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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Chávez</title>
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		<title>Venezuela&#8217;s Top 10 Useful Idiots and Propagandists, Pt. II</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-ii/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-ii</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 22 Apr 2014 04:35:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Red Ken]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223892</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The little-known leftist revolutionaries making the regime's brutal crackdown possible. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/140218-leopoldo-lopez-arrest-jsw-101p_a8b5f667159211b4419d4aea799890f8.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223898" alt="140218-leopoldo-lopez-arrest-jsw-101p_a8b5f667159211b4419d4aea799890f8" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/140218-leopoldo-lopez-arrest-jsw-101p_a8b5f667159211b4419d4aea799890f8-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Hugo Chávez&#8217;s &#8220;21st Century socialism&#8221; has been a disaster for Venezuela, an oil-producing country that ought to be rich &#8212; but is instead poor. Bloody anti-government protests have roiled the South American nation for more than two months, provoked by food shortages, economic chaos, and out-of-control crime. But Chávez, the late firebrand president, can&#8217;t be blamed for everything; and nor can his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader. They have gotten plenty of help from a diverse group of useful idiots and propagandists. Who are the top ten? Yesterday, FrontPage listed the <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-i/">top five</a>. Here are the rest.</p>
<p><b>Mark Weisbrot</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Mark Weisbrot, a left-wing American economist, is a steadfast defender of Venezuela&#8217;s leftist regime. He is often quoted as an expert source on Venezuela and regularly writes newspaper columns in support of Venezuela&#8217;s leftist regime. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan and is co-director of the lefty Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. This gives him an aura of credibility to journalists in the mainstream media who, when writing about Venezuela, want to get both sides of the story &#8212; including the leftist pro-Venezuela version that Weisbrot provides. And so they go to Weisbrot, an able propagandist.</span></p>
<p>After Chávez&#8217;s death, Weisbrot published a column in Al Jazeera English that lauded the despot for standing up to the United States and improving the lives of millions of poor Venezuelans &#8212; no matter that Venezuela was then sliding toward basket-case status. Weisbrot also has defended Chávez&#8217;s hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro &#8212; despite worsening food shortages, out-of-control crime, and economic chaos. And in typical leftist fashion, Weisbrot has turned a blind eye to Maduro&#8217;s brutal crack-down against massive anti-government protesters that have been widely condemned by human rights groups. A pal of Oliver Stone, Weisbrot co-write the filmmaker&#8217;s pro-Chávez documentary &#8220;South of the Border.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Leftist propagandists and useful idiots have always been well-represented in the academic world. Weisbrot is one of them.</span></p>
<p><b>&#8216;Red&#8217; Ken Livingstone</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hugo Chávez made many friends in Europe, and one of his biggest propagandist was Ken Livingstone &#8212; a British Labor Party politician and former mayor of London. He&#8217;s known informally as &#8220;Red Ken&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2006, Chávez arrived in London on one of his many globetrotting trips in his presidential Airbus 319. He got a big welcome from &#8220;Red Ken&#8221; who gave Chávez a</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://bigcarnival.blogspot.com/2006/05/hugos-broken-promises-londons-left_26.html"> rock-star&#8217;s welcome </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">at a rally where Chávez called President George W. Bush a &#8220;genocidal assassin.&#8221; And at private functions, the Venezuelan strongman and former coup leader (who&#8217;d once called himself a “Maoist” and praised Cuba’s “sea of happiness”) hobnobbed with like-minded parliamentarians and celebrities. The later included virulent anti-American playwright and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter and activist Bianca Jagger, former wife of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“He was a friend and a comrade,&#8221; said Livingston after Chávez&#8217;s death. &#8220;He was focused on what he could do for the people of Venezuela and of course also what he could do for poor people in New York or London. He saw himself as part of an international movement to change the way things are.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As London&#8217;s mayor, Livingstone, now 68 years old, enjoyed Venezuela&#8217;s oil largesse, having signed an oil deal that used discounted Venezuelan oil for London&#8217;s buses and trains, thereby allowing half-price bus and train fares for those on income support. In exchange, Livingston sent experts from his government to work in Venezuela to provide advice on recycling, waste management, traffic and on reducing carbon emissions. Venezuela had a similar arrangement with Cuba. The program, considered an embarrassment by conservatives, was discontinued when Livingstone departed the mayor&#8217;s office.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Red Ken&#8221; and his ideological soul-mates easily overlook Venezuela&#8217;s poverty and rights abuses &#8212; so bedazzled are they by the leftist regime&#8217;s anti-Americanism.</span></p>
<p><b>Rafael Caldera</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rafael Caldera, a twice-elected Venezuelan president, unwittingly turned himself into a useful idiot by paving the way for Hugo Chávez to succeed him as president. Like other politicians of his generation, Caldera hungered for power well into his 70s &#8212; even if it meant holding back younger talent in the Christian Democratic Party that he founded. Longing for a second presidential term as he neared 80 years old, Caldera left the Christian Democrats and made deals with old leftist enemies to form the Convergence Party, which opposed the unpopular neoliberal reforms undertaken by the previous elected president, Carlos Andrés Pérez. Those reforms provoked price riots and a bloody and aborted coup by then-Army Lt. Colonel-paratrooper Hugo Chávez.</span></p>
<p>Venezuelans and the military overwhelmingly rejected Chávez&#8217;s aborted coup on February 4, 1992 &#8212; yet in a seminal speech to Congress, then-Senator Caldera legitimized the coup (and Chávez) by contending there were justifiable reasons for it &#8212; a statement aimed in part at the unpopular President Pérez of the rival Democratic Action party, a Caldera nemesis. Caldera also defended the massive rioting that swept Venezuela when Perez&#8217;s reforms sparked dramatic price hikes for gasoline and public transportation. Perez, a former populist, saw the economic reforms as the only way to pull Venezuela out of its growing economic dysfunction. After winning the presidency, Caldera pardoned Chávez in a politically popular move &#8212; thus paving the way for him to run for office. Ironically, Caldera also turned away from Venezuela&#8217;s old petrodollar-fueled populist polices; a miserable economy forced him to undertake unpopular free-market reforms. Those unpopular polices would provide Chávez with political fodder during his presidential campaign, when he claimed to be seeking a &#8220;third way&#8221; between &#8220;savage neoliberalism&#8221; and socialism.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Caldera, a former sociology and law professor, must have realized his useful idiot status when Chávez was sworn-in as president. As a stony faced Caldera looked on, Chávez went off script and called the constitution &#8220;moribund&#8221; when taking his oath &#8212; an early indication of where he would take Venezuela.</span></p>
<p><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">John Maisto</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">John Maisto, the U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela during Hugo Chávez&#8217;s first term, is famous for having coined a phrase that to many observers encapsulated the Clinton administration’s wishful thinking regarding Chávez. &#8220;Watch what he does, not what he says,&#8221; advised Maisto, a career diplomat, even as Chávez was already on the record for making over-the-top statements, including that Venezuela would be &#8220;traveling toward the same sea as the Cuban people.&#8221; Maisto, to be sure, may have been upbeat in his public statements to avoid antagonizing the thin-skinned Chávez, fearing that taking a tougher line would push him into Cuba&#8217;s camp. But as it turned out, Chávez did exactly what he said he&#8217;d do as he quickly made anti-American alliances with governments in Latin American, the Middle East, and China. At home, he concentrated his power in a rewritten constitution. Eventually. Miastro&#8217;s mantra &#8212; &#8220;Watch what Chavez does, not what he says&#8221; &#8212; became a symbol of Washington&#8217;s naivety and inaction toward an increasingly powerful Hugo Chávez.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Maisto was always soft on Chávez, like he was soft on Daniel Ortega during his stint as Ambassador to Nicaragua in the 1990s, before he was sent to Venezuela,&#8221; wrote former Heritage Foundation analyst John Sweeney in an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.vcrisis.com/?content=letters/200509071243">essay</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, &#8220;Playing the Washington Blame Game.&#8221; He described Maisto as &#8220;a career diplomat strongly associated with the Democratic Party and Liberation Theology ideas.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuela had once been a pro-American country, aside from an occasional flag burning outside the U.S. Embassy. But Chávez&#8217;s regular anti-American rants, which started early into his first term, eventually had an effect on public opinion. &#8220;From a pre-Chávez level of over 65% approval (for the U.S.), today the positive image of the U.S. has fallen to a historic low of 31% in Venezuela,&#8221; according to a confidential </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/03/08CARACAS420.html">diplomatic cable </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">dated March 26, 2008, that was signed by then-Ambassador Patrick Duddy and titled: &#8220;Embassy Strategic Communications &#8211; Countering Chávez&#8217; (sic) Anti-Americanism.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Accordingly, the U.S. Embassy finally decided it must respond with a major public relations campaign in Venezuela to counter the growing anti-Americanism. The so-called &#8220;Maistro Doctrine&#8221; was dead, having extended even into the Bush years.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Some useful idiots are more culpable than others, of course. Maisto thought his softball approach would win Chávez over, rather than driving him into Cuba&#8217;s orbit. But it may have instead conveyed weakness to a man who easily made friends with fellow strongmen in the Middle East and left-learning authoritarians in Latin America. Ultimately, the now-75-year-old Maisto may have been a victim of his own naivety, having made the mistake (common among leftists) of projecting his own good intentions and decency on an evil man.</span></p>
<p><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">Luis Miquilena</b></p>
<p>Miquilena a 94-year-old former former Chávez mentor and top official, was a prominent leftist in Venezuela with roots starting in the communist party in his early years. Like many desiring a change for the better in Venezuela, he rallied around Chávez after his aborted coup on February 4, 1992, as an Army Lt. Colonel-paratrooper. But like many who supported Chávez, Miquilena was an unwitting useful idiot and, to his credit, he would publicly admit his mistake.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Widely considered the man who molded Chávez into a presidential candidate, Miquilena left Chávez&#8217;s administration, disillusioned, a few years into his first term. “As far as I see it, he is a left-winger. Obviously. But he has gotten into bed with the failed left,”</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.amazon.com/Hugo-Chavez-Cristina-Marcano-ebook/dp/B000SF52VO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1397756813&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Hugo+Chavez%2C+marcano"> he said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p>Regarding Cuba&#8217;s increasing influence in Venezuela, Miquilena also<a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/03/chavez-mentor-venezuela-has-been.html"> observed</a>: &#8220;Venezuela today is a country that is practically occupied by the henchmen of two international criminals, Cuba&#8217;s Castro brothers. They have introduced in Venezuela a true army of occupation. The Cubans run the maritime ports, airports, communications, the most essential issues in Venezuela. We are in the hands of a foreign country.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Miquilena, of course, is hardly the first unwitting useful idiot of a leftist despot. He will not be the last. </span></p>
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		<title>Venezuela&#8217;s Top 10 Useful Idiots and Propagandists, Pt. I</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-i/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-i</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Apr 2014 04:40:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bart Jones]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eva Golinger]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joe Kennedy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223826</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Shilling for Chavista tyranny and terror. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-02-25T175801Z_01_TBR06_RTRIDSP_3_VENEZUELA-PROTEST.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223830" alt="2014-02-25T175801Z_01_TBR06_RTRIDSP_3_VENEZUELA-PROTEST" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-02-25T175801Z_01_TBR06_RTRIDSP_3_VENEZUELA-PROTEST-450x299.jpg" width="270" height="179" /></a>Food shortages. Economic chaos. Out-of-control crime. Things have never been quite so bad in oil-rich Venezuela. Massive and bloody anti-government protests have roiled the South American nation for more than two months &#8212; a response to what Hugo Chávez&#8217;s &#8220;21st Century socialism&#8221; has wrought to a nation that ought to be rich, but is instead poor.</p>
<p>Hugo Chávez can&#8217;t be blamed for everything, however.</p>
<p>The late Venezuelan president got plenty of help from a myriad group of useful idiots and propagandists. They helped sweep him into power in 1999 and gave him various kinds of support during his 14 years of increasingly autocratic rule, until dying of cancer one year ago. Now they&#8217;re giving their unquestioning support to his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro &#8212; a bus driver and former union leader &#8212; who is doubling downs on Chávez&#8217;s policies. Maduro has ramped up Cuba&#8217;s role in Venezuela and, with the help of Cuban security agents and goons, has ordered a brutal crack-down on anti-government protests. He has jailed opposition figures on trumped-up charges while professing a desire for a dialogue with opposition leaders. Human rights groups are outraged. But not the worst of Venezuela&#8217;s useful idiots.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Who are they?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Living in Venezuela, the United States and overseas, they include left-wing politicians, government officials, journalists, and Hollywood filmmakers. Some unwittingly facilitated Hugo Chávez&#8217;s Bolivarian revolution and subsequently admitted they were duped after belatedly recognizing Chávez&#8217;s malevolence. But the most odious of them &#8212; the true believers &#8212; have proudly set aside their moral compass to worship at the alter of socialist ideology, much to the delight of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.</span></p>
<p>And here are the first five of the top ten &#8230;</p>
<p><b>Eva Golinger</b></p>
<p>Eva Golinger, a lawyer and writer based in Brooklyn, is hands-down Venezuela&#8217;s biggest propagandist. The 40-year-old Venezuelan-American was a confident of the late President Chavez. She often appears on Venezuela&#8217;s state radio and television to defend Venezuela&#8217;s so-called &#8220;Bolivarian revolution.&#8221; Speaking with a think American accent, she promotes the virtues of socialism, belittles the opposition, and elaborates on the latest plot that Venezuela claims Washington has hatched against it.</p>
<p>“I’m a soldier for this revolution,” Golinger told The New York Times three years ago. In its<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/world/americas/05venezuela.html?_r=0"> profile</a>, &#8220;In Venezuela, an American has the President&#8217;s Ear,&#8221; The Times called her &#8220;one of the most prominent fixtures of Venezuela’s expanding state propaganda complex.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Recently, Golinger defended the Maduro regime during an interview on</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2014/03/25/puppet-or-defender-us-woman-who-trumpets-venezuelan-chavismo-is-lightning-rod/"> Fox News Latino</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, even as his security forces were engaged in a brutal crack-down against massive anti-government protests. Human rights groups were outraged, but not Golinger. “The protesters have been a minority of people…concentrated in upper and middle class areas,&#8221; she claimed. But there have been reports of lower-class Venezuelans increasingly joining the anti-government protests. Maduro also didn&#8217;t inherit Chávez&#8217;s halo or ability to sail to comfortable election wins. In balloting shortly after Chávez&#8217;s death, Maduro won by a razor-thin margin. This was despite credible claims that like Chávez, he benefited from election irregularities and voter intimidation including by </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> motorcycle thugs.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Born at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, Golinger&#8217;s father was a military psychiatrist during the Vietnam War. She enjoyed a privileged life as a doctor&#8217;s daughter; yet she ridicules Venezuela&#8217;s opposition leaders for having attended prestigious schools in the United States, something she suggests makes them out of touch with ordinary Venezuelans. Golinger, for her part, attended preppy Sarah Lawrence College near New York City. When not living in her upscale apartment in Caracas, she earned a law degree at City University of New York.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2010, Chávez took her on one of his globetrotting trips aimed at building anti-American alliances; it included stops in Syria, Iran and Libya. Chávez introduced her as &#8220;La novia de Venezuela&#8221; or &#8220;Venezuela&#8217;s girlfriend.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Golinger writes for pro-Venezuela websites, hosts a weekly show on RT Spanish (formerly called Russian Television), and is the author of &#8220;The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela&#8221; and &#8220;Bush vs. Chávez: Washington&#8217;s War on Venezuela.&#8221; She also writes for the leftist site Venezuelanalysis.com. How much she earns for such work is unknown.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Golinger has denied being on Venezuela&#8217;s payroll, but opposition activists dug up documents showing she received nearly $10,000 from the Venezuela Information Office to pay for a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, on media reform.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">True believers like Golinger, however, never shill only for money, and nor did her counterparts among earlier generations of Americans &#8212; all those starry-eyed leftists who happily shilled for the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Like Golinger, they burned with the desire to be part of something greater than themselves &#8212; the creation of a heaven on earth. A socialist utopia.</span></p>
<p><b>Oliver Stone</b></p>
<p>Hollywood has produced more than its share of useful idiots and propagandists over the years. First, they rallied around the Soviet Union. Then Cuba. Now they see Venezuela as an emerging socialist utopia.</p>
<p>Oliver Stone, the director and screenwriter, is Venezuela&#8217;s biggest propagandist in Hollywood &#8212; more so than celebrities like actors Danny Glover and Sean Penn who, like Stone, regarded Hugo Chávez as a friend and ideological soul mate. Stone has by far the greatest propaganda value for Venezuela&#8217;s leftist regime, however.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Consider his 2009 documentary &#8220;South of the Border.&#8221; It explores the rise of leftist governments and movements in South America which were inspired by Hugo Chávez&#8217;s election and enjoyed his oil largesse. To Stone, these movements are the answer to the region&#8217;s economic development. At the film&#8217;s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Stone was photographed hobnobbing with Chávez on numerous occasions &#8212; even as he was being widely condemned by right groups. But Stone has called Chávez nice guy. Not surprisingly, Stone didn&#8217;t bother to interview opposition leaders when making the film, which he promoted on a tour of South America.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stone&#8217;s next documentary was &#8220;Mi Amigo Hugo,&#8221; about his friendship with Chávez. On the first anniversary of Chávez&#8217;s death last March 5th, Venezuela&#8217;s government premiered the film on state television and (by government edict) private television channels. Talk about a captive audience! Stone wasn&#8217;t on hand in Venezuela for the premiere; it was just as well because massive and bloody anti-government protests were then underway &#8212; fueled by outrage over food shortages, out-of-control crime, and a dysfunctional economy. Danny Glover, however, did show up and gave a rousing speech in support of Venezuela&#8217;s &#8220;21st Century socialism.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Over the years, many of Stone&#8217;s films have had a leftist and anti-American agenda. The most recent example was &#8220;The Untold History of the United States&#8221; &#8212; an anti-American hatchet job that aired last year on the the Showtime cable channel. And let&#8217;s not forget &#8220;JFK&#8221; which taught millions of young and impressionable viewers that President John F. Kennedy was murdered by right-wing conspirators tied to America&#8217;s vast military-industrial complex.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore used to be one of Chávez&#8217;s useful idiots, incidentally; but he had a falling out with Chávez&#8217;s thin-skinned supporters after claiming to have given Chávez political advice and helped him write a U.N. speech. This supposedly happened during a late-night drinking session with the strongman in his hotel room at the Venice Film Festival.</span></p>
<p>Stone, ironically, has made millions of dollars in the United States thanks to its free-markets, rule of law, and respect for private property &#8212; and yet he believes that Venezuela, Cuba, and South America is better off without these virtues.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stone is not only a shill for tyranny, he is an incredible hypocrite.</span></p>
<p><b>Bart Jones</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Bart Jones, a left-learning American journalist, was a &#8220;local hire&#8221; reporter for the Caracas bureau of the Associated Press in the mid-1990s, back when Venezuela was a relative backwater. He didn&#8217;t start out as a journalist in Venezuela, however. In 1992, he went there as a missionary for the left-leaning Maryknoll order of the US Catholic Church. He worked 18 months in a slum where he soaked up huge amounts of right-wing social injustices (as he saw it) and then joined the AP. By dint of hard work and talent, Jones eventually became one of the bureau&#8217;s lead reporters &#8212; just in time to cover Hugo Chávez&#8217;s unexpected rise to power.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Who would have guessed that Jones was a closet </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> while writing all those supposedly objective articles for the AP? His political views were on display in his 2009 </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.amazon.com/Hugo-Chavez-Story-Perpetual-Revolution-ebook/dp/B002BH5HTE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1397757737&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Bart+Jones">biography</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of Chávez: &#8220;Hugo! The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution.&#8221; The book has gotten many reviews and is highly readable. It is the only source of in-depth information for many hankering to learn about Hugo Chávez and his so-called Bolivarian revolution. Jones, however, delivers a decidedly lefty view &#8212; presenting Chávez as a veritable saint and portraying all who disagree with him as classists, racists, or oligarchs. To Jones, Venezuela&#8217;s troubles revolve around a brown-skinned poor majority living under the thump of a white-skinned elite. A simplistic leftist narrative, it ignores the rainbow of colors existing among Venezuelans, including among more than a few of its politicians over the years.</span></p>
<p>Jones also condemns Venezuela&#8217;s private media as doing the dirty work of anti-Chávez oligarchs. In particular, he lashes into its biased coverage (and, yes, it was definitely slanted) during Chávez&#8217;s brief ouster during a failed military-civilian uprising on April 11, 2002. Private media outlets, however, didn&#8217;t start out being virulently anti-Chávez; they only started waving the anti-Chávez banner when Chávez played a gigantic bait-and-switch on Venezuela &#8212; imposing a socialist regime despite having claimed to be a moderate, not a socialist, during his first election campaign. As Jones skewers the anti-Chávez media, one wonders if he is similarly troubled about how most of America&#8217;s mainstream media was in Barack Obama&#8217;s camp from the get go. Jones surely cherishes his first amendment protections, yet he seems delighted that Venezuela&#8217;s government has neutered private media outlets or driven them out of business.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s troubling that Jones researched much of his book long after Chávez had revealed himself to be a megalomaniac &#8212; a despot who was leading Venezuela toward an authoritarian and poverty-ridden abyss. Checks and balances were dissolved, power was concentrated in Chávez&#8217;s hands, and quality-of-life indices took a nose dive. Human rights groups were alarmed. But not Jones. He shrugs off Chávez&#8217;s authoritarianism and personal excesses, including his womanizing and purchase of an Airbus 319 presidential jet that he rode on with Chávez; it wasn&#8217;t as opulent, he wrote, as Chávez&#8217;s critics had claimed. To Jones, Chávez can do no wrong because he is ruling in behalf of Venezuela&#8217;s poor majority.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Jones, incidentally, rented an apartment a few floors above me in an upscale complex on a tony corner of eastern Caracas, now an opposition stronghold. One day, Bart and I ran into each other at the entrance. We talked shop for a few minutes, and I asked about his thoughts on Chávez&#8217;s growing and inexplicable anti-American rhetoric.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Jones was normally calm and affable, but he suddenly launched into a frothy anti-American rant, declaring the United States had unleashed unspeakable atrocities upon Latin America in the past, and so it was totally understandable that Chávez was now telling those in Washington to go &#8220;f&#8211;k themselves.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>This, incidentally, was during Bill Clinton&#8217;s presidency. But like many of Chávez&#8217;s worshipers, Jones was living in another era. Not long after our conversation, in early 2000, Jones moved to Long Island, New York, and became a reporter for Newsday, a daily with a politically left-wing outlook.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">How lucky for Jones that he and his Venezuelan-born wife aren&#8217;t raising their children in the country that he regards as a beacon of emerging social justice.</span></p>
<p><b>Joseph P. Kennedy II</b></p>
<p>Joe Kennedy II has been the Venezuelan government&#8217;s favorite useful idiot in Massachusetts since 2005. Since then, the former U.S. representative and scion of the Kennedy family has facilitated and cheered on what amounts to an anti-American program by oil-rich yet impoverished Venezuela. Though his non-profit Citizens Energy Corporation, Kennedy and Venezuela&#8217;s government provide free home-heating oil to needy Americans.</p>
<p>In so doing, Kennedy and Venezuela&#8217;s leaders get to portray themselves as heroes of the poor. The media-savvy Chávez started the program and Maduro has continued with it &#8212; even as Venezuela&#8217;s inflation-wracked economy slides toward basket-case status. CITGO Petroleum Corporation, the Houston-based arm of Venezuela’s state oil company, claims that more than 235 million gallons of home-heating oil have been distributed over the past nine years to more than 1.8 million low-income Americans.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Joining Kennedy are two Democratic politicians who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2013/03/10/rfk-son-is-oil-broken-up-over-chavez-death/">negotiated</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the oil deal: former Rep. Bill Delahunt from Massachusetts, who had served on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Queens Rep. Gregory Meeks, who took off time from fighting corruption allegations to attended Chávez’s funeral last year. Both reportedly introduced Kennedy to Chávez on a trip to Caracas.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Kennedy, to be sure, isn&#8217;t as stupid as he seems. Citizen&#8217;s Energy reportedly pays him a cool $86,311 annually.</span></p>
<p><b>Kim Bartley and Donnacha O&#8217;Briain</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Kim Bartley and Donnacha O&#8217;Briain, young and lefty Irish filmmakers, arrived in Venezuela in September 2001 to make a documentary about firebrand leftist president Hugo Chávez.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Their research took an unexpected turn after seven months.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On April 11, 2002, while in the presidential palace, Chávez was briefly ousted from power amid massive pro- and anti-government marches in response to Chávez&#8217;s increasingly polarizing leadership. At least 20 people died and more than 150 received gunshot wounds, with some gunfire coming from shadowy snipers whose allegiances and motives were never determined.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Their riveting 2003 documentary, &#8220;The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,&#8221; attracted large audiences and generated rave reviews. It won some prestigious awards.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It also is riddled with errors and manipulated footage &#8212; all to serve the pro-Chávez leftist narrative they had gone to Venezuela to film.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As useful idiots, they dished up a huge wallop of international propaganda for Chávez&#8217;s increasingly embattled government. To Chávez&#8217;s delight, they portrayed his outster as an old-fashioned Latin American-style coup involving right-wing oligarchs backed by Washington (the Bush administration in this case).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuela&#8217;s government never set up a non-partisan commission to establish what precisely transpired, perhaps due to political convenience; or so observed the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://caracaschronicles.com/2004/04/14/the-untold-story-of-venezuelas-2002-april-crisis-2/">Caracas Chronicles </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">blog, citing newspaper columns by opposition editor Teodoro Petkoff, a prominent former Marxist guerrilla and now opposition figure with neoliberal economic views.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So what happened behind the scenes during Chávez&#8217;s ouster for 47 hours?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Level-headed journalists and analysts without an ideological ax to grind have variously described the military-civilian uprising against Chávez as evolving from a self-coup that Chávez orchestrated (in order to dissolve Congress and Supreme Court and declare martial law); a coup against him by top generals (spurred mainly by Chávez&#8217;s illegal order to turn the military loose on anti-government protesters and create a bloodbath); or a counter-coup due to concerns by generals and officials, including some loyal to Chávez, about where the uprising was heading. They believed Chávez&#8217;s ouster, while appropriate, had nevertheless proceed in an unconstitutional direction when newly appointed president Pedro Carmona, a businessman who headed the business chamber Fedecamaras, moved to dissolve Congress. This also lost him union support that was vital for successful governance.</span></p>
<p>It&#8217;s a complicated story, to be sure. But the leftist version makes for a more thrilling documentary and serves a leftist narrative &#8212; even if the truth is wildly distorted. Or as veteran journalist Phil Gunson <a href="http://www.vcrisis.com/print.php?content=letters/200405200431">explained</a> in The Columbia Journalism Review: &#8220;Constructing a false picture of a classic military coup devised by an allegedly corrupt and racist oligarchy, they omit key facts, invent others, twist the sequence of events to support their case, and replace inconvenient images with others dredged from archives.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Gunson, a former Caracas correspondent, noted that the film portrays the opposition as &#8220;rich, white, racist, and violent. Unseen are the armed bands of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">thugs who for years have made the center of Caracas a no-go area, beating up or shooting opposition marchers or TV crews who dare to approach.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The film&#8217;s title takes its name from the fact that the opposition media excluded the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> point of view from its coverage. But Venezuela&#8217;s private media outlets, as mentioned above, hadn&#8217;t always been virulently anti-Chávez; they got that way after Chávez revealed himself to be an authoritarian leftist &#8212; not the moderate he&#8217;d claimed to be during his first election campaign.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In portraying the private media as being anti-Democratic oligarchs, &#8220;The Revolution Will Not Be Televised&#8221; also omits the fact that, as protesters were being shot in the street, Chávez ordered radio and television channels to carry one of his long-winded speeches. As the shooting and violence continued, private broadcasters then put up a split screen &#8212; one side showing the violence in the streets, the other showing Chávez&#8217;s speech. In response, Chávez ordered the National Guard to shut down private television stations.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What&#8217;s more, Chávez wasn&#8217;t restored to office by &#8220;people power&#8221;; that is, by massive street demonstrations by his slum-dwelling supporters. He was returned to power as a result of behind-the-scenes political intrigues. And after that happened, his supporters took to the streets.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The lefty BBC, Ireland’s RTE, and other European broadcasters underwrote &#8220;This Revolution Will Not be Televised,&#8221; noted Gunson. Chávez had 20,000 copies made in Cuba.</span></p>
<p>As a rejoinder to the poisonous falsehoods of &#8220;This Revolution Will Not Be Televised,&#8221; a documentary was released in 2004 called &#8220;Radiografía De Una Mentira&#8221; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtDl7SuHRkM">(&#8220;X-Ray of a Lie</a>&#8220;). It was not a box office hit, having only been released (with English-subtitles) on YouTube and on DVDs.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Winning back hearts and minds bewitched by leftist propaganda is invariably an uphill battle.</span></p>
<p><em><strong>Read Part II of this article in tomorrow&#8217;s edition of FrontPage Magazine. </strong></em></p>
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		<title>Latin Leftists with Blood on Their Hands</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/latin-leftists-with-blood-on-their-hands/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=latin-leftists-with-blood-on-their-hands</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2014 04:06:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222069</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ignoring human rights abuses in Venezuela in exchange for cheap oil. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bolivarian-national-guard.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222077" alt="bolivarian-national-guard" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bolivarian-national-guard.jpg" width="350" height="289" /></a>It was one of the more clever protests against Venezuela&#8217;s repressive socialist regime – and specifically, against the region&#8217;s leftists governments who are supporting it. But this time, there were no street barricades or massive marches protesting what Venezuela-style socialism has wrought: out-of-control crime, food shortages, and a dysfunctional economy. No tear gas or rubber bullets were fired by Venezuela&#8217;s security forces or Cuban agents and goons. No </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> thugs showed up on motorcycles.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This was a remarkably peaceful <a href="http://www.el-nacional.com/politica/Estudiantes-protestan-frente-embajadas-ONU_0_378562316.html">student protest</a> &#8212; one utilizing headline-grabbing political theater to expose the moral corruption of Venezuela&#8217;s regional allies. Earlier this week, scores of students gathered outside four embassies: Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Nicaragua. Like 18 other left-leaning nations in the Caribbean and Latin America, they are either ideological soulmates of oil-rich Venezuela or enjoy its oil largesse. Not surprisingly, they have remained silent over Venezuela&#8217;s brutal crackdown against massive anti-government protests that have raged for nearly two months &#8212; leaving at least 35 people dead and hundreds injured. Most were students. Hugo Chávez, a firebrand socialist, used sweetheart oil deals to make friends and build anti-American alliances soon after becoming president in 1999.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Besides the obligatory protest signs, the students brought something else: oil barrels. They lined several of them up outside each embassy, and then tossed fake dollars bills around them. At issue for the students was last Friday&#8217;s shameful meeting of the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., where Venezuelan opposition lawmaker María Corina Machado got a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304026304579453831436990584?mg=reno64-wsj">cold shoulder </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">from most OAS members. They had no interest in hearing her discuss Venezuela&#8217;s rights abuses.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The OAS&#8217;s mission includes promoting peace and democracy; yet its members argued for hours about whether Machado, a 46-year-old engineer, could or couldn&#8217;t speak. Coming to her defense, Panama made her a temporary part of its delegation &#8212; a procedural maneuver it hoped would allowed her to discuss Venezuela&#8217;s right abuses in a formal and public session. But Venezuela&#8217;s left-leaning allies ultimately prevailed, voting only to hear her during a private session reserved for ad hoc matters. The vote was 22 to 11.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Keeping the session private was unusual for an organization claiming to support transparency; whose charter allows for sanctioning rights abusers within its ranks. Yet Venezuela&#8217;s OAS member Carmen Luisa Velasquez defended the closed session and, according to The Wall Street Journal, provoked loud laughter when commending that it would be preformed &#8220;[w]ith total transparency: in privacy.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It was an Orwellian remark, the sort of language you might expect in a communist state like Cuba, where language is turned on its head to serve the state. Machado said as much, blaming the behavior of the OAS on the influence of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and Cuba. Under Maduro, Cuba has gained an even bigger role in Venezuela than it had during Hugo Chávez&#8217;s days, according to many observers. Chávez died of cancer a year ago.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;They are afraid of the truth,&#8221; Machado told reporters after the OAS meeting. &#8220;They don&#8217;t want the truth to come out about the massive repression taking place in Venezuela. They don&#8217;t want it to be known in the world and in our America.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Machado is hardly alone in speaking out against Cuba. In recent months, its growing influence in Venezuela has provoked anti-Cuban protest marches; anti-Cuban graffiti (&#8220;Cuba Out!); and Cuba has been a frequent topic on social media. Venezuela&#8217;s twitter users &#8212; when not blocked by Venezuela&#8217;s Internet censors &#8212; have buzzed with accounts of Cuban goons and military equipment playing a part in the brutal crack-down of the student-led protest movement. Cuba receives 100,000 barrels of Venezuela oil a day in exchange for various types of technical assistance. It has long regarded Venezuela as a prize, having sponsored guerrilla insurgencies there in the 1960s. Recently, El Nuevo Herald, sister paper of The Miami Herald, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.elnuevoherald.com/2014/03/18/1704332/cubanos-dirigen-a-paramilitares.html">documented </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">the extensive role that Cuba&#8217;s security forces are playing in Venezuela, based on interviews with ex-intelligence agents in Venezuela.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Cubanization of Venezuela is not only reflected in the repression which the OAS doesn&#8217;t want to hear about, but in the Maduro administration&#8217;s harassment and marginalization of opposition leaders &#8212; a strategy right out of the Castro brothers&#8217; playbooks. After addressing the OAS, for instance, Machado was called a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/venezuela-investigation-maria-corina-machado-protests">traitor</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by some Venezuelans lawmakers. The leader of Venezuela&#8217;s congress, Diosdado Cabello, even said her OAS appearance had violated the constitution; and so she had lost her seat in the legislature and was no longer immune from being prosecuted for allegedly provoking violent protests.</span></p>
<p>And earlier this week, security agents <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/20/us-venezuela-protests-idUSBREA2J02Y20140320">arrested</a> one opposition mayor, and another was sentenced to ten months in prison. Both were accused of inciting rebellion by having failed to dismantle street barricades set up by anti-government protesters. This follows last month&#8217;s arrest of opposition leader Leopoldo López, a former mayor, for allegedly inciting protesters; or what President Maduro claimed was a call to murder, arson, and terrorism &#8212; charges Amnesty International called a &#8220;politically motivated attempt to silence dissent. &#8220;To this day, no evidence of any kind has been presented,&#8221; López <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/opinion/venezuelas-failing-state.html">wrote</a> in a New York Times op-ed.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Machado, for her part, is no stranger to Chavista thuggishness. Last April, Chavista lawmakers </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/venezuela/140321/oas-washington-venezuelan-congresswoman-maria-machado">attacked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> her in congress and broke her nose.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">OAS members who supported Panama&#8217;s effort to give Machado a public hearing were: Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, United States, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Paraguay, and Perú. Among those opposing Panama&#8217;s effort: Brazil, Nicaragua, Uruguay, El Salvador, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and the Caribbean countries minus Barbados, which abstained.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Obama administration has spoken out against Venezuela&#8217;s human rights violations, but it has yet to take action. While the OAS meeting was discouraging for U.S. interests and supporters of democracy, it did have an upside, as </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://caracaschronicles.com/2014/03/21/were-not-that-isolated/">pointed out </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">by Venezuela analyst Francisco Toro at Caracas Chronicles. &#8220;Nearly twice as many people live in the eleven countries that voted against the Maduro regime than in countries that voted with it. Out of the 17 Spanish speaking countries in OAS, 9 voted against the Maduro regime, just 8 for it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Machado reportedly took this video with her to explain what has been happening in Venezuela:</span></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/p6mPR25qfu8" height="315" width="560" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>The video depicts a grim reality for Venezuela. Unfortunately, the country continues to roil, with reconciliation still a distant possibility.</p>
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		<title>El Salvador&#8217;s Dance with the Devil</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/el-salvadors-dance-with-the-devil/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=el-salvadors-dance-with-the-devil</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Mar 2014 04:20:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[El Salvador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[guerrilla]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marxist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salvador Sanchez Ceren]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221679</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Another Venezuela in the making? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Salvador-Sanchez-Ceren.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221681" alt="Salvador-Sanchez-Ceren" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Salvador-Sanchez-Ceren-450x327.jpg" width="315" height="229" /></a>Some leftists have smartened up. Guerrilla insurgencies are passé for them. So are AK-47s from Cuba or the Soviet bloc or China.</span></p>
<p>They saw an easier way to seize power; so they got shaves, put on suites, and ran for office claiming to be left-leaning pragmatists. But after their<strong> </strong>election wins, they took advantage of a polarized citizenry and weak institutions to tear the system apart – more or less legally – from inside out.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The stealth approach worked well for Hugo Chávez in Venezuela where </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.elnuevoherald.com/2014/03/18/1704332/cubanos-dirigen-a-paramilitares.html">Cuban agents </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and goons are now pitching in to put down anti-government protesters fed up with Venezuela&#8217;s “21st Century Socialism.” During his first election campaign, Chavez </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-paulin/hugo-chavez-%E2%80%98i-am-not-a-socialist%E2%80%99/">denied </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">he was a socialist and portrayed himself as a moderate despite having led an aborted coup against a democratic government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Now, El Salvador seems poised to follow that same path after a former Marxist guerrilla leader – 69-year-old Salvador Sánchez Cerén – was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-el-salvador-presidential-election-20140313,0,1042688.story#axzz2wT5rV9EY">elected</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> president by a razor-thin margin and amid allegations of voting irregularities, which included </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579423943589870048?KEYWORDS=El+Salvador&amp;mg=reno64-wsj">claims</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that gang members were recruited to intimidate voters who opposed him. Sánchez Cerén had been El Salvador&#8217;s vice president &#8212; a hardliner in the ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) party, named after a legendary Salvadorian rebel leader, Farabundo Martí, from the 1930s.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sánchez Cerén had an uneasy relationship with President Mauricio Funes, a 54-year-old former television reporter who had never been a guerrilla but identified with the left.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Five years ago, the two teamed up in a union of political convenience that drew voters from across the political spectrum – and they won. Their election victory ended nearly two decades of conservative rule by the center-right National Republican Alliance (Arena). But President Funes&#8217;s political strategy was a pact with the devil. During his 5-year-term, his relationship with Sánchez Cerén and other FMLN hard-liners become increasingly strained, according to political observers.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Arena has yet to accept the outcome. But barring unexpected developments, Sánchez Cerén will take office on June 1. He will be the first guerrilla leader to govern the Central American country, where an atrocity-filled civil war raged nearly 13 years, killing at least 75,000 people and sending tens of thousands of refugees to the U.S. A peace accord was signed in 1992 between the military-led government and leftist groups that had fought under the FMLN umbrella. They were subsequently absorbed into the FMLN political party.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuela&#8217;s turmoil overshadowed El Salvador&#8217;s bitterly contested election; for 50 percent of Salvadorians deeply fear the ideological left. They doubted Sánchez Cerén was a pragmatist who would work with opposition leaders and uphold El Salvador&#8217;s constitution. They had good reasons to be afraid: Sánchez Cerén has a long history as a Marxist ideologue. What&#8217;s more, he had a hand in murder and kidnappings during El Salvador&#8217;s horrific civil war – a dark past mentioned in a secret U.S. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09SANSALVADOR928_a.html">diplomatic cable </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">made public by WikiLeaks. His “commitment to law and order cannot be easily assumed,” observed the missive for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dated September 30, 2009, and signed by Deputy Chief of Mission Robert Blau.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sánchez Cerén, an admirer of Hugo Chavez&#8217;s Bolivarian revolution, received 50.11% of the vote compared with 49.89% for Norman Quijano of Arena. Quijano was a former mayor of San Salvador, the nation’s capital.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A mere 6,364 votes carried Sánchez Cerén to victory in a run-off election on March 9. Some 3 million ballots were cast in the country of 6.2 million people.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Amid allegations of voter fraud, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal did a partial recount and, four days later, declared Sánchez Cerén the winner. Arena supporters have reason to be suspicious of the tribunal&#8217;s decision, because as some political analysts </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2014/03/el-salvadors-election-0">pointed out</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, most of its members have ties to the FMLN. Quijano hinted that the military might intervene, but military leaders said they were keeping out of the bitterly contested election.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sánchez Cerén grew up in a working-class family &#8212; the ninth of 12 children whom his parents struggled to support. Five years ago, his campaign for the vice presidency was overshadowed by Funes&#8217;s campaign, but his entrance into the political arena did attract the attention of Washington and the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador. Embassy officials seemed skeptical that Sánchez Cerén had indeed traded the bullet for the ballot. They wondered if he remained a Marxist ideologue who was merely echoing the talking points of FMLN&#8217;s more moderate presidential candidate.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“We are struck by the irony of Sánchez Cerén commenting on the need for tolerance at the end of a week where media featured his having ordered summary executions of accused infiltrators during the civil war,” observed a confidential </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.wikileaks.elfaro.net/es/201105/cables/4199/">diplomatic cable </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">dated September 26, 2008, and signed by then-U.S. Ambassador Charles L. Glazer. “It is still an open question whether he or Funes calls the FMLN shots.” The cable&#8217;s title: “FMLN VP Candidate Sánchez Cerén: Hard-liner&#8217;s Soft Sell.” It was sent to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among others.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last week, after the electoral tribune ruled that Sánchez Cerén had won fair and square, the president-elect declared: “We have the people’s sovereign mandate; starting June 1 we will govern for five more years. We are ready for a dialogue to build El Salvador.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But Diario Latino, a Salvadorian newspaper, summed up the fears of 50 percent of the population with an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.diariolatino.net/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=15692:se-le-puede-creer-a-sanchez-ceren-que-no-reformara-la-constitucion-&amp;catid=37:editorial&amp;Itemid=70">editorial</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> stating the obvious: Sánchez Cerén had dedicated much of his life to teaching and defending “Marxist-Leninist principles” and thus could be counted on to take El Salvador toward socialism.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sánchez Cerén, for his part, provided the first indication of where he was heading when naming his </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://centralamericanpolitics.blogspot.com/2014/03/here-guerrilla-there-guerrilla.html">transition team </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">– six former guerillas. At least two were mentioned in U.S. diplomatic cables for their unsavory pasts as guerrilla fighters: José Luis Merino was involved in arms trafficking and Manuel Melgar in murder.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Funes was unable to run for reelection because El Salvador limits presidents to 5-year terms. But he had left El Salvador poised for growth.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“The last government has prepared the ground work in many ways for private investment to take off. It’s not for a lack of policy, the issue is political,” </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-13/el-salvador-s-sanchez-ceren-wins-disputed-election.html">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Joydeep Mukherji, a managing director for Standard &amp; Poor&#8217;s during a conference call with Bloomberg News.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even so, Sánchez Cerén will lead a country with one of the world&#8217;s worst murder rates caused by violent gangs. The government has negotiated a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/02/economist-explains">truce</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> with them but has yet to rein them in; they </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579423943589870048?KEYWORDS=El+Salvador&amp;mg=reno64-wsj">control neighborhoods</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and extort money from residents and businesses. About </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://data.worldbank.org/country/el-salvador">35 percent </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">of the population remains in poverty.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If Sánchez Cerén lives up to his reputation, expect to see El Salvador descend into Venezuela-style political chaos and economic decline, and for another wave of Salvadorian refugees to flee to America. President Funes must be regretting his pact with the devil right about now.</span></p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone Does Venezuela</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/oliver-stone-does-venezuela/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stone-does-venezuela</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/oliver-stone-does-venezuela/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 04:12:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220628</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The PR king of government oppression. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/venezuela.png"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-220728" alt="venezuela" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/venezuela.png" width="319" height="247" /></a>Famous foe of imperialism Oliver Stone just premiered his documentary <i>“Mi Amigo </i><em>Hugo</em><i>”</i> <i>(“</i><em>My Friend Hugo</em><i>”) </i>in the Cuban colony of Venezuela<i>. </i>As the title suggests, the film honors Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s late Venezuelan viceroy. The film was released amidst lavish celebrations on the first anniversary of Chavez’s death and broadcast on the Cuba-run TV channel of the Cuban viceroyalty of Venezuela. For the occasion, Raul Castro himself graced his South American dominion with a visit.</p>
<p>“Venezuela today is a country that is practically occupied by the henchmen of two international criminals, Cuba&#8217;s Castro brothers,” recently declared Luis Miquilena<b> </b>who served as<b> </b>Hugo Chavez’ Minister of Justice for three years before finally resigning in disgust. “They (the Cubans) have introduced in Venezuela a true army of occupation. The Cubans run the maritime ports, airports, communications, the most essential issues in Venezuela. We are in the hands of a foreign country. <a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/03/chavez-mentor-venezuela-has-been.html">This is the darkest period in our history.”</a></p>
<p>The Chavez documentary comes twelve years after the premiere at the Sundance Film Festival of Oliver Stone’s documentary <i>“Comandante,”</i> which honored Venezuela’s foreign emperor himself:  Fidel Castro.</p>
<p>&#8221;I am like a prisoner,&#8221; Castro laments to Stone near the beginning of “<i>Comandante.</i>” The Stalinist dictator was referring to the travails that accompany his selfless vocation of running Cuba.  “This is my cell,&#8221; he sighs while pointing around.  At this declaration from the jailer of more political prisoner per-capita than Stalin, the famously “edgy” Oliver Stone reveals no hint of a smirk. And no snarkiness tinged his follow-up questions, most of which hovered right over home plate. When a few questions strayed from the banal talking points and Castro answered evasively, Stone twinkled that, “his elusiveness is always charming.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8221;Fidel is magnetic and charismatic,&#8221; Stone concluded.  “He is a movie star.&#8221;</p>
<p>Alas, he’s getting a little long in the tooth for close-ups. So Stone has since shifted the focus of his camera lenses over to the more camera-friendly subject of Castro’s colony, Venezuela.</p>
<p>Nowadays the Cuba-enthroned emperor of Venezuela more or less reigns while his baby brother Raul rules. The actual nuts and bolts of running the empire, which include stealing 100,000 barrels of oil daily from their Venezuelan viceroyalty as priority, comes courtesy of the 50,000 Cubans who infest Venezuela and run the colony’s vital police and intelligence functions, among many others. It took the Castros some doing, but they finally got Venezuela in the bag. To wit:</p>
<p>Fidel Castro’s very first trip abroad as head of state was to Venezuela where on January 25, 1959 he implored Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt to “join” his “master plan <i>against</i> the gringos.” The newly elected Venezuelan president soon learned that his “joining” would consist of massive loans, financial aid, and shipments of free oil to Castro from Venezuela. So Betancourt brusquely declined the “invitation.” It took Hugo Chavez for Venezuela to finally “join” Castro’s master plan.</p>
<p>Please note the date and the aggressive anti-U.S. policy Castro proposed to Venezuela. That was only two weeks after Fidel Castro <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">(with U.S. help)</a> entered Havana. And yet you’ll be hard-pressed to find a U.S. “academic expert” who doesn’t swear up and down that in 1959-61 the U.S. arrogantly, selfishly and stupidly snubbed a friendly Fidel Castro and pushed him—kicking and screaming, no less&#8211; into the arms of the Russians.</p>
<p>As the title of Stone’s new film suggests, the filmmaker does not hide his veneration for Cuban satrap Hugo Chavez any more than he did for his mass-murdering, war-mongering colonial master Fidel Castro. This makes Stone’s propaganda films for Latin American communists less effective than those of his fellow filmmaker Robert Redford, who with his Motorcycle Diaries performed services for the image of Che Guevara that no Madison Avenue agency could hope to match for a client. To compare Stone to Redford simply compare Julius Streicher to Leni Riefensthal.</p>
<p>Oliver Stone claims that the massive protests currently rocking Venezuela are simply the CIA’s handiwork, with a few Venezuelans in the role of local patsies. Given all the hidden hands and plotters and “patsies” in Stone’s movie JFK, we can barely wait to see what a tangled web Stone will eventually weave regarding the current Venezuelan crisis.</p>
<p>Three weeks before departing for Venezuela to premier his communist infomercial Oliver Stone was among the honored speakers at the recent “2014 International Students for Liberty Conference.”  The crowd at this Libertarian-Palooza, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/oliver-stone-and-the-libertarians-215632840.html">according to some accounts</a>, was absolutely mitten with a man who devotes much of his time and fortune to glorifying dictators who abolish private property and murder entrepreneurs. Apparently these aren’t your father’s libertarians.</p>
<p>The only fuddy-duddy scoffers were a handful of Latin American students with first-hand experience of the handiwork by the communists Stone exalts in speech, print and film. Funny how that works.</p>
<p>Stone’s advocacy and infomercials for Castroism and Chavismo have brought him under fire recently in social media. But he’s been quick to fire back. “You (critics) remind me of crazy Tea Partiers!” he recently snarled on his Facebook page.  More horribly still his critics are: “Similar to the right-wing Florida Cuban exiles who’ve helped keep the US in a dungeon of ignorance.”</p>
<p>Speaking of dungeons, ignorance and Cuban exiles.  Among these latter Stone can find the most and the longest suffering political prisoners in the modern history of the human race. This suffering came in torture-chambers and dungeons designed by his Stalinist idol <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">and his KGB-mentors</a>. Let’s hope Oliver Stone is merely ignorant of that.</p>
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		<title>Venezuelans Bleed Under Socialist Oppression</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelans-bleed-while-left-worships-their-government/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelans-bleed-while-left-worships-their-government</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelans-bleed-while-left-worships-their-government/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 04:45:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[student]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220630</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While the Hollywood elite cheer on the government. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/A-student-takes-part-in-a-011.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220656" alt="A student takes part in a protest against Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/A-student-takes-part-in-a-011.jpg" width="286" height="191" /></a>Massive and bloody anti-government protests have been roiling Venezuela for more than a month – provoked by an out-of-control murder rate, food shortages, and myriad instances of inept governance. But that didn&#8217;t stop a rogues&#8217; gallery of Latin leftists, including Cuban President Raul Castro, from turning up in Caracas to honor the late Hugo Chávez on the first anniversary of the Venezuelan leader&#8217;s death.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Security forces and pro-government militias have responded with a vengeance against the protesters, leaving at least 21 dead and hundreds injured. Most were students.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The tear gas, rubber bullets and </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> thugs on motorcycles, however, were out of sight and mind for Castro and fellow leftists, including Bolivian President Evo Morales and his Nicaraguan counterpart Daniel Ortega. Like Castro, they enjoyed Chávez&#8217;s oil largess over the years. Chávez had promoted himself as the savior of Venezuela&#8217;s poor yet gave away billions of dollars of their oil wealth as a way to expand his influence and build alliances against the United States. The firebrand socialist, famous for his colorful anti-American broadsides, died a year ago of cancer, on March 5th, at age 58.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A couple of Hollywood heavy weights – director Oliver Stone and actor Danny Glover – lent their celebrity to Wednesday&#8217;s ceremonies that included a military parade and civic events. Glover and Stone considered Chávez a friend and ideological soulmate.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chávez&#8217;s hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro – a 51-year-old former bus driver and union leader – led the ceremonies at “El Comandante&#8217;s&#8221; sacred tomb – situated in a former military museum in Caracas that had served as the command center for a disorganized and bloody coup attempt that Lt. Colonel Hugo Chávez led on February 4, 1992, against a democratic government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Hugo Chávez was, without a doubt, the great leader who brought democracy. Never in history has there been a leader who so authentically loved the people of this country,&#8221; Maduro</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579421441297723368?KEYWORDS=Venezuela&amp;mg=reno64-wsj"> told </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">cheering Chávez loyalists. The ceremony featured goose-steeping soldiers, columns of tanks, and low-flying Russian Sukhoi jets.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A lavish spectacle, it came amid the economic and social chaos produced by what Chávez called “21st Century Socialism,&#8221; and the bread-and-circuses populism is being deepened by Maduro in the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation. Venezuela has long been a prize for Cuba, which sponsored leftist insurgences there in the 1960s. Now, socialist Venezuela has come to look more and more </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">like</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Cuba, where basic goods also are scarce.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ironically, Chávez had portrayed himself during his first presidential campaign as a moderate seeking a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Claiming he&#8217;d traded the bullet for the ballet, he pledged to reverse declining living standards and root out Venezuela&#8217;s rampant corruption. But months after his landslide election victory, he did an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/539348/posts">about-face</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, praising Cuba&#8217;s communism and forming a close friendship with Fidel Castro. Soon he was forming anti-American alliances with Middle Eastern strongmen such as Iraq&#8217;s Saddam Hussein and Libya&#8217;s Moammar Gadhafi. He nationalized large swaths of the economy in Venezuela; or to be precise: the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Early into his first term, Chávez insisted on the name change &#8212; inspired by Venezulea&#8217;s aristocratic independence hero Simón Bolivar &#8212; as he pushed through a rewritten constitution in a Congress packed with his loyalists.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for Venezuela&#8217;s corruption, Chávez took it to new heights by allowing for the emergence of a new social class; what a Venezuelan journalist famously called the “Boliburguesía” &#8212; a portmanteau of the word&#8217;s Bolivarian and bourgeoisie. As has been </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CiqzufsT4Y&amp;list=FLhcRY22v3s3rJFFMeVY3Qrw&amp;index=8">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> often over the years, in print and broadcast media, they became rich overnight thanks to sweetheart contacts, cronyism, and corruption.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Glover, however, spoke only of Chávez as a man of the people to enthusiastic applause from Chávez loyalists. “His memory lives with us through the work that you do as citizens of this great nation,” </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/03/07/actor-danny-glover-supports-venezuelan-government-during-visit-to-honour-hugo-chavez/">he said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stone didn&#8217;t attend but in an interview with a local news outlet talked wistfully of his departed friend Hugo. “I miss Chávez, miss his spirit and presence,”</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://globovision.com/articulo/oliver-stone-extrano-a-hugo-chavez-extrano-su-espiritu-y-su-presencia"> he said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Stone allowed his documentary film, “My Amigo Hugo,” to premier on Venezuela television. (The government</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/world/americas/one-year-after-chavezs-death-a-divide-in-venezuelans-fervor.html?_r=0"> required </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">all television stations, both state-owned and private, to broadcast it.)</span></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/gcwGp0yn9nk" height="315" width="560" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">An information war is underway. Government censorship – including twitter and Internet outages – have been another weapon the government has used in its battle against the protesters whom Stone </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=102281">compared</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to “the right-wing Cuban exiles in southern Florida.” Later, he complained that he&#8217;d been subjected to “verbal violence” over his support for the Chávez and Maduro regimes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Social media, for its part, has helped organize the protests and shown the world the brutal handiwork of Venezuela&#8217;s security forces. Twitter&#8217;s SOSVenezuela has buzzed with photos claiming to show Cuban troops and military aircraft in Venezuela. Opposition protesters are convinced that Cubans are participating in the repressive crack-down against students. Over the years, Chávez invited many Cuban security agents and advisers into the country to help solidify his socialist rule.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Bread and circuses populism has a long history in Venezuela, as does statism and authoritarianism. But Chávez took these things to new heights. Now after 11 years of Chávez, and one year of Maduro, who is doubling down on Chávez&#8217;s policies, Venezuela is sliding toward basket case status. It has one of the world&#8217;s worst murder rates. Shortages of basic goods &#8212; including milk, medicines, and toilet paper – are common due to currency exchange and price controls that have made it unprofitable for business to import goods. And things are bound to get worse after recent government edicts requiring retailers and businesses to offer government-set “fair prices.” “</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=1599572&amp;CategoryId=10717">Good Morning, Communism</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">!” declared the respected newsletter VenEcomony after analyzing the impact of Maduro&#8217;s recent “economic war” against supposedly bourgeoisie retailers and businessmen. Maduro has called the opposition “fascists” and dupes of “Yankee imperialists.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuela has become a polarized country divided into two ideological camps, thanks mainly to class-warrior Chávez. And last month, opposition leader </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-20/leopoldo-lopez-the-venezuela-oppositions-new-hero">Leopoldo López</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, a 42-year-old Harvard-educated politician and former mayor, was sent to jail on trumped up charges, including murder and inciting rioters, for having lent his support to the ongoing street protests.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“HE WHO tires, loses”: that was the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21596945-after-opposition-leader-arrested-violence-continues-unabated-tale-two-prisoners">slogan</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> printed on a T-shirt worn by López when he was arrested among a sea of supporters. To Maduro&#8217;s outrage, López had urged protesters to continue taking their grievances to the streets with peaceful protests; it&#8217;s the only option they have left against an authoritarian government. Unarmed student demonstrators have been using two valuable weapons: twitter (#SOSVenezuea) and YouTube. Powerful videos like this have gone viral:</span></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/EFS6cP9auDc" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In last April&#8217;s presidential election, Maduro prevailed over opposition leader Henrique Capriles, a state governor and former mayor, by a razor-thing 50.6 percent of the vote. Protesters rightly believe that Capriles ought to be leading the country in light of Chávez and Maduro&#8217;s demagoguery and populism on top of illegal campaign spending and threats against state employees who supported opposition candidates.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Students come mainly from the middle-class and have been the backbone of the nationwide protest movement. It started in early February in San Cristóbal, a college town in the Andean mountains of 650,000, following the sexual assault of a female student. Initially, the protests were provoked by out-of-control crime. But as they spread to every major city in Venezuela, students added additional grievances to their manifesto – corruption, electrical blackouts, and other quality-of-life issues. Here and there, there have been reports in social media of the protests spreading to working-class areas that have been traditional Chávez strongholds.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the hope of pulling off a Ukrainian-style revolution seems remote. The military is with Maduro, by all accounts. The students and other protesters are a minority; and so far their rage has been vented mainly against the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">symptoms</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of bread and circuses socialism – not against the system itself; and that system is without a doubt corrupt. It revolves in part around the popular belief, especially among the poor majority, that Venezuelans ought to be rich and entitled by dint of their oil wealth &#8212; an impossibility in Venezuela today. It&#8217;s a sirens song – the paradox of plenty, as some call it – that keeps free-market policies at bay, keeps power concentrated in the hands of a few, and lends itself to a mentality that blames others. In this culture, anti-Americanism flourishes. Free-market policies and investor-friendly laws, on the other hand, would create wealth – far more than could be pumped out of the ground.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The prophetic warning of Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, a Venezuelan intellectual who was instrumental in founding OPEC, is often cited and worth quoting in respect to Venezuela&#8217;s long decline and current crisis. “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see: oil will bring us ruin… Oil is the Devil&#8217;s excrement.”</span></p>
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		<title>A Carter Intervention in Venezuela</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/jimmy-carter-to-visit-venezuela/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jimmy-carter-to-visit-venezuela</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2014 05:36:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Carter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Riot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Another PR stunt to serve Venezuela's socialist oppressors? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jimmy_carter_2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220098" alt="jimmy_carter_2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jimmy_carter_2-443x350.jpg" width="310" height="245" /></a>Last week Jimmy Carter fired off letters to Venezuela’s fraudulent President Nicolas Maduro and to Venezuela’s defrauded Presidential candidate Enrique Capriles expressing “grave concern” regarding the political turmoil and bloodshed convulsing their nation. From his pulpit at Emory University’s Carter Center, the former U.S. president calls for “dialogue” among the embattled Venezuelan parties and offers to visit the troubled nation &#8212; but not as a formal “mediator.”</span></p>
<p>The news of Carter’s proposed Venezuela visit was only hours old when alarmed Venezuelan anti-socialists sent out an SOS: “Please, desist from your trip,” reads an open letter from Venezuelan blogger/journalist Daniel Duquenal. “You have absolutely no credibility in Venezuela…You have cursed us enough as it is. I can assure you that half of the country has no respect nor credibility for you and the other half (the Castroites) thinks you are a mere fool that they can use <a href="http://daniel-venezuela.blogspot.com/2014/02/open-letter-to-jimmy-carter-dont-you.html">and discard as needed.” </a></p>
<p>Venezuelan continues as a veritable battleground between hundreds of thousands of protestors and thousands of Cuban-trained government police and national guardsmen. Fifteen protestors have been shot dead, hundreds arrested and thousands injured. “I feel as if this were a war zone,” said one resident of the far-western city of San Cristobal, long known for it’s anti-Chavista activism.</p>
<p>Desperate to cow that area’s rebellious residents Maduro even sent some of his regime’s Russian-built Sukhoi warplanes to buzz (but not yet bomb) the area. “It doesn’t matter if it takes a month, two months, three months. We have to get rid of this government,” said one desperate protestor.</p>
<p>This is a very unequal battle. The protestors have overwhelming numbers on their side, but the Cuba-puppet regime has the guns, the planes, the tanks, the truncheons and the tear gas. Better still (for the Venezuelan regime) the hands-on tutelage of their repressive apparatus comes courtesy of a regime (Castro’s) that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s<i> </i>during the Great Terror, and murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler‘s murdered Germans during his <i>first six. </i>No “security specialists” in the Western Hemisphere can boast anything close to these credentials on their CV.</p>
<p>So like anyone else with stellar credentials Castro’s military and police advisors demand top price for their services. Last year Venezuelan subsidies to Cuba totaled $10 billion. That’s more than <i>double</i> what the Soviets used to send. No, Castro’s KGB-trained murderers and torturers will not work for peanuts.</p>
<p>Alas, Castro’s “security” assistance to Maduro’s regime has lately been revealed as more than strictly “advisory.” Venezuelan social media (the only type still functioning freely in this Cuban satrapy) is leaking out some tragi-comedies: <a href="https://yrj8p7qye6fzoz3aqjhp.r.worldssl.net/foto-tu-eres-venezolano-cantame-el-himno-nacional-le-decia-la-mujer-al-gnb-en-las-mercedes-esta-tarde/">“You’re not Venezuelan!”</a> yelled a demonstrator to a heavily armed national Guardsman. “Then sing the Venezuelan national anthem!” and of course the man in the Venezuelan Guardsman’s uniform could not.</p>
<p>Jimmy Carter has a long and illustrious history of “mediation” in disputed Venezuelan elections, dating back to 1998. In every case his mediation served to legitimize the electoral fraud of Venezuela’s Castroites and socialists. In fact the international legitimacy of Maduro’s fraudulent presidency owes much to Carter himself.</p>
<p>“The voting part” of it was &#8220;free and fair,” declared Jimmy Carter after Maduro “won” the elections of April, 2013 shortly after Hugo’ Chavez death. “Venezuela probably has the <i>most excellent</i> voting system that I have ever known,” he concluded.  Maybe if Jimmy Carter spent less time watching Wayne’s World and more time listening to the Venezuelan opposition he’d know that election was blatantly stolen by Maduro.</p>
<p>Jimmy Carter’s relationship with Venezuela’s current colonial overlords may explain his solicitude for the welfare of the Maduro regime. To wit:</p>
<p>“We greeted each other as old friends,” gushed Jimmy Carter regarding his most recent meeting with Fidel Castro in April 2011.</p>
<p>“In 2002, we received him warmly,” reciprocated Fidel. “Now, I reiterated to him our respect and esteem.&#8221;</p>
<p>“Jimmy Carter was the best of all U.S. Presidents,” gushed Fidel’s brother Raul while seeing his American guest off personally and jovially after those ultra-amiable meetings.</p>
<p>But Jimmy Carter’s affection for the Castros amounts to more than smiles, handshakes and love notes. On his most recent Cuban visit he appeared on Cuban TV to denounce the U.S. justice system and plead for the release of Cuban terrorist/spies (The Cuban Five) &#8212; a conviction by U.S. Federal juries upheld all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, by the way. The charges against Castro’s spies included</p>
<p>•Gathering intelligence against the Boca Chica Air Naval Station in Key West, the McDill Air Force Base in Tampa and the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Homestead, Fla.</p>
<p>•Compiling the names, home addresses and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers, along with those of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica.</p>
<p>•Infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command.</p>
<p>•Sending letter bombs to Cuban-Americans.</p>
<p>•Spying on McDill Air Force Base, the U.S. armed forces’ worldwide headquarters for fighting “low-intensity” conflicts.</p>
<p>•Locating entry points into <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">Florida for smuggling explosives.</a></p>
<p>&#8220;I believe that there is no reason to keep the Cuban Five imprisoned,” declared Jimmy Carter while being interviewed by a Communist apparatchik on Cuban TV. “I had the opportunity to meet the families of the five Cuban <i>patriots </i>[italics mine], with their wives and with their mothers&#8230;..I&#8217;m well aware of the shortcomings of the U.S. judicial system [but apparently not the Cuban] but hope that President Obama will grant their pardon. He knows my opinion on this matter, that the trial of the Cuban Five was very dubious, <a href="http://www.freethefive.org/updates/CubanMedia/CMCarterArleen33011.htm">that many norms were violated</a>.”</p>
<p>The man hailed as the “Elder Statesman” of America’s <i>majority</i> political party insulted the judicial system of the nation that elected him President while hosted by a regime that imported its judicial system—lock, stock and barrel—<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">from the heirs of Joe Stalin.</a></p>
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		<title>Showdown in Caracas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/showdown-in-caracas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=showdown-in-caracas</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Feb 2014 05:28:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Leopoldo Lopez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219128</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Democracy supporters fight back against Chavez's legacy of tyranny. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ALeqM5givHJr1yRYOknak-IPl6Sxz0iE0A.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219130" alt="ALeqM5givHJr1yRYOknak-IPl6Sxz0iE0A" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ALeqM5givHJr1yRYOknak-IPl6Sxz0iE0A-450x318.jpg" width="270" height="191" /></a>In a move that almost guarantees violent clashes, Venezuela&#8217;s increasingly nervous Marxist </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">caudillo</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is calling for his supporters to take to the streets Tuesday to combat a large planned march by that oil-rich nation&#8217;s opposition.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is asking his allies, including state employees, to demonstrate in force against Leopoldo Lopez, leader of the opposition party, Popular Will (Voluntad Popular). Lopez, who has been accused by Maduro of inciting violence, asked Venezuelans to dress in white and march alongside him, daring authorities to arrest him.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Opposition Governor Henrique Capriles, who was beaten by Maduro in the dubious April election, said the government was instigating the unrest to “hide the grave problems that the country is facing with the scarcity of food, medicine, the inflation, devaluation and insecurity.”</span></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://tiny.iavian.net/1yc3">Demonstrations</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> against the Maduro regime have become commonplace because socialist economic bungling has caused shortages of consumer goods, food, and medicine. People have good reason to be upset. Runaway inflation is destroying savings. Inflation more than doubled over the past 12 months, rising to 56.3 percent in January, the central bank reports. The bank&#8217;s scarcity index shot up to an unprecedented 28 percent, which means that at any given time more than one in four basic goods was out of stock.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, Lopez, who is now in hiding, vows to allow himself to be arrested.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“I’ve not committed any crime,” he said in a YouTube video. “If there is a decision to illegally jail me, I’ll be there.” Popular Will spokesman Carlos Vecchio said yesterday that the government is responsible for the protesters&#8217; safety.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Security forces </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/02/17/venezuela-expells-americans/5545453/">raided</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Popular Will&#8217;s headquarters yesterday.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Four guys, dressed entirely in black, violently broke down the doors. They weren&#8217;t police; they weren&#8217;t National Guard,&#8221; volunteer Lisett Esteves was quoted as saying. &#8220;They asked for leaders of the party. Intelligence agents then came in with a warrant to take away all of our equipment.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">David Smolansky, mayor of El Hatillo, one of Caracas&#8217; municipalities, was in the building during the raid. &#8220;They were looking for Leopoldo and all the leaders of our political party,&#8221; he said. &#8220;It&#8217;s more proof that in Venezuela we don&#8217;t have democracy.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On Feb. 12, three people were killed and 66 injured when demonstrators fought with government supporters. Of the 99 individuals detained from Feb. 12 to 13, 13 are still in custody after judges deemed their actions &#8220;severe.&#8221; Student protesters are demanding that the detainees be free. Yesterday, for the sixth consecutive day hundreds of students in Caracas defied a presidential decree banning public demonstrations.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Maduro is the less colorful replacement for Hugo Chavez, a crude, erratic, neo-communist despot who officially died last March after seeking medical treatment from the quacks and bunglers of Cuba&#8217;s so-called health care system. When he actually departed this world is far from clear. Hidden away from the public for months, Chavez, whose election in 1999 sparked a leftist revival throughout Latin America, may have actually died some time ago.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Maduro can count on community organizers to come to his aid.</span></p>
<p>Government-linked community councils and “Bolivarian Circles,” similar to Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, remain active. In order to identify citizens worthy of governmental persecution, neighborhood-based militias spy on citizens. In true <i>Sturmabteilung</i> fashion, these groups also break up opposition meetings by force.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Like the roving paramilitary death squads that have been active in various Latin American countries, violent groups with no formal governmental ties are useful because they can do the regime&#8217;s dirty work, using force against opponents, and terrorizing the population, without directly implicating government officials.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sounding somewhat like President Obama whining about Fox News, Maduro also claims international news outlets aren&#8217;t providing fair coverage of his attempt to seize absolute power. He ordered Colombian station NTN24 off the air in Venezuela for committing the sin of showing the bloody civil unrest produced by his socialist policies. On Feb. 13 he accused Agence France-Presse of manipulating information.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s all part of the politics of distraction, Venezuelan-style.</span></p>
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		<title>The Kennedy-Chavez Oil Subversion Campaign Lives On</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/the-kennedy-chavez-oil-subversion-campaign-lives-on/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-kennedy-chavez-oil-subversion-campaign-lives-on</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/the-kennedy-chavez-oil-subversion-campaign-lives-on/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Feb 2014 05:02:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CITGO]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kennedy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OIL]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218291</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Still whitewashing a socialist slave state. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/joeken.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218292" alt="joeken" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/joeken.jpg" width="252" height="220" /></a>Venezuela&#8217;s economy is on life support, yet its pretensions of humbling the United States persist. This is underscored by its <a href="http://media.citgo.com/2014-02-05-Ninth-Annual-CITGO-Venezuela-Heating-Oil-Program-to-Warm-Thousands-of-Families-During-Cold-Winter-Months,1">plans</a> to continue Hugo Chávez&#8217;s showcase anti-American propaganda program  – giving away free home-heating oil to poor Americans this winter, just like it has done for the past nine years. As usual, former U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy II is facilitating and cheering on what amounts to an anti-American program by the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There had been much speculation about whether Venezuela would continue, amid its deepening </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-09/venezuela-in-data-denial-after-inflation-tops-50-andes-credit.html">economic woes</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, to use oil largess to promote its leftist ideology abroad, as the late President Chávez had done. But CITGO Petroleum Corporation, the Houston-based arm of Venezuela&#8217;s state oil company, confirmed on Wednesday that it will indeed provide free home-heating oil to poor Americans, those who supposedly can&#8217;t afford heating oil.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Leftist firebrand Chávez, who died last March of cancer, launched the program in 2005. Since then, CITGO claims that more than 235 million gallons of home-heating oil have been distributed to more than 1.8 million low-income Americans. It says it has assisted families, homeless shelters, and native American tribes in 25 states and District of Columbia. Naturally, the blue states of the Northeast are major recipients given the wide use of home-heating oil there.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chávez made anti-Americanism a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://bigcarnival.blogspot.com/2006/09/in-perspective-hugos-anti-americanism.html">cornerstone</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of his foreign policy. He devised sweetheart oil deals with like-minded nations to spread his leftist ideology &#8212; essentially using oil as a political weapon. His hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader, is showing yet again that he is determined to follow in Chávez footsteps.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Interestingly, CITGO&#8217;s announcement comes as a U.S. judge in South Texas fined CITGO more than $2 million for </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/05/3915614/judge-finds-citgo-guilty-of-clean.html">felony violations </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">of the U.S. Clean Air Act committed by its Corpus Christi refinery. Pollution from the facility was blamed for sickening dozens of nearby residents. Presumably, they were low-income Americans, people who could only afford to live near a smelly oil refinery and who, it would seem, lacked the propaganda value of poor Americans elsewhere, especially in the Northeast&#8217;s blue states.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;We have committed to this program once again this year because we see it as a humanitarian effort that helps our most vulnerable neighbors stay warm during one of the coldest winters in history,&#8221; Nelson P. Martinez, President and CEO of CITGO Petroleum Corporation, announced in his company&#8217;s </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://media.citgo.com/2014-02-05-Ninth-Annual-CITGO-Venezuela-Heating-Oil-Program-to-Warm-Thousands-of-Families-During-Cold-Winter-Months,1">news release</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. &#8220;We can&#8217;t relieve the need for everyone but this is our humble contribution to share the responsibility of improving the quality of life in our communities by using the strength of our resources to help those in need. This is one of the most important values we share with our shareholder, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), the national oil company of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,&#8221; he added.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Kennedy, for his part, is again playing the role of useful Democratic idiot in Venezuela&#8217;s anti-American oil largess. A non-profit he created in 1979, Citizens Energy Corporation, has gladly partnered with CITGO to again deliver the fuel.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;The poor are facing a terrible hardship this winter,&#8221; said Kennedy, as quoted in CITGO&#8217;s news release. &#8220;Federal fuel assistance has dropped 40 percent over the last few years while heating oil prices have jumped by a third. With the kind of cold we&#8217;ve experienced this winter, the federal aid just doesn&#8217;t go as far. It&#8217;s a triple whammy on the poor. That&#8217;s why the generosity of CITGO Petroleum and the people of Venezuela is so important – it helps fill the fuel gap for the most vulnerable among us.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Did Kennedy clear his comments about scaled-back federal fuel assistance with the Obama administration? Or perhaps the cutbacks to which he refers were made </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">because</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the Obama administration was counting on Venezuela&#8217;s anti-American government to keep providing poor Americans (presumably Democratic voters) with free home-heating oil. And when referring to the generosity of Venezuela&#8217;s people, was Kennedy aware that no referendum was ever held among Venezuela&#8217;s voters as to whether</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> their </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">oil patrimony should be given away to further the ideological ambitions of their political leaders?  Under Chávez, Venezuela gave away billions of dollars of its oil patrimony in sweetheart oil deals with Cuba, the Caribbean, and left-leaning countries in South America. It&#8217;s all apart of Venezuela&#8217;s effort to spread its leftist ideology and counter American hegemony, which it sees as the cause of the world&#8217;s suffering.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">President Maduro has been deepening Chávez’s socialism as he grapples with worsening food shortages, falling oil prices, and annual inflation topping 50%  – the region&#8217;s highest. Venezuela is quite literally broke. It can&#8217;t afford to give away its oil, yet it continues to do so because Maduro is dedicated first and foremost to his leftist ideology &#8212; not the welfare or ordinary Venezuelans.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Has any of this occurred to Joseph P. Kennedy and like-minded Democrats? The eagerness with which they embrace Venezuela&#8217;s oil largess suggest one of three things. They are useful idiots, fellow travelers – or both. </span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Can a Beauty Queen&#8217;s Murder Bring Down Socialism?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/can-a-beauty-queens-murder-bring-down-socialism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=can-a-beauty-queens-murder-bring-down-socialism</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Jan 2014 05:20:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[miss venezuela]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[monica spear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[murder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216531</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the murder of a former Miss Venezuela is threatening the post-Chavez regime. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1389123169_monica-spear-467.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-216532" alt="1389123169_monica-spear-467" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1389123169_monica-spear-467-408x350.jpg" width="286" height="245" /></a>Beauty queens are revered in Venezuela, none more so than those crowned &#8220;Miss Venezuela.&#8221; So when a beloved former &#8220;Miss&#8221; named Mónica Spear and her ex-husband were murdered by highway bandits, the crime sparked national outrage &#8212; touching off street protests, non-stop media coverage, and an ongoing national conversation about the socialist government&#8217;s failure to stop a runaway murder epidemic.</p>
<p>Now, outrage over the murders is prompting many Venezuelans to confront the contradictions of Venezuela-style socialism. One of the biggest ironies: violent crime has exploded since President Hugo Chávez, a firebrand leftist, took office 15 years ago. This has happened, moreover, as capitalism has increasingly been dismantled – supposedly replaced by more economic equality and “social justice” in the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation.</p>
<p>Chávez, who died last March of cancer, coined the term “21<sup>st</sup> Century socialism.” He contended it would reverse corruption-riddled Venezuela&#8217;s long economic decline, as would his strategy of pursing anti-American alliances. But as fallout continues over the high-profile murders, many Venezuelans are becoming more cynical about President Nicolás Maduro&#8217;s socialist agenda as tens of thousands of Venezuelans are being murdered annually. Maduro, Chávez&#8217;s hand-picked successor, is grappling with food shortages, falling oil prices, and annual inflation topping 50%. He rules a politically polarized country where just over 50 percent of voters support his leftist agenda. He possesses neither Chávez&#8217;s charisma nor mystical connection to Venezuela&#8217;s poor majority.</p>
<p>Spear, crowned &#8220;Miss Venezuela&#8221; in 2004, died in a hail of gunfire on a dark highway on Monday, January 6, with ex-husband Henry Thomas Berry, a 39-year-old British citizen who specialized in adventure tourism at a local travel agency. Their 5-year-old daughter suffered a leg wound.</p>
<p>Police said several bandits laid sharp objects on the road that flattened the car&#8217;s tires; other reports said the car was disabled after hitting a pothole &#8212; a common problem on poorly maintained roads. The couple locked themselves in their car as the bandits showed up, but to no avail: Six shots were fired as a tow-truck arrived. The couple&#8217;s ill-fated holiday in the spectacular mountains and plains of western Venezuela had been intended to give them a new start together.</p>
<p>With Spear and Berry&#8217;s murders, Venezuela&#8217;s skyrocketing murder rate suddenly has human faces – and President Maduro is on the defensive. He&#8217;d been focusing on deepening “21<sup>st</sup> Century socialism.” This included an “<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/09/us-venezuela-election-idUSBRE9B707720131209">economic offensive</a>” against the commercial class: from owners of supermarkets to electronics stores to car dealerships – all were being ordered to offer government-set “fair prices.” And before November&#8217;s make-or-break municipal elections, he&#8217;d won votes by taking bread-and-circuses populism to <a href="http://bigcarnival.blogspot.com/2013/11/hugo-chavezs-successor-takes-bread-and.html">new heights</a>, tacitly giving Christmas shoppers, as some observers saw it, a green light to loot electronics stores. &#8220;We&#8217;re doing this for the good of the nation,&#8221; he said. “Let nothing remain in stock!” A number of retailers were jailed &#8212; accused of speculating, hoarding, and unfair lending.</p>
<p>Now, sensing political trouble over Spear and Berry&#8217;s murders, Maduro is shifting his attention away from his “economic offensive.” He&#8217;s instead calling for an unprecedented <a href="http://globovision.com/articulo/gobierno-iniciara-gira-por-el-pais-para-definir-estrategias-de-seguridad">anti-crime program</a>, and he <a href="http://globovision.com/articulo/gobernadores-alcaldes-y-gobierno-se-reunen-para-corregir-detalles-en-planes-contra-el-hampa">recently met </a>with big-city mayors, governors, and administration officials to come up with a plan. Details remain sketchy. But hopefully, Maduro will focus on improving the nation&#8217;s often corrupt and inefficient police forces and criminal-justice system. In the past, he and Chávez had believed socialism would address what they believed were crime&#8217;s root causes: capitalism and class-conflict; poverty and economic inequality &#8212; and even violent American movies shown on Venezuelan television and movie theaters.</p>
<p>Venezuela suffered the world&#8217;s fourth highest murder rate in 2010 after Honduras, El Salvador, and Jamaica, according to United Nation&#8217;s <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/Latin-America-Monitor/2014/0107/Murder-of-former-Miss-Venezuela-spotlights-country-s-rampant-crime">statistics</a>. Official Venezuelan crime statistics are non-existent: the government stopped providing them ten years ago. But sociologist Roberto Briceño León, president of the Venezuelan Observatory on Violence, a watchdog group, estimates that yearly homicides have increased 427% since Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998, after campaigning on a platform to seek a “third way” between socialism and capitalism, and to reverse rampant corruption and declining living standards. “In 1998, we had 4,550 homicides in the country, but we closed the past year with 24,000,” Briceño León recently <a href="http://globovision.com/articulo/briceno-leon-el-crimen-de-spear-le-puso-rostro-a-miles-de-personas-que-fallecen-en-manos-de-la-violencia">told Globovision</a>, a Caracas television channel, in a segment about the Spear and Berry murders. To put those grim murder numbers into perspective: war-torn Iraq&#8217;s population is comparable in size to Venezuela&#8217;s, yet it suffered 7,800 killings in 2013 &#8212; about one third of Venezuela&#8217;s homicides. “A third of our murders, and yet the international community says absolutely nothing about the violence in Venezuela. Shame on them,” wrote Juan Cristobal Nagel, an opposition blogger at <a href="http://caracaschronicles.com/">Caracas Chronicles</a>.</p>
<p>To outraged Venezuelans, the couple&#8217;s murders were especially tragic because their lives were caught up with the rise and fall of the Venezuelan dream – an ideal that existed from the 1970s to mid-80s, the era of “Saudi Venezuela” when oil prices were soaring. Berry&#8217;s British parents had immigrated to Venezuela more than 40 years ago, when Caracas was a charming place known as the “city of red roofs.” His father was a mathematics professor at Simón Bolívar University. Spear, a fifth runner-up in the Miss Universe pageant, went on to because a successful soap-opera actress for the Spanish-language Telemundo network. In 2011, she had moved to Florida, one of more than 500,000 Venezuelan now <a href="http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/140113/crece-numero-de-venezolanos-que-emigran-y-solicitan-refugio">living aboard </a>to escape Venezuela-style socialism. Many are members of the business and professional classes, people whom class-warrior Chávez saw as part the problems ailing Venezuela.</p>
<p>Police investigating Spear and Berry&#8217;s murders quickly rounded up nine suspects who were part of a gang that preyed on motorists; they were carrying credit cards and a digital camera that belonged to the couple. It was splendid police work. But to most Venezuelans it underscored that their country, even under “21<sup>st</sup> Century socialism,” has two standards of justice: one for the well-connected and famous, and the other for ordinary Venezuelans, observed Briceño León, the sociologist. Indeed, most Venezuelans doubt that police would have expended such an effort for ordinary Venezuelans, he explained. &#8220;People can commit crimes without any consequences,&#8221; sociologist Luis Cedeño, director of civic group Active Peace, <a href="http://globovision.com/articulo/sociologo-en-venezuela-las-personas-pueden-delinquir-sin-ningun-tipo-de-consecuencias">told Globovision</a>.</p>
<p>Whatever crime-reduction plan President Maduro implements will face a major problem: Venezuela is broke. Draconian currency exchange and price controls have left many supermarket shelves empty; even toilet party is in short supply. Attracting significant foreign investment is not an option &#8212; not after Chávez nationalized large swaths of the economy. Recently, Bloomberg News <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-09/venezuela-in-data-denial-after-inflation-tops-50-andes-credit.html">reported</a> that Venezuela&#8217;s “economic distress is so acute that the central bank stopped releasing regular statistics for the first time ever, threatening to increase borrowing costs further as the nation faces $10 billion of financing needs.” Benjamin Wang, a money manager at PineBridge Investments LLC, was quoted as saying: “There’s no transparent data to measure the risk.”</p>
<p>As the fallout over the death of a beauty queen plays out, cynicism is likely to grow toward Venezuela-style socialism. So will murder, corruption, and economic decline. How ironic that a beauty queen&#8217;s death may serve as a catalyst for positive change that opposition candidates have been unable to achieve by defeating Hugo Chávez or Nicolás Maduro at the polls.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Chavez&#8217;s Successor to Obama: &#8216;Yankee Go Home!&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-paulin/chavezs-successor-to-obama-yankee-go-home/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=chavezs-successor-to-obama-yankee-go-home</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2013 04:25:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diplomats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205981</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A telling sign of the future of Venezuela. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Nicolás_Maduro.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206007" alt="Nicolás_Maduro" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Nicolás_Maduro-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro has expelled three top U.S. Embassy officials, accusing them on Monday of fomenting economic sabotage, including all-too-frequent power blackouts, in the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation. Maduro&#8217;s remarks were right out of Hugo Chavez&#8217;s anti-American playbook. They dashed Washington&#8217;s hope that Maduro, a former union leader and bus driver, would be more &#8220;pragmatic&#8221; than Chávez, the popular firebrand president who died last March. Maudro was apparently unimpressed with President Obama&#8217;s desire for a reset in relations with Venezuela.</span></b></p>
<p>“Get out of Venezuela! Yankee go home!&#8221; Maduro shouted on live television, during a celebration marking the bicentennial of a battle for independence from Spain. &#8220;Enough of abuses against the dignity of a homeland that wants peace.”</p>
<p>The embassy officials were <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/world/americas/venezuela-expels-top-us-embassy-official-and-two-others.html?_r=0">identified</a> as chargé d’affaires Kelly Keiderling; political officer Elizabeth Hoffman; and vice consul David Moo. They have 48 hours to leave the country.</p>
<p>Maduro didn&#8217;t say whether the trio had anything to do with the dark side of Venezuela&#8217;s so-called &#8220;21st Century&#8221; socialism: toilet paper and food shortages; an annual inflation rate of more than 45 percent; epic levels of corruption; and Caracas&#8217; status as the world&#8217;s murder capital. Power blackouts also have been a problem.</p>
<p>“We have detected a group of officials of the United States Embassy in Caracas, in Venezuela, and we have been tracking them for several months,&#8221; Maduro <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/world/americas/venezuela-expels-top-us-embassy-official-and-two-others.html?_r=0">explained</a>. &#8220;These officials spend their time meeting with the Venezuelan extreme right wing, financing them and encouraging them to take actions to sabotage the electrical system, to sabotage the Venezuelan economy.”</p>
<p>Regarding the Obama administration, <a href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/10054">Maduro said</a> he &#8220;doesn&#8217;t care&#8221; about its response. “We&#8217;re not going to allow an imperial government to come and bring money to stop companies operating, (and) to take out the electricity to shut Venezuela down.&#8221;</p>
<p>“Señores gringos, imperialists, you have before you men and women of dignity that…will never kneel before your interests and we&#8217;re not afraid of you. We&#8217;ll confront you on all levels, the political, the diplomatic.&#8221;</p>
<p>Maduro&#8217;s rant underscores that things can only get  worse in Venezuela. Under Chávez and Maduro, Venezuela’s old pathologies &#8212; Statism, bread-and-circus populism, and corruption &#8211; have grown to epic levels. But like Chávez, Maduro is clueless about what&#8217;s wrong; and so he finds it convenient to promote conspiracy theories and anti-Americanism. But this isn&#8217;t merely about political expediency and demagoguery, because Maduro no doubt really believes what&#8217;s he saying, as do many Venezuelans.</p>
<p>&#8220;Yankee go home!&#8221; Sadly, it&#8217;s an old story in Latin America and many parts of the world.</p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/hnxFmanKYtY" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
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		<title>The Red Fascism of Colonel Chavez</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-red-fascism-of-colonel-chavez/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-red-fascism-of-colonel-chavez</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 May 2013 04:15:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hitler]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tyranny]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=191091</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Venezuelan comandante was the real successor of Stalin and Hitler.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Ahmadinejad_chavez.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-191263" alt="Venezuela's President Chavez speaks next to Iran's President Ahmadinejad during an agreement-signing ceremony in Tehran" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Ahmadinejad_chavez-450x330.jpg" width="315" height="231" /></a>What are the legacies of chavismo? Shameless demagogy, rampant poverty, duplicitous kleptocracy, strident chauvinism, ubiquitous propaganda, demonization of political opponents, a delusional police state pretending, like Castro&#8217;s Cuba, to embody the behests of History. Hugo Chavez (1954-2013) was the most strident voice of the new anti-western and anti-democratic front. By the end of his life (he passed away on March 5, precisely sixty years after Stalin’s demise), the Venezuelan comandante, compromised in his own country, was increasingly prone to engage in external adventures.</p>
<p>Not unlike Che Guevara&#8211;Che’s daughter Aleida is the author of a hagiography about Chavez&#8211;the Venezuelan leader dreamed of himself as the reincarnation of Bolivar, Jose Marti, Lenin, and even Evita Peron (a few years ago, Chavez proclaimed: “Evita died on July 26,1952. Only two days later, on July 28, 1954 I was born. Imagine!”) As the ridicule does not kill, Chavez launched a campaign to unearth Bolivar’s bones in order to demonstrate that El Libertador was poisoned bya reactionary conspiracy. In 2008, voicing his hostility to Colombia’s democratic regime, Chavez called  the neighbouring country “Latin America’s Israel.”</p>
<p>In this crusade, the narco-terrorism of the FARC guerillas, colluded with Chavez’ delirious petro-populism. Combining grotesque bufoonery, political farce, and the most obscene demagogy, Chavez symbolized leftist opportunism in its most aggressive form. We deal with red Fascism, because Chavez’s methods and aspirations did not differ essentially from those of Mussolini; statism, cult of personality, tribalist collectivism, indigenista messianism, the annihilation of political rivals, and the persecution of any source of civic autonomy. As in Eastern Europe before the revolutions of 1989, civil society has become the main enemy of the dictatorship.  Like Eastern Europe’s Leninist dinosaurs, Chavez indulged in endless, systematic lying.</p>
<p>The ally of the Castro brothers started his career as a demagogue of Peronista orientation. His affinities linked him to the far right; irrationalism, exacerbated nationalism, fascination with occultism, militarism, and political shamanism. Gradually, he absorbed the obsessions of the far left and discovered in the anti-imperialist rhetoric a self-aggrandizing platform able to catapult him as a prophet of the new tercermundismo.</p>
<p>Years ago, noted Venezuelan political thinker Carlos Rangel (1929-1988) wrote an illuminating book about Latin America’s revolutionary myths (&#8220;Del Buen Salvaje al buen Revolucionario,” translated into English as &#8220;The Latin Americans. The Love-Hate Relationship with the US.”) Rangel diagnosed the resentful grammar underlying the utopian Castro-Guevarist project. If we think of the youth years of Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin, it is hard not to notice precisely this contempt for the rule of law (&#8220;Rechtstaat”). The same can be said about the declassé young Hitler in a multi-ethnic Vienna, a city open to bourgeois modernity. These revolutionaries were in fact viscerally anti-conservative: they loathed pluralist values, procedural parliamentarism, and religion appeared to them as a form of mental enslavement. There is a whole literature about the socialist roots of Fascism.</p>
<p>We notice the emergence of a new International (exalting &#8220;el nuevo socialismo del siglo 21”) opposed not only to the United States (no matter who is the president, George W. Bush or Barack Obama), but hostile to the free market and to the economic, political, and cultural project based on the recognition of human rights.</p>
<p>We hear passionately humanitarian denunciations of the treatment of Islamicist prisoners in Guantanamo, but very little about the fact that on the same island, in Cuba, whoever dares to oppose the police dictatorship suffers ruthless persecutions. With his phantasmagorical ideas about “Bolivarian Socialism”, colonel Chavez epitomized the effort to regroup and resuscitate the leftist attempt to delegitimize and abolish pluralism.</p>
<p>In another book written by Rangel about Third World mythologies (with a foreword, as for the previous one by the late French political thinker Jean-François Revel) we find a seminal analysis of socialism as a doctrine intimately related to Fascism in terms of rejecting capitalism as “plutocratic,” “soulless,” and “mercantile”. Both politcal religions –Communism and Fascism- promised to accomplish <i>hic ad nunc</i> the perfect community. In the words of political philosopher Eric Voegelin, they tried to immanentize the Eschaton. This meant to condemn human beings to State-dictated happiness. As Rangel put it: “It was not at all an accident that Joseph Goebbels oscillated for a while between Communism and Nazism: he realized that both ideologies were equally compatible with his own inclination for a nationalist and authoritarian government that would save the country from what he saw as the decadent liberalism of the Weimar Republic.”</p>
<p>Colonel Chavez’ red Fascism was welcomed by the most diverse circles: from Iranian Islamiscist theocrat Ahmadinejad to the unreconstructed Sandinista Marxist Daniel Ortega. The frantic search for the New Man, anti-Occidentalism, anti-Semitism, and the utopian-revolutionary hubris made Hugo Chavez the real successor of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Guevara, and Fidel Castro.</p>
<p><strong>Vladimir Tismaneanu is professor of politics at the University of Maryland and the author of numerous books including &#8220;<em>Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel</em>,&#8221; &#8220;<em>Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe,&#8221;</em> and &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/"><em>The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century</em></a>.” The views presented in his articles are his and do not represent any institution.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Resisting ObamaCare &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-needs-another-dictator-to-replace-chavez-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-obama-needs-another-dictator-to-replace-chavez-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Mar 2013 04:34:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Glazov Gang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bob Zeidman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[death]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Larry Greenfield]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Morsi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=180637</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is it too late to pull the plug?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-needs-another-dictator-to-replace-chavez-on-the-glazov-gang/obamacare-7/" rel="attachment wp-att-181576"><img class="size-full wp-image-181576 alignleft" title="ObamaCare" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ObamaCare1.jpg" alt="" width="324" height="500" /></a>This week’s <em>Glazov Gang</em> had the honor of being joined by <strong>Bob Zeidman</strong>, award-winning novelist, <strong>Larry Greenfield</strong>, Senior Fellow at the American Freedom Alliance and <strong>Howard Hyde</strong>, author of the new pamphlet, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939" target="_blank"><em>Pull the Plug on Obamacare</em></a>. The Gang members discussed <em>Resisting ObamaCare. </em>The dialogue occurred in <strong></strong> <strong>Part II</strong> and dealt with Hyde&#8217;s pamphlet and whether it is too late to pull the plug on Obama&#8217;s health care plan. The segment also  included an analysis of <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obamas-billion-dollar-giveaway-to-the-muslim-brotherhood/"><em>Obama’s Billion-Dollar Giveaway to the Muslim Brotherhood</em></a>. <strong>Part I</strong> focused on <em>The Death of Hugo Chavez</em>.</p>
<p>To watch both parts of the two part series, see below:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/hOr__eY0MuY" frameborder="0" width="425" height="325"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/S6MZhBeKXxM" frameborder="0" width="425" height="325"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>You can make sure that </strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=ASY2NUM6OSJ9" target="_blank"><strong><em>Jamie Glazov Productions</em></strong></a><strong> continues to take you where no other media programs dare to go. Help us by </strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=ASY2NUM6OSJ9" target="_blank"><strong>clicking here</strong></a><strong> and making a tax deductible contribution today. To see the archives of <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, </strong><a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUqCK5RFjwgmx2z4sOjqd-kQ&amp;feature=plcp"><strong>click here.</strong></a><strong></strong></p>
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		<title>Mr. Hugo Chavez, You Were No Fidel Castro</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/mr-hugo-chavez-you-were-no-fidel-castro/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mr-hugo-chavez-you-were-no-fidel-castro</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/mr-hugo-chavez-you-were-no-fidel-castro/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Mar 2013 04:18:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[American Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hero]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[worship]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=180660</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the pantheon of heroes for America’s leftist elite, Hugo was a pathetic D-lister. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/mr-hugo-chavez-you-were-no-fidel-castro/castro_chavez/" rel="attachment wp-att-180662"><img class=" wp-image-180662 alignleft" title="castro_chavez" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/castro_chavez-450x297.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="208" /></a>(While all the media and academic wizards and soothsayers were pussyfooting and using weasel-words, a Frontpage columnist went <em>on record</em> on Canada&#8217;s <a href="http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/2198256527001">SunNews last Friday</a> and categorically stated that: &#8220;All hope is gone for his survival&#8211;Hugo Chavez will die within days.&#8221; Four days later Hugo was dead.)</p>
<p>**************</p>
<p>Events this week showed that in the pantheon of heroes for America’s liberal elite, Hugo Chavez was a pathetic D-lister. The Venezuelan buffoon never amassed even a small fraction of Fidel Castro’s U.S. celebrity, tycoon and politician fan-base. So Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, Joe Kennedy, Rep. Jose Serrano all expressed admiration for Chavez upon his passing. Big deal.</p>
<p>Listing Fidel Castro&#8217;s A-list celebrity, tycoon and politician fan-base would waste half of Frontpage’s bandwith on something easily <a href="http://www.hfontova.com/fidel.html">found here. </a></p>
<p>The Republican National Committee <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/twitter-room/other-news/286379-rnc-slams-democratic-congressman-voicing-sympathy-for-chavez">scolded</a> Democratic Rep. Serrano for his affectionate tweet to the dead Chavez. Good for them. But if the RNC applied the same standard to scolding Democratic affection for a live Fidel Castro they&#8217;d have time for nothing else. In fact, the RNC could start with some Republicans themselves, such as notorious Castro water-carrier Senator Jeff Flake.</p>
<p>Hugo Chavez was an <em>authoritarian</em> bully, a narcotrafficker, a thief and a buffoon. He wasn&#8217;t a <em>totalitarian</em> mass-murderer, a mass-jailer and a mass-torturer who outlawed all political opposition under penalty of torture-chamber and firing squad and came within a hair of igniting a worldwide nuclear war, aimed first at destroying the U.S.</p>
<p>Despite his bluster and monkeyshines, this last point was never on Hugo Chavez’ bucket list. Indeed it was the<em> last</em> thing he wanted. Keep this under your hat, but: the U.S. is – by far &#8212; the biggest customer for Venezuelan oil. Hugo Chavez was our fourth largest oil supplier.</p>
<p>Three years into power Castro had already murdered more political prisoners (out of a population of 6.5 million) than Hitler murdered (out of a population of 65 million) in his first six years. Ten years into power Castro had jailed and tortured at a higher rate than Stalin during his Great Terror. Fidel Castro’s lifelong dream was to destroy the U.S. &#8212; and he came within a hair of it.</p>
<p>So given his tiny attainments (by Castroite standards) in mass-murder, mass-torture, mass-terror and anti-Americanism, it&#8217;s small surprise that Hugo Chavez amassed only a fraction of Castro’s affection from American liberals.</p>
<p>“VIVA FIDEL!”— “VIVA CHE GUEVARA!” yelled a beaming nominee for America’s dominant political party, Democrat Jesse Jackson, in 1984, while arm in arm with the man who craved to nuke his nation.</p>
<p>“VIVAL FIDEL!” yelled ultra-influential Democratic U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel right before rushing up and suffocating in a bear hug the man who had craved to nuke him. The scene was Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in October 1995, where the very rafters shook from the thundering chants of “VIVA-FIDEL!—VIVA FIDEL!” issuing from a crowd that also included Maxine Waters.</p>
<p>&#8220;Castro is very shy and sensitive,&#8221; revealed U.S. Senator (and “conscience”  of  America’s dominant political party) George McGovern upon first meeting the man who craved to nuke the nation McGovern sought to run as president. &#8220;I frankly liked him [Fidel Castro] &#8230; I consider him a friend.”</p>
<p>“Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis.”<em> </em>(Dan Rather.)</p>
<p>“Fidel Castro is one hell of a guy. You people would like him.”<em> </em>(Ted Turner to a beaming crowd at Harvard Law School.)</p>
<p>“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly—even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure.”<em> </em>(Andrea Mitchell.)</p>
<p>&#8220;It was quite a moment to behold. Fidel Castro was very engaging and very energetic,&#8221; said a hyperventilating Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA).</p>
<p>“Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful.” (Barbara Walters.)</p>
<p>And on, and on, <a href="http://www.hfontova.com/fidel.html">and on….</a></p>
<p>When Hugo Chavez visited the United Nations in 2006 and bad-mouthed President George Bush as “the devil,” “a cowboy,” etc., he was roundly denounced by President Bush’s most vocal Democratic opponents.</p>
<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t come into my country; you don&#8217;t come into my congressional district and you don&#8217;t condemn my president,&#8221; shot back a scowling Charles Rangel.</p>
<p>&#8220;He [Chavez] is an everyday thug,&#8221; added the angry House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.</p>
<p>Chavez started his UN rant on the right foot. He held up a book by Noam Chomsky while blasting the U.S. His mentor Castro was undoubtedly nodding at the time: “Nice &#8230; very nice.”</p>
<p>But Hugo quickly got carried away and went off the rails, blasting Bush himself.  “No, no, no, Hugo!” Castro probably moaned with his face in his hands. “The beauty of this thing, Hugo, is that so many American leftists are so eager to echo our ravings that there&#8217;s absolutely <em>no need for us to mouth them ourselves</em>, you idiot! It’s practically <em>impossible</em> to get Democrats riled up against a Latin Marxist – and here you&#8217;ve managed it, you idiot! Now look what you&#8217;ve done! Prominent Democrats – my historic allies – from Rangel to Pelosi are speaking against you! I&#8217;ve relied on such people to mouth or echo my ravings for decades, Hugo!”</p>
<p>For simply saying the U.N. &#8220;smelt of sulfur,&#8221; Chavez was censured by prominent New Yorkers. After twice trying to make the entire city smell of charred flesh, his mentor, Fidel Castro, got a reception to shame Simon and Garfunkel&#8217;s in Central Park.</p>
<p>When Fidel Castro visited New York in 1995 he was &#8220;The Toast of Manhattan!&#8221; wined and dined from the Council on Foreign Relations to <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> with dozens of The Beautiful People lining up for his autograph. The jailer and torturer of the longest suffering black political prisoners in modern history was bear-hugged by Charles Rangel. The jailer and torturer of the most female political prisoners in the modern history of the western hemisphere was hugged and smooched by feminist Diane Sawyer. The jailer and torturer of the most journalists in the modern history of the western hemisphere found everyone from Dan Rather to Mike Wallace to Tina Brown  lining up for his autograph. The jailer and torturer who abolished private property within his Stalinist fiefdom found David Rockefeller and Mort Zuckerman crowding around him for a handshake.</p>
<p>The mass-murderer was not only the man <a href="http://babalublog.com/2013/03/06/mr-chavez-you-were-no-fidel-castro/">&#8220;to see&#8221; but the one to be <em>seen with</em>.</a></p>
<p>Chavez was a cheap chump and clown. Maybe if he&#8217;d twice come within a hair of incinerating New York, he&#8217;d have been bestowed the proper<em> cachet </em>&#8211; and the city&#8217;s elite would now be paying him the proper respect.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>How Obama Turned America into Venezuela</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/how-obama-turned-america-into-venezuela/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-obama-turned-america-into-venezuela</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/how-obama-turned-america-into-venezuela/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Mar 2013 04:50:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economic destruction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=180378</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Chavez and Obama’s leftist politics of economic destruction.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/how-obama-turned-america-into-venezuela/obc/" rel="attachment wp-att-180534"><img class=" wp-image-180534 alignleft" title="obc" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/obc-450x253.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="177" /></a>Hugo Chavez&#8217;s death was met with tributes from Iran, Bolivia, China and El Salvador. The Western left did not waste much time adding their withered roses to El Comandante&#8217;s coffin. George Galloway called him another Spartacus. Jimmy Carter described him as a leader who fought for the &#8220;neglected and trampled.&#8221; Michael Moore praised him for declaring that the oil belongs to the people.</p>
<p>Whether or not the oil belongs to the people is a matter of some debate considering how much of it ended up in Chavez&#8217;s pocket.</p>
<p>Chavez died with an estimated net worth of 2 billion dollars making him the 4th richest man in Venezuela and the 49th richest man in Latin America.</p>
<p>While the Bolivarian Spartacus lined his pockets with oil money, Venezuela&#8217;s middle-class was struggling to get by in a country where the private sector had imploded. Income increased on paper, but decreased in reality. Around the same time that Comrade Hugo was launching the third phase of his Bolivarian Revolution, inflation had <a href="http://english.eluniversal.com/2011/02/04/en_ing_esp_average-household-in_04A5099091.shtml" target="_blank">decreased household income 8.8 percent</a> while consumer goods prices increased 27 percent.</p>
<p>On his deathbed, Hugo Chavez devalued his country&#8217;s currency for the fifth time by 32 percent, after <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-08/venezuela-devalues-currency-from-33-to-6-30-bolivars-per-dollar.html" target="_blank">tripling the deficit</a> during his previous term when the national debt had increased <a href="http://www.eluniversal.com/economia/120303/in-three-years-venezuelas-foreign-debt-grew-90" target="_blank">by 90 percent</a>. From 2008 to 2011, Chavez&#8217;s oil-rich government increased the debt by nearly 50 billion in a country of less than 30 million. That same year, The Economist speculated that <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/18233412" target="_blank">Venezuela might go bankrupt</a>.</p>
<p>Chavez had swollen the ranks of Venezuela&#8217;s public employees to 2.5 million in a country where the 15-64 population numbered only 18 million. With 1 public employee to every 7 working adults, the entire mess was subsidized by oil exports and debt. When the price of oil fell, only debt was left.</p>
<p>Those public employees became Chavez&#8217;s campaign staff with no choice but to vote for him or see their positions wiped out to keep the economy from crashing. And they won him one last election.</p>
<p>The dead tyrant leaves behind the lowest GDP growth rate and highest inflation rate in Latin America. He leaves behind an economy where more than half the population depends on government benefits or government jobs. He leaves behind a giant pile of debt for the people and 2 billion dollars in misappropriated oil money for his heirs.</p>
<p>But we don&#8217;t need to look to a leftist banana republic south of the border to see how profitable fighting for the poor can be.</p>
<p>7<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/seven-of-nations-10-most-affluent-counties-are-in-washington-region/2012/09/19/f580bf30-028b-11e2-8102-ebee9c66e190_story.html" target="_blank"> of the 10 richest counties</a> in America are now in the Washington D.C. area. Arlington County alone added $6,000 to its average income in one year alone. D.C. and its bedroom communities got rich at twice the rate of the rest of the country and in the last election; Obama won <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/man-of-the-people-obama-won-8-of-10-wealthiest-counties/" target="_blank">8 of the 10 richest</a> counties in the country.</p>
<p>Washington D.C. is richer than Silicon Valley. <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203752604576641683529031952.html" target="_blank">Median income in the D.C. area </a>hit $84,523 despite the city itself having horrendous unemployment and poverty statistics. The top 5 percent in D.C. earns 60% more than the top 5 percent in other cities and 54 times what the bottom fifth earns in that same city.</p>
<p>This wealth of government money isn&#8217;t a rising tide that lifts all boats. Income inequality in Washington D.C.<a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-03-08/local/35446235_1_income-inequality-earners-dc-fiscal-policy-institute" target="_blank"> is one of the worst</a> in the nation. For families with children, the income inequality level in D.C. is double the average for the rest of the country.</p>
<p>But when you concentrate the wealth of the land in a single imperial city, then you end up with a sharp gap between the poor and the fighters for the poor. Mid-level jobs are disappearing, but high-level jobs continue to grow. Small businesses are going out of business, but lawyers and consultants are being hired at a breathtaking rate.</p>
<p>Washington D.C. has the highest concentration of lawyers in the country. <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/d.c.-the-lawyer-capital-of-the-world/article/119812" target="_blank">1 out of every 12</a> city residents is a lawyer. 1 in 25 of the country&#8217;s lawyers lives in Washington D.C. In 2009, the Office of Personnel Management reported that there were 31,797 practicing lawyers in the Federal government earning an average salary of $127,500 a year. Or to put it another way, the taxpayers were spending double Hugo Chavez&#8217;s 2 billion dollar net worth each year just to pay the lawyers.</p>
<p>That was in 2009. The numbers have undoubtedly gotten much worse since.</p>
<p>That same year there were 383,000 federal civilian workers with six figure salaries. Multiply that and you get all the debt that Hugo Chavez dumped on Venezuela being dumped out in a single year on American taxpayers.</p>
<p>The number of Federal civilian employees is only slightly higher than in Chavez&#8217;s utopian Socialist paradise, but average Federal employee salary clocks <a href="http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/01/average-federal-pay-matches-microsoft/" target="_blank">in at a mean $75,000</a>.</p>
<p>Federal civilian employee wages and benefits run around $200 billion. The cost of the Federal workforce in a single year is more than double Venezuela&#8217;s entire national debt. During Nixon&#8217;s first year in office, $200 billion would have covered the entire Federal budget. Now it&#8217;s just the paychecks. In the United States Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees welfare and food stamps, among other things, 1,461 of HHS&#8217; 64,750 employees earn over $155,000.</p>
<p>While the Obama Administration fires marines, it hires more civilian employees. <a href="http://news.investors.com/politics-andrew-malcolm/121012-636426-americans-figure-out-public-employees-have-it-better-than-private-workers.htm#ixzz2EhDuT2Qk" target="_blank">101 new Federal employees</a> have been hired every day of Obama&#8217;s first term in office. In 1962, there were more American military personnel than Federal civilian employees. The number of military personnel has dropped sharply, but the number of civilian employees is higher now than it was then. And their salaries have become much higher.</p>
<p>But the civilian employees are only part of the picture. The massive deficit spending has turned Washington D.C. into a treasure trove of government grants and stimulus plans on the favor train. The national debt grew by 6 trillion dollars in one term of Obama <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/first-term-obama-increased-debt-50521-household-more-first-42-presidents-53-terms" target="_blank">adding $50,521 in debt per household</a>. That money was used to buy favors and support across the country.</p>
<p>While Obama ran on a platform of taking care of the poor, he was raiding the social safety net to buy support from a coalition of billionaires that paid him back with bundled contributions and SuperPACs. Green Energy tycoons got rich on loans and grants, while the middle class imploded. Billions in taxpayer money was traded for millions in contributions in one of the dirtiest deals to take place outside an actual banana republic.</p>
<p>Like Chavez, Obama presides over a poorer country whose poor are convinced that he is the only thing standing between them and absolute poverty. Deficit spending and high debt has destroyed any potential for GDP growth leaving America looking like an oversized version of Venezuela.</p>
<p>The new America is not a booming economy, but a political power structure built on unsustainable spending. Like Chavez, Obama has created an impossible trap that leaves half the country dependent on him and leaves his opponents with no alternative but to propose some form of austerity. It is an economic kamikaze maneuver that invariably ends with economic or political destruction.</p>
<p>Obama, like Chavez, has made economic recovery structurally impossible, perpetuating poverty in order to profit politically from the national state of misery. Chavez died before the consequences of his economic policies caught up with Venezuela. Like Chavez, Obama won a contentious election, but he has no easy escape from the economic destruction coming up on the road ahead.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Hugo Chavez: ‘I Am Not a Socialist!’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-paulin/hugo-chavez-%e2%80%98i-am-not-a-socialist%e2%80%99/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hugo-chavez-%25e2%2580%2598i-am-not-a-socialist%25e2%2580%2599</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Oct 2012 04:12:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[venezuala]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=146899</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Deceit and bullying on a political campaign.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/hugo.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146997" title="hugo" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/hugo.jpg" alt="" width="374" height="290" /></a></p>
<p>Yes, Hugo Chavez really said it: “I am not a socialist!” Not recently, to be sure, but 14 years ago when Chavez – as a cashiered Army paratrooper who&#8217;d led a failed military coup in February 1992 &#8212; was making a run for Venezuela’s presidency.</p>
<p>“I am not a socialist!” he said during a television interview, wearing a suite and speaking in reasonable tones. This was when he was trying hard to convince voters – especially middle-class and well-off Venezuelans who were leery of him &#8212; that he&#8217;d definitely cast aside the bullet for the ballot. Chavez, at the time, claimed he was an idealistic moderate who would pursue a “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism. He pledged to reverse wide-spread poverty, clean up endemic corruption, and restore the oil-rich but impoverished South American nation’s national pride – a nation that, during the era of high oil prices, was a beacon of democracy in the region and, many Venezuelans believed, was poised to attain first-world status. Back then, the country was dubbed “Saudi Venezuela.”</p>
<p>“I am not a socialist!” Chavez&#8217;s words now figure prominently into a powerful YouTube video – &#8220;Yo no soy socialista&#8221; – that juxtaposes Chavez’s original campaign pledges against his leftist rhetoric that started soon after he took office in 1999. The video comes as Chavez, 58, is in a close election race against 40-year-old state governor Henrique Capriles.</p>
<p>You don&#8217;t need to understand Spanish to understand the video in which El Presidente &#8212; who now speaks of creating a paradise of “21st Century Socialism” &#8212; extols the virtues of “fatherland, socialism, or death” (“patria, socialismo o muerte&#8221;) to an audience. At another point, he declares: “I am a true revolutionary!”</p>
<p><iframe width="610" height="343" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/yVvwWH3GlOY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>In the mainstream media’s Venezuela coverage, an important piece of context is often omitted regarding Chavez’s rise to power – it&#8217;s erroneously suggested that only Venezuela’s poor voted for Chavez, who won the second-largest<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_presidential_election,_1998"> popular vote </a>ever, 58.4%, in 1998. In fact, many middle-class and well-off Venezuelans voted for Chavez. They didn’t see him as a messiah as did Venezuela’s poor, to be sure. But they did regard him as a sincere reformer &#8212; a political outsider not associated with Venezuela’s traditional parties, a man who would be an antidote for Venezuela’s decline.</p>
<p>But as the YouTube video dramatically shows, Chavez carried out a monstrous bait-and-switch after becoming president. Declaring himself a revolutionary socialist and adopting an anti-American foreign policy, despite Venezuela’s historically close ties with the U.S., Chavez consolidated his power by rewriting the constitution and packing the Supreme Court and other institutions with his supporters. He demonized anybody who disagreed with him. It happened because of Venezuela’s weak checks and balances and the popular wave of support on which Chavez was riding.</p>
<p>As a Caracas-based journalist at the time, I was impressed at the way some prescient Venezuelans, a minority to be sure, avoided group think. They saw Chavez as a wolf-in-sheep’s clothing from the start. Even before Chavez’s landslide election victory, for instance, many upper-level executives in state oil company PDVSA were resigning &#8212; making plans for early retirement aboard, with Miami being a popular spot to whether out the storm. Many were among Venezuela’s best and brightest. They had wanted to be part of the solution to Venezuela’s problems. But Chavez, a class warrior instead of a uniter, saw them as part of Venezuela’s problems.</p>
<p>Ultimately, Chavez took three bad ideas from Venezuela’s past – statism, authoritarianism, and bread-and-circuses populism – and took them to new heights. He stoked anti-Americanism like never before, traveling frequently aboard as he made alliances with Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Middle Eastern strongmen. He even praised Venezuelan-born terrorist Carlos the Jackal as a &#8220;worthy heir of the greatest [leftist] struggles.&#8221;</p>
<p>As for PDVSA, it used to be one of the world’s most respected state oil companies, a vital source of income. Under Chavez, it has become rife with political cronyism. Oil production has declined significantly, according to many observers. It’s thought the Chavez administration’s mismanagement was responsible for a huge refinery explosion last month – whose flames, as shown in the “I-am-not-a-socialist” video, look like scenes from hell. It’s an apt metaphor for what “21st Century socialism” has brought to Venezuela.</p>
<p>In his reelection campaign, Chavez has had a clear advantage. He controls the levers of power and has no qualms about using state resources to aid his campaign, as was underscored on Tuesday with<a href="http://globovision.com/articulo/el-dato-vehiculos-de-pdvsa-hacen-campana-en-favor-del-candidato-de-gobierno"> a report </a>from television news channel Globovision: It showed PDVSA vehicles driving around with Chavez campaign stickers.</p>
<p>Capriles is good looking compared to the puffy-faced Chavez who claims to be in remission from cancer; and in Venezuela &#8212; home to many beauty queens &#8212; looks matter. Capriles has connected with audiences by hammering away at Venezuela’s epic levels of corruption, mismanagement, and Chavez’s willingness to use Venezuela’s oil to support leftist political goals abroad &#8212; all while Venezuela has suffered regular <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/venezuela/110615/venezuela-power-outages">electricity outages</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/world/americas/venezuela-faces-shortages-in-grocery-staples.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0">food shortages</a>, and one of the world’s highest <a href="http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/120915/venezuela-has-the-fourth-highest-homicide-rate-worldwide">murder rates</a>.</p>
<p>What will happen when Venezuelans go to the polls this Sunday? It may be ugly. Chavez, after all, sees himself as being on a divine mission, a veritable reincarnation of Venezuelan independence hero Simon Bolivar, his idol. He believes the ends justify the means. Most ominously, Chavez and his senior advisers <a href="http://www.cfr.org/venezuela/political-unrest-venezuela/p28936">have asserted </a>that Venezuela will suffer violence and political instability if he’s not reelected. All of which raises fears that the country is poised for a social explosion, with Chavez’s most fanatical supporters and government forces taking to the streets. This would be in response to a Capriles victory – or perhaps in response to a Chavez victory that&#8217;s regarded by enraged Capriles’ supporters as being rigged.</p>
<p>“A number of multinational companies with operations in Venezuela (including oil companies) are updating contingency plans to pull their expatriate staff out of the country quickly if there’s a sudden eruption of social and political conflict,”<a href="http://caracasgringo.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/contingency-plans/"> writes</a> blogger Caracas Gringo, a prescient American expat who writes anonymously from Venezuela.</p>
<p>Whoever wins, Venezuela’s sad decline will not be reversed anytime soon.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Occupy at One Year</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/occupy-at-one-year/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=occupy-at-one-year</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Sep 2012 04:45:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Adbusters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George Soros]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Occupy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[occupy wall street]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OWS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=144427</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Comeback or last gasp? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/120412-Occupy_Wall_Street-AP120412013399_620x350.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144438" title="120412-Occupy_Wall_Street-AP120412013399_620x350" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/120412-Occupy_Wall_Street-AP120412013399_620x350.gif" alt="" width="375" height="247" /></a>The violent anti-American radicals of Occupy Wall Street plan to celebrate the anniversary of their neo-communist movement today by shutting down the New York Stock Exchange and hitting dozens of corporate targets.</p>
<p>The anniversary comes days after an operative for the Anonymous computer hacker group was arrested for allegedly threatening a federal agent. Barrett Brown, a self-described spokesman for Anonymous, which is allied with the Occupy Wall Street movement, boasts that he carried out cyber-attacks against Visa and MasterCard.</p>
<p>These Bolshevik banditos plan to begin the day with occupying &#8220;Wall Street with non-violent civil disobedience and flood[ing] the area around it with a roving carnival of resistance,&#8221; according to <a href="http://adbusters.org/">adbusters.org</a>. The group will &#8220;surround access to [the NYSE] with the People&#8217;s Wall sit-in&#8221; and then conduct &#8220;a swirl of mobile occupations of corporate lobbies and intersections.&#8221; Operation Latte Thunder will then &#8220;Storm Wall Street and demand it stop bankrolling climate change.&#8221;</p>
<p>As always the leaders of Occupy Wall Street are lying about non-violence. The violence is the whole point of the demonstrations. When he interviewed OWS protesters in lower Manhattan&#8217;s Zuccotti Park last year Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen discovered that 31 percent of the movement supported using &#8220;violence to advance their agenda.&#8221;</p>
<p>And as Arnold Ahlert <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/occupy-allied-actvists-bomb-plot-foiled/">writes</a> there have been at least &#8220;6,990 documented arrests in 114 cities across the nation directly associated with the OWS movement.&#8221; Apologists for the movement, especially the mainstream media, treat all these antisocial behaviors as freak occurrences, as if the Occupiers themselves were victims of saboteurs and dirty tricksters. &#8220;[B]ut thousands of arrests in hundreds of cities, coupled with instances of anti-semitism, sexual assaults (including rape), vandalism, and even murder can hardly be attributed solely to &#8216;fringe&#8217; or &#8216;rogue&#8217; elements &#8216;hijacking&#8217; an otherwise peaceful movement.&#8221;</p>
<p>The reason the movement exists &#8220;is to disrupt the normal course of everyday life at every opportunity and to turn &#8216;one percent&#8217; of Americans into literal enemies of the nation,&#8221; Ahlert writes.</p>
<p>It is true that the Occupy Wall Street movement has petered out since it was <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/matthew-vadum/radical-rage-marxist-mob-plans-to-occupy-wall-street/">launched</a> on September 17, 2011, amidst photos of defaced ten-dollar bills showing Founding Father Alexander Hamilton with black hair and a Hitler mustache. Its stated goal at the time was to condemn &#8220;greed&#8221; and &#8220;profit over and above all else&#8221; and to undermine economic freedom.</p>
<p>That protest was originally promoted as a &#8220;US Day of Rage&#8221; named after the so-called Days of Rage that took place in Chicago in 1969. That tumultuous year, members of what was later to become known as the Weather Underground, the terrorist organization of Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, provoked four days of riots and demonstrations against &#8220;The System.&#8221; Leftists continue to insist that Occupy Wall Street was inspired largely by last year&#8217;s Arab Spring, a series of popular uprisings against authoritarian Middle Eastern governments that many mistook for a desire for democratic rule. To provide cover for his radical friends leftist pseudo-intellectual Cornel West refers to OWS as &#8220;a democratic awakening,&#8221; the same expression he used to describe Hugo Chavez&#8217;s brutal communist revolution in Venezuela. Leftists say it&#8217;s not true democracy unless they win.</p>
<p>Last year&#8217;s US Day of Rage was heavily promoted by the Vancouver, Canada-based Adbusters Media Foundation, the nonprofit behind the “anti-consumerist” magazine. The foundation is funded by organizations associated with George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a radical billionaires&#8217; club that wants to turn America into Greece. Soros is a convicted criminal who prefers Communist China&#8217;s government over America&#8217;s and who openly aspires to bring European-style socialism to the United States. He told <em>Newsweek</em> earlier this year that he was delighted with the violence and civil unrest percolating across the fruited plain. &#8220;In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible,&#8221; he said, echoing Saul Alinsky&#8217;s adage that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Since 2001 Adbusters has received $317,773 from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation and $176,500 from the Glaser Progress Foundation, which was created by Alliance member and RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser.</p>
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		<title>Oslo Freedom Forum&#8217;s Chilly Welcome in Norway</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/oslo-freedom-forums-chilly-welcome-in-norway/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oslo-freedom-forums-chilly-welcome-in-norway</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/oslo-freedom-forums-chilly-welcome-in-norway/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 May 2012 04:15:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom Forum]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Human Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oslo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=131859</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The European left is uneasy with the concept of human liberty. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Oslo_freedom_forum.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-131869" title="Oslo_freedom_forum" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Oslo_freedom_forum.gif" alt="" width="375" height="248" /></a>Let&#8217;s begin with an <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentarer/Dialog-uten-Store-6822100.html">article</a> by Kristoffer Rønneberg that appeared in <em>Aftenposten, </em>Norway&#8217;s newspaper of record, on May 7:</p>
<blockquote><p>From all over the world, activists, academics, politicians, businesspeople, and technology pioneers are coming [to Oslo] to negotiate, discuss, and learn.  About 90 journalists are traveling to Norway to cover the conference&#8230;.This is an event that puts Oslo and Norway on the map.</p>
<p>It is therefore incomprehensible that Norwegian authorities are choosing to stay away.</p></blockquote>
<p>What are the authorities staying away from?  It&#8217;s the <a href="http://www.oslofreedomforum.com/welcome.html">Oslo Freedom Forum</a> (OFF), an annual event which, during its four years of existence, has presented talks by Vladimir Bukovsky, Elena Bonner, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Elie Wiesel, and dozens of other human-rights heroes from around the world.  Year after year, the OFF shines a light on regimes that have abused and imprisoned citizens simply for speaking out and wanting to breathe free.  What&#8217;s not to like?</p>
<p>Well, it appears that a number of people in Norway&#8217;s Foreign Ministry and elsewhere in the upper echelons of the Norwegian government “are skeptical about the conference because they fear that it can have underlying political motives.”  They&#8217;re “especially skeptical about the man who is behind the whole thing” – Thor Halvorssen, the energetic young head of Human Rights Foundation in New York. Despite his name, Halvorssen is not Norwegian but a Venezuelan-American.  His grandfather was a Norwegian ambassador to Venezuela; his mother is a descendant of Simón Bolívar, the hero of South American independence.</p>
<p>Although, noted Rønneberg, “there is nothing about this year&#8217;s conference that indicates a political bias in one direction or the other,” Halvorssen has had a rough time of it in Norway because his politics grate against those of the Norwegian elite.  What politics?  Well, for example, he&#8217;s “an outspoken opponent of Hugo Chávez” and has been criticized for inviting opponents of Chávez and Castro to the OFF in 2010.</p>
<p>Yes, you read that right – in Norway, it just isn&#8217;t <em>done </em>to invite opponents of Chávez and Castro to a human-rights conference.</p>
<p>“It shouldn&#8217;t matter what Halvorssen thinks of  Castro or Chávez,” wrote Rønneberg (although, of course, Halvorssen&#8217;s opposition to these tyrants matters very much indeed).  “What matters,” said Rønneberg, “is who is taking part in the conference and what they can do to promote human rights in the world.”  The forum&#8217;s 121 speakers, he noted, come from 71 countries; 36 have been imprisoned for a total of 175 years; 20 are exiles; 23 have been tortured.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s not enough, it seems, for Norwegian authorities, who view the OFF as unacceptably un-Norwegian. Rønneberg pointed out that one of the offenses committed by the attendees at the OFF, in the eyes of its Norwegian critics, is that they&#8217;re too formally dressed.  (Many Norwegian leftists simply can&#8217;t process the idea of a human-rights activist in a business suit – you&#8217;re supposed to look like a <em>hippie, </em>goddamn it.)  The leftist daily <em>Dagsavisen </em><a href="http://www.dagsavisen.no/nyemeninger/alle_meninger/cat1002/subcat1024/thread245923/">sneered</a> that the title of this year&#8217;s conference, “Out of Darkness, Into Light,” was too “far-reaching” – in other words, “American.”  (Norwegian like their conference titles dry and low-key.)  There were even complaints about the gift bags – containing an umbrella, a candy bar, and other modest items – that were distributed this year to forum participants.  This, too, is considered un-Norwegian.</p>
<p>The main complaint, however, is that the OFF devotes too much attention to “political and civil rights, not the broader human rights concept that Norwegian authorities and organizations often advocate” – the “broader” concept, that is, that makes it possible to make heroes of monsters like Castro and Chávez.  The sad fact is that Norwegian authorities, like many on the left, don&#8217;t feel terribly comfortable with the word <em>freedom.  </em>They&#8217;re proud to call their country the “peace nation,” and they&#8217;re happy to blather on about “social justice” and “economic justice” (which they think people like Castro and Chávez have promoted), but they consider freedom an illusory concept, if not an outright lie, and, in any case, a preoccupation of the right-wingers they abhor.</p>
<p>Perhaps what <em>really </em>makes the OFF stick in the craw of the Norwegian establishment, however, is that, unlike many feel-good, politically correct, peace-centered Norwegian initatives, it&#8217;s had tangible results.  As a consequence of the OFF&#8217;s attention to Singapore dissident Chee Soon Juan, the Norwegian ambassador to Singapore has felt compelled to ask for his case to be reviewed.  “It is easy to suspect that some of the displeasure directed at Halvorssen and the conference,” suggested Rønneberg, “stems from a kind of envy – that he, in a short time, has accomplished something that Norwegians have not dared to dream of.”</p>
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		<title>Latin America: Iran&#8217;s New Front Against the U.S.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-puder/latin-america-irans-new-front-against-the-u-s/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=latin-america-irans-new-front-against-the-u-s</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-puder/latin-america-irans-new-front-against-the-u-s/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:19:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ahmadinejad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hezbollah]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[unholy alliance]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[venezuala]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=121525</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A menacing axis solidifies south of our border.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chavez-ahmadinejad.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-121597" title="chavez-ahmadinejad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chavez-ahmadinejad.jpg" alt="" width="420" height="252" /></a></p>
<p>Appearing before The Orthodox Union Presidential Forum in a Boca Raton, FL synagogue on Monday, January 30, 2012, former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) stated that, “When President Ahmadinejad <a title="http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com2012/01rick-santorum-time--for-america-to-lead.html" href="http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com2012/01rick-santorum-time--for-america-to-lead.html" target="_blank">recently</a> toured the capitals of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Ecuador, it was not a form of cultural diplomacy; it was primarily to increase the tempo of preparations for the war against America.”  He then added, “It is long past time for us to respond, but instead our president declares imminent victory.”</p>
<p>While Ahmadinejad is the visible figurehead representing the Iranian regime, it is Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist sub-contractor, which is creating cells throughout Latin America and, inside the U.S. as well.  Shortly after the Second Lebanon war between Israel and Hezbollah, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee held hearings on the <a title="http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/archives/109/30143.pdf" href="http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/archives/109/30143.pdf" target="_blank">Global Reach</a> of Hezbollah’s cells. The Committee heard testimony regarding the capabilities of Hezbollah to attack the U.S. and other western targets. The protocol from the hearing clearly established Hezbollah’s “wide reaches” under the military leadership of Imad Mugniyah, who was assassinated in February 2008 in Damascus, Syria.</p>
<p>U.S. Representative Ed Royce, Chairman of the International Terrorism and Nonproliferation Subcommittee, had this to say during the hearings: “<a title="http://www.royce.house.gov/News/DocumentsSingle.aspx?Document-ID=50977" href="http://www.royce.house.gov/News/DocumentsSingle.aspx?Document-ID=50977" target="_blank">Hezbollah</a> isn&#8217;t just a menace to Israel, Lebanon and the region. According to the State Department terrorism report, Hezbollah has ‘established cells in Europe, Africa, South America, North America, and Asia.’ “One witness,” Rep. Royce continued, “will tell us that Hezbollah’s organizational and logistic network exists in over 40 countries; this includes a significant presence in our own hemisphere, in the tri-border region of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. The network operates in West Africa, where Hezbollah has been active trading ‘blood diamonds,’ an issue the Africa Subcommittee explored when I chaired it.</p>
<p>Rep. Royce added, “Many Americans may be surprised to learn that Hezbollah&#8217;s global reach includes significant activities on U.S. soil.”  Royce characterized Hezbollah as posing a “grave threat” and, he repeated a statement made by a former Deputy Secretary of State in 2002 that, “Hezbollah may be the A-team of terrorists and maybe al-Qaeda is actually the B-team.” He added, “Hezbollah’s lethality is magnified by the support it receives from state sponsors of terrorism, primarily Iran.”</p>
<p>U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State on Terrorism Frank Urbanchik testified at the same hearings that the U.S. is particularly concerned over the close ties between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Iran’s terrorist tool &#8211; the Hezbollah.</p>
<p>Addressing retirees at The Villages in FL on January 29, 2012, Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich referred to President Obama saying, &#8220;He lives in a <a title="http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket-florida-retirees-gingrich-pokes-fun-obama-suggests-214752796.html" href="http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket-florida-retirees-gingrich-pokes-fun-obama-suggests-214752796.html" target="_blank">fantasy</a> world where there are no enemies&#8221; and, he characterized the president&#8217;s perception of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as &#8220;just misguided people with whom he has not yet had coffee.&#8221;  Gingrich went on to say, “We watched him go see Hugo Chavez and we watched him smile and be friendly while Chavez deliberately, cynically and insultingly gave him an anti-American book and Obama didn&#8217;t have a clue he&#8217;d been insulted. You know, Ahmadinejad, the dictator of Iran, says that he wants to wipe out Israel and drive America out of the Middle East. Now, as a historian, I have a pretty good sense of what that means. It means he wants to wipe out Israel, and drive America out of the Middle East. But if I were a left-wing Harvard Law graduate surrounded by really clever left-wing academics, I would know that this is actually a sign that Ahmadinejad probably had a bad childhood…”</p>
<p>The Associated Press reported on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 that “Iran’s president lauded his country&#8217;s newly launched Spanish-language satellite TV channel, saying it would deal a blow to &#8220;<a title="http://today.msnbc.com/id/46200139" href="http://today.msnbc.com/id/46200139" target="_blank">dominance seekers</a>&#8221; — remarks that were an apparent jab at the U.S. and the West.”</p>
<p>The launch is Tehran’s latest effort to reach out to Iran-friendly governments in Latin America and comes on the heels of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad&#8217;s four-nation tour of the region earlier in January, which included stops in Cuba and visits to Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador.</p>
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		<title>Democracy’s Demons</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/democracy%e2%80%99s-demons/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=democracy%25e2%2580%2599s-demons</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/democracy%e2%80%99s-demons/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 04:43:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communist-party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim world]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=121030</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Representative government is only as good -- or as frightening -- as the people it represents. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Salafists.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-121059" title="Salafists" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Salafists.gif" alt="" width="375" height="254" /></a></p>
<p>When the 2006 Palestinian Arab elections resulted in a decisive victory for Hamas, the advocates of democracy as the solution for all regional ills blamed Israel’s undermining of the Palestinian Authority. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring when the Al-Nahda Islamists swept to power in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists captured a majority in Egypt, some of the same people blamed the United States for enabling dictators.</p>
<p>The excuses were an attempt to place the blame somewhere other than the electorate which had cast their ballots for theocracies, or rather more extreme versions of the existing theocratic elements in the legal and political system. The most convenient target for blame was the scapegoat of Western foreign policy.</p>
<p>If only the United States and Israel had not undermined the “liberal” alternative to the hard core Islamists then the results would have been different, went the refrain. But the United States had done everything possible to back the “liberal” opposition in Egypt, despite it being fueled by a raging hatred of the United States. During the shakedown in Egypt, Western nations had all but ordered the Egyptian military to cede power to El Baradei.</p>
<p>The Palestinian Authority was fed by Israeli and American money and protected by their armed forces. It was the United States that encouraged the PA’s showdown with Hamas after its election losses and it was Israel that bailed out the PA’s cowardly militias when Hamas began throwing them off buildings. American weapons, training and money, not to mention funding of social services and all the other vaunted elements of soft power did not salvage the Palestinian Authority which has learned its lesson and has repeatedly ducked out of holding elections since.</p>
<p>The advocates of democracy have been unable to admit that Hamas, Al-Nahda, the Brotherhood and the Salafis are the people’s choice because they represent their values and ideals. The Salafist victory in Egypt cannot be put down to an effective organization, to a moderate veneer or even the ability to engage voters on economic issues. Nevertheless they surprised everyone with a popularity that was not based on any external factor or political cunning, but on their core message of hate for non-Muslims, repression for women and Islamist tyranny for Egypt.</p>
<p>The trouble with democracy is that it is representative. It is representative in Egypt, in Tunisia, in the West Bank, in Iraq and beyond. The rise of Islamist groups is a symptom of the mindset throughout the Muslim world. But democracy has not worked all that well throughout the rest of the world either.</p>
<p>After all the efforts made to keep the Sandanistas out of power, El Salvador’s supreme leftist pedophile Daniel Ortega is back in the Presidential Palace in Nicaragua. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is polling well ahead of his left-wing opposition rival. In Brazil, former leftist terrorist Dilma Rousseff boasts even higher approval ratings.</p>
<p>Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the second largest party in the Russian Duma is the Communist Party. Its actual vote totals are probably higher due to the fraudulent nature of the elections under the control of Putin’s United Russia Party. This roster is rounded out by the Liberal Democratic Party, which is run by a career lunatic who has proposed conquering Alaska, dumping nuclear waste on nearby nations and rounding up the Jews into camps.</p>
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