Venezuela: The Big Lie [my title]

Your View: Media provides a distorted portrayal of Venezuela

By Ted Morgan

The Morning Call

https://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-opi-venezuela-america-20190416-3igb3xzmendcxeynbvujxi4coy-story.html

Apr 16, 2019

[Photo selected by the Morning Call:] Supporters of opposition leader Juan Guaido march on April 6, 2019, in Caracas, Venezuela to protest outages that left most of the country scrambling for days in the dark. (Natacha Pisarenko/AP)

Backed by a chorus of U.S. corporate media singing in unison, the Trump administration has prepared the American people to believe that the United States is going to do whatever it takes to rescue the suffering people of Venezuela from their despotic and incompetent ruler, Nicolás Maduro.

The media behavior is quite stunning really, unless you happen to recall that the national media always respond this way when government propaganda prepares the public for a U.S. war or other form of intervention — from Vietnam and Central America to Afghanistan, Iraq, and many others.

From Fox News on the right spewing Trumpian rhetoric about the “failed socialism” of Venezuela to the New York Times, MSNBC and New Yorker on the so-called “left” side of the spectrum, the media have been cheerleading for what amounts to a Big Lie from this and previous administrations. Anyone wishing to examine the media chorus can check the media watch-dog www.fair.org and review any of its few dozen articles that document mass media coverage on Venezuela.

Let us first acknowledge that, yes, the Maduro administration, and to a lesser degree its predecessor under Hugo Chavez, has been increasingly authoritarian, suppressing opposition forces. Arguably, too, there has been mismanagement of the state-owned oil producer (PDVSA) and corruption among government officials. And, although the reasons are understandable, Chavez erred in failing to diversify Venezuela’s economy when oil was such a rich resource.

But we need to be clear about a few things. This is not about authoritarian government in Venezuela.

The United States has over the decades supported scores of authoritarian regimes — consider, for example, that bastion of human rights, Saudi Arabia. Readers might check William Blum’s documentation of case after case in his book, “Killing Hope.” This is not about bringing democracy to Venezuela. And very importantly, it is not about bringing aid to the suffering people of Venezuela.

No, instead, the U.S. has engaged in economic warfare against Venezuela going back into the Barack Obama administration, and, prior to that, staged a brief coup against Chavez during the George W. Bush years. Donald Trump has sharply escalated the U.S. effort to strangle the Venezuelan economy through devastating sanctions and a financial embargo.

For U.S. policymakers, the Venezuelan government’s cardinal sin has for years been that, in defiance of the United States, it used its ample oil revenue to provide the Venezuelan poor and working classes with a better life while also providing aid to other Latin American governments to free them from the boot of “Yankee Imperialism,” i.e., centuries of U.S. hegemony over “our backyard.”

As documented by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, poverty and extreme poverty declined precipitously under Chavez. Inequality, unemployment and infant mortality all fell significantly. The economy nearly doubled and the private sector grew faster than the public sector.

After Chavez’s death, global oil prices dropped radically, severely straining the Venezuelan economy. Then, claiming Venezuela was “an extraordinary threat to U.S. national security,” the Obama administration imposed sanctions that made it more difficult for Venezuela to attract investment and financing.

Meanwhile, the U.S. actively supported opposition groups through the so-called National Endowment for Democracy, a government funded organization with a record of working for regime change in “unfriendly” countries. Along with other opposition groups, the U.S. was grooming a young right-winger named Juan Guaido to this end.

The five separate Trump administration sanction orders have all but eliminated Venezuela’s ability to produce oil for export in order to provide revenue for public needs. Indeed, the nation’s economy is being strangled, and food and medicine shortages are increasing public desperation. Hence, the U.S. named Guaido as Venezuela’s “legitimate” interim president and announced $20 million in U.S. “humanitarian aid.”

The media provided unending visuals to back up administration claims about the heartless Maduro blocking aid for his people — what was in fact a publicity stunt designed to wean military supporters away from Maduro.

I believe the real aims of U.S. policy toward Venezuela are: 1) to gain control over Venezuelan oil reserves, the largest in the world, 2) to reassert U.S. domination over all of Latin America, after bringing about rightist regimes in Honduras, Brazil and Paraguay, and 3) to ensure that other nations do not seek a form of economic development independent of the U.S. neoliberal model.

[Links to press reports and the words "I believe" added by the Morning Call.]

Ted Morgan is emeritus professor of political science at Lehigh University and the author most recently of “What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy.”

Exposing the Myth of a Free-Market Economy

[Published in the Morning Call, November 5, 2018: https://www.mcall.com/opinion/national/mc-opi-democratic-socialism-capitalism-20181105-story.html ]

 

My former Lehigh University colleague, Anthony Patrick O’Brien, recently traced the evolution of the iPhone back to Adam Smith and the origins of capitalism in The Morning Call. There’s some truth in that.

However, along the way, his argument reinforced two oft-repeated ideological myths that have long crippled the American polity’s ability to deal with the profound problems we face.

In O’Brien’s account, the Industrial Revolution in England produced “economic growth capable of improving the life of the average person … . Capitalism had arrived!”

Yet what improved the lives of average people? According to this free-market mythology, rising productivity meant that “for the first time in human history, the average family was well clothed, well fed, and well housed.” In other words, left to its own devices, the market takes care of average people.

The reality is radically different. Anyone who has read Smith knows he made no such claim, but instead maintained that state intervention was necessary to level the playing field for a market system to work. Left to its own devices, industrial capitalism produced — and continues to produce — massive inequality and the horrific exploitation of working people, all reinforced by violent repression by the state and private goons. The unfettered market also produces a tendency toward giant monopolies.

So, what did improve the lives of average people?

Against the resistance of capitalists, laborers organized and became a political force via their ability to strike and demand concessions. In part, worried about the danger of mass uprising, the state intervened in the economy and produced a wide range of social reforms — minimum wage and overtime protection, collective bargaining guarantees, a graduated income tax, efforts to equalize educational opportunity, and a public safety net for the elderly.

Later interventions began to safeguard us all from the ravages of industrial capitalism, protecting both our rights as consumers and the environment we all share.

Of course, the state has also consistently intervened to protect capitalism from its own built-in destructiveness — through anti-trust laws, subsidies, insurance against bank failures, and bailouts, among many other actions. Government in the modern state is inextricably involved in the market economy, one reason the free market is itself a mythical concept.

The idea of government being used to help the average person be “well clothed, well fed, and well housed” (and well educated) is precisely what has been under attack for decades, going back to the rise of neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and we have been paying a deep price for that attack for a long time.

Along with deregulation, privatization, a campaign to destroy organized labor, and attacks on public education and social welfare policies, tax “reforms” have produced obscene wealth in the hands of relatively few.

Because of the significance of money in politics, neoliberalism means that the average person is increasingly at risk while the state is dominated by the interests of capital.

How can this be sustained where there is supposed to be one person, one vote (although that, too, is under attack)? One thread running through our entire history has been the use of race to create a threatening “other” that allegedly endangers our well-being. Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has hyped up the alleged threat to our way of life of Muslim and brown-skinned immigrants. Divide and rule goes back a long way.

But the other ideological device echoed in O’Brien’s piece, to say nothing of the leaders of both political parties, is the alleged threat to our freedom of something called socialism. In conventional usage, socialism now means any effort to use government to address the needs of average people or to protect our commons.

Yet lurking in that distortion is the implied connection with the long-discredited state socialist model we used to call communism. As O’Brien puts it, socialism would bring a “stagnation in living standards and the loss of freedom.” Sounds like the old USSR, doesn’t it?

It’s certainly radically different from the poorly understood idea of democratic socialism — a democratic ideal, really, in which we, an aware, civically educated and engaged people, work together to figure out the constraints that need to be put on how markets operate so as to ensure the well-being of all, including future generations. 

In other words, markets subservient to democratically generated aims of the people, not the aims of 

the people subservient to imperatives of capitalism.

Average people have endured a stagnation in living standards for some time now; democratic socialism would obviously begin to redress that. If there is to be some loss of freedom, it is most likely to revolve around the ability of the very wealthy to expropriate and horde wealth and the ability of private enterprise to endanger the prospects for human survival.

Mainstream Media Obscure the Real Immigration Story

Published by Truthout Buzzflash

http://buzzflash.com/commentary/mainstream-media-obscure-the-real-immigration-story
July 26, 2018

TED MORGAN FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The cruel separation of undocumented immigrant children from their parents and the Trump administration's continuing deportation of parents persists as a hot-button news item.
Much can be learned from the way the mass media have informed and misinformed us about immigration issues.

For starters, as is often the case, dramatic and heart-wrenching visuals of children being separated from their parents catapulted the issue into public awareness and debate over administration policies.

Yet importantly, this latest chapter took place against a backdrop of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign that effectively played on fears of "criminal" immigrants "stealing Americans' jobs." Fears of "illegal immigrant gangs" burning down cities have been stoked by right-wing media for years.

Interesting that many of these cities have declared themselves "sanctuary cities" to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Meanwhile, empirical research has demonstrated that immigrant populations are, in fact, less likely than citizens to break the law and that rising immigration does not lead to rising crime.
Yet Trump's repeated dismissals of "fake news" helps to lock his electoral base into a right-wing echo chamber, led by Fox News. In effect, exposed to no countervailing views that might be considered legitimate, they live in a kind of totalitarian realm.

The Boundaries of Mainstream Debate

The inhumane practice of separating children from their parents legitimized widespread denunciation across much of the political spectrum, and was the catalyst for recent "Families Belong Together" protests erupting across the US and in cities around the world.

Trump administration responses appealed to a simplistic "law and order" mentality: "Illegal" immigrants are "criminals" and should be treated as such, and separating children from parents will "deter" future migration from Mexico and Central America.

Mainstream media coverage makes it too easy to see this as simply a Trump-caused problem, when in fact it is produced by an imperial US foreign policy and the wider exploitation of the Global South by the wealthy nations of the world.

As many in the mass media have documented, most migrants are fleeing for their lives from gang violence or state oppression in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.

The question is: Where does this violence come from?

The answer has the bloody hands of the United States all over it.

Gang violence in El Salvador took root after the US deported hundreds of gang members from Los Angeles, without letting the government of El Salvador know that the deported had criminal records.
These MS-13 members grew up poor and marginalized in the barrios of Los Angeles, the children of parents who had fled for their lives from the brutal police-state violence of the US-backed regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala in the '70s and '80s -- what mainstream media outlets like The New York Times sanitize as those countries' "civil wars."

This makes their parents legitimate recipients of political asylum. However, US policy has restricted that category to those who fled repression from enemy(e.g., leftist) regimes. To designate Salvadoran or Guatemalan immigrants as political refugees would be to acknowledge the brutal repression the US supported. Hence, they instead became "illegal immigrants."

Those foreign policies were echoed in the 2009 Obama-supported military coup in Honduras that restored the brutal repression of the traditional Honduran elites.  Honduras has joined El Salvador as one of the murder capitals of the world and is now a leading source of immigrants fleeing north.
As Honduran singer, Karla Lara, put it at a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania concert, "We are not a violent people. [Honduras] has been made violent by US guns. For years, the US military has been killing us."

Rarely acknowledged in mainstream media, support for brutal police-state dictatorships has been a persistent feature of US foreign policy for decades, typically justified in the name of "defending freedom" -- against, you know, the "international communist conspiracy," as Sen. Joseph McCarthy liked to put it.

Yet beneath this support lies the imperative of imperialism -- of creating a good climate for business and investment in what was called the "Third World." As political scientists Daniel Hellinger and Dennis Judd have written in The Democratic Façade,

The important features of a good business climate, as defined by corporate and foreign policy elites, are: a tractable low-paid labor force; an absence of worker-controlled unions; weak or nonexistent environmental protection laws; lax health and safety regulations in the work place; tax concessions and government subsidies for business; the use of public money to provide the infrastructure necessary for the functioning of business; and laws permitting the tax-free repatriation of corporate profits back to the United States.  Because political revolutions commonly arise in reaction to such a system of exploitation, a repressive political system is a necessary feature of a `good business climate.'

US policy has, of course, been reinforced by international institutions of capital like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Loans to aid "development" follow the "good business climate" model. Nations devoting too much public effort to the needs of their own citizens are then required to make "strategic adjustments" if they want to receive more aid.

A similar dynamic can be seen in the wealthy European Union seeking strategic adjustments by the struggling nations of Greece, Spain and Italy.

So much for "spreading democracy" in the world. But as with blowback from US policies in the Middle East, the plight of immigrants brings the impact of US policy abroad back home to us.

These costs are only the tip of the iceberg of what Americans pay for our heavily militarized, imperial foreign policy. The political mainstream operates much like a totalitarian society where these crucial truths are invisible to all who don't seek access to progressive resources.