Susan Warner writes for The Gatestone Institute (via ZeroHedge), that Venezuela, an oil-producing OPEC state that at one time claimed to be the most prosperous nation in Latin America, “is unraveling at breakneck speed”:
- A dozen eggs now cost $150, as inflation will hit 720% this year according to the International Monetary Fund.
- It’s not just insanely overpriced food; there is a shortage of food to buy, as well as medicine, electricity and water. For some months now, there are reports of people waiting in supermarket lines all day, only to discover that expected food deliveries never arrived and the shelves are empty.
- A once comfortable middle-class Venezuelan father is seen scrambling desperately to find his family’s next meal, sometimes hunting through garbage for salvageable food.
- Desperate people are killing household pets and zoo animals for food.
- The 75% majority of Venezuelans who were in poverty before the economic collapse reportedly are verging on starvation.
Typical grocery story in Venezuela
But President Nicolás Maduro, who succeeded Hugo Chavez — actor Sean Penn’s BFF — is doubling down on the proven failed policies and philosophies of “Bolivarian Socialism,” while diverting attention away from the crisis by blaming Venezuela’s collapse on foreign “enemies” such as the United States, Saudi Arabia and others.
Only 9 years ago, U.S. policy “experts” celebrated Chavez’s socialist revolution. In a 2007 study, “The Chávez Administration at 10 Years: The Economy and Social Indicators,” for the liberal Washington, D.C. think tank, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, economists Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval wrote:
“[a]t present it does not appear that the current economic expansion is about to end any time in the near future. The gains in poverty reduction, employment, education and health care that have occurred in the last few years are likely to continue along with the expansion.”
There’s a name for people like Weisbrot, Sandoval, and Penn.
It’s “useful idiots”: People who, unwittingly, are propagandists for a cause the goals of which they are not fully aware, and who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause.
Except that in the case of intellectuals like Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval, they are not unaware ignorants. Neither is Sean Penn. There should be another name for them:
Malevolent useful idiots
It’s just too bad these “malevolent useful idiots” for socialism are never there to pick up the pieces for Venezuelans and other peoples across the world, including the American poor and middle class, when it all goes bad — which it always has and inevitably will.
Meanwhile, as the people of Venezuela starve, Sean Penn is still nowhere to be seen in their country to help out the starving poor.
With an estimated net worth of $150 million, Penn has lived a privileged life since birth as the son of actor-director Leo Penn (and grandson of Ashkenazi Jewish emigrants from Lithuania and Russia). Sean has been signed to star in a new movie, Professor & the Mad Men, with Mel Gibson, and was last spotted on August 23, having dinner at the elegant Mediterranean restaurant Il Piccolino in West Hollywood, where the menu includes steaks, chicken, veal, lamb, artisan duck sausages, seafood pasta, and octopus appetizers.
Sean Penn at Il Piccolino restaurant, August 23, 2016
See also:
- Venezuela at the abyss: 500,000 swarm streets of capital to demand recall of president
- Venezuela is shutting down
- Apocalyptic Venezuela: 5,000 loot supermarket; president declares state-of-emergency
- This is Venezuela: Mob burns a man alive over $5
- Socialist Venezuela into the abyss: people are killing pets for food
- Socialist Hugo Chavez died with a family fortune worth $2 billion
~Eowyn
