Journalism, Wall Street Journal-Style

by Stephen Lendman

It takes great courage to venture onto the editorial
pages of the Wall Street Journal - especially on
Fridays when Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s Americas column
appears.  This is a woman who surely will have a
serious back problem one day resulting from her
permanent position of genuflection to the most extreme
far-right she pledges allegiance to.  In her assigned
role at the Journal, which includes character
assassination, she can best can be characterized as
one of the “devil’s” disciples - to borrow a word so
aptly used by a well-known “courageous man” in recent
days.  She proved it in her September 22 column titled
In Chavez’s Crosshairs (the “courageous man” in
question), and in it she outdid herself in her level
of vitriol that was enough to punish all the senses of
those able to get through it.

The column drips with hate and is filled with the most
outrageous lies and hostility from the opening words
to the last ugly pronouncement.  This editorial writer
begins by telling readers that “Fidel Castro is not
far from death” which I’m sure will come as a surprise
both to the Cuban leader and his doctors who seem to
be indicating that Fidel is slowly recuperating from
his major surgery which is quite normal for someone
aged 80.  She cites as her evidence “Hugo Chavez’s
performance at the United Nations” which she claims
was a “revolutionary” baton-passing to the “kook from
Caracas, Castro’s wealthiest and keenest protege.”
O’Grady apparently didn’t bother checking that the
Venezuelan President’s salary at about $24,000 is
barely above the poverty level for a US family of four
according to the US Census Bureau.  Compare that to
George Bush (responsible for Mary’s future back
problem) who’s extremely wealthy and earns an annual
salary of $400,000 plus all the luxury perks that go
with his office that Hugo Chavez Frias doesn’t have or
even want.

But this was just for openers.  O’Grady then begins
another diatribe against the man who’s become her
favorite target.  She begins by making her only
notable truthful statement describing the Venezuela
leader as the “scariest speaker at the General
Assembly.”  She’s right, of course, because today we
live in an age where the truth Chavez speaks has
become a radical or even a subversive act.  It would
never cross this hateful woman’s mind that Hugo Chavez
is one of the few world leaders willing to admit
publicly what all the others know is true.  For this
he’s condemned in the corporate-run media and
especially in columns of right wing flacks like Mary
O’Grady who have no credibility or even enough
knowledge of the region she reports on in her writing.
It shows in what she has to say.

It helps to understand where this woman is coming from
if we note where she was formerly employed.  She one
time worked as an options strategist for Advest, Inc.,
Thomson McKinnon Securities, and Merrill Lynch & Co.
She also once held a position at the far-right
Heritage Foundation think tank that never met a
corporate-friendly policy or US-led war it didn’t
support. In addition,  as a journalist, she was
awarded the Inter-American Press Association’s (IAPA
association of private media corporations) Daily
Gleaner Award for editorial commentary and received an
honorable mention in IAPA’s opinion award category for
1999.  With this kind of background, there’s nothing
surprising about O’Grady’s ideology and why her
writing is hopelessly biased and one-sided in favor of
the Bush Administration’s neoliberal Washington
Consensus model now waging a “long war” against the
world for total dominance and greater profits for the
corporate predators benefitting from it - all at the
expense of people needs being ignored.

O’Grady has lots more to say in this week’s column and
quickly gets into the meat it - that Venezuela
represents a “pressing threat” (where) “The
battleground is Bolivia, which Mr. Chavez badly wants
to control so he can seize that country’s natural-gas
reserves and become the sole energy supplier in the
Southern Cone.”  She goes on with the delusional
notion that Chavez hopes to “seriously damage the
Brazilian economy and crush Brazil’s geopolitical
ambitions as the leader in South America.  In its
place he wants to plant the flag of Venezuelan
hegemony.  If he gets away with it, Argentine and
Chilean sovereignty would also be diminished and
continental stability lost.” She has lots more to say,
but already she’s left the reader breathless and
needing to pause before going further.

If O’Grady stuck to the facts instead of specializing
in her brand of poisoned rhetoric, she would know Hugo
Chavez is a positive force in the region and beyond
and has been a unifier, not a divider or exploiter.
He’s pursued his own Bolivarian Alternative for the
Americas (ALBA) progressive alternative to the
corrupted neoliberal WTO/IMF/World Bank model O’Grady
champions.  It’s a comprehensive plan for Latin
American integration aiming to develop “the social
state” benefitting everyone, not just the privileged
elite O’Grady swears allegiance to.  It’s based on the
principles of complementarity, solidarity and
cooperation among nations - just the opposite of the
exploitive practices O’Grady likes to think work best.
She’s right if she means for the corporate giants
that can only grow and prosper at the expense of
ordinary people everywhere.  Hugo Chavez has a
different vision.  Instead of trying to subjugate
Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina, Venezuela has joined
with these nations in the Southern Common Market
customs union known as Mercosur.  In doing so, Chavez
expressed hope that this trade block would “prioritize
social concerns (ahead of) the old elitist corporate
model’’ that puts profits ahead of people needs.
These are the facts Mary O’Grady ignores as reporting
them would expose all the other lies she’s written for
years.  It would also likely get her fired for not
sticking to the party line she’s paid to do.

Her article continues by referring to the opposition
in Venezuela as “democrats,” recounting her distorted
version of how they tried to remove Chavez in their
2004 recall referendum (aka US-directed coup by other
means) and failed.  Chavez blew the opposition away
with about 58% of the vote in an election judged free,
open and fair but which O’Grady characterized as
“clocked in state secrets” - no doubt because the
wrong candidate won convincingly.  She claimed exit
polls showed Chavez was “badly beaten” but the
“chavista-stacked electoral council declared him the
winner.”  She fails to identify what exit polls she’s
referring to or who conducted them.  The reader can
only conclude they’re either ones she dreamed up for
this column or they were fraudulent ones conducted by
the oligarchs in the country that have everything to
gain if Chavez is ousted by any means.

This woman doesn’t know when to quit.  She then
contends “Mr. Chavez boasts he was democratically
elected and foments hatred against his neighbors,
including the US (and) the non-aligned movement
(intends) on going nuclear.” She doesn’t explain she’s
referring to Iran, a country that’s a signatory to the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), is in full
compliance with it, and has every legal right to
develop its commercial nuclear industry which is all
it’s doing according to all available evidence.  She
then again stresses that chavistas are putting a
“blitz” on Bolivia “to make that country a (hydro)
carbon copy of Venezuela.” 

Next, however, comes her best shot and one of her
least accurate.  She makes the audacious claim that
Evo Morales (her other favorite target) “rose to
executive power by first using violence to bring down
two constitutional presidents and then forcing a new
election, which he won.”  She doesn’t explain that
Juan Evo Morales Ayma (known as Evo) was a leader of
Bolivia’s cocalero movement or loose federation of
coca leaf-growing campesinos.  He’s also the leader of
his Movement for Socialism Party (MAS which means
more).  In both capacities he’s been a champion of
progressive change in his country and organized
peaceful protests in 2005 in the capitol La Paz that
forced the resignation of President Carlos Mesa who
served the interests of capital and ignored the needs
of his people.  This is what O’Grady calls violence -
courageous resistance to repression and intolerance.
Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia in
December, 2005 in an election controlled by the
opposition because the people were so fed up with
business as usual they defied all expectations turning
out in large numbers to convincingly elect the only
man they would entrust to rule their country. 

Morales isn’t O’Grady’s kind of president because he
wants to serve all his people and not just the elite
few who’ve always had things in Bolivia their way.  So
she says “He dreams of an indigenous, collectivist
Bolivarian economy under the thumb of an authoritarian
government” while falsely claiming most Bolivians are
“entrepreneurial.”  She may be right if she leaves out
the indigenous majority (about 70% of the population)
most of whom are poor and always had been
disenfranchised until now.  She accuses Morales of
being “coached” by Hugo Chavez who’s helping him
institute progressive policies and programs which
O’Grady rails against - because they’re
people-friendly and bad for the corporate interests
she represents.  She stresses Bolivia under Morales
“could use some help from the international
community….to weaken Evo.”  But she ends her weekly
hate-column by coming back to her favorite target and
public enemy number one in her eyes - Hugo Chavez - by
trumpeting the notion that it’s “clear….doing
nothing while Mr. Chavez seizes power on the continent
is not an option.”  It has all the sound of a call to
arms to remove President Chavez by force or any other
means despite the fact that he’s the leading democrat
in the hemisphere and beloved by the great majority of
his people who will never tolerate a return to the
ugly past of rule by the repressive oligarchs they’ll
never again accept.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) —Also visit his blog
site at sjlendman.blogsspot.com