Stretching credulity...

When you see multi-millionaire former Prez George W sharing the billionaire team-owners luxury suite with multi-millionaire lefty Ellen, you know somebody's pulling your leg.

What's up with the media-infotainment complex's whitewashing of the old guard war criminals? The reframing of the Bush dynasty goes hand in hand with the reframing of the CIA and the FBI. Any remotely progressive person has always known that those entities are to human rights what Holy Water is to the devil's excrement. (I'm not talking about oil, although it wouldn't be hard to work it into the narrative.)

Hollywood is coming dangerously close to showing its hand. Even that staple of the progressive's viewing diet, SNL, is having fun and chasing ratings by mocking "medicare for all." You know, that public health care regime which promises care for all who need it, regardless of their financial situation. It's practically universal in the so-called developed world (and even quite a bit beyond), but for some reason, the richest country on the planet can't afford it.

"Some reason" consists mainly of the richest, most lavishly funded lobby in lobby-infested DC. There's a lot of money to be made not providing health care to people who can't afford it. The people who enrich themselves as shareholders and executives in the health-care field would have to find honest work if America ever had public health care.

That scares the shit out of them.

The same Hollywood masterminds who create SNL aren't about to get behind any other genuinely progressive ideas either. Hollywood is owned by Wall Street and the billionaire class, just like the GOP and the DNC. That's why across the spectrum, from MSNBC to Fox News, you'll find nothing but scorn and ridicule poured on Bernie and the so-called squad.

The word "socialism" is increasingly in the news these days.


That's not news the billionaires want to hear.

Conan O'Brien proves Haiti not a sh!thole

It's a thing now - high priced US celebrities go to Haiti for a few days and a few photo-ops to prove that far from being a shithole, Haiti is in fact a lovely getaway with pristine beaches, stunning vistas, and photogenic schoolgirls...

Hmm... Cuba has all that and so much more. Free education and health care. A GDP per person ten times that of Haiti. Life expectancy fifteen years greater.

Here's another difference; Haiti gets American "aid." Cuba gets American sanctions. In spite of that, few would deny that Cubans enjoy a vastly superior quality of life.

A mere sixty miles of ocean separate these two Caribbean states. One has enjoyed a socialist mode of governance for over half a century. The other has had its elected leader removed by Uncle Sam and friends any time he starts mouthing vaguely socialist rhetoric.

This contrast raises a couple of intriguing questions:

• what might Cuba's economy look like absent US sanctions? 
• what might Haiti look like absent US interference?  

Frankly, I think they'd both be better off if Uncle Sam stayed home and worked at fixing America's problems instead.

Top twat pontificates on Venezuela's economic catastrophe

According to his Wikipedia page, Ricardo Hausmann is best known for inventing several abstruse concepts to make the Dismal Science even more obscurantist than it would otherwise be. When I was coming up "dark matter" was a term from theoretical physics and "original sin" was something you learned about in Sunday school.

No more. Thanks to Hausmann, introducing these concepts to economics has given dismal scientists some much-needed tools to better explain the inexplicable, or whatever it is those people do.

In his spare time, Hausmann is the director of Harvard's Center for International Development, the successor to Harvard's Institute for International Development, which went down in flames as a result of hanky-panky involving its activities in post-Soviet Russia. It was in his capacity as director at the CID that I found him in the Op-ed pages of my Globe and Mail today.

Here's a taste; "The Maduro government's all-out attack on liberty and democracy is deservedly attracting greater international attention." Hmm... gotta say that whenever I hear an apologist for Empire profess concern for "liberty and democracy" the old bullshit detector starts twitching uncontrollably. No honest person today would posit that being on Uncle Sam's bestie list has anything whatsoever to do with one's commitment to "liberty and democracy."

As for that "greater international attention" bit, I suppose that's all relative. There has certainly been no deficit of American attention to Venezuelan politics in recent decades. By their own admission, the National Endowment for Democracy (that US government funded "NGO"- how Orwellian is that!?) has spent over 100 millions since the election of Chavez meddling in Venezuela's internal politics, and it looks like their efforts are finally bearing fruit.

The claim that Venezuela is the world's most indebted country is a bit of a puzzler. According to the CIA, (ya, that CIA) Venezuela has a debt/GDP ratio of 36.7%. That compares to 181.6% for Greece, 132.5% for Italy, and 126.2% for Portugal... and oh lookee! There's the USA with a debt/GDP ratio of 73.8%!

But Venezuela is the most indebted country in the world? Get outta here!

So why doesn't Maduro just belly up to the loan desk at the IMF or the World Bank like all those other guys? Borrow a few billions to tide his country over this tight spot? That's an interesting question. Here's a couple of paragraphs from a Huffpost article a few years back.

Venezuela also has specific grievances against the IMF, which are likely to generate sympathy in other developing countries with democratic, left-of-center governments. On April 12, 2002, just hours after Venezuela’s democratically elected government was overthrown in a military coup, the IMF stated publicly that it was “ready to assist the new administration [of Pedro Carmona] in whatever manner they find suitable.”

This instantaneous show of financial support for a newly installed dictatorship - one which immediately dissolved the country’s constitution, general assembly, and Supreme Court - was unprecedented in the IMF’s history. Typically the IMF does not react so quickly, even to an elected government. It is no wonder that this move was seen in Venezuela and elsewhere as an attempt by the IMF to support the coup itself. Washington, which dominates the Fund, had advance knowledge of the coup, supported it, and funded some of its leaders - according to U.S. government documents.

Oopsie... it almost looks like Uncle Sam and his toadies at the IMF and the World Bank are a little inconsistent in their commitment to "liberty and democracy," doesn't it? 

So there's no question that one of the main causes of Venezuela's suffering today is due to a long-standing policy of egregious Yanqui meddling. 

A related and equally important cause can be found in Mr. Hausmann's text, "...the government decided to cut imports while remaining current on foreign-debt service..."

WTF? What kind of "socialist" is this Maduro? He prioritizes debt payments over feeding his people?

That's the Venezuelan tragedy in a nutshell; not enough socialism and way too much US meddling.