Posted on 02/09/2002 11:38:11 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela's military brass closed ranks around President Hugo Chavez and demanded that two dissident officers who called for Chavez's resignation, spurring widespread protests this week, turn themselves in.
Compared to the large protest of thousands outside Chavez's residence on Thursday, Caracas' streets were quiet Saturday as many left politics behind for a week of Carnival. Thousands of Chavez supporters, however, maintained a peaceful vigil at the presidential palace.
Air Force Col. Pedro Soto stunned the nation on Thursday by calling for a civilian junta to replace Chavez until elections can be held. Authorities gave him until Monday to report to his superiors before officers are dispatched to arrest him.
Dissident air force Colonel Pedro Soto (L) and National Guard Captain Pedro Flores protest against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Caracas, February 8, 2002. Supporters and opponents of the maverick left-wing leader staged rival protests for a second day. REUTERS/Kimberly White
Soto's whereabouts were unknown. National Guard Capt. Pedro Jose Flores, believed to be involved with Soto, also was missing.
Soto said most of the armed forces resent Chavez's uncompromising style of governing and his verbal attacks on the news media. The government described Soto as a disgruntled colonel passed over for promotion to general.
Vice President Diosdado Cabello assured the nation that no coups were stirring and that this South American nation "is in complete and total calm."
"The National Guard will never support a military coup," Guard Cmdr. Francisco Belisario Landis insisted, adding that Flores had been summoned to report to headquarters to face disciplinary action.
After Cabinet meetings, Chavez decided there was no need to personally respond to Soto, said Guillermo Garcia Ponce, director of Chavez's "Revolutionary Political Command."
"The country has returned to normalcy and Venezuelans are preparing for Carnival," Ponce said. "This individual doesn't have the means to endanger political stability."
The United States and the Organization of American States expressed concern for Venezuelan democracy after the protests. OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria urged Soto to surrender, noting that Chavez was democratically elected as president in 1998 but that the international community was watching to ensure Soto's rights are respected.
Deputy Gerardo Blyde of the opposition Justice First party said the spontaneous protests showed people are tired of Chavez's provocative rhetoric and lengthy broadcasts of his activities and want him to start governing.
"People were protesting not for the colonel, but for dignity," Blyde told Globovision television.
The Chavez-controlled National Assembly said it will open an investigation into an alleged conspiracy involving Soto and Flores and outlined by Vice President Cabello on Friday.
Ponce said too many people were focusing on the opposition protests in Caracas, especially in the wealthier, eastern part of the city, and not enough on the impoverished countryside, from where the populist Chavez draws most of his support.
"Venezuela isn't eastern Caracas, and eastern Caracas doesn't represent the country's 23 million people," Ponce said.
Venezuelans protest against President Hugo Chavez in Caracas February 8, 2002. Another Venezuelan military officer spoke out against Chavez, condemning him as a threat to democracy as supporters and opponents of the maverick left-wing leader staged rival protests for a second day.
The sign shows the head of Chavez in a wok. REUTERS/Kimberly White
Chavez fires VP gives job to general who participated in his failed 1992 coup --and LINKS to other information about Hugo Chavez.
May 16: "The Chinese are betting on Venezuela" said President Hugo Chavez, following a 4-day visit by Chinese officials, reports Caracas El Universal.
"We are not just speaking empty words, but we are dealing with specific issues," Chavez exclaimed. Since Chavez's visit to Beijing in October 1999, "No less than five high-level government and private business commissions have visited [Venezuela], as well as commissions comprising local governments." Chavez said bilateral agreements were reviewed in such areas as gas and oil, as well as agriculture and mining, plus the national railroad plan.
The 14-member Chinese delegation was led by Li Ruihuan, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. After meeting with the delegation, Venezuelan National Legislative Commission president Luis Miqilena said his country, "has much to learn and receive from China. We have not only opened our heart, but also all sectors of our economy, all possibilities for hyper-development between the two countries . . ."
With the exception that in 1830 the US economy was leveraged with investment banking whereas China's is with slave human banking.
but tantalizing, go on...tell me more.
Banks mostly speculate by loaning 10 times their reserves, betting the money they print will attain its promised future value when the financed factories do produce goods and assets that do end up backing up this money. Essentialy, a loan and paper money have become future contracts, while people view it erroneously as an absolute promise for the day. Except that no specific date is specified on that future contract as it is up to us (the market) to set that date, or rather a liquidity and value factor on that money. However note that the bank's main assets, its services, and the service value of money are also the risks the bank takes. If all the banks assets backed the money, the risks of the banks would be huge, so we spread this risk between the bank assets and the work that needs to be done for the money to attain true value.
Though the bank is not taking a life taking risk as a miner or a pilot, the bank is taking perceivable risks, and the value of 10 times the bank's asset is a government mandated one, though markets should also have a say in this (which they do in the manner of interest rate value taged to risks on a loan). The big debate hence is when there is need to judge the actual value to risk ratio each party should bear - as judges, the government and the federal reserve set limits or marketable values on loans by setting their interest rate or coupons and various variables. Government, as a demagogic entity is not perfect in this, but has an interest through taxation, maintaining security and relying on the people who are key governors of themselves and participants in the overall governance of things.
So, in the end, the money paid to the worker does have a value. So the worker does take a risk when he works. He takes the risk that the money he is paid with will have no value at all if the economy tanked and people started stealing or mismanaging money. The bourgeois represents a class in between, a worker, but also the primary lenders/depositors as well as business and asset owner that may borrow. THe bourgeois stands clearly as the insurance that work is being done according to contract and that investments are trustworthy. It brings confidence to the economy and actual value and service from the money.
Communists refuse any idea of speculation and claim workers should not participate in the risk taking because it is inhumane if things went wrong. They even call it the bourgeois slavery, or the slavery to the materials and money future contracts. In addition they claim the bourgeois is guilty of impersonating a superior role that it is not fit to claim - a fraud.
That man is born in a risky procedure, only to live a risky life, life dependant on production anyhow, only to end up parting from it all after all this work to die, does not phase the communists. The bet that we can improve living standards, remove the yoke of life mostly, live longer and longer by such generational generous healing and speculating works does not make them dream either. We all die they say, a good bourgeois life is a burdensome insanity and not rewarding according to the cynics. Was Hypocrates wrong? Should we kill off the sick while he suffers, or should we engage the sick to fight the illness with tremendous pain, only to die, taking all the risks, so that the next generations can live with less risks? The hatred of the tradition by progressists is indeed teltale of a class struggle in the temporal frame, in addition to the material anti-bourgeois class frame. According to progressists, the living should not take the risk, and the past generations should be blamed for putting us in the present predicamment.
In their minds there are classless people of the proletaria who should be protected and should not lose their "virginity" through speculation, and the insane who through speculation are guilty of impersonating crimes or have mental problems. In essence the risks should be hence taken by the people inherently ímbued with bourgeois character, and the enslavers should be enslaved and taking the risks, not the other way around (idealy in true communist fashion). Also those deemed impersonating talk with, or speculating with, God are considered in that category.
Of course this is all an excuse for not wanting to do your share of risk taking in the world, as risk taking is inherently vital to keep the economy going. To diminish this risk, the risk has to be spread out from the upper class down to the masses.
The communist goal is simple because it bets that the economic need to spread the risk evenly will create a huge class and union of people on which risk is spread, mass which finds commonality in the common risk, a communist mass that can be harnessed as a force to fraudulently (or ludicrously) reorient the risk responsibility against the bourgeois, the past generations, even burdensome innocent children for whom we take so many risks (where animals are even better valued as they request us nothing in terms of risk taking in particular) or those with bourgeois attitudes, in arbitrary fashion most of the time.
I believe that this self defeating goal of communism will always breath so long as man is envious, coveting and cynical. However it will be especialy vibrant in a unipolar world where the US is viewed as making the others take the risks while it contains all the value. THe economy of the communists hence will largely depend on a mean of enslaving/looting the US.
The question comes: should we do a burned earth policy and dare nuclear war? The communists may hope not, however their values are based on a one time class struggle before "paradise", according to their value without risk ideal. (Contradiction makes it sometimes more likely actualy in their world). If they do not hope for nuclear war, then world governance class struggle model could be a mean, though not completely satisfactory. So long the communists do not completely control that process and the social/human worldwide engineering and wars necessitating appropriate purges for appropriate control, they will be uneasy.
In the US some leaders and business men have been betting that we can prevail with our spot, life and assets somewhat intact in a world governance scheme, which is a complete lie because the US would be mostly taxed and subject to foreign armies of poor and proletarian types. This is one great danger.
World governance is not wrong in and of itself. Blood letting often results in new laws and new governments, invariably, and a world body is not imune from the probability of seeing the birth of a true one world government. What is wrong is world governance in this obvious atmosphere of uncompromising stance in the world against perceived fraudulent American impersonation and the American bourgeois. Even if the world was fair to America, the coming natural economic convergence of the third world to the US would result in huge de-investments in the US to abroad, devestments that would cripple our way of life as we know it. The mere potential for huge trouble, even in a political harmonious climate, should chill one in his tracks from such goal. And note that this time the banks would take few risks by moving capital easily, while the more sedentary American person capital would be at risk in this short term goal, term that should require much greater care and long term planning, and, that is, WITHIN A HAMONIOUS WORLD POLITICAL ATMOSPHERE - atmosphere that has not been attained, let alone the actual planning.
The people advocating one world government are either communists, frauds, complete nuts, its main demagogic beneficiaries without risk, or a mix of the above.
Russia, China and the third world do not want to deal with speculative or future monetary value impersonating as is done in the US, they want to see the US either to their levels, enslaved, or fully participating in a system where the worker takes no risk and the rest are slaves and risk takers, in arbitrary fashion. Their economies are still based on such systems, or a mix of speculative and true arbitrary anti-bourgeois slavery system, that is all too telling of their intentions to never let us get ahold of the way the economy should be run according to Bourgeois.
Last but not least, even if China or Russia's leaders today genuinely wanted to do away with former ways (which they are not since they are so brainwashed and illuminated into their culture, prejudices and personal emotional investments into this cult of despise of money), their whole armies, people and security services are cohesively commited, and they expect their leaders to be too commited to these evil goals, inherently so. Just as when Saddam could not lose face when he had bureaucraticaly comitted his nation and operatives to work hard with the promise of rape and looting of Kuwait, the leaders of Russia and China have promised loot to their people who have sacrificed all their lives to get that loot. Like Pharoh and the Egyptians, they cannot possibly reverse that stance.
Reversing on that decision would make the people of Russia and China feel betrayed for the human, family and living standards sacrifices they have done to attain this goal. Waiting on this goal makes them even more anxious, anti-American and doubtful of the abilities of their current leaders to accomplish anything. With time and investments, the problem does not get solved, it exacerbates it.
Like hungry wolves in a pit, waiting for too long and getting only the first world investment peels of flesh to eat, they are less and less patient as our investments and their trickling down to them is getting their demented appetite going even stronger. I believe this to be inevitable.
Electing Chavez was done on such populist terms during a period in which the Venezuelan economy was just starting up. The WTC happened at a time when the Middle East was opening up its markets and their economies were starting up and getting false starts. Terror and war is inevitable in this context, if not terror itself is. THe migration hysteria that is happening on the Southern border with Mexico is also very much telling of the upheavals going on. And in Russia and China the volunteering to destroy the US is now having shades of the Palestinian intifada spontaneity, with "rogue" commanders and demagogue stiring up the pot, supporting rogue operations or supporting "rogue" political statements of their own. Like Arafat claiming he can't control terror, the Chinese openly let their generals write white papers, slam the US while the likes of Duma filled facists in the Russian parliaments are quite popular.
i live near the mexican border and see the hysteria daily here on the forum.
so, your view is that the chicoms will survive by terrorism in the western hemisphere against the united states?
the c.i.a. is betting that ethnic rivalries and class rivalries will implode the chinese empire.
fukuyama's book "trust" explains that the chicom leadership is of the same large extended family, which includes the riadys, i believe. most americans are unaware of this. it's a large family analogous to the sauds of saudi arabia.
Even though communism is an evil cult that cares for no nation nor man, it still is a cult that is now viewed with nostalgia there. There is nothing hysterical about this, it is a fact that Russians and Ukrainians still see as their enemy the participation of the proletarian in the sharing of the financial risk taking that the bourgeois in banks and big business take.
They somehow believe that, being at the bottom of the social classes, they do not have anything to fear from communism but everything to fear from big business risk taking, notwithstanding the threat that people amongst them who maintain themselves at the lower class will denounce them one day again in the revolutionary cycle.
These people not only lack business confidence and manly confidence in business, they also fear a second revolution and the lack of commonality with their acquaintances. The bottom line commonality between men is the risk they take. Ideals of a commonality in the works of healing or God believing is speculative on the other hand.
Think about it, communism in in Russia and in China are a very strong cohesive force. THe CIA is being naive in speculating about Chinese ethnic strife. It won't happen and cannot be leveraged with economic incentives or cyclical winds of political reforms and revolutions. Communism lays at the bottom stable level of these cycles. You can bush a ball in bowl only that much, and it always will come back down. And that is exactly the hopes and probably accurate anticipation of the communists, sadly. It is not until we acknowledge this threat and strength of evil that we will be able to do something real about this situation.
Class, ethnic and religious struggles are what strengthen communism and those nations. It is their foundation.
The second is Taiwan. No Chinese Imperial dynasty paid the least attention to Taiwan, or bothered to claim it. The Manchus did, though, in 1683, and ruled it in a desultory way, as a prefecture of Fujian Province, until 1887, when it was upgraded to a province in its own right. Eight years later it was ceded to Japan, whose property it remained until 1945. In its entire history, it has been ruled by Chinese people seated in China's capital for less than four years. China's current attitudes to Taiwan are, I think, pretty well known.
And the third stumbling block to the restoration of China's greatness is…….the United States. To the modern Chinese way of thinking, China's proper sphere of influence encompasses all of East Asia and the western Pacific. This does not mean that they necessarily want to invade and subjugate all the nations of that region, though they certainly do want to do just that to Taiwan and some groups of smaller islands. For Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Micronesia, etc., the old imperial-suzerainty model would do well enough, at least in the short term. These places could conduct their own internal affairs, so long as they acknowledged the overlordship of Beijing, and, above all, did not enter into alliances, nor even close friendships, with other powers.
Which, of course, too many of them have done, the competitor power in every case being the U.S. It is impossible to overstate how angry it makes the Chinese to think about all those American troops in Japan, Korea, and Guam, together with the U.S. Seventh Fleet steaming up and down in "Chinese" waters, and electronic reconnaissance planes like the EP-3 brought down on April 1 operating within listening distance of the mainland. If you tackle Chinese people on this, they usually say: "How would you feel if there were Chinese troops in Mexico and Jamaica, and Chinese planes flying up and down your coasts?" Leaving aside the fact that front companies for the Beijing regime now control both ends of the Panama Canal, as well as Freeport in the Bahamas, the answer is that the United States is a democracy of free people, whose government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, so that the wider America's influence spreads, the better for humanity: while China is a corrupt, brutish, and lawless despotism, the close containment of which is a pressing interest for the whole human race. One cannot, of course, expect Chinese people to be very receptive to this answer.
Or, indeed, to anything much we have to say on the subject of their increasing militant and assertive nationalism. We simply have no leverage here. It is no use trying to pretend that this is the face-saving ideology of a small leadership group, forced on an unwilling populace at gunpoint. The Chinese people respond eagerly to these ultra-nationalist appeals: That is precisely why the leadership makes them. Resentment of the U.S., and a determination to enforce Chinese hegemony in Asia, are well-nigh universal among modern mainland Chinese. These emotions trump any desire for constitutional government, however much people dislike the current regime for its corruption and incompetence. Find a mainlander, preferably one under the age of thirty, and ask him which of the following he would prefer: for the Communists to stay in power indefinitely, unreformed, but in full control of the "three T's" (Tibet, Turkestan, Taiwan); or a democratic, constitutional government without the three T's. His answer will depress you. You can even try this unhappy little experiment with dissidents: same answer.
Is there anything we can do about all this? One thing only. We must understand clearly that there will be lasting peace in East Asia when, and only when, China abandons her atavistic fantasies of imperial hegemony, withdraws her armies from the 2 million square miles of other people's territory they currently occupy, and gets herself a democratic government under a rule of law. Until that day comes, if it ever does, the danger of war will be a constant in relations between China and the world beyond the Wall, as recent events in the South China Sea have illustrated. Free nations, under the indispensable leadership of the United States, must in the meantime struggle to maintain peace, using the one, single, and only method that wretched humanity, in all its millennia of experience, has so far been able to devise for that purpose: Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. [End Excerpt]
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