Reply #26: First of all, beware of the source. The Associated Press is a corporate disinformation

[Peace Patriot]

outlet, serving the interests of global corporate predators and war profiteers, and they have been especially bad on the South American left. I don't trust them at all. I don't trust their framing, their choice of topics, their "experts" and their often unnamed sources. I don't trust their translation of quotes and their often suspicious attribution of statements to people without quotation marks.

This hit piece uses one of their classics: "The president's opponents accuse him of..."

The OP snips off the last paragraph of this very short article. Here it is:

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"The president's opponents accuse him of aiming to indoctrinate young Venezuelans with socialist ideology. But the education minister said the aim is to develop 'critical thinking,' not to impose a single way of thought."

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For a long while, they were using a very similar phrase to "the president's opponents"--"his critics"--with the accusation that Chavez is "increasingly authoritarian" or "increasingly dictatorial." They never named anyone. Maddening. So I want hunting for who might have said this, and I tracked it to a very rightwing Catholic Venezuelan cardinal who had spent his entire career in the Vatican finance office and was one of the few people the Vatican ever fired (during fascist banking scandals of the 1980s). This old "Opus Dei" cardinal regularly spews vitriol against the Chavez government from the pulpit. Even the Vatican considers him something of an embarrassment. HE is the only source I could find for the accusation that Chavez is "increasingly authoritarian," in a search for the source about two years ago. Is AP using the Catholic Church as its source? Or is the Bush-purged CIA funneling "talking points" through fascist churchmen to AP?

So who are "the president's opponents" who "accuse him" of "aiming to indoctrinate young Venezuelans"? I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same source. Who, of all the institutions on earth, is MOST guilty of "indoctrinating" the young? Like the Bush Junta, the Catholic Church often accuses others of the evils that they themselves are committing.

Or was it one of the rightwing coup plotters, who wanted to change Venezuela the old fashioned way, with a violent military coup? One of THOSE "opponents"? Or perhaps one of the Bushite-funded (with our tax dollars) phony "opposition" groups run by the USAID/NED, say the one who promulgated the false poll (Chavez didn't really win the last election in December 2006) that was to be the trigger for Florida '00-type, rightwing "riots" and another coup attempt, the day after the election. Maybe that's AP's source here--Condi "Exxon" Rice or John "death squad" Negroponte, using local lapdogs. Who are these "president's opponents"? It is highly suspicious-making that AP obscures them from our view.

Note: Exxon is really, really pissed off at Chavez for not paying them what THEY think they deserve for their local oil facilities, and has roped in the World Bank for an "arbitration" (i.e., extorting more billions from Venezuela's poor into the pockets of our most murderous and anti-democratic Corporate Rulers).

But back to AP: Notice in the first three paragraphs that there is only one quote ("Society cannot allow the private sector to do whatever it wants.") The rest--also attributed to Chavez--is free-form "translation." No quotes. What did he really say? Your guess is as good as mine. If it's so important, worthy of a news article, why not quote him directly?

As for the substance of the article, as it slithers through this stinky oil slick of arbitrary transliteration, to its appointed feeding grounds (the "indoctrination of young Venezuelans," according to "the president's opponents"), we can only guess at what the Chavez government is really proposing, and we really cannot base any conclusions about it on the information given here.

But even if its accusations are true, what's so bad about indoctrinating young Venezuelans in socialism? WE indoctrinate young Americans in predatory capitalism, even unto the way that our "public school" textbooks are procured, from corporate monopolies who suck like vampires on the necks of U.S. taxpayers and school boards, in a dictatorial process that denies public school teachers any leeway in the choice of texts. WE teach lessons in corporate welfare. Why not teach them something better, such as "critical thinking" (as the education minister avers)? Or even--God forbid--the obligations of society towards the poor, the social benefits of cooperation and sharing, the requirements of conscience and ethics in business and trade, and the evils of greed, of massive accumulations of wealth and untoward power over others, and of corporate domination?

The proponents of these state actions are out there--saying what they're saying (whatever that was). The "opponents" lurk behind the scenes, putting the worse face on these Venezuelan proposals (whatever they are), under cover of AP. I would say: Give the Chavistas the benefit of the doubt until you can speak more knowledgeably about the actual proposals. The Chavez government has the overwhelming support of the Venezuelan people. They won the last election with 63% of the vote, in elections that were heavily monitored by the OAS, the Carter Center and EU election monitoring groups, and universally determined to be fair and aboveboard. Chavez himself has something like a 70% approval rating right now. (The opposition candidate--to his credit--publicly disavowed that phony USAID/NED poll, by the way, and the heinous plot that it was to be the trigger for.) Chavez and his government are very genuine representatives of the great majority of Venezuelans, and we therefore are obliged to presume that imposing a national curriculum on private schools is a popular idea and that Venezuelans, as a whole, have good reasons for wanting to do it. And it is impossible to judge their ideas from this skimpy and biased information from AP, a notoriously unreliable corporate news monopoly.

The Chavez government has so far been hugely beneficial to the Venezuelan people and to the region, and it has scrupulously followed constitutional procedure and the rule of law. There is no evidence at all that the Chavez government is oppressive or dictatorial. They are going out of their way to maximize public participation in politics and government and in important decisions. Venezuela has the liveliest political culture in the western hemisphere. If the Venezuelan people make mistakes in policy, it cannot be said of them that the mistakes were made undemocratically. Democracies do make mistakes. (We've made some whoppers here.) But on the whole democracies tend toward the general good, and the more democracy there is, in a society, the better chance there is that the best ideas--those that serve the common good--will prevail.

If this is a bad policy, it will be tried out and then mitigated or dropped. I have no doubt at all that Venezuela has sufficient democratic strength, flexibility and internal criticism to end up with a beneficial policy on education. I wish I could say that about my own country. We are still stuck with this monster, "No Child Left Behind"--one of the worst educational policies ever conceived. And we can't seem to get rid of that, or the war, even with a Democratic Congress. Who has the better democracy--the one that handcounts 0% to 1% of the votes in a "trade secret," proprietary, corporate-run electronic voting system, or the one that handcounts FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the votes, as a check on machine fraud, in an open source code system? And, of these two democracies, which one is likely to develop a good educational policy? I'll place my bet on Venezuela.

I'll also place a bet that AP never does a news article on the already vastly improved Venezuelan educational system, which is entirely due to the Chavez government's strong commitment to education for all (--hundreds of new schools built and staffed in poor areas never before served by government; 50% literacy to 100% literacy in five years, due to an intense effort at adult education; free university educations for all qualified students; active programs to keep teenagers in school; government subsidies to the poor, for education and training; government subsidies to the Venezuelan children's classical music school, an immensely successful program that has produced world class orchestras and conductors, by training STREET CHILDREN in classical musical instruments). (What do we do with our street children? Send them to jail! What does Venezuela do? Send them to classical music school! Jeez. Where's the AP article on THAT?)