Can’t seem to find his tongue except to condemn capitalism
Mary Anastasia O’Grady at the Wall Street Journal in her latest posting Who Will Stop Venezuela’s Slow Self-Coup? reports:
“Eleven new-born babies died recently due to a respiratory bacteria outbreak in the neonatal unit of a hospital in…Venezuela’s Monagas state.” (Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Wall Street Journal)
Dire food and medicine shortages, the collapse of the health care, sanitation and transportation infrastructure, and hyperinflation have all led to speculation that the Venezuelan government, headed by Nicolás Maduro, will soon fall. But the Cuban-backed regime is entering a new phase of self-preservation. Havana has no intention of losing its hold over its most valuable satellite.
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Venezuela is also adjusting its socialist economic model, using a template the Castros borrowed from Russia’s Vladimir Putin. With the assistance of Mr. Obama, they are inviting in U.S. capital investment so they can consolidate power for the next generation.
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It would be a mistake to read this as a surrender to democratic capitalism. Just as the Cuban police state is making careful use of American capitalists, Caracas is making use of the market for survival.
It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the Obama administration is unwilling to back the restoration of Venezuelan democracy because that would put at risk its efforts to solidify the U.S.-Cuban friendship. If a new Venezuelan government were to stop financing Cuba—which it continues to do despite its own distress—the island would sink and Mr. Obama’s legacy “achievement” would likely sink with it.
These and many more such deaths are reflections of the “dire food and medicine shortages, the collapse of health care, sanitation, and transportation infrastructure” in Venezuela… directly traceable to the socialist/marxist policies of the late Hugo Chavez and the current Cuban-backed Nicolas Maduro government.
And according to O’Grady, “The U.S. is doing little to help defend democracy (there), which will please the Castros.”
Does anyone besides me wonder why the chatty, opinions-on-everything “Pope Humbleness” has had nothing to say about the severe crisis in socialist-governed Venezuela? I’ll skip the obligatory “with all due respect” to suggest that Pope Francis seems to never miss an opportunity to speak out against capitalism, “unfettered” in his mind, nor to suggest that the terrible living conditions among the poor in Latin America, are due, also in his mind, to exploitation by the USA.
Ms O’Grady has a much better informed and measured analysis of Latin America, the economic systems, and governing ideology than apparently the Pontiff’s sources are capable of offering.
Il Papa is very friendly toward regimes in Castro’s Communist Cuba, Evo Morales’s marxist Bolivia, his own corruption-ridden Argentina, and in Ecuador, much more than he has ever been toward the US or other free market capitalist nations.
Maybe Francis should take a look at how well the socialist economic model he so much admires is working out for the people of Venezuela.
Here is another report on current developments in that very sad nation, via Fox News:
Caravans of Venezuelans continue to pour into Colombia in search of food, medicine
DLH
