robbo203

Forum Replies Created

Viewing 15 posts - 211 through 225 (of 2,909 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253797
    robbo203
    Participant

    “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

    https://links.org.au/what-happened-venezuelas-presidential-elections-interview-human-rights-activist-antonio-plessmann

    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

    in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253790
    robbo203
    Participant

    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-court

    Others 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://english.elpais.com/international/2023-03-23/rampant-corruption-in-venezuelas-national-oil-company-weighs-down-the-economy.html#

    https://insightcrime.org/investigations/venezuela-mafia-state/

    https://www.connectas.org/especiales/chavismo-inc/en/un-desfalco-con-ramificaciones-globales/index.html

    in reply to: Reddit discussion of socialist article #253776
    robbo203
    Participant

    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 inCapitalismVSocialism

    Socialist Society would require about 7 to 10 hours of work per week.
    byu/Disastrous_Scheme704 inCapitalismVSocialism

    The Libertarian Myth
    byu/Disastrous_Scheme704 inCapitalismVSocialism

    Was Money Abolished In Cambodia?
    byu/Disastrous_Scheme704 inCapitalismVSocialism

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by robbo203.
    in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253628
    robbo203
    Participant

    The 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

    https://insightcrime.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Rise-of-the-Criminal-Hybrid-State-in-Venezuela-InSight-Crime-1.pdf

    in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253546
    robbo203
    Participant

    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

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by robbo203.
    • This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by robbo203.
    in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253541
    robbo203
    Participant

    Interesting article on the elections in Venezuela and how the opposition anticipated an electoral fraud

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/10/gonzalez-proof-win-venezuela-election-vote-tally-maduro

    in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253531
    robbo203
    Participant

    “According to it, the Maduro government has apparently passed on the famous “actas” — the full results — to the Supreme Court examining the elections, so somebody else has got them. Surely they will be leaked at some time?”
    ____________________________________________-

    Ive heard that the hacktivist group, Anonymous, has hacked over 300 government websites as well as the CNE´s website which presumably has 100% of the Actas. Cant confirm it yet but this information is supposed to show that the opposition did indeed win by a big majority (meaning the government knew this all along). This is in line with the results given on the opposition´s own website which is based on just over 80% of the actas and has to be considered reliable because it contains scanned images of the original actas

    See this https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-08-02/who-won-the-venezuelan-election-opposition-data-is-more-verifiable-than-the-official-figures.html

    The regime suggested that some entity in Macedonia might have hacked the data from the voting centres. But this is not possible because the results were communicated via landlines, not the internet. I guess the CNE must have been compiling the results and entering them in on its website which website might have been hacked by Anonymous

    https://x.com/AnonymousVene10

    in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253525
    robbo203
    Participant

    It’s been nearly two weeks and STILL Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime has provided zero evidence (which he promised he would provide) in support of the claim that he won the election. However much we might dislike and oppose the right-wing opposition and its hypocritical Western backers like the US State Department (who bleat about “democracy” when it suits them and oppose it when it doesn’t) the hard empirical evidence in the form of scanned copies of the actual voting returns for each voting centre unequivocally shows that the opposition won by a landslide – more than 2 to 1

    It’s like the emperor has been found with no clothes on. No one seriously believes Maduro won apart from a few sad deluded trendy lefties on the West coast of the US still peddling the lie that is laughably called “21st century socialism”. Oh and, of course, predictably enough, Russia and China (there are plenty of Russians and Chinese setting up base in Venezuela) The fat cats that surround the figurehead of Maduro have creamed off a great deal of the wealth of Venezuela while the economic plight of Venezuelan workers steadily worsens – not just as a result of sanctions but also because of the corrupt policies of the regime itself

    In the meanwhile, the activities of the hacker group, Anonymous, are causing havoc to the regime. Hundreds of names of officers in the military and police forces have been published – including photos and contact details – following the increase in state repression particularly in favelas or shanty towns, erstwhile strongholds of Chavismo. Bank accounts of the regime´s fat cats including Maduro´s, have apparently been hacked as well. The computer history of some of the top brass in the military has been exposed including in one case, this individual´s multiple visits to porn sites. It’s all designed to make a laughing stock of the regime and it seems to be working

    Where it’s all going to lead to I don’t know. The opportunity for Maduro to save face and leave quietly – maybe to Cuba or somewhere else friendly to the current regime – seems to have disappeared. He has nailed his colours to the mast and will probably go down fighting to keep alive the lie. Or he might be overthrown by the military, in due course, but at the moment the military is backing him

    in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253498
    robbo203
    Participant

    It seems that some organisation called Anonymous has been hacking the accounts of government departments of the Venezuelan regime and also the personal accounts of individuals associated with the regime and involved in the repression of the opposition.

    https://x.com/revistacodigo21/status/1820670044730237027?t=S8kE87wUMeZxtgyDSYVZUQ&s=08

    Hundreds of photos and personal numbers of high-ranking military, police and other individuals, have been released on to the internet. Also released is information about the extraordinary wealth of the tiny capitalist clique at the heart of the regime. These individuals are well and truly loaded as the expression goes and no doubt have some luxurious bolthole to retire to if things go pear-shaped. I understand Turkey is one of the favoured destinations but there are other options including Cuba

    Difficult to know how things are going to pan out. Though we obviously oppose the right-wing opposition and its Western backers, just as we oppose the thuggish capitalist Maduro regime, there can zero doubt now that, in fact, the opposition did win the election by a big margin and as democrats it behoves us to acknowledge this. The concrete empirical evidence is irrefutable

    https://resultadosconvzla.com/

    If anyone hasn’t seen the evidence click on the above link, scroll down and click on any blue button to the right. Continue in this fashion and then on the last page for “mesa”(or voting table) click on “acta” (or voting slip). These actas cannot be forged or faked (they each have a QR code and unique ID number) and so the result as recorded on that site (with 80 per cent of the actas) has to be accurate

    The big question is – how does Maduro, having lied about having won the election wriggle out of this impossible situation and still keep face? I cant see that happening and at the moment I can’t see the army coming in, either, and staging a coup. The activities of Anonymous might prompt a backlash and cause them to close ranks around Maduro

    in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253463
    robbo203
    Participant

    At the risk of being accused of relying too much on the “MSN”, here´s an update on the situation in Venezuela from the “Irish News”

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/diplomatic-efforts-to-persuade-maduro-to-release-venezuela-election-vote-tallies/ar-BB1r2JuR?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=38e5599118f744eaaaa56714de5d4de0&ei=20

    in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253462
    robbo203
    Participant

    Hi there,

    Are you a member of the SPGB?
    ……………………………………….
    Toby – Yes, I am. Are you wanting to say something? Make a comment about what I wrote?

    To anticipate any flak for saying what I said in my comments about the Maduro regime (since I seem to have run into some flak elsewhere!), I should copy and paste something here that I posted elsewhere (slightly amended for greater clarity). If anyone can show me that I am mistaken in writing what I have written, I would be grateful if you could point out specifically where and how I have erred. This is my genuine understanding of what the situation is in Venezuela but I am open to correction if I am wrong….
    …………………………………………

    Yes of course we should be sceptical of Western sources and statements from the US State Department. We should also be sceptical of sources like Consortium News, that Alan linked to, that come to quite different conclusions about this election. We should accept no argument at face value but should examine the evidence forensically. I am fortunate in this respect in that my partner is Venezuelan and has explained how the procedure works in detail.

    The evidence centres on the “Actas de manos” or voting tallies that each voting machine on every table in every voting centre throughout the country, produces. The Acta is a long slip of paper which has a QR code and a unique identification number that cannot be forged. It is also time dated. At the end of the vote copies are given to accredited witnesses of the different parties present, signed and counter signed by the person responsible for the voting centre. The results are sent to the CNE the central electoral body, but the people on the ground have physical proof of how the voting went in the form of the Acta. It’s an excellent system – the best in the world in fact according to the Carter center that monitored the elections but it precisely because it is so good that the Maduro regime, I believe, was found out to have committed fraud on a grand scale. It was caught with its trousers down.

    What happened is that it did not anticipate that the opposition had a plan to deliberately collect together all of these actas and totalise the results to ensure the vote was accurate. Nearly every acta produced throughout the country – about 90% at last count I believe – has now been published on its website and made available for complete public scrutiny. I repeat again – you cannot fake or forge an Acta. It has a QR code and a unique identification number. The totalised result of the Actas on the website show that the opposition got somewhat more than twice the number of votes that Maduro got.

    This is the basic argument in support of the claim that result declared was a fraud.
    Significantly the CNE declared Maduro had won before all the votes had been counted and to date has still not provided any factual evidence that he got 51 per cent of the vote . I could not care less if it so happens that the US State Department or other western outlets have come to the same conclusion or that the opposition is a “right-wing bourgeois party” I obviously oppose it without reservation but what we have here is the principle of democratic practice that is at stake.

    The evidence seems pretty overwhelming that a fraud has been committed. We shouldn’t allow the fact that US State Department has said this to prevent us from saying this as well. Even the Communist Party of Venezuela has declared that the result was a fraud and, like I say, it is very telling that the CNE, has still not published any actual evidence supporting its claim that Maduro won. That’s because it is in an impossible situation, in my view, that it never anticipated would happen. What happens next I have no idea…

    in reply to: The Starmer Labour government #253439
    robbo203
    Participant

    Starmer. What a hypocrite

    https://x.com/TweetForTheMany/status/1818220080439742825

    (IN case people here don’t have access to X – Twitter – what the script accompanying the video of the Starmer interview says is as follows:

    “Keir Starmer talked before the election – he was worried about pensioners who struggle to afford to put the heating on – even WITH the winter fuel allowance!

    Yesterday, the allowance was removed from millions of pensioners who earn basic £220 per week.”

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by robbo203.
    in reply to: The Starmer Labour government #253432
    robbo203
    Participant
    in reply to: Maduro´s gangster capitalist regime #253403
    robbo203
    Participant

    Useful idiots like the so-called Venezuelan Solidarity Campaign lending their support to a gangster capitalist state like Venezuela seem to be utterly oblivious to the utterly corrupt nature of the regime. Economic inequality in Venezuela is one of the highest in the world and the gini coefficient has steadily increased over the last decade to a staggering 0.6

    A tiny clique of extraordinarily wealthy and well-connected economic parasites has flourished under this regime which ranks as number 177 out of 180 countries in terms of corruption according to the Transparency Index. According to this article, “the Maduro family heads up a racket aiming at pillaging gold mines in the south of the country, by buying up the gold at low cost and then selling it overseas through the central bank”.

    https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/gamechangers-venezuela-maduro-criminal-ties/

    It makes my stomach turn when I come across expressions such as “Chavista socialism” or so-called “21st-century socialism” in Venezuela. This is as bad as the abuse of the term “socialism” by the Nazis. Maduro and his cronies have nothing whatsoever to do with socialism. They are a bunch of capitalist criminals out to enrich themselves and cynically using politics to achieve their aim. Those who support him should be exposed for what they are- useful idiots

    in reply to: The Starmer Labour government #253380
    robbo203
    Participant
Viewing 15 posts - 211 through 225 (of 2,909 total)