October 10th 2008, by Joe Emersberger - HaitiAnalysis.com
Now that HRW has blown the lid off the grave human rights
abuse of unanswered questions in Venezuela, perhaps they can finally respond to some questions posed to them.
Regardless of the impact of the existing economic meltdown, the
Venezuelan government has taken important economic decisions, even
before the crisis was even known, that now benefits and secures its
economy against the financial crisis.
An interview with Carlos Lanz, one of Venezuela's main socialist intellectuals and leaders, who pioneered worker management in one of Venezuela's largest state-owned companies, the Aluminum processing plant Alcasa. He talks to Michael Albert about how the workplace of the future would be organized, among other things.
Less than a year ago The New York Times
described ending term limits is not as an attempt to "serve the larger
cause of democracy" as it is when Bloomberg tries to do it, but
rather said Chavez is seeking "the option to stand for re-election as many
times as he wants" as part of "his plan to become president for life."
During the past decade, Latin America
has become the most exciting region of the world. The dynamic has very
largely flowed from right where you are meeting, in Caracas, with the
election of a leftist president dedicated to using Venezuela's rich
resources for the benefit of the population rather than for wealth and
privilege at home and abroad.
The most ambitious and significant recent project undertaken by South
America's armed forces has been the creation of Conselho Sul-Americano
de Defesa (South American Defense Council - CSD), an agency of the
Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).
It is not that pure capitalist politicians are all against the state
intervention in the economy, they just want that the money go straight
into very rich people, this time for the amount of $700 billion dollars. On the other hand, socialist state intervention prioritizes the most basic needs of people.
Central America, Cuba,
the Dominican Republic and islands in the eastern Caribbean are
receiving more and more oil from Venezuela, while major refineries are
planned in South America -- at Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, and
at El Aromo, on Ecuador's Pacific coast.
A close reading of the recent Human Rights Watch "Report" on Venezuela reveals an astonishing number of
blatant falsifications and outright fabrications, glaring deletions of
essential facts, deliberate omissions of key contextual and comparative
considerations and especially a cover-up of systematic long-term,
large-scale security threats to Venezuelan democracy posed by
Washington.
