The Venezuelan menace

After being forced into an unprecedented recall vote Hugo Chavez won 58 per cent of the vote from a 94% turnout despite no mainstream domestic media support. Convincing? Not according to this Heritage Foundation article – frenzied immunity to elementary fact (Carter can’t talk to the media) is almost as impressive as its maniacal hatred of the people. It’s particularly chilling in the closing sections, given the likelihood of the hardline policy toward Caracas being accelerated, regardless of who ‘wins’ in November.

Like the ‘analyst’ on R4 who said Chavez had lost when he had won, this is the reality of modern media and western democracies, where bad news about uppity states is buried or obfuscated beyond any credible level. Nice work guys. When that news is about an oil producer pursuing an agenda that dares to defer to the majority will (of his people, not Americans), then the facts will be swamped in bullshit.

Stephen Johnson’s piece is so jaundiced as to be almost unreadable – we like the irony of a Heritage fucko saying Chavez might consider rigging the recall vote... that never happens anywhere else... Not only is this Heritage Foundation (horribly benign name in itself) journalist a maniacal fascist in his total rejection of the legitimacy of state provision of healthcare and education, he is a lying idiot who writes like a malicious child “…friendly regimes and China.” Lunatic. What's ‘worrisome’ (love the quaint English words those guys use) is the fact that in the US he is completely ‘free’ to peddle such hysterical bullshit, clearly designed to create fear among the psychologically incarcerated majority in the US, and then have it published in parochial rags like the Orange County Register (no doubt heralded with deferential aplomb) where there is absolutely no immediately available context. Except on the deviant-infested internet (quite right, it’s where the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Project for a New American Imperialist Fascism post their rabid ideology) and no true Christian on the breadline would want to pursue such a satanic device. This is one of the clearest indications of how America works, through fearful enslavement to the superannuated needs of big business.

How can he seriously suggest that Chavez is trying to get together a group of Latin American leaders to go to war with America? Quite easily, obviously, because the (ever growing in terms of influence and power) right wing in the US equates nascent trade struggles with military wars in regions regarded as racially inferior (because spics are not as rich as white US’). As if creating more equitable trade agreements with Latin American countries would damage the US economically.

So what if Cuban doctors are helping Chavez get healthcare into the slums? This does not represent a Latino-Communist conspiracy with the ultimate aim of toppling the US. This idiotic cunt is the conspirator, along with the slavish fiscal freaks at ‘the Heritage’ and sundry other far right ‘think tanks’ feeding off a deluge of corporate cash in order to forward the interests of their sponsors, which are not the same as 98.235% (we proved it in tests) of US citizens (despite what many of them have been pummeled into regarding as their own ‘views’) or 99.98797979% of the rest of the world (thanks for the returned faxes).

Bloated greenback chomping, info-throttling, paranoid, monomaniac bio-hazards.

Read Tariq Ali for a fairer portrayal of Chavez’s victory.

What’s far nearer to the truth is that South American political movements are providing one of the sole rays of hope for socialist, equitable solutions to the world’s ills. What, able to look past the consumer democracy and the inalienable right of the westerniser to happiness with his products? Yep that’s right… now let’s launch a coup to nip this one in the bud (as happened in Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Guyana, Grenada, etc etc), preferably from a client/pliant state with a military junta thirsty for military aid. Otherwise, the poor of the US (at least 30% of the population) will realise that the Latin American governments they are regularly called on to denounce in trailer park show trials are spending money (they aren’t supposed to have, being inferior in every way) on the health and education of their people than the mega-rich, investment-savvy, freedom loving, democratically elected and obsessed US government.

  ¶ 3:18 PM

  Occupational hazards

Increasing amounts of noise coming out of the Occupied Territories have it that Arafat's apparatus is feeding Tel Aviv with information about militants. Three collaborators were killed in Gaza on 3 August. This virtual civil war could be very bad news for the peace process (how can we trust those who fight among themselves, etc), but it may displace Arafat and co...

The Palestinian Authority and the mayoral system have already disintegrated in terms of relevance to the Palestinian population. Most aid is distributed to them by the provisional wings of Hezbollah, Hamas et al, who increasingly dictate the educational curriculum as well (ie, “we must drum into the kids absolute hatred of Israel and all Jews. Come on: help us get those martyrs out and the martyr posters up, throwing a small splash of ‘celebrity’ around our fucked gaffs”). The internecine strife between the factions is merely a realisation of Israeli policy. The ‘peace process’ will soon be written off as impossible, because, the Palestinians will be deemed incapable of holding a meeting among themselves, let alone their captors, sorry, Israeli counterparts.

We have already seen this in the text of the Disengagement Plan: “Israel has come to the conclusion that at present, there is no Palestinian partner with whom it is possible to make progress on a bilateral agreement.” They may be right but they are and have been more than complicit in the internal political turmoil among Palestinians. Well over 1 million in Gaza and West Bank are still classed as refugees by the UN and there are over 4 million Palestinian refugees internationally – King Abdullah has raised concerns that Arafat is washing his hands on the majority of them in Jordan. Yet an invitation by Arafat to them to return to their homes (as if that were feasible or the domiciles themselves still existed) would be regarded as some sort of declaration of war by any Israeli government. No doubt the diaspora contains some mildly irked individuals who wish to kill Israelis but the aforementioned Disengagement Plan removes the right to return of all Palestinians outside the Occupied Territories. The fat demographer strikes again, with the false Texan's nodding approval.

Yet there has been a significant reduction in suicide bombings in Israel of late. Again, the UK ‘left’ (some of whom remain committed to words), valiantly unaided by the liberal media, are squirming on the partisan button because to say a reduction in suicide bombings would be to justify Israel's grand water theft wall. Even though the wall is not even half finished. So why isn't this being said by the impartial political organs that don't exist, and used by, say, the EU to broker negotiations between the conflicting Palestinian groups? I’m sorry, I had my political adenoids out last year and I don't know what can be meant by those words.

It’s quite amazing. Say something like, oh, I dunno, “we are building a security fence” then it would seem that most spastic imaginings in the West have the WALL built, painted, endorsed, sponsored and home for a glass of the water formerly accessible to the Palestinians by tea time, all in the seven seconds immediately after the statement finished over with and was done.
Or “take the coalition troops out of Iraq” and several chinned commentators unpack their hair and serious expressions for the cameras to reassure us that this would be a betrayal of “the Iraqi people”. Only if withdrawal tomorrow (impossible, even if Kerry wins, shoots Edwards and declares a dictatorship run by him and five Jane Fonda smoking bureaucrats) were being demanded would it be an irresponsible dementamand. Timetabled withdrawal over the next six months and real support for an elected government that has some influence outside of Baghdad, anyone? Certainly not, the US embassy in Baghdad is already the largest in the world and has far more immediate and profitable activities to concern itself with.

You’re standing on my carpet.

  ¶ 9:10 PM