Zimbabwe On the Caribbean
Here’s how dictatorships begin to unravel:
Venezuela’s top food company has accused troops of illegally seizing more than 500 tonnes of food from its trucks as part of President Hugo Chavez’s campaign to stem shortages.
The leftist Chavez this week created a state food distributor and loosened some price controls, seeking to end months of shortages for staples like milk and eggs that have caused long lines and upset his supporters in the OPEC nation.
The highly publicised campaign has also included government crackdowns on accused smuggling, with the military seizing 1,600 tonnes of food and sending 1,200 troops to the border with Colombia.
Jose Anzola, a director of food company Alimentos Polar, told reporters that troops stopped 27 of its trucks over the last three days and described the seizures as “illegal, arbitrary and irresponsible.”
Venezuela has more oil than than on the rubber sheets at a ’70s swinger party, but they can’t manage to keep foodstuffs on the shelves. Sad. Predictable, but sad.
….finally, the real story behind the 70′s oil crisis begins to leak out- it was the swingers!
Cracking down on black market food? This guy has seen one too many episodes of Firefly.
Part of the vast right wing conspiracy out to get Chavez.
“We gone take t’ings away from you on behalf of de common good”. Caesar ‘Salad’ Chavez quoting Hillary ‘Cankles’ Clinton.
You can burn the land and boil the seas, but you’ll never take the sky from me.
Great, thanks for the mental image of a naked, greased-up Chavez.
The worst part is that this is so predictable. How long before Miami becomes a majority Venezuelan city because of refugees?
How long until Miami starts seeing a flood of Venezuelan refugees? How about now. See yesterday’s New York Times.
“Rise of Chávez Sends Venezuelans to Florida”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/us/23florida.html?ref=todayspaper
It doesn’t matter how much oil you are standing over. If you force producers to sell goods below cost you get shortages. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out but it still comes as a surprise to your average dictator.
As the fiance of a Venezuelan, I can tell you that this is a very frustrating time for her.
Since she settled on me however, she won’t be settling in Miami. They all live in Ft. Lauderdale anyway.
Ah, at this rate Hugo will have duplicated Castro’s Workers’ Paradise in no time, flat!
I say we send Mother Sheehan and Sean Penn down there right away to give him great, big hugs in solidiarity with the glorious and courageous struggle blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah . . .
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life. The really sad part is, Chavez isn’t even drunk! He should try it – he could scarcely do a worse job drunk and, with any luck, socialist-produced Aguardiente might be tainted.
Bad guys do bad things. We didn’t seem to be willing to act when he (and many other dictators) nationalized our (or others’) stuff: oil production here, gas fields in Bolgaria , oil fields in Iran, farms in Zimbawa…
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Not that any of the pres-candidates are worth their salt, but when Mrs. Bill proposes redirecting oil profits, freezing interest rates, enslaving doctors… we’re accepting the same bucket of crap that the dictators offered their countrymen early on.
“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life. The really sad part is, Chavez isn’t even drunk!”
Drunk, no, but perpetually amped on coca leaf.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2008/01/20/chavez_admits_to_chewing_coca_leaves/6321/
He gets a pass for anything he does from supporters the same way Clinton used to, and for the same psychological reasons.
Interesting. Might we be looking at a total collapse by the end of the year. (Or perhaps a coup.)
Chavez is nowhere near collapse. There were long lines in the Soviet Union over decades. No, he will probably be able to last as long as the oil revenue lasts. Castro and Mugabe are still in office with no oil revenue to live on.
His next move will be to seize Cuba upon Castro’s demise, with the assistance of an appropriate puppet leader. I think he is already in control there. Then he will make alliance with a world power such as China.
And what of Hillary’s Mugabe tendencies? She said that she wants to freeze interest rates and mortgage forclosures. She wants to overrule the market and private contracts.
I don’t know if she is ignorant or a demagogue, but I do know she wants people to think that the president is God.
Oil at $100 a barrel and Venezuela has food stortages.
That is all you need to know about socialism.
The flight of people from Venezuela over the near term will be similar to what happened in Cuba before the curtain came down. Doctors, lawyers, and businessmen will steadily stream out of Venezuela until Chavez closes the borders. When that happens, the people will be truly f%^&ed.
It’s not just Florida that they are fleeing to. Many of the ex oil company (PDVSA) workers Chavez fired are now in either Houston or Calgary. While oil may be at record prices, Venezuela’s production has been on a downward spiral since he put his cronies in charge of PDVSA.
Personally I don’t care if he is a marxist, has caused food shortages, is trying to become ‘president for life’, has cracked down on opposition media, etc. He was nice to Sean Penn so that’s good enough for me!
Chavez is nowhere near collapse. There were long lines in the Soviet Union over decades. No, he will probably be able to last as long as the oil revenue lasts.
That’s right. As long as Chavez can pay the army, he doesn’t have to worry about a coup.
He won’t collapse for the same brilliant reason Cuba won’t collapse. The USSR fell because enough dissidents finally stood up (and the military wasn’t up for a massacre). Cuba and now Venezuela avoid this by letting the dissidents leave. Its hard to forment a revolution from across the sea. Any decent opposition by expats is easily dismissed as Yankee intervention. Chavez may look like a pineapple, but he’s smarter than your average bear…