Inevitably, if you research Smartmatic and Hugo Chavez from scratch, as I did, and you haven't been out of the MSM echo chamber for long, you're going to be presented with some contradictions. Hugo Chavez was a socialist and we're told he invented the software to rig elections. Before that he nationalized oil, which involved seizing private assets of wealthy Venezuelans. His efforts to develop other economic sectors were failures, as you'd expect from a socialist, and he couldn't build a tourism industry in what should have been a tropical paradise, despite being flush with oil money, because there was so much violent crime on his watch.

But it gets tricky when you consider that Chavez shared the same opponents with President Trump, and they used the same strategies and rhetoric to delegitimize Chavez. Venezuela's media was run by the same internationalists who smear Trump today, and they own controlling shares in the western oil companies Chavez pushed out of Venezuela. This is my go-to barometer: when in doubt, I try to learn who someone's enemies are.

Bush, Abrams and the CIA tried to coup Chavez in March, 2002; in April, 2003, Smartmatic unveiled its prototype. Smartmatic, like the western oil companies and our stock market in general, is owned by an opaque network of international shell companies, but I think it's accurate that Chavez had control of it.

Chavez in turn had a regional alliance with Cuba. He depended on Castro to buy his oil and Cuba depended on Chavez to provide it, and thus both countries could navigate western trade embargoes. 

The conundrum here is the group leading the spear to topple the US government today, did the same with Chavez and now Maduro, and they also tried to topple Castro. That group is the CIA and now it's Trump that they want out, and it's clear that their leadership sees the US as a foreign country. They've been staging coups and rigging elections all over the world and now we're in their sights.

So it makes no sense to point the finger at Chavez, a previous target of the same conspirators, as the architect of our corrupted elections. But it feels right because Chavez was a socialist and affiliated with Castro, and the CIA and American government are supposedly non-communist; in fact, you wouldn't believe it today, but the CIA was known throughout the Cold War as an anti-communist force.

I'm not writing this to apologize for any communists or diminish their crimes, so don't get the wrong idea. Communism is a marketing strategy for conquest and subjugation that fails to achieve its stated  utopian goals by design. In this series, which I think is on the mark, the John Birch Society makes the case that communists of the 20th Century were just carrying forward the Jacobin tradition.

Rather, I seek to identify the communists, and to do so in as few words as possible. If the interest grabs you, I'm compiling a massive list of articles on this that will be linked here at some point. For now, here are the ones on Smartmatic and the Philippines, and some on Venezuela. I'll go through the communist takeover of America in the 1900's, and then more briefly, get to Hugo Chavez.

There is some indication the CIA was taken over by Rumsfeld's contingent, the Committee on the Present Danger (later repurposed as the OSP), between the Ford and Carter administrations--but if you look back to McCarthy, the CIA was the same type of organization they are today and McCarthy hated them (this is a thorough source). For that reason and others below, I doubt their war on communism was genuine, and suspect they created more communists in South America and the US than they ever stopped. At any rate, during the 2002 Venezuela coup, the CIA was a communist enterprise and this traces back to the Roosevelts, the starting point for communism in America.

Teddy ran against President Taft, split the Republican ticket and got Wilson elected in 1913. Wilson gave us the Federal Reserve, World War I, Wilsonian foreign policy (invading countries under the pretext of freeing them or spreading liberal values) and seeded FDR's administrative state.

Hoover was Wilson's US Food Administrator.  When the USSR was on the brink of collapse due to mass starvation, he propped their government up by sending food. Otherwise, communism would have died in its cradle.

During Hoover's program of feeding communism, Harold Ware travelled to Russia, ostensibly to teach them how to use tractors so they could learn collective farming. While there he studied at Lenin's spy school. Stalin gave him $25,000 in seed money before his return trip and he got a job in FDR's New Deal, then set up the Alger Hiss' and Whitaker Chambers' communist cell. The Perlo Group during WWII grew out of the Ware Group.

Through these Stalinist cells, communists penetrated our government at every level, to the top of FDR's cabinet and FDR himself. Chambers named names during McCarthy's HUAC hearings and he was proven right decades later in the Venona Papers. 

Less well-known in America, there was also a civil war taking place between Communists: Stalin, who ran the Communist Party and mass-murdered communists who disagreed with him, versus Trotsky, who promoted a more militant, international communism. The Trotskyites HATED Stalin. The Stalinists worked for FDR.

A group of "ex"-Trotskyites at the University of Chicago began calling themselves Neoconservatives. They wanted an LBJ/Wilsonian foreign policy (war under false pretenses) coupled with New Deal, but not Great Society, social programs. They were still communists! And they still are.

The Chicago neocons got jobs with New York newspapers, in government or at the RAND Corporation, or the CIA. They rode Rumsfeld into the top echelons of government during Gerald Ford's presidency, culminating with Team B/Clear and Present Danger CMTE slamming the agency for underestimating USSR's nuclear capability, which they were later shown to be wrong about.

But they got everyone fired and Bush Sr. was promoted to CIA Director. You can bet they were hawks against the USSR because they were Trotskyists but they marketed it as anti-communism, and it's the story of the Cold War. Their philosophy is Straussian (will-to-power through deception) and there's even a school of Trotskyism called Pabloism, which calls on members to adopt a capitalist facade in order to infiltrate capitalist institutions. Standard Trotskyists claim to vehemently disagree with them, but we should assume that's an effort to put the cat back in the bag. You can't trust these people.

Bush's entire cabinet were neocons and that's who wants to invade Venezuela. They were never the good guys and you can be sure they were doing all the usual things: bussing around voters, stuffing ballots, putting out suppression polls.

So my suspicion is that Chavez used Smartmatic to outrig the CIA in his own elections, or perhaps even to stop the rigging. It's hard to know what to believe, but there are things I know, and I know who was in Bush's cabinet. What I don't know is whether or not the software ORIGINALLY swapped votes, nor am I sure that matters. It's been integrated with a lot of other software programs over the years. 

Venezuela has the largest oil supply in the world, Chavez took the oil back and that's what I think it's about, and I think he was a survivalist more than a socialist, despite his praises of socialism. Chavez' Bolivarianism, which lives on in Maduro, focusses a lot more on sovereignty than redistribution, and in Venezuela's circumstances, what's been redistributed is a public resource that was largely owned by foreigners.