Catching up with Russell Brand, comedian turned socialist sage

How time flies! It was over two years ago that we wrote about Russell Brand, whom we were about to describe as a “British comedian” before we realized that it’s been a long time since we actually heard him say anything funny.

Russell Brand

No, Brand has long since transcended mere comedy. As we noted on June 8, 2015, he’s been more comfortable the last few years “posturing as a crusading champion of the downtrodden and a heroic enemy of The System.” His 2014 stand-up show was entitled Messiah Complex, for which this world-class egomaniac should at least get credit for truth in advertising. The show was a tribute to some of his heroes, among them Che Guevara. And the book he published the same year was called Revolution, in which he expanded upon his enthusiasm not only for the “morally unimpeachable” Che but also for Fidel Castro.

Sharing pearls of wisdom from his latest masterpiece at Carlton House Terrace, London, October 14, 2017

Lately Brand has been busy plugging a new book about his history of addiction. The book’s publisher describes it as a collection of lessons learned from “fourteen years of recovery” from addiction to “heroin, alcohol, sex, fame, food and eBay.” The author himself calls it a “manual for self-realization,” adding, with an uncharacteristic touch of what sounds like – can it be? – humility, that his “qualification” to offer up these life lessons “is not that I am better than you but I am worse.”

The Sermon on the Mount?

But don’t worry: that quote notwithstanding, Brand appears to be as much of a crusading know-it-all as ever, no less convinced than before that – despite his admitted inability, over a period of years, to stay on track and keep his own house in order – he takes a back seat to no one when it comes to diagnosing the planet’s ills. In other words, while he’s escaped dependency on booze and drugs, he’s still hooked on himself. And the media, perversely, can’t kick the habit of reporting on his every pearl of wisdom. On October 25, for example, the BBC’s website carried a story headlined “Russell Brand: Society is collapsing.” (It’s not every day you see a headline like that on any website’s “Entertainment” section.)

“People,” Brand told BBC scribe Steven McIntosh, “are starting to recognise that the reason they feel like they’re mentally ill is that they’re living in a system that’s not designed to suit the human spirit.” They’re frustrated over having to “work 12 hours a day,” over having to “live in an environment that is designed for human beings from one perspective but not from a holistic perspective,” over the fact that they’re “[b]reathing dirty air, eating dirty food, thinking dirty thoughts.”

The people Brand is apparently talking about are those who live in the Western world today; and the system in question is therefore democratic capitalism. Given Brand’s heavily documented enthusiasm for Castro, Che, and other Communists, we can only suppose that he is unfavorably comparing life in the West today with life under various Communist countries, past and present. Donald Trump’s recent speech to the South Korean parliament drew a striking contrast between the freedom, prosperity, and respect for the individual that characterize life below the DMZ with the deprivation, fear, and despair of life under the tyranny of the Kim family regime. Brand’s comments to the BBC are apparently a through-the-looking-glass version of Trump’s speech. Yes, the British funnyman appears to be saying, South Korea may look okay enough “from one perspective,” but life in places like Cuba and North Korea is better holistically. Got that?

Two Brand heroes: Corbyn and Chávez

Brand told McIntosh that he had no intention of going into politics, but that determination didn’t keep Brand from penning a Huffington Post paean last May to Labour Party chieftain Jeremy Corbyn. Now, Corbyn is a guy whom even many Labour stalwarts consider to be way over the line. Corbyn, an enemy of NATO and fan of Castro’s Cuban Revolution and Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, is a Communist in all but name; but for Brand, he’s a man who combines “principles” with “common sense and compassion,” who has kept his “integrity perfectly preserved,” and who is, all in all, a “caring socialist leader” who has kept it together despite being the target of a “hegemonic narrative singularity.” No, we don’t know what that means either.

Posted on November 20, 2017November 22, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

Caleb Maupin, lackey for Putin and the mullahs

We’ve spent the last couple of days exploring the career of Caleb Maupin, a small-town Ohio boy who became a Communist in fifth grade and went on to help organize Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in New York. The OWS movement, however, fizzled just as quickly as it had flared up.

But if OWS was effectively dead, Maupin remained active. At some point he quit the Workers World Party, with which he had long been associated. In recent years, instead, he has appeared to be strongly aligned with the governments of Iran and Russia. In 2013 he appeared very briefly on CNN, speaking against U.S. participation in the war in Syria. The next year, he spoke at a conference in Iran. In 2015, he was on board an Iranian ship, the Shahed, claiming to be on a “humanitarian mission” to Yemen, although various countries charged that the ship was smuggling arms to the Houthi terrorist group. In addition, he has served as UN correspondent for Iran’s government-owned Press TV.

He has also been a reporter for RT (Russia Today), the English-language news, TV, and radio service of the Putin regime. In a December 2015 article for RT, he claimed that the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela was still alive and well: “Due to the policies of the Bolivarian government, it now costs less than $1 to fill a gas tank. Children in schools receive free breakfast, lunch, and snacks. Rural Venezuelans receive interest-free loans in order to buy their own land. Public transportation is extremely cheap – and free for senior citizens….In the Bolivarian neighborhoods of Caracas, one can have the kind of conversations about literature, world history, politics, religion and philosophy only found on college campuses in the United States.”

In another piece, he charged that “US society is based on money and capitalism with so much violence everywhere and so much state repression” and that it was thus “highly conducive to insanity; this is not a healthy society.” In yet another RT contribution, he spoke up for the Islamic Republic of Iran while smearing pro-democracy Iranian dissidents as liars and impostors.

In one September 2015 interview with Beijing-based Maoist Jeff J. Brown, Maupin praised Mao Zedong, celebrated the “great strides” China has taken in the last few decades as a (supposed) consequence of the revolution begun by Mao, and bonded with Brown over their shared contempt for America’s capitalism and “fascism.”

The fact that much of Maupin’s recent work has been published by the relatively obscure group Students and Youth for a New America (SYNA), which will sponsor a debate on July 8 between Maupin and a member of the “alt right,” may indicate that his career is on the decline. But this seems improbable. Maupin is, after all, an ambitious and still very young man, and his association with SYNA more likely reflects his interest in mentoring a new generation of young American Communists to carry on the work of the revolution that has preoccupied him since his childhood.

Posted on June 16, 2017May 18, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Last idiots standing?

In his lifetime, Hugo Chávez was a hero. After his populist, anti-gringo rhetoric won him the Venezuelan presidency, he rivaled the Castro brothers as an international symbol of socialism – and as a desired chum for chuckleheaded American celebrities eager to boost their coolness factor.

glover_chavez — Danny Glover and Hugo Chávez

We’ve previously discussed some of Chávez’s Hollywood conquests. One of them, Danny Glover, visited Chávez several times; they were so close that El Presidente actually arranged financing for a couple of movies Glover planned to make about Simón Bolivar and Touissant L’Ouverture. Nor did Glover’s enthusiasm for chavismo die with Hugo himself: in 2014, he led a list of showbiz luminaries – among them Oliver Stone and Tom Hayden – who signed a letter to the U.S. Congress in support of the caudillo‘s successor, Nicolás Maduro.

Another big-name A.D.H. (amigo de Hugo) was Sean Penn, who after Chávez’s death in 2013 tweeted “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it [sic] never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion….Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president Maduro.”

Not long after Maduro took over, of course, the chickens came home to roost. (Which is actually not the best metaphor in this case, because in reality chickens, and most other foodstuffs, all but disappeared. Earlier this year, a video was posted on You Tube showing a mob of starving Venezuelans who’d stopped a truck on a highway and pulled live chickens out of their cages.)

As we noted last May, one side effect of the social and economic collapse now underway in Venezuela is that the celebrities who once cheered Chavez’s policies have been keeping their distance now that the Venezuelan people are being forced to live – or try to live – with those policies’ calamitous results.

We did point out that a couple of foreign fans of chavismo seem to have hung in there. As of last December, anyway, Dan Kovalik of the University of Pittsburgh was still claiming that Chavez’s policies worked; in March of last year, Greg Grandin of NYU, writing in The Nation, complained that the shortage of basic goods in the Bolivarian Republic was being sensationalized, and approvingly quoted another far-left fool who proposed that the solution to Venezuela’s problems was even more socialism (for example, Stalin-style collective farms).

caracas-oct-5-2016-venezuelan-president-nicolas-462342 — Lukas Hass and Jamie Foxx with the First Couple of Venezuela

But while a few clowns in academia may still cling to chavismo, almost all of the film stars who once celebrated the Bolivarian Revolution have lost Nicolás Maduro’s phone number. With two exceptions. As the Associated Press reported a few days ago, Jamie Foxx, who won the 2004 Academy Award for his impersonation of Ray Charles, had just dropped in on Maduro in Caracas in order to “support the country’s socialist revolution and attend the signing of an agreement between Venezuela and its allies for the construction of houses for the poor.”

Accompanying him was actor Lukas Haas, who three decades ago played the little boy in Witness and has since turned up in movies like Woody Allen’s Everybody Says I Love You and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. At the Fusion website, Manuel Rueda provided a couple more details of this visit, informing us, for instance, that Foxx had sat in on “a strange and tedious ceremony where the Venezuelan leader signed construction contracts with a Jordanian housing firm.” In other words, Soviet-style entertainment. A video of this event confirms that it was indeed strange and tedious:

Then there’s this news clip, in which Maduro can be seen meeting the actors and showing them a couple of the historical treasures in the Miraflores Palace:

Fusion posted a number of tweets by Venezuelans who were furious at Foxx for providing their incompetent leader with positive PR. (Sample: “you should’ve asked Maduro to take you to the public hospitals in Caracas where people are dying because of the medical scarcity.”) And Fox News Latino quoted an opposition leader who wondered how much public money had been spent on these high-profile shenanigans at a time when Venezuelans are literally starving to death. As of this writing, meanwhile, neither Foxx nor Haas has issued a public explanation of their friendly call on the detestible Maduros.

Posted on October 10, 2016October 9, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

Galloway’s heroes

epa02375994 British PM George Galloway poses with a gift he received during his reception at the Arab Cultural Center in the Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, Syria, 05 October 2010. Galloway leads the Gaza-bound Viva Palestina 5 aid convoy that arrived in Damascus on 02 October from Turkey. The convoy includes 143 trucks loaded with medical and humanitarian aids and 370 Arab and foreign activists. Galloway said he is determined to go on with his aid convoy to Palestinians under Israeli siege despite the Egyptian authorities' decision to ban his entry to Egypt. EPA/YOUSSEF BADAWI — George Galloway

Recently, columnist Nick Cohen noted that the folks on the left who used to come to the defense of George Galloway have gone silent, having finally realized, apparently, just how loathsome a creature they were associating with. The same, it might be added, has been true of the defenders of Hugo Chávez: with a few exceptions, those who exulted over Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution in its first years have stopped doing so, having seen the increasingly tragic consequences of chavista socialism.

It’s no surprise that Galloway himself was an early booster of chavismo – and that, long after it declined from a chic cause into an embarrassment for the international left, he continued to eulogize it.

Back in 2007, Galloway lauded Chávez in the Guardian, sounding for all the world like John Reed celebrating the birth of the USSR:

The atmosphere in Caracas is fervid. The vast shanty towns draping the hillside around the cosmopolitan centre bustle with workers’ cooperatives, trade union meetings, marches and debates. The $18bn fund for social welfare set up by Chávez is already bearing fruit. Education, food distribution and primary healthcare programmes now cover the majority for the first time. Queues form outside medical centres filled with thousands of Cuban doctors dispensing care to a population whose health was of no value to those who sat atop Venezuela’s immense wealth in the past.

Galloway rejected out of hand the “mendacious propaganda that Chávez is a dictator and human rights abuser.”

gallowaycastro — Galloway with Fidel Castro

In 2012, he actually spent two weeks in Venezuela campaigning for Hugo’s re-election; the next year, when Hugo shuffled off this mortal coil, Galloway was quick to mourn the caudillo’s death, calling it “a body blow for the poor and the oppressed,” praising his friend for having “transformed Venezuela by the force of his will,” and calling him “a veritable Spartacus” who “rallied an army of not slaves, but those despised by the oligarchy.” He celebrated Chávez for standing up to Israel and to “North American hegemony.” By this point, it was clear to every pair of eyes unblinkered by ideology that Chávez’s only accomplishment had been to destroy his country’s economy – along with its liberties and human rights. But Galloway never let real-world conditions get in the way of his uncritical admiration for absolutism and contempt for freedom.

What about Castro? Check this out. “Of all the people you’ve met in your lifetime, who’s had the most positive impact on you?” an interviewer once asked Galloway. His reply: “Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro is the greatest man I’ve ever met by several miles….The most inspiring, the most charismatic, the most wise, and the most tireless of all the people I’ve ever met. He’s my real hero.”

And let’s not forget Putin. Since 2013, both Galloway and his wife have been on the payroll of the Kremlin’s RT television network. In the first half of that year alone (while still a member of the British Parliament, mind you), he earned £25,600 – about $37,000 – for going on RT from time to time to trash his own country and extol Putin. The Russian president has certainly gotten his money’s worth out of employing Galloway. In his appearances on RT, the wily Scotsman has consistently defended Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, arguing that Russia “has every right, indeed, obligation, to act in defense of its compatriots, its citizens, its economic and military assets which it has on the territory of the Ukraine by agreement and by treaty.” He’s called the U.S. approach to the Kremlin actions “ludicrous” and counseled the EU not to “poke the bear with a stick.” And, in the ultimate act of moral degeneracy, he’s smeared patriotic, democracy-loving Ukrainians who oppose Russian intrusion in their affairs as “terrorists,” “ultra-nationalists,” and “Nazis.” There’s no low to which he won’t go.

Posted on June 23, 2016June 10, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Checking in on chavismo‘s cheerleaders

Yesterday we started looking in on some of the Americans who, not that long ago, were slavering fans of chavismo. Where, we asked, are they now? What, if anything, do they have to say about what’s happened to Venezuela as a result of the so-called Bolivarian Revolution? Has any of them exhibited even the remotest hint of regret, remorse, repentance for cheering on Hugo’s socialist shake-up?

Among those who signed a 2014 letter to the U.S. Congress in defense of the Chávez regime was NYU historian Greg Grandin. Writing in The Nation in March of last year, Grandin “explained” current developments in Venezuela by turning to one after another of his fellow signers of that letter to Congress. (We took note of Grandin’s piece, incidentally, last June.)

Grandin cited with approval, for example, Miguel Tinker Salas‘s insistence that “we have to keep perspective” about developments in Venezuela. There followed another attempt to change the subject: why focus on the horrors of Venezuela but not, say, Mexico? Tinker Salas rejected U.S. media reports suggesting that Venezuela “is once again on the verge of a precipice” and mocked “[s]ensational headlines [that] focus on the lack of toilet paper and condoms.” Grandin likewise took comfort from anthropologist Naomi Schiller’s observation that “[t]here have been few periods where Bolivarianism hasn’t been deeply embattled.”

He further cited George Ciccariello-Maher, who offered the novel observation that by focusing on Venezuela’s present shortage of basic goods “we run the risk of losing sight of…the historically poor, the revolutionary grassroots, those who knew shortages and insecurity long before wealthy elites raised these as banners.” Ciccariello-Maher further suggested that instead of turning back from the precipice, Venezuela needed to charge forward faster than ever, putting its faith in the new phenomenon of “self-governed communes,” which produce their own manufactured and agricultural goods. We looked at those communes back in January, noting the ominous similarity between them and Stalin’s collective farms.

But of all these cheerleaders for chavismo, who’s still waving the pom-poms? Well, there’s Eric Draitser, for one. Who’s he? He’s the founder of a website called StopImperialism.com and is a regular contributor to both RT (Putin’s English-language TV channel) and Press TV (Iran’s English-language TV channel). Writing in April in the bizarre, far-left Counterpunch (a publication whose apparent purpose is to make The Nation look sane), Draitser spurned the “corporate media” which, he wrote, “would have you believe that Venezuela is a dictatorship on the verge of political and economic collapse; a country where human rights crusaders and anti-government, democracy-seeking activists are routinely rounded up and thrown in jail….In fact, the opposite is true.”

venezuela-grocery_store_queue — Reality check: a photo of one of those Venezuelan grocery lines

In Draitser’s world, chavista socialism hasn’t destroyed Venezuela’s economy; what’s happened, rather, is that the political opposition has “undermined, targeted, and destabilized” the Bolivarian Revolution and has used “the sacrosanct terminology of ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy,’ and ‘human rights’ to conceal” its “grave crimes against the people of Venezuela” and its “iniquitous agenda, shaped and guided, as always, by its patrons in the United States.” It’s no surprise that Draitser’s piece first appeared on the website of TeleSUR, a Caracas-based joint initiative of the governments of Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Bolivia.

Posted on May 3, 2016April 25, 2016 by usefulstooges 5

Hugo’s fans: where are they now?

The headlines don’t mince words. “Socialism in Venezuela: No toilet paper, TV, or long distance call service.” “Venezuela nearing total ‘collapse.’” “Venezuela’s Collapse Brings ‘Savage Suffering.’” “Venezuela has a crazy new plan to save electricity.” (The “plan” is to change the country’s time zone.)

nicolas-maduro-foto-reuters_nacima20140305_0114_21.jpg_1718483346 — Nicolás Maduro

It was only a couple of years ago – but seems much, much longer – that celebrity fans of chavismo in the U.S. were still proudly proclaiming their support for the so-called Bolivarian Revolution. Consider the March 2014 letter written by a bunch of Hugo’s stateside admirers to members of the U.S. Congress, chiding them for the passage of H.R. 488, a bill expressing support for Venezuelans “as they protest peacefully for democratic change and calling to end the violence.” The letter fiercely defended the chavista government, stating that it “may have legitimate reasons for arresting and detaining” many opposition members, and accused the U.S. Congress of “politicization of human rights.” In a classic change-the-subject gambit, the letter asked why the Congress was exercised about human rights in Venezuela and not, say, in Colombia or Peru? And in conclusion, the letter warned that “Congressional resolutions steeped in hyperbolic rhetoric that portray Venezuela as a repressive government or even a dictatorship threaten to undermine the integrity of the U.S. Congress in the eyes of our Latin American neighbors.”

Who were the signatories of this missive? The big names were actor Danny Glover, director Oliver Stone, and aging hippie Tom Hayden. But there were also several academics, some of them pretty big names in their fields – George Ciccariello-Maher, a political scientist at Drexel; Arturo Escobar, an anthropologist at Chapel Hill; Dan Kovalik of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law; Miguel Tinker Salas, a historian at Pomona; Sinclair Thomson and Greg Grandin, both historians at NYU; John Womack, Jr., a retired Harvard historian and economist; Gilbert M. Joseph, a historian at Yale; and Gerardo Renique, a historian at CUNY.

Where are these champions of chavismo now? Where, c’est-à-dire, are the schmoes of yesteryear? A few quick Google searches suggest that, of all these admirers of the Bolivarian Revolution, Kovalik is one of the two or three buffoons on the above list who’ve weighed in most recently on Venezuelan affairs. And what did Kovalik have to say? Scribbling in the Huffington Post in December, he lamented the opposition’s victory in the parliamentary elections: “Ultimately, it is the impoverished people of Venezuela who suffered the biggest loss in the recent elections, for the Chavista revolution has been focused on improving the once-neglected poor of Venezuela.” Kovalik was, at that point, still making great claims for the economic results of chavismo: “the Chavista government has done a laudable job in greatly reducing poverty and in reducing economic inequality.”

Then there’s Grandin. We’ll get around to him tomorrow.

Posted on May 2, 2016April 29, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

Venezuela: Weimar redux

venezmoney — A Caracas food line in January

Venezuela is blessed with magnificent natural resources and great promise, but thanks to chavismo, the reality-challenged socialist system imposed upon it by the late egomaniac Hugo Chávez and his torpid successor, former bus driver Nicolás Maduro, it has recently become, as we saw yesterday, the worst economy on earth. Inflation is so high, as Kejal Vyas reported on February 3 in the Wall Street Journal, that the government has been shipping in planeloads of newly printed money – at least five billion bank notes in all. The demand for more bolivars has been so urgent that the Venezuelan government has been forced to split the print job among several major international firms – including a subsidiary of Giesecke & Devrient, “which printed currency in 1920s Weimar Germany, when citizens hauled wheelbarrows of cash to buy bread.” In an unsettling echo of those days, Venezuelans are now carrying around giant rolls of cash, with supper at a fine restaurant costing “a brick-size stack of bills.”

veneztp — Waiting on line for price-controlled toilet paper

Venezuela’s currency was already close to worthless; this influx of fresh bolivars is virtually guaranteed to reduce the value of the bills even further, increasing inflation (which is already expected to hit 720% this year, currently the highest rate on earth) and sending Venezuela’s economy totally down the tubes. As of early February, the bolivar, which seven years ago was worth about fifty cents, had dropped to a tenth of a penny on the black market. “The flood of money has led some sectors of the economy,” notes Vyas, “to effectively price their goods in U.S. dollars,” in violation of Venezuelan law. Even criminals have switched to greenbacks, with “professional kidnap-and-ransom teams often demand[ing] U.S. currency instead of bolivars.”

CNN’s Patrick Gillespie, in another February 3 report, threw in an additional tidbit. How screwed up is Venezuela? So screwed up that although it has 298 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, more than Saudi Arabia or Iran and eight times the reserves held by the U.S., the country is now importing oil. Its oil sector is so incompetently run that it’s not capable of profitably refining its own crude So it’s been shipping in oil from Russia, Angola, Nigeria, and the U.S.

The former bus driver, driving his country off a cliff

Is Maduro taking urgent action to pull his country up out of its economic nightmare? Of course not. That would mean recognizing the folly of the current economic policies. And for the true believer in the Bolivarian Revolution, that’s simply not an option. Better to betray the people than abandon chavismo. Better to blame Venezuela’s economic woes on capitalist conspiracy, presumably masterminded by the U.S., than to acknowledge that socialism is a formula for self-destruction.

Thus Maduro “has changed the law so the opposition-controlled National Assembly can’t remove the central bank governor or appoint a new one.” Also, he’s “picked someone who doesn’t even believe there’s such a thing as inflation to be the country’s economic czar.” How can this be? How can someone not believe in inflation? According to this new “czar,” when prices go up, it’s not inflation; it’s profiteering by “parasitic” businesses.

In short, the Venezuelan people are at the mercy of rulers whose devotion to chavista thought compels them to deny the basic laws of economics. For them, ideology trumps reality. Better a mind crammed with utopian ideas than a full stomach.

Posted on February 11, 2016February 8, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Venezuela: still plummeting

For years, many members of the U.S. news media treated the chavista regime in Venezuela with far more respect than it deserved. Hugo Chávez, Americans were told, might not be perfect – he might not, for example, be as devoted to democratic principles as some of us might prefer – but he was a true hero, using his power (albeit quite ruthlessly at times) to bring fairness and equality to his country.

If there’s anything good about the current economic decline of Venezuela, it’s that such glowing reports are now rather thin on the ground – almost as thin, indeed, as many an indigent Venezuelan who goes to bed hungry every night because there’s nothing on the grocery shelves.

One prominent instance of the new media frankness about Venezuela was a January 29 article in the Washington Post, in which Matt O’Brien explained that both that country’s government and its economy “are well into their death throes.” Experts, he noted, now “expect Venezuela to default on its debt in the very near future. The country is basically bankrupt.” This, even though it has “the largest oil reserves in the world.” But as O’Brien pointed out, that’s the genius of chavista socialism.

The recipe for this disaster? Hand out freebies you can’t pay for. Replace skilled officials at the state-owned oil company with incompetent friends of the regime. And when the money runs out, just start printing more. Quoth O’Brien: “Lenin was wrong. Debauching the currency is actually the best way to destroy the socialist, not the capitalist, system.”

venezline — At least the supply of grocery carts seems undiminished.

Thanks to the wisdom of chavismo, Venezuela’s supermarkets have empty shelves, the breweries don’t have “enough hops to make beer,” its factories have insuffienct “pulp to produce toilet paper,” and so on. “The only thing Venezuela is well-supplied with are lines,” wrote O’Brien. Long, long lines of people waiting to buy things that are in short supply – if they’re in stock at all. Readers will recall that we’ve already discussed this socialist triumph on this site; the one new twist here, identified by O’Brien, is that the Venezuelan government has actually started rationing spots on those grocery-store queues, “kicking people out of line based on the last digit of their national ID card.”

A February 3 article by Kejal Vyas in the Wall Street Journal provided some more illuminating details.“Millions of pounds of provisions, stuffed into three-dozen 747 cargo planes, arrived here from countries around the world in recent months to service Venezuela’s crippled economy,” reported Vyas from Caracas. But the “provisions” to which Vyas was referred weren’t food items or medical supplies – they were shipments of currency, “at least five billion” freshly printed bank notes, which reportedly doubled the amount of cash in circulation.

What does this stunning development portend? We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Posted on February 10, 2016February 8, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Friend of the Revolution

Yesterday we began revisiting some of the useful stooges of Venezuela in the wake of that country’s promising November 6 parliamentary elections – as a result of which a national legislature with a pro-freedom, anti-chavista majority will begin serving today.

In December, American political commentator Eric Draitser – the logo of whose website, StopImperialism.org, juxtaposes the flags of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union with those of the U.S. and U.K. – reassured his fellow fans of chavismo, who had naturally been unsettled by the Venezuelan vote, that the Bolivarian Revolution “is not a revolution that can be undone with one election, nor can it be simply legislated out of existence.”

On the contrary, wrote Draitser (a frequent contributor to Putin’s English-language TV channel, Russia Today), “the Revolution will survive. It will be resurgent. It will be reborn thanks to the commitment of millions of dedicated Chavistas.” This conviction on his part, Draitser explained, was “born of experience in Venezuela, one that is informed by dozens of conversations with activists and organizers whose words of love and dedication to the revolution are matched only by their actions to build it.”

Like any good chavista, foreign or domestic, Draitser was quick to shift the focus away from the country’s incompetent, crooked Marxist managers to the Evil Empire to the north – representing the U.S. as a threat to Venezuelan independence, prosperity, and stability and depicting the Bolivarian Revolution as a gutsy thumb in the eye to Uncle Sam on behalf of all Latin Americans, all oppressed peoples, and all victims of the evils of capitalism. If Venezuelan voters rejected Maduro’s party, maintained Draitser, it wasn’t because they were fed up with the sour fruits of its knavish, criminal stewardship, but because of anti-government propaganda that could be traced directly to U.S. support for Venezuela’s “right-wing media.” He might more aptly have said “independent media” or “free media,” thereby to draw a proper distinction between real journalists and the hacks who work for Maduro’s propaganda outlets.

“The right-wing media in the country ,” charged Draitser, “has done everything in its power to undermine the government.” In other words, they’ve reported honestly on the ruling party’s activities and provided a forum to members of the political opposition. In the mind of a dyed-in-the-wool chavista ideologue, such fidelity to the tenets of objective journalism is tantamount to betrayal of the Revolution. (There’s a reason why the chavistas look up to Castro’s Cuba, where there are no independent media, and where Internet access by ordinary subjects continues to be profoundly restricted.)

As for the economic devastation that has been Venezuela’s fate under Chávez‘s and Maduro’s destructive socialist policies, Draitser doesn’t try to deny the problems; instead, again following standard practice, he attributes them largely to “economic sabotage” by the regime’s opponents and their “patrons in Miami and Washington.” He sums up his ridiculous position as follows: “This is certainly not to absolve the government of all blame, but rather to point out that Venezuela and its Revolution have been directly targeted by the forces of the Empire…the U.S. and its proxies have done everything in their power to destroy the Bolivarian process.”

If only! The good news is that, with any luck, “the Bolivarian process” is on the way out. And when it dies, the diagnosis won’t be murder but suicide. Tomorrow, more on those chavistas who, whle feathering their own beds, have helped hasten their own system’s end.

Posted on January 5, 2016January 3, 2016 by usefulstooges 4

Jeremy Corbyn, chavista

As we saw yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn is a big Putin booster. That being the case, it shouldn’t be a surprise that he’s also an ardent admirer of Venezuela’s chavista government.

Corbyn-Chavez-650 — With the caudillo himself

Never mind that Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, have declared war on individual liberty, trashed human rights, jailed opposition leaders, and sponsored terrorist cells; never mind that they’ve taken crime and corruption to new heights, surrounding themselves with grasping, cartoonish thugs who will apparently do anything to anybody to put a few more céntimos in their pockets; never mind that their ideologically driven economic policies have made their oil-rich nation inconceivably poor, depriving ordinary citizens of desperately needed medications and emptying the supermarket shelves of basic goods. No, forget all that: to dogmatic socialists like Corbyn, what matters is the ideology itself, not its real-world consequences.

venezuela_supermarket_empty_shelves — The triumph of the Bolivarian Revolution, summed up in a single picture

To be sure, like many other dogmatic socialists, Corbyn has apparently managed to convince himself that the real-world consequences of chavista ideology have been just dandy. He’s praised Venezuela as “an example of what social justice can achieve.” In 2009, he lauded Chávez for “seriously conquering poverty by emphatically rejecting the Neo Liberal policies of the world’s financial institutions.” In 2012, he traveled to Caracas so he could be there in person to celebrate Chávez’s re-election. Upon Chávez’s death in March 2013, Corbyn tweeted: “Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world.”

His zeal for chavismo didn’t end with the death of Chávez. Last year, Corbyn called into Maduro’s weekly radio show to eulogize the just-deceased UK socialist honcho Tony Benn, and they talked like old buddies, taking turns trashing capitalism, lauding the politics of Benn and Chávez, and patting each other on the back. This year, Corbyn said the following: “When we celebrate, and it is a cause for celebration, the achievements of Venezuela, in jobs, in housing, in health, in education, but above all its role in the whole world as a completely different place, then we do that because we recognise what they have achieved.”

venezuela-food-lines — Venezuelans queuing up for groceries

Corbyn’s devotion to the chavista cause has not gone unnoticed in Britain. This past July, only weeks before he became party boss, a Labour MP unhappy with the prospects of a Corbyn victory told a Telegraph reporter that if the man from Islington were to win, it would be “an absolute disaster. The first thing on his agenda will probably be twinning the UK with Venezuela.” In August, Corbyn won the endorsement of a British group called Hands Off Venezuela, which cheered him as “a long standing supporter of the Bolivarian revolution.” Indeed, the group went even further, stating that “[t]he spirit of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign, in a certain sense, is the spirit of the Bolivarian revolution being brought into British politics: the struggle against oppression, injustice, exploitation, imperialism and war, and in defence of health care, education, housing for all, the struggle for socialism.”

Well, here we go. Somewhere up there, Chávez is smiling.

Posted on October 15, 2015September 18, 2015 by usefulstooges 3

Useful Stooges