Check out Venezuela....they have a socialist...

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Last Monday, Christian televangelist Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. While Robertson's remarks were shocking in their utter disregard for global democracy and the rule of law (he eventually apologized), he is by no means the first to beat the drum against Venezuela.

In fact, his comments were merely a more vitriolic version of what the Bush administration has been saying for some time, with declarations to contain Chavez and the funneling of millions of dollars to opposition groups within the country. The White House even supported a 2002 military coup, before popular uprisings restored Chavez to power. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and now Robertson are all in their own ways trying to build the case that Chavez is a menace, a danger to democracy and a source of instability in the region.

I attended the 16th World Festival for Youth and Students, which drew more than 15,000 young peace and justice activists from across the globe.

What I saw, in the enormous city of Caracas and the rural towns of Monagas state, were huge numbers of people who, for the first time in their lives, have free and adequate health care, the opportunity to attend university, access to land grants and work contracts, constitutionally assured rights for women and indigenous people, and free breakfast programs for children. And with all this, a sense of dignity and ownership over their lives.

In a room that smells of Tiger Balm, with rain beating on the roof, a doctor massages the curled hands and feet of a crippled boy while his mother murmurs gentle words. Before the free hospital was built, the boy had no access to regular physical therapy and lived in constant pain.

An old woman, her eyes gleaming through thick glasses, says that two years ago, when she enrolled in a reading class taught by university volunteers, she practically ate the books in her hunger for words, flying through basic reading and moving on to high school equivalency courses. She plans to attend one of the nation's new free public universities next year. At 76 she dreams of being a lawyer.

The 22-year-old Osmar, with tight curls and baggy jeans, says that in yesterday's Venezuela he would have been a taxi driver or sold cigarettes on the street, doing work without honor. But he was among the thousand top scorers on a nationwide exam and will soon leave for five years of free medical school in Cuba.

These individuals, like millions across Venezuela, have experienced tangible, visible change in their lives over the last several years. But while these changes have made Chavez a hero in the eyes of Venezuela's poor majority, they have made him an enemy in the White House.

It makes Washington's blood boil that Chavez not only denounces its global mandates of fiscal austerity, structural adjustment and radical privatization, but that Venezuela has the resources to successfully enact its own development model.

Using its oil wealth, Venezuela is constructing one of the truly alternative models of economic growth in today's world. The fourth-largest exporter of petroleum to the United States, Venezuela has shifted production from multinational corporations into the hands of the state, which now harvests the bulk of this liquid gold in order to sembrar el petroleo, sow the oil, and invest billions inwards.

So while Venezuela sows its oil, Washington is sowing the seeds to unseat Chavez. It is building up the case for invasion, a coup or an assassination. If, for many of us, Robertson's comments were the first we registered of this positioning, it is not the first for Venezuelans, who speak often of being the potential next battleground, overt or covert, in the United States' deceptive and never-ending war on terrorism.

Let us be wary. Very. For those moving to vilify Chavez are the same people who knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, who used nonexistent uranium to justify a war in which tens of hundreds of young Americans and countless Iraqis have died.

Let's also honor the value of freedom, of human dignity and democracy. Let us support Venezuela's right to build its own future.

Venezuela Embassy, Washington D.C. -- Press Release -- September 7, 2005: As announced by President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan national oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) will ship approximately one million barrels of PDVSA-produced gasoline this month directly to the United States in the wake of the horrible devastation and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina.

This volume is in addition to PDVSA�s normal shipments to the United States.

�Venezuela is privileged to be able to help the United States in this time of need,� said Venezuela's Ambassador to the United States, Bernardo Alvarez Herrera. �We see ourselves as a compassionate people and hope that our efforts will help cope with current market needs of the U.S. for gasoline, and provide some immediate relief to the victims of this horrific natural disaster.�

Four additional shipments of gasoline, totaling over 960,000 barrels, taken from storage and diverted from other customers, will be sent to and distributed by PDVSA�s wholly-owned US subsidiary, CITGO Petroleum Corp (CITGO) and will supplement PDVSA�s previously scheduled shipments to CITGO in September of 1.2 million barrels of petroleum.

Each of the four additional gasoline shipments will be sent from Venezuela to CITGO during the following time frames:

September 14-16, September 23-25, September 28-30 and September 29-October 1.

With shipping time from Venezuela to the US Gulf Coast only four-five days, these shipments from Venezuela will arrive much more quickly than cargoes from Europe, the Middle East or Asia and, hence, will be able to meet US needs that much sooner.

PDVSA is the fifth largest provider of petroleum products in the world and the third largest provider to the United States. During the last year, Venezuela has occasionally been the largest supplier of oil to the United States, surpassing Saudi Arabia, Canada and Mexico. It exports 95% of its hydrocarbons, 57% of which are earmarked for the United States. PDVSA�s oil refining capacity globally is 3.3 million barrels per day.

Conservatives are currently attacking President Barack Obama by calling him a socialist. (Photo: Wired.com)

"We are all socialists now," proclaims Newsweek. We are creating "socialist republics" in the United States, says Mike Huckabee, adding, on reflection, that "Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff." We are witnessing the Obama-era phenomenon of "European socialism transplanted to Washington," says Newt Gingrich.

Well! Even as we all turn red, I've still encountered just two avowed democratic socialists in my daily rounds through the nation's capital: Vermont's Sen. Bernie Sanders . . . and the guy I see in the mirror when I shave. Bernie is quite capable of speaking for himself, so what follows is a report on the state of actual existing socialism from the other half of the D.C. Senators and Columnists Soviet.

First, as we survey the political landscape, what's striking is the absence of advocates of socialism, at least as the term was understood by those who carried that banner during the capitalist crisis of the 1930s. Then, socialists and communists both spoke of nationalizing all major industries and abolishing private markets and the wage system. Today, it's impossible to find a left-leaning party anywhere that has such demands or entertains such fantasies. (Not even Hugo Ch�vez - more an authoritarian populist than any kind of socialist - says such things.)

Within the confines of socialist history, this means that the perspective of Eduard Bernstein - the fin DE siecle German socialist who argued that the immediate struggle to humanize capitalism through the instruments of democratic government was everything, and that the goal of supplanting capitalism altogether was meaningless - has definitively prevailed. Within the confines of American history, this means that when New York's garment unions left the Socialist Party to endorse Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, they were charting the paradigmatic course for American socialists: into the Democratic Party to support not the abolition of capitalism but its regulation and democratization, and the creation of some areas of public life where the market does not rule.

But in the United States, conservatives have never bashed socialism because its specter was actually stalking America. Rather, they've wielded the cudgel against such progressive reforms as free universal education, the minimum wage or tighter financial regulations. Their signal success is to have kept the United States free from the taint of universal health care. The result: We have the world's highest health-care costs, borne by businesses and employees that cannot afford them; nearly 50 million Americans have no coverage; infant mortality rates are higher than those in 41 nations - but at least (phew!) we don't have socialized medicine.

Give conservatives credit for their consistency: They attacked Roosevelt as a socialist as they are now attacking Obama, when in fact Obama, like Roosevelt before him, is engaged not in creating socialism but in rebooting a crashed capitalist system. The spending in Obama's stimulus plan isn't a socialist takeover. It's the only way to inject money into a system in which private-sector investment, consumption and exports - the other three possible engines of growth - are locked down. Investing more tax dollars in education and research and development is a way to use public funds to create a more competitive private sector. Keeping our banks from speculating madly with our money is a way to keep banking alive.

If Obama realizes his agenda, what emerges will be a more social, sustainable, competitive capitalism. His more intellectually honest and sentient conservative critics don't accuse him of Leninism but of making our form of capitalism more like Europe's. In fact, over the past quarter-century, Europe's capitalism became less regulated and more like ours, one reason Europe is tanking along with everyone else.

Take it from a democratic socialist: Laissez-faire American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism. And the reason isn't that the woods are full of secret socialists who are only now outing themselves.

Judging by the failures of the great Wall Street investment houses and the worldwide crisis of commercial banks; the collapse of East Asian, German and American exports; the death rattle of the U.S. auto industry; the plunge of stock markets everywhere; the sickening rise in global joblessness; and the growing shakiness of governments in fledgling democracies that opened themselves to the world market - judging by all these, a more social capitalism is on the horizon because the deregulated capitalism of the past 30 years has blown itself up, taking much of the known world with it.

So, for conservatives searching for the culprits behind this transformation of capitalism: Despite our best efforts, it wasn't Bernie and it wasn't me. It was your own dam system.

HE'S A SOCIALIST, MUSLIM; WE WILL HAVE SOCIAL MEDICINE, ALL THE CHURCHES WILL BE CLOSED AND ALL CHRISTIANS WILL BE PERSECUTED. NO HOMESCHOOLING FOR SURE. OUR BORDERS WILL BE OPEN. YOU MUST HIRE HOMOSEXUALS IN YOUR CHURCHES AND SCHOOLS AND BUSINESSES. REMEMBER WHAT HITLER DO, IT WILL BE MUCH, MUCH WORSE. ******

A great article on history, very informative and interesting - here's the link: http://www.truthout.org/032009R

"Socialism" is a pejorative term in American politics and needs to be carefully examined. It usually refers to increased government control over the economy, or policies that promote the redistribution of wealth. There is no doubt that President Obama's economic measures, passed and proposed, will raise tax rates on the richest Americans to pay for increased government funding of health care, green energy and education. So the new president is indeed a redistributionist, but so was Ronald Reagan, except that Obama's plans will transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, whereas Reagan's bills transferred wealth from the poor and the middle class to the opulent. In fact, Obama's measures are puny, whereas Reagan's were massive. If the Democrat is a "small" socialist, Reagan was the Great American Socialist.

Let's go back to the early 1980's. In 1981, Reagan signed a law that sharply reduced the income tax for the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The president asserted his program would create jobs, purge inflation and, get this, trim the budget deficit. However, following the tax cut, the deficit soared from 2.5 percent of GDP to over 6 percent, alarming financial markets, sending interest rates sky high, and culminating in the worst recession since the 1930's.