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The globalist elite play chess while the Islamists and Leftists/Socialists play checkers

The word globalism is often used in its narrowest context to mean global trade, which obscures its broader political intention to internationalize nation states and ultimately impose one-world government.

Similarly the word Islamism is often used in its narrowest context to mean a religion like any other which obscures its broader political intention to reestablish the caliphate and impose sharia law worldwide.

Both are supremacist, expansionist socio-political movements intent on world dominion.

Islamists like Globalists believe themselves and their supremacist tenets to be morally superior to all others. The Islamist cloaks his supremacy in religious fervor and the disingenuous conviction that Islam is a peaceful religion because peace to an Islamist means when all the world is Muslim.

The Globalist cloaks his supremacy in a parallel and equally disingenuous conviction that Globalism is tolerant because tolerance to a globalist means tolerating those who LOOK different, not those who THINK differently.

Both systems are tyrannical in their demand for absolute conformity to their proscribed rules of behavior - for Islamists it is religious sharia law and for globalists it is secular political correctness.

The Islamist and the Globalist are both soldiers in their parallel wars seeking totalitarian rule of the world. The difference between Islamists and Globalists is the difference between communism and socialism described by Ayn Rand:

THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM, EXCEPT IN THE MEANS OF ACHIEVING THE SAME ULTIMATE END: COMMUNISM PROPOSES TO ENSLAVE MEN BY FORCE, SOCIALISM BY VOTE. IT IS MERELY THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MURDER AND SUICIDE.

Islamism and Globalism appear to exist on opposite sides of the political spectrum but they share a common enemy - the nation state. Nationalism is the single greatest obstacle to the religious caliphate of Islamism and to the secular one-world government of Globalism. The ancient proverb The enemy of my enemy is my friend explains the counter-intuitive common cause and intersectional alliance between Islamists and Globalists today.

Disinformation is a deliberate tactic of war. The Islamist fiction that the annihilation of Israel will bring peace to the middle east is a unifying tactic of war designed to demonize Israel, manipulate public opinion, and garner intersectional support from left-wing liberal lemmings against Israel. Islamist disinformation has a name - TAQIYYA - lying in the service of Islam. It is a deceitful strategy that deflects attention from the Islamist end game of eliminating the left-wing liberal infidels who support them. Similarly, the disinformation campaign supporting the fiction that Socialism will bring justice to the United States also has a name - ALINSKIYYA - lying in the service of Socialism. The hippies and anarchists of the 60s did not go quietly into the night. They have reconstituted themselves as the professors, administrators, politicians, activist judges, and policy-makers adhering to well-defined Tavistock Institute principles of social engineering and mass indoctrination designed to disinform, destabilize, and destroy America from within. Whoever controls the information controls society - and whoever controls the educational curriculum controls the future.

Islamists and Globalists follow the same expansionist playbook codified by Saul Alinsky in his book Rules for Radicals, Rule #12:

PICK THE TARGET, FREEZE IT, PERSONALIZE IT, POLARIZE IT. DONT TRY TO ATTACK ABSTRACT CORPORATIONS OR BUREAUCRACIES. IDENTIFY A RESPONSIBLE INDIVIDUAL. IGNORE ATTEMPTS TO SHIFT OR SPREAD THE BLAME.

Israel and America have been demonized, targeted, personalized, and polarized because both are unapologetic and unwavering in their commitments to their national sovereignty. The war against Israel and America is a war against nationalism. Israels right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state is actually being debated as is Americas right to exist as a sovereign democratic nation. The left-wing liberal narrative courtesy of Barack Hussein Obama has reformatted American education and American entertainment to reflect the dreams from his father - a Kenyan radical socialist who considered America an evil colonial power. The information war waged by the colluding mainstream media, academia, and the entertainment industry foments American self-loathing, demonizes President Donald Trump the symbol of America-first nationalism, and glorifies socialism, anti-semitism, and presents internationalism as the panacea that will bring social justice to the masses. Socialism has never worked in the long-run in any country in the world because as Margaret Thatcher pointed out Eventually you run out of other peoples money. Socialism has only had limited success in the short-run in very small homogenous populations because socialism and pluralism are antithetical to each other. Socialisms greatest success is in destroying a nations prosperity and in sacrificing individual citizens rights to government control. Ayn Rand explains that socialism even robs an individual of his right to exist:

SOCIALISM IS THE DOCTRINE THAT MAN HAS NO RIGHT TO EXIST FOR HIS OWN SAKE, THAT HIS LIFE AND HIS WORK DO NOT BELONG TO HIM, BUT BELONG TO SOCIETY, THAT THE ONLY JUSTIFICATION OF HIS EXISTENCE IS HIS SERVICE TO SOCIETY, AND THAT SOCIETY MAY DISPOSE OF HIM IN ANY WAY IT PLEASES FOR THE SAKE OF WHATEVER IT DEEMS TO BE ITS OWN TRIBAL, COLLECTIVE GOOD.

The essential question is WHY the Left is promoting communist values. The left-wing liberal agenda seeks to destroy the socio-political capitalist infrastructure of American democracy and transform it into a dependent socialist state with cradle to grave control by the government. Their strategy is to destroy the traditional American institutions of family, religion,, and education that promote independence, adulthood, individualism, and ego strength - all the qualities that made America great. The entire narrative of the Left is designed to induce regression through educational indoctrination and the media - as Hillary Clinton famously remarked they need an unaware compliant public. Unaware and compliant are the hallmarks of childhood. The sales pitch might sound good to a childish mind who is seduced by candy from a stranger but the adult mind understands the sinister end-game. Once the public is entirely dependent on the government they lose all individual rights and national sovereignty and the newly socialized state is poised to become part of an internationalized one-world government. That is the end-game of the globalist elite and the motivation for indoctrinating America toward socialism.

The problem is that the left-wing liberal lemmings are too arrogant to understand that they are participating in their own destruction - they are just the useful idiots. The Left has been indoctrinated to believe they are fighting for social justice when in fact they are helping to establish the dystopian nightmare of one-world government where there is no middle class, no upward mobility, no national sovereignty, and absolutely no individual freedoms. There is only the master ruling elite and the enslaved population who service them. The left-wing liberal lemmings should take a break from marching and resisting and start reading Bertrand Russells The Impact of Science on Society written in 1952. They will learn that their script was written 65 years ago by the globalist elites who dreamed of their own one-world government - a binary socio-political system of masters and slaves. The globalist elites New World Order was their personal self-serving answer to the Malthusian problem of the earth not having enough resources to sustain the population growth.

Tavistock Institute was exported to America after WWII with the specific purpose of indoctrinating Americans via education and the media - particularly television - the greatest vehicle for mass social engineering ever invented. The Hollywood glitterati and the protesting hoards should take a pause and understand there is no place for them in the New World Order - they are simply useful idiots who will be destroyed. The aristocratic Lord Bertrand Russell and the late David Rockefeller had no moral problem with eliminating the useless eaters anymore than Hitler had with exterminating Jews, Islamists with exterminating infidels, or the Chinese Emperors with burying their concubines alive to service them in the afterlife. The point is elitism is supremacist - there is no egalitarian respect for human life only the pretense of humanitarian considerations. The Left and the Islamists have common cause in trying to destroy America from within - but it is the globalist elites who finance and disingenuously facilitate both groups because the social chaos they each engender is a prerequisite for imposing globalist one-world government. For the globalist elite the Left and the Islamists are BOTH useful idiots. The globalist elite play chess while the Islamists and Leftists/Socialists play checkers.

Linda Goudsmit is a devoted wife, mother, and grandmother. She and her husband owned and operated a girls clothing store in Michigan for 40 years and are now retired on the beach in sunny Florida. Linda graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, earning a B.A. in English literature. Having a lifelong commitment to learning, she is an avid reader and observer of life. She has shared her thoughts, observations, and philosophy of behavior in her book DEAR AMERICA Whos Driving the Bus? Linda is currently working on a childrens book series titled Mimis STRATEGY that offers helpful problem solving techniques encouraging resourcefulness and critical thinking skills for kids.

Continued here:
CONNECTING THE DOTS: ISLAMISM...SOCIALISM GLOBALISM - Canada Free Press

Liverpool fans hold up a banner with Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn before the game against Southampton. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

Tradition has it that Liverpool FC stands for socialism, even while many of the legends who bestrode the Anfield turf quietly voted Tory because they liked the idea of lower taxes. The association goes back to Bill Shankly, whose line that The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. Its the way I see football, its the way I see life, became a slogan that sold a million T-shirts.

Shanklys socialism was practical rather than theoretical: he is remembered for declaring to a crowd that, Even Chairman Mao has never seen a greater show of Red strength, but moments earlier hed had to ask Brian Hall for the name of the Chinese leader.

So the Liverpool fans who produced a pro-Jeremy Corbyn banner at the match against Southampton yesterday were honouring a cherished part of the identity of the club. But the striking thing about the banner was how quaintly out-of-place it seemed at the club Liverpool has become, and indeed in the wider context of the Premier League.

Liverpool has changed even more than most clubs, the club of Shankly is now under its second set of American owners. The first set were leveraged buyout specialists, one of whom memorably compared Liverpool FC to another company that was once part of his portfolio, Weetabix.

The current owner, John Henry, decided to buy the club because it satisfied the criteria of an investment model that he had learned from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway.

That is to say, he recognised that Liverpool FC was (a) famous (b) cheap and (c) had a lot of obvious room for improvement. If we could acquire this for the debt, I really feel like we would be stealing this franchise, Henry wrote in an email to his co-investors.

No UK investor both understood the economic potential of the club and had the finance to invest. Henry and his group have seen Liverpools valuation increase by nearly a billion dollars since they bought it for $500 million in 2010.

There were three main factors behind that spectacular capital gain. Most important was the increase in the Premier Leagues income from new TV deals. Second was the building of a new main stand at Anfield, which was chiefly aimed at increasing the number of corporate seats. Third was the thorough rationalisation of how Liverpool were managed, through the introduction of statistical and mathematical methods into scouting and recruitment.

Its not fashionable to speak about Moneyball any more, and the word would probably have struck Shankly as an oxymoronic and faintly obscene piece of Newspeak, but it remains the most concise description of the ethos of the current Liverpool FC.

And most of the other Premier League clubs are run along similar lines. Some of the critics of the Corbyn banner argued that politics and football should not mix, but those critics are failing to grasp that the Premier League promotes a certain set of political values simply by its existence and example.

From its inception, when the richest clubs decided to break the link with the rest of the football pyramid so that they could take a greater share of the forthcoming boom in TV money for themselves, the Premier League has embodied the values of neoliberalism.

It has become Britains most successful cultural export, and probably its most globalised industry. Owned by foreign capital, dominated by talented foreign coaches and players, and compliant with up-to-date standards of political correctness, it stands for internationalisation, deregulation, conspicuous consumption, and free trade.

For years people have worried that the influx of vast sums of money into the game would break the emotional connection between the fans in the stands and the players on the field. With the average Premier League footballer now earning more than 100 times the average industrial wage, the days of players spending midweek evenings drinking with fans in working mens clubs have long gone.

It turns out that people still can empathise with what happens on the field, because that emotional connection never had anything to do with money in the first place. But you wonder how long the Premier League can continue to stand for values that the fans who fill its stadiums increasingly seem to be rejecting.

Whether the Corbynistas at Anfield or the Tories who seem to be in the majority elsewhere, it seems that the great majority these days would have some reason to hate the model of the Premier League a Murdoch-sponsored greed-fest where immigrants have already taken two-thirds of the jobs.

Perhaps the league can take comfort in the fact that people seem to be rather good at disconnecting their thinking about football from their thinking about politics. No other set of immigrants is as warmly received in England as talented football players. There are millions of football fans who cheer every week for foreign footballers, then vote for whichever party promises the harshest measures against immigration.

This might be why the Premier League still seems confident that they can win an exemption from the coming restrictions on employing immigrant labour. Many of the same people who scowl at the thought of Polish plumbers taking English jobs would nevertheless be delighted for Chelsea to sign Robert Lewandowski. In football at least, most people can still see that England for the English is a step in the wrong direction.

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Ken Early: Liverpool are a long way from socialism these days - Irish Times

The World Economic Forum is promoting a new economic model that could help end inequality. Like the doughnut it resembles, it looks appealing, but has no nutritional value. It is empty at its core and in practice will benefit nobody other than corrupt politicians and their cronies.

On the eve of the World Economic Forum on Africa (WEF-Africa), held in Durban last week, the group of government jetsetters and their rich cronies unveiled a doughnut. They called it a new economic model that could help end inequality. Heres what it looks like:

The image is described as follows: The hole at the Doughnuts centre reveals the proportion of people worldwide falling short on lifes essentials, such as food, water, healthcare and political freedom of expression and a big part of humanitys challenge is to get everyone out of that hole. At the same time, however, we cannot afford to be overshooting the Doughnuts outer crust if we are to safeguard Earths life-giving systems, such as a stable climate, healthy oceans and a protective ozone layer, on which all our well-being fundamentally depends.

It was written by a self-proclaimed renegade economist, Kate Raworth, an Oxford academic who focuses on environmental and sustainability issues, a former researcher for Oxfam, and a member of the Club of Rome.

The Club of Rome is a group of professional alarmists that has since 1972 been warning us about the The Limits to Growth. It restates the old Malthusian misconception that population grows exponentially, while the technology to produce more resources grows only linearly. Therefore, Malthusians argue, the world is in trouble, and it will only get worse unless economic growth is somehow constrained.

A typical phrasing, by Kenneth Boulding, an environmental adviser to the late US President John F. Kennedy, was made famous by naturist and filmmaker David Attenborough: Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist.

Ironically, technology did advance at an exponential rate, and neither population growth nor resource depletion has proved to be catastrophic. On the contrary, by any measure of human welfare poverty, hunger, literacy, farm productivity, life expectancy, child mortality, disease burden, you name it the world has become a better place.

In previous columns, I have debunked the inanity of limits to growth rhetoric, disputed the resource depletion myth in great detail, and showed how history keeps proving prophets of eco-apocalypse wrong. Last year, I wrote an article (and a follow-up) defending the record of free-market capitalism in terms of both human welfare and environmental risk.

Oxfam, which co-hosted WEF-Africa and whose international chairperson, Winnie Byanyima, was a co-chairperson, likewise has a dismal record. Its inequality rhetoric is fatally flawed, and based on blatant falsehoods. They bang on about inequality because they cant make the case that things are getting worse using just poverty statistics, but even then theyre wrong. Global inequality is actually decreasing. (See a more technical treatment of the subject here.)

The WEF-Africa doughnut explicitly cites Oxfams false and misleading inequality reports. It also cites the 2009 book The Spirit Level, by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, which argues that more equal societies almost always do better. Although wildly popular on the left, the book has been harshly criticised in economic circles for using outdated data, cherry-picking countries, and ignoring confounding variables in its analysis. Its conclusion is simply not supported by the facts presented.

Having done a re-analysis using the very same methodology the book used, but using newer data, Christopher Snowdon, research fellow at the Institute for Economic Affairs, concluded: It seems that the relationship between inequality and life expectancy only holds when we use data from early in the last decade and arbitrarily exclude a number of countries. It fails the basic scientific test of reproducibility. A law that only works under certain circumstances and in certain years is no law at all.

Finally, the doughnut article cites the book that made Thomas Piketty a superstar on the left, Capital in the 21stCentury. His central thesis is that if interest rates on capital are consistently greater than wage growth, social conflict results. While the book has its merits, particularly in collating vast amounts of economic data from around the world, its conclusions are far grander than the limits of the data he presents allow, as Clive Crook argues for Bloomberg.

This tendency is apparent all through the book, Crook writes, but most marked at the end, when he sums up his findings about the central contradiction of capitalism:

The inequality r>g [the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth] implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future. The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying ...

Every claim in that dramatic summing up is either unsupported or contradicted by Pikettys own data and analysis.

In an article for Reason Magazine, Garett Jones points out that taxing capital, which is Pikettys proposed remedy for reducing inequality, cannot work: The Boston University economist Christophe Chamley and the Stanford economist Kenneth Judd came up independently with what we might call the Chamley-Judd Redistribution Impossibility Theorem: Any tax on capital is a bad idea in the long run, and that the overwhelming effect of a capital tax is to lower wages. A capital tax is such a bad idea that even if workers and capitalists really were two entirely separate groups of people if workers could only eat their wages and capitalists just lived off of their interest like a bunch of trust-funders it would still be impossible to permanently tax capitalists, hand the tax revenues to workers, and make the workers better off.

As Tim Worstall explains in Forbes: Average wages in an economy are determined by the average productivity of labour in that economy. Applying capital to labour is what drives up productivity in an economy. Thus we would like there to be more capital applied to labour as that raises the average income in said economy.

So whether it relies on Oxfam, The Spirit Level or Piketty, from the outset, the economic validity of the doughnut model looks suspect. But even on its own, it doesnt bear a lot of scrutiny.

The first problem with the chart is that it quantifies nothing. The green lines it draws for the social foundation and ecological ceiling are entirely arbitrary. What constitutes inadequate, sufficient, or excessive prosperity? How much pollution is too much? The model doesnt even say whether the lines indicate income, wealth, productivity, growth, or some other measure of economic performance. Its just a vague and generalised critique of wealth. No wonder it is popular in the halls of academia, the only place where discredited socialist ideas which have killed more people than Nazism retain an air of respectability.

It also does not show the proportion of people worldwide falling short on anything, as Raworth claims. It doesnt show proportions at all. How to interpret the funny-shaped red boxes in the hole is a mystery. In fact, the shapes that are supposed to indicate proportions of poor people who suffer various shortfalls dont even occur in Raworths original concept. The illustration is meaningless, and relies on no data at all. It depicts ideology; it does not depict reality.

In the outer, overshoot ring, which is supposed to represent the dangers of exceeding some arbitrary ecological ceiling, there is no indication of the possible causes of environmental harm. It just assumes that excessive wealth causes them all. It does not recognise that some of the worlds most serious environmental problems are caused not by rich people, but by poor people trying to get rich. Compare the environment surrounding poor slums and rich suburbs. Consider that poor farmers are the primary culprits in deforestation. Big corporations with valuable brands to protect have to be far more careful about their environmental record than the thousands of small, obscure miners or manufactories of the developing world. Think about the difference in attitude towards species conservation between rich elites and poor communities for whom wildlife is either potential food or a potential threat. Contrast the environmental policies of rich countries with those of poor societies.

When you dont know where your next meal is coming from, youre not likely to care much for anything else. When youre well-off, your horizons become broader and youre far more likely to consider the social and environmental impact of your choices. Simply put, rich people can afford to look after the environment, and inevitably choose to do so. None of this complexity is reflected in the WEFs new economic model.

All this is not to say we shouldnt address the worlds problems, of course. But they are best solved by increasing prosperity for all instead of appealing to populism about restraining the rich. According to Simon OConnell, executive director of Mercy Corps Europe, the World Bank recently elevated conflict from being one of many drivers of suffering and poverty to being the primary driver. Hunger is not an environmental problem or a problem caused by inequality. It is a man-made problem caused by war, marginalisation and weak governance. I would add socialism and corrupt dictatorships to that mix, as weve seen in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and so many postcolonial African countries. Address these underlying problems, and much of the worlds remaining poverty will evaporate like dew under the bright rays of economic freedom.

That an institution such as the World Economic Forum instead falls prey to socialist rhetoric about inequality is distressing, not only for the rich that are targeted (by which we mean the capitalists funding the worlds productivity, not the rich who are represented at WEF shindigs, of course). It is especially distressing for the worlds remaining poor. Self-serving hot air by wealthy elites who can afford to indulge socialist fantasies, and government bureaucrats whose only motive is to manipulate the poor for votes, are a curse they dont deserve.

In the Mail & Guardian, Patrick Bond, professor of political economy at Wits and honorary professor of development studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, compiled a scathing account of how Oxfam facilitated the corruption swamp of controversial politicians and crony capitalists that were involved in WEF-Africa.

One consequence is to embolden corrupt leaders like Jacob Zuma. As Sean Gossel and Misheck Mutize point out in The Conversation, his attacks on capital are a dangerous political approach used in failing states like Algeria, Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Its aim is to deflect attention from its policy failures and from numerous scandals surrounding President Jacob Zuma, his family and the politically connected Gupta network.

This approach, they argue, makes it harder to hold the private sector to account for its real sins, damages our chances of economic recovery, and fails to address the countrys structural challenges.

What needs to be made clear is that the debate around white monopoly capital and radical economic transformation is about much more than statistics and definitions, write Gossel and Mutize. It is about the ownership and control of both public and private capital by a politically connected elite. Thus it comes with the potential risk of turning South Africas entire economy into a centrally controlled patronage network.

That the World Economic Forum is aiding and abetting this descent into socialism, cronyism and poverty is a disgrace. Their new economic model is as unhealthy as the doughnut upon which it is based. DM

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Ivo Vegter - Daily Maverick

In his column "What Happened in France," Bruce Bawer tries to explain why Front National's Marine Le Pen suffered what he calls a "devastating loss." His conclusion is basically that Europeans have been "psychologically manipulated to the point where they truly believe, on some level, at least in some Orwellian doublethink kind of way, that acting in clear defense of their own existence, their own culture, their own values, and their own posterity, is an act of ugly prejudice." And so Emmanuel Macron, the darling of the politically correct left and Brussels, won.

That sure sounds like a wonderful, easy-to-grasp explanation, but I'm afraid Bawer is overlooking one rather important detail: the Front National is simply a horrendous party. Yes, yes, I'm aware that we all have to celebrate the rise of populism, and yes, to some degree those parties certainly have an important role to play in modern Europe. Even if you disagree with Le Pen's policy ideas, you can at least respect her role as a battering ram against political correctness.

All true.

But if you look at the actualcontent of the Front National's platform, you can only conclude that the party is anythingbutconservative. Le Pen and her party are opposed to the free-market system; they're against free trade. They actuallybelieve the government should take over entire sectors of the economy. Additionally, Front National supports France's untenable and unaffordable welfare state. Thirty-five-hour work week? Check. Lower the retirement age to 60? Check. Introduce trade barriers? Check.

Let's face it: When it comes to economics, the Front National and Marine Le Pen are diehard socialists.

Oh, and if that isn't bad enough, the party was also the subject of a controversy because Le Pen's intended temporary successor as FN's leader,Jean-Franois Jalkh, had in years pastpublicly doubted the existence of Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers. When he was confronted with those statements Jalkh quickly resigned, but it was too late: he had reminded French voters of Front National's less-than-stellar reputation on the issue. And that's exactly what Le Pen couldnot use.

It must give American "nationalists" a great feeling of superiority to simply declare that Europeans have surrendered to political correctness and have forgotten who they are, but the fact of the matter is that French immigration and integration hawks used a very problematic party to take on Macron. Le Pen personally certainly has potential, but she'll need to change her party's platform of nationalistic socialism if she ever wants to become president. If she does not, well, I guess that just means that conservatives' best hope for the future is a revived Republican Party -- that's the party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy that lost this year's election because its candidate, Francois Fillon, was involved in a corruption scandal. Had he not been, he, not Macron, would have beenthe favorite to win.

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Marine Le Pen Lost Because Front National Is a Bad Party With Bad Ideas - PJ Media

Remember the photos of Soviet Union department stores with virtually nothing on the display shelves? In the 1970s, while I was serving in the military, we were told about the hardships the Soviet citizens were undergoing at the hands of their Communist government.

Aside from typically abysmal fiscal policy manifested by a command-and-control economy and the huge burden on that economy caused by military spending, the people were helpless to improve their lot. For them to protest or force change meant imprisonment or death.

Not far to the south of us, Venezuela has surpassed the old USSR in mismanagement by a wide margin. Unfortunately, under Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro, the downhill slide is accelerating into perilous territory, that of civil disorder and chaos.

Ironically, Venezuela is reportedly sitting on the largest supply of oil and gas in the world, but is paralyzed in its ability to benefit from it. Foreign oil companies and other businesses have been nationalized (a polite term for stolen by the government) and in so doing has frightened-off any more significant industrial investment. Why should a corporation invest in a country where its assets can be easily seized? It would be stupid to take that risk.

The basic mode of failure is the standard template of socialism which can be summarized by Dame Margaret Thatchers famous quote: The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money. To apply a commonly-used phrase used to describe terminal cases, Venezuela is circling the drain to economic oblivion.

The populist/socialist Hugo Chavez really got the cart rolling by dolling out largess to people he thought would support him and thus keep him in power. But it becomes difficult to support a leader who cannot keep his people in paper toilet paper.

Chavez died March 5, 2013, just when things were becoming tense. His hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, has been trying to keep the economy bailed out, and to say that it hasnt been working out is a vast understatement. Conditions have deteriorated to the point of massive demonstrations, marches and rebellious actions by the now-nearly starving citizens.

But everything will probably turn out okay because in 2012 Chavez forbade the ownership of firearms by all citizens, presumably to keep them out of the hands of criminals so to protect the more and more angry (and hungry) citizens.

However, Maduro saw that the police and military forces might not be able to handle the rebellious Venezuelan people, so he did what every self-respecting dictator would do: He formed his own private, armed (non-government) militia to maintain order through force of intimidation or through whatever means necessary.

Now, instead of cutting his losses and returning the government to a democratic form, he will try to hang on until the end and either he is driven from power and killed, or becomes so ruthless that the people simply have no choice but to give up or be exterminated. The former is exactly what happened in Cuba when the Communists under the Castro brothers took over. But guess whose families are well-off, set for life and protected? Yes, its the tyrants.

Note that banning the private ownership of firearms in Venezuela was enacted just before conditions became intolerable. Without the means to defend themselves effectively against a rogue government and its enforcers, the people will suffer dearly.

The United States is the only nation that was founded on the principle of individual liberty. That means the right of men and women to protect their own lives. Our history our heritage is unique in that regard. The people of other countries have not had that experience, so they do not have the liberty mindset in which we were educated emphasis on were.

It is no secret that liberals/socialists in our government were licking their lips at the thought of Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 presidential election. Except for Democrat Party primary nomination shenanigans, self-described socialist Bernie Sanders would have been a suitable substitute. The supreme prize of control of the Supreme Court was lost in that electoral defeat.

Keep an eye on Venezuela and you will be surprised at the number of similarities in the dialogue of the Maduro regime and American liberal talking points, especially regarding class warfare.

Link:
Commentary: Venezuela, a rich country ruined by socialist dictators - Austin American-Statesman