More info about the poll in Venezuela by Mark Penn and Company and NED

[madfloridian]

Penn, Schoen & Berland is the company. Mark Penn is a long time pollster for the Clintons, now with Hillary. I was looking via Google to find other of their polls. I did find one that said most approved of the Medicare drug bill, but more on that later.

This is what interested me. They were in Venezuela for the election this year, and their polling at one point was very off...with Chavez ahead by just 6 points. I wrote about that here:

Penn, Schoen & Berland, Mark Penn a pollster for Hillary. Just in Venezuela.

One part about this polling they did there caught my eye, as it mentioned the National Endowment for Democracy. NED. We have discussed that group at DU before. They were also part of this election in a way. The movie mentioned, Our Brand is Crisis, is about Carville's group...Carville, Greenberg, and Shrum. I believe that is the right name.

Edited to put link to Upside Down World:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/503/1

Rosales's campaign is U.S.-designed and uses modern marketing techniques and catchy slogans. The situation is similar to 2005 documentary movie "Our Brand Is Crisis", which exposes how a team of political operatives from the U.S designed the campaign of Washington's favored candidate in Bolivia, and eventually won. these brilliant campaigns use sophisticated methods to create exactly the image they need for their candidate. They tend to target youth, and often include youth movements as they have with Primero Justica (Justice First) in Venezuela. The branding of the campaign with a color, and a one-word slogan is an important part of the U.S.-designed campaigns. In Serbia is the slogan was "Otpor", meaning resistance. In Georgia it was "Kmara" (Enough!). In Ukraine, "Pora", means "It's Time!" And now, in Venezuela, the brand is "Atrevete," roughly translated as "Be bold!"

The second step has been to use the mass media to create the perception that the elections are fraudulent. They have done this in a variety of ways. The NED has funded an organization, Sumate (one-word slogan that means "join up"), with the expressed goal of "achieving a high level of citizen participation in Venezuelan elections."(7) Founded in 2002, Sumate organized the campaign for the recall referendum to revoke Chavez's presidential term. They lost the recall vote in August 2004 by a large margin, but went on to claim, with the help of Penn, Schoen, and Berland's "exit polls," that the election was fraudulent. Five other polls showed exactly the opposite and concurred with the official voting results in which Chavez won by a wide margin. However, PSB and Sumate maintained that the opposition had won and that Chavez had committed "massive fraud" in spite of the fact that 5 of the 6 polls concurred with the official results, and that the voting process was certified by both the Carter Center and the Organization of American States.(8) Consequently, Chavez's image as a democratically elected leader was damaged both nationally and internationally. The fraud claim resonated through the major media, and planted doubts about Chavez's legitimacy.

Sumate...would you like to read more about Sumate and PSB from the Guardian? Interesting.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/calvin_tucker/2006/11/post_723.html

Penn, Schoen & Berland say that their exit polls have a margin of error of under +/- 1%. So how could they have been off by a margin of 36 percentage points? Simple. They had subcontracted the conduct of the poll to a US government funded, anti-Chávez group called Sumate, whose leader participated in the 2002 coup. The poll was entirely bogus, but it served the purpose of casting a shadow over the democratic credentials of the Chávez presidency and the left in general.

Past performance is the best guide to future performance, so I'll end this piece with a prediction. Chávez will win Sunday's election by a landslide and the result will be declared free and fair by election observers from the EU, the OAS and the Carter Centre. The following day, opposition extremists will pour onto the streets screaming fraud in a vain attempt to stage a Ukrainian-style " orange revolution" and unseat the man they couldn't remove through the ballot box.

And how will all this be justified?

"We were robbed by the computerised voting machines", they will tell us.

And the proof?

"Every single important pollster had us ahead".

Chavez won by a good margin. I did not hear if the opposition ever had those post-election protests.

Here's a link to NED. There are many other groups like it. I guess they all spread Democracy in their own way.
http://www.ned.org/

[madfloridian]

1. Here's the trailer for Our Brand is Crisis...more info on NED

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/770
Greenberg,Carville, Shrum...Our Brand is Crisis Trailer..Bolivia

And more info on NED from Right Web.
http://rightweb.irc-online.org:80/profile/1513

And from Source Watch more on the various countries PSB has done polling in...I am careful with Source Watch but this is mostly factual stuff. Quite interesting all the places we have been.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Penn%2C_Schoen_%26_Berland

PSB and the Serbian elections in 2000
Interestingly, PSB was involved in similar charges of "American political interference in Serbia, locus of a $77 million U.S. effort to do with ballots what NATO bombs could not--get rid of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. In the run-up to national elections on Sept. 24, U.S. aid officials and contractors are working to strengthen Serbia's famously fractured democratic opposition. They have helped train its organizers, equipped their offices with computers and fax machines and provided opposition parties with sophisticated voter surveys compiled by the same New York firm that conducts polls for President Clinton" -- PSB.<10>

Jonathan Mowat has a more incisive appraisal of PSB as follows:

Penn, Schoen and Berland (PSB) has played a pioneering role in the use of polling operations, especially "exit polls," in facilitating coups. Its primary mission is to shape the perception that the group installed into power in a targeted country has broad popular support. The group began work in Serbia during the period that its principle, Mark Penn, was President Clinton's top political advisor.<11>

PSB and the 2005 British general election
In late January 2005, The Daily Telegraph revealed that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had recruited the services of PSB's Mark Penn in the run-up to the general election in the UK, widely expected to take place in May of that year <12>.

PSB and the expected Italian elections in 2006
At the beginning of 2006, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered PBS (via his party Forza Italia) to conduct a survey on the next Italian elections (of April 9, 2006). The results showed Berlusconi's coalition winning, while all other surveys by Italian pollsters showed the opposition winning. The Penn, Shoen & Berland Italian survey results can be seen here. Other news reports on this contested survey are here and here."

Just feeling alarmed at how much we are involved in elections elsewhere.

[madfloridian]

3. More about Italy's election referred to above.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/04/news/italy.php

"The issue gained prominence last week after the release of "Uccidete la Democrazia" (Kill Democracy), a DVD by Enrico Deaglio and Beppe Cremagnani, two left-leaning journalists. They contend that something funny went on after the polls closed April 10. Instead of winning by a significant margin, as exit polls suggested, Romano Prodi's center- left bloc barely eked out a victory, by 24,000 votes, over the conservative coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi, who was prime minister."

"Polling organizations said there were many reasons why the results did not match the pre-election surveys, which had given the left a hefty lead, citing a particularly nasty electoral campaign that left many voters undecided until the final days."

The polls are listed at this site, but they are not in English:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Penn%2C_Schoen_%26_Berland

[shance]

2. Good work Floridian*** Thank you.

n/t

[madfloridian]

6. More...CATO calls NED a loose cannon, and slush fund for politicians.

I am not fond of CATO either, but this is very good article. NED site shows that the most common words there are emerging democracies. That is their goal.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-027.html

"The National Endowment for Democracy is a foreign policy loose cannon. Promoting democracy is a nebulous objective that can be manipulated to justify any whim of the special-interest groups--the Republican and Democratic parties, organized labor, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--that control most of NED's funds. As those groups execute their own foreign policies, they often work against American interests and meddle needlessly in the affairs of other countries, undermining the democratic movements NED was designed to assist. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has nullified any usefulness that such an organization might ever have had. There is no longer a rival superpower mounting an effective ideological challenge, and democracy is progressing remarkably well on its own."

" NED is a little-known foreign aid program intended to promote democracy abroad. It is a nominally private organization, but all of its funds come from the federal treasury. Although small in comparison with other federal programs- its annual budget has ranged from a low of $15 million in 1987 to a high of $27.5 million in 1992--NED has been con troversial throughout its 10-year history, engendering intense congressional debate that cuts across party lines. Moreover, although it is a child of the Cold War, NED continues to be a strong point of contention in the post-Cold War era. This year, for instance, NED represented only $35 million of a $23 billion Senate appropriations bill, yet it attracted more speakers to the floor than any other item in the bill.(1)"

"At its most innocuous, NED is a slush fund for politicians.(3) Journalist David Corn has described it as "a porkbarrel for a small circle of Republican and Democratic party activists, conservative trade unionists and free marketeers who use the endowment money to run their own mini-State Departments."(4) The distribution of money to opposing interest groups helps NED deflect charges of partisanship in the distribution of pork, but the fact remains that the taxpayer is picking up the tab for politicking."

"What finally drew public attention to NED's meddling in foreign elections was an aborted attempt to provide opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro with $3 million in funding for her 1989 election campaign against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. The plan was abandoned after it was determined that NED's charter, which expressly forbids campaign contributions, would be violated. In the end, the money was channeled to programs that aided Chamorro indirectly rather than through direct campaign contributions. That incident illustrated that NED had no qualms about interfering in elections in general and stopped short in the Nicaragua case only because of blatant illegality. In 1988, for example, the endowment had given $600,000 to organizations working to defeat Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet. NED considered that endeavor entirely appropriate, even though the recipients themselves lamented it as American intervention in the electoral process. One recipient, contemplating the "hard moral dilemmas" involved in accepting U.S. funds, admitted his reluctance to accept the money, which he bemoaned as a "lesser evil" than the reelection of Pinochet.(10) NED was involved in similar activities in 1990 in Czechoslovakia, where it was criticized for funding 2 parties close to Vaclav Havel to the exclusion of 22 other legitimate parties.(11) So while NED may stop short of violating the letter of its charter by giving direct contributions to specific candidates, it clearly does use funds to interfere with foreign democratic processes. Its willingness to do so ignores the innate contradiction between free elections and outside interference in the electoral process. As George Washington warned in his farewell address, "Foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican govern ment."(12)"

[David__77]

4. Opposition laying low for now.

I kind of wish they had gone batshit. Then they could have been completely relegated to the dustbin. They will be anyway. Soon they'll lose their remaining governerships.

[madfloridian]

5. We should stay out of other countries' elections...more about it

Mark Penn's analysis of why Gore lost....looking back at 2000 in light of Penn's Venezuela polling.

This is why I got worried when Carville and his group with all the connections to the PSB group...went after Dean after the election. These guys have connections and power, even though we talk about them here....they are in charge.

[shance]

7. Must see for all citizenry is "The Revolution will not be Televised".

Amazing and incredibly inspiring.