- Well almost, as explained below. Hugo Chavez Frias' reelection
on December 3 stands out when compared to the greatest landslide presidential
victories in US history. Except for the close race in 1812 and the electoral
deadlock in 1800 decided by the House of Representatives choosing Thomas
Jefferson over Aaron Burr, the very earliest elections here weren't hardly
partisan contests at all as the Democrat-Republican party of Jefferson
and Madison was dominant and had everything its own way. It was like that
through the election of 1820 when James Monroe ran virtually unopposed
winning over 80% of the vote. A consistent pattern of real competitive
elections only began with the one held in 1824, and from that time to the
present Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide victory beat them all.
-
- The nation's first president, George Washington, had
no party affiliation, ran unopposed twice, and got all the votes. His "elections"
were more like coronations, but Washington wisely chose to serve as an
elected leader and not as a monarch which Federalists like Alexander Hamilton,
John Adams and the nation's first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay
preferred and one aligned with the British monarchy. They also were nationalists
believing in a militarily strong central government with little regard
for the rights of the separate states.
-
- Most of them were dubious democrats as well who believed
for the nation to be stable it should be run by elitists (the way it is
today) separate from what Adams arrogantly called "the rabble."
And John Jay was very explicit about how he felt saying "The people
who own the country ought to run it." Today they do. Adams showed
his disdain for ordinary people (and his opposition) when as president
he signed into law the Patriot Acts (I and II) of his day - the Alien and
Sedition Acts of 1798 to protect the country from dangerous aliens (today's
"terrorists") and that criminalized any criticism of his administration
(the kind George Bush calls traitorous).
-
- Jefferson denounced both laws and called the Sedition
Act an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right of free
expression. It helped him and his Democrat-Republicans beat Adams in 1800
that led to the decline of the Federalists as a powerful opposition and
their demise as a political party after the war of 1812. It meant that
from 1800 - 1820, after Washington's two unopposed elections, presidential
contests were lopsided affairs (except for the two mentioned above), the
"loyal opposition" was hardly none at all, and the Democrat-Republicans
weren't challenged until the party split into factions and ran against
each other in 1824. Then Democrat party candidate Andrew Jackson beat National
Republican John Quincy Adams in 1828. It's only from that period forward
that any real comparison can be made between Hugo Chavez's impressive landslide
on December 3 and presidential contests in the US. And doing it shows one
thing. In all US landslide electoral victories from then till now, Chavez
outdid them all, but you won't ever hear that reported by the dominant
corporate-controlled media.
-
- Earlier, there might not have been a basis for comparison
had Washington chosen to be president for life as the Federalists preferred.
If he'd done it, he could have stayed on by acclamation and those holding
office after him might have done the same. Wisely, however, he decided
eights years was enough and stepped down at the end of his second term
in office setting the precedent of a two-term limit until Franklin Roosevelt
went against tradition running and winning the presidency four times.
-
- The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1951
settled the issue providing that: "No person shall be elected to the
office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the
office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of
a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected
to the office of the President more than once."
-
- The US Constitution specifies that the president and
vice-president be selected by electors chosen by the states. Article Two,
Section One says: "Each state shall appoint, in a Manner as the Legislature
thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of
Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the
Congress." The electors then meet in their respective states after
the popular vote to choose a president and vice-president.
-
- That's how it's been done since George Washington was
first elected president in 1789 with John Adams his vice-president. The
method of choosing state electors changed later on, but the US system choosing
presidents and vice-presidents by the Electoral College (a term unmentioned
in the Constitution) of all the state electors has remained to this day,
to the distress of many who justifiably believe it's long past time this
antiquated and undemocratic system be abolished even though it's unimaginable
a state's electors would vote against the majority popular vote in their
states - at least up to now. Until 2000, it was also unimaginable that
five members of the US Supreme Court would annul the popular vote in a
presidential election to choose the candidate they preferred even though
he was the loser - but they did, and the rest is history.
-
- Hugo Chavez Frias' Electoral Victory Majority Greater
Than For Any US President - Since 1820
-
- Amazing but true. On December 3, 2006, the people of
Venezuela voted in what hundreds of independent observers from around the
world, including from the Carter Center in the US, called a free, fair,
open and extremely smooth and well-run electoral process. They chose the
only man they'll entrust with the job as long as he wants it reelecting
Hugo Chavez with a majority 62.87% of the vote with the highest voter turnout
in the country's history at almost 75% of the electorate. No US president
since 1820, when elections here consistently became real contests, ever
matched it or has any US election ever embraced all the democratic standards
all Venezuelans now enjoy since Hugo Chavez came to office.
-
- The Venezuelan Bolivarian Constitution Hugo Chavez gave
his people states: "All persons have the right to be registered free
of charge with the Civil Registry Office after birth, and to obtain public
documents constituting evidence of the biological identity, in accordance
with law." To see this happened Chavez established an initiative called
Mision Itentidad (Mission Identity) that's now a mass citizenship and voter
registration drive. It's given millions of Venezuelans full rights of citizenship
including the right to vote for the first time ever.
-
- As glorious and grand a democratic experiment as the
US Constitution was and is, it had and still has lots of flaws including
who's empowered to vote and what authority has the right to decide. It's
the reason through the years many amendments and laws were needed and enacted
to establish mandates for enfranchisement, but even today precise voting
rights qualifications are left for the states to decide, and many take
advantage to strike from their voter rolls categories of people they decide
are unfit or that they unjustly wish to exclude from the most important
of all rights in a democracy no citizen should have taken away.
-
- It shouldn't be this way as millions in the US have lost
the right to vote for a variety of reasons including for being a convicted
felon or ex-felon in a country with the highest prison population in the
world (greater than China's with four times the population). It exceeds
2.2 million, increases by about 1000 each week, one in every 32 adults
in the country is either imprisoned, on parole or on probation, half the
prison population is black, half are there for non-violent crimes, half
of those are for mostly minor drug-related offenses, and most of those
behind bars shouldn't be there at all if we had a criminal justice system
with equity and justice for all including many wrongfully convicted because
they couldn't afford or get competent counsel to defend them.
-
- Virtually all citizens in Venezuela have the right to
vote under one national standard and are encouraged to do so under a model
democratic system that's gotten the vast majority of them to actively participate.
In contrast, in the US, elections are especially fraud-laden today, but
in the past many categories of voters were unjustly denied the franchise
including blacks until the 1865 13th amendment to the Constitution freed
them from slavery, the 1870 15th amendment gave them the right to vote,
but it still took until the passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights
Acts in the mid-1960s abolishing the Jim Crow laws in the South before
blacks could exercise that right like others in the country could. Earlier,
it wasn't until the 19th amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920,
before women got the right to vote they'd been fighting for over 70 years
to get.
-
- Back at the republic's birth, only adult white male property-owners
could vote. It took until 1810 to eliminate the last religious prerequisite
to voting and until 1850 before property ownership and tax requirements
were dropped allowing all adult white males the franchise. It wasn't until
1913 and the passage of the 17th amendment that citizen voters could elect
senators who up to then were elected by state legislatures. Native Americans,
whose land this was for thousands of years before the settlers arrived
and took it from them, couldn't vote until the 1924 Indian Citizenship
Act granted all Native peoples the rights of citizenship, including the
right to vote in federal elections. It didn't matter that this was their
country, and it's they who should have had to right to decide what rights
the white settler population had instead of the reverse.
-
- In 1924, the 24th amendment outlawed discrminatory poll
taxes in federal elections, and in 1966 the Supreme Court in Harper v.
Virginia Board of Elections ended poll tax requirements in all elections
for the four remaining southern states still using them including George
Bush's home state of Texas. In 1971, the 26th amendment set the minimum
voting age at 18, and in 1972 the Supreme Court in Dunn v. Blumstein ruled
residency requirements for voting in state and local elections were unconstitutional
and suggested 30 days was a fair period.
-
- This history shows how unfair laws were and still are
in force in a country calling itself a model democracy. The most fundamental
right of all, underpinning all others in a democratic state, is the right
of every citizen to exercise his or her will at the polls freely and fairly
without obstructive laws or any interference from any source in the electoral
process.
-
- That freedom has been severely compromised today in the
US, and unless that changes, there's no possibility of a free, fair and
open democratic process here for all citizens. That happening is now almost
impossible with more than 80% of the vote now cast and counted on easily
manipulated electronic voting machines with no verifiable paper trail.
The process is secretive and unreliable, privatized in the hands of large
corporations with everything to gain if candidates they support win, and
based on what's now known, that's exactly what's been happening as seen
in the 2000 and 2004 fraud-laden elections.
-
- The Six Greatest Landslide US Presidential Elections
Since Contests Began After 1820
-
- Six US presidential elections stand out especially for
the landslide victories they gave the winners. Hugo Chavez's December 3,
2006 reelection topped them all.
-
- 1. In 1920, the first time women could vote in a federal
election, Republican Warren Harding got 60.3% of the vote to beat Democrat
James Cox getting 34.1%. This election was particularly noteworthy as Socialist
Eugene Debs ran for the high office from prison getting over 900,000 votes.
He was sentenced and was serving 10 years by the Wilson administration
for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 that along with the Sedition Act
of 1918 were the Patriot Acts of their day like the earlier Alien and Sedition
Acts were under John Adams. Debs was found guilty of exercising his constitutional
right of free expression after making an anti-WW I speech in Canton, Ohio.
He served about 2.5 years before Harding commuted the sentence on Christmas
day, 1921.
-
- Harding capitalized on the unpopularity of Woodrow Wilson
who took the country to the war he promised to keep us out of. The economy
was also in recession, the country and Congress were mainly isolationist,
and the main order of business was business and the need to get on with
it and make it healthy again. It turned out to be the start of the "roaring
twenties" that like the 1990s "roared" mainly for the privileged.
It also was a time of scandal and corruption best remembered by the Teapot
Dome affair of 1922 that involved Harding's Interior Secretary Albert Fall's
leasing oil reserve rights on public land in Wyoming and California without
competitive bidding (like the routine use of no-bid contracts today to
favored corporations) and getting large illegal gifts from the companies
in return that resulted in the crime committed.
-
- Harding was dead (in 1923) and Coolidge was in the White
House before everything came to a head with Fall eventually found guilty,
fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison making him the first ever
presidential cabinet member to serve prison time for offenses while in
office.
-
- 2. In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover defeated Democrat
and first ever Catholic to run for the presidency Al Smith with 58.2% v.
40.8% for Smith. It wasn't a good year to be a Democrat, especially a Catholic
one at that time. The 1920s were "roaring," including the stock
market (again only for the privileged), and Republicans were tough to beat
as long as, at the macro level, the economy was strong. Coolidge was president
but declined a second term (fortunate for him as it turned out) and Commerce
Secretary and capable bureaucrat Hoover got the nomination winning big.
As things turned out, fate dealt him a bad hand as the stock market crashed
less than a year into his term, but bad administration and Federal Reserve
policy turned what only should have been a stiff recession for a year or
two into the Great Depression. It swept Republicans from office and ushered
in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who won impressively in 1932, not
one of our big six, but was reelected in 1936 and included in our select
group with the second greatest landslide victory ever on our list. Number
one is after the FDR years.
-
- 3. The Great Depression 1930s weren't good years to be
Republicans, and in 1936, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was reelected overwhelmingly
with 60.8% of the vote to 36.5% for Republican Alf Landon who had no chance
to convince the electorate the New Deal was corrupt and wasteful when it
was helping a lot of desperate people. Roosevelt asked for and got a mandate
from the public to continue his progressive agenda that included the landmark
Social Security Act (now in jeopardy in the age of George Bush) and other
important measures that included establishing the FDIC, insuring bank deposits,
the SEC, regulating the stock exchanges, and the NLRB with the passage
of the Wagner Act that was the high water mark for labor rights. It guaranteed
labor had the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management,
something that began eroding badly with the passage of the Taft-Hartley
Act of 1947 over Harry Truman's veto that began reversing the hard-won
rights gained that now have nearly vanished entirely in a nation dominated
by corporate giants and both Democrat and Republican parties supporting
them including their union-busting practices.
-
- 4. In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the greatest
landslide presidential victory on our list, unsurpassed to this day. He
got 61.1% of the vote to 38.5% for Republican Barry Goldwater who was portrayed
as a dangerous extremist in a still-remembered TV "Daisy Girl"
campaign ad featuring a little girl picking petals from a daisy in a field,
counting them and then segueing to a countdown and nuclear explosion. Ironically,
the ad only ran once in September that year on NBC, but it stirred such
a controversy all the broadcasters ran it as a news story giving it far
greater prominence than it otherwise would have gotten.
-
- From the Great Depression through the 1960s, Republicans
had a hard enough time competing with Democrats (Dwight Eisenhower being
the exception because of his stature as a war hero and the unpopular Korean
war under Harry Truman), and Goldwater made it worse by being a conservative
before his time and a hawkish one advocating the use of tactical nuclear
weapons in Vietnam at a time the war was still in its early stages but
would be an act of lunacy any time.
-
- 5. In 1972, most people would be surprised to learn (except
those around to remember it) Republican Richard Nixon trounced Democrat
George McGovern getting 60% of the vote to McGovern's 38%. The main issue
was the Vietnam war (that drove Lyndon Johnson from office in 1968), and
Nixon managed to convince the public he had a plan to end it and peace
was at hand. McGovern was strongly anti-war, but had to replace his running
mate Thomas Eagleton after it was learned he hadn't revealed he'd undergone
electroshock therapy for depression.
-
- It proved a decisive factor in McGovern's defeat, but
oddly as things turned out, Nixon was popular enough at that time to sweep
to a landslide win only to come a cropper in the Watergate scandal that
began almost innocently in June, 1972, months before the election, but
spiralled out of control in its aftermath along with growing anger about
the war. It drove Richard Nixon from office in disgrace in August, 1974
and gave the office lawfully under the 25th amendment to Gerald Ford. It
made him the nation's only unelected president up to the time five Supreme
Court justices gave the office to George Bush violating the law of the
land they showed contempt for.
-
- 6. In 1984, Republican Ronald Reagan won a decisive victory
getting 58.8% of the vote to Democrat Walter Mondale's 40.6%. The "Reagan
revolution" was in full swing, and the president was affable enough
to convince a majority of the electorate his administration's large increases
in military spending, big budget deficits run up to pay for it, tax cuts
mainly for the rich, slashed social spending and opposition to labor rights
were good for the country. Mondale was no match for him and was unfairly
seen as a candidate supporting the poor and disadvantaged at the expense
of the middle class.
-
- In 1980s America, Hugo Chavez might not have stood a
chance against the likes of Ronald Reagan even though Chavez's Bolivarian
Revolution serves all the people while Reagan's ignored and harmed those
most in need including the middle class, mostly helping instead those in
the country needing no help - the rich and powerful, at the beginning of
the nation's second Gilded Age, serving an empowered plutocracy that reached
full fruition with the dominance of the privileged class under George W.
Bush.
-
- One Other Landslide Win for Chavez Unreported
-
- Time Magazine just voted this writer and all others communicating
online their "Person of the Year." In their cover story they
asked who are we, what are we doing, and who has the time and energy for
this? Their answer: "you do. And for seizing the reins of the global
media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working
for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the
Year for 2006 is you." Strange how underwhelming it feels at least
for two reasons, but it must be stressed we beat the pros before they're
even out of bed in the morning doing one thing they almost never do - telling
the truth communicating real news, information and honest opinion on the
most important world and national issues affecting everyone and refusing
to genuflect to the country's power establishment.
-
- While Time was honoring the free use of the internet,
its importance, and the millions of ordinary people using it, it's parent
company Time-Warner has for months been part of the corporate cabal trying
to high-pressure the Congress to end internet neutrality and destroy the
freedom the magazine praised so effusively in their disingenuous annual
award just announced. If the cable and telecom giants win their lobbying
effort, the public Time calls "YOU" loses. They want to be self-regulating,
to be able to charge whatever they wish, to choose wealthier customers
and ignore lesser ones, to have a monopoly on high-speed cable internet
so they can take over our private space and control it including, at their
discretion, the content on it excluding whatever portions of it they don't
want in their privatized space. They want to take what's now free and open
and exploit it for profit, effectively destroying the internet as we now
know it.
-
- Time also failed to report they held an online poll for
"Person of the Year" and then ignored the results when they turned
out not to their editors' liking. "Time's Person of the Year is the
person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or
for ill, and embodied what was important about the year." It turned
out Hugo Chavez won their poll by a landslide at 35%. Second was Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at 21%. Then came Nancy Pelosi at 12%, The
YouTube Guys 11%, George Bush 8%, Al Gore 8%, Condoleezza Rice 5% and Kim
Jong Il 2%. For some reason, the magazine's December 25 cover story omitted
these results so their readers never learned who won their honor and rightfully
should have been named Time's Person of the Year. An oversight, likely,
in the holiday rush, so it's only fitting the winner be announced here
- in the online space the magazine rates so highly:
-
- Venezuelan President Hugo is Time Magazine's 2006 Person
of the Year.
-
- Venezuela under Hugo Chavez v. the US Under Republican
or DLC Democrats Little Different From Republicans
-
- The age of social enlightenment in the US, such as it
was, lasted from the election of Franklin Roosevelt through the years of
Lyndon Johnson and began heading south thereafter in the 1970s and ending
with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. For the past generation, the
US has been run for the interests of capital while the standard of living
of ordinary working people, including the middle class fast eroding, had
an unprecedented decline.
-
- It shows in how wide the income disparity is between
those at the economic top and ordinary wage earners. When Reagan was elected
in 1980, average corporate CEO earnings were 42 times the average working
person. The spread widened to 85 times in 1990 and skyrocketed to 431 times
in 2004 as average top executive pay rose to about $14 million a year after
the election of George Bush plus enormous benefits adding to that total,
including huge ones at retirement, compared to working Americans who now
earn less, adjusted for inflation, than they did 30 years ago.
-
- This disparity is highlighted in tax data released by
the IRS showing overall income in the country rose 27% adjusted for inflation
from 1979 to 2004, but it all went to the top. The bottom 60% of Americans
(earning less than $38,761 in 2004) made less than 95% of what they did
in 1979. The 20% above them earned 2% more in 2004 than in 1979, inflation
adjusted, and only the top 5% had significant gains earning 53% more in
2004 than in 1979. The largest gains of all went to the top 1% as expected
- one-third of the entire increase in national income that translates to
about 350% more in inflation adjusted dollars in 2004 than in 1979.
-
- It all means since Ronald Reagan entered office, his
administration and those that followed him, including Democrat Bill Clinton's,
engineered a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary working people to
the top income earners in the country while, at the same time, slashing
social benefits making it much harder for most people to pay for essential
services at much higher prices with the lower inflation-adjusted levels
of income they now receive.
-
- Especially hard hit are the 20% of workers on the bottom
earning poverty-level wages - below $11,166 a year. The IRS definition
of a taxpayer is either an individual or married couple meaning the 26
million poorest taxpayers are the equivalent of about 48 million adults
plus 12 million dependent children totaling around 60 million Americans
in the richest country in the world with incomes of about $7 a day (per
capita) in a state of extreme destitution with the official poverty line
in 2004 being $27 a day for a single adult below retirement age and $42
a day for a household with one child. The data excludes all public assistance
like food stamps, medicaid benefits and earned-income tax credits, but
since the Clinton administration's "welfare reform" Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA)
ended welfare payments after five years, that loss is much greater for
the needy than the benefits remaining also being reduced.
-
- It's hardly a testimony to the notion of "free market"
capitalism under the Reagan revolution, the first Bush presidency following
it, and eight years under Bill Clinton governing by Democratic Leadership
Council (DLC) "centrist" principles eschewing the enlightened
progressive party tradition, selling out instead, like Republicans, to
the interests of wealth and power at the expense of ordinary people left
far behind.
-
- It all seemed like a warm-up leading to the election
of George W. Bush in 2000 characterized by outrageous levels of handouts
to the rich in the form of huge tax cuts for top earners and giant corporations;
larger than ever corporate subsidies (aka socialism for big corporations)
at taxpayer expense; and endless wars and all the bounty from them to well-connected
corporate allies, some literally getting a license to steal, that never
had it so good but getting it at the public's expense this president shows
contempt for and is forced to follow the rules of law-of-the-jungle "free
market" capitalism.
-
- Today, under Republican or Democrat rule, the country
is run by and for a rich aristocracy, in a rigidly structured class society
promoting inequality and destroying the founding principles of the nation's
Framers. In the last generation, the great majority of ordinary working
people have been abandoned and are sinking lower in their losing efforts
to make ends meet and survive in a heartless society caring only about
the interests of capital. This writer will explore this issue more fully
in a year-end review and outlook article due out shortly.
-
- A Different Enlightened Way in Venezuela Under Hugo Chavez
-
- Things are much different in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez
that showed up in the overwhelming electoral endorsement he got from his
people on December 3. Until he was first elected in December, 1998 taking
office in February, 1999, the country was run by and for rich oligarchs,
in league with their counterpart dominant interests in Washington and corporate
America. They ignored the needs of ordinary people that left most of them
in a state of desperate poverty. Hugo Chavez pledged to his people he'd
ameliorate their condition and did it successfully for the past eight years,
to the great consternation of the country's aristocracy who want the nation's
wealth for themselves and their US allies.
-
- Following the crippling US and Venezuelan ruling class-instigated
2002 - 03 oil strike and destabilizing effects of their short-lived coup
deposing him for two days in April, 2002, Hugo Chavez's enlightened Bolivarian
economic and social programs cut the level of poverty nearly in half from
around 62% to where it is today at about one-third of the population, a
dramatic improvement unmatched anywhere in Latin America or likely anywhere
in the world. Along with that improvement are the essential social benefits
now made available to everyone in the country by law, discussed below.
-
- The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
was created democratically by popular referendum and adopted in December,
1999. It established a model humanistic social democracy providing checks
and balances in the nation's five branches of government instead of the
usual three in countries like the US where currently all branches operate
unchecked in lockstep under the Bush administration and will change little
when the DLC Democrat-controlled 110th Congress convenes in January.
-
- In Venezuela, in addition to the executive, legislative
and judicial branches, the country also has independent electoral and prosecutorial
ones. Chavez controls the executive branch, and his supporters control
the four others because they democratically won a ruling majority in the
legislature. They in the National Assembly have the authority to make appointments
to the other three branches independent of the executive while Hugo Chavez
has no authority to appoint to or remove members from the other four branches
or have any power to dictate what they do. Today in the US, George Bush
has a virtual stranglehold over all three government branches that mostly
rubber stamp his agenda without opposition including the most outrageous
and controversial domestic and foreign policy parts of it.
-
-
- In Venezuela, the Constitution also stipulates that all
the people are assured political, economic and social justice under a system
of participatory democracy guaranteeing everyone a legal right to essential
social services and the right to participate in how the country is run.
The services include free high quality health and dental care as a "fundamental
social right and....responsibility....of the state," housing assistance,
improved pensions, food assistance for the needy, job training to provide
skills for future employment, free education to the highest level that
eliminated illiteracy and much more including the full rights of citizenship
for everyone including the right to vote in free, fair and open democratic
elections, now a model for the world and make a sham of the fraud-laden
ones in the US.
-
- While the ruling authority in Washington systematically
destroyed democracy and deprived people most in need of essential social
services, Hugo Chavez built a model democracy growing stronger by enhancing
already established socially enlightened policies further using the nation's
oil revenue to do it. Much in the country is happening from below, and
it's planned that way by the government in Caracas. Community organizing
in councils has been promoted that includes all sorts of committees around
the country involved in urban land development and improvement, health,
the creation of over 100,000 cooperatives outside of state or private control,
and the revitalization of hundreds of bankrupt businesses and factories
put under worker control.
-
- In addition, Hugo Chavez aggressively pursued a policy
of putting underutilized land to use by redistributing more than two million
hectares of it to over 130,000 families in a country with the richest 5%
of landowners controlling 75% of the land, the great majority of rural
Venezuelans having little or none of it, and Chavez wanting to change that
imbalance and do it fairly. He also established over 5,000 Urban Land Committees
representing almost 20% of the population (CTUs). The law governing them
stipulates Venezuelans who live in homes they built on occupied land may
petition the government for title to it to be able legally to own the land
they live on. This is in addition to the government's goal to build thousands
of new and free public housing units for the poor without homes.
-
- These are the kinds of things going on in Venezuela in
that country's first ever age of enlightenment, but it's only a beginning.
Chavez wants to expand existing programs and advance his Bolivarian Project
to the next level implementing his vision of a social democracy in the
21st century. His landslide electoral victory now gives him a mandate to
do it, and during the pre-election campaign in September announced he wanted
to move ahead in 2007 with the formation of a single united political party
of the Bolivarian Revolution to further "consolidate and strengthen"
the Bolivarian spirit.
-
- Post-election in mid-December, Chavez addressed his followers
and party members at a celebratory gathering at the Teresa Carrena theater
repeating his September announcement calling for the establishment of a
"unique (or unity) party" to replace his Movement for the Fifth
Republic Party (MVR) that brought him to power in 1998, has been his party
until now and will end in January. Chavez surprisingly announced the MVR
is history and will be replaced by a United Socialist Party of Venezuela
(PSUV) hoping to include the MVR and all its coalition partners that wish
to join. He wants it to be a peoples' party rooted in the country's communities
created to win the Battle of Ideas that will move Venezuela ahead to become
a fully developed social or socialist democracy for all the people.
-
- Chavez has enormous grassroots support for his vision
but faces daunting obstacles as well, not the least of which is a hostile
administration in Washington committed to derailing his efforts and removing
him from office by whatever means it chooses to use next in another attempt
sure to come at some point.
-
- He'll also likely get little help from the Democrat 110th
Congress arriving in January with the likes of newly empowered House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, a member of the US aristocracy, shamelessly calling Chavez
an "everyday thug" and the US corporate-controlled media spewing
the party line by relentlessly attacking him with tirades of venomous agitprop
at times strong enough to make some old-line Soviet era aparachiks blush
calling him an autocrat, a dictator, another Hitler and the greatest threat
to US interests in the region in decades. It's the same kind of demonizing
Chavez undergoes at home by the dominant corporate media that includes
the country's two largest dailies, El Universal and El National, and the
three main TV networks - Venevision (owned by arch-Chavez enemy and 2002
coup plotter billionaire Gustavo Cisneros), Radio Caracas Television and
Globovision.
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- The only charge against Chavez that's credible, for quite
another reason, is that he's indeed the greatest of all threats the US
and Venezuelan oligarchs face - a good example spreading slowly through
the region inspiring people throughout Latin America to want the same kinds
of social benefits and democratic rights Venezuelans now enjoy. The powerful
interests of capital in Washington, Venezuela and throughout the region
are determined to stop him, but the momentum in Latin America is with Chavez
if it can advance it. He has the power of the people behind him and a growing
alliance of populist or moderate leaders emerging in Bolivia, Argentina,
Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Chile and for almost half a century
in Cuba either wanting an end to savage capitalism, Washington-style, or
a significant softening of it, along with the old-style military-backed
entrenched elitism that denied long-oppressed people all the rights they
now enjoy or are beginning to demand.
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- The people in the region yearning for freedom and demanding
governments address their rights and needs are in solidarity with him,
a modern-day Bolivar, a hero and symbol of hope that they, too, may one
day get the equity and justice they deserve like the people of Venezuela
have, if they can keep it, and help Hugo Chavez fulfill his vision to take
it to the next level.
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- Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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