Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a fan of Hugo Chavez’s and Castro’s leadership in Venezuela and Cuba respectively, claims that “his [Chavez’s] brand of socialism achieved real economic gains.”
Given Sanders unflinching faith in communism, Sanders campaign announced today the hiring of a hard-left adviser and speechwriter — David Sirota.
In 2013, Sirota wrote a lengthy defense for hard-left Salon on Chavez’s reign in Venezuela shortly after the dictator’s death, which he called an “economic miracle.”
While Sirota admitted to the human rights abuses and crime problems, he gloried in the alleged miracle economy.
Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.
For instance, according to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez’s first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez’s brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its “extreme poverty” rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America. Additionally, as Weisbrot points out, “college enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.”
And on and on it goes.
THEY WANT THE USA TO BE VENEZUELA
When we tell you these candidates want to turn us into Venezuela, not Denmark, you must believe us.
People who were once middle class in Venezuela are now eating out of the garbage and children are dying for lack of food and medicine. Their health system has collapsed and Nicholas Maduro has Russian and Iranian elite military running around the country terrorizing people.
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Sirota wrote, “When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter — and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on.”
Six years later, the people have been disarmed and their money is worthless. They are teetering on complete economic and social collapse. It has been this way since 2014 because of their socialist policies, despite being an oil-rich nation.
FREE EVERYTHING WITH THE BENEVOLENT GOVERNMENT IN CHARGE OF THE MONEY DOES NOT WORK
The free everything, in the beginning, gave the Socialist nation a false economic boom.
“And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chavez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?” Sirota asked.
Yeah, no Sirota. You’re an idiot.
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