Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Re: [NetworkAztlan_News] Forbes.com-Venezuela's Election System Holds Up As A Model For The World

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Gracias Cort ~ Wish you had DIRECT LINK
Venceremos! We Will Win! Educate to Liberate!
Peter S. Lopez AKA @Peta_de_Aztlan
Sacramento, California
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From: Cort Greene <cort.greene@gmail.com>
To: Venezuela_Today <Venezuela_Today@yahoogroups.com>; csny <CubaSolidarityNY@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 5:12 PM
Subject: [NetworkAztlan_News] Forbes.com-Venezuela's Election System Holds Up As A Model For The World

 


This article is by Eugenio Martinez, who covers elections for Venezuela's newspaper El Universal.

Venezuela's Election System Holds Up As A Model For The World

This article is by Eugenio Martinez, who covers elections for Venezuela's newspaper El Universal and is the host of the weekly TV showEl Termómetro.
Nicolas Maduro
Nicolas Maduro (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Two weeks ago Venezuelans went to the polls to elect a president to transition their country into the post-Chavez era. Nicolas Maduro, Chavez's hand-chosen successor, and his opponent, Henrique Capriles, had spent 34 days hurling criticisms and promises back and forth as they attempted to woo voters and guide Venezuela's future.
Maduro, representing the Chavista movement, was expected to win easily, and few anticipated taht his margin of victory would be an ultra-narrow 1.83%. Judging by his defiant speeches after the election, Maduro seems to believe he inherited the throne and the legitimacy of a wide-margin victory.
However, the slim margin propelled Capriles on a quest for lost votes, a crusade to prove electoral irregularities and cast doubt on the outcome. This campaign has exposed deep political rifts among our citizens when it is essential that the people of Venezuela have the greatest confidence in the election process.
Venezuela employs one of the most technologically advanced verifiable voting systems in the world, designed to protect voters from fraud and tampering and ensure the accuracy of the vote count. Accuracy and integrity are guaranteed from the minute voters walk into the polls to the point where a final tally is revealed.
The system Venezuela uses has some of the most advanced and voter-friendly security features in modern elections. Voters use a touch-sensitive electronic pad to make and confirm their choices. After confirmation, the electronic vote is encrypted and randomly stored in the machine's memories. Voters audit their own vote by reviewing a printed receipt that they then place into a physical ballot box.
At the end of Election Day, each voting machine computes and prints an official tally, called a precinct count. It transmits an electronic copy of the precinct count to the servers in the National Electoral Council's central facility, where overall totals are computed.
By mutual agreement between the contenders, 52.98% of the ballot boxes are chosen at random, opened, and their tallies compared with the corresponding precinct counts. This audit step ensures that no vote manipulation has occurred at the polling place. The extent of this audit, the widest in automatic elections, leaves little room for questioning.
The series of tests before, during, and after a Venezuelan election is thorough and intense, conducted in the presence of election officials and political parties to ensure proper functionality and full confidence in the system. When it comes to elections, Venezuela has become a highly advanced nation of auditors, with the most advanced audit tools at its disposal and a voting process that is as transparent as any in the world.
Even though the election to succeed Chavez was announced with only 34 days to campaign and organize the election mechanics, the National Electoral Council and Smartmatic, the company that developed the highly-sophisticated voting machines and the technology supporting them, managed to perform more than 12 audits on the voting platform, many in front of both Capriles' and Maduro's representatives.
Like any candidate who suffers a narrow defeat at the polls, Mr. Capriles is entitled to keep his dream alive. He can continue trying to prove that somehow the outcome was affected by a corrupt electoral ecosystem. His people are betting that scrutinizing the manual electoral book and the government-controlled electoral roll will reveal a clue to how their triumph slipped away. In a nation of auditors and entirely transparent election mechanics, that quest is certainly their right, but their chance of changing the election's outcome may be very slim.
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Carnel David ~ Re: [NetworkAztlan_News] Mexican Americans and Latinos

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Carnal David y gente ~ I am at the point where I can accept the term Latino as interchangeable with Chicanos. It can cover a larger group of people than just Chicanos, though we need to evolve beyond any form of narrow nationalism, including Chicano cultural nationalism. I definitely do not relate to the term Hispanic ~ a Nixon-era invention by a Tia Taco. Let each one figure it out for themselves, though I do try to educate my 'White' comrades.

As Chicanos we really do need to evolve beyond the old stale arguments about what to call ourselves. Many of us who call ourselves Chicanos, those who have not died out, should keep in mind that we are actually indigenous natives of these lands. I no longer consider myself an Amerikan of any kind, though I still have U.S. citizenship.

Any 'racial' term is going to be defective since we are all of one human race called humanity. Hell, now I could be politically incorrect and should spell Chicano Xicano, but I am old school.
Thus, I remain a Chicano de Aztlán.

On Being A Chicano de Aztlán
Posted on 04/26/2013 by
http://helpmatrix.wordpress.com/2013/04/26/on-being-a-chicano-de-aztlan-3/
 
Besides we need to evolve beyond racial and ethnic categories in terms of politics, mass mobilization for liberation and all dedicated efforts towards an eventual seizure of state power and overthrow of the Evil Empire led by the fascist U.S. Regime.

We are one people, an endangered species, on one Mother Earth. Global Revolution is the ultimate solution for us to establish a basis for peace, justice and true democracy in the world (though democracy has its inherent defects as it usually means tyranny by the majority).

Venceremos! We Will Win! Educate to Liberate!
Peter S. Lopez AKA @Peta_de_Aztlan
peta.aztlan@gmail.com
Sacramento, California
c/s

From: David Sanchez <davidsanchezphd@webtv.net>
To: DAVIDSANCHEZPHD@webtv.net; NetworkAztlan_News@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 1:33 PM
Subject: [NetworkAztlan_News] Mexican Americans and Latinos

 
In my opinion, I feel that most people do not understand Chicano Power.
This is an ideal that has been pushed under the rug by many Latinos.
Probably because many Chicanos do not accept the word Latino. Some
Chicanos feel that Latino is a European word used for the people from
Spain and Italy, Or a Greek word like Latin. Nonetheless, there should
be unity among all Brown People and on solidarity of issues which have
some common ground. At the other end, Prof Julian Zamora said that,
Latinos do not understand that Mexican Americans have been singled out
throughout time and are left out. And that most Latino Americans are
volunteer immigrants and not native by local conquest of the Southwest
which was once a part of Mexico. Hence, divisions in the Brown community
do exist, Nonetheless, the forging of common issues needs to come first.

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[HELP-Matrix Blog] In Mexico, restrictions on U.S. agents signal drug war shift ~By Nick Miroff

 
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Venceremos! We Will Win! Educate to Liberate!
Peter S. Lopez AKA @Peta_de_Aztlan
Sacramento, California
c/s

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Blogger <no-reply@blogger.com>
To: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 7:13 PM
Subject: [HELP-Matrix Blog] In Mexico, restrictions on U.S. agents signal drug war shift ~By Nick Miroff

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-mexico-restrictions-on-us-drug-agents-seen-as-overdue/2013/05/14/a86bd394-b9ae-11e2-b568-6917f6ac6d9d_story.html


A U.S. Border Patrol Agent inspects a truckload of marijuana seized from drug smugglers near the U.S.-Mexico border in Hidalgo, Texas.

By Nick Miroff

MEXICO CITY — The recent changes ordered by new President Enrique Peña Nieto to Mexico's anti-narcotics partnership with the United States have produced markedly different reactions here and in Washington, underscoring what appear to be diverging perceptions of the drug war's goals and the costs of fighting it.

Peña Nieto's decision to limit the ability of American agents to operate in Mexico has been met with dismay by U.S. law enforcement agencies, which left a heavy footprint under the previous administration of Felipe Calderon. They warn that intelligence sharing will suffer if they can no longer choose which Mexican force — the army, navy or federal police — to give sensitive information to; they've been instructed to now funnel everything through Mexico's Interior Ministry instead
 
The agents also caution that the personal relationships developed under Calderon will fray if they are no longer welcome to work side by side with trusted partners at sites such as the joint command centers where Americans helped spy on Mexican narcotics traffickers and direct operations against them.

Yet here on the southern side of the fight, where gangland violence has taken 60,000 to 90,000 lives in the past six years, there is little surprise that Peña Nieto would move to reformat the relationship. It is a change that has been coming for a long time.

Standing opposite President Obama at a news conference here May 2 during the U.S. president's recent visit, Peña Nieto insisted that drug war cooperation would remain robust but that Mexico wants a more "efficient" strategy.

"Let me say it very clearly," he said. "Under this new strategy, we're going to order things up. We're going to make it institutional. The channels will be very clear. We're going to use one single channel in order to be more efficient, to attain better results."

It is the meaning of "better results" that the two countries increasingly differ on.

Seeking change

Seizing dope and smashing cartels were the shared goals for Mexico and the United States under Calderon. He allowed U.S. agencies unprecedented latitude to gather intelligence on drug cartel suspects and decide which Mexican security forces were trustworthy and effective enough to share it with. To safeguard against the gangsters' corrupting powers, the Americans developed "vetted" units of elite drug-war fighters, relying heavily on Mexico's marines to be a lethal strike force against high-level targets.

But the flow of drugs north and the death toll in Mexico remained virtually undiminished as fallen mafia capos were quickly replaced by new leaders and the troubles of the border region spread south.

Frustrated Mexicans were looking for a change, and on the campaign stump last year and since taking office in December, Peña Nieto pledged that "reducing violence" would become his overarching security goal. In private, his aides characterized the Calderon years as a free-for-all that put tens of thousands of troops on the streets but didn't make Mexico safer.
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HELP-Matrix Humane-Liberation-Party Blog ~ http://help-matrix.blogspot.com/ ~

Humane-Liberation-Party Portal ~ http://help-matrix.ning.com/ ~

@Peta_de_Aztlan Blog ~ http://peta-de-aztlan.blogspot.com/ ~ @Peta_de_Aztlan
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Posted By Blogger to HELP-Matrix Blog at 5/14/2013 07:13:00 PM


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Sunday, May 12, 2013

President Obama – Stop Your Bullying!


President Obama – Stop Your Bullying!

By: Patricio Gomez (Mexican American Political Association)

Finally the cat is out of the bag in terms of what type of “comprehensive immigration reform” constantly referred to by President Obama.  For four long years it was all speculation, although any sensible person who has been active on the immigration issue could read the tea leaves. 

The aggressive enforcement measures on all fronts – secure communities program with local police, E-verify with employers, expedited removals on a massive scale, and a humongous border build-up – told the story.  He mealy-mouthed excuses throughout his first term that CIR or executive order action was not possible without bipartisan support.  He squandered his political capital coming off his first-term win on other political priorities, and we were not on the short-list.  To date Obama is responsible for deporting approximately 1.7 million individuals, 70 percent non-criminals.  He will reach 2 million by the end of 2013, an unprecedented number for any previous president.  Considering this level of immigration enforcement by the administration you would think that the president would expect some push-back.

The Senate bipartisan “gang of eight” recently introduced their compromise legislation and it generally mirrors the president’s perspective on CIR.  The important committee process has taken hold and a myriad of amendments have surfaced from both sides of the political aisle.  There is obvious dissatisfaction from both the proverbial left and right.  The left includes a full spectrum of immigrant rights advocates and activists, churches, and labor, and even an important segment of corporate America.  The right encompasses the usual suspects, Tea Party types, conservative think tanks, media pundits and hosts, and a different slice of business.  All are doing their best to alter the legislative dynamic and end product to their liking in the interests of their respective constituencies.  If for nothing else this is to justify their existence.

The Washington Post recently reported that in a private meeting with a selective few Latino leaders, President Obama demanded obedience to the strategy laid out by the Senate leaders and the White House on CIR.  He insisted that attempting to amend the bill in favor of the advocates’ concerns could risk scuttling the reform effort.  Some of the objections aired in the meeting by the likes of the National Council of La Raza and the League of United Latin American Citizens were that the bill excludes too many of the estimated 11 million undocumented and the “path to citizenship” is considered too perilous for the remainder.  Obama made very clear to the group that he expected them to get behind the Senate version and to not tinker with the proposal.   Leave well enough alone, was his message.  The Washington Post reported that Janet Murguia, president of NCLR, quoted the president as saying, “if the bill was presented on my desk today, I would sign it.”

Now, NCLR is not considered more than moderate in its advocacy for immigration reform by any stretch of the imagination.  Since before the 2007 effort to pass legislation it had expressed support for bracero-type programs under Murguia’s leadership, and even signed off on E-verify and rigorous border enforcement.  It’s been said by other national leaders that NCLR has no bottom line for compromise with the opposition.  Nevertheless, even timid expressions of concern over the Senate proposal have been met with harsh cajoling by the White House and Democratic Party leaders.  It goes without saying that those selected “leaders” and their organizations are recipients of abundant liberal foundation largesse.  No one should expect that they will bite the hand that feeds them.

The Post also reported that many other religious and Latino leaders have complained that other parts of the legislation are considered quite draconian – pointing to the high $2,000 fee and the requirement to not be unemployed for more than 60 days during the ten-year purgatory period of temporary visa status prior to being eligible to apply for permanent residency. 

Nevertheless, President Obama expects his liberal supporters to toe the line and not muddy the waters with favorable amendments to immigrants.  He forgets that he was brought to the table of immigration reform kicking and screaming after four years of unprecedented enforcement.  It was only after extensive polling by inside partisan pollsters indicating that he was losing Latino voters prior to last year’s election that he issued the executive order giving legal relief to young immigrants brought to the U.S. in unauthorized status by their parents.  The Dreamer movement repeatedly embarrassed the White House with public acts of civil disobedience demanding executive action. 

Latinos, Asians, and young voters pulled his chestnuts out of the fire in the battle-ground states replicating the 2008 experience.   In this sense they owe nothing to the president.  This is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog.  The leaders taken to the woodshed by Obama know full well that the immigrant bases are not satisfied with the proposal on the table and are demanding unqualified legalization that is fair and humane, an end to deportations, and separation of families.  Obama’s continued bullying and implied threats will only backfire.

5/13/13 – Patricio.gomez93@yahoo.com.  Authorized to re-publish.  Find me on Facebook, Twitter (SinFronterasSal),  Tumblr (SinFronteras2013), Blogger (mapablogger2013.blogspot.com). http://www.mapa-ca.org/news.html



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