By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--February 14, 2014
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In the serene private clubs of Caracas, there is no milk, and the hiss of the cappuccino machine has fallen silent. In the slums, the lights go out every few days, or the water stops running. In the grocery stores, both state-run shops and expensive delicatessens, customers barter information: I saw soap here, that store has rice today. The oil engineers have emigrated to Calgary, the soap opera stars fled to Mexico and Colombia. And in the beauty parlours of this nation obsessed with elaborate grooming, women both rich and poor have cut back to just one blow-dry or manicure each week. Venezuela, the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, is a leading candidate for next collapsed state. “To be Venezuelan today is to live on the edge of the apocalypse, convinced it will happen tomorrow,” said Alberto Barrera, a poet, screenwriter and biographer of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, in a recent conversation over coffee that was, by necessity, black. “But then, we’ve been expecting the crisis at any moment for years now.”
A Venezuelan court ordered the arrest on Thursday of opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez on charges including murder and terrorism linked to street protests that resulted in the deaths of three people the day before. The U.S.-educated Lopez has for two weeks helped organize sporadic demonstrations around the country to denounce President Nicolas Maduro for failing to control inflation, crime and product shortages, and vows to push him from office. The president accuses him of sowing violence to try to stage a coup similar to the one 12 years ago that briefly ousted late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, though there is little indication that the protests could topple Maduro. "Without a doubt, the violence was created by small groups coordinated, exalted and financed by Leopoldo Lopez," said Jorge Rodriguez, a leader of the ruling Socialist Party and mayor of the Caracas area where Wednesday's biggest marches took place. Shortly before a Caracas court upheld a request from the Public Prosecutor's Office to order Lopez's arrest, the opposition leader blamed armed government supporters for firing on peaceful protesters. "The government is playing the violence card, and not for the first time. They're blaming me without any proof ... I have a clear conscience because we called for peace," Lopez told Reuters.This is what you get when you elect populist politicians whose support is built on demonizing the rich. They abuse the power of the government to attack businesses, ostensibly for the benefit of "the people" but really for the benefit of their own political power. During municipal elections in December, the Maduro government employed a tactic of simply taking control of local shops and offering massive discounts on everything in the store. It was designed to create the impression that the shopowners were greedy bastards but they, the socialists, were looking out for the people. What do you get when you combine that type of disingenuous populism with the inevitable corruption that comes with such a regime? Just what you'd expect. Producers don't produce, prices soar, jobs are lost and the nation finds itself with shortages of just about everything. That is exactly what you get when you put a target on the producers in society and turn them into the villains in your little morality play. No one knows if the socialist government can survive this, but one thing we do know is that no one can any longer buy the fiction that the people of Venezuela support their rule of malfeasance.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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