The Honduras Coup Is a Sign: The Radical Tide Can be Turned

[If this were Burma or Iran the assault on democracy would be a global cause celebre. Instead, Obama is sitting on his hands.]

The Honduras Coup Is a Sign: The Radical Tide Can be Turned

August 13th 2009, by Seamus Milne - Comment Is Free (The Guardian)

If Honduras were in another part of the world – or if it were, say, Iran or Burma – the global reaction to its current plight would be very different. Right now, in the heart of what the United States traditionally regarded as its backyard, thousands of pro-democracy activists are risking their lives to reverse the coup that ousted the country's elected president. Six weeks after the left-leaning Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped at dawn from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa and expelled over the border, strikes are closing schools and grounding flights as farmers and trade unionists march in defiance of masked soldiers and military roadblocks.

The coup-makers have reached for the classic South American takeover textbook. Demonstrators have been shot, more than a thousand people are reported arrested, television and radio stations have been closed down and trade unionists and political activists murdered. But although official international condemnation has been almost universal, including by the US government, barely a finger has been lifted outside Latin America to restore the elected Honduran leadership.

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Avila TV Venezuela: Revolutionizing Television

Photo: Avila TV Mural
[In Venezuela they are a key force in the country’s ongoing media-war. Armed with video cameras, they are a team of some 380 young people working for Caracas television station, Avila TV. Started as an experiment just three years ago, according to one study it is now the third most watched station in the city. Funded completely by the government, they consider themselves a voice of President Hugo Chavez’s “socialist revolution.”]

Avila TV Venezuela: Revolutionizing Television

June 15th 2009, by Lainie Cassel - UpsideDownWorld.org

In Venezuela they are a key force in the country's ongoing media-war. Armed with video cameras, they are a team of some 380 young people working for Caracas television station, Avila TV. Started as an experiment just three years ago, according to one study it is now the third most watched station in the city. Funded completely by the government, they consider themselves a voice of President Hugo Chavez's "socialist revolution."

Located on Avenida Urdaneta, in the center of the city, Avila TV is in a large beautiful building bustling with young adults sporting Caracas' latest urban fashions. The building, a former bank, has been transformed with floors of state of the art equipment and walls decorated with elaborate murals and posters of well-known revolutionary figures.

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Venezuela: Socialism for the 21st Century

[In 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected President of Venezuela. He spoke strongly and acted against savage neoliberalism in his electoral campaign and after taking power but socialism was not a part of his vocabulary or program for his first few years in office. Since late 2004, he has been increasingly calling for Socialism for the 21^st Century in Venezuela, and speaking out against capitalism and imperialism.]

Venezuela: Socialism for the 21st Century

August 5th 2009, by Peter Bohmer - Znet

For much of the 19^th and 20^th century, socialism was the hope of millions of working people around the globe, including the United States in the early part of the 20^th century. This was the period of the growth of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW. Socialism has meant a society committed to meeting the basic needs of all people including health, food, education, and housing , where there is no poverty and full employment, where enterprises and firms are socially and publicly owned not privately owned by capitalists to make profits. It has meant a society where workers control how firms are run and where the economy is democratically planned to serve human needs. As a great socialist revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg said in the early 20^th century, socialism requires democracy, and democracy requires socialism.

In the 1980's, we were told by government leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, most economists, media pundits such as Thomas Friedman that there is no alternative (TINA) to unregulated market capitalism. This economic model and the related policies are called neoliberalism in Latin America.

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Economist Backs Down over Misleading Readers on Venezuela

[On its July 18, 2009, edition The Economist on article on Bolivia ("Bolivia's divisive president. The Permanent Campaign", July 18), asserted that “Venezuelan troops helped quell a rebellion centred on the airport at Santa Cruz in the east in 2007.” The article did not bother to substantiate such a serious charge against Venezuela and is buried as one of several unjustified and unsubstantiated allegations against the president and government of Bolivia.]

Economist Backs Down over Misleading Readers on Venezuela

August 5th, by Francisco Dominguez - Venezuela Solidarity Campaign

On its July 18, 2009, edition The Economist on article on Bolivia ("Bolivia's divisive president. The Permanent Campaign", July 18), asserted that “Venezuelan troops helped quell a rebellion centred on the airport at Santa Cruz in the east in 2007.” The article did not bother to substantiate such a serious charge against Venezuela and is buried as one of several unjustified and unsubstantiated allegations against the president and government of Bolivia,
 
The piece "Bolivia's divisive president. The Permanent Campaign" does not even  pretend to be 'even-handed' or 'balanced.' Some of the statements in it are simply unalloyed anti-Morales propaganda. Putting the blame squarely on Evo Morales, for example, for the diplomatic difficulties Bolivia has been having with the US (without informing the readers that Bush unilaterally had ended Bolivia's export preferential treatment on some exports or that Bolivia expelled US ambassador Mr Phillip Goldberg because he had been actively supporting secessionist efforts in Santa Cruz), and with Peru (without telling readers that Peru gave asylum to Bolivian Cabinet minister indicted for civilian deaths resulting from military repression of protests six years ago during the government of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada), but explaining them as a deliberate Morales drive to isolate Bolivia because, according to The Economist, "Many in the government dream of an economic autarky, powered by gas." The article goes even further by quoting government’s opponents in Santa Cruz, who describe Morales as an “indigenous fascist” with The Economist accepting such a highly inflammatory label with no qualification whatsoever. And, if there was any doubt as to where The Economist stands on the Morales government, the piece ends by sympathetically paraphrasing one pundit who says "Bolivia is suffering a classic bout of Latin American populism: personalised politics, mild paranoia, bad economic policy and a weak opposition." No journalistic objectivity or even the pretension of it. Venezuelan Ambassador to the United Kingdom, HE Samuel Moncada, responded to the allegation regarding the participation of Venezuelan troops in the suppression of a rebellion in Santa Cruz in 2007, with letter to Michael Reid, The Economist's Latin American editor, in which he stated that “Unfortunately, dangerous and negative consequences in the region may arise due to this blunder published in your magazine. I would therefore demand a correction of such fallacy”. (The Ambassador's letter can be found in full at http://www.vicuk.org/index.php?ption=com_content&task=view&id=503&Itemid=30). 

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Community Media: The Thriving Voice of the Venezuelan People

[In Venezuela today a grass-roots movement of community and alternative media is challenging the domination of private commercial media. Part of this transformation is the understanding of freedom of speech as a positive and basic right.]

Community Media: The Thriving Voice of the Venezuelan People

July 31st 2009, by Liz Migliorelli and Caitlin McNulty

In Venezuela today a grass-roots movement of community and alternative media is challenging the domination of private commercial media. Community oriented, non profit, non commercial, citizen and volunteer run media outlets are a crucial part of the democratic transformation of society that is occurring throughout Venezuela. Part of this transformation is the understanding of freedom of speech as a positive and basic right. This right includes universal access to a meaningful space for communication in addition to freedom from censorship. Freedom of expression as a positive right provides universal access to the means of communication. Political Analyst Diana Raby reiterates; "the technology of modern communications has to be made accessible to all, not merely as consumers but as participants and creators."[1] Community media is beginning to fill this role in Venezuela.

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Siding with the Generals: The Independent on Honduras

August 5th 2009, by Media Lens

Iran’s June 12 presidential elections have been widely criticised, both domestically and abroad, as lacking credibility. During the popular protests that followed, some 30 people were killed by government forces with hundreds more arrested. These events have been subject to intense and continuous US-UK media scrutiny.

Also in June, a military coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of Honduras. President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and deported to Costa Rica on June 28. Initial clashes between troops loyal to the coup plotters and Zelaya supporters left at least one person dead and 30 injured. On July 30, as many as 150 people were arrested, with dozens injured, when soldiers and police attacked demonstrators with tear gas, water cannon, clubs and gunfire. One of the wounded, a 38-year-old teacher, was left fighting for his life after being shot in the head. Journalists reporting from the scene were also attacked. (Bill Van Auken, ‘Honduran coup regime launches brutal crackdown,’ August 1, 2009, World Socialist Web Site;http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/hond-a01.shtml)

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Free press? Venezuela beats the US

[Of course Chávez's new media law is bad. But it won't make a dent in the huge amount of press freedom in Venezuela]

Free press? Venezuela beats the US

August 4th 2009, by Mark Weisbrot - Comment is Free (The Guardian)

Denis MacShane attacks the British left for defending Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, against an onslaught from the media, "new cold warriors", and rightwing demagogues throughout the world. His rhetorical trick is to tar the left with a new media law currently being debated in the Venezuelan congress, which he says "would impose prison sentences of up to four years for journalists whose writings might divulge information against 'the stability of the institutions of the state'."

Of course this is a bad law. There are a number of bad laws on the books in Venezuela, and in fact numerous countries in the region havedesacato (pdf) laws that make it a crime to insult the president. Do MacShane's targets – he mentions Ken Livingstone and Richard Gott – support such laws? I would bet serious money that they do not. So his main line of attack is misleading if not downright dishonest.

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