Oliver Stone, Jesse Ventura On Larry King-Must See!

[Joe234]

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Watch Jesse on Part 2 give it to Conniie Mack about 2/3 through.

[tom502]

I missed it. I do like Jesse though.

[truthwolf1]

I was at my cabin last weekend and little drunk when Jesse came on the late show Carson Daily, Last Call. We only get a few stations out there.
It made me a little nervous how popular this conspiracy stuff is getting even for a conspiracy nut like myself.

[tom502]

I think if they(the media) make it a pop fad, then it will not be taken seriously, it becomes entertainment.

[Joe234]

This isn't about conspiracy stuff. It's about retards like Sen. Connie Mack, who's only credential
is that his dad was a baseball player, demonizing Hugo Chavez without any facts.

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[truthwolf1]

It's is about Stone's new movie.

I would love to drink tequila, smoke cigars and talk smack with Chavez.

[sgreger1]

This isn't about conspiracy stuff. It's about retards like Sen. Connie Mack, who's only credential
is that his dad was a baseball player, demonizing Hugo Chavez without any facts.

---

Yah I don't know why people even bother making up conspiracies about Chavez, he gives us plenty of facts to know why he sucks, no need to make up our own.

[Joe234]

Yah I don't know why people even bother making up conspiracies about Chavez, he gives us plenty of facts to know why he sucks, no need to make up our own.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Pa...Venezuela.html

Far from ruining the country, here are some of the good things the Chavez government has accomplished:

* A land reform program designed to assist small farmers and the landless poor has been instituted-this past March a large landed estate owned by a British beef company was occupied by agrarian workers for farming purposes

* Education is now free (right through to university level), causing a dramatic increase in grade school enrollment

* The government has set up a marine conservation program and is taking steps to protect the land and fishing rights of indigenous peoples

* Special banks now assist small enterprises, worker cooperatives, and farmers

* Attempts to further privatize the state-run oil industry-80 percent of which is still publicly owned-have been halted and limits have been placed on foreign capital penetration

* Chavez kicked out U.S. military advisors and prohibited overflights by U.S. military aircraft engaged in counterinsurgency in Colombia

* "Bolivarian Circles" have been organized throughout the nation, neighborhood committees designed to activate citizens at the community level to assist in literacy, education, vaccination campaigns, and other public services

* The government hires unemployed men, on a temporary basis, to repair streets and neglected drainage and water systems in poor neighborhoods

Then there is the health program. I visited a dental clinic in Chavez's home state of Barinas. The staff consisted of four dentists, two of whom were young Venezuelan women. The other two were Cuban men who were there on a one-year program. The Venezuelan dentists noted that in earlier times dentists did not have enough work. There were millions of people who needed treatment, but care was severely rationed by one's ability to pay. Dental care was distributed like any other commodity, not to everyone who needed it, but only to those who could afford it.

When the free clinic in Barinas first opened it was flooded with people seeking dental care. No one was turned away. Even opponents of the Chavez government availed themselves of the free service, temporarily putting aside their political aversions.

Many of the doctors and dentists who work in the barrio clinics (along with some of the clinical supplies and pharmaceuticals) come from Cuba. Chavez has also put Venezuelan military doctors and dentists to work in the free clinics. Meanwhile, much of the Venezuelan medical establishment is vehemently opposed to the free clinic program, seeing it as a Cuban communist campaign to undermine medical standards and physicians' earnings. That low-income people are receiving medical and dental care for the first time in their lives does not seem to be a consideration that carries much weight among the more "professionally minded" practitioners.

I visited one of the government-supported community food stores that are located around the country, mostly in low income areas. These modest establishments sell canned goods, pasta, beans, rice, and some produce and fruits at well below market price, a blessing in a society with widespread malnutrition.

Popular food markets have eliminated the layers of middlepeople and made staples more affordable for residents. Most of these markets are run by women. The government also created a state-financed bank whose function is to provide low-income women with funds to start cooperatives in their communities.

There is a growing number of worker cooperatives. One in Caracas was started by turning a waste dump into a shoe factory and a T-shirt factory. Financed with money from the Petroleum Ministry, the coop has put about 1,000 people to work. The workers seem enthusiastic and hopeful.

Surprisingly, many Venezuelans know relatively little about the worker cooperatives. Or perhaps it's not surprising, given the near monopoly that private capital has over the print and broadcast media. The wealthy media moguls, all vehemently anti-Chavez, own four of the five television stations and all the major newspapers.

The person most responsible for Venezuela's revolutionary developments, Hugo Chavez, has been accorded the usual ad hominem treatment in the U. S. news media. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle described him as "Venezuela's pugnacious president." An earlier Chronicle report (November 30, 2001) quotes a political opponent who calls Chavez "a psychopath, a terribly aggressive guy." The London Financial Times sees him as "increasingly autocratic" and presiding over something called a "rogue democracy."

In the Nation (May 6, 2002), Marc Cooper-one of those Cold War liberals who nowadays regularly defends the U.S. empire-writes that the democratically-elected Chavez speaks "often as a thug," who "flirts with megalomania." Chavez's behavior, Cooper rattles on, "borders on the paranoiac," is "ham-fisted demagogy" acted out with an "increasingly autocratic style." Like so many critics, Cooper downplays Chavez's accomplishments and uses name-calling in place of informed analysis.

Other media mouthpieces have labeled Chavez "mercurial," "besieged," "heavy-handed," "incompetent," and "dictatorial," a "barracks populist," a "strongman," a "firebrand," and, above all, a "leftist." It is never explained what "leftist" means.

A leftist is someone who advocates a more equitable distribution of social resources and human services and who supports the kinds of programs that the Chavez government is putting in place. (Likewise a rightist is someone who opposes such programs and seeks to advance the insatiable privileges of private capital and the wealthy few.) The term "leftist" is frequently bandied about in the U. N. media, but seldom defined. The power of the label is in its remaining undefined, allowing it to have an abstracted built-in demonizing impact, which precludes rational examination of its political content.

Meanwhile Chavez's opponents, who staged an illegal and unconstitutional coup in April 2002 against the democratically elected government, are depicted in the U.S. media as champions of "pro-democratic" and "pro-West" governance. We are talking about the free-market plutocrats and corporate-military leaders of the privileged social order who killed more people in the 48 hours they held power in 2002 than were ever harmed by Chavez in his years of rule.

When one of these perpetrators, General Carlos Alfonzo, was hit with charges for the role he had played, the New York Times chose to call him a "dissident" whose rights were being suppressed by the Chavez government. Four other top military officers charged with leading the 2002 coup were also likely to face legal action. No doubt, they too will be described not as plotters or traitors who tried to destroy a democratic government, but as "dissidents," decent individuals who are being denied their right to disagree with the government.

President Hugo Chavez, whose public talks I attended on three occasions, proved to be an educated, articulate, remarkably well-informed and well-read individual. He manifests a sincere dedication to effecting some salutary changes for the great mass of his people, a person who in every aspect seems worthy of the decent and peaceful democratic revolution he is leading. Millions of his compatriots correctly perceive him as being the only president who has ever paid attention to the nation's poorest areas. No wonder he is the target of calumny and coup from the upper echelons in his own country and from ruling circles up north.

Chavez charges that the United States government is plotting to assassinate him. I can believe it.

[sgreger1]

Reasons I do like him

1) I think Chavez is not evil and truly wants to help the poor. He likes to make a personality cult about himself but for the most part he is helping people in his country so more power to him.

2) In a country with that many poor people, I think his ideas work better than the last guy, so I don't really complain about what he does. If you have a nation of poor people, than socialism may be a good framework to build it into something better. In a nation like America, which is full of rich people, the socialist way of doing things doesn't work quite as well.


Reasons I don't like him

1) Chavez embraces socialism, and his whole practice in nationalizing things, redistribution, abolishment of wealthy etc is not my style.
2) He is big into propaganda and tries to blame the west for everything, always claiming how we are trying to assasinate him, but after years nothing has happened. He tries to talk like he is a somebody when he is in fact a nobody. He is very much like che guevara, more like the good parts of him though.


So without going into a long debate about how he has made himself a defacto dictator by rewriting all of government, giving himself new powers, changing the rules on how long you can stay in power, stacking the supreme court in his favor as well as the constitutional assembly, cracking down on any political dissidents etc, I will just concede that what he is doing seems to be working, so more power to him.


I don't think he's some greedy fidel castro type myself, I just think he's an idiot. He is always talking about how the US is trying to kill him and this and that, but after years and years and years there has been very little US intervention over there so he is just doing what all other 3rd world countries to, rally the people by blaming big bad america for anything and everything.

Venezuelans are an intiresting type of people, they have a hair trigger and like to do things like throw one guy out, then after the new guy gets there they decide they don't like him either so the next day they elect the old guy. Chavez has been thrown out more than once and brought back, he seems to be doing some good which is more than I can say for some places.

"Every factory must be a school to educate, like Che Guevara said, to produce not only briquettes, steel, and aluminum, but also, above all, the new man and woman, the new society, the socialist society."
— Hugo Chávez, at a May 2009 socialist transformation workshop[67]





This is what he does wrong that is going to end up hurting his people. He is a rookie and makes too many mistakes, putting his idealism before his people:




Chávez has seized many large farms from their owners. Some of the farmland that had been productive while under private ownership is now idle under collective ownership, and some of the farm equipment sits gathering dust. As a result, food production has fallen substantially. One farmer, referring to the government officials overseeing the land redistribution, stated, "These people know nothing about agriculture."[69]

Chávez has seized many supermarkets from their owners. Under government ownership, the shelves in these supermarkets are often empty.[70]

According to Francisco Rodríguez, resources have been directed "away from the poor even as oil profits were surging",[38] and there is no evidence of improvements in the literacy, poverty or social and economic welfare of the poor (and some evidence of decline in those measures) beyond what could be explained by rising oil prices. He says that "inequality has actually increased during the Chávez administration.[38]

He calls the result of Chávez's policies a "highly distorted economy in which the government effectively subsidizes two-thirds of the costs of imports and foreign travel for the wealthy while the poor cannot find basic food items".[38] He says the percentage of the budget allocated to "health, education and housing" was identical in Chávez's first eight years to the preceding eight years, and lower in 2008 than in 1992.[38] Barry Cannon writes that "most areas of spending have increased".[71] "[S]pending on education as a percentage of GDP stood at 5.1% in 2006, as opposed to 3.4% in the last year of the Caldera government."[71] Spending on health "has increased from 1.6% of GDP in 2000 to 7.71% in 2006".[71] Spending on housing "receives low public support", increasing only "from 1% in GDP to 1.6% in 2006".[71] Teresa A. Meade, writes that Chávez's popularity "rests squarely on the lower classes who have benefited from these health initiatives and similar policies [...] poverty rates fell from 42 to 34 percent from 2000 to 2006, still leaving over 30 percent in this oil-rich nation below the povery line".[72]

A 2006 Foreign Affairs article concurs that minimal gains have occurred despite the oil boom, and says that the government "just changed its methodology for measuring poverty", which rose "from 43 to 54 percent during Chávez's first four years in office" according to government statistics.[52] Barry Cannon attributes this decline to the oil strike in 2002: "The situation changed dramatically [...] once the oil strike was defeated. The Centre for Economic Policy Research[vague][Need quotation on talk to verify] (CEPR) shows that the Venezuelan economy grew on average by 11.85% in the period 2004-2007".[73] Some economists argue that job creation may not be permanent, for it relies on an expanded public payroll that will become unaffordable if oil prices fall.[74] Critics also question the government's reported poverty figures, based on contradictory statistics and definitions,[52] which they say have not fallen enough considering the country's vast oil revenues in the last two years.[74] The Economist reports that both poverty and unemployment figures under Chávez have not seen significant improvement and that official corruption under his government is rampant,[75] and point to the 1–2% drop in Venezuela's per-capita GDP early in Chávez's term, before the 2004 surge in oil prices.[76] According to The Boston Globe, critics say the government defines "informal workers, such as street vendors, as employed, and exclud[es] adults who are studying in missions from unemployment numbers". When the president of the Venezuelan National Statistics Institute released numbers in 2005 which showed that poverty had actually risen by more than 10 points under Chávez (to 53% in 2004, just after the strike), Chávez called for a new measure of poverty, defining a "social well-being index". Under this new definition, poverty registered at 40 percent in 2006.[77]