— summit organizers even turned off his microphone
— at which point the King told him to "shut up"
Hugo Chavez has a formidable talent
to get up the noses of western leaders
and their complacent bourgeois values
The President of the United States
is the Bourbon King of Spain
Obvious, once you think about it really...
Ancien regime leaders like Bush, Gordon Brown,
Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and European Union
NATO ventriloquist-dummy Javier Solana
have now bumped up hard against
the limits of their imperialist regime's
economic power and environmental sustainability
Despite sporadic coverage by major English Anglo-American news media like the Los Angeles Times, and Time magazine, it is hard to convey the massive impact on the Spanish speaking world of the confrontation between Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez.
The confrontation culminated in the Spanish King telling Chavez “¿Por qué no te callas?” translated as “Why don’t you shut up?”
The utterance was captured on camera and immediately snowballed into a news, political and internet avalanche.
Many people in Spain and Latin America have downloaded the ring tone to their cell phone that has the audio clip of Juan Carlos saying “¿Por qué no te callas?”
There are several dozen music mixes of the confrontation on You Tube, at least one of which has been viewed over 1.1 million times and many have been viewed over 100,000 times. The Western news media eschewed attempts at fair coverage and took sides with a vengeance.
They lunged into anti-Chavez tirades with a vengeance. "How dare this colonial upstart challenge our cherished beliefs? We have freedom, democracy and tolerance on our side."
No mention of imperial plunder and exploitation lasting several hundred years.
Chávez became visibly irritated at the summit when Spain's current Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — a socialist and Chávez ally — insisted that Latin America needs to attract more foreign capital if it's going to make a dent in its chronic, deepening poverty.
Chávez blames "savage capitalism" for Latin America's gaping inequality and insists "only socialism" can fix it — hence his tirade against [former Spanish Prime Minister] Aznar and other free-market "fascists."
At that point Zapatero chided Chávez, reminding him that Aznar himself "was democratically elected by the Spanish people."
Chávez kept trying to interrupt — summit organizers even turned off his microphone — at which point the King told him to "shut up." Hugo Chavez has a formidable talent to get up the noses of western leaders and their complacent bourgeois values.
One can read too much into the unprecedented rude behaviour and abrupt departure of Juan Carlos, Bourbon King of Spain, during the recent Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile.
Clearly, when he got up and left in the middle of Daniel Ortega's lucid analysis of international relations, after first telling Hugo Chavez to shut his mouth, he was simply leaving in order to shape-shift discreetly back into George W. Bush.
What else explains the astonishing fall of the United States and its European and Pacific allies into ancien regime corrupt decay and relative decline?
The President of the United States is the Bourbon King of Spain. Obvious, once you think about it really ....
Ancien Regimes
Ancien regime leaders like President Bush, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and European Union NATO ventriloquist-dummy Javier Solana have now bumped up hard against the limits of their imperialist regime's economic power and environmental sustainability.
Their overwhelming economic dominance no longer goes unchallenged. Their countries' own natural resources are almost exhausted. Like any other empire in decline they are more than ready to use military power to hold on to what they want.
The vast anti-humanitarian, corporate-welfare globalization scam has ended up as little more than a faltering cheap credit boom facilitating rich-country multinational control of worldwide resources and markets to feed destructive, exclusive, parasitic "growth".
The "war on terror" - and the pathetic failure of international corporate media to give a true and fair view of their political and economic leaders' accounts - are directly related to the relative economic decline of the ancien regime of the US elite and their allies.
The US government and its craven allies, peeping out and name-calling from behind overwhelming US military power, now face having to negotiate access to global resources as equals.
The ancien regime countries' leaders will never willingly accept that. Until now, their wishes have always come true, as and when made.
To understand their mentality it may be handy to look again at shape-shifting mutant Head of State, Juan Carlos W. Bush.
King Juan Carlos was not Generalissimo Franco's preferred heir for nothing. The Bush family's proto-fascist pedigree before and during World War 2 is also well known.
For such people and their peers, democracy is an inconvenient facade to be circumvented whenever possible.
They believe fervently they are the natural inheritors of the earth and everything on it not owned by legitimate people - people like themselves.
Their mental landscape is a feudal demesne where seigneurial rights prevail.
Globalization & Colonialism
Colonialism expanded that mentality to take in the natural resources of whole countries and peoples. For the ancien regime, those revert to the natural inheritors, the global elites, by right of mortmain.
Members of the multinational corporate elite that own and operate the G-7 imperialist Thing know very well that the biggest threat to their system is not China or Russia or other large countries like Brazil and India.
Those countries' respective elites can well be relied on to play some version or other of the globalization "free market" three card trick, via kickbacks of all kinds, including a slice of the global protection racket known as the UN Security Council.
The Ex-Colonies Fight Back
What the global corporate elite and their political front-persons probably fear most is the combination by former colonies determined to defeat once and for all the structures of neo-colonialism imposed since the Second World War.
That is why they hate the Iranian and Venezuelan leaders with such venom. It is why they are determined to destroy the Iranian revolution, to defeat the indigenous movement in Bolivia, the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the Socialist Revolution in Cuba.
The four ALBA countries have persistently declared their interest in fomenting South-South economic cooperation with African and Asian countries to defend the rights of their peoples to self-determination against the imperialist powers.
The Dolllar's Demise
Now that Ecuador and Angola are OPEC members (along with Iran, Venezuela, Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, Indonesia, Lybia, Iraq, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia), the capacity of these countries to defend their economies against the collapse of the dollar will be greater.
But it is absolutely clear that the US and the European Union will continue to manage the current international economic and political crisis to destroy the Bolivarian process in Venezuela and to destabilize more vulnerable Latin American countries like Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador.
They will use the usual mixture of economic sabotage, political pressure, military intimidation, corporate media saturation propaganda and interventionist covert action.
The next three years are likely to be decisive in the final liberation - or its failure - of Latin America's peoples from domination by foreign imperialist powers.
By the end of 2010 we will see whether the profoundly humanitarian vision of the ALBA country model of equitable trade, prioritizing social needs over corporate profit prevails.
The alternative for the impoverished majority and the continent's indigenous peoples will be endless impoverishment and serfdom subject to the whims of mutant ancien regime royalty, King Juan Carlos W. Bush or Queen Isabella Clinton and their cortege of rotten global corporate aristocracy.
In truth, there are only two sides to what is unmistakeably a global class conflict. When George W. Bush said, notoriously, "either with us or against us", he could not have been more right.
Either one is with the death-dealing, destructive, unsustainably-greedy global elite or one is with the vast majority of the world's peoples who want, simply, a sustainable decent life.
One is either on the side of ordinary people or of the seigneurial global elite - on the side of humanity or of inhumanity.