Chavez Landslide Tops All In US History
by Stephen Lendman
Well almost, as explained below. Hugo Chavez Frias’
reelection on December 3 stands out when compared to
the greatest landslide presidential victories in US
history. Except for the close race in 1812 and the
electoral deadlock in 1800 decided by the House of
Representatives choosing Thomas Jefferson over Aaron
Burr, the very earliest elections here weren’t hardly
partisan contests at all as the Democrat-Republican
party of Jefferson and Madison was dominant and had
everything its own way. It was like that through the
election of 1820 when James Monroe ran virtually
unopposed winning over 80% of the vote. A consistent
pattern of real competitive elections only began with
the one held in 1824, and from that time to the
present Hugo Chavez’s impressive landslide victory
beat them all.
The nation’s first president, George Washington, had
no party affiliation, ran unopposed twice, and got all
the votes. His “elections” were more like
coronations, but Washington wisely chose to serve as
an elected leader and not as a monarch which
Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and
the nation’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice John
Jay preferred and one aligned with the British
monarchy. They also were nationalists believing in a
militarily strong central government with little
regard for the rights of the separate states.
Most of them were dubious democrats as well who
believed for the nation to be stable it should be run
by elitists (the way it is today) separate from what
Adams arrogantly called “the rabble.” And John Jay
was very explicit about how he felt saying “The people
who own the country ought to run it.” Today they do.
Adams showed his disdain for ordinary people (and his
opposition) when as president he signed into law the
Patriot Acts (I and II) of his day - the Alien and
Sedition Acts of 1798 to protect the country from
dangerous aliens (today’s “terrorists”) and that
criminalized any criticism of his administration (the
kind George Bush calls traitorous).
Jefferson denounced both laws and called the Sedition
Act an unconstitutional violation of the First
Amendment right of free expression. It helped him and
his Democrat-Republicans beat Adams in 1800 that led
to the decline of the Federalists as a powerful
opposition and their demise as a political party after
the war of 1812. It meant that from 1800 - 1820,
after Washington’s two unopposed elections,
presidential contests were lopsided affairs (except
for the two mentioned above), the “loyal opposition”
was hardly none at all, and the Democrat-Republicans
weren’t challenged until the party split into factions
and ran against each other in 1824. Then Democrat
party candidate Andrew Jackson beat National
Republican John Quincy Adams in 1828. It’s only from
that period forward that any real comparison can be
made between Hugo Chavez’s impressive landslide on
December 3 and presidential contests in the US. And
doing it shows one thing. In all US landslide
electoral victories from then till now, Chavez outdid
them all, but you won’t ever hear that reported by the
dominant corporate-controlled media.
Earlier, there might not have been a basis for
comparison had Washington chosen to be president for
life as the Federalists preferred. If he’d done it,
he could have stayed on by acclamation and those
holding office after him might have done the same.
Wisely, however, he decided eights years was enough
and stepped down at the end of his second term in
office setting the precedent of a two-term limit until
Franklin Roosevelt went against tradition running and
winning the presidency four times.
The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution ratified in
1951 settled the issue providing that: “No person
shall be elected to the office of the President more
than twice, and no person who has held the office of
President, or acted as President, for more than two
years of a term to which some other person was elected
President shall be elected to the office of the
President more than once.”
The US Constitution specifies that the president and
vice-president be selected by electors chosen by the
states. Article Two, Section One says: “Each state
shall appoint, in a Manner as the Legislature thereof
may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole
Number of Senators and Representatives to which the
State may be entitled in the Congress.” The electors
then meet in their respective states after the popular
vote to choose a president and vice-president.
That’s how it’s been done since George Washington was
first elected president in 1789 with John Adams his
vice-president. The method of choosing state electors
changed later on, but the US system choosing
presidents and vice-presidents by the Electoral
College (a term unmentioned in the Constitution) of
all the state electors has remained to this day, to
the distress of many who justifiably believe it’s long
past time this antiquated and undemocratic system be
abolished even though it’s unimaginable a state’s
electors would vote against the majority popular vote
in their states - at least up to now. Until 2000, it
was also unimaginable that five members of the US
Supreme Court would annul the popular vote in a
presidential election to choose the candidate they
preferred even though he was the loser - but they did,
and the rest is history.
Hugo Chavez Frias’ Electoral Victory Majority Greater
Than For Any US President - Since 1820
Amazing but true. On December 3, 2006, the people of
Venezuela voted in what hundreds of independent
observers from around the world, including from the
Carter Center in the US, called a free, fair, open and
extremely smooth and well-run electoral process. They
chose the only man they’ll entrust with the job as
long as he wants it reelecting Hugo Chavez with a
majority 62.87% of the vote with the highest voter
turnout in the country’s history at almost 75% of the
electorate. No US president since 1820, when
elections here consistently became real contests, ever
matched it or has any US election ever embraced all
the democratic standards all Venezuelans now enjoy
since Hugo Chavez came to office.
The Venezuelan Bolivarian Constitution Hugo Chavez
gave his people states: “All persons have the right to
be registered free of charge with the Civil Registry
Office after birth, and to obtain public documents
constituting evidence of the biological identity, in
accordance with law.” To see this happened Chavez
established an initiative called Mision Itentidad
(Mission Identity) that’s now a mass citizenship and
voter registration drive. It’s given millions of
Venezuelans full rights of citizenship including the
right to vote for the first time ever.
As glorious and grand a democratic experiment as the
US Constitution was and is, it had and still has lots
of flaws including who’s empowered to vote and what
authority has the right to decide. It’s the reason
through the years many amendments and laws were needed
and enacted to establish mandates for enfranchisement,
but even today precise voting rights qualifications
are left for the states to decide, and many take
advantage to strike from their voter rolls categories
of people they decide are unfit or that they unjustly
wish to exclude from the most important of all rights
in a democracy no citizen should have taken away.
It shouldn’t be this way as millions in the US have
lost the right to vote for a variety of reasons
including for being a convicted felon or ex-felon in a
country with the highest prison population in the
world (greater than China’s with four times the
population). It exceeds 2.2 million, increases by
about 1000 each week, one in every 32 adults in the
country is either imprisoned, on parole or on
probation, half the prison population is black, half
are there for non-violent crimes, half of those are
for mostly minor drug-related offenses, and most of
those behind bars shouldn’t be there at all if we had
a criminal justice system with equity and justice for
all including many wrongfully convicted because they
couldn’t afford or get competent counsel to defend
them.
Virtually all citizens in Venezuela have the right to
vote under one national standard and are encouraged to
do so under a model democratic system that’s gotten
the vast majority of them to actively participate. In
contrast, in the US, elections are especially
fraud-laden today, but in the past many categories of
voters were unjustly denied the franchise including
blacks until the 1865 13th amendment to the
Constitution freed them from slavery, the 1870 15th
amendment gave them the right to vote, but it still
took until the passage of the landmark Civil and
Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s abolishing the Jim
Crow laws in the South before blacks could exercise
that right like others in the country could. Earlier,
it wasn’t until the 19th amendment to the
Constitution, ratified in 1920, before women got the
right to vote they’d been fighting for over 70 years
to get.
Back at the republic’s birth, only adult white male
property-owners could vote. It took until 1810 to
eliminate the last religious prerequisite to voting
and until 1850 before property ownership and tax
requirements were dropped allowing all adult white
males the franchise. It wasn’t until 1913 and the
passage of the 17th amendment that citizen voters
could elect senators who up to then were elected by
state legislatures. Native Americans, whose land this
was for thousands of years before the settlers arrived
and took it from them, couldn’t vote until the 1924
Indian Citizenship Act granted all Native peoples the
rights of citizenship, including the right to vote in
federal elections. It didn’t matter that this was
their country, and it’s they who should have had to
right to decide what rights the white settler
population had instead of the reverse.
In 1924, the 24th amendment outlawed discrminatory
poll taxes in federal elections, and in 1966 the
Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections
ended poll tax requirements in all elections for the
four remaining southern states still using them
including George Bush’s home state of Texas. In 1971,
the 26th amendment set the minimum voting age at 18,
and in 1972 the Supreme Court in Dunn v. Blumstein
ruled residency requirements for voting in state and
local elections were unconstitutional and suggested 30
days was a fair period.
This history shows how unfair laws were and still are
in force in a country calling itself a model
democracy. The most fundamental right of all,
underpinning all others in a democratic state, is the
right of every citizen to exercise his or her will at
the polls freely and fairly without obstructive laws
or any interference from any source in the electoral
process.
That freedom has been severely compromised today in
the US, and unless that changes, there’s no
possibility of a free, fair and open democratic
process here for all citizens. That happening is now
almost impossible with more than 80% of the vote now
cast and counted on easily manipulated electronic
voting machines with no verifiable paper trail. The
process is secretive and unreliable, privatized in the
hands of large corporations with everything to gain if
candidates they support win, and based on what’s now
known, that’s exactly what’s been happening as seen in
the 2000 and 2004 fraud-laden elections.
The Six Greatest Landslide US Presidential Elections
Since Contests Began After 1820
Six US presidential elections stand out especially for
the landslide victories they gave the winners. Hugo
Chavez’s December 3, 2006 reelection topped them all.
1. In 1920, the first time women could vote in a
federal election, Republican Warren Harding got 60.3%
of the vote to beat Democrat James Cox getting 34.1%.
This election was particularly noteworthy as Socialist
Eugene Debs ran for the high office from prison
getting over 900,000 votes. He was sentenced and was
serving 10 years by the Wilson administration for
violating the Espionage Act of 1917 that along with
the Sedition Act of 1918 were the Patriot Acts of
their day like the earlier Alien and Sedition Acts
were under John Adams. Debs was found guilty of
exercising his constitutional right of free expression
after making an anti-WW I speech in Canton, Ohio. He
served about 2.5 years before Harding commuted the
sentence on Christmas day, 1921.
Harding capitalized on the unpopularity of Woodrow
Wilson who took the country to the war he promised to
keep us out of. The economy was also in recession,
the country and Congress were mainly isolationist, and
the main order of business was business and the need
to get on with it and make it healthy again. It
turned out to be the start of the “roaring twenties”
that like the 1990s “roared” mainly for the
privileged. It also was a time of scandal and
corruption best remembered by the Teapot Dome affair
of 1922 that involved Harding’s Interior Secretary
Albert Fall’s leasing oil reserve rights on public
land in Wyoming and California without competitive
bidding (like the routine use of no-bid contracts
today to favored corporations) and getting large
illegal gifts from the companies in return that
resulted in the crime committed.
Harding was dead (in 1923) and Coolidge was in the
White House before everything came to a head with Fall
eventually found guilty, fined $100,000 and sentenced
to a year in prison making him the first ever
presidential cabinet member to serve prison time for
offenses while in office.
2. In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover defeated
Democrat and first ever Catholic to run for the
presidency Al Smith with 58.2% v. 40.8% for Smith. It
wasn’t a good year to be a Democrat, especially a
Catholic one at that time. The 1920s were “roaring,”
including the stock market (again only for the
privileged), and Republicans were tough to beat as
long as, at the macro level, the economy was strong.
Coolidge was president but declined a second term
(fortunate for him as it turned out) and Commerce
Secretary and capable bureaucrat Hoover got the
nomination winning big. As things turned out, fate
dealt him a bad hand as the stock market crashed less
than a year into his term, but bad administration and
Federal Reserve policy turned what only should have
been a stiff recession for a year or two into the
Great Depression. It swept Republicans from office
and ushered in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who
won impressively in 1932, not one of our big six, but
was reelected in 1936 and included in our select group
with the second greatest landslide victory ever on our
list. Number one is after the FDR years.
3. The Great Depression 1930s weren’t good years to be
Republicans, and in 1936, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt
was reelected overwhelmingly with 60.8% of the vote to
36.5% for Republican Alf Landon who had no chance to
convince the electorate the New Deal was corrupt and
wasteful when it was helping a lot of desperate
people. Roosevelt asked for and got a mandate from the
public to continue his progressive agenda that
included the landmark Social Security Act (now in
jeopardy in the age of George Bush) and other
important measures that included establishing the
FDIC, insuring bank deposits, the SEC, regulating the
stock exchanges, and the NLRB with the passage of the
Wagner Act that was the high water mark for labor
rights. It guaranteed labor had the right to bargain
collectively on equal terms with management, something
that began eroding badly with the passage of the
Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 over Harry Truman’s veto that
began reversing the hard-won rights gained that now
have nearly vanished entirely in a nation dominated by
corporate giants and both Democrat and Republican
parties supporting them including their union-busting
practices.
4. In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the greatest
landslide presidential victory on our list,
unsurpassed to this day. He got 61.1% of the vote to
38.5% for Republican Barry Goldwater who was portrayed
as a dangerous extremist in a still-remembered TV
“Daisy Girl” campaign ad featuring a little girl
picking petals from a daisy in a field, counting them
and then segueing to a countdown and nuclear
explosion. Ironically, the ad only ran once in
September that year on NBC, but it stirred such a
controversy all the broadcasters ran it as a news
story giving it far greater prominence than it
otherwise would have gotten.
From the Great Depression through the 1960s,
Republicans had a hard enough time competing with
Democrats (Dwight Eisenhower being the exception
because of his stature as a war hero and the unpopular
Korean war under Harry Truman), and Goldwater made it
worse by being a conservative before his time and a
hawkish one advocating the use of tactical nuclear
weapons in Vietnam at a time the war was still in its
early stages but would be an act of lunacy any time.
5. In 1972, most people would be surprised to learn
(except those around to remember it) Republican
Richard Nixon trounced Democrat George McGovern
getting 60% of the vote to McGovern’s 38%. The main
issue was the Vietnam war (that drove Lyndon Johnson
from office in 1968), and Nixon managed to convince
the public he had a plan to end it and peace was at
hand. McGovern was strongly anti-war, but had to
replace his running mate Thomas Eagleton after it was
learned he hadn’t revealed he’d undergone electroshock
therapy for depression.
It proved a decisive factor in McGovern’s defeat, but
oddly as things turned out, Nixon was popular enough
at that time to sweep to a landslide win only to come
a cropper in the Watergate scandal that began almost
innocently in June, 1972, months before the election,
but spiralled out of control in its aftermath along
with growing anger about the war. It drove Richard
Nixon from office in disgrace in August, 1974 and gave
the office lawfully under the 25th amendment to Gerald
Ford. It made him the nation’s only unelected
president up to the time five Supreme Court justices
gave the office to George Bush violating the law of
the land they showed contempt for.
6. In 1984, Republican Ronald Reagan won a decisive
victory getting 58.8% of the vote to Democrat Walter
Mondale’s 40.6%. The “Reagan revolution” was in full
swing, and the president was affable enough to
convince a majority of the electorate his
administration’s large increases in military spending,
big budget deficits run up to pay for it, tax cuts
mainly for the rich, slashed social spending and
opposition to labor rights were good for the country.
Mondale was no match for him and was unfairly seen as
a candidate supporting the poor and disadvantaged at
the expense of the middle class.
In 1980s America, Hugo Chavez might not have stood a
chance against the likes of Ronald Reagan even though
Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution serves all the people
while Reagan’s ignored and harmed those most in need
including the middle class, mostly helping instead
those in the country needing no help - the rich and
powerful, at the beginning of the nation’s second
Gilded Age, serving an empowered plutocracy that
reached full fruition with the dominance of the
privileged class under George W. Bush.
One Other Landslide Win for Chavez Unreported
Time Magazine just voted this writer and all others
communicating online their “Person of the Year.” In
their cover story they asked who are we, what are we
doing, and who has the time and energy for this?
Their answer: “you do. And for seizing the reins of
the global media, for founding and framing the new
digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating
the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year
for 2006 is you.” Strange how underwhelming it feels
at least for two reasons, but it must be stressed we
beat the pros before they’re even out of bed in the
morning doing one thing they almost never do - telling
the truth communicating real news, information and
honest opinion on the most important world and
national issues affecting everyone and refusing to
genuflect to the country’s power establishment.
While Time was honoring the free use of the internet,
its importance, and the millions of ordinary people
using it, it’s parent company Time-Warner has for
months been part of the corporate cabal trying to
high-pressure the Congress to end internet neutrality
and destroy the freedom the magazine praised so
effusively in their disingenuous annual award just
announced. If the cable and telecom giants win their
lobbying effort, the public Time calls “YOU” loses.
They want to be self-regulating, to be able to charge
whatever they wish, to choose wealthier customers and
ignore lesser ones, to have a monopoly on high-speed
cable internet so they can take over our private space
and control it including, at their discretion, the
content on it excluding whatever portions of it they
don’t want in their privatized space. They want to
take what’s now free and open and exploit it for
profit, effectively destroying the internet as we now
know it.
Time also failed to report they held an online poll
for “Person of the Year” and then ignored the results
when they turned out not to their editors’ liking.
“Time’s Person of the Year is the person or persons
who most affected the news and our lives, for good or
for ill, and embodied what was important about the
year.” It turned out Hugo Chavez won their poll by a
landslide at 35%. Second was Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at 21%. Then came Nancy Pelosi at
12%, The YouTube Guys 11%, George Bush 8%, Al Gore 8%,
Condoleezza Rice 5% and Kim Jong Il 2%. For some
reason, the magazine’s December 25 cover story omitted
these results so their readers never learned who won
their honor and rightfully should have been named
Time’s Person of the Year. An oversight, likely, in
the holiday rush, so it’s only fitting the winner be
announced here - in the online space the magazine
rates so highly:
Venezuelan President Hugo is Time Magazine’s 2006
Person of the Year.
Venezuela under Hugo Chavez v. the US Under Republican
or DLC Democrats Little Different From Republicans
The age of social enlightenment in the US, such as it
was, lasted from the election of Franklin Roosevelt
through the years of Lyndon Johnson and began heading
south thereafter in the 1970s and ending with the
election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. For the past
generation, the US has been run for the interests of
capital while the standard of living of ordinary
working people, including the middle class fast
eroding, had an unprecedented decline.
It shows in how wide the income disparity is between
those at the economic top and ordinary wage earners.
When Reagan was elected in 1980, average corporate CEO
earnings were 42 times the average working person. The
spread widened to 85 times in 1990 and skyrocketed to
431 times in 2004 as average top executive pay rose to
about $14 million a year after the election of George
Bush plus enormous benefits adding to that total,
including huge ones at retirement, compared to working
Americans who now earn less, adjusted for inflation,
than they did 30 years ago.
This disparity is highlighted in tax data released by
the IRS showing overall income in the country rose 27%
adjusted for inflation from 1979 to 2004, but it all
went to the top. The bottom 60% of Americans (earning
less than $38,761 in 2004) made less than 95% of what
they did in 1979. The 20% above them earned 2% more
in 2004 than in 1979, inflation adjusted, and only the
top 5% had significant gains earning 53% more in 2004
than in 1979. The largest gains of all went to the
top 1% as expected - one-third of the entire increase
in national income that translates to about 350% more
in inflation adjusted dollars in 2004 than in 1979.
It all means since Ronald Reagan entered office, his
administration and those that followed him, including
Democrat Bill Clinton’s, engineered a massive transfer
of wealth from ordinary working people to the top
income earners in the country while, at the same time,
slashing social benefits making it much harder for
most people to pay for essential services at much
higher prices with the lower inflation-adjusted levels
of income they now receive.
Especially hard hit are the 20% of workers on the
bottom earning poverty-level wages - below $11,166 a
year. The IRS definition of a taxpayer is either an
individual or married couple meaning the 26 million
poorest taxpayers are the equivalent of about 48
million adults plus 12 million dependent children
totaling around 60 million Americans in the richest
country in the world with incomes of about $7 a day
(per capita) in a state of extreme destitution with
the official poverty line in 2004 being $27 a day for
a single adult below retirement age and $42 a day for
a household with one child. The data excludes all
public assistance like food stamps, medicaid benefits
and earned-income tax credits, but since the Clinton
administration’s “welfare reform” Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
of 1996 (PRWORA) ended welfare payments after five
years, that loss is much greater for the needy than
the benefits remaining also being reduced.
It’s hardly a testimony to the notion of “free market”
capitalism under the Reagan revolution, the first Bush
presidency following it, and eight years under Bill
Clinton governing by Democratic Leadership Council
(DLC) “centrist” principles eschewing the enlightened
progressive party tradition, selling out instead, like
Republicans, to the interests of wealth and power at
the expense of ordinary people left far behind.
It all seemed like a warm-up leading to the election
of George W. Bush in 2000 characterized by outrageous
levels of handouts to the rich in the form of huge tax
cuts for top earners and giant corporations; larger
than ever corporate subsidies (aka socialism for big
corporations) at taxpayer expense; and endless wars
and all the bounty from them to well-connected
corporate allies, some literally getting a license to
steal, that never had it so good but getting it at the
public’s expense this president shows contempt for and
is forced to follow the rules of law-of-the-jungle
“free market” capitalism.
Today, under Republican or Democrat rule, the country
is run by and for a rich aristocracy, in a rigidly
structured class society promoting inequality and
destroying the founding principles of the nation’s
Framers. In the last generation, the great majority
of ordinary working people have been abandoned and are
sinking lower in their losing efforts to make ends
meet and survive in a heartless society caring only
about the interests of capital. This writer will
explore this issue more fully in a year-end review and
outlook article due out shortly.
A Different Enlightened Way in Venezuela Under Hugo
Chavez
Things are much different in Venezuela under Hugo
Chavez that showed up in the overwhelming electoral
endorsement he got from his people on December 3.
Until he was first elected in December, 1998 taking
office in February, 1999, the country was run by and
for rich oligarchs, in league with their counterpart
dominant interests in Washington and corporate
America. They ignored the needs of ordinary people
that left most of them in a state of desperate
poverty. Hugo Chavez pledged to his people he’d
ameliorate their condition and did it successfully for
the past eight years, to the great consternation of
the country’s aristocracy who want the nation’s wealth
for themselves and their US allies.
Following the crippling US and Venezuelan ruling
class-instigated 2002 - 03 oil strike and
destabilizing effects of their short-lived coup
deposing him for two days in April, 2002, Hugo
Chavez’s enlightened Bolivarian economic and social
programs cut the level of poverty nearly in half from
around 62% to where it is today at about one-third of
the population, a dramatic improvement unmatched
anywhere in Latin America or likely anywhere in the
world. Along with that improvement are the essential
social benefits now made available to everyone in the
country by law, discussed below.
The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of
Venezuela was created democratically by popular
referendum and adopted in December, 1999. It
established a model humanistic social democracy
providing checks and balances in the nation’s five
branches of government instead of the usual three in
countries like the US where currently all branches
operate unchecked in lockstep under the Bush
administration and will change little when the DLC
Democrat-controlled 110th Congress convenes in
January.
In Venezuela, in addition to the executive,
legislative and judicial branches, the country also
has independent electoral and prosecutorial ones.
Chavez controls the executive branch, and his
supporters control the four others because they
democratically won a ruling majority in the
legislature. They in the National Assembly have the
authority to make appointments to the other three
branches independent of the executive while Hugo
Chavez has no authority to appoint to or remove
members from the other four branches or have any power
to dictate what they do. Today in the US, George Bush
has a virtual stranglehold over all three government
branches that mostly rubber stamp his agenda without
opposition including the most outrageous and
controversial domestic and foreign policy parts of it.
In Venezuela, the Constitution also stipulates that
all the people are assured political, economic and
social justice under a system of participatory
democracy guaranteeing everyone a legal right to
essential social services and the right to participate
in how the country is run. The services include free
high quality health and dental care as a “fundamental
social right and….responsibility….of the state,”
housing assistance, improved pensions, food assistance
for the needy, job training to provide skills for
future employment, free education to the highest level
that eliminated illiteracy and much more including the
full rights of citizenship for everyone including the
right to vote in free, fair and open democratic
elections, now a model for the world and make a sham
of the fraud-laden ones in the US.
While the ruling authority in Washington
systematically destroyed democracy and deprived people
most in need of essential social services, Hugo Chavez
built a model democracy growing stronger by enhancing
already established socially enlightened policies
further using the nation’s oil revenue to do it. Much
in the country is happening from below, and it’s
planned that way by the government in Caracas.
Community organizing in councils has been promoted
that includes all sorts of committees around the
country involved in urban land development and
improvement, health, the creation of over 100,000
cooperatives outside of state or private control, and
the revitalization of hundreds of bankrupt businesses
and factories put under worker control.
In addition, Hugo Chavez aggressively pursued a policy
of putting underutilized land to use by redistributing
more than two million hectares of it to over 130,000
families in a country with the richest 5% of
landowners controlling 75% of the land, the great
majority of rural Venezuelans having little or none of
it, and Chavez wanting to change that imbalance and do
it fairly. He also established over 5,000 Urban Land
Committees representing almost 20% of the population
(CTUs). The law governing them stipulates Venezuelans
who live in homes they built on occupied land may
petition the government for title to it to be able
legally to own the land they live on. This is in
addition to the government’s goal to build thousands
of new and free public housing units for the poor
without homes.
These are the kinds of things going on in Venezuela in
that country’s first ever age of enlightenment, but
it’s only a beginning. Chavez wants to expand
existing programs and advance his Bolivarian Project
to the next level implementing his vision of a social
democracy in the 21st century. His landslide
electoral victory now gives him a mandate to do it,
and during the pre-election campaign in September
announced he wanted to move ahead in 2007 with the
formation of a single united political party of the
Bolivarian Revolution to further “consolidate and
strengthen” the Bolivarian spirit.
Post-election in mid-December, Chavez addressed his
followers and party members at a celebratory gathering
at the Teresa Carrena theater repeating his September
announcement calling for the establishment of a
“unique (or unity) party” to replace his Movement for
the Fifth Republic Party (MVR) that brought him to
power in 1998, has been his party until now and will
end in January. Chavez surprisingly announced the MVR
is history and will be replaced by a United Socialist
Party of Venezuela (PSUV) hoping to include the MVR
and all its coalition partners that wish to join. He
wants it to be a peoples’ party rooted in the
country’s communities created to win the Battle of
Ideas that will move Venezuela ahead to become a fully
developed social or socialist democracy for all the
people.
Chavez has enormous grassroots support for his vision
but faces daunting obstacles as well, not the least of
which is a hostile administration in Washington
committed to derailing his efforts and removing him
from office by whatever means it chooses to use next
in another attempt sure to come at some point.
He’ll also likely get little help from the Democrat
110th Congress arriving in January with the likes of
newly empowered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a member
of the US aristocracy, shamelessly calling Chavez an
“everyday thug” and the US corporate-controlled media
spewing the party line by relentlessly attacking him
with tirades of venomous agitprop at times strong
enough to make some old-line Soviet era aparachiks
blush calling him an autocrat, a dictator, another
Hitler and the greatest threat to US interests in the
region in decades. It’s the same kind of demonizing
Chavez undergoes at home by the dominant corporate
media that includes the country’s two largest dailies,
El Universal and El National, and the three main TV
networks - Venevision (owned by arch-Chavez enemy and
2002 coup plotter billionaire Gustavo Cisneros), Radio
Caracas Television and Globovision.
The only charge against Chavez that’s credible, for
quite another reason, is that he’s indeed the greatest
of all threats the US and Venezuelan oligarchs face -
a good example spreading slowly through the region
inspiring people throughout Latin America to want the
same kinds of social benefits and democratic rights
Venezuelans now enjoy. The powerful interests of
capital in Washington, Venezuela and throughout the
region are determined to stop him, but the momentum in
Latin America is with Chavez if it can advance it. He
has the power of the people behind him and a growing
alliance of populist or moderate leaders emerging in
Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador,
Nicaragua, Chile and for almost half a century in Cuba
either wanting an end to savage capitalism,
Washington-style, or a significant softening of it,
along with the old-style military-backed entrenched
elitism that denied long-oppressed people all the
rights they now enjoy or are beginning to demand.
The people in the region yearning for freedom and
demanding governments address their rights and needs
are in solidarity with him, a modern-day Bolivar, a
hero and symbol of hope that they, too, may one day
get the equity and justice they deserve like the
people of Venezuela have, if they can keep it, and
help Hugo Chavez fulfill his vision to take it to the
next level.
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.blogspot.com