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Opinion Forum:
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Saturday's
Lagniappe
Ignoring
Chavez's Plan
By
Michael Rowan and Doug Shoien
Hugo Chavez may have lost both the recall referendum in 2004
and the December 2006 presidential election, according to studies
conducted by a distinguished multidisciplinary team in Caracas,
Venezuela. The team includes the rector of Universidad Simon
Bolivar, Frederick Malpica, and a former rector of the National
Electoral Council, Alfredo Weil.
Astonishing
as it may seem to Americans who believe the contention by Mr.
Chavez that he won both elections by a landslide — 58%
to 42% in the recall and 61% to 39% in the presidential election
— the studies show that since 2003, Mr. Chavez has added
4.4 million favorable names to the voter list and "migrated"
2.6 million unfavorable voters to places where it was difficult
or impossible for them to vote.
None
of these additions or migrations to the voter-register has been
independently audited in Venezuela. Instead, the votes have
been electronically counted by Chavez cronies. So when Mr. Chavez
announces a landslide, there has been no way to prove otherwise,
even though exit polls and other data have consistently shown
that half the voters of Venezuela or more oppose Mr. Chavez.
On
the basis of this fraudulent manipulation, Mr. Chavez has claimed
a national mandate for all of the following, which we clarify
for Americans as if President Bush had done so in America. He:
•
won all 435 seats in the House and all 100 in the Senate, and
packed the Supreme Court with nine sycophants that never ruled
against him;
•
asked his rubber-stamp Congress to let him legislate unilaterally
including amending the Constitution, and 100% of the members
of Congress voted for that;
•
decreed under these powers that he can run for re-election to
the presidency for life;
•
plans to decree that cities and states will no longer be governed
by elected mayors and governors, but by people's committees
named by him;
•
owned or controlled all but a few TV and radio stations that
either cover his endless speeches averaging 40 hours a week
or risk losing their broadcast licenses;
•
created one political party and denied the rights of citizenship
to recalcitrant members of opposition parties;
•
took over the Federal Reserve and spent the national Treasury
as if it were a personal checking account;
•
funded his campaign with government money and publicly and repeatedly
threatened government workers to vote for him or be fired;
•
dictated wages, prices, interest rates, profits, and currency
exchange rates under the economic theory that he knows best;
•
created an army reserve commanded personally by him that was
10 times the size of the existing military;
•
nationalized the telephone and electric utilities along with
thousands of private enterprises on the theory that collectives
are better than private enterprises;
•
put military henchmen loyal only to him in charge of government
and civil institutions that they have no qualifications to run;
•
declared that schools would submit to a curriculum that rewrites
national history as he sees it, and mandated military indoctrination
for all children;
•
dictated the purpose and occupancy for private homes, apartment
houses, and properties under the threat of confiscation if owners
did not comply;
•
prosecuted human rights and voter-rights leaders for treason,
which is punishable by 16 years in prison;
•
jailed individuals for five years who voiced opinions on TV
he disagreed with;
•
looked the other way as thousands of his police and military
worked the murder, kidnapping, theft, drug, and money-laundering
trades with impunity;
•
began considering declaring a national religion with him as
its spiritual leader;
•
changed the way unemployment and poverty are calculated when
the international standards of measurement proved embarrassing
to his false claims of having solved those problems;
•
put military henchmen loyal only to him in charge of government
and civil institutions that they have no qualifications to run;
•
declared that schools would submit to a curriculum that rewrites
national history as he sees it, and mandated military indoctrination
for all children;
•
dictated the purpose and occupancy for private homes, apartment
houses, and properties under the threat of confiscation if owners
did not comply;
•
prosecuted human rights and voter-rights leaders for treason,
which is punishable by 16 years in prison;
•
jailed individuals for five years who voiced opinions on TV
he disagreed with;
•
looked the other way as thousands of his police and military
worked the murder, kidnapping, theft, drug, and money-laundering
trades with impunity;
•
began considering declaring a national religion with him as
its spiritual leader;
•
changed the way unemployment and poverty are calculated when
the international standards of measurement proved embarrassing
to his false claims of having solved those problems;
•
ran an off-budget slush fund that rivals the size of the official
government budget;
•
increased the size of a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy
so grandly that he now has at least one employee in half the
families of the country;
•
traveled the world lavishly preaching about ending poverty,
welfare, and theft — the three main characteristics of
his government;
•
advertised his model of government — with the highest
inflation rate and highest murder rate in Latin America, and
one of the worst human rights records — as the hope of
the world.
We
are not making this up. Mr. Chavez did — or is doing —
all of that and more. But some have said that he is really a
good guy who has been slandered and misunderstood. We need more
dialogue with him, they say. He's an elected president of a
sovereign nation and we should respect that, they also say.
What
is it about Mr. Chavez that they don't get? What does Mr. Chavez
have to do to make them see him as he really is? If calling
Mr. Bush "the Devil" and America "the Evil Empire"
is all someone has to do to gain acceptance from those who oppose
American policy, why didn't Pol Pot, Muammar Gadhafi, and Robert
Mugabe qualify?
President
Carter endorsed the Chavez counts without any verifiable paper
ballot count or audit. Why? And why does he continue to support
Mr. Chavez? Why do members of Congress from 17 states look the
other way as Mr. Chavez delivers subsidized oil to households
in their districts?
We
believe Mr. Chavez is given a wide berth everywhere because
he's got an oil supply second only to Saudi Arabia. He is using
America's oil market — or lack of oil production —
to get Americans to ignore what he's up to.
Doug Schoen
is a former principal in Penn Schoen & Berland, which conducted
exit polls in the 2004 recall referendum and in the 2006 presidential
election. Michael Rowen
is a free-lance columnist and the author of "Getting Over
Chavez and Poverty."Petroleumworld do not necessarily share
these views.
