robbo203
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Interesting article. It looks increasingly like the Kursk adventure backfired and that the Ukrainian regime is going to pay a heavy price for it. The Russian military has already recaptured a part of Kursk taken by the Ukrainian military and has destroyed a large part of the latter´s equipment and personnel there. If the plan was to get the Russian military to divert resources from Eastern Ukraine where it has been steadily advancing, this has not worked.
Realistically, there is no chance of the Zelensky regime achieving its goals of evicting the Russian regime in the East and Crimea. But whoever wins this war, and it’s looking increasingly like Russia will, the workers on both sides will have lost in the pathetically stupid cause of nationalism. Let’s hope this tragedy comes to an end sooner rather than later and the pointless bloodshed stops….
Interesting piece from the Communist Party of Venezuela. At least they recognise that Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime is no friend of the workers:
“In Venezuela there is a fierce confrontation between two bourgeois poles disputing the domination of the state apparatus in order to control the management of the oil rent: On the one hand, there is the sector of the traditional bourgeoisie and its parties grouped in the Democratic Unitary Platform that have attempted coups d’états, the imposition of foreign sanctions and the theft of public patrimony abroad. And on the other side is the new bourgeois and landed class of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and its allies that emerged from 25 years of privileged access to oil revenues with an administration plagued with corruption and an inability to transform the rentier and dependent base of Venezuelan capitalism.”
“Opposition technicians argue that voting records are very complex difficult to hack — they have electronic signatures, a specific paper and a QR code — and that it would be very easy to verify whether or not they are authentic. “There are people who say that they [the Chavistas] are working to show some records,” said María Corina Machado at an opposition rally in Caracas. “I hope they do it. It would be public proof of fraud. I am waiting for them: publish your records.”
Even when the elections commission released its result, it was botched, Jacques says. “The first state tv announcement listed all the candidates with their percentages and when you added it up, it totaled 132%,” he said. “You would think someone would have checked the addition.”
Brussels-based technology writer Jan Govaerts says the Maduro government doesn’t care that it has been caught red-handed. “They plan to stonewall it, stick to their numbers even though the world knows it’s a lie,” he says. “Maduro and his lieutenants have a lot to lose if they admit defeat — they would probably face long prison terms – so why not stick to the lie. They’ve gotten away with it so far.”
Also, the Court seemed to request that the electoral commission publish the full “election results” within 30 days of the proclamation of Maduro as the winner. Maybe there is someone out there who can say when the result was officially proclaimed? Maybe it wasn’t 30 days after the date of the election?
I think it was 30 days after the election which has now passed. I can’t see them providing the breakdown results now. Its all a charade to provide the regime with a veneer of legitimacy by involving the Supreme Court (packed with Maduro loyalists) etc etc. If Maduro had actually won in reality it would be in the interest of the CNE to publish the breakdown results ASAP (as happened under Chavez for example). If they have got the actual proof why the delay? That in itself makes one smell a rat. They are trying to hide the fact that Maduro lost
“Machado and Gonzalez have made several confusing claims, that they have 40 percent of the voting records, then 70 percent and also 100 percent. President Maduro has gone to the Supreme Court filing a review appeal which involves the government submitting all the ‘voting records’ in the possession of his coalition, asking the Supreme Court to summon all 10 candidates for them to submit their voting records.
I am not quite sure where the (government supporting) Orinoco Times gets its information from but as far as I understand it, the opposition collected somewhat over 80 per cent (83%?) of the actas which were then published on its website. It had organised a massive campaign beforehand to get its supporters to collect the physical evidence in the form of these actas which were then scanned and published on the website. In a small number of cases, the voting centers refused to give actas to opposition parties so only the CNE would have 100& of the actas. But even with 83% of the actas there is enough evidence to show Maduro lost by a big margin…..
Valid point, by the way, asking why the pro-US opposition didn’t submit its tally sheets to the court. What had they to lose?
From what I read, they are fearful of handing over the original evidence – their physical copies of the actas – because they believe the CNE will destroy this evidence (bearing in mind these actas have the original “wet signatures” of the officials who signed them). But I would have thought the scanned copies that appear on their website would surely be enough evidence to submit to the CNE as they are unforgeable and could easily be checked against the government’s own set of duplicate actas. Still, it is a little odd that the opposition has not submitted the original actas as they now have nothing to lose by submitting them if the CNE is just going to ignore the actual breakdown results…
There is also, of course, the little matter of Gonzalez and Machado probably being arrested should they make an appearance at the CNE….
NEWSFLASH
It seems that virtually the whole country, including Caracas, today suffered from a massive total or partial power failure which also affected telecommunications
Power outages have been becoming more common and have been attributed lack of proper maintenance due to gross corruption and incompetence. Experts have apparently been warning that a massive outage such as what happened today was on the cards.
The Maduro regime has (predictably) been blaming it on sabotage by the opposition. The problem is that all the power installations, as I understand it, are heavily militarised. This prompts the thought – if it is sabotage could it possibly have been carried out by military personnel?
While the top brass of the military has pledged allegiance to the regime, low-ranking soldiers are more equivocal. Most are poorly paid unlike the top brass and of course, have familial links with Venezuelan workers who are suffering – particularly the poorest in the shanty towns that the regime is particularly intent on repressing
Could there be some kind of military coup in the offing? It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing has happened
“What the media are hiding”
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Globalresearch.ca may well be a peddler of “falsehoods and conspiracy theories” as LEW suggests but to be fair to the article published by this entity that has been linked here, it does make some good points (but also some very bad points!)
I am aware of the dodgy background of the two main opposition leaders it refers to – Edmundo Gonzalez and Maria Corina Machado. González involvement in Operation Condor is something that I’ve come across before many times in surfing the web. Very unsavoury! Personally, I think Machado is the more problematic of the two. I have a particular dislike of populist politicians and she, like Trump, falls into that category. So of course it goes without saying that in no way can we have any sympathy for these people – this quite apart from the fact that they stand for more capitalism!
However, the article then goes on to make several tendentious claims. I will look at just two of these
1) “The same goes for the exit polls. The Edison Research poll was eagerly mentioned. It foretold opposition candidate González 65 percent and Maduro 31 percent of the vote. The media failed to mention that this agency is linked to the CIA and they were silent about the exit polls of the prestigious Hinterlaces agency, which at noon had Maduro at 54.6 percent and González at 42.8 percent (very close to the official result).”
The Hinterlaces Agency which the article calls “prestigious” is no more neutral than the pollsters favouring the opposition. It is part of the Maduro propaganda machinery. According to Wikipedia:
“Efecto Cocuyo analysed an April 2024 poll by Hinterlaces and concluded that its methodology was inconsistent, citing contradictory dates, a small sample size, high number of undecided voters, and very high margin of error.[11][9] The poll results were published on website Fuser News, alleged by Efecto Cucuyo to be disseminators of Russian, Iranian, Chinese and Venezuelan state propaganda,[12] and also by Telesur, a state-controlled Venezuelan media company.[citation needed]”
Apart from that, all this reference to “exit polls” (on both sides!) can be taken with a pinch of salt. The only thing that counts is the actual vote and the physical evidence in the form of voting tallies or actas (generated by machines on some 30,000 voting tables) shows absolutely unequivocally that Maduro lost by a big margin. These actas cannot be faked or forged as I´ve said several times before. The opposition (whatever else we might think of them) were astute enough to anticipate that Maduro would try to pull a fast one. That is exactly what he attempted to do but, this time round, he was caught with his panties down. He hadn’t anticipated that the opposition would organise a massive campaign to collect all the physical evidence it required to show a fraud had been committed.
The subsequent wriggling by the regime and its supporters has been frankly pathetic. Maduro promised one month ago to provide a detailed breakdown of the votes by voting centre. This is, actually, a legal requirement – the CNE is legally required to present this evidence. It seems Maduro has conveniently forgotten that promise. What we got instead was a meaningless and farcical ritual involving the Supreme Court (unsurprisingly packed with Maduro supporters) to legitimise the CN´s unsupported claim that Maduro had won 51% of the vote
see here
2). “In addition, on election day there was a massive cyberattack from Colombia and the US against government institutions, including the National Electoral Council. This attack delayed the counting of votes for hours and gave the opposition the opportunity to come up with their own results before the official results were available.”
This is almost entirely BS There was apparently an attempted hack of just one particular computer that was outside of the CNE information loop (I may be wrong but I think this was for overseas votes – a few voters abroad were allowed to vote but the vast majority were denied the right to vote from abroad – including my partner). However, the effect of hacking this computer would have been immaterial. Inside the CNE loop (which would cover almost all of the voting results), these results are communicated to the CNE from the voting centres by landline – meaning they cannot possibly be hacked. So the CNE had all the information available to show that Maduro had lost. It chose to hide this information.
I think the claims about cyberattacks were a complete distraction to throw people off the scent. Apart from the one single example above they appear to be fabrications. Remember when Maduro was going on about a cyberattack from North Macedonia? Here´s what the government there has to say about this
https://balkaninsight.com/2024/07/30/north-macedonia-baffled-by-venezuelan-claims-of-hacking-attack/
What more is there to be said? Hardly any country on the South American continent including countries with left-wing governments like Chile, Columbia and Brazil – recognises the results. Venezuelan people don’t recognise the results including many Chavistas themselves who are appalled by what has happened. What happens next is anybody´s guess….
The analysis proffered by ALB and Robbo make no mention at all of probable CIA involvement. You could argue this a puzzling omission by the Forum’s intellectual heavyweights, or something more sinister
____________________________________________________________Nothing sinister about it all. Certainly, it is highly probable that Machado´s organisation has been funded by the CIA and the prospect of a Machado-led government is not one that the Venezuelan working class should look forward to at all. It would screw the workers just as much as the current gangster capitalist regime of Maduro is doing and it would be with the aid of “American imperialism” (in contrast to the Maduro regime that enjoys the support of Russian and Chinese imperialism)
I have omitted to talk much about the opposition because frankly – let’s face it – the main focus at the moment is on the fraudulent claims of the Maduro regime to have won the election. Any honest and democratic response would be to acknowledge that Maduro comprehensively lost the election – beyond a shadow of a doubt. All the hard empirical evidence is there for everyone to see.
It is absolutely appalling that significant swathes of the Left are so unprincipled and so blind to the reality as to be willing accomplices in spreading the lie that Maduro won. That, to me, is one of the most sickening and shocking aspects of this whole sordid business – that they would not only support an obviously corrupt plutocrat and lying bastard like Maduro (and his cronies) but that they would actually lie through their own teeth to help keep this individual in power….
Further evidence of just how intellectually and morally bankrupt a large part of the Left (with some honourable exceptions) has become.
So, today is the deadline when the Maduro regime was supposed to have presented a detailed breakdown of the voting results in the July elections confirming that it has legitimately won the elections. Predictably it has not done so at the time of writing. This is despite a solemn pledge that it would do so. See this.
It won’t present the evidence because it hasn’t got the evidence. You can’t go against the hard empirical and scientific evidence provided by the opposition on its website of scanned copies of over 80 per cent of the actas or voting tallies – that cannot be forged or faked – that show absolutely and without question that Maduro lost this election by a huge margin.
I don’t (obviously!) have any sympathy for the opposition and the overwhelming vote they got was, I understand, more a protest vote against the regime than a vote for the opposition, as such. Nevertheless, the outcome of the vote was crystal clear. Maduro lost the elections and his holding on to power is based on a shabby lie.
Those who continue to support this obnoxious and increasingly repressive gangster capitalist regime have demonstrated their utter contempt for the democratic process. They are aiding Venezuela´s slide into full-on fascism.
It’s from this pro-governnent news site:
………………….
I wouldn’t trust this site further than I can spit. Its totally biased in favour of the regime. I just cannot see how the CNE can publish any meaningful breakdown of the election results when, empirically and scientifically, the actual evidence shows that Maduro was trounced by a huge margin. The other option available to the regime is to lie through their teeth. Though the vote favoured the opposition I think in reality it was more a vote against Maduro than for the opposition, as such. People are just fed up with the corruption and the grinding poverty…
“The TSJ president, who also heads the body’s electoral branch, additionally stressed that the CNE should publish the “definitive results” in the National Gazette before an August 28 deadline. Venezuela’s electoral authority has not published detailed results broken down by voting center.”
Do you have the link for this quote, incidentally?
I am pretty sure the CNE are NOT going to publish the “definitive results” – though they might cobble together some fake results. If they published the definitive results it would be curtains for Maduro and he can start making arrangements to reside somewhere else outside of the country – in some posh mansion somewhere and subsist on the fruits of his corruption.
You can’t fake or forge an acta and the results of the voting tallies show he lost by a long way.
Interestingly, more and more leftists are apparently becoming lukewarm towards the regime and even dropping their support for it. Here´s another article Ive come across that once again makes the point that Maduro´s electoral victory was based on a lie
I hope this speeds up the demise of the capitalist ideology of Leftist Chavismo and people see it for the dead end it is – a cover for rampant corruption and working-class exploitation
It seems pretty clear to me that the detailed breakdown of the election results that the CNE was supposed to present by law are not ever going to be presented. Instead, the CNE is going to go along with the ruling by the Venezuelan Supreme Court that Maduro had won the elections and that the matter is effectively closed.
Extraordinarily, the Supreme Court even suggested that voting tallies published online by the opposition were forged. Technically speaking this is simply not possible. You cannot forge an acta or voting tally which has a QR code and a unique ID number as well as being officially signed off. Within two or three days of the election the opposition had scanned and uploaded over 80 per cent of all the actas produced by all the voting tables throughout the country. The hard indisputable empirical evidence is there to show that Maduro was resoundingly defeated
The Supreme Court and the CNE are both lying through their teeth. Everybody knows this, its an open secret – a cynical political game played people who have no interest in democratic decisionmaking. These bodies are packed with Maduro loyalists. There are exceptions. One member, Juan Carlos Delpino, of the five-member National Electoral Council,(or CNE) did dissent and published a list of irregularities that occurred during the elections. Who knows what is to become of him?
What seems to be happening now is that political opposition to the regime is being repressed. Even official witnesses at the voting centres are being rounded up and imprisoned. We are witnessing the slide into a full-on far-right fascist state.
Interestingly, even Leftist governments in the region have repudiated the regime. In a recent communique, the governments of Argentina, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay condemned the regime
“Strikingly, the communique was endorsed not just by conservative governments that have long been hostile to Maduro’s purportedly socialist movement, but also by the administration of Chile’s progressive president, Gabriel Boric – now one of the Venezuelan’s most outspoken leftwing critics – and that of Guatemala’s centre-left leader, Bernardo Arévalo.
“We are dealing with a dictatorship that falsifies elections,” Boric said after the supreme court ruling, rejecting the idea that Maduro’s regime was leftwing.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/23/latin-american-states-and-us-reject-maduro-vote-certification-election-venezuela-supreme-courtOthers like Brazil, Columbia and Mexico – also leftist inclined, have likewise refused to recognise the result and have called for a detailed breakdown that will simply not be forthcoming.
It is very clear to me that chavismo and the whole idea of so-called “21st century socialism” is a complete and utter fraud. It is a fraud that seeks to hide itself behind such spurious and deluded arguments that if you don’t side with the regime you are a “tool of Western imperialism”. that is quite a pathetic excuse for shoring up what is unquestionably an abhorrent and disgusting capitalist regime presiding over one of the most corrupt and unequal societies on the planet
Maduro and his fat cat capitalist buddies have grown extraordinarily wealthy at the expense of the Venezuelan working class as the activities of the hacktivist group Anonymous are currently demonstrating releasing more and more details of shady bank accounts and enormously pricey properties purchased by the Bolivarian oligarchs in various parts of the world…
https://insightcrime.org/investigations/venezuela-mafia-state/
Looking at the Reddit site, I noticed that there are several other articles posted by the same individual. It does seem to be a good way of attracting interest and it would be worth getting members and sympathisers involved in posting stuff there. There are several other large Reddit communities one can join such as Communism, DebateCommunism, AntiMoneymemes, AntiWork, Marxism….This is just from the capitalismVsocialism community
The Human Nature Myth
byu/Disastrous_Scheme704 inCapitalismVSocialismSocialist Society would require about 7 to 10 hours of work per week.
byu/Disastrous_Scheme704 inCapitalismVSocialismThe Libertarian Myth
byu/Disastrous_Scheme704 inCapitalismVSocialismWas Money Abolished In Cambodia?
byu/Disastrous_Scheme704 inCapitalismVSocialismThe hacktivist group, Anonymous, has been publishing loads of stuff about corruption among the Venezuelan oligarch class. Here’s one example – Cilia Flores, Maruro´s missus, who has been implicated in drug trafficking. There are many more such examples
https://x.com/AnonymousVene10/status/1823881905932058683?t=575P2QRmz-49HS363R8aiw&s=08
These people – the Venezuelan capitalist class – have got seriously wealthy with a network of bank accounts, investments and properties in various parts of the world. This, in a country that has one of the highest GINI indices anywhere. It is a grotesquely unequal society. I cannot understand why the more gullible sections of the left, even allowing for their basic state-capitalist sympathies, would want to support such a regime. It’s so blatantly obvious that this whole “chavismo” thing and the BS about “socialism of the 21st century” is just such a con – a money-making racket
There is an interesting report here that I came across on the links between the regime and organised crime
According to this website, all the other candidates contesting the election (there were 10 candidates in all) except the US-backed candidate González (and alternative gang of gangster capitalists) have submitted evidence, including their tallies, to the Supreme Court. Why not? What have they got to hide? What game are they playing?
My understanding of the situation is that the main opposition PUD party of Gonzalez and Machado has refused to appear before the Supreme Court and present the physical evidence that they had won the elections because
1) they believe they will be arrested on various charges. (Machado is currently in hiding)
2) they believe that once the physical evidence of voting tallies – the actual slips of paper representing the voting results generated by each voting machine – had been presented to the court, they would lose control over this evidence which could then be destroyed. Having expended so much effort collecting this evidence, they want to keep this ace card up their sleeve….
It’s a political game of chess that each side is playing but one should bear in mind that both the CNE and the Supreme Court are, to a lesser or greater extent, tools of the authoritarian Maduro regime. They are not neutral.
The article says
On Tuesday, CNE President Elvis Amoroso delivered the electoral evidence requested by the Supreme Court, including disaggregated voting records and totals. The electoral authority was likewise asked to provide evidence of the cyberattack, with experts calling for thorough answers given that the CNE’s data transmission is an offline, encrypted process.
This is curious. The electoral body or CNE has yet to publish a breakdown of the results which it is obliged to do legally. This is a departure from past elections when the disaggregated results were published. I suspect it is because they know the opposition candidate had won the election. The disaggregated election results published on the opposition website showing this, cannot be forged because they are based on the evidence of scanned copies of the original actas each with their unique QR code, ID number and the original “wet signatures”. Though the opposition did not manage to collect all of the actas, they did collect about 83% of them, enough to demonstrate that Gonzalez had won convincingly by more than 2 to 1. The problem is that the regime has blocked access to this website inside Venezuela itself, as I understand it, even if you and I can access it from outside the country.
If the Supreme Court requires definitive evidence then presumably they have it in the form of the disaggregated results provided by the CNE. So why are they asking others to present evidence? The thing is the Supreme Court is not going to publish these results itself, I don’t think, and doesn’t really have the competency to assess them. That is the job of the CNE but they have refused to publish them.
This is why I strongly suspect that the Supreme Court is just being used by Maduro to rubber stamp what is a massive electoral fraud. It will then deflect criticism of the regime by coming up with trumped-up charges against the opposition about insurrection and the like. The detailed results will likely never get published….
The problem is that the opposition has not helped its cause by aligning themselves with unsavoury regimes like the US At the end of the day they, like the Maduro regime, are capitalist entities intent upon administering a socio-economic system that can only ever be administered against the interests of the workers. Even so what is at stake here is some semblance of the democratic process and what we are witnessing is the slide into a kind of fascism.
The Maduro regime with its hired thugs and stasi-like network of informants is bent on ratcheting up the repression. I have seen videos of streets with doors marked with a big “X” signifying the presence of opponents of the regime to be later rounded up and incarcerated. Chilling. Bit like the Nazis and the Jews if you ask me. Mind you, the hacktivist group Anonymous has not helped matters, in my opinion, by publishing lists of the contact details of literally hundreds of police officers and others implicated in the repression. It just gives these people an additional reason to stick with the regime
Interesting article on the elections in Venezuela and how the opposition anticipated an electoral fraud
