{"id":30617,"date":"2015-03-11T04:00:23","date_gmt":"2015-03-11T08:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30617"},"modified":"2015-03-10T07:30:19","modified_gmt":"2015-03-10T11:30:19","slug":"venezuela-then-and-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/03\/11\/venezuela-then-and-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Venezuela, then and now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin D. Williamson<\/a> looks to the not-too-distant past to see how Venezuela got into the economic disaster they’re currently facing:<\/p>\n

Venezuela had a good run of it for about five minutes there, at least in public-relations terms. When petroleum prices were booming, all it took was a few gallons of heating oil from Hugo Ch\u00e1vez to buy the extravagant praise of House members, with Representative Chaka Fattah (D., Philadelphia) issuing statements praising Venezuela\u2019s state-run oil company \u201cand the Venezuelan people for their benevolence.\u201d Lest anybody feel creeped out by running political errands for a brutal and repressive caudillo, Joseph Kennedy \u2014 son of Senator Robert Kennedy \u2014 proclaimed that refusing the strongman\u2019s patronage would be \u201ca crime against humanity.\u201d Kennedy was at the time the director of Citizens Energy, which had a contract to help distribute that Venezuelan heating oil \u2014 Boss Hugo was a brute, but he understood American politics. <\/p>\n

Celebrities came to sit at his feet, with Sean Penn calling him a \u201cchampion\u201d of the world\u2019s poor, Oliver Stone celebrating him as \u201ca great hero,\u201d Antonio Banderas citing his seizure of private businesses as a model to be emulated in the rest of the world, Michael Moore praising his use of oil for political purposes, Danny Glover celebrating him as a \u201cchampion of democracy.\u201d His successor, Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, continued in the Ch\u00e1vez vein, and even as basics such as food and toilet paper disappeared the American Left hailed him as a hero, with Jesse Myerson, Rolling Stone<\/em>\u2019s fashionable uptown communist, calling his economic program \u201cbasically terrific.\u201d Some of the more old-fashioned liberals at The New Republic<\/em> voiced concern about Venezuela\u2019s sham democracy, its unlimited executive authority, political repression, the hunting down of government critics, the stacking of elections and the government\u2019s perpetrating violence inside polling places \u2014 but Myerson insisted that Venezuela\u2019s \u201celectoral system\u2019s integrity puts the U.S.\u2019s to abject shame.\u201d Never mind that opposition leaders there are hauled off to military prison after midnight raids. <\/p>\n

Vice President Biden, who can always be counted on to cut straight to the heart of any political question, ran into Maduro in Brazil and, noting the potentate\u2019s thick mane, commented: \u201cIf I had your hair, I\u2019d be president of the United States.\u201d Tragically for the Sage of Delaware, hair transplants don\u2019t work that way. <\/p>\n

That is all going down the memory hole. The Obama administration has announced economic sanctions on Venezuela\u2019s rulers and its intelligence agents, citing the \u201cerosion of human-rights guarantees\u201d \u2013 erosion<\/em>, as though this were something new, as though Hugo Ch\u00e1vez hadn\u2019t been a tyrant back when President Obama\u2019s ally Representative Fattah was carrying his political water all over the eastern seaboard. In the New York Times<\/em>\u2019 account of Venezuela\u2019s woes and Maduro\u2019s misrule, there is no mention at all of the critical role the American Left played in lending legitimacy to Chavismo<\/em>, of the so-called liberals and progressives who denounced legitimate protests against Maduro\u2019s brutality as nefarious U.S.-backed coup attempts, who remained \u2014 and remain \u2014 silent on the regime\u2019s censorship, political repression, torture, and economic incompetence. William Neuman of the Times<\/em> did find an economist \u2014 a leftist economist, he assures us \u2014 who went so far as to say that certain aspects of the Ch\u00e1vez program \u201cneeded to be revised or even discarded to set the nation\u2019s economy on the right track.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin D. Williamson looks to the not-too-distant past to see how Venezuela got into the economic disaster they’re currently facing: Venezuela had a good run of it for about five minutes there, at least in public-relations terms. When petroleum prices were booming, all it took was a few gallons of heating oil from Hugo Ch\u00e1vez […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[465,25,28],"tags":[766,807,122,398],"class_list":["post-30617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americas","category-economics","category-media","tag-democracy","tag-expropriation","tag-movies","tag-venezuela"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7XP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30618,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30617\/revisions\/30618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}