We must remember that the HopeyChangey folks love Chavez, and Castro, just as the New York Times loved Stalin in the 1930's. (That worked out well, did it not?)
The two most recent posts from The Devil's Excrement are illustrative.
First, the food shortages are showing up on grocery store shelves, as are shortages of other basic necessities of life. Like diapers and cleaning products.
The author reports:
I don’t know if I have been distracted lately or if I was just not paying attention. I have been hearing for weeks about the problems with shortages of diapers and sanitary napkins (an almost daily topic of discussion by the women in my office), but to tell you the truth, I was stunned when I went to the supermarket on Tuesday and saw all the empty or semi-empty shelves. Thinking that it was just coincidental, maybe the shelves had not been replenished from the weekend, I thought by today things would go back to normal.
No such luck, the shelves looked even worse. On the left you can see the paper products shelf, looking truly empty, only one brand of diapers available.
OS looked through the comments section on this post, and saw a most poignant comment left by one CarlosElio. Well worth the time invested to read.
The second post is an eye-wateringly detailed account of the Venezuelan bond market, and how it is now used by businesses as an end-run around currency controls imposed by Chavez.
Remember, ya'll. The Left loves Chavez and Castro. This is what they have in mind for us here, if we allow it. A friend just returned from a visit to Cuba. He loves the friends he has made there, but the poverty and lack of freedom are just stunning.
OS hopes one and all take time to read these posts, and pass them along.
Showing posts with label Castro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Castro. Show all posts
Monday, February 14, 2011
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Let's Remember, Ya'll: Himself Really ADMIRES Chavez
This from a English-language Venezuelan blog OS has been following of late, The Devil's Excrement.
Last May, Hugo Chavez ordered the expropriation of a dairy farm, Hacienda las Carolinas, stating that the 'land was unproductive, and its owner, Diego Arria, used it solely to invite his friends over to drink whiskey'.
(OS reads a bit of Spanish, and was stunned to read that line in the announcement, so he's including the quote below, just to be certain his old eyes weren't deceiving him.
El primer mandatario aseguró que las tierras estaban improductivas y que su dueño, Diego Arria, las utilizaba “sólo para invitar a sus amigos a tomar whisky.)
The first link is one to click, fer sure, fer sure. It's the 'before and after' pictures of the hacienda: before, when Mr. Arrias was inviting his mates over for whiskey, and after, six months after the great socialist hero Chavez heroically confiscated it on behalf of the proletariat.
Hmmmm.....
A couple of points immediately come to mind.
(1) If, indeed, Mr. Arias were using the farm as a gentleman farmer operation where he could invite his mates to visit, drink, hunt, play cards, etc.--all of them legal activies--then that's his own business, and not the business of any arm of the government, anywhere, anytime. If Mr. Arrias wished to abandon it and let it go fallow, well, that's his business as well. That's how a culture operates under a sane rule of law that deliberately limits the power of the state.
(2) Obama, and a lot of the folk around him, really admire Chavez, and Castro, and Mao, and Stalin--all of whom engage(d) in wholesale expropriation of property from private hands in order to 'redistribute' it to their own favored constituencies. In every case, poverty resulted. Along with a lot of starvation, prison camps, etc. Remember Stalin and the kulaks? Millions died, and a great nation that once exported grain to the world became a massive importer, just to keep the population fed.
The pictures of this farm are illustrative, and powerful, because they can easily be understood. ThePeopleInCharge, having already expropriated some big chunks of the economy, will be very tempted by our houses and lands, our savings accounts, our pension savings, our small businesses, if the crunch really comes. And OS, hoping he is wrong, suspects we are in for one.
OS hopes ever'body keeps them in mind as November approaches, 'cuz that's future we face unless we all stand up and say Hell, No!. We need to do this now, while we still have a ballot box, and the ability to make use of it.
Last May, Hugo Chavez ordered the expropriation of a dairy farm, Hacienda las Carolinas, stating that the 'land was unproductive, and its owner, Diego Arria, used it solely to invite his friends over to drink whiskey'.
(OS reads a bit of Spanish, and was stunned to read that line in the announcement, so he's including the quote below, just to be certain his old eyes weren't deceiving him.
El primer mandatario aseguró que las tierras estaban improductivas y que su dueño, Diego Arria, las utilizaba “sólo para invitar a sus amigos a tomar whisky.)
The first link is one to click, fer sure, fer sure. It's the 'before and after' pictures of the hacienda: before, when Mr. Arrias was inviting his mates over for whiskey, and after, six months after the great socialist hero Chavez heroically confiscated it on behalf of the proletariat.
Hmmmm.....
A couple of points immediately come to mind.
(1) If, indeed, Mr. Arias were using the farm as a gentleman farmer operation where he could invite his mates to visit, drink, hunt, play cards, etc.--all of them legal activies--then that's his own business, and not the business of any arm of the government, anywhere, anytime. If Mr. Arrias wished to abandon it and let it go fallow, well, that's his business as well. That's how a culture operates under a sane rule of law that deliberately limits the power of the state.
(2) Obama, and a lot of the folk around him, really admire Chavez, and Castro, and Mao, and Stalin--all of whom engage(d) in wholesale expropriation of property from private hands in order to 'redistribute' it to their own favored constituencies. In every case, poverty resulted. Along with a lot of starvation, prison camps, etc. Remember Stalin and the kulaks? Millions died, and a great nation that once exported grain to the world became a massive importer, just to keep the population fed.
The pictures of this farm are illustrative, and powerful, because they can easily be understood. ThePeopleInCharge, having already expropriated some big chunks of the economy, will be very tempted by our houses and lands, our savings accounts, our pension savings, our small businesses, if the crunch really comes. And OS, hoping he is wrong, suspects we are in for one.
OS hopes ever'body keeps them in mind as November approaches, 'cuz that's future we face unless we all stand up and say Hell, No!. We need to do this now, while we still have a ballot box, and the ability to make use of it.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Stick A Fork In It, Betty-Lou! I Gets The Feeling El Socialismo Cubano Is Done
If one lives long enough, and pays a bit of attention, all manner of wondrous events can occur.
In this case, we have Fidel and Raoul Castro, each in their own way, admitting that the socialist state they erected, enforced (generously propped up with Russian money), built a police state for, and attempted to export at the point of the gun for the past fifty or so years is, in fact, an abject failure.
They, in contrast to Our Beloved Leader, are laying off government employees in large numbers--500,000 on the first round, with more to come. They are encouraging the formation of small businesses, and beginning to take their boot-heel off the neck of the country.
From The Wall Street Journal:
Cuba will lay off more than half a million state workers and try to create hundreds of thousands of private-sector jobs, a dramatic attempt by the hemisphere's only Communist country to shift its nearly bankrupt economy toward a more market-oriented system.
The mass layoffs will take place between now and the end of March, according to a statement issued Monday by the Cuban Workers Federation, the island nation's only official labor union. Workers will be encouraged to find jobs in Cuba's tiny private sector instead.
"Our state can't keep maintaining...bloated payrolls," the union's statement said. More than 85% of Cuba's 5.5 million workers are employed by the state.
Well, cut my legs off and call me Shorty! Obamanomics, modeled on Fidel-o-nomics, sucks, creates poverty, malaise, and despair. And the government of the Worker's Paradise admits it! Within a couple of years, OS predicts the only remaining socialist true believers left in the US will reside in the White House, Harvard, Yale, UC Berkley, Plains Georgia, and Miz Nancy's and Mr. Harry's unsold autobiographies in the sale bins of discount bookstores in strip malls.
Hell's-Bells, ya'll! Even Fidel admitted it to Jeff Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly last month. In the presence of credible witnesses, unprompted and unbidden:
Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting. We were seated around a smallish table; Castro, his wife, Dalia, his son; Antonio; Randy Alonso, a major figure in the government-run media; and Julia Sweig, the friend I brought with me to make sure, among other things, that I didn't say anything too stupid (Julia is a leading Latin American scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations). I initially was mainly interested in watching Fidel eat - it was a combination of digestive problems that conspired to nearly kill him, and so I thought I would do a bit of gastrointestinal Kremlinology and keep a careful eye on what he took in (for the record, he ingested small amounts of fish and salad, and quite a bit of bread dipped in olive oil, as well as a glass of red wine). But during the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.
"The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," he said.
This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, "Never mind"?
I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, "He wasn't rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under 'the Cuban model' the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country."
Game, set, match. Stick a fork in it, Betty-Lou, 'cuz I think it's done. Someone get on the phone to Himself, and let him know he better come up with some other plausible verbiage to spout, 'cuz what he's saying now won't pass the laugh test no more.
Now, if they could just get around to freeing the remaining political prisoners, and let Chavez know...
In this case, we have Fidel and Raoul Castro, each in their own way, admitting that the socialist state they erected, enforced (generously propped up with Russian money), built a police state for, and attempted to export at the point of the gun for the past fifty or so years is, in fact, an abject failure.
They, in contrast to Our Beloved Leader, are laying off government employees in large numbers--500,000 on the first round, with more to come. They are encouraging the formation of small businesses, and beginning to take their boot-heel off the neck of the country.
From The Wall Street Journal:
Cuba will lay off more than half a million state workers and try to create hundreds of thousands of private-sector jobs, a dramatic attempt by the hemisphere's only Communist country to shift its nearly bankrupt economy toward a more market-oriented system.
The mass layoffs will take place between now and the end of March, according to a statement issued Monday by the Cuban Workers Federation, the island nation's only official labor union. Workers will be encouraged to find jobs in Cuba's tiny private sector instead.
"Our state can't keep maintaining...bloated payrolls," the union's statement said. More than 85% of Cuba's 5.5 million workers are employed by the state.
Well, cut my legs off and call me Shorty! Obamanomics, modeled on Fidel-o-nomics, sucks, creates poverty, malaise, and despair. And the government of the Worker's Paradise admits it! Within a couple of years, OS predicts the only remaining socialist true believers left in the US will reside in the White House, Harvard, Yale, UC Berkley, Plains Georgia, and Miz Nancy's and Mr. Harry's unsold autobiographies in the sale bins of discount bookstores in strip malls.
Hell's-Bells, ya'll! Even Fidel admitted it to Jeff Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly last month. In the presence of credible witnesses, unprompted and unbidden:
Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting. We were seated around a smallish table; Castro, his wife, Dalia, his son; Antonio; Randy Alonso, a major figure in the government-run media; and Julia Sweig, the friend I brought with me to make sure, among other things, that I didn't say anything too stupid (Julia is a leading Latin American scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations). I initially was mainly interested in watching Fidel eat - it was a combination of digestive problems that conspired to nearly kill him, and so I thought I would do a bit of gastrointestinal Kremlinology and keep a careful eye on what he took in (for the record, he ingested small amounts of fish and salad, and quite a bit of bread dipped in olive oil, as well as a glass of red wine). But during the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.
"The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," he said.
This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, "Never mind"?
I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, "He wasn't rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under 'the Cuban model' the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country."
Game, set, match. Stick a fork in it, Betty-Lou, 'cuz I think it's done. Someone get on the phone to Himself, and let him know he better come up with some other plausible verbiage to spout, 'cuz what he's saying now won't pass the laugh test no more.
Now, if they could just get around to freeing the remaining political prisoners, and let Chavez know...
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