¡MINISTRO JESSE CACHÓN: MENTIROSO!

[pm]

" El Último Aguijón "

"Juro delante de Usted, juro por el Dios de mis padres, juro por
ellos, juro por mi Honor y juro por la Patria, que no daré descanso a mi
brazo ni reposo a mi alma hasta que haya roto las cadenas que nos oprimen...
15 de Agosto de 1.805

" R.R."

Desde la clandestinidad, Venezuela, Abril de 2005

¡MINISTRO JESSE CACHÓN:

MENTIROSO!

El día Domingo 17de Abril de 2005, el Diario 2001, en su primera
página y en la página 20, publicó que el Gral. Néstor González González
fue sorprendido frente a un casino de El Hatillo, por una comisión de la
DIM, y que el mencionado General, huyó abriéndose paso a tiros con unos
guarda-espaldas.

Luego usted, MINISTRO MENTIROSO, el 21 del mismo mes, confirmó que
una Comisión de la Dirección de Inteligencia Militar, rastrea a González
González, a quien se le vio en un casino en el municipio El Hatillo, "pero
logró escapar de las autoridades. El día sábado se recibió una información
en la DIM, de su presencia en el Casino Princess, de El Hatillo; una
comisión se movilizó hacia el sitio, detectando su presencia en el sitio. En
el momento en que sale del casino, es interceptado por la comisión; al darle
la voz de alto, éste repele disparando con un 357, se va de retroceso, y en
ese momento, se atraviesa una camioneta. Fue imposible su detención". Antes
de lo declarado, que se encuentra entre comillas, con satisfacción
manifiesta, había afirmado a los periodistas, textualmente, lo siguiente:
"Espero que le tengamos buenas noticias a los venezolanos sobre su
detención"

Ahora bien, MINISTRO MENTIROSO, quiero decirle que Usted y los
supuestos funcionarios de la DIM saben que no estuve en el Casino Princess,
ubicado en El Hatillo, en la fecha y hora que Usted afirmó, lo que
significa, que no estaba cambiando dólares ni euros en el casino mencionado,
ni fui sorprendido por Comisión alguna de la DIM, ni de ningún otro cuerpo
de seguridad del Estado, ni me escapé abriéndome paso a tiros junto con
varios guardaespaldas; lo que si es cierto, MINISTRO MENTIROSO, es que
Usted junto con sus cómplices de la represión, han querido desprestigiarme
con esa falsa noticia presentándome ante la opinión pública como un
irresponsable, cuando, lejos de ello, lo que he hecho es denunciar los
abusos cometidos por este Régimen y la descomunal corrupción en todos los
Poderes; así como defender públicamente y notoriamente los derechos del
Pueblo Venezolano y denunciar la Traición a la Patria, el atropello, el
abuso de autoridad y las innumerables arbitrariedades que comete el Régimen,
contra los opositores y los disidentes.

MINISTRO MENTIROSO, quienes me conocen saben que no utilizo la
mentira para beneficiarme como Usted sí lo hace. Ahora, si tiene alguna duda
de que me caracteriza el decir siempre la verdad, pregúntele a CHÁVEZ y a
JOSÉ VICENTE, si es o no cierto que siempre he dicho la verdad sin
importarme las consecuencias y que ésta es la razón por la cual estoy en la
clandestinidad perseguido por Usted y los esbirros de este Régimen.

JESSE CACHÓN, quiero que tenga muy claro que la clandestinidad no
significa ocultarnos sino garantizarnos el derecho a no callar.

Ahora bien, Ministro, le pregunto ¿Es parte de toda esta artimaña,
tratar de neutralizar el ascendiente moral que aun permanece en los
cuarteles y en la sociedad civil sobre mi determinación y la determinación
de la Gente de Petróleo, las ONG, algunos dirigentes de partidos
políticos, las Asambleas de Ciudadanos y de opositores y disidentes en
general, de luchar contra gente como ustedes, que traicionan a la patria,
engañan, se apoderan y despilfarran, sin rubor, de los dineros del Estado
y manipulan al pueblo y a la Comunidad Internacional a cambio de petróleo,
dinero, miedo, terror, negocios políticos, hambre, compra de voluntades,
odio, soborno, manipulación, mentiras y promesas que jamás podrán cumplir y
hacen cada día más miserable a nuestro pueblo? Si lo hace contra mi, un
General del Ejército de la República de Venezuela, y contra tanta gente
inocente, ¿Cómo podrá usted mantener su credibilidad y la del Régimen ante
los casos de: los "Paramilitares Colombianos de Miranda"; Rodrigo Granda;
los supuestos "Paramilitares de Amazonas"; el supuesto control de los
índices de reducción de la delincuencia que usted anuncia periódicamente;
el de las posible invasiones al país por fuerzas extranjeras; el de los
magnicidios frustrados y nunca probados, etc.?

Ministro, no aclare porque obscurece.

Y yo me pregunto: si usted es tan avezado en perseguir disidentes
¿porqué no dice donde están y porqué no ha presentado ante el Ministerio
Público, a los funcionarios de la DISIP JOSÉ ALEXANDER PRAGA Y FRANKLIN
JAVIER SEQUERA RODRÍGUEZ, cuya detención fue solicitada por la Fiscal del
Caso, la Dra. IRIS MARU, por el secuestro, tortura y asesinato del joven
GERMAN DELGADO, quien fue mi escolta y luego lo fue de Patricia Poleo? Si
son de la DISIP, dependencia bajo su autoridad, ¿por qué no los ha puesto
a derecho? ¿O es que para usted la Justicia que se le imparte a los
afectos al Régimen es la impunidad, tal como ocurrió con los pistoleros de
Llaguno?

MINISTRO MENTIROSO, es muy fácil ser valiente con un supuesto control
de los organismos de seguridad; con un fusil, como llegó usted al Canal 8
en el golpe de Estado en el año 92 comandando a muchos otros que también
portaban fusiles; y ahora con mucho dinero y escondido detrás de un cargo
gubernamental; pero si así y valiéndose de tal condición, es usted valiente
y fue hombre para acusar a PATRICIA POLEO y lograr que fuera condenada a
cumplir una pena de prisión de seis meses, por difamación; prepárese para
cuando la verdadera Justicia llegue a nuestro país y podamos ejercer
nuestros derechos, para que se defienda, no a puertas cerradas como lo hizo
en el caso de la licenciada Poleo, sino a puertas abiertas, ante el pueblo
venezolano, de todas la acusaciones que serán presentadas contra usted por
su conducta delictiva. Usted como militar conoce estos términos y sabe que
no es una amenaza, no es una advertencia, es la Ley, es la Justicia, es la
realidad que tendrá que enfrentar.

Cuando usted manifestó que espera tenerle buenas noticias a los
venezolanos sobre mi detención, demuestra que muy poco conoce a nuestro
pueblo; quizás en Cuba tuviesen eco sus palabras, pero le garantizo que la
mayoría de los que habitan este país "no se alegrarían" con mi supuesta
detención, por cuanto, hasta ahora he permanecido en la clandestinidad y
"en mi país", gracias a ese pueblo que Usted desconoce.

Con la mentira que Usted y sus asesores cubanos planificaron y dieron
a conocer a la opinión pública sobre mi supuesto enfrentamiento con
funcionarios de la DIM en el Casino Princess, ganó usted una presea que lo
hace muy importante en el clan de los mayores mentirosos del Régimen y
Traidores a la Patria, clan donde se encuentran, entre otros infames:
Chávez, José Vicente, Isaías Rodríguez, Mundaraín, García Carneiro y el
Alto mando de la Fuerza Armada Nacional. Además, llamó mi atención el
detalle de que cuando usted se refirió a mi en sus declaraciones, obvió mi
grado de General de Brigada del Ejército de la República de Venezuela;
detalle que prueba su frustración profesional porque siendo Capitán ®,
jamás llegará al grado que, con mucho honor y orgullo, yo ostento. Como
usted bien debe recordar, en el año 1941, los Nazis prohibieron a los
judíos utilizar sus grados de Doctores, Profesores, etc. ¿es sólo una
coincidencia que Usted se comporte como ellos?

Para concluir, pido a Dios que nos siga dando la fuerza, la entereza
y la lucidez que necesitamos todos los que seguimos luchando para execrar
a este Régimen corrupto y totalitario a fin de lograr la excelencia de país
que nos merecemos y tener en cargos de tanta relevancia, como el que usted
ejerce ahora a personas realmente responsables, honestas, que respondan al
bienestar del pueblo y no al servilismo, mentira, terrorismo de Estado y
Traición a la Patria como usted lo hace ahora, Ministro mentiroso y
farsante

Néstor González González

G/B (Ej.)

"CEDER NUESTROS DERECHOS ES PERDER LA REPUBLICA"

! VIVA LA REPUBLICA DE VENEZUELA!

NGG/ngg

Abril05

[Super User For Ever]

pm wrote:

[Here's the penultimate installment of Stan Goff's treatise on
imperialism, persuasion, and the ethical black hole of contemporary
capitalism. The piece is so full of insight that it needs no
introduction. But the editors wish to add the following suggestions for
further reading: On why the masses vote for the right: Millburn, M.A.
and Conrad, S.D., (1996) The Politics of Denial. On the need for
meaning: Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning.
Goff aptly quotes world-systems theorist Alf Hornborg on post-modernism:
"a condition where the exhausting attitude of radical skepticism tends
to give way to a structurally enforced feigned gullibility. All hope of
certainty has vanished, but precisely because no pretense to power or
truth can be admitted, any pretense is as good as any other…" This
calls to mind a quotation from E. Martin Schotz and Vincent Salandria's
History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the
Murder of President Kennedy: "One of the primary means of immobilizing
the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of
confusion in which anything can be believed and nothing can be known
--nothing of significance, that is." -JAH]

Jurassic Park, Psuedo-events, and Prisons
The fallout from Abu Ghraib

Part VI

by Stan Goff

© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications,
www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted,
distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes
only.

HAMMOND: How can we stand in the light of discovery and… and not act?

MALCOLM: What's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative
act that scars whatever it explores.

The paradox of post-Enlightenment modernity. Discovery, conquest,
ceaseless transformation, absolute disequilibrium.

The political Left, of which I count myself a part, has missed the
driving force behind any belief system, and the very reason that the
American working class (that thinks of itself mistakenly as "middle"
class) - left on its own - veers inevitably into atavism and reaction in
times of crisis.

Belief systems are adopted out of a desire for meaning and a need for
reassurance in the face of confusion and incertitude.

"Meaning has to do with a perception of order, intelligibility, and
familiarity based on a relationship of compatibility between past and
present experience," says Alf Hornborg. "Fundamental to meaning are
experiences of recognition and reassurance. Its opposite is an
experience of chaos or arbitrariness variously referred to as anomie,
alienation, or anxiety."

This has deep implications for activism and for how activists relate to
the people. It is the reason we are never "rationally" persuasive on a
large scale until conditions create a disruption, and even then people
will integrate new information and new emotions as far as possible into
a semiotic universe that has been constructed for them since birth.

Various forms of "spirituality" are a revolt against the disequilibrium
/ anxiety of modernity - in the overdeveloped world as both New Age
mysticism and manifold species of religious fundamentalism, and in the
underdeveloped world as resistance in the framework of primitive
religious cosmologies.

But what is the material basis of this modern, and evermore
"post-modern" system that has engendered these pre-modern reactions?

Alf Hornborg describes post-modernism as "a condition where the
exhausting attitude of radical skepticism tends to give way to a
structurally enforced feigned gullibility. All hope of certainty has
vanished, but precisely because no pretense to power or truth can be
admitted, any pretense is as good as any other… This is the structural
space of Baudrillard's "political economy of the sign," Goffman's
"impression management," and Lasch's "culture of narcissism."

It was Lasch who said, in his examination of the social and political
transformations occurring as the US was re-positioned after World War II
increasingly not as a producer society, but as the consumer of last
instance for the world economy:

"Consumer goods spoke so loudly, in fact, that social critics began to
fear that the voice of moderation and sobriety was in danger of being
completely submerged in the clamorous invitation to buy, to borrow, and
to spend without a second thought, and to indulge every whim as quickly
as it came to mind. When Dwight Eisenhower engaged an advertising firm
to promote his campaign for the presidency in 1952, many commentators
objected to this packaging of a candidate by Madison Avenue-a practice
that threatened to replace political discourse with advertising slogans.
Mass promotion, it was now clear, would not stop with the marketing of
washing machines and refrigerators. In The Image (1962), Daniel Boorstin
pointed out that images of reality threatened to replace reality itself,
so that politics came to revolve not around events but around
"pseudo-events" staged for the benefit of the mass media."

Boorstin was actually coming from an early neo-conservative perspective
that lamented the degradation of "Western civilization" by this
substitution of simulation for reality.

Erving Goffman, who coined the term "impression management," prefigures
the effect of disruptions in these pseudo-events for the Bush
administration, in his 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in
Everyday Life:

"I have considered some major forms of performance disruption-unmeant
gestures, inopportune intrusions, faux pas, and scenes. These
disruptions, in everyday terms, are often called "incidents." When an
incident occurs, the reality sponsored by the performers is threatened.
The persons present are likely to react by becoming flustered, ill at
ease, embarrassed, nervous, and the like. Quite literally, the
participants may find themselves out of countenance. When these
flusterings or symptoms of embarrassment become perceived, the reality
that is supported by the performance is likely to be further jeopardized
and weakened, for these signs of nervousness in most cases are an aspect
of the individual who presents a character and not an aspect of the
character he projects, thus forcing upon the audience an image of the
man behind the mask. "

The latest example of this is the collection of scenes Michael Moore
used in his wildly successful Fahrenheit 9-11 documentary, where - in
violation of the unwritten law of mainstream media to never show
embarrassing out-takes of prominent leaders - he shows Bush rolling his
eyes cluelessly, John Ashcroft telling the make-up artists to make him
look young, and Paul Wolfowitz spitting into his comb to tame his
cowlick… where we can all behold these "leaders" as what they are,
dangerous geeks who have bullshitted their way into power with the help
of advertising psychologists and zillion-dollar PR firms.

The whole pseudo-event of the "good" war in Iraq began to come apart
with the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison and the subsequent release
of hundreds of heretofore "dangerous" characters who were dramatically
and "coincidentally" rehabilitated.

Goffman continues:

"In order to prevent the occurrence of incidents and the embarrassment
consequent upon them, it will be necessary for all the participants in
the interaction, as well as those who do not participate, to possess
certain attributes and to express these attributes in practices employed
for saving the show. These attributes and practices will be reviewed
under three headings: the defensive measures used by performers to save
their own show; the protective measures used by audience and outsiders
to assist the performers in saving the performers' show; and, finally,
the measures the performers must take in order to make it possible for
the audience and outsiders to employ protective measures on the
performers' behalf."

Here is where someone, if they intend to spoil the performance
altogether, has to run up onto the stage and shout, "Bullshit!" This is
what is necessary at this juncture to break the thrall of the audience,
force them to accept that they've burned the price of their tickets, and
send them walking out of the theater.

On May 26, Robert Fisk wrote of the breaking scandal:

"The re-writing of Iraqi history is now going on at supersonic speed.
Weapons of mass destruction? Forget it. Links between Saddam and
al-Qa'ida? Forget it. Liberating the Iraqis from Saddam's Abu Ghraib
life of torture? Forget it. Wedding party slaughtered? Forget it. Clear
the decks for both 'full (sic) sovereignty' and 'chaotic events.' This
is, at any rate, according to Mr Bush. When I heard his hesitant
pronunciation of Abu Ghraib as 'Abu Grub' on Monday night, I could only
profoundly agree."

But we're in danger again of missing the detail. Just as the
unsupervised armed mercenaries being killed in Iraq are being described
by the occupation authorities as "contractors" or, more mendaciously,
"civilians" - so the responsibility for the porno interrogations at Abu
Ghraib is being allowed to slide into the summer mists over the Tigris
River. So let's go back, for a moment, to the long weeks in which the
Department of Bad Apples allowed its jerks to put leashes around Iraqi
necks, forced prisoners to have sex with each other and raped some Iraqi
lasses in the jail.

The abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib were known and on record, on
record in the military and on record for the public, for months. Are we
really to believe that the visual images alone added that much power to
the reports? In fact, they did.

This confusion between image and reality has been part of American
culture for so long that - like the air we breathe - we don't see it,
and we don't think about it.

Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism - American Life in an
Age of Diminishing Expectations, published in 1979, described social
phenomena very well, even though Lasch, like Freud, blamed it all on
weak men and strong women. His description below, minus Lasch's goofy
Freudian misogyny, is actually useful.

"Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity… all politics
becomes a form of spectacle. It is well known that Madison Avenue
packages politicians and markets them as if they were cereals or
deodorants; but the art of public relations penetrates more deeply into
political life… The modern prince [an apt turn of phrase for the
current member of the Bush political dynasty] … confuses successful
completion of the task at hand with the impression he makes or hopes to
make on others. Thus American officials blundered into the war in
Vietnam… More concerned with the trappings than with the reality of
power, they convinced themselves that failure to intervene would damage
American 'credibility…' [They] fret about their ability to rise to
crisis, to project an image of decisiveness, to give a convincing
performance of executive power… Public relations and propaganda have
exalted the image and the pseudo-event."

"…confuses successful completion of the task at hand with the
impression he makes or hopes to make on others…"

Remember the May 2003 pronouncement that major combat was over? It is
not just the public who has come to suspend its disbelief, it is now the
actors themselves.

* * *

In 1994, I was running an A-Detachment in 3rd Special Forces, ODA-354 to
be precise, a team that specialized in free-fall parachute infiltration
and special (strategic) reconnaissance. 3rd Special Forces Group's area
of operation encompassed sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, and our
team was specifically designated for the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
So we had two language requirements on the team, Spanish and French
(even though most Haitians actually speak Haitian Kreyol).

I had a communications sergeant on my team named Ali Tehrani. His father
was an expatriate Iranian who'd married a German, and Ali had been
raised in extremely comfortable circumstances in Europe, where his
father and the society around him pushed him to fluency in English,
German, Spanish, and French. Ali also spoke decent Italian. He was the
most fluent French-speaker on the battalion, and a year before we were
sent to Haiti with the 1994 invasion, Ali had been sent to the camps
constructed by the United States military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for
the purpose of detaining tens of thousands of Haitians who were trying
to escape the brutal repression and grinding poverty of Haiti in
ramshackle boats. Ali was needed there because of his language fluency.

Ali was typical of many of the "non-white" members of Special Forces in
two respects. He was demonstrably patriotic - compelled, it seemed, to
prove his devotion to the American security state - and he adopted the
prevailing attitude within much of Special Operations of Negrophobia - a
kind of institutional disdain for Black troops that served to bloc other
"non-whites" with whites in SF. It's a peculiar mechanism of white
supremacy where there is not a master-race mentality so much as a
deficient-race ideology from which all others could self-exclude. This -
along with an anabolic version of masculinity - served as one form of
social glue in SF culture, though there were a few exceptions.

Ali's Negrophobia wasn't virulent like that I had witnessed in other SF
troops. In fact, he was willing to grant exceptions among individual
Black soldiers fairly easily. It was more part of his obsessive desire
to fit in.

Ali had spent six months "working the camps" at Guantanamo in 1993.

When we received word of our mission to invade Haiti in 1994, he reacted
violently. His revulsion toward Haitians was visceral and white-hot.
Given that my own team's mission might depend on both Ali's language
capabilities ("my" language was Spanish) and on our ability to establish
rapport with local Haitians, Ali's outburst sent up a warning flare in
front of me, and I made time to sit down with him for a long talk.

Ali was, aside from his passive racism and the simmering rage that one
could always sense just below his surface, a very intelligent and
sensitive man. I always suspected that he may have suffered either
physical or psychological abuse as a child.

When we talked, we fairly quickly concluded together that his aversion
to Haitians had something to do with the role he had been thrown into
against the Haitians at the camps, the role of jail-boss, and he agreed
to keep that in mind and to subordinate his conditioned reflexes on the
matter to mental time-outs in order to assure that he would behave
appropriately while we were on the mission in Haiti, which he did…
most of the time.

But the point I'm getting to is this. The antagonism that Ali
experienced as an individual toward Haitians was structured by the
institutional antagonism built into the jailer-and-jailed relationship.
Ali had internalized the external reality that he was a prison guard and
they were the prisoners. His job was to dominate, to bend Haitians to
his will, and every exercise of human agency by the Haitians threatened
that. Their very humanity - that combination of independent
consciousness and will - was structured by the prison-camp phenomenon to
be an enemy force in relation to Ali and the other prison-keepers.

In 1971, Stanford University Professor of Psychology Phillip Zimbardo
designed an experiment that would come to be known as the Stanford
Prison Experiment. Subjects were recruited and paid a modest stipend,
whereupon they were separated into "prisoners" and "guards," and placed
in a mock prison built in a Stanford basement. The prisoners were
stripped, deloused, shackled, and placed in prison clothes, while the
guards were given authoritative uniforms, sunglasses, and batons. Long
story short - within two days there was a near prison riot,
psychosomatic illness began to break out, white middle-class kids in the
role of guards became rapidly and progressively more sadistic and
arbitrary, and the two-week experiment had to be abandoned after only
six days… before someone was badly hurt or killed.

The experiment seemed to support the truism that "absolute power
corrupts absolutely." But that conclusion serves as a description, not
an explanation. It describes what happens to the individual, but it
fails to account for the role of rationalization that legitimates the
domination, and it completely fails to account for institutional support
of that domination.

When one uses the term "systemic," she is saying that the source of this
abuse is not individual moral failure, but a predictable expression of
the system and its structures.

The abuses of detainees, by US troops, by CACI International and Titan
Corporation mercenaries, and by the CIA in Iraq, was "systemic."

But in the same way that the system found an expression in the thoughts
and emotions of Ali Tehrani, in the same way that the structure of
domination and subjection pushed him to rationalize away his shared
humanity with his Haitian captives, we can now see in the leering grins
of the Abu Ghraib prison guards, who are regular people - like the
experimental subjects in the Stanford Prison Experiment - who quickly
learned to behave as sadistic torturers. The military has admitted that
60% of these detainees are neither combatants nor threats.

People were not only humiliated and forced to pose in degrading
positions with each other naked. They were forced to masturbate in front
of taunting guards. Some were sodomized with foreign objects. It appears
that some were also beaten to death during interrogation - one whose
body was put on ice for a day then carted away the next on a litter with
a faked intravenous infusion in the arm.

Now the cover stories are being spun out like webs.

We are being asked to believe that:

(1) The only abuse that occurred against anyone detained by American
forces in Iraq was photographed and reported.

(2) No abuses occurred anywhere that were not photographed or reported.

(3) The one percent of US troops who are the "bad apples" all happen to
serve together in the same unit… the unit that is the only one guilty,
and that happened to get caught because of the photographs.

(4) The aggressive investigation now being proclaimed by everyone from
George W. Bush to CENTCOM, about abuses that were already on record in
the military (an internal investigation had already been launched in
February by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, but was kept from the
public), would have happened had the photographs and story not been
aired on national television.

(5) The military was not attempting to cover up their own investigation,
and that they would have informed the public of these abuses even had
Seymour Hersh not put the whole miserable episode into print.

(6) The military did not cover anything up in the two weeks between the
time CBS warned them that they were going to air an expose and when they
actually did air it.

(7) No one in the chain of command above Brigadier General Janis
Karpinski is responsible for the failure to halt these abuses, even
though Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez was informed of the
investigation of these abuses, complete with sworn statements and
photographs, by General Taguba last February.

Other abuses and violations of the Geneva Conventions and Laws of
Warfare are already on record, some with videos available on the web,
such as:

(1) Shooting people who are clearly not armed and who are engaged in no
threatening behavior.

(2) Shooting into ambulances.

(3) Shooting wounded people who are not armed.

(4) Shooting wounded people who are obviously no longer capable of
fighting.

(5) Shooting into crowds.

There has never been a Stanford Military Occupation Experiment to
complement the Stanford Prison Experiment, unless we just count the
military occupations themselves. There is a structured, systemic
antagonism between an occupying military and the people whose land they
occupy. And there will be no investigations of any of it, because there
never are, unless and until the American public is confronted with them.

The National Command Authority and its cheerleaders cannot say out
loud… this is what we are doing, and it can't get done unless we
dehumanize the occupied. This reality, this system, will express itself
in the thoughts and emotions of you, the troops who carry it out,
because this military occupation is in a sense making a prison of Iraq
and making you, the troops, its turnkeys.

It will only be those exceptional individuals in the military who refuse
to surrender their humanity - no matter how little they may understand
the big picture - and who will witness. Those who do break with the
system and witness are very important people, important to history,
because their refusal to surrender your own moral integrity to the
system may lead to our collective salvation by ending this felonious
occupation. The troops who filed reports about the abuses at the Abu
Ghraib prison were such exceptions.

So were Tom Glen and Ron Ridenhour.

What these images of the Abu Ghraib humiliation and torture have done in
the United States is collide with the "exalted image and the
pseudo-event" of the Bush propaganda apparatus, just as the images of
the My Lai massacre did in 1969. That collision between the reality and
the real image of war startles civilians here in the La-La Land of wide
screen TV and suburban SUV's, and it shakes them out of their opiated
shopper dream-state.

My Lai is what General Colin Powell was remembering when he implemented
"the Powell Doctrine" for the military, which includes a co-opted press
and a vigorous attempt to keep things like flag-draped coffins off of
those wide screen TVs.

Many of you don't remember My Lai.

On March 16, 1968, units of the Americal Division, to which Powell was
assigned as a staff officer in Chu Lai, entered a Vietnamese village
called My Lai and spent four hours raping women, burning houses, then
finally massacring men, women, and children - including infants whom
dying women tried to shield with their own bullet-riddled bodies. The
massacre was stopped by a Georgia-born helicopter pilot named Hugh
Clowers Thompson who landed his chopper between the few surviving
Vietnamese and the blood-intoxicated soldiers, and ordered his door
gunners to open fire on the Americans if they failed to stand down.

A few weeks later, General Creighton Abrams, then commanding general in
Vietnam, received a letter from a young Specialist-4 in the Americal
Division named Tom Glen:

"The average GI's attitude toward and treatment of the Vietnamese people
all too often is a complete denial of all our country is attempting to
accomplish in the realm of human relations… Far beyond merely
dismissing the Vietnamese as 'slopes' or 'gooks,' in both deed and
thought, too many American soldiers seem to discount their very
humanity; and with this attitude inflict upon the Vietnamese citizenry
humiliations, both psychological and physical, that can have only a
debilitating effect upon efforts to unify the people in loyalty to the
Saigon government, particularly when such acts are carried out at unit
levels and thereby acquire the aspect of sanctioned policy… [American
soldiers attack Vietnamese] for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately
into Vietnamese homes and without provocation or justification shoot at
the people themselves… Fired with an emotionalism that belies
unconscionable hatred, and armed with a vocabulary consisting of 'You
VC,' soldiers commonly 'interrogate' by means of torture that has been
presented as the particular habit of the enemy. Severe beatings and
torture at knife point are usual means of questioning captives or of
convincing a suspect that he is, indeed, a Viet Cong… It would indeed
be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an American soldier
that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for justice and human
feeling is a prototype of all American national character; yet the
frequency of such soldiers lends credulity [sic] to such beliefs… What
has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in
others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is
indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can
through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military
Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be
eradicated."

Glen's letter was forwarded from Abrams' office to the Americal Division
and ended up with Major Colin Powell in Chu Lai.

Powell never followed up by questioning Glen, and instead ended his
"investigation" of Glen's allegations after accepting uncritically the
claim by Glen's commander that Glen hadn't been close enough to "the
front" (whatever that was supposed to be in Vietnam) to have any
knowledge of such alleged abuses. Powell then began his career as a
damage-control expert in the military by writing a letter, dated
December 13, 1968, in which he said, ""There may be isolated cases of
mistreatment of civilians and POWs… [but] this by no means reflects
the general attitude throughout the Division… In direct refutation of
this [Glen's] portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal
soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." He went on to impugn
Glen's account for having been brought to light only reluctantly and
lacking sufficient detail.

This was, of course, horseshit. Abuses were systemic.

Glen had only heard through rumors about My Lai. It was another GI, Ron
Ridenhour, an infantryman who was not willing to surrender his humanity
to occupier-racism, who finally pieced together, on his own initiative,
the story of the My Lai massacre, and brought it to public light. When
the photographs of the massacre were combined with Ridenhour's account,
and the American public was confronted with the reality of an entire
unit participating in a systematic massacre of civilians, it marked a
turning point in the loss of political support in the United States for
continued military occupation of Vietnam.

Powell himself admitted war crimes in his memoir, My American Journey,
where he wrote, "I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for
military-age male… If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who
looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and
fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of
hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him." Powell
would also come to the defense of Brigadier General John Donaldson who
had the door gunners on his own helicopter shoot Vietnamese for sport.
Donaldson was exonerated, naturally, in a military investigation.

Powell not only developed as a skilled cover-up artist, he would
eventually incorporate this ability to manage public perception about
war as a key element in the "Powell Doctrine," which he imposed on the
military and the press. He never forgot My Lai, and he has always
believed that exposure of My Lai and other atrocities were responsible
for the US defeat in Vietnam.

Donald Rumsfeld shares these beliefs with Colin Powell. They are both
wrong. The two phenomena that collide with this Powell-Rumsfeld
orientation were and are (1) the decision of their 'enemy' never to
quit, and (2) the inevitability that someone who is part of the
occupation force will be confronted with these contradictions between
"the exalted image and the pseudo-event" and the real character of war -
and that this someone will expose it in an attempt to rescue his or her
own humanity.

The war in Vietnam was lost by the French and then by the Americans
because they didn't belong there, and the resistance endeavored to do
whatever was necessary to make that point. This is also the situation in
Iraq.

So I'll leave to others the analysis of whether the troops facing courts
martial are scapegoats (they are, and they are also probably guilty as
hell), and whether or not the military is letting the officers off with
reprimands and walking papers to prevent the fire spreading (which it
is). I'll just emphasize that the war in Iraq cannot be won. Not because
of the inability of US troops to fight, but because we don't belong
there. And since that's the case (which I firmly believe it is) every
life - Iraqi, American, or otherwise - that is lost or ruined… is
wasted.

All this talk of whether Military Intelligence or the mercenaries
working for CACI International or the CIA or the MP commanders were
responsible is diversionary bullshit so we won't see how Iraq itself has
become the Stanford Military Occupation Experiment. Because if we
conclude that the problem is systemic, then the only thing to do to stop
this is to walk away. And the Bush administration sent troops there for
the purpose not of building democracies, but of building permanent
military bases in the heart of oil country, and if they walk away, they
can't rightly build bases, can they?

So we can either blithely obey and support our new Neros, or we can
continue to cling to the absurd notion that the vandals can rebuild the
house they just ravaged, or we can do what we might to make them walk
away. Troops that come forward will play a key role in this moral
imperative.

Every troop that comes forward with accounts of the inhumanity of this
war - while jeopardizing his or her career - is serving to hasten an end
to this criminal enterprise of the Military-Petroleum Complex. These
troop/witnesses will serve to hasten an end to the suffering of Iraqi
families and the suffering of the families of the occupying forces. They
will serve to prevent more torture, more humiliation, more suspicion and
hatred, and more lives being thrown away on this imperial folly.

Every troop who keeps his secrets, who faithfully serves the system and
never bears witness, can travel for the rest of his life.

She can go to Rio de Janeiro.

He can go to Bangladesh.

She can go to Lagos, or Montreal, or Tokyo, or Moscow, or Antarctica.

But no matter where he goes, there he'll be - alone with the growing
weight of his own silence on his head, wrapping himself in his own
rationalizations, and restlessly turning away from the faces that look
back at him in the mirrors of his memory.

* * *

The set collapses and exposes the half-dressed actors backstage. Their
names are no longer Terrorism or Democracy, but Abu Ghraib and
Fallujah… My Lai, No Gun Ri, Wounded Knee, Jenin, Jakarta, Rwanda,
Mozote, Pelican Bay… killing fields and prisons.

And now to prisons.

End, Part Six

[Super User For Ever]

pm wrote:

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050411&s=parenti

THE NATION es una revista semanal muy liberal y tiene
140 años de establecida. Es toda una institución.

Gracias, mariconi, por el excelente articulo....
Ves que cuando quieres puedes?.... Sigue ahi....

---------------------------------------------------------------

Hugo Chávez and Petro Populism
by CHRISTIAN PARENTI

[from the April 11, 2005 issue]

The views from the slopes of Barrio San Agustín del Sur are spectacular.
Tight passageways frame Caracas and the lush, cloud-draped Avila
Mountain beyond. Along the neighborhood's rough cement steps, teenagers
lounge around, flirting, arguing or lost in the cheap text-messaging
functions of their cell phones. Ascending a nearby cliff is a small
garbage dump. From afar its refuse looks like the sand in some ominous
urban hourglass.

Illiteracy, violence, disease and the listlessness of endemic
unemployment have shaped the life of this barrio since landless
squatters from the countryside first settled it about forty years ago.
But much of that could be changing.

"Even though we have had problems, we are moving forward," says Carmen
Guerrero, a woman in her late 40s who is one of San Agustín's most
dedicated activists. "Here, we are all with President Chávez. Everybody
except for maybe six families."

On the yellow walls of her living room are masks in the form of
fashionable ladies' faces, a clock, a mirror and a small picture of
Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chávez Frías. Guerrero explains
that she and her neighbors are studying in several government-created
programs called missions and organizing themselves into committees to
deal with everything from local and national election campaigns to
sanitation and legalization of land titles.

Like most slums in Caracas, this community also has a state-owned,
subsidized market, a soup kitchen, a number of small-scale cooperative
businesses and a little two-story, octagonal, red-brick medical center.
Upstairs two Cuban doctors live in cramped quarters; downstairs is a
small waiting room and clinic.

Guerrero's neighbor, a young man named Carlos Martinez, is showing me
around; he works with the local construction cooperative. They have a
contract from the mayor's office to lay new drainage pipe in the barrio.
Given the recent flooding, it is an important task. Later he shows me
where a patch of ranchos--dirt-floored shacks made of corrugated tin and
wood--are being replaced at government expense by solid, two-story brick
homes.

For this little barrio and a thousand others like it, such changes mean
a lot. Like two generations of Venezuelan politicians before him, Chávez
has pledged sembrar el petróleo--to sow the oil. That is, to invest its
profits in a way that transforms the very structure of Venezuela's
economy. But what would that entail? Are social programs enough?

Lately Chávez has been talking about a "revolution within the
revolution," about "transcending capitalism" and about "building a
socialism for the twenty-first century." It is a discourse that
frightens his enemies, electrifies his base and inspires the left
throughout Latin America. After two decades of the US-promoted
Washington Consensus--a cocktail of radical privatization, open markets
and severe fiscal austerity--Latin America is an economic disaster
marked by increasing poverty and inequality.

Taken as a whole and controlling for inflation, Latin America has grown
little since the mid-1980s and hardly at all in the past seven years.
With the entire region primed for social change, a new breed of
populists and social democrats is coming to power. Brazil, Argentina and
Uruguay, in addition to Venezuela, have leftist governments of some
sort, while Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru will hold
presidential elections in 2006.

But a closer look at Venezuela reveals just how vexing and complicated a
political and economic turn to the left can be, even in a country that
is rich with oil and not deeply indebted.

Thus far, Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, named for South America's
nineteenth-century liberator, Simón Bolívar, has deepened and
politicized a pre-existing tradition of Venezuelan populism. Despite
Chávez's often radical discourse, the government has not engaged in mass
expropriations of private fortunes, even agricultural ones, nor plowed
huge sums into new collectively owned forms of production. In fact,
private property is protected in the new Constitution promulgated after
Chávez came to power. What the government has done is spend billions on
new social programs, $3.7 billion in the past year alone. As a result,
1.3 million people have learned to read, millions have received medical
care and an estimated 35-40 percent of the population now shops at
subsidized, government-owned supermarkets. Elementary school enrollment
has increased by more than a million, as schools have started offering
free food to students. The government has created several banks aimed at
small businesses and cooperatives, redeployed part of the military to do
public works and is building several new subway systems around the
country. To boost agricultural production in a country that imports 80
percent of what it consumes, Chávez has created a land-reform program
that rewards private farmers who increase productivity and punishes
those who do not with the threat of confiscation.

The government has also structured many of its social programs in ways
that force communities to organize. To gain title to barrio homes built
on squatted land, people must band together as neighbors and form land
committees. Likewise, many public works jobs require that people form
cooperatives and then apply for a group contract. Cynics see these
expanding networks of community organizations as nothing more than a
clientelist electoral machine. Rank-and-file Chavistas call their
movement "participatory democracy," and the revolution's intellectuals
describe it as a long-term struggle against the cultural pathologies
bred by all resource-rich economies--the famous "Dutch disease," in
which the oil-rich state is expected to dole out services to a
disorganized and unproductive population.

But for the moment, the Venezuelan battle against poverty is possible
only because oil prices have been at record highs for several years, and
the state owns most of the petroleum industry. All of Venezuela's oil
and mining and most of its basic industry were nationalized in the
mid-1970s. On average, oil sales make up 30 percent of Venezuelan GDP,
provide half of state income and make up 80 percent of all Venezuelan
exports.

Internal and often sympathetic critics of the reform process in
Venezuela say it is one thing to "spend the oil" on social welfare; it
is another altogether to "sow the oil" and create new collectively
owned, productive, nonsubsidized industries that will generate wealth in
an egalitarian and sustainable fashion.

"When the coup happened we realized we had to get involved or we would
lose everything," explains Carmen Guerrero. She says she was always a
Chávez supporter but was not very active until the April 2002 coup
d'état against Chávez launched by Venezuela's main business council, its
notoriously corrupt labor federation, dissident military officers and
masses of middle- and upper-class Caraqueños. Declassified documents
have since revealed that the CIA knew at least a week beforehand that a
coup was planned, while other US government agencies, such as the
National Endowment for Democracy, were channeling aid to the opposition.

"There is no going back now," says Guerrero. Then, very seriously, she
adds: "I hugged Chávez at a rally. I don't know how I got through
security. I guess because I am short. I can't explain the feeling, the
emotion was so strong." She clutches her fists to her breast and looks
away.

Guerrero started supporting Chávez in 1992, on that fateful day when the
then-unknown 37-year-old colonel launched a failed coup of his own. When
defeat appeared imminent, Chávez surrendered. To avoid a bloodbath he
went on television and asked his compatriots who were still holding two
cities to put down their weapons.

During that short live broadcast Chávez did two things that electrified
the Venezuelan imagination. First, he took personal responsibility for
the botched coup. This seemed to many viewers like a significant break
from the standard political tradition of lying and blaming others for
failure. Then, in explaining the defeat, Chávez said, "For now, the
objectives that we have set for ourselves have not been achieved."

During the next two years, while Chávez was in prison studying, that key
phrase--"for now," or por ahora in Spanish--became a rallying cry, a
slogan of defiance painted on walls, a talisman of hope in an otherwise
squalid and corrupt political landscape.

Guerrero's sentiments, down to the details about the coup and the por
ahora speech, were echoed again and again in dozens of interviews
throughout some of Caracas's poorest slums. The majority of people
here--ranging from formerly apolitical housewives to hard-core veterans
of the urban guerrilla movements of the 1970s--revere President Chávez.
They view him as a political saint, a savior, the embodiment of a new
national ideal.

But through Guerrero's open front door we can see the Modernist towers
of offices, banks, hotels and luxury apartments in the other Caracas, a
city that has grown fat on the vast oil fortunes flowing from
Venezuela's subsoil.

It is this contrast between rich and poor--a contrast so visually
obvious as to make the landscape of Caracas feel almost didactic--that
animates Venezuelan politics. And in the other Caracas, the one with the
country clubs, the citizens hate Chávez with an ardor as strong as the
devotion one finds for him in the barrios. Just as the urban poor and
campesinos love Chávez because of his swarthy, indigenous looks, tight
curly hair and his rough, down-to-earth talk, so too are the wealthier
classes driven apoplectic with rage by the fact that their president
looks likes a construction worker or cab driver.

For six years Chávez and his supporters have battled this opposition, an
enemy that Chávez has nicknamed los escuálidos, or "the weaklings." But
the opposition has not always been so weak. It includes the privately
owned mass media, which have been virulently and propagandistically
hostile to the government, devoting days at a time to commercial-free
attacks on it as "totalitarian" and "Castro communist." There was the
armed coup, then the oil strike, which cost the economy an estimated
$7.5 billion and led to severe shortages of gas, food and beer. As one
consultant in the Planning Ministry said in all seriousness: "I thought
the day we ran out of beer would be the day the country fell into
anarchy and civil war."

There was also a prolonged public protest by a group of respected former
generals who urged active soldiers to rebel. Then there was a series of
violent protests by rightist street fighters calling themselves the
Guarimbas, who set up burning barricades during early 2004.

Despite all this, Chávez and his political allies have won seven
national ballots, including the approval of a new Constitution, an
overhaul of the notoriously corrupt judiciary, two national legislative
elections, two presidential elections and one attempted presidential
recall.

Through it all, occasional armed clashes between hard-core Chavistas and
opposition militants have left about twenty people on both sides dead or
seriously wounded. And the Chávez government has enacted a media law
that punishes slander with jail time and prohibits broadcast of the
twenty-four-hour-a-day video loops that were an opposition favorite,
drawing sharp criticism from press-freedom advocates. But there has been
no major government campaign of repression, not even against the
architects of the coup, many of whom are at liberty and still in
Venezuela.

The barrio 23 de Enero (January 23) is to the Venezuelan left what
Compton is to hip-hop: the home of its hard core. The barrio's eponym is
the date of a popular uprising that took place in 1958 against dictator
Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Tucked into a Caracas valley and flowing over a
few hillsides, 23 de Enero is a mix of 1950s-era cement tower blocks and
the usual cinder-block homes wedged along winding staircases and
walkways.

The ten- and fifteen-story tower blocks are adorned in an improbable and
tatterdemalion layer of colorful laundry hanging from external drying
racks or barred windows. Behind the clothes and the bars one can see
lush potted plants, caged and squawking birds or household items stacked
up in the tiny, overcrowded apartments. On the back sides of the towers,
mounds of trash sit in and around dumpsters that are placed below long,
dilapidated external garbage chutes that usually have big sections of
pipe missing.

From the top of each tower flies a red-and-blue flag: the colors of the
Coordinador Simón Bolívar, a powerful community organization that has
its roots in the urban guerrilla movements of the 1970s and '80s.
Described with the catchphrase Tupamaros, these urban partisans were
really a collection of groups and factions rather than a single force,
as the name would suggest.

Even today, many comrades in the barrios are still armed. A fellow
journalist was pulled over by masked gunmen at a Tupamaro checkpoint in
23 de Enero during the tense days around the August 2004 referendum. The
homies were making sure no escuálido thugs snuck into the 'hood to do a
drive-by. They also wanted my friend to donate his videocamera to the
revolution, putting a gun to his head to help him make his decision. But
when adult supervision finally showed up, the muchachos running the
traffic stop were persuaded to give back the camera.

At the Coordinador's little headquarters I meet this other type of
Chavista: not a sentimental housewife like Guerrero, but a hard-core
ex-guerrilla. Juan Contreras is balding, a bit paunchy and has rather
unassuming boyish features, but he got his political education the hard
way and at a young age: in the form of demonstrations, police beatings
and shootouts with the paramilitary forces of the state. He is now one
of the key organizers in the Coordinador.

The walls outside the office are covered in revolutionary murals: One
honors a youth killed in a demonstration against Henry Kissinger in the
1970s, another is for the Zapatistas, a third displays the classic
Alberto Korda portrait of Che Guevara. Most of the art predates Chávez,
and none portrays his image.

"Chávez did not produce the movements--we produced him," explains
Contreras. "He has helped us tremendously, but what is going on here
cannot be ascribed only to Chávez."

According to Contreras and a few of his comrades, the Coordinador got
its start after the failed Chávez coup in 1992. In the wake of that
defeat, the government began jailing leftists. Contreras fled to Cuba
for a month with twenty-nine other activists from 23 de Enero; upon
their return, almost all of them were arrested, and Contreras went into
hiding. About a year and a half after the attempted coup, the activists
regrouped and decided that armed struggle was definitely over and done
with. They created the Coordinador and devoted themselves to aboveground
work.

Today the Coordinador pursues a three-pronged strategy that involves
reclaiming public space from drug gangs, recovering local cultural
traditions and promoting organized sports. Already the barrio has
produced several players for Major League Baseball, including Ugueth
Urbina, Juan Carlos Ovalles and Juan Carlos Pulido. Later a young guy
named Kristhian Linares stops by to pay his respects to Contreras. Only
18 years old, Linares has just signed with the Florida Marlins. He
starts spring training as soon as his papers are in order.

After building these forms of social solidarity, the Coordinador then
launched another project, setting up committees to deal with health,
land titles, elections and the like. Some of this work interfaces with
government-funded missions, some doesn't. But the paramount issue here
is security. The slums of Caracas are extremely violent. Every week,
around eighty people are murdered in this city of 5 million.

"We use culture and sports and organization to take over public spaces,"
explains Contreras. What if the drug gangs refuse to move? "Well, many
of them are connected by family to the larger community, so we use that
pressure. There is the armed tradition here, and they respect that. And
there is a tradition of lynching in this barrio. In the past the
community has killed some criminals. Not recently, but it has happened.
So most of the gangs take us seriously and stay away from the central
areas."

Later, as we scale a ridge packed with little homes, he explains that
farther into the barrio are some agricultural projects but that I'll
have to come back to visit them because the outlying areas become
dangerous in the afternoon. Clearly, cultural reclamation plus threat of
lynching does not completely displace crime.

It also seems that the opposition, or elements in it, have on occasion
used criminals against Chavistas. An activist from nearby 23 de Enero, a
woman who once lived in California, tells the story of a gangster who
was paid to make death threats against the local Cuban doctors. The
doctors got so freaked out they split. But the woman, a trained social
worker, found the young thug, a local guy, and explained to him that he
would certainly be tracked down and killed by angry Chavistas if he
persisted with his threats. The gangster reconsidered and decided to
stay out of politics. The Cuban doctors returned.

The organized opposition to Chávez is rather thin on the ground these
days, having been largely discredited by the right-wing extremism of
their coup and the economic devastation caused by their oil strike. So I
visit the offices of the right-wing tabloid Así Es la Noticia, owned by
one of Venezuela's top-circulation dailies, El Nacional.

"Look, Chávez won the referendum. People have to accept that," says the
editor, Albor Rodriguez. She is in her early 30s, an escuálido all the
way, but she respects the facts.

Standing erect at her desk, one black-clad shoulder tipped forward, she
takes long drags on her cigarette between comments. "There is no 'Castro
communist' here. That's ridiculous. They say there are Cubans in the
government and the security. But there is no proof. However, does Chávez
have autocratic tendencies? Yes! He comes from the military. Does his
government, or he himself, know what they are doing? No! His head is a
mix--a marmalade of notions and slogans. He speaks without thinking. He
makes innuendoes about Condoleezza Rice being in love with him. That's
insane. He's totally erratic."

Albor, to my surprise, is almost as harsh on the opposition: "They lost
because Chávez has a deep emotional connection with the people, and they
have no connection with the people. Also, he has spent a lot of money on
the barrios. He pours money into the barrios."

She explains that when her paper reported on the real work of the
missions, some readers accused her of lying and "having gone to the moon
to find these things." She explains: "The opposition lied to itself.
They were deluded and now they are smashed." With that rather definitive
summation, she puts out her cigarette and invites me to lunch.

There are some in the opposition whose critique focuses less on Chávez's
supposed abuses of power and more on the government's alleged
mismanagement and left-wing economic tomfoolery. Oscar Garcia Mendoza is
president of Banco Venezolano de Credito, a very old and conservative
bank. He's what Chávez would call an "oligarch," the official enemy: a
capitalist financier. But when I meet him in his beautiful corner office
on the ninth floor of a Modernist highrise, he is beaming. He wears a
dark blue suit, his gray hair is cropped stylishly short and he has that
healthy look that seems to come from being rich and relaxed.

Classical music filters out from speakers in the ceiling; on the table
are fine Cuban cigars. We sit in bent plywood and leather Herman Miller
chairs, and gaze out across the city through a glass wall lined with
thick green plants.

"Business has never been better," says Garcia. "This government is
totally incompetent. They have no idea what they are doing. The head of
their land reform, Eliezer Otaiza, is a former male stripper. And did
you see they just appointed Carlos Lanz, a former terrorist kidnapper, a
communist, as head of Alcasa, our largest aluminum company?" Through it
all, Garcia wears a slightly suppressed grin as if he thinks the whole
thing is hilarious. "I mean, can you imagine that?"

In a way, Lanz's appointment is not so outrageous: Another former
guerrilla, Ali Rodriguez Araque, once minister of mining and energy,
then head of OPEC, is now foreign minister and widely respected as a
level-headed negotiator.

Garcia also has some very concrete criticisms. He says that the current
economic boom is a chimera based on oil prices. In 2004 government
spending jumped 47 percent, much of which went to pay for healthcare and
education--the missions. But despite the oil windfall, the government
has had to borrow heavily. Instead of turning to international
financiers, it has increased its internal debt to Venezuelan banks.

Garcia says that in the past four years this internal debt has gone from
$2 billion to more than $27 billion. The Finance Ministry confirms these
figures and says that 60 percent of this debt is held in government
bonds.

"But what makes this really crazy," says Garcia, "is that the government
is depositing all its oil revenue in the same banks at about 5 percent,
then borrowing it back at 14 percent. It's a very easy way for bankers
to make money. That's why I say this is a government for the rich."

Last year Venezuelan banks made $1.38 billion in profits, just a bit
more than they did the year before. And most of that money came from
lending to the Chávez government and trading in special
government-approved, dollar-denominated bonds, a legal loophole in the
new currency-control law. Garcia's bank actually does no business with
the government, but the huge increase in oil revenues has doubled his
loan portfolio. The economy is awash in money: Growth was 17.3 percent
in 2004.

So if the economy is booming, why does Garcia dislike Chávez?

"These people are crooks," he says. "Look, Venezuela has always been
corrupt, but these guys are the worst." When I point out that the
government just fired 120 managers in Zulia state for corruption, Garcia
waves it away as insufficient.

"What are they doing with all the money? They are not investing. They
spend it all on food and medicine. As soon as oil goes down, their party
is over." So what should the government do to avoid this? "They should
privatize everything."

Getting a Chávez government response to charges of mismanagement,
corruption and overdependence on freakishly high oil prices is
difficult. My inquiries are fed into the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the
Information Ministry, where every few days a new official loses my
paperwork and needs a full CV and another letter from my editors and
another complete written explanation of my project.

After three weeks no one in the Chávez government has come forth with an
on-the-record statement except for one laid-back spokesperson at the
Higher Education Ministry.

Finally an old friend gets me an interview with his boss, Jorge
Giordani, a former academic who befriended Chávez during the rebellious
paratrooper's stint in jail and is now the planning and development
minister. On matters of economic development, Giordani is the
revolution's brain. We meet in his office near the top of South
America's tallest building, one of a pair of towers, the other of which
stands half-burned, its gold-tinted, mirrored windows blown out and
black, the result of a recent accident caused by bad maintenance.

Giordani is tall, gray and hunched. He wears big glasses, a tie, a brown
cardigan sweater and has a short white Abe Lincoln beard. He evades most
specific questions. As for corruption, he says simply: "We are not doing
enough. It is a very serious problem."

Mostly he offers a long but interesting explanation of Venezuela's
historical development and its lack of internal economic integration. We
move from map to map as he explicates the economic geography of various
regions.

Many Chavistas hope that investing in physical infrastructure, health
and education will open new, nonpetroleum industries in high technology,
business services, healthcare and agriculture. When I ask Giordani how
the country plans to wean itself from oil, about land reform and about
the many so-called "endogenous" development projects being promoted, he
sighs and shakes his head as if I am naïve.

"We've been fighting political battles for most of our time in office.
Many people have learned to read in the last few years, but how long
will it take for them to work in high technology, or medicine, or
services? Ten years? A generation? We are fighting a very
individualistic, rentier culture. Everything has been 'Mama state, Papa
state, give me oil money.' To organize people is extremely hard."

After a long, roundabout discussion in which I press him on the question
of import substitution and new industrialization, he settles on one key
point: Venezuela's only real hope lies in regional economic integration.
Only then will internal markets be big enough to nurture alternative
technologies and new industries that might otherwise threaten current
multinational monopolies.

Giordani seems weary and cynical. "No, I am just practical," he says
with a chuckle. "Development in Venezuela will take at least fifty
years."

And how long will the oil last?

"Maybe twenty years, maybe thirty."

[samvaknin]

Hi,

Regarding Lasch, these may be of interest:

http://samvak.tripod.com/lasch.html

http://samvak.tripod.com/14.html

http://samvak.tripod.com/althusser.html

Take care.

Sam