Venezuela

CNBC anchor Joe Kernen tore into the prospect of a socialist president, and knocked young people who he said had a warped view of Bernie Sanders. Kernen’s comments came in response to a report by political correspondent John Harwood on the democratic presidential race. In his report, Harwood featured a poll that had Sanders losing to Clinton by 14 percentage points.

Venezuela's hyperinflationary economic crisis has gotten worse in one very important and apparently unprecedented sense than even the one seen in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. Yet the Associated Press and the New York Times apparently have no interest in telling their readers, listeners or viewers about it. In the post-World War I German Weimar Republic, the situation became so out of control…

If form holds, the Democratic Party's presidential candidates in the U.S. will continue to spout various forms of socialism and class warfare as the answers to this nation's woes in hopes of buying enough "free stuff" votes to hang on to the White House. Venezuela's apparent imminent economic collapse poses a problem for this strategy. The country's problems are the direct result of 15 years of…

On Thursday, Venezuela's Supreme Court decided to grant Bolivarian socialist "President" Nicolas Maduro what an unbylined Associated Press report described as "broad decree powers" to deal with the economic crisis and humanitarian nightmare he and his predecessor Hugo Chavez created. Maduro's government now for all practical purposes has total control of that nation's economy, which in the…

In trying to explain the current situation in Venezuela, the Washington Post's Matt O'Brien, in a post at the paper's Wonkblog, also inadvertently identified two reasons why authoritarian socialist tyrants like Huge Chavez and Nicolas Maduro are able to achieve and retain power. The formula is simple: When you first gain power, garner international and media goodwill by giving stuff away, like…

When the Associated Press issues a brief unbylined report on an obviously important matter, one's first instinct should always be to ask: "What are they deciding not to tell us?" More often than not, the answer is "Plenty." An example justifying the need to look further appeared this morning when the wire service published a five-paragraph report on inflation in Venezuela's economy:

Entrevista de Henry Ramos Allup en Al Punto echa a perder una gran oportunidad

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…