(I apologize that this will be a terribly inelegant and rough diary; but needs must.)
Ah, yes; starring Miz Picklepuss of Adrienne Arsht/ Atlantic Council: working to secure the future (of some™) western Imperialists.
‘Hillary Clinton and a Venezuelan Murder Mystery: Who Killed Luis Manuel Díaz?’, mark Weisbrot at CEPR.net
Note the angle on the Guardian website on VZ, for instance.
‘Live Updates: Venezuela’s National Assembly Elections’, at telesur english, voting day, Dec. 6
A Telesur tweet identifies a photo as “Part of the delegation of 109 international observers from 28 countries #VenezuelaDecides
UPDATE: 10:41 a.m. – Venezuelan prosecutors confirm that jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez has full right to vote today. Even though Lopez is barred from holding public office, this does not affect his right to vote, authorities said. In Venezuela, not only are ex-prisoners entitled to vote, contrary to many U.S. states, but so too can current prisoners who have not yet been sentenced. Every prison is equipped with ballot boxes.
‘Why Progressives Should Defend Venezuela’s Democratic Elections’by Frederick B. Mills
‘US Corporate Media Seek to Undermine Venezuelan Democracy with Lies and Distortions’, by Eric Draitser (some excerpts after noting that many Venezuelans are arguably frustrated by high inflation, scarcity of basic goods, and high violent crime rates):
“In fact, the opposition has already laid the groundwork for a potential destabilization of the country as a number of key figures have openly stated that should they lose the election, it would be an indication of fraud. Essentially, the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), which is neither democratic nor unified, has manufactured a win-win scenario wherein a loss in the election proves it was cheated, thereby allowing it to decry the elections as a fraud: a pernicious lie which only would benefit them.
Such tactics are par for the course for an opposition made up of US-backed, right wing neoliberal members of the former ruling class – an opposition that heralds criminals such as Leopoldo Lopez as righteous heroes persecuted by the government. The violence that is likely to break out should the MUD lose is also a standard tactic of everyone from criminal gangs to fascist political formations, both terms aptly describing the Venezuelan opposition.
This narrative of ‘election fraud’ is the same one trotted out by the opposition in every election in the last 15 years, with US media dutifully providing the cover of legitimacy to baseless claims as it repeats the same tired, utterly discredited talking points about ‘dirty elections’. The truth however is that Venezuela’s electoral system is the best, “most transparent in the world,” as former US President and humanitarian Jimmy Carter proclaimed in 2012. Indeed, despite the lies and distortions of the US media, these elections will be free, fair, and reflective of the will of the people.”
At Café Babylon: ‘WikiLeaked Cables Demonstrate Attempts to Overthrow Elected Socialist Governments in Latin America’. I’m so lame at categorizing posts, it’s the only one of many I could score.
‘US Study: Majority Not Enough to Take Over Venezuela Parliament’ Mark Weisbrot with this brief video explaining VZ’s National Assembly electoral voting. Winning a majority in Venezuela’s Dec. 6 parliamentary elections does not guarantee control of the country’s National Assembly, notes a study released Thursday by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. » read more
‘CNN Doesn’t Want You To Know The Truth About Venezuela’s Voting System’ by Eva Golinger, December 4th 2015 at http://venezuelanalysis.com, but there are loads of informative essays there.
I haven’t seen anything about when election results might come, but likely tomorrow. I’ll check as I’m able tommorow.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
if i understand correctly, there are 22 seats to still be decided. but as of their last posting on results, it looks like this.
but yes, inflation and failure to diversify from oil makes life tough:
stir in marine le pen leading in france who says she’ll ‘reconquer france’s lost territories’, whatever that means:
Right wing win in Argentina also, and France. Looks like the same for the U.S.A. next year except for Clinton who is right wing in my book.
“For the first time, they may not feel like the proud, governing majority in the country. On the other hand, an opposition with power is more the reason for strengthening organization. Having lost the luxury of taking victories for granted, the grassroots will likely become even more serious. With an emboldened opposition, they and their projects may also face verbal and physical attacks.”
Kind of goes with the line of thinking that poses whether it would be better for a republican president to win to finally get the left off it’s ass. “The grassroots likely will become even more serious”. I think the same applies here and everywhere people are fighting against the ruling class’. Time to get even more serious. To me that means exploring options not considered before, like election boycotts, global petitions, etc. They can’t win without us and we can’t win without them (the Venezuelan left that is).
World on the verge. . .
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/The-Causes-and-Consequences-of-Venezuelan-Election-Results-20151207-0002.html
macri, yes, but mark weisbrot doesn’t see it as a serious setback for leftist nations in the south. i’m not sure he’s right, but he does try to make the case. oddly, the original essay was at ‘fortune’; wot?
thanks for bringing the ’causes and consequences’ piece; i’d clipped a tweet with that link, and it turned out i’d doubled up on another one instead.
yes, that theme of ‘the left offering pushback’ has been touted for years, as has its opposite: LOTE voting (rebecca solnit, et.al.). trouble is, there is no longer any meaningful left, and some will gladly say that a) there has already been a right-wing one; and b) that ‘the left’ refuses to admit that there is already a third world war afoot against…ISIS/daesh.
but it’s still hard not to think of:
“arise like lionss from your slumber…
we are many, and they are few”
as many then point out: but they have the 101st airborne.
and what will happen in europe? especially in greece? ‘‘Ilargi: Greece is a Nation Under Occupation’ (naked capitalism)
i forgot to address your characterization of (team) clinton: well, if a clinton-as-neocon FP is hidden or called ‘experienced’, and she’s busy recasting herself as an economic populist, whaddaya get? a politician.
i read at some site, perhaps ian welsh’s, that even donald hairdo is to the left of her on some issues. but srsly, i try never to read about him past the headlines. my fervent wish is that the msm would quit showing that photo of him aping a disabled journalist. it makes me wanna smack him in the face. but then: only a nixon could sorta survive ‘going to china’.
be pretty funny if the deep state decides he’s our guy; but otoh, they make pick the bern as the most able to pull off a trojan horse act; the MIC is what counts, no?
I was just reading an article about Trump now saying all Muslims should be stopped from entering the country ASAP. Insane, but what’s really insane is how many of the people in the 8 thousand plus comments (No,I didn’t look at them all) were agreeing with him. Even those disagreeing exhibited ignorance about what’s really happening and why. That’s the ticket right there, the ruling class is winning the information war lock, stock and barrel.
i’d read speculation that europe has essentially been invalidating the wht, 13-yr-ol Schengen open borders agreement. Xenophobia, it seems, is running the table. who will be searching for the Holy Grail?
Preemptively deflecting the blame for this major loss of confidence in the PSUV towards outside influences, even if they are real and powerful, misses the message delivered by the people of Venezuela that they are tired of the failures, internal corruption and the inability of the Party to deliver the grassroots power and choices promised by the Revolution. Powerful party operatives are chosen over local favorites to represent the masses and the same favoritisms is applied to the management of State industries and other high profile positions.
I see this as more of a protest vote than actual support for MUD or their policies. The PSUV now has the mandate to clean their own house, if possible, and regain support showing how they are going to empower the people with direct transfer of power away from the State and into the hands of the people who made the Bolivarian Revolution possible.
it wasn’t a pre-emptive excuse for losing the election so much as the hundreds of drums beating for ‘the election will be a total fraud’, wayoutwest. yes, maduro has admitted he wasn’t quite up to the tasks at the time, and made some errors, etc.
but a lot of the financial debacle, violence, and shortages of goods, were directly the handiwork of the opposition parties, including MUD. now i haven’t done the math, but depending on where those other 22 seats land, it may be that a total rout of chavismo is coming, according to the charts.
i read a cool essay on the ‘beehive’ communities, and their direct control of their communities; wish i could remember more. maybe cory morningstar, but her essays and exposés are very poorly archived. one of her chief culprits in her ‘art of annihilation’ series (or is it jay taber?) is avaaz.
on edit: had the elections been called corrupt, it would have allowed the world’s deep state NGO’s to fund another coup; MUD winning, many said, just might prevent that; who knows?
Maduro brought this onto himself and due to his incompetence. And well-deserved, I say. Maduro is still in Office and now, with little if any power despite the determination of the final 22 votes.
Perhaps, Maduro will face a non-socialist Congress, or perhaps, a more active “socialist” government with Maduro having no “responsibility” due to being banned from policy planning. And of course, our America will find someway to interfere in this nation’s politics? To wit, America is not into “nation building” and Argentines should be so informed and strongly advised.
Jaango
thanks for weighing, jaango. i’m not sure which things he did or didn’t do you mean by ‘his own incompetence’, but it appears that if 13 more seats go to MUD, they can launch a recall vote, dismiss the supreme court justices, and rewrite what they’re calling ‘the chavez constitution’. so i think it could matter greatly, but that bring us to western media hints that not have finalized the results means something fishy’s going on.
well, the US has been meddling in VZ, honduras, argentina, and peru for quite some time, and in several other leftist nations.
but i did just see something at the wapo that was surprising, in that i hadn’t even considered it:
“In a cryptic address late Sunday night before results were announced, Defense Minister Gen. Vladimir Padrino, standing with the top military command, congratulated Venezuelans for doing their civic duty peacefully, but made no statements in support of the Maduro government, which has been common under Chavez.”
and of course it was the military’s allegiance to chavez that brought him back to power in both coup attempts.
i found another post; remember when obama issued an EO denouncing VZ as “an “Extraordinary Threat to US National Security”? when maduro was elected, ‘our president’ wouldn’t even acknowledge him as such.
anyhoo, this has loads of info, and lots of tweets from the resultant hashtags like #handsOffVenezuela solidarity. great images.
Argentina election, Brazil (Dilma Roussef impeachment investigation), Venezuela vote – and don’t forget who’s in the TPP countries as well. The local PTB strike back.
In Venezuela, MUD, a coalition is going have to hold together enough to focus their agenda and the Chavistas are going themselves be tested as to who leads after Maduro or whatever politicking in determining the President succeeds in preserving Maduro in power (is this likely?).
Venezuela is a member of OPEC which continues to maintain current production levels, which is lowering prices and revenues. That has political implications depending on the state of the Venezuelan economy.
Most likely, if MUD performs to neoliberal principles, Venezuela sees austerity for almost everyone but the PTB.
The big fights are going to be over fundamental changes in the society, such as any attempts to revise the Chavez constitution.
i’d seen headlines about dilma, but never clicked in. i assume you don’t mean VZ is part of the tpp, but chile, peru, and mexico in the global south are.
good points you make, but neoliberal loan defaults will take a while to catch up to austerity, no? and one can’t think that they won’t default. ‘transnational investments’ signal re-privatizing the oil, yes?
i did read that MUD is splintered, although ‘how’ wasn’t mentioned. thanks, thd; sorry to be fading so quickly.
question: i read someone say today that israel is also bombing syria now; any idea if it’s so? but then, i also read that investors are bailing out of turkey. because isis and oil, i wonder?.
The whole point of threatened or actual loan defaults is to force austerity and privatization. That’s why they need the politicians who will be suckers for private and wasteful public debt. And conduct de facto embargoes on the holdouts.
Reprivatizing the oil. Yes, that’s the whole point of breaking Chavismo.
If Israel is bombing Syria, they are either doing it with the collaboration of Russia or they are going to have Russia on their case. Last week Putin and Bibi agreed to some sort of coordination of air use agreement so that the IDF didn’t accidentally do what Turkey did on purpose – shoot down a Russian plane. So what are the details about Israel bombing Syria? Where and who? Has Israel been de facto roped into a coalition against DAESH that includes Iran and Hezbollah? The multi-way animosities over Syria makes some definitely strange bedfellows.
Yes, exactly where the fault lines in the MUD coalition are becomes a significant piece of information.
i see that austerity defaults and ‘restructuring’ are baked in, but isn’t a missed payment what forces the triggering, at least allegedly, for the PTB winners in a nation to put them into effect?
how od that i didn’t know that about putin and israel; otoh, news says that ‘putin’ just provided a whale of a lot of air defense power to iran. rt says, though, that a russian/israel bilateral trade agreement’s in the works. the geopolitical strategery gets a bit complicated.
meanwhile, a great headline at rt today: ‘Britain’s got its mojo back in Syria, with US in reasserting Western values’ – Osborne ‘ Just.So.
and i’d clicked through to a link somewhere to an essay by alvaro vargas llosa at nationalinterest.org and saw on the sidebar: ‘Should the U.S. Leave NATO?’ er… i may go read it just for the silly title. yes, montenegro’s been pre-approved for membership, and poland is asking nato for nuclear weapons. prolly just small ones, though. ;-)
Bond speculators can stampede a country into a default by manipulating the market. That’s essentially what Nestor Kirchner tried to deal with and the recent election restores as a vulnerability.
Small nukes are still destabilizing.
excellent point re: bond vigilantes.
but er…’small nukes’ was meant to be a bit of levity. still this might signify: ‘wait and we’ll see; we’re providin’ ya a lot fer your dues’. but the 2016 nato summit seems to be in warsaw. oof, so many new things on their account since i’d last peeked in…
oh, and james petras has a whole lot of speculation and information about macri in argentina, as well as some bit about VZ and dilma’s increased neoliberalism. i’d read that her approval ratings are hovering around 10%, for what that’s worth.
WD, you might read ‘ In Praise of Chavismo’ at VA for an internal assessment of the causes of this loss and what challenges are ahead, mainly the coming recall election to remove Maduro.
i will do so, and thanks, wayoutwest. (i’m sorta working toward a cop 21 fukkery part IV diary, too.)
here’s the link. sounds about right with a few exceptions. dunno anything about avila tv, myownself.
oh, and at trrn, US meddling in elections, and why? including economic sanctions.
It’s hard for me to take a site too seriously that calls itself ‘The’ Real News Network although they do seem to do some good reporting.
This was just another preemptive projection of blame away from the internal causes of this loss of confidence that had been building from before Chavez’s death. I seriously doubt many voters in Venezuela listen to what HRC has to say about their country or its governments achievements or failures, they witness both of them firsthand. The Maduro government has failed to effectively address the major economic problems they face daily and I still don’t understand why the major private Venezuelan food company that is causing much of the shortages hasn’t been nationalized, it’s too late now.
When the agroecologists and grassroots farmers groups had to almost storm their congress to stop the PSUV backed Seed Law that would have opened the door for Monsanto I knew there was something deeply flawed with their system but they did win that fight, sadly against their own leaders.
The question now is can Maduro and the PSUV recommit themselves to the Revolution or will they use the weak rhetoric of LOTE and surely write their own obituary.
i know what you mean about the self-serving name. Forbes called them and telesur ‘the al jazeera of…’ something. cory morningstar said back in 2010, iirc, that they were funded by seedy money; hope it’s not so now. they have had the man who translated the link you’d mentioned, and wooot! is he poorly spoken.
but see, you just told me a lot that i hadn’t known; thank you so much.
on edit: i’d mentioned the sanctions because i’d forgotten about them. the large appliance antics was just designed to piss off people, arg. how stoopid.
Interesting report yesterday: Based on witnessing 30 election locations, US National Lawyers Guild reported seeing no evidence of election irregularities.
If this small sample is indicative of the actual situation nationwide in Venezuela, wayoutwest’s sense that the incumbents got booted out because they did not continue authentic Chavismo policies (because of growing corruption maybe) might be correct. And yes, the temptation after this sort of a loss is not to weed out the corruption but to frame the next election as a lesser-of-two-evils choice.
The Seed Law events are a huge tell about where the drift was taking them.
In other news, interestingly the IMF does not squeeze Ukraine the same way it squeezes Argentina or Venezuela. The mask drops and the number of national security alums in the international financial revolving door has a huge light shined in — McNamara, Wolfowitz…
the point was that no matter who won, it was a win-win for both the opposition and the West. clinton and the MSM had gone on about the fact that it would be another illegal election by the tyrannical maduro, yada, yada. jimmy carter had always said that theirs were always the cleanest elections anywhere, but look at the eva golinger/CNN link above. i snagged two links sometime earlier, one a real hit on chavez,at least seemingly regretful and the other at BAR seeming to say much the same as wayoutwest’s. at least the prefaces seem so; i haven’t had time to rad them.
but i hadn’t known about the seed law’s history, nor a couple other things.
and angela merkel is Time’s person of the year.