Posted on 01/24/2010 9:17:36 AM PST by spyone
I picked an exciting week to visit Venezuela. The night before my arrival, the regime seized the country’s largest shopping mall. The day after, Israeli authorities disclosed that a recently intercepted shipment of missiles to Hezbollah had originated in Venezuela.
These two dissimilar events are importantly related. The seized mall belonged to one of Venezuela’s wealthiest Jewish families. Following an armed attack on the country’s most visible synagogue in January 2009, the seizure sent a strong message: None of you are safe.
(Excerpt) Read more at network.nationalpost.com ...
My understanding is that technical support for many of the drug-shipping semi-submersibles is from HEZBOLLAH —they work closely with Colombian gangs, and some of that work is in Venezuela.
..Barak targeting bankers...
We had a chance to topple him too, some years back, but fumbled it away.
Based on some of the anecdotes I’ve read here on FR from guys doing military technical support for armor and aircraft in Arab/Muslim countries, there is no way in Hell I’d ever get in a submarine that was operating with “technical support” from Hezbollah.
That’s the way it seemed to me, too. It wasn’t just an attack on a concept but a very inflammatory, rabble rousing attack on persons in which he could have been quoting directly from one of those foul NOI screeds
More: about 18 months ago on StrategyPage.com, there were reports that Hezbollah was kidnapping wealthy Jews from VENEZUELA, and then ransoming them
I cannot confirm this, but...I would see a confluence of interests there, for sure; Hez gets money, strikes a blow, and Chavez is rid of some enemies/gets to cultivate a non-state client ally.
Seemed pretty amazing to me —very international. World suddenly getting very small.
Hezbollah does not need submarines, at lease in the attack more. Thy can simple smuggle things in from Jordan. Who cares of they get caught 50% of the time. That means they get through 50% of the time too.
If we can't stop drugs at our borders, how can we expect anyone in SWA to stop anything.
You can never defeat the guerrilla in the field, but you always defeat him when you defeat and deny his outside base of support.
Seriously? Are you referring to Chavez or 0bama?
Or Mein Kampf. This turd is looking more and more like Hitler every day.
Me neither.
EVERY Persian rug is made with a deliberate flaw, as only allah can create something perfect. To even attempt to do so is blasphemous.
Meantime, I read in Tikkun—a radical left rag by a socialist Jewish rabbi, that they like Venezuela’s “democratizing” of the media—where “locals” determine programming. Mark Lloyd, Obama appointee, is also a fan. Maybe we should look at Venezuela’s decline under Chavez more closely and see if we can learn anything to forestall similar ambitions here by the left.
Interesting (see Limbaugh’s comments Friday) how people can hate themselves so much while basking in the successes only attained by capitalism. Soros comes to mind.
While this little conceit is harmless in the creation of carpets, it is fatal in the manufacture of submarines, spaceships, airplanes, medicines, vehicles, weapons, and nearly just about anything else!
Meanwhile, MY God teaches us to use, invest, and perfect our talents wisely, and cause them to multiply.
Next stop, mandating theaters in Venezuela start showing “Der Ewige Jude.”
Here’s the awful article from Tikkun Magazine PRAISING Venezuela local programming. Watch out America!
Free Speech or Fee Speech: Progress in Latin America; Confusion in the United States
by Allen D. Kanner
In an unprecedented challenge to corporate domination of the airwaves, earlier this year Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez sent a bill to Congress that would allocate a third of broadcast frequencies to private companies, a third to state broadcasters, and a third to nonprofit organizations such as churches, community groups, and universities. In other words, the corporate media would lose control of two-thirds of Argentina’s broadcasting. Imagine President Obama sending a similar bill to the U.S. Congress. Fernandez said, “press freedom cannot be confused with freedom for press owners.”
When Fernandez refers to the confusion or conflict between freedom of speech and corporate ownership of the media, she is addressing a fundamental problem that lies at the heart of commercially driven media: Those with the most money have the most access to the media, and therefore get to “speak” the most. To be democratic, a media system has to be fully accessible to all segments of society and has to provide the financial, technological, and legal means for even the poorest and most disenfranchised to utilize that access. Commercially driven media, with their built-in bias toward the wealthy, cannot meet these criteria.
But even if Fernandez’s bill passes, handing over a large chunk of the airwaves to the government and nonprofit sector will not secure a democratic media. The reduced for-profit sector will still be the most heavily funded, which will give it an advantage in producing, distributing, and marketing its materials. The government-controlled media may very well broadcast propaganda, repress alternative viewpoints, and be indirectly influenced by corporate lobbying. Even in the nonprofit sector, the challenge remains as to how to structure access in a fair and just manner. But wresting the majority of broadcasting frequencies away from the corporate world is a necessary and critical first step. Moreover, promising alternatives to commercial media are springing up throughout Latin America and tackling many of the above concerns.
Take, for example, the remarkable developments in Venezuela over the last decade. As a result of the Organic Telecommunications Law of 2000, which was aimed at stimulating and protecting community media, thirty-four licensed, locally controlled community television stations and 400 radio stations were broadcasting from barrios and neighborhoods across the country by 2008. To obtain a permit, community stations had to agree to the following rules: At least 70 percent of their daily programming must be produced from within the community. No single producer can take up more than 20 percent of the programming. The paid staff may only produce 15 percent of the programming, with the rest produced by unpaid volunteers.
Catia TVe, Venezuela’s first legal community television station, takes grassroots media even further. Located in a working-class section of Caracas, the station is a collective that holds workshops for “teams” of four to seven local residents representing specific interest areas, such as students, workers, professionals, artists, or the sports community. The workshops help teams to identify and articulate their particular concerns and train them in audio-visual production. Materials arising from the teams are not subject to editorial approval from “above” at the station but rather are directly aired. Also, from 2-4 pm daily, the station broadcasts programs produced by children for children.
Venezuela’s community television and radio stations are a major reason President Hugo Chavez is able to maintain strong support among the large population of the country’s poor, even while the national corporate media relentlessly oppose him. The Chavez administration is strongly supportive of community media; for example, it recently donated sixty-nine sets of audio-visual equipment to community stations around the country. In time Venezuela and other nations could create constitutional mandates for their governments to sufficiently fund community stations so that the broadcasters need not rely on government largesse. Such support could go a long way toward guaranteeing community media’s viability as a noncommercial entity and minimizing government interference.
Across Latin America, media activists have recognized the fatal flaws of a commercialized media and turned their efforts toward building noncommercial alternatives. But in the United States, the progressive community has been reluctant to unite behind the goal of transforming the nation’s media from commercial to noncommercial. The same community, however, strongly endorses exactly this kind of transformation for health coverage, wanting to replace private insurance, a commercial system, with single-payer insurance, a noncommercial system. Why the glaring inconsistency? Many U.S. progressives believe that banning advertising (de-commercializing the public media) is a violation of corporate free speech (see my article in the July/August 2008 issue of Tikkun). Like it or not, they contend, progressives are obligated to protect corporate marketing.
But advertising is “fee speech,” not free speech, and is accessible only to those who can afford it. This arrangement is inherently undemocratic. As President Fernandez reminds us, when we allow large corporations to control the media because they are wealthy, we are confusing press freedom with freedom for press owners. It is time for the U.S. media movement to get past this confusion and join its Latin American colleagues.
OMG. May ALL IED’s be DUDS.
From my lips to God’s ears.
Hugo has shut down the main opposition TV channel, on a day that celebrates the end of another dictatorship. In their face, I guess. Chavez also demanded “absolute loyalty” from the people and declared “I am the people”.
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