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Send in the tanks! (Chavez)

Highest oil reserves in the world, and high oil prices, yet Chavez is running the country into the ground. And yet some people still worship him. Amazing.
 
The Dark Lord said:
Chavez is running the country into the ground.
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You have no clue of what you're talking about.

Talking about priorities ... from the CEPR study:

A significant part of the government’s stimulus has been its housing program, initiated last year to reduce the nation’s housing shortage. In 2011, there were about 147,000 houses built under this program, with two-thirds built by the public sector and one-third from the private sector. Some 200,000 are planned for this year, with over 50 percent of these having been built by September. These are large numbers relative to Venezuela’s population; a comparable number for Venezuela’s 2011 construction in the U.S. would be more than 1.6 million homes, or two and half times the number of houses actually built in the U.S. in that year. Not surprisingly, construction has been a significant contributor to the recovery, as noted above.
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And:

Extreme poverty declined even more, from 16.6 to 7.0 percent from 1999 to 2011, or a 57.8 percent decline. Measuring from 2004, the decline is 70 percent. However, these figures do not include the most recent program, introduced in December 2011, which pays 430 BF ($100) per month for each child and pregnancy to families below the extreme poverty level. This is expected to lower the extreme poverty rate by half, to about 3.5 percent.

It is also important to note that these poverty rates include only cash income. They do not include the populations’ increased access to education – for example, college enrollment has doubled since 2004, with free tuition for many students. It also does not include the increased access for millions of people to health care.
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But but but ... that SOCIALISM!!!!1 We prefer to live in tent cities on the one side on the highway while our foreclosed homes are on the other side of the highway! Because that's what God (Mammon) wants!
 
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Childlike Empress said:
Today in Caracas, Chavez' final rally took place - campaigns are over. Now look at that, in one of the murder capitals of the world, as the critics continue to point out, a man who has just beaten cancer - yet here he is taking an incredible bath in the masses. Absolutely fearless. :)

Mark Weisbrot sums it up for The Guardian: Why the US demonises Venezuela's democracy
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Mark Weisbrot
South America's support is Venezuela's best guarantee against continuing attempts by Washington – which is still spending millions of dollars within the country in addition to unknown covert funds – to undermine, delegitimise, and destabilise democracy in Venezuela.
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More news baby Hugo's venezuelaanalysis blog won't report:
But one especially potent weapon in Mr. Chávez’s arsenal is what might be called the fear factor.

Many Venezuelans who are eager to send Mr. Chávez packing, fed up with the country’s lackluster economy and rampant crime, are nonetheless anxious about casting their ballot out of fear that voting against the president can mean being fired from a government job, losing a government-built home or being cut off from social welfare benefits.

“I work for the government and it scares me,” said Luisa Arismendi, 33, a schoolteacher who cheered on a recent morning as Mr. Chávez’s challenger, Henrique Capriles Radonski, drove by, waving from the back of a pickup truck. Until this year, she always voted for Mr. Chávez and she hesitated before giving her name, worried about what would happen if her supervisors found out she was switching sides. “If Chávez wins,” she said, “I could be fired.”

...The fear has deep roots. Venezuelans bitterly recall how the names of millions of voters were made public after they signed a petition for an unsuccessful 2004 recall referendum to force Mr. Chávez out of office. Many government workers whose names were on the list lost their jobs.

Mr. Chavez runs a well-oiled patronage system, a Tammany Hall-like operation but on a national scale. Government workers are frequently required to attend pro-Chávez rallies and they come under other pressures as well.

“They tell me that I have to vote for Chávez,” said Diodimar Salazar, 37, who works at a government-run day care center in a rural area southeast of Cumaná. “They always threaten you that you will get fired.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/w...rs-ahead-of-election.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

And Chavez has a thug mob which can act with impunity, even murdering:
Chávez wasn’t helped last Sunday when two supporters of his centrist challenger, Miranda state Governor Henrique Capriles Radonski, were shot and killed in Chávez’s home state of Barinas, allegedly by Chávez backers who were blocking a Capriles campaign caravan.

A third victim, also a Capriles supporter, is in critical condition. Chávez urged Venezuelans to “confront each other with votes, not violence,” but he just as quickly took the polarizing low road and blamed his “bourgeois” opponents for the deadly confrontation. The Capriles camp was angered again on Wednesday when a judge in Barinas, where Chávez’s elder brother Adán is Governor, inexplicably released two of the shooting suspects.
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http://world.time.com/2012/10/05/hugo-chavezs-re-election-bid-is-the-latin-american-left-losing/

Just some good ol' boys who were a bit too enthusiastic in their support for Chavez, nothing criminal there!
 
Hey, it's for the good of the people and the booming Venezuelan inflation economy.

And despite the name, the Christian Science Monitor actually is a good paper. I haven't been that pleasantly surprised by a news outlet since I first watched Al Jazeera.
 
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WildCat said:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/w...rs-ahead-of-election.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

And Chavez has a thug mob which can act with impunity, even murdering:
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As to the second: You saw the little word "allegedly", kitten? Maybe you did, but who needs to wait for an investigation into this, after all you know that Chavez is evil, right? So "he" shot those people. Next.

As to the first: Excellent, you can't lecture about Propaganda without mentioning the New York Times, the most important agenda-setter in "the West". Of course, here the audience are people who think of themselves as educated, not some douchebags who think Faux News is a reliable source. So you come into realms which earn the term propaganda, not plain BS. You'll rarely find plain made up stuff (remember Judith Miller?), the message here gets transported by the subtext, the goal is to leave the reader with a certain impression - often, as in this case, build on what they already "know" from years of indoctrination: Chavez is a wackjob, a "strongman" if not a dictator. For the impression, the headline is central, here "Fears Persist Among Venezuelan Voters ahead of Election", that's what you're supposed to take home. We saw the atmosphere of "fear" yesterday in Caracas.

As one commenter says:

Mella said:
It is no secret that this newspaper is an enemy of President Chavez having even supported a fascist coup against him 2002 and never apologizing for doing so when the people of Venezuela brought back to power the man they democratically elected in 1998. So this paper sends reporters to Venezuela with the express purpose of doing hit jobs against Chavez and never reporting anything positive that the government does.

Now we have this guy reporting about an unfounded fear. Remember that this is the same guy who reported that Wikileaks' Julian Assange doesn't flush the toilet and for which the Times was so much criticized that the paper quietly dropped that line. [...]
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Were it Faux News, one could assume that those people don't even exist, but as it is the NYT, maybe they do. And as it is the NYT, they don't outright claim that the Venezuelan electoral system doesn't protect the anonymity of the vote (which it does), but they use those "ordinary Venezuelans" to imply it. And the reader gets the message. In case of WildCat, he's so exited that he outright forgets to include the important paragraph following his snippet, which tells us more about Ms. Salazar:

New York Times said:
Ms. Salazar said that her pro-Chávez co-workers insisted that the government would know how she voted. But experience has taught her otherwise. She simply casts her vote for the opposition and then tells her co-workers that she voted for Mr. Chávez.
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Oh, so it's peer pressure, not anything to do with the system. How could WildCat miss that?

A few paragraphs deconstructed, near the beginning of the article where one can expect the readers with short attention span to make it. My comments in red:

New York Times said:
[...] Although polls diverge widely, with some predicting a victory for Mr. Chávez and others showing a race that is too close to call [As shown above, in reality the vast majority of polls show a double digit lead for Chavez, while the most often cited of the few who show a close race, Consultores 21, has a track record so constanly blatantly wrong that they would be out of business if they were there to make business in the first place], there is wide agreement [Among whom?] that Mr. Chávez is vulnerable as never before. Handicapping the election is complicated by the angst [not only fear, it's angst. Stealth Godwin.] felt by many Venezuelans [How many? How do you know?] that a simple vote for the opposition could bring retaliation.

In advance of Sunday’s balloting, the government introduced a new electronic voting system [Lie. Nothing new about it.] that many Venezuelans [Again, how many? The handful in your article??] fear might be used by the government to track who voted against the president. Electoral officials and opposition leaders [Opposition leaders, hear hear. They used the same system to pick Capriles, btw] defend the integrity of the system but there is significant distrust [Sez you.] and a big part [Evidence? Could be, as he has no program to speak of.] of Mr. Capriles’s campaign has been to reassure voters that their votes will remain secret.

“The government has sown this fear,” Mr. Capriles said in an interview, adding that the reluctance of people to speak their mind skewed opinion polls in favor of Mr. Chávez. “If we can overcome the fear, I believe that we can win this election by a million votes.” [Ah, so your favorite candidate is the source for the many manies? Well, if he says so.]

The fear has deep roots. Venezuelans bitterly recall how the names of millions of voters were made public after they signed a petition for an unsuccessful 2004 recall referendum to force Mr. Chávez out of office. Many government workers whose names were on the list lost their jobs. [sources and studies differ vastly on this, far from fact, maybe complete nonsense] [...]
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And so on and so on. Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Constructing the narrative out of hearsay, unsourced or vastly biased opinions, ommissions and distortions, and this or the other lie. You'll find those techniques over and over again.

Well, it's 2012, let them rant. As Weisbrot said, messing with Venezuela 2012 is messing with most of South America including the big guys. If the "educated" in "the West" will believe the oppositions cries of foul after their sound defeat - the goal of the article - doesn't really matter. But it would be nice if people could wise up to how to read between the lines and become aware of the subtext. In general.
 
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Childlike Empress said:
Oh, so it's peer pressure, not anything to do with the system. How could WildCat miss that?
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The fear is that because the new voting machines take a thumbscan of the voter to verify identity that Chavez will be able to know who voted for him, and fire and hire and dole out government benefits accordingly.

No comment on your hilarious 2-step trying to explain how the New York Times is a government propaganda mouthpiece like venezuelaanalysis.com is. Nothing I say could damage your case more than you already have.
 
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WildCat said:
The fear is that because the new voting machines take a thumbscan of the voter to verify identity that Chavez will be able to know who voted for him, and fire and hire and dole out government benefits accordingly.

No comment on your hilarious 2-step trying to explain how the New York Times is a government propaganda mouthpiece like venezuela analysis.com is. Nothing I say could damage your case more than you already have.
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As you know perfectly well, the only connection venezuelanalysis has to the Venezuelan government is that it is hosted by aporrea, which isn't even a direct connection. It's still run by those people, completely independently. It features all kinds of articles, mostly sympathetic to the Bolivarian revolution, but also constructive criticism. We've been over this time and time again so you shouldn't be surprised that your continued whining will continue to not change anything about my habit of referring them, as they are the most profound source around.
 
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Childlike Empress said:
As you know perfectly well, the only connection venezuelanalysis has to the Venezuelan government is that it is hosted by aporrea, which isn't even a direct connection. It's still run by those people, completely independently. It features all kinds of articles, mostly sympathetic to the Bolivarian revolution, but also constructive criticism. We've been over this time and time again so you shouldn't be surprised that your continued whining will continue to not change anything about my habit of referring them, as they are the most profound source around.
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Oh please, those are all Chavez's useful idiots.

Can you link to an VA article critical of Chavez?
 
WildCat said:
Oh please, those are all Chavez's useful idiots.

Can you link to an VA article critical of Chavez?
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Sure, there are several already in this thread. Constructive criticism, of course. Just for you I searched for "Chavez authoritarian" and found this among the first hits. Enjoy.

Roland Denis is a leading intellectual and revolutionary in Venezuela. He served as Vice Minister of Planning in the Hugo Chávez government in 2002-03, but resigned after ten months in protest of the lack of grassroots involvement in the planning process.
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WildCat said:
More news baby Hugo's venezuelaanalysis blog won't report:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/w...rs-ahead-of-election.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

And Chavez has a thug mob which can act with impunity, even murdering:

http://world.time.com/2012/10/05/hugo-chavezs-re-election-bid-is-the-latin-american-left-losing/

Just some good ol' boys who were a bit too enthusiastic in their support for Chavez, nothing criminal there!
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Wow,just wow. Makes the infamous "Pineapple Primary" in Chicago in the 1920's look like a Sunday School Picnic ,and Al Capone's electioneering tactics those of a bumbling amateur.
 
WildCat said:
That's an article criticizing Chavez? :rolleyes:
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No kidding.

SS and JWR: What is the importance of the elections on October 7, 2012?

RD: In one sense, they're of absolutely no relevance in terms of the revolution. In another basic sense, they would become tremendously important if Chávez lost. Can you *********** imagine [leaning back and throwing up his hands]? We'd have to start organizing marches all over again against the privatization of education, struggles against everything – violence, repression, human rights – against the privatization of health! Once again with the same **** we've been struggling against for the last 20 years, and that we've supposedly transcended, no!

If he loses, it would be a terrible set back. But if he wins, we have not really ‘won’ anything, but the horizons would remain open. What I do sincerely hope happens, is that after the election all of this discontent, this tension that is mounting between the popular forces and the bureaucracy will come to a head. I hope that people will begin to speak and name the problem for what it is. Right now everyone is silent because they are waging an electoral campaign.
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:dl:
 
ANTPogo said:
No kidding.
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99074d54b459448e8.gif


I know it's a bit much to ask as this text might go over some heads and many attention spans, but I suggest you actually read it instead of just scrolling to the end believing you found an opportunity for one of your little contrarian cheap shots. This guy argues from a profoundly anti-statist position and doesn't spare with accusations of corrupt buerocracy and personality cult towards the Chavistas. Something you'd never find on a "state-run propaganda" outlet like WildCat feels the need to label the site against better knowledge. What did you expect, a dull "Chavez is a dictator" rant? That you indeed won't find on venezuelanalysis, but there's no shortage elsewhere.
 
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Childlike Empress said:
[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/99074d54b459448e8.gif[/qimg]

I know it's a bit much to ask as this text might go over some heads and many attention spans, but I suggest you actually read it instead of just scrolling to the end believing you found an opportunity for one of your little contrarian cheap shots.
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Most other CT make this same complaint when we resist doing their homework for them.

If you can't be bothered to present your argument in your own words, why is it incumbent on us to read your endless pages and watch your endless videos?
 
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