Hi Miriam,
Philosophical on the outside, but raging on the inside.
I recall when I first heard about the Monroe Doctrine, I believed that
it was America's way of reaching a helping hand out to our friends in
Central and South America.
And in a way that was what the American Empire did, extend a helping
hand that grasped everything it touched.
When I remember how Working Class Cubans lived under Batista, and how
the wealthy Cubans and their American backers screamed and swore
revenge, I cheered Fidel Castro from the Sweatshop, the drapery
factory where I labored at the time. Score One for the Underdog!
Cuba, a small nation living off the shore of history's most bloated
Empire, and surviving. Even with the boycotts placed upon it by the
Empire's bully boys.
And when Hugo Chavez turned Venezuela around, and other South American
nations began to thumb their noses at the American Empire, I believed
the worm had turned. But never count Greed out.
As revolutionary as the American experience in democracy was, it was
flawed. It was flawed because it never resolved the struggle of the
People versus Greed. We need to gather our wisest minds and examine
why Greed corrupts our every effort to live at peace with one another.
We got ourselves into our present mess, and with enough effort and
time, we can set a new course.
Carl Jarvis, ever hopeful and forever smelling the roses.
On 8/9/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
While you are able to remain philosophical about this situation, I have to
tell you that I have been watching it develop step by step for months and
months through podcasts and articles and I am extremely upset. Of course I
know that the US has done this before, and Cuba is a prime example. But to
watch the mass media dishing out lie after lie and the Democrats supporting
all of it, while listening to the truth being reported from reporters on the
ground there like Max Blumenthal and many others, is a real nightmare. All
Amy did, was 2 interviews with one Venezuelan government official. She
managed to spend a whole program plus another complete segment, not part of
the program, on Toni Morrison, and that's OK. But she's ignoring the murder
of a country and its people. The US has stolen Venezuela's oil and its gold
reserves. It is blockading it so food will be almost impossible to get. The
people most impacted, are the poor and the working class, the people who
support Moduro. It's a plot to destroy the people and hand the country over
to the white elite, just like Puerto Rico which is such a horror, that I
can't even begin to talk about it. And then there's what's happening right
here. And all of those people whom ICE is hunting down, are here because of
what the US has been doing to their countries of origin for years. And the
average American might be mildly disturbed, but not horrified enough, to be
out in the streets, protesting. Do you remember that I said that I'm
reading a book about a journalist who was being investigated by the House
Unamerican Activities Committee because he was a member of the Communist
Party? There are all sorts of interesting historical tidbits in that book.
One of them is that the auto workers in Detroit were virulently
anti-communist. They wanted nothing to do with Communist labor organizers
and went on strike until one of them was fired from his job. All this
fantasy in which the political left indulges about how the working class
will welcome it with open arms. The white working class supported the
Vietnam war and a good percentage of it, apparently, supports Trump. Just
listen to the folks at his rallies.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, August 09, 2019 10:58 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Venezuela: Another US Coup Attempt - and Why
It Failed
In order to expand, every empire must use force.
Every empire must become more and more controlled by fewer and fewer elite.
Every empire must force its workers into supporting actions that run counter
to the needs of the workers, in order to support the wants of the elite.
Every empire reaches a point where it implodes through careless use of
resources and pure greed.
Every empire is so enthralled by its own image that it never sees its own
demise looming on the horizon.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/9/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Venezuela: Another US Coup Attempt – and Why It Failed By Keith
Brooks, Reader Supported News
08 August 19
“How come we’re not at war with Venezuela? They have all that oil.”
was in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 30th, the day of the failed coup.
There were eight of us, five from NYC, one Vermonter and one Canadian,
along with the leader of our group, a Venezuelan with whom I had
traveled to Venezuela once before, in 2012, when Hugo Chavez was still
alive. Chavez was elected to power in 1999 leading what is known as
the Bolivarian Revolution. Less than three years later, a 2002 U.S.-backed
coup failed to overthrow him.
I witnessed back then Chavez’s wide base of support, and the reasons
for
it:
a new constitution guaranteeing as human rights health, education,
housing and social welfare, and the laws and projects designed to make
those rights a reality. The results were impressive: one million new
low-cost housing units, a dramatic drop in the poverty rate, infant
mortality rate down from
19.1 per thousand in 1999 to 10 per thousand by 2012. Health Care was
made free for all Venezuelans, reflected by an increase in life
expectancy.
Working hours were reduced to 6 hours a day and 36 hours per week,
without loss of pay, while the minimum wage became the highest minimum
wage in Latin America. In December 2005, UNESCO said that Venezuela
had eradicated illiteracy. The malnutrition rate fell from 21% in 1998
to less than 3% in 2012.
The national management of the oil industry in 2003 put Venezuela in
control over its most valuable natural resource, and used it to fund
many of the social reform programs. Venezuela has the world’s largest
oil reserves, which the U.S. has coveted ever since and admittedly
seeks to control, as John Bolton made clear on Fox News: “It will make
a big difference to the United States economically if we could have
American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in
Venezuela.”
So the Chavez presidency marked a new day of empowerment for
Venezuela’s poor and working-class people, overwhelmingly people of
color. And there was always a sector of the population, mainly the
very wealthy mainly white upper class, who hated Chavez and his openly
socialist policies.
So I went again this April because I wanted to see for myself if it
was possible the impressions we are now given by the mainstream
corporate media were true – was Venezuela really on the verge of civil
war? Had the Venezuelan people turned against the Bolivarian
revolution and President Maduro, who was elected to office after
Chavez’s death in 2013 and re-elected in 2018? Did the U.S.-supported
opposition really have widespread mass support?
The April 30th Failed Coup
Back in January, a politician virtually unknown to Venezuelans named
Juan Guaidó, long mentored by U.S. regime-change specialists,
announced himself as the president of Venezuela after receiving a
phone call from U.S. Vice President Mike Pence. Guaidó, who was the
head of the National Assembly, an unelected post, vowed that President
Maduro would be gone by May Day. While blackouts of electricity rolled
across Venezuela, Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo threatened U.S.
military intervention if Maduro didn’t step down.
We were in Venezuela from April 26th to May 5th. On April 30th, the
morning of the failed coup, we knew something was up as we ate
breakfast in our hotel’s restaurant which had an open-air terrace. I
saw a woman banging on a pan standing on a balcony in the apartment
house next door to the hotel, yelling out to others to join her in
denouncing Maduro. No one else joined her. She went back in. We heard
what could have been firecrackers or gunfire. But when we looked out
onto the street, business seemed no different than any of the previous
three mornings we were there – people on their way to work, students
going to school, motorbikes and cars on the streets.
By the time we left in our van for a housing conference at the Hotel
ALBA celebrating the construction of two and a half million new
low-cost housing units, we learned that there was a coup attempt, yet
we had seen no sign of a military or police presence on the streets as
one might expect if there was a major threat to the government. If you
were in Caracas that day, outside the upper-class neighborhood where
the attempt was made, you would never have known there was a coup
attempt. During a lunch break in the conference, we were able to watch
TV coverage on the attempted coup from both CNN and TeleSUR, a
Venezuelan news outlet. Right in the lobby of the hotel our group
quickly wrote a statement denouncing the Trump administration’s
efforts to overthrow the government, and we were interviewed by
Venezuelan government television, which was featured in the news
throughout the day. Our statement said in part, “We are a group of U.S.
and Canadian citizens gathered to denounce the U.S. government’s
illegal and immoral actions against the people of Venezuela. We also
oppose the U.S.
sanctions which are not only illegal but are already causing immense
suffering, especially through the denial of much needed medicines and
adequate nutrition ...”
While we soon learned that the coup had failed, it was not until later
that we heard the incredibly farcical details of what had transpired.
Some might remember U.S Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claiming the
day before that Maduro was escaping to Cuba. In fact, Guaidó had been
led – actually duped – to believe that high-level military officials
were going to defect and join him outside the airport that morning,
along with large numbers of soldiers.
But almost all the soldiers who showed up – after being lied to that
they were going to receive promotions – quickly ran back to the base
when it was clear they had been tricked into appearing to defect!
Within a short time, the same Venezuelan defense minister that Guaidó
had expected to defect to his side went on national television
surrounded by his generals to say that the military was standing
strong with Maduro and that no coup had taken place.
An estimated 2,000 Guaidó supporters did gather on an overpass to
watch the highway below where 200 or so violent protesters were firing
on the military and throwing Molotov cocktails near the airbase – as
tens of thousands of Maduro supporters flocked to the presidential
palace to defend it. Guaidó then went into hiding, but not before
calling for the “mother of all marches” for the next day’s May Day
celebrations. His “mother of all marches” pulled out at best 3 to 4
thousand less than 1% of the estimated
400,000 our group marched with at the Maduro May Day rally, one of the
largest pro-government mobilizations since the days of Chavez.
It was quite striking even for a longtime activist like myself to
witness the blatant lies and propaganda that saturate our media. It
was like two different worlds as CNN, The New York Times, and
mainstream media reported that a coup was underway in Venezuela. The
NYT reported “a predawn takeover of a military base in the heart of
the capital”– and that Guaidó had made a video appeal for an uprising
from the “liberated” airbase – except they never got on the base. In
another outrageous example, there’s a film clip that has been aired of
two military vehicles running into opposition protesters. What’s not
shown is what happened next, as the vehicles were surrounded by
soldiers, with the occupants forced at gunpoint to get out and lie
down on the ground! The truth is that the vehicles were driven by
defecting soldiers who rammed into their own protesters to make it
look like it was the government violently suppressing dissent. The
drivers of the vehicle were arrested shortly after by the military as
the rest of the news video clearly showed.
“This is not the foolish country of yesteryear. This country has
awoken, and that’s one of the biggest changes that has taken place
here in these 13 years, a cultural change” – Hugo Chavez, 2012
So this trip did dispel for me any of the widespread notions spread
24/7 by the mainstream U.S. corporate media that Maduro and the
Bolivarian revolution have lost popular support and that Venezuela is
a country on the verge of a civil war. While the U.S. sanctions, along
with plummeting oil prices, have created serious challenges to Maduro,
popular support and enthusiasm for the Bolivarian revolution and the
elected government remains.
Has Venezuela become a dictatorship? Not if judged by the 2 or 3 major
newspapers I bought every day that were anti-Maduro (as were the daily
anti-Chavez papers I bought on my 2012 trip), nor by the rallies
called by the U.S. backed coupsters openly inciting violence and
calling for the overthrow of the government. There is, in fact, a
“loyal opposition” that ran against Maduro in the 2018 election, the
leader of which, Henri Falcon, received 32 % of the vote and was
actually threatened with sanctions by the U.S. for participating in
the election! And it deserves mention that I saw marchers at the
Maduro May Day rally evidently feeling comfortable enough to be
wearing Falcon t-shirts. Even Maria Machado, a well known staunch
Guaidó supporter, has stated that Maduro is not a dictator.
The American people have been propagandized to believe that Trump is
trying to overthrow Maduro out of humanitarian concern for an economic
crisis caused by Maduro’s incompetence in handling the collapse of oil
prices over the last five years and to “restore democracy,” a
laughable rationale in light of the history: the U.S. has been trying
to overthrow the Bolivarian revolution since the failed attempt
against Chavez in 2002, and then there is the long history of U.S.
coups and invasions of Latin America and around the world from the
1954 Guatemala coup, the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba,
U.S. invasions of the Dominican Republic in 1965, the overthrow of
Allende in 1973 in Chile, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, the removal
of Aristide in Haiti in 2004, the Honduras coup in 2009 and many
others. Any government that refuses to be under the thumb of the U.S.
is a target for overthrow.
While there is debate over how much Maduro’s economic policies have
played a role, it’s not the fall in oil prices that have put Venezuela
in crisis and threaten to destroy all the gains over the last 20 years
– it’s the sanctions where the U.S. uses its worldwide economic power
to prohibit countries from doing business with Venezuela. Along with
the U.S.-engineered electricity blackouts, and the failed coup
attempts, sanctions have frozen and even confiscated billions of
dollars of Venezuelan assets in banks around the world, blocked
payments for Venezuelan oil, and facilitated other outright instances
of what can only be called piracy. Sanctions are just as deadly as
bombs and bullets, a form of economic terrorism whose explicit
rationale is to escalate the suffering of the civilian population to
get them to turn against their government. A recent study estimated
40,000 deaths caused by blockading the shipment of medical supplies
like insulin, HIV medications, and other life-supporting supplies,
such as an emergency food program.
But all this has failed in the goal of driving the population into
blaming and overthrowing the Maduro government; instead, as Chavez put
it, this is an awakened country that largely understands the main role
the U.S. has played in fomenting a crisis. From what I saw, Trump has
actually united many of those opposed to and critical of Maduro to
join in opposition to U.S. sanctions and military intervention, as Falcon
and others have done.
While the threat of direct U.S. military intervention is ever-present,
our trip also brought home how it is too easy for liberals like Bernie
Sanders, AOC, and others to oppose military intervention and avoid
taking a stand against the sanctions. Among Democratic Party
candidates running for the presidency, only Tulsi Gabbard has opposed the
sanctions.
It is also essential to establish that one does not have to defend
Maduro to oppose this latest U.S. imperialist adventure and understand
that the U.S.
has ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT to sabotage the Venezuelan economy and impose
murderous sanctions to strangle the population into submission. This
didn’t start with Maduro, and it is just the latest in the long list
of U.S. coups and overthrows in Latin America and around the world.
So What Can We Do?
As we head toward the 2020 election, the issue of Trump’s policies
toward Venezuela – as well as Iran – should be front and center in the
debates, yet the Democratic party and the mainstream corporate media
seem to have a tacit agreement to say as little as possible on these
two imminent threats of more U.S. aggression. And a number of
Democrats and liberal media – Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer,
Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, The New York Times, The Washington
Post, Rachel Maddow, and PBS commentators – are among those leading
liberal figures actually in support of Trump’s right to impose regime
change on another people’s country.
It’s hard to see how this protracted siege of Venezuela will resolve
itself, but the Venezuelan people are far from a demoralized
population; rather they’ve been mobilized to resist with the formation
of a people’s militia of
2 million, training with the military and national guard. An
infrastructure of resistance has been created that would make it more
than difficult for any U.S.-installed neoliberal puppet regime to
rule. It could just turn into a people’s war, Trump’s Vietnam, for the
president who ran claiming he was going to end “all these foolish
wars.”
As U.S. citizens it is our responsibility to demand that our elected
officials stop the threat of war and end the sanctions on Venezuela.
We have a particular responsibility to oppose our government’s
actions. Write letters to the editor, sign petitions, call your
elected officials, take part in rallies and demonstrations, and
challenge in whatever ways you can the “official story” we’re fed by
the corporate mass media. And I urge anyone interested to go to
Venezuela and see for yourself what is going on.
William Camarada, the Venezuelan who led the two trips I was on, is
planning another highly affordable trip in August. For more
information, contact cbalbertolovera@xxxxxxxxx or
estebanbartlett@xxxxxxxxx or call 502 / 415-1080.
Email This Page
Keith Brooks is a longtime anti-war and labor/community activist, a
retired NYC alternative high school teacher, and a member of DSA and
Brooklyn For Peace.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
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