Life In Venezuela: Publicly Funded Elections

justinaforjustice

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Mon Aug-20-07 10:15 AM
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Life In Venezuela: Publicly Funded Elections

Edited on Mon Aug-20-07 10:16 AM by justinaforjustice

(Cross-posted from www.dailykos.com)

Prior to moving here to Merida, Venezuela to live, I had long been active in the Democratic Party in the United States.

It had frequently confounded me how we could call ourselves a democratic country when it took millions of dollars, raised privately, to win all our major elections.

Until the advent of internet fund raising, so successful with the Howard Dean Democratic Party presidential nomination campaign in 2004, candidates seeking major offices were required to tailor their views to the dictates of their big contributors.

Undoubtedly many candidates felt that taking the big money and appearing to agree with the views of the big campaign donors was necessary to get elected but, once elected, or so the naive thought, they would "vote their conscience". Except, upon getting elected, they had to think about being re-elected, to think about the views of those deep pockets, and so went the idealistic "vote my conscience" notions. Clearly, the only solution was publicly funded elections.

With that background in mind, I was delighted to discover that the new Venezuelan constitutional reforms include mandated public funding for elections, access for candidates to public spaces for meetings and rallies and access to the media.

It does not seem to exclude private donations as well, although it does include a provision prohibiting acceptance of campaign funds from foreign governments or foreign public or private entities.

The U.S. State Department, through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-private non-profit established by Congress to spread democratic principles funded largely by U.S. tax payers has been financially supporting opposition political groups here in Venezuela in line with their desire to oust President Chavez from office.

(See Eva Golinger, "Bush v. Chavez" (Monte Avila, 2005) and "El Codigo Chavez" (Monte Avila, 2006) for detailed documentation of the Bush-Chaney funding of the opposition and its activities in Venezuela.)

Indeed, the native Venezuelan opposition was so disorganized and fragmented here following the 1998 election of President Chavez, that it probably would not exist at all except for the funding and technical support from the U.S. government.

But, with U.S. support, the opposition staged an unsuccessful coup in 2001, a unsuccessful oil strike in 2001-2001, an unsuccessful national referendum to recall Chavez, and an unsuccessful attempt to unseat him in the regular national election of 2006.

A great deal of U.S. tax payer's dollars have been spent on these failures. But then, the same Republicans brought us the fiascoes of Iraq and the New Orleans.

At any rate, President Chavez hopes to put an end to foreign influenced elections at the same time he seeks to put an end to forcing political candidates to beg for money from the rich.