It was a very fast statement, and it was, for one thing, referring to Juan
Guaido as the head of the Venezuelan government and saying that few people
voted. He's not the head of the government. He's the unpopular former leader
of the alternative assembly whom the US government tried to install as leader
in a failed coup. The US ordered the opposition to boycott the election. The
far right did. The rest of the opposition didn't. I haven't seen any hard
numbers yet from the observers who have been covering the election, as to how
many people voted.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, December 7, 2020 1:25 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: US Congress and corporate media deploy massive
lie, claiming Venezuela's government threatened to starve non-voters
I'll need to listen again at 5 PM. I was doing last night's dishes at
5 this morning, and I thought I was paying attention, but...
The American Corporate Empire has so meddled in South and Central America and
so polluted Truth and Facts, it is impossible to get straight information. My
rule of thumb is if the USA government is opposed, then someone must be doing
some good. But then, our own
nation is also subject to the same bully tactics.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/7/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
By the way, if you heard Democracy Now this morning, one of the
headlines was about Venezuela and it was an out and out lie. Amy is
still OK on much of the domestic stuff, but God knows where she's
getting her info on international news or who is paying her off.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, December 7, 2020 9:37 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: US Congress and corporate media deploy
massive lie, claiming Venezuela's government threatened to starve
non-voters
"...
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.
