[BOSTONGLOBE] In a Salon piece titled "Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle," David Sirota declared that the Venezuelan ruler, with his "full-throated advocacy of socialism," had "racked up an economic record that . . . American president[s] could only dream of achieving." The Guardian offered "Three cheers for Chavez." Moviemaker Oliver Stone filmed a documentary gushing over "the positive changes that have happened economically in all of South America" because of Venezuela’s socialist government. And when Chavez died in 2013, Jimmy Carter ... the worst president ever. Maybe the second worst. The votes aren't all in yet... extolled the strongman for "improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen."
In the real world, however, socialism has transformed Venezuela into a Third World dystopia.
Venezuela this Christmas is sunk in misery, as it was last Christmas, and the Christmas before that. Venezuelans, their economy wrecked by statism, face crippling shortages of everything from food and medicine to toilet paper and electricity. Violent crime is out of control. Shoppers are forced to stand in lines for hours outside drugstores and supermarkets -- lines that routinely lead to empty shelves, or that break down in fistfights, muggings, and mob looting. Just last week the government deployed 3,000 troops to restore order after frantic rioters rampaged through shops and homes in the southeastern state of Bolivar.
In the beautiful country that used to boast the highest standard of living in Latin America, patients now die in hospitals for lack of basic health care staples: soap, gloves, oxygen, drugs. In some medical wards, there isn’t even water to wash the blood from operating tables.
Socialism invariably kills and impoverishes. Gushing oil revenues amid a global energy boom could temporarily disguise the corrosion caused by a government takeover of market functions. But only temporarily. The Chavez/Maduro "Bolivarian revolution" has been economic poison, just like every other Marxist "revolution" from Lenin’s Russia to Kim Il Sung’s North Korea to the Castros’ Cuba. By shredding property rights, dictating prices, and trying to control supply and demand, socialist regimes eventually make everything worse and virtually everyone poorer. Conversely, when governments protect free markets and allow buyers and sellers to interact freely, prosperity expands.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/29/2016 00:00 ||
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...and no one of the American leftists mentioned in the article will ever admit they were wrong about this. A real tough call, I know.
[AmericanElephant] Take a few minutes to check out the linked posts. Imo, well worth the excursions.
Posted by: Vast Right Wing Conspiracy ||
12/29/2016 00:00 ||
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Obama sees Hillary’s defeat as an opportunity to burn the Dem’s last bridges with the larger country and its “bitter clingers”, to double down on nationalizing power and to define the political narrative around the agendas of urban elites. The left crippled the Democrats. Now it wants to utterly consume them.
[Breitbart] Breitbart News’s national security editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, talked about President Obama’s betrayal of Israel at the United Nations on Fox News’s Hannity with guest host Jeanine Pirro.
"It’s outrageous," Gorka said:
This is a lame-duck presidency, but what’s happened in the last eight years? The Obama administration has created global chaos. The world is on fire wherever you look -- north, south, east, and west. Europe, you see Russia invade Ukraine; Asia, you see China build fake islands and then put military installations on them. Then you see disaster after disaster in the Middle East. The rise of ISIS, the rise of Boko Haram, on and on and on.
"And what do they do? Instead of following the Hippocratic Oath for the last month of their administration -- the ’do no harm’ promise -- what do they do? They throw gasoline on the fire. They side with everybody else who really is using the United Nations to execute a form of veiled anti-Semitism. There’s nothing else that you can describe this as," he said.
Fellow guest Ric Grenell said there was "no question" the Obama administration was behind the controversial anti-Israel resolution at the UN.
"I spoke specifically and directly to the French ambassador to the United States, and he told me that they have been working on the Obama administration for weeks," Grenell said. "Then we see the media from New Zealand that have now come out and confirmed the fact that the New Zealand foreign minister has had multiple conversations with John Kerry, trying to find the language that would be acceptable so that the United States would abstain."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[BOSTONGLOBE] In a Salon piece titled "Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle," David Sirota declared that the Venezuelan ruler, with his "full-throated advocacy of socialism," had "racked up an economic record that . . . American president[s] could only dream of achieving." The Guardian offered "Three cheers for Chavez." Moviemaker Oliver Stone filmed a documentary gushing over "the positive changes that have happened economically in all of South America" because of Venezuela’s socialist government. And when Chavez died in 2013, 
[Breitbart] Breitbart News’s national security editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, talked about President Obama’s betrayal of Israel at the United Nations on Fox News’s Hannity with guest host Jeanine Pirro.
