redbloodedamerica:

Venezuela’s American Support

Venezuelans are starving and dying.  40,000% hyperinflation has destroyed the economy.  Life is so bad that basic medications like antibiotics are no longer available and the average Venezuelan has lost 24 pounds in the last year due to lack of food, leaving desperate citizens to resort to breaking into the zoo to eat the themselves starving animals, and leading prisoners to become cannibals.

Despite Venezuela being the biggest tragedy in the Western Hemisphere at the moment, large and influential swaths of the American left have supported the Venezuelan socialist project since

Hugo Chávez

came to power in 1998.  Back then, Venezuela’s poverty rate was 55%; today, it is almost 90%.  

In 2011, Bernie Sanders published an article on his website that said, “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as…VENEZUELA…, where incomes are actually more equal today.”  Famed activist and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson went to Venezuela to speak before the Venezuelan parliament where he praised Chávez

’s policies.  Director Oliver Stone called Chavez a “great hero” and directed a pro-Chavez film titled South of the Border.  Actor Sean Penn met with Chávez

on numerous occasions and said he had done “incredible things for the 80% of the people that are very poor there.”  After Chavez’s death, Penn described also him as a “great hero” and a “friend”and that “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president

Nicolás Maduro.”  Famed left-wing documentarian Michael Moore praised Chavez after his death for “eliminating 75% of extreme poverty” and “[providing] free health and education for all.”  

In 2002, 16 US congressmen wrote a letter to then President Bush asking him to end diplomatic relations with Venezuela if Chávez

were to be replaced in a coup.  Left-wing political non-profits such as The North American Congress on Latin America at New York University, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and Global Exchange have all praised the Venezuelan project, as have writers for left-wing media operations such as The Nation, The Huffington Post, Mic.com, The Independent, and the openly socialist Jacobin Magazine.  

Some pundits like Jon Oliver have tried to claim socialism was not the problem in Venezuela, mismanagement was; but that’s an utterly ignorant analysis considering much of the free market criticism of socialism is based on how its poor incentive structure causes mismanagement.  As we see the American Left fail to recognize their mistakes and move further and further leftward towards Chávez

-style democratic socialism, let’s remember how their ideas worked for Venezuela.