Network Shows Ignore Copenhagen's Warm Reception for Anti-Capitalist Rhetoric From Chavez

Earlier this week, NewsBusters Editor at Large Brent Baker noted how the broadcast networks seemed oblivious to communist protesters outside the Copenhagen global warming summit.

But the Red-friendly red meat slogans are not just being tossed about by violent demonstrators outside the conference. Today NewsBusters sister site CNSNews.com noted how dissent-oppressing, private-land seizing dictators Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe yesterday denounced capitalism and praised socialism to a warm and receptive crowd at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

Of course neither ABC's "Good Morning America" nor CBS's "Early Show" or NBC's "Today" addressed that this morning in their brief updates on Copenhagen.

Reports CNS News International Editor Patrick Goodenough:

To save the planet from global warming, [Hugo Chavez] said, the system itself must be changed.

“I have been reading some of the slogans painted in the streets [outside the conference venue],” he said. “One said, ‘Don’t change the climate, change the system.’ And I bring that on board for us – let’s not change the climate, let’s change the system. And as a consequence, we will begin to save the planet. Capitalism is a destructive model that is eradicating life, that threatens to put a definitive end to the human species.”
 
Chavez also linked the climate change issue to the global economic situation. “If the climate was a capitalist bank, they would have saved it, the rich governments,” he said.
 
Venezuela is the world’s fifth-biggest exporter of crude oil. Environmentalists say the burning of fossil fuels is a principal source of increases in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which they blame for global warming.
 
Television footage of Chavez’ address showed delegates applauding some of his remarks, particularly those on capitalism, with some standing and clapping.

For his part, Mugabe, whose dictatorship has ground his country's economy into the dirt, lamented that there are no "sanctions" against countries that don't meet Kyoto Protocol carbon targets, much like the sanctions that are levied on human rights offenders, namely Zimbabwe:

“When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it’s we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere who gasp and sink and eventually die,” he said.
 
“Why is the guilty north not showing the same fundamentalist spirit it exhibits in our developing countries on human rights matters on this more menacing threat of climate change?”
 
Mugabe, who faces sanctions by Western governments for human rights abuses at home, asked why developed nations not cooperating with the existing global climate treaty – the U.S. by implication – were not being punished.
 
“Where are the sanctions for offenders?” he asked. “When we spit at the Kyoto Protocol by seeking to retreat from its dictates, or simply refusing to accede to it, are we not undermining the rule of global law?”

Another leftist head of state, Evo Morales -- who seized an opponent's ranch shortly after winning reelection as president of Bolivia -- was quoted in today's Washington Post calling for an end to "the slavery of Mother Earth" by "capitalist countries." Of course, that came at the tail end of an article in the printe edition* entitled "Signs of hope emerge at climate conference: Obama's Friday visit expected to be pivotal."

*The headline in the digital edition reads "At Copenhagen, both rich and developing nations offer concessions."