Development: May 2006 Archives

"Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela is the first major oil producer to use its oil revenue to liberate the poor."

"Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English cooperative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage."

I have spent the past three weeks filming in the hillside barrios of Caracas, in streets and breeze-block houses that defy gravity and torrential rain and emerge at night like fireflies in the fog. Caracas is said to be one of the world's toughest cities, yet I have known no fear; the poorest have welcomed my colleagues and me with a warmth characteristic of ordinary Venezuelans but also with the unmistakable confidence of a people who know that change is possible and who, in their everyday lives, are reclaiming noble concepts long emptied of their meaning in the west: "reform," "popular democracy," "equity," "social justice," and, yes, "freedom."

Full story: http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=8993

If your country has a possibility bombing the atomic one in the future, just think it over..... 500,000 of our lovely grandparents died in the flash with Radioactive Heat ..... Thousands of bodies were evaporated ..... Other survivors, after 50 years, are still suffering from the effects......

For the past century, human beings had the agricultural capacity, the technology and the organizational skills to feed every last person on the planet. Yet, marching along into the 21st century, 80 percent of the world's population lives in absolute poverty - economically defined as missing one or more of the five fundamental necessities of life, i.e., food, clothing, shelter, health care and education. Millions of people have died of neglect, disease, malnutrition and starvation. In large part they have died because precious funds went instead to feed the war machine, also called euphemistically as "military expenditures" or "milex." More recently these costs are referred to not even as military expenditures but as "defense expenditures." This change was wrought in 1947 when the extant Department of War was renamed to Department of Defense. George Orwell referred to these nefarious terminological twists as "doublethink" and "doublespeak."

The driving force behind the Cold War, which was continued by Ronald Reagan through the 1980s and continued to the extreme with 9/11, was fear. If a government can manage to instill high levels of fear into the populace, that government can do anything it wants, in the name of alleviating that fear. Hence the American people always said 'yes' to wars.