<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Socialism</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/socialism/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:47:27 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>The Chavez Revolution Is Over</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-chavez-revolution-is-over/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-chavez-revolution-is-over</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-chavez-revolution-is-over/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2014 05:50:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hugo Chavez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247440</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Venezuela is going down.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Part-MVD-Mvd6654303-1-1-01.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247443" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Part-MVD-Mvd6654303-1-1-01-450x330.jpg" alt="Part-MVD-Mvd6654303-1-1-0" width="342" height="251" /></a>Officers chant “Chavez Lives” at their &#8220;Studies of the Thoughts of the Supreme Commander Hugo Chavez&#8221; classes. But Supreme Commander Chavez was killed by Cuban medicine and his regime and philosophy are on their last legs as the Venezuelan people have turned against his successor.</p>
<p>When Cuban medicine let Chavez die, it also raised a tombstone for the Castro regime. Chavez gave away 100,000 barrels a day to Castro keeping the Communist regime afloat. In return Cuban secret police, organizers and teachers helped keep the Supreme Commander in power. But Hugo Chavez is dead and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, is wildly unpopular. Venezuela has turned into Cuba with food shortages and soldiers in the street and no one wants to live like Cuba.</p>
<p>Not even the Cubans do.</p>
<p>The cult of Chavez portrays him as a holy figure to Venezuela’s poor and to its military officers who are the last firewall of a collapsing government which needs soldiers and street thugs to protect Maduro. But the revolution is collapsing faster than the next wave of officers can be indoctrinated with chants of “Chavez Lives”. This inevitable failure of Socialism is being unintentionally sped up by Saudi Arabia.</p>
<p>The Saudi campaign against American fracking has dumped cheap oil on the market hurting Russia, Iran and Venezuela; all of which rely heavily on energy exports.</p>
<p>Chavez had screamed against capitalism in fiery speeches while building his Socialist revolution around oil exports and financial credit. Now Maduro is stuck with a $5 billion bill and no way to pay it. The former bus driver and community organizer vowed that he would make oil $100 a barrel. Not only does he have no way of doing that outside his own miserable price controlled country, but oil is headed for $50 a barrel and Maduro is stuck denouncing credit rating companies for ranking Venezuela below African countries with Ebola. African countries with Ebola however have lower debt and a financial plan that doesn’t involve delivering a speech denouncing the CIA every hour on the hour.</p>
<p>Maduro and his Cuban handlers know that a debt default is coming. There are basic shortages all over the country of everything from milk to toilet paper. A debt default will make Venezuela’s deeply dysfunctional economy in which no one can buy a new car and people fly out of the country to get dollars to buy basic products on the black market even worse.</p>
<p>But Maduro can’t cut off Cuba’s oil without being overthrown. He can’t trim the ranks of the country’s massive bureaucracy because they represent his last remaining bastion of support. His attempts at central planning have failed miserably, but introducing free market reforms would be an admission that Chavez was wrong and that the revolution is over. All Maduro can do is fight the inevitable overthrow.</p>
<p>Indoctrinating the military is one way of doing it. Forced redistribution of flat screen televisions from electronics stores by the military is another. It’s no longer a matter of winning elections, even rigged ones, it’s about maintaining a radical base willing to fight to prevent the return of freedom.</p>
<p>Chavez won the loyalty of slum dwellers by giving them everything from government supermarkets to government clinics, but the supermarkets are low on food and the clinics are low on Cuban doctors. Maduro’s approval rating fell from a bare majority to barely a quarter of the population. Identification with the United Socialist Party of Venezuela has fallen to 16 percent of the population; a significant comedown from a party that recently claimed a quarter of the population as members.</p>
<p>Members of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela smell blood in the water and are fighting to throw Maduro into the water to salvage the cult of Chavez by using the former bus driver as the scapegoat. Those Marxist groups that didn’t join the USPV are readying their own street protests to exploit the opportunity. If both the populist right and left fully go out into the streets, Maduro won’t survive.</p>
<p>Maduro still commands the street thugs of the UBCh (Units of Battle Hugo Chavez) and the Chavista generals are doing their best to indoctrinate officers with the cult of Chavez, but just as in the last days of the USSR, everything will be determined by the willingness of the soldiers in the street to shoot.</p>
<p>The big question mark is how far will Castro go to protect his 100,000 barrels of oil a day? Normally the United States might have served as a check on Cuban intervention, but Obama is highly unlikely to interfere over anything short of total genocide. Opposition sources have estimated that there are thousands of Cuban troops in the country and unknown numbers of agents of influence. And with a Latin American map of governments dominated by Marxists linked to Cuba in Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Uruguay and a mini-Chavez in charge of Bolivia, there won’t be much local opposition.</p>
<p>And yet the current system is economically unsustainable.</p>
<p>Venezuela took over the job of subsidizing and organizing the Latin American left when the USSR ceased to exist and Cuba could no longer afford to play puppetmaster without funding from the Kremlin. Now it’s too deep in debt and its oil is worth too little, there are too many angry people in the streets and too little food in the stores. Under Cuban guidance, Maduro has tried to impose a radical system that even his own bosses in Havana have been slowly backing away from. The only way he can stay with it is by killing enough of his people and establishing a full dictatorship under the gun.</p>
<p>That’s what Cuba wants him to do, but the transition from a populist regime that promised to give everything to everyone using oil money to a dictatorship in which party members gorge themselves while the rest of the country goes hungry isn’t going well.</p>
<p>Chavez might have made it work, but Maduro’s populism is a weak echo of his old boss. Where Chavez seemed powerful, Maduro only seems paranoid. His attempts to pick a fight with America, his constant conspiracy theories and his claims of supernatural phenomena involving Chavez only make him seem unstable. Havana wanted a weak dim Venezuelan leader with few ideas of his own to carry out their agenda, but now many of the Chavistas want another Chavez. And they’ll have to fight the Cuban puppeteers who have been running their country into the ground to get him.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the street protests of the right will rise again and the street protests of the left will come. And whatever happens, Venezuela’s credit will be shot and its generous economic projections based on high oil prices will collapse leading to a major crisis.</p>
<p>Maduro’s reliance on the military to do everything from breaking up protests to handing out flat screen televisions has become a liability. Hugo Chavez came out of the military and attempted to organize a coup with fellow officers. The military is still the likeliest force to end up running the country once the chaos becomes too much for the Maduro regime and its rivals to manage.</p>
<p>Indoctrinating officers with the &#8220;Studies of the Thoughts of the Supreme Commander Hugo Chavez&#8221; is among other things a final gamble that the next military dictator will be a man of the left.</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-chavez-revolution-is-over/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>52</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Bill Whittle: Socialism &#8212;- The Loch Ness Monster of Politics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-socialism-the-loch-ness-monster-of-politics/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-socialism-the-loch-ness-monster-of-politics</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-socialism-the-loch-ness-monster-of-politics/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2014 04:20:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[loch ness monster]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[utopia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241906</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>The Loch Ness Monster is a &#8220;cryptid&#8221; &#8212; something rumored to exist but without actual proof. The Socialist Utopia of the progressives is a cryptid too. In his latest Firewall, Bill Whittle shows why Good Socialism, like the Loch Ness Monster, is a giant, air-breathing creature that (conveniently!) NEVER COMES UP FOR AIR. See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/FvfHLr5aEqU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">LOCH NESS SOCIALISM</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Ah, Progressives! You really have to – well, not admire them exactly – but if not admire them then at least grant them a grudging respect for the tenacity of their beliefs.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately for them, the Socialist utopia is a Cryptid, which, according to Wikipedia’s serviceable definition, is “a creature whose existence has been suggested but has not been discovered or documented by the scientific community.” Here’s another example of a cryptid: it’s called the Loch Ness Monster. Like the socialist utopia, the Loch Ness Monster requires a lot of magical thinking.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Magical thinking is not wishful thinking. “It sure would be cool if there was a Loch Ness Monster!” That’s wishful thinking.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Magical thinking is the belief that belief can make things actually manifest themselves in the real world. Magical thinking not only dulls reason – it kills reason. Magical thinking is actually form of anti-thinking: belief in something not because of evidence, but in spite of evidence.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">For example, people who believe in the existence of the Loch Ness Monster will almost universally claim that it is the last of the Plesiosaurs – giant marine dinosaurs that definitely did exist millions of years ago. Like all dinosaurs, Plesiosaurs are air breathers. So in order to believe in the Loch Ness Monster, you have to believe that an air-breathing creature the size of a city bus lives under the surface of Loch Ness.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now conservatives have beliefs too, but our beliefs are not based on what we wish to be true but what the evidence shows us to be true. We believe in the power of the free market, of individual effort and reward, and of the power of self interest to make life better for everyone. So we too believe that there are bus-sized creatures that breathe air and live under the surface of the water.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the creatures we believe in are called whales. We believe in whales not because we want to believe in whales. We don’t depend on a mystery wake, or a blurry, distant outline of what might be humps or might be a tree trunk. Conservatives believe in whales because there are thousands of pictures of whales taken every single day. We believe in the power of capitalism and the free market because there are billions of people that benefit from it every single day, and the evidence of that benefit – even and perhaps especially from former socialist economies like China and India – grows every single day.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The fact that there are no pictures of the Loch Ness Monster – not one – that is even close to the thousands and thousands of pictures of whales, tell those of us who do not believe in magical thinking something very important: and that is that whales exist, and the Loch Ness Monster does not.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">If you could print wealth instead of money, that would be a close-up of the Loch Ness Monster. But you can’t print Cadillac’s: you can only print what people use to buy Cadillac’s and the more you print the less it’s worth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">If Health Care were free, that would be HD video of the Loch Ness Monster being petted on the head. But Health Care is not free. Health Care is very expensive. And if the government pays for it – from your taxes – then the government controls it. Which means they can turn off the health care you pay for with your tax money.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">If war were a big misunderstanding that could be resolved though open discussion, well, that’d be Nessie in a tank at Sea World. But it’s not a misunderstanding. ISIS wants the world to pray to Allah five times a day, murder homosexuals, and keep women in tents, indoors. We don’t like that, so we’re going to have to fight those people.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now Progressives, to be fair, say that the history of socialism isn’t just the Great Terror of the French Revolution, the purges and enforced famine of the of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; the mass starvation of maybe fifty million Chinese peasants in the People’s Republic of China; seven, eight, ten million more teachers, doctors, and musicians murdered in the progressive socialist takeovers in Vietnam and Cambodia; plus throw in a couple more million murdered by socialists – but progressive socialists! – in Cuba, El Salvador, Nicauragua and Venezuela, etc. and so on. They say Socialism can work without killing hundreds of millions of people, and to prove it, they point to places like Sweden.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">For many years, this was the best single piece of evidence for the Loch Ness Monster. It’s called the “Surgeon’s Photograph.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Surgeon’s Photograph was a hoax. And decades after this picture was taken, some researchers reproduced the hoax, to show how it was done. And the shocking thing about it was the little model monster they used for the picture was only about this big: about the size of a duck decoy. And it’s only knowing that that you can look at the Surgeons Photograph and see what’s wrong with it: the waves are too big, and too smooth – they are shaped like ripples. They’re shaped like ripples because they are ripples: the best evidence of the Loch Ness Monster was so poor that without magical thinking people would have seen through it right away.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now it is absolutely true that Sweden is a socialist country, in the real world. But “good” Socialism, as it exists in Sweden, is not real. It’s a plaster cast of socialism. Sweden has cradle-to-grave socialist benefits because for a while – and only a short while – because like the Loch Ness Monster, Sweden is a fake, for two beneath-the-surface reasons.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">First, Sweden can afford to pay all of these benefits –“free” health care, “free” maternity leave, and so on – because the cost of defending Sweden is paid by American capitalist taxpayers. I don’t want to hear about the few jets or token troops Sweden might have.  ALL of the money made by ALL of the Swedes could not pay for Sweden’s defense against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Good socialism only exists because capitalists pay to defend the good socialists from the bad socialists.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And Sweden, and the rest of the socialist states, is a fraud for a second reason: All of the European socialist states – ALL of them – are dying.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Socialism is a Ponzi scheme. In order to pay for someone from cradle to grave, someone else has to do the work to come up with the tax money. As long as you have a pyramid – enough young people working – then you can afford these kind of benefits. And sure enough, that was the case for several decades after World War 2.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But…</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">A stable society – not a pyramid but just a column – requires about 2.1 births per woman: one to replace the man, one to replace the woman and point 1 to take the fire challenge on Facebook. That .1 belongs to Darwin – they’re not going to live long enough to have kids.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Sweden’s birthrate is 1.9. There are fewer Swedes every year. Norway is 1.9; Denmark is 1.7; Canada is 1.6; Japan is 1.4, and Spain and Greece are all 1.3. These social welfare states are dying. Turns out if the government gives people everything they need to live, they don’t seem to want to live anymore – not as a culture, anyway. They’re all dying – all of them – and their welfare states are propped up by importing workers from places like Yemen – where the birthrate is a robust 4.2. Unfortunately, these imported workers – many of them from Muslim countries, where they still do want to live – aren’t Swedes, no matter how hard Sweden tried to make them Swedes. So blonde Swedish women no longer feel safe going out in a mini-skirt. And for at least five years in Neighboring Oslo, Norway, the percentage of rapes caused by the Muslim minority was – 100%. All of them. As the brilliant mark Steyn said: demographics is destiny.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Bad socialists murdered at least 200 million people. Good socialists are committing suicide, and would have been extinct long ago without American capitalism to protect them from the bad socialists.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Progressive utopia is the Loch Ness Monster of politics: a giant, air-breathing creature that never surfaces for air. Progressives claim to love it because of their morally advanced love of the poor, but the fact is, the reason they love wealth redistribution to achieve income equality is because other people’s wealth is being redistributed to them. It’s not morality. It’s laziness, envy and it’s stealing, and the history – the photographs – show that time and time again they will murder those who create wealth and steal it before they would, you know, go out and create some of their own.</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-socialism-the-loch-ness-monster-of-politics/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>20</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Andrew Klavan: Europe Is For Real</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-europe-is-for-real/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-klavan-europe-is-for-real</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-europe-is-for-real/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 04:58:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Klavan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Europe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[heath care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241802</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><span style="color: #000000;">In this special episode, our whimsical host, Andrew Klavan, takes a look at the faith-based story of a young man who dies and goes to the promised land, only to find that it&#8217;s a giant lie propped up by the American taxpayer and military. See the video and transcript below. </span></strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/nG5qF3V0Sq8" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Today, in a special religious edition of the Revolting Truth, we’d like to take a look at the new faith-based bestseller, “Europe Is For Real.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">“Europe is for Real” tells the inspiring story of the adorable 5-year-old Iowa boy Derpy Lipschitz.  One fateful day, in April of 2005, little Derpy complained to his mother of stomach pains and was rushed to the hospital where doctors discovered he had accidentally swallowed a copy of the New York Times while trying to bite the head off his pet canary.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Derpy was taken into surgery but the emergency worsened when the doctors tried to remove the Times’ op-ed page from the child’s colon and couldn’t determine which was which.  In the confusion, a column by Paul Krugman traveled through the boy’s bloodstream to his head causing instantaneous brain death.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It was then that a miracle happened.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">As 5-year-old Derpy later told his parents, he felt his soul leave his body.  It traveled down the hall to a broom closet where he saw Mommy praying to Jesus, although she pronounced it Hay-soos.  Then, in a spiral of light, Derpy felt himself lifted up to a wondrous place beyond his wildest imagination.  It was a place where there was never any war, health care was free, and energy was green.  Yes, Derpy was in Europe.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, the surgery was a success.  The doctors were able to remove the New York Times from Derpy’s brain and colon in a revolutionary procedure called pulling the head out of the ass.  When Derpy woke up in the hospital room, he saw his parents standing over him smiling, and he said, “Daddy, I’ve been to Europe!”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And Derpy’s Daddy said to him, “Derpy, Europe is not for real.  Europe is an expensive socialist fantasy which was paid for by American capitalism for 65 years and is now going broke anyway.  They financed their so-called free health care with money they would have had to spend on defense if our military didn’t keep them safe.  Oh, and by the way, the pharmaceutical companies can give them their meds at cheap rates because we pay inflated prices that pick up the slack and fund research and development.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">As for European energy being green, ten years ago Germany trumpeted a transition to renewable resources that was supposed to create jobs, provide cheap electricity and save the planet.  It failed on every front and all across the European Union, green energy initiatives are being quietly abandoned.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It’s true there’s no war in Europe because they’re protected from outside attack by America.  But as Socialism drains the money and the life out of their societies, and their populations quickly dwindle, the European nations are being conquered from within by Islamist monsters who rape and vandalize almost at will.  No one’s allowed to criticize these animals because that would violate a pious leftist nonsense called multiculturalism&#8230;  and since leftism has destroyed every vestige of patriotism on the continent, no one has the conviction or the guts to stand up to this alien evil anyway.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So you see, Derpy, Europe is just the myth of a false religion called leftism.  But don’t worry:  Heaven is for real.  Although Mommy can’t go there because of what she did with Haysoos.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-europe-is-for-real/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>9</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Why Conservatives Have the Winning Argument</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-conservatives-have-the-winning-argument/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-conservatives-have-the-winning-argument</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-conservatives-have-the-winning-argument/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2014 04:40:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Liberals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240191</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And why David Horowitz is a conservative champion.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/nb.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240273" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/nb-450x245.jpg" alt="nb" width="299" height="163" /></a>Why David Horowitz is a conservative champion:</p>
<blockquote><p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/42JK3ukEIbo" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><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"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-conservatives-have-the-winning-argument/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>14</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Dinesh D&#8217;Souza Tells the True Story of America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/dinesh-dsouza-tells-the-true-story-of-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dinesh-dsouza-tells-the-true-story-of-america</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/dinesh-dsouza-tells-the-true-story-of-america/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jul 2014 04:50:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colonialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dinesh D'Souza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236412</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["America" demolishes the Left's false narrative of the United States. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/MV5BMjM0MjgyOTQ4NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTQ1NzQ3MTE@._V1_SX214_AL_.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-236413" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/MV5BMjM0MjgyOTQ4NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTQ1NzQ3MTE@._V1_SX214_AL_.jpg" alt="MV5BMjM0MjgyOTQ4NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTQ1NzQ3MTE@._V1_SX214_AL_" width="211" height="252" /></a>Dinesh D’Souza’s latest film, “America, Imagine a World Without Her,” which <a href="http://www.deadline.com/2014/07/america-movie-dinesh-dsouza-exclusive-clip-abraham-lincoln-video/"><span style="color: #042eee;">earned</span></a> a rare A+ rating from CinemaScore, is apparently such a threat to progressive ideology that Costco initially ordered the book on which the movie is based <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/costco-removing-dsouzas-america-from-shelves/"><span style="color: #042eee;">removed</span></a> from its shelves. One can understand why: the film is a devastating takedown of those who see America as the primary source of evil in the world.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The picture opens with a what-if scenario that includes the assassination of George Washington by a British sniper, and the subsequent disintegration of Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial, the Iwo Jima Memorial, and the Statue of Liberty, as D’Souza asks, “What would the work look like if America did not exist?”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The question is used as a vehicle to set up—and subsequently knock down&#8211;the left’s grievance agenda and its victims. Those grievances include theft of land, labor and the American Dream, as well as genocide, segregation and racism. The victims include Native Americans, black Americans, Hispanics and ultimately all Americans. &#8220;These indictments developed separately, and each has been around for a long time,&#8221; D’Souza explains. “But now they’ve come together in a single narrative of American shame.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The main driver of that narrative is historian Howard Zinn, whose polemic, “A People’s History of the United States,” has been required reading in thousands of American public schools and universities for years. &#8220;When I hear young people on the campus repeat the narrative of American shame, I know they haven’t been told the whole story,” D’Souza notes.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">He proceeds to fill in the gaps, explaining most of the world’s history is driven by the &#8220;conquest ethic,” where those who are conquered have their land taken and are invariably made slaves in the process. For example, while the left singles out the settlers of the New World for “stealing&#8221; Native American territory, D’Souza reveals the same land transfers occurred in precisely the same manner among tribes who successively conquered one another. The charge of genocide is debunked when D’Souza explains that far more Indians died from disease than slaughter, and the same lack of natural defenses that made Native Americans vulnerable to European-borne maladies are the ones that made Europeans susceptible to the Asian-borne diseases that devastated Europe. Tellingly, no one refers to the European tragedy as genocide.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">More historical gaps are filled in with regard to the history of the Mexican War and American slavery. All of Mexico was conquered during a rebellion against the oppression of dictator Santa Ana, but half was returned, and Mexican war debt was retired in the process. And while D’Souza freely admits the legacy of slavery was theft of life and labor, he reminds us that 300,000 Union soldiers gave their lives to free the slaves. “What’s uniquely Western is the abolition of slavery,” D’Souza states. “And what’s uniquely American is the fighting of a great war to end it.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Once again D&#8217;Souza emphasizes that singling out America for the sins of the word is a fool’s errand because slavery existed in every culture in the world from the Egyptians to the Chinese to the African to the American Indians (long before Columbus) and, as we are reminded, slavery exists even today.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">D&#8217;Souza also fills in some important historical gaps with facts that would likely surprise many Americans. These include the existence of free <i>black</i> plantation masters who owned more than ten thousand slaves of their own, and the story of black American Sarah Breedlove, aka Madam C. J. Walker, who became the nation’s first female self-made millionaire marketing a line of beauty and hair products for black women.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">D’Souza employs the same technique in debunking the leftist accusations of American imperialism, and the “theft” of the American Dream that capitalism ostensibly represents. From WWII to the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, D’Souza reminds Americans that not only have we stolen nothing from these countries, but expended considerable blood and treasure re-building them. And the free-market capitalism that has showered this nation with unprecedented wealth succeeds &#8220;not through coercion or conquest, but through the consent of the consumer.” “The wealth of America isn’t stolen, it’s created,” D’Souza asserts. “The ethic of conquest is universal. What’s uniquely American is the alternative, equal rights, self-determination, and wealth creation. If America did not exist, the conquest ethic would dominate the world.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The movie points out that the American left embraces a conquest ethic all its own. &#8220;The shaming of America is not accidental, it’s part of a strategy,” he warns. It is a strategy formulated by the likes of radical leftist Saul Alinsky who was &#8220;the godfather in the art of using shame for political shakedown.” The cultural revolution of the ‘60s provided Alinsky with his army of shakedown artists who have since infiltrated media, academia and, most importantly, government. Ever-expanding government has given us a nation where agencies like the IRS, the EPA, the DOJ and the NSA “are all collecting information and storing it on every American,” D’Souza warns. He explains that Barack Obama didn’t create this liberty-stifling reality. Rather, it created him.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In the closing of the film, he lays out where the nation has been, and where it must go. “The Revolution was a struggle for the creation of America. The Civil War was a struggle for the preservation of America. World War II was a struggle for the protection of America. Our struggle is for the restoration of America.” And while he would like to see the emergence of a leader as forceful and inspiring as Washington, Lincoln, or Reagan, he makes it clear that the ultimate restoration of America must be engendered by the people themselves.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It is important to note that D’Souza freely owns up to the many of the nation&#8217;s historical shortcomings. Yet unlike the American left, he offers some much-needed&#8211;and factual—context to the narrative. Because leftists like Zin and others are more than willing to leave out so many uplifting American stories in an effort to realize their agenda of national transformation, D’Souza insists we have a moral obligation to reinstate them and prevent it from happening.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">He also offers fair warning to the historical revisionists. &#8220;We won’t let them shame us. We won’t let them intimidate us. We are going to start telling the true story of America,” he declares.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">D&#8217;Souza has definitely hit a leftist nerve. Their reviews of his picture ooze with <a href="http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-america-imagine-the-world-without-her-1201253480/"><span style="color: #042eee;">condescension</span></a> and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/america-imagine-the-world-without-her-movie-review/2014/07/01/a420aac6-012e-11e4-8fd0-3a663dfa68ac_story.html"><span style="color: #042eee;">disdain</span></a> for his point of view, with Media Matters <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/07/09/five-media-figures-who-endorse-dinesh-dsouzas-r/200046"><span style="color: #042eee;">referring</span></a> to it as “racially charged agitprop.” Yet the bet here is a lot of Americans would like to see a movie that contains stories about the goodness and greatness of our nation, even as it illuminates the cast of characters and the shame-inducing agenda that forms the heart of their efforts to denigrate American exceptionalism. Costco, whose co-founders Jim Sinegal and Jeffrey Brotman are big Obama supporters, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2014/0709/Costco-removes-then-puts-back-the-book-America-by-conservative-writer-Dinesh-D-Souza"><span style="color: #042eee;">reinstated</span></a> D’Souza&#8217;s book following an outpouring of protests. It is most definitely in Americans’ best interests to see what they wished to suppress.</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/dinesh-dsouza-tells-the-true-story-of-america/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>147</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>America&#8217;s Future Under the Left: Socialist Venezuela has No Coffins to Bury the Dead</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/americas-future-under-the-left-socialist-venezuela-has-no-coffins-to-bury-the-dead/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=americas-future-under-the-left-socialist-venezuela-has-no-coffins-to-bury-the-dead</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/americas-future-under-the-left-socialist-venezuela-has-no-coffins-to-bury-the-dead/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2014 18:25:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234173</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["Shortages are good for the environment." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/chavez-and-obama.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-234175" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/chavez-and-obama.jpg" alt="TRINIDAD-AMERICAS-SUMMIT-CHAVEZ-OBAMA" width="450" height="342" /></a></p>
<p>Hugo Chavez and his seance bus driving buddy Maduro have managed to top Lenin and Castro. At least neither of those geniuses of command economies were working with a country in which money came out of the ground.</p>
<p><a href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2014/06/13/shortages-even-affecting-venezuelans-from-beyond-grave/">Maduro has managed to bring Venezuela t</a>o the point where it can&#8217;t manage to <a href="http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=239428">stock toilet paper, milk and now even coffins.</a></p>
<blockquote><p>Now, even in death, Venezuelans are afflicted by shortages. Coffin production has dropped between 20% and 30% this year for lack of materials, forcing funeral and burial delays and boosting cask prices, industry officials say.</p>
<p>Pedro Navarro, former president of Venezuela&#8217;s funeral parlor association, has blamed lagging production <strong>at the state-run foundry Sidor</strong>. In short supply especially was the metal leaf used in the construction of coffins. &#8220;Some factories are paralysed. Others are buying thicker leaf,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>The country, which has a population of 30 million, has about 50 coffin factories. The president of one of Caracas&#8217; biggest coffin companies, Ataudes Venezuela, said that glue, varnish, paint and fabric for the interiors, was scarce.</p>
<p>Demand for coffins has grown in recent years. Venezuela has one of the world&#8217;s highest murder rates. People have been coping with shortages since 2006, long before the death from cancer last year of the pro-socialist president, Hugo Chávez.</p></blockquote>
<p>I&#8217;m sure Maduro is even now issuing a press release blaming the CIA and ordering his thugs to find coffin hoarders and expropriate their coffins to give to the people.</p>
<p>Giving coffins to the people is a timeless Socialist hobby.</p>
<p>Fortunately the good people at Democratic Underground have seen through this filthy scam.</p>
<blockquote><p>rickyhall  &#8211; The rich punishing the socialists? Just another day in paradise. . .</p>
<p>Spouting Horn  &#8211; Shortages are good for the environment. Blackouts? No CO2 released. No toilet paper? Trees not being cut down. No meat? No cows flatulating into the atmosphere changing the climate.</p></blockquote>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/americas-future-under-the-left-socialist-venezuela-has-no-coffins-to-bury-the-dead/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>9</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<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>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-ii/#comments</comments>
		<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>
<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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-ii/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>8</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<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>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-i/#comments</comments>
		<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>
<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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-i/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The War on Poverty &#8212; $21 Trillion Later</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Apr 2014 04:53:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war on poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222428</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The big fat leftist failure. Now where is the mea culpa? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/poverty.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222437" alt="poverty" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/poverty.jpg" width="280" height="280" /></a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Fifty years and trillions of dollars after the &#8220;War on Poverty&#8221; was launched, poor Americans aren&#8217;t much better off, according to a study published by Republican reformers in Congress.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The War on Poverty has barely made a dent in actual poverty, states the 205-page </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://budget.house.gov/waronpoverty/">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> unveiled last month by the House Budget Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The paper, created in the hope of starting a discussion in Congress about reforming America&#8217;s bungled poor-relief programs, came out before Ryan </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/us/politics/paul-ryan-budget.html?_r=0">released</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the GOP&#8217;s new budgetary blueprint yesterday that lays out how to balance the budget in 10 years. That document calls for reducing federal government spending by $5.1 trillion over a decade largely by getting a grip on out-of-control social programs. The House Budget Committee could vote on the fiscal plan as soon as Friday. Leadership in the Democrat-dominated Senate, which hasn&#8217;t even tried to adopt a budget in recent years, isn&#8217;t planning to craft a fiscal blueprint this year, either.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The heart of the War on Poverty report is its observation that most federal poverty-alleviation programs are essentially useless or incapable of having their impact measured in the real world.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The study observes that in 1965, the poverty rate was 17.3 percent. In 2012, it was 15 percent. This means taxpayers blew a staggering $20.7 trillion over the last half century in order to achieve a paltry 2.3 percentage point decrease in poverty.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Broken down into less mind-blowing, easier-to-grasp figures, between 1965 and 2012 the average family of four spent roughly $146,000 per percentage-point drop in poverty, or $335,000 per family for the whole 2.3 percentage-point reduction.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Only the most blinkered or jaded among us in the body politic believe that sucking $9 trillion out of the private, productive economy for each single percentage-point reduction in the poverty rate constitutes an acceptable return on investment.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which brings us to the modern &#8220;progressive&#8221; Left.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Those on the Left consider the gentle statistical dip in poverty over five decades to be social progress achieved by way of holy coercive redistribution. Mere results have always been less important to the Left than intentions.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Although a sane person would consider the extremely modest reduction in poverty a humiliating defeat, left-wingers have successfully been changing the subject, hurling epithets, smearing opponents, and intimidating adversaries, all in an effort to move the discussion away from their 50 years of human misery-generating policy failures.</span></p>
<p>The Obama White House self-servingly slices and dices the statistics to portray the War on Poverty as a smashing, if flawed, success.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While the Obama administration admits that some of the government&#8217;s poverty-fighting approaches are less than optimal, President&#8217;s Obama Council of Economic Advisers issued a ringing endorsement of the War on Poverty.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50th_anniversary_cea_report_-_final_post_embargo.pdf">that body</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, poverty has declined by more than one-third since 1967. &#8220;The percent of the population in poverty when measured to include tax credits and other benefits has declined from 25.8 percent in 1967 to 16.0 percent in 2012.&#8221; Predictably, the council opines that &#8220;[d]espite real progress in the War on Poverty, there is more work to do.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>The council also obsequiously slaps President Obama on the back, praising him for taking steps to &#8220;further increase opportunity and economic security by improving key programs while ensuring greater efficiency and integrity.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It then moves from servile flattery to outright revisionism, claiming that Obama&#8217;s actions have &#8220;prevented millions of hardworking Americans from slipping into poverty during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ever the class warrior, in a December address on income inequality, Obama showed just how much a prisoner he is of his own self-imposed ideological bubble. Without mentioning the devastating impact that the high tax rates and runaway social spending he ardently supports have had on American society, the president argued that it&#8217;s all deterministic, all the fault of capitalism. He said:</span></p>
<p>&#8220;But we know that people’s frustrations run deeper than these most recent political battles. Their frustration is rooted in their own daily battles &#8212; to make ends meet, to pay for college, buy a home, save for retirement. It’s rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. And it’s rooted in the fear that their kids won’t be better off than they were.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Big government, a lawless administration, and radical attacks on civil society aren&#8217;t worth worrying about, according to Obama.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It is &#8220;a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain &#8212; that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is &#8220;the defining challenge of our time,&#8221; he said, even though Americans don&#8217;t give a farthing&#8217;s cuss about economic inequality. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That challenge consists of &#8220;making sure our economy </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">works</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for every working American,&#8221; Obama declared, slyly anthropomorphizing the economy, an intangible abstraction, in order to push the illusion that markets, like animals or streams, can somehow be controlled and centrally managed.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">All of this rhetorical blatherskite had its heyday in the awful 1960s, an era historian Paul Johnson correctly described as &#8220;America&#8217;s suicide attempt.&#8221; Instead of being satisfied with New Deal-era programs like Social Security, left-wingers resolved to move America even farther away from its founding ideals, fundamentally changing the country by erecting a supremely sclerotic behemoth welfare state answerable to no one.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The War on Poverty itself was a part of the massive left-wing social engineering and vote-buying scheme known as the Great Society. This war really should have been called the war on American values. As a result of misguided government policies that grew out of the War on Poverty, social evils have not only been encouraged but subsidized with taxpayer dollars. For example, out-of-whack financial incentives have caused out-of-wedlock birthrates to mushroom, as David Horowitz and John Perazzo </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/government-versus-the-people/">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in &#8220;Government vs. the People.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Despite an orgy of federal spending, blacks and other minorities have suffered the most from big government poverty alleviation efforts. The anti-marriage, anti-family tilt of welfare policies has devastated black communities and society at large.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In his first State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ushered in a half-century of government-incentivized sloth, indolence, dependency, and social decay. He exhorted Congress to launch a new belligerency against a perpetually ineradicable foe.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Let this session of Congress be known,&#8221; Johnson exclaimed, &#8220;as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964 became the centerpiece of the new war.  It expanded the nation&#8217;s social safety hammock, turning government resources into war materiel to be used against the American system of constitutionally limited government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The War on Poverty gave taxpayers’ money to so-called community groups like ACORN and Saul Alinsky&#8217;s Industrial Areas Foundation in order to encourage them to agitate against the status quo. This, in turn, stimulated demand for more government spending as taxpayer dollars became a kind of ever-increasing subsidy for pro-big government activism. The federal government still hands out significant grants to left-wing groups to subsidize their efforts to take away our economic freedoms. Many of the EOA-created programs still exist today, including VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America), now known as AmeriCorps VISTA, Job Corps, and Head Start.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Many more excuses for handouts were created after the mid-1960s &#8212; so many, in fact, that it is difficult nowadays for poor people to tiptoe through the ever expanding minefield of government assistance unscathed. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Loud calls for yet more welfare spending continue unabated from the echo chambers of the Left every single day whether the national economy is good or bad.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These calls come even after the country has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-povertys-biggest-casualties/">saturation-bombed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> poor people with welfare over the past 50 years, to the tune of $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars, far exceeding what the U.S. has spent on every actual, non-figurative war it has fought. Federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is now 16 times greater than when this phony war was declared, according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While millions of Americans remain stuck in poverty, the House Budget Committee&#8217;s white paper from March inventories a dizzying array of expensive failed programs on which mountains of money have been lavished.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The federal government now administers at least 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans. There are dozens of education and job-training programs, 17 different food-aid programs, and over 20 housing programs. The federal government spent $799 billion on these programs in fiscal 2012 alone, according to the report.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Among more than 15 programs, more than $100 billion was spent on food aid. More than $200 billion was spent on cash aid. Spread over more than 20 programs, more than $90 billion was spent on education and job training. Almost $300 billion was spent on health care and close to $50 billion was spent on housing.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Let&#8217;s look at some of the eye-popping numbers involved in the major aid category of cash aid.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There were three federal agencies involved in spending $220 billion on cash aid in fiscal 2012. They are the Social Security Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of the Treasury.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Created in 1974, the Supplemental Security Income program provides cash benefits to elderly, blind, or disabled persons with limited income and assets. It weighs in at $50 billion.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), created in 1935, provides assistance to needy families. In 2012 it weighed in at $16.7 billion.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Earned Income Tax Credit, established in 1975, provides cash assistance to low-income working families. The EITC, which some analysts consider to be a rare federal anti-poverty success, is the largest measure in the tax code that is aimed at reducing poverty. In 2012, its budget was $59 billion.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Child Tax Credit, enacted in 1997, provides assistance to families with children. The IRS spent a little over $57 billion on total child credits in 2013.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Title IV-E Foster Care/Adoption Assistance program, created in 1997, helps states pay for arranging temporary homes for disadvantaged children or for facilitating their adoption. The federal government spent $6.8 billion on the program in 2012.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But most of the 92 federal poverty-alleviation programs have a mediocre to downright dreadful track record of helping people in need.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To make matters worse, over the past three years, “deep poverty” has reached its highest level on record and about 21.8 percent of children live below the poverty line, the report states. Although changing demographics and slow economic growth contribute to continued poverty, federal policies are also discouraging work. For example, a rapid increase in disability caseloads has shrunk the labor force.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;But a large problem is the &#8216;poverty trap,&#8217;&#8221; the report states. &#8220;There are so </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">many anti-poverty programs—and there is so little coordination between them—that they often work at cross purposes and penalize families for getting ahead.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Because these programs are means-tested—meaning that benefits fall as recipients earn more money—poor families face very high implicit marginal tax rates. The federal government, in effect, is discouraging them from making more money.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Congress has taken a haphazard approach to this problem; it has expanded programs and created new ones with little regard to how these changes fit into the larger effort. Rather than provide a roadmap out of poverty, Washington has created a complex web of programs that are often difficult to navigate.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Some programs work, some don&#8217;t, and with many of them, &#8220;[t]here&#8217;s little evidence either way.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Federal programs are not only failing to address problems in society; in some ways they are making the problems worse. &#8220;Changes are clearly necessary, and the first step is to evaluate what the federal government is doing right now,&#8221; the report said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But President Obama, neo-Marxist ideologue that he is, isn&#8217;t interested in making changes to anti-poverty programs. Obama is </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-budget-proposal-obama-to-seek-more-money-for-anti-poverty-programs/2014/03/03/e86cf5bc-a306-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html">seeking</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $56 billion in new spending for a variety of programs expanding educational offerings for preschoolers and job training for laid-off workers. No doubt he&#8217;ll find a way to lard still more billions of dollars in so-called emergency spending onto the budget as the year progresses.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“The two sides have converged in terms of the problems they’re diagnosing,” said Alan D. Viard of the American Enterprise Institute. “But the solutions are very far apart.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><i>That</i> is an understatement.</p>
<p><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" 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 style="line-height: 1.5em;">.  </b></p>
<p><b>Make sure to </b><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>29</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<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>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<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>
<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>
<p><b>Make sure to </b><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/oliver-stone-does-venezuela/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<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>
<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>.<br />
</b></p>
<p><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">Make sure to </b><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelans-bleed-while-left-worships-their-government/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>20</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A Socialism Spill on Aisle 9</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Feb 2014 05:51:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219353</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The minimum wage hike mess and the poor workers who will have to live with it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/20101026_054910_1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml.jpg_GALLERY.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219354" alt="1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/20101026_054910_1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml.jpg_GALLERY.jpg" width="320" height="215" /></a>The working class in the United States has no better champion than Barack Obama. Like most champions of the working class, he has never actually worked at a real job and instead divided his time between academia, non-profits and politics which explains his current work ethic in which he tries to get a speech in between every two vacations.</span></p>
<p>The progressive law professors, who are currently the only thing standing between the working class and the abyss, at least according to other progressive professors, not only haven’t worked for a living, but don&#8217;t know what working for a living entails and don&#8217;t even understand the concept.</p>
<p>The protectors of the working class, currently presiding over a country where over 90 million adults are not in the workforce, have a plan to wipe out another 500,000 jobs. Before Obama, 63 percent of working age Americans had jobs. Today it&#8217;s 58 percent. And Obama is trying to see if he can drop the country below the 50 percent mark.</p>
<p>A minimum wage hike sounds like a great idea to a progressive professor who, like Marie Antoinette, wonders why the poor can&#8217;t just eat cake during a bread shortage. If the poor aren&#8217;t making enough money, just raise their salaries.</p>
<p>The first casualty of the minimum wage hike will be some 500,000 jobs. While just 19 percent of the minimum wage increase will go to those below the poverty line, the same isn&#8217;t true of that 500,000. The most disposable workers also tend to be the poorest. They are the first ones out the door when a small business comes up against the ObamaCare employer mandate or a minimum wage hike. It doesn&#8217;t take much to push them out from full-time to part-time and from part-time to the unemployment line and from the unemployment line to permanent unemployment.</p>
<p>Purge six figures worth of workers and suddenly income inequality becomes an even bigger problem that the Harvard and Yale Friends of the Working Class can use to run for reelection. It doesn&#8217;t occur to them that the living standard of the poor is not defined by an infographic comparing their income to Bill Gates&#8217; spectacles budget or George Soros&#8217; villain lair complete with lasers and piranhas.</p>
<p>It isn&#8217;t even defined by their salary, but by the buying power of that salary.</p>
<p>A salary is just a number. It was once possible to buy a meal for a dime and a politician for a hundred dollars. Today dinner with a politician will cost you that hundred and the politician may cost you a hundred thousand.</p>
<p>The businesses that minimum wage workers depend on are peopled with other minimum wage workers. Even assuming that the pay hike would be employment neutral, which it most certainly is not, it would rebalance once the businesses they patronize pass on the pay hike as a price hike. And then before you know it everyone is making more money that still buys about the same amount that their old paychecks did.</p>
<p>Income inequality is class warfare, a subject of interest to Marxist professors, but of very little relevance to the price of a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk and a pound of ground beef.</p>
<p>The prices of basic staples have risen sharply under the Friend of the Working Class in Washington. While he dines on faux Wagyu beef at White House dinners, the working class victims of his class warfare are standing in Aisle 9 trying to assemble a puzzle that consists of their upcoming paycheck, a Payday loan and a grocery list.</p>
<p>The woman weighting a can of beans in one hand and her pocketbook in the other trying to decide what she can afford to take home doesn&#8217;t need income equality with a Harvard Law prof. What she needs is a living standard that will allow her to afford what working Americans used to be able to afford. A minimum wage hike is a blunt instrument that looks good until it puts her out of a job or until she comes back to Aisle 9 and sees that the price hikes match her new paycheck.</p>
<p>Each progressive solution makes life worse in Aisle 9, but progressives never visit Aisle 9. If they did, they would outlaw the other half of the products in it that they haven&#8217;t already outlawed through various contrived legalisms.</p>
<p>In the Venezuelan Aisle 9, mobs are fighting over powdered milk in government stores in a country that has 85 percent of the oil reserves in the region. Everyone is entitled to powdered milk and other price controlled staples. But being entitled to something doesn&#8217;t mean that you can get it. Not until the government seizes control of the entire production process of powdered milk and when that is done, then no one will ever drink powdered milk again.</p>
<p>The path to Venezuela&#8217;s Aisle 9 is surprisingly similar to America&#8217;s Aisle 9. Governments can raise wages or lower food prices, but they can&#8217;t enforce the availability of food or jobs and they can&#8217;t control how the working class will work around the consequences of foodless government supermarkets and minimum wage jobs that have been priced out of the marketplace.</p>
<p>Venezuela&#8217;s Friend of the Working Class, Hugo Chavez, kicked the golden bucket with an estimated net worth of 2 billion dollars. The Friends of the Working Class are also doing comfortably well in D.C. where it pays to be an expert on poverty and an advocate for helping the working class by adding 12 million illegal aliens to the job market with illegal alien amnesty, shutting down jobs with environmental regulations and freeing the people still working from that dreaded &#8220;job lock.&#8221;</p>
<p>For the Washington Friends of the Working Class drifting from one cocktail party and fundraising dinner to another, the minimum wage hike is their latest gimmick for winning in 2016. They are as ignorant of the lives of the waiters who bring them their Wagyu beef and the vagaries of a working class budget as they are of Ancient Sanskrit or the geography of the moon.</p>
<p>In Aisle 9, things are simple and inflexible, but in politics and academia everything is subjective.</p>
<p>Weighing a can of food in your hands that you need but cannot afford wonderfully focuses the mind on the real, but at the cocktail parties of the Friends of the Working Class, everything is wonderfully unreal. There are no hard facts, only ideas and slogans.</p>
<p>Like The Great Gatsby&#8217;s Tom and Daisy, the progressive law professors and community organizers inhabit a &#8220;vast carelessness&#8221; of conferences and cocktail parties from which they emerge to carelessly smash things up before retreating back into it with no real awareness of what they have done and a certainty that the people on Aisle 9 whose lives they have smashed up ought to be grateful to them.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>365</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<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>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/showdown-in-caracas/#comments</comments>
		<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>
<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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/showdown-in-caracas/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>34</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>An 1887 Science Fiction Novel Predicted DeBlasio and Bloomberg&#8217;s New York</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/an-1887-science-fiction-novel-accurately-predicted-deblasio-and-bloombergs-new-york/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-1887-science-fiction-novel-accurately-predicted-deblasio-and-bloombergs-new-york</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/an-1887-science-fiction-novel-accurately-predicted-deblasio-and-bloombergs-new-york/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 16 Feb 2014 01:48:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[science fiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218666</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Officer of Hygiene prescribes the kind of food he thinks you require]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/91+b04ozj7L.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-218667" alt="91+b04ozj7L" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/91+b04ozj7L-405x350.jpg" width="405" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>&#8220;The Republic of the Future: or Socialism a Reality&#8221; was an anti-utopian novella that was part of a field of satirical responses to Utopian Socialist novels like Looking Backward. (I discuss one of the more curious forms of that genre in <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/green-socialists-on-mars/">Socialists from Mars</a>)</p>
<p>Written by Anna Bowman Dodd, a New York journalist, The Republic of the Future spoofs the futuristic Socialist travelogues of the utopian writers by visiting a Socialist New York City in the year 2050. ABD&#8217;s views on some subjects don&#8217;t hold up that well and her version of New York where all the houses and people are the same doesn&#8217;t actually exist, but under one mayor obsessed with food and another obsessed with equality, it appears rather timely in places.</p>
<p>Diet in the Socialist New York is regulated to a degree that Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio could only fantasize about with no more kitchens, only a centrally planned single food production center in Chicago and dietary inspections for all.</p>
<blockquote><p>When travelers had found themselves forced to abide by the rules and regulations governing the socialists&#8217; diet. But what was this diet?</p>
<p>The State scientists now regulate all such matters. Once a month our Officer of Hygiene comes and examines each member of the household. He then prescribes the kind of food he thinks you require for the next few weeks, whether it shall be more or less phosphates, or cereals, or carnivorous preparations.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of the shops in the Socialist New York of 2050, ABD writes;</p>
<blockquote><p>The total lack of contrast which is the result of the plan on which this socialistic city has been built, comes, of course, from the principle which has decreed that no man can have any finer house or better interior, or finer clothes than his neighbor.</p>
<p>There is, consequently, neither rivalry nor competition. The shop keepers, who are in reality only clerks and salesmen under government jurisdiction, take naturally, no personal or vital interest either in the amount of goods sold, or in the way in which these latter are placed before the public.</p>
<p>The shop-windows, therefore, are as uninviting as are the goods displayed. Only useful, necessary objects and articles are to be seen.</p></blockquote>
<p>This has yet to be true of New York store windows, but it was true of store windows in the Soviet Union. ABD describes the dulness of the people who have nothing to strive toward.</p>
<blockquote><p>They have the look of people who have come to the end of things and who have failed to find it amusing.</p>
<p>The entire population appear to be eternally in the streets, wandering up and down, with their hands in their pockets, on the lookout for something that never happens. What indeed, is there to happen ? Have they not come to the consummation of everything, of their dreams and their hopes and desires? A man can&#8217;t have his dream and dream it too. Realization has been found before now, to be exceedingly dull play.</p>
<p>As it is, I am free to confess, that the dullness and apathy of these ideally-perfect socialists weighs on me.</p></blockquote>
<p>ABD goes on to conjecture about social changes.</p>
<blockquote><p>Both men and women are muscled like athletes, from their continual exercises and perpetual bathing.</p></blockquote>
<p>This would be somewhat true for the upper classes, though the Greek baths she envisioned aren&#8217;t a reality.</p>
<blockquote><p>It is now nearly two hundred years since women have enjoyed the same freedom and rights as men. It is interesting and curious to note the changes, both upon the character and nature of the two sexes, which has been the result of this development.</p>
<p>One&#8217;s first impression, in coming here, is that women are the sole inhabitants of the country. One sees them<br />
everywhere — in all the public offices, as heads of departments, as government clerks, as officials, as engineers, machinists, aeronauts, tax collectors, firemen, filling, in fact, every office and vocation in civil, political and social life.</p>
<p>The few men — by comparison, whom I saw seemed to me to be allowed to exist as specimen examples of a fallen race. Of course, this view is more or less exaggeration. But the women here do appear to possess by far the most energy, vigor, vitality and ambition. Their predominance in office just now is owing to their over-powering number, the women&#8217;s vote polled being ten to one over that of the men.</p></blockquote>
<p>ABD didn&#8217;t anticipate the service industry shift and did assume, for the purposes of the narrative, that machinery could fill in.</p>
<blockquote><p>As motherhood came in course of time to be considered in its true light, as perhaps the chief cause of the degradation of women, it was finally abolished by act of legislature. Women were still to continue to bear children, or else the socialistic society itself would cease to be. A law was passed providing that children almost immediately after birth, should be brought up, educated and trained under state direction to be returned to their parents when fully grown, and ready for their duties as men and women citizens.</p>
<p>It has followed, of course, that with the jurisdiction of the state over the children of the community, all family life has died out. Men and women live together as man and wife, but the relation between them has become more nominal than real. It is significant of the changes that have been brought about between the sexes, that the word &#8221; home ** has entirely dropped out of the language. A man&#8217;s house has in truth ceased to be his home. There are no children there to greet him, his wife, who is his comrade, a man, a citizen like himself, is as rarely at home as he.</p>
<p>The word wife has also lost all its original significance. It stands for nothing. Husband and wife arc in reality two men having equal rights, with the same range of occupation, the same duties as citizens to perform, the .same haunts and the same dreary leisure.</p></blockquote>
<p>The word wife has already nearly vanished in the UK to be replaced by Partner. Under the influence of the gay rights lobby, the US will probably be next.</p>
<p>The collective child-rearing scheme that ABD describes was pursued by Socialists in her day, but it hasn&#8217;t been fully implemented on a national level. The push for universal Pre-K is a manifestation of the same phenomenon.</p>
<p>This too forms a rather familiar scene&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>The exercises of the day began at the great Ethical Temple. Here ten thousand children were gathered to listen first to a lecture on the history of Christmas. There was a play in which Santa Claus appeared and a number of other legendary characters, to show the children in what mythological, absurd beings the children of the unenlightened nineteenth century believed in. Then ten thousand toys were distributed, dolls and whips and tops, and sleighs and skates. But as all were distributed indiscriminately by State officers to the children as they passed out on review, of course all the boys got the dolls and the girls the whips and tops.</p></blockquote>
<p>ABD notes accurately that happiness will becoming the great missing quality and indeed much of modern culture is preoccupied with the search for happiness.</p>
<blockquote><p>I asked myself, again and again, why should this people, of all people, be full of this discontent and unhappiness ? Haven&#8217;t they come to the realization of all their dreams? Have they not attained to the very summit and to the full glory of the possession of their social, civic and political desires and aspirations? Is there not equality of sex? Has not leisure instead of labor become a law ?</p>
<p>Is not private property abolished — is not the land the property of the State — the wage&#8217;system become a thing of the past, and the possession of capital made a crime punishable bylaw? Does not the State also exist for the people, educating them, training them for their work in life, distributing among them any surplus funds that the public treasury  may accumulate, and furnishing for their amusement and leisure a vast system of educational clubs, educational theaters, public games, museums and shows ?</p>
<p>If a people are not happy under such conditions, what will insure content ?</p></blockquote>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/an-1887-science-fiction-novel-accurately-predicted-deblasio-and-bloombergs-new-york/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>5</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Inequality of Government Access</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-inequality-of-government-access/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-inequality-of-government-access</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-inequality-of-government-access/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:55:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class warfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marxism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218705</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Big Government's war on "inequality" is a dead end. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/deblasiofinlayter4.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218875" alt="deblasiofinlayter4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/deblasiofinlayter4-450x350.jpg" width="315" height="245" /></a>A day after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio&#8217;s Tale of Two Cities address in which the wealthy Park Slope resident once again made inequality his focus, the radical pol intervened to spring one of his biggest supporters from prison. The New York Post responded by putting, &#8220;A Jail of Two Cities&#8221; on its front page.</span></p>
<p>Aside from being the commonplace corruption that one ought to expect from a politician trying to ban horses in Central Park because a wealthy real estate magnate wants to seize their stables, the Jail of Two Cities also reveals why government wars against inequality are a dead end.</p>
<p>When government is big, then the true inequality is not of wealth, but of political access. Money can buy you access, or as the recently released Orlando Findlayter discovered, so can being an activist who bets on the right horse-hating politician. The rich can write a check, but the poor can vote early and often. Access isn&#8217;t about money; it&#8217;s about becoming useful to those in power.</p>
<p>There are two cities and two countries in America; the land of the politically connected who are part of a network that can score anything from millions in cash to open door prisons and the land of the politically unconnected who don&#8217;t understand why the government won&#8217;t leave them alone. It won&#8217;t leave them alone because in a corrupt system, being left alone is a special political favor.</p>
<p>Government should not be concerned with the inequality of income, which isn&#8217;t in its purview, but with the inequality of access, which is. It&#8217;s not the job of government to even out how much money everyone makes, but it is its job to ensure that everyone has equal access to government.</p>
<p>In a city or a country run by income inequality campaigners like Barack Obama or Bill de Blasio, the inequality of wealth takes a back seat to the inequality of access. Battling income inequality leads directly to inequality of access by putting the equalizers in charge of picking winners and losers through the agency of an expanding government.</p>
<p>The bigger government gets, the less sense it makes to invest in business and the more sense it makes to invest in politicians. Powerful politicians are a much less riskier investment than millions of customers whose behavior is hard to predict.</p>
<p>The unpredictability of the public makes competition possible and reduces income inequality while the predictability of politicians is a monopoly that increases income inequality as political monopolies become economic monopolies.</p>
<p>Obama handed out hundreds of millions to the Green Energy tycoons who supported him and dispenses ambassadorships to unqualified bundlers who barely know the name of the major country they have been assigned to. Voters who came out in collective groups for Obama got wealth redistribution paydays. Everyone else got taxed.</p>
<p>There is no equality of access even within the ranks of his supporters. The Obama voter was rewarded with ObamaCare, but the ObamaCare website was outsourced to an incompetent company whose top executive was a pal of Michelle Obama. The company got a six hundred million dollar contract and the ObamaPhone voters got a broken website and hours on hold.</p>
<p>Government works when it&#8217;s held accountable. Inequality campaigners avoid accountability by assembling a base of enthusiastic voters who come out in large percentages to score special access. Those voters are hard to beat because, like the politicians they vote for, they take bribes, using their votes to gain insider access in a corrupt system while ruining it for everyone else.</p>
<p>They take the bribes and then complain that nothing works. And they&#8217;re the reason why. Their corrupt choices are why the sidewalks are cracked, the streetlights don&#8217;t turn on at night, the firefighters don&#8217;t show up and the pension fund is empty. They have become complicit in a corrupt system that encourages them to take advantage of others even as it takes advantage of them.</p>
<p>A thief is still a thief whether he wears a mask, a suit or a t-shirt with a social justice slogan. When people appoint thieves to steal for them, they shouldn&#8217;t be surprised when the thieves also steal from them. As the scorpion said to the frog, “You knew what I was when you let me ride.”</p>
<p>The voters who most depend on government vote to break it far more thoroughly than any Tea Party politician could. No Republicans could have done to Detroit what Detroit did to Detroit. Not even the most extreme Tea Party politician could have done as much damage to the federal government as Obama did.</p>
<p>Corruption and ineptitude are far more of a threat to the progressive vision than any number of people waving Gadsden flags. Republicans can shut down a progressive program, but only progressives can discredit it from the inside the way that Obama has done with ObamaCare; taking it apart piece by piece to cover for his incompetence and appease pieces of his coalition.</p>
<p>The urban and rural political centers of the Democratic Party are places where the progressive vision lies dead and buried with a stake through its rotten heart while its zombie policy corpse shambles around decaying streets moaning, &#8220;Money, money, money.&#8221;</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t take the Koch Brothers to kill the left. Letting the left have what it wants does it much more devastatingly, but with more collateral damage.</p>
<p>Campaigns against income inequality invariably become mandates for corruption as aggrieved voters convinced that the system is rigged against them embrace the unfair advantage that they believe they are owed and politicians escape accountability from their own corrupt voters because every crime they commit is officially for the benefit of the underclass.</p>
<p>Class warfare leads to a culture of thievery even inside the most Socialist systems. The Soviet Union&#8217;s class warfare produced Homo Sovieticus, a disgusting creature who believed that  &#8220;Everything belongs to the collective, everything belongs to me&#8221; and accordingly stole everything that he could get his hands on leading to a broken system where nothing was available in stores and everything was available on the black market.</p>
<p>Even after the fall of the USSR, $400 billion in bribes are paid out annually. Russians bribe their officials for access. Americans bundle donations to them. The more power a government has over its people, the more people are willing to pay for access to those who hold power over them.</p>
<p>The cycle of corruption follows its own inevitable momentum. The more people come to believe that a system is corrupt, the fewer will vote for honest politicians over the crooks who promise them special benefits. Everyone becomes cynical and complicit in the corruption. Politicians play divide and conquer, redistributing wealth from some groups to other groups. Trust vanishes from government and financial institutions. Everyone suspects everyone else&#8230; and everyone steals.</p>
<p>That is the formula for a failed nation, a failed city and a failed community. A society is built on confidence in its institutions and its people. When that confidence falls apart, then nothing works and everyone has someone to blame. Social justice politicians begin by telling a tale of two cities and end by locking up everyone in a jail of two cities to which they alone hold the key.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Ann-Marie Murrell</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on <em>Robert Gates’ Revelations Confirm Horowitz&#8217;s “Party of Defeat,”</em> <em>Abandoning Iraq, </em><em> How Americans Died For a War Obama Didn&#8217;t Believe In</em>, <em>The Release of Terrorist Lawyer Lynne Stewart</em>, <em></em>and much, much more:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xwp_CUfwAss" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/TywIVHDnwxc" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for <em>The Glazov Gang,</em> <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Click here</a>.</strong></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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-inequality-of-government-access/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>147</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Food Rationing in Socialist Venezuela Leads to Mob Fighting Over Milk</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/food-rationing-in-socialist-venezuela-leads-to-mob-fighting-over-milk/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=food-rationing-in-socialist-venezuela-leads-to-mob-fighting-over-milk</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/food-rationing-in-socialist-venezuela-leads-to-mob-fighting-over-milk/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2014 17:13:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218519</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It took nearly two hours to get to the check-out counter ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/f95560f4-c204-4e61-bff7-742479587b68.grid-4x2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-218520" alt="f95560f4-c204-4e61-bff7-742479587b68.grid-4x2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/f95560f4-c204-4e61-bff7-742479587b68.grid-4x2-271x350.jpg" width="271" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Socialism. It really works. If you don&#8217;t believe me, just ask any of these people fighting over rationed supplies of powdered milk. (<a href="http://ace.mu.nu/">via Ace</a>)</p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.liveleak.com/ll_embed?f=4a0f64a86552" height="360" width="540" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>Venezuela&#8217;s powdered milk crisis has a long wacky history full of price control problems. Chavez and his even loonier successor Maduro have tried to set price controls for powdered milk.</p>
<p>Unfortunately neighboring Columbia would love to buy all of Venezuela&#8217;s powdered milk at real market prices leading <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22759138/#.UvmdHPlr7J8">Chavez to denounce dairy companies </a>that sell milk abroad as &#8220;traitors&#8221;.</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;I&#8217;m putting you on alert,&#8221; Chavez said. &#8220;If there&#8217;s a producer that refuses to sell the product &#8230; and sells it at a higher price abroad &#8230; ministers, find me the proof so it can be expropriated.&#8221;</p>
<p>Addressing his Cabinet, he said: &#8220;If the army must be brought in, you bring in the army.&#8221;</p>
<p>Chavez issued the warning on his weekly broadcast program &#8220;Hello President&#8221; after announcing a hike in milk prices, a measure intended to counter recent shortages.</p>
<p>The plant in the town of Machiques was bought last year from Italy&#8217;s Parmalat SpA. Chavez said it cost some $3.7 million and is being relaunched as a &#8220;socialist business&#8221; by the state.</p></blockquote>
<p>Maduro launched raids against &#8220;milk hoarders&#8221; confiscating milk for the people leading to absurd mob scenes like these with only one can to a person. (Anything else would be hoarding.)</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s an account of <a href="http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=99466">what it&#8217;s like to try and buy milk in Venezuela</a>. Any resemblance to the Soviet Union is not accidental.</p>
<blockquote><p>Last week, we were walking near a Bicentenario (large, government-run markets offering products at reasonable or “friendly” prices) and saw a number of people walk out with cans of milk.</p>
<p>“Hey, look!” said my partner, who’s always on the lookout for these kinds of things, as though she were the one from Cuba.</p>
<p>When we went inside the market, we were somewhat disappointed: there wasn’t a single can of milk left on the shelves, even though purchases are restricted to one can per person.</p>
<p>Someone said to us: “Stay close to the chekout counters. When one person tries to buy two cans, they take one away from them and you can have one of those.”</p>
<p>Team work is always more productive, so I stood in line to buy something while my partner went out to hunt, that is, to stand by the check-outs to see if some unfortunate soul was forced to part with one of their cans of milk.</p>
<p>It took nearly two hours to get to the check-out counter and, during this time, I was able to see and hear a bit of everything.</p>
<p>Standing in line ahead of me was an elderly gentleman who had left his home early in the morning to go shopping at the opposite end of Caracas and had to walk a very long distance to get his hands on some milk for his granddaughter (the child’s father could not take on such a journey, for he was bed-ridden, recovering from a gunshot wound).</p>
<p>While we were talking, a man arrived, stuck his hand into a pile of bags of bread on a shelf and “found” a can of milk. He darted off with it, in the direction of a check-out.</p>
<p>The people in line immediately reacted. Shelves with milk cans among bags of bread?</p>
<p>Like in the Old West, but without the gunfire, the line lunged towards the shelves and began looking for the much-coveted white gold. Nearly everyone in the line found cans of milk, mysteriously hidden behind other products.</p>
<p>Someone gave me one of the ones they found and told me people hide them in order to go to the check-out more than once and to be able to buy two or more cans.</p>
<p>People who sell these also hide them. Perhaps even the market employees do so. It really makes no difference.</p>
<p>Some cursed. Others said that everyone should have the right to buy as many products as they want, the way it’s always been.</p></blockquote>
<p>Welcome to Socialism. If you like your powdered milk, get ready to take one can of it home. If you can find.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/food-rationing-in-socialist-venezuela-leads-to-mob-fighting-over-milk/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>14</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Toilet Paper Defeats Venezuelan Socialism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/toilet-paper-defeats-venezuelan-socialism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=toilet-paper-defeats-venezuelan-socialism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/toilet-paper-defeats-venezuelan-socialism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 02 Feb 2014 15:17:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hugh Chavez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217759</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“Soon we’ll be using newspaper, just like they do in Cuba!” said an elderly man]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/maduro-ph.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-217760" alt="maduro-ph" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/maduro-ph-450x246.jpg" width="450" height="246" /></a></p>
<p>Frances Goldin of Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA may want to take some notes. This is <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/at-markets-chavez-successor-falls-short/2014/01/31/ac85c62a-8518-11e3-a273-6ffd9cf9f4ba_story.html">what turning a working country into a Socialist country</a> leads to.</p>
<blockquote><p>After his annual address to parliament last month, Maduro declared 2014 “the year of the ultimate triumph in the economic war,” announced a new team of economic managers and decreed a law capping business profits at 30 percent.</p>
<p>“You can be sure we will be inspecting everyone, sooner or later,” Maduro warned, part of the “New Economic Order” he vows to create.</p></blockquote>
<p>Sounds great. How is the ultimate triumph in economic war going so far?</p>
<blockquote><p>Soon word spread that the long-awaited rolls had arrived, and despite a government-imposed limit of one package per person, the checkout lines stretched all the way to the decimated dairy case in the back of the store.</p>
<p>“This is so depressing,” said Maria Plaza, 30, a lawyer, an hour and a half into her wait. “Pathetic.”</p>
<p>Pathetic, in a country with the world’s largest petroleum reserves and oil prices at nearly $95 a barrel, yet unable to supply basic goods because of its crumbling local currency and a shortage of U.S. dollars.</p>
<p>“Soon we’ll be using newspaper, just like they do in Cuba!” said an elderly man nearby, inching forward in line. “Yeah! Like Cuba!” others shouted.</p>
<p>The fate of Venezuela’s revolution, it seems, will be decided at the supermarket.</p>
<p>Most Venezuelans are too busy just trying to secure the basics. Residents from the country’s interior say the shortages are even worse outside the capital.</p>
<p>“There’s nothing to buy where we live,” said Maria Valencia, a preschool teacher from the oil-producing hub of Maracaibo, near Venezuela’s western border, while shopping at a government-run Bicentenario supermarket where products sold by recently nationalized companies carried little heart symbols and the phrase “Made in Socialism.”</p>
<p>Valencia and three family members had filled their cart with corn oil, four bottles each, the maximum. “This stuff is gold,” she said.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is what Made in Socialism looks like. But at least Venezuela is safer under left-wing tyranny.</p>
<blockquote><p>Fear is so widespread that shopping mall kiosks offer “Express Armoring” for motorists who want their vehicles bullet­proofed, fast.</p>
<p>Despite calls for an overhaul of Venezuela’s woeful police ­forces, Maduro said violent soap operas were to blame and warned broadcasters to clean up their content.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yes, it&#8217;s the soap operas. Once the last independent broadcaster is shut down, then Venezuela will be safer because crime won&#8217;t be reported.</p>
<blockquote><p>Venezuela’s real problem, economists say, is that a shortage of U.S. dollars is squeezing the ability of the government and the private sector to import. Even in upscale Caracas shopping malls, international chain stores such as Zara and Gucci are gutted, their employees standing around with nothing to sell and the mannequins left naked.</p>
<p>While the government has fixed the exchange rate of the country’s currency, the “strong bolivar,” at 6.3 to the dollar, the widely used street rate is more than 10 times higher. Inflation was 56 percent last year — officially — and in an oil-warped economy that depends heavily on imported goods, businesses can’t get the dollars they need to restock their shelves. Even Venezuelan-made items go scarce as factories struggle to obtain replacement parts and raw materials.</p></blockquote>
<p>But Venezuela&#8217;s insane dictator Maduro, who claims that a little bird in the form of Chavez visited him, does have a solution.</p>
<blockquote><p>Maduro’s government also plans to grease the wheels by selling at least $5 billion in U.S. money — at nearly twice the official rate — to companies trying to shed bolivars and secure hard currency.</p></blockquote>
<p>Crony Socialism. It&#8217;s not just for Obama.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Venezuelans-buy-toilet-ro-010.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-217761" alt="Venezuelans buy toilet rolls" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Venezuelans-buy-toilet-ro-010-450x270.jpg" width="450" height="270" /></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/toilet-paper-defeats-venezuelan-socialism/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>32</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<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>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/can-a-beauty-queens-murder-bring-down-socialism/#comments</comments>
		<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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/can-a-beauty-queens-murder-bring-down-socialism/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>19</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Why People Fail</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/why-people-fail/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-people-fail</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/why-people-fail/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2014 05:10:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amy "Tiger Mom" Chua]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214997</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Culture is just another way of saying family matters.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Success-Failure-Sign.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-215046" alt="Success-Failure-Sign" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Success-Failure-Sign-450x299.jpg" width="315" height="209" /></a>The hysterical responses to Amy &#8220;Tiger Mom&#8221; Chua&#8217;s book discussing why some cultures succeed and others fail are revealing. Even though Chua was talking about cultural elements, rather than genetic ones, the accusations of racism are entirely predictable.</p>
<p>Chua&#8217;s thesis, like most similar arguments, is plausible in some areas and implausible in others. Any explanation that tackles as big a subject as that is bound to have as many hits as misses.</p>
<p>And yet it&#8217;s undeniable that some cultures succeed where others fail.</p>
<p>The left refuses to distinguish between culture and race; denouncing everything from criticism of Islam to complaints about gang culture as racist. It treats culture as equivalent to race because it doesn’t believe that people are capable of change.</p>
<p>The cast of successful cultures in Chua&#8217;s book is more than racially diverse enough, but it&#8217;s the idea that people succeed or fail because of their attitude toward life, rather than because of their privilege or lack of privilege that infuriates the left.</p>
<p>No one succeeds on their own, Elizabeth Warren and Obama insisted. They succeed only through the grace of state institutions. It&#8217;s not family or culture that matters; only the state.</p>
<p>But the support of the state isn&#8217;t enough for individuals or for businesses. Obama lavishly doled out government money to Green Energy companies only to see them fail. With corporate welfare, as with social welfare, the need for government money is a reliable predictor of failure.</p>
<p>Those who cannot succeed on their own, will not succeed through the government.</p>
<p>Government money could not compensate for what was wrong with companies like Solyndra, Fisker or A123. It also can&#8217;t compensate for what is wrong with individuals and communities that are prone to failure, not because of someone else&#8217;s privilege, but because they have never learned how to try.</p>
<p>The left does not want to deal with the question of why some people succeed and others fail since its entire ideological infrastructure is built around the argument of unequal access.</p>
<p>Individuals don&#8217;t fail, progressives from Obama to Bill de Blasio insist, social institutions fail them.</p>
<p>The <i>New York Times</i> trotted out a young black girl named Dasani living in a dilapidated homeless shelter as its argument that the city had been subdivided between the rich and the poor. Dasani made another appearance at Bill de Blasio&#8217;s inauguration as a prop for class warfare.</p>
<p>But the city didn&#8217;t fail a girl whose parents are criminals and junkies and have burned through tens of thousands of dollars. Dasani isn&#8217;t living on the margins because Mayor Bloomberg or the institutions of the city failed her. On the contrary those institutions have lavished huge amounts of money and resources on her schooling and on every aspect of her life.</p>
<p>If Dasani fails, it&#8217;s not because the larger society failed her, but because her parents failed her. And the roots of their failure lie in communities where drug use and delinquency have become accepted and commonplace.</p>
<p>The left insists that people are interchangeable. They are not. It insists that their failures and successes belong to the guiding hand of the state. They do not.</p>
<p>Institutional determinism is why the Great Society measures failed. The progressive response to these failures has been to discover new and more abstract forms of racism culminating in white privilege to explain why the lack of access is holding some groups back.</p>
<p>There is an entire academic industry dedicated to turning out proofs of racism to explain failure and yet there are indisputable studies out there documenting things such as the diminished grade levels and higher crime rates for students from single parent homes on a worldwide scale.</p>
<p>While the left pushes harder for its post-family world of powerful institutions, there are reams of data showing how destructive trading the family for the state is. And there is no group of people that embodies that better than African-Americans whose lives have been taken over by the state.</p>
<p>Black families have fallen apart while state intervention in their lives has dramatically increased. It was a bad bargain and its consequences can be seen in every major city and in the lives of little girls like Dasani who are used as props by activists calling for more welfare from a government that can spend millions, but can’t fix the lack of responsibility of her family members.</p>
<p>Welfare not only correlates with social failures, it causes them. And it doesn&#8217;t just cause them in our own country.</p>
<p>Third World activists complain that Western aid destroys local capabilities and cripples domestic economies while promoting a culture of corruption and violence. The best evidence of that may be in the world&#8217;s biggest welfare state in the Palestinian Authority where the locals know how to do little except make demands and threaten to kill everyone if they don&#8217;t get their way.</p>
<p>Institutional determinism promotes learned helplessness. It teaches people that their failures can only be remedied by blaming someone else. Without individual responsibility, all that&#8217;s left are institutional subsidies for failure and there are only so many companies that can be bailed out and only so many individuals who can live off the welfare state.</p>
<p>Many of the cultures that Chua lists are refugees. That distrust of government may be a powerful antidote to Hillary Clinton&#8217;s village of the state.</p>
<p>And all of the cultures on the list are family oriented.</p>
<p>A basic difference between Asian-Americans and African-Americans is that the former are most likely to be married and the latter are least likely to be married. That may be why Asian students succeed in the same “bad” urban schools that are supposedly failing the other minority students.</p>
<p>The magic ingredient is a stable family and parental involvement. It is the difference between Dasani and a Chinese girl who is already working toward getting into Stuyvesant High School; that elite city institution of high-performing students that Bill de Blasio wants to &#8220;diversify”.</p>
<p>Despite the best efforts of the left, Dasani and her family are not typical of African-Americans. If they were, the city and the country would be uninhabitable and there would be no black middle class. But it is the mission of the <i>New York Times</i> and the rest of the left to convince their white readers that if not for their social justice campaigns, every black little girl would be a Dasani.</p>
<p>There are black parents who push their children to succeed every bit as hard as Amy Chua does. I have met some of them over the years. The problem is that there aren&#8217;t nearly as many of them as there were before the wheels of the Great Society began to turn and African-Americans were told that they should accept failure and even welcome it as proof of their persecution.</p>
<p>Culture is just another way of saying that it isn&#8217;t the state that makes success possible, but the individual and the family.</p>
<p>We are more than the sum of our institutions, we are our parents and our grandparents, we are the things we read and the things we believe, we are the sense of mission that brought our ancestors through thousands of years of trouble and we are their strengths and their weaknesses.</p>
<p>It’s not institutions that make our successes possible. It is our beliefs that make all the difference.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/why-people-fail/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>58</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Why Socialism Is on the Rise</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/why-socialism-is-on-the-rise/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-socialism-is-on-the-rise</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/why-socialism-is-on-the-rise/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jan 2014 05:54:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[comeback]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservatives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214838</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Did the Soviet Union's collapse teach the West nothing?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/de-blasio.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214844" alt="de-blasio" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/de-blasio-450x253.jpg" width="315" height="177" /></a>It took capitalism half a century to come back from the Great Depression. It&#8217;s taken socialism half that time to come back from the collapse of the Soviet Union. In New York City, avowed socialist Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared that his goal is to take &#8220;dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities&#8221; &#8212; the gap between rich and poor. In Seattle, newly elected socialist city Councilmember Kshama Sawant addressed supporters, explaining, &#8220;I wear the badge of socialist with honor.&#8221; To great acclaim from the left, columnist Jesse Myerson of Rolling Stone put out a column telling millennials that they ought to fight for government-guaranteed employment, a universal basic income, collectivization of private property, nationalization of private assets and public banks.</p>
<p>The newly flowering buds of Marxism no longer reside on the fringes. Not when the president of the United States has declared fighting income inequality his chief task as commander in chief. Not when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has said that America faces &#8220;no greater challenge&#8221; than income disparity. Not when MSNBC, The New York Times and the amalgamated pro-Obama media outlets have all declared their mission for 2014 a campaign against rich people.</p>
<p>Less than 20 years ago, former President Bill Clinton, facing reelection, declared &#8220;the era of big government&#8221; over. By 2011, Clinton reversed himself, declaring that it was government&#8217;s role to &#8220;give people the tools and create the conditions to make the most of our lives.&#8221;</p>
<p>So what happened?</p>
<p>Capitalism failed to make a case for itself. Back in 1998, shortly after the world seemed to reach a consensus on the ineffectiveness of socialist schemes, economists Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw wrote that the free market required something beyond mere success: It required &#8220;legitimacy.&#8221; But, said Yergin and Stanislaw, &#8220;a system that takes the pursuit of self-interest and profit as its guiding light does not necessarily satisfy the yearning in the human soul for belief and some higher meaning beyond materialism.&#8221; In other words, they wrote, while Spanish communists would die with the word &#8220;Stalin&#8221; on their lips, &#8220;few people would die with the words &#8216;free markets&#8217; on their lips.&#8221;</p>
<p>The failure to make a moral case for capitalism has doomed capitalism to the status of a perennial backup plan. When people are desperate or wealthy, they turn to socialism; only when they have no other alternative do they embrace the free market. After all, lies about guaranteed security are far more seductive than lectures about personal responsibility.</p>
<p>So what is the moral case for capitalism? It lies in recognition that socialism isn&#8217;t a great idea gone wrong &#8212; it&#8217;s an evil philosophy in action. It isn&#8217;t driven by altruism; it&#8217;s driven by greed and jealousy. Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don&#8217;t give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution. Socialism violates at least three of the Ten Commandments: It turns government into God, it legalizes thievery and it elevates covetousness. Discussions of income inequality, after all, aren&#8217;t about prosperity but about petty spite. Why should you care how much money I make, so long as you are happy?</p>
<p>Conservatives talk results when discussing the shortcomings of socialism. They&#8217;re right: Socialism is ineffective, destructive and stunting to the human spirit. But they&#8217;re wrong to abandon the field of morality when discussing the contrast between freedom and control. And it&#8217;s this abandonment &#8212; this perverse laziness &#8212; that has led to socialism&#8217;s comeback, even though within living memory, we have seen continental economies collapse and millions slaughtered in the name of this false god.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/why-socialism-is-on-the-rise/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>184</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 1435/1622 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 09:18:11 by W3 Total Cache -->