Noam Chomsky: How Close the World Is to Nuclear War

A powerful excerpt from the new book, "Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe."

The following is an excerpt from the new book Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe, by Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk, which takes the form of a series of interviews with MIT Professor Noam Chomsky (Seven Stories, 2013).

Laray Polk:What immediate tensions do you perceive that could lead to nuclear war? How close are we?

Noam Chomsky:Actually, nuclear war has come unpleasantly close many times since 1945. There are literally dozens of occasions in which there was a significant threat of nuclear war. There was one time in 1962 when it was very close, and furthermore, it’s not just the United States. India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the issues remain. Both India and Pakistan are expanding their nuclear arsenals with US support. There are serious possibilities involved with Iran—not Iranian nuclear weapons, but just attacking Iran—and other things can just go wrong. It’s a very tense system, always has been. There are plenty of times when automated systems in the United States— and in Russia,it’s probably worse—have warned of a nuclear attack which would set off an automatic response except that human intervention happened to take place in time, and sometimes in a matter of minutes. That’s playing with fire. That’s a low-probability event, but with low-probability events over a long period, the probability is not low.

There is another possibility that, I think, is not to be dismissed: nuclear terror. Like a dirty bomb in New York City, let’s say. It wouldn’t take tremendous facility to do that. I know US intelligence or people like Graham Allison at Harvard who works on this, they regard it as very likely in the coming years—and who knows what kind of reaction there would be to that. So, I think there are plenty of possibilities. I think it is getting worse. Just like the proliferation problem is getting worse. Take a couple of cases: In September 2009, the Security Council did pass a resolution, S/RES/1887, which was interpreted here as a resolution against Iran. In part it was, but it also called on all states to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s three states: India, Pakistan, and Israel. The Obama administration immediately informed India that this didn’t apply to them; it informed Israel that it doesn’t apply to them.

If India expands its nuclear capacity, Pakistan almost has to; it can’t compete with India with conventional forces. Not surprisingly, Pakistan developed its nuclear weapons with indirect US support. The Reagan administration pretended they didn’t know anything about it, which of course they did. India reacted to resolution 1887 by announcing that they could now produce nuclear weapons with the same yield as the superpowers. A year before, the United States had signed a deal with India, which broke the pre-existing regime and enabled the US to provide them with nuclear technology—though they hadn’t signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s in violation of congressional legislation going back to India’s first bomb, I suppose around 1974 or so. The United States kind of rammed it through the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and that opens a lot of doors. China reacted by sending nuclear technology to Pakistan. And though the claim is that the technology for India is for civilian use, that doesn’t mean much even if India doesn’t transfer that to nuclear weapons. It means they’re free to transfer what they would have spent on civilian use to nuclear weapons.

And then comes this announcement in 2009 that the International Atomic Energy Agency has been repeatedly trying to get Israel to open its facilities to inspection. The US along with Europe usually has been able to block it. And more significant is the effort in the international agencies to try to move toward a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East, which would be quite significant.6 It wouldn’t solve all the problems, but whatever threat Iran may be assumed to pose—and that’s a very interesting question in itself, but let’s suppose for the moment that there is a threat—it would certainly be mitigated and might be ended by a nuclear-weapon-free zone, but the US is blocking it every step of the way.

Laray Polk: Now that Iran’s reactor at Bushehr is running, the current fear is that they’re going to use the plutonium produced from the fuel cycle to make weapons. The questions raised about Iran’s possible nuclear weapons program are similar to those asked of Israel–

Noam Chomsky:Since the 1960s. And in fact, the Nixon administration made an unwritten agreement with Israel that it wouldn’t do anything to compel Israel, or even induce them, to drop what they call their ambiguity policy—not saying whether or not they have them. That’s now very alive because there’s this regular five-year Non-Proliferation Review Conference.In 1995, under strong pressure from the Arab states, Egypt primarily, there was an agreement that they would move toward a nuclear-weapon-free zone and the Clinton administration signed on. It was reiterated in 2000. In 2005 the Bush administration just essentially undermined the whole meeting. They basically said, “Why do anything?”

It came up again in May 2010. Egypt is now speaking for the Non-Aligned Movement, 118 countries, they’re this year’s representative, and they pressed pretty hard for a move in that direction. The pressure was so strong that the United States accepted it in principle and claims to be committed to it, but Hillary Clinton said the time’s “not ripe for establishing the zone.” And the administration just endorsed Israel’s position, essentially saying, “Yes, but only after a comprehensive peace agreement in the region,” which the US and Israel can delay indefinitely. So, that’s basically saying, “it’s fine, but it’s never going to happen.” And this is barely ever reported, so nobody knowsabout it. Just as almost nobody knows about Obama informing India and Israel that the resolutions don’t apply to them. All of this just increases the risk of nuclear war.

It’s more than that actually. You know, the threats against Iran are nontrivial and that, of course, induce them to move toward nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Obama in particular has strongly increased the offensive capacity that the US has on the island of Diego Garcia, which is a major military base they use for bombing the Middle East and Central Asia. In December 2009, the navy dispatched a submarine tender for nuclear submarines in Diego Garcia. Presumably they were already there, but this is going to expand their capacity, and they certainly have the capacity to attack Iran with nuclear weapons. And he also sharply increased the development of deep-penetration bombs, a program that mostly languished under the Bush administration. As soon as Obama came in, he accelerated it, and it was quietly announced—but I think not reported here—that they put a couple of hundred of them in Diego Garcia. That’s all aimed at Iran. Those are all pretty serious threats.

Actually, the question of the Iranian threat is quite interesting. It’s discussed as if that’s the major issue of the current era. And not just in the United States, Britain too. This is “the year of Iran,” Iran is the major threat, the major policy issue. It does raise the question: What’s the Iranian threat? That’s never seriously discussed, but there is an authoritative answer, which isn’t reported. The authoritative answer was given by the Pentagon and intelligence in April 2010; they have an annual submission to Congress on the global security system, and of course discussed Iran. They made it very clear that the threat is not military. They said Iran has very low military spending even by the standards of the region; their strategic doctrine is completely defensive, it’s designed to deter an invasion long enough to allow diplomacy to begin to operate; they have very little capacity to deploy force abroad. They say if Iran were developing nuclear capability, which is not the same as weapons, it would be part of the deterrent strategy,which is what most strategic analysts take for granted, so there’s no military threat. Nevertheless, they say it’s the most significant threat in the world. What is it? Well, that’s interesting. They’re trying to extend their influence in neighboring countries; that’s what’s called destabilizing. So if we invade their neighbors and occupy them, that’s stabilizing. Which is a standard assumption. It basically says, “Look, we own the world.” And if anybody doesn’t follow orders, they’re aggressive.

In fact, that’s going on with China right now. It’s been a kind of a hassle, also hasn’t been discussed much in the United States—but is discussed quite a lot in China, about control of the seas in China’s vicinity. Their navy is expanding, and that’s discussed here and described as a major threat. What they’re trying to do is to be able to control the waters nearby China—the South China Sea,Yellow Sea, and so on—and that’s described here as aggressive intent. The Pentagon just released a report on the dangers of China. Their military budget is increasing; it’s now one-fifth what the US spends in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is of course a fraction of the military budget. Not long ago, the US was conducting naval exercises in the waters off China. China was protesting particularly over the plans to send an advanced nuclear- powered aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, into those waters,which, according to China, has the capacity to hit Beijing with nuclear weapons—and they didn’t like it. And the US formally responded by saying that China is being aggressive because they’re interfering with freedom of the seas. Then, if you look at the strategic analysis literature, they describe it as a classic security dilemma where two sides are in a confrontation. Each regards what it’s doing as essential to its security and regards the other side as threatening its security, and we’re supposed to take the threat seriously. So if China is trying to control waters off its coast, that’s aggression and it’s harming our security. That’s a classic security dilemma. You could just imagine if China were carrying out naval exercises in the Caribbean—in fact, in the mid-Pacific—it would be considered intolerable. That’s very much like Iran. The basic assumption is “We own the world,” and any exercise of sovereignty within our domains, which is most of the world, is aggression.

Laray Polk: Is there any type of nuclear racism involved in these issues?

Noam Chomsky: I think it would be the same if there were no nuclear weapons. I mean, it goes back to long-term planning assumptions, and I don’t really think it’s racism. Let’s take a concrete case. We have a lot of internal documents now, some interesting ones from the Nixon years. Nixon and Kissinger, when they were planning to overthrow the government of Chile in 1973, their position was that this government’s intolerable, it’s exercising its sovereignty, it’s a threat to us, so it has to go.14 It’s what Kissinger called a virus that might spread contagion elsewhere, maybe into southern Europe—not that Chile would attack southern Europe—but that a successful, social democratic parliamentary system would send the wrong message to Spain and Italy. They might be inclined to try the same, it would mean its contagion would spread and the system falls apart. And they understood that, in fact stated that, if we can’t control Latin America, how are we going to control the rest of the world? We at least have to control Latin America. There was some concern—which was mostly meaningless, but it was there—about a Soviet penetration into Latin America, and they recognized that if Europe gets more involved in Latin America, that would tend to deter any Soviet penetration, but they concluded the US couldn’t allow that because it would interfere with US dominance of the region. So, it’s not racist. It’s a matter of dominance.

In fact, the same is happening with NATO. Why didn’t NATO disappear after the Soviet Union collapsed? If anybody read the propaganda, they’d say, “Well, it should have disappeared, it was supposed to protect Europe from the Russian hordes.” Okay, no more Russian hordes, so it should disappear. It expanded in violation of verbal promises to Gorbachev. And it expanded, I think, largely in order to keep Europe under control. One of the purposes of NATO all along was to prevent Europe from moving in an independent path, maybe a kind of Gaullist path, and they had to expand NATO to make sure that Europe stays a vassal. If you look back to the planning record during the Second World War, it’s very instructive. It’s almost never discussed, but there were high-level meetings from 1939 to 1945 under the Roosevelt administration, which sort of planned for the postwar years. They knew the United States would emerge from the war at least very well off and maybe completely triumphant. They didn’t know how much at first. The principles that were established were very interesting and explicit, and later implemented. They devised the concept of what they called the Grand Area, which the US must dominate. And within the Grand Area, there can be no exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US plans—explicit, almost those words. What’s the Grand Area? Well, at a minimum, it was to include the entire Western Hemisphere, the entire Far East, and the whole British Empire—former British Empire—which, of course, includes the Middle East energy resources. As one high-level advisor later put it: “If we can control Middle East energy, we can control the world.” Well, that’s the Grand Area.

As the Russians began to grind down the German armies after Stalingrad, they recognized that Germany was weakened—at first, they thought that Germany would emerge from the war as a major power. So the Grand Area planning was extended to as much of Eurasia as possible, including at least Western Europe, which is the industrial-commercial center of the region. That’s the Grand Area, and within that area, there can be no exercise of sovereignty. Of course, they can’t carry it off.

For example, China is too big to push around and they’re exercising their sovereignty. Iran is trying, it’s small enough so you can push them around—they think so. Even Latin America is getting out of control. Brazil was not following orders. And, in fact, a lot of South America isn’t, and the whole thing is causing a lot of desperation in Washington. You can see it if you look at the official pronouncements. China is not paying attention to US sanctions on Iran. US sanctions on Iran have absolutely no legitimacy. It’s just that people are afraid of the United States. And Europe more or less goes along with them, but China doesn’t. They disregard them. They observe the UN sanctions, which have formal legitimacy but are toothless, so they’re happy to observe them. The major effect of the UN sanctions is to keep Western competitors out of Iran, so they can move in and do what they feel like. The US is pretty upset about it. In fact, the State Department issued some very interesting statements, interesting because of their desperate tone. They warned China that, this is almost a quote, “if you want to be accepted into the international community, you have to meet your international responsibilities, and the international responsibilities are to follow our orders.” You can see both the desperation in US planning circles and you can kind of imagine the reaction of the Chinese foreign office, they’re probably laughing, you know, why should they follow US orders? They’ll do what they like.

They’re trying to recover their position as a major world power. For a long time they were the major world power before what they call the “century of humiliation.” They are now coming back to a three-thousand-year tradition of being the center of the world and dismissing the barbarians. So, okay, “we’ll just go back to that and the US can’t do anything about it,” which is causing enormous frustration. That’s why they get terribly upset when China doesn’t observe US sanctions on Iran. By now it’s not China and Iran that are isolated on Iran sanctions; it’s the United States that’s isolated. The nonaligned countries—118 countries, most of the world—have always supported Iran’s right to enrich uranium, still do. Turkey recently constructed a pipeline to Iran, so has Pakistan. Turkey’s trade with Iran has been going way up, they’re planning to triple it the next few years. In the Arab world, public opinion is so outraged at the United States that a real majority now favors Iran developing nuclear weapons, not just nuclear energy. The US doesn’t take that too seriously, they figure that dictatorships can control the populations. But when Turkey’s involved or, certainly, when China’s involved, it becomes a threat. That’s why you get these desperate tones. Apart from Europe, almost nobody’s accepting US orders on this. Brazil’s probably the most important country in the South. Not long ago, Brazil and Turkey made a deal with Iran for enriching a large part of the uranium; the US quickly shot that down. They don’t want it, but the world is just hard to control. The Grand Area planning was okay at the end of the Second World War when the US was overwhelmingly dominant, but it has been kind of fractured ever since—and during the last few years, considerably. And I think this is related to the proliferation issues. The US is strongly supporting India and Israel, and the reason is they’ve now turned India into a close strategic ally—Israel always was. India, on the other hand, is playing it pretty cool. They’re also improving their relations with China.

Laray Polk:President Obama recently secured military basing rights in Australia and formed a new free-trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which excludes China. Is this move related to the South China Sea?

Noam Chomsky:Yes, in particular that, but it’s more general. It has to do with the “classic security dilemma” that I mentioned before, referring to the strategic analysis literature. China’s efforts to gain some measure of control over nearby seas and its major trade routes are inconsistent with what the US calls “freedom of the seas”—a term that doesn’t extend to Chinese military maneuvers in the Caribbean or even most of the world’s oceans, but does include the US right to carry out military maneuvers and establish naval bases everywhere.For different reasons, China’s neighbors are none too happy about its actions, particularly Vietnam and the Philippines, which have competing claims to these waters, but others as well. The focus of US policy is slowly shifting from the Middle East—though that remains—to the Pacific, as openly announced. That includes new bases from Australia to South Korea (and a continuing and very significant conflict over Okinawa), and also economic agreements, called “free-trade agreements,” though the phrase is more propaganda than reality, as in other such cases. Much of it is a system to “contain China.”

Laray Polk:To what degree are current maritime sovereignty disputes related to oil and gas reserves?

In part. There are underseas fossil-fuel resources, and a good deal of contention among regional states about rights to them. But it"s more than that. The new US base on Jeju Island in South Korea, bitterly protested by islanders, is not primarily concerned with energy sources. Other issues have to do with Malacca Straits, China"s main trade route, which does involve oil and gas but also much else.

In the background is the more general concern over parts of the world escaping from US control and influence, the contemporary variant of Grand Area policies. Much of this extends the practice of earlier hegemonic powers, though the scale of US post-World War II planning and implementation has been in a class by itself because of its unique wealth and power.

Reprinted with permission from Seven Stories Press. Copyright 2013 — All Rights Reserved

 

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Noam Chomsky: How Close the World Is to Nuclear War

Will Chávez Revolution Continue in Venezuela? A Debate After Maduro"s Close Election Victory

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin in Venezuela, where Nicolás Maduro has narrowly won Sunday’s election to choose a replacement for Chávez, who died of cancer last month. Maduro had served as vice president and foreign minister under President Hugo Chávez. The National Electoral Council said Maduro received 50.7 percent of the vote, Henrique Capriles Radonski won 49.1 percent. The vote was far closer than one in October when Chávez beat Capriles by 11 percentage points.

In his victory speech, Maduro, a former bus driver, said a new era for the Bolivarian revolution is beginning.

PRESIDENT-ELECT NICOLÁS MADURO: [translated] Long live Chávez! Long live Chávez! Long live Chávez! Until victory forever, let’s go to the streets to defend this victory, to defend the triumph, in peace and in order to celebrate with the people and to remember that we have complied with the commander. Chávez, I swear to you, we have fulfilled your promise for independence and a socialist fatherland.

AMY GOODMAN: Sunday’s vote was the closest presidential election in Venezuela since 1968. Capriles, the governor of the state of Miranda, is refusing to concede defeat and has demanded a recount.

HENRIQUE CAPRILES RADONSKI: [translated] I want to say to the government’s candidate, the loser today is you. And I say that firmly. You are the loser, you and your government. I say that with firmness and with all the compromise and transparency. We will not recognize the results until each and every Venezuelan vote, one by one, has been counted. We demand here that the National Electoral Council open all of the boxes and that each Venezuelan vote be counted.

AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, Venezuelan voters talked about the significance of the election to pick a successor to the late Hugo Chávez.

DANIEL TORRES: [translated] Without a doubt, this is an act that will leave a relevant mark in our history. But it is forming the start of another era, an era 14 years before, and we’ll have to wait and see what will happen in the 14 years after.

RONNIE GONZALEZ: [translated] I am here early in hopes of improving the situation. I am anxious to execute my right and try to implement the change to the situation that has been agitating all Venezuelans.

MARIA RODRIGUEZ: [translated] Now, with Maduro, we also have to carry out the tasks he gives us, and, God willing, we hope this president will carry on with what the past president left behind.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk about the election and the state of Venezuela after the death of Chávez, we’re joined by two guests.

Rory Carroll is author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. He was The Guardian‘s Latin America correspondent and was based in Caracas until last year. He’s now the U.S. West Coast correspondent for The Guardian, based in Los Angeles.

Mark Weisbrot joins us from Washington, D.C., an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Mark, let’s begin with you. Can you talk about the significance of what took place yesterday, the election of Nicolás Maduro?

MARK WEISBROT: Well, I think it is—you know, the majority, at least, did vote for continuity, and I think they did so mainly because there was a large increase in living standards for people over the past 14 years, you know? If you take the point where the government got control over the oil industry, since then—because they couldn’t really do anything before that—since then, the poverty was reduced by 50 percent, extreme poverty by 70 percent. You had millions of people got access to free healthcare for the first time. Unemployment was 14-and-a-half percent when Chávez took office; it was 8 percent last year. So, big increases in employment and living standards. And I think, you know, that’s why they voted for.

I think also it was very lucky for the country that the Chávez government established this really secure electoral system. Now, you can see Capriles is—he’s kind of playing to the part of the opposition that in every election has not wanted to accept the results. Every election since 2004, there’s been a part of the opposition that just says, you know, “We don’t buy it.” But he’s not really going to do anything, I don’t think, because it’s very easy to have an audit. The system they have, Jimmy Carter called it the best in the world, and it really is quite good. I mean, they have two records of every vote. You push a touch screen: You have an electronic record. And then you have a receipt that goes in the ballot box. And all you have to do is compare those. And they will do that. And I’m sure it won’t change the result, because the margin is still large enough. It’s around 275,000 votes. So, it’s good—it’s very good for the country that they have a system like that and will be able to resolve it.

I think the election also has enormous significance for the region. That’s why you already saw the congratulations coming in, you know, from Argentina, from Ecuador. And all of the governments, I think, will, you know, stand behind if there’s any conflict over it. They’ll stand behind the government of Venezuela.

And, of course, on the other side is the United States, and I think that’s something that your viewers and listeners should really understand, is that whenever we talk about Venezuela here in the United States, you know, there’s really only two reasons you have as much news—and all of it’s bad—about Venezuela. One is that Venezuela is the primary target for regime change from the United States government, has been since the coup that the U.S. was involved in in 2002, you know, the primary target in the world probably, with the possible exception of Iran. And secondly, it has the largest oil reserves in the world. And those two things of course are related.

And that’s going to continue to shape relations with the United States. The United States is not really going to change its policy in the foreseeable future. They’ll still be trying to get rid of this government and really any target of opportunity they have among the left governments in South America. You know, you can see what happened in Paraguay last year, for example. There’s a nice article in The Nation by Natalia Viana showing that the USAID supported the coup there. And you had Honduras. You know, President Zelaya was on your show saying that the U.S. was involved in that coup in 2009. So, there’s always going to—the U.S. stepped up funding after the coup in 2002 to Venezuela, and I think they’ll continue to be active there.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory Carroll, you wrote Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. Your assessment of the significance of the election in Venezuela, and your response to economist Mark Weisbrot?

RORY CARROLL: Hi. Good morning, Amy. Good morning, Mark.

I think the significance of the result was written on the faces of the people, of the ministers behind Nicolás Maduro on the balcony last night. I mean, they were extremely somber, and they were shaken. I mean, this is not a good result for Nicolás Maduro or Chavismo, although they have won, and very, very narrowly. And it’s shockingly narrow. And the opinion polls and they themselves have been suggesting a sweeping double-digit victory. And the fact that they’ve just squeaked in is a major blow to his authority, his authority in terms of just the country nationally. It shows just how polarized the country is: It’s a 50-50 nation now. And also, it will undermine his own authority within the ranks of Chavismo. And I think many people within the movement will wonder now whether Nicolás Maduro really is the best man to lead them, because they have been so accustomed to these huge landslides that Hugo Chávez used to win, time after time.

And I think the reason this time that the landslide didn’t happen is really quite revealing, in some ways, because this is a government that had huge advantages of incumbency. And firstly, it controls the—pretty much most of the money in the country. As a petro state at a time of high oil prices, it has had huge powers of patronage, which it used lavishly to bolster its position, and happily blending party and state’s resources to cement that advantage. Also, you had civil servants whom, as ever, were instructed that you will vote for the government, or perhaps you won’t have a job. You had the head of the armed forces telling people, either hinting or also saying so explicitly, that you will vote for the government. And so, these are very strong advantages for the government.

And the fact that, with all of that, they still so narrowly won—basically lost 49-point-something percent of the population, shows that a lot of Venezuelans are unhappy. And they’re unhappy with insecurity, the fact that murder rates are out of control in Venezuela, especially in Caracas. They’re not happy with the fact that the economy is really quite dysfunctional and the fact that there are shortages of many basic goods and the fact that currency controls means that it’s very difficult for any businesses to do anything. And the fact that inflation is so strong means that daily life is often quite, quite difficult for people. And Venezuelans are no different to anybody else, in the sense that they just want—they want good jobs, and they want to be safe. And I think the vote that we saw was a sign that many people are not happy there.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and come back to this discussion with Rory Carroll, author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, also a reporter for The Guardian, and Mark Weisbrot, who’s speaking to us from D.C.—Center for Economic and Policy Research is his organization—an economist. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we talk about the results of the election in Venezuela: winning by a very slim margin, Nicolás Maduro, over Henrique Capriles. We urge folks to go to the website, democracynow.org. Our guests are Rory Carroll, author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela and the—of The Guardian, and Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Mark, your response to the critique of Rory Carroll to what’s happened in Venezuela today?

MARK WEISBROT: Well, first, we don’t want to exaggerate the advantage—or, I’m not even sure the government really had an advantage. You know, their state television has about a 6 percent audience share, so that’s not that much. And, you know, they even showed commercials for Capriles, for the opposition candidate, on state TV. And so—and then, of course, the print media is very much against the government, and the radio is probably against the government, as well. And so—and, of course, most of the wealth and income of the country is in the hands of the opposition, and they had plenty of ads. They were very sophisticated, very—a lot of resources. They ran a very good campaign. They did the same thing in the last election. So, I think this is a fairly level playing field compared especially to other—the average election in Latin America. I mean, look at Mexico, for example, where you had the media really determine the outcome of the election in 2006, and probably 2012, as well. where the left-of-center candidate doesn’t even have a chance, you know, with that kind of media duopoly as 95 percent of the media. So, this is a competitive election.

And I do think that there are serious problems the government has to deal with, and this is—this should be a wake-up call for them. I mean, you know, what happened since the last election that I think might have moved some of the 3 or 4 percent that moved from Chávez to the other camp was the economy deteriorated some—you know, the shortages that Rory was talking about. This is a problem mostly in the exchange rate system that has been badly managed. So, I think they need to stabilize the exchange rate. They need to make sure that foreign exchange is available, like it was. You know, you had a recovery. I mean, the economy has been growing for almost three years now. And so, it began to grow in—after the world recession and the recession they had in the middle of 2010. And it grew, and growth accelerated, and inflation was actually falling, right up to the last—almost to the last election, while the economy accelerated. And so, you didn’t have other problems that you’ve had in the last five months with the shortages, and so—and the increasing inflation you’ve had in the last few months. So I think that, definitely, the government needs to stabilize the exchange rate. They need to bring inflation down. And those two things together will get rid of the shortages, as they have in the past. They’ve reduced them and gotten rid of them at some points. And I think that’s some of the things they’re going to have to do. And they have to keep the economy growing and employment growing.

I think they—you know, if the other side would have won, you would have had a classic austerity plan immediately, and they would have brought down inflation by having a recession. I hope that this government doesn’t do that. They would have brought down imports, as well, the same way. I think this government can in fact resolve the problems of the exchange rate system and inflation while allowing the economy to grow, as they were doing right up to the last quarter of last year.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory Carroll, I wanted to get your response to Mark, as well as this comment. Following Chávez’s death last month, we spoke to Carol Delgado, the Venezuelan consul general in New York. She had returned to Caracas for the state funeral and praised Chávez’s work for the poor.

CAROL DELGADO: Venezuela has reduced poverty dramatically, particularly extreme poverty. Venezuelans right now have education, free up to the university level. We have free, universal health for everyone. And those kind of achievements are fantastic.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory Carroll, your response?

RORY CARROLL: Certainly there have been impressive social gains made in the past 10 years, but unfortunately there’s a problem of sustainability, and a lot of those social gains appear to be fraying. Those deep falls in poverty appear to have more or less halted, or certainly slowed very much, since 2010, and in social programs. If you visit public hospitals in Venezuela, as I’ve done many times, it’s pretty Dickensian, in terms of—there’s broken glass. Often there are power shortages in the hospitals. People have to bring their own medicines. They have to bring their own bedsheets. Criminals can break into hospitals and threaten staff. And these are—these are the main public hospitals in Caracas that we’re talking about. If you go outside the capital, it can be even more grim. So, I think there has to be a bit of a health warning, if you like, over some of the acclaim for some of these social programs, unfortunately.

That said, yes, poverty has fallen, and people have more money in their pockets, so they—and that’s great. But the country is increasingly lost in a labyrinth of petro populism. You need just to look at the statistics about the dependence on oil exports. I mean, now they’re about 94 percent dependent on—for their foreign revenue, revenue on oil exports. And the reason for that—or the consequence of that is that there really—there are hidden degrees of unemployment, because factories are—especially state-owned factories are either working at half capacity—I went to Ciudad Guayana, the industrial heartland of Venezuela, and there’s a whole chapter in the book about that, which shows that this great kind of manufacturing potential that Venezuela has has really been squandered.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory, I wanted—I wanted to ask you something. In your own newspaper, The Guardian, it said infant mortality is now lower than in 1999, from a rate of 20 per thousand live births to 13 in 2011; that poverty has decreased, in 1999 23.4 percent of the population recorded as being in extreme poverty, fell to 8.5 percent in 2011, according to official government figures. Can you talk about your trajectory of changing your view of Hugo Chávez when you first went down as a reporter and what made you shift to your critique of him?

RORY CARROLL: Yeah, I did—I was there for six years, from 2006 ’til last year, full time, although I still regularly visit. And I think, for me, the leitmotif is waste, wasted opportunity, that with Hugo Chávez, it was an immensely gifted politician, and he had such a strong mandate, he had—he had the great fortune to coincide with this explosion in oil revenues, and there was such goodwill behind him, and yet—and he was such a brilliant campaigner, but unfortunately, as a governor, as a ruler, he was—he was incompetent. And he more or less admitted this towards the end. I mean, he was asked one time, “Do have any regrets?” And he thought about it, and he said, “Well, mi gestión,” you know, most like “My management.” And we could—we see that in this kind of profound dysfunction. And just one example will be the infrastructure, the fact that they neglected to invest in infrastructure or maintain it, as the result of which now there are power cuts all the time, especially outside the city, outside Caracas. And yet the government, under Hugo Chávez and also now Nicolás Maduro, they resort to these kind of surreal excuses, like they blame mercenaries or maybe the CIA for sabotage, rather than the fact—the more banal fact is that this reflects a decade of mismanagement. And that applies really to the wider economy. And I just think it’s a wasted opportunity, because you just look further south to Brazil, and you can see there how they’ve made increasing—just as impressive reductions in poverty that are clearly much more sustainable.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to, well, at the time Foreign Minister Maduro in our studio. Juan González and I interviewed the new elected president, Nicolás Maduro, in October of 2007. This was during the Bush years, when he served as Chávez’s foreign minister. It was a year after Chávez had famously referred to then-President George W. Bush as the devil in a speech before the United Nations, saying, quote, “The devil came here yesterday. It smells like sulfur today.” I asked Maduro what message he had for the United States.

NICOLÁS MADURO MOROS: [translated] Our message is a message, first of all, to draw a balance of what has happened over the last months in the world, what happened in the world, what’s been the role of the United Nations to guarantee peace, how much the world has lost as a result of this crazy policy that apparently will be prolonged with this attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran. It could reach a crazy level if we pretend to take the way of war to aggress, to attack the Iranian people.

Our message remains the same. The world should open their eyes. The U.S. society should react. The U.S. people can do a lot for peace, for stability in the planet, for the recovery of the planet. The awareness in the world today, it’s also expressed in the United States, and we need a large humane alliance between the U.S. people and the peoples of the world, respecting our diversity, cultural diversity, our different ways to see the world, and establishing a relationship of equality. That’s the main message, and that’s been the message of President Chávez a year ago.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro, who was just elected president yesterday in Venezuela. Mark Weisbrot, if you could tell us exactly who Nicolás Maduro is, where he comes from, and the significance of this election, and if you think, in the call for the recount, is it possible that they would come up with different figures, since this was such a razor-slim margin that he won by yesterday?

MARK WEISBROT: Yes, well, it wasn’t that slim. I mean, it was 1.6 percentage points and around 300,000 votes, so it’s not going to be changed. And, I mean, it’s—anything is possible. There could have been some mistake, but it’s just really, really, really unlikely. And given the secure system they, I—and Maduro has said, by the way, you know, Capriles asked for 100 percent of the ballots instead of the—normally do like 54 percent, which is way more than you need. And he said, basically, yes. So, I don’t think there’s going to be any doubt.

In terms of Maduro, you know, he was the foreign minister for six years. He did a pretty good job, really. I think most people would recognize that. He comes from a left background. He was a union organizer and a bus driver. And I think he’s going to continue, you know, a lot of the same policies.

I want to just respond to Rory, if I can, because I think he presented what you see in the media every day. Now, he didn’t challenge the statistics that you gave on poverty and extreme poverty, and nobody does, but these are—you know, and those are huge changes in people’s lives, you know? And, of course, all the other changes that we talked about—employment. I didn’t even mention income, real income growth. But instead, the media focuses on everything that’s bad. I mean, you could do that with the Clinton years. You know, Clinton presided over the largest economic—longest economic expansion in U.S. history, and there were still a lot of bad things, you know, going on in the United States, even though unemployment hit record lows and, you know, poverty reduced sharply—and it came back, by the way, after he was gone. But, you know, this is just presenting this completely one-sided picture that you see every single day. Yeah, the public hospitals deteriorated, but that’s one of the reasons why they created—because they couldn’t control the health ministry, so that’s why they created the misiones to provide healthcare for millions of people there. And so, yeah, you know, there’s no doubt that Rory’s talking about problems—there were serious problems in administration. But to say that—you know, to just say that this was a failure? I mean, if you look at Venezuela the 20 years prior to Chávez, where the economy actually shrank in a per capita basis, I mean, this is a huge improvement in people’s living standards. And that’s why they’ve won 15 out of the last 16 elections. It’s not, as the media would have it, just because Chávez was a great performer and had a lot of charisma. I think that’s very important for people to understand.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory Carroll, on the issue of those statistics, the figures that I just read, according to your own paper and to the government figures, the serious reduction in extreme poverty, your response to that?

RORY CARROLL: Yes. Well, I think—I mean, those are the function of two things. One is the oil prices increased from about $ 8 or $ 9 a barrel when Hugo Chávez took over; in 1999, they exploded up to more than $ 100 a barrel. And this put huge amounts of money into the Venezuelan treasury. And we saw in the 1970s, during a previous boom, that there are falls in poverty and that this generates lots of money in the economy. And Venezuela, above all, is a petro state. And that, in a sense, the—this fall of poverty, in many ways, reflected that. But it did also reflect the lavish spending that Hugo Chávez’s government did with this boom. They spent very generously on social programs, and rightly so. They invested a lot on reducing poverty, and that’s all great.

The problem, the catch—and it’s a big one—is that the way they did it was clearly not sustainable. And many of—instead of building an economy that—with real jobs, which would give the poor people like a permanent leg up, I think we see a lot of the money has been spent on subsidies, the fact that gasoline is basically free—which is, in a way, a regressive subsidy: It benefits the middle class more than the poor. The fact that so many prices are kind of frozen and that they have to send out the police and the army to try to enforce these price controls is just one indication of just how things are distorted there. And as Mark himself said, I mean, for example, they couldn’t control the health ministry. Well, why not? I mean, they were the health ministry. And that’s reflective of the wider dysfunction in the government. And therein lies the tragedy.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Weisbrot—

MARK WEISBROT: Can I respond to that? Yeah. First of all—

AMY GOODMAN: If you would respond, and also if you could talk about what has been the U.S. role in Venezuela.

MARK WEISBROT: Yeah, that’s very important, too. I mean, that’s—well, but first let’s talk about sustainability. For 14 years, all of the media, and especially the business press, you know, 90 percent of the media, has been predicting economic collapse in Venezuela. They’ve always said it’s unsustainable. You know, I have these debates with opposition economists, and they don’t dispute any of the statistics; all they say is next year it’s going to collapse. Well, they’ve been saying this for 14 years, and it hasn’t collapsed yet. They’ve had two recessions. One was caused by an opposition oil strike in 2002 and 2003—certainly not the government’s fault—and the other that was caused at the—in 2009 and half of 2010 that was brought on by the world recession. So, it’s not going to collapse. This idea of sustainability, that’s just saying, you know, “We hope it collapses, and it’s going to collapse some day, and we hope it’s soon.” And it’s not going to. And, you know, they don’t have an unsustainable debt. So, unsustainable is like what we had in 2006, when you had an $ 8 trillion housing bubble, and everybody who was looking at it, which unfortunately wasn’t most economists, could tell you that it was going to burst and it was going to cause a huge recession, OK? They don’t have those kinds of imbalances. They have a problem: You know, they have inflation, and inflation is higher than their trading partners, and so that appreciates their real exchange rate, and that’s why you had a devaluation. And this is an ongoing problem that they have to fix. But that isn’t like what we had, where you have a giant bubble, asset bubble, collapses, and you get a great recession out of it. So, this is all—a lot of this is really exaggerated.

Now, the other question about the U.S. role, that’s very important, because, you know, Rory points to Brazil and says, “Well, they were able to do a lot of nice things, and they didn’t have this polarization and conflict and all these things that we don’t like.” Well, that’s great, but they weren’t facing the same kind of opposition that had, you know, according to Petkoff—Teodoro Petkoff, a leader of the opposition himself, said they had a strategy of military overthrow from 1999 to 2003, OK? Brazil didn’t have that. They had the military—was as nationalistic as the government. And they had—they didn’t have the United States, on the side of this—not only the military, but the opposition—telling them all along and pouring money in there and saying, “You just—you know, we get rid of everybody we don’t like in this region, and you just hang in there, and you don’t have to deal with this guy. You don’t have to be part of a government. You can boycott the 2005 elections,” as they did for the National Assembly. “You can pretend that the 2004 referendum was stolen,” even though Jimmy Carter—the Carter Center certified it, and so did the OAS. This is what Chávez had to deal with.

So, yeah, he was a polarizing figure, if you want to say that, but he was dealing with people who, every time he offered them an olive branch, they just slapped him in the face. And they had no intention of ever dealing with him. And, you know, in that sense, you can say there’s progress, because here, at least, you know, they’re participating in elections. They started doing that in 2006. And they have started accepting the results. So there’s some progress there. But again, you know, this is the U.S. main—as I said, it’s the number one or two target for regime change. The opposition knows that. And they don’t feel like there’s any reason to work with the government the way the opposition in Brazil does.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory Carroll, your quick response, as we wrap up?

RORY CARROLL: Well, I think there’s so much bluster, really, in terms of the U.S.-Venezuelan relationship. Venezuela continues, and has always, under Chávez, and will continue to do so, sells oil to the United States. Companies like Chevron operate in Venezuela. And the United States will continue to buy Venezuela’s oil. And I think the U.S.’s shameful role in the 2002 coup has been well documented, but that was, you know, more than a decade ago. And I think this heightened rhetorical attacks between—from Caracas really have been—served largely now as a distraction, and the fact that we saw it reaching kind of surreal levels with Nicolás Maduro basically accusing the CIA or the United States of poisoning Hugo Chávez, of giving him cancer, and really—and that’s ridiculous.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Weisbrot, on that one issue of the charges and the belief of many in Venezuela that the United States killed Hugo Chávez?

MARK WEISBROT: Well, they haven’t presented any evidence, so until they do I can’t say that it has any validity. But I can understand why people would believe it. How many times did they try to kill Castro? And how many times have they, you know, done things like this? They have a—White House has a kill list where they kill people they don’t like every week. So, yeah, I mean, I can see why the people would believe that, but I have no idea whether there’s any validity to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there, but we’re going to, of course, continue to follow politics in Venezuela. I want to thank Mark Weisbrot from the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Rory Carroll, author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. He also writes for The Guardian newspaper.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, well, it’s Tax Day, and we’ll speak with a tax resister. Stay with us.

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Democracy Now!

Will Chávez Revolution Continue in Venezuela? A Debate After Maduro"s Close Election Victory

Will Chávez Revolution Continue in Venezuela? A Debate After Maduro"s Close Election Victory

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin in Venezuela, where Nicolás Maduro has narrowly won Sunday’s election to choose a replacement for Chávez, who died of cancer last month. Maduro had served as vice president and foreign minister under President Hugo Chávez. The National Electoral Council said Maduro received 50.7 percent of the vote, Henrique Capriles Radonski won 49.1 percent. The vote was far closer than one in October when Chávez beat Capriles by 11 percentage points.

In his victory speech, Maduro, a former bus driver, said a new era for the Bolivarian revolution is beginning.

PRESIDENT-ELECT NICOLÁS MADURO: [translated] Long live Chávez! Long live Chávez! Long live Chávez! Until victory forever, let’s go to the streets to defend this victory, to defend the triumph, in peace and in order to celebrate with the people and to remember that we have complied with the commander. Chávez, I swear to you, we have fulfilled your promise for independence and a socialist fatherland.

AMY GOODMAN: Sunday’s vote was the closest presidential election in Venezuela since 1968. Capriles, the governor of the state of Miranda, is refusing to concede defeat and has demanded a recount.

HENRIQUE CAPRILES RADONSKI: [translated] I want to say to the government’s candidate, the loser today is you. And I say that firmly. You are the loser, you and your government. I say that with firmness and with all the compromise and transparency. We will not recognize the results until each and every Venezuelan vote, one by one, has been counted. We demand here that the National Electoral Council open all of the boxes and that each Venezuelan vote be counted.

AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, Venezuelan voters talked about the significance of the election to pick a successor to the late Hugo Chávez.

DANIEL TORRES: [translated] Without a doubt, this is an act that will leave a relevant mark in our history. But it is forming the start of another era, an era 14 years before, and we’ll have to wait and see what will happen in the 14 years after.

RONNIE GONZALEZ: [translated] I am here early in hopes of improving the situation. I am anxious to execute my right and try to implement the change to the situation that has been agitating all Venezuelans.

MARIA RODRIGUEZ: [translated] Now, with Maduro, we also have to carry out the tasks he gives us, and, God willing, we hope this president will carry on with what the past president left behind.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk about the election and the state of Venezuela after the death of Chávez, we’re joined by two guests.

Rory Carroll is author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. He was The Guardian‘s Latin America correspondent and was based in Caracas until last year. He’s now the U.S. West Coast correspondent for The Guardian, based in Los Angeles.

Mark Weisbrot joins us from Washington, D.C., an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Mark, let’s begin with you. Can you talk about the significance of what took place yesterday, the election of Nicolás Maduro?

MARK WEISBROT: Well, I think it is—you know, the majority, at least, did vote for continuity, and I think they did so mainly because there was a large increase in living standards for people over the past 14 years, you know? If you take the point where the government got control over the oil industry, since then—because they couldn’t really do anything before that—since then, the poverty was reduced by 50 percent, extreme poverty by 70 percent. You had millions of people got access to free healthcare for the first time. Unemployment was 14-and-a-half percent when Chávez took office; it was 8 percent last year. So, big increases in employment and living standards. And I think, you know, that’s why they voted for.

I think also it was very lucky for the country that the Chávez government established this really secure electoral system. Now, you can see Capriles is—he’s kind of playing to the part of the opposition that in every election has not wanted to accept the results. Every election since 2004, there’s been a part of the opposition that just says, you know, “We don’t buy it.” But he’s not really going to do anything, I don’t think, because it’s very easy to have an audit. The system they have, Jimmy Carter called it the best in the world, and it really is quite good. I mean, they have two records of every vote. You push a touch screen: You have an electronic record. And then you have a receipt that goes in the ballot box. And all you have to do is compare those. And they will do that. And I’m sure it won’t change the result, because the margin is still large enough. It’s around 275,000 votes. So, it’s good—it’s very good for the country that they have a system like that and will be able to resolve it.

I think the election also has enormous significance for the region. That’s why you already saw the congratulations coming in, you know, from Argentina, from Ecuador. And all of the governments, I think, will, you know, stand behind if there’s any conflict over it. They’ll stand behind the government of Venezuela.

And, of course, on the other side is the United States, and I think that’s something that your viewers and listeners should really understand, is that whenever we talk about Venezuela here in the United States, you know, there’s really only two reasons you have as much news—and all of it’s bad—about Venezuela. One is that Venezuela is the primary target for regime change from the United States government, has been since the coup that the U.S. was involved in in 2002, you know, the primary target in the world probably, with the possible exception of Iran. And secondly, it has the largest oil reserves in the world. And those two things of course are related.

And that’s going to continue to shape relations with the United States. The United States is not really going to change its policy in the foreseeable future. They’ll still be trying to get rid of this government and really any target of opportunity they have among the left governments in South America. You know, you can see what happened in Paraguay last year, for example. There’s a nice article in The Nation by Natalia Viana showing that the USAID supported the coup there. And you had Honduras. You know, President Zelaya was on your show saying that the U.S. was involved in that coup in 2009. So, there’s always going to—the U.S. stepped up funding after the coup in 2002 to Venezuela, and I think they’ll continue to be active there.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory Carroll, you wrote Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. Your assessment of the significance of the election in Venezuela, and your response to economist Mark Weisbrot?

RORY CARROLL: Hi. Good morning, Amy. Good morning, Mark.

I think the significance of the result was written on the faces of the people, of the ministers behind Nicolás Maduro on the balcony last night. I mean, they were extremely somber, and they were shaken. I mean, this is not a good result for Nicolás Maduro or Chavismo, although they have won, and very, very narrowly. And it’s shockingly narrow. And the opinion polls and they themselves have been suggesting a sweeping double-digit victory. And the fact that they’ve just squeaked in is a major blow to his authority, his authority in terms of just the country nationally. It shows just how polarized the country is: It’s a 50-50 nation now. And also, it will undermine his own authority within the ranks of Chavismo. And I think many people within the movement will wonder now whether Nicolás Maduro really is the best man to lead them, because they have been so accustomed to these huge landslides that Hugo Chávez used to win, time after time.

And I think the reason this time that the landslide didn’t happen is really quite revealing, in some ways, because this is a government that had huge advantages of incumbency. And firstly, it controls the—pretty much most of the money in the country. As a petro state at a time of high oil prices, it has had huge powers of patronage, which it used lavishly to bolster its position, and happily blending party and state’s resources to cement that advantage. Also, you had civil servants whom, as ever, were instructed that you will vote for the government, or perhaps you won’t have a job. You had the head of the armed forces telling people, either hinting or also saying so explicitly, that you will vote for the government. And so, these are very strong advantages for the government.

And the fact that, with all of that, they still so narrowly won—basically lost 49-point-something percent of the population, shows that a lot of Venezuelans are unhappy. And they’re unhappy with insecurity, the fact that murder rates are out of control in Venezuela, especially in Caracas. They’re not happy with the fact that the economy is really quite dysfunctional and the fact that there are shortages of many basic goods and the fact that currency controls means that it’s very difficult for any businesses to do anything. And the fact that inflation is so strong means that daily life is often quite, quite difficult for people. And Venezuelans are no different to anybody else, in the sense that they just want—they want good jobs, and they want to be safe. And I think the vote that we saw was a sign that many people are not happy there.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and come back to this discussion with Rory Carroll, author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, also a reporter for The Guardian, and Mark Weisbrot, who’s speaking to us from D.C.—Center for Economic and Policy Research is his organization—an economist. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we talk about the results of the election in Venezuela: winning by a very slim margin, Nicolás Maduro, over Henrique Capriles. We urge folks to go to the website, democracynow.org. Our guests are Rory Carroll, author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela and the—of The Guardian, and Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Mark, your response to the critique of Rory Carroll to what’s happened in Venezuela today?

MARK WEISBROT: Well, first, we don’t want to exaggerate the advantage—or, I’m not even sure the government really had an advantage. You know, their state television has about a 6 percent audience share, so that’s not that much. And, you know, they even showed commercials for Capriles, for the opposition candidate, on state TV. And so—and then, of course, the print media is very much against the government, and the radio is probably against the government, as well. And so—and, of course, most of the wealth and income of the country is in the hands of the opposition, and they had plenty of ads. They were very sophisticated, very—a lot of resources. They ran a very good campaign. They did the same thing in the last election. So, I think this is a fairly level playing field compared especially to other—the average election in Latin America. I mean, look at Mexico, for example, where you had the media really determine the outcome of the election in 2006, and probably 2012, as well. where the left-of-center candidate doesn’t even have a chance, you know, with that kind of media duopoly as 95 percent of the media. So, this is a competitive election.

And I do think that there are serious problems the government has to deal with, and this is—this should be a wake-up call for them. I mean, you know, what happened since the last election that I think might have moved some of the 3 or 4 percent that moved from Chávez to the other camp was the economy deteriorated some—you know, the shortages that Rory was talking about. This is a problem mostly in the exchange rate system that has been badly managed. So, I think they need to stabilize the exchange rate. They need to make sure that foreign exchange is available, like it was. You know, you had a recovery. I mean, the economy has been growing for almost three years now. And so, it began to grow in—after the world recession and the recession they had in the middle of 2010. And it grew, and growth accelerated, and inflation was actually falling, right up to the last—almost to the last election, while the economy accelerated. And so, you didn’t have other problems that you’ve had in the last five months with the shortages, and so—and the increasing inflation you’ve had in the last few months. So I think that, definitely, the government needs to stabilize the exchange rate. They need to bring inflation down. And those two things together will get rid of the shortages, as they have in the past. They’ve reduced them and gotten rid of them at some points. And I think that’s some of the things they’re going to have to do. And they have to keep the economy growing and employment growing.

I think they—you know, if the other side would have won, you would have had a classic austerity plan immediately, and they would have brought down inflation by having a recession. I hope that this government doesn’t do that. They would have brought down imports, as well, the same way. I think this government can in fact resolve the problems of the exchange rate system and inflation while allowing the economy to grow, as they were doing right up to the last quarter of last year.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory Carroll, I wanted to get your response to Mark, as well as this comment. Following Chávez’s death last month, we spoke to Carol Delgado, the Venezuelan consul general in New York. She had returned to Caracas for the state funeral and praised Chávez’s work for the poor.

CAROL DELGADO: Venezuela has reduced poverty dramatically, particularly extreme poverty. Venezuelans right now have education, free up to the university level. We have free, universal health for everyone. And those kind of achievements are fantastic.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory Carroll, your response?

RORY CARROLL: Certainly there have been impressive social gains made in the past 10 years, but unfortunately there’s a problem of sustainability, and a lot of those social gains appear to be fraying. Those deep falls in poverty appear to have more or less halted, or certainly slowed very much, since 2010, and in social programs. If you visit public hospitals in Venezuela, as I’ve done many times, it’s pretty Dickensian, in terms of—there’s broken glass. Often there are power shortages in the hospitals. People have to bring their own medicines. They have to bring their own bedsheets. Criminals can break into hospitals and threaten staff. And these are—these are the main public hospitals in Caracas that we’re talking about. If you go outside the capital, it can be even more grim. So, I think there has to be a bit of a health warning, if you like, over some of the acclaim for some of these social programs, unfortunately.

That said, yes, poverty has fallen, and people have more money in their pockets, so they—and that’s great. But the country is increasingly lost in a labyrinth of petro populism. You need just to look at the statistics about the dependence on oil exports. I mean, now they’re about 94 percent dependent on—for their foreign revenue, revenue on oil exports. And the reason for that—or the consequence of that is that there really—there are hidden degrees of unemployment, because factories are—especially state-owned factories are either working at half capacity—I went to Ciudad Guayana, the industrial heartland of Venezuela, and there’s a whole chapter in the book about that, which shows that this great kind of manufacturing potential that Venezuela has has really been squandered.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory, I wanted—I wanted to ask you something. In your own newspaper, The Guardian, it said infant mortality is now lower than in 1999, from a rate of 20 per thousand live births to 13 in 2011; that poverty has decreased, in 1999 23.4 percent of the population recorded as being in extreme poverty, fell to 8.5 percent in 2011, according to official government figures. Can you talk about your trajectory of changing your view of Hugo Chávez when you first went down as a reporter and what made you shift to your critique of him?

RORY CARROLL: Yeah, I did—I was there for six years, from 2006 ’til last year, full time, although I still regularly visit. And I think, for me, the leitmotif is waste, wasted opportunity, that with Hugo Chávez, it was an immensely gifted politician, and he had such a strong mandate, he had—he had the great fortune to coincide with this explosion in oil revenues, and there was such goodwill behind him, and yet—and he was such a brilliant campaigner, but unfortunately, as a governor, as a ruler, he was—he was incompetent. And he more or less admitted this towards the end. I mean, he was asked one time, “Do have any regrets?” And he thought about it, and he said, “Well, mi gestión,” you know, most like “My management.” And we could—we see that in this kind of profound dysfunction. And just one example will be the infrastructure, the fact that they neglected to invest in infrastructure or maintain it, as the result of which now there are power cuts all the time, especially outside the city, outside Caracas. And yet the government, under Hugo Chávez and also now Nicolás Maduro, they resort to these kind of surreal excuses, like they blame mercenaries or maybe the CIA for sabotage, rather than the fact—the more banal fact is that this reflects a decade of mismanagement. And that applies really to the wider economy. And I just think it’s a wasted opportunity, because you just look further south to Brazil, and you can see there how they’ve made increasing—just as impressive reductions in poverty that are clearly much more sustainable.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to, well, at the time Foreign Minister Maduro in our studio. Juan González and I interviewed the new elected president, Nicolás Maduro, in October of 2007. This was during the Bush years, when he served as Chávez’s foreign minister. It was a year after Chávez had famously referred to then-President George W. Bush as the devil in a speech before the United Nations, saying, quote, “The devil came here yesterday. It smells like sulfur today.” I asked Maduro what message he had for the United States.

NICOLÁS MADURO MOROS: [translated] Our message is a message, first of all, to draw a balance of what has happened over the last months in the world, what happened in the world, what’s been the role of the United Nations to guarantee peace, how much the world has lost as a result of this crazy policy that apparently will be prolonged with this attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran. It could reach a crazy level if we pretend to take the way of war to aggress, to attack the Iranian people.

Our message remains the same. The world should open their eyes. The U.S. society should react. The U.S. people can do a lot for peace, for stability in the planet, for the recovery of the planet. The awareness in the world today, it’s also expressed in the United States, and we need a large humane alliance between the U.S. people and the peoples of the world, respecting our diversity, cultural diversity, our different ways to see the world, and establishing a relationship of equality. That’s the main message, and that’s been the message of President Chávez a year ago.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro, who was just elected president yesterday in Venezuela. Mark Weisbrot, if you could tell us exactly who Nicolás Maduro is, where he comes from, and the significance of this election, and if you think, in the call for the recount, is it possible that they would come up with different figures, since this was such a razor-slim margin that he won by yesterday?

MARK WEISBROT: Yes, well, it wasn’t that slim. I mean, it was 1.6 percentage points and around 300,000 votes, so it’s not going to be changed. And, I mean, it’s—anything is possible. There could have been some mistake, but it’s just really, really, really unlikely. And given the secure system they, I—and Maduro has said, by the way, you know, Capriles asked for 100 percent of the ballots instead of the—normally do like 54 percent, which is way more than you need. And he said, basically, yes. So, I don’t think there’s going to be any doubt.

In terms of Maduro, you know, he was the foreign minister for six years. He did a pretty good job, really. I think most people would recognize that. He comes from a left background. He was a union organizer and a bus driver. And I think he’s going to continue, you know, a lot of the same policies.

I want to just respond to Rory, if I can, because I think he presented what you see in the media every day. Now, he didn’t challenge the statistics that you gave on poverty and extreme poverty, and nobody does, but these are—you know, and those are huge changes in people’s lives, you know? And, of course, all the other changes that we talked about—employment. I didn’t even mention income, real income growth. But instead, the media focuses on everything that’s bad. I mean, you could do that with the Clinton years. You know, Clinton presided over the largest economic—longest economic expansion in U.S. history, and there were still a lot of bad things, you know, going on in the United States, even though unemployment hit record lows and, you know, poverty reduced sharply—and it came back, by the way, after he was gone. But, you know, this is just presenting this completely one-sided picture that you see every single day. Yeah, the public hospitals deteriorated, but that’s one of the reasons why they created—because they couldn’t control the health ministry, so that’s why they created the misiones to provide healthcare for millions of people there. And so, yeah, you know, there’s no doubt that Rory’s talking about problems—there were serious problems in administration. But to say that—you know, to just say that this was a failure? I mean, if you look at Venezuela the 20 years prior to Chávez, where the economy actually shrank in a per capita basis, I mean, this is a huge improvement in people’s living standards. And that’s why they’ve won 15 out of the last 16 elections. It’s not, as the media would have it, just because Chávez was a great performer and had a lot of charisma. I think that’s very important for people to understand.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory Carroll, on the issue of those statistics, the figures that I just read, according to your own paper and to the government figures, the serious reduction in extreme poverty, your response to that?

RORY CARROLL: Yes. Well, I think—I mean, those are the function of two things. One is the oil prices increased from about $ 8 or $ 9 a barrel when Hugo Chávez took over; in 1999, they exploded up to more than $ 100 a barrel. And this put huge amounts of money into the Venezuelan treasury. And we saw in the 1970s, during a previous boom, that there are falls in poverty and that this generates lots of money in the economy. And Venezuela, above all, is a petro state. And that, in a sense, the—this fall of poverty, in many ways, reflected that. But it did also reflect the lavish spending that Hugo Chávez’s government did with this boom. They spent very generously on social programs, and rightly so. They invested a lot on reducing poverty, and that’s all great.

The problem, the catch—and it’s a big one—is that the way they did it was clearly not sustainable. And many of—instead of building an economy that—with real jobs, which would give the poor people like a permanent leg up, I think we see a lot of the money has been spent on subsidies, the fact that gasoline is basically free—which is, in a way, a regressive subsidy: It benefits the middle class more than the poor. The fact that so many prices are kind of frozen and that they have to send out the police and the army to try to enforce these price controls is just one indication of just how things are distorted there. And as Mark himself said, I mean, for example, they couldn’t control the health ministry. Well, why not? I mean, they were the health ministry. And that’s reflective of the wider dysfunction in the government. And therein lies the tragedy.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Weisbrot—

MARK WEISBROT: Can I respond to that? Yeah. First of all—

AMY GOODMAN: If you would respond, and also if you could talk about what has been the U.S. role in Venezuela.

MARK WEISBROT: Yeah, that’s very important, too. I mean, that’s—well, but first let’s talk about sustainability. For 14 years, all of the media, and especially the business press, you know, 90 percent of the media, has been predicting economic collapse in Venezuela. They’ve always said it’s unsustainable. You know, I have these debates with opposition economists, and they don’t dispute any of the statistics; all they say is next year it’s going to collapse. Well, they’ve been saying this for 14 years, and it hasn’t collapsed yet. They’ve had two recessions. One was caused by an opposition oil strike in 2002 and 2003—certainly not the government’s fault—and the other that was caused at the—in 2009 and half of 2010 that was brought on by the world recession. So, it’s not going to collapse. This idea of sustainability, that’s just saying, you know, “We hope it collapses, and it’s going to collapse some day, and we hope it’s soon.” And it’s not going to. And, you know, they don’t have an unsustainable debt. So, unsustainable is like what we had in 2006, when you had an $ 8 trillion housing bubble, and everybody who was looking at it, which unfortunately wasn’t most economists, could tell you that it was going to burst and it was going to cause a huge recession, OK? They don’t have those kinds of imbalances. They have a problem: You know, they have inflation, and inflation is higher than their trading partners, and so that appreciates their real exchange rate, and that’s why you had a devaluation. And this is an ongoing problem that they have to fix. But that isn’t like what we had, where you have a giant bubble, asset bubble, collapses, and you get a great recession out of it. So, this is all—a lot of this is really exaggerated.

Now, the other question about the U.S. role, that’s very important, because, you know, Rory points to Brazil and says, “Well, they were able to do a lot of nice things, and they didn’t have this polarization and conflict and all these things that we don’t like.” Well, that’s great, but they weren’t facing the same kind of opposition that had, you know, according to Petkoff—Teodoro Petkoff, a leader of the opposition himself, said they had a strategy of military overthrow from 1999 to 2003, OK? Brazil didn’t have that. They had the military—was as nationalistic as the government. And they had—they didn’t have the United States, on the side of this—not only the military, but the opposition—telling them all along and pouring money in there and saying, “You just—you know, we get rid of everybody we don’t like in this region, and you just hang in there, and you don’t have to deal with this guy. You don’t have to be part of a government. You can boycott the 2005 elections,” as they did for the National Assembly. “You can pretend that the 2004 referendum was stolen,” even though Jimmy Carter—the Carter Center certified it, and so did the OAS. This is what Chávez had to deal with.

So, yeah, he was a polarizing figure, if you want to say that, but he was dealing with people who, every time he offered them an olive branch, they just slapped him in the face. And they had no intention of ever dealing with him. And, you know, in that sense, you can say there’s progress, because here, at least, you know, they’re participating in elections. They started doing that in 2006. And they have started accepting the results. So there’s some progress there. But again, you know, this is the U.S. main—as I said, it’s the number one or two target for regime change. The opposition knows that. And they don’t feel like there’s any reason to work with the government the way the opposition in Brazil does.

AMY GOODMAN: Rory Carroll, your quick response, as we wrap up?

RORY CARROLL: Well, I think there’s so much bluster, really, in terms of the U.S.-Venezuelan relationship. Venezuela continues, and has always, under Chávez, and will continue to do so, sells oil to the United States. Companies like Chevron operate in Venezuela. And the United States will continue to buy Venezuela’s oil. And I think the U.S.’s shameful role in the 2002 coup has been well documented, but that was, you know, more than a decade ago. And I think this heightened rhetorical attacks between—from Caracas really have been—served largely now as a distraction, and the fact that we saw it reaching kind of surreal levels with Nicolás Maduro basically accusing the CIA or the United States of poisoning Hugo Chávez, of giving him cancer, and really—and that’s ridiculous.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Weisbrot, on that one issue of the charges and the belief of many in Venezuela that the United States killed Hugo Chávez?

MARK WEISBROT: Well, they haven’t presented any evidence, so until they do I can’t say that it has any validity. But I can understand why people would believe it. How many times did they try to kill Castro? And how many times have they, you know, done things like this? They have a—White House has a kill list where they kill people they don’t like every week. So, yeah, I mean, I can see why the people would believe that, but I have no idea whether there’s any validity to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there, but we’re going to, of course, continue to follow politics in Venezuela. I want to thank Mark Weisbrot from the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Rory Carroll, author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. He also writes for The Guardian newspaper.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, well, it’s Tax Day, and we’ll speak with a tax resister. Stay with us.

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Will Chávez Revolution Continue in Venezuela? A Debate After Maduro"s Close Election Victory

BUDGET DAY, Weiner eyes comeback, McConnell: Our campaign was "bugged," Manchin-Toomey gun deal close, Immigration bill Thurs?, Kelly wins House seat, trivia

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BUDGET DAY: OBAMA’S $ 3.77T BUDGET CALLS FOR TAXES ON RICH BUT ALSO ENTITLEMENT CUTS – President Obama’s 2014 fiscal blueprint was being delivered to Capitol Hill this morning, but the White House had already released some of the highlights. Reid J. Epstein writes for the hometown paper: “The budget itself represents some level of concession, White House aides say, arguing that Obama still would prefer a grand bargain that would completely rethink spending and revenue — though only one that comes on his terms. But even after weeks of outreach to Republicans following Obama’s beat-‘em-up campaign to stop the sequester cuts failed, that kind of deal still isn’t on the table. So they’re back to the budget duel: House Republicans want major cuts. Obama wants big revenues from the rich.

– “His $ 3.77 trillion proposal would reduce the deficit by $ 1.8 trillion by adding $ 580 billion in new taxes on the wealthy, according to senior administration officials. It also includes an estimated $ 230 billion in savings by reducing cost-of-living adjustments for federal entitlement programs. But all of those cuts — which White House aides say the president is ready to make — depend on whether Republicans agree to new tax revenues, including requiring people who make $ 1 million or more to pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes and limiting deductions for the top 2 percent of earners. ‘If they refuse to include revenues in any deal, then there will be no deal. It’s that simple,’ a senior administration official said in a briefing call with reporters Tuesday.” http://politi.co/ZMwXMt See an overview of Obama’s budget here: http://politi.co/YjbXlG

OBAMA’S BUDGET MUDDLE – Glenn Thrush and Byron Tau report for POLITICO: On Wednesday, Senate Republicans will break bread with President Barack Obama at the White House. On Tuesday, Bernie Sanders, the most liberal member of the Senate Democratic caucus, was standing outside the gates rebuking Obama for selling out seniors. That jarring juxtaposition captures the upside-down political dynamic of Obama’s new budget proposal, due to be released Wednesday: Its centerpiece is a highly controversial plan to trim Social Security cost-of-living increases — a move one longtime Obama adviser called a ‘goodwill gesture’ to Republicans and liberals decry as a shocking departure from Obama’s 2012 campaign rhetoric, a betrayal that warrants retribution. So far, there is scant evidence that Republicans view Obama’s ‘chained CPI’ proposal as a sign of good will. And there are plenty of people on the left who regard it as a sign of bad will—a departure from the message that won Obama a second-term and new occasion for doubting the president’s negotiating skills.” http://politi.co/ZMsp8P

– A dozen GOP senators are expected to dine with Obama tonight, including Sens. Johnny Isakson (Ga.), John Thune (S.D.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah.). Isakson will release the full list today but none are said to have attended last month’s dinner with senators at a nearby hotel.

– In an interview with POLITICO’s Jon Allen and Mike Allen, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer says Democrats aren’t ready to embrace Obama’s ‘chained CPI” plan. Watch video of the interview and read the story here: http://politi.co/12GInoR

WEINER EYES COMEBACK, MAYOR’S RACE – Maggie Haberman writes for POLITICO: “In a sweeping confessional interview published Wednesday, Anthony Weiner provided his first explanation of the bizarre behavior that led to his downfall, compared his wife’s circumstance to that of Hillary Clinton’s after the Monica Lewinsky scandal — and acknowledged he’s eagerly looking at a political comeback this year. The New York Times Magazine interview with Weiner and his wife, Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, has been the talk of New York’s political world for the past week. It is a building block of a political return by the former Queens congressman, who resigned after admitting that a lewd tweet sent from his account, which he’d claimed had been hacked, was in fact his own doing. The piece is the first time Weiner and Abedin have spoken at length about the rapid-fire events of 2011 that led him to resign his seat: the tweet he sent thinking it was a private message, the exposure by Andrew Breitbart’s site, the days of claiming he was the victim of a crime and then the ultimate, tearful confession at a Midtown press conference. http://politi.co/ZMtFss

– Jonathan Van Meter writes in the NYT Magazine piece: “At breakfast, Weiner quickly put all the speculation to rest: he is eyeing the mayor’s race. He told me that his political committee spent more than $ 100,000 on polling and research by Obama’s longtime pollster, David Binder (a detail that would be made public — and prompt a flurry of news reports — in mid-March when a spending report was filed with the city’s Campaign Finance Board). The focus of the poll, Binder says, was the question “Are voters willing to give him a second chance or not, regardless of what race or what contest?” And the answer? “There was this sense of ‘Yeah, he made a mistake. Let’s give him a second chance. But there are conditions on that, and there are a couple of things we’re going to want to know: What have you been doing since this incident occurred? Did you learn anything from this mistake? How did you deal with it?’ They want to know that they’ve put it behind them.” http://nyti.ms/10SLnMg

McCONNELL CLAIMS THE LEFT ‘BUGGED’ HIS CAMPAIGN HQ, ‘NIXONIAN’ TACTICS – Siobhan Hughes writes in the Wall Street Journal: “Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) on Tuesday accused ‘the political left in America’ of engaging in ‘Nixonian’ political tactics, reacting to the publication of an audio tape of a McConnell re-election strategy session. Mother Jones magazine published an article Tuesday based on the tape, in which campaign aides discussed how to attack potential rival Ashley Judd. Mr. McConnell told reporters:  ‘Last month, they were attacking my wife’s ethnicity’ — a reference to a tweet by a liberal group claiming wife Elaine Chao moved U.S. jobs to China– ‘and then apparently also unbeknownst to us they were bugging our headquarters – quite  a Nixonian move.’ He added:  ‘This is what you get from the political left in America.’ Ms. Chao, who was born in Taiwan, was labor secretary during the George W. Bush administration.

– “In a statement on its website, Mother Jones said: “As the story makes clear, we were recently provided the tape by a source who wished to remain anonymous. We were not involved in the making of the tape, but we published a story on the tape due to its obvious newsworthiness. It is our understanding that the tape was not the product of a Watergate-style bugging operation. We cannot comment beyond that.’ The tape of the McConnell strategy session begins with Mr. McConnell saying, ‘I assume most of you have played the, the game Whac-A-Mole? This is the Whac-A-Mole period of the campaign,’ to try to identify and attack potential contenders, according to the transcript posted by Mother Jones.” http://on.wsj.com/10SFQVZ

– Mother Jones’ David Korn, who broke the story, writes that the McConnell campaign discusses raising Judd’s past history with mental illness: “[T]he McConnell gang explored going far beyond Judd’s politics and policy preferences. This included her mental health. The meeting leader noted: ‘She’s clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it’s been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she’s suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the ’90s.’” http://bit.ly/YjkHZ0

– At the request of the McConnell campaign, the FBI is looking into the matter, POLITICO’s Lois Romano and Kevin Robillard reports: http://politi.co/10OSxmn

MANCHIN, TOOMEY SAY THEY’RE CLOSE TO GUN DEAL – John Bresnahan and Reid Epstein reports for POLITICO: “Sen. Joe Manchin says he is on the verge of a bipartisan deal to expand background checks for gun sales, an agreement that could lead to the biggest change in U.S. gun laws in nearly 20 years. Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, has been meeting with conservative GOP Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania over the past week to try to forge a deal on background checks. Following a briefing with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Manchin told reporters the two sides were very close to an agreement. … Signaling that they had reached consensus, Manchin and Toomey announced Tuesday night they would be holding a joint press conference on expanded background checks on Wednesday at 11 a.m. …

– “Reid moved Tuesday night to start debate over a gun control package that is a wish list for gun control advocates. Reid filed a cloture motion that sets up a Thursday vote to end a GOP filibuster of the motion to proceed to that gun bill. In order to gather 60 votes, Reid and other senior Democrats believe they can hold on to their own nervous members from red states, while picking up 10 or so Republicans.” http://politi.co/Z6339T

–The WSJ editorial board’s lead op-ed says Ted Cruz and his fellow Republicans have “misfired” in filibustering the gun bill: “The President’s calculation seems to be that even if gun control fails, at least he’ll have a keep-kids-safe political issue to help flip the House back to Democratic control in the next midterm. In that sense his inflammatory rhetoric is meant to bait Republicans, some of whom are biting.  If conservatives want to prove their gun-control bona fides, the way to do it is to debate the merits and vote on the floor. They can always filibuster the final bill if they want to, but it makes no sense to paint themselves into a political box canyon before even knowing what they’re voting on.” http://on.wsj.com/ZEB3gP

‘GANG OF EIGHT’ IMMIGRATION BILL COULD COME THURSDAY – Mike Allen reports for POLITICO: “The Senate’s immigration Gang of Eight plans to announce a deal within a week but a committee markup is not expected until at least the week of May 6, providing a long period for debate and changes, Senate aides said Tuesday. Aides said the legislative proposal could be released as soon as Thursday, but is more likely to be ready early next week. The schedule outlined by the aides is meant to satisfy Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has said repeatedly that he wants a full debate and amendment process, to maximize the chances that the final vote is an overwhelming majority.” http://politi.co/ZgUwOD

Wall Street Journal, A1, “Senate Plan Sets High Bar On Border Security,” By Sara Murray: “Immigrants in the U.S. illegally would not gain green cards under a bipartisan Senate bill until law-enforcement officials are monitoring the entire southern border and stopping 90% of people crossing illegally in certain areas, according to people familiar with the plan. The border-security proposal, part of a broader immigration bill being written by eight senators, sets several goals that would have to be met before any of the estimated 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally could apply for permanent legal residency, also known as a green card, according to the people familiar with the Senate talks. Meeting all the goals is expected to take 10 years.

– “In a major change for businesses, all employers would be required after a five-year phase-in period to use the government’s E-Verify system, which screens for illegal workers. E-Verify now is largely voluntary, though some states require it. Some 409,000 employers had enrolled in the program as of last year, the federal government says, a tiny fraction of the estimated six million private U.S. employers, many of which have only a handful of employees.” http://on.wsj.com/ZMDhDz

– A House immigration bill is hung up on a disagreement over low-skilled workers, Jake Sherman and Kate Nocera report for POLITICO: http://politi.co/17pUsCE

IMMIGRATION POLITICS IS LOCAL – Manu Raju and Anna Palmer report for POLITICO: “Sen. Barbara Mikulski wants to help the Polish. Sen. Chuck Schumer wants to help the Irish. Sen. Marco Rubio wants to woo foreign workers to help after national emergencies. And Sen. Mazie Hirono wants to reunite Filipino World War II veterans with their families. As negotiations over a sweeping immigration deal comes to a head, senators are rapidly moving to resolve a bevy of narrow and parochial issues raised by lawmakers nervous about the impact of the far-reaching plan.

– “On Tuesday, one issue affecting rural America appeared closer to resolution: A new visa program for foreign workers on farms. A deal between labor and farm industry officials over wages for workers and caps on annual visas for migrant workers could come as soon as Wednesday, helping attract a range of rural-state lawmakers eager to appease farm interests back home. And Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said he was close to resolving a lingering dispute with Rubio, the Florida Republican, over the number of H1-B visas to provide high-skill foreign workers.” http://politi.co/152xVwj

** On the Hill? Then join the Susan G. Komen Global Race for the Cure ‘State of Pink’ Challenge, a little friendly competition to support the fight against breast cancer. Just form a team in your office and then come celebrate with us on Saturday, May 11. Winning teams will be recognized on Race Day. Learn more. http://globalrace.info-komen.org/site/PageServer?pagename=hq_gr_2012_about_hill_teams   

GOOD WEDNESDAY MORNING, APRIL 10, 2013, and welcome to The Huddle, your play-by-play preview of the day’s congressional news. Send tips, suggestions, comments, complaints and corrections to swong@politico.com. If you don’t already, please follow me on Twitter @scottwongDC.

My new followers include @cshogan276 and @MatosJay.

TODAY IN CONGRESS – The Senate is in at 9:30 a.m. resume consideration of a cloture motion on gun control legislation known as the Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013. Unless the Senate comes to an agreement, the Senate will hold a cloture vote on the motion to proceed on Thursday.

The House is in at 10 a.m. with first votes expected between 1:30 and 2 p.m. and last votes expected between 5 and 6 p.m. on the Bureau of Reclamation Small Conduit Hydropower Development and Rural Jobs Act.

AROUND THE HILL – President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2014 budget is delivered to Congress at 8 a.m. in Cannon 210 and at 8:15 a.m. in Dirksen 604. Sen. Ted Cruz speaks on guns at 9:30 a.m. in S-325. Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders hold a post-conference media availability at 10 a.m. in HC-8. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer holds a pen and pad briefing at 10:30 a.m. in H-144.

Reps. Chris Smith and Frank Wolf speak on Vietnamese victims on religious persecution in Vietnam at 10:30 a.m. at the House Triangle. Sens. Pat Toomey and Joe Manchin will speak on firearms background checks at 11 a.m. in S-325.

A news conference where Sens. Jerry Moran, Dick Blumenthal, Jim Inhofe, Amy Klobuchar, Kelly Ayotte and David Vitter planned to reintroduce legislation to stop air traffic control tower closings has been postponed due to a scheduling conflict.

Reps. Marcia Fudge and Chaka Fattah, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and others speak on the State of Black America at 11:30 a.m. at the House Triangle. Rep. Joe Crowley speaks on comprehensive immigration reform at 12:30 p.m. at the House Triangle. Steny Hoyer and House Democrats speak on Make It In America legislation at 1 p.m. in HVC Studio A. Rep. Frank Wolf speaks on Benghazi at 1:30 p.m. at the House Triangle.

The Small Business Committees hold a small business summit from 1 to 5:30 p.m. in Russell 428A. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions hold a conference call tomorrow in response to President Obama’s fiscal year 2014 budget proposal, at 2 p.m. Call in: (888) 469-1370. Passcode: 224143. House Triangle. Rep. Bob Goodlatte speaks on RFS legislation at 2:30 p.m. at the House Triangle. Chairwoman Patty Murray’s Senate Budget Committee holds a hearing on President Obama’s budget at 3 p.m. in Dirksen 608. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger hold post-CISPA mark-up availability at 4 p.m. at the HVC Intel stakeout site.

‘OBAMA PHONES’ DRAW SCRUTINY ON CAPITOL HILL – Karen Tumulty writes on A1 of thwe Washington Post: “Obama phone” is the widely used — and misleading — nickname of a 28-year-old federal program known as Lifeline. It provides discounts, averaging $ 9.25 a month, on phone service for 13.3 million low-income subscribers. In the 31 / 2 years after false rumors started that the Obama administration was giving free cellphones to poor people — and six months after a racially charged video about it went viral — a once-obscure phone service subsidy is getting renewed scrutiny on Capitol Hill. There are growing calls in Congress to end or drastically cut back Lifeline; later this month, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing that could help determine its fate.  … Lifeline was begun not by President Obama but under Ronald Reagan. It expanded to include cellphone service during the presidency of another Republican, George W. Bush.” http://wapo.st/ZMCXoD

KELLY EASILY WINS JACKSON JR.S OLD HOUSE SEAT – Rick Pearson and Bill Ruthhart write on A1 of the Chicago Tribune: “Following Tuesday’s special election victory, Democrat Robin Kelly will start a new job in Congress as the least senior member of a House dominated by Republicans. That political reality is not lost on Kelly, who said her first task is to restore district offices and concentrate on constituent services as she replaces disgraced former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. in the South Side and south suburban 2nd Congressional District. … Kelly, who launched her campaign on a strong gun-control theme, was joined at her victory party by Nathaniel Pendleton and Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, the parents of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old band majorette killed by gunfire on the South Side little more than a week after performing in Washington during President Barack Obama’s inauguration weekend festivities. ‘Watch us take on the NRA, the tea party and anyone else standing in the way of safety,’ Kelly said. With 80 percent of precincts counted in the low-turnout contest, Kelly had 74 percent of the vote to about 19 percent for Republican Paul McKinley, an unemployed political activist and ex-convict.” http://trib.in/10TPk5P

OBAMA’S NOMINEES COAST THROUGH SENATE HEARINGS – Matthew L. Wald and Robert Pear write for the New York Times: “President Obama’s three nominees to run Medicare and Medicaid, the Energy Department and the Office of Management and Budget sailed through their separate Senate confirmation hearings on Tuesday and appeared to be on track to win approval from the committees, though none of the panels voted on the nominations. Marilyn B. Tavenner, who has been chosen to run the government’s big health care programs, won endorsement from the House Republican leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, who said he had worked with her in his days as a state lawmaker. …

– “Similarly, Mr. Obama’s nominee for energy secretary, Ernest J. Moniz, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was under secretary of energy in the Clinton administration, faced no opposition Tuesday in a three-hour hearing held by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who has been nominated as director of the budget office, also appeared to have no serious opposition in the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.” http://nyti.ms/12J1xug

TUESDAY’S TRIVIA WINNER – Adam Heider was first to correctly answer that Ted Yoho (Florida), David Price (UNC) and Joe Courtney (UConn) are the current House members who represent the districts that include the three universities that are tied for the most number of Division I NCAA basketball championships in the last 10 years. Each won two titles in the past decade.

CORRECTION: Monday’s trivia answer should have said Tom McMillen was elected to Congress in 1986, the same year he retired from the NBA.

TODAY’S TRIVIA – Claude Marx has today’s question: Which president signed legislation creating the Labor Department? First to correctly answer gets a mention in the next day’s Huddle. Email me at swong@politico.com.

GET HUDDLE emailed to your Blackberry, iPhone or other mobile device each morning. Just enter your email address where it says “Sign Up.” http://www.politico.com/huddle/

** On the Hill? Then join the Susan G. Komen Global Race for the Cure ‘State of Pink’ Challenge, a little friendly competition to support the fight against breast cancer. Since 1990, Komen’s investments have helped drive down breast cancer mortality rates in the U.S. by 33% thanks to participants like you. Represent your state and keep the momentum going. Form a team in your office today and then come celebrate with us on Saturday, May 11. The largest congressional team and top fundraising team will be recognized on Race Day. Learn more. http://globalrace.info-komen.org/site/PageServer?pagename=hq_gr_2012_about_hill_teams

POLITICO – Top 10 – The Huddle

BUDGET DAY, Weiner eyes comeback, McConnell: Our campaign was "bugged," Manchin-Toomey gun deal close, Immigration bill Thurs?, Kelly wins House seat, trivia