Here to stay: Chavez wins Venezuelan presidency

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.(Reuters / Edwin Montilva)

Source: Russia Today

Incumbent President, Hugo Chavez, has won Venezuela’s tightly-contested presidential elections, clinching a fourth term with over 54 per cent of the vote, according to the National Electoral Council.

With more than 90 per cent of the ballot counted, election officials claim Chavez has won beyond doubt, with rival Henrique Capriles managing just 44,97 per cent of the vote.

“Thank you God! Thank you to everyone,” Chavez said on his Twitter account.

Chavez will take office for a six-year term beginning February 2013.

The election appears to have seen an impressive turnout, with Tibisay Lucena, the National Electoral Council president, stating 81 percent of nearly 19 million registered voters, cast ballots.

Capriles has congratulated Chavez on his victory and told followers not to feel defeated. "We have planted many seeds across Venezuela and I know that these seeds are going to produce many trees,'' he told supporters in a speech late Sunday, AP reports.

Joyful crowds of supporters cheered as the results were announced. Fireworks have been heard around the capital, Caracas. “Absolutely incredible. Everywhere I look fireworks are going off. The city won't sleep tonight,” RT’s Lucy Kafanov tweeted from the Venezuelan capital.

Chavez supporters celebrate the victory /Photo from twitter.com user @madeleintlSUR

There have been six candidates competing for the presidency in the current election. However since the very beginning, opinion polls suggested the race was between just two potential leaders.Incumbent President Hugo Chavez, representing the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, has proven prominent, but opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, representing the Coalition for Democratic Unity, has been biting at his heels throughout campaigning.Capriles is the first opposition candidate in Chavez’s 13 years in power. The current leader and his young pro-US rival have been neck-and-neck in opinion polls.

Chavez was first elected in 1998 and since then has been waging what he calls a “Bolivarian revolution” towards socialism. He has received a lot of negative coverage from Western media, many regarding him as a reactionary, seeking to cling to power for another presidential term. His controversial foreign policies have provoked the anger of the US on more the one occasion.

He has condemned the support of the opposition in Syria and advocates Iran’s right to enrich uranium. In addition, he has been a key figure in the movement for Latin American integration and the exclusion of the US regarding internal policies.

In contrast, 40-year-old Capriles has resolved to radically change Venezuelan foreign policy upon election, heralding a possible strengthening of ties with the US. Born in 1972, Venezuelan politician and lawyer Capriles was mayor of Baruta Municipality of Caracas. Since November 2008 has been governor of the country’s Miranda state.
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Venezuela’s Victory Over Wall Street

Image: President Hugo Chavez soundly defeated US-backed opposition, despite a coordinated propaganda campaign, and millions of US State Department dollars utilized to manipulate the elections. Venezuela still faces many challenges.

By: Tony Cartalucci

Source: Global Research

Venezuela looks to have effectively outmaneuvered Western designs to overthrow national sovereignty, but many challenges lay ahead.


Venezuela has provided the world with a successful model to counter the subversive methods of Wall Street and London in their bid to overthrow yet another nation-state to be rolled into their global collective. However, many have noted that President Hugo Chavez is a flawed leader, with flawed policies – many of which run contra to concepts of personal freedom and while this could be said about virtually any politician, the fact is that despite President Chavez’ flaws, he has posed a substantial obstacle to Western ambitions across South America, and has consistently opposed Western machination across the world.

It has been pointed out however, that President Chavez is heading a political movement very similar to the highly criticized, Wall Street proxy, Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand – that is, using populist policies to build a reliable voting bloc to stay perpetually in power. In many aspects this is true, though Venezuela’s policies are sustainable, and a direct result of nationalizing the oil industry, while Shinawatra of Thailand simply took money out of state coffers while attempting to further privatize and sell-off to foreign multinationals, Thailand’s vast resources.

Also, political and economic policies are erroneously viewed by many as “sides” one is either on or against. In reality, the global elite see them simply as tools, and their use dictated not by personal preference or ideology, but by utility given any specific circumstance. Whether one is “good” or “bad,” when they are presented with boards that must be nailed together, they pick a hammer. Likewise, when a nation must be unified against a large, capable political opposition – political machines, populism, and socialist policies are generally used.

It is difficult to see what other effective method President Chavez could have used against the West in organizing the Venezuelan people against the collective corporate-financier interests arrayed against them and the substantial foreign subversion President Chavez has faced throughout his political career. Boards needed to be nailed together, and President Chavez elected to use a hammer. He is succeeding, and as his political structure is hammered together, taking a more distinct and stable form, it will soon be time to take out other tools to further refine it.

Ensuring A Stable, Enduring Structure

As Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez consolidates his position, it will be important to move beyond the populist policies required to win over people in the face of concerted efforts by foreign-funded opposition to win them over. In “Free Markets & Socialism: An Alternative View,” it stated:

Socialist handouts are tools. Like any tool they are only as good as the people using them. While the intentions of socialist medicine, welfare, education and so on seem noble, in reality they are primarily used by self-serving crooked politicians as bribes handed out in exchange for the voting public’s servile dependency on a particular political agenda. Generations of voting blocs have been created using socialist handouts in just this fashion. Pragmatic solutions are never seriously pursued because pragmatic, permanent solutions – while alleviating entirely any particular social problem – would undermine the real purpose of the handouts, namely, building a dependent, servile voting bloc.

However, let us imagine socialist handouts for a particular social problem such as medical care applied in the context of a temporary stop-gap measure. While people are subsidized for care, the commitments are temporary and voluntary only to prevent people from dying without proper treatment. Meanwhile, investments are put into education and biomedical technology with specific benchmarks and time frames in mind. Simultaneously, barriers such as crippling “intellectual property rights” and monopolizing business practices are eliminated to allow real competition to flourish.

By increasing the supply of trained practitioners and biomedical engineers through improved education, and advancing biomedical technology past current levels of precarious scarcity the price for medical care will drop accordingly. With monopolies eliminated, real progress can be effected. If a particular company has a viable, affordable treatment for cancer, no established monopoly will be able to lobby Washington to regulate it out of business to protect their particular racket. Similar solutions could also easily be applied to the inadequate, antiquated, parasitic oil and car industries as well.

We should look around society today and take stock in industries and commodities we take for granted. We do not kill one another over the last chicken leg or leaf of lettuce nor do many people go without basic food. This is not because we have mastered subsidizing socialist handouts to feed our populations, rather we have developed agricultural technology that allows us to create an affordable market nearly anyone can benefit from under normal circumstances.

Likewise, medical technology and other essential industries can and must be advanced to where the market price is affordable to all. This will not happen with socialist handouts or monopolizing regulations in place. It will happen with improved education and healthy competition within the markets, where the only protection given is the rights of entrepreneurs big and small to pursue their trade without being hindered by monopolistic practices. In the meantime, it is sensible to transition away from total, permanent (and pandering) socialist solutions and move toward temporary stop-gaps until this is achieved.

It should be understood that the concept of a “free market” described above does not refer to absolute economic anarchy. For instance, should Venezuela elect to pursue more permanent, technological solutions to problems currently subsidized, they would not by necessity “open their markets” to foreign multinationals and crippling “neoliberalism.” In many ways the West already observes truly “free markets,” or economic anarchy where giant corporations are free to do anything they wish, including wage massive, global wars in pursuit of their interests. The constricting laws and regulations many well-intentioned free-market advocates abhor, have been imposed by these unhindered, anarchical corporations, not by a “socialist government.” What these advocates perceive as a “socialist government” is in fact an interface created and controlled by unhindered, unregulated, unaccountable corporate-financier interests

Image: Building things, making things, technological and scientific progress moves forward the frontier of human knowledge and makes all that follows in its wake more accessible and affordable to the average person. The next step of any genuine socialist movement aiming to meet the immediate needs of the people, is to empower the people through education and technology with the means to develop permanent technological solutions to replace what should be only temporary government-dependent subsidies. Socialism as a final end, is but another system of control.

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For Venezuela, the threat of foreign subversion is still very real. There is a very real global network of subversion maintained by the corporate-financier interests of Wall Street and London, forming the foundation of modern imperialism. For President Hugo Chavez to move on to the next step, to put down the hammer and begin using more articulate tools, he would have to effectively communicate these intentions to his support base and ensure that the Venezuelan people are aware of the dangers and payoffs of pursuing the next step.

Finally, as a growing front of nations begin to rise up against Western global hegemony and the “Washington Consensus,” it is important that people around the world prevent an identical, but opposing global order to take its place. Global governance by any name, administered by any nation, or group of nations, is unnecessary and only serves to subvert national, local, and individual sovereignty. A mulipolar world where the mutual respect of national sovereignty, and the primacy of the nation-state is it’s foremost principle, is what we the people of the world should not only demand of our representatives, but should work on a daily basis locally to achieve.