An Ailing Chavez Prays For Time

Supposedly, the first op was botched, and that didn't help his situation.

I hope this is accurate:

Venezuela is actually better than Cuba.

...but prayer didn't even work for Jesus.

I only hope the PSUV has somebody waiting to take his place if worst comes to worst.

It would be horrible if the Old Right won the next election by default-austerity and inequality are the LAST things Venezuela needs.

...behind Capriles. Would need a truly energetic, young, likeable candidate, imo.

Fortunately for Venezuela the likely winner is hardly "old right."

You can't be a progressive and back those things.

In Latin America, foreign investment always means submission to the foreigner.

It figures that you'd prefer the conservative candidate-even though Capriles has nothing to offer the poor and the workers and even though he'd render them permanently powerless by closing down the community councils and reducing the country to the old, non-democratic parliament.

thus by your assertion Hugo has encouraged submission to them.

is encouraging Chinese investment a progressive position?

but Capriles is calling for the restoration of the old order of total foreign dominance. Unless you're a right-wing extremist with light skin, you'd have no good reason to prefer Capriles.

He has no progressive or even positive ideas. He just wants total control for the old elites.

Venezuela doesn't need a right-of-center government.

It should be so easy for you.

BTW, it has to be a quote from Capriles not some propagandistic "analysis." It must be a quote from Capriles or his campaign. Anything else I will justifiably dismiss as I've been following these elections closely and what you are saying is totally not true.

the 39-year-old candidate, who is governor of Miranda state, also strongly criticized Mr. Chavez’s economic policies. He condemned the government’s expropriations of hundreds of businesses, apartment buildings and farms over the past decade.

“All the expropriations have been a failure,” Mr. Capriles said. “The companies that have been seized by the state must be reviewed one by one.”

He said some of those businesses could be privatized if he defeats Mr. Chavez."

source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/feb/20/venezuelan-challenger-aims-to-oust-chavez/

Obviously, that can only mean a Thatcherite fire sale of the people's assets

(I've read Capriles rhetoric in which he pretends to be for a mixed economy...but, given the social classes and the skin hues that are his primary supporters, it goes without saying that he's lying about his intentions. If you're elected as the candidate for the rich, it goes without saying you'll put the rich first.

Why on earth do you trust this guy? You know he doesn't care about the workers or the poor.)

He doesn't pontificate about getting stuff done, he does it.

Meanwhile I'm not going to buy your conspiracy theory. That's a good quote but it in no way means there's a Thatcherite fire sale of the people's assets.

Not if he's financed by the rich. Nobody in Venezuela's upper classes accepts that that poor have a right to have anything.

And what about the fact that he'll get rid of the community councils. How can you be ok with that?

Reducing democracy to parliamentary elections means permanently rigging the system for the rich. It's only local direct or near-direct democracy that can ever liberate anyone.

Excuse me for not wanting the "aspiration" Armani suit types to go back and steal the country again. Capriles would take the country back to the useless old days. The market cannot be the friend of the poor.

Capriles walks in the barrios with the people. Chavez hasn't done that in a very long time. The system is simply too corrupt and it needs a change.

It's a cheap shot to attack him for not walking around in public.

I make this prediction:

If Capriles wins, he'll suddenly announce that, supposedly, there's this huge financial shortfall that he didn't know about, and that Venezuela has no alternative but to do whatever the IMF wants. Just watch and see.

Why do you think he's keeping the rhetoric so vague?

I think once he's elected he'll be another Lula or Santos and be more progressive than he was credited for (Santos in particular was vilified on DU but he's been more progressive than expected).

I make this prediction:

When Capriles wins (which he will do), there will be people on DU vilifying the elections and vilifying the Venezuelan people, either they voted for the wrong guy because they are "stupid" or "propagandized" or the elections were fixed.

The Washington consensus rules - we're about to receive another heavy dose right here in Jamaica.
Poor Chavez - cancer sucks.

That won't mature for 20 years.

Chavizmo is the one having massive amounts of foreign investment by China.

Capriles is not the "conservative candidate."

He's practically left of our Democrats.

That is always code for Thatcherism

And he would dismantle the community councils...something that is only beneficial to the rich, since only the rich benefit from democratic being reduced to a parliament, an institution that is always structured to favor the wealthy over the workers.

Rather than, eg, giving house building contracts to foreign Chinese or Cuban's like chavismo, Capriles gave it to local Mirandinos. He got more houses built with less resources in the same period of time as chavismo. This is basic progressivism. What people are neglecting to see is how chavismo is selling the country to foreign investors.

And did most of the housing go to the poor, as it should have?

Why would you EVER want a country to move to the right on anything? And obviously, Capriles program would have to mean further cuts in social services and reductions in wages...that's what "business-friendly" means everywhere.

...or build new ones with their own hands.

He wasn't preventing people from fixing their own homes.

Capriles as president will put the rich first...since they are bankrolling him. He won't have to care at all about the poor and the workers. Why on earth would you ever trust the more-conservative candidate?

If the wealthy vote for a candidate in Latin America...that, by itself, guarantees that that candidate, once in office, will put the wealthy first.

I doubt the poor in Mirando like Capriles.

And officials from Lula's government have said that Capriles was lying when he implied he'd govern like Lula did(btw, Lula basically sold out the poor and the workers as president too, so Lula-like governance in Venezuela would not be an improvement).

I'm sorry, but I don't want Venezuela put through the hell Nicaragua went through between 1990 and 2006-an era where the poor pretty much lost everything. That's what "anticommunism" means...it isn't about fighting big-C Communism(an ideology and alleged "threat" that doesn't exist anymore)it's about forcing the poor to know their place.

Read history.

...and giving Venezuelan's the money to build a home. Huge difference. How many Venezuelan's were out of a job because chavismo outsourced the building to foreigners?

I do not think that HCR is more conservative, I think he is more bureaucracy oriented, and gets shit done.

That should automatically tell you everything you need to know. If the PSUV loses, it's gonna be all power to the 1% again.

The poor will all mourn.

...and how he's going to keep much everything nationalized (they distrust him when he says he'll "review" the nationalized companies). He's not what they want in truth, they wanted someone like Leopold Lopez or María Corina Machado (who famously called out the nationalization and called it theft, to Chavez' face).

The right wing / wealthy in Venezuela like him because he's seen as anti-Chavez, that's all.

Of course the right wing / wealthy in Venezuela like Chavez, too, because if they do what he wants, they leave him alone. See: Venevisión which is owned by Gustavo Cisneros!

You say that as if it means something...

n/t.

...are right of him.

We have the most right-wing political culture of any electoral democracy in the world.

But fair enough in any event.

that's an absurd claim. You should take a closer look at the list of electoral democracies in the world.

ONLY the United States limits electoral politics to the right wing and the just-barely-not-right-wing(if your party is committed to market economics, it can't be called anything more progressive than centrist, or perhaps center-right.)

BTW, are you posting here for any reason other than the personal animosity you've nursed against me for years? Let it go already...I've done nothing to deserve the ire you hang onto regarding me.

doesn't mean that we should advocate that those who do not take advantage of it. That's how you end up in that situation in the first place. Witness how we ended up here... A truly liberal Democratic party and a Republican party that was something like today's Democrats (or maybe even left of that). People voted in the Republicans because "they're not so bad" and that lead to the endless rightward spiral of both parties to the point where you can now correctly state that a right-wing party in another country is practically to the left of our Democratic party. I don't want to see other countries head down that path.

...got reelected.

I don't see a third time.

You think you're being insulting, but you just appear to be ignorant.

Why should he get credit for something his political ideologues did?

CHAVISMO is a political ideology, NOT a person, although the name certainly comes from his name, Chavez.

I'm only trying to help you here, not argue for or against anything. If you want to continue to sound like you don't know what you're talking about, then just ignore me, as you appear to be doing...

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/08/us-venezuela-chavez-idUSBRE83701020120408?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+reuters/worldNews+(News+/+US+/+International)&utm_content=My+Yahoo

Chavez hikes Venezuela's minimum wage before vote

.... But the 57-year-old president has managed to maintain a strong lead over the opposition candidate in most recent opinion polls, based on his enduring emotional connection with Venezuela's poor majority - and heavy state spending. ....



Ahead of the October 7 presidential election, his government has launched many projects, or "missions," including one that aims to build hundreds of thousands of homes, and others that provide cash handouts to the elderly and to poor families with children. ....


Ahead of Saturday night's cabinet meeting, details were published of three phone calls he held with two fellow leftist leaders, Bolivian President Evo Morales and Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, and his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad.



It said Chavez and Assad discussed what was happening in Syria, "especially the successful way the Syrian government had contained armed terrorist gangs ... which were seeking in vain to impede the advance of political reforms pushed forward by the Assad government." ....

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Is Chavez obligated to maintain hard times just to make life easier for the pro-capitulation candidate?

I don't like Assad myself, but what difference does it make what Chavez' position on SYRIA is?

Any "pro-American" government in Latin America is going to be a right-wing dead loss.

Capriles doesn't care about the poor or the workers...he couldn't care about those groups and support "business-friendly" policies, since such policies always hurt the non-wealthy.

Not if he wants to move Venezuela to the right.

Bullying thugism is bullying thugism, from the Wingnut side AND from the Left. Are ASSAD and AHMADINEJAD considered to be Left? Why does Huguito never find any murdering thug he doesn't just luerve to pieces?


Huguito is not worth anybody's idealism.

But he's the only candidate in the race who is standing up for the poor and the workers in Venezuela.

And the community councils Chavez created are the only forums in Venezuelan society in which non-millionaires have ever really had a say. Get rid of them go back to just the conventional bourgeois "representative" institutions, and the poor are going to be powerless and hopeless again, like they are here.

Also, Capriles can't be trusted not go to on a mass privatization spree. He's backed by too many of the forces of the old order to be trusted to leave the social gains untouched.

And I love my DU idealists and am sad that the alternatives in Latin America and many other places are so putrid.


Have just observed so often here that any word against Huguito or a few others is projected to be support for (insert name here) or "American stoogeism." Detestation of Huguito is, for me, what it is, all by itself. Although I loved the show when he attacked Shrub. There, I've said something nice about him.

Whatever.

(btw...does anybody in Venezuela actually call him "Huguito" or is it just you?)

One of the Huguito stalwarts here once berated me for dissing "a head of state" or whatever. I use my mild diminuitives to ridicule my political/philosophical enemies: LIMBOsevic, Shrub, Matt SLUDGE/PUDGE (although it's hard to go worse than "DRUDGE").

But more seriously, my thing with Huguito is not just a "you just don't like (him)" triviality.


Regardless of whatever "gains" he claims to have made for the disadvantaged, he's a BULLYING THUG. What used to be called "a strongman." The PERONs (yes, I know they were in Argentina) did lots of charity junk and MUSSOLINI got the trains on time and HITLER loved dogs and LIMBOsevic loves Xmas. And murdering Che looked great in a beret. And, NO, my comment about Che does NOT mean I'm a supporter of the BATISTA a-holes, the CIA Cubans, the Rethug Cubans in Congress. I detest Gloria ESTEBAN and her hubby Esteban ESTEBAN or whatever his name is, too. Did you know she was attemptedly recruited into the CIA (she says she declined)? And the ESTEBANs have been fixtures at Poppy state dinners and countless B.F.E.E. events. Evo and especially Rafita (to keep the little names going) are on my lists, too.


Thugs do MORE DAMAGE to the window dressing beneficiaries' causes with their thugism than any good they do.

I'm reading Robert CARO's bio of Robert MOSES, with its profile of Al SMITH and of the Progressive movement, and the point is made about "practical politics" versus uncompromising idealism: SMITH had contempt for idealists who staged great theater for their causes but GOT NOTHING PASSED INTO LAW, whereas the political ART OF THE POSSIBLE made REAL, concrete gains in maybe-little piece by little piece. Same thing happened in 195(8?) when LBJ got the first Civil Rights law passed in a hundred years, while he was railed against by Libs for his having watered it down (to get it passed). (Talking here BEFORE his later, BIG deals.)

I wasn't trying to trivialize what you were saying.

I'm not in Chavez' personality cult...it's just that, in that country, there's not really an alternative on the left to the PSUV that I'm aware of.

And...while he's been more authoritarian than I would have liked(although he's not a Fidel the Second in that regard), it's his introduction of the community councils I feel the greatest loyalty to...and putting in something like that doesn't strike me as thuggish. It far more thuggish to get rid of them and restrict democracy to conventional bourgeois parliaments, institutions in which workers and the poor never really win.

Effectively, they function as "revolutionary" = chavista = PSUV councils

Party and community; the two concepts are quite distant. Unless the "revolution" becomes a permanent situation projected by a party-state.

They are far more democratic than a "representative" legislature-since "represtatitive" bodies are always rigged to favor the rich(look at ours, for example).

The community councils are the only institution in which the poor have a real say. That automatically makes them democracit

What's so sacred about institutions that privilege the wealthy?

What's so sacred about institutions that discriminate normal citizens because of their political poinion?

Remember the Tascon list? 4 million Venezuelan citizens blacklisted by their own government because they voted against Chavez.

Who the hell is talking about "institutions that privilege the wealthy"? Are you able to follow the same argument for more than 2 posts before deflecting it?

he'd trust his life to at this point. Castro also ended up seeking help abroad. That doesn't say much for the Cuban or Venezuelan health systems.

despite the severe punitive embargo under which the small nation suffers.

The Cuban govt. provides the stats to the UN and they simply accept it as fact. Its ridiculous. Having dealt with the Cuban health care system first-hand, i can tell you that it is certainly not comparable to those in the West, including here in the US.

'Late Friday, Mr. Chávez called in to a state-sponsored television show and said that his emotional appearance at the mass "was spontaneous, natural, like the rain, like a volcano of feeling." He called rumors a waste of time and said that he would return to Cuba Saturday night to continue his "battle."'

I'll be there in a couple of weeks time - must see if I can catch up with him if he's toing and froing .

but will anyway. Thanks for thought.

Much as I don't like Chavez, dying of cancer is horrible.

Even the worst of all the brutal dictators or Dick Cheney don't deserve to die of cancer.

Now what will happen if Chavez does die?
I have a hunch there will be a brutal power struggle, with many murders and people being tortured in prisons.
I really hope not.

But I am a realist, and I've seen this happen too often.

Than I saw it was the Wall Street Journal, and after reading some of the comments on their website realised the purpose was to give their wacked-out readers a chance to mock President Chavez when he is going through a particularly rough time.

Wouldn't almost everyone go through what President Chavez is when told the end is near -- wishing for a few more years to see through something dear to them, whether it be an unfinished garden, a grandchild growing up or a country in transition?

if Chavez becomes weak = not for Venezuelan people = or 90% of American either

but hey people in USA run it that way, so Americans are used to it and cant envision another way of doing things with their natural resources so Chavez is always a "bad guy" due to the limited thought of possibilities and what they are being told and taught.

There is a lot of propaganda to make sure the unenlightened stay that way and dont get any funny ideas about distribution of the land's resources/weath in the US and that propaganda needs to be constantly put out there ( in rotation with other subjects ) by the media minions of big oil,investors etc.

The grabbing hands are borderless and grab all they can IMO

.

in order to celebrate this man's very possibly imminent sprial down through enormous suffering, and plunge straight into oblivion, had shown some extraordinarily decent restraint this time.

When yesterday went by and it didn't appear, I thought there must be some good ones among them, after all.

To the ones who didn't exploit this opportunity to mock the man, I have to say I respect your choice to allow the man to pass in peace who has never hurt you, has never had anything but deepest wishes for his masses of poorly regarded Venezuelan peers to climb out of poverty and find the freedom that comes with food, shelter, education, and medical assistance, and a fair chance outside the shadow of searing racism.

How do those rich people know what Chavez is thinking?
Maybe he is "praying" for his country.

They probably already have the champagne on ice for the death announcement...with Gloria Estefan lined up to sing at the celebration.

Said he wanted 100 crucifixions or some shit, it was really wack.

I'm still hopeful for Chavez' recovery. The WSJ is hopeful for his death, as are others...just when I wonder how low they will go, the usual suspects never disappoint. It's so tacky to celebrate serious illness, but tackiness doesn't bother them. In fact, for more than a few of them, it reigns supreme.

It will be a great loss if he doesn't.

I visited Havana just a couple of weeks ago and the health care system, even for the elite, is abysmal.

Death is the only sure way that this asshole will leave my country. Even if Chávez survives but Capriles wins fair and square, the Comandante is simply not going to let go of his power. He will start a civil war if he has to. He's already responsible for several deaths back in '92 when he unsuccesfully committed that coup-d'etat. What's to say he won't hesitate to take some more lives to stay as president? He's already shown his intentions by arming up his private militias and buying military hardware for God-knows-what (except to protect his own goddamn skin).

You better hope they don't get their wish.

by the current administration and military. The assassination of Capriles is also a possibility.

That the only democratically valid result would be Capriles taking power.

Capriles doesn't represent anything intrinsically more legitimate than anything else, and his wealthy backers have never given a damn about democracy-they just want the old days back when their class and their skin color(you will vary rarely find an anti-Chavez Afro-or Indio-Venezuelan) automatically mattered more than everyone else.

Capriles is not any more democratic than anybody else. Nor any more honorable. It's just that he's "pro-market"-which automatically puts him on the opposite side of history from the majority of the human race.

80% of the population is mestiza. 10% is "white", 7% "black" and 3% "indigenous".

I've never been in a less racist country than Venezuela, I've traveled quite a lot in my life and I'm what you call an "afro-indio-Venezuelan".
Maybe you could enlighten me about those issues going on in my country? Do you have at least something to back up the "truths" you're spraying?
Quoting you: "they just want the old days back when their class and their skin color(you will vary rarely find an anti-Chavez Afro-or Indio-Venezuelan) automatically mattered more than everyone else. "

50% of the electors voted against Chavez's party during last elections. Which means that, even if all "whites" voted against Chavez (which is absolutely not the case), at least 80% of the opposition voters would still be black, indian or mestizo.

Not ONE of the candidates in the opposition's primary belongs to a party that existed before Chavez.

So finally, I'm curious, how do you get to repeat so many stereotypes concerning a country you've never put a foot in? Do you really have any interest concerning the reallity in Venezuela? It doesn't seem so.