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Investors Business Daaily
In a refreshingly powerful and direct statement, Venezuela's bishops Monday blamed "Marxist socialism" and "communism" by name for the horrors and chaos gripping their country, according to a story in El Universal.
The bishops said the long lines of people trying to buy food and other basic necessities and the constant rise in prices are the result of the government's decision to "impose a political-economic system of socialist, Marxist or communist," which is "totalitarian and centralist" and "undermines the freedom and rights of individuals and associations."
The Venezuelan bishops specifically stated that the private sector was critical for the well being of the country. The document, read by Monsignor Diego Padron in Spanish, said the country needs "a new entrepreneurial spirit with audacity and creativity."
So not only did these bishops diagnose the cause of the misery correctly; they also warned that communism harms the poor most of all.
They sounded positively like readers of Investor's Business Daily, matching the content of this editorial here.
More interestingly, the timing comes just as a certain former colleague of theirs from another part of South America continues to denounce free-market economies
The Venezuelan archbishops make the useful observation that if capitalist economies have problems, socialist alternatives are far worse for the poor and needy. Could it be the pope's Latin American colleagues on the ground in the cesspool of communism are the ones who can get through to the holy father on economics? Stay tuned.
from the
Washington Post
An enduring characteristic of Barack Obama’s presidency has been his determination to implement the ideological agenda with which he arrived in office without regard for conditions in the real world. He imposed timetables for “ending the wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq unlinked to military progress. He insisted on pursuing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, even though the leaders of both sides were manifestly unwilling. He began his second term by seeking a new nuclear arms deal with Vladimir Putin, despite abundant evidence that Putin was preparing for confrontation with the West.
Now, six years into his presidency, Obama has launched, as his first significant initiative in Latin America, detente with Cuba. It’s a torch that many liberals have carried for decades. Once again, however, the president has acted with willful disregard for current events.
In particular, two salient facts were ignored. The first is that the regime of Raúl Castro was desperate for an economic opening to the United States — meaning that concessions offered gratis by Obama could have been used to leverage meaningful political concessions by the regime. A simple one could have been an end to the arrests and beatings of peaceful dissidents, such as those that occurred last week.
Second, Obama ignored the slowly mushrooming crisis that triggered Castro’s distress and that ought to be the focus of U.S. energies in Latin America. That is the slow but potentially catastrophic collapse of Venezuela, a major U.S. oil supplier with three times Cuba’s population that, as 2015 begins, is well on its way to becoming a failed state.
Venezuela has been a virtual Cuban colony in recent years, which is one big reason for the fix it is in. After sheltering caudillo Hugo Chávez during his slow demise from cancer, Havana helped to install as his successor Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver of astonishingly small talents. Since Chávez’s death 22 months ago, Maduro has faithfully continued the 100,000-barrel-a-day oil subsidy that keeps Cuba’s moribund economy from crumbling.
Meanwhile, Maduro has overseen the degeneration of his country’s economic, political and social situation from abysmal to truly disastrous. Economic production declined by 5 percent in the first half of this year, inflation rose past 60 percent and an estimated one-third of consumer goods were in shortage — and that was before the 50 percent drop in the price of Venezuela’s oil, which provides 95 percent of the hard currency for a country that imports most of its food and medicine.
By many measures, Venezuela is already a failed state. According to the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a record 25,000 people were murdered in the country in 2014, the second-worse homicide rate in the world after Honduras. The U.S. government estimates that half of the cocaine produced in South America now moves through Venezuela — 300 tons a year — with the help of top leaders of the military and police. There have been deadly clashes between official security forces and the armed civilian “collectives” organized by the regime. And Wall Street has begun anticipating a Venezuelan default.
As oil revenue has plummeted in the past few months, Maduro has refused to address even the most extreme economic distortions — such as a black-market exchange rate for the dollar 350 percent higher than the highest of three official ones, or gasoline that sells for pennies a gallon. Instead he has delivered endless speeches denouncing the “economic war” he claims is being waged against Venezuela by the United States, and he has imprisoned top opposition leaders such as Leopoldo López, a U.S.-educated moderate leftist. “My country,” López wrote in a letter published by the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 25, “is on the verge of social and economic collapse.”
Oddly, the only discernible policy the Obama administration has toward this unfolding implosion is the one it just repudiated for Cuba: sanctions. The day after announcing the normalization with Havana, Obama signed legislation mandating visa bans and asset freezes for senior Venezuelan officials linked to violations of human rights, including the killing of dozens of street demonstrators last year.
Venezuela’s opposition supports those sanctions. But its leaders have also been saying that the country desperately needs outside diplomatic intervention. A halfhearted effort by the Unasur regional group petered out months ago. Now the region’s big governments, like the White House, focus on the political rehabilitation of Cuba while ignoring the situation in Caracas.
That’s particularly wrongheaded because there is a clear role for foreign mediators to play in brokering a deal between the government and moderate opposition that could allow for a political truce, the release of prisoners and emergency measures to stabilize the economy. “To remain silent,” wrote López, “is to be complicit in a disaster that doesn’t just impact Venezuela but could have implications across the hemisphere.” Too bad his country wasn’t on Obama’s preconceived agenda.
What the "peace-loving" Commie International Left Cheerleaders think.... "Maduro needs to kill more Venezuelan bourgeosie"
from the
New York Sun
Let us take the moment of President Obama’s betrayal of Free Cuba to step back a bit — back to say, May 19, 1895. That’s when the tribune of Cuba Libre, Jose Marti, was killed in combat against the Spanish Royalists at the Battle of Dos Rios. His body was barely in the ground when he was mocked by the New York Times as the “so-called President of the Cuban Republic.” It called him a “commonplace poet and writer, a prolix orator of diffuse style...”
The separatists, the Times sneered, “lacking a chief having any prestige at all,” gave Jose Marti their money. It said he must be “severely judged.” Why? “To put into turbulence a country which asked for nothing but peace and work, to expose it to a ferocious race, thinking always of revenge against the whites, to light the fires of civil war, pillage under the pretext of ‘Cuba libre,’ and put obstacles in the way of reforms which had been demanded for years, are not acts that claim indulgence.”
Those were but some of the libels against Jose Marti issued at his death by the newspaper that is now extolling — that has spent years plumping for — the normalization of relations that Mr. Obama promises with the Cuban communist regime. For Marti to sustain his revolution against the Spanish, the Times said, “he had recourse to all sorts of means: lies, false news, calumny.” Yet that is what the Times has used against the anti-communist forces in its long fight to vindicate Castro.
If we seem sensitive on the point, it is because the newspaper whose flag the Sun flies was on the other side of that fight. It was unambiguously on the side of Cuba Libre. When Jose Marti was in exile in America, he maintained his office inside the newsroom of the New York Sun. The Sun hung the flag of Free Cuba from its windows over lower Broadway. IT was from those offices that Marti left for his return to the Cuba on whose soil he finally fell.
We’ve told this story before in these columns but it’s rarely seemed more relevant than today, when the long campaign of solidarity with the anti-communist Cubans and with the Americans whose property was stolen by the communists in Cuba has been betrayed in a political calculation by a lame duck administration. Even such a principled skeptic of the embargo as the Wall Street Journal — which is covered with glory in the anti-communist cause — is appalled at the nature of the deal just announced.
This is a moment to remember that Congress is part of this struggle. It passed as recently as 1992 a law called the Cuban Democracy Act. It was sponsored by a Democrat, Les Aspin, then in the House, and signed by a Republican, President George H.W. Bush. It allows the president to relax certain restrictions only if he “determines and reports to Congress” that the government of Cuba has, among other things, met a string of conditions.
That is, the president has to be prepared to assert in good faith that Cuba has, as the law puts it, “held free and fair elections conducted under internationally recognized observers,” “permitted opposition parties ample time to organize and campaign for such elections,” and allowed “full access to the media to all candidates in the elections.” Which one of those conditions can the Democrats today say that Cuba has met?
The good news is that Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Senator Marco Rubio are vowing to take up the cause of free Cuba in the Congress. Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen is quoted in the Bloomberg as warning that the president may be in violation of the Cuban Democracy Act and several other laws. In tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, Mr. Rubio writes that in the months ahead he will work with members of both parties to do “prevent President Obama’s dangerous policies from becoming reality.”
“Our people cannot realize their full promise if the world becomes more dangerous because America retreats from its role in the world,” Mr. Rubio writes. He adds that “the Cuban people have the same rights that God bestowed on every other man, woman and child that has ever lived. All of those who are oppressed around the world look to America to stand up for their rights and to raise its voice when tyrants like the Castros are trying to crush their spirits.” We don’t have the slightest doubt that the spirit Jose Marti is right there with him.
