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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Venezuela</title>
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		<title>Venezeula&#8217;s Insane Socialist President Keeps Accusing People of Wanting to Kill Him</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/venezeulas-insane-socialist-president-keeps-accusing-people-of-wanting-to-kill-him/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezeulas-insane-socialist-president-keeps-accusing-people-of-wanting-to-kill-him</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/venezeulas-insane-socialist-president-keeps-accusing-people-of-wanting-to-kill-him/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 06 Dec 2014 14:36:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246711</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Sometimes we call world leaders insane because they're mean and kill lots of people. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/maduro-chavez.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-246712" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/maduro-chavez.jpg" alt="maduro chavez" width="275" height="183" /></a></p>
<p>Sometimes we call world leaders insane because they&#8217;re mean and kill lots of people. That&#8217;s not the case with Venezuela&#8217;s Socialist president Nicolas Maduro.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s not to say that he doesn&#8217;t kill lots of people. He does. But he also talks to<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/oliver-stone-to-make-movie-about-socialist-dictator-who-returns-from-the-dead-in-bird-form/"> deceased ex-president Hugo Chavez in bird form</a>, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/insane-socialist-president-of-venezuela-claims-hugo-chavez-face-appeared-on-subway-wall/">sees his image on subway walls</a> and threatened those who didn&#8217;t vote for <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/chavez-successor-threatens-venezuelans-who-dont-vote-for-him-with-ancient-curse/">him with an ancient Indian curse</a>.</p>
<p>He sent the army to <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/socialist-venezuelan-leader-orders-military-occupation-of-electronics-stores-photos/">occupy electronics stores</a> and there&#8217;s milk and <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/toilet-paper-defeats-venezuelan-socialism/">toilet paper rationing</a> in what used to be one of the wealthier countries in the region.</p>
<p>Like a lot of crazy people, Maduro is also obsessed with assassination plots.</p>
<p>First Maduro claimed there was a CIA plot to kill his political opponent Capriles who was uniquely qualified to be the President of Venezuela, not only on account of his degrees and background, but because he wasn&#8217;t a complete lunatic.</p>
<p>Capriles pointed out that if anyone killed him it wouldn&#8217;t be the CIA, it would the Birdman of Caracas.</p>
<p>So Maduro began claiming that the CIA wanted to kill him. Now if the CIA wanted to kill Maduro, it would tell him that eating rat poison will give him magical abilities. And Maduro remains un-assasinated, despite much of the country which doesn&#8217;t work for the government hating his guts.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/041214-venezuela-machado-m.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-246713" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/041214-venezuela-machado-m-450x253.jpg" alt="041214-venezuela-machado-m" width="450" height="253" /></a></p>
<p>Now he had a woman arrested f<a href="http://www.france24.com/en/20141204-venezuela-opposition-assassination-plot-conspiracy-president-maduro/">or conspiring to kill him</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Venezuelan prosecutors charged a prominent opposition leader with conspiracy Wednesday in relation to an alleged plot to assassinate leftist President Nicolas Maduro.</p>
<p>Maria Corina Machado, a vocal supporter of anti-government protests that rocked the country earlier this year, vehemently rejected the charge as she left the attorney general&#8217;s office after questioning.</p>
<p>&#8220;Today they have charged me with the crime of conspiracy,&#8221; she said. &#8220;All the accusations and supposed evidence are false, and I reject them.&#8221;</p>
<p>Under Venezuelan law she faces eight to 16 years in prison if convicted.</p>
<p>The attorney general&#8217;s office said in a statement she had been charged with &#8220;conspiracy&#8221; for &#8220;allegedly having links to the assassination plan against the president.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>You know the case is solid when the attorney general is using the term &#8220;allegedly&#8221; for a conspiracy he&#8217;s charging her with.</p>
<blockquote><p>Along with Leopoldo Lopez, an opposition leader jailed since February on charges of inciting violent protests, she has been one of the most visible figures in an anti-government protest movement called &#8220;La Salida,&#8221; or &#8220;The Way Out.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The way out in Venezuela is the same way out as in the USSR. Saudi Arabia&#8217;s oil war and fracking in the US have turned Venezuela&#8217;s oil money into collateral damage. Chavez and his crazier successor have run up huge debts and the money isn&#8217;t coming in.</p>
<p>Maduro had to announce a 20 percent cut in government spending. Now he&#8217;s trying to shut down his opposition with a show trial.</p>
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		<title>Venezuela&#8217;s Jihadist Congressman Claims Hitler Only Killed Progressive Jews</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/venezuelas-jihadist-congressman-claims-hitler-only-killed-progressive-jews/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelas-jihadist-congressman-claims-hitler-only-killed-progressive-jews</link>
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		<pubDate>Sat, 29 Nov 2014 16:07:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246296</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["We will see that the main financiers were the Zionists — the Bush family"]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/hqdefault1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-246297" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/hqdefault1-450x337.jpg" alt="hqdefault" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p>Venezuelan politics can be described as Huey Long on crack on even the best of days. Currently under the rule of a Cuban backed Socialist who claims to be talking to the deceased Hugo Chavez in the form of a bird while rationing milk and using the army to occupy stores and give away televisions to his supporters&#8230; Venezuela is not on one of its best days.</p>
<p>Not helping matters any is the large number of Baathists from Syria and Iraq who form an influential emigre population in the country and have close ties to the Chavez mob.</p>
<p>Even by those standards Congressman Adel El Zabayar of Syria is pretty bad. He&#8217;s such a strong supporter of Assad that he flew there during the civil war <a href="http://world.time.com/2013/08/30/assads-newest-ally-venezuelan-congressman-goes-to-syria-to-fight-rebels-the-u-s/">claiming to have joined the army</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Syria needs full support against these criminals,” wrote Venezuelan lawmaker Adel el-Zabayar in a letter to his country’s National Assembly this week. He was requesting indefinite leave from office in order to fight alongside the Syrian army.</p>
<p>“Without doubt, I’ll have a weapon,” he told TIME by telephone early on Friday morning local time from a site he said was around 50 miles south of Damascus near the city of Sweida. “I’m on the battlefield now.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In reality, not so much.</p>
<blockquote><p>Adel El Zabayar has no formal weapons training and is currently carrying out more administrative tasks on the battlefield, he says, alongside government fighters.</p></blockquote>
<p>After that publicity stunt, he returned to Venezuela to do what he does best, give interviews to Hezbollah&#8217;s television station<a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/venezuelan-mp-says-zionists-bush-family-financed-hitler/"> ranting about America and the Jews</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Congressman Adel El Zabayar, a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly, told the Hezbollah-sponsored Al Manar TV headquartered in Lebanon that: “In order to understand what is happening today in the Middle East and what happened in the world in the First and Second World Wars we must examine the original Zionist conspiracy.</p>
<p>“If we look into who financed Hitler before World War II, we will see that the main financiers were the Zionists — the Bush family, in fact. The Bush family made its fortune as a result of what happened in World War II.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>I&#8217;ll just skip over the part where Adel El Zabayar naturally equates the Bush family and Zionists. That&#8217;s a small piece of the crazy train that&#8217;s about to pull into the station.</p>
<blockquote><p>“If you study the history of the killing of the Jews in Europe, you find that Hitler killed those Jews who belonged to progressive organizations.”</p>
<p>He also said: “You will not find in those lists representatives of global Zionism.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s a lot of progressive organizations. In fact the majority who belonged to any organization were probably Orthodox Jews since the worst of the Holocaust took place in Eastern Europe and trapped them between the Nazis and the Communists. Plenty of Zionists, Orthodox and otherwise, died.</p>
<p>On Twitter, Adel El Zabayar denounced his Jewish critics as &#8220;Zionist bandits&#8221; and claimed he was &#8220;honored&#8221; by the attacks while retweeting every story that mentioned him and then retweeting them to Maduro, Venezuela&#8217;s mentally challenged leader who claims Chavez visited him in bird form.</p>
<p>Venezuela. Not having a good year. Or a good decade.</p>
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		<title>NY Times Triples-Down as Communist Mouthpiece</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/ny-times-triples-down-as-communist-mouthpiece/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ny-times-triples-down-as-communist-mouthpiece</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/ny-times-triples-down-as-communist-mouthpiece/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2014 04:20:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York Times]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243523</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[History repeats itself. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/new-york-times.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243524" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/new-york-times-450x320.jpg" alt="new-york-times" width="380" height="270" /></a>The past 10 days have seen <i>three</i> hysterical editorials from the New York Times <i>pleading</i> for a U.S. economic lifeline to the Castro brothers’ terror-sponsoring regime (i.e. to end the so-called embargo).</p>
<p>It’s the economy, stupid—Venezuela’s that is. Those plummeting oil prices (20% in the past few months) are playing havoc with the Cuban colony’s already-rotten economy.  Venezuelan subsidies to Cuba last year, mostly in the form of essentially free oil, were estimated to total $10 billion. That’s more than double what the Soviets used to send.</p>
<p>But Castro’s Venezuelan puppet Maduro is now on very shaky ground. The only thing keeping this pathetic satrap in power—besides the 30,000 or so Cuban military and security “advisors” essentially running Venezuela—are the bread and circuses that sitting on top of the world’s largest oil reserves allows the Venezuelan regime to put on for Venezuelans.</p>
<p>Now this oil-fueled largesse looks imperiled—and with it the subsidies to Venezuela’s colonial overlords in Havana. Hence the Castro brothers’ desperation for a rescue from U.S. tourists and taxpayers—and the SOS to their regime’s traditional agents-of-influence worldwide, among whom the New York Times features very prominently.</p>
<p>“Fidel Castro…has largely vanished from public view in Cuba,” reads the second NY Times editorial on Oct. 14. “But the 88-year-old former <i>president </i>[italics mine] has not altogether abandoned the business of telling Cubans what to think.”</p>
<p>Is the Times &#8212; at long last! &#8212; acknowledging a totalitarian streak in the longest-reigning Stalinist dictator of modern history? Sure sounds like it. Now please pay close attention as the editorial continues:</p>
<blockquote><p>On Tuesday [Oct. 14<sup>th</sup>], Mr. Castro dedicated a column to an editorial published in The [New York] Times on Sunday [Oct. 11] that called on the Obama administration to restore diplomatic ties with the Cuban government and end the <i>counterproductive </i>[italics mine]<i> </i>embargo the United States has imposed on the island for decades. His take was remarkable for one main reason…quoting nearly every paragraph in the [our] editorial…Hosts of Cuban state-run radio stations [also] read Mr. Castro’s column and discussed its content…</p></blockquote>
<p>In brief: so closely did the New York Times echo the sentiments of a Stalinist dictator that he gleefully ordered their article disseminated—almost word for word &#8211; throughout his regime’s KGB-founded and mentored media. It gets better:</p>
<blockquote><p>He [Fidel Castro] appeared to endorse the thrust of the editorial,” The second NY Times editorial boasts, “comparing it to an interview he gave in 1957 as a young rebel leader to a [New York] Times foreign correspondent at the time, Herbert Matthews…</p></blockquote>
<p>In April of 1959 &#8212; amidst an appalling bloodbath of Cubans by firing squad ordered by Fidel Castro but mostly administered by his ever-faithful Igor, <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.hfontova.com/che.html">Che Guevara</a> </span>&#8211; Castro made a special visit to the New York Times offices in New York. After a warm greeting from Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, a beaming Fidel Castro personally decorated a beaming Herbert Matthews with a specially-minted medal expressing his bloody regime’s highest honor.</p>
<p>“To our American friend Herbert Matthews with gratitude,” beamed Castro as the flashbulbs popped. “Without your help, and without the help of the New York Times, <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"><span style="color: #0433ff;">the Revolution in Cuba would never have been.”</span></a></p>
<p>“Fidel Castro has strong ideas of liberty, democracy and social justice,” Matthews had written on the front pages of (at the time) the world’s most prestigious newspaper in February 1957. “But it amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic, and therefore <i>anti</i>-communist.”</p>
<p>Herbert Matthews doubled-down a few months later: “This is <i>not</i> a Communist revolution in any sense of the term. Fidel Castro is not only <i>not</i> a Communist, he is decidedly <i>anti-</i>Communist” (Herbert Matthews, the <i>New York Times</i>, July 1959).</p>
<p>Reasonable people might ask: has any <i>tiny</i> little thing transpired in the intervening half-century that might cause the New York Times to regret their enabling of Fidel Castro?</p>
<p>But reasonable people will search in utter vain for any hint of such regret, especially in light of this week’s editorials, which – if anything &#8212; double-down on the New York Times&#8217; historical fondness for the Castro regime.</p>
<p>Through their unrivaled (at the time) public relations cachet and their heavy influence with their ideological cohorts and cronies in the CIA and U.S. State Department, the New York Times enabled into power a regime that:</p>
<p>*Jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s during the Great Terror.</p>
<p>*Murdered more Cubans than Hitler murdered Germans during the Night of Long Knives.</p>
<p>* converted a nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe into one that repulses Haitians.</p>
<p>* Wantonly brought the world within a whisker of nuclear war.</p>
<p>Over <i>fifty times</i> as many Cubans have died (and horribly) while attempting to flee Castro’s Cuba as Germans died trying to flee East Germany. And prior to Castroism Cuba welcomed more immigrants per-capita (primarily from Europe) than did the U.S.</p>
<p>And remember, the New York Times, like all anti-embargo propagandists (Chamber of Commerce, Hillary Clinton, Brookings Institute, Cato Institute, etc.), advocates against the so-called embargo by claiming Castro secretly favors it. The embargo &#8212; the intellectual eggheads wink and snicker at us knuckle-draggers &#8211; gives Castro a foil for his economic failures and an excuse to keep the clamps on. “Don’t you blockheads understand?”</p>
<p>We’re greatly impressed with your erudition and powers of ratiocination, think-tank eggheads. But first off, if Castro “<i>secretly</i> favors the embargo,” then why did every one of his <i>secret</i> agents campaign secretly and obsessively <i>against</i> the embargo while working as <i>secret</i> agents? Castro managed the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent U.S. history. The spy’s name is Ana Belen Montes, known as &#8220;Castro’s Queen Jewel&#8221; in the intelligence community. In 2002 she was convicted of the same crimes as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and today she serves a 25-year sentence in federal prison. Only a plea bargain spared her from sizzling in the electric chair like the Rosenbergs.</p>
<p>Prior to her visit from the FBI and handcuffing, Ana Belen Montes worked tirelessly to influence U.S. foreign policy <i>against</i> the embargo. The same holds for more recently arrested, convicted and incarcerated Cuban spies Carlos and Elsa Alvarez and Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers. All of these worked tirelessly to influence U.S. policy <i>against</i> the &#8220;embargo&#8221;&#8211; while working as <i>secret</i> agents.</p>
<p>In brief, the “reasoning” against the so-called embargo by people who fancy themselves intellectuals calls for Rod Serling introducing a Twilight Zone episode:</p>
<blockquote><p>Imagine if you will &#8230; a place where every &#8220;prestigious&#8221; think-tank (from Brookings to CATO) and every &#8220;prestigious&#8221; publication (from the New York Times to The Atlantic) denounces the Cuba &#8220;embargo&#8221; as &#8220;Castro&#8217;s best-friend, a policy he secretly favors&#8221;&#8211; even when every one of Castro’s convicted secret agents campaigned secretly and obsessively <i>against </i>the embargo while working as secret agents. On top of that, the KGB-mentored media of Castro&#8217;s totalitarian regime makes it a point to reprint every &#8220;end-the-embargo&#8221; article ever printed in the world, especially those by the New York Times&#8230;</p></blockquote>
<p>Imagine if you will&#8230;a place where the institutions that call the embargo &#8220;Castro&#8217;s best-friend&#8221; still manage to be known as <a href="https://docs.zoho.com/writer/ropen.do?rid=otj666e8e533cb3154646a6601ccfd09ef95c#bookmark=http://babalublog.com/2014/10/16/beam-me-up-scotty-new-york-times-editorial-think-tanks-and-the-cuba-embargo/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">“<i>think</i>-tanks.”</span></a></p>
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		<title>Venezuelan Union Demands Car Insurance and Video Games</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/venezuelan-union-demands-car-insurance-and-video-games/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelan-union-demands-car-insurance-and-video-games</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 23:29:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240287</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“They want to impose this contract on us to defeat our union" ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/venezuelabandera_trabajadores.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-240288" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/venezuelabandera_trabajadores-450x251.jpg" alt="venezuelabandera_trabajadores" width="450" height="251" /></a></p>
<p>Ah Venezuela, glorious Socialist motherland whose proud people stand in line for milk and use apps to search for toilet paper and whose glorious nationalized companies <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/a-once-proud-industrial-city-now-a-monument-to-venezuelas-economic-woes/2014/09/03/4b577663-8f18-4841-b958-eee3b8830ad9_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop">are producing about as well as you expect</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>The steelmaking company at the core of the Ciudad Guayana project, Sidor, produced a record 4.3 million tons before it was nationalized by Chávez in 2008.</p>
<p>Today, most of its furnaces sit cold, deprived of raw materials, new technology and reliable labor.</p></blockquote>
<p>Because&#8230; Socialism. The unions have some perfectly reasonable demands.</p>
<blockquote><p>Maduro officials say their proposed Sidor contract is generous, with salary increases that will more than double workers’ compensation over the next two years. It accommodates some rather extraordinary union demands: perks such as auto insurance for workers’ personal vehicles and millions of dollars to buy holiday gifts for their children, with special union committees to pick out the video games, dolls and stuffed animals they want.</p></blockquote>
<p>Why aren&#8217;t they signing a contract? Because they&#8217;re getting paid anyway.</p>
<blockquote><p>Despite repeated strikes and work stoppages, the government has continued to pay salaries at the aging plant, including for more than 2,000 union officials who draw wages but don’t produce an ounce of steel.</p>
<p>Still, with annual inflation in Venezuela topping 60 percent, steelworkers say their quality of life has plummeted. They lay the blame on government corruption and mismanagement by know-nothing military officials whom Maduro has placed atop state companies to ensure loyalty.</p></blockquote>
<p>While there isn&#8217;t much steel coming out, both sides are denouncing each other as puppets of Western imperialism.</p>
<blockquote><p>“They want to impose this contract on us to defeat our union and clear the way for their neo-liberal adjustment plans,” said Mario Valor, a union delegate, accusing the government of attempting to divide and conquer Venezuela’s workers in preparation for austerity measures.</p>
<p>National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello — Venezuela’s second most powerful figure after Maduro — has denounced union adversaries at Sidor as “mafias” in the service of U.S. “imperialism,” offending many of the workers who consider themselves Chávez loyalists and true patriots.</p></blockquote>
<p>Maybe Chavez can return to Maduro in bird form and guide him through this mess. Or he can just let China take over.</p>
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		<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>
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		<title>Venezuela&#8217;s Top 10 Useful Idiots and Propagandists, Pt. II</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-ii/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelas-top-10-useful-idiots-and-propagandists-pt-ii</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 22 Apr 2014 04:35:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Red Ken]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

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

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223826</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Shilling for Chavista tyranny and terror. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-02-25T175801Z_01_TBR06_RTRIDSP_3_VENEZUELA-PROTEST.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-223830" alt="2014-02-25T175801Z_01_TBR06_RTRIDSP_3_VENEZUELA-PROTEST" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2014-02-25T175801Z_01_TBR06_RTRIDSP_3_VENEZUELA-PROTEST-450x299.jpg" width="270" height="179" /></a>Food shortages. Economic chaos. Out-of-control crime. Things have never been quite so bad in oil-rich Venezuela. Massive and bloody anti-government protests have roiled the South American nation for more than two months &#8212; a response to what Hugo Chávez&#8217;s &#8220;21st Century socialism&#8221; has wrought to a nation that ought to be rich, but is instead poor.</p>
<p>Hugo Chávez can&#8217;t be blamed for everything, however.</p>
<p>The late Venezuelan president got plenty of help from a myriad group of useful idiots and propagandists. They helped sweep him into power in 1999 and gave him various kinds of support during his 14 years of increasingly autocratic rule, until dying of cancer one year ago. Now they&#8217;re giving their unquestioning support to his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro &#8212; a bus driver and former union leader &#8212; who is doubling downs on Chávez&#8217;s policies. Maduro has ramped up Cuba&#8217;s role in Venezuela and, with the help of Cuban security agents and goons, has ordered a brutal crack-down on anti-government protests. He has jailed opposition figures on trumped-up charges while professing a desire for a dialogue with opposition leaders. Human rights groups are outraged. But not the worst of Venezuela&#8217;s useful idiots.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Who are they?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Living in Venezuela, the United States and overseas, they include left-wing politicians, government officials, journalists, and Hollywood filmmakers. Some unwittingly facilitated Hugo Chávez&#8217;s Bolivarian revolution and subsequently admitted they were duped after belatedly recognizing Chávez&#8217;s malevolence. But the most odious of them &#8212; the true believers &#8212; have proudly set aside their moral compass to worship at the alter of socialist ideology, much to the delight of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.</span></p>
<p>And here are the first five of the top ten &#8230;</p>
<p><b>Eva Golinger</b></p>
<p>Eva Golinger, a lawyer and writer based in Brooklyn, is hands-down Venezuela&#8217;s biggest propagandist. The 40-year-old Venezuelan-American was a confident of the late President Chavez. She often appears on Venezuela&#8217;s state radio and television to defend Venezuela&#8217;s so-called &#8220;Bolivarian revolution.&#8221; Speaking with a think American accent, she promotes the virtues of socialism, belittles the opposition, and elaborates on the latest plot that Venezuela claims Washington has hatched against it.</p>
<p>“I’m a soldier for this revolution,” Golinger told The New York Times three years ago. In its<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/world/americas/05venezuela.html?_r=0"> profile</a>, &#8220;In Venezuela, an American has the President&#8217;s Ear,&#8221; The Times called her &#8220;one of the most prominent fixtures of Venezuela’s expanding state propaganda complex.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Recently, Golinger defended the Maduro regime during an interview on</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2014/03/25/puppet-or-defender-us-woman-who-trumpets-venezuelan-chavismo-is-lightning-rod/"> Fox News Latino</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, even as his security forces were engaged in a brutal crack-down against massive anti-government protests. Human rights groups were outraged, but not Golinger. “The protesters have been a minority of people…concentrated in upper and middle class areas,&#8221; she claimed. But there have been reports of lower-class Venezuelans increasingly joining the anti-government protests. Maduro also didn&#8217;t inherit Chávez&#8217;s halo or ability to sail to comfortable election wins. In balloting shortly after Chávez&#8217;s death, Maduro won by a razor-thin margin. This was despite credible claims that like Chávez, he benefited from election irregularities and voter intimidation including by </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> motorcycle thugs.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Born at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, Golinger&#8217;s father was a military psychiatrist during the Vietnam War. She enjoyed a privileged life as a doctor&#8217;s daughter; yet she ridicules Venezuela&#8217;s opposition leaders for having attended prestigious schools in the United States, something she suggests makes them out of touch with ordinary Venezuelans. Golinger, for her part, attended preppy Sarah Lawrence College near New York City. When not living in her upscale apartment in Caracas, she earned a law degree at City University of New York.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2010, Chávez took her on one of his globetrotting trips aimed at building anti-American alliances; it included stops in Syria, Iran and Libya. Chávez introduced her as &#8220;La novia de Venezuela&#8221; or &#8220;Venezuela&#8217;s girlfriend.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Golinger writes for pro-Venezuela websites, hosts a weekly show on RT Spanish (formerly called Russian Television), and is the author of &#8220;The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela&#8221; and &#8220;Bush vs. Chávez: Washington&#8217;s War on Venezuela.&#8221; She also writes for the leftist site Venezuelanalysis.com. How much she earns for such work is unknown.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Golinger has denied being on Venezuela&#8217;s payroll, but opposition activists dug up documents showing she received nearly $10,000 from the Venezuela Information Office to pay for a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, on media reform.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">True believers like Golinger, however, never shill only for money, and nor did her counterparts among earlier generations of Americans &#8212; all those starry-eyed leftists who happily shilled for the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Like Golinger, they burned with the desire to be part of something greater than themselves &#8212; the creation of a heaven on earth. A socialist utopia.</span></p>
<p><b>Oliver Stone</b></p>
<p>Hollywood has produced more than its share of useful idiots and propagandists over the years. First, they rallied around the Soviet Union. Then Cuba. Now they see Venezuela as an emerging socialist utopia.</p>
<p>Oliver Stone, the director and screenwriter, is Venezuela&#8217;s biggest propagandist in Hollywood &#8212; more so than celebrities like actors Danny Glover and Sean Penn who, like Stone, regarded Hugo Chávez as a friend and ideological soul mate. Stone has by far the greatest propaganda value for Venezuela&#8217;s leftist regime, however.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Consider his 2009 documentary &#8220;South of the Border.&#8221; It explores the rise of leftist governments and movements in South America which were inspired by Hugo Chávez&#8217;s election and enjoyed his oil largesse. To Stone, these movements are the answer to the region&#8217;s economic development. At the film&#8217;s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Stone was photographed hobnobbing with Chávez on numerous occasions &#8212; even as he was being widely condemned by right groups. But Stone has called Chávez nice guy. Not surprisingly, Stone didn&#8217;t bother to interview opposition leaders when making the film, which he promoted on a tour of South America.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stone&#8217;s next documentary was &#8220;Mi Amigo Hugo,&#8221; about his friendship with Chávez. On the first anniversary of Chávez&#8217;s death last March 5th, Venezuela&#8217;s government premiered the film on state television and (by government edict) private television channels. Talk about a captive audience! Stone wasn&#8217;t on hand in Venezuela for the premiere; it was just as well because massive and bloody anti-government protests were then underway &#8212; fueled by outrage over food shortages, out-of-control crime, and a dysfunctional economy. Danny Glover, however, did show up and gave a rousing speech in support of Venezuela&#8217;s &#8220;21st Century socialism.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Over the years, many of Stone&#8217;s films have had a leftist and anti-American agenda. The most recent example was &#8220;The Untold History of the United States&#8221; &#8212; an anti-American hatchet job that aired last year on the the Showtime cable channel. And let&#8217;s not forget &#8220;JFK&#8221; which taught millions of young and impressionable viewers that President John F. Kennedy was murdered by right-wing conspirators tied to America&#8217;s vast military-industrial complex.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore used to be one of Chávez&#8217;s useful idiots, incidentally; but he had a falling out with Chávez&#8217;s thin-skinned supporters after claiming to have given Chávez political advice and helped him write a U.N. speech. This supposedly happened during a late-night drinking session with the strongman in his hotel room at the Venice Film Festival.</span></p>
<p>Stone, ironically, has made millions of dollars in the United States thanks to its free-markets, rule of law, and respect for private property &#8212; and yet he believes that Venezuela, Cuba, and South America is better off without these virtues.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stone is not only a shill for tyranny, he is an incredible hypocrite.</span></p>
<p><b>Bart Jones</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Bart Jones, a left-learning American journalist, was a &#8220;local hire&#8221; reporter for the Caracas bureau of the Associated Press in the mid-1990s, back when Venezuela was a relative backwater. He didn&#8217;t start out as a journalist in Venezuela, however. In 1992, he went there as a missionary for the left-leaning Maryknoll order of the US Catholic Church. He worked 18 months in a slum where he soaked up huge amounts of right-wing social injustices (as he saw it) and then joined the AP. By dint of hard work and talent, Jones eventually became one of the bureau&#8217;s lead reporters &#8212; just in time to cover Hugo Chávez&#8217;s unexpected rise to power.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Who would have guessed that Jones was a closet </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> while writing all those supposedly objective articles for the AP? His political views were on display in his 2009 </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.amazon.com/Hugo-Chavez-Story-Perpetual-Revolution-ebook/dp/B002BH5HTE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1397757737&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Bart+Jones">biography</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of Chávez: &#8220;Hugo! The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution.&#8221; The book has gotten many reviews and is highly readable. It is the only source of in-depth information for many hankering to learn about Hugo Chávez and his so-called Bolivarian revolution. Jones, however, delivers a decidedly lefty view &#8212; presenting Chávez as a veritable saint and portraying all who disagree with him as classists, racists, or oligarchs. To Jones, Venezuela&#8217;s troubles revolve around a brown-skinned poor majority living under the thump of a white-skinned elite. A simplistic leftist narrative, it ignores the rainbow of colors existing among Venezuelans, including among more than a few of its politicians over the years.</span></p>
<p>Jones also condemns Venezuela&#8217;s private media as doing the dirty work of anti-Chávez oligarchs. In particular, he lashes into its biased coverage (and, yes, it was definitely slanted) during Chávez&#8217;s brief ouster during a failed military-civilian uprising on April 11, 2002. Private media outlets, however, didn&#8217;t start out being virulently anti-Chávez; they only started waving the anti-Chávez banner when Chávez played a gigantic bait-and-switch on Venezuela &#8212; imposing a socialist regime despite having claimed to be a moderate, not a socialist, during his first election campaign. As Jones skewers the anti-Chávez media, one wonders if he is similarly troubled about how most of America&#8217;s mainstream media was in Barack Obama&#8217;s camp from the get go. Jones surely cherishes his first amendment protections, yet he seems delighted that Venezuela&#8217;s government has neutered private media outlets or driven them out of business.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s troubling that Jones researched much of his book long after Chávez had revealed himself to be a megalomaniac &#8212; a despot who was leading Venezuela toward an authoritarian and poverty-ridden abyss. Checks and balances were dissolved, power was concentrated in Chávez&#8217;s hands, and quality-of-life indices took a nose dive. Human rights groups were alarmed. But not Jones. He shrugs off Chávez&#8217;s authoritarianism and personal excesses, including his womanizing and purchase of an Airbus 319 presidential jet that he rode on with Chávez; it wasn&#8217;t as opulent, he wrote, as Chávez&#8217;s critics had claimed. To Jones, Chávez can do no wrong because he is ruling in behalf of Venezuela&#8217;s poor majority.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Jones, incidentally, rented an apartment a few floors above me in an upscale complex on a tony corner of eastern Caracas, now an opposition stronghold. One day, Bart and I ran into each other at the entrance. We talked shop for a few minutes, and I asked about his thoughts on Chávez&#8217;s growing and inexplicable anti-American rhetoric.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Jones was normally calm and affable, but he suddenly launched into a frothy anti-American rant, declaring the United States had unleashed unspeakable atrocities upon Latin America in the past, and so it was totally understandable that Chávez was now telling those in Washington to go &#8220;f&#8211;k themselves.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>This, incidentally, was during Bill Clinton&#8217;s presidency. But like many of Chávez&#8217;s worshipers, Jones was living in another era. Not long after our conversation, in early 2000, Jones moved to Long Island, New York, and became a reporter for Newsday, a daily with a politically left-wing outlook.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">How lucky for Jones that he and his Venezuelan-born wife aren&#8217;t raising their children in the country that he regards as a beacon of emerging social justice.</span></p>
<p><b>Joseph P. Kennedy II</b></p>
<p>Joe Kennedy II has been the Venezuelan government&#8217;s favorite useful idiot in Massachusetts since 2005. Since then, the former U.S. representative and scion of the Kennedy family has facilitated and cheered on what amounts to an anti-American program by oil-rich yet impoverished Venezuela. Though his non-profit Citizens Energy Corporation, Kennedy and Venezuela&#8217;s government provide free home-heating oil to needy Americans.</p>
<p>In so doing, Kennedy and Venezuela&#8217;s leaders get to portray themselves as heroes of the poor. The media-savvy Chávez started the program and Maduro has continued with it &#8212; even as Venezuela&#8217;s inflation-wracked economy slides toward basket-case status. CITGO Petroleum Corporation, the Houston-based arm of Venezuela’s state oil company, claims that more than 235 million gallons of home-heating oil have been distributed over the past nine years to more than 1.8 million low-income Americans.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Joining Kennedy are two Democratic politicians who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2013/03/10/rfk-son-is-oil-broken-up-over-chavez-death/">negotiated</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the oil deal: former Rep. Bill Delahunt from Massachusetts, who had served on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Queens Rep. Gregory Meeks, who took off time from fighting corruption allegations to attended Chávez’s funeral last year. Both reportedly introduced Kennedy to Chávez on a trip to Caracas.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Kennedy, to be sure, isn&#8217;t as stupid as he seems. Citizen&#8217;s Energy reportedly pays him a cool $86,311 annually.</span></p>
<p><b>Kim Bartley and Donnacha O&#8217;Briain</b></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Kim Bartley and Donnacha O&#8217;Briain, young and lefty Irish filmmakers, arrived in Venezuela in September 2001 to make a documentary about firebrand leftist president Hugo Chávez.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Their research took an unexpected turn after seven months.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On April 11, 2002, while in the presidential palace, Chávez was briefly ousted from power amid massive pro- and anti-government marches in response to Chávez&#8217;s increasingly polarizing leadership. At least 20 people died and more than 150 received gunshot wounds, with some gunfire coming from shadowy snipers whose allegiances and motives were never determined.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Their riveting 2003 documentary, &#8220;The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,&#8221; attracted large audiences and generated rave reviews. It won some prestigious awards.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It also is riddled with errors and manipulated footage &#8212; all to serve the pro-Chávez leftist narrative they had gone to Venezuela to film.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As useful idiots, they dished up a huge wallop of international propaganda for Chávez&#8217;s increasingly embattled government. To Chávez&#8217;s delight, they portrayed his outster as an old-fashioned Latin American-style coup involving right-wing oligarchs backed by Washington (the Bush administration in this case).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuela&#8217;s government never set up a non-partisan commission to establish what precisely transpired, perhaps due to political convenience; or so observed the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://caracaschronicles.com/2004/04/14/the-untold-story-of-venezuelas-2002-april-crisis-2/">Caracas Chronicles </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">blog, citing newspaper columns by opposition editor Teodoro Petkoff, a prominent former Marxist guerrilla and now opposition figure with neoliberal economic views.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So what happened behind the scenes during Chávez&#8217;s ouster for 47 hours?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Level-headed journalists and analysts without an ideological ax to grind have variously described the military-civilian uprising against Chávez as evolving from a self-coup that Chávez orchestrated (in order to dissolve Congress and Supreme Court and declare martial law); a coup against him by top generals (spurred mainly by Chávez&#8217;s illegal order to turn the military loose on anti-government protesters and create a bloodbath); or a counter-coup due to concerns by generals and officials, including some loyal to Chávez, about where the uprising was heading. They believed Chávez&#8217;s ouster, while appropriate, had nevertheless proceed in an unconstitutional direction when newly appointed president Pedro Carmona, a businessman who headed the business chamber Fedecamaras, moved to dissolve Congress. This also lost him union support that was vital for successful governance.</span></p>
<p>It&#8217;s a complicated story, to be sure. But the leftist version makes for a more thrilling documentary and serves a leftist narrative &#8212; even if the truth is wildly distorted. Or as veteran journalist Phil Gunson <a href="http://www.vcrisis.com/print.php?content=letters/200405200431">explained</a> in The Columbia Journalism Review: &#8220;Constructing a false picture of a classic military coup devised by an allegedly corrupt and racist oligarchy, they omit key facts, invent others, twist the sequence of events to support their case, and replace inconvenient images with others dredged from archives.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Gunson, a former Caracas correspondent, noted that the film portrays the opposition as &#8220;rich, white, racist, and violent. Unseen are the armed bands of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">thugs who for years have made the center of Caracas a no-go area, beating up or shooting opposition marchers or TV crews who dare to approach.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The film&#8217;s title takes its name from the fact that the opposition media excluded the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> point of view from its coverage. But Venezuela&#8217;s private media outlets, as mentioned above, hadn&#8217;t always been virulently anti-Chávez; they got that way after Chávez revealed himself to be an authoritarian leftist &#8212; not the moderate he&#8217;d claimed to be during his first election campaign.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In portraying the private media as being anti-Democratic oligarchs, &#8220;The Revolution Will Not Be Televised&#8221; also omits the fact that, as protesters were being shot in the street, Chávez ordered radio and television channels to carry one of his long-winded speeches. As the shooting and violence continued, private broadcasters then put up a split screen &#8212; one side showing the violence in the streets, the other showing Chávez&#8217;s speech. In response, Chávez ordered the National Guard to shut down private television stations.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What&#8217;s more, Chávez wasn&#8217;t restored to office by &#8220;people power&#8221;; that is, by massive street demonstrations by his slum-dwelling supporters. He was returned to power as a result of behind-the-scenes political intrigues. And after that happened, his supporters took to the streets.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The lefty BBC, Ireland’s RTE, and other European broadcasters underwrote &#8220;This Revolution Will Not be Televised,&#8221; noted Gunson. Chávez had 20,000 copies made in Cuba.</span></p>
<p>As a rejoinder to the poisonous falsehoods of &#8220;This Revolution Will Not Be Televised,&#8221; a documentary was released in 2004 called &#8220;Radiografía De Una Mentira&#8221; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtDl7SuHRkM">(&#8220;X-Ray of a Lie</a>&#8220;). It was not a box office hit, having only been released (with English-subtitles) on YouTube and on DVDs.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Winning back hearts and minds bewitched by leftist propaganda is invariably an uphill battle.</span></p>
<p><em><strong>Read Part II of this article in tomorrow&#8217;s edition of FrontPage Magazine. </strong></em></p>
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		<title>New York Times Gives Space to Venezuelan Tyrant Rationing Food, Beating Protesters to Promote Himself</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/new-york-times-gives-space-to-venezuelan-tyrant-rationing-food-beating-protesters-to-promote-himself/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=new-york-times-gives-space-to-venezuelan-tyrant-rationing-food-beating-protesters-to-promote-himself</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/new-york-times-gives-space-to-venezuelan-tyrant-rationing-food-beating-protesters-to-promote-himself/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Apr 2014 17:32:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hugo Chavez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York Times]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222634</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Amnesty International has received dozens of accounts of torture]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Genesis-Carmona-3164631.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-222635" alt="Genesis-Carmona-3164631" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Genesis-Carmona-3164631-450x299.jpg" width="450" height="299" /></a></p>
<p>Can the Kim Jong-Un editorial praising himself for revolutionizing the North Korean tourism industry be far behind?</p>
<p>Venezuela, a country currently rationing food, many of whose stores are under military occupation, is not doing well under its insane leader Nicolas Maduro.</p>
<p>Maduro constantly accuses everyone, including the United States, of conspiring against him. He claimed that former dictator Hugo Chavez appeared to him in the form of a small bird. And then later on the wall of a subway. He threatened those who wouldn&#8217;t vote for him with an ancient curse. And he sent in soldiers to forcibly discount electronics.</p>
<p>So the <a href="http://freebeacon.com/national-security/nicolas-maduro-fact-check/">New York Times thought it would be a good idea to provide </a>space to some PR flack for him to claim that he reduced poverty.</p>
<blockquote><p>Maduro wrote in the Times that “now is a time for dialogue and diplomacy” in Venezuela and called for mediated talks to end two months of protests against his administration.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yes, it&#8217;s the perfect time. <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-01/amnesty-reports-dozens-of-venezuela-torture-accounts.html">Even Amnesty International agrees</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Amnesty International has received dozens of accounts of torture allegedly carried out by government security forces in Venezuela since protests that have left at least 37 dead broke out in February.</p>
<p>The Human Rights Center at the Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas is aware of 30 cases of torture or bad treatment in Venezuela since protests started&#8230;</p>
<p>“There are two cases that involved electric shocks, two cases that involved pepper gas and another two cases where they were doused with gasoline,” she said.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is how far into the gutter the New York Times has crawled&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>Maduro cited United Nations and World Bank data to argue that his government, as well his predecessor Hugo Chavez, had reduced income inequality and poverty in Venezuela.</p>
<p>While both of those measures have decreased since Chavez was first elected president in 1998, Maduro did not mention that Chavez himself acquired great personal wealth during his 14-year rule.</p>
<p>Chavez’s family now reportedly owns 17 country estates totaling more than 100,000 acres in the western state of Barinas, as well as assets of $550 million stored in various international bank accounts. Residents in the same region wait as long as three hours for basic provisions at grocery stores.</p>
<p>National Assembly Speaker Diosdado Cabello, a close confidant of Chavez and member of Maduro’s United Socialist Party, has allegedly amassed “a private fortune” through corruption and ties to regional drug traffickers. The Miami Herald reported accusations last week that Cabello received at least $50 million in bribes to overlook lucrative public contracts that were overpriced, according to a recent lawsuit.</p>
<p>About 90 percent of the country’s public hospitals lack vital supplies due to government-imposed dollar shortages and price caps. The government was forced to suspend organ donations, transplants, and non-emergency surgeries.</p></blockquote>
<p>And <a href="http://freebeacon.com/national-security/catholic-church-accuses-nicolas-maduro-of-brutally-repressing-protesters/">here&#8217;s a message from the Venezuelan church</a> that you won&#8217;t find in the New York Times which prefers to print the press releases of tyrants.</p>
<blockquote><p>Monsignor Diego Padron, leader of Venezuela’s conference of bishops, said Maduro was further implementing “the fatherland plan” of former longtime strongman Hugo Chavez:</p>
<p>“Within it they are hiding the promotion of a totalitarian-style system of government, putting in doubt its democratic credentials,” he said, reading a church communiqué.</p></blockquote>
<p>Another thing Obama has in common with Chavez.</p>
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		<title>Russia&#8217;s Threat in the Americas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/russias-threat-in-the-americas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=russias-threat-in-the-americas</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2014 04:56:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hague]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Latin America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicaragua]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[threat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222049</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Putin's disturbing military build-up in our own backyard. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/vladimir-putin-nicolas-maduro-evo-morales-cumbre-gas-rusia-foto-efe.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222122" alt="vladimir-putin-nicolas-maduro-evo-morales-cumbre-gas-rusia-foto-efe" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/vladimir-putin-nicolas-maduro-evo-morales-cumbre-gas-rusia-foto-efe.jpg" width="280" height="186" /></a></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">President Obama dismissed Russia as no more than a “regional power” in remarks he made to the press in The Hague on March 25</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, where he was attending a summit meeting on nuclear security. “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength, but out of weakness,” he said.</span></p>
<p>True, the Russian Federation is a shadow of the Soviet empire in its heyday. And Russia is not driven by a global Communist ideology that it seeks to spread to every part of the world in opposition to the capitalist democratic model, as the Soviet Union tried to do. But that does not make Russia a weak neighborhood bully posing little threat beyond its “immediate neighbors,” as President Obama seems to think. Mitt Romney was right when he said during the 2012 presidential campaign that Russia is “our number one geopolitical foe.”</p>
<p>First, consider Russia’s nuclear arsenal. According to a <a href="http://bos.sagepub.com/content/69/3/71.full.pdf">Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists study</a> published in May 2013, it was estimated that, as of March 2013, Russia had “a military stockpile of approximately 4,500 nuclear warheads, of which roughly 1,800 strategic warheads are deployed on missiles and at bomber bases.” Russia is also “modernizing its nuclear forces, replacing Soviet-era ballistic missiles with fewer improved missiles. In a decade, almost all Soviet-era weapons will be gone, leaving a smaller but still effective force that will be more mobile than what it replaced.”</p>
<p>While these are only estimates, since Russia is not transparent about how many nuclear weapons it has, the size of Russia’s arsenal and its ambitious modernization program do not connote the image of weakness that Obama wants to paint of Russia as a mere “regional” power. By way of comparison, the United States “has an estimated 4,650 nuclear warheads available for delivery by more than 800 ballistic missiles and aircraft,” according to a <a href="http://bos.sagepub.com/content/70/1/85.full.pdf">Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists study</a> published in January 2014.</p>
<p>These numbers and Russia’s modernization strategy should be placed in the context of a very disturbing statement made last December by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Dmitry Rogozin: “We have never diminished the importance of nuclear weapons—the weapon of requital—as the great balancer of chances.” Rogozin has said that Russia was prepared to use nuclear weapons if attacked first even by only conventional weapons.</p>
<p>Russia is also on the march far from its immediate neighborhood and much closer to the United States. According to Gen. James Kelly, commander of U.S. Southern Command, who discussed his concerns regarding the increased presence of Russia in Latin America at a Senate hearing earlier this month, there has been a “noticeable uptick in Russian power projection and security force personnel. It has been over three decades since we last saw this type of high-profile Russian military presence.”</p>
<p>Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced last month plans to build military bases in such countries as Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, as well as outside of Latin America including Vietnam, the Seychelles, and Singapore. “The talks are under way, and we are close to signing the relevant documents,” Shoigu said. Russia is also on the lookout for refueling sites for Russian strategic bombers on patrol.</p>
<p>Russia is already a major arms supplier to Venezuela, whose navy has conducted joint maneuvers with Russian ships. At least four Russian Navy ships visited Venezuela last August, the Venezuelan daily El Universal reported.</p>
<p>“Two Russian Tupolev Tu-160 Blackjack strategic bombers flew last October from an airbase in southwestern Russia and landed in Venezuela in routine exercise,” Russia&#8217;s Defense Ministry announced, according to the Voice of Russia. “The nuclear-capable bombers, which took off from the Engels airbase in the Volga region, ‘flew over the Caribbean, the eastern Pacific and along the southwestern coast of the North American continent, and landed at Maiquetia airfield in Venezuela,’ the ministry said in a statement.”</p>
<p>Nicolas Maduro, the President of Venezuela, is so enamored of Putin that he expressed support last year for the Russian president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. During a visit to Moscow by Maduro last summer, Maduro and Putin reaffirmed, in Putin’s words, &#8220;their wish for continuing their course towards strategic cooperation in all sectors.&#8221;</p>
<p>Putin was the first Russian president to visit Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet Union. <a href="http://english.pravda.ru/russia/politics/01-08-2012/121804-russia_army_base-0/">Pravda quoted Putin</a> as declaring in 2012 that Russia gained the consent of the Cuban leadership to place “the latest mobile strategic nuclear missiles ‘Oak’ on the island,” supposedly as a brush back against U.S. actions to create a buffer zone near Russia. Last month, according to a report by Fox News Latino, “the intelligence-gathering ship Viktor Leonov docked in Havana’s harbor without warning.” It was reportedly armed with 30mm guns and anti-aircraft missiles.</p>
<p>Left-wing Argentinian President Cristina Fernández is intent on forging closer relations with Russia, inviting Russia to invest in fuel projects. In return for Russia’s support of Argentina’s quest to annex the Falkland Islands, Fernández supported Putin’s grab of Crimea. Crimea &#8220;has always belonged to Russia,&#8221; she said, just as the Falkland Islands have &#8220;always belonged to Argentina.&#8221; She added that the Crimean referendum was &#8220;one of the famous referendums of self-determination.&#8221;</p>
<p>Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa praised Russia as a “great nation” during a visit to Moscow last October after Putin pledged to invest up to $1.5 billion into new domestic energy projects in Ecuador. Correa said Ecuador was also interested in buying Russian military equipment.</p>
<p>Brazil is planning to purchase short-to-medium-range surface-to-air Pantsir S1 missile batteries and Igla-S shoulder-held missiles from Russia. It has already bought 12 Mi-35 attack helicopters. This is all part of what Brazil views as a growing strategic relationship with Russia, as Brazil leads efforts to counter U.S. electronic surveillance that included alleged spying on Brazilian citizens. &#8220;More than buying military equipment, what we are seeking with Russia is a strategic partnership based on the joint development of technology,&#8221; said Brazilian Defense Minister Celso Amorim after meeting with his Russian counterpart.</p>
<p>After Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinista revolution, returned to power in Nicaragua in 2007, Russia and Nicaragua have moved in the direction of a strategic economic and military relationship. In October 2013, for example, Nicaragua and Russia signed a memorandum of international security cooperation. Russia’s Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev noted during his visit to Nicaragua that “Nicaragua is an important partner and friend of Russia in Latin America,” pointing to the coincidence of views of the two countries’ authorities “on many issues.” For his part, Ortega said: “We are very grateful and very much appreciate the Russian people’s support of our country.”  Ortega welcomed the arrival of two Russian strategic bombers Tupolev Tu-160.  Ortega added that Putin had sent him a letter, in which the Russian leader reaffirmed his “readiness to continue to work together with our country.”</p>
<p>According to a March 2014 report by the Strategic Culture Foundation, a progressive, pro-Russian think tank, Nicaragua’s</p>
<blockquote><p>parliament has ratified a cabinet resolution allowing Russian military divisions, ships and aircraft to visit the republic during the first half of 2014 for experience sharing and training of military personnel of the Central American republic. Furthermore, the parliament has approved the participation of Russian military personnel in joint patrols of the republic&#8217;s territorial waters in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean from January 1 through June 30, 2015.</p></blockquote>
<p>Russia is also forging a closer relationship with El Salvador, which has been led by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (“FMLN”) that arose out of a left-wing guerrilla movement from the country&#8217;s 1979-1992 civil war. Leftist ex-guerrilla Sanchez Ceren has just won the presidential election. He can be expected to build on the “Federal Law On Ratification of the Agreement on the Foundations of Relations” between the Russian Federation and the Republic of El Salvador, signed by Vladimir Putin in November 2012. It was the first interstate agreement between the two countries since they established diplomatic relations in 1992.</p>
<p>In fact, given Ceren’s background &#8211; one of five top guerrilla commanders during the civil war that left 76,000 dead and over 12,000 missing &#8211; we can expect a more avowedly anti-U.S. government that will welcome Russia’s outstretched arms. After all, the FMLN leadership during the civil war described its own ideology as “Marxism-Leninism.”</p>
<p>On a regional level, the Strategic Culture Foundation has reported that the Central American Common Market, which includes Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, “advocates the creation of a free trade zone with the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus.”</p>
<p>Foreign ministers from members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and Russia declared their intention, after meeting in Moscow last May, that they were working to establish a means of continuous dialogue “to discuss and synchronize positions on international issues.” CELAC includes thirty-three countries in the Americas, but the United States and Canada are excluded.</p>
<p>&#8220;Imperial Russia never left, to be blunt,&#8221; Stephen Blank, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council said as quoted in Deutsche Welle. “What they&#8217;re looking for in Latin America is great-power influence, they have never forsaken that quest. There&#8217;s no doubt that Moscow is dead serious about seeking naval bases and port access in Latin America.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the Middle East, also out of range of Russia’s “immediate neighbors,” Russia continues to prop up the Assad regime in Syria with increased shipment of arms. Reuters reported in January 2014 that “[I]n recent weeks Russia has stepped up supplies of military gear to Syria, including armored vehicles, drones and guided bombs.” Putin also managed to out-maneuver Obama regarding the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons program, buying more time for Assad and enhancing his legitimacy.</p>
<p>Moreover, Russia is running interference for Assad at the United Nations Security Council, where Russia, along with China, vetoed a series of resolutions aimed at condemning and sanctioning the Assad regime. Its veto power in the Security Council puts Russia in parity with the other four permanent members of the Security Council – the U.S., the United Kingdom, France and China. As Russia demonstrated with regard to Syria as well as the veto it recently exercised to block a Security Council resolution on Crimea, Russia is exploiting this lever of “soft power” to exert its influence on the global stage.</p>
<p>Russia is also continuing to cultivate stronger ties with Iran, while also participating in the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program that include the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany. Russia is one of Iran’s leading trading partners, selling Iran nuclear technology and arms. When Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif visited Moscow last January he extended an invitation to Vladimir Putin to visit Tehran. Putin replied: “I hope to visit you in Tehran very soon. We have a large bilateral agenda. This relates firstly to our trade and economic ties, of course.” Putin also went out of his way to praise the Iranian regime, declaring that the nuclear negotiations were advancing because of “the efforts of the Iranian authorities and the stance of the Iranian authorities.” More recently, because of the mounting tensions over the Ukraine crisis, Russia has threatened to stop cooperating with respect to the nuclear negotiations with Iran. That may not mean very much, considering Russia’s existing back door dealings with Iran that reduce Iran’s economic incentives to negotiate in good faith. However, just by making this threat and having it paid attention to in Washington and other world capitals, Russia has made a point regarding its influence beyond its “immediate neighbors.”</p>
<p>Finally, there is the whole battleground of cyber warfare which has no geographical boundaries. An article in the winter 2014 publication of <i>inFocus Quarterly</i>, titled <a href="http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/4924/russian-cyber-capabilities">“Russian Cyber Capabilities, Policy and Practice”</a> by David J. Smith, Senior Fellow and Cyber Center Director at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and Director of the Georgian Security Analysis Center in Tbilisi, paints a grim picture.</p>
<p>“Russia—its government and a motley crew of sometimes government-sponsored but always government-connected cyber-criminals and youth group members—has integrated cyber operations into its military doctrine,” according to Mr. Smith. Russia “has used cyber tools against enemies foreign and domestic, and is conducting strategic espionage against the United States.”</p>
<p>After describing the multifaceted Russian approach to information warfare and the government’s close links with the “thriving cyber-criminal industry” and extensive well-trained youth groups all too happy to sell their services to the government, Mr. Smith concluded:  “In sum, Russia—in its capabilities and its intent—presents a major cyber challenge to the United States.”</p>
<p>Russia is not a superpower on the order of the former Soviet Union. But Putin’s animosity towards the United States, coupled with Russia’s expanding role internationally through alliances with countries in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East, Russia’s exploitation of its permanent member status on the UN Security Council and its nuclear arms and cyber warfare capabilities, all add up to a very dangerous geopolitical foe.  President Obama needs to wake up to the fact that Vladimir Putin will not be content to play only in his own neighborhood, and that he has a variety of tools at hand to cause serious mischief far from Russia’s own borders.</p>
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		<title>Latin Leftists with Blood on Their Hands</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/latin-leftists-with-blood-on-their-hands/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=latin-leftists-with-blood-on-their-hands</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2014 04:06:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222069</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ignoring human rights abuses in Venezuela in exchange for cheap oil. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bolivarian-national-guard.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222077" alt="bolivarian-national-guard" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bolivarian-national-guard.jpg" width="350" height="289" /></a>It was one of the more clever protests against Venezuela&#8217;s repressive socialist regime – and specifically, against the region&#8217;s leftists governments who are supporting it. But this time, there were no street barricades or massive marches protesting what Venezuela-style socialism has wrought: out-of-control crime, food shortages, and a dysfunctional economy. No tear gas or rubber bullets were fired by Venezuela&#8217;s security forces or Cuban agents and goons. No </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> thugs showed up on motorcycles.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This was a remarkably peaceful <a href="http://www.el-nacional.com/politica/Estudiantes-protestan-frente-embajadas-ONU_0_378562316.html">student protest</a> &#8212; one utilizing headline-grabbing political theater to expose the moral corruption of Venezuela&#8217;s regional allies. Earlier this week, scores of students gathered outside four embassies: Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Nicaragua. Like 18 other left-leaning nations in the Caribbean and Latin America, they are either ideological soulmates of oil-rich Venezuela or enjoy its oil largesse. Not surprisingly, they have remained silent over Venezuela&#8217;s brutal crackdown against massive anti-government protests that have raged for nearly two months &#8212; leaving at least 35 people dead and hundreds injured. Most were students. Hugo Chávez, a firebrand socialist, used sweetheart oil deals to make friends and build anti-American alliances soon after becoming president in 1999.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Besides the obligatory protest signs, the students brought something else: oil barrels. They lined several of them up outside each embassy, and then tossed fake dollars bills around them. At issue for the students was last Friday&#8217;s shameful meeting of the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., where Venezuelan opposition lawmaker María Corina Machado got a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304026304579453831436990584?mg=reno64-wsj">cold shoulder </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">from most OAS members. They had no interest in hearing her discuss Venezuela&#8217;s rights abuses.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The OAS&#8217;s mission includes promoting peace and democracy; yet its members argued for hours about whether Machado, a 46-year-old engineer, could or couldn&#8217;t speak. Coming to her defense, Panama made her a temporary part of its delegation &#8212; a procedural maneuver it hoped would allowed her to discuss Venezuela&#8217;s right abuses in a formal and public session. But Venezuela&#8217;s left-leaning allies ultimately prevailed, voting only to hear her during a private session reserved for ad hoc matters. The vote was 22 to 11.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Keeping the session private was unusual for an organization claiming to support transparency; whose charter allows for sanctioning rights abusers within its ranks. Yet Venezuela&#8217;s OAS member Carmen Luisa Velasquez defended the closed session and, according to The Wall Street Journal, provoked loud laughter when commending that it would be preformed &#8220;[w]ith total transparency: in privacy.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It was an Orwellian remark, the sort of language you might expect in a communist state like Cuba, where language is turned on its head to serve the state. Machado said as much, blaming the behavior of the OAS on the influence of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and Cuba. Under Maduro, Cuba has gained an even bigger role in Venezuela than it had during Hugo Chávez&#8217;s days, according to many observers. Chávez died of cancer a year ago.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;They are afraid of the truth,&#8221; Machado told reporters after the OAS meeting. &#8220;They don&#8217;t want the truth to come out about the massive repression taking place in Venezuela. They don&#8217;t want it to be known in the world and in our America.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Machado is hardly alone in speaking out against Cuba. In recent months, its growing influence in Venezuela has provoked anti-Cuban protest marches; anti-Cuban graffiti (&#8220;Cuba Out!); and Cuba has been a frequent topic on social media. Venezuela&#8217;s twitter users &#8212; when not blocked by Venezuela&#8217;s Internet censors &#8212; have buzzed with accounts of Cuban goons and military equipment playing a part in the brutal crack-down of the student-led protest movement. Cuba receives 100,000 barrels of Venezuela oil a day in exchange for various types of technical assistance. It has long regarded Venezuela as a prize, having sponsored guerrilla insurgencies there in the 1960s. Recently, El Nuevo Herald, sister paper of The Miami Herald, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.elnuevoherald.com/2014/03/18/1704332/cubanos-dirigen-a-paramilitares.html">documented </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">the extensive role that Cuba&#8217;s security forces are playing in Venezuela, based on interviews with ex-intelligence agents in Venezuela.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Cubanization of Venezuela is not only reflected in the repression which the OAS doesn&#8217;t want to hear about, but in the Maduro administration&#8217;s harassment and marginalization of opposition leaders &#8212; a strategy right out of the Castro brothers&#8217; playbooks. After addressing the OAS, for instance, Machado was called a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/venezuela-investigation-maria-corina-machado-protests">traitor</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by some Venezuelans lawmakers. The leader of Venezuela&#8217;s congress, Diosdado Cabello, even said her OAS appearance had violated the constitution; and so she had lost her seat in the legislature and was no longer immune from being prosecuted for allegedly provoking violent protests.</span></p>
<p>And earlier this week, security agents <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/20/us-venezuela-protests-idUSBREA2J02Y20140320">arrested</a> one opposition mayor, and another was sentenced to ten months in prison. Both were accused of inciting rebellion by having failed to dismantle street barricades set up by anti-government protesters. This follows last month&#8217;s arrest of opposition leader Leopoldo López, a former mayor, for allegedly inciting protesters; or what President Maduro claimed was a call to murder, arson, and terrorism &#8212; charges Amnesty International called a &#8220;politically motivated attempt to silence dissent. &#8220;To this day, no evidence of any kind has been presented,&#8221; López <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/opinion/venezuelas-failing-state.html">wrote</a> in a New York Times op-ed.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Machado, for her part, is no stranger to Chavista thuggishness. Last April, Chavista lawmakers </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/venezuela/140321/oas-washington-venezuelan-congresswoman-maria-machado">attacked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> her in congress and broke her nose.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">OAS members who supported Panama&#8217;s effort to give Machado a public hearing were: Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, United States, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Paraguay, and Perú. Among those opposing Panama&#8217;s effort: Brazil, Nicaragua, Uruguay, El Salvador, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and the Caribbean countries minus Barbados, which abstained.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Obama administration has spoken out against Venezuela&#8217;s human rights violations, but it has yet to take action. While the OAS meeting was discouraging for U.S. interests and supporters of democracy, it did have an upside, as </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://caracaschronicles.com/2014/03/21/were-not-that-isolated/">pointed out </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">by Venezuela analyst Francisco Toro at Caracas Chronicles. &#8220;Nearly twice as many people live in the eleven countries that voted against the Maduro regime than in countries that voted with it. Out of the 17 Spanish speaking countries in OAS, 9 voted against the Maduro regime, just 8 for it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Machado reportedly took this video with her to explain what has been happening in Venezuela:</span></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/p6mPR25qfu8" height="315" width="560" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>The video depicts a grim reality for Venezuela. Unfortunately, the country continues to roil, with reconciliation still a distant possibility.</p>
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		<title>El Salvador&#8217;s Dance with the Devil</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/el-salvadors-dance-with-the-devil/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=el-salvadors-dance-with-the-devil</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Mar 2014 04:20:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[El Salvador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[guerrilla]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marxist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salvador Sanchez Ceren]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221679</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Another Venezuela in the making? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Salvador-Sanchez-Ceren.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221681" alt="Salvador-Sanchez-Ceren" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Salvador-Sanchez-Ceren-450x327.jpg" width="315" height="229" /></a>Some leftists have smartened up. Guerrilla insurgencies are passé for them. So are AK-47s from Cuba or the Soviet bloc or China.</span></p>
<p>They saw an easier way to seize power; so they got shaves, put on suites, and ran for office claiming to be left-leaning pragmatists. But after their<strong> </strong>election wins, they took advantage of a polarized citizenry and weak institutions to tear the system apart – more or less legally – from inside out.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The stealth approach worked well for Hugo Chávez in Venezuela where </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.elnuevoherald.com/2014/03/18/1704332/cubanos-dirigen-a-paramilitares.html">Cuban agents </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">and goons are now pitching in to put down anti-government protesters fed up with Venezuela&#8217;s “21st Century Socialism.” During his first election campaign, Chavez </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-paulin/hugo-chavez-%E2%80%98i-am-not-a-socialist%E2%80%99/">denied </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">he was a socialist and portrayed himself as a moderate despite having led an aborted coup against a democratic government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Now, El Salvador seems poised to follow that same path after a former Marxist guerrilla leader – 69-year-old Salvador Sánchez Cerén – was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-el-salvador-presidential-election-20140313,0,1042688.story#axzz2wT5rV9EY">elected</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> president by a razor-thin margin and amid allegations of voting irregularities, which included </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579423943589870048?KEYWORDS=El+Salvador&amp;mg=reno64-wsj">claims</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that gang members were recruited to intimidate voters who opposed him. Sánchez Cerén had been El Salvador&#8217;s vice president &#8212; a hardliner in the ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) party, named after a legendary Salvadorian rebel leader, Farabundo Martí, from the 1930s.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sánchez Cerén had an uneasy relationship with President Mauricio Funes, a 54-year-old former television reporter who had never been a guerrilla but identified with the left.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Five years ago, the two teamed up in a union of political convenience that drew voters from across the political spectrum – and they won. Their election victory ended nearly two decades of conservative rule by the center-right National Republican Alliance (Arena). But President Funes&#8217;s political strategy was a pact with the devil. During his 5-year-term, his relationship with Sánchez Cerén and other FMLN hard-liners become increasingly strained, according to political observers.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Arena has yet to accept the outcome. But barring unexpected developments, Sánchez Cerén will take office on June 1. He will be the first guerrilla leader to govern the Central American country, where an atrocity-filled civil war raged nearly 13 years, killing at least 75,000 people and sending tens of thousands of refugees to the U.S. A peace accord was signed in 1992 between the military-led government and leftist groups that had fought under the FMLN umbrella. They were subsequently absorbed into the FMLN political party.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuela&#8217;s turmoil overshadowed El Salvador&#8217;s bitterly contested election; for 50 percent of Salvadorians deeply fear the ideological left. They doubted Sánchez Cerén was a pragmatist who would work with opposition leaders and uphold El Salvador&#8217;s constitution. They had good reasons to be afraid: Sánchez Cerén has a long history as a Marxist ideologue. What&#8217;s more, he had a hand in murder and kidnappings during El Salvador&#8217;s horrific civil war – a dark past mentioned in a secret U.S. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09SANSALVADOR928_a.html">diplomatic cable </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">made public by WikiLeaks. His “commitment to law and order cannot be easily assumed,” observed the missive for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dated September 30, 2009, and signed by Deputy Chief of Mission Robert Blau.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sánchez Cerén, an admirer of Hugo Chavez&#8217;s Bolivarian revolution, received 50.11% of the vote compared with 49.89% for Norman Quijano of Arena. Quijano was a former mayor of San Salvador, the nation’s capital.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A mere 6,364 votes carried Sánchez Cerén to victory in a run-off election on March 9. Some 3 million ballots were cast in the country of 6.2 million people.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Amid allegations of voter fraud, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal did a partial recount and, four days later, declared Sánchez Cerén the winner. Arena supporters have reason to be suspicious of the tribunal&#8217;s decision, because as some political analysts </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2014/03/el-salvadors-election-0">pointed out</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, most of its members have ties to the FMLN. Quijano hinted that the military might intervene, but military leaders said they were keeping out of the bitterly contested election.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sánchez Cerén grew up in a working-class family &#8212; the ninth of 12 children whom his parents struggled to support. Five years ago, his campaign for the vice presidency was overshadowed by Funes&#8217;s campaign, but his entrance into the political arena did attract the attention of Washington and the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador. Embassy officials seemed skeptical that Sánchez Cerén had indeed traded the bullet for the ballot. They wondered if he remained a Marxist ideologue who was merely echoing the talking points of FMLN&#8217;s more moderate presidential candidate.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“We are struck by the irony of Sánchez Cerén commenting on the need for tolerance at the end of a week where media featured his having ordered summary executions of accused infiltrators during the civil war,” observed a confidential </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.wikileaks.elfaro.net/es/201105/cables/4199/">diplomatic cable </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">dated September 26, 2008, and signed by then-U.S. Ambassador Charles L. Glazer. “It is still an open question whether he or Funes calls the FMLN shots.” The cable&#8217;s title: “FMLN VP Candidate Sánchez Cerén: Hard-liner&#8217;s Soft Sell.” It was sent to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among others.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last week, after the electoral tribune ruled that Sánchez Cerén had won fair and square, the president-elect declared: “We have the people’s sovereign mandate; starting June 1 we will govern for five more years. We are ready for a dialogue to build El Salvador.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But Diario Latino, a Salvadorian newspaper, summed up the fears of 50 percent of the population with an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.diariolatino.net/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=15692:se-le-puede-creer-a-sanchez-ceren-que-no-reformara-la-constitucion-&amp;catid=37:editorial&amp;Itemid=70">editorial</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> stating the obvious: Sánchez Cerén had dedicated much of his life to teaching and defending “Marxist-Leninist principles” and thus could be counted on to take El Salvador toward socialism.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sánchez Cerén, for his part, provided the first indication of where he was heading when naming his </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://centralamericanpolitics.blogspot.com/2014/03/here-guerrilla-there-guerrilla.html">transition team </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">– six former guerillas. At least two were mentioned in U.S. diplomatic cables for their unsavory pasts as guerrilla fighters: José Luis Merino was involved in arms trafficking and Manuel Melgar in murder.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Funes was unable to run for reelection because El Salvador limits presidents to 5-year terms. But he had left El Salvador poised for growth.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“The last government has prepared the ground work in many ways for private investment to take off. It’s not for a lack of policy, the issue is political,” </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-13/el-salvador-s-sanchez-ceren-wins-disputed-election.html">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Joydeep Mukherji, a managing director for Standard &amp; Poor&#8217;s during a conference call with Bloomberg News.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even so, Sánchez Cerén will lead a country with one of the world&#8217;s worst murder rates caused by violent gangs. The government has negotiated a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/02/economist-explains">truce</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> with them but has yet to rein them in; they </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579423943589870048?KEYWORDS=El+Salvador&amp;mg=reno64-wsj">control neighborhoods</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and extort money from residents and businesses. About </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://data.worldbank.org/country/el-salvador">35 percent </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">of the population remains in poverty.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If Sánchez Cerén lives up to his reputation, expect to see El Salvador descend into Venezuela-style political chaos and economic decline, and for another wave of Salvadorian refugees to flee to America. President Funes must be regretting his pact with the devil right about now.</span></p>
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		<title>Communist Guerrilla Leader &#8216;Wins&#8217; El Salvador Elections</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/communist-guerrilla-leader-wins-el-salvador-elections/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=communist-guerrilla-leader-wins-el-salvador-elections</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:29:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Columbia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[drug]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[El Salvador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FARC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Faribundo Marti Liberation Front]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salvador Sanchez Ceren]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221508</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Another Latin American country succumbs to the communist-narco gang alliance. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/555.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221509" alt="555" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/555.png" width="290" height="240" /></a>A former Communist guerrilla commander linked to various butcheries during El Salvador’s savage civil war in the 1980s won that nation’s Presidential elections this week by a squeaker.</span></p>
<p>Nowadays this former FMLF (<i>Faribundo Marti Liberation Front</i>) commander is accused of partnering with murderous Salvadoran drug-smuggling and human-trafficking gangs that operate in 40 U.S. cities, have been declared  “international criminal organizations” by the U.S. Treasury department, and have had members convicted of multiple murders, rapes and tortures within sight of the U.S. capitol. One of these rape-murders was of Washington intern Chandra Levy.</p>
<p>Salvador Sanchez Ceren is the “former” Communist guerrilla declared winner of El Salvador’s presidential elections this week by 6,600 votes. Since 2009, he had served as El Salvador’s Vice President. Ceren’s electoral opponents of the center-right ARENA party alleged blatant Venezuelan-mentored electoral fraud. But the Salvadoran “Supreme Electoral Tribunal” (staffed and controlled by Ceren’s party) overruled ARENA.</p>
<p>Roger Noriega, a former assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs with many high-level contacts in the region warns that El Salvador’s FMLF is linked, not only to the Communist leadership of the Castro-Venezuela axis, but to the biggest and wealthiest narco-traffickers in the hemisphere, <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/03/03/ms-13s-secretly-backing-ruling-party-in-el-salvador/">along with their distributors and retailers in the U.S. </a></p>
<p>Chief among these U.S.-based retailers are the Salvadoran MS-13 and MS-18 gangs. These are not your father’s “gangs,” by the way. Latin gangs have come a long way since the Sharks of Westside Story. And “street gangs” in general have come a long way since the Cripps and Bloods. In 2012, the Obama administration declared MS-13 an “international criminal organization,” quite a distinction for a “street gang” and the first case of such an “honor” for a gang operating in the U.S. Some background:</p>
<p>In the 1980s the Cuba-Soviet backed FMLF waged a terror campaign trying to Cubanize the small and impoverished Central American nation of El Salvador. The government fought back and tens of thousands of Salvadorans perished in a variety of ways on both sides of what became a full-fledged and—as usual for such conflicts&#8211; brutal civil war. The U.S. media habitually pegged <i>all </i>resulting deaths on “right-wing death squads”—often spicing up the description with “U.S.-backed” or “U.S.-trained.”</p>
<p>It’s an old story for anyone who fights Communist terror. “If rape’s inevitable” goes the joke, “lay back and enjoy it!” Same apparently goes for Communist revolution. Any resistance will only make things worse and get one demonized by all “respectable” academic and media precincts. There are no historical exceptions to this rule. From Pilsudski and Horthy in Eastern Europe, through Franco in Spain, to Pinochet in Chile— all violently (and successfully) resisted the violent communization of their nations.  And all sport horns and a tail in media/academic depictions.</p>
<p>After being crushed militarily thanks to help from the Reagan administration in the 1980s, the FMLF renounced violence and went respectable as a political party in the 1990s. Now they steal and buy elections. Chicago politics will get you what Bolshevik terror couldn’t, seems like the new motto for Latin American socialists.</p>
<p>This stealing and buying of elections is made easy by the billions of dollars flooding into the area from narco-trafficking. So essentially it’s facilitated by Americans’ appetite for drugs.  Nowadays “revolution” in Latin American is all about narcotrafficking. The Best and the Brightest (and most experienced) in this field is Colombia’s FARC (<i>Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia</i>). Colombian officials estimate the FARC’s annual earnings somewhere <a href="http://en.mercopress.com/2012/10/25/colombia-says-farc-has-an-annual-budget-of-2.4bn-and-an-army-of-8.147">between $2.4 and $3.5 billion.</a></p>
<p>The Marxist mumo-jumbo still pops up in “communiqués” and press releases from the FARC from their Venezuelan <i>Chavista </i>allies, and from<i> </i>the FMLF itself<i>. </i>But after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Latin American Communists of every stripe found their new vocations (and funding) in narco-trafficking.</p>
<p>Hollywood tells us that mobsters hate commies. “I kill a communist for fun!” snarls narco-trafficking capo Tony Montana in Oliver Stone’s 1983 screenplay for Scarface. “For a green card, I gonna carve him up real nice!”</p>
<p>In real life it doesn’t work that way. To wit: &#8220;Thanks to Fidel Castro,&#8221; boasted late FARC commander Tiro-Fijo in a 2002 interview, &#8220;we are now a powerful army, not a hit and run band.&#8221; A report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency attributes half of the world’s cocaine supply to Columbia’s FARC, the largest, oldest and most murderous terrorist group in our Hemisphere, whose murder toll dwarfs that of Al Qaeda and the Taliban <i>combined</i> and includes many murdered U.S. citizens. Yes, this same drug-running FARC thanks Fidel Castro for their immense fame and fortune.</p>
<p>&#8220;We lived like kings in Cuba,&#8221; revealed Medellin drug Cartel bosses Carlos Lehder and Alejandro Bernal during their trials in the &#8217;80s and &#8217;90s. <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">&#8220;Fidel made sure nobody bothered us.&#8221;</a></p>
<p>Venezuela’s oil windfall (the nation supposedly sits atop the largest oil reserves on earth) also helps the area’s election-rigging and vote-buying by allied parties and essentially keeps Cuba afloat financially.  Alas, Venezuela’s “21st Century Socialism” is having the predictable effects on oil production. Remember Reagan’s old joke about a sand shortage if socialists controlled the Sahara dessert? Well the same punch line is playing out real-time in socialist Venezuela with oil.  Venezuela’s oil exports to the U.S. dropped from $41.9 billion in 2011 to $30.8 billion in 2013, for instance.</p>
<p>So now many <i>Chavista</i> officials are “wetting their beaks” (in the famous phrase of Don Fanucci in The Godfather) from the narco-trafficking windfall that links Venezuelan officialdom with neighboring Colombia’s FARC and with El Salvador’s FMLF. These latter sit strategically on the main route for FARC/Venezuelan drugs to the U.S. market.</p>
<p>In the &#8217;80s the drug-trafficking route often went from Colombia straight across the Caribbean to Florida, with Cuba as a way station and toll-booth. &#8220;The case we have against Fidel and Raul Castro right now is much stronger than the one we had against Manuel Noriega in 1988,&#8221; a federal prosecutor in south Florida told the Miami Herald in 1996. Four grand juries at the time had disclosed Cuba&#8217;s role in drug smuggling into the U.S. The Clinton administration, hellbent on cozying up to Castro at the time, refused to press ahead with the case against the Castro brothers&#8217; dope trafficking.</p>
<p>Now the main route takes the Colombian-Venezuelan drugs through Central America and Mexico, and eventually across the southwest U.S. border, usually with the help of the FMLF and their Mexican gang allies. Our Southern Command headquartered in Panama does its best to stop them before they reach Mexico but given its status as the red-headed stepchild of U.S. overseas commands it can’t do much.</p>
<p>“Because of asset shortfalls [i.e. Defense budgets cuts],” admitted South-Com commander Marine Gen. John Kelly to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, “we’re unable to get after 74 percent of suspected maritime drug smuggling. <a href="http://www.military.com/daily-news/2014/03/17/southcom-pushes-for-more-anti-drug-ships.html">I simply sit and watch it go by.”</a></p>
<p>Sanchez-Ceren’s “electoral” victory will not make General Kelly’s job any easier.</p>
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		<title>Oliver Stone Does Venezuela</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/oliver-stone-does-venezuela/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=oliver-stone-does-venezuela</link>
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		<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>
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		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220628</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The PR king of government oppression. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/venezuela.png"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-220728" alt="venezuela" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/venezuela.png" width="319" height="247" /></a>Famous foe of imperialism Oliver Stone just premiered his documentary <i>“Mi Amigo </i><em>Hugo</em><i>”</i> <i>(“</i><em>My Friend Hugo</em><i>”) </i>in the Cuban colony of Venezuela<i>. </i>As the title suggests, the film honors Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s late Venezuelan viceroy. The film was released amidst lavish celebrations on the first anniversary of Chavez’s death and broadcast on the Cuba-run TV channel of the Cuban viceroyalty of Venezuela. For the occasion, Raul Castro himself graced his South American dominion with a visit.</p>
<p>“Venezuela today is a country that is practically occupied by the henchmen of two international criminals, Cuba&#8217;s Castro brothers,” recently declared Luis Miquilena<b> </b>who served as<b> </b>Hugo Chavez’ Minister of Justice for three years before finally resigning in disgust. “They (the Cubans) have introduced in Venezuela a true army of occupation. The Cubans run the maritime ports, airports, communications, the most essential issues in Venezuela. We are in the hands of a foreign country. <a href="http://www.capitolhillcubans.com/2014/03/chavez-mentor-venezuela-has-been.html">This is the darkest period in our history.”</a></p>
<p>The Chavez documentary comes twelve years after the premiere at the Sundance Film Festival of Oliver Stone’s documentary <i>“Comandante,”</i> which honored Venezuela’s foreign emperor himself:  Fidel Castro.</p>
<p>&#8221;I am like a prisoner,&#8221; Castro laments to Stone near the beginning of “<i>Comandante.</i>” The Stalinist dictator was referring to the travails that accompany his selfless vocation of running Cuba.  “This is my cell,&#8221; he sighs while pointing around.  At this declaration from the jailer of more political prisoner per-capita than Stalin, the famously “edgy” Oliver Stone reveals no hint of a smirk. And no snarkiness tinged his follow-up questions, most of which hovered right over home plate. When a few questions strayed from the banal talking points and Castro answered evasively, Stone twinkled that, “his elusiveness is always charming.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8221;Fidel is magnetic and charismatic,&#8221; Stone concluded.  “He is a movie star.&#8221;</p>
<p>Alas, he’s getting a little long in the tooth for close-ups. So Stone has since shifted the focus of his camera lenses over to the more camera-friendly subject of Castro’s colony, Venezuela.</p>
<p>Nowadays the Cuba-enthroned emperor of Venezuela more or less reigns while his baby brother Raul rules. The actual nuts and bolts of running the empire, which include stealing 100,000 barrels of oil daily from their Venezuelan viceroyalty as priority, comes courtesy of the 50,000 Cubans who infest Venezuela and run the colony’s vital police and intelligence functions, among many others. It took the Castros some doing, but they finally got Venezuela in the bag. To wit:</p>
<p>Fidel Castro’s very first trip abroad as head of state was to Venezuela where on January 25, 1959 he implored Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt to “join” his “master plan <i>against</i> the gringos.” The newly elected Venezuelan president soon learned that his “joining” would consist of massive loans, financial aid, and shipments of free oil to Castro from Venezuela. So Betancourt brusquely declined the “invitation.” It took Hugo Chavez for Venezuela to finally “join” Castro’s master plan.</p>
<p>Please note the date and the aggressive anti-U.S. policy Castro proposed to Venezuela. That was only two weeks after Fidel Castro <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">(with U.S. help)</a> entered Havana. And yet you’ll be hard-pressed to find a U.S. “academic expert” who doesn’t swear up and down that in 1959-61 the U.S. arrogantly, selfishly and stupidly snubbed a friendly Fidel Castro and pushed him—kicking and screaming, no less&#8211; into the arms of the Russians.</p>
<p>As the title of Stone’s new film suggests, the filmmaker does not hide his veneration for Cuban satrap Hugo Chavez any more than he did for his mass-murdering, war-mongering colonial master Fidel Castro. This makes Stone’s propaganda films for Latin American communists less effective than those of his fellow filmmaker Robert Redford, who with his Motorcycle Diaries performed services for the image of Che Guevara that no Madison Avenue agency could hope to match for a client. To compare Stone to Redford simply compare Julius Streicher to Leni Riefensthal.</p>
<p>Oliver Stone claims that the massive protests currently rocking Venezuela are simply the CIA’s handiwork, with a few Venezuelans in the role of local patsies. Given all the hidden hands and plotters and “patsies” in Stone’s movie JFK, we can barely wait to see what a tangled web Stone will eventually weave regarding the current Venezuelan crisis.</p>
<p>Three weeks before departing for Venezuela to premier his communist infomercial Oliver Stone was among the honored speakers at the recent “2014 International Students for Liberty Conference.”  The crowd at this Libertarian-Palooza, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/oliver-stone-and-the-libertarians-215632840.html">according to some accounts</a>, was absolutely mitten with a man who devotes much of his time and fortune to glorifying dictators who abolish private property and murder entrepreneurs. Apparently these aren’t your father’s libertarians.</p>
<p>The only fuddy-duddy scoffers were a handful of Latin American students with first-hand experience of the handiwork by the communists Stone exalts in speech, print and film. Funny how that works.</p>
<p>Stone’s advocacy and infomercials for Castroism and Chavismo have brought him under fire recently in social media. But he’s been quick to fire back. “You (critics) remind me of crazy Tea Partiers!” he recently snarled on his Facebook page.  More horribly still his critics are: “Similar to the right-wing Florida Cuban exiles who’ve helped keep the US in a dungeon of ignorance.”</p>
<p>Speaking of dungeons, ignorance and Cuban exiles.  Among these latter Stone can find the most and the longest suffering political prisoners in the modern history of the human race. This suffering came in torture-chambers and dungeons designed by his Stalinist idol <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">and his KGB-mentors</a>. Let’s hope Oliver Stone is merely ignorant of that.</p>
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		<title>Venezuelans Bleed Under Socialist Oppression</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelans-bleed-while-left-worships-their-government/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelans-bleed-while-left-worships-their-government</link>
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		<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>
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		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220630</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While the Hollywood elite cheer on the government. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/A-student-takes-part-in-a-011.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220656" alt="A student takes part in a protest against Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/A-student-takes-part-in-a-011.jpg" width="286" height="191" /></a>Massive and bloody anti-government protests have been roiling Venezuela for more than a month – provoked by an out-of-control murder rate, food shortages, and myriad instances of inept governance. But that didn&#8217;t stop a rogues&#8217; gallery of Latin leftists, including Cuban President Raul Castro, from turning up in Caracas to honor the late Hugo Chávez on the first anniversary of the Venezuelan leader&#8217;s death.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Security forces and pro-government militias have responded with a vengeance against the protesters, leaving at least 21 dead and hundreds injured. Most were students.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The tear gas, rubber bullets and </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> thugs on motorcycles, however, were out of sight and mind for Castro and fellow leftists, including Bolivian President Evo Morales and his Nicaraguan counterpart Daniel Ortega. Like Castro, they enjoyed Chávez&#8217;s oil largess over the years. Chávez had promoted himself as the savior of Venezuela&#8217;s poor yet gave away billions of dollars of their oil wealth as a way to expand his influence and build alliances against the United States. The firebrand socialist, famous for his colorful anti-American broadsides, died a year ago of cancer, on March 5th, at age 58.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A couple of Hollywood heavy weights – director Oliver Stone and actor Danny Glover – lent their celebrity to Wednesday&#8217;s ceremonies that included a military parade and civic events. Glover and Stone considered Chávez a friend and ideological soulmate.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chávez&#8217;s hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro – a 51-year-old former bus driver and union leader – led the ceremonies at “El Comandante&#8217;s&#8221; sacred tomb – situated in a former military museum in Caracas that had served as the command center for a disorganized and bloody coup attempt that Lt. Colonel Hugo Chávez led on February 4, 1992, against a democratic government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Hugo Chávez was, without a doubt, the great leader who brought democracy. Never in history has there been a leader who so authentically loved the people of this country,&#8221; Maduro</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579421441297723368?KEYWORDS=Venezuela&amp;mg=reno64-wsj"> told </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">cheering Chávez loyalists. The ceremony featured goose-steeping soldiers, columns of tanks, and low-flying Russian Sukhoi jets.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A lavish spectacle, it came amid the economic and social chaos produced by what Chávez called “21st Century Socialism,&#8221; and the bread-and-circuses populism is being deepened by Maduro in the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation. Venezuela has long been a prize for Cuba, which sponsored leftist insurgences there in the 1960s. Now, socialist Venezuela has come to look more and more </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">like</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Cuba, where basic goods also are scarce.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ironically, Chávez had portrayed himself during his first presidential campaign as a moderate seeking a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Claiming he&#8217;d traded the bullet for the ballet, he pledged to reverse declining living standards and root out Venezuela&#8217;s rampant corruption. But months after his landslide election victory, he did an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/539348/posts">about-face</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, praising Cuba&#8217;s communism and forming a close friendship with Fidel Castro. Soon he was forming anti-American alliances with Middle Eastern strongmen such as Iraq&#8217;s Saddam Hussein and Libya&#8217;s Moammar Gadhafi. He nationalized large swaths of the economy in Venezuela; or to be precise: the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Early into his first term, Chávez insisted on the name change &#8212; inspired by Venezulea&#8217;s aristocratic independence hero Simón Bolivar &#8212; as he pushed through a rewritten constitution in a Congress packed with his loyalists.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for Venezuela&#8217;s corruption, Chávez took it to new heights by allowing for the emergence of a new social class; what a Venezuelan journalist famously called the “Boliburguesía” &#8212; a portmanteau of the word&#8217;s Bolivarian and bourgeoisie. As has been </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CiqzufsT4Y&amp;list=FLhcRY22v3s3rJFFMeVY3Qrw&amp;index=8">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> often over the years, in print and broadcast media, they became rich overnight thanks to sweetheart contacts, cronyism, and corruption.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Glover, however, spoke only of Chávez as a man of the people to enthusiastic applause from Chávez loyalists. “His memory lives with us through the work that you do as citizens of this great nation,” </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/03/07/actor-danny-glover-supports-venezuelan-government-during-visit-to-honour-hugo-chavez/">he said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stone didn&#8217;t attend but in an interview with a local news outlet talked wistfully of his departed friend Hugo. “I miss Chávez, miss his spirit and presence,”</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://globovision.com/articulo/oliver-stone-extrano-a-hugo-chavez-extrano-su-espiritu-y-su-presencia"> he said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Stone allowed his documentary film, “My Amigo Hugo,” to premier on Venezuela television. (The government</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/world/americas/one-year-after-chavezs-death-a-divide-in-venezuelans-fervor.html?_r=0"> required </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">all television stations, both state-owned and private, to broadcast it.)</span></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/gcwGp0yn9nk" height="315" width="560" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">An information war is underway. Government censorship – including twitter and Internet outages – have been another weapon the government has used in its battle against the protesters whom Stone </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=102281">compared</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to “the right-wing Cuban exiles in southern Florida.” Later, he complained that he&#8217;d been subjected to “verbal violence” over his support for the Chávez and Maduro regimes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Social media, for its part, has helped organize the protests and shown the world the brutal handiwork of Venezuela&#8217;s security forces. Twitter&#8217;s SOSVenezuela has buzzed with photos claiming to show Cuban troops and military aircraft in Venezuela. Opposition protesters are convinced that Cubans are participating in the repressive crack-down against students. Over the years, Chávez invited many Cuban security agents and advisers into the country to help solidify his socialist rule.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Bread and circuses populism has a long history in Venezuela, as does statism and authoritarianism. But Chávez took these things to new heights. Now after 11 years of Chávez, and one year of Maduro, who is doubling down on Chávez&#8217;s policies, Venezuela is sliding toward basket case status. It has one of the world&#8217;s worst murder rates. Shortages of basic goods &#8212; including milk, medicines, and toilet paper – are common due to currency exchange and price controls that have made it unprofitable for business to import goods. And things are bound to get worse after recent government edicts requiring retailers and businesses to offer government-set “fair prices.” “</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=1599572&amp;CategoryId=10717">Good Morning, Communism</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">!” declared the respected newsletter VenEcomony after analyzing the impact of Maduro&#8217;s recent “economic war” against supposedly bourgeoisie retailers and businessmen. Maduro has called the opposition “fascists” and dupes of “Yankee imperialists.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuela has become a polarized country divided into two ideological camps, thanks mainly to class-warrior Chávez. And last month, opposition leader </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-20/leopoldo-lopez-the-venezuela-oppositions-new-hero">Leopoldo López</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, a 42-year-old Harvard-educated politician and former mayor, was sent to jail on trumped up charges, including murder and inciting rioters, for having lent his support to the ongoing street protests.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“HE WHO tires, loses”: that was the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21596945-after-opposition-leader-arrested-violence-continues-unabated-tale-two-prisoners">slogan</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> printed on a T-shirt worn by López when he was arrested among a sea of supporters. To Maduro&#8217;s outrage, López had urged protesters to continue taking their grievances to the streets with peaceful protests; it&#8217;s the only option they have left against an authoritarian government. Unarmed student demonstrators have been using two valuable weapons: twitter (#SOSVenezuea) and YouTube. Powerful videos like this have gone viral:</span></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/EFS6cP9auDc" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In last April&#8217;s presidential election, Maduro prevailed over opposition leader Henrique Capriles, a state governor and former mayor, by a razor-thing 50.6 percent of the vote. Protesters rightly believe that Capriles ought to be leading the country in light of Chávez and Maduro&#8217;s demagoguery and populism on top of illegal campaign spending and threats against state employees who supported opposition candidates.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Students come mainly from the middle-class and have been the backbone of the nationwide protest movement. It started in early February in San Cristóbal, a college town in the Andean mountains of 650,000, following the sexual assault of a female student. Initially, the protests were provoked by out-of-control crime. But as they spread to every major city in Venezuela, students added additional grievances to their manifesto – corruption, electrical blackouts, and other quality-of-life issues. Here and there, there have been reports in social media of the protests spreading to working-class areas that have been traditional Chávez strongholds.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the hope of pulling off a Ukrainian-style revolution seems remote. The military is with Maduro, by all accounts. The students and other protesters are a minority; and so far their rage has been vented mainly against the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">symptoms</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of bread and circuses socialism – not against the system itself; and that system is without a doubt corrupt. It revolves in part around the popular belief, especially among the poor majority, that Venezuelans ought to be rich and entitled by dint of their oil wealth &#8212; an impossibility in Venezuela today. It&#8217;s a sirens song – the paradox of plenty, as some call it – that keeps free-market policies at bay, keeps power concentrated in the hands of a few, and lends itself to a mentality that blames others. In this culture, anti-Americanism flourishes. Free-market policies and investor-friendly laws, on the other hand, would create wealth – far more than could be pumped out of the ground.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The prophetic warning of Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, a Venezuelan intellectual who was instrumental in founding OPEC, is often cited and worth quoting in respect to Venezuela&#8217;s long decline and current crisis. “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see: oil will bring us ruin… Oil is the Devil&#8217;s excrement.”</span></p>
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		<title>A Carter Intervention in Venezuela</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/jimmy-carter-to-visit-venezuela/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jimmy-carter-to-visit-venezuela</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2014 05:36:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Carter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Another PR stunt to serve Venezuela's socialist oppressors? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jimmy_carter_2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220098" alt="jimmy_carter_2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jimmy_carter_2-443x350.jpg" width="310" height="245" /></a>Last week Jimmy Carter fired off letters to Venezuela’s fraudulent President Nicolas Maduro and to Venezuela’s defrauded Presidential candidate Enrique Capriles expressing “grave concern” regarding the political turmoil and bloodshed convulsing their nation. From his pulpit at Emory University’s Carter Center, the former U.S. president calls for “dialogue” among the embattled Venezuelan parties and offers to visit the troubled nation &#8212; but not as a formal “mediator.”</span></p>
<p>The news of Carter’s proposed Venezuela visit was only hours old when alarmed Venezuelan anti-socialists sent out an SOS: “Please, desist from your trip,” reads an open letter from Venezuelan blogger/journalist Daniel Duquenal. “You have absolutely no credibility in Venezuela…You have cursed us enough as it is. I can assure you that half of the country has no respect nor credibility for you and the other half (the Castroites) thinks you are a mere fool that they can use <a href="http://daniel-venezuela.blogspot.com/2014/02/open-letter-to-jimmy-carter-dont-you.html">and discard as needed.” </a></p>
<p>Venezuelan continues as a veritable battleground between hundreds of thousands of protestors and thousands of Cuban-trained government police and national guardsmen. Fifteen protestors have been shot dead, hundreds arrested and thousands injured. “I feel as if this were a war zone,” said one resident of the far-western city of San Cristobal, long known for it’s anti-Chavista activism.</p>
<p>Desperate to cow that area’s rebellious residents Maduro even sent some of his regime’s Russian-built Sukhoi warplanes to buzz (but not yet bomb) the area. “It doesn’t matter if it takes a month, two months, three months. We have to get rid of this government,” said one desperate protestor.</p>
<p>This is a very unequal battle. The protestors have overwhelming numbers on their side, but the Cuba-puppet regime has the guns, the planes, the tanks, the truncheons and the tear gas. Better still (for the Venezuelan regime) the hands-on tutelage of their repressive apparatus comes courtesy of a regime (Castro’s) that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s<i> </i>during the Great Terror, and murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler‘s murdered Germans during his <i>first six. </i>No “security specialists” in the Western Hemisphere can boast anything close to these credentials on their CV.</p>
<p>So like anyone else with stellar credentials Castro’s military and police advisors demand top price for their services. Last year Venezuelan subsidies to Cuba totaled $10 billion. That’s more than <i>double</i> what the Soviets used to send. No, Castro’s KGB-trained murderers and torturers will not work for peanuts.</p>
<p>Alas, Castro’s “security” assistance to Maduro’s regime has lately been revealed as more than strictly “advisory.” Venezuelan social media (the only type still functioning freely in this Cuban satrapy) is leaking out some tragi-comedies: <a href="https://yrj8p7qye6fzoz3aqjhp.r.worldssl.net/foto-tu-eres-venezolano-cantame-el-himno-nacional-le-decia-la-mujer-al-gnb-en-las-mercedes-esta-tarde/">“You’re not Venezuelan!”</a> yelled a demonstrator to a heavily armed national Guardsman. “Then sing the Venezuelan national anthem!” and of course the man in the Venezuelan Guardsman’s uniform could not.</p>
<p>Jimmy Carter has a long and illustrious history of “mediation” in disputed Venezuelan elections, dating back to 1998. In every case his mediation served to legitimize the electoral fraud of Venezuela’s Castroites and socialists. In fact the international legitimacy of Maduro’s fraudulent presidency owes much to Carter himself.</p>
<p>“The voting part” of it was &#8220;free and fair,” declared Jimmy Carter after Maduro “won” the elections of April, 2013 shortly after Hugo’ Chavez death. “Venezuela probably has the <i>most excellent</i> voting system that I have ever known,” he concluded.  Maybe if Jimmy Carter spent less time watching Wayne’s World and more time listening to the Venezuelan opposition he’d know that election was blatantly stolen by Maduro.</p>
<p>Jimmy Carter’s relationship with Venezuela’s current colonial overlords may explain his solicitude for the welfare of the Maduro regime. To wit:</p>
<p>“We greeted each other as old friends,” gushed Jimmy Carter regarding his most recent meeting with Fidel Castro in April 2011.</p>
<p>“In 2002, we received him warmly,” reciprocated Fidel. “Now, I reiterated to him our respect and esteem.&#8221;</p>
<p>“Jimmy Carter was the best of all U.S. Presidents,” gushed Fidel’s brother Raul while seeing his American guest off personally and jovially after those ultra-amiable meetings.</p>
<p>But Jimmy Carter’s affection for the Castros amounts to more than smiles, handshakes and love notes. On his most recent Cuban visit he appeared on Cuban TV to denounce the U.S. justice system and plead for the release of Cuban terrorist/spies (The Cuban Five) &#8212; a conviction by U.S. Federal juries upheld all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, by the way. The charges against Castro’s spies included</p>
<p>•Gathering intelligence against the Boca Chica Air Naval Station in Key West, the McDill Air Force Base in Tampa and the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Homestead, Fla.</p>
<p>•Compiling the names, home addresses and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers, along with those of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica.</p>
<p>•Infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command.</p>
<p>•Sending letter bombs to Cuban-Americans.</p>
<p>•Spying on McDill Air Force Base, the U.S. armed forces’ worldwide headquarters for fighting “low-intensity” conflicts.</p>
<p>•Locating entry points into <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">Florida for smuggling explosives.</a></p>
<p>&#8220;I believe that there is no reason to keep the Cuban Five imprisoned,” declared Jimmy Carter while being interviewed by a Communist apparatchik on Cuban TV. “I had the opportunity to meet the families of the five Cuban <i>patriots </i>[italics mine], with their wives and with their mothers&#8230;..I&#8217;m well aware of the shortcomings of the U.S. judicial system [but apparently not the Cuban] but hope that President Obama will grant their pardon. He knows my opinion on this matter, that the trial of the Cuban Five was very dubious, <a href="http://www.freethefive.org/updates/CubanMedia/CMCarterArleen33011.htm">that many norms were violated</a>.”</p>
<p>The man hailed as the “Elder Statesman” of America’s <i>majority</i> political party insulted the judicial system of the nation that elected him President while hosted by a regime that imported its judicial system—lock, stock and barrel—<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova">from the heirs of Joe Stalin.</a></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Where Have all the Flower (Children) Gone?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/where-have-all-the-flower-children-gone/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=where-have-all-the-flower-children-gone</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Feb 2014 05:25:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communist repression]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[National Guardsmen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219706</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Forget looking in the mainstream media for the nitty-gritty of the communist repression in Venezuela.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/vw.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-219737" alt="vw" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/vw.gif" width="400" height="281" /></a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That silence you hear issues from the media/celebrity axis regarding the massive protests in Venezuela where hip college kids are being beaten, tear-gassed and shot down in a manner to shame anything done by Mayor Daley’s police in 1968 or the Ohio National Guard in 1970. Six Venezuelan youths are confirmed dead and hundreds </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://babalublog.com/2014/02/15/where-have-all-the-flower-children-gone-regarding-venezuela-crickets/">have been injured and/or arrested.</a></p>
<p>Forget looking in the mainstream media for the nitty-gritty of this communist repression. The Venezuelan regime —under the (literal!) and expert tutelage of their Cuban colonial overlords&#8211;is easily censoring the sheeplike mainstream media. The truth, however, is seeping out through social media. <a href="http://caracaschronicles.com/2014/02/19/19f/">Please don’t miss these dramatic videos. </a></p>
<p>But these are Communist police and National Guardsmen doing the beating, gassing and shooting, you see. Hence the silence. Worse still, these Venezuelan storm-troopers are “practiced at the art of repression” thanks to hands-on training by the best in the business: Castro’s police.</p>
<p>There is no place in the media-celebrity narrative on Latin American police repression for this sort of thing. Pinochet? Somoza? Batista?—sure! These Latin American dictators thrived on repressing young hipsters. But they were all “right-wingers.” So it was only natural. A good word regarding any of those regimes by a rocker celebrity would have lead to instant and permanent blacklisting.</p>
<p>On the other hand, a good word regarding the Castro regime serves almost as password <i>into</i> the uppermost reaches of celebrity-rocker status, especially it’s “thinking” echelons (as such things are measured among rockers.)</p>
<p>The notion of Castro’s Cuba as stiflingly Stalinist nation never quite caught on among ‘the enlightened.” Instead the island often inspires hazy visions of a vast commune, rock-fest or Occupy site, studded with free health clinics and with Wavy Gravy handing out love-beads at the entrance. The regime was founded by beatniks, after all. In 1960 Jean Paul Sartre hailed Cuba’s Stalinist rulers as “<i>les Enfants au Pouvoir</i>” (the children in power). A few months earlier Fidel Castro spoke at Harvard the same bill as beat poet Allen Ginsberg. And ever since then, long-haired Che Guevara has reigned worldwide as top icon of youthful rebellion.</p>
<p><i>“</i>They saw in him (Fidel Castro,)” writes Camelot court scribe Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “the hipster who in the era of the Organization Man had joyfully defied the system.”<i> </i></p>
<p>In fact the brain-shackled robot Fidel Castro and Che Guevara tried to create with their firing squads, forced labor camps and Stalinist indoctrination makes the Eisenhower era’s “Organization Man” look like a combination of Jimmy Hendrix and Jack Kerouac.</p>
<p>As exhibit A. in this grotesque ideological disconnect let’s take the famous rockers and “political thinkers” responsible for the songs “<i>Four Dead in Ohio</i>” and “<i>Chicago</i>.”</p>
<p>In 1979 when Fidel Castro (whose regime <i>murdered</i> more political prisoners than pre-war <i>Hitler&#8217;s and </i>jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than <i>Stalin&#8217;s</i>) invited Stephen Stills to perform in Cuba at a Communist propaganda-palooza known as “Havana-Jam,” the famous Woodstocker could hardly contain his elation. The fervent champion of human-rights, civil rights and free-speech (indeed Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s last tour was titled “The Free-Speech Tour”) not only took up the offer to perform at this “Havana-Jam,” but also composed a song in Castro’s honor, titled “<i>Cuba al Fin!”</i> (Cuba at Last!)</p>
<p>Jazz-master and Cuban exile Paquito‘d Rivera, living in Cuba at the time, recalls watching Stephen Stills on stage at Havana’s Karl Marx theatre lovingly crooning his songs to the families of Cuba’s Stalinist nomenklatura as if Havana-Jam were a personal performance for the mass-murderer &#8211; in-chief himself. Within blocks of this cheeky “Havana-Jam,” (which also included Human-Rights activist Kris Kristofferson along with Billy Joel) Cuban youths, black and white, languished in dungeons suffering longer prison sentences than Nelson Mandela’s. The Cubans’ crimes were attempting free speech.</p>
<p>“They (Castro’s Stalinist regime) invited me because they knew I was politically astute,” gloated Stephen Stills regarding the acumen and good taste of his Cuban hosts, who to this day jail and torture youths for the crime of saying “Down with Fidel!”</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>“<i>There’s a man with a gun over there, ’tellin me I gotta beware,” wrote</i> Stepen Stills in the 1967 hit For What it’s Worth.”  Indeed, Stephen Stills: Cuban youths have much to teach regarding that scenario. If only you’d deigned to part briefly from your Stalinist hosts (the gunmen) in Havana and asked around.</p>
<p><i>“Paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep. It starts when you&#8217;re always afraid, you step out of line, the man come and take you away.”</i></p>
<p>The “man who came to take away” Cubans at a higher rate than Russians were taken away by Stalin and Germans were taken away by Hitler was your very host on your Cuban visit, Stephen Stills.</p>
<p><i>“Young people speaking their minds—a getting SO much resistance from behind..”</i></p>
<p>“Exactly Stephen Stills, from the people right behind your stage, from the Stalinists who were sponsoring you, who you were brownnosing with you, who were jailing and torturing us, for the crime of listening to YOUR music!”  Might reply many Cuban youths of the time.</p>
<p>“You have to give them (Cuba’s Stalinists) due respect because they have a unique form of socialism that’s very significant in the scheme of world history,” Stephen Stills gloated while explaining his Cuba visit.<b> </b></p>
<p>Oh, it’s unique alright, Mr. Stills. Few 20th Century regimes jailed and tortured youths <i>en-masse</i> for the crime of <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">growing long hair and craving rock music.</a></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Showdown in Caracas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/showdown-in-caracas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=showdown-in-caracas</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Feb 2014 05:28:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Leopoldo Lopez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicolas Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219128</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Democracy supporters fight back against Chavez's legacy of tyranny. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ALeqM5givHJr1yRYOknak-IPl6Sxz0iE0A.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219130" alt="ALeqM5givHJr1yRYOknak-IPl6Sxz0iE0A" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ALeqM5givHJr1yRYOknak-IPl6Sxz0iE0A-450x318.jpg" width="270" height="191" /></a>In a move that almost guarantees violent clashes, Venezuela&#8217;s increasingly nervous Marxist </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">caudillo</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is calling for his supporters to take to the streets Tuesday to combat a large planned march by that oil-rich nation&#8217;s opposition.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is asking his allies, including state employees, to demonstrate in force against Leopoldo Lopez, leader of the opposition party, Popular Will (Voluntad Popular). Lopez, who has been accused by Maduro of inciting violence, asked Venezuelans to dress in white and march alongside him, daring authorities to arrest him.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Opposition Governor Henrique Capriles, who was beaten by Maduro in the dubious April election, said the government was instigating the unrest to “hide the grave problems that the country is facing with the scarcity of food, medicine, the inflation, devaluation and insecurity.”</span></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://tiny.iavian.net/1yc3">Demonstrations</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> against the Maduro regime have become commonplace because socialist economic bungling has caused shortages of consumer goods, food, and medicine. People have good reason to be upset. Runaway inflation is destroying savings. Inflation more than doubled over the past 12 months, rising to 56.3 percent in January, the central bank reports. The bank&#8217;s scarcity index shot up to an unprecedented 28 percent, which means that at any given time more than one in four basic goods was out of stock.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, Lopez, who is now in hiding, vows to allow himself to be arrested.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“I’ve not committed any crime,” he said in a YouTube video. “If there is a decision to illegally jail me, I’ll be there.” Popular Will spokesman Carlos Vecchio said yesterday that the government is responsible for the protesters&#8217; safety.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Security forces </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/02/17/venezuela-expells-americans/5545453/">raided</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Popular Will&#8217;s headquarters yesterday.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Four guys, dressed entirely in black, violently broke down the doors. They weren&#8217;t police; they weren&#8217;t National Guard,&#8221; volunteer Lisett Esteves was quoted as saying. &#8220;They asked for leaders of the party. Intelligence agents then came in with a warrant to take away all of our equipment.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">David Smolansky, mayor of El Hatillo, one of Caracas&#8217; municipalities, was in the building during the raid. &#8220;They were looking for Leopoldo and all the leaders of our political party,&#8221; he said. &#8220;It&#8217;s more proof that in Venezuela we don&#8217;t have democracy.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On Feb. 12, three people were killed and 66 injured when demonstrators fought with government supporters. Of the 99 individuals detained from Feb. 12 to 13, 13 are still in custody after judges deemed their actions &#8220;severe.&#8221; Student protesters are demanding that the detainees be free. Yesterday, for the sixth consecutive day hundreds of students in Caracas defied a presidential decree banning public demonstrations.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Maduro is the less colorful replacement for Hugo Chavez, a crude, erratic, neo-communist despot who officially died last March after seeking medical treatment from the quacks and bunglers of Cuba&#8217;s so-called health care system. When he actually departed this world is far from clear. Hidden away from the public for months, Chavez, whose election in 1999 sparked a leftist revival throughout Latin America, may have actually died some time ago.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Maduro can count on community organizers to come to his aid.</span></p>
<p>Government-linked community councils and “Bolivarian Circles,” similar to Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, remain active. In order to identify citizens worthy of governmental persecution, neighborhood-based militias spy on citizens. In true <i>Sturmabteilung</i> fashion, these groups also break up opposition meetings by force.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Like the roving paramilitary death squads that have been active in various Latin American countries, violent groups with no formal governmental ties are useful because they can do the regime&#8217;s dirty work, using force against opponents, and terrorizing the population, without directly implicating government officials.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sounding somewhat like President Obama whining about Fox News, Maduro also claims international news outlets aren&#8217;t providing fair coverage of his attempt to seize absolute power. He ordered Colombian station NTN24 off the air in Venezuela for committing the sin of showing the bloody civil unrest produced by his socialist policies. On Feb. 13 he accused Agence France-Presse of manipulating information.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s all part of the politics of distraction, Venezuelan-style.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Venezuelans &#8216;Taking it to the Streets&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/venezuelans-taking-it-to-the-streets/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelans-taking-it-to-the-streets</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Feb 2014 05:05:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maduro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protests]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sean Penn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218958</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Where is Sean Penn? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/kl.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-219036" alt="kl" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/kl.jpg" width="275" height="183" /></a>&#8220;Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President Maduro.&#8221; (Sean Penn, March 5, 2013.)</p>
<p>This is to say nothing of the “proven” –and particularly, the <i>enduring&#8211;”</i>leadership” of Maduro’s colonial overlords in Havana, of whom Sean Penn is also extremely fond.</p>
<p><strong>“</strong>I had the <i>privilege</i> to introduce my children to comandante Fidel Castro!” (Sean Penn, arm in arm with “great friend” Hugo Chavez, Caracas Feb. 13, 2012.)</p>
<p>Protests rocked Venezuela this week. Hundreds of Venezuelans were arrested by Cuban-trained police and at least three were shot dead by Cuban-trained paramilitary storm-troopers. As we go to press, Caracas is under a military clampdown with government troops guarding most public buildings and patrolling the streets.</p>
<p>In brief, Venezuelans have had it with the corruption, shortages, censorship, 56% inflation rate, crime and general privations brought on by the late Hugo Chavez’ “Bolivarian Revolution,” especially as implemented by Chavez’ successor Nicholas Maduro, who won last October’s elections&#8211;most non-Hollywood observers believe—by stealing them.</p>
<p>Now Maduro and his cronies are stealing the country blind. It’s all under the guise of something the<i> Chavistas</i> call “21<sup>th</sup> Century Socialism,” mind you. But it still amounts to the government stealing businesses and replacing the owners and managers with vengeful, bumbling and rapacious government hacks. So the results exactly mimic those of old-fogey <i>20<sup>th</sup> c</i>entury socialism. Here’s a nation sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves and earning $100 BILLION in oil revenues annually—while its citizens can’t find toilet paper in any stores.</p>
<p>But no matter how hard daily life becomes for Venezuelans, no matter how menacingly looms the prospect of national bankruptcy, no matter how drastically oil production drops&#8211;President Maduro keeps shipping 100,000 barrels of oil to Castro’s Cuba <i>daily.</i> Venezuelan subsidies to Cuba last year were estimated to total $10 billion. That’s more than double what the Soviets used to send.</p>
<p>So, as you might imagine, the Castro regime’s interest in the Maduro regime’s “durability” probably exceeds even Sean Penn’s interest. To that end around 50,000 Cubans infest Venezuela. The media (especially those networks and agencies bestowed Havana bureaus) all claim these Cubans are all “doctors and teachers.” Actual Venezuelans know better. In fact the Venezuelan secret police is essentially controlled by KGB-trained Cubans.  Maduro’s very platoon of bodyguards is headed by Cubans. This is the type of “teaching” most valued by such as Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro, who the Castro regime took under their wing as far back as the 1990’s. Maduro’s Quisling-esque qualities shone even then.</p>
<p>The thousands of young Venezuelans (mostly college students) who took to Venezuela’s streets this week demanded, essentially, that the Venezuelan government abide by the Venezuelan constitution and end their pathetic subservience to the Castros.</p>
<p>“We are not Cuba!” chanted Venezuelan demonstrators in front of a hotel hosting Cuban baseball players last week, before being arrested. Another dig came from the leader of the Venezuelan opposition party behind most of this week’s protests Leopoldo Lopez. Venezuela’s rubber stamp judiciary recently issued an arrest warrant against him. So the 42 year old Harvard-educated firebrand Tweeted back: “Come on, Maduro.  You don’t have the guts to arrest me. Or are you waiting your orders from Havana?”</p>
<p>In fact as we go to press, Lopez has <i>not</i> been arrested. The order has not come from Maduro’s colonial overlords. The Cuban leadership, let’s not forget, is very keen on the pitfalls of “making martyrs”&#8211; for the opposition, that is. Fidel himself rode to power on the strength of his own martyrdom at Batista’s hands. That this martyrdom was mostly bogus mattered little when such as the New York Times were <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">spreading the hoax on it’s front-page. </a></p>
<p>Sure, the Venezuelan regime rants and raves about “Yankee Imperialism!” But the Venezuelan people fully recognize their genuine imperial masters. On Canada’s Sun News last week one Frontpage writer went so far as to claim that <a href="http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/video/featured/prime-time/867432237001/violence-in-venezuela/3198550007001">“Maduro can’t even sneak to the toilet with Raul Castro’s permission!”</a></p>
<p>Most Venezuelans blame the Maduro government’s dirty work, including the three dead demonstrators, on paramilitary storm-troopers called <i>“colectivos</i>” (collectives.) “Chavez called them (the <em>colectivos</em>) the armed wing of his Revolution,” revealed Anthony Daquíne ex-security assesor of Venezuela&#8217;s Interior Ministry. &#8220;In essence they are paramilitary groups. The leaders of the collectives have traveled to Cuba for socialist education and military training.&#8221;</p>
<p>Hugo Chavez’ inspirational debt to Ernesto “Che” Guevara is such that he titled his regime&#8217;s socio-economic model, &#8220;Mision Che Guevara.”  So unsurprisingly, many of these Cuban-trained storm-troopers regard Che Guevara with great affection, <a href="http://babalublog.com/2014/02/13/maduros-storm-troopers-quite-fittingly-inspired-by-che-guevara/">even as their inspiration.</a></p>
<p>“Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates! Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service! The very spirit of rebellion is reprehensible!&#8221; raved Che Guevara in a famous speech in 1961.</p>
<p>&#8220;My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any <em>vencido</em> that falls in my hands” raved Ernesto Guevara in a book later known as The Motorcycle Diaries. The Spanish world <em>vencido,</em> by the way, translates into defeated, hence surrendered, hence defenseless.</p>
<p>So, indeed, what could be more fitting than murdering unarmed youngsters while worshiping <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Exposing-Real-Che-Guevara-Idolize/dp/1595230521/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1289600704&amp;sr=1-1-fkmr0">Che Guevara?</a><strong> </strong><b></b></p>
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		<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>
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		<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>
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		<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>
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		<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>
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