March 5 marked exactly a year since Hugo Chávez died. The parades through the city center in Caracas and the memorial gathering at his tomb in the Mountain Barracks were impressive affairs. But the celebrations and daylong television evocations of the man they now call the Supreme Commander did not reflect the atmosphere across Venezuela.

The situation has become more complex in the last few weeks. A few days ago, on a bus I was taking into town, a man leapt on and delivered a short speech announcing “This is the end of Castro Communism in Venezuela. No more Cubans,” then he leapt off just as quickly.

In the line at the Electricity Company, an elderly woman began to shout at the people behind the desk, demanding that they shut the country down. Her outburst could be attributed to the two hours she had to wait — for no obvious reason — to pay her bill. But it reflected the rage of the middle classes.

These two fairly trivial incidents reflect the rapid development of a visceral class hatred. Up till now, the violence that has been shown so relentlessly on the global media was limited, at least in Caracas, to middle-class areas. In the area where I live, a middle class dormitory suburb for the most part, the streets are lined with posters demanding freedom and peace and an end to dictatorship. Small barricades made of burning tires and trash, dislodged concrete posts, wire fences, and (most unpleasantly) oil spread across the street appear on most nights, further angering the middle class — even though it is mostly their sons and daughters creating the barricades.

The Right within Venezuela and outside have focused their protests around issues of repression. Thirty people have died across the country, some of them at the hands of police or national guard. But a majority have been killed on the street, like the young motorcyclist riding home from work who was decapitated by a wire stretched across the road. Others, like the elderly woman who was prevented from going to a hospital emergency room by a barricade, were victims of the growing confrontations.

Until now, the response of the state has been muted. But President Nicolas Maduro’s speech at the Chávez commemoration made clear that the policy is changing and that the smell of tear gas will become more familiar on the streets.

It is outside Caracas where the violence in the streets has escalated most. The young people and students who set the fires in the early phase have now been joined by more sinister elements, hiding beneath the familiar black balaclavas. As the growing complaints from every sector of society about insecurity have made clear, an armed criminal element associated with drug trafficking has become increasingly powerful in poor barrios in particular.

The levels of violence are startling, and serve as an indication of how many weapons are held across the country. In some areas, particularly the frontier states like Táchira, the violence is directed by heavily-armed and ruthless paramilitary groups who operate across the Colombian border and earn enormous profits from an extensive smuggling operation of everything from drugs to oil. The government has  been singularly unsuccessful in dealing with these groups in the past, and they are now the allies of the extreme right within the opposition.

The Right’s most prominent leader, Leopoldo López, a leader of the People’s Vanguard organization which called the original demonstrations, is in jail, along with a man called Simonovis, a sniper who killed a number of Chavista demonstrators during the failed coup of 2002. He was arrested then and remains in jail, but he has become a cause celebre for the extreme right, who are calling for his release on humanitarian grounds.

López and Maria Corina Machado, both members of wealthy oligarchic families, are the leading voices of the increasingly violent street movement. They are happy to encourage it, but they do not control it in any real sense. It is highly significant that Machado (a member of parliament) was not in Caracas for the commemoration but in the state of Táchira, on the Colombian border: Táchira is a key element in their strategy of making Venezuela ungovernable.

Many on the Left are convinced that the strategy they are pursuing is the “Media Luna” option. The wealthy eastern states of Eastern Bolivia, the Media Luna or “Half Moon,” attempted a strategy of secession a few years ago to undermine the government of Evo Morales. They too mobilized around racism and pursued strategies of civil disorder, advised by the US ambassador at the time. The strategy failed, but at a cost. Had it succeeded, Bolivia would have been plunged into a civil war between a largely white Media Luna and an indigenous Highland Bolivia. A similar logic may be at work in Venezuela: all the leaders of the right wing parties are white.

Venezuela’s half moon would be the frontier states, Trujillo, Merida, and the wealthiest of them all, Zulia, the heart of Venezuela’s oil industry, where there have been major mobilizations and which has a long separatist tradition. It would be a natural ally for Táchira, and its governor, Arias Cárdenas, once a close ally of Chávez, broke with him for several years before returning to the Chavista fold.

The US would not be disappointed if this happened. Colombia, of course, on the other side of the frontier, is the keystone of US policy in the region. Their backyard fence has lots of gaps in it now, and the recent ouster of President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras was a sign that the US was again prepared to back and sustain, politically and economically, an enforced regime change. China is making massive inroads into Latin America — a $3 billion loan to Ecuador, enormous investment in Venezuela — and the arrival this week in Havana of a Russian intelligence-gathering ship, will only serve to deepen Washington’s anxiety. Against that background, the Half Moon option does not seem so outlandish.

What seems to be emerging around López and Machado is an attempt to build a mass movement around street violence. Their powerful allies in the international media are at pains to represent the Venezuelan opposition as a civic movement of justified protest against a cruel dictatorship. Hollywood stars at the Oscars have articulated their humanitarian concern for the fate of the protesters, painting them as victims of state repression. CNN in Spanish, meanwhile, has mounted a ferocious and sustained campaign against Venezuela and in vocal support of the opposition. Even the Showbiz sections are now devoted to interviewing artists hostile to Chavismo.

The problem, of course, is that Maduro was elected freely and cleanly to the presidency less than a year ago, and his opponent, Capriles, the third oligarchic leader of the protests, lost by a small margin that no genuine dictatorship could have risked.

All sorts of fraud claims were made then, and disproved, and there was street violence and barricades on a small scale. But Capriles now seems to have drawn back slightly, suggesting that there are different camps within the opposition. He is almost certainly watching the emergence of a different political option expressed at a Peace Conference called by Nicolas Maduro last week. There were some members of the opposition there, plus representatives of private capital and the Catholic church — though not López or Corina Machado, who are closely linked to the powerful group of Venezuelan capitalists currently based in the US; it would clearly be in their interest to remove Maduro so that they could return to their domination of the national economy.

I wrote in my first article that when Nicolas Maduro spoke about peace, it was not clear what he meant by it — an end to violence or a social pact. After all, the Right has now adopted the peace slogan. The recent Peace Conference clarified what the real agenda was. The invited delegates did not include trade unionists, nor members of grassroots community organizations (though some of the lower levels of the state bureaucracy were present).

But they did include Venezuela’s most powerful private capitalist, Lorenzo Mendoza, head of the Polar group which has aspirations to become a regional multinational food distributor. Weeks ago, Maduro met privately with Mendoza, ostensibly to discuss how to control speculation. Yet Mendoza emerged clearly at the Conference as a political leader advocating a different option — a “dialogue” between private capital and government based on a series of “points for consideration” he presented to the conference. Presumably that was what he and Maduro were discussing all those weeks ago.

Capriles and the Catholic church, among others, enthusiastically back the idea of dialogue. But so too do important forces within the Maduro government, many of whom belong to the new state bureaucracy that has concentrated enormous economic as well as political power in its hands.

The Chavista process is run from above by a bureaucracy that is building a state capitalist project in the name of revolution. The anti-imperialist rhetoric is reserved for Washington. The Chinese and Russians, whose purposes in investing in Venezuela have nothing to do with socialism and a great deal to do with profit, are the new partners in the Venezuelan economy. Chinese money is funding the government house building programs, for example.

What then can dialogue mean in these circumstances? It is hard to believe it would not involve compromising the objectives of the revolution, many of them already paralyzed by corruption, inefficiency and the total absence of any coherent economic strategy.

As has been the case in the past, and is now even more so, policy seems time and again to be dictated by immediate pressures and by the endless negotiation between powerful groups and individuals. There is an overwhelming feeling in Venezuela, shared by many, of aimlessness, of decisions made on the spur of the moment.

Thus, for example, the creation of new agencies to deal with the allocation of foreign currency has produced more confusion and a continuing outflow of dollars. The reason for this becomes clear on a stroll around the city. The Venezuelan production system is at a standstill and the gap has been filled by a rising tide of imports, paid for in dollars. The exchange rate reflects the fact that the bolívar has nothing to sustain it, no production and shrinking reserves. Venezuela is even importing oil, in order to fulfill its international obligations.

Yet it was oil revenues that were to fund and sustain the often very exciting social programs that did, undoubtedly, transform the lives of Venezuela’s poor in the early part of Chávez’s government. But those programs are now failing because oil finances are shrinking, or at least being diverted to sustain other areas of the national economy.

The result are the very real day-to-day difficulties. The fact that the opposition complains about shortages and price inflation that affect it less than the majority population does not detract from the realities. Supermarket shelves are empty, building materials almost impossible to come by, auto parts conspicuous by their absence, and there is a critical shortage of drugs and medicines.

After every shortage the price of basic goods rise again, usually with the excuse that imported inputs have to be paid for in dollars. Yet the importers are charging far more for their dollars than they had to pay under the government’s preferential rate arrangements. The beneficiaries of those arrangements, in the state machine and in the private sector, can easily be seen in the packed restaurants, buying whiskey at inflated prices, and driving expensive SUVs. Corruption and speculation are funding high living.

What is the response of the Maduro government? He is right to denounce the US-backed disinformation campaign — even though he has just appointed an ambassador to Washington after a long time without one. He is probably right to describe the far-right activists as involved in an attempt to build a fascist-type organization of angry and alienated youth.

But the underlying frustrations and discontents which affect every sector of the society, and not just the middle class, are the consequences of shortages, inflation, and centrally about corruption. There is a widely accepted figure that $2 billion have “disappeared” from public coffers over the last year or so. And it is well known that speculation and black marketeering is common within both the private and the public sector.

One outcome of the Peace Conference was the creation of an Economic Truth Commission which will address issues of speculation, the collapse of production, shortages and runaway inflation. It will include business representatives, Mendoza himself, and government representatives who may well themselves be involved in circuits of corruption. What is there to be discussed about speculation when the speculators are sitting at the table?

A genuine Truth Commission would mobilize the immediate knowledge of workers, people in the communities, the grassroots organisations which have so loyally supported Maduro in recent weeks on the basis of his promise to continue and deepen the revolution. That promise seems hollow in face of a strategy of “dialogue” which will give the representatives of private and state capital the central role in determining where the revolution goes. Instead of being expropriated, the speculators will now be allowed to shape the future, with rumours of war and burning barricades at their back.

The mass movements have saved the revolution over and over again — in their mobilizations, in their defense of production, in their massive electoral support, and in their solidarity. They are the forces of Chavismo, not a political compromise between hostile classes.

Whatever the immediate future, these are the only forces that will carry the revolution forward. That is what people are proclaiming when they wear the fashionable caps bearing Chávez’s eyes, looking out into the future. The alternative is one they already know, because the oppositionists have demonstrated where they want to take Venezuela: back to the poverty, the inequality, and corruption of the past. This was what the Right offered when they last attempted to seize power, and that is still the vision that drives them.

But what are the Chavista leaders offering? They have launched campaigns against corruption, speculation, and violence in the past that have produced very few results; the few government members who took their role seriously and took on the speculators were soon removed.

This is a moment to address the real problems that the majority of Venezuelans are facing — their causes and potential radical solutions. The Right is now mobilizing across the country in protests against scarcity and rising prices. If they become the leaders of a mass movement, in the absence of any real government action beyond deploying the national guard on the street, the consequences could be very serious.

In Venezuela, the word they use to describe the Chávez period is “el proceso,” the process. Processes that do not go forward move inexorably backwards.

We are extremely concerned by the response of the international community to the popular protests that have erupted against almost two decades of misrule in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Editorial, 17 February). Western media and politicians have argued that now is not the time for the western powers to disengage from Bosnia.

In fact, it is time to recognise that external rule in Bosnia has failed. The Dayton agreement in 1995 set up an undemocratic “protectorate”, giving the high representative of the western powers neocolonial authority over a political system that has institutionalised ethnic divisions, while neoliberal economic policies have impoverished ordinary Bosnians regardless of ethnicity.

Do the western powers have any answers to this crisis? The high representative, Valentin Inzko, can think only of threatening military intervention. Periodic threats by the US and the EU to revise the Dayton agreement by recentralising Bosnia have only made matters worse, raising the spectre of secession as Serbs and Croats look to Serbia and Croatia for support. And neither Brussels nor Washington will contemplate reversing the neoliberal economic policies that have impoverished so many.

It is therefore time to terminate the office of the high representative and end outside meddling in Bosnian affairs.

The popular protests have made clear that there is widespread rejection of ethnic divisions and neoliberal policies imposed from above. Free from external economic, political and military pressure, we are confident that the peoples of Bosnia will come together to establish a society based on social justice and national equality.
Samir Amin Economist, Senegal
Cédric Durand Economist, Paris 13 University, France
Emin EminagićActivist, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Lindsey German Stop the War Coalition (p/c), United Kingdom
Grigoris Gerotziafas Associate professor of hematology-hemostasis, Université Pierre et Maris Curis (Paris VI), militant of Antarsya in France/Greece
Anna Grodzka Member of parliament of the Republic of Poland
Costas Isihos Member of the political secretariat and head of the foreign policy department of Syriza
Mariya Ivancheva Independent scholar and member of the editorial board of LeftEast, Bulgaria
Stathis Kouvelakis Reader in political theory, King’s College, London, and Syriza central committee, United Kingdom and Greece
Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski Researcher and editor, Poland
Aleksandra Lakić Researcher, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Ken Loach Film director, United Kingdom
James Meadway Economist, United Kingdom
Matija Medenica Solidarnost editor, Serbia
China Miéville Author, United Kingdom
Tijana Morača Independent researcher, Serbia
Goran Musić Historian, Austria
Jelena Petrović Red Min(e)d, Slovenia
Dragan Plavšić Lawyer and author, United Kingdom
Florin Poenaru Anthropologist, Romania
Srećko Pulig Aktiv editor, Croatia
Marija Ratković The Culture of Memory, Serbia
James Robertson Graduate student, history, New York University, United States
Catherine Samary Economist, France
Richard Seymour Author and columnist, United Kingdom
GM Tamás Philosopher, CEU, Budapest, Hungary
Mary Taylor CUNY Graduate Center, USA
Vladimir Unkovski-Korica Historian, United Kingdom
Ana Vilenica Uz)bu))na))) editor, Serbia
Andreja Živković Author, United Kingdom

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/03/end-western-meddling-bosnia

People ask for solutions, but no solutions are possible in a disinformed world. Populations almost everywhere are dissatisfied, but few have any comprehension of the real situation. Before there can be solutions, people must know the truth about the problems.  For those few inclined to be messengers, it is largely a thankless task.

The assumption that man is a rational animal is incorrect. He and she are emotional creatures, not Dr. Spock of Star Trek. Humans are brainwashed by enculturation and indoctrination. Patriots respond with hostility toward criticisms of their governments, their countries, their hopes and their delusions. Their emotions throttle facts, should any reach them. Aspirations and delusions prevail over truth. Most people want to be told what they want to hear. Consequently, they are always gullible and their illusions and self-delusions make them easy victims of propaganda. This is true of all levels of societies and of the leaders themselves.

We are witnessing this today in western Ukraine where a mixture of witless university students, pawns in Washington’s drive for world hegemony, together with paid protesters and fascistic elements among ultra-nationalists are bringing great troubles upon Ukraine and perhaps a deadly war upon the world.

Many of the protesters are just the unemployed collecting easy money. It is the witless idealistic types that are destroying the independence of their country. Victoria Nuland, the American neoconservative Assistant Secretary of State, whose agenda is US world hegemony, told the Ukrainians what was in store for them last December 13, but the protesters were too delusional to hear.

In an eight minute, 46 second speech at the National Press Club sponsored by the US-Ukraine Foundation, Chevron, and Ukraine-in-Washington Lobby Group, Nuland boasted that Washington has spent $5 billion to foment agitation to bring Ukraine into the EU. Once captured by the EU, Ukraine will be “helped” by the West acting through the IMF. Nuland, of course, presented the IMF as Ukraine’s rescuer, not as the iron hand of the West that will squeeze all life out of Ukraine’s struggling economy.

Nuland’s audience consisted of all the people who will be enriched by the looting and by connections to a Washington-appointed Ukrainian government. Just look at the large Chevron sign next to which Nuland speaks, and you will know what it is all about.

Nuland’s speech failed to alert the Ukraine protesters, who are determined to destroy the independence of Ukraine and to place their country in the hands of the IMF so that it can be looted like Latvia, Greece and every country that ever had an IMF structural adjustment program. All the monies that protesters are paid by the US and EU will soon be given back manyfold as Ukraine is “adjusted” by Western looting.

In her short speech the neoconservative agitator Nuland alleged that the protesters whom Washington has spent $5 billion cultivating were protesting “peacefully with enormous restraint” against a brutal government.

According to RT, which has much more credibility than the US State Department (remember Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the UN setting up the US invasion of Iraq with his “evidence” of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, a speech Powell later disavowed as Bush regime disinformation) Ukrainian rioters have seized 1,500 guns, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, 3 machine guns, and grenades from military armories.

The human-rights trained Ukrainian police have permitted the violence to get out of hand.  A number of police have been burned by Molotov cocktails. The latest report is that 108 police have been shot.  A number are dead and 63 are in critical condition. http://rt.com/news/ukraine-kiev-firearms-weapons-police-934/   These casualties are the products of Nuland’s “peacefully protesting protesters acting with enormous restraint.” On February 20, the elected, independent Ukraine government responded to the rioters use of firearms by allowing police to use firearms in self-defense.

Perhaps the Russophobic western Ukrainians deserve the IMF, and perhaps the EU deserves the extreme nationalists who are trying to topple the Ukraine government.  Once Ukrainians experience being looted by the West, they will be on their knees begging  Russia to rescue them.  The only certain thing is that it is unlikely that the Russian part of Ukraine will remain part of Ukraine.

During the Soviet era, parts of Russia herself, such as the Crimea, were placed into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, perhaps in order to increase the Russian population in Ukraine. In other words, a large part of today’s Ukraine–eastern and southern provinces–are traditional Russian territory, not part of historical Ukraine.

Until Russia granted Ukraine independence in the early 1990s, Ukraine had experienced scant independence since the 14th century and had been a part of Russia for 200 years. The problem with the grant of independence is that much of Ukraine is not Ukrainian. It is Russian.

As I have reported previously, Russia regards the prospect of Ukraine as a member of the EU with NATO with US bases on Russia’s frontier as a “strategic threat.”  It is unlikely that the Russian government and the Russian territories in Ukraine will accept Washington’s plan for Ukraine. Whatever their intention, Secretary of State John Kerry’s provocative statements are raising tensions and fomenting war.  The vast bulk of the American and Western populations have no idea of what the real situation is, because all they hear from the “free press” is the neoconservative propaganda line.

Washington’s lies are destroying not only civil liberties at home and countries abroad, but are raising dangerous alarms in Russia about the country’s security. If Washington succeeds in overthrowing the Ukrainian government, the eastern and southern provinces are likely to secede. If secession becomes a civil war instead of a peaceful divorce, Russia would not be able to sit on the sidelines.  As the Washington warmongers would be backing western Ukraine, the two nuclear powers would be thrown into military conflict.

The Ukrainian and Russian governments allowed this dangerous situation to develop, because they naively permitted for many years billions of US dollars to flow into their countries where the money was used to create fifth columns under the guise of educational and human rights organizations, the real purpose of which is to destabilize both countries. The consequence of the trust Ukrainians and Russians placed in the West is the prospect of civil and wider war.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format.

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/21/is-ukraine-drifting-toward-civil-war/

I’ve been away for the past week so I wasn’t able to write anything on the unfolding turmoil in Venezuela, but I’ve been following the situation closely and in recent days have grown increasingly frustrated with (a) the total lack of balanced reporting on Venezuela in the international media, including left-liberal publications like The Guardian; (b) the seeming ease with which comrades on the libertarian left ignore the events in Venezuela as if it were somehow “irrelevant” to our cause, simply because we’re not supposed to have any close ideological affinity with chavismo; and (c) the ill-informed basis on which many activists and even several major movement pages have taken the side of the protesters against the government, unquestioningly sharing the propaganda of the right-wing opposition and echoing dangerously superficial and wrongheaded interpretations about the protests. I intend to write more on this later, but here are some initial reflections:

1. Just because there’s people in the streets doesn’t mean they’re on our side. We live in the era of the protester, and violent protest has become a media spectacle par excellence. In the wake of Tahrir and Occupy, we have somehow been conditioned to automatically feel sympathy for all men and women taking to the streets and facing down lines of riot police. Now there’s a YouTube clip floating around the web of a Venezuelan girl with an obnoxious upper-class American accent recounting the story of Venezuela’s heroic student uprising against an “illegitimate government”. At first sight, the video — which garnered over 2 million views so far — seems to neatly fit the narrative of the global uprisings. But anyone with even the slightest inkling to do some fact-checking or background research will quickly discover that the protests in Venezuela are nothing like Occupy or the Chilean student movement. You wouldn’t sympathize with a nationalist insurrection in Kiev or a royalist rebellion in Thailand. So why side with the US-funded right-wing opposition in Venezuela?

2. The protests in Venezuela are orchestrated by the right-wing oligarchy. Let’s get the facts straight: plenty of Venezuelans are taking to the streets with legitimate grievances about violent crime, high inflation and food shortages — and there is no doubt that the Venezuelan riot police are indeed behaving violently towards many of these protesters. All police brutality should be roundly condemned. The people of Venezuela should be allowed to freely express their indignation in public without fear of repression. But it bears emphasizing in this respect that at least two of the protesters’ main grievances have been deliberately escalated by the oligarchic elite itself: through extensive hoarding and smuggling of consumer products (giving rise to shortages and fueling price inflation) and massive speculation on the foreign currency market (pushing down the Bolívar and feeding into further inflation). This is precisely the type of economic warfare that the US-backed Chilean opposition drew upon prior to the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973.

Moreover, even though the protests initially began as a student mobilization on Venezuela’s national Youth Day (February 12), they have in the past week become effectively subsumed under the leadership of the most right-wing section of the opposition alliance, Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), led by Maria Corina Machado and Leopoldo López. As the firebrand leaders of the most anti-democratic faction of the oligarchic elite, López and Machado have been actively calling for the overthrow of Nicolas Maduro’s democratically-elected government and have urged the continuation of violent protest until he resigns. In the last 15 years, these people have shown themselves to be intent on restoring their class privilege at any costs, even if it requires casualties among the general population. They are deliberately fueling violence and social unrest in order to delegitimize and oust the government.

3. Venezuela’s opposition receives active support from the United States. While there is no evidence that the ongoing protests have been directly machinated by the White House or the CIA, it is publicly known that leading Venezuelan opposition groups receive millions of dollars in financial support from the US government and US-based NGOs and think tanks. In 2008, a leader of Venezuela’s student movement — which organized similar anti-Chávez protests back in 2007 — won the $500.000 Milton Friedman Award from the right-libertarian CATO Institute, which is funded by major corporate sponsors like the Koch Brothers and the Ford Foundation, headed by an “ardent devotee” of Ayn Rand, and driven by a zealous mission to defend “the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.”

All in all, it is estimated that various “youth outreach” programs in Venezuela received at least $45 million from US sponsors. Furthermore, the Obama administration has earmarked at least $5 million to directly support Venezuela’s opposition parties through 2014 — not to mention the secret ties that undoubtedly exists between the opposition and the US intelligence community. This comes on top of the dozens of millions of dollars that have been donated to the opposition over the years. Not surprising, perhaps, given that Venezuela is sitting on top of the largest known oil reserves in the world, just around the corner from the US.

4. The democratic credentials of Maduro’s government are not in question. The US-backed opposition, which is now openly calling for Maduro’s salida (exit) considers his government “illegitimate”. This is absurd, because even judging by the limited standards of liberal constitutionalism, the democratic legitimacy of Maduro’s administration is unsurpassed. In 15 years, the United Socialist Party has won 18 elections and lost only one. Venezuela’s electoral system has been described by former US President Jimmy Carter — who has observed elections in 92 different countries on all continents — as “the best system in the world.” Just two months ago, in December 2013, the government won 76% of all local municipalities in midterm elections and decisively defeated the opposition, led by the “moderate” Henrique Capriles, by more than 10 percentage points. Much more than this, the government has been actively working together with grassroots movements to create one of the world’s most vibrant experiments in direct and participatory democracy, giving rise to thousands of communal councils, hundreds of communes and tens of thousands of worker-run cooperatives. In no other country in the world is citizen participation in politics and the economy as actively stimulated by the state as it is in Venezuela.

5. The right-wing opposition is itself thoroughly anti-democratic. The really dangerous forces in Venezuela right now are not inside the “illegitimate government” but in the thoroughly anti-democratic right-wing segment of the opposition. A quick glance at the two opposition leaders — Maria Corina Machado and Leopoldo López — reveals enough. Both were original signatories of the infamous 2002 Carmona Decree, which temporarily dissolved the Chávez government following an attempted coup d’étât by the oligarchic elite and right-wing elements in the military. López, meanwhile, orchestrated the violent clashes in front of the Presidential Palace, which led to dozens of deaths and provided the pretext for the coup. During the coup, López even personally participated in the unconstitutional arrest (i.e., kidnapping) of Interior Minister Ramon Rodriguez Chacin.

When chavista loyalists in the army and the movements reinstated the President, Chávez decided not to pursue vengeance and allowed the conspirators to walk free. Machado went on to found Súmata, an “NGO” that received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington (where she received a personal welcome from President George W. Bush), which played a central role in the failed recall referendum that sought to oust Chávez two years after the failed coup. López was allowed to remain mayor of Chacao, the wealthiest district of Caracas, before being prosecuted by the government on corruption charges in 2006. In 2007, López was caught on tape planning to bring about a new political crisis by creating social instability. Is it really such a stretch to suspect him of being involved in a renewed attempt to destabilize the government through violent and anti-democratic means?

6. The 2014 protests are a replay of the run-up to the 2002 coup. All the above clearly illustrates the historical parallels between the failed 2002 coup and the ongoing turmoil in Venezuela: leading US-funded opposition figures deliberately stir social unrest in the hope that the government will be thoroughly de-legitimized by the resultant street violence so the right can take over — either through elections or through an outright coup. Once again, the oligarchic elite is trying to achieve through illiberal means what it could not achieve peacefully: the ouster of the Socialist government and the repression of the Bolivarian Revolution and its radical experiment in direct democracy, social solidarity and workers’ control.

All of this clearly illustrates the opposition’s despair: first they tried a military coup; when that failed they tried to bring down the government through an oil strike; when that failed they unsuccessfully pursued a recall referendum; then they ran out of ideas and simply boycotted National Assembly elections for no legitimate reason whatsoever; in 2007 they tried their hands at a student rebellion; and, following Maduro’s victory in last year’s elections, Capriles kept ordering recounts and refusing to recognize the election outcome even while it was clear to everyone — including independent election observers — that he had lost. Finally, after Capriles’ humiliating defeat in the December municipal elections, the right-wing of the opposition decided to abandon the electoral road and return to the old-fashioned coup preparation tactics of 2002. As before, these anti-democratic maneuvers may end up backfiring on the right by rallying the grassroots movements behind the government and further strengthening Maduro’s internal position within the United Socialist Party.

7. The media is the problem. A crucial point: the reason so few people seem to know about any of the above is simply because there is hardly any balanced reporting on Venezuela, and because many people are simple-minded enough to just buy anything they read on Twitter or Facebook without doing any fact-checking or further background research at all. When it comes to Venezuela, in particular, the international media — including beloved “progressive” outlets like The Guardian — are so full of shit that they have become an embarrassment to the journalistic profession as such, while social networks are so awash in falsehoods and propaganda that some media scholars would have to seriously revise their post-2011 theories about the “democratizing” effects of Facebook and Twitter.

The international media are fond to talk about Chávez and Maduro’s crackdown on the Venezuelan media and their censorship of the public debate, but it turns out that, as in the West, Venezuela’s media is overwhelmingly privately owned by the country’s richest business elites. In 2012, the BBC noted that only 4.58% of the country’s TV and radio channels actually belong to the state. The three national newspapers — El Universal, El Nacional and Ultimos Noticias, accounting for 90% of the country’s readership — are all anti-government. Of the four main national TV channels, three — Venevision, Globovision and Televen, similarly accounting for 90% of the audience — are aligned with the opposition. The international media (along with the admins of important social movement pages on Facebook and Twitter) simply echo the right-wing narrative emanating from Venezuela’s highly concentrated corporate media landscape without asking any critical questions whatsoever.

8. A Challenge to the Hegemony of Neoliberalism and the US.  So the inherent bias of the corporate media is one of the main reasons why you never read that income inequality in Venezuela — once one of highest in Latin America — has now been reduced to the lowest on the continent, while shared growth and redistributive social programs have cut poverty in half and reduced extreme poverty by a whopping 70% since 2002. Illiteracy was eradicated and vast improvements were made in health, housing and education. Just some indicators of social progress: infant mortality fell by more than one-third; the number of social security beneficiaries more than doubled; the amount of primary healthcare physicians in the public sector increased 12-fold from 1999 to 2007, providing healthcare to millions of Venezuelans who previously did not have access; and education enrollment rates more than doubled from 1999 to 2008.

This is the evil anti-democratic regime the US-supported right-wing opposition is trying to overthrow. In reality, of course, it is an experiment in democratic socialism that seeks to build popular power through direct democratic institutions like councils, communes and cooperatives. This is precisely what’s driving the US and the Venezuelan elite so mad: the left in Venezuela is building up its own institutions of communal organization that many hope will one day come to complement or even supplant the bourgeois state. This means that, even if the right ever wins back power, they will still be faced with a formidable popular counter-power in the neighborhoods and working places. Libertarian socialists and autonomous movements elsewhere should not deny these important advances but stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Venezuela’s grassroots movements in defending them from this anti-democratic onslaught by the US-backed oligarchic elite.

Needless to say, none of this means that we should be uncritical of Maduro’s government or of chavismo more generally (for more on that, check out the essay on the contradictions of Chávez’ legacy that I wrote after his death). But it does mean that we — as activists, journalists and organizers — should start doing some serious fact-checking before mindlessly regurgitating the shallow propaganda we are fed by the mainstream media every day. Here are some reliable alternative sources to take a look at: Popular Resistance, Democracy Now, Venezuela Analysis, ZNet, Upside Down World, CEPR. If you know of any other good sources (in English or Spanish) please share them in the comments below.

¡La lucha sigue!

Source: http://roarmag.org/2014/02/venezuela-protests-opposition-coup/

Three years ago, the Museum of Broken Relationships was set up in Zagreb by former lovers Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubiši?.Displays include an axe used by a woman to smash her ex-girlfriend’s furniture together with a splintered chair, a wedding dress with its note saying, “I liked the idea that I could give something away that awakened painful memories for me,” gall stones, a Vespa and a nasal spray. There is even a wooden leg from an amputee who lost it during the 1992-5 war and who fell in love with his nurse. The card next to it says, “This prosthetic had a longer life-span than the relationship.”

This museum is a metaphor for how the nationalists in the countries of the former Yugoslavia wish to view their past – a broken relationship which may be remembered with mementoes and nostalgia but nothing else.

The recent uprisings in Bosnia Hercegovina are the biggest attempt to rebuild that relationship since sniper fire broke up the Sarajevo demonstration against national divisionsin 1992.

For twenty years Bosnians have suffered war followed by the rule of oligarchs using ethno-nationalist rhetoric to hide their plunder of the nation’s wealth. The post Dayton Peace accords which ended the war in 1995 excluded ordinary citizens, workers and students from all this, helping to impose the neo-liberal orthodoxy of privatisation, factory closures and job losses. Unemployment has been at 40% and 57% among young people. Pensioners are left to dig through waste bins.

The first protests in Tuzla, Sarajevo, Zenica and Bihac involved attacks on government and political party buildings. In Mostar, a city still physically divided by the battle lines of the war, Croat and Bosniak protesters came together to attack the offices of their respective political parties.

Since then daily demonstrations and popular assemblies have been taking place in many towns and cities.

The movement is explicitly anti-capitalist. In Tuzla, workers and studentshave issued a list of demands which include forming non-ethnicstate and local governments whose members come from outside the existing political class, the prosecution of economic crimes, reversing privatisations, restoring workers’ rights, and equalizing the pay of politicians with that of workers. They are also demanding the collectivisation of the privatised and formerly state-owned factories.

A system of self-management dates back to 1950 when Tito broke free from Stalin. It was in many ways a farce as the Communist Party ensured that they controlled the management of mist enterprises, but was never totally bogus. The Tuzla workers will have remembered all this.

For the moment the political elites are on the defensive. Prime Minister Nermin Niksic has said, “We are ready to cede the power to anyone legitimate”. The Prime Minister of the Sarajevo canton, Suad Zeljkoviv said, “no one has reasons for unrest … nor does any sector of society have reasons for dissatisfaction.” The following day he resigned.The regional governments in the Tuzla and Zenica-Doboj cantons have collapsed. The Federation government has called for a review of the privatisations. The Director of the Directorate for Police Coordination of Bosnia and Hercegovina (his Orwellian title evidence of the extent of the bureaucracy in the country) has resigned. There are unconfirmed reports that special force police officers removed their helmets and joined protestors in Sarajevo.

There should be no doubt that the oligarchs and their international backers will be working out their counter-attack. Valentin Inzko, speaking for the UN, has said, “If it comes to escalation we would have to consider the intervention of EU forces.” A Sarajevo police chief has said, “the international community and the EU should consider deploying international military forces in BiH if widespread rioting occurs again.” Two days ago the President of the independent trade unions, Josip Milic, was attacked in the streets of Mostar and there are reports of nationalist thugs beating up people attempting to reach the main square there for the daily unity demonstrations. The Bosnian Serb leader, Miloran Dodik, has accused supporters of the Bosnia protestors of being a ‘muslim’ 5^th column.

There is urgent need for solidarity across the region and beyond. Solidarity demonstrations have been held in Banja Luka (at the heart of the Serbian region of the country), in the Serbian capital of Belgrade and in Croatia’s capital Zagreb. In the Montenegran capital of Podgorica demonstrators called for the resignation of their government

On a wall in Tuzla a sign reads, “You must all resign! Death to nationalism!” and in Sarajevo a graffiti says, “he who sows hunger reaps rage.” A friend of mine in Mostar told me “The wheel has started turning, and it is too huge to be stopped. If it gets quiet it won‘t be for long and if they don‘t change this sick system, the next explosion will be their private properties and them. It will be absolute chaos.”

Source: http://leftunity.org/bosnia-the-wheel-has-started-turning/

1. Racisme is een veel te alledaags verschijnsel

De ontwikkelingen rond racisme in Nederland geven een dubbel beeld.Enerzijds lijkt het racisme onder de bevolking als geheel af te nemen.Het Sociaal Cultureel Planbureau publiceerde in december een onderzoek dat liet zien hoe steeds minder mensen in Nederland moeite lijken te hebben met het grote aantal verschillende nationaliteiten in Nederland. In 2002 gaf bijna de helft van de ondervraagden aan hiermee een probleem te hebben, terwijl dit nu minder dan een derde is.

Tegelijkertijd zien we dat de racistische minderheid verder verhardt. Uit cijfers van het Verwey-Jonker Instituut blijkt dat het aantal racistische incidenten in 2012 met een kwart is toegenomen ten opzichte van 2011.

Dezelfde verharding zien we ook uit de reacties op Quinsy Gario en Anouk. Vorige maand kwam daar de 17-jarige diabetespatiënt Yosra bij. Zij werd vorige maand aangehouden in een Hema omdat ze voor een junk werd aangezien toen ze in een pashokje insuline spoot.

Onder druk van publieke woede bood de Hema een week later excuses aan voor de arrestatie. Op een onlineforum schreef een collega van de beveiligers over de arrestatie: ‘Echt weer zo een buitenlander streek. Als het aan mij zou liggen komen ze de winkel niet eens meer binnen.’

Maar het probleem gaat verder dan individuele opvattingen van beveiligers. Toen Yosra op het politiebureau haar medicijnen liet zien zei een agent: ‘Dat is vast een truc om eerder weg te mogen uit de cel. Dat doen veel allochtonen.’

De politie zegt dat dit gelogen is, maar hun geschiedenis spreekt tegen hen. Het incident komt maanden na het nieuws van oud-agenten dat de Haagse politie in de Schilderswijk structureel racistisch geweld gebruikt tegenover (al geboeide) arrestanten. Doordat korpsleiding en VVD-burgemeester van Aartsen stil blijven, groeit het zelfvertrouwen van racistische agenten. Zij worden nog eens gesterkt in hun ideeën door de politiek.

2. Gevestigde politiek is onderdeel van het probleem

De PVV is in peilingen even groot als de PvdA en VVD samen. Maar racistische opvattingen worden ondertussen door het hele politieke spectrum omarmd. Een initiatief in Amsterdam om de opkomst tijdens gemeenteraadsverkiezingen te verhogen onder ‘jongeren, internationals en allochtonen’ werd na een mediastorm aangepast. Het argument was dat de campagne vooral de PvdA stemmen zou opleveren. CDA’er Marijke Shahsavari is bang voor een grotere verkiezingsopkomst: ‘Als een etnische groep plotseling massaal gaat stemmen is de verkiezing geen afspiegeling van de samenleving meer.’

Maar de PvdA gebruikt evengoed rechtse retoriek om stemmen te winnen. In een interview met de NRC zei voorzitter van de deelraad van Amsterdam Nieuw-West, Baâdoud, dat de oorsprong van criminaliteit ‘bij de opvoeding ligt’. Hij heeft aan minister Hennis-Plasschaert voorgesteld een legerkazerne in zijn wijk neer te zetten om Turks-Nederlandse jongeren ‘discipline’ bij te brengen. Bij Baâdoud geen woord over de werkloosheid die bij dezelfde jongeren in Nieuw-West boven de veertig procent ligt. Zo gebruiken politici racisme om mensen te verdelen en de aandacht af te leiden van werkelijke problemen.

3. Om het momentum rond racisme te vertalen naar de straat

Door het moedige werk van zwarte activisten is racisme weer onderwerp van discussie geworden. Dit is een positieve ontwikkeling, maar om verandering af te dwingen moeten we de druk op politici opvoeren. Op zaterdag 22 maart wordt er in Amsterdam gedemonstreerd in het kader van de internationale dag tegen racisme de dag ervoor. Die dag werd uitgeroepen door de Verenigde Naties in reactie op de protesten tegen de pasjeswetten in Sharpeville, Zuid-Afrika, waarbij 69 mensen werden gedood door politiekogels.

Vorig jaar op 23 maart gingen meer dan 3000 mensen de straat op tegen het Nederlandse vluchtelingenbeleid. De coalitie die dit organiseerde bestond naast vluchtelingen zelf uit meer dan tachtig organisaties: linkse partijen en organisaties, vakbonden, kerken, moskeeën en vluchtelingenorganisaties. De doelen van groepen liepen hierbij uiteen van het opheffen van elke vorm van migratiebeperking tot het eisen van een ‘humaner’ asielbeleid.

Met een grote en brede demonstratie op 22 maart tegen racisme zetten we niet alleen de politiek onder druk, maar komen we ook in contact met veel meer mensen die in actie willen komen tegen racisme. De oproep van het 21 maart Comité combineert een brede analyse over de opkomst van extreemrechts in Europa aan concrete eisen uit campagnes rond bijvoorbeeld etnisch profileren en Zwarte Piet.

In de aanloop naar de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen legt dit protest de vinger op de zere plek: Nederland heeft een racismeprobleem en het wordt hoog tijd de strijd ertegen weer serieus te nemen. – See more at: http://socialisme.nu/blog/nieuws/39903/geen-ruimte-voor-racisme/#sthash.ibswAgOF.dpuf

On 8/1/14 the Greek government organized festivities for taking over the presidency of the EU. The protest organized by radical left organizations in Athens has been banned by the police on purely political grounds. The organizations of the left that organize the protest have decided to defy the ban and go on with the demonstrations. Several trade unions and political parties of the left denounced the ban.

Pavlos Antonopoulos, a trade unionist from the board of the union of civil servants (ADEDY) and member of the left wing organization ANTARSYA, was arrested and handcuffed for defying the demonstration ban. At Omonia Square in the center of Athens, several hundreds of protesters defied the ban of demonstrations against the festivities for the Greek EU Presidency. They were attacked with tear gas by the riot police. Pavlos Antonopoulos trial will be tomorrow.

The common backdrop is the 2008-09 financial crisis and its aftermath. Economic distress is almost a necessary condition for serious social or political instability, but it is not a sufficient one. Declines in income and high unemployment are not always followed by unrest. Only when economic trouble is accompanied by other elements of vulnerability is there a high risk of instability. Such factors include wide income-inequality, poor government, low levels of social provision, ethnic tensions and a history of unrest. Of particular importance in sparking unrest in recent times appears to have been an erosion of trust in governments and institutions: a crisis of democracy.

Trust has been in secular decline throughout the rich world since the 1970s. This trend accelerated and spread after the collapse of communism in 1989. And as opinion polls have documented, it has sped up again since the 2008–09 financial crisis.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, measures the risk of social unrest in 150 countries around the world. It places a heavy emphasis on institutional and political weaknesses. And recent developments have indeed revealed a deep sense of popular dissatisfaction with political elites and institutions in many emerging markets.

The protesters in Turkey in 2013, for example, were dissatisfied with some abrupt decisions by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. In Bulgaria, what started off as protests against higher electricity bills turned into generalised anti-government demonstrations complaining of corruption—and led to the fall of the government. Protests have continued.

What to expect in 2014? The recession is now over or has eased in much of the world. Yet political reactions to economic distress have historically come with a lag. Austerity is still on the agenda in 2014 in many countries and this will fuel social unrest.

Restlessness on the rise

According to the EIU’s ratings, 65 countries (43% of the 150) will be at a high or very high risk of social unrest in 2014. For 54 countries the risk of instability is medium and for the remaining 31 countries it is low or very low. Compared with five years ago, 19 more countries are now in the high-risk categories.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA), southern Europe, the Balkans and the former Soviet countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) are well represented in the high-risk categories: 12 out of 18 MENA states, six of the seven Balkan countries, eight out of the 12 CIS states, five out of six southern European ones. More than 40% of the countries in eastern Europe are in the high-risk categories. This region was hit hard by the financial crisis and also has many of the underlying characteristics associated with unrest. Unsurprisingly, many high-risk countries are in sub-Saharan Africa. But there are also some in Latin America and Asia—including the world’s largest and most successful emerging market, China, where the authorities are perennially nervous about the risk of mass protests.

Laza Kekic: director, country forecasting services, Economist Intelligence Unit

Source: http://www.economist.com/news/21589143-where-protest-likeliest-break-out-ripe-rebellion