Seattle Press on Line - Bush Trips Over Democracy In Venezuela

Jim Hightower

Jim Hightower

Bush Trips Over Democracy In Venezuela

By Jim Hightower

May 09, 2002 -- There's an old saying in Chicago politics: Before you dance on someone's grave, be sure he's dead.

George W. and the global corporate empire builders in his administration forgot this basic rule when they exultantly tried to dance on the political grave of Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez. On April 11, a cabal of wealthy Venezuelan elites and the military staged a coup against Chavez, putting him in an island prison and installing the head of Venezuela's chamber of commerce as their hand-picked president.

Whatever you think of Chavez, he was the duly elected president, and it's considered bad manners and totally anti-democratic to impose an unelected oligarchy on the country. But the Bushites hate Chavez, who won't go along with their model of a world run by corporate power, so they had been meeting with the coup plotters and now cheered his demise. At first, they claimed that he had resigned because no one in Venezuela supported him any more. Neither was true -- indeed, an explosion of popular protest swept the country within hours of the coup.

Worse, the business elites who took over had delusions of grandeur -- they dissolved the congress, fired the supreme court and all state governors, and suspended the constitution, declaring that they would rule by popular decree. But they were not at all popular with the great majority of Venezuelans who live in grinding poverty. To its credit, the military decided to back the people in a counter-coup ... and Chavez was returned to the presidency only 48-hours after being deposed.

Meanwhile, Bush & Company were caught completely on the wrong side of democracy. While all Latin American countries had immediately condemned the coup, our nation did not join in the condemnation and publicly gloated about Chavez's ouster by the business oligarchy. Now, Chavez has more support than ever, and Bush looks like an arrogant bully.

This is Jim Hightower saying ... For George W., supporting democracy is strictly a matter of political convenience ... not of political commitment.

Jim Hightower's column appears courtesy of Alternet.

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Vincente Beazel	Jan 02, 2003	Tehachapi, CA	drilling rig hand
This was one of the clearest indicators of the hostility that our government has always shown towards the south; a battle that it won in the 1960's, has become a global conflict. With all the banks in the North, along with industries that threaten to flood the poor countries with polluted, diseased, genetically altered meat, dairy and produce, we seem to be hell-bent on forcing them to pay the interest on cold-war debt, and have sided, once again with the corporate interests, that seek to enslave the poor, and keep them from reclaiming, by democratic means, the revenues earned from their own production. We have imposed taxation and carpet-baggers on the Southern nations, as it has become our role, as the last empire, to collect the taxes, and send the rebels to prison, who refuse to pay. We have become the red coats, and George is the name of the new emperor. We have yet to justify the role of empire, and how the world is made safer for democracy by our attempting to crush the rebels, and force them to sign our treaties. Even our own courts have come to recognize that only those treaties with our hostile natives that were signed at the time that the constitution was ratified are in effect. We continue to march through the land, to the sea, and the corporate welfare, in the form of farm subsidies, is destroying any chance for a diplomatic solution with the South. We are at war with every democratic force that opposes us in Latin America and Asia and Africa, that questions our claims of "eminent domain", and the only nation that is not alarmed by all this "intervention" is our dis-united states. I lived in Venezuela twenty years ago, for a period of sixteen months, and heard people rail against the government for not doing more to help people, and rebuild the country. I, along with dozens of other nortenyos were being trained to teach the message of peace - the words of Jesus. A former missionary from El Salvador tried to explain what the companies were doing to the people, the land and the government, and we all thought that he was a communist, because he was denouncing capitalism. I learned for myself, after seeing natives rounded up like cattle, for trying to sell in the flea market, and raising the opposition of shop keepers who had to pay rent for their shops, against the street vendors, who were transporting from their homeland in Colombia, to support their families; after one of the mothers with small children had to search for her husband for three days, and was only released from jail, after a cousin from another city just happened to see the man in jail, and because he worked for the police, was able to secure the man's release - otherwise he would have just disappeared, like so many other natives, who ended up being forced into the military, with little compensation. I determined that if this could happen in a so-called democracy, then the people who came to power were being paid to maintain the status-quo. Over the years I learned that in almost every case, the power brokers in latin america were backed by foreign industry and our own government. During the cold war, those who lusted for power, would gain a reputation for being anti-communist and anti-drug. What we do not hear about is the deals that involve international trade, and shipping oil and gas in pipelines that extend across several countries. Our military has remained active in protecting the oil companies, and that has not changed since south-east asia. I am currently involved in helping to promote wind and solar power development as a way to free the western hemisphere from our dependence on oil - foreign or domestic. As for the drilling rigs, we will need them to drill for water, after our surface supply becomes so polluted, that we will have to drill deeper wells; wherever there is oil, there is water.