Reply #53: I agree with all your points, Sabrina 1--and well said! Except for this...

[Peace Patriot]

Chavez did NOT nationalize Venezuela's oil. The previous rightwing governments nationalized the oil. The problem was they were basically giving away most of the profits to multinational corporations--about a 10/90 split favoring the multinationals--benefiting a small oil elite in Venezuela, and no one else. What Chavez did was to re-negotiate the contracts several times, to the present 60/40 split of the profits, favoring Venezuela. The Chavez government is using those profits in the best way possible--for education, health care, fostering small business, fostering local manufacturing, land reform, local and regional infrastructure development, etc.--attending to problems long neglected by the rightwing oil elite. Making a better society. The Chavez government has wiped out illiteracy, reduced extreme poverty by 30%, and has produced a nearly 10% economic growth rate over the last five years, with the most growth in the private sector (not including oil).

Exxon Mobil walked out of the talks with the Venezuelan government over the 60/40 split for Venezuela (and Venezuelans!), and tried to grab $12 billion of Venezuela's assets, in a lawsuit that they lost. Exxon Mobil, which recently reported the biggest earnings of any corporation in history, literally tried to take food out of the mouths of poverty-stricken Venezuelan children, to fatten their bloated coffers. Chavez said, "Bye-bye." Other corporations agreed to the terms--among them Norway's Statoil, France's Total and British BP. This was a critically important assertion of a basic democratic principle: That corporations do business only with the permission of the sovereign people of the country where they want to operate, and on the terms set by that sovereign people, and with accountability and responsibility for the society that they are impacting.

We have lost that principle here--the source of most of our troubles. It is being re-asserted in Venezuela and, indeed, throughout South America. Chavez is one of the key leaders of that re-assertion.

This is what comes from TRANSPARENT elections--and Venezuela has the most transparent elections in the western hemisphere, and maybe the world, and also one of the liveliest political cultures.

OF COURSE the Bushwhacks revile Chavez. OF COURSE our Democratic leaders ape that view. Hardly a one of our political leaders--D or R--can prove that he or she was actually elected!

Our elections are now run by three rightwing Bushwhacko corporations, using 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls--by mutual consent of the Republican and Democratic leadership. We have LOST all transparency in vote counting. You wonder how our Democratic Congress can have merited a 10% approval rating--worse than Bush's? Because they weren't elected EITHER--most of them. That's my conclusion, and they can't prove otherwise.

Venezuela uses electronic voting, but it is an OPEN SOURCE code system. The code by which the votes are tabulated belongs to the public, and anyone may review it. They also handcount a whopping 55% of the votes, as a check on machine fraud. Here, we not only have no right to review the SECRET code by which our votes are tabulated, half the voting systems in the country handcount nothing because there is nothing to count--no ballot, no paper trail. Those systems cannot be audited! The other half counts only 1%--miserably inadequate in a 'TRADE SECRET' code system. (Some experts say we need a minimum 10% audit to detect fraud. We are not even close.)

Chavez won 63% of the vote in the last presidential election, in a system that is not only clean and transparent, as to election method, but has also been heavily monitored by the Carter Center, the OAS and other international election monitoring groups, all of whom have declared Venezuela's elections to be open and aboveboard. He enjoys about a 60% approval rating, while the products of our system are despised by the people (Bush-20% approval, Congress-10%).

Chavez has a right to speak about the U.S., whose leaders, both R and D, have so reviled him, with this current, unelected Bush junta actively colluding against him and his elected government, including support for a violent rightwing military coup in 2002, in which the perpetrators kidnapped Chavez, and threatened his life, and suspended the Constitution, the courts, the National Assembly and all civil rights. When the people of Venezuela defeated that coup, the Bushwhacks tried a U.S. taxpayer-funded recall election. (Yup, the Venezuelans can recall their president. Don't we wish!) They tried a crippling oil professionals' strike. They've tried relentless psyops and disinformation, and God knows what else they've tried.

After all this crap they've pulled to topple Venezuela's government, Chavez has a right to lecture the U.S.! He was actually elected. He can prove it. And those who wield undemocratic power here, and those who have dragged us into a horrible and unjust war, and those who are looting us unto the 7th generation, who cannot prove that they were elected, hate him because he is the opposite of them. It is our own leaders who are the tyrants, not Chavez.

As we pay the price here, for our nearly 100% non-transparent election system--a price that now includes a bottomless cup of Fool's Gold for the richest people on earth, starting with a $1 trillion "bailout"--the Final Looting--we should pay close attention to the leaders of South America, the great majority of whom are friends and allies of Chavez. And the more the Bushwhacks hate them, and the more our Corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies defame them--the more attention should we pay. Because they have important things to teach us about how to recover democracy in this Corpo/fascist world.. Chavez in Venezuela. Evo Morales in Bolivia. Rafael Correa in Ecuador. Cristina Fernandez in Argentina. The most hated. And also, Lula da Silva in Brazil (who recently said, of Chavez: "You can criticize Chavez on a lot of things, but not on democracy.") Fernando Lugo in Paraguay. Tabare Vasquez in Uruguay. These and other leaders of the south are pulling together to assert their peoples' sovereignty and principles of democracy and social justice, in the face of unrelenting hostility by the Corpo/fascists who are running things here.

If we learn nothing else from South America, we should learn the lesson of transparent vote counting--the bottom line of democracy. They have it, and they have worked hard for it. We have lost it. And we must--we MUST--get it back.