Santa Claus, Make Way for Santa Chavez

By Juan Gonzalez
The New York Daily News
November 23, 2005

Poor residents and nonprofit groups in the South Bronx are about to receive a huge Christmas gift from Venezuela's firebrand President Hugo Chavez: Eight-million gallons of heating oil at bargain-basement prices.

Two months ago, in an interview with the Daily News during his visit to the United Nations, Chavez first made the startling offer of cheap fuel for this winter from his oil-rich country to a handful of poor communities in the United States.

At the time, critics of the radical populist Chavez, the Bush administration's biggest nemesis in South America, scoffed at his proposal.

But the Venezuelan leader is about to deliver.

Culture and politics — a tale of two suburbs

Margarita Windisch, Caracas, GreenLeft Weekly

Three months after the takeover of the local metropolitan police station by the poor community of 23 Enero, in the west of Caracas, the place is as busy as a beehive. The Coordinadora Simon Bolivar (CSB), a militant grassroots community organisation, has been instrumental in involving members of the barrio (neighbourhood) in transforming the derelict old police station into the pride and joy of the poor suburb.

The community is especially proud of the massive portraits painted by local artists of Latin American revolutionary heroes Che Guevara and Simon Bolivar crowning the entrance to the centre. Juan Contreras from the CSB explained: “Now our heroes greet us, not the stench of a rotten and violent system represented by the corrupt police force. Instead of having corrupt police guarding the front gate, grandmothers are doing their daily exercises under the supervision of Cuban health professionals. The centre now also provides education, dance lessons for children, and will be launching its very own radio station on November 25.”

Hugo Chavez vs. the King of Vacations

By MIKE WHITNEY, Counterpunch

Hugo Chavez seems to take great pleasure in tweaking George Bush's nose. He's repeatedly called Bush a "terrorist" and disparaged the US as a "terrorist state". Just last week, Chavez fired off another broadside saying, "The planet's most serious danger is the government of the United States ... The people of the United States are being governed by a killer, a genocidal murderer, and a madman."

He got that right.

The rise of Bush’s new enemy

John Pilger, New Statesman
14th November 2005

I was dropped at Paradiso, the last middle-class area before barrio La Vega, which spills into a ravine as if by the force of gravity. Storms were forecast, and people were anxious, remembering the mudslides that took 20,000 lives. “Why are you here?”, asked the man sitting opposite me in the packed jeep-bus that chugged up the hill. Like so many in Latin America, he appeared old, but wasn’t. Without waiting for my answer, he listed why he supported Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez: schools, clinics, affordable food, “our constitution, our democracy” and “for the first time, the oil money is going to us”. I asked him if he belonged to the MVR (Movement for a Fifth Republic), Chavez’s party. “No, I’ve never been in a political party; I can only tell you how my life has been changed, as I never dreamt.”

It is raw witness like this, which I have heard over and over again in Venezuela, that smashes the one-way mirror between the West and a continent that is rising. By rising, I mean the phenomenon of millions of people stirring once again, “like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number”, wrote the poet Shelley in The Mask of Anarchy. This is not romantic; an epic is unfolding in Latin America that demands our attention beyond the stereotypes and cliches that diminish whole societies to their degree of exploitation and expendability.

Workers building a new Venezuela

By Federico Fuentes, Green Left Weekly

Together, the government and workers have begun a process aimed at creating jobs at the same time as ensuring the production that is necessary to meet the needs of Venezuela’s people. Part of this is an experiment in cogestion or co-management, where workers are given a role in the running of their workplaces. The idea of co-management has been around for some time. In Germany, for example, co-management was used to co-opt the workers’ movement by giving workers shares and some nominal decision-making power, aimed at convincing them that their interests lay with increased production and profits for the bosses.

However in Venezuela, co-management is being posed as an alternative to the interests of the bosses, and more fundamentally, to those of capitalism. As Canadian academic Michael Lebowitz, now living in Venezuela, explained at a recent national gathering of workers for the recuperation of factories, “the point of co-management is to put an end to capitalist exploitation and to create the potential for building a truly human society. When workers are no longer driven by the logic of capital to produce profits for capitalists, the whole nature of work can change. Workers can cooperate with each other to do their jobs well; they can apply their knowledge about better ways to produce to improve production both immediately and in the future; and, they can end the division in the workplace between those who think and those who do — all because, in co-management, workers know that their activity is not for the enrichment of capitalists.

Venezuela's Path

by Michael Albert, Z-Net

My first and arguably most personally surprising encounter with the Bolivarian Revolution was at the Ministry for Popular Participation, which was created in accord, I was told, with Chavez's desire "that the people should take power."

I asked the officials we interviewed, "What does that mean, that the people should take power?" After noting thousands of years of "empires obstructing people from participating in politics," all culminating in "the North American empire," the official said the "U.S. has had 200 years of representative government, but in your system people turn over control to others." Instead, in Venezuela, "we humbly are proposing a system where people hold power in a participatory and protagonist democracy. We want a new kind of democracy to attain a new kind of society."

On the wall was a diagram of their aims. It had lots of little circles, then other larger ones in another layer, and so on. The idea, they said, "was to establish numerous local grassroots assemblies or councils of citizens where people could directly express themselves." These local councils would be the foundational components of "a new system of participatory democracy."

Chávez and Maradona Lead Massive Rebuke of Bush

By Jordana Timerman, the Nation

Some aspects of George Bush's travels have become commonplace, including massive protests, sporadic violence and tight security operations. All of these usual elements--notably the imperial-style arrival of the US president with an entourage of 2,000 people and four AWACS surveillance systems--were present at the Fourth Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

But the opposition to Bush and his proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), as well as neoconservative economic policies and capitalism in general, took on a creative twist this time, with a massive march that ended in a rally at a sports stadium involving a heterogeneous group of Latin American leaders: Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Bolivian socialist leader Evo Morales, Argentine leaders of the unemployed, Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, singers from all over the continent, and, of course, Diego Maradona, legendary soccer hero.

Economic Growth is a Home Run in Venezuela

By: Mark Weisbrot - Knight-Ridder News Service

CARACAS - "Viva Chavez," shouted Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, as the team celebrated its World Series sweep last week. Guillen is Venezuelan, and a national hero in this country of 25 million people who seem to believe that they too, along with Chicagoans, have won the World Series.

His cheer for the country's leftist President Hugo Chavez might have caused some reaction just a year or two ago. But these days it went largely unnoticed, despite the continuing hostility between the Chavez government and the Bush administration. Relations between the two governments have been sour since the Bush administration supported a military coup against Chavez in April 2002, as well as a failed attempt to recall him last year.

But Chavez' popularity is now among the highest of any president in Latin America, with a 77 percent approval rating, according to the latest polling.