Hugo Chavez Pictures In Venice With Oliver Stone (PHOTOS)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made his Venice red carpet debut on Labor Day when he joined director Oliver Stone for the premiere of 'South Of The Border.'

An article about Chavez and Stone's movie and the premiere is here.

PHOTOS:

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Comments

[Longbaugh]

I bet all the haters on here LOVED "World Trade Center."

[RevBookburn]

Dear Hugo: The Americans who are smearing you will embrace you if you do the following: Lower the quality of life for the citizens; drain your resources for corporate America; build sweatshops. buy into the 'free-trade' scam, and befriend CIA death squads. Then the commenters will love you. Rev. Bookburn - Radio Volta

[ProudPrimate]

You're wasting you time, preacher! Hugo will never surrender!

[wayoutleft]

sean penn, oliver stone, and cynthia mckinney represent my foreign policy. not the war beggars always begging for more war stuff to blow up unimaginably poor and weak countries who won' follow orders. chavez is a hero who - unlike american leaders- is bold enough to do what he must to guide his country in the gunsights of the gringo capitalists. he's a little strong for american stomachs weaned on bought off, mickey mouse congressional committee politics and network commentary. but he's real. he doesn't lie down by his dish when he's told to by big money.

[ProudPrimate]

bravo comment!

[betty22]

don't tell Oliver Stone he made all his money through Capitalism

[Ergon]

He made his money as an artist, you boob. Did he lend money at extortionate rates or have a monopoly on capital, or credit? If not, he isn't a capitalist.

[ProudPrimate]

I was going to say that, but Webster's threw me off. I still think your case is sound.

Capitalism isn't the mom & pop store -- that's called "commerce". Capitalism is JP Morgan. The Robber Barons. The power of massive money. Capitalism devolves inexorable to Monopoly. Only regulation prevents this.

Capitalism is merely feudalism without the hereditary titles.

Communism removes all private business. Socialism merely levels the playing field.

[backyards]

Chavez helps the poor. He is taking the example that Jesus taught. Take the oil money and care for the poor.

[PWM]

I don't think Jesus was political.

[DannyGee]

Nice idea, but not a reality. The "poor" in socialist countries like Venezuela are as exploited as the poor under capitalism.

[Ergon]

Free medical care and education for the poor in Venezuela.
The American poverty classes only get to get an education and medical care if they agree to invade foreign countries.

[Untitled]

Um... Hugo Chavez isn't a nice guy (to say the ultimate least). And it's one thing to make a movie about him, but to schmooze with him? Oliver Stone, bad move.

[PWM]

No worse than what Reagan did with known war criminals and violaters of human rights.

[ProudPrimate]

Like the ones that blew up the Cubana airliner, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, now living free in the US, though their extradition order to Venezuela to continue their sentences is still standing?

Terrorists are welcome here as long as they blow up people we don't like.

[ProudPrimate]

Notice how this guy ("Untitled" is all the name he's willing to own up to) starts his pitch with "Um..."

Recognize that expression? That means "everybody but you knows" what follows. It is an epithet of condescension, frequently used by the reichwing to do two things:

1. minimize and trivialize all opinion outside their narrow cult curtain
2. encourage and soothe all the cult members inside that same jealously closed perimeter

What he has been told in the inner sanctum is pure one-sided McCarthyism. But true to his calling he accepts it without question and broadcasts it with as much certainty as if it came from the math tables in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

[Ergon]

He got to 'schmooze' with Chavez and Castro? I envy him.

[LemonGrass2]

Chavez looks like a wax figure of himself, and Stone's hair is so obviously dyed.

[FishTacosRGood]

Shun this f*ck ASAP.

[kopssuck]

If you look at Stone's body of work objectively, you will see he is nothing more than a CIA shill.

[Trueheart]

Am having trouble seeing that.
"JFK" certainly didn't let the CIA off the hook insofar as conspiracy was concerned.

[PWM]

So we should turn a blind eye to the CIA's experimentation on people?

[simpleperson]

"Infrastructure Minister Diosdado Cabello closed 34 radio stations in July, saying the government was "democratizing" media ownership."

Here's what the new poster child for the loony left is into. So much for free speech.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKN0520744720090905

[ProudPrimate]

Simpleperson -- you're oversimplifying.

You left out some of the most important parts of the Reuters article:

"Chavez was himself ousted for 48 hours 10 years later in a short-lived army rebellion after he won office democratically. That putsch had the support of some of the country's television companies."

Soundbites are the tool of demagogues. In truth, we are suffering another kind of loss of freedom of speech. Just as the endless war between virus writers and virus-protection writers goes on, so too does the war between constitution writers and those often successfully making end-runs around constitutions.

"Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"

That's obviously an incomplete protection. It's only a start. It doesn't prevent the president from making Executive Orders that abridge the freedom. Congress would have to create laws to protect it, if that were the problem. The failure of Congress would be omission, not commission, in such a case.

{continued below}

[ProudPrimate]

But we have a much more sinister enemy here: the power of money is abridging the freedom of speech. How? Not by shutting you up, but by drowning you out. We are lucky the internet is still alive, and we should not be surprised to see the older media suffering, because the net is more democratic.

But the power of money has won the day in the Supreme Court, in cases like Buckley, where we were told that "money is speech". As a result, in most cases, more money spent on advertising, especially negative, wins elections.

It's no longer "one man one vote" (man in the sense of "mankind") but "one dollar one vote", and the "economic royalists" FDR railed against are making scary progress in rolling back the American Revolution.

"These economic royalists," he said in 1936, "complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of, is that we seek to take away their power!" As the crowd roared approval, he went on to say, "And our allegiance to American institutions [viz. the Declaration] REQUIRES the overthrow of THIS KIND of power."

We need radical steps to remove the money power from the levers of rule. The absolute best way is public funding for elections.

We fought a revolution to do away with hereditary lords. But they are back. We must put a stake through the heart monarchy, aristocracy, and oligarchy.

Public funding for elections.

[simpleperson]

They even wore matching outfits....how cute.

[tkondaks]

Oliver Stone never met a communist he didn't like.

[PWM]

Reagan never met a violent dictator he didn't like - all they had to do was say they were anticommunist and raygun gave them anything they wanted.

[DannyGee]

look up red herring in the dictionary. That's apparently all you know.

[ProudPrimate]

Again in the days of Reagan, the memory of Sandino was sounded to try to liberate those lands. But the Reagan government, in direct violation of the will on Congress,and international law, sold weapons to Iran, and sold cocaine to the people of South Central Los Angeles, in order to procure weapons to defeat the enemies of the investors of Boston and Chiquita Banana. Wall Street again triumphed.

Near the end of World War II, as Naval Intelligence was planning the invasion of Italy from North Africa, Charles "Lucky" Luciano was taken from prison in Clinton, N.Y., and deported to Sicily on the condition that he persuade the Mafiosi there to assist the landing of US forces, and aid the overthrow of Mussolini.

This he did, and afterward became the greatest heroin dealer in the world. His Western Hemisphere capital was Havana, Cuba, under the protection of the then dictator Fulgencio Batista. His lieutenant, Santo Trafficante of Miami was installed as manager there, with his whole family.

The overthrow of Batista by Fidel Castro was a cruel blow to the mafia, the latifundist elites, and the CIA, who are notorious for acquiring the funds they need for their covert ops by smuggling drugs. (See my placard, http://www.proudprimate.com/Placards/narcoCIA.JPG for details).

These same hotheads were central in the murder of both the Kennedys.

[ProudPrimate]

Yale's riches spilled over into a great American University, upon whose campus is a statue of America's first spy, Nathan Hale. The Skull & Bones Society is also located there, and many of America's spies originate therefrom. A Yale graduate joining the CIA will think it's "old home week".

It bears mention that the founder of Skull & Bones was William Russell, cousin to Samuel Russell, merged partner of T.H. Perkins in the great "China white" bonanza. It is also pertinent that opium was one of the key commodities carried by the British East India Company, where Yale's wealth came from, as were slaves.

The secret services, later known as the "intelligence community", sprang not from criminologists, nor from military interests, but rather from commercial interests, and the "old boys" of the spy trade were "about their fathers' business" when they first they practiced their covert arts.

Spies arise from grand old rapacious families, like the Dulles brothers, whose investments in United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) were too great to allow Sandino to take Nicaragua back for its people, as their forebears had done when Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler was sent in with his Marines in 1909. In 1927, Augusto Nicolás Calderón Sandino, for whom the Sandinistas would be named, made a heroic struggle to wrest his country and people out of the hands of United Fruit, but ultimately was defeated.

[ProudPrimate]

Once Upon A Time, in the city of Boston, lived a man named Thomas Handasyd Perkins. His grandfather was a merchant of hats and furs. At twelve, young Tom was in the crowd which first heard the Declaration of Independence read to the citizens of Boston.

Receiving a small inheritance from his grandfather, he showed his talent for Capitalism by prospering in the slave trade in Haiti. Later he became a trader on the high seas, selling Turkish opium to the people of China, who were, incidentally, largely ignorant of the stuff until the British and Americans forced it in, against the wishes of the Emperor.

Many of the best Boston families married into the Perkins dynasty, including the names Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing, Sturgis, Coolidge, Alsop, Delano, and Weld. After merger with Russell & Co., it was known as "the Boston Concern", and in conjunction with the Scottish firm Jardine-Matheson, "the Combination". By the mid-1830s the opium trade had become "the largest commerce of its time in any single commodity, anywhere in the world."

Another great Bostonian was Elihu Yale, who amassed a great fortune in the employ of the British East India Company, that oppressive, first of all multinational corporations, whose OVERPRICED and UNDERTAXED tea was thrown in Boston Harbor by the "real" Tea Party. True to form, Yale's riches came by cheating his employer. But two wrongs don't make a right.