By: Stephen Lendman
VHeadline.com commentarist

This may be my last article for VHeadline.com. As of midnight August 31, this extraordinary web site will cease publishing new material because its financial resources are nearly exhausted.

The site will remain up until all funds are gone or unless enough new funding is secured in time to allow us to continue operating.

All week we've addressed an urgent plea to our hundreds of thousands of loyal readers to help save us from oblivion by contributing what they can afford and do it now before it's too late. None of us who bring you the kind of information you depend on want this to happen, and the entire VHeadline.com family of contributors based round the world call out to you the readers to hear our urgent plea and respond as generously as you can.

It's been an honor and privilege for me to be a regular commentator for VHeadline.com since I first began writing about Venezuela, the region and much more in January after beginning to write at all late last year.

Back then I knew a little about Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution but wanted to learn more about it ... and did. I was so impressed I knew I had to write about it in detail and tell others what the spirit of true participatory democracy and social equity and justice in Venezuela is all about.

Most people outside Venezuela and the region ... especially in the US ... don't know and can't even imagine what all Venezuelans have now come to expect. It's so impressive and important, the truth about it has to be suppressed in the US because if people understood how ill-served they are here by a government unconcerned about their basic needs compared to the commitment of the Chavez Movement for the Fifth Republic Party (MVP) to the Venezuelan people they'd be mass demonstrations of outrage demanding change.

I'm committed to working for that kind of change to reverse the destructive course the Bush and previous US administrations have had the country on at least since the election of Ronald Reagan. It began a period of government dedicated more than ever since the 1920s to serving the interests of wealth and power at the expense of the needs and welfare of the people. It also initiated an intensive military buildup, a simultaneous erosion of the government's commitment to providing essential social needs to pay for it, and the systematic destruction of civil liberties to assure dissent over government policy was suppressed by force if necessary.

It's the main reason the US now has the largest prison population in the world at over 2.2 million -- even greater than in China with four times the population.

This is a process that never ended and is now on steroids under the out-of-control Bush administration that effectively declared a permanent war on the world in service to the interests of capital it represents and a simultaneous war at home against its own people by enacting the destructive USA Patriot Act, illegally spying on all of us, and seeing to it that all dissent is suppressed. It's called "democracy, American-style."

Things are much different in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. The US public overall has no idea Chavez gave his people a Constitution, that the Venezuelan people got to vote on and approve, that mandates the government to guarantee a true participatory democracy, protect fundamental freedoms, and assure the essential needs of all the people will be served above the interests of wealth and power.

Can anyone living in the US, knowing the facts, imagine a US government doing anything more than paying lip service to these principles but, in fact, either ignoring them or enacting policies that deny them.

* And how many US citizens know that the US Constitution was drafted by rich white men serving their own interests.

It was only an afterthought that the basic freedoms we call the Bill of Rights were added as the first 10 amendments and even then only the more privileged ever got them. Women didn't, nor the poor, nor blacks who were slaves, and this nation's original inhabitants were systematically slaughtered over a few hundred years in one of the greatest of all genocides ever committed and that never ended to this day. It was our earliest type of ethnic cleansing that now goes on all over the country in a different form but essentially for the same reason.

Back then it was the great imperial push west and south to open the lands for white settlers and to exploit the resources found there. Now it happens in cities all over the country disguised with names like urban renewal, slum clearance, redevelopment and gentrification.

What it's really is the exploitation of the poor and disadvantaged for profit with government at all levels acting as agents for corporate profiteers. It's what happened in New Orleans after the Katrina disaster one year ago when 250,000 mostly poor black people were forcibly removed from the city and not allowed to return because the city and state plan to turn their land over to developers who want to turn the city into a giant theme park and play land for well-off tourists. They don't want all those black people around except the ones living in ghettos far enough away they can exploit as cheap labor or modern-day slaves.

It gets even worse as all of us, except the privileged, have seen our constitutional rights steadily erode over the past 25 years, as already explained, by governments uncaring and unwilling to serve their own people -- except the rich and powerful. Besides that, there's nothing written in our Constitution mandating the government to provide for the essential needs of its people including health care, education to the highest level, the right to decent housing and a job.

In Venezuela, the Constitution guarantees all these things and much more ... including the kind of democracy the US never had and likely never will.

That's why, of course, the Bush administration in Washington is committed to regime change in Venezuela, the removal of Hugo Chavez as its leader, and the return of the country to its ugly past. It's because Hugo Chavez is the greatest of all threats the US faces today. I've written and said it many times. He's the good example the US fears will flourish and spread across the region threatening the Washington Consensus model serving the interests of capital the US intends to impose on all countries and do it at the barrel of a gun if any resist.

More of them are now, and I've written about some of them in articles posted on this web site. There's strong resistance in Venezuela, of course, but also in Bolivia, Cuba, some but not enough in Argentina and Brazil, and an incredible amount of it I just wrote about several times in Mexico where the people are near rebelling against the country's traditional authoritarian system of rule. They're now on the streets daily en masse demanding honest elections and real social, economic and political change.

VHeadline brings you all this news, information and analysis. It's what you'll never hear, see or read about in the dominant corporate media. I'm proud to have been a part of it for the past 8 months and hope somehow at the 11th hour we'll be saved and allowed to continue our essential work.

* I know those reading these words feel as I do, which is why I hope and urge you to help while there's still time.

I especially want to reach out to all those who call themselves Chavistas as I proudly do, act in the spirit of the Bolivarian Revolution we admire and support, and help us in our hour of need.

You and the people of Venezuela need what is VHeadline's mission to pursue as it always has since inception -- to independently "promote democracy in its fullest expression and the inalienable right of all Venezuelans to self-determination and the pursuit of sovereign independence without interference."

That's also my mission, in Venezuela and everywhere else, and in the pursuit of it I proudly call myself a Chavista. I hope it's not the last time I can say that on this web site, but if it is I want to express my thanks to Roy, my fellow-commentators and the wonderful people of Venezuela for letting me be a part of this extraordinary effort.

You'll always be in my heart and thoughts, and I'll never waver on my commitment to keep working for the kind of world we all want and hope one day we will get for everyone.

God bless.

Stephen Lendman
lend...@sbcglobal.net

* Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lend...@sbcglobal.net -- also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com

http://www.vheadline.com/lendman