As if anyone needed any further proof that socialism harms the poor most of all, the New York Times has a masterly spread on the extent of mass starvation in Venezuela as a result of "government policies." Over the course of five months, the Times interviewed doctors at 21 public hospitals across the country and got on-the-record quotes to create a worthy picture.
So much for socialism helping the poor. And so much for socialist handout policies creating "poverty reduction," as multilaterals like the World Bank put it.
What Venezuela's 19 years of socialism has demonstrably produced is starvation, same as all other socialist dictatorships, and it's not the rich who are starving. The poor aren't merely poor in that hellhole; they are dead or going to be dead. The long, picture-laden Times piece is Pulitzer prize stuff, with every sentence well worth reading, even with the Times's customary failure to lay the disaster at socialism's door.
"Children are arriving with very precarious conditions of malnutrition," said Dr. Huníades Urbina Medina, the president of the Venezuelan Society of Childcare and Pediatrics. He added that doctors were even seeing the kind of extreme malnutrition often found in refugee camps – cases that were highly unusual in oil-rich Venezuela before its economy fell to pieces.
For many low-income families, the crisis has completely redrawn the social landscape. Parents like Kenyerber's mother go days without eating, shriveling to the weight of children themselves. Women line up at sterilization clinics to avoid having children they can't feed. Young boys leave home and join street gangs to scavenge for scraps, their bodies bearing the scars of knife fights with competitors. Crowds of adults storm Dumpsters after restaurants close. Babies die because it is hard to find or afford infant formula, even in emergency rooms.
"Sometimes they die in your arms just from dehydration," Dr. Milagros Hernández said in the emergency room of a children's hospital in the northern city of Barquisimeto[.]
So much for the humanitarian claims of socialism – in Venezuela – that leftists such as Bernie Sanders have been so quick to praise and claim as superior to capitalism.
Have the Millennials who think socialism is better than capitalism gotten their arms around this manufactured system of starvation?
What of Sean Penn, Naomi Campbell, Oliver Stone, and other celebrities who have praised Venezuela's starvation-creating regime?
What's creepy here is that the government, like Stalin's before it as it starved Ukraine, seeks to keep the extent of the starvation it has created a secret. The Times report got hold of an accidentally released statistic from the government and then data from the hospitals, writing:
[T]he statistics that have come out are staggering. In the Ministry of Health's 2015 annual report, the mortality rate for children under 4 weeks old had increased a hundredfold, from 0.02 percent in 2012 to just over 2 percent. Maternal mortality had increased nearly fivefold in the same period.
As for the poor themselves, the Times tracks the lives of several families as they bury their starved babies, explaining their Venezuelan customs such as placing angel wings on baby coffins and getting charity embalmers to help with the burial since all of their money goes to food. We get a whiff of the Zika virus and its capacity to affect mothers' milk, meaning babies must rely on unavailable formula and often get fed God-awful stuff such as anise tea instead, which damages their stomachs. Kids leave their parents to forage for garbage in gangs where the eating is better, others go without food for days, and parents contemplate committing suicide. That's what starvation looks like up close, and it's the product of price controls, import controls, currency controls, spend-up-a-storm inflation (right now the world's highest at over 2,000%), and government rationing that make up the tapestry of socialism. The Times calls it "government mismanagement," but it's quite a bit more specific than that.
Sure, the government will take care of you. What's not to trust?
Besides the failure to provide, nasty stories are woven in to the piece about Venezuelan officials coercing the poor for votes in order to secure food and threats to doctors for reporting accurately on the causes of children's deaths.
It creates a detailed picture of the socialist nightmare and ought to be required reading in schools.
What we are seeing here is the most obvious thing in the world: not only does socialism fail every time it's tried, eventually running out of other people's money when there's nothing left, but it has a special way of targeting and harming the poor, first taking away their freedom, then taking away their food, and then lying about it. It's effectively violence reinforced by lies and lies reinforced by violence, as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn once wrote.
The Catholic Church on its liberation theology side has been loud in touting the "preferential option for the poor," but it's been dead silent about this unfolding human catastrophe. Vatican Radio has cited Venezuela just twice in the past two years if you do a search on it, neither of which time speaking about the enormous obscenity of this kind of man-made poverty born of socialism.
Will the praisers of socialism finally speak out after this report? They'd better if they want to retain any credibility.
Well, well, well – what have we here? As thousands of Atlanta's airport passengers found themselves stranded due to a power outage in what was for many an unfamiliar airport, who should come out to feed them for free, making their hellish travel ordeal a bit less hellish?
Sure enough, it was Chick-fil-A, the delicious chicken fast food chain that was otherwise branded "hate chicken" by rabid leftists during a 2012 flap over marriage and the company owners' unwillingness to support opening up the institution to same-sex couples.
Late Sunday night, while Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport worked to restore power during a massive outage that crippled air travel at the nation's busiest airport, officials handed out Chick-fil-A and waters to stranded passengers.
"Lights on and delivering food and water to our passengers," the airport said on Twitter, thanking Chick-fil-A Chairman and CEO Dan Cathy for opening on a Sunday.
Seems the restaurant chain, whose outlets are ordinarily closed on Sunday due to the Baptist owner's wish to honor the Lord's Day, went ahead and opened up in order to feed the hungry multitudes. As per Judeo-Christian practice describe in the Bible, actually. Jesus said that if your ox falls into a well on the Sabbath, you get the beast out, regardless of the day of week. (Someone had been criticizing him for performing miracles on the Sabbath.) For Chick-fil-A, the airport emergency at Atlanta fits right into that category.
Some "hate chicken."
It goes to show that the company, influenced by its owner's biblical values, brings good stuff, not hate, to the needy.
Chick-fil-a owner Dan Cathy says as much:
"We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but we thank the Lord we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles," he said in an interview with the Baptist Press.
Chick-fil-A has done this kind of charitable giveaway in the past too – I recall for hurricane refugees. This isn't the first time. The company's chicken is delicious, its service is top-notch, its restaurants are wonderfully clean, and small wonder the joint surpasses all other fast food establishments in profitability per store due to its popular business model, even as it is open only six days a week. Yet the left has been quick to demonize it, boycott it, zone it out of business, and subject it to selective enforcement for code violations.
Now the airline travelers experiencing Atlanta for the first time will recall not just the airport stranding alone, but the kindness shown by Chick-fil-A, the restaurant chain that lives by its values and cares about others, asking nothing in return. These are the values that are so abhorred by the left.
Today's cold civil war has seen a series of strikes by the left on the presidency of Donald Trump. The overwhelming wave of negativity toward him, as reported constantly by the old media, and the onslaught of wailing by the leftist Democratic Party, et al. have been a major part of life in the United States since November 9, 2016.
The strikes have been intensified by what is called "the Deep State," meaning the D.C. bureaucracy and the powerful government agencies of the DOJ and the FBI. Seeming chaos has reigned as leak after leak came out trying to damage the Trump administration. What appeared to be damaging strikes were launched by the Democrat-media-Deep State complex. The whole of Washington, D.C., along with the media, has never relented, going on a binge of hate-filled rhetoric and actions. They are trying to convince an unwitting public that Trump is nothing but horrible news.
Thank goodness for the center-right new media. Much of the truth about the Trump presidency has been getting out over the heads of the well organized leftist intent to cause chaos.
In plain sight, Trump is working to do what he said he would do during the campaign. He and his administration have been persistent in pressing forward with this agenda. On steroids. At the speed of Trump. There are even a few stray leftists who realize his accomplishments and are coming to the recognition that he's winning.
While these folks have been busy dehumanizing Trump and swearing allegiance to the dumbest political narratives ever – Trump-Russia. Trump-inhuman. Trump-stupid. Trump-incompetent – he's been working at undoing the damage done by the Obama-Clinton cabal at a speed that has surprised even them.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles."
Trump knows his enemy. And fortuitously, the left thinks he's stupid. Leftists have no clue he sees them for what they are. Blockbuster revelations are now seeping up through the ooze of the swamp. There is a set of facts and circumstances that show us that Trump now holds the high ground, that he has dug into strong positions, and that bombshell after bombshell is about to go off against the left.
Now we know there was an organized, political cabal at the FBI that worked against Trump not only during the campaign, but ever since.
We are seeing the picture come together – an unprecedented and ugly one. Look at how many of these have been outed as wrongdoers in the past months. McCabe. Strzok. Yates. Lynch. Comey. Ohrs. All toast.
The drips are on the verge of becoming a torrent. And if the I.G. report is the blockbuster being touted, it will become a raging flood. Suddenly, the Democrats are complaining about the text messages of Strzok being leaked. And they were leaked from the I.G.'s office. Suddenly, they are getting worried about the I.G. report. With the FBI flatly refusing to release records to the House Oversight Committee, the I.G. office is now saying it has them and will release them.
The scenario is of a horribly politicized, lawless operation within the FBI and DOJ, tied to the Obama-Clinton cabal. It's bad actors doing unthinkable, unprecedented, and horrid things. This is far beyond Watergate. It's the worst political scandal we've ever seen, and it's about to blow.
All these rumblings are the "opportunities to be seized" from Sun Tzu. It's been noted that so much is leaking out about all this, there must be a plan to slowly make the public aware of just how big the train is around the corner. We can all hear it coming now.
Ladies and gentlemen, the fan is about to be hit. Operation Counter-Strike. Deceptive. Yet right in front of us all. The trap is sprung. The Hessians were drunk on their own self-righteousness and sleeping while the battle crept up on them. Planned by an orange oaf.
Deep State is nothing more than a group of deceiving, criminal and corrupt politicians and government workers who are working to overthrow the US government because of their desire for power and belief that they best can govern this great nation. In reality they are treasonous lunatics aided by the equally corrupt mainstream media (MSM).
A number of individuals, referred to collectively as ‘Deep State’, are using their power to prevent President Donald Trump from governing as he was duly elected to do and are doing all they can to overturn the election that put the President in place. Numerous actions taking place either individually or in an organized fashion can be attributed to deep state.
The entire Mueller investigation is a scam created by the deep state to overthrow the US government and is the deep state’s ultimate plot to re-take the country. Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolten called the deep state’s actions against President Trump the first Coup D’état in US History –
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