Venezuela is Starving – Blared a recent Wall Street Journal headline. The drop head went on to say. “Once Latin America’s richest coutry, Venezuela can no longer feed its people, hobbled by the nationalization of farms as well as price and currency controls.” Then the article begins by describing the one year old child who “has drawn the face of an old man and a cry that is little more than a whimper. His ribs show through his skin. He weighs just 11 pounds.” It goes on to describe the efforts of his mother to feed him with scraps found pilfering through discarded garbage…
Then there is this, from the otherwise Fake News network CNN. But this is CNN’s Money division, which apparently had a momentary diversion from every theme presented by the flagship’s political panels. Venezuela: How a Rich Country Collapsed, reads the headline above the drophead, “Venezuela is running out of food. Hospitals are overcrowded with sick children while doctors don’t have enough medicine or X-ray machines. Electricity isn’t guaranteed.” It describes how Venezuela was a cash flush, oil rich, prosperous country that was plunged into poverty and starvation thanks to the imposition of state control to make everything fair. “But inequality grew extreme. A small elite class controlled everything while the increasingly impoverished masses fumed.”
“The country turned toward socialism in 1999 and elected Hugo Chavez president…But his government overspent on welfare programs, and it fixed prices for everything. It declared farmlands state property and then abandoned them, and instead made the nation dependent on selling its oil abroad.” There you have it. The government seized private property and internationally owned and operated factories and companies and then… And then the price of oil fell sharply, and monstrous debts had been acquired from the likes of Russia and China. The Chavez regime printed paper money like crazy, causing run-a-way inflation. “Prices could rise an astounding 2000% next year.”
Chavez, is of course, long since dead. But his handpicked successor, Nicola Maduro has doubled down on the socialistic policies of his predecessor, and accuses the United States as being responsible for Venezuela’s collapsed economy. Maduro, the CNN Money article says, has chosen to service debts acquired from Russia and China rather than using it to import food. That has resulted in widespread starvation in a nation with vast, rich farmland.
From the DAILY WIRE, “Once South America’s richest country, Venezuela implemented a socialist agenda. Now people are starving to death.” That is followed by the grim statistics, showing the highest inflation on earth along with a severely shrunken economy. “Huge numbers of Venezuelans bring their children as they rummage through garbage for food; farm crops are routinely stolen; groceries are looted. It carries a report of 75% of the population having lost nearly twenty pounds in the last year. Meanwhile, scores have been reported killed in riotous clashes with government forces.
The Washington Post writes, Venezuela’s paradox: People are hungry, but farmers can’t feed them.
Forbes reports: Venezuelas Starving People are Now Eating the Zoo Animals… It’s an article that justifies milder socialist impositions, but says Venezuela went overboard with price-fixing which completely destroyed the economy, calling it “bad management.” “That’s what bad economic management can do for you, reduce the country with the world’s largest oil reserves to a nation of dumpster divers. Well done there, well done.”
From The Telegraph, Starving Venezuelans pour across the border to Colombia, as Caracas braces for more protests following deadly clashes. It tells of the humanitarian crisis which has engulfed Venezuela amid hyperinflation and critical shortages of food and medicine, with an accompanying photograph showing people streaming on foot into Columbia in hopes of finding food.
These are examples of but a fraction of the articles, largely from the mainstream press, detailing the abject misery, hunger and poverty that big government socialist policies implemented on the basis of “fairness and equality,” have visited upon a nation that was abundant in food and international trade, until the government, in it’s great wisdom, took control of everything.
But here’s the corker. Pope Francis supports Maduro, even though some Catholic publications say that he’s angry about what’s happened in Venezuela, and has a solution that, given time, can work. From the reports of immediate suffering and starvation, the people of Venezuela seem to have run out of time. Check out this column from the Miami Herald, under the headline: Pope Francis, get out of Venezuela. You’re only making things worse. “Many of us have praised Pope Francis for his humbleness and for his tolerance toward victims of discrimination who had long been neglected by the Vatican, but it’s time to tell him loud and clear: Get out of Venezuela.”
It goes on to show that the Vatican under Francis legitimized the dictatorial rule of Nicolas Maduro, “throwing him a lifeline when millions of protesters were demanding his resignation on the streets in October 2016. And it has helped him get back on his feet by further cracking down on the opposition.” As followers of the news will know, Maduro has invalidated the constitutional rights of citizens, and made all opposition illegal and dangerous. Opposition forces are standing down because of the Vatican’s support for Maduro.
Meanwhile, the pope humbly seeks to impose the “fair and equal” benefits of socialism upon every nation on earth, under his “humble” leadership.
