Better Than Venezuela

Just came up with a thought to give the proper context to just about anything in our political, social, and economic world: Almost no matter what, it's better than in Venezuela.

Have you been following what's going on in that oil-rich, socialist wonderland so beloved by Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Jeremy Corbin, and Bernie Sanders?

Venezuela, about which I wrote before --here and here, for example--has gone into full failed state mode by almost all measures of the classic definition. The slow-motion anti-democratic implosion that began with the Chavez reign has turned into a massive social-political-economic-humanitarian black hole as the Chavez-Maduro "star" collapses, threatening to pull in other nations of the region. The excuses for that collapse are numerous, and you can find them in the standard swampy media. My favorite is, of course, that Venezuela was done in by the "collapse" of oil prices: a stupid, lazy lie. According to OPEC data, the average price of a barrel of oil in 1999, the year Chavez took power, was $17.44; the price of oil today is over $68. Only in prog world can that be a collapse. Furthermore, at no time since 1999, has oil gone below the price it was in 1999. During the entire Chavez-Maduro disaster, oil stayed well above the 1999 price.

Can't blame oil.

What could be the case of the Venezuelan disaster? The cause of the failure is, dare we say it, dare we say the one word of which our increasingly deranged Democrat party has become so enamored? Here goes, it's a shocker, SOCIALISM. Wow! It was hard to carry that secret around by myself.

Chavez-Maduro followed the global socialist playbook literally to a fault. They even wrote new chapters: they not only ran out of other people's money, they ran out of their own oil money, as well. A notable achievement in the annals of Socialism! The Venezuelan Socialist regime undertook the destruction of the private sector; the obliteration of the democratic opposition; fantabulous social programs costing billions upon billions; a foreign policy of hostility to the West, including promotion of and protection for drug trafficking, and of trying to buy influence wherever possible with those ever handy petrodollars, which they continued to receive from . . . the USA! Yes, we continued throughout it all to be Venezuela's biggest market. No Cuban-style embargo. And, of course, in true socialist state fashion it developed a fabulously wealthy cadre around the Dear Leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. The Chavez and the Maduro families have become extremely wealthy, as have favored Generals and bureaucrats--all the while ordinary people experience hunger, lack of medical care, the world's highest homicide rate, and an inflation rate, according to the IMF,  about to hit one million percent. Yes, one million percent! What does that even look like?

Starvation is now a real possibility in Venezuela. We already are seeing massive hunger and, of course, the flight of millions of Venezuelans to safety in Colombia and elsewhere, including Brazil and the USA.  In the last couple of days, we have seen bizarre stories of exploding drones trying to kill Maduro. I am sure soon the CIA will get blamed. I am a big, big critic of the CIA, but let me tell you, drone strikes is something they actually do quite well. They, furthermore, do not buy their drones at Walmart, Big Lots, or off of Amazon or e-Bay. If it were one of our drones going after big boy, there would be a big black hole--this time literally a black hole, not figuratively as above--where Maduro once stood. It's all nonsense and goes to show how fragile and frightened the regime has become.

The insanity in Venezuela is rippling across the region. The spiraling but barely reported violence in Nicaragua, for example, is at least partly a result of the Sandinistas--more Socialist darlings--no longer able to count on receiving cheap Venezuelan oil. Haiti, too, is experiencing unrest for the same reason. I am not sure what is happening on this score with Cuba, but there could be effects there, too. While I will shed no tears for troubles suffered by the Sandinistas or the Castro klan, the instability in Venezuela could have effects in, thus far, more stable places, such as Colombia and Brazil, as the Venezuelan migration river turns into a torrent, and the regime becomes increasingly belligerent.

The solution? Well, the region has been pathetic in responding to the growing in Venezuela. It's time, however, for that apathy to end. I can see at least a partial solution being an offer of asylum to Maduro and key cohorts from some place such as Panama or Ecuador. That might get the ball rolling for a change of regime in Caracas. Rebuilding Venezuela will be an arduous and expensive task even after the Chavez-Maduro bacteria are removed, but it would be a start.

I won't complain about anything ever again . . . well . . . sorta won't . . .