Chavez accused of "pandering to the poor"

Someone should start a thread.

RIP big guy.

apparently so, AP reporting it.

Bam will hv the CIA calling the shots in a year, rite?

MORBZ FOR VENEZUELAN PREZNIT

First order of business: beisbol beisbol beisbol.

lol

thats lol at chavez dying not at ned's post

haha @ both

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lo4y23JGrE1qcrzkko1_500.gif

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/05/us-venezuela-chavez-idUSBRE92405420130305

the caribbean series is in VZ next winter, id love to go.

Boy THAT'S a mindfart on my part. Zombie Chavez already.

I can hear the pots and pans banging from several neighborhoods.

the advantages of being a mod

literally, alfred?

literally!

Doral is two miles north.

Just asked my friend in Caracas: "What now?" Her response: "I have no fucking clue. I really don't." So hmm.

damn

xp

ugh Facebook will be insufferable tongiht

"Why do you look like Chad Hugo?"
"Because you don't know what Hugo Chavez looks like."

(c) 2013

ugh @ Billy Bragg RIPing him on FB

really sad. can't find a youtube of Too Much Joy playing "Hugo".

George Takei
Well, no one lives forever. When Hugo, Hugo.
Like · · Share · 4,089390426 · 10 minutes ago ·

Hmm...

The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has given free rein to fears that Cuba will plunge into an economic abyss again if Caracas halts its subsidies, estimated at well above the massive aid that the Soviet Union once provided to Havana.

“The impact of a cutoff will be that the crisis we now have will turn into chaos, because the Cuban government has no other source of financing,” said Miriam Leiva, a Havana dissident and former Cuban diplomat.

Havana now gets two-thirds of its domestic oil consumption from Caracas — about 96,000 barrels per day — and pays part of the bill with the vastly overpriced labor of 35,000 Cuban medical personnel, teachers and others working in Venezuela.

The rest of the bill is chalked up as a debt, mostly to Venezuela’s PDVSA oil monopoly, which now stands at more than $8 billion, said Jorge Piñon, a Cuba–born oil expert at the University of Texas in Austin.

“If Cuba had to pay $96 to $98 per barrel, that would mean a gigantic negative impact on its cash register,” said Piñon.

man, i didn't know that at all!

My marination in Cuban-American culture, ironically, has kept me from explaining the subtleties of the tempestuous relations between Cuba and the U.S. and South American and the U.S. I've got pretty mixed feeligns, as you might imagine, about the ease with which American media caricature older Cuban exile -- and the degree to which the Cuban exile gives the media all the help it can get.

the NYT:

He grew obsessed with changing Venezuela’s laws and regulations to ensure that he could be re-elected indefinitely and become, indeed, a caudillo, able to rule by decree at times. He celebrated his past as a military officer and stacked his government with generals, colonels and majors, drawing inspiration from the leftist military officers who ruled Peru and Panama in the 1970s.

A bizarre governing apparatus subject to his whims coalesced around him. State television cameras recorded nearly every public appearance, many of them to make surprise, unscripted announcements, often in his military uniform and paratrooper’s red beret. He might rail against Venezuela’s high consumption of Scotch whisky — he did not drink alcohol, his aides said — or its high demand for breast augmentation surgery. He once stunned citizens by decreeing a new time zone for the nation, a half-hour behind its previous one. Fawning cabinet ministers sat through his televised lectures as he browbeat them over unfulfilled objectives.

Hmm, Maduro is/was a follower of Sathya Sai Baba?

http://infocatolica.com/blog/infories.php/1212161141-nicolas-maduro-sucesor-de-hug

Jon Lee Anderson's recent New Yorker story on Caracas' soaring crime rate:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/28/130128fa_fact_anderson

^great piece

he was horrible, but on the other hand if youre gonna be horrible its p cool to be horrible like this

http://kinialohaguy.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/chavez-parrot2.jpg

wholesale ilx dismissive lols seem a bit odd towards someone who despite mentalism and massive flaws had policies that e.g. reduced poverty massively and extreme poverty even moreso.

(something like 50% and 66% iirc.)

theres a good piece in harpers from like five years ago on his weekly tv show thats so insane

xp Brilliant and horrifying article

Fellow lefties on my Twitter timeline seemingly unwilling to concede an inch about Chavez's considerable failings.

wholesale ilx dismissive lols seem a bit odd towards someone who despite mentalism and massive flaws had policies that e.g. reduced poverty massively and extreme poverty even moreso.

― hot young stalin (Merdeyeux), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 6:26 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(something like 50% and 66% iirc.)

― hot young stalin (Merdeyeux), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 6:26 PM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

™ Chavez Research Inc

Caracas has always been fucked up. The slums and crime predate Chavez and probably couldn't have been fixed by him. The "deterioration" of the city is far more complex and should be seen in the light of the tense relationship he has always had with huge swathes of the capital. If you want a real measure of his success or failure, it probably makes sense to look at the rest of the country as well.

caracas has not always been fucked up! and least not in the way it is now. of course the beginning of the decline predates chavez and is partially precipitated by all sorts of trends outside of his control, but the country got much poorer and more corrupt under his regime despite record oil profits

I've had literally dozens of students over the years -- the children of the Venezuelan middle and upper-classes -- who've dealt with the sudden disappearance of relatives, not to mention the press clampdown. I'm loath to criticize Chavez on the basis of how his attention to the poor helped the lives of thousands -- enough for them to overlook his thuggery, coarseness, and demagoguery.

Chavez's death depresses me because I don't know whether an equitable system for providing basic services to the poor requires turning a country into the subject of a Conrad novel. I mean, this is what the international left looks like in 2013?

throwing some bones to the poor while yr cronies are getting rich is better than not throwing them any bones but its a completely unsustainable system via collapsing economy and infrastructure

^^ yep. An oligarchy in leftist drag.

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/03/05/1678661/why-democrats-shouldnt-eulogize-hugo-chavez

Chavez’s state-run media hounded Venezuela’s small, beleaguered Jewish population — he himself once said “Don’t let yourselves be poisoned by those wandering Jews.” A study released by the Kantor Center at Tel Aviv University found that Chavez’s rule “witnessed a rise in antisemitic manifestations, including vandalism, media attacks, caricatures, and physical attacks on Venezuelan Jewish institutions.” Indeed, roughly half of Venezuelan Jews fled the country because of “the social and economic chaos that the president has unleashed and from the uncomfortable feeling that they were being specifically targeted by the regime.”

I replied to Billy Bragg with the wikipedia on Chavez's anti-semitism and he didn't respond. Unbelievable, I know.

it's always kind of creeped me out to see a certain kind of leftist gush over chavez, always felt like a faint echo of soviet/stalin apologetics from the '30s. seems like all a dictator's got to do is make fun of bush and brandish a chomsky book and he's got the counterpunch/ollie stone crowd eating out of his hand.

agreed tho it seems like this sort of sentiment has greatly declined in recent years

Right wing Cuban exile's attempts to co-opt anti-chavismo had the odd effect of mitigating how much worse Fidel is as autocrat and human being.

I admit I had hopes for him when he first came to power. then things became cartoonishly dictatorial. all very predictable really.

damn -- I miss the inevitable Hitchens obit.

caracas has not always been fucked up! and least not in the way it is now

The slums and extreme poverty are not new. The increased crime is, at least in part, down to the way cocaine routes have been redrawn over the last fifteen years. The upper middle class that kept a lot of the visible signs of prosperity functioning have suffered but the previous system was not sustainable. I'm not going to defend a lot of what he did but articles stripped of historical and wider national context tell very little of the picture.

when you say caracas you are necessarily not talking about the whole country, thats called venezuela

Recent accounts of Hugo Chávez's politicized necrophilia may seem almost too lurid to believe, but I can testify from personal experience that they may well be an understatement. In the early hours of July 16—just at the midnight hour, to be precise—Venezuela's capo officiated at a grisly ceremony. This involved the exhumation of the mortal remains of Simón Bolívar, leader of Latin America's rebellion against Spain, who died in 1830. According to a vividly written article by Thor Halvorssen in the July 25 Washington Post, the skeleton was picked apart—even as Chávez tweeted the proceedings for his audience—and some teeth and bone fragments were taken away for testing. The residual pieces were placed in a coffin stamped with the Chávez government's seal. In one of the rather free-associating speeches for which he has become celebrated, Chávez appealed to Jesus Christ to restage the raising of Lazarus and reanimate Bolívar's constituent parts. He went on:
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"I had some doubts, but after seeing his remains, my heart said, 'Yes, it is me.' Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: 'It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.' "

As if "channeling" this none-too-subtle identification of Chávez with the national hero, Venezuelan television was compelled to run images of Bolívar, followed by footage of the remains, and then pictures of the boss. The national anthem provided the soundtrack. Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

Simón Bolívar's cadaver is like any other cadaver, but his legacy is a great deal more worth stealing than that of Kim Il Sung. Gabriel García Márquez's novel The General in His Labyrinth is one place to begin, if you want to understand the combination of heroic and tragic qualities that keep his memory alive to this day. (In New York, his equestrian statue still dominates the intersection of the Avenue of the Americas and Central Park South.) The idea of a United States of South America will always be a tenuous dream, but in his bloody struggle for its realization, Bolívar cut a considerable figure, as he did in his other capacities as double-dealer, war criminal, and serial fornicator, also lovingly portrayed by Márquez.

In the fall of 2008, I went to Venezuela as a guest of Sean Penn's, whose friendship with Chávez is warm. The third member of our party was the excellent historian Douglas Brinkley, and we spent some quality time flying around the country on Chávez's presidential jet and bouncing with him from rally to rally at ground level, as well. The boss loves to talk and has clocked up speeches of Castro-like length. Bolívar is the theme of which he never tires. His early uniformed movement of mutineers—which failed to bring off a military coup in 1992—was named for Bolívar. Turning belatedly but successfully to electoral politics, he called his followers the Bolivarian Movement. Since he became president, the country's official name has been the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. (Chávez must sometimes wish that he had been born in Bolivia in the first place.) At Cabinet meetings, he has been known to leave an empty chair, in case the shade of Bolívar might choose to attend the otherwise rather Chávez-dominated proceedings.

It did not take long for this hero-obsession to disclose itself in bizarre forms. One evening, as we were jetting through the skies, Brinkley mildly asked whether Chávez's large purchases of Russian warships might not be interpreted by Washington as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. The boss's response was impressively immediate. He did not know for sure, he said, but he very much hoped so. "The United States was born with an imperialist impulse. There has been a long confrontation between Monroe and Bolívar. … It is necessary that the Monroe Doctrine be broken." As his tirade against evil America mounted, Penn broke in to say that surely Chávez would be happy to see the arrest of Osama Bin Laden.

I was hugely impressed by the way that the boss scorned this overture. He essentially doubted the existence of al-Qaida, let alone reports of its attacks on the enemy to the north. "I don't know anything about Osama Bin Laden that doesn't come to me through the filter of the West and its propaganda." To this, Penn replied that surely Bin Laden had provided quite a number of his very own broadcasts and videos. I was again impressed by the way that Chávez rejected this proffered lucid-interval lifeline. All of this so-called evidence, too, was a mere product of imperialist television. After all, "there is film of the Americans landing on the moon," he scoffed. "Does that mean the moon shot really happened? In the film, the Yanqui flag is flying straight out. So, is there wind on the moon?" As Chávez beamed with triumph at this logic, an awkwardness descended on my comrades, and on the conversation.

Chávez, in other words, is very close to the climactic moment when he will announce that he is a poached egg and that he requires a very large piece of buttered toast so that he can lie down and take a soothing nap. Even his macabre foraging in the coffin of Simón Bolívar was initially prompted by his theory that an autopsy would prove that The Liberator had been poisoned—most probably by dastardly Colombians. This would perhaps provide a posthumous license for Venezuela's continuing hospitality to the narco-criminal gang FARC, a cross-border activity that does little to foster regional brotherhood.

Many people laughed when Chávez appeared at the podium of the United Nations in September 2006 and declared that he smelled sulfur from the devil himself because of the presence of George W. Bush. But the evidence is that he does have an idiotic weakness for spells and incantations, as well as many of the symptoms of paranoia and megalomania. After the failure of Bolívar's attempted Gran Colombia federation—which briefly united Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and other nations—the U.S. minister in Bogotá, future president William Henry Harrison, said of him that "[u]nder the mask of patriotism and attachment to liberty, he has really been preparing the means of investing himself with arbitrary power." The first time was tragedy; this time is also tragedy but mixed with a strong element of farce.

Chávez, in other words, is very close to the climactic moment when he will announce that he is a poached egg and that he requires a very large piece of buttered toast so that he can lie down and take a soothing nap

"politicized necrophilia"

^^ author did not look up the word necrophilia

re: The increased crime is, at least in part, down to the way cocaine routes have been redrawn over the last fifteen years.

---

This would perhaps provide a posthumous license for Venezuela's continuing hospitality to the narco-criminal gang FARC, a cross-border activity that does little to foster regional brotherhood.

http://www.insightcrime.org/images/FARC_presence_in_Venezuela_and_Drug_Routes.jpg

My discomfort with left-wingers on Twitter handwaving Chavez's human rights abuses and dictator bromances has been put into perspective by the monotonous and overwhelming Chavez-bashing I'm seeing across US news sites. Jon Lee Anderson at the New Yorker blog offers a rare bit of balance. Shouldn't be too hard to accept that someone could reduce poverty, boost literacy and inspire Latin America AND do a bunch of incompetent/malicious shit at the same time.

Apologies for gross oversimplifications but it's midnight here and I'm going to bed. You get the gist.

chavez wielder of near absolute power for the last 15 years is responsible for nothing

Xps, what's going on in Caracas does need to be seen in the context of what's happening in the rest of the country though. The policy of reversing the situation where a small upper middle class in the capital siphoned off the bulk of the oil money was always going to have an effect but the other side of that coin is pretty important to acknowledge too.

But as for the increased literacy rates I say to Castro/Chavez apologists: what the hell is worth reading in Cuba and Venezuela anyway? Have you ever tried reading Granma?

Shouldn't be too hard to accept that someone could reduce poverty, boost literacy and inspire Latin America AND do a bunch of incompetent/malicious shit at the same time.

― Deafening silence (DL), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 6:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the thing abt this is improvement is completely relative to previous horrible regimes, is anyone willing to claim that he did all he could or that venezuelas poor are not still in very bad shape, that he in any way lived up to his rhetoric

Xps, what's going on in Caracas does need to be seen in the context of what's happening in the rest of the country though. The policy of reversing the situation where a small upper middle class in the capital siphoned off the bulk of the oil money was always going to have an effect but the other side of that coin is pretty important to acknowledge too.

― Des Fusils Pour Banter (ShariVari), Tuesday, March 5, 2013 6:59 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i said this upthread m/l but its still a poor excuse for a crumbling city overrun w/crime, the guy held unfettered power for 15 years its not unreasonable to hold him accountable

It's fucked either way. "The Poor" won't be interviewed by CNN about the improvements in their lives, and the Venezuelans who emigrated to the US will get dismissed by leftists as capitalist stooges who deserved what they got.

I'd question whether he had unfettered power in Caracas. He always met with pretty strong resistance there. You can also point to a proportionately similar increase in gun crime in Trinidad, but w/e. I have to go to bed.

I don't want to defend him to the hilt as he was clearly a dick at times and made significant mistakes at all points but, like Putin, I have to recognise pretty much everyone who came before was worse.

man I know history gets short shrift in our schools but is South American history the most neglected -- considering its proximity?

hey man its called covert for a reason

from a FB friend:

I am at home with my family but I can't get in touch with my dad. Seems phonelines are collapsed. The law mandates elections should be done in a period of 30 or 90 days -can't really remember right now- but I don't have too many hopes for people whose speech consists of insulting the opposition -Maduro pretty much called former presidential candidate Capriles, a homosexual today- and all of the reports about Chavez's health have been pretty contradictory if not straight up false. We are living in a military de facto government and that is what bothers me most.

http://www.hrw.org/americas/venezuela

heres a good leftist apologia if anyones looking http://www.thenation.com/article/173212/legacy-hugo-chavez

RIP the greatest man of the 21st century

what abt the 20th century kinda feel like youre selling him short

Chavez was a tyrannical butthole.

yep... so better in many ways than Obama.

his UN 'the Devil was here' speech a def career highlight.

idk feel like you shd prob spend a lil more time w his oveur

but hey youve already compared him to obama so perhaps yr work is done here

Morbs...seriously?

well O has fucked the poor p well so there's not much of a comparison

pissing off the US gets you major points w/ me.

a major accomplishment in governance surely

say what you will about Hirohito, but he pissed off the US real good

im just talking about cheap sensation, like yr love of chris nolan jointz. xp

i surely do not love chris nolan 'jointz', i merely like them

oookay ;)

this is so unfair

that Nation piece is good... i dont think teh Venezuelans want another prez w/ (milder) cancer so i do not choose to run.

http://i.imgur.com/GzNOA.jpg

kramer would've made a fine pres of venezuela imo

"pissing off" rightwing pundits that welcome a good stooge when they see one /= pissing off the US

larison linked to this old piecehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/chavez-hasnt-had-a-serious-impact-on-u-s-national-security/, some mix of this and the nation obit seems a fair measure of the man. leftists in my feeds mourning him as a champion of the poor, anti-imperialist, etc are ridiculous but not nearly so as much as rightists in my feeds acting like the guy was 'another hitler', plain and simple. guy wasn't even another castro, nevermind hitler. esp rmde at these guys since so many of them wanted obama to prop up mubarak. any rightists chortling over that nation obit would be well advised to look at any of the national review's multiple gushing obits at franco's death, one of which called him the 'greatest ruler of the twentieth century'.

"I’m what they call a useful idiot when it comes to Hugo Chávez,"

The Nation calls itself out. Love it.

ftists in my feeds mourning him as a champion of the poor, anti-imperialist, etc are ridiculous but not nearly so as much as rightists in my feeds acting like the guy was 'another hitler', plain and simple. guy wasn't even another castro,

yah this was my point upthread. Cubans ain't doing their moribund cause any favors by comparing our man in Havana to a charmless acolyte.

awesomeness in the CV:

"Honorary Doctorate in Economics – Granted by the Faculty of Economics and Commerce of Beijing University (People's Republic of China) on 24 May 2001."

the nation piece kinda gives a better illusion of an argument than an actual argument while artfully ignoring many of the more concrete criticisms of the man, i mean i know i said it was good but i meant it was good in its own way

I like the part where they wave off a bunch of Chavez's awful shit because that awful shit was happening with the previous regimes too

now who's making an Obama comparison...?

"I smell sulfur" was totally charming, Alfred.

wasn't it?

Living in a county burdened with one of the most venal and corrupt of police forces -- swollen with dollars and hubris since George W's brother/our governor decided we needed a perpetual war ethos to keeep safe -- you can excuse me for not feeling much sympathy with your position. You've rightly railed against the Bush-Obama police state. Now you're implying that you prefer Chavez's caudillo-ist autocracy because -- well, why exactly? He gives them black credit cards? This is intellectual barbarism.

your county didn't need more money in the police force? Which county are you in?

Miami-Dade's doing fine with police funding. It's fire rescue that's often in trouble. Also: I would not recommend pissing off municipal cops or FHP unless you like the circadian rhythms of Taser electricity.

bad boys bad boys

a police force that is not underfunded?!?! (dandydon faints)

I agree with your accusations of corruption (though AFAIK that police force was quite corrupt in the 80s) and happiness with taser. But you said that Jeb swelled the police forces with money, so I was curious if that was a fact.

Everything's underfunded everywhere. Anyone with a budget always needs more.

ha clean hit there morbs

jon lee anderson:

http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/03/postscript-hugo-chavez-1954-2013.html

he called Dubya "Mister Danger" and "Donkey"

lolz

not as good as the "sulfur" bit tho

cant imagine gwb not secretly loving mister danger

it's no "turd blossom", but definitely seems his vibe

turd blossom was inspired work

can't imagine gwb not secretly having a pet name for chavez

can't imagine Hugo not having a pet named "Sulphur."

“Remember, little girl, I’m like the thorn tree that flowers on the plain. I waft my scent to passers-by and prick he who shakes me. Don’t mess with me, Condoleezza. Don’t mess with me, girl.” — Chávez, to then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in 2006.

r.i.p.

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2013/03/death-by-slideshow-hugo-chavez-rip/

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/files/2013/03/Chavez-Bol%C3%ADvar-NYT.png

dope pic, had no idea bolivar was such a dandy

Alfred heard it...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/world/americas/venezuelan-expatriates-see-a-reason-to-celebrate.html

one can be an autocrat and make the lives of the poor better, for awhile anyway.

Absolutely. Though Lula proved you could have one without the other.

http://i.imgur.com/jcoEjuV.png

buuuusted

lol @ nineties eyeware

90s lapels, all 90s everything

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/03/hugo_chavez_s_legacy_the_former_venezuelan_president_was_not_the_typical.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/in-the-end-chavez-was-an-awful-manager.html

http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2273961/chavez_large_medium.jpg

the night hugo chavez broke shea stadium

glove + pinstripes + cleats = awesome

I asked him why, so late in the day, he had decided to adopt socialism. He acknowledged that he had come to it late, long after most of the world had abandoned it, but said that it had clicked for him after he had read Victor Hugo’s epic novel “Les Misérables.”

lol

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/03/postscript-hugo-chavez-1954-2013.html#ixzz2MmMGK8TL

we need to know if he got a chance to watch the movie tho

Sean Penn screened it for him.

a buncha good links in this Slate article: http://www.theforce.net/kids/coruscant/probe_droid/palpatine.jpg

it's got some good building meter data too

This one's even better.

Cuba and Venezuela: the ties that bind

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112596/hugo-chavez-dead-cuba-defined-him-much-venezuela-did?utm_source=The+New+Republic&utm_campaign=2a7c3a41c6-TNR_Daily_030613&utm_medium=email#

I can't stop looking at that 3d bolivar

@DennisThePerrin
Too bad Obama didn't assassinate Chavez -- a nice two-for-one for the Rachel Maddows of this world.

‏@DennisThePerrin
A downside to aging is how my Bollywood dance moves have slowed

Chavez kissed poor "like a kitten"

lol

http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/03/06/ap-chavez-wasted-his-money-on-healthcare-when-he-could-have-built-gigantic-skyscrapers/

can we get hatcat to sub in for '@DennisThePerrin'

First-rate Chris Hayes show discussing Chavez: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46979738/ns/msnbc-up_with_chris_hayes/vp/51122755#51122768

http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/03/07/hugo_chavez_economic_policies_the_ap_makes_the_case_he_s_been_good_for_venezuela.html?original_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FlD6N85I3KB

Perrin usta work for FAIR

Heard a radio interview with an academic who said the nearest comparison for Chavez was Juan Peron. He made a good case. International capitalists hated Peron, too.

dennis peron

haha

Morbs, do you really think Perrin is funny or insightful, ever?

he's fine imo

Echoing Alfred's praise for that Chris Hayes discussion he linked. msnbc. Who fuckin knew.

http://coreyrobin.com/2013/04/08/from-the-mixed-up-files-of-mr-jon-lee-anderson/

good piece on Jon Lee Anderson's baseless and unsupported anti-Chavez claims in the NYer