of his peers – he's driven by something far more internal than that.

In an old interview, Stone once said that his films are an "emotional barometer" for him. The violence of Natural Born Killers came out of the anger and sadness he felt when his second wife and mother of his two sons, Elizabeth, left him. So, I wonder, what attracted him to the competing issues at stake in South of the Border and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps?

"My father was a Republican. And he hated Roosevelt. And that's sort of been the battle of my life, I think. You have to understand that I grew up a Republican conservative. I hated Castro. And I put my money where my mouth was because I went to war, but I understood pretty quickly that this was another place, another culture, and we would never fit in there.

"It's the same story in Afghanistan, Iraq and South America. It's white people meeting people who they think they are better than. And I feel that this war is the war of my life. I've seen it over and over again and if I can do one thing with what's left of my remaining years, it's just to cry it out and say it, I hope, with enough entertainment that people will want see it."

In this context, South of the Border is simply another variant on this, his life's work. What the film makes clear is how much of a bogeyman Chávez is in the United States. The first half of the film, a not-altogether-successful Michael Moore-esque homily, features clips from the US news media (or "the missile shield", as Stone refers to it) with Fox News declaring that Chávez is "as big a threat as Osama bin Laden".

It's in the second half that the film comes to life, though, where Stone meets Chávez. "I liked him. He's very warm and very gracious. And he's a bear. I've always said that if he looked like Woody Allen he'd play a lot better with the world press. I think men are threatened by his physicality."

The affection seems to be mutual. At one point, standing on a runway in the dark, Chávez points to a building where he was imprisoned during a coup and where some of his men lost their lives. "As an ex-soldier I understand," says Stone and Chávez rests his hand upon his shoulder.

Making a documentary "was the last thing I wanted to do," says Stone. "It was Fernando Sulichin who I worked with on Comandante [the 2003 documentary of Stone interviewing Fidel Castro] and who is funding Secret History who suckered me in. And we went and we talked to Chávez and he said, 'Don't just take my word for it; go and talk to these other presidents.' So that's what we did, we went on this road trip." He jaunts off and chews coca and talks socialism with Bolivia's Evo Morales and meets Brazil's Lula da Silva, Paraguay's Fernando Lugo, Ecuador's Rafael Correa and Cuba's Raúl Castro. "The result," says Stone, "is this weird little thing. What is it? It's not a documentary."

It is, just not an entirely sane one, with two halves that don't quite fit together, but it's still a fascinating glimpse of Chávez and an overview of a massive popular movement on one of the largest continents of the world.

"I'm not an interviewer, I'm a director. And I go to these places and take advantage of the status that I have as a film-maker and can treat the person like an equal. And I'm not hostile. I give them face time. We don't even know the names of these guys in the United States."

Fundamentally, Oliver Stone is doing it his way because he can and because he's spent his life doing things his way. He's as idiosyncratic as they come, jumping from genre to genre, from indie documentaries to studio blockbusters. Hitting spectacularly with some (he's won three Oscars), missing spectacularly with others (Nixon, like Alexander, was brutally panned). He's always been impossible to pigeonhole, to predict quite where he'll go next.

There are high hopes for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I rewatch Wall Street on the plane over and enjoy it as much as I did when I first saw it years ago. It's completely of its time – mobile phones the size of breeze blocks, an array of kitchen equipment so dazzling it gets its own special sequence (I give you the microwave and the hand-held blender). But it has stood the test of time.

Released in 1987, it was a brilliant, prescient taste of what was to come: the crash later that year; the insider trading scandals. I also spot Stone in a cameo I hadn't noticed before. He's plays a moneyman, a financier.

"I was playing my father, Lou," he says. And, had the 60s and Vietnam not blown him off course, it's what Stone might very well have become. It was what he was born to. His father was a stockbroker, who met Oliver's French mother in Paris during the second world war. Stone had a privileged, if emotionally austere, upbringing at an east coast boarding school. His mother was often absent and then disappeared altogether: aged 15, his headmaster called him into his office and informed him that his parents were getting divorced.

He went to Yale – he was in the same year as George Bush – and it's here that his conventional, bourgeois upbringing breaks down. He dropped out, deciding first to try to write a novel and then to enlist.

I read a quote, I say, where he says that he felt he wouldn't be properly human if he didn't know what war was. "There was something bugging me," he says. "Yale was a problem for me. I was not a happy young man. I didn't feel good in my skin. I'm glad I left but it was very painful at the time. My father thought I was pissing away my life. I was becoming an infantry soldier and I was going to become one of life's unfortunates. I wasn't going to amount to much. He was worried. And frankly so was I."

You've spent the rest of your life proving him wrong? "In a way, although it took me years. Coming back from Vietnam was extremely difficult. My father did, towards the end of his life, believe that Vietnam was a mistake, but we had many, many fights about it."

What would your father have made of the Wall Street of the last few years? I ask. "Look, he was pissed off when we left the gold standard in '73, although'73 is actually very interesting. It's a really crucial year, because the income of the average working man flattened out in '73 and never went up in spending ability. But meanwhile the productivity of America went up like this. Where did that money go? It went to CEOs and stock holders. It went to the banks."

The most remarkable aspect of Wall Street was that the villain of the piece, Gordon Gekko, became a hero to a new generation of moneymen. Michael Douglas claims that he's unable to go out for dinner in New York without having a hedge fund manager slap him on the back and thank him for inspiring him to enter Wall Street.

But if the first film was an old-fashioned, rite-of-passage story about a young man, Bud Fox, corrupted by greed, is there a take-home message from Wall Street 2?

"It's a fun movie, an entertaining movie. The first one I think you'd say is a morality tale and I think this one is too. In the sense of what is important? Are there more important values than money?"

Were you wary of glamourising it, given what happened to Gekko?

"It's 23 years on and greed will go on for the rest of times. And envy. Envy plays a big role in this film too. If you pass all the regulations in the world, they'll try and get around that. I have no problem with people wanting to make money. But don't make the banks into hedge funds, which is what they did.

"There's something Douglas says in the movie. He says that in 2008, of the corporate profits in the US, 47% were from finance-related companies. In the old America, it was 17%. It became the main business of America. We became a giant casino."

There is a father and son at the heart of the first Wall Street, as there is in much of Stone's work. It's a relationship that has clearly preoccupied him. But Lou Stone was perhaps not your standard, uptight New York stockbroker: he paid for Stone to lose his virginity to a prostitute at the age of 16. Stone has raised two sons himself now – Sean, 26, and Michael, 18. Has that made him see his father differently?

"Sure, but even before I had my sons, I was very father-oriented. He was a very powerful man. But you must remember my mother was very powerful too."

Ah yes, his mother. Jacqueline Goddet met Lou Stone when he was working as an aide to Eisenhower. She does sound like an extraordinary character, I say. "She still is – she's 88 and a party animal. She loves people and they love her. She called me the other night and she'd been out on the 4th of July weekend until two in the morning."

Perhaps Stone's greatest exploration of his relationship with his mother is in his novel, A Child's Night Dream. He started writing it when he was 17 and returned to it at 50, a period that he refers to as his midlife crisis. "I'd been criticised and loved, and criticised and loved, I mean, really, extremely… Nixon had just come out and had flopped. And I loved Nixon. I thought it was one of my more mature works and it had not been well-received. But it didn't matter. I returned to the book. I knew that it would never have a big circulation, but it mattered to me and I got it out. I just stopped making films for two years and basically did that. I think I lost my way and I felt like the book was putting me back."

Was writing the novel a way of reckoning with the past and in particular his mother? After all, there is a character called Oliver Stone who is sexually obsessed with his mother… "Yeah, well, there were two Stones, William and Oliver; they were two sides to me. But, yes that's correct. There was no incest, but my mother was very French and very free. It wasn't a big deal to walk around naked in the house and stuff like that."

I tell him about an extraordinary quote I have found from her a few years ago, where his mother says" "Oliver didn't just love me. He was in love with me."

"Is that right?" he says. "Ha, ha, ha. Well, she was a great tease. If that's the case, it's a classic Freudian case, the frustrations of an Oedipus complex. The son wants the mother but never gets her because she's the first woman in his life."

"Does that make sense to you?" I ask. "The Freudian explanation?"

"Absolutely. Your mother's body is the first thing you know and, frankly, it's very attractive and it turns you on. But you don't know what to do so it's a tremendous puzzle."

Usually, when an interviewer discovers something interesting about a subject, it's repeated in every article thereafter, but I find only one piece from the mid-90s, an interview with Elizabeth Stone, in which she claims that it was his mother who initiated him sexually. She says that Jacqueline had told her: "He couldn't relax and I had to show him."

"It's not clear," the interviewer goes on, "from detailed interviews with Elizabeth, Oliver and his mother, Jacqueline, what actually occurred. Elizabeth claims that Jacqueline Stone touched her teenage son's genitals and masturbated him. Jacqueline heatedly denies it."

So, I ask him straight out: "Did your mother teach you how to masturbate?"

"Well, I can't live with denial – sure."

"She physically showed you?"

"It was no big deal. It's not English. It's French. It was no big deal. I wasn't attracted to her. You have to understand. After a certain point, I grew up and I moved on. And I've had successful relations – with everybody!"

He says this a joke, but it's also true. He is a self-confessed womaniser. Elizabeth, his second wife, (his first, Najwa Sarkis, was Lebanese ) is said to have left him after having finally run out of patience with his extramarital dalliances. "It's on the record," says Stone. "And I don't like to lie. That's bullshit. It's not a big deal… I'm not running for office."

The Asian mentality is very different, he says, to the Anglo-Saxon one. "That's why I loved Asia when I was young. When I went over there, it was a revelation. I could never quite come back. I always had difficulties readjusting to the Anglo-Saxon mentality with women."

It is why his third wife, Sun-jung Jung, understands him, he says. "She's cool. She's Korean. Different mentality. Mutual respect… she laughs and trills and she sings when she speaks. I love the sound of her voice."

Their daughter, Tara, is 14. "She's part of that new generation, Asian-American. We're really going through it now. I mean, she's 14 – she does respect me but she does give me a hard time. But it's fun. She's smart. We go to the movies. She loves talking about movies."

Has having a daughter changed his attitude to women? "Yes it has. It's harder to be blind. Sometimes, you have to be blind to jump into some of these things, but when you see your daughter in some of these women… you see the human side more clearly than before."

I wonder aloud whether his relationship with his daughter will inform his female characters. His films have always seemed to me to be explorations of masculinity, of male relationships, in one form or another, but then his world, for years, was male. He was an only child and incarcerated for years in an all-male boarding school, before going to an all-male Yale. Discovering women in Vietnam, he says, he felt like Gauguin in the South Seas. "They were these ripe fruits."

He starts reciting his female characters, finishing with Olympias, Alexander's mother. It is abundantly clear from everything he says that Alexander was the project of his life. "It was. That's why I went back three years later and did a third version of it. If you could ever see it – it's the right version of it. The editing was rushed… I was never able to… frankly it's a complicated vision and I'm fighting to get it recirculated. In England, there is a release of it, but it's very little known because it was so slagged at the time. It was very painful to me."

Of all the films, it's his most autobiographical, he says. That's a strange statement given that its subject concerns the greatest emperor who ever lived, but then he is also the vulnerable son of all-powerful parents. He first dreamt of making it as a film student, he says, and it was during that midlife period of reflection that he came back to it again.

"I remember feeling like I had lost my way. The book was important and so was Alexander. I do think that there is the idea what you are when you're young, you must stay faithful to something in there."

This is one of his core beliefs. His teenage years are still the crucible of Oliver Stoneness on which he draws. They were so extreme, in almost every way. From the emotional barrenness of boarding school ("For years, I thought it was a disaster; it had taken the love out of my life; there was no sense of humanity"), those odd experience with his parents and sexuality, through the privilege of Yale and finally, apocalyptically, Vietnam. You really don't need to be a Freudian to read something into this. His ex-wife, Elizabeth, has put it more bluntly: "That little boy didn't stand any chance of any normal sort of life."

He's an assiduous diary-keeper and regularly rereads ancient entries to check up on himself. In 2000, he even decided to relive the acid trips of his youth. Under the supervision of three psychoanalysts, he sat on a mat, put an eyemask on and took LSD. It lasted nine hours and was, he says, because he wanted to relive past experiences with the drug "under more scientific conditions".

He's gone through various stages of taking drugs, mostly psychedelic ones. "Heavy trips," he calls them – in Oliver Stone there's a small part of the 60s that never died. He tells me about being "frightened to death" on one of them. So why did he do it? "Because of the adventure."

Ah yes. The adventure. That other Oliver Stone hallmark. His cousin James says that Stone went to war because: "Anything he could do to be at the edge, and to experience more than other people had experienced, and to shock, he was likely to do. It was consistent for him to want to experience the most intense thing that was going on then in the world."

Even now, there seems to be no letting up. The hell-raising days may be over – although I wouldn't bank on it – but there still seems to be this lust for experience, as evidenced by South of the Border. At an age where most men might start thinking about golf, Stone is chasing socialists across South America.

He's as committed as he ever has been, if not more so. Politically, workaholically. There's still a relentless drive to work, work, work. It's coming up to 9pm by the time I leave his office and nobody seems to be making a move to go home. His film editor has been waiting patiently for him in the room next door, ready to attack yet another section of Oliver Stone's Secret History of America. There's another documentary on Castro to come – the third part of his trilogy. He'd like to do an update to his novel, he says, some sort of epilogue. There are the final edits on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. And then there's South of the Border to launch in London. And defend from attacks all over again.

I fear for Oliver Stone's Secret History of America. Oliver Stone will do it Oliver Stone's way, whatever the critics think. He exhibits an artist's singlemindedness, an ideologue's obduracy. If his ambition occasionally exceeds his talent, it's not because his talent is small, but that his ambition is so very, very large. The Alexander comparison is really not as far-fetched as it might seem: he really is trying to remould the world according to his vision. Watch out, world.