With the Chavez Socialist Government, which includes articulate young leaders, many of them women, Venezuelans have these rights, benefits and protections, which the government is mandated to enforce. Americans Need Them Too:
• Right to Jobs, Housing, Health Care,Food, Education and Training
• Right to Equality, Democracy and to Fulfill Human Potential.
• Right to Adequate Living Wage & Human Working Conditions.
• Right to Unionize & Bargain Collectively.
• Strong Labor Laws Favoring Workers, for Occupational Health & Safety, Hours, Pay, Hiring and Dismissals.
• Guaranteed Minimum Wage, Highest in South America.
• Guaranteed Paid Vacations & One Month's Pay Christmas Bonus.
• Government Technical and Financial Assistance to Worker Cooperatives.
• Democratic Rules for Ownership & Control of Cooperatives.
• Equal Pay For Equal Work for All.
• 24 Weeks Off, Paid, for New Mothers, 6 Weeks for Fathers.
• Mandatory Childcare and Nursing Mother Services at Work for Companies with More than 20 Employees.
• Free Childcare Centers.
• 13 Months Pay for 12 Months Work, Paid Vacations
• 40 Hour Workweek, on the Way to 38 Hours and Below.
• Free Public Education & Training to Doctoral Level, With Pay
• Free Laptops Provided to All Students From Second Grade.
• Free Community Computer/Internet Centers and Training.
• Free Neighborhood health care,including Optical and Dental
• Free Treatment and All Drugs for Cancer and Serious Conditions.
• Extensive, Free Immunization and Emergency Assistance Programs.
• Government Assisted Home Ownership and Repairs
• Paychecks for Single Stay-at Home Moms and Care Givers.
• Social Security for All Formal and Informal Workers.
• Special Assistance for Seniors and the Disabled, Including Free or Low Cost Transport and In-home Assistance, including Repairs.
• Hospice and Assisted Living Programs.
• Free or Low Cost Social Tourism Programs for Seniors and Disabled.
• Access to Free or Low Cost Foods & Necessities, Including Appliances, for All.
• Access to Free Musical Instruction for Youth and Prisoners, including Free Instruments.
• Extensive Government-Supported Sports, Recreation, Arts, Theater and Dance Programs.
• Free/Low Cost Land to Farm Cooperatively.
• Government Loans and Grants to Start Businesses & Cooperatives.
• Truly Honest and Audited Elections at all Levels.
• Democratic Neighborhood Control of Repairs and Improvements.
• Loans and Grants for Community Repairs & Improvements.
• Loans and Grants for Individual Owners Home Repairs & Improvements.
• Government Regulated Prices for Basic Necessities, Including drugs, Utilities and Rents.
(The list of services and rights above was compiled from personal experiences here in Venezuela and from articles in English in www.venezuelanalysis.com, such as "Why Do Venezuelan Women Vote for Chavez?", "Venezuela’s Chavez Signs New Labour Law in Act of “Social Justice” for Workers", "Venezuela’s New Labour Law: Promoting Mutual Parental Responsibility.", among others which can be accessed through venezuelanalaysis's search feature by topic.)
Venezuelans have truly honest, accurate and automatically audited and monitored elections at the local, state and national levels. (No dicey, un-auditable computers here.) They enjoy neighborhood control, through democratically elected community councils, of services and community repairs, improvements and zoning issues. Their votes are actually counted and they know it.
Chavez and his socialist government have won 14 out of 15 national elections since 1998, all found by international monitors to be honestly run. In February, 2012, Chavez had 66% approval ratings for his efforts, more than 80% approval for his government’s “Missions”, and, if the election had been run on that day in February, 58.3% would have voted for Chavez and 34.5% for his opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski, who was an anti-Chavez activist in the 2002 coup to remove the elected Chavez. Capriles Radonski supported the coup’s abolition of the Supreme Court, the National Electoral Commission, the Ombudsman, and its dissolution of the national assembly. See "New Poll Reveals Majority Support for Socialism in Venezuela". Newer polls reported by the Correo Del Orinoco newspaper & on-line in Spanish reflect even higher approval ratings. Venezuelanalysis reports on Capriles Radonski's history as a wealthy coup supporter here.
In 2002, when the U.S. funded capitalist right-wing tried to topple President Chavez by kidnapping him and installing a Chamber of Commerce leader in his place, millions of Venezuelans took to the streets, flooding down from the barrios of Caracas and cities all over the country to demand Chavez’s return. Within 48 hours, the coup leaders gave up. The people and the army returned Chavez to his presidency. (See "Chávez Nuestro" by Elizalde and Báez, Casa Editora Abril, Havana, 2005 for a fascinating personal history of Chávez and a blow-by-blow account of the 2002 coup. Available from Amazon in English, free downloads in Spanish on the net.)
If something happens to President Chavez before the October, 2012 election, the over-whelming majority of Venezuelans, themselves empowered through Chavez’s democratic ideals and his government, will keep Chavez’s ideas, his programs and the Socialist government in power.
Venezuelans have the Constitutional Right to be treated with Respect, Dignity, and Equality. They won’t give those up easily. When will the American citizens join the Occupy Movement and flood the U.S.streets to demand them as well?
Contrast the rights and benefits enjoyed by Venezuelans with the reality that U.S. citizens face today:
Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their other assets and their health thanks to the capitalist economic system that makes money from impoverishing them. The objective of these capitalist companies is solely and exclusively to make profits, nothing else matters to them, certainly not the lives of the human beings through whom they make their profits.
U.S. manufacturing and IT jobs have been exported to Third World, low-wage countries, forcing Americans into un-employment and under-employment in low paid service industry jobs.
Our financial companies have defrauded millions of us from our homes by their mortgage frauds and mortgage speculations, even stealing money from our local land recording offices through their MERS scheme to avoid recording fees, preventing many homeowners from even knowing who actually owns their mortgage and who has the legal right to foreclose on them. The phony MERS system has drastically disrupted our previously accurate recording systems, putting a legal cloud over many thousands of property titles. (See my "Finance Capitalism: Has It Eaten Its Own Entrails in Mortgage Fraud Debacle?" and numerous stories in nakedcapitalism.com for articles detailing the frauds.)
The big financial companies also used their MERS system to facilitate stealing our pension funds by selling the pension funds mortgage-backed-securities which they knew to be backed by worthless “liar loan” mortgages. Thus these companies stole both houses and pensions from average citizens.
Our U.S. Justice Department knows exactly who these criminals are, but has not prosecuted them for their mortgage frauds. After all, they are major campaign donors. The Department of Justice doesn’t prosecute them, but they do exonerate them. The U.S. government is in the process of excusing them from their potential civil liabilities through a “global settlement” which requires only insignificant concessions and paltry monetary payments, payments in an insignificant amount in comparison to the massive profits made through the frauds. With this awful "The Top Twelve Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement"the government is, itself, actively defrauding those who have been injured by the big business players, by protecting the big banks from further law suits.
Rather than prosecute the criminals who have stolen trillions from Americans, our U.S. Department of Justice spends tax payer money prosecuting medical marijuana cases against the ill and those who assist them or against “whistle-blowers” such as Bradley Manning, who dared to expose the truth about our government’s inhuman and illegal actions abroad.
In the U.S., our health has been endangered by the increasingly high cost of medical, dental and optical services. Many are dying as a result. So too, many have died because they were denied access to medical insurance, even when they could have paid for it, due to the insurance companies exclusions of those with “pre-existing conditions”. Former Florida Congressman Alan Grayson calculated that more than 30,000 Americans die every year from lack of access to medical care. (See See his Daily Kos article here.)
We have the highest health costs in the world, although we are 37th in world-ranking in health care. More than fifty million of us can’t even go to doctors or hospitals because we can’t afford it; even many of those with insurance can’t go because they can’t afford the high co-pays required. Some of us even die because we couldn’t afford a simple tooth extraction.
We can't even afford to buy drugs. The high prices charged to us by our pharmaceutical companies is obscene, the highest drug prices in the world. The drug companies, through their paid-for congressional representatives, were successful in prohibiting Americans from buying cheap drugs from Canada and in preventing Medicare from negotiating volume discounts from drug companies, as is allowed for our veterans' health care programs.
Debt caused by health care expenses, even for those with medical insurance, are the single leading factor driving Americans into bankruptcy each year.
Although most of us still have free access to public education from kindergarten to high school for our chidren (although there are now attempts to "privatize" them), the higher education necessary to obtain good paying jobs is not free. Student debt is now over a trillion dollars, higher than all our credit card debts.
Most students have to take out high cost loans to attend college and graduate schools, incurring thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of debts upon their graduations, and facing a future of debt slavery, as their choices are severely limited by their debtor status. (Some are even refused employment merely for having student loans, not being in default of their payments).
The companies giving these student loans have successfully passed laws preventing their discharge in bankruptcy, meaning the students are caught in debt slavery for years, if not for the rest of their lives.
Given that so many of us have lost their jobs due to both companies outsourcing our jobs to other countries and due to the bankers crashing of the housing market, many also have been unable to pay their mortgages or even their rents. New decent paying jobs are not available, so they job hunt unsuccessfully and/or take low wage, part-time jobs which can’t adequately feed, clothe and house them. Thus, millions have been made homeless, millions more don’t have enough money to buy food and necessities, and are over-whelming our charitable food banks.
Although millions of homes are empty, have been taken back by the banks (many via fraudulent procedures), while millions of citizens need housing, the government has now proposed a scheme whereby the force-closed houses of Fannie Mae, will be sold in bulk at huge discounts to big businesses (many of the same businesses who stole them in the first place) to be turned into rentals. Thus do the big companies make profits from every single aspect of their mortgage frauds, while tax payers and homeowners suffer the losses.
All this is taking place in what is frequently called the “Richest country in the world”. Why isn’t it taking place in Venezuela?
In socialist Venezuela, the riches from the country’s oil resources are being used to improve the lives, health and welfare of its citizens. Fulfilling human needs and aspirations is that government’s first and only priority. It needs no foreign invasions, no drone bombings to murder innocent civilians, no assassinations, kidnapping or torture to fulfill its priorities.
Time for Americans to wake up and throw off the propaganda that falsely claims that our capitalist economic and political system is the only possible system in this, the “best of all possible capitalists worlds”.
Today, Venezuela’s example proves that that false propaganda is simply not true. Gallup tells us that Venezuela is the 5th happiest country in the world, while the four top countries are all northern European social democracies. (See my dailykos post here for more details.)
Another world, one where human needs and human aspirations are given top priority is being born. It is happening in Venezuela and other countries in Latin America. Let’s join it. Start by joining together in our communities, workplaces, food banks, unemployment lines, and Occupy actions to discuss ideas about what our real needs are, how we want to live, how we want to organize our economic and political system and how we can unit to make a new world our reality. Americans deserve to live like human beings too!
Mon May 07, 2012 at 6:28 AM PT: President Chavez Polls at 57% over Capriles Radonski at 31.9% as reported by Telesur TV Network today: See:
http://www.telesurtv.net/...