Chávez builds base with grass-roots circles in U.S.

Miami Herald ^ | November 21, 2005 | PABLO BACHELET pbachelet@herald.com

[Cincinatus' Wife]

WASHINGTON - Miami's Jesús Soto supports Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's vision of ''participatory democracy.'' Valerie Pusch of Chicago backs Chávez because of his policies on behalf of the poor.

And they say so loudly, as heads of their local Bolivarian Circles -- among the dozen or so U.S. copies of the groups Chávez has set up throughout his country to mobilize Venezuelans on behalf of his socialist ``revolution.''

Even as Chávez attacks President Bush as his sworn nemesis, his government is running a strong campaign to curry favor with U.S. citizens through leftist grass-roots groups, paid lobbyists and public relations operatives and offers of cheap fuel for America's poor.

The Venezuelan leader is running a ''grass-roots foreign policy,'' said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Washington based Center for Economic and Policy Research, a group that supports Chávez.

''Obviously the government of the United States has not been very friendly and [the Venezuelans] figure they have a better chance at dealing directly with the people who don't have any particular reason not to like Venezuela,'' he added.

Chávez steadily accuses the Bush administration of planning to topple him, and his prosecutors have even filed charges of ''conspiracy to destroy the nation's republican form of government'' against four leaders of a Venezuelan activist group that got U.S. funds and helped organize a failed recall vote on the president last year.

Bush administration policy on both Venezuela and Cuba is to support pro-democracy groups -- and Chávez seems to be taking a page from the same book.

Earlier this month, about 1,300 persons paid $20 each to attend ''an evening of solidarity with Bolivarian Venezuela'' in New York. Partly organized by the local Bolivarian Circle, it also was endorsed by more than 80 left-wing organizations ranging from the U.S. antiwar group ANSWER to the Cuban legislature in Havana.

Organizers said it was the largest U.S. public demonstration to date in favor of Chávez, and was followed a few days later by a similar affair in Los Angeles.

Some 15 Bolivarian Circles -- named after Venezuelan independence hero and Chávez icon Simón Bolivar -- now operate in the United States, in cities with populations of Venezuelan expatriates like Cincinnati, Boston and Miami, but also in places like Salt Lake City, Knoxville and Milwaukee.

SPONTANEOUS GROUPS?

Although interviews with several members suggest the U.S. groups sprang up spontaneously and are not directed from Caracas, they seem to share strong left-of-center views.

One member of the Detroit circle, Martin Schreader, is also an activist in the Detroit Working People's Association, whose website defines it as ``working for the liberation of working people and the abolition of modern slavery -- wage-slavery.''

''Our purpose is to tell the world that there's no dictatorship in Venezuela,'' said Soto, a former police chief in Venezuela who founded the Miami circle in 2001. With 185 members of several nationalities, he says his group is the biggest of the U.S. circles.

Pusch, an adult education teacher married to a Venezuelan, said that if the United States is supposed to be supporting democratic processeses, ``why is there is so much trouble accepting this democratically elected president?''

The Venezuelan government appears to have started reaching out to U.S. organizations two years ago, when its embassy in Washington created the Venezuela Information Office -- fully-funded by Caracas with nearly $800,000 in the year ending Aug. 31, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act filings at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Its first head was Deborah James, who went there from Global Exchange, a group that shares Chávez's strongly anti-free trade views. The office's Justice Department filings say it contacts journalists, to seek ''balance'' in the reporting on Venezuela, and key congressional staffers.

''The Venezuelan government feels frustration that their side of the story is not getting out,'' said Eric Wingerter, a spokesman who used to work for Defenders of Wildlife and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The filings also show the Venezuelan embassy hired a marquee Washington lobby firm, Patton Boggs LLP, in September 2003 and paid it about $1.6 million. But the contract was not renewed when it expired late last year because the embassy ran out of money, said Venezuela's ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez.

MONEY FOR LOBBYISTS

According to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based group that tracks lobbying payments, Venezuela paid out $500,000 for lobbying in 2004, mostly through its state oil company PDVSA and its U.S. branch, Citgo.

In another effort by Chávez to curry favor with Americans, Venezuela, which already supplies 12-15 percent of U.S. oil imports per year, offered to send more fuel after Hurricane Katrina and to sell cheap heating oil for America's poor, working through members of Congress who are friendly to Chávez.

Just last week, Citgo clinched a deal to sell 12 million gallons of discounted heating oil to 45,000 families in Massachusetts, in a deal brokered with Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., and the nonprofit Citizen's Energy Corp.

Fadi Kabboul, a Venezuelan embassy advisor on energy issues, said Citgo hoped to reach a similar deal with the office of Rep. José Serrano, D-N.Y., who represents the Bronx.

Venezuelan officials say the savings for end users on both deals would be about $10 million.

Last month, Ambassador Alvarez sent Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, a letter highlighting Venezuela's decision to send an additional 2.5 million barrels of gasoline, jet fuel and diesel to help ease U.S. shortages caused by hurricanes.

To Bush administration officials the names of organizations that back the Venezuelan president have a familiar ring to them.

''The Venezuelans just got the Rolodex from Cuba,'' said one senior State Department official who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue.

One of the scheduled speakers at the New York event was actor Danny Glover, a strong critic of U.S. sanctions on Cuba. He could not attend because he was filming.

Another speaker, Rev. Lucius Walker of the group Pastors for Peace, routinely challenges the trade embargo on Cuba by organizing aid shipments to the island and all but daring U.S. Customs officials to seize the goods.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Hugo Chavez - Venezuela

Latin America’s Terrible Two - Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez constitute an axis of evil ***…..What is happening in our neighborhood? Press reports indicate that a leftist-populist alliance is engulfing most of South America. Some Andean and Central American countries are sliding back from economic reforms and narcotics eradication, and the Caribbean remains irrationally hostile to the U.S. This is the reality U.S. policymakers must confront; and our most pressing specific challenge is neutralizing or defeating the Cuba-Venezuela axis. With the combination of Castro’s evil genius, experience in political warfare, and economic desperation, and Chávez’s unlimited money and recklessness, the peace of this region is in peril…………***

[Caipirabob]

The yahoo I'm going to verabally pummel with your work from yesterday is one of those old hippies who loves Communism and refuses to believe the loss of millions to it's horrors is fine so long as they help the people.

I get more PO'd the more I think about it.

At any rate we got into a "discussion" about Chavez last week and despite my facts and references she ended her whine by saying "he does more for his people than the President does!"

I'm not going to go into more detail, but now I'm PO'd and wide awake. Oh well, she's never actually won an arguement yet, but still insists this is for "the good of us all".

My whole point is that these are the types of people that Chavez is targetting as a base in the US. The complete wakjob leftists.

I don't fear them, but it's going to be a hell of a mess to clean up once we are force to crush them.

[LegendHasIt]

If they love hugo so much, why don't they depart our evil capitalist lands and go live in the idyllic paradise of Venezuela or haul their keisters back to Bolivia.... The land of tin and tin-pot dictators??????

[dsc]

"If they love hugo so much, why don't they depart our evil capitalist lands and go live in the idyllic paradise of Venezuela or haul their keisters back to Bolivia.... The land of tin and tin-pot dictators??????"

If they love hugo so much, why don't we deport them?

[Cincinatus' Wife]

It's not so much they love Castro/Chavez, but that they believe the U.S. is the cause of everyone's problems and once we're defeated, the world will be paradise - the people's paradise.

Castro's Medical Mercenaries ................By the mid-1990s Cuba's vaunted medical program was crumbling as well. Hospital patients asked relatives in Miami to send bedsheets, pillowcases and cotton balls because Cuba's hospitals had none. Hospital hallways were dark because staff stole the lightbulbs in order to resell them. Some doctors complained they couldn't write prescriptions: no paper or pens. Córdova's frustrations mounted. Some days, he turned patients away. "You can make a diagnosis, but there's no medication to treat it," he says. "No penicillin, no aspirin. It is like a bad joke."

Yet at certain hospitals, such as Cira García in Havana, the shelves were well stocked with drugs and top-of-the-line equipment. Cira García strictly treated foreigners with hard currency and Cuba's ruling elite--doctors' families not included. ............

........Newspapers have picked up on Florida Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's complaints that the bank hasn't satisfactorily explained the source of $3.9 billion processed for Cuba over a period of seven years.......***

[DB]

That's easy. Because the Venezuelan paradise is being prevented from budding by oppression from the evil US... If only the US were gone Venezuela would become all socialism can be...

Deport them all.

[mmercier]

These groups mean nothing here other than a waste of Venezuela's cash. American communists don't like to work and glom onto any cause or faction that will send cash without the expectation of any return on the investment.

Our culture dissolves these myriad fringe groups one person at a time as they finally grow up and get jobs (and lives).

Look at what happened with the hippies and heads of the 60's and 70's. Granted some are still hanging out with the antiwar crowd, but a close examination of the lives of these 60 year old heads will reveal either a SSDI kiss in the mail or a connection with a viable drug distribution network.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

...Look at what happened with the hippies and heads of the 60's and 70's....

They're running schools of education and journalism.

I understand your point but they must be pointed out and ridiculed.

[JohnLongIsland]

i wonder who's the head of the massachussets chapter, the cape cod orca or lurch? definetly charlie rangel has to be heading up my home state chapter.

[rvoitier]

I would love to hear Bush declare in a speech concerning this development, "We are a Representative Republic whose economy is fueled by capitalism. I will enforce our Constitution to the fullest extent of the law." Or something to that effect.

[tet68]

And people say communism is dead.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

I hear you, loud and clear.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

And people say communism is dead.

***......................Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.

But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.

No matter how opportunistically the left's agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which "social justice" prevails.

Because the transformation progressives seek is ultimately total, the power they seek must be total as well. In the end, the redemption they envision cannot be achieved as a political compromise, even though compromises may be struck along the way. Their brave new world can ultimately be secured only by the complete surrender of the resisting force. In short, the transformation of the world requires the permanent entrenchment of the saints in power. Therefore, everything is justified that serves to achieve the continuance of Them.

In Peggy Noonan's psychological portrait of Hillary Clinton, one can trace the outlines of the progressive persona I have just described. She observes that the "liberalism" of the Clinton era is very different from the liberalism of the past. Clinton-era liberalism is manipulative and deceptive and not really interested in what real people think because "they might think the wrong thing."

That is why Hillary Clinton's famous plan to socialize American health care was the work of a progressive cabal that shrouded itself in secrecy to the point of illegality. Noonan labels Clinton-era politics "command and control liberalism," using a phrase with a familiar totalitarian ring. But, like so many conservatives I have come to know, Noonan is finally too decent and too generous to fully appreciate the pathology of the left. ....

......"The Third Way" is a familiar term from the lexicon of the left with a long and dishonorable pedigree in the catastrophes created by messianic socialists in the 20th Century. It is the most ornate panel in the tapestry of deception I described at the beginning of this essay.

In the 1930s, Nazis used "The Third Way" to characterize their own brand of national socialism as a equidistant between the "internationalist" socialism of the Soviet Union and the capitalism of the West. Trotskyists used "The Third Way" as a term to distinguish their own Marxism from Stalinism and capitalism. In the 1960s, New Leftists used "The Third Way" to define their politics as an independent socialism between the Soviet gulag and America's democracy.

But as the history of Nazism, Trotskyism and the New Left have shown, there is no "Third Way." There is the capitalist, democratic way based on private property and individual rights-a way that leads to liberty and universal opportunity. And there is the socialist way of group identities, group rights, a relentless expansion of the political state, restricted liberty and diminished opportunity. The Third Way is not a path to the future. It is just the suspension between these two destinations. It is a bad faith attempt on the part of people who are incapable of giving up their socialist schemes to escape the taint of their discredited past. ...........*** Source

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Bump!

[mmercier]

>> They're running schools of education and journalism.

And as fine job they are doing. Public education for the most part is in the hopper and the nation is watching hundred year old media institutions dissolve before our very eyes.

>> I understand your point but they must be pointed out and ridiculed.

Ridicule and criticism are what separate the good bad and ugly. I agree we must keep on these nutjobs and each other. Clarity of thought and integrity of ideas are what will keep America the leader of the free world.

We are all eventually held accountable for our actions and statement's here.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

We educate, as well as learn, on FR.

[mmercier]

>> We educate, as well as learn, on FR.

Indeed. The Free Republic is the best source of information I have found to date, and you get immediately slapped into place when you substitute your fondly held notions for fact.

In an insane world where I was ruler of all things the Free Republic would be mandatory for an hour a day from 6th grade through high school graduation in all schools.

[Americanexpat]

If they love Hugo so much why don´t we deport them?

---

I think we ought to exile them to the country they say is much better than our own and let them live and try to survive in that society. Ought to open their eyes.

Never ceased to amaze nme the number of American haters and apologist I have met overseas who seemed ashamed to be American. Most of them have those famous liberal words tattooed on their forheads "They learned their coruption from the US or two wrongs don´t make a right,"

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Good points.

When you have to defend your position, you learn to think - something that's missing in today's education.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

If they love Hugo so much why don´t we deport them?

That would pretty much clear out the Democrats in office.