intercepted CIA memo on attacking democracy in Venezuela

If you have only heard bad things about Hugo Chavez in the media, you might not have heard that his election, re-election, and triumph in a US-backed recall by wide margins were certified by international monitors, and that network whose broadcast license he refused to renew actively helped the US backed coup against Chavez and bragged about it on the air while the coup was going on. He also refused the IMF economic program that would have cut social spending and left Venezuela with only 1% of their oil income, the rest going to oil companies and the debt run up by past corrupt governments.

A 90 SECOND VIDEO OF COUP

And if you believe the criticism of him in the media, consider what our ally, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is doing right now: sentencing a gang rape victim to 200 lashes for being in the company of men. There is no election of the Saudi family, recall, or referendum on their power, but the CIA isn't trying to remove them because big oil thinks they've already got the best deal they can get there.

Now there is another vote in Venezuela on amending their constitution, and even the CIA concedes 57% of Venezuelans support Chavez.

That is not stopping them from planning the kind of economic disruption and military take over that led to the coup in Chile in 1973 and decades of torture, mass executions, and economic policies that enriched a handful of the already wealthy and eroded the middle class.

The only problem with doing this in Venezuela is Chavez is FROM the military, and most of the military sided with him when a coup was attempted before because they were sick of being the bad guys and oppressing their own people.

Attacking Chavez is not only morally wrong, but economically foolish. Like Iran, the best weapon Venezuela has to retaliate is economic--they can simply accelerate the move away from trading oil in dollars, drying up the money and credit Bush needs to continue his wars.

If we were really concerned about reducing terrorism and having a stable supply of oil, we would work with leaders like Chavez and work to destabilize big oil instead.

KEY EXCERPTS:

The memo sent by an embassy official, Michael Middleton Steere, was addressed to the Director of Central Intelligence, Michael Hayden. The memo was entitled 'Advancing to the Last Phase of Operation Pincer' and updates the activity by a CIA unit with the acronym 'HUMINT' (Human Intelligence) which is engaged in clandestine action to destabilize the forth-coming referendum and coordinate the civil military overthrow of the elected Chavez government. The Embassy-CIA's polls concede that 57 per cent of the voters approved of the constitutional amendments proposed by Chavez but also predicted a 60 per cent abstention.

The US operatives emphasized their capacity to recruit former Chavez supporters among the social democrats (PODEMOS) and the former Minister of Defense Baduel, claiming to have reduced the 'yes' vote by 6 per cent from its original margin. Nevertheless the Embassy operatives concede that they have reached their ceiling, recognizing they cannot defeat the amendments via the electoral route.

The memo then recommends that Operation Pincer (OP) be operationalized. OP involves a two-pronged strategy of impeding the referendum, rejecting the outcome at the same time as calling for a 'no' vote. The run up to the referendum includes running phony polls, attacking electoral officials and running propaganda through the private media accusing the government of fraud and calling for a 'no' vote. Contradictions, the report emphasizes, are of no matter.

The CIA-Embassy reports internal division and recriminations among the opponents of the amendments including several defections from their 'umbrella group'. The key and most dangerous threats to democracy raised by the Embassy memo point to their success in mobilizing the private university students (backed by top administrators) to attack key government buildings including the Presidential Palace, Supreme Court and the National Electoral Council. The Embassy is especially full of praise for the ex-Maoist 'Red Flag' group for its violent street fighting activity. Ironically, small Trotskyist sects and their trade unionists join the ex-Maoists in opposing the constitutional amendments. The Embassy, while discarding their 'Marxist rhetoric', perceives their opposition as fitting in with their overall strategy.

The ultimate objective of 'Operation Pincer' is to seize a territorial or institutional base with the 'massive support' of the defeated electoral minority within three or four days (presumably after the elections though this is not clear. JP) backed by an uprising by oppositionist military officers principally in the National Guard. The Embassy operative concede that the military plotters have run into serous problems as key intelligence operatives were detected, stores of arms were decommissioned and several plotters are under tight surveillance.

Apart from the deep involvement of the US, the primary organization of the Venezuelan business elite (FEDECAMARAS), as well as all the major private television, radio and newspaper outlets have been engaged in a campaign of fear and intimidation campaign. Food producers, wholesale and retail distributors have created artificial shortages of basic food items and have provoked large scale capital flight to sow chaos in the hopes of reaping a 'no' vote.


FULL TEXT

MUST READ: economic democracy crushed by tanks & coups again and again but keeps coming back stronger and stronger

This is simply breath-taking in tying together what has happened to us her in the US since the Reagan Revolution, what neoliberalism and resource wars like Iraq have done to the rest of the world, and most importantly, how people fought back again and again and could only be deterred by economic or military force.

This is partly why Hugo Chavez is so terrifying to the corporate world: not that he is so far left but because their usual tools failed to remove him or bring him to heel. When they called their bought off generals for a coup enough of the Venezuelan people and even enough of the military saw Chavez was looking out for their interests and the economic elite were not.

Whether the Democrats will really put the people before their corporate donors remains to be seen, but this is the direction we MUST push them in if we in the middle and working class don't want to end up living in a cardboard box in a Third World slum in the middle of North America.

EXCERPTS:











Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

Naomi Klein: From Think Tanks to Battle Tanks, "The Quest to Impose a Single World Market Has Casualties Now in the Millions"

This idea of our intellectual and ideological failure is the dominant narrative of our time. It’s embedded in all the catchphrases that we’ve been referring to. “There is no alternative,” said Thatcher. “History has ended,” said Fukuyama. The Washington Consensus: the thinking has already been done, the consensus is there. Now, the premise of all these proclamations was that capitalism, extreme capitalism, was conquering every corner of the globe because all other ideas had proven themselves disastrous. The only thing worse than capitalism, we were told, was the alternative.

Now, it’s worth remembering when these pronouncements were being made that what was failing was not Scandinavian social democracy, which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare state, which has produced the highest standard of living by UN measures in the world, or at least it did before my government started embracing some of these ideas. It wasn't the so-called Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in the ’80s and ’90s built the Asian “tiger” economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a combination of trade protections to nurture and develop national industry, even when that meant keeping American products out and preventing foreign ownership, as well as maintaining government control over key assets, like water and electricity. These policies did not create explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as we see today. But record levels of profit and a rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has been attacked in these past thirty years.

***
Now, I want to use the rest of my time just to say that this was not the first time, that this -- if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again. Many of you were here for the opening address from Ricardo Lagos, the former president of Chile, who talked about another September 11th, which was another one of those moments, a far more significant one, when a very important democratic alternative, the real third way, not Tony Blair's third way, but the real third way between totalitarian communism and extreme capitalism was being forged in Chile. And that was the great threat.

And we know that now through all of the declassified documents. There’s a really revealing one: a correspondence between Henry Kissinger and Nixon, in which Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. What he actually wrote was, “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on -- and even precedent value for -- other parts of the world…The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” So that alternative, that other world, had to be blasted out of the way, and extreme violence was used in order to accomplish that.

***

We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective we have seen is when the army tanks and the think tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world market has casualties now in the millions, from Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They're popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.

FULL TEXT

A good brief summary of neoliberalism

How "economic hit men" set it up and enforce it

How Bush is plundering Iraq's OIL

Klein on the plunder of Iraq

90 sec video: corporate media vs. democracy

While the Bush administration is unique in their blunt force approach to seizing Iraq's oil, older, subtler methods are used in other places, including one method that looks a hell of a lot like what happens here--only they take it a couple of steps further.

See the rest of the story HERE.

The full movie starts a bit slow but quickly
turns into a real life version of
V for Vendetta,
with an actual coup caught on tape.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

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LETTER TO DEM: Iraq War & business first foreign policy

I got a nice campaign letter from Barbara Ann Radnofsky entitled "No More Iraqs," which was good as far as it went, but failed to get to the heart of the problem. My letter isn't meant as a criticism of her, but as a call for a real re-assessment of the core of our foreign policy that few Democrats seem willing to do (Byron Dorgan and a few others excepted).

Dear Ms. Radnofsky,

Thank you for the email on parallels to Vietnam, but in the case of Iraq, there is an even bigger issue than response to strategic threats, particularly since the Bush administration knowingly exaggerated the threat Iraq would pose to us even if they did have nukes. The issue is how much corporate and financial interests dictate our foreign policy, often to the detriment of the safety of the American people since it incites such resentment in the countries these policies target.

In the case of Iraq, the business interest was oil. Bush cancelled Iraq's oil contracts with Russia, France, and others and gave them to American corporations. Gen. Jay Garner the first guy we sent over to run Iraq said seizing the oil and the radical privatization of their economy would incite an insurgency. He was right, and immediately fired.

Saddam was a bad guy, but this business first approach also trumps democracy when democracy doesn't produce the results business likes. Bush vetoed the Iraqi parliament's first choice for prime minister, and backed a recall and even coup against Hugo Chavez, who has been elected and re-elected by wide majorities with international election monitors watching (in stark contrast to our own presidential elections). Chavez' primary sin seems to be driving a hard bargain with the oil companies and having the audacity to ask for the same royalties on his oil that the US gets on our oil--about 13-16%, and is actually using some of the money to improve the lives of his citizens. Far from suppressing freedom, I heard him take a question from a reporter whose paper's owner backed the coup against him. In the US, a reporter like Helen Thomas who merely says something critical about the president is ignored for years and in the case of Dan Rather, literally run out of his job.

Chavez is likewise popular in the rest of South America because our pro-corporate, pro-banking foreign policy, neoliberalism, has had such brutal effects there.

I like capitalism. I think I have better tennis shoes and computers because of it. But our foreign policy is not merely promoting capitalism, but giving a structural advantage to a few at the expense of the rest of the world and the average American.

If we stopped invading countries that elected leaders who stand up for their people, and stopped writing trade agreements that make the poor poorer, and create a race to the bottom for the lowest wages which is sucking American jobs out of the country, wages here would stabilize because they would be doing the same elsewhere. If we allowed people to choose their own government (without our troops guns in their faces or expectation of a military coup if they make the "wrong" choice) and run their own economies, they will be less likely to become terrorists who want to fly planes into our buildings.

The past few years it has become painfully clear that even our own democracy takes a back seat when oil companies see a prize like Iraq's trillions of dollars worth of oil. If the true goal of ensuring the profits from that oil went to American corporations were presented honestly to the American people, stripped of any talk of WMD, terrorist boogey men, spreading democracy, or even the less embarrassing lie that we need to invade to get access to the oil (which can be done far more cheaply through negotiating contracts as China and other countries are doing) few Americans would support the war apart from major shareholders in oil companies.

If the Democrats take over Congress, it would be nice if they changed things so the worst criticisms of our foreign policy are no longer true.

Links to sources on Iraq's oil & neoliberalism:
http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2006/09/iraq-oil-war-resources.html








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Chavez more honest about OIL CRISIS than US pols

It's sad that the president of a Latin American country is more honest about our energy situation than our own elected officials. If you don't trust Hugo Chavez, National Geographic, Scientific American, and gas and oil journals have been making the same point for a while.

National Geographic: "End of Cheap Oil"

Scientific American: "the End of Cheap Oil"

Collection newspaper, magazine and technical articles on peak oil

I'm faxing this to all our senators and telling them to start telling us the truth about our energy situation and how it's driving our foreign policy. Maybe if they let us in on the debate, we'd choose to do something other than occupy oil producing countries until the oil companies suck every last drop out of the ground and leave us with the debt of hatred and emnity of those countries this earned.

Oil companies practice a nearly perfect example of one corporate mantra: "Socialize risk and privatize profits." We risk our tax dollars, our good reputation abroad, and our soldiers lives, and oil companies reap the profits.

KEY EXCERPTS:

Chavez: World Faces Major Energy Crisis

By CIARAN GILES, Associated Press Writer 21 minutes ago

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that the world faces an energy crisis but there is little chance of his country and other OPEC members increasing production because they are already pumping near "their capacity."

"We're at the doorway of major energy crisis worldwide," Chavez said. "We'll have to develop other resources such as wind, solar and nuclear energy — naturally for peaceful purposes." He said Venezuela was in talks with Argentina and Brazil regarding nuclear power.

"The United States for example, with scarcely five percent of the world's population, uses almost 25 percent of the petroleum and combustion fuels produced in the world," he said.

FULL TEXT:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051015/ap_on_bi_ge/spain_chavez_oil









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