Based on The Independent Institute's Senior Fellow Robert Higgs' calculation of US defense spending for FY 2006 of $934.9 billion, it still means the Pentagon outspends Venezuela's military by around 500 to one. Higgs includes the separate budgets for the Department of Defense, Energy, State, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Treasury's Military Retirement Fund, other smaller defense-related budgets plus net interest paid attributable to past debt-financed defense outlays. Even then, he omitted off-the-books budgets and secret intelligence ones for CIA and NSA.
Back to the Times' Romero and it's clear his reporting smells the same as Iraq's WMDs and Iran's legal commercial nuclear program being threat enough to warrant sanctions and a US military response. Romero is right in step with Bush administration World Bank president neocon nominee Robert Zoellick. He took aim at Hugo Chavez from Mexico City June 16 with warnings Venezuela is "a country where economic problems are mounting, and as we're seeing on the political side it's not moving in a healthy direction."
Romero reports similar agitprop and did it May 17 in his article titled "Clash of Hope and Fear as Venezuela Seizes Land." He began saying "The squatters arrive before dawn with machetes and rifles, surround the well-ordered rows of sugar cane and threaten to kill anyone who interferes. Then they light a match to the crops and declare the land their own." He continued saying "Mr. Chavez is carrying out what may become the largest forced land redistribution in Venezuela's history, building utopian farming villages for squatters, lavishing money on new cooperatives and sending army commando units to supervise seized estates in six states."
Violence has accompanied seizures, says Romero, "with more than 160 peasants killed by hired gunmen in Venezuela (and) Eight landowners have also been killed...." Since Chavez took office, there have been peasant and other violent deaths, but most of them have been at the hands of US-Colombian government financed paramilitary death squads operating in Venezuela.
Romero stays clear of this while making his rhetoric sound like an armed insurrection is underway in Venezuela forcibly and illegally seizing land from its rightful owners. What's going on, in fact, is quite different that can only be touched on briefly to explain. Hugo Chavez first announced his "Return to the Countryside" plan under the Law on Land and Agricultural Development in November, 2001. The law set limits on landholding size; taxed unused property; aimed to redistribute unused, mainly government-owned land to peasant families and cooperatives; and expropriate uncultivated, unused land from large private owners compensating them at fair market value. So, in fact, the government seizes nothing. It buys unused land from large estates and pays for it so landless peasants can have and use it productively for the first time ever benefitting everyone equitably.
Nowhere in his article did Romero explain this although he did acknowledge prior to 2002, "an estimated 5 per cent of the population owned 80 per cent of the country's private land." By omitting what was most important to include, Romero's report distorted the truth enough to assure his readers never get it from him. Nor do they from any other Times correspondent when facts conflict with imperial interests. That's what we've come to expect from the "newspaper of record" never letting truth interfere with serving wealth and power interests that includes lying for them. Shameless reporting on Venezuela under Hugo Chavez is one of many dozens of examples of Times duplicity and disservice to its readers going back decades.
Former Times journalist John Hess denounced it his way: I "never saw a foreign intervention that the Times did not support, never saw a fare....rent....or utility increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't get me started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?" And why should anyone think its so-called news and information is anything more than propaganda for the imperial interests it serves?
Robert McChesney and Mark Weisbrot explained it well in their June 1 CommonDreams.org article on "Venezuela and the Media" saying: "the US media coverage (with NYT in the lead) of Venezuela's RCTV controversy (and most everything else) says more about the deficiencies of our own news media than it does about Venezuela. It demonstrates again (it's more) willing to carry water for Washington (and the corporate interests it serves) than to ascertain and report the truth of the matter." At the Times, truth is always the first casualty, but especially when the nation's at war.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
I am a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.
First let me thank you for your clear thinking and beautifully written truthful article.
Chavez, in my eyes is a hero to the people of Venezuela. He is villified by those in our country because he won't cave to the dictatorial power of the U.S. and our corrupt Corporate controlled government. I fear the assassination attempts on Chavezs' life will only continue to escalate. I pray for his safety.
Our country is a mess and that I realize is an understatement. How so many of the people in this country can continue to allow themselves to be so blind as to the total decline of anything resembling Democracy in the U.S. is beyond my comprehension. Or how they cannot see that this Corporate control has used us in the hundreds of aggressive actions to control and be the world police around the globe and have destroyed everything in it's path. The deaths of millions having no more meaning than road kill. They don't see that the unrest that begins and escalates is from factions that have been planted, by the Corporate criminals, in these other countries is to deliberatly stir trouble to open the doors so that they can overthrow the then ruling governments and install governments of their choice and it's all for their greed..these countries all have assets they want to control. Greed and control is the ugly driving force of it all.
We see it daily with the decisions within and among the majority of our (so called)elected facilitated also by the bought and paid for no news news media.
I personally feel the beginning of the end of our country began when a corrupt Senator deceived the Congress into believing he was presenting a monetary reform act when in fact he was opening the door to a global monetary system..exactly what the reform act was meant to prevent..The Federal Reserve System.
With the directives our puppet president signed May 9th, I think life as we have known it, however flawed, is history. Our next election, unless another bought and paid for puppet for the White House is assured, may not even happen. We will just find ourselves with a Dictator, King or Emporer pitting our military against their own people.
Thank you again for your clarity.
Sharon Haley (aka mimirae)
I'm a 71 year old, 5th generation of 6 generations of out-spoken women and all realist to boot.
by
Rae (0 articles, 1 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 221 comments)
on Thursday, June 21, 2007 at 4:33:47 PM
THE ONLY INALIENABLE RIGHT IN A DEMOCRACY IS PROPERTY
Thanks for the information about Venezuela and your focus on the distortions of the New York Times that copyrights (i.e. makes property of) the articles it prints regardless of the by-line. The war pimps like Judy Miller are merely the instruments of the Times function you have aptly characterized as propaganda for the propertied interests in the United States.
by
william (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 5 comments)
on Saturday, June 23, 2007 at 1:09:12 AM
Thanks for this excellent overview of the Chavez story -- the most detailed I've found so far on the Internet.
This statement made me smile:
"Unmentioned also was that the Times had to dismiss one of its Venezuelan reporters, Francisco Toro, in January, 2003 when Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) revealed he was an anti-Chavista activist masquerading as an objective journalist."
I didn't realize that anyone from the NYT or the WashPost ever consulted any source but each other.
Thanks again.
by
delia (0 articles, 1 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 112 comments)
on Friday, June 29, 2007 at 5:41:57 AM
3 comments
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