THOMAS PAINE’S CORNER |•

By Jason Miller

6/10/07

Each day untold millions of US Americans unwittingly immerse themselves in an intellectual, social, cultural, economic, political and spiritual cesspool so rancid and toxic that even microbes with the most voracious appetites for human waste, vomit, and inanimate flesh would shun this infinitely repulsive sewer.

Many highly qualified and intelligent researchers, analysts, and authors have written books, essays, and reports documenting the astounding multitude and variety of crimes committed by the United States throughout its history. Since a nation is an entity comprised of numerous elements and dynamics, we can’t simply blame the government, the Republicans, the Religious Right, the Democrats, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or any one particular component. Therefore, nearly all US Americans bear a degree of responsibility. Obviously, some (i.e. Bush and Cheney) are far more culpable than others because they wield such tremendous power and act with a conscienceless, cynical awareness of the suffering they are inflicting on the Earth and its sentient inhabitants.

Since only about 4% of the population shares Bush’s sociopathic inability to experience empathy or guilt, what is this powerful siren call that motivates so many inherently decent human beings to repeatedly lacerate their souls upon the jagged rocks of complicity in acts that inflict unnecessary suffering upon billions of humans and animals?

How did we become a statistical aberration to the extent that we are a nation of resource-rich, technologically-advanced, mean-spirited, intellectually-stunted moral barbarians where a significant percentage of the population behaves as sociopaths by directly supporting or apathetically ignoring the evils in which they are complicit?

Is it something in our water? Are we genetic misfits? Does our population represent the vanguard of the next step in humanity’s moral “evolution”?

Sarcasm aside, the underlying cause of our depravity is our false, skewed and fractured consciousness which our malignant system begins hammering into our minds as we draw our first breath. This relentless psychological assault persists until we take our final gasp of air.

Nearly unshakeable illusions and delusions enable a relative handful of ruthless corporations and plutocrats to manipulate nearly 300 million people into helping them pursue their objective of world domination and exploitation, as out-lined in the Project for the New American Century.

Let’s deconstruct but a few examples of the nearly innumerable strands in the tangled web of pernicious lies comprising our false consciousness:

The Founding Fathers were noble, saint-like champions of the “common” people who forged a nation affording freedom and equality for all.

Our founders were mostly aristocrats who formed a constitutional republic of, by and for land-owning white males. Native Americans, the poor, and women were excluded. Chattel slavery was recognized as a legal enterprise. Many of our revered founders advocated and facilitated the Native American Genocide in the interest of expanding our borders.

Greed and selfishness are virtues.

Capitalism, which has evolved into its utterly reprehensible advanced stages here in the United States, is intellectually buttressed by the ridiculous notion that people acting on two of the most despicable traits of humanity, greed and selfishness, will enhance the commonweal. The current state of affairs in the United States demonstrates otherwise. Despite the slight doses of socialism which have mitigated the abject suffering inflicted by relatively unfettered capitalism during the Gilded Age, and despite the fact that we are the wealthiest nation in the history of humanity, there are still over a million homeless human beings, millions experience hunger and food insecurity, nearly fifty million lack a viable means to obtain our outrageously expensive medical care, our leading indicators of health are amongst the lowest of industrialized nations, urban public school systems are in a state of crisis and decay, and, as Katrina so clearly indicated, we are content to spend most of our hard-earned tax dollars on industrialized murder, blame victims, and leave the suffering to die, even here at home.

America is the land of opportunity.

Are many of us better off than most of the people on the planet? In a material sense, yes. However, bear in mind that the principal reasons many US Americans enjoy a degree of prosperity is that we stole a large chunk of a resource-rich continent (which is geographically situated in a way that makes a mass invasion nearly impossible), and that we built much of our prosperous economy on the backs of black slaves. Rapacious capitalism has enabled us to economically colonize and exploit many nations in the developing world, which explains the utterly nauseating gluttony we exhibit by representing 5% of the world’s population and consuming 25% of its resources. Oink, oink!

Is there economic upward mobility in our society? Yes. Yet rags to riches stories are extremely rare. Aristocratic dynasties are alive and well in the United States. One need look no further than George W. Bush or Paris Hilton to recognize that we are far from being the meritocracy that media shills like Oprah would have us believe. Beloved Oprah is ostensibly a benign and benevolent self-made billionaire emblematic of the “boundless opportunities” in the US. Certainly there is merit to her philanthropy. However, she erases her positive contributions many times over by promoting the notion that if a black woman like her can make it, anyone can. (And by the way, you who haven’t “made it” like Oprah, what the hell is wrong with you?) Her glowing endorsement of The Secret and its wholesale promotion of employing “magical thinking” to attain the “American Dream” was beyond the pale.

America saved the world from fascism during World War II

Let’s set the record straight here. A number of large US corporations and dynastic plutocrats, including Bush 43’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, made significant financial contributions to the Nazi cause before the Trading with the Enemy Act became law in 1942. We also need to remember that the United States refused to lift a finger to help the poor and working class in Spain as they fought to preserve their democratically-elected government from the fascist onslaught of Franco, the Church, and the moneyed elite.

We lost about 500,000 people battling fascist imperialist forces in World War II. Russia sacrificed 20 million human beings. Were it not for Russia, we would probably be speaking German right now.

Besides, the United States is now in the prefigurements of fascism. We are becoming the very threat from which we allegedly saved the world.

America needs to maintain its leviathan military industrial complex to ensure its security and to spread freedom and democracy

The United States spends more money on “defense” each year than the rest of the world combined. With the vast arsenal of weaponry we possess, it is beyond farcical to suggest that our security is seriously threatened at the existential level.

We maintain military bases in 130 countries. We invaded Iraq and Afghanistan preemptively (which is a war crime for which we hanged Nazis). Yet we tenaciously strive to perpetuate the inane assertion that we are not an empire. Capitalism demands perpetual growth, meaning capitalist nations inevitably engage in imperialism to expand their markets, enhance their profits, and find cheaper wage slaves. We utilize the legions of the empire to spread the misery of “free markets,” consumerism, exploitation, and environmental rape.

America is a Christian nation.

While many argue endlessly over the separation of church and state, or whether or not the United States was founded as a Christian nation, an equally profound question receives far too little attention.

What is the nature of the Christianity that our nation, in which a large number of denizens label themselves as Christians, collectively manifests?

Our rigid Puritanical roots still maintain a tenacious grip on our psyches. This impedes our capacity to overtly experience life’s carnal, sensual pleasures without experiencing guilt at violating taboos. Denying ourselves reasonable indulgence triggers the bacchanalian excesses that lead to rampant addiction to pornography, drugs, and alcohol.

The isolation, rage, and spiritual emptiness engendered by our consumerist, narcissistic, and violence-obsessed culture catalyze events like the ones at Columbine and Virginia Tech. With lamentations and hand-wringing, the mainstream media repeatedly expresses its utter astonishment when people snap to such an extent. After all, human beings living in a spiritually vacuous, hyper competitive environment have an infinite capacity to absorb insults, loneliness, rejection, exclusion, bullying, and hatred without reacting violently, don’t they?

One of the basic principles Christ espoused was to practice the Golden Rule. Whoops. Slaughtering millions of human beings throughout our history leaves us well short of the mark on that one.

Perhaps the most inspiring spiritual wisdom the Jewish carpenter conveyed to humanity came in the form of the Beatitudes. How do we manifest them in the United States?

The poor in spirit are considered to be impotent and irrelevant in a culture that thrives on egoism and self-promotion.

Those who mourn over moral injuries and tragedies are instructed to “get over it,” take some pills to mask the pain, and “move on”.

The meek are crushed by aggressive, acquisitive mobs.

Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness find that their efforts to satisfy, slake or quench are in vain as they wander a seemingly endless spiritual wasteland.

The merciful are considered weak and fall prey to those who abuse their compassion for their own personal gain.

The pure in heart are exploited as a reward for their decency.

The peacemakers are ridiculed as idealists, cowards, and collaborators with the latest enemy our plutocracy has created to justify its endless wars.

Despite the brutal nature and seemingly insurmountable power of this juggernaut of a nation, there is still hope for humanity and the world. While the opulent class, military careerists, fundamentalist Christian leadership, corporatists, AIPAC, “elected” officials, and the prostitutes in the corporate-dominated media propagate a sociopathic agenda through maintaining the simulacrum of the United States as the “leader of the free world,” there is abundant evidence of an increasing awareness of their perfidy and malevolence. Simmering beneath the surface for years, moral outrage now threatens to reach full boil thanks to the increased awareness facilitated by the Internet.

The people of the United States are not freaks or anomalies. 96% of us have a conscience and can act empathetically. It is simply a matter of time, and perhaps a few more doses of pain, before reality obliterates what is left of the fiction we have been inculcated to embrace as the United States of America.

Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. You can reach him at JMiller@bestcyrano.com

Photo: Mary O’Grady Wins Bastiat Prize for Journalism

By Stephen Lendman

6/9/07

She’s at it again on the Journal’s editorial page in her June 4 article called “The Young and the Restless,” subtitled “Is this the beginning of the end for Hugo Chavez?” The writer is self-styled Latin American expert Mary Anastasia O’Grady always getting top grades in vilification and disinformation but failing ones on regional knowledge and legitimate journalism.

This time she may have overstepped. Her article reeks with disinformation, outright lies, and most disturbing of all - incendiary commentary straddling the tipping edge of inciting insurrection. She can get away with it because she represents elitist interests and the Journal’s editorial view supporting the Bush administration’s fixation on ousting Hugo Chavez by any means, including through violence. It doesn’t matter that Chavez was just reelected again in December by a near two to one margin or that he’s admired and loved by the great majority of Venezuelans. They’re unperturbed and/or supportive of his shuttering RCTV’s VHF Channel 2 overshadowing that issue being used as a pretext for suspicious violent street protests, mainly in Caracas. More on that below.

It’s clear O’Grady will fit right in if the Journal’s controlling Bancroft family succumbs to greed selling out to Rupert Murdock’s wooing. That prospect’s got Journal employees apoplectic. They’re scrambling through their union seeking an alternate buyer willing to grant what Murdock never will - journalistic independence and what’s left of the paper’s tattered integrity. Those ideas are anathema to how he views journalism, and he’s not shy saying it.

Australian-raised author Bruce Page wrote about him in his new book, “The Murdock Archipelago,” calling him “one of the world’s leading villains (and) global pirates.” Murdock is clear, according to Page. He wants his journalistic empire to be a privatized “state propaganda service, manipulated without scruple and with no regard for truth (in return for) vast government favors such as tax breaks, regulatory relief, and monopoly” market control free as possible from competitors having too much of what Murdock wants for himself. The problem is he usually gets his way. Unless Journal employees stop him, the WSJ’s independence and status as a legitimate publication are over. Under Murdock control, no distinction will be made between real news, editorial opinion and agitprop, and no views will be tolerated, henceforth, contrary to Mr. Murdock’s. That’s how he operates throughout his media empire - take it or leave and find another line of work.

The way O’Grady writes, she’s not on board with other staffers against the Bancroft family sellout. Murdock will love her views, may give her more latitude and maybe more space as well. Let’s hope she’s disappointed, that Journal employees retain their independence, and Journal readers keep what they now have free from the venomous claws of the villainous king of media moguls.

On June 4, O’Grady was warming up for the Murdock era, but her circuits were crossed, and she’s straddling a dangerous line. Despite her claim or hope, it’s not the end of Hugo Chavez in a nation where two-thirds of the people adore him and all but the “sifrino” well-off 15 - 20% want no one else as president. They plan on keeping him as long as he wants the job regardless of O’Grady’s delusional musings. She might also try getting her facts straight, hard as that is for her.

She wrote “As tens of thousands of antigovernment student protestors poured into the streets of Caracas last week and national guard troops used tear gas and rubber bullets against them, many observers were asking whether….Chavez had finally met his Waterloo.”

Sorry Mary. Your account needs fine-tuning and your commentary an explanation of what really went on, why, for whose benefit, and who’s behind it.

For starters, a moderately large protest march took place in Caracas May 28 after Radio Caracas Television’s (RCTV) VHF Channel 2 went off the air at midnight May 27. A much larger crowd of supporters dwarfed the opposition, unmentioned in O’Grady’s column. A new public TV station, TVes, went on the air immediately, mandated by the Venezuelan Constitution to do for all Venezuelans what RCTV never did serving corporate interests alone.

RCTV lost its operating license because it broke the law and continued flaunting it openly. It playing a leading role instigating and supporting the aborted April, 2002 coup against President Chavez mass public support on the streets helped overturn. At year’s end, it conspired again in the economically devastating main trade union confederation (CTV) - chamber of commerce (Fedecameras) lockout and industry-wide oil strike. It cost state oil company PDVSA an estimated $14 billion from lost revenue and willful sabotage of its facilities. In January and late May, this writer twice wrote about these events detailing how RCTV flaunted the law, especially in an article titled “Venezuela’s RCTV Acts of Sedition.”

No government should tolerate seditious acts, especially from its broadcasters able to reach and influence large audiences. Chavez, however, was tolerant letting RCTV’s VHF Channel 2 continue on-air until its license expired. His National Telecommunication Commission (CONATEL) then, with full justification, refused to renew it. RCTV broke the law and flaunted the public trust. But it wasn’t silenced and is still able to broadcast through cable and satellite where media like CNN in the US thrive. It even set up huge public screens in upscale neighborhoods airing its programming for street viewers there. Shuttering Channel 2 isn’t a free speech issue. It’s a public trust and responsibility one. In how he governs, Chavez respects that as his duty to all Venezuelans. RCTV consistently failed on all counts. Yet, it got off with a wrist slap.

The protests continued, nonetheless, on Monday with several thousand students from several universities demonstrating in central Caracas. Pro-business newspaper El Universal and other reports said violence broke out between demonstrators and police after students threw rocks at a government building. The police acted to stop it they as they should, but not as O’Grady wrote making it sound like a military assault.

About 200 students also burned tires and boxes blocking traffic at Plaza Brion in the Chacaito neighborhood, then again attacked a government building. Police were forced to use tear gas and perdigones, or plastic shrapnel, in response with protestors throwing with rocks and bottles.

Protests continued for several days with opposition media channel Globovision falsely reporting demonstrations were peaceful and police attacked without provocation. It’s this kind of reporting, common on Globovision and other corporate media channels, that made Chavez speak out on national television May 29 warning Globovision specifically he will act against it if its violence-inciting reports don’t stop. He did what any responsible leader must to maintain law and order saying he won’t tolerate privately run media or public officials openly inciting violence and chaos in the country.

What Venezuela’s National Assembly did allow is something unimaginable in the US where democracy is more illusion than fact. It invited students on both sides of RCTV’s shuttering to debate it before a full session of congress. When they came June 7, it highlighted what’s evident on the streets - the sharp class divide showing students from elitist families in the protests while the great majority of ordinary Venezuelans, benefiting from Bolivarianism, opposing them.

The National Assembly forum was held June 7. Each side showed up with a list of 20 speakers, but things didn’t go as planned. Protesting student representatives came, then left after the first pro-government speech saying nothing after its leader’s comment that protests would continue. It proved free expression isn’t the issue at all as, given the chance to make their case to congress, student agitators chose not to do it.

When exposed to the truth in a public forum, their hypocrisy imploded. It can’t stand against Chavez’s commitment to participatory democracy at the grassroots, true respect for free and open expression, and support for free quality education at all levels. His government just increased access to it further by eliminating university entrance exams and raising teachers’ salaries, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s part of an effort to give children of the poor and working class equal access to what those of the well-off always had.

Made-For-Media Staged Street Protests

We’ve seen this scheme on the streets play out before. It preceded the aborted 2002 Venezuelan coup with Washington’s dirty hands all over it. US administrations often pull these stunts as a tactical way to incite trouble, at times having something more devious in mind like ousting a sitting government it’s become expert at doing. Often when it happens anywhere, you can bet on two things:

– The ruling government isn’t a US client state. That means it’s unwilling to sacrifice its own sovereignty to that of the lord and master of the universe.

– Secondly, Washington’s dirty hands are all over it, and no stunt is too underhanded to use, including murder. Unconfirmed reports indicate seven or more Chavistas have already been killed in the violence.

Past May Be Prologue

On August 19, 1953, a Washington-orchestrated CIA implemented coup ousted the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh Iranian nationalist government whose “crime” was challenging US-UK corporate interests. Masterminding CIA’s Operation Ajax was Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Kermit. It took him two attempts to do it, and the key making it work involved bribing Iranian military officers and engineering street protests like what’s ongoing now in Venezuela, mainly in Caracas. Venezuelans should take note of the Iranian experience. Following the coup, the US reinstated Shah Reza Pahlavi to power ushering in his 25 year reign of terror leading to the 1979 revolution ousting him.

Mossadegh was lucky staying alive. He died in 1967 at age 82, but lived under house arrest in his hometown of Ahmad Abad. Chavez won’t likely fare as well if a US coup against him succeeds. He won’t be tried in a staged kangaroo court trial like Saddam and then hanged. Washington won’t let him survive that long realizing it erred in 2002 when it had a chance to eliminate him and didn’t. This time it will, Chavez knows it, and possibly we’re witnessing the latest US attempt to do it using RCTV’s shuttering as a pretext.

That’s how things played out in Chile in 1973 when Nixon, Kissinger and CIA ousted and murdered democratically elected Salvador Allende ushering in 16 years of fascist rule under General Augusto Pinochet. It began with Nixon “making the (Chilean) economy scream” leading up to CIA-instigated destabilization and bloody military coup on another September 11. Prior to it, the anti-Allende disinformation campaign championed “freedom of the press” with CIA money given to right wing daily newspaper El Mercurio for anti-government propaganda. Washington also orchestrated an international disinformation campaign against the Allende government smearing his socially democratic administration similar to what’s happening now against Chavez on the same issue of free expression and the media.

Back to the Present

It wasn’t surprising US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used the June Organization of American States (OAS) general assembly to lash out at Chavez on the RCTV issue calling on OAS to investigate the state of freedom of expression in Venezuela. Without a touch of irony, she championed “Freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of conscience” in a democracy. She neglected to mention her own government openly defiles democracy saying challenging its policies is unpatriotic or even treasonous with George Bush stating “Either you are with us, or you are with the ‘terrorists.’ “

Bush had more to say in Prague en route to the G-8 summit in Germany saying “In Venezuela, elected leaders have resorted to shallow populism to dismantle democratic institutions and tighten their grip on power.” The shameless US Senate agreed, passing a resolution denouncing Chavez and supporting RCTV - another example of how complicit the Democrat-led Congress is with Bush’s imperial agenda.

Various human rights organizations, like Human Rights Watch, have been co-opted as well joining in this outrageous attack. So did Reporters without Borders, with a long record ignoring real abuses and denouncing phony ones all too often. Then there’s the notorious (US) National Endowment of Democracy (NED) that’s funded and operated to subvert what it claims to stand for and has an ugly record doing it. It works with the CIA, doing overtly what the spy agency does sub rosa - helping to oust democratically elected leaders unwilling to be submissive US clients.

Peru’s Alan Garcia serves the elite so his lawlessness was ignored when he pulled the operating licenses of two TV stations and three radio stations. The likely reason was their support for a strike Garcia opposes because, unlike Chavez, he’s subservient to Washington and no democrat.

Summing up, what’s playing out on Venezuela’s streets is part of a made-in-Washington attempt weaken Hugo Chavez through a phony trumped up scheme denouncing him for opposing free expression, using RCTV’s shuttering as the pretext. This writer even got one unconfirmed report that elitist university professors ordered their students to the streets in protest or get failing grades in their courses if they refused. It’s likely true, so many in the protest crowds weren’t there for conviction, but fearing retribution in class if they demurred.

Chavez supporters, however, aren’t being quiet although their actions go unreported in the US and Venezuelan corporate media. Chris Carlson (from Venezuela) wrote in Venezuela Analysis June 1 that “Organizations, journalists, students, activists and intellectuals in Venezuela accused the national and international media of waging a campaign against Venezuela as part of destabilization efforts over the past few days….the RCTV protests and media coverage of them have a hidden agenda directed by the United States and their Venezuelan allies to destabilize the country.”

Carlson continued saying over 600 social organizations attended a May 31 press conference in Caracas. They signed a document rejecting the “imperial interference to destabilize and overthrow the Bolivarian government” citing interference by CIA. They also supported Chavez’s shuttering of RCTV and revealed evidence from documents obtained that Washington (through NED) paid RCTV and Globovision journalists to incite street violence on-air that could result in deaths hoping to discredit and weaken Chavez. They further claimed RCTV and Globovision systematically “called for subversion, chaos, fascism, terrorism, and assassination” acting as “spokespersons for foreign interests” - namely the Bush administration. Its ultimate objective is to “overthrow and assassinate President Hugo Chavez,” they said.

Pro-Chavez students joined in denouncing the corporate media smear and violence inciting plan saying “We, the university students, denounce….the destabilization plan….promoted by the private media (serving) the national and transnational elite…..We repudiate (lies) to alter the public order and peace” to create conditions like April, 2002 and the 2002-03 industry lockout and oil strike.

Wall Street Journal O’Grady’s Role in Washington’s Scheme to Destabilize Chavez’s Government and Oust Him

O’Grady writes a weekly “Americas” column for the Journal’s hard right editorial page at times extreme enough to make a Nazi blush. Once Murdock arrives, it’s hard imagining how much worse it may get, but he has a way of surprising for the worst. It may not be long finding out how bad. Imagine Fox News on every WSJ page or more O’Gradys making them even worse.

In her June 4 column, O’Grady writes: Chavez is “An avowed Marxist….in the process of destroying his country….he is also an international menace….using his oil wealth to sow revolution, a la Fidel Castro, in South and Central America (and) a dear friend of the Iranian government. Most of Latin America….has his number, and it would be hard to find a democrat in the Western Hemisphere who wouldn’t cheer his retirement and the return of checks and balances in Venezuelan government.”

Space won’t allow a proper and thorough denunciation of this line of vitriolic, hateful rot. Understanding what’s really happening in Venezuela under Chavez and his relations in the region and beyond requires only flipping this rhetoric on its head to know the truth. Read “Hugo Chavez’s Social Democratic Agenda” by this writer to get the facts in detail, not O’Grady’s agitprop fiction. It explains the Chavez agenda comparing it to Washington under George Bush who’s no democrat, unlike Chavez who’s a model one. And that’s the problem as Bush neocons see him as their greatest of all threats - a good example that’s spreading and must be stopped.

O’Grady continued saying “film footage….featured unarmed university students….caught in clouds of tear gas, being chased and beaten by helmeted jackboots, and fired on with water cannons. (They were spurred) by eight years of property confiscations, the jailing of government adversaries and the manipulation of voter rolls and elections (but now) the attack on free speech hit a nerve and sent them to the streets….” The resistance movement “focus(es) on freedom and calls to end the dictatorship….with polls showing more than 70% of Venezuelans opposed to the closing of RCTV….(there’s) simmering discontent in the economy as well (with) Venezuelans no better off than….eight years ago (before Chavez). Food shortages are growing….A perfect storm may be brewing.”

Again, turn all this on its head to know the truth - the exact opposite of what O’Grady writes, and it’s shameful she’s allowed to get away with it. Sadly, that’s the state of the dominant US media that’s right out of Orwell with war being peace, freedom being slavery, and ignorance being strength. O’Grady’s pathetic writing alone proves it. Journalism it’s not.

She continues saying “Chavez has fallen from grace and a majority of Venezuelans now want him gone (but he won’t likely) go down without a fight….He has built up support inside the military, armed a street militia and refined intelligence tactics using Cuban personnel….(He) no longer feels it necessary to keep up the appearance of a democracy.” No comment needed except to say O’Grady got one thing right. Chavez does have support in the military also infiltrated with rogue elements opposing him. She ends her hate piece practically calling for insurrection saying Chavez won’t relinquish power voluntarily as O’Grady practically demands. But “Given his failing popularity, a showdown, sooner or later, is more than probable.”

O’Grady writes these articles from an elitist perspective. Her background is from earlier Wall Street and extremist Heritage Foundation employment before joining the Journal. She’s now tasked to write black propaganda for the imperial government in Washington she pledges fealty to. No matter it’s a near-fascist administration building a military colossus, waging war on the world, shredding civil liberties at home, and destroying the social state to pay for it - an agenda O’Grady champions winning awards writing about it.

Mirror opposite of what O’Grady writes, the great majority of Venezuelans want none of it. They had it for generations under repressive rule till Chavez was elected in December, 1998 and took office in February, 1999. Under him, social democracy bloomed, and the great majority of Venezuelans benefit under it in ways Americans can’t imagine. They’d be outraged to learn they lack essential social benefits (in the richest country in the world) all Venezuelans have - because of Hugo Chavez’s dedication to all the people, not just the privileged under democracy US-style.

In Venezuela, it’s the real thing, although still a work in progress undoing generations of governments of, by and for the rich and well-off alone. No longer, and people like O’Grady denounce it because it works so well shaming the state of things in America she won’t reveal. She can keep railing, but facts, in the end, trump rhetoric, and Venezuelans have them. They need only cite their daily lives in socially democratic Venezuela compared to how things were in the past. They’re not about to go quietly into the night letting that be lost. They fought for it once. If threatened, they’ll do it again, sending a message to others - you, too, can have this. Just go for it, including in America where the need is greater than ever under George Bush.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.