Down the Memory Hole

Ah, NPR's Scott Simon.  What a guy.

On Saturday morning, Simon interviewed Cardinal Blase Cupich to find out why three American cardinals, Cupich among them, had criticized Donald Trump's foreign policy in Venezuela, Greenland, and elsewhere.  

The interview was of little interest, but at one point Cupich sneezed, and Simon said "Gesundheit!" He then chortled at the crazy idea of him, a layman and a non-Catholic, saying "God bless you" to a Prince of the Catholic Church. Cupich accepted it graciously.

The trouble is, Gesundheit is German for "health," not "God bless you." I know, I know, it's the thought that counts, but NPR is supposed to be high-quality, fact-based journalism.  Not that Simon's smarmy combination of coziness and obsequiousness is either one.  But it jolted me awake, and I figured I had an easy blog post in hand, so I waited for the transcript to be posted.

A few hours later, I read the transcript, and the exchange wasn't there.  I listened to the sound file; it too had been edited.  I don't know why.  If Simon was embarrassed by his tiny error -- no, he seems incapable of embarrassment. This isn't a big thing, but it's emblematic of NPR.

Elsewhere in the interview, Simon asked:

What about the argument, for example, that 8 million Venezuelans have voted with their feet and left their own country. It's a quarter of the population. Hasn't removing Nicolás Maduro to stand trial for drug trafficking in the U.S. opened the door to change?

It's true that extensive emigration from Venezuela has taken place, but it predates Maduro's regime.  First, when Hugo Chavez became president, wealthy Venezuelans moved to Miami, which has long been a haven for right-wing Latin Americans. Then as the US moved to strangle the Venezuelan economy with sanctions and other forms of economic warfare, plus support for multiple military coups,.poorer Venezuelans joined the exodus.  Most stayed in the region; certainly the US didn't intend for them to come here. How much of this flight was due to political opposition to either Chavez or Maduro and how much was driven by economic need probably can't be distinguished.  But I don't think, in years of waking up to NPR's morning news programs, I've ever heard more than token acknowledgment of destructive US policy, and never of its role in driving emigration. Nor did Cupich say anything about it, for what that's worth.

In other faith-based news, CNN reported on Saturday that our new American Pope had issued a warning that

“As we scroll through our information feeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand whether we are interacting with other human beings, bots, or virtual influencers,” Pope Leo wrote on Saturday.

“Because chatbots that are made overly ‘affectionate,’ in addition to always present and available, can become hidden architects of our emotional states, and in this way invade and occupy people’s intimate spheres,” he added.

So true! That's the clergy's role.

(I'm also worried about many people's turning to AI constructs for emotional support, but there are good as well as bad reasons why they do it. Clergy in all sects have not distinguished themselves by their respect for boundaries with vulnerable believers, and their superiors (and even parents) have protected the abusive ones. I'm still concerned by people who turn to AI for interaction that is designed never to cross them, just as I'm concerned by people who turn to pets for it. The trouble isn't just that it's difficult to understand whether one is interacting with other human beings or with computer software, it's that many people prefer the software to actual human beings.  That chatbots can become abusive is worrisome too.  But this is too serious for what I meant to be a lighthearted post.)

Really Gives You Something to Think About

NPR's Weekend Edition did an item today on Fox News's cancellation of Lou Dobbs, which may or may not have something do with the $2.7 billion lawsuit SmartMatic filed against Fox. By way of illustration, the segment included a recording of Dobbs and Rudy Giuliani declaring that SmartMatic was founded by some Venezuelans seeking to undermine American democracy by tampering with our elections.

NPR's reporter declared that SmartMatic was not founded by Venezuelans, and that the company has nothing to do with Maduro or the late Venezuelan "dictator" Hugo Chavez.  I thought that the reporter hesitated very slightly before he bore down on the word "dictator," as though he might have been about to say "President" but remembered just in time that this is America.

Or maybe not, it might have been my imagination.  But Hugo Chavez was legally and democratically elected, and managed to stay in office until his premature death of cancer despite a US-supported military coup in 2002 and ongoing US monetary and other support for the Venezuelan opposition. The criteria for calling him a dictator are unclear, given the US' enthusiastic support for dictators elsewhere in the world, so I'll just assume that the reporter was conforming to American propaganda guidelines, as NPR and other corporate media normally do.

It's doubly ironic, because Chavez did not institute a reign of terror after the 2002 coup, which compares favorably with many US liberals' drive to pass new, draconian laws in the wake of our own January 6 insurrection. Democrats are now trying to claim that Russia and China were behind the insurrection.  Even now, the unelected US-designated leader of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, is still at large despite his calls for a US invasion to install him (Trump thought it would be "cool", Lindsey Graham said it was "too early"), for an uprising against the democratically elected President Maduro, and his utter lack of popular support.  That's what NPR considers "democracy" to be.

Our Childlike, Emotional Leaders: The Latest Episode

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, posted a thread on Twitter yesterday in which he blasted Donald Trump for botching the coup in Venezuela.  That's right: he doesn't object to the coup itself, or to interfering in the elections of other countries, he's just pissed that Trump failed to bring it off.  He doesn't seem to recognize the Venezuelan opposition's failure in the job; like them, he presumably thought the US would do the heavy lifting and hand the country over to them.  It's a remarkably petulant performance, and would be amusing if real people's lives weren't at stake.

Aside from calling coup frontman Juan Guaidó "charismatic," and thereby continuing the tradition of American male elites going all moist over brown-skinned strongmen, Murphy made an interesting admission:

Then, it got real embarrassing. In April 2019, we tried to organize a kind of coup, but it became a debacle. Everyone who told us they’d rally to Guaido got cold feet and the plan failed publicly and spectacularly, making America look foolish and weak.

It's remarkable because respectable US media have been working hard to deny that there was, or had been a coup against Maduro -- as they also have about the later coup in Bolivia.  Mainstream US coverage of Venezuela has been dishonest and anti-democratic for years, so this is no surprise.

I'd like to know who Murphy had in mind as the "we" who "tried to organize a kind of coup."  Bipartisan support for a coup in Venezuela is not exactly a surprise.  Most senior Congressional Democrats were onboard for removing Maduro with Guaidó while distancing themselves from overt military action, and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hesitated to speak out against American interference with other countries' politics.  By making a big deal of their opposition to an invasion, they could distract from their acceptance of the US' right to control other countries in other ways.  But Murphy has let the cat out of the bag: whoever "we" were, he's one of them.

Murphy tries to put all the blame on Trump, but some of it has to fall on "we," including him.  And he's no angel: he's been agitating for the overthrow of the Bolivarian government for some time, as in this January 2019 op-ed for the Washington Post, co-authored with the former Obama flunky Ben Rhodes.

It's no surprise that there was a lot of pushback to Murphy's thread.  Notable to me were the number of people who believed that if Biden is elected, everything will be okay.  In some cases they made it clear that they wanted to overthrow Maduro and were just angry that Trump had failed to do it because of Putin.  (Murphy also blamed Putin for Trump's failure to bring off the coup, though it's more likely, given Trump's notoriously evanescent attention span, that when Maduro didn't fall right away, he just lost interest in the game.)  Some were sure that Biden would be better in some undefined way, but this isn't likely: Biden also wants Maduro removed by any means feasible.  He has differences with Trump on Venezuela, but they're minor and technical.  A Biden administration will continue the strangulation of Venezuela; it's what Barack would want.  Corporate media also have faith.

The corporate media covered the hearings Murphy referred to in this thread, but not his talk about his "kind of coup."  I suppose it's not news.

Who Wants to Be the Last to Go Bankrupt Before Medicare for All Kicks In?

Pete Buttigieg (it's not actually that hard to pronounce) has been getting attention from a number of people I respect, and from some I don't.  Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a city I lived near for the first twenty or so years of my life and lived in for two of those years, so I'd heard of him before he decided to run for the American Presidency.  He came to my attention first because he's gay; getting elected to a traditionally Republican*, Roman Catholic city like South Bend is an impressive achievement for a gay man, even a married one, even a veteran.  It recently occurred to me that none of the right-wing Christian frothers I'm friends with on Facebook freaked out when he was first elected, even though some of them live in South Bend.  How'd he do it?

Recently a lefty tree-hugger friend of mine, an IU alumnus but now resident in the Bay Area, linked to Buttigieg's recent appearance on Stephen Colbert's Late Show.  My friend was highly impressed by Buttigieg's performance; I was more concerned that a homophobic "centrist" Obama toady like Colbert found Buttigieg acceptable.  Then Glenn Greenwald began praising him, which I take more seriously.  Greenwald is temperate in his praise:

There are specific policy views expressed by @PeteButtigieg I disagree with, but have been very impressed by him from the moment I began paying attention. I couldn't put my finger on why. Part of it was his heterodox thinking. But now I see the crux: he only speaks authentically...

As he links to Buttigieg's statement to South Bend's Muslims in the wake of the Christchuch massacre.  Fair enough, I guess, but this really just strengthened my doubts.  First, while he doesn't use the word, it seems that Greenwald is impressed by Buttigieg's charisma -- and he should know as well as I do the dangers of charismatic politicians.  There's an uncharacteristic lack of focus on Buttigieg's actual positions here ("I couldn't put my finger on why"), focusing on the claim that he "only speaks authentically".

To speak as authentically as I can, I'm not sure what that means.  Buttigieg's statement is fine, the kind of thing that any halfway experienced politician should be able to produce in his or her sleep.  That many such can't do so wide awake, with their staffs working on it at white heat, only means that the bar is pretty low.  (Compare this appalling screed by an Australian Senator to see how low the bar can go.)  Mayor Pete clears that bar, but it's not a sterling achievement.

Greenwald also wrote of Buttigieg's "heterodox thinking."  Heterodoxy is relative only to a respective orthodoxy, and I wonder which one Greenwald has in mind.  So I began looking for some of Buttigieg's specific policy positions, and found this interesting summary of his performance at a recent CNN town hall, reprinted in the Chicago Tribune from the Washington Post.  Notice that it's the work of Jennifer Rubin, a far right-wing writer, which makes her positive take on Buttigieg all the more disturbing.

He was asked about Venezuela. "Well, the situation in Venezuela is highly disturbing. And I think that the Maduro regime has lost its legitimacy," he explained. "That's why it's not just the U.S. but 50 countries that have declined to recognize the legitimacy of that regime."

He continued, "That being said, that doesn't mean we just carelessly threaten the use of military force, which is what it appeared the national security adviser was doing at one point, kind of hinting that troops might be sent to South America."

... "I don't mean to disagree that we need to support democratic outcomes in that country. And so to the extent that sanctions can be targeted and can be focused on trying to bring about new free and fair elections so that there can be self-determination by the Venezuelan people, that puts in a government that I think has that legitimacy, then we should do our part not through force but through the diplomatic tool kit in order to try to bring that outcome about."

Rubin gushes, "That might be the best answer on Venezuela I've heard from any Democratic candidate — maybe the best foreign policy answer, period."  Really?  It looks to me like the standard "centrist" answer to questions about US interference in Venezuela, and it's anything but "heterodox."  Buttigieg disavowed "carelessly threaten[ing] the use of military force" (maybe careful threats are okay?), which the other Dems would agree with, while endorsing the use of sanctions to starve the mass of Venezuelans into submission.  The kinds of sanctions that might target only government elites would probably also affect the wealthy, right-wing creoles of the opposition, and that would not go down well.

As far as "free and fair elections," Venezuela already has them, and that's why the US wants to overturn them: they produce outcomes we don't like.  Buttigieg says that "the Maduro regime has lost its legitimacy."  First, it never had any in the eyes of the US government, its lackey states, and its tame media; nor did Chavez' "regime," which the US began trying to replace with more corporate-friendly authoritarians from the time Chavez took office.  Second, the most recent election Maduro won was certified fair by international observers; presumably Buttigieg, like the rest of the US mainstream, chooses to forget that.  Finally, the US' designated hitter Juan Guaidó has no legitimacy whatsoever: he has won no election, has no mass base, and only has a platform because of US support.  He also says he's "not afraid of civil war" and hoped to incite US military intervention by staging provocations at the border with Colombia.  Whether Buttigieg likes it or not, that's the "self-determination" he's calling for and supporting.  This is not a minor issue either, because it indicates what Buttigieg's approach to other official enemies (such as North Korea, Iran, or Syria) would look like.

Next Rubin quotes Buttigieg's position on Medicare for all.  He praised the Affordable Care Act, which he said "made a great difference."

"That's why I believe we do need to move in the direction of a Medicare-for-all system. Now, I think anyone in politics who lets the words ‘Medicare-for-all’ escape their lips also has a responsibility to explain how we could actually get there, because as you know, from working on this day in and day out, it's not something you can just flip a switch and do.

"In my view, the best way to do that is through what you might call a Medicare-for-all-who-want-it setup. In other words, you take some flavor of Medicare, you make it available on the exchange as a kind of public option, and you invite people to buy into it. So if people like me are right that that's ultimately going to be more efficient over time and more cost-effective, then you will see that very naturally become a glide path ..."

Ah, the "public option."  Again, that's hardly a "heterodox" position, any more than his gradualist "move in the direction."  Medicare itself was "something you can just flip a switch and do," both in the US and Canada.  Yes, it will take planning, but my impression is that the politicians who are spearheading the drive to Medicare for All are working on the planning and the details.  But it's not really hard to explain "how we could actually get there," since we could learn a great deal from Canada's implementation, not to mention the fact that we already have Medicare in this country for people 65 and older.  It's extremely popular with voters, as is the idea of a national single-payer system.  The basic infrastructure is already in place; it would not be a radical move to expand it.  I'd have a bit more respect for Buttigieg's gradualism if he balanced it by noting how much money and energy we waste on, say, the military.  Instead he went on to say:

"You know, we as a country pay out of our health care dollar less on patient care and more on bureaucracy than almost any other country in the developed world. And so it's very clear that we've got to do some unglamorous technical work. Actually, some of the benefits of automation could come in this sense. You think about how many hands have to touch a prior authorization sometimes. And the right answer to that should be zero, but we're not there yet. So we've got to do that, that kind of unfashionable technical work within (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) to make the system more efficient."

This is extremely misleading.  He may not have meant it that way, but in context Buttigieg gave the impression that the "bureaucracy" that runs up the costs of healthcare in the US is located within "the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services," so we need "to make the system more efficient."  I have no doubt that the Medicare administration has room for improvement, but it's hardly obscure that the wasteful bureaucracy that runs up costs so that too "many hands have to touch a prior authorization sometimes" belongs to the private insurance companies that Buttigieg wants to preserve until the Messiah comes.  A smart technocrat, as he presents himself to be, must know that. Again, there's nothing heterodox here, it's just centrist boilerplate.

I'm going to skip his remarks on impeachment, which are more safe on-one-hand/on-the-other hand stuff, perfectly compatible with the Democratic establishment.  Speaking of Buttigieg as smart technocrat, though:

"As to what Gov. (Mitt) Romney was talking about, look, we do need to work to make government more efficient. One of the things we did when I came in, in South Bend as mayor was — kind of a banned phrase around the county city building was 'We do it this way because we've always done it this way.'"

"We subjected everything we do to rigorous analysis, because at the city level, I don't get to print money. We legally have to balance the general fund budget. And if I want to do more, we just have to figure out a way to do what we're doing more efficiently or else we'll have to do less of something else. And sometimes that's the right answer, too.

"So I think that on-the-ground knowledge of how to get something done that I maybe began to get in the business community, but really put to work in public service at the local level, will be useful at a time when, frankly, in federal budgeting we're being told we can get something for nothing. And things that are completely unaffordable, like the tax cuts for the wealthiest, are being passed off as though they're worth just as much as things that if we ever do deficit spending would be a better use of it, like investing in infrastructure and education and the things that we know have a payback and will pay for themselves in the long run."

"We've always done it this way" is of course a stumbling block in private enterprise too, regularly attacked in books on management.  Wherever Buttigieg got his "on-the-ground knowledge of how to get something done," it wasn't "in the business community."  Beyond that, these remarks are standard centrist prattle about running government like a business, you can't get something for nothing, we have to balance the budget.  Many arguments can be made against these slogans, but the key point is that they are not heterodox, not bold path-breaking authentic proposals that no one has had the guts or imagination or passion to advance before.  Far from it: they're routine parts of every election cycle as far back as I can remember.

Maybe Buttigieg is better than these remarks indicate, but again, he made them on his own, in a showcase where he evidently felt free to say what he thinks.  Contrary to Glenn Greenwald, I don't see a lot of exciting authentic substance here.  When my Bay-Area friend was upset by my skepticism toward this shiny new guy, I made it clear that I don't think he's totally evil, he might amount to something someday, but I really think he should at least run for a legislative office, state or federal, before aiming at the Oval Office. Much of the excitement I see over Buttigieg, like the excitement I see over Robert "Beto" O'Rourke, whom he resembles, is based on his presentation, his aging-elfin cuteness, his undeniable intelligence rather than his positions, which I think are ground for concern rather than celebration.  O'Rourke has been compared to Obama in his vacuousness, but thanks to his political history O'Rourke's unsavory record is there for scrutiny for those who care.  But many don't care: they'd rather daydream at their desks, practicing writing their married name in their notebooks (guys, Mayor Pete already has a husband).

Which brings up what is by now a familiar paradox: smart liberals who denounce Joe and Jane Sixpack for focusing on personalities rather than issues, generally have very little interest in issues but swoon over personalities.  If a candidate has no personality or a repellent one, no problem -- they'll work very hard to persuade themselves that he's really the most charismatic candidate ever!  Pete Buttigieg doesn't have that problem, he's evidently an engaging person.  Speaking seven languages, I admit, is a refreshing change from the monolingual Trump and Obama.  If you like a candidate, invite him to dinner, ask her out for coffee, paper your room with posters, but that is no reason to overlook his policies, let alone a reason to vote for him.  It bothers me, because it's so reminiscent of the rise of Barack Obama over a decade ago, to see this pattern repeating itself among people who really are smart enough to know better.

*CORRECTION: I've learned since I wrote this that South Bend's mayors have been Democrats for decades.

Fierce Latina Holds Her Fire

It seems that the Trump regime's coup against the government of Venezuela isn't going as smoothly as he expected, and I take some comfort from that.

I'm not surprised that most Democratic Party politicians and fellow-travelers have supported the coup.  Even Bernie Sanders couldn't oppose it without including some US propaganda against Maduro; but then he's always been weak on foreign policy.  Representatives Ro Khanna of California, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan have condemned the coup forthrightly, but they're the exceptions.

I am surprised, I admit, that new Democratic Congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has hesitated to take a firm stand.  On January 30 the journalist Max Blumenthal reported:

I caught @AOC rushing into a committee hearing today on the Hill and asked her about Venezuela. "We're working on a statement," was all she said before entering the room. Don't think her name was on @USProgressives letter against intervention. Will have more reactions soon.

I don't like to quote the Daily Caller, but only right-wing media seem to be reporting the statement she finally, belatedly made:

“Our office is monitoring it closely. I think that, you know, the humanitarian crisis is extremely concerning but, you know, when we use non-Democratic [sic] means to determine leadership, that’s also concerning, as well,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Daily Caller on Thursday. “So, we’re figuring out our response and making sure that we center the people of Venezuela first and foremost.”

This won't do, though the capitalization of "democratic" there is amusing and presumably not Ocasio-Cortez' fault.  I see nothing here that would justify her hesitation about issuing a statement before.  It's just typical both-sides equivocation.  The "humanitarian crisis," as she must know, is largely the US' doing, thanks to its support for the anti-democratic Venezuelan opposition, and especially the sanctions that are intended to harm the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans.  If she doesn't know it, she should probably have admitted her ignorance and refused to comment.  But it doesn't take much background to oppose US support for coups.  The burden of argument lies not on opponents of US interference in other countries, but on those who support it.

Ocasio-Cortez' customary forthright readiness to snap back at Trump's malfeasance is on hold here, and I wonder why. The other frosh Representatives she calls her sisters are on record opposing the coup; why doesn't she follow their lead?  I've been wondering if perhaps significant numbers of her Latinx base support the coup, but I haven't seen any evidence one way or the other.

For me, it's pretty simple, given the US' horrific record in Latin America generally, and in Venezuela specifically.  It's difficult to distinguish lies from truth in US coverage of the situation, which has been fanatically hostile and indifferent to factual accuracy ever since Chavez was first elected.  If you want an introduction to the matter, Alan MacLeod's Bad News from Venezuela (Routledge, 2018) is a good place to begin, and will point you to other discussions.  But even if Maduro were as bad as we're told, that wouldn't justify US interference in Venezuela, which our gangster leaders are not even bothering to hide.  (A "dictator"?  "Corrupt"?  "Incompetent"?  These are all qualifications for US support of a regime.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has some good positions and proposals, and I still approve of her more than I don't.  But I'm monitoring her closely, and I find her reluctance to speak out against the US-backed coup in Venezuela extremely worrying.

Don't Count Your Libres Before They're Hatched

Venezuela had elections yesterday, and the right-wing Democratic Unity Roundtable won 99 out of 167 seats in the National Assembly according to Democracy Now.  The ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela won only 46 seats.  I'm not going to have much to say about this until some informed commentators whose opinions I trust weigh in.  As I've said before, it's very difficult to sort out truth from lies in US media where Venezuela is concerned.  (Not only Venezuela, of course.)  I will probably wait until the dust settles and we see how the new coalition conducts itself, because people are too damned eager to jump to conclusions about elections and their consequences.  (P.S. December 8: Greg Grandin's piece at the Nation is very helpful.)

I've seen a lot of raving where I have looked online.  One commenter on a Mother Jones pre-election post claimed that President Nicolás Maduro would refuse to accept the results of the election, stage a coup, and declare himself president-for-life or something.  (P.P.S. According to Grandin, DUC had been pushing this line throughout the campaign, so if it lost it could cry foul.)  Again, according to Democracy Now's brief post, Maduro has accepted the results.  Something could change there, but clearly a lot of people want Maduro to overturn the election so they can preen themselves on being right about him.  Not because they care about the welfare of most Venezuelans; they don't.  Accusations fly about Maduro's alleged corruption, his disregard for democracy, his attempts to suppress the opposition.  But again, I see no reason to suppose that the accusers really care.  One commenter pointed out, with devastating acuity, that Maduro was formerly a bus driver, and declared that he should have remained one.  Why?  It couldn't be because he really believes the wealthy are naturally immune to the temptations of corruption and abuse of power; it's presumably because he believes that proles should remain proles and let the Real People run society.  Just because.  Despite this commenter's protestation that he's not a right-winger -- he admits and condemns the many atrocities the US has supported and carried out in Latin America -- he shows no sign of being a believer in democracy or political equality.

A Venezuelan (but resident here in my city in Indiana) friend is spamming his Facebook feed with memes celebrating the change.  He seems to think that this vote turned current president Nicolás Maduro out of office, which of course isn't true. Another theme is that Venezuela is now "free"; again, he's jumping the gun, but also I think revealing his political assumptions and views.  I admit I don't know him that well, so it's entirely possible that he'd like a return to the US-backed dictatorships that ruled Venezuela for most of the twentieth century.  But more likely he's just not thinking, much like the people who celebrated the election of Barack Obama, or that of Justin Trudeau.  I've been criticizing his posts, so it's entirely possible we won't still be friends by next week or so; but it's too early to tell.

Here's what I think I can say.  First, in principle I think it's a good thing that the USPV lost an election.  One-party rule isn't good for democracy.  In the real world, though, it's obvious to me that the DUC (MUD is the Spanish acronym) won because of worsening conditions in Venezuela and Maduro's inability to improve them.  Venezuelan voters may or may not have had any illusions about the character of the opposition leaders; most likely they thought they were simply Voting the Rascals Out, as we do in the USA, and we know how well that works.  I doubt the DUC will be able to do anything about unemployment, inflation, food supplies, or other problems that affect most Venezuelans.  I also doubt they care.  They've been on the US payroll for years, getting millions from the Obama administration.  Imagine the frenzy that would ensue if it were revealed that Maduro had been funneling millions of dollars into either US political party's coffers, to "protect democratic space and seek to serve the interests and needs of the [American] people."  And the US, not excluding the Obama administration, has no interest in democracy or the welfare of most Venezuelans, or of most citizens of any country in the world including this one.  Obama, like his predecessors, has reliably sided with dictators and wealthy elites, and against democratic reforms and the majority of human beings.  I see no reason to suppose that he has suddenly gotten religion with respect to Venezuela, uniquely in the world.

Suppose that all the accusations against Maduro are true.  It would't follow that the DUC is going to be good, or even any better at all -- or that they intend to.  From the reports I've seen over the years, it's a coalition made up of a range of groups to compensate for the fact that no one opposition group had much popular appeal, but many of them are straight-out fascists.  Because it's a coalition, though, I'm not going to be too pessimistic yet.  If the DUC wants to keep its majority in the Assembly, it will have to make good on its rather extravagant promises to improve the lot of the poor majority at the same time it collaborates with US corporate elites and their servants.  If (or should I say "when"?) it fails to do so, it can expect to be voted out in its turn -- if it doesn't install a new dictator first.  Given its role in the 2002 coup -- supported by the US if not instigated by us -- against Chavez, and in political violence since then, that possibility can't be lightly dismissed.  I'm not Venezuelan, so I can really only be a spectator, wait to see how things will play out.  I think that speculation from here is a First World Luxury.  Venezuelans will have to decide what they'll do, and I mean all Venezuelans.

An Injury to One Is an Injury to All

My liberal friends are very fond of the word "class," though not in a political-economy or sociological sense -- rather a cultural one: Barack and Michelle are so classy!  Well, not only liberals: there was a right-wing meme going around a week or two back, consisting of photos of Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama, with the caption Remember when First Ladies had class? Well, no I don't, now that you ask.  Laura Bush was in my opinion the best of that creepy GOP batch, and I don't actively hate Michelle Obama -- it's just that the word "class" has no real meaning in this context, and besides, when you're reduced to judging a presidential administration by the coolness of the President's wife, you're pretty much signaling that you have turned off whatever intelligence you had to begin with, which in most cases was not much.

The word "class," used in this way, reliably sets my teeth on edge: it points to stuff like accent, looks, dressing stylishly, possessing a certain je ne sais quoi that says "I'm better than those debased, watermelon-eating, cousin-marrying trailer dwellers out there," and that allows the fan to identify with the classy person even (or especially) if the fan lacks all those traits oneself.  It's a lot like participating vicariously in the victories of a sports team, sharing in its glory even if your sole athletic skill is working a remote.  But as I say, my liberal friends are big on this, no doubt because of "class" anxieties and insecurities of their own.  When I reminded one of them of the riots that followed our own little school's last half-successful basketball season, he said, "Let's hope we can celebrate with a little more class this time."  That was quite stupid, if only because the rioters were mostly privileged white kids, the kind whose skulls the cops never crack, the kind who see someone else's car as something to be overturned, the kind whose yards in my neighborhood are covered with refuse for days, even weeks, after their parties.  They're the kind of people who set the tone for these celebrations: rioting after a sports victory is a hallowed IU tradition, and what could be classier than Tradition? But as Raymond Williams remarked of his Cambridge days, "nobody fortunate enough to grow up in a good home, in a genuinely well-mannered and sensitive community, could for a moment envy these loud, competitive and deprived people."

Nice middle-class people have sometimes tried to reassure me that I'm one of them, because I read and I think and I'm smart and I don't talk like trailer trash.  Increasingly, as I observe them, I don't think so: reading and thinking are among the things that show I'm not like them.

But what I'm thinking of is Hugo Chávez, who, whatever his failings, had no "class" in this sense at all, which is one of the things I like about him.  That he had respectable pundits and politicians (who felt a sense of personal kinship with the worst tyrants in the world) foaming at the mouth because he disrespected Our Dear Leader at the United Nations was an added bonus.  (Was that moment "scripted"?  Who cares?)  According to a piece by Greg Grandin at The Nation, however, Chávez' shtick was to a great an extent an act, a conscious performance.  Granted, Chávez was low-class by background: he was "the second of seven children, born in 1954 in the rural village of Sabaneta, in the grassland state of Barinas, to a family of mixed European, Indian and Afro-Venezuelan race ... he was sent to live with his grandmother since his parents couldn’t feed their children".  This wouldn't be held against him if his rise had consisted of allying himself with the wealthy and powerful instead of opposing them, of course.

The high point of Chávez’s international agenda was his relationship with Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Latin American leader whom US foreign policy and opinion makers tried to set as Chávez’s opposite. Where Chávez was reckless, Lula was moderate. Where Chávez was confrontational, Lula was pragmatic. Lula himself never bought this nonsense, consistently rising to Chávez’s defense and endorsing his election.

For a good eight years they worked something like a Laurel and Hardy routine, with Chávez acting the buffoon and Lula the straight man. But each was dependent on the other and each was aware of this dependency. Chávez often stressed the importance of Lula’s election in late 2002, just a few months after April’s failed coup attempt, which gave him his first real ally of consequence in a region then still dominated by neoliberals. Likewise, the confrontational Chávez made Lula’s reformism that much more palatable. Wikileaks documents reveal the skill in which Lula’s diplomats gently but firmly rebuffed the Bush administration’s pressure to isolate Venezuela.

Their inside-outside rope-a-dope was on full display at the November 2005 Summit of the Americas in Argentina, where the United States hoped to lock in its deeply unfair economic advantage with a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Agreement. In the meeting hall, Lula lectured Bush on the hypocrisy of protecting corporate agriculture with subsidies and tariffs even as it pushed Latin America to open its markets. Meanwhile, on the street Chávez led 40,000 protesters promising to “bury” the free trade agreement. The treaty was indeed derailed, and in the years that followed, Venezuela and Brazil, along with other Latin American nations, have presided over a remarkable transformation in hemispheric relations, coming as close as ever to achieving Bolívar’s “universal equilibrium.”

There are other intriguing anecdotes in Grandin's piece, like the one that gives

the lie to the idea that poor Venezuelans voted for Chávez because they were fascinated by the baubles they dangled in front of them. During the 2006 presidential campaign, the signature pledge of Chávez’s opponent was to give 3,000,000 poor Venezuelans a black credit card (black as in the color of oil) from which they could withdraw up to $450 in cash a month, which would have drained over $16 billion dollars a year from the national treasury (call it neoliberal populism: give to the poor just enough to bankrupt the government and force the defunding of services). 

(Dangling baubles in front of the rich -- tax breaks, cutting services to the poor, "austerity" -- is not just acceptable but the natural order of things in "classy" politics.)

Grandin also tells of Chávez successfully lobbying Lula and then-Argentinian president Kirchner on a proposal to give debt relief to numerous poor countries in Latin America.

Chávez asked a number of thoughtful questions, at odds with the provocateur on display on the floor of the General Assembly ... We later got word that Chávez had successfully lobbied Lula and Kirchner to support the deal. In November 2006, the IADB announced it would write off billions of dollars in debt to Nicaragua, Guyana, Honduras and Bolivia (Haiti would later be added to the list).

I've felt hesitant to write about Chávez (but here I am, with my second post in twenty-four hours), because I really do believe that personalities are less important than issues.  I'm not interested (except lustfully, which is moot now) in Chávez so much as whether the organizations he worked with will be able to adapt and protect their gains after he's gone. This is why I've found myself defending Obama and Bill Clinton against right-wing attacks, and even Bush and Romney against liberal ad hominems. As I wrote before, only time will tell whether the good things he built in Venezuela will survive him; I've already seen his critics gloating, and there was already a celebration at the Atlantic's site last night. But he clearly did build alliances in Latin America that have made some breathing space for freedom there, and if you want to blame anyone for his ascendancy, blame George W. Bush, who overextended US power with his brutal, expensive wars and weakened its influence in Latin America and elsewhere.  In that area, as in so many others, Obama has followed in Bush's footsteps.

But one thing I do know: a major reason Chávez was hated so much by US elites was that he had no class.  This morning Democracy Now! did a segment on post-Chávez Venezuela, also featuring Greg Grandin.  Eva Golinger, one of the participants and an associate of Chávez, described how the Venezuelan vice president, Nicolás Maduro a former bus driver and union activist, was attacked by the opposition: "Oh, he’s a bus driver. You know, he knows nothing. He has no education. How could he be the top diplomat of the country?" When I look at how ignorant and stupid the properly entitled people (commonly known as the "meritocracy") have consistently shown themselves to be, I figure a bus driver couldn't do any worse.  As things turned out, it appears that he did much better.  But those attacks also remind me what most of the rulers think of the people they rule, and I know which side I'm on.

The Vultures Are Circling

I just heard that Hugo Chavez has died, and I must say that matters more to me than the latest deaths of TV sitcom stars and the like.  I'm not uncritical of Chavez, he did make some moves I objected to, and it seems he abused power at times.  I put it tentatively like that because the corporate media were so dedicated to lying about him that it became more trouble than it was worth to distinguish lies from truth where Chavez was concerned; I just tended to assume that everything bad I heard about him was false, except on the rare occasions when it came from someone more or less trustworthy.  When it comes to human rights violations and abuses of power, though, Chavez didn't begin to compare to any number of rulers the US has propped up to the bitter end -- to say nothing of our own President.

My real worry is whether Venezuela will be able to maintain the good things Chavez worked for.  The main thing that bothered me about his electoral successes was that they were too tied to his person, and it was hard to tell whether a political culture was growing in Venezuela that would survive him.  I guess we'll find out now.

I expect a lot of material from right-wingers and centrists to turn up on Facebook celebrating Chavez' death, so I'm girding my loins and opening a big can of whoop-ass.  But part of me is asking quietly, "What's the use?"  I imagine that will pass once the monkeys start throwing their handfuls of fecal matter.  Still, it's a valid question.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good post today about the national "Conversation on Race":

Writers who focus on race/gender/sexual orientation are often of the mind that the issues that they are tackling have, somehow, never been tackled before, or if so, have not been tackled "honestly" or "forthrightly" or "candidly." In the arena of race, the notion that Americans "don't talk about race" is a particularly pernicious rendition of this logic. I've never actually found this to be true. On the contrary, there's a lot of literature on the subject -- some of it enlightening, some of it clueless, and some of it racist. The sheer amount of material should, theoretically, raise the bar for "writing about race."

But because Americans actually enjoy yelling about race a great deal, it does not.

He might have qualified that first sentence by specifying "writers for corporate media", but you know what he meant, don't you?  There is a lot of good "literature" on all those subjects (race/gender/sexual orientation, and he could have added religion or politics in general), but little of it turns up in the corporate media.  (Coates himself is one of the notable exceptions.)  That's not because of a conspiracy, but because the people who run the media are generally not very knowledgeable about anything, and writing that strays from the corporate center with all its squishy goodness will be found to be "not right for us, thanks."  So the same tired cliches on controversial subjects persist for decades and more, and as I've gotten older I've found that more and more dispiriting.  Sure, I keep myself sane by reading outside the corporate media, but sooner or later I have to face what the mainstream is saying: the same old same-old.

An instructive example is a post that also appeared on the Atlantic's site, explaining why Cuba will still be anti-American after Castro.  At first glance I thought it had possibilities: someone could write a good article about the reasons Cubans have to look askance at the US: invasions, terrorism, multiple assassination attempts on Castro, and economic warfare in the form of a decades-long blockade aimed at starving the Cuban people into submission. This article, however, wasn't it: it was all about Fidel and Raul find it politically expedient to blame the US for all of Cuba's problems (which works so well because the US is to blame for many of Cuba's problems) as they pack the government with loyalists, more elderly revolutionaries, and their own kids. These would be good points if they were put in context, but author Jaime Suchlicki isn't interested in context, just in the perfidy of the Castro brothers. He has not a word to say about the dictatorships the US supported in Cuba before the Revolution, nor about US attempts after the Revolution to return Cuba to its proper place in our sphere of influence.  To talk about Castro's anti-Americanism as though it were a total fabrication in the face of US benevolence, which is what Suchlicki does, is to mark his article as "clueless" at best  in Coates's classification scheme, which means it's perfectly mainstream.

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

It's been a fairly busy day, and I couldn't decide what to write about, but this might be worth passing along. I heard about it on the Shortwave Report, a radio program that plays on my community radio station on Fridays, so I looked around on the web, and sure enough, it was true:

For the first time in recent history, the Foreign Operations Budget (State Department) openly details direct funding of at least $5 million to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela. Specifically, the budget justification document states, "These funds will help strengthen and support a Venezuelan civil society that will protect democratic space and seek to serve the interests and needs of the Venezuelan people. Funding will enhance citizens' access to objective information, facilitate peaceful debate on key issues, provide support to democratic institutions and processes, promote citizen participation and encourage democratic leadership".

Sure, it's better for Obama to interfere in the Venezuelan elections with cash instead of bombs, but can you imagine the hysteria if it were revealed that Venezuela had funded the US political opposition on a similar scale? You don't even really need to imagine it. Back in 1976 one of our free-world allies sought to influence the workings of Congress by greasing a few palms, and all heck broke loose. Time complained about "exported South Korean corruption", and I suppose they had a point: what, our homegrown American corruption isn't good enough for Congress, they have to import it from the Asian sweatshops? One source reported that

he once saw then Ambassador Kim Dong Jo stuffing $100 bills into white envelopes. Kim's attaché case was "bulging with bundles of $100 bills. There must have been several hundred thousand dollars in that briefcase. It was an astonishing sight."

Oh, the humanity! How un-American to hand bundles of hundred-dollar bills to government officials!

Incidentally, Tongsun Park, the prime mover in Koreagate, kept up his US connections. He eventually became a lobbyist for Iraq at the United Nations for the oil-for-food program of the late 1990s. He was convicted in 2007 of influence-peddling and served about a year of a five-year sentence. The things you learn ....

You See? I Told You

Damn! I should have spent more time on yesterday's post.

It turns out that US media have reacted to the revelation that the Oslo attacks were apparently the work, not of al-Qaeda, but a right-wing Christian fundamentalist Nordic farmer, by continuing to claim that al-Qaeda did it, or Muslims in general.

Before the dust had cleared, the Only President We've Got agreed (via), though cautiously as is his wont:

“I wanted to personally extend my condolences to the people of Norway,” Obama said at the White House after meeting with New Zealand Prime Minister John Key. “It’s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring. We have to work cooperatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks.

"This kind of terror" doesn't explicitly mention Muslims, but who else could be implied in his references to "the international community" and the cooperative gathering of "intelligence"? Unless Obama already knew about the suspect's international ties to right-wing anti-Muslim circles in the US, but I think we can safely doubt that.

From the same article, a reminder that it's about us, always and only about us.

The State Department issued a similar statement and said it had no reports that any Americans were hurt in either attack.

Anyway, what I neglected to write about yesterday was something I noticed but didn't bother to look for again and quote, namely this bit from the New York Times report:

There was ample reason for concern that terrorists might be responsible.

Blogger Richard Silverstein noticed and wrote about this, in the same post that showed the suspect's role as a guest blogger on an American anti-Muslim site. According to Glenn Greenwald, earlier versions of the Times article put "Islamic" in front of "terrorists," but the implication remains the same: "terrorism" is violence perpetrated by Muslims who aren't in the pay of the US. Any other violence isn't terrorism, by definition.

That Terrorism means nothing more than violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes has been proven repeatedly. When an airplane was flown into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, it was immediately proclaimed to be Terrorism, until it was revealed that the attacker was a white, non-Muslim, American anti-tax advocate with a series of domestic political grievances. The U.S. and its allies can, by definition, never commit Terrorism even when it is beyond question that the purpose of their violence is to terrorize civilian populations into submission. Conversely, Muslims who attack purely military targets -- even if the target is an invading army in their own countries -- are, by definition, Terrorists. That is why, as NYU's Remi Brulin has extensively documented, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore the most manipulated, word in the English language. Yesterday provided yet another sterling example.

Another of my Facebook friends recovered quickly: "Whaddaya know - a Christian fundamentalist. No surprise - in the next decade, I expect them to become the new Islamic fundamentalists - including on US soil. You listen to some of their rhetoric and it's not much different from what's coming from Al Qaida..." And: "It surprises me that the Phelps haven't become domestic terrorists... I guess they're too high-profile?" His friends agreed: "There's a reason Markos Moulitsas has consistently referred to the Christian Right in the U.S. as the 'American Taliban.' Different religions, same crazy-ass bullshit."

Of course Christian terrorism has a long respectable history in the US, there's nothing "new" about it. And wholesale secular state violence based in the political center has killed far more innocent people than retail religious-based terror, whether Christian-fundamentalist or Islamic-fundamentalist. For that matter, I don't see much -- well, any difference between the reactions of the people I'm quoting here (and I could add many more) and the hysterical kill-all-ragheads response of many Americans to the September 11 attacks, by people who expect to cheer from the sidelines as the bad guys are executed publicly.

Speaking of which, RWA1 linked on Facebook to an op-ed in the right-wing Economist which declares confidently that Chávismo is dying, like the man himself, and that the Brazilian collaborationist model of "Brazil’s Lula, a fellow-leftist but a democratic one," is the wave of the future. (Remember that in this discourse "democratic" means "rule by multinational corporations, enforced by the American military.") The op-ed itself is oversimple and dishonest: it may be more or less right about Venezuela's problems, but overhopeful about the failure of Latin American resistance to US domination, since "leftists" there continue to win elections. But it's RWA1's comment that is relevant here: "May he meet his reward quickly, and let some sanity return to Venezuela." ("Sanity," of course, means "democracy," as previously glossed: a dictatorship, military if necessary, on the multinational corporate payroll.) One of RWA1's friends chimed in in comments: "By 'reward' I hope you mean the circle of hell reserved for socialist dictators. And by 'quickly' I hope you mean 'suddenly and painfully.'" As with RWA1's earlier hope for "trouble and turmoil" in Venezuela, the human fellow-feeling these guys express is touching.

P.S. As to why "There was ample reason for concern that terrorists might be responsible," Richard Seymour at Lenin's Tomb writes:

I don't mind telling you that I think this was wish fulfilment. That is, I think that these pundits and their employers largely would have liked nothing better than for it to be an Islamist attack, because then they have a set of responses that they can energetically put into motion, and a pre-determined narrative around which they can cohere those responses. Far right racists murdering young leftists, on the other hand, is not a subject on which they can rapidly form plausible responses.

The BBC post I linked to yesterday is a good example of the "pre-determined narrative" Seymour had in mind, I think. I wonder if RWA1 will find any useful links related to the attacks. ("Useful" for me, that is.)