Chavez is loony, looney, looney.

[Jaguar]

Jaguar's Apolyton guidelines come into play here:

Oerdin is right more often than not.

Kid is always wrong.

Therefore, if Oerdin and Kid are in an argument, Oerdin is, without doubt, the victor.

[Kidlicious]

You have to love the fact that the economy is growing at an astronomical rate while Oerdin is Chavez bashing and making crazy claims. Sorry Oerdin, but you should just let this thread die. It's the worst thread I've ever seen.

[Jaguar]

I have to admit that given my guidelines, you are doing far better then you should be.

[techumseh]

This quibbling about economic numbers diverts us from Oerdin's original thesis:

This guy is a loony and his crony policies are a total failure. I can only guess he's making wild claims about the US trying to assassinate him in order to distract people from the terrible economic mess he's put his country in.

The US has tried to mount a coup. It failed. Then they organized a strike of the government petroleum corporation. It failed. Then they tried, through their lackey's, to organize a recall referendum. It failed. Three guesses what their next move might be.

Chavez is committed to share Venezuela's oil wealth with the poor. That is why the majority of the Venezuela's people support Chavez. And if you truly believe in democracy, that ought to be enough for you.

[Dinner]

If kid doesn't like this thread then it is on the right track.

Chavez is still a nutter for running around claiming the US wants to kill him.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by techumseh
The US has tried to mount a coup. It failed. Then they organized a strike of the government petroleum corporation. It failed. Then they tried, through their lackey's, to organize a recall referendum. It failed. Three guesses what their next move might be.

Please provide any evidience that the US was involved with the coupe? I can show the US spoke out against the coupe and demanded coupe plotters step down. I realize that in your world the US is responsible for all things evil but the rest of us like to stick to facts.

[Kidlicious]

Yeah, because the US has never tried to assasinate anyone.

[techumseh]

Originally posted by Oerdin


Please provide any evidience that the US was involved with the coupe? I can show the US spoke out against the coupe and demanded coupe plotters step down. I realize that in your world the US is responsible for all things evil but the rest of us like to stick to facts.

I thought you were ignoring me, but fine, you're on. Please show "the US spoke out against the coupe (sic) and demanded coupe (sic) plotters step down."

And I'll take that as a challenge to find evidence that the US was indeed involved in the failed coup against Chavez. Stay tuned.

[Ramo]

Ummm.. the US certainly did welcome the coup.

From the WaPo:

The Bush administration yesterday blamed former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez for the events that led to his forced resignation and arrest, calling his toppling by the nation's military a "change of government" rather than a coup. Officials said Chavez's departure was the will of Venezuela's people.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A41210-2002Apr12&notFound=true

[techumseh]

Here's a good article, though far from proof:

April 14, 2002

The CIA and the Venezuela Coup
Hugo Chavez: A Servant Not Knowing his Place
by William Blum

How do we know that the CIA was behind the coup that overthrew Hugo Chavez?

Same way we know that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. That's what it's always done and there's no reason to think that tomorrow morning will be any different.

Consider Chavez's crimes:

Branding the US attacks on Afghanistan as "fighting terrorism with terrorism", he demanded an end to "the slaughter of innocents"; holding up photographs of children killed in the American bombing attacks, he said their deaths had "no justification, just as the attacks in New York did not, either." In response, the Bush administration temporarily withdrew its ambassador.

Being very friendly with Fidel Castro and selling oil to Cuba at discount rates.

His defense minister asking the permanent US military mission in Venezuela to vacate its offices in the military headquarters in Caracas, saying its presence was an anachronism from the cold war.

Not cooperating to Washington's satisfaction with the US war against the Colombian guerrillas.

Denying Venezuelan airspace to US counter-drug flights.

Refusing to provide US intelligence agencies with information on Venezuela's large Arab community.

Questioning the sanctity of globalization.

Promoting a regional free-trade bloc and united Latin American petroleum operations as a way to break free from US economic dominance.

Visiting Sadaam Hussein in Iraq and Moammar Gaddafy in Libya.

And more in the same vein which the Washington aristocracy is unaccustomed to encountering from the servant class.

The United States has endeavored to topple numerous governments for a whole lot less.

The Washington Post reported from Venezuela on April 13: "Members of the country's diverse opposition had been visiting the U.S. Embassy here in recent weeks, hoping to enlist U.S. help in toppling Chavez. The visitors included active and retired members of the military, media leaders and opposition politicians.

"The opposition has been coming in with an assortment of 'what ifs'," said a U.S. official familiar with the effort. "What if this happened? What if that happened? What if you held it up and looked at it sideways? To every scenario we say no. We know what a coup looks like, and we won't support it."

Right. They won't support a coup. So what happens when a coup occurs which they want to support? Simple. They don't call it a coup. They call it a "change of government" and say that Chavez was ousted "as a result of the message of the Venezuelan people." Veritable grass-roots democracy it was.

Opposition legislators were also brought to Washington in recent months, including at least one delegation sponsored by the International Republican Institute, an integral part of the National Endowment for Democracy, long used by the CIA for covert operations abroad.

Overthrowing a man such as Hugo Chavez, guilty of such transgressions, was a duty so "natural" for the CIA that the only reason it might not have been intimately involved in the operation would be that the Agency had been secretly disbanded.

[techumseh]

Here's a good article. It has valuable links, too: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1203-09.htm

And this one, from the Observer, is very good:

Venezuela coup linked to Bush team

Specialists in the 'dirty wars' of the Eighties encouraged the plotters who tried to topple President Chavez

Observer Worldview

Ed Vulliamy in New York
Sunday April 21, 2002
The Observer

The failed coup in Venezuela was closely tied to senior officials in the US government, The Observer has established. They have long histories in the 'dirty wars' of the 1980s, and links to death squads working in Central America at that time.
Washington's involvement in the turbulent events that briefly removed left-wing leader Hugo Chavez from power last weekend resurrects fears about US ambitions in the hemisphere.

It also also deepens doubts about policy in the region being made by appointees to the Bush administration, all of whom owe their careers to serving in the dirty wars under President Reagan.

One of them, Elliot Abrams, who gave a nod to the attempted Venezuelan coup, has a conviction for misleading Congress over the infamous Iran-Contra affair.

The Bush administration has tried to distance itself from the coup. It immediately endorsed the new government under businessman Pedro Carmona. But the coup was sent dramatically into reverse after 48 hours.

Now officials at the Organisation of American States and other diplomatic sources, talking to The Observer, assert that the US administration was not only aware the coup was about to take place, but had sanctioned it, presuming it to be destined for success.

The visits by Venezuelans plotting a coup, including Carmona himself, began, say sources, 'several months ago', and continued until weeks before the putsch last weekend. The visitors were received at the White House by the man President George Bush tasked to be his key policy-maker for Latin America, Otto Reich.

Reich is a right-wing Cuban-American who, under Reagan, ran the Office for Public Diplomacy. It reported in theory to the State Department, but Reich was shown by congressional investigations to report directly to Reagan's National Security Aide, Colonel Oliver North, in the White House.

North was convicted and shamed for his role in Iran-Contra, whereby arms bought by busting US sanctions on Iran were sold to the Contra guerrillas and death squads, in revolt against the Marxist government in Nicaragua.

Reich also has close ties to Venezuela, having been made ambassador to Caracas in 1986. His appointment was contested both by Democrats in Washington and political leaders in the Latin American country. The objections were overridden as Venezuela sought access to the US oil market.

Reich is said by OAS sources to have had 'a number of meetings with Carmona and other leaders of the coup' over several months. The coup was discussed in some detail, right down to its timing and chances of success, which were deemed to be excellent.

On the day Carmona claimed power, Reich summoned ambassadors from Latin America and the Caribbean to his office. He said the removal of Chavez was not a rupture of democra tic rule, as he had resigned and was 'responsible for his fate'. He said the US would support the Carmona government.

But the crucial figure around the coup was Abrams, who operates in the White House as senior director of the National Security Council for 'democracy, human rights and international opera tions'. He was a leading theoretician of the school known as 'Hemispherism', which put a priority on combating Marxism in the Americas.

It led to the coup in Chile in 1973, and the sponsorship of regimes and death squads that followed it in Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and elsewhere. During the Contras' rampage in Nicaragua, he worked directly to North.

Congressional investigations found Abrams had harvested illegal funding for the rebellion. Convicted for withholding information from the inquiry, he was pardoned by George Bush senior.

A third member of the Latin American triangle in US policy-making is John Negroponte, now ambassador to the United Nations. He was Reagan's ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 when a US-trained death squad, Battalion 3-16, tortured and murdered scores of activists. A diplomatic source said Negroponte had been 'informed that there might be some movement in Venezuela on Chavez' at the beginning of the year.

More than 100 people died in events before and after the coup. In Caracas on Friday a military judge confined five high-ranking officers to indefinite house arrest pending formal charges of rebellion.

Chavez's chief ideologue - Guillermo Garcia Ponce, director of the Revolutionary Political Command - said dissident generals, local media and anti-Chavez groups in the US had plotted the president's removal.

'The most reactionary sectors in the United States were also implicated in the conspiracy,' he said.

And here's an interesting article on the one sided reporting in the US media on the coup: http://www.trinicenter.com/world/venez/lessons.shtml

[Agathon]

Chavez is still a nutter for running around claiming the US wants to kill him.

Really? If I were a left wing Latin American leader that the US hadnt tried to kill, I'd be a pretty rare bird.

Otherwise it looks as if you've been pwned pretty badly in this thread Oerdin.

And the GDP might shrink quite a bit if the state starts giving stuff away that people used to pay for. Just the opposite of when developing countries report massive amounts of growth. There really isn't much real growth, it is just that activities that were not organized through the market are now being organized that way.

GDP is a crapass way to measure economic development.

[Urban Ranger]

You can get massive GDPs by building lots of buildings, demolish them, rebuild them, demolish them again, ad nauseam.

[DaShi]

*cough*

[Agathon]

You can get massive GDPs by building lots of buildings, demolish them, rebuild them, demolish them again, ad nauseam.

My favourite is how the Exxon Valdez spill was great for the economy.

Shoot economists!!!!