You know, I'm not sure that the American experience was revolutionary, or at
least, not in the way that American propaganda says it was. People did emigrate
here to have a better life, and they were welcomed when this country needed
their labor, or rather, their labor was welcomed, not the people. But somehow,
for many, the American dream that was sold to them worked. I think of all those
European Jews who came to the lower east side of New York to labor in sweat
shops, and ended up, decades later, as professionals, living in affluent
suburban communities on Long Island or in Westchester County. It worked for
them because of FDR's New Deal, because we had a social welfare state which
really did help white working class immigrants become educated, often at no
cost or at very little cost, and provided low interest home buyers' loans.
That is the piece of the American dream that I know about from personal
experience.
By the way, your mention of Cuba reminds me that I've recently read several
novels which include the current version of its recent history being provided
to the book reading public. You know, the same thing was done regarding Israel.
Well, the picture of Cuba being provided, shows a country of poor, deprived
people who resent their government, but who stayed because they were patriotic.
It describes the revolutionaries as either honest but misguided, or power
hungry from the start. It provides a sympathetic picture of the people who
left, very wealthy people, good people, who, through no fault of their own,
lost everything and had to start over in Florida. It does provide a bit of
negative information about Batista and a sense of the wish of some young men
who mistakenly joined the revolution because they wanted things in their
country to improve. This is sort of a rough summary of what was in those 3 or 4
novels, all of which, except for one, written within the past 7 or so years,
There isn't a word about how the US embargo impacted the Cuban economy or about
the kinds of public services that are available to the people. Not a word about
how Cubans have helped so many countries in emergencies by sending medical
help. When we talk about how the media manipulates American citizens, we
forget about all of the ficdtion that people consume. It's not just movies.
It's books.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, August 10, 2019 11:18 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Venezuela: Another US Coup Attempt - and Why It
Failed
Hi Miriam,
Philosophical on the outside, but raging on the inside.
I recall when I first heard about the Monroe Doctrine, I believed that it was
America's way of reaching a helping hand out to our friends in Central and
South America.
And in a way that was what the American Empire did, extend a helping hand that
grasped everything it touched.
When I remember how Working Class Cubans lived under Batista, and how the
wealthy Cubans and their American backers screamed and swore revenge, I cheered
Fidel Castro from the Sweatshop, the drapery factory where I labored at the
time. Score One for the Underdog!
Cuba, a small nation living off the shore of history's most bloated Empire, and
surviving. Even with the boycotts placed upon it by the Empire's bully boys.
And when Hugo Chavez turned Venezuela around, and other South American nations
began to thumb their noses at the American Empire, I believed the worm had
turned. But never count Greed out.
As revolutionary as the American experience in democracy was, it was flawed.
It was flawed because it never resolved the struggle of the People versus
Greed. We need to gather our wisest minds and examine why Greed corrupts our
every effort to live at peace with one another.
We got ourselves into our present mess, and with enough effort and time, we can
set a new course.
Carl Jarvis, ever hopeful and forever smelling the roses.
On 8/9/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
While you are able to remain philosophical about this situation, I
have to tell you that I have been watching it develop step by step for
months and months through podcasts and articles and I am extremely
upset. Of course I know that the US has done this before, and Cuba is
a prime example. But to watch the mass media dishing out lie after lie
and the Democrats supporting all of it, while listening to the truth
being reported from reporters on the ground there like Max Blumenthal
and many others, is a real nightmare. All Amy did, was 2 interviews
with one Venezuelan government official. She managed to spend a whole
program plus another complete segment, not part of the program, on
Toni Morrison, and that's OK. But she's ignoring the murder of a
country and its people. The US has stolen Venezuela's oil and its gold
reserves. It is blockading it so food will be almost impossible to
get. The people most impacted, are the poor and the working class, the
people who support Moduro. It's a plot to destroy the people and hand
the country over to the white elite, just like Puerto Rico which is
such a horror, that I can't even begin to talk about it. And then
there's what's happening right here. And all of those people whom ICE
is hunting down, are here because of what the US has been doing to
their countries of origin for years. And the average American might be
mildly disturbed, but not horrified enough, to be out in the streets,
protesting. Do you remember that I said that I'm reading a book about
a journalist who was being investigated by the House Unamerican Activities
Committee because he was a member of the Communist Party? There are all sorts
of interesting historical tidbits in that book.
One of them is that the auto workers in Detroit were virulently
anti-communist. They wanted nothing to do with Communist labor
organizers and went on strike until one of them was fired from his
job. All this fantasy in which the political left indulges about how
the working class will welcome it with open arms. The white working
class supported the Vietnam war and a good percentage of it,
apparently, supports Trump. Just listen to the folks at his rallies.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, August 09, 2019 10:58 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Venezuela: Another US Coup Attempt -
and Why It Failed
In order to expand, every empire must use force.
Every empire must become more and more controlled by fewer and fewer elite.
Every empire must force its workers into supporting actions that run
counter to the needs of the workers, in order to support the wants of the
elite.
Every empire reaches a point where it implodes through careless use of
resources and pure greed.
Every empire is so enthralled by its own image that it never sees its
own demise looming on the horizon.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/9/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Venezuela: Another US Coup Attempt – and Why It Failed By Keith
Brooks, Reader Supported News
08 August 19
“How come we’re not at war with Venezuela? They have all that oil.”
was in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 30th, the day of the failed coup.
There were eight of us, five from NYC, one Vermonter and one
Canadian, along with the leader of our group, a Venezuelan with whom
I had traveled to Venezuela once before, in 2012, when Hugo Chavez
was still alive. Chavez was elected to power in 1999 leading what is
known as the Bolivarian Revolution. Less than three years later, a
2002 U.S.-backed coup failed to overthrow him.
I witnessed back then Chavez’s wide base of support, and the reasons
for
it:
a new constitution guaranteeing as human rights health, education,
housing and social welfare, and the laws and projects designed to
make those rights a reality. The results were impressive: one million
new low-cost housing units, a dramatic drop in the poverty rate,
infant mortality rate down from
19.1 per thousand in 1999 to 10 per thousand by 2012. Health Care was
made free for all Venezuelans, reflected by an increase in life
expectancy.
Working hours were reduced to 6 hours a day and 36 hours per week,
without loss of pay, while the minimum wage became the highest
minimum wage in Latin America. In December 2005, UNESCO said that
Venezuela had eradicated illiteracy. The malnutrition rate fell from
21% in 1998 to less than 3% in 2012.
The national management of the oil industry in 2003 put Venezuela in
control over its most valuable natural resource, and used it to fund
many of the social reform programs. Venezuela has the world’s largest
oil reserves, which the U.S. has coveted ever since and admittedly
seeks to control, as John Bolton made clear on Fox News: “It will
make a big difference to the United States economically if we could
have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil
capabilities in Venezuela.”
So the Chavez presidency marked a new day of empowerment for
Venezuela’s poor and working-class people, overwhelmingly people of
color. And there was always a sector of the population, mainly the
very wealthy mainly white upper class, who hated Chavez and his
openly socialist policies.
So I went again this April because I wanted to see for myself if it
was possible the impressions we are now given by the mainstream
corporate media were true – was Venezuela really on the verge of
civil war? Had the Venezuelan people turned against the Bolivarian
revolution and President Maduro, who was elected to office after
Chavez’s death in 2013 and re-elected in 2018? Did the U.S.-supported
opposition really have widespread mass support?
The April 30th Failed Coup
Back in January, a politician virtually unknown to Venezuelans named
Juan Guaidó, long mentored by U.S. regime-change specialists,
announced himself as the president of Venezuela after receiving a
phone call from U.S. Vice President Mike Pence. Guaidó, who was the
head of the National Assembly, an unelected post, vowed that
President Maduro would be gone by May Day. While blackouts of
electricity rolled across Venezuela, Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo
threatened U.S.
military intervention if Maduro didn’t step down.
We were in Venezuela from April 26th to May 5th. On April 30th, the
morning of the failed coup, we knew something was up as we ate
breakfast in our hotel’s restaurant which had an open-air terrace. I
saw a woman banging on a pan standing on a balcony in the apartment
house next door to the hotel, yelling out to others to join her in
denouncing Maduro. No one else joined her. She went back in. We heard
what could have been firecrackers or gunfire. But when we looked out
onto the street, business seemed no different than any of the
previous three mornings we were there – people on their way to work,
students going to school, motorbikes and cars on the streets.
By the time we left in our van for a housing conference at the Hotel
ALBA celebrating the construction of two and a half million new
low-cost housing units, we learned that there was a coup attempt, yet
we had seen no sign of a military or police presence on the streets
as one might expect if there was a major threat to the government. If
you were in Caracas that day, outside the upper-class neighborhood
where the attempt was made, you would never have known there was a
coup attempt. During a lunch break in the conference, we were able to
watch TV coverage on the attempted coup from both CNN and TeleSUR, a
Venezuelan news outlet. Right in the lobby of the hotel our group
quickly wrote a statement denouncing the Trump administration’s
efforts to overthrow the government, and we were interviewed by
Venezuelan government television, which was featured in the news
throughout the day. Our statement said in part, “We are a group of U.S.
and Canadian citizens gathered to denounce the U.S. government’s
illegal and immoral actions against the people of Venezuela. We also
oppose the U.S.
sanctions which are not only illegal but are already causing immense
suffering, especially through the denial of much needed medicines and
adequate nutrition ...”
While we soon learned that the coup had failed, it was not until
later that we heard the incredibly farcical details of what had transpired.
Some might remember U.S Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claiming the
day before that Maduro was escaping to Cuba. In fact, Guaidó had been
led – actually duped – to believe that high-level military officials
were going to defect and join him outside the airport that morning,
along with large numbers of soldiers.
But almost all the soldiers who showed up – after being lied to that
they were going to receive promotions – quickly ran back to the base
when it was clear they had been tricked into appearing to defect!
Within a short time, the same Venezuelan defense minister that Guaidó
had expected to defect to his side went on national television
surrounded by his generals to say that the military was standing
strong with Maduro and that no coup had taken place.
An estimated 2,000 Guaidó supporters did gather on an overpass to
watch the highway below where 200 or so violent protesters were
firing on the military and throwing Molotov cocktails near the
airbase – as tens of thousands of Maduro supporters flocked to the
presidential palace to defend it. Guaidó then went into hiding, but
not before calling for the “mother of all marches” for the next day’s
May Day celebrations. His “mother of all marches” pulled out at best
3 to 4 thousand less than 1% of the estimated
400,000 our group marched with at the Maduro May Day rally, one of
the largest pro-government mobilizations since the days of Chavez.
It was quite striking even for a longtime activist like myself to
witness the blatant lies and propaganda that saturate our media. It
was like two different worlds as CNN, The New York Times, and
mainstream media reported that a coup was underway in Venezuela. The
NYT reported “a predawn takeover of a military base in the heart of
the capital”– and that Guaidó had made a video appeal for an uprising
from the “liberated” airbase – except they never got on the base. In
another outrageous example, there’s a film clip that has been aired
of two military vehicles running into opposition protesters. What’s
not shown is what happened next, as the vehicles were surrounded by
soldiers, with the occupants forced at gunpoint to get out and lie
down on the ground! The truth is that the vehicles were driven by
defecting soldiers who rammed into their own protesters to make it
look like it was the government violently suppressing dissent. The
drivers of the vehicle were arrested shortly after by the military as
the rest of the news video clearly showed.
“This is not the foolish country of yesteryear. This country has
awoken, and that’s one of the biggest changes that has taken place
here in these 13 years, a cultural change” – Hugo Chavez, 2012
So this trip did dispel for me any of the widespread notions spread
24/7 by the mainstream U.S. corporate media that Maduro and the
Bolivarian revolution have lost popular support and that Venezuela is
a country on the verge of a civil war. While the U.S. sanctions,
along with plummeting oil prices, have created serious challenges to
Maduro, popular support and enthusiasm for the Bolivarian revolution
and the elected government remains.
Has Venezuela become a dictatorship? Not if judged by the 2 or 3
major newspapers I bought every day that were anti-Maduro (as were
the daily anti-Chavez papers I bought on my 2012 trip), nor by the
rallies called by the U.S. backed coupsters openly inciting violence
and calling for the overthrow of the government. There is, in fact, a
“loyal opposition” that ran against Maduro in the 2018 election, the
leader of which, Henri Falcon, received 32 % of the vote and was
actually threatened with sanctions by the U.S. for participating in
the election! And it deserves mention that I saw marchers at the
Maduro May Day rally evidently feeling comfortable enough to be
wearing Falcon t-shirts. Even Maria Machado, a well known staunch
Guaidó supporter, has stated that Maduro is not a dictator.
The American people have been propagandized to believe that Trump is
trying to overthrow Maduro out of humanitarian concern for an
economic crisis caused by Maduro’s incompetence in handling the
collapse of oil prices over the last five years and to “restore
democracy,” a laughable rationale in light of the history: the U.S.
has been trying to overthrow the Bolivarian revolution since the
failed attempt against Chavez in 2002, and then there is the long history of
U.S.
coups and invasions of Latin America and around the world from the
1954 Guatemala coup, the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba,
U.S. invasions of the Dominican Republic in 1965, the overthrow of
Allende in 1973 in Chile, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, the
removal of Aristide in Haiti in 2004, the Honduras coup in 2009 and
many others. Any government that refuses to be under the thumb of the U.S.
is a target for overthrow.
While there is debate over how much Maduro’s economic policies have
played a role, it’s not the fall in oil prices that have put
Venezuela in crisis and threaten to destroy all the gains over the
last 20 years – it’s the sanctions where the U.S. uses its worldwide
economic power to prohibit countries from doing business with
Venezuela. Along with the U.S.-engineered electricity blackouts, and
the failed coup attempts, sanctions have frozen and even confiscated
billions of dollars of Venezuelan assets in banks around the world,
blocked payments for Venezuelan oil, and facilitated other outright
instances of what can only be called piracy. Sanctions are just as
deadly as bombs and bullets, a form of economic terrorism whose
explicit rationale is to escalate the suffering of the civilian
population to get them to turn against their government. A recent
study estimated
40,000 deaths caused by blockading the shipment of medical supplies
like insulin, HIV medications, and other life-supporting supplies,
such as an emergency food program.
But all this has failed in the goal of driving the population into
blaming and overthrowing the Maduro government; instead, as Chavez
put it, this is an awakened country that largely understands the main
role the U.S. has played in fomenting a crisis. From what I saw,
Trump has actually united many of those opposed to and critical of
Maduro to join in opposition to U.S. sanctions and military
intervention, as Falcon and others have done.
While the threat of direct U.S. military intervention is
ever-present, our trip also brought home how it is too easy for
liberals like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and others to oppose military
intervention and avoid taking a stand against the sanctions. Among
Democratic Party candidates running for the presidency, only Tulsi
Gabbard has opposed the sanctions.
It is also essential to establish that one does not have to defend
Maduro to oppose this latest U.S. imperialist adventure and
understand that the U.S.
has ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT to sabotage the Venezuelan economy and impose
murderous sanctions to strangle the population into submission. This
didn’t start with Maduro, and it is just the latest in the long list
of U.S. coups and overthrows in Latin America and around the world.
So What Can We Do?
As we head toward the 2020 election, the issue of Trump’s policies
toward Venezuela – as well as Iran – should be front and center in
the debates, yet the Democratic party and the mainstream corporate
media seem to have a tacit agreement to say as little as possible on
these two imminent threats of more U.S. aggression. And a number of
Democrats and liberal media – Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer,
Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, The New York Times, The Washington
Post, Rachel Maddow, and PBS commentators – are among those leading
liberal figures actually in support of Trump’s right to impose regime
change on another people’s country.
It’s hard to see how this protracted siege of Venezuela will resolve
itself, but the Venezuelan people are far from a demoralized
population; rather they’ve been mobilized to resist with the
formation of a people’s militia of
2 million, training with the military and national guard. An
infrastructure of resistance has been created that would make it more
than difficult for any U.S.-installed neoliberal puppet regime to
rule. It could just turn into a people’s war, Trump’s Vietnam, for
the president who ran claiming he was going to end “all these foolish
wars.”
As U.S. citizens it is our responsibility to demand that our elected
officials stop the threat of war and end the sanctions on Venezuela.
We have a particular responsibility to oppose our government’s
actions. Write letters to the editor, sign petitions, call your
elected officials, take part in rallies and demonstrations, and
challenge in whatever ways you can the “official story” we’re fed by
the corporate mass media. And I urge anyone interested to go to
Venezuela and see for yourself what is going on.
William Camarada, the Venezuelan who led the two trips I was on, is
planning another highly affordable trip in August. For more
information, contact cbalbertolovera@xxxxxxxxx or
estebanbartlett@xxxxxxxxx or call 502 / 415-1080.
Email This Page
Keith Brooks is a longtime anti-war and labor/community activist, a
retired NYC alternative high school teacher, and a member of DSA and
Brooklyn For Peace.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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