Venezuela

How Poor Can Venezuela Get?

Featured image We haven’t checked in on Venezuela for a while. Formerly one of the world’s richest countries, Venezuela has become destitute since it was taken over by socialists Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. The country has gone downhill in an ever-worsening spiral of poverty and dysfunction. Things have gotten so bad that American liberals no longer hold up Venezuela as an example of “real socialism.” The London Times reports: [T]his is »

Joe Biden’s Third War?

Featured image There’s a lot of chatter rocketing around social media and on the cable news networks today about the House Intelligence Committee making Congress “aware” of an “imminent national security threat.” I won’t highlight any of the speculation, with this exception, which would be notable and newsworthy without today’s enigmatic announcement from Capitol Hill: Between the Gaza war, the Ukraine war, and the worry about whether China might decide to exploit »

Venezuela Downsizes the Bolivar. Don’t Tell Bernie

Featured image It has been a while since we have checked in on the socialist disaster of Venezuela. For a while it looked as though Maduro’s criminal gang might be driven from office, but the threat has passed and instead, millions of Venezuelans have simply left. Now that country’s socialist government has announced that it is devaluing its currency by (if my arithmetic is correct) one million times: Venezuela on Friday launched »

Slow Learners on the Left

Featured image It appears even Venezuelan socialists can figure it out sooner or later: Venezuela Backs Away From Price Controls as Citizens Go Hungry CARACAS, Venezuela—President Nicolás Maduro’s government has begun dismantling price controls, a major policy shift that aims to ease widespread unrest by letting shops sell food at market prices but is worsening Venezuela’s already punishing inflation. . . “Before there was nothing; now there’s everything,” said Jesús Barrios, 36, »

Wanted: Nicolas Maduro

Featured image Today the Department of Justice indicted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and 14 of his close associates on drug trafficking charges: The U.S. indicted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro for drug trafficking on Thursday, offering a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest, as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on an adversary it has sought to push aside. The U.S. also indicted 14 key Maduro associates, including former Vice »

Venezuela Mourns Soleimani

Featured image For many years, people have commented on the seemingly-incongruous alliance between radical Muslims and Communists. In fact, however, there is no mystery: both are hostile to the values of advanced Western civilization and yearn for tyrannies that are not, in practice, particularly different from one another. Thus, while millions of Iranians are celebrating the demise of terrorist leader Qasem Soleimani, we shouldn’t be surprised that Venezuela’s Maduro regime is officially »

Socialism Breeds Disease and Death

Featured image We have chronicled Venezuela’s descent into medieval levels of poverty and tyranny for several years now. But President Maduro enjoys, for the moment, the support of Venezuela’s military, so opponents are jailed, tortured and murdered, and the disastrous Chavez/Maduro regime hangs on by its fingernails, while millions of Venezuelans flee to non-socialist countries. What happens in the last stages of democratic socialism? For one thing, diseases that have long been »

Hong Kong, Caracas and Portland

Featured image As you no doubt are aware, there have been mass protests in Hong Kong over China’s increasing assertion of sovereignty over the formerly independent city. Some demonstrations reportedly have turned out hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents. A couple of days ago, demonstrators battled police in the central city: What I want to comment on is the Hong Kong government’s use of violent gangs to suppress demonstrations. The London »

Jimmy Carter, Electoral Oracle

Featured image Jimmy Carter’s latest is at best delusional. It seems almost inconceivable that a former president would say something like this, but we live in a time when all norms have been abandoned by the Democratic Party: There is no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election. By buying a tiny handful of Facebook ads that promoted Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, and attacked Marco Rubio and »

Life In the Socialist Paradise of Bernie Sanders and AOC

Featured image Venezuela is the latest chapter in the long story of socialist crimes against humanity. Venezuela reminds us how long a country can circle the drain, destroyed by socialism but still hanging on by its fingernails. Reuters, a liberal news source, has the latest on Venezuela’s long goodbye, but never mentions the fact that it is socialism that destroyed what once was one of the world’s richest countries: These days, its »

Maduro Forces Run Down Protesters

Featured image As Paul noted earlier today, Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó has taken to the streets with Venezuelan soldiers and others to try to bring about the final downfall of socialism in that country. But Nicolás Maduro, Hugo Chavez’s legitimate heir, is not going quietly. This video shows armored vehicles under the command of Maduro’s socialist government running down pro-freedom demonstrators: Novelist Brad Thor comments: This is why the government will »

The “final phase” in Venezuela?

Featured image Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó appeared Tuesday with troops at a Caracas military base to announce a “final phase” to remove President Nicolás Maduro from office. Whether we have entered the final phase of removing Maduro, or indeed whether he will be removed at all, remains to be seen. But, as the leftists of my youth used to say, “if you don’t push it, it won’t fall. The Washington Post »

Reviving the Monroe Doctrine

Featured image When I was growing up, any 12-year-old could accurately describe the Monroe Doctrine. I don’t suppose that is true anymore. Instead, we have John Kerry–in my estimation, one of the least capable men ever to engage in American public life–assuring us that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” Russia took advantage of that assurance to send around 100 “specialists” to aid Venezuela’s bankrupt socialist regime. The Trump administration »

The uses of socialism

Featured image When it comes to the creation of wealth, socialism is worse than worthless. It is a great destroyer. For the promotion of equality by immiseration of the people who suffer under it, socialism is a powerful tool. But as a means of social control by the ruling elite, it is unparalleled. Yesterday’s long New York Times story by Nicholas Casey — “‘It Is Unspeakable’: How Maduro Used Cuban Doctors to »

Caracas goes dry

Featured image Bloomberg has a vivid story on one of the incidental effects of Venezuela going dark: it’s going dry too. Its water system, designed to run on electricity, has now become at least intermittently inoperable. Bloomberg quotes Norberto Bausson, the head of state utility Hidrocapital in the 1990s. “As of this morning, this system hasn’t been restarted yet,” Bausson said yesterday. “The supply of water for the city is at risk.” »

Venezuela Goes Dark

Featured image You probably have read that the lights have gone out in Venezuela. It isn’t really a surprise: a regime that can’t drill oil also can’t maintain and operate an electrical grid. Marco Rubio posted this extraordinary photo of Caracas at night on Instagram. It is reminiscent of the satellite photos you probably have seen of Asia at night, with bright lights everywhere, except that North Korea is entirely dark. Common »

Venezuela Is No Joking Matter

Featured image Two of my favorite jokes about socialism come to mind with today’s news out of Venezuela that the electricity is out. The regime is claiming “sabotage,” and they may ironically be correct: the “sabotage” has a name, and that name is socialism. Ronald Reagan loved telling a joke about the Soviet Union that he claimed was one the Soviets told themselves. One person asks another—”Is this it? Have we finally »