Venezuela president granted sweeping powers

[Judi Lynn]

22. Who has the time, indeed! Outstanding comment, perceptive.

It's a good thing well balanced people take the time to look beyond the right-wing drool which gets stuffed into what should be intelligent conversations.

Most people have known for years how important it is to continue looking for the truth, above and beyond the cheap, manipulated crap thrown out by the corporate media.

Food for thought on this situation which has been going on since the very day Hugo Chavez took office:

FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs
Feb 02 2009

A new FAIR study finds that leading newspapers have been putting political considerations ahead of humanitarian concerns in their editorials on human rights in Latin America.

The report, "Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington's Needs," finds that while Venezuela is by every measure a safer place than Colombia to live, vote, organize unions and political groups, speak out against the government or practice journalism, editorials at four influential newspapers have portrayed Venezuela's government as having a far worse human rights record than Colombia's. While the human rights concerns expressed in newspaper editorials do not track with the degree of human rights abuses documented by human right groups, they do closely follow Washington's official stances toward these countries.

Some highlights from the study, which looked at editorials on human rights in Venezuela and Colombia in the New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald and Los Angeles Times over 10 years (1998-2007):

- Nine in 10 editorials about human rights in Venezuela presented a strictly negative view of the country's record, while a majority of the Colombia editorials presented either a mixed or wholly positive assessment. Of the 101 editorials on Venezuela examined in the study, 91 described the human rights situation negatively, and not a single editorial portrayed Venezuela's record in a wholly positive light. Of 90 editorials on Colombia, 42 only portrayed Colombia's situation as negative, 32 expressed a mixed assessment, and 16 were entirely positive.

~snip~

The authors conclude that, "rather than independently and critically assessing the Colombian and Venezuelan records, major corporate newspaper editors, to one degree or another, have subordinated crucial human rights questions to what they see as the U.S.'s interests in the region."

More:
http://fair.org/press-release/fair-study-human-rights-coverage-serving-washingtons-needs/

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]

Buying Venezuela's Press With U.S. Tax Dollars

Posted: 07/19/10 02:28 PM ET

Originaly published in NACLA

The U.S. State Department is secretly funneling millions of dollars to Latin American journalists, according to documents obtained in June under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The 20 documents released to this author--including grant proposals, awards, and quarterly reports--show that between 2007 and 2009, the State Department's little-known Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor channeled at least $4 million to journalists in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela through the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), a Washington-based grant maker that has worked in Latin America since 1962. Thus far, only documents pertaining to Venezuela have been released. They reveal that the PADF, collaborating with Venezuelan NGOs associated with the country's political opposition, has been supplied with at least $700,000 to give out journalism grants and sponsor journalism education programs.

Until now, the State Department has hidden its role in funding the Venezuelan news media, one of the opposition's most powerful weapons against President Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian movement. The PADF, serving as an intermediary, effectively removed the government's fingerprints from the money. Yet, as noted in a State Department document titled "Bureau/Program Specific Requirements," the State Department's own policies require that "all publications" funded by the department "acknowledge the support." But the provision was simply waived for the PADF. "For the purposes of this award," the requirements document adds, " . . . the recipient is not required to publicly acknowledge the support of the U.S. Department of State."

Before 2007, the largest funder of U.S. "democracy promotion" activities in Venezuela was not the State Department but the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), together with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). But in 2005, these organizations' underhanded funding was exposed by Venezuelan American attorney Eva Golinger in a series of articles, books, and lectures (disclosure: This author obtained many of the documents). After the USAID and NED covers were blown wide open--forcing USAID's main intermediary, Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), a Maryland-based contractor, to close its office in Caracas--the U.S. government apparently sought new funding channels, one of which the PADF appears to have provided.

Although the $700,000 allocated to the PADF, which is noted in the State Department's requirements document, may not seem like a lot of money, the funds have been strategically used to buy off the best of Venezuela's news media and recruit young journalists. This has been achieved by collaborating with opposition NGOs, many of which have a strong media focus. The requirements document is the only document that names any of these organizations--which was probably an oversight on the State Department's part, since the recipients' names and a lot of other information are excised in the rest of the documents. The requirements document names Espacio Publico and Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, two leading organizations linked to the Venezuelan opposition, as recipients of "subgrants."

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-bigwood/buying-venezuelas-press-w_b_650178.html

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]

You Probably Didn’t Hear that Venezuela Was Again Ranked the Happiest Country in South America

Written by Dan Beeton
Tuesday, 17 September 2013 15:50

The U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its World Happiness Report for 2013 last week. Following up on the first such report, released last year, the U.N. says that the 2013 edition

delves in more detail into the analysis of the global happiness data, examining trends over time and breaking down each country’s score into its component parts, so that citizens and policy makers can understand their country’s ranking. It also draws connections to other major initiatives to measure well-being, including those conducted by the OECD and UNDP’s Human Development Report…

The World Happiness Report, as with similar such studies as the Happy Planet Index is in part a response to perceived shortcomings with traditional economic and social measures such as growth, poverty rates, employment, education, life expectancy and other indicators.

While U.S. media coverage of the report was not overwhelming, there was some. The report was also covered in numerous international outlets in countries throughout Europe, in Asia, Africa and Australia and New Zealand, among others. CNN noted that

“On a regional basis, by far the largest gains in life evaluations in terms of the prevalence and size of the increases have been in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in Sub-Saharan Africa", the report said. Reduced levels of corruption also contributed to the rise.

But CNN neglected to mention that Venezuela ranked first – again – among South American nations as happiest.

More:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/you-probably-didnt-hear-that-venezuela-was-again-ranked-the-happiest-country-in-south-america

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]

AP’s One-Sided Venezuela Coverage

On Desk Reporters Who “Phone-in” the Spin

By Dan Feder
Special to the Narco News Bulletin
December 18, 2002

The statement seemed clear enough. After a total of 25 hours of negotiations that framed this past weekend, the Organization of American States – representing 34 governments – released a much-awaited declaration on the crisis in Venezuela. The OAS rejected any solution that is not consistent with the Venezuelan constitution – which went into law with the support of President Hugo Chávez in 1999 only after the entire nation approved the text in a referendum – and “fully support(s) the democratic and constitutional order of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, whose government is headed by Hugo Chávez Frías.”

But the Associated Press (AP)’s Nestor Ikeda, who until yesterday had not written on Venezuela since the coup last April, doesn’t seem to get it. And looking at the coverage AP has provided on Venezuela for the last two weeks, this is hardly surprising; the reports, especially those of a certain writer we will get to in a moment, have been a steady stream of dishonest spin.

Despite a short, uncomplicated, essentially unambiguous declaration (making it something of an anomaly in diplomatic literature), Ikeda apparently felt the need to bend over backwards trying to prove that the OAS had, in fact, “given no direct support to Chavez.” What could have been more direct than the above statement? A photo of the 34 ambassadors wearing red berets shouting “viva la revolución bolivariana?” An international force sent in to squash the opposition? How long can people like Ikeda deny that the opposition has lost the bulk of the international support that it once had?

Ikeda goes on to quote the US Ambassador to the OAS, Roger Noriega, who says “this resolution supports the secretary general’s efforts, unequivocally and energetically,” giving the impression that Noriega was quite pleased with the resolution. Here may lie the key to Ikeda’s bizarre slanting of this important story. Noriega recently served on the Senate Foreign Affairs committee. While in that post, he became notorious for his skill at manipulating reporters. Once, he was overheard bragging that New York Times’ Larry Rohter never made a move without consulting him. It seems that, rather than seek out independent analysis of the resolution, or do his own (did he even read it? one has to wonder), Ikeda has let a veteran Washington spin-doctor tell the story for him.

More:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue26/article567.html

[font size=4]ETC.[/font]