In the annual competition between leftist media outlets for the screwiest (or most Scrooge-like) criticism of Christmas traditions, a Huffingon Post item published Thursday morning by Michael McLaughlin (HT Breitbart) was a formidable entry.
After the HuffPo reporter's headline noted that "U.S. Christmas Lights Burn More Energy Than Some Nations In A Year," he suggested that "maybe we should unplug our decorations."
For those who still believe that Black Lives Matter is legitimate grass-roots movement which came out of nowhere in response to events in Ferguson, Missouri over a year ago, consider BLM co-founder Opal Tometi.
Tometi somehow took the time and somehow found the money to get down to Venezuela, home of the latest failed attempt to impose a socialist "workers' paradise" on an unwilling population. On Sunday, despite shameless gerrymandering, significant government-imposed barriers on political speech and a virtual denial of media access, the "revolution" Hugo Chavez began in 1999 and which Nicolas Maduro continued after Chavez's death in 2013 suffered an unprecedented electoral rebuke, as the government's opposition won 112 of 167 seats in the country's legislature. Guess whose side Opal Tometi was on?
On the eve of the National Assembly elections of Venezuela in which many observers expect voters to express their extreme dissatisfaction with the the Socialist policies of the ruling Chavistas which have completely ruined the economy of that oil rich nation, The Guardian of the UK has found a villain. A wealthy elite living in a state of priveleged luxury.
A normal person would expect the culprits to be the corrupt Chavistas such as National Assembly president Diosdado Cabello who is estimated to have stolen over 2 billion dollars via corruption or the President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro who is believed to have pocketed at least a billion dollars by corruption and family drug dealing. In addition, there are the many other wealthy Chavistas who used their power to abscond with billions of dollars more leaving Venezuela an ecomonic basket case. So who does The Guardian writer, Sibylla Brodzinsky, point the accusatory finger at? "Country Club" conservatives while giving the vast corruption of the Chavistas a free pass. I kid you not. Here is Brodzinsky casting this group in cartoon caricature terms:
How inflated is Venezuelan currency? So inflated that even thieves in Venezuela are refusing to steal it.
This has been reported in several media outlets such as the New York Times and Vox but a certain word is very noticebably absent in both reports. It is the S-word that dare not speak its name. One big reason it is taboo in liberal circles to associate that word with economic failure is that one Democrat candidate for president is openly an advocate of the unspoken system and most of the rest of the other candidates silently support it. We start with the New York Times story which avoids you-know-what word:
Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro presides over a country which is falling apart thanks to the socialist policies of his government and that of his predecessor Hugo Chavez. The Economist describes the period since Chavez took over in 1998 as that of "authoritarian misrule" characterized by "by shortages of everything from poultry to pharmaceuticals, by inflation approaching 200% and by rampant corruption and crime."
It also cites the country's "dwindling cash reserves." Given the situation, the fact that a U.S.-based PR firm has recently and eagerly taken on the task of trying to make Maduro look good should be seen as appalling. But that hasn't been the case. The apparent silence of some of this PR firm's leftist clients arguably indicates that they tacitly support obvious oppression as long as the one engaging in it is a socialist. What little press coverage there has been of this firm's association with Maduro has been neutral to mildly laudatory.
As Venezuela's Chavista economy under Nicolas Maduro continues to crumble, the Associated Press and others in the media to describe its problems as if they came out of nowhere instead of originating with its statist, oppressive government.
Examples follow the jump.
The news out of Venezuela has apparently become so grim that the arguably Chavista-sympathetic press barely bothers to report it in any kind of sutstantive fashion. Inflation has gone wild, the level of violent crime has become frightening, and the government has taken to jailing citizens who dare to tweet their dissatisfaction with the regime of Nicolas Makuro (note that the linked report was prepared by a freelance journalist and not one of the worldwide wires; where have they been while this has been going on?).
One telling Associated Press dispatch from Venezuela last week concerned what's left of the nation's food distribution system. The item revealed that the press refuses to get over its classist obsessions, even as an entire country falls apart. A video seen after the jump will show that the government's "solution" has no realistic chance of fixing the problem.
A Reuters report published late Saturday evening ("Obama meets Venezuela's Maduro at time of high tensions") is astonishing for what it ignores.
The unbylined report from Panama City opens by referring to how "the United States recently placed sanctions on Venezuela." Indeed, President Barack Obama did just that in an executive order on March 9, stating that he was "declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela." But Reuters completely ignored the fact that Obama told the world this week that he didn't mean it.
On Thursday night’s PBS NewsHour, they devoted two segments to the forthcoming Summit of the Americas and like Andrea Mitchell, PBS correspondent Margaret Warner felt it necessary to document how Latin American countries think Team Obama’s actions toward Venezuela “smacked of U.S. bullying” and even “imperialist meddling.”
It might seem a bit perverse, but the government-funded channel was calmly explaining to viewers that standing up for dissidents is a diplomatic fiasco.
Throughout her MSNBC show on Thursday from Panama at the Summit of the Americas, host Andrea Mitchell wrung her hands over the Obama administration actually trying to stand up to a Latin American dictator: "...there are other issues here, including recent sanctions by the U.S. against Venezuela, which have really upset the Cubans and a lot of America's close allies here, Costa Rica and Colombia and others, who are not happy about the wording of that sanctioning of Venezuela, Cuba's closest ally."
Daniel Pardo of BBC Mundo went on a shopping spree to see how many household goods he could find while waiting on the notoriously long lines in Venezuela. On the first day he was able to obtain a grand total of only three items out of a shopping list of eight but promised he would return the next day to see if he could get any of the rest. Well, as far as the world knows tomorrow never came. In fact, following the March 16 Spanish language broadcast of his first day shopping for the three items, it seems Daniel Pardo never returned. Neither to BBC nor anywhere else including his Twitter feed where he mysteriously stopped tweeting on that same day, March 16.
Daniel Pardo of BBC Mundo provides us with an interesting report, namely how long does it take to purchase basic home products while waiting on the notoriosly long lines at the stores in Venezuela. Unfortunately, although Pardo shows us how tough it is to buy these products he fails to give us the why even though the answer is written on wall posters all over that country. The S-word that dare not speak its name in his BBC Mundo report.