International Elections Thread

Current Affairs
41

[quote=“The Runt, post: 741359, member: 181”]Totti, how are you calling the election in your homeland?

Could Berlusconi complete a lazarus like recovery?[/quote]
No chance.

42

The BBC are reporting that it’s likely to end in a stalemate with neither party able to form a government.

43

I’m quietly confident Silvio can lead us again.

44

Some comedian got 3rd place

45

Silvio?

46

[SIZE=6][FONT=georgia]Why the US demonises Venezuela’s democracy[/FONT][/SIZE]

[FONT=arial]Venezuela is about to hold impeccably free and fair elections. Yet the US treats it as a dictatorship[/FONT]
[LIST]
[][U]Mark Weisbrot[/U]
[]The Guardian, Wednesday 3 October 2012
[/LIST]
[FONT=arial]http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/03/why-us-dcemonises-venezuelas-democracy[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]On 30 May, Dan Rather, one of America’s best-known journalists,announced[/URL] that Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez would die “in a couple of months at most”. Four months later [URL=‘http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/02/hugo-chavez-strongmans-last-stand?newsfeed=true’]Chávez is not only alive and campaigning but widely expected to win re-election on Sunday.[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]Such is the state of misrepresentation of Venezuela – it is probably the most lied-about country in the world – that a journalist can say almost anything about Chávez or his government and it is unlikely to be challenged, so long as it is negative. Even worse, Rather referred to Chávez as “the dictator” – a term that few, if any, political scientists familiar with the country would countenance.[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]Here is what Jimmy Carter said about Venezuela’s “dictatorship” a few weeks ago: “As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.”[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]Carter won a Nobel prize for his work through the election-monitoringCarter Center, which has observed and certified past Venezuelan elections. But because Washington has sought for more than a decade to delegitimise Venezuela’s government, his viewpoint is only rarely reported. His latest comments went unreported in almost all of the US media.[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]In Venezuela, voters touch a computer screen to cast their vote and then receive a paper receipt, which they verify and deposit in a ballot box. Most of the paper ballots are compared with the electronic tally. This system makes vote-rigging nearly impossible: to steal the vote would require hacking the computers and then stuffing the ballot boxes to match the rigged vote.[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]Unlike in the US, where in a close vote we really have no idea who won (see Bush v Gore[/URL]), Venezuelans can be sure that their vote counts. And also unlike the US, where as many as 90 million eligible voters [URL=‘http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-08-15/non-voters-obama-romney/57055184/1’]will not vote in November[/URL], the government in Venezuela has done [URL=‘http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6934’]everything to increase voter registration (now at a record of about 97%) and participation.[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]Yet the US foreign policy establishment (which includes most of the American and western media) seethes with contempt for Venezuela’s democratic process. In a report timed for the elections, the so-called Committee to Protect Journalists says that the government controls a “media empire”, neglecting to inform its readers that Venezuelan state TV has only about 5-8% of the country’s audience. Of course, Chávez can interrupt normal programming with his speeches (under a law that pre-dates his administration), and regularly does so. But the opposition still has most of the media, including radio and print media – not to mention most of the wealth and income of the country.[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]The opposition will probably lose this election not because of the government’s advantages of incumbency – which are abused throughout the hemisphere, including[/URL] the United States, but because the living standards of the majority of Venezuelans have [URL=‘http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/update-the-venezuelan-economy-in-the-chavez-years’]dramatically improved[/URL]under Chávez. Since 2004, when the government gained control over the oil industry and the economy had recovered from the devastating, extra-legal attempts to overthrow it (including the 2002 US-backed military coup and oil strike of 2002-2003), poverty has been [URL=‘http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/venezuelas-economic-recovery-is-it-sustainable’]cut in halfand extreme poverty by 70%. And this measures only cash income. Millions have access to healthcare for the first time, and college enrolment has doubled, with free tuition for many students. Inequality has also been considerably reduced. By contrast, the two decades that preceded Chávez amount to one of the worst economic failures in Latin America, with real income per person actually falling by 14% between 1980 and 1998.[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]In Washington, democracy has a simple definition: does a government do what the state department wants it to do? And of course here, the idea of politicians actually delivering on what they promised to voters is also an unfamiliar concept. So it is not just Venezuela that regularly comes under fire from the Washington establishment: all of the left and newly independent governments of South America, including Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia are in the crosshairs (although Brazil is consideredtoo big to get the same treatment except from the right). The state department tries to keep its eyes on the prize: Venezuela is sitting on 500bn barrels of oil, and doesn’t respect Washington’s foreign policy. That is what makes it public enemy number one, and gets it the worst media coverage.[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]But Venezuela is part of a “Latin American spring” that has produced the most democratic, progressive, and independent group of governments that the region has ever had. They work together, and Venezuela has solid support among its neighbours. This is the former president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, last month: “A victory for Chávez is not just a victory for the people of Venezuela but also a victory for all the people of Latin America … this victory will strike another blow against imperialism.”[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]South America’s support is Venezuela’s best guarantee against continuing attempts by Washington – which is still spending millions of dollars within the country in addition to unknown covert funds – to undermine, delegitimise, and destabilise democracy in Venezuela.[/FONT]

47

[SIZE=6]The media’s misunderstanding of Venezuela[/SIZE]

Hugo Chavez is definitely going to lose, isn’t he?
By Lee SalterPublished 05 October 2012 11:18
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/world-affairs/2012/10/medias-misunderstanding-venezuela

In the run-up to this year’s Venezuelan election, one thing is clear. The incumbent, Hugo Chavez, may lose this time. Indeed he probably lost in 1998, 2000, 2005 and every election contested. At least that’s what we can judge from British news media coverage. Tales of a “shock victory” and of winning an “unexpected majority” will no doubt animate reporting after, as is almost certain, Chavez wins.

It is unsurprising that reporters in the UK remain confused after each election. After all, the business and private media elite take great pride in assuring the world that real Chavez supporters are few, and those that there are are largely brainwashed.

Indeed mention Hugo Chavez to a reasonably well-informed person in the UK and the response will probably be one of suspicion. The outspoken president of Venezuela does manage to get himself noticed, but rarely with a favourable reception in the British press. Often those who may otherwise support a left wing movement that has made significant advances in social welfare at a time when the West seems only capable of punishing the neediest know little of such progress but a good deal to be cautious of.

The challenge is to understand how the vague notions that there’s something perhaps illegitimate, undemocratic and maybe corrupt about the Venezuelan president emerge. To this end, it helps to look to the source of most people’s information on foreign affairs – corporate news.

Venezuela was hardly on the news radar in 1989, the year of the Tiananman Square massacre, when repression of protests in Caracas against IMF-imposed austerity led to a massacre of roughly as many as perished in China. However, when Hugo Chavez was first elected ten years later the press did take interest.

Chavez won a landslide victory in 1998, with 56 per cent of the vote. A new constitution was passed in 1999, supported by 72 per cent of the electorate, all parliamentary votes have been won by Chavez’s supporters since, and Chavez has been re-elected President with between 59.8 per cent and 62.8 per cent of the vote.

Despite this democratic mandate, as Chavez began to confront Venezuela’s internal elite and its allies in the US, reporting on Venezuela was found to be biased in a number of studies (1). One I’ve conducted examined 10 years of BBC online coverage. Within a year of Chavez’s election, the BBC reported that “Opposition leaders in Venezuela have appealed to the international community to intervene to protect democratic rule” (12 April 1999). Four months later it had reported that Venezuela was already a dictatorship.

Few reports referenced Chavez’s electoral legitimacy, and only a tiny percentage even mentioned the widespread social programmes implemented by the government.

At times the BBC’s reporting was beyond comprehension. A subheading in one article referred to the 2002 coup as “Restoring Democracy”. Despite the coup leader having assumed office by military force, the BBC reassured us that “In forming a transitional government, Venezuela has looked not to an existing politician, but to the head of the business leaders’ association”. What was meant by “Venezuela” was obvious yet unexplained.

There is much to be concerned about in Venezuela, as any honest supporter of the government will admit: corruption, crime, inadequate water supplies, repression of journalist by all sides, inadequate housing… the list goes on. Yet a dominant theme in BBC online news reports throughout the 2000s was the legitimacy of the president.

It should therefore be no surprise that a scoping survey I conducted this year (2) found that 20 per cent of respondents thought Venezuela was a dictatorship (only 46 per cent knew it was a democracy), and only 40 per cent thought Chavez was elected by a fair vote.

The same study of the UK press identifies interesting trends. Sixty percent of articles published by six major British newspapers between March 2011 and February 2012 characterised Chavez as “mismanaging”, “threatening”, “misguided or dishonest” etc. Only six per cent included positive characterisations. Much of the coverage of Venezuela’s foreign relations focussed on Iran and Libya, which, whilst problematic in the eyes of many, are not very dissimilar to Britain’s relations with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Again, many of the progressive policies introduced in this period were roundly ignored. There was apparently no room to mention the proposal to construct 1,200 public healthcare projects, the free treatment of 100,261 people for visual impairment, the Special Contribution Law for Oil to ensure that oil profits be shared among the Venezuelan people, or for news that the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean’s found poverty to have been halved in Venezuela between 2002-8 (in spite of the coup and the oil industry lockout). The introduction of a plan to assist up to one million poor children in leisure activities passed without mention, as did the launch of a mission to build two million houses. The sequestration of “idle land” belonging to collapsed banks passed without comment.

There was little or no reporting of USAID funding of “the opposition”, nor of opposition attacks on pro-government journalists. It was also unimportant that a Colombian senator accused Venezuelan Presidential candidate Capriles of having paramilitary ties in Colombia.

We did hear that the person the Express called “Venezuela’s crackpot wannabe dictator” was, according to The Times and Telegraph, teetering near the edge, facing growing hostility from Venezuelans. It is indeed a long-established trend that before each election the number of stories predicting Chavez’s decline increases dramatically.

The concern of many in the Bolivarian movement is that such stories act as priming for the inevitable announcement from “the opposition” and perhaps from the odd US diplomat the elections were questionable or perhaps even invalid.

The big news was Chavez’s cancer, the story of which read as an allegory for Venezuelan politics. The Sun told us that “medics claimed” and “sources said” “bungling surgeons” “botched” the operation on Chavez, leaving him just months to live.

It’s not difficult to see the links between the “botched” operation, Chavez’s health and the fate of Venezuela. In its article “World’s worst dictators”, the Times found Chavez’s cancer may lead to the fall of a “dictator”. One may assume that with the cancerous dictator gone, Venezuela would be healed.

In spite of this prospect, the Telegraph informed us that without an “authoritarian” to rule, colleagues in government would initiate a power struggle that would lead to crisis at “unprecedented levels”.

It also used the opportunity to remind us that “Critics accuse [Chavez] of authoritarian instincts, mismanaging the economy and squandering billions of dollars of oil revenues”. Given that his only well-wishers seemed to be Castro and Ahmadinejad, Chavez’s cancer was a good opportunity to note that “His stridently anti-Western foreign policy and vigorous promotion of his “socialist Bolivarian revolution" across Latin America has left him with few allies beside President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran”. Kirchner, Zayala, Rousseff, Correa, Ortega, Humala, Morales and Funes must have felt somewhat jilted.

The few times policies in Venezuela get mentioned, more often than not they act as vehicles for speculation on Chavez’s prospective threats to democracy.
The policy to repatriate Venezuelan gold reserves from the UK was designed provide for economic stability and further economic integration in Latin America. But we hear in the Times that “others suggested” Chavez’s was motivated by his worry “about international sanctions in the case of violence during the presidential elections … the transfers will allow him to keep control of the country if he refuses to accept defeat”. Presumably that’s why he “planned to siphon off Venezuela’s gold wealth for personal gain.”

It is no surprise then that the British public’s perceptions of Venezuela, on the left as well as on the right, are largely of a dysfunctional state ruled a megalomaniacal tyrant.
Venezuelan politics can be difficult for British journalists to report outside liberal democratic and bureaucratic capitalist frameworks. It is true that there are genuine concerns about the political situation in the country. The concerted efforts to destabilise the government over the past 14 years have met with government responses that have restricted the freedom of some media outlets, and have not lessened the existing tension between social classes.

Vehemently anti-Chavez news reports are rare in the UK press, but this does not negate the softer power of anti –Chavez voices, whose claims often frame reporting. These voices also often act as the originators of memes that spread around copy.

There was the odd expression of old-fashioned imperialism, as when the Telegraph told us Iran was “audacious” by launching a Spanish language Iranian television channel in “America’s backyard”, a month after the Times reported Ahmadinejad’s “tour of America’s backyard”, but in the main the memes of “opposition concerns”, political instability, and the threat of Chavez dominated.

Many of these memes arise from rumours and speculation that circulate in Latin American news and opinion programmes, and from discussions in well-to-do parts of Caracas (where most correspondents are based). One need spend only a few minutes in conversation in an Alta Mira cafe before one is struck by tales of government wrongdoing.
The selection of memes reflects the affinities between the dominant culture of UK journalism and preoccupations of Western states. Yet the need for information, and the rarely adhered to professional ethic of balance, provides some space for filler memes from the “other side”. For example there was an admission that Chavez has some support, but that was only in reproduced Reuters copy that reported he “appeared on the balcony of his presidential palace in front of thousands of supporters”.

There was also the odd reference to the 2002 coup. The same sentence, that Chavez was the target of a failed coup attempt that year and the claims of plots against him, was reproduced in four articles in different papers published in July 2011, seemingly pasted from agency copy. It’s probably worth noting that of those four mentions, one was in an piece titled “Chavez’s absence makes rivals and older brother grow bolder” (Times), and one in a piece titled “Region in turmoil as Chavez reveals battle with cancer” (Times).

One of the biggest restrictions on accurate journalism has been one of resourcing. With foreign reporting budgets – especially covering Latin America – ever reduced in most news companies, the reliance on agency copy, stringers, and domestic media is increased. But when this is received with ideological suspicion of a government, the latter will always be at a communicative disadvantage. So too, the beneficiaries of government social policies are marginalised when they lack international communicative power.

In the meantime corporate media audiences remain largely uninformed should. They’ll know of this or that spat, of some concerns about democracy and a little about a president who seems rather like a tyrant. No doubt they will be surprised at the outcome of the election, and will take the opposition’s challenge to the legitimacy of the vote as necessary.

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[SIZE=13px][FONT=Verdana]21st century Newspeak:[/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=13px][FONT=Verdana]“Undemocratic”: Winning four elections in a row with 56%, 60%, 64% and 54% of the vote. Allowing every exile from your country a vote in every election, even though you know they’ll almost exclusively vote against you. Running campaigns to boost voter registration and participation, instead of running the sort of campaigns to get large sections of the population barred from voting that “free” countries engage in.[/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=13px][FONT=Verdana]“Regime”: A four times democratically-elected government.[/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=13px][FONT=Verdana]“Dictator”: Running “the best election system in the world”, in the words of a former US President. Accepting the results of a constitutional referendum that went against you, rather than re-running it a year later to get the result you wanted.[/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=13px][FONT=Verdana]“Corrupt”: Redistributing wealth derived from a country’s natural resources towards the poor, where before it had been almost entirely appropriated by honest oligarchs and benevolent US corporations. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=13px][FONT=Verdana]“Buying elections”: Improving housing, healthcare and education. Greatly reducing poverty and unemployment. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=13px][FONT=Verdana]“Anti-free speech”: Allowing an environment where 92% of media outlets have a clear and outspoken agenda against you. [/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=13px][FONT=Verdana]“Authoritarian”: Not allowing media to openly call for a bloody coup against you. Because every other country in the world allows such a thing. Improving recognition for the rights of minorities.[/FONT][/SIZE]

[SIZE=13px][FONT=Verdana]“A total failure”: Not being able to cure every single ill in 14 years in a country that had previously whose population expanded from 11 million people in 1972 to 28 million people in 2011 and in a country where extreme poverty was some of the worst on the planet before you took over.[/FONT][/SIZE]

49

Not quite an election but I see the Brits are quite chuffed at the outcome of their referendum on the ownership of the Malvinas. Only 3 people voted against British rule, which isn’t that surprising considering the electorate comprised British settlers. It’s a bit like asking the Israeli settlers do they want to be Israeli or Palestinian.

On a slightly related note there’s a bit of disquiet in the commonwealth about Sri Lanka’s human rights record. They seem to be taking over some rotating ceremonial hosting of some commonwealth event or other and now a few countries are up in arms about their commitment to democracy. As some weird English cunt laughably put it on C4 News last night, “if the Commonwealth doesn’t stand for human rights and democracy then what does it stand for?” Eh nothing, that’s the point.

Imagine using the ruins of a brutal empire as some sort of torch to shine enlightened democratic ways on the the darker corners of the earth. Arrogant wankers.

50

Chavez’s party have held onto power in Venezuela after an election but the opposition aren’t happy and are predictably demanding a recount and claiming they won. Interesting to see if anyone else intervenes. I’m calling it a fair win for Chavez.

51

That’s good enough for me Rocko.

52

+2

53

Some win alright considering he is dead

54

Don’t believe everything you read in the media Jules.

55

:eek:

56

Berlusconi has been sentenced to 7 years in jail after being found guilty of paying an underage prostitute for sex and abusing his office to cover it up.

57

What would he have got if he hadn’t paid?

58

I’m not sure, maybe a kiss and a cuddle.

59

He is hard luck so, the poor fucker.

60

He won’t actually go to prison, of course.