¡Felicitaciones, Venezuela!

venezuela_supermarket_empty_shelves — Grocery shopping in 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.

lopez — Leopoldo López, who stands to be released from prison after the opposition takes control of the Venezuelan legislature

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

Putin’s Chinese fans

On October 7, Vladimir Putin celebrated his sixty-third birthday. To commemorate this occasion, we’ve spent the last few days here at Useful Stooges looking at Putin – and at a few of his benighted fans around the world.

This one is particularly depressing. Apparently it’s time to add a new wing to the Putin fan gallery. A huge wing. For, as it turns out, Vladimir Putin is a superstar in China.

While people in other countries have cooled on Vlad since he sent troops into Ukraine, in China his numbers have soared. A biography of him was a bestseller last fall. After Russia annexed Crimea, his approval rating hit 92%. A 2014 article in a Chinese publication referred to “Putin fever.”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Jeremy Page provided the context in an article that appeared last October: in recent years, he noted, the governments of China and Russia have grown closer, united by their contempt for democracy in general – as represented by pro-freedom protests in Hong Kong and Kiev – and for the U.S. in particular, which is seen as instigating such protests.

putinbook — Bestseller: millions of Chinese book buyers want to read about Putin

Chinese president Xi Jinping has said that the two countries have the world’s “best great-power relationship.” In September, Putin said: “Russian-Chinese ties have reached probably their highest level in history and continue to develop.” Last year, Timothy Garton Ash wrote in the Guardian that Xi and other Chinese leaders, who “grew up under Chairman Mao,” look up to Putin because they love “the idea of another non-western leader standing up to the capitalist and imperialist west.”

mao — Mao: he killed 50 to 80 million people, but oh, that charm!

Indeed, Mao may be history and China may have become a top-flight capitalist power, but the PRC’s government remains firmly Communist – and its people are still taught from infancy to respect, and even fear, authority. While Putin, as Page notes, has “overseen a gradual rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin,” Xi has done much the same for the memory of Mao. Even though millions of Chinese citizens unquestionably crave democracy, long for greater freedom, and are active in reform movements, millions more, like generations of their ancestors before them, reflexively esteem tyrants. Or, as they might prefer to put it, they admire leaders who have power and aren’t afraid to use it boldly to benefit their own countries.

Uninspired by Obama, they’re galvanized by Putin. They’re impressed by his bullying moves against Georgia and Ukraine. As one Chinese journalist has said, they’re attracted by Putin’s “strong ’emperor’ quality.” They view him as “a leader with character” who “strikes back when the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is invaded.” To quote a commenter at an online Chinese forum: “Chinese people approve of Putin for the same reasons that they reminisce about Chairman Mao.”

Since Page’s article appeared, the Chinese enthusiasm for Putin has only intensified. In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that China’s “adulation” of the Russian president had “reached dizzying new heights” thanks to “a slick propaganda video lavishing praise” on him. The video includes comments by Chinese people praising Putin for his “very big muscles” and calling him “a big handsome man!” How can freedom compete with that?

Posted on October 13, 2015September 14, 2015 by usefulstooges 3

Jane Fonda: she regrets (almost) nothing

jane2 — Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, 1972

To older readers, it may seem unnecessary to revisit the moral depredations of Jane Fonda, which made worldwide headlines during the Vietnam War. But the fact is that countless younger people today, while acquainted with her through her continuing work in movies and television, are unfamiliar with her sordid history. Even many of those who will never forget her 1972 visit to North Vietnam and the famous photographs of her sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery, as if she were a soldier preparing to shoot down American aircraft, may not remember – or may never have known about – some of her other, equally offensive actions over the years. Yes, she’s apologized numerous times for those pictures, confessing to “a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever”; but her actions on that day were of a piece with her entire history of political activism, for which she has never apologized and which she continues to pursue to this day.

jane5 — Laughing with North Vietnamese soldiers, 1972

During her 1972 North Vietnam visit alone, for example, she made several radio broadcasts in which she unquestioningly regurgitated her hosts’ propaganda, accusing the U.S. of genocide, calling U.S. soldiers war criminals, and urging President Nixon to read the poetry of Ho Chi Minh. On her return home, she testified that American POWs were being humanely treated; later, when released POWs contradicted her accounts, she called them liars. When she and her second husband, radical activist Tom Hayden, had a son in 1973, they named him Troy, after Nguyen Van Troi, a Viet Cong bomber who, ten years earlier, had tried to assassinate Robert McNamara and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (When Troy married black actress Simone Bent in 2007, Hayden described it as “another step in a long-term goal of mine: the peaceful, nonviolent disappearance of the white race.”)

fondahayden — Jane Fonda and second husband Tom Hayden

In a 2002 book, Aid and Comfort, authors Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer demonstrated convincingly that Fonda’s actions in North Vietnam rose to the level of prosecutable treason. By contrast, in her own 2005 memoir, My Life So Far, Fonda offered a radically whitewashed account of that chapter of her life – claiming, for instance, that all she’d done on Hanoi radio was speak from her heart about the cause of peace. In fact she’d read verbatim from scripts prepared by the North Vietnamese government – scripts crammed with crude propaganda exalting Communism and demonizing the U.S. military.

In her book, far from expressing blanket remorse for her North Vietnamese visit, Fonda apologized only for those notorious pictures. “I do not regret,” she wrote, “that I went [to North Vietnam]. My only regret about the trip was that I was photographed sitting in a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun site.” Indeed, she applauded herself for going to North Vietnam and even suggested that her efforts had helped end the war. On the contrary, as North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin later told the Wall Street Journal, “Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda…gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.” And thus prolonged the war, and helped ensure American defeat.

That’s a bad enough legacy for anyone. But as we say, Fonda’s North Vietnam visit was only one episode in a long, destructive life of useful stoogery. More tomorrow.

Posted on September 1, 2015August 23, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

Taking on Kyle Bass’s illicit pharma scheme

Since inaugurating this website, we’ve tried to keep up with the always interesting activities of Cristina Kirchner’s favorite hedge-fund manager, Dallas’s own Kyle Bass – who’s routinely praised her corrupt, incompetent Marxist regime and slammed his fellow hedgies for expecting her to pay the money she owes them. We’ve seen him defend General Motors’s cover-up of a faulty-airbag case by blaming the passengers who lost their lives as a result of the defect.

Most recently, we looked at his newest money-making scheme. Taking advantage of a new process called “inter partes review” (IPR), he challenges drug companies’ patents via a newly formed front group called the Coalition for Affordable Drugs – and, at the same time, short-sells those companies’ stocks. It’s a sure-fire gimmick: the minute a patent challenge becomes public, the firm’s stock price plummets and Bass pockets a few million dollars. Meanwhile, of course, every new patent challenge further weakens the motivation of pharmaceutical firms to invest in product development – and thus places at risk the welfare (and perhaps even the lives) of heaven knows how many sick people who are in desperate need of miracle drugs.

Bass, who’s constantly trumpeting his own moral superiority to (for example) the “vulture” hedge funds that actually expect Argentina to pay its debts, claims that this slimy pharma hustle of his was prompted by the most ethical of motives: he wants to break up monopolies on certain medicines and thus bring down prices. But the pharmaceutical industry isn’t buying it: as James C. Greenwood, head of the BIO trade association put it, “There’s nothing in this man’s history to suggest he has any interest in lowering health-care costs.” Another observer, intellectual-property expert Scott McKeown, calls Bass a “patent troll.”

Bass, McKeown recently wrote, “is certainly not embarking on this multi-million dollar venture to help Medicare patients. Instead, he is simply hoping to spook financial markets to his benefit.”

At least some folks on Capitol Hill agree, and are doing their best to stop Bass in his tracks. On June 10 came the news that the House Judiciary Committee, in response to Bass’s activities, was “considering revisions to a pending bill” that would “require any party seeking an inter partes review…of an existing patent to certify that it does not have any financial interest in a drop in the patent owner’s securities.” On June 22, it was reported that the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB) had agreed to consider a motion by Celgene, one of the pharma firms targeted by Bass, to sanction the Coalition for Affordable Drugs for abusing the IPR process. And on June 26, the Wall Street Journal added a scintillating new detail:

…according to Celgene, Bass had committed extortion, threatening to challenge Celgene’s patents unless the firm paid him off.

Oh, well. We already knew how chummy Bass is with Cristina Kirchner and her crooked crew. Why should we expect his behavior to be any less morally reprehensible than theirs?

Posted on July 29, 2015July 23, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

In Gabon, Bongos play you

In April, an article in Britain’s Daily Mail drew attention to a head of state who’s virtually unknown in the Western world: Ali Bongo Ondimba, President-for-Life of the small West African nation of Gabon. Bongo, wrote reporter Sebastian Shakespeare, “is Prince William’s closest ally in the fight against ivory poaching in Africa.” But now, it appeared, he could turn out to be “a source of acute embarrassment” to the prince.

Why? Because Gabonese oil minister Etienne Dieudonne was “considering levying tens of millions of dollars in tax penalties against the energy giant Shell, which has operated in the West African country since 1960.” If this taxation plan were put into effect, explained Shakespeare, it would “plunge relations with Gabon into the deep freeze” and make it “very tricky for William to continue his relationship with Bongo,” who’d previously been viewed by British diplomats “as a devoted Anglophile who was expected to seek Commonwealth membership for the former French colony.”

There was something very curious about Shakespeare’s article, and it was this: his clear implication that Bongo wasn’t already “a source of acute embarrassment” to the British prince. After all – as Shakespeare himself noted – Bongo, whose father ruled the country before him for 41 years, has “long been dogged by accusations of nepotism and money laundering.”

And that’s putting it mildly. Every year, the Bongo family – which has been described as carrying out “institutionalized pillaging of public resources” and as treating “the national treasury like its own private bank account” – skims about 25% off the top of Gabon’s massive oil revenues. The family owns 39 luxury houses and apartments in France, including a 14-bedroom, 48,ooo-square-foot, $130 million mansion on Paris’s upscale rue de l’Université that’s the most expensive residence in France.

Bongo’s French real estate, moreover, is only a small fraction of his empire. He also has a £50 million house in Mayfair, and until recently owned a Boeing 777 jet, which Paris police seized in connection with a lawsuit. This wasn’t Bongo’s first unpleasant brush with Gallic cops: in February 2013, the gendarmes raided a Bongo-owned villa in Nice in connection with a graft investigation.

chateau — “The most expensive residence in France”

There’s even more. In February 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Justice and Homeland Security departments were looking into American properties linked to the Bongo family in an effort “to determine whether any assets are traceable to public corruption” in Gabon. And this spring, it emerged that Bongo and his 50-odd siblings were warring in French courts over the family fortune, and that the struggle was bringing to light new information about their wealth – and the elaborate system of institutionalized corruption that made it possible. Among the contested family assets, it turns out, are clandestine bank accounts in Monaco containing at least hundreds of millions of dollars, plus “scores of luxury villas…around the world,” not to mention “planes, boats, art and huge stakes in Gabon’s key industries.” Oh, and let’s not forget Bongo’s “vast fleet of hundreds of luxury cars including Mercedes, Maybachs and Rolls Royces.”

Meanwhile, nearly a third of Gabon’s citizens live in poverty; the average Gabonese makes $12 a day.

All this being the case (and having been widely known to be the case for several years now), it was bemusing, at first glance, to see Sebastian Shakespeare suggesting in April that Ali Bongo had now, suddenly, because of a possible plan to levy a tax, emerged as a potential embarrassment to Prince William – as if Bongo’s years of shameless, limitless rapacity weren’t already more than enough of an embarrassment.

bongoharry — M. le Président and Mme. Bongo, Prince Harry

On second thought, however, we realized that there wasn’t really anything bemusing about Shakespeare’s article. On the contrary, it reflected a way of thinking that’s very familiar in the Western world today – a way of thinking that not only takes for granted the prodigious scale of corruption by African heads of state but accepts it, with a complacent shrug, as an endemic and intractable element of life on that continent. Most of Prince William’s countrymen, we reflected, would probably react with indifference to the news that he’d teamed up with the likes of Bongo to fight ivory poaching. After all, it’s a worthy cause, isn’t it? The House of Windsor can’t change the world, can it?

No, it can’t. But what it can do, and does routinely, is to take actions that send a message. And the message that Wills is sending by working with Bongo is not a welcome one. Intentionally or not, he’s doing the tyrant a massive favor – whitewashing his crimes, lending him legitimacy, providing him with an image reboot of a sort that the world’s best PR people could only dream of. The prince should understand this, and respond by acting responsibly. And he should understanding something else, too: that Bongo’s involvement in this partnership with him is almost certainly motivated by nothing more or less than a cynical desire to get precisely such a publicity boost.

Let’s face it: could a dictator who’s plundered so wantonly from his own people, accumulating palaces while his people try to scrape by on $12 a day, truly care all that much about the fate of elephants?

Posted on July 6, 2015June 8, 2015 by usefulstooges 6

Daniel Och’s dirty money

Lately, we’ve taken a look or two at Kyle Bass, who, as we discovered, is, among other things, awfully chummy with the swindling thugs who run Argentina. But when it comes to making sweetheart deals with slimy heads of state, he’s got nothing on fellow New York hedge funder Daniel Och, the CEO and Chairman of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group. For the story of Och’s career is, to a remarkable extent, an account of intimate, mutually profitable, and utterly unconscionable transactions with some of the most brutal tyrants of our time.

First, a brief introduction: Och (who’s been described as “one of the few men for whom the description steely-eyed is truly apt”) is a native New Jerseyan who, after graduating from the Wharton School, spent eleven years at Goldman Sachs. In 1994, with a $100 million cash infusion from the heirs to the Ziff publishing fortune, he founded Och-Ziff. By 2013, he was #17 on Forbes’s list of the year’s 25 top-earning hedge funders, with a $400 million take. In addition to his principal residence, an apartment at 15 Central Park West in Manhattan – the “world’s richest address” – he owns a $20.3 million, 12,000-square-foot mansion in Aspen, Colorado, that boasts 7 bedrooms and 9.5 baths.

Och has had more than his share of controversy. In 2011, Och-Ziff was sued by an ex-employee who claimed he was owed $7.9 million in pay and stock. Last year, a group of Och-Ziff shareholders sued the firm for issuing “false and/or misleading statements and/or fail[ing] to disclose material adverse facts” about its activities. According to the New York Observer, when Lehman Brothers went down the drain, its lawyers suspected Och of short-selling their company “into the dirt.” Indeed, court papers filed in 2010 charged that Och-Ziff had spread rumors “that helped bring down Lehman Brothers.” As the Wall Street Journal reported, Och-Ziff “likely disseminated and/or was the recipient” of a story “that Lehman had spun off debt to two Lehman-controlled hedge funds to reduce [its] leverage” – a lie that was allegedly propagated “by unscrupulous market participants looking to profit” from shorting Lehman stock.

But what about those transactions with tyrants? Tune in tomorrow.

Posted on June 22, 2015June 7, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

They’re getting wise to Stephen F. Cohen

It’s a pleasure to report that in recent weeks, awareness of Professor Stephen F. Cohen‘s role as an ardent Putin apologist seems to have risen, at least in certain circles. In an April 28 New York Times op-ed, Polish sociologist Slawomir Sierakowski slammed Cohen’s view that Ukraine is part of Russia’s sphere of influence, pointing out that Cohen

overlooks the question of whether the countries that fall within [that sphere] are there by choice or coercion. Ukraine is willing to be in the Western sphere of influence because it receives support for civil society, the economy and national defense — and Russia does nothing of the kind.

Also, added Sierakowski, “Cohen and others don’t just defend Russia; they attack the pro-democracy activists in Ukraine.”

Vladimir Putin at a navy parade in Severomorsk — Vladimir Putin

A week later, at the website of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Carl Schreck weighed in, noting that “[e]ven respected Russia specialists who, like Cohen, advocate for a U.S.-Russian relationship based on realism say Cohen is essentially defending the Kremlin’s agenda in the West.” Schreck quoted Lynn Lubamersky, an associate professor of history at Boise State University, as calling Cohen “a mouthpiece for a mass murderer.”

Schreck also cited a recent debate with Garry Kasparov and Anne Applebaum – two of the sharpest and best-informed critics of Putin’s Russia alive today – at which Cohen had “accused the West of provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin with NATO expansion, stoking potential war with Moscow, and failing to acknowledge its responsibility for what has happened in Ukraine in the last 15 months” – a line of argument, Schreck pointed out, that largely “dovetailed with a narrative pushed by the Kremlin, which portrays its seizure of Crimea as a response to Western meddling in Ukraine.” Denying in an interview with Schreck that he’s a fan of Putin, Cohen insisted that, on the contrary, he’s a “patriot of American national security,” while those who criticize him – including, apparently, Kasparov and Applebaum – are not.

pcr_stamp-01[1] — Paul Craig Roberts: such a loyal Putin defender that he deserves his own stamp

A key point about Schreck’s piece is that he didn’t attack Cohen – not in the slightest. He reported on the plain fact that many people, including a number of Cohen’s fellow Russia experts, consider the guy a Putin apologist; also, Schreck interviewed Cohen, got his side of the story, and presented it at considerable length – and with apparent fairness. This is called proper journalistic conduct. But it was too much for economist Paul Craig Roberts, who savaged Schreck – and Radio Liberty – at the website of Pravda, itself an institution not widely known for its fealty to proper journalistic conduct.

robertsrt — Roberts appears frequently on Russian TV

As we’ve discussed previously, Roberts, a former Wall Street Journal editor and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, has become “a hard-core propagandist” for Putin, “serving up breathtaking, bald-faced claims that are almost always the very antithesis of the truth.” At the Pravda site, Roberts rechristened Radio Liberty as “Radio Gestapo Amerika” and accused it of attacking “distinguished Americans who are known and respected for their allegiance to the truth.” In addition to calling Schreck a “propagandist” for “Washington’s agendas,” Roberts took on Lubamersky, denying her charge that Putin is a mass murderer and adding that “[t]he mass murderers of our time are George W. Bush and Obama, and clearly Cohen is not a mouthpiece for them.”

Another Putin apologist whom we’ve mentioned before, Robert Parry, also tore into Schreck. We’ll look at him tomorrow.

Posted on June 17, 2015July 1, 2015 by usefulstooges 3

Shilling for Maduro

Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion.” That’s Sean Penn, Oscar-winning actor, political activist, and ex-spouse of Madonna, upon hearing the news of Hugo Chávez’s death. “I lost a friend I was blessed to have,” Penn lamented, adding that “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president Maduro.”

£¨·¨ÐÂ£©£¨1£©²éÎ¤Ë¹Óë¼ÍÂ¼Æ¬µ¼ÑÝÄ¦¶û¼ûÃæ — Hugo Chávez, Michael Moore

On the same occasion, Michael Moore tweeted: “Hugo Chávez declared the oil belonged 2 the ppl. He used the oil $ 2 eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health & education 4 all. That made him dangerous. US approved of a coup to overthrow him even though he was a democratically-elected president.”

We’ve already surveyed Oliver Stone‘s tributes to Chávez, which included not only any number of embarrassingly fulsome press releases but two classic examples of film agitprop. But in addition to this trio of ill-informed Hollywood stooges (whose equally deplorable Fidel fandom we’ve previously covered), the putatively humble-yet-heroic Hugo – and his less colorful but equally vile successor, Nicolás Maduro – have also accumulated praise from people who actually should know better.

One of them is ex-Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II – JFK’s nephew; Bobby and Ethel’s oldest son – who today runs a green-oriented nonprofit called Citizens Energy. In February 2014, under the headline “A Kennedy Shills for Maduro,” Sohrab Ahmari reported in the Wall Street Journal that TV ads for Citizens Energy were praising Maduro for providing free heating fuel to underprivileged Bay Staters. Calling the commercials “an almost-perfect exercise in demagoguery,” Ahmari described one of them as follows:

“The cold can overwhelm even the toughest amongst us,” Mr. Kennedy says, as a sad piano tune plays and images of children with cancer fill the screen. “The heating bills just keep piling on,” Mr. Kennedy goes on, and we see him hugging a young cancer survivor, who smiles but also seems slightly uncomfortable. Then, following a burst of upbeat music, Mr. Kennedy says: “The people of Venezuela and President Maduro are once again . . . the only country to answer our call to provide heating assistance to the poor.”

As Ahmari noted, the ads didn’t mention such “other hallmarks of the Maduro regime” as outrageous corruption, soaring crime, shortages of food and medicine, and the arrest of opposition leader Leopoldo López. “Given the situation at home,” Ahmari summed up, “Maduro must be thrilled that he can count on useful idiots like Joe Kennedy to sing his praises to the world.”

Then there’s Belén Fernández, who in February 2014 published an article at the Al Jazeera website that was one long sneer at the “absurd hysterics that typify the Venezuelan opposition,” a.k.a. the “doom-and-gloom squawking of the elite.” Fernández’s case in point: a Caracas blogger, Emiliana Duarte, who’d written about having to visit ten different supermarkets in order to find all the ingredients she needed to bake a cake.

Duarte’s account nicely illustrated the impact of chronic shortages on everyday Venezuelan life; but for Fernández, it was nothing but an “elite right-wing…sob story” and a “less than persuasive evidence of the supposedly brutal tyranny under which Duarte and her socioeconomic cohorts are forced to reside.” Of course, the story wasn’t intended to provide evidence of brutal tyranny but of economic mismanagement; in any event, Fernández had nothing to counter it with but mockery. For her, plainly, any criticism of any aspect of chavismo is nothing but elitist treason, motivated by a longing for (as she put it) “the deliverance of Venezuela into the imperial [American] embrace.”

Or take “social-justice” activist Dan Kovalik, who has called Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution “the most benevolent revolution in history.” In a piece that ran at Huffington Post on February 20, 2014, Kovalik spun chavismo this way: it’s benefited “the very poor and those of darker skin tone,” so if the U.S. government and media smear Venezuela as a “basket case” and condemn its “alleged lack of democracy,” it’s because they’re racists who “openly side with the white, wealthy elite – such as Kenyon and Harvard trained right wing leader Leopoldo López.”

Kovalik’s mention of López was, alas, not well-timed: two days before Kovalik’s article appeared, López was put under arrest; he’s been behind bars ever since, and both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch consider him a political prisoner. (HRW described his detention as exemplary of “the classic tactics of an authoritarian regime.”)

venezuela_food_line — Venezuelans waiting in line outside a supermarket

As for the Venezuelan economy, Kovalik called “claims of ‘economic collapse’…quite exaggerated,” citing as evidence import and export figures that proved nothing. (The shortages went unmentioned.) And the country’s high level of violence? Kovalik attributed it – with a straight face – to opposition agitators, and even maintained that “the Venezuelan government has exercised great restraint” in its response to that violence.

Sheer fiction. Kovalik’s piece made one thing clear. For him, as for Fernández, any criticism of chavismo, however legitimate, should be recognized as part of a perfidious effort to “reverse” Venezuela’s “liberation” from U.S. domination – and, consequently, even the most deceitful response to such criticism is justifiable as a blow for the glorious revolution.

Oh, and by the way: in April, 2015, the Fusion website reported that some hotels in Venezuela were now asking foreign tourists to bring their own toilet paper and other basic supplies. “For over a year,” lamented one hotelier, “we haven’t had toilet paper, soap, any kind of milk, coffee or sugar. So we have to tell our guests to come prepared.” Another hotel owner admitted that in all good conscience, she couldn’t advise visitors from abroad to come to Venezuela: “As soon as they get off the plane they will encounter risks.”

Welcome to “liberation,” chavista style.

venezuela-food-lines — More Venezuelans queuing up to buy groceries

Posted on May 26, 2015May 20, 2015 by usefulstooges 8

Chomsky & co.

We’ve seen how some of Vladimir Putin’s Western apologists belong to the “yes, but” brigade. They’re quick to acknowledge that he’s a pretty vile character, and yet they feel moved to defend the guy – or even, as in Peter Hitchens‘s case, claim to like him.

There’s no “yes, but,” however, for Noam Chomsky, the World’s Leading Intellectual©. He’s all in for Putin, and then some. Writing in May 2014 about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Chomsky was quick to “contextualize” it, in his own unique way, by bringing in the “era’s most extreme international crime, the United States-United Kingdom invasion of Iraq.” For Chomsky, the latter “crime” more than excuses the former. Yes, the US and UK took down one of the most murderous tyrants of all time, while Putin invaded a country that had just undergone a democratic revolution, but such distinctions have never mattered to Chomsky: the suffering of people here and there around the globe doesn’t interest him unless he can find a way to pin that suffering on America.

Chomsky mocked the idea that Russia’s move on Ukraine should be viewed as a crisis. After all, as so many of his fellow Putin apologists have pointed out, Ukraine is in Russia’s “neighborhood.” He also helpfully cited polls supposedly indicating that people all over the planet overwhelmingly consider the U.S., not Russia, a “pariah state” and “the greatest threat to world peace.” So there.

Chomsky, of course, is in a category all his own. But when it comes to standing up for Putin, the guy who puts even him in the shade is almost certainly Paul Craig Roberts. An economist who once worked as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, Roberts has since gone off the deep end, contributing regularly to Counterpunch – the journal of the loony, Jew-hating far left – and routinely siding with Putin against the U.S. Indeed, “Putin apologist” is far too feeble a term for Roberts; he’s a hard-core propagandist, pure and simple, serving up breathtaking, bald-faced claims that are almost always the very antithesis of the truth.

Here’s just a sampling. In Roberts’s lexicon, the people running the Ukraine are “Washington’s stooge government in Kiev”; the Eastern European countries who’ve joined NATO to protect themselves from being re-incorporated into the Kremlin’s empire are “NATO’s vassals.” The U.S., charged Roberts in July 2014, “is at work through its Kiev proxy murdering citizens in eastern and southern parts of present-day Ukraine that once were part of Russia.”

Meanwhile Putin’s the good guy, standing up alone to “Washington’s crimes against humanity” and striving in vain “to find a peaceful settlement” that would help “the Ukrainians who are being attacked” on orders from Washington. Putin’s only fault, in Roberts’s eyes? His failure “to realize that his reasonableness is not reciprocated by Washington.” Summing up: “Putin has done what he can to avoid conflict. Now he needs to do the right thing, as he did in Georgia and Crimea.”

If Roberts isn’t on the Kremlin payroll, he should be; he’s doing a PR job for Putin that should be the envy of any Hollywood publicity mill.

Posted on May 3, 2015April 8, 2015 by usefulstooges 1