I don't understand. How can DGlover be endorsing the oppresion that Hugo burdens on his own people, and say that USA is bad. Hugo cares only for money and power, not so different from "other countries". Seems to me that so much egotism is involved that no one is making a very good judgement or a very caring decision. It's all about ME, ME, ME, and my adgenda. Not good for the whole.

It may be difficult to understand, but Glover has been endorsing leftist agendas for most of his career.

Per Discoverthenetworks.org, Glover is a leftist ideologue.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he said that the U.S. was in no position to pass moral judgment on the terrorists who had perpetrated the slaughters. "One of the main purveyors of violence in this world," said Glover, "has been this country, whether it's been against Nicaragua, Vietnam or wherever." Criticizing patriotism in general, Glover has stated, "It's basically this rabid [post-9/11] nationalism that has its own kind of potential of being maniacal, in some sense. As we march down and wave the flags, we must be sure of what we're waving them for." Characterizing President Bush - who has made more minority appointments to higher positions than any previous US President -- as a racist who would gladly turn back the clock on the civil rights gains of the past four decades, Glover has said, "We must stand vigilant against Bush in these times and work with the abolitionists." At a February 2003 anti-war rally in New York City, Glover charged that the Bush administration was composed of "liars and murderers."

Glover was a signatory to "The Conscience of the World," a public letter signed by 160 artists which condemned the War in Iraq, and pledged support for the Communist dictatorship of Cuba. He also supports the Maoist group Not In Our Name (NION), which "pledges resistance to endless war, detentions and roundups, [and] attacks on civil liberties," and is directed by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In June 2004, only a few hours after learning that former President Ronald Reagan had died, Glover insolently stated, "We all know Reagan's legacy, from the Iran-Contra affair to the funding of the Nicaraguan military in which over 200,000 people died. The groundwork for the move steadily to the right happened with the Reagan administration. People want to elevate him to some mythic level; they have their own reason for doing that."

"At a time when many people have fallen into despair," wrote Glover, "when our opponents seem invulnerable, it's critical to have a magazine that challenges us to think, inspires us to action, and makes us realize that the impossible is only difficult, not insurmountable. That magazine is Monthly Review."

An avid supporter of the socialist Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Glover has visited Venezuela several times and has made guest appearances on Chavez's television and radio talk show, Hello, President. He is a Board member of Venezuela's "TeleSUR" news network, which Chavez created in 2005. In May 2007 it was reported that Glover had recently accepted a two-picture movie deal that included an $18 million payment to direct a film on an 18th century slave revolt in Haiti.

Good for Danny! It's refreshing to see an American who actually understands what the US government has been secretly, and not so secretly, doing around the world in our name. Glover is one American who, fortunately, is not brain dead from focusing on American Idol and meaningless "news" about Paris Hilton. The US government has been working extremely hard over several years to foment coups and destabilization in Venezuela. US organizations, such as the AFL CIO, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID have been used by the CIA and the state department to viciously undermine the democratically elected government of Venezuela. You have to ask yourselves why Chavez is being so demonised in our media while the oppressive regimes in Burma and China are left alone. Oil is just one part of the equation, the other is the Chavez administration's goal of introducing socialist reforms to a country where capitalism has failed generations of impoverished Venezuelans. US big business, and its representatives in its bought and owned Congress can't allow such reforms to work because others might emulate them. Also, ask yourselves how anti-American can Chavez be if he is providing cheap fuel for low-income Americans. Do you know of any US fuel companies who are doing the same?

OMG, with all due respect to his personal opinion, I can't help but think that Steve is either a holdover from the old Soviet Union now living in the U.S., or very heavy into some very strong Kool-Aid, and lots of it.

Steve's comments leave me absolutely flabbergasted; surely, Steve's world view is some distance to the left of Che Guevara. I can save a lot of breath and writing time by simply saying here that I couldn't disagree with almost everything he says, including his tone, more. However, like my fellow poster Richard, I too have spent hard time in combat for the likes of Steve to dribble as much anti-American spiel as he wants.

God bless America, and Chavez and his ilk can go to hell.

Actuallly Abdul,

I look forward to you spending more "time in combat" until you come to your senses. I think US big business has a lot of work prepared for the likes of you. Sadly, you believe that you have spent that time in combat to benefit the "likes of" me. Instead of focusing on the myths perpetuated by Hollywood and the media, if you had ever troubled yourself to study the writings of two-time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient: Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, you might have thought twice about whose interests you were really fighting for. According to Butler such wars are "conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes." Halliburton are doing fine and dandy. How about those families working for minimum wage in the US and still needing healthcare? Be a true patriot and fight to truly benefit your fellow citizens.
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

It's appalling! Having experienced in my own flesh, and seen with my own two eyes as a child all the terror and savagery my family and I suffered, all the "revolutionary social justice" we and the rest of the Cuban people experienced and are enduring to this day under Castro, and all the "common good and prosperity" with which he has effectively turned a once beautiful and thriving Cuba into nothing but a Third World ruin of endemic hunger, poverty, and privation, I find your asinine comments not only highly offensive, but naively brutal, not only to those of us who had the misfortune of suffering through your idealist "communist paradises" in their own flesh, but to all those still enduring the yoke of such unspeakable horror, want, and oppression at every level in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and now Venezuela! Your inexcusable defense of Danny Glover and the brutal repressive regimes you and he so idealize, is but a slap in the face to such true "Freedom Fighters" (not as the likes of you and Glover like to call gangs of murderous Ché Guevara communist guerrilla thugs and mass murdering suicidal Islamist terrorists) as the unnamed Chinese hero who stood up to the tanks in Tienamen Square, and others like him, who in 1989 opened the way to reforms in China and began to shirk off the Maoist yoke stifling them.

Castro - Danny's and Chávez's idol, hero, and mentor -has turned Cuba, a once beautiful and prosperous land which had a standard of living comparable to that of the United States and Europe, where white and black, mulatto and Chinese immigrant all lived side by side on the same streets of Habana, into nothing but a husk of its former self and a ruin, mired in endemic hunger, want, and privation, lacking in even the most fundamental social services and necessities, oppressed by a brutal regime that negates the Cuban people even the most basic human freedoms!

Castro and his accursed "Revolution" have made of Cuba nothing but a "Third World" country that would make Haiti - the legacy of another long line of tin-pot dictators, beginning with that egomaniac self-aggrandized negro who is one of Glover's heroes and the purported subject of one of his planned future cinematic fiascoes with Chávez, Toussaint Louverture, who expulsed the French "Colonialists" from Haiti only to make himself "Emperor" and parade himself like a "black peacock" in French-styled military uniforms overflowing with meaningless medals down the streets of Port-au-Prince, sporting the latest many-feathered "Haute Couture" "Maréchal" hat, a la Napoleon, while his uncouth and impoverished black subjects, naked and in rags, naively hailed him as their new African "Chieftain," of their Caribbean "Kraal" - look prosperous!

So, Danny Glover "understands" - as you, loony Rosie O'Donnell, and all the far-left "conspiracy theorists" do -
"what the US government has been secretly, and not so secretly, doing around the world in our name"??? You may not be "brain dead from focusing on American Idol and (I have to agree) meaningless 'news' about Paris Hilton", but I would venture say it sure seems like you must still be reeling from your last "acid trip" from the glorious bygone days of your youth as an American Viet-Cong flag wielding, Vietnam war protesting,"Free Love" oversexed, "Hippie"drugged up, "Jane Fonda" styled traitor...while other less fortunate young men died in Vietnam in your place! Either that, or you are simply the Marxist indoctrinated, leftist idiot, Scion of one as such.

Do you really think that we were behind the failed populist coup against Chávez, that failed precisely because our hand-wringing indecisive failure to support it - now facing the dire consequences for our lack of action?

You really expect us to swallow that the AFL-CIO, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID - all Democrat loving, left-leaning organizations that support the likes of Kerry, Hillary, Obama, and "There's no such thing as a War on Terror" Edwards and their left-leaning socialist policies - are actually secretly in "cahoots" with our incompetent "George Tenet of 'slam dunk' fame" CIA (the Keystone Cops or sub-contracting our intelligence operations to former KGB agents would be more efficient and safer) , the State Department, and their nemesis the "Hated Bush Administration"? I think even delusional "slob-Sappho" Rosie would find that far fetched! If it's not the "acid" flashback, then you must surely be smoking something!
Then to top it all off, you call Hugo Chávez's rise to power, first by the military coup that originally brought him to power, and then through corrupt and fraudulent elections fraught with deception, repression, and violence, "democratically elected" ? Pray tell me, Steve, what is "democratic" about armed pro Chávez mobs with guns and clubs roaming the streets of Caracas during elections, intimidating voters, breaking up anti-Chávez protests with shootings, with beatings, and with violence, maiming and killing innocent members of the opposition, and silencing all those within their grasp who oppose Chávez an his hellish "Bolivariano paradise," with the tacit approval of the Chávez police and authorities? What, that Jimmy "Pink" Carter (the worst and most ineffectual wimp of a spineless president we've ever had) whose staff at the Carter Center recently resigned in protest disgusted by his bias in favor of the Palestinian and Islamist terrorists and his open anti-Semitism, "certified" the Venezuelan elections? Maybe you would have had "forty-eight-years sitting on his throne" Castro certify the Venezuelan elections for his buddy Hugo as well, eh? And what really amazes me, is how you, Steve, and your sick ilk, get all wrought up, bent out of shape, and have to go visit your therapists, all traumatized because Bush won in Florida in 2000, you call it a "coup," you whine about "suppression of voters rights" while you applaud Chávez and the thugs that have imposed his dictatorship by violence, intimidation, and murder upon the Venezuelan people! I would just love to see what you and your twisted leftist scum would be saying if like Chávez, President Bush would have set aside the Constitution and abrogated such unlimited powers to himself, as Chávez has, in order to further his "socialization" of Venezuela and consolidate his communist grip on power! Oh, I forgot, you people say Bush has...as in listening in, and thus violating the "privacy" of Al Qaeda terrorists plotting to blow us all up! Again, I wonder what you'd say if Bush were to declare like Chávez that he intends to remain in power for 25 years - in Bush's case to advance the "Republican Revolution"? And this "piss-pot" (Castro is a "tin-pot" dictator, but at least he's literate, has an education, and has commanded world attention, whereas Chávez is a resented, illiterate, uncouth, "Heinz 57 Genetic Varieties" mongrel mixture of white, negro, mulatto, Indian - and possibly monkey - megalomaniac, and nothing more than an aspiring Castro "wannabe" not even worthy of being called "tin-pot") of a bad joke, Chávez, is what you and Glover so enthusiastically applaud and look up to as a "bulwark of democracy"? Don't make me laugh!

And as for "demonizing", the U.S. government has mostly ignored Chávez (which is of course a great blow to his ego), and as far as I can recall the only one talking about "devils" and "azufre" (sulphur) was the buffoon himself at the United Nations, remember?

As to your fallacious assertion that "capitalism has failed generations of impoverished Venezuelans" having experienced the "Latin American experience" first hand, and not through books of naive propaganda indoctrination as you have, I can attest to the fact that, as with Mexico most other Latin American nations, it wasn't "capitalism" and "Free Market" economies which have failed "generations of impoverished Venezuelans" or generations of impoverished Mexicans now flooding us through our southern borders like a plague for that matter, but Venezuelans failing Venezuelans, Mexicans failing Mexicans, and so on. Both Venezuela and Mexico have been self-governing "Republics" for nearly 200 years now, and much longer than most countries in the world have been nations. Yet all through their history most Latin American countries have been mired in their two hundred-year-old "colonialist prejudice and baggage" mentality -"Cien Años De Soledad" as Colombian literary Nobel Laureate García Márquez would call it - and have nothing to show for it but an endless list of petty despots, dictators, revolutions and uprisings, leaving in their wake the enduring legacy of endemic poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, and "institutionalized" corruption that persists to this day, destabilizing the region in the clash between these backward societies haunted by their colonial past and the modern realities of a shrinking world and global economy, and which now culminates with the dictatorship of Chávez in the case of Venezuela, and in unprecedented mass migrations in the millions to the United States in the case of Mexico.

You say to "ask ourselves how anti-American can Chavez be if he is providing cheap fuel for low-income Americans"? All you have to do is listen to all the anti-American tripe and venom Chávez spews on a daily basis in his Castro-styled marathon discourse diatribes! He openly has sided up with Iran, Ahmadinejad, and the Islamofacist terrorists hell-bent in destroying us, is fomenting rabid anti-American sentiments and political unrest all through the region, has all but openly declared war on the United States, and you still question wether he's "anti-American" or not? You really ought to go easier on the meth, or whatever else it is you leftist "commies" take to ease the pain of "Capitalism" on yourselves, you "useful idiot" as Stalin would call you!

For the most part "Big Business" is indeed amoral, as amply proven by all the American companies still doing business with Chávez owned CITGO - not to mention those self-serving Americans in communities as in Harlem and Boston that have received this "piss-pot" oppressor of the Venezuelan people as a "hero" in their churches, and applaud him (like you and Danny) because he offers cheap Venezuelan "goo" oil for heating to low-income sell-out Americans like them, as part of his "anti-American propaganda" campaign; ironically, to us in the "Land of Plenty" while his own people starve. But to say that even the "Pelosi Democratic" Congress will not allow the implementation such "communist reforms" to work "because others might emulate them" is not only paranoiac and preposterous, but the height of imbecility! How out of touch with reality can anyone be???

Besides, last I heard, Congress and the Democratic presidential hopefuls, are trying to ram down out throats nationalized medicine, more government bureaucracy and taxes, more wasteful social programs (how come Obama and Hillary don't have heating oil for the poor?) that do no good but only serve to institutionalize poverty and the Ghettos, open borders "amnesty" and citizenship for the rest of Mexico's and central America's untold millions, and an agenda that most sensible Americans consider to be such "communist styled reforms" as you say "Congress can't allow[...] to work because others might emulate them." So, you say Congress (and the Democrats) are afraid "others might emulate them, yet they are pushing for a similar agenda to shove it down our collective throats here in America? Does that make any sense?

But I waste my time! You are so obviously living in some romantic "Ché Guevara" (by the way a murderer and an assassin who lined up thousands of innocent Cubans in front of walls "paredones" and shot them by firing squad for just being "suspected" of being "anti-revolutionaries") ideologue, socialist "alternate reality," that such thing as objectivity, reality, and truth are simply irrelevant to you (as also with most Democrats), and the only thing that matters to you and your "comrades" is the attainment by humanity of Marx's "communist paradise" - never mind that history has been amply proven such perverse, twisted, and slaving ideology to have been but a monumental failure wherever it has been established, beginning with the failed Soviet Union and the Eastern Block nations, with China and Vietnam evolving out of it forced by sheer economic realities and necessities, and ending with the amply proven cataclysmic failures that persistent Cuba and North Korea have become! And this is what Chávez is trying to impose upon the Venezuelan people and that Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, and other leftist idiots like you applaud and support?

I know that you will call it a cliché, but honestly, if America is so "hateful," and Castro and Chávez are so "great," why don't you, Glover, and Belafonte put your money where your mouth is, and move to your "communist paradise" in Cuba or Venezuela, before you keep opening your big, mealy, mouths, and cheerleading and supporting these barbaric and murderous dictators, and see how you like it?!?! Nothing like a bit of reality check!

Oh, and by the way, do us a favor and take the twelve million illegal Mexicans infesting us with you, won't you? After all, don't many of them love "Ché" and wear his picture on their T-shirts?