Connecting these dots is easy:
Margaret Thatcher was right when she famously warned that the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.
To be sure, we already had proof from Greece, France, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and many other places. But it’s still nice to have another piece of evidence that big government eventually produces very dire results.
Even the New York Times feels the need to report on the mayhem in Venezuela.
“The courts? Closed most days. The bureau to start a business? Same thing. The public defender’s office? That’s been converted into a food bank for government employees. Step by step, Venezuela has been shutting down. … Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory. … that is only the start of the country’s woes. Electricity and water are being rationed, and huge areas of the country have spent months with little of either. … the Mexican company that bottles Coke in the country, has even said it was halting production of sugary soft drinks because it was running out of sugar.”
While it’s amusing to dissect the verbal gymnastics of the New York Times, it’s even more fun to observe the dour reaction of Bernie Sanders when asked about the issue.
The folks at Newsbusters have the video, and here’s the relevant transcript if your stomach’s not strong enough to actually watch the Vermont Senator on screen.
Huh, the guy’s been waxing poetic about the glories of socialism and big government his entire life, so much so that he reportedly was kicked out of a Marxist commune for being too much of a blowhard, but now he’s suddenly so “focused” on his campaign that he can’t comment on the biggest story about socialism since the fall of the Berlin Wall?!?
Yeah, right.
Too bad the reporter didn’t ask the logical follow-up question: “So what makes you think the policies that have failed in Venezuela will work in the United States?”
Heck, I would like some journalist to present my two-part challenge for leftists and see if anyone can name a single successful statist jurisdiction.
Though I’m guessing many would inaccurately claim Sweden or Denmark, even those two nations got rich first and then adopted big government.
P.S. Interestingly, the Washington Post does not appear to be as reflexively left wing as the NYT.
“… one of the worst crises of governance Latin America has seen in modern times. The country’s collapsing economy, soaring crime … Mr. Maduro … inherited the mess created by the late Hugo Chávez and then greatly worsened it … Venezuelans are furious about endemic shortages, triple-digit inflation and a poverty rate that exceeds that of 1999, when the Chavista movement first came to power. … That Mr. Maduro … threatens violence probably is a reflection … of the regime’s deep-seated criminality. Two of the president’s nephews are being held in New York on drug-trafficking charges, and U.S. authorities are reportedly investigating numerous other senior figures, including the current president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, who is considered the regime’s second most powerful official.”
To be sure, the Post editorial doesn’t explicitly tie the wretched conditions in Venezuela to left-wing policy, but at least there’s no ambiguity about the fact that Maduro is a bad guy.
Now if we can get the Post to cease being reflexively supportive of statism in the United States, that will be real progress.
P.P.S. Yes, socialism breeds misery, but it also generates some clever humor. More examples here, here, here, and here.
[It always reminds me of this picture:]
Bernie Sanders started out by running against Wall Street. These days he’s running against Israel.
Running against Wall Street was hard. The Sanders campaign had to produce actual numbers. Americans were shocked to learn the higher taxes they would be facing in the People’s Republic of Bernie. Prominent economists on the left and the right tore his economic plans to shreds. The Sandernistas responded by touting the support of the country’s most prominent Marxist economist, the son of the Rosenberg Stalinist atom bomb traitors and an instructor at Chemeketa Community College.
Bashing Israel is a lot easier and appeals to the same conspiratorial bigoted contingent of the left.
And the facts don’t matter.
Bernie Sanders lied and claimed that Israel had killed 10,000 innocent people in Gaza. That statement was false in every possible way. As Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, “every word… is a lie including the ‘and’ and ‘the’.” But the Sanders base, which had gleefully eaten up his conspiracy theories about Goldman Sachs, loved every minute of it.
Like the Manchurian Candidate’s Senator Iselin, Senator Sanders gleefully threw around false numbers in the fashion of a cheap bigoted demagogue knowing that the resulting debate would not be about whether Israel had killed innocent people in Gaza, but how many innocent people it had killed in Gaza.
But with each defeat, Bernie Sanders pandered even harder to his anti-Semitic left-wing base. In Arizona, he had a member of the Students for Justice in Palestine hate group standing next to him on stage. SJP has become notorious for its publication of anti-Semitic materials and harassment of Jewish students on campus. He lost Arizona, 57% to 39%. After his slander of Israel, he lost New York 58% to 42%. Trailing in the race for the nomination, he is doubling down on his war on the Jewish State.
Bernie Sanders has a long history of pandering to anti-Semitic leftists. He endorsed Jesse Jackson despite his Hymietown slur. He has campaigned with Harry Belafonte, who had claimed that "Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich" and Spike Lee who had responded to criticism of anti-Semitic stereotypes in his movies by saying that he “couldn’t make an anti-Semitic film” because Jews run Hollywood. He met with Sharpton who had jeered, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” Sanders had nothing to pin back and happily came.
Now he’s pushing some of his favorite haters of Israel in on the Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee.
The Sanders Democratic dream team includes Cornel West, who flirted with 9/11 Trutherism and is an opponent of Israel, and James Zogby, who had defended Hamas and Hezbollah. West claimed that anti-Semitic hate group leader Louis Farrakhan “always pushes me in a powerful way.” Farrakhan had claimed that “Satanic Jews… control everything and everybody.” That’s certainly powerful.
Zogby had referred to Israel as Nazis, compared the Lebanon War to the Holocaust and described Iran’s anti-Semitic Hezbollah terrorists as "the Lebanese armed resistance." The boss of this “Lebanese armed resistance” has stated that, “If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
Bernie Sanders supporters are the only group of backers for any of the candidates in the race who are more likely to support the terrorists over Israel. And as Sanders has focused more on bashing Israel, their bigotry is only likely to grow.
West doesn’t even pretend, as do some left-wing “peace” groups, to be opposing Israeli policy in order to save it from itself. He makes the simpler case that occupation is unconscionable oppression and that until Israel abandons it, Israel deserves to be treated like apartheid South Africa — anathematized, cut off, made to bleed morally and economically. The Sanders appointees wish to bend the Democratic platform to encourage such diminishment unless Israel redeems itself by liberating Palestine.
This is an unusual argument for a Democratic platform committee, largely because it is logically and morally perverse. Israel did in fact follow such high-minded advice in 2005: It terminated its occupation and evacuated Gaza. That earned it (temporary) praise from the West. And from the Palestinians? Not peace, not reconciliation, not normal relations but a decade of unrelenting terrorism and war.
Israel is now being asked — pressured — to repeat that same disaster on the West Bank. That would bring the terror war, quite fatally, to the very heart of Israel — Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ben Gurion Airport. Israel is now excoriated for declining that invitation to national suicide.
The millennials who worship him and pack his rallies haven’t lived through — and don’t know — the history of Israel’s half-century of peace offers. They don’t know of the multiple times Israel has offered to divide the land with an independent Palestinian state and been rebuffed.
Sanders hasn’t lifted a finger to tell them. The lovable old guy with the big crowds and no chance at the nomination is hardly taken seriously (except by Hillary Clinton, whose inability to put him away reveals daily her profound political weakness). But when he makes platform appointees that show he does take certain things quite seriously, like undermining the U.S.-Israeli relationship, you might want to reconsider your equanimity about the magical mystery tour. It looks like Woodstock, but there is steel inside the psychedelic glove.
US President Barack Obama once again displayed his anti-Israel sentiment on Wednesday after he renewed a presidential waiver that would delay the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for another six months, Haaretz reported.
“Pursuant to the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, including section 7(a) of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995”, read the memorandum directed to US Secretary of State John Kerry. “I hereby determine that it is necessary, in order to protect the national security interests of the United States, to suspend for a period of 6 months the limitations set forth in sections 3(b) and 7(b) of the Act.”
Voted on by a supermajority, Congress passed The Jerusalem Embassy and Recognition Act in 1995. The bill stated that “the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999.” But a woven caveat allows for a president to postpone the move, for six-monthly periods, in the interests of national security.
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama have all issued such waivers at each possible interval ever since.
Obama’s most recent decision to delay the move brings with it yet another sigh of exasperation for many of his pro-Israel supporters who had no doubt been inspired by the president’s 2008 campaign during which Obama referred to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, saying “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”
The next time the waiver comes up for review, in December of this year, Obama will be weeks away from stepping down as President. The decision whether to employ the Act, however, will still be in his hands at that time.
Continuing the rhetoric employed by American politicians looking to secure the Jewish vote, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has gone on record expressing his intentions to follow through with the Jerusalem Embassy Act. During his address to AIPAC attendees in March, Trump assured his audience that he would meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “immediately” and “move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem” should he win the election.
When Barack Obama speaks to the public, it is very rare that he does so without a specific purpose in mind. So why is he urging Americans “to be prepared for a disaster” all of a sudden? On May 31, Obama took time out of his extremely busy schedule to deliver an address at the FEMA National Response Coordination Center in Washington. During his speech, he stressed that every American is responsible for preparing for disasters, and that includes “having an evacuation plan” and “having a fully stocked disaster supply kit”. These are basic steps that I have been encouraging people to do for years, but if they won’t listen to me, perhaps they will listen to the man currently residing in the White House. The following excerpt from Obama’s speech comes directly from the official White House website…
One of the things that we have learned over the course of the last seven and a half years is that government plays a vital role, but it is every citizen’s responsibility to be prepared for a disaster. And that means taking proactive steps, like having an evacuation plan, having a fully stocked disaster supply kit. If your local authorities ask you to evacuate, you have to do it. Don’t wait.
This speech was timed to coincide with the beginning of the hurricane season, although hurricanes have not posed much of a threat lately.
In fact, a major hurricane has not made landfall in the United States for 127 straight months.
But without a doubt, we all need to be preparing for disaster. Hurricanes can create a short-term emergency that can last for a few days, but there are other threats that could create a major emergency that could potentially last for an extended period of time. That list of potential threats includes a major volcanic eruption, a natural or engineered pandemic, a west coast earthquake, a New Madrid earthquake, a tsunami on either the east or west coasts, a meteor impact, Islamic terror, war, an EMP burst that takes down the power grid, cyberwarfare, economic collapse, and civil unrest resulting in the imposition of martial law.
One more thing that I found particularly noteworthy about Obama’s speech was that he said that there is now “a FEMA app” that can direct you to the nearest “FEMA shelter” in the event of a major emergency.
If you need information about how to put together an evacuation plan, how to put together a disaster preparedness kit, as Craig said, we’ve got an app for everything now. We have a FEMA app in English and in Spanish to help you prepare your family for a disaster. You can update the National Weather Service alerts. You can get safety tips for more than 20 kinds of hazards. It provides you directions to nearby shelters.
Could you envision yourself and your family having to take refuge in a “FEMA shelter” someday?
In 2006, Pastor John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI) with hopes of disseminating to the masses pro-Israel programming that would “not be conversionary in any sense of the word”. Since then, CUFI has become America’s largest pro-Israel organization with over 3 million members.
With anti-Semitic sentiments and physical attacks increasing worldwide, CUFI is now spreading its wings to the United Kingdom (UK). “Last year, with 1,000 Christians in attendance, we launched CUFI UK,” Des Starritt, executive director for CUFI UK, told Breaking Israel News. “In this short time, we have gained a lot of traction, reaching thousands of people each week through emails, print and on social media.”
CUFI’s goals include education and advocacy in which churches, ministries and individuals can support Israel in matters related to Biblical issues. At the 2015 launch, Pastor Hagee emphasized the biblical mandate to fight anti-Semitism by quoting the book of Isaiah.
“A Night to Honor Israel” has been held annually in hundreds of American cities since 1981. The event began when Pastor Hagee organized a one-time celebration to counter anti-Israel rhetoric in America after Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, an act that Pastor Hagee saw as Israel protecting the world. Following the announcement of his plans, Pastor Hagee received death threats and bomb threats to the venue.
