Prison report: Lula in, Leopoldo out

While all kinds of terrible things are happening in South America and around the globe, that continent recently supplied us with a couple of pieces of very good news.

In Brazil, almost a year after socialist President Dilma Rousseff’s removal from office, her mentor, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has been sentenced to nine years and six months in prison. Both were brought down by their roles in the Petrobras scandal, a.k.a. Operation Car Wash, the largest scandal ever in the history of that nation. Lula, a Worker’s Party politician who served two terms in Brazil’s highest office and who anointed Rousseff to succeed him, was found guilty of corruption and money-laundering. Lula plans to appeal the verdict; meanwhile, four – count them, four – other corruption trials lie ahead of him.

The specifics of Lula’s corruption are tawdry and rather dull: he was found guilty of taking a massive bribe – in the form of a luxury beachfront apartment – from a construction company, OAS. In addition to presenting Lula with the apartment, OAS also gave Lula’s party about $27 million in bribes in return for a suspiciously lucrative contracts with Petrobras. At the trial, Lula denied having anything to do with the apartment in question.

It’s hard to explain just how staggering the conviction of Lula is in his home country. He’s not just a former president but a national icon. His admirers believe that his socialist policies helped boost the Brazilian economy, lifting millions out of poverty. As a result, he’s widely revered as a folk hero, the ultimate man of the people, the very personification of socialist largesse – so that the idea of him raiding the treasury on behalf of OAS in exchange for an apartment seems a particularly cheesy sort of betrayal.

Lula is actually eligible to run again for president, and, prior to his conviction, was leading the polls in the run-up to next year’s elections. But if his appeal fails, he won’t be allowed to be a candidate. In any case, his conviction has surely diminished him in the eyes of at least some of his fans.

So that’s the good news from Brazil. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Venezuela, which is basically a tool of President Nicolás Maduro, took an action that surprised the world: it ordered that Leopoldo López be removed from prison, where he has languished for more than three years, and placed instead under house arrest.

López, of course, is someone whose fortunes we’ve been following pretty closely on this site: as we wrote in March of last year, he is “the chavista regime’s most eloquent critic [and] the opposition’s most charismatic leader” and was plainly locked up “for no other reason than that he is …by far the most potent threat to the power of…Maduro.”

This is a man who, as mayor of one of the five municipalities that make up Caracas, was recognized for his erudition and eloquence and showered with international awards for excellence and transparency in public service – making him the very antithesis of the crude caudillo Hugo Chávez and his lunkhead successor, Maduro. As we have put it previously:

López is so manifestly everything that Maduro is not, so completely the Gallant to his Goofus, that it seems almost too tidy a scenario; if this were a film script, the producer would almost certainly order the writer to make the villain at least somewhat less buffoonish and corrupt and the hero somewhat less noble and courageous.

Liliana Tintori at the White House in February with President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Senator Marco Rubio

Our most recent mention of López here was in March, when we noted that his wife, Liliana Tintori, had met with President Trump at the White House not long after the latter’s inauguration. At the time, Trump issued a call for López’s immediate release. It was more than President Obama had ever done for López, and it may well have made a difference.

In any event, López is out of jail, and that’s good news. But, like the rest of the people in his country, he’s not yet entirely free. We’ll continue to keep an eye on the course of Venezuela’s fortunes, and Leopoldo’s.

Posted on July 17, 2017July 14, 2017 by usefulstooges 3

Tightening the screws in Venezuela

Ever since this website got underway, we’ve been following the inexorable economic decline of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela under the rule of Hugo Chávez’s hapless yet ruthless protégé and successor, Nicolás Maduro. We’ve seen how Maduro’s stubborn devotion to socialist policies has led to shortages in basic goods and even – in a country that’s one of the world’s largest oil producers – to an inability to provide Venezuelan motorists with enough gasoline to keep their cars and trucks going.

A year ago, the Venezuelan electorate dealt chavismo a huge blow by electing a National Assembly dominated by opponents of the Maduro regime. The vote was viewed as a potential game changer. Observers assumed there would be major changes in the offing. For example, it was widely believed that Maduro’s most high-profile political prisoner, the folk hero Leopoldo López, would soon be free.

Donald Trump, Liliana Tintori, Mike Pence, and Marco Rubio at the White House on February 15

Well, López is still behind bars. (His wife, Liliana Tintori, met with President Trump in February, after which Trump called for Lopez’s immediate release.) And not much else has changed, either. At least not for the positive. On the contrary, Maduro has flexed his muscles more aggressively than ever – limiting the authority of the National Assembly, stepping up arrests of opposition leaders, imprisoning people without trial, canceling elections, violently crushing protests, closing down CNN en Español, and barring the New York Times’s Caracas correspondent from the country. In late March, according to the Times, “the United States, Canada and a dozen of Latin America’s largest nations called for Mr. Maduro to recognize the National Assembly’s powers, a rare joint statement that reflected deep impatience with his government.”

A Venezuelan protester holds up a flag bearing the slogan: “No dictatorship”

Alas, Maduro, instead of responding to this statement by developing a newfound respect for the National Assembly, did precisely the opposite. On March 29, Venezuela’s Supreme Court, which is dominated by Maduro loyalists, essentially dissolved the National Assembly and said that henceforth it, the Court, would be exercising legislative powers in its stead. In one fell swoop, this outrageous action effectively removed from the scene the major challenge to Maduro’s authority. As the Times noted, “In taking power from the National Assembly, the ruling removed what most consider to be the only remaining counterbalance to the president’s growing power in the country.”

Julio Borges protesting the Court’s action

Of course, there’s a word for this sort of thing: coup. Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States, did not hesitate to call it precisely that. The U.S., Mexico, and Colombia all officially denounced the Supreme Court’s action; Peru cut off diplomatic relations with Venezuela. Julio Borges, president of the National Assembly, denounced the Court’s ruling as “garbage,” stating: “They have kidnapped the Constitution, they have kidnapped our rights, they have kidnapped our liberty.”

The Miami Herald quoted Peter Schechter, director of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, as saying that Venezuela should henceforth be treated as a “pariah state.” Stated Schechter: “If there was any doubt before, there should no longer be one: Venezuela is a dictatorship.” The Times echoed this view, noting that the Venezuelan government, which until recently had been described by many as “an authoritarian regime,” was now widely viewed as “an outright dictatorship.”

To anyone familiar with the dreadful, depressing history of institutionalized socialism, none of this should be terribly surprising. The implementation of socialist ideology inevitably leads, sooner or later, to economic crisis, food shortages, and the suppression of human rights; and this combination of disasters, in turn, almost invariably causes the tyrants in charge not to reverse their catastrophic policies but to tighten the screws and intensify their grasp on power.

Briefly put: this can’t end well.

Posted on April 3, 2017March 31, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

A bouquet of Norwegian Chávez groupies

Here’s a quickie. Last August, and again in June of this year, Norwegian historian Bård Larsen published newspaper articles in which he noted that prominent left-wingers in his own country who had long cheered the Hugo Chávez (now Nicolás Maduro) regime in Venezuela were now finally – finally! – acknowledging the failure of the so-called Bolivarian Revolution.

At the same time, however, they weren’t quite willing to accept that they themselves had been fools and knaves, clinging with blind faith to an authoritarian ideology that from the very beginning had quite obviously contained the seeds of disaster. Some of them, indeed, had dropped their own past statements about chavismo down the memory hole.

Among these chavista “groupies,” as Larsen called them, is Audun Lysbakken, head of Norway’s Socialist Left Party, who’s on record as having called chavismo “an expansion and deepening of democracy.” Over the years he’s made other statements in praise of the Bolivarian Revolution, but they now appear to have been removed from his party’s website.

Lysbakken isn’t alone in his party, which has firmly supported chavismo from the beginning. After Chávez was re-elected in 2004, the Socialist Left’s national board – including such high-profile figures as Kristin Halvorsen, Øystein Djupedal, and Bård Vegar Solhjell – sent a letter of congratulations to Caracas that begin with the words “Dear comrades!”

Author Eirik Vold now presents himself as having foreseen Venezuela’s collapse. But it was only three years ago that the radical-left publisher Manifest issued Vold’s extremely pro-chavista book, Hugo Chávez: The Revenge. In it, Vold hailed Chávez as a “Christmas present for the left” and claimed that the dictator had a lot to teach Norwegian socialists.

Another sap: Benedicte Bull, a researcher at the University of Oslo. She now supports the Venezuelan opposition, but not long ago she was praising Chávez for working towards “a more egalitarian society and democratic government institutions” and condemning Norwegian critics of the caudillo for their supposed ignorance and lack of “nuance.”

Then there’s Peter M. Johansen of the national Communist daily Klassekampen, who had repeatedly depicted Chávez, and then Maduro, as waging a heroic struggle against what he described as a “cryptofascist oppisition directed from Washington.”

One Norwegian enthusiast for chavismo who has yet to jump ship is Dave Watson (no, the name doesn’t sound too Norwegian to us, either), who belongs to something called the Latin America Group in Bergen. In an article written in May, five months after the Venezuelan opposition scored a victory in last December’s parliamentary elections, Watson blamed the Bolivarian Republic’s economic disaster largely on the ruling party’s opponents, whom he accused of “undermining, destabilizing, and sabotaging” chavista efforts to bring about utopia.

Instead of criticizing Maduro for incarcerating opposition leaders such as Leopoldo López, moreover, Watson actually condemned the Venezuelan opposition for using its new majority to try to free these political prisoners. (Yes, you read that right.) Similarly, instead of recognizing that the country’s grocery shelves were empty because of the colossal failure of chavista economics, Watson suggested that the “mysterious disappearance” of staples from the stores was the product of a corporate conspiracy to bring down Maduro. All of which goes to show that some dreams – some self-delusions – never die.

Posted on July 29, 2016July 28, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Apocalypse no?

Yesterday we began taking a long look at Mark Weisbrot, whose enthusiasm for chavista economics appears to know no bounds. In November 2013, he ruled out the possibility of a “Venezuelan apocalypse” of the kind that is now well underway. Then came last December’s parliamentary elections, when, as we’ve seen, the Venezuelan electorate registered its loathing for President Nicolás Maduro’s incompetent handling of the economy, his increasing restriction on civil rights, and other outrages. But Weisbrot hadn’t given up the fight. In an article headlined “What Next For Venezuela?”, he started out by trying to put a good face on the people’s verdict. For one thing, he applauded Maduro for accepting the results of the vote. (In short, he praised the prez for doing the right thing and not violating the constitution; one might, in the same way, give somebody a pat on the back for not committing murder or rape.) For another, he attributed the heavy anti-Maduro tally to the opposition’s supposedly greater financial resources and to media support.

lopez — Jailed opposition leader Leopoldo López

Weisbrot strove throughout, in fact, to paint the chavista regime as responsible, law-abiding, and prepared to work harmoniously with its critics to fix the economy; meanwhile, he depicted those critics as violent, polarizing extremists who, unreasonably, refused to cooperate with the government in the interest of bringing the economy around. He also persisted in his now utterly ludicrous claim that life in the Bolivarian Republic had “changed substantially for the better” under Chávez and Maduro. Yes, he felt obliged to acknowledge the current economic crisis; but what he wouldn’t admit was that it was the predictable result of policies he himself had supported and helped devise. Nor did his pretty picture of the Maduro regime take into account such violations of human rights as the jailing of opposition leader Leopoldo López.

Former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner gestures as he arrives for a ceremony at the Casa Rosada Government Palace in Buenos Aires, June 17, 2008. Kirchner's wife Argentine President Cristina Fernandez's image deteriorated further in June as a nasty dispute with the farm sector entered its fourth month, according to a poll released on Tuesday. Her center-left government raised soy export taxes in mid-March, sparking farmer protests that have caused occasional food and fuel shortages. REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci (ARGENTINA) — Late Argentine President Nestor Kirchner

All right. So who is Mark Weisbrot? He’s an economist who’s associated with the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Sounds impressive, right? But his pronouncements on Venezuela and Argentina make it clear that Weisbrot is just about as far from the consensus on these nations’ economies as possible. Serious, objective members of his profession have been warning for years that Chávez, Maduro, and the Kirchners were leading their countries down the garden path. In September 2014, for example, The Economist ran an article about Venezuela subtitled “Probably the World’s Worst-Managed Economy.” It began: “A big oil producer unable to pay its bills during a protracted oil-price boom is a rare beast. Thanks to colossal economic mismanagement, that is exactly what Venezuela, the world’s tenth-largest oil exporter, has become.” A few months earlier, the same periodical ran a piece headlined “The Tragedy of Argentina: A Century of Decline.” A sampling: “Its standing as one of the world’s most vibrant economies is a distant memory….it trails Chile and Uruguay in its own back yard…. It has shut itself out of global capital markets…Property rights are insecure….Statistics cannot be trusted.”

Such, more or less, is the verdict of virtually all respected economists on these two countries. But Weisbrot sings a different tune. In 2007 – five years after Argentina defaulted on its sovereign debt – he toasted Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s victory in that year’s election, calling it “not difficult to explain” given her husband’s glowing performance in office during the previous four years. In 2011, with the country’s inflation rate hovering at around 25%, Weisbrot – under the headline “Cristina Kirchner and Argentina’s Good Fortune” – assured readers of the Guardian that Argentina under Cristina, who was then running for re-election, was doing “remarkably well” and undergoing a “remarkable expansion.”

And then? More tomorrow.

Posted on May 31, 2016May 31, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Leopoldo

Tuesday evening brought what may be promising news from Venezuela. The National Assembly, which since January 6 has been dominated by the anti-chavista opposition, passed a law ordering the release of political prisoners. President Maduro vowed to veto. We’ll see what happens. We’ll have to keep an eye on the Venezuelan media, because outlets like the New York Times and CNN can’t always be relied on to pay attention to such developments.

It’s not as if the international news media have entirely ignored what’s been going on in the Bolivarian Republic, but it does seem to us that, with few exceptions, they’ve failed to recognize just how remarkable the current situation is in that tortured country.

This failure, if that’s the right word, is not entirely a puzzlement, of course, given that many of the aforementioned media were, not so very long ago, eager stooges and vociferous cheerleaders for Hugo Chávez, the father of Venezuelan socialism, otherwise known as chavismo. Chávez, with his brazen and unapologetic anti-Americanism, embodied the hopes of certain Americans and Europeans for a smashingly successful socialist Latin America, led by the example of the fearless Hugo and wonderfully free of the baleful influence of the nefarious norteamericanos.

Instead, Venezuela has turned out to be an extraordinary dramatic – indeed tragic – textbook example of the sheer folly of socialism. The rapidity with which the country’s economy has collapsed, and the terrifying particulars of that collapse, provide – for those too young to remember the Soviet Union and too foolish to recognize that the Castros’ Cuba is not a charming vintage-auto museum or 24/7 salsa party but a well-nigh unlivable everyday reality for 11 million people – a vivid picture of the disaster that is Communism.

That in itself is dramatic enough. But add to that the singular case of Leopoldo López. The chavista regime’s most eloquent critic, the opposition’s most charismatic leader, he has been in prison for over two years now, for no other reason than that he is – quite obviously – by far the most potent threat to the power of Chávez’s hapless, fatuous successor, Nicolás Maduro. López is so manifestly everything that Maduro is not, so completely the Gallant to his Goofus, that it seems almost too tidy a scenario; if this were a film script, the producer would almost certainly order the writer to make the villain at least somewhat less buffoonish and corrupt and the hero somewhat less noble and courageous.

Venezuelan acting President Nicolas Maduro raises his fist during a campaign rally in San Carlos, Cojedes State, on April 4, 2013. The presidential campaign to replace Venezuela's Hugo Chavez formally kicked off Tuesday, with Maduro -- Chavez's hand-picked successor -- battling opposition leader Henrique Capriles for the forthcoming April 14 vote. AFP PHOTO / JUAN BARRETOJUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images — Nicolás Maduro

But on rare occasions, reality is simply better than fiction – and this is, quite simply, one of those times. López – a collateral descendant of Simón Bolívar, the George Washington of South America – studied economics and government at Kenyon College in Ohio and public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Elected mayor of Chacao, one of the five administrative districts of Caravas, by a slim margin in 2000, he was re-elected four years later with 81% of the vote.

leopoldolopezprisonervenezuela-670x472 — With his wife, Lilian Tintori

The glowing success of his mayoral tenure and the thoroughgoing spotlessness of his record were attested to by Transparency International, which gave him its first-prize award in 2007 and again in 2008 for running his country’s most honest and efficient city government. In 2008, he came in third in the World Mayors contest for the planet’s best mayors. He’s a remarkable, almost incredible combination: a learned student of economics and statecraft, a staunch, eloquent defender of human liberty, a highly competent and incorruptible administrator, and an inspired, practical-minded reformer of local government on every level.

venezuela_supermarket_empty_shelves — Just a reminder of those empty Venezuelan grocery shelves…

Since his unjust arrest, he has also proven to be a man of extraordinary bravery. Pretty much every major international human-rights group has declared him a political prisoner and called for his immediate and unconditional release. So have the New York Times and Washington Post. Polls show that if he were to run for president today, he would win easily. It’s clear that the main reason he remains behind bars is that Venezuela’s current leader, a grotesquely inept, ill-educated, and economically illiterate former bus driver, knows that Leopoldo is everything he isn’t and that more and more of the Venezuelan people – who are suffering increasingly from the tragic everyday consequences of chavismo – realize that Leopoldo is exactly what they need to pull their country out of its hole.

…and ridiculously long lines to get into those grocery stores

The present state of affairs, in short, could scarcely be more striking: Venezuela has what may well be the worst government on earth right now, and López, if chosen to replace Maduro, would, upon his installation, immediately become one of the world’s most thoughtful, ethical, and skillful heads of government. Every day that he continues to languish in prison is a lost day for the Venezuelan people, who have waited long enough for rescue. Let’s hope they’re able to finally spring him from the joint – and turn the grim winter of Venezuela’s discontent into a Venezuelan spring.

Posted on March 31, 2016April 2, 2016 by usefulstooges 5

Faces of chavista corruption

In late December, answering questions sent to him by the newspaper El Nacional, the popular, articulate Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López – who’s been in prison since February 2014 for the crime of being, well, a popular, articulate opposition leader – said that the next priority, after the seating of the pro-market, anti-chavista parliament that was elected on November 6, has to be the ousting of the country’s dictatorial honcho Nicolás Maduro.

lopez1 — López at an anti-government protest before his imprisonment

Maduro’s term doesn’t end until 2019, but López, who was sentenced to a 14-year term and who’s expected to be released by the new parliament (which went into session yesterday) over a promised presidential veto, insisted that some legal way must be found to remove Maduro from office, so that Venezuelan citizens could regain control of their national institutions. “Today,” said López, “the unconstitutionally appointed Supreme Court continues to be hijacked.The Attorney General protects the powerful and in Venezuela the victims who dare to complain are the ones who end up imprisoned.”

It will be interesting to see whether the opposition actually does try to unseat Maduro when it gains control of the legislature. In any case, the president’s opponents already have announced a lengthy agenda, which addresses many of the issues – and useful stooges – we’ve discussed previously on this site. Among their proposals: improvements in legislation that would make possible the repatriation of taxpayer funds stolen by corrupt politicians and their cronies. The corrupt politicians include three pre-Chávez presidents, Luis Herrera Campins, Carlos Andrés Pérez, and Jaime Ramón Lusinchi. Among the chavista crooks they hope to target is Alejandro Andrade, aptly described as “the most emblematic figure of corruption” because of his “accumulation and ostentatious display of a five-billion-dollar fortune.” As we explained last May, Andrade got rich the old-fashioned way: back when he and Chavez were kids, Chávez inadvertently blinded him in one eye during a game of “chapitas”; later, when Chávez became the great caudillo, he installed Andrade in a series of jobs – ultimately head of the national treasury – that enabled him to steal epic amounts of cash by means of a variety of ingenious schemes.

And let’s not forget Rafael Ramírez, the Chávez crony (and, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “soft-spoken son of a Marxist guerrilla”) who last year served briefly as Venezuela’s Foreign Minister. Before that he spent ten years (2004-2014) running the government-owned oil firm, PDVSA, where he commanded his underlings “to vote for Chávez or else” and tweaked the nation’s already corrupt oil racket in such a way as to make it, in the words of one obsever, “rotten to the core.” As we’ve noted, he “ultimately achieved the impossible: bankrupting the state oil firm of one of the world’s leading oil powers.”

Where is he now? Since December 2014 he’s been Venezuela’s man at the UN. In October he reacted with outraged to news of “a series of wide-ranging investigations” by American authorities into his tenure at PDVSA, the idea being to try to find out whether he and various amigos “used PDVSA to loot billions of dollars through kickbacks and other schemes” and “whether PDVSA and its foreign accounts were used for other illegal purposes, including black-market currency schemes and laundering drug money.” It’s an open secret that corruption is hardly a strong enough word to describe what Ramírez was up to at PDVSA, but Ramírez dutifully pulled off the outraged-innocent act, calling the U.S. probe “slander…a mass of lies and manipulation” and (of course) “part of a campaign…against our country, our government and our revolution.”

Posted on January 6, 2016December 22, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

¡Felicitaciones, Venezuela!

Yesterday we exulted in the November 22 victory in the Argentinian presidential elections of opposition candidate Mauricio Macri, who, promising to roll back socialist excesses and pursue an approach respectful of individual liberties and the free market, took power on December 10. But that victory, as we noted, was only the first part of a thrilling double play by the champions of liberty in South America. Let’s move now to Venezuela, where, since 1999, under the demagogic Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro, a despicable gang of stooges have impoverished the people in the name of chavismo, all the while shamelessly enriching themselves. On December 6, the Venezuelan electorate showed it was finally fed up with the empty promises, empty grocery-store shelves, and empty socialist rhetoric, and handed the National Assembly over to the opposition.

nicolas-maduro-foto-reuters_nacima20140305_0114_21.jpg_1718483346 — Maduro in happier times

“Coupled with last month’s defeat of the ruling Peronist movement in Argentina’s presidential election,” wrote Juan Forero and Anatoly Kurmanaev in the Wall Street Journal, “the outcome also signaled another important loss for leftist populism in South America.”

Julio-Borges_NACIMA20130425_0012_6 — Julio Borges

The Journal reporters quoted an opposition deputy, Julio Borges, as saying: “I feel as if we won the World Cup while playing with our two legs tied….This has been the most abusive campaign ever, but the important thing is that we were able to use democracy to beat a system that is deeply undemocratic.” Maduro, for his part, found a way (as always) to blame his party’s failure on the U.S. “We’ve lost a battle,” he said, “but the struggle to build socialism is only beginning.” He also insisted that the victory belonged not to “the opposition” but to “a counter-revolution.”

liliantintori(2l)_DemUnityMvmtleaders — Lilian Tintori, wife of Leopoldo López, cheering the opposition victory with leaders of the Democratic Unity Movement

The opposition’s triumph at the polls, it was noted, will likely mean freedom for political prisoners such as Leopoldo López, the highly accomplished – and highly popular –former mayor of one of the constituent cities of Caracas. López has been behind bars since February 2014, for no other reason than that President Maduro recognized him as a palpable threat to his own power. The election results will also enable the new legislature, which takes power on January 5, to address the problems (including an inflation rate topping 200%) that make Venezuela’s economy the world’s worst-performing, according to the International Monetary Fund. It’ll make possible desperately needed judiciary and administrative reforms.

But it won’t be easy. To pull Venezuela out of its “death spiral,” wrote Forero and Kurmanaev, the new members of the legislature will need to make “a series of painful and unpopular adjustments, rolling back more than a decade of populist and statist policies” –notably an outrageously impractical system of social-welfare programs that the country simply can’t afford (especially given the constant flow of taxpayer cash into the chavista elite’s private offshore accounts).

There are other reasons for concern, too. As Srdja Popovic and William J. Dobson warned in Slate, the opposition’s struggle to undo chavismo “is nowhere near over. Maduro and the ruling party will attempt to marginalize this victory in the weeks and months ahead…. Expect the courts to issue rulings circumscribing the powers of the legislature. Expect new edicts and orders concentrating even more power into the executive. Look for government budgets and competencies to shift. Watch out for allegations of corruption and criminal offenses against key members of the opposition.”

In short, the new powers-that-be in Argentina and Venezuela alike have their work cut out for them. It won’t be easy to turn these tragically broken systems around. But the election results send a powerful and encouraging message: namely, that the people of both countries have seen through the lies of their socialist leaders and cast a vote for individual liberty and the free market. And that, in itself, is cause for celebration.

Posted on December 18, 2015December 8, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

¡Felicitaciones, Argentina!

Christmas came early for fans of freedom in South America.

It almost seems too good to be true. On November 22, in an upset election, opposition candidate Mauricio Macri beat out Daniel Scioli, whom the current head of state, the dictatorial Cristina Kirchner, had supported fully to replace her as president of Argentina. He took office on December 10.

His election, wrote Agustino Fonteveccia at Forbes, “blew new wind into the sails of South America’s second-largest economy” and “led to a flurry of optimism across the country, and particularly on Wall Street.”

Twelve years of Kirchnerism (Cristina’s eight years in power followed four years of rule by her late husband, Nestor) brought the Argentinian economy to its knees with excessive social-welfare spending, shameless government bloat, sky-high tariffs, massive corruption, and the imposition of a whole raft of destructive socialist economic ideas – all of which led, inevitably, in 2014, to the country’s second sovereign-debt default in fourteen years. Kirchner, as we’ve seen several times on this site, surrounded herself with stooges who propped up her power while enriching themselves at the expense of the Argentinian people. Macri, who has been mayor of Buenos Aires for eight years, promised to turn the country back in the direction of the free market and to fight institutional corruption.

Kirchner has called Macri a tool of corporate interests. “A country is not the same as a business,” she chided in one speech. Macri, for his part, when asked what he would change about Kirchner’s foreign policy – which has emphasized close relations with Cuba and Venezuela, said: “Everything!”

After his victory was secured, he “immediately made a call for Venezuela to be booted from South America’s continental trade union Mercosur,” citing the chavista regime’s habit of imprisoning its critics, most famously opposition leader Leopoldo López. He’s also expressed an eagerness to strengthen ties to Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile. And he’s vowed to enact “a rapid and wide-ranging burst of reforms designed to dismantle the thicket of socialist controls” put in place by the Kirchners. “We will experience the start of a new era,” promised Alfonso Prat-Gay, Macri’s choice for Minister of the Economy (and a former top official at J.P. Morgan in the U.S.). “The tyranny of authoritarian populism is over.”

During her final days in power, La Kirchner did not, shall we say, develop anything remotely resembling class. Instead of working with her successor to ensure a smooth transition for the country’s own good, she threw up so many obstacles for Macri’s incoming administration – making last-minute appointments and appropriations that will cause lasting damage not only to him but to the citizens of Argentina – that even some of her ardent supporters cried foul.

Fonteveccia, to be sure, offered cautionary words. “Not only is Macri not the freewheeling markets capitalist he suggests he is,” maintained the Forbes writer, “but the challenges his administration faces—rampant inflation, a bankrupt central bank, a fractured political system, and a stagnant economy, to name a few—suggest more pain is in the cards before Argentina can spread its wings and become a fully functioning member of the world economy and the global financial system.”

Nor, admittedly, does it help that the Kirchnerites retain a majority in both chambers of the National Congress. Then again, many observers are a good deal more optimistic than Fonteveccia. There is particular enthusiasm, not only in Buenos Aires but in Washington and on Wall Street, over the people he’s selected for his cabinet. It certainly looks more promising than the gang of useful stooges with which the Kirchners surrounded themselves.

In any event, the Argentinian vote was only the first part of a terrific one-two punch. We’ll get to that tomorrow.

Posted on December 17, 2015December 8, 2015 by usefulstooges 3

Maduro’s descent into madness

Over the last few months, we’ve seen that a whole gallery of American celebrities are fans of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. Last year Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s oldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy II, who’d lent his name to some Massachusetts power-supply initiative (presumably to burnish his image in his family’s home state), effusively thanked Maduro (who’d made a token contribution to the effort in order to burnish his image in America’s bluest state), for “answer[ing] our call to provide heating assistance to the poor.” Also last year, Danny Glover, Oliver Stone, Tom Hayden, and several other clueless Hollywood luminaries signed a letter to the U.S. Congress singing Maduro’s praises.

glover_maduro — Maduro with Danny Glover

Why are we serving up this reminder? Because of a Daily Beast article in late September whose headline asked a head-turning question – namely, “Has Venezuelan President Maduro Gone Insane?” Maduro, wrote Jeremy Kryt, “has grown so erratic some are calling him ‘the South American Hitler.’” In the course of a few weeks, he’d “come to the brink of war” with both Colombia and Guyana. He’d turned Venezuela into “an Orwellian dystopia, complete with the highest inflation rate in the world,” not to mention rampant violence, crime, and kidnappings, and shortages that are “so severe that it’s sometimes impossible to buy a roll of toilet paper in Caracas.” He’s told the media in all seriousness that he receives “advice from the deceased Chavez via a talking bird” – a claim that brings to mind the off-the-wall statements by the victorious leader of a coup d’êtat in a fictional Central American country in Woody Allen’s 1971 comedy Bananas. (“From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish.”)

Maduro’s paranoia has led him to jail popular opposition leader Leopoldo López. It’s led him to order “the use of deadly force against demonstrators he sees as a threat to his regime.” Adam Isaacson of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) told Kryt, “If he believes a lot of what he’s saying about the conspiracy theories against him, then he’s not the sanest man in the world….Internationally there’s no trust of Maduro at all….He says things that aren’t true, and he’s quite erratic….Something very ugly could happen in the next few months.”

Nicolas Maduro wife Cilia Flores — Maduro and his wife, Cilia

To top all this off, on November 10, Haitian officials arrested two nephews of Maduro’s wife and turned them over to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which flew them to New York for arraignment on charges of drug trafficking. Longtime observers of chavismo weren’t surprised: in today’s Venezuela, the principal activities of the leaders and their families are raiding the treasury, laundering money, and selling narcotics.

But were Kennedy, Glover, Stone, and Hayden surprised? Have any of them said anything about any of this? Not that we know of. As far as we’re aware, they’re all still in Maduro’s corner. What, one wonders, would it take to shake their faith in the caudillo? The mind reels. For such people, it’s clear, ideology will always trump reality.

Posted on November 23, 2015November 20, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

Venezuela: a new assault on freedom

He studied sociology at Kenyon College and public policy at Harvard; after returning home to Venezuela, he was elected mayor of Chacao, one of the five political subdivisions of the city of Caracas. Twice during his eight-year tenure (2000-2008), Transparency International gave him awards for presiding over an honest and efficient municipal administration in a country otherwise rife with corruption, inefficiency, and lack of transparency. The City Mayors Foundation awarded him third place in its international World Mayors Commendation, calling him “a hands-on mayor as well as a national politician fighting for democratic openness and fairness in Venezuela.” When he completed his two terms as mayor, he had a 92% approval rating.

What stopped Leopoldo López from going on to a third term? Hugo Chávez. In 2008, citing manifestly trumped-up corruption charges, the government denied López and a number of other opposition politicians the right to run for office. Human Rights Watch, the Organization of American States, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) all took López’s side, calling his treatment undemocratic, but the chavistas held firm: they knew a serious threat to their rotten-to-the-core regime when they saw one.

López – young, handsome, passionate, eloquent, charismatic, and sharp as a tack – went on to become not just a leader but a symbol of his country’s democratic opposition. On February 18 of last year, after organizing and participating in a mass protest against the Chávez government, he was arrested on charges of “terrorism, murder, grievous bodily harm, public incitement, arson, damage to property, and conspiracy to commit crimes.” The charges were as patently illegitimate as the charge of corruption that kept him from running for elective office, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights demanded his immediate release – to no avail.

He has been in prison ever since. During his incarceration, he has been showered with honors. Harvard gave him an award. So did the National Endowment for Democracy. In Spain, he won the Cádiz Cortes Ibero-American Freedom Prize. This June, Foreign Policy – which had already named him one of its “Leading Global Thinkers of 2014” – ran an article hailing him as “Venezuela’s Last Hope” and said he embodied “the change his country needs.” Polls show that in an electoral face-off for the presidency between López and the incumbent, Chávez protégé Nicolás Maduro, the vote would be 72% to 28%.

(Meanwhile The Nation, the flagship weekly of America’s far left and home base for the nation’s most egregious useful stooges, exhibited its usual contempt for freedom by deferentially interviewing a longtime chavista who was allowed to smear López in its pages as an “extreme right-winger,” “fanatical fascist,” and “ultra-super-reactionary.”)

vdheuvel12 — Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Nation

The latest outrage came two days ago, on September 10. After a closed-door trial, López was sentenced to thirteen years and nine months in prison. Erika Guevara-Ross, Americas Director at Amnesty International, made her organization’s position clear: López, she said, is being punished for leading “an opposition party….He should have never been arbitrarily arrested or tried in the first place. He is a prisoner of conscience and must be released immediately and unconditionally.” José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director at Human Rights Watch, called the case “a complete travesty of justice.” The Washington Post noted that in recent months U.S. diplomat Thomas A. Shannon Jr. had met with Maduro and other officials “to convey U.S. concern about the outcome of the López trial,” but obviously to no avail.

Innumerable Americans and Europeans root reflexively for Venezuelan socialism, having been beguiled into thinking that it embodies “liberal” or “progressive” values. If they had any decency, this latest cruel and cynical move against the ruling party’s #1 opponent would awaken them to the truth about Maduro’s monstrous regime. But don’t count on it. As history shows, useful stooges have a remarkable gift for preserving their own self-delusion.

Posted on September 12, 2015September 12, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

Useful Stooges