"...
President-elect Joseph Biden has
condemned what he called government “handouts” for desperate American
citizens."
Joe Biden is as much a puppet of the American Corporate Empire(ACE) as
is Donald Trump. While Biden will bring "kinder, gentler" government,
nonetheless, he is an ACE spokesman.
Americans forget that democracy only works when *All citizens are
informed and involved. Informed means access to all oppinions and all
sources of information. Involvement means putting in time educating
oneself to the greatest extent possible, and looking inward for making
critical decisions. Far too many Americans have come to the point of
allowing others to think for them, and allowing others to act for
them. The current sad tale involving ACE's political spin on
Venezuela, is a case in point. Americans need to stand strong and
demand openness in governmental affairs. In my opinion, if we working
class Americans fail to demand support for working class Venezuelans,
then we are letting the American working class down, too.
Carl Jarvis, just the son of a workingman/woman.
On 12/6/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
US Congress and corporate media deploy massive lie, claiming Venezuela’s
government threatened to starve non-voters
MAX BLUMENTHAL AND ANYA PARAMPIL·DECEMBER 6, 2020
VENEZUELA
Spun out by US Congress and the Wall Street Journal, the cynical deception
is part of an assault on Venezuela’s legislative election, where even
opposition politicians have been sanctioned for participating.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US corporate media have declared
Venezuela’s legislative elections a “sham” before results have even been
announced, opening a new front in the propaganda war on the besieged
country
and its leftist government.
Among the most blatant distortions deployed against President Nicolas
Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) party is a claim first
advanced by Leopoldo López, the far-right, US-backed opposition leader who
recently fled to Spain. On Twitter, López tweeted a deceptively edited clip
of Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello addressing an election
rally, and accused Cabello of “blackmailing the hungry people with food to
force them” to vote for his governing party.
López’s assertion has since been propagated by the Wall Street Journal’s
Ryan Dube, who claimed in an article about Venezuela’s “sham” election that
Cabello “threatened to withhold food handouts in a country where millions
are going hungry.”
A bipartisan US congressional letter condemning Venezuela’s election as a
“sham” also echoed the opposition leader’s dubious interpretation, stating,
“the regime has threatened to withhold food from Venezuelans who do not
vote
in the sham elections.”
In their haste to shape a narrative delegitimizing Venezuela’s legislative
elections, the US government and its loyal pack of corporate media
stenographers have relied on López, a lead participant in two military
coups
and a series of violent right-wing riots, as their house interpreter.
But the full statement by Cabello in its actual context tells an entirely
different story. The complete speech, which López conveniently omitted, can
be seen here.
Below is an English translation of the relevant section:
(After a competition between men and women over who can shout the loudest).
“The women won. Women always win, women always win and women are going to
be
at the forefront of this battle. I know that it is so. I know that it is
the
woman who is going to get up early and say at home, “Hey, get up and go to
the [Carabobo voting center] because you have to go vote!” Of course, and
those who do not vote, do not eat. For those who do not vote, there is no
food. Whoever does not vote, does not eat, a quarantine is applied there
without eating. But the woman is going to be there because the woman is
going to say to the son: “Look son, you did not live what I experienced.
You
have not suffered what I suffered when I was young.” Here, the youth and
workers, and the working brothers, correct me if it is true or a lie: Here
they had no life at all, they were persecuted. More than 11 thousand dead,
there are still 3 thousand disappeared (…) there was no peace with misery,
there was no peace with men, with women.”
A close review of Cabello’s comments reveals both the devious nature of
López and the cluelessness of Washington. First serving as the president
of
Venezuela’s Constituent Assembly, Cabello is the host of Con El Mazo Dando,
a popular Chavista broadcast variety show that serves as a platform for his
unique brand of off-color humor.
With his story about Chavista women warning men that if they do not vote,
they will not “eat,” Cabello was making a sexual double entendre that would
be familiar to most Venezuelans. In Venezuelan culture, “comer” not only
means “to eat,” but is also slang for having sex.
Thus Cabello was not threatening to withhold food to anyone; he was
conjuring up a humorous and hypothetical scenario about revolutionary women
denying sex to their husbands and boyfriends if they refused to vote. His
appeal was a Chavista-style blend of the Aristophanes play Lysistrada and
the cringeworthy “Get Your Booty to the Polls” ad campaign Democratic Party
supporters rolled out during the 2020 presidential election.
“This is a classic Diosdado [Cabello] provocation,” explained Diego
Sequera,
a Venezuelan journalist and political analyst who has contributed to The
Grayzone. “His joke about those who don’t vote not eating has a double
sense, because ‘no comer’ also means to not have sex with your partner.
Diosdado always talks in these terms, so it’s funny to see it getting spun
all week.”
Cabello’s rhetoric about the politics of food contained multiple layers of
meaning. In his reference to mothers admonishing their sons to vote by
reminding them of their country’s history – “Look son, you did not live
what
I experienced. You have not suffered what I suffered when I was young” –
the
Chavista leader was invoking the pre-Chavez era of neoliberalism when
Venezuela’s poor and working class experienced abject misery, exclusion and
repression.
Cabello’s comments also represented a clear warning to his party’s base
about the right-wing opposition’s plans for a program of massive economic
privatization that would deprive the country’s most vulnerable sectors of
basic provisions in the midst of a pandemic.
Indeed, nearly all of the opposition parties have campaigned to end the
government’s CLAP program, which provides millions of Venezuelans with
heavily subsidized food and sanitary supplies for little to no cost. The US
State Department has imposed sanctions on CLAP, and has kidnapped and
allegedly tortured one of its key architects, Alex Saab.
The meaning of Cabello’s actual remarks therefore represented the precise
opposite of the deceptive interpretation put forward by López, the US
government and its corporate media mouthpieces. Beyond the humorous double
meaning of his yarn, he was warning poor and working class Venezuelans that
the opposition – not his government – would impose policies of economic
deprivation if they achieved power.
For Venezuelans old enough to remember the 1989 massacre that the
Venezuelan
military carried out to crush the poor people’s uprising known as El
Caracazo, the fear of a return to neoliberal governance is very real. This
painful event was the culmination of a period of brutal repression that
Cabello invoked when he recalled “more than eleven thousand dead” and
“still
three thousand disappeared.”
Throughout the pandemic and its periodic quarantines, Venezuela’s
government
has continued to supply its population with food and sanitary supplies
through the CLAP program. The Grayzone has published several on-the-ground
reports about the life-saving impact of this program, including with a
visit
to food fairs that municipal governments hold on a regular basis across the
country.
The idea that the Venezuelan government could halt the CLAP program in the
middle of a pandemic and crushing US economic blockade is simply
unfathomable, and would likely lead to the kind of social unrest that the
US
government has tried and failed to provoke.
To complement the information war waged against Venezuela’s legislative
election, Washington has worked to intimidate opposition politicians into
boycotting the race. So far, the US State Department has sanctioned Luis
Parra, a right-wing opposition leader and former ally of Guaidó, along with
an array of other opposition politicians including leading members of the
traditional social democratic party, Democratic Action. Their crime?
According to Mike Pompeo’s State Department, by simply participating in the
election, these opposition figures were guilty of “rob[bing] the people of
Venezuela of their right to choose their leaders.”
The State Department has simultaneously praised coup leader Juan Guaidó and
the US-funded extremist factions for boycotting the elections, branding
them
“Venezuela’s champions for democracy.”
On Election Day, Guaidó urged Venezuelans to stay at home, exploiting a
Covid safety hashtag to enact a naked campaign of voter suppression.
Washington has worked to undermine Venezuela’s election while President
Donald Trump and his allies are still painting recent US election results
as
fraudulent. US Congress, for its part, has gone months without authorizing
any support for US citizens going hungry during a runaway pandemic.
As lines for food assistance grow longer around the US and Trump
increasingly retreats from public view, President-elect Joseph Biden has
condemned what he called government “handouts” for desperate American
citizens.
