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Venezuela cannot wake up from its socialist nightmare.

The Venezuelan opposition just staged a massive protest against the government, which the government repressed with military force, leading to at least three deaths, The New York Times reports. Detained opposition activists say the authorities tortured them, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, across the country, people are starving.

Venezuela, a beautiful, oil-rich country, once one of the wealthiest nations in the Southern Hemisphere, is only sinking further into economic devastation and chaotic, corrupt authoritarianism. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro increasingly looks like a "Bolivarian" version of Vladimir Putin, holding power through corrupt patronage, fear, and the smothering of alternative voices and power centers. The protests were triggered by further moves by the executive to consolidate power. Maduro has banned a main opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, from holding political office.

Meanwhile, the economy keeps rotting. Venezuela has topped Bloomberg's Economic Misery Index, a benchmark whose title is self-explanatory, for three years running. The economy shrank by 18 percent last year, with unemployment at 25 percent, and inflation slated to be 750 percent this year and 2,000 percent the next, according to the International Monetary Fund (Venezuelan government statistics are, of course, made up, so third-party figures are more reliable).

But it's other statistics that show the real extent of the misery, and make one's stomach truly churn. Over the past year, 74 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of nearly 20 pounds each, reports The Economist. The military controls the country's food supply, and the result is widespread malnourishment and, of course, corruption. Venezuela's hospitals have more in common with those in Aleppo than with those of an oil-rich, emerging economy. As the Guardian reported last year, children are suffering from malnourishment for the first time in the country's modern history; there are outbreaks of scabies, a disease easily prevented with basic hygienic practices; hospitals are running out of even basic drugs. Caracas is the murder capital of the world. Corruption has infected the country wholesale even as it has created a new class of kleptocratic oligarchs linked to the security services.

Put all of this together, and it's not just that the economy is doing terribly. The whole of Venezuelan society is breaking down at a fundamental level. We are witnessing the collapse of a once-proud, beautiful country with a rich culture and countless assets. It is truly heartbreaking.

This was wholly preventable. And I blame socialism.

Venezuela's previous president, Hugo Chavez, set the stage for the country's destruction by spending Venezuela's oil money on social programs designed to boost his popularity even as he set about wrecking the country's assets, expropriating most valuable private companies, sometimes to turn them into bureaucracies and sometimes to give them to friends, implementing price and retail controls that ensured people wouldn't have access to basic necessities and capital controls that caused inflation to rise, shutting down alternative voices in the media, Putin- and Erdogan-style, and winking at top-to-bottom corruption.

When global oil prices declined, the house of cards fell.

Of course, rich-world socialists will quibble over semantics and say that Chavez's policies of nationalization, price controls, capital controls, and authoritarianism are not socialism. This is debatable. What isn't is that the collapse was wholly self-inflicted, and it was obvious from the start to anyone who was paying attention and was grounded in reality that this would be the outcome; you didn't have to be a conservative to know this would end badly (although, in fact, conservatives saw it first and were louder about it). And now it's Venezuelans, especially the poorest and more marginal among them, who are paying the price for this madness.

Let us now hope that they, and the rest of the world, will remember for a long time.

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Venezuela's socialist hell - The Week Magazine

PARIS

France will head to the polls tomorrow to vote in the first of two rounds of its presidential election. Barring the unlikely event of any candidate winning more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff on May 7 will determine the winner. One of the most remarkable aspects of this race is the stunning implosion of the French Socialist Party.

You might be tempted to ask: Does this mean French socialism is in its final throes? Well, not exactly.

Based on current polls, Socialist Party candidate Benoit Hamon is struggling to crack the single digits, currently sitting at around 8 percent, according to Opinionways PresiTrack poll. All this really means is that current Socialist President Francois Hollande destroyed the brand.

Hollandes favorability rating is about 19 percent, according to a YouGov poll taken at the end of February. A pragmatist, Hollande might have scored better had he not been surrounded by actual Socialists for the past five years.

French citizens, however, seem tempted by the idea of electing another pragmatist from the Hollande camp, but one who isnt obligated to surround himself with Socialists.

According to an Opinionway survey earlier this month, 50 percent of Hollandes voters now support independent presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron, a former Hollande minister who was with the Socialist Party for three years. But Macron is a former investment banker whose program includes an entire section dedicated to making the lives of entrepreneurs easier. Rather than ideology, hes focused on renewal and the desire to bring outsiders into public life.

So this means that socialism is dead in France, right? Not so fast. French leftists have gravitated to Jean-Luc Melenchon, an independent candidate who wants a fiscal revolution that involves taxing at 100 percent any earnings over the maximum revenue of 400,000 euros annually. Hes also expressed interest in involving Frances overseas territories in ALBA (formally the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), founded by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who ran a country that represents the epitome of socialist end times. A recent Opinionway poll showed Melenchon sitting at 18 percent, behind Macron and the National Fronts Marine Le Pen, tied at 22 percent, and center-right candidate Francois Fillon at 21 percent.

Socialism as a French brand is tanking in name only. Almost all of the presidential candidates have integrated socialist policies into their platform. The least socialist option in this race is Fillon, who has a double disadvantage: Hes the establishment candidate at a time when global electoral momentum is trending against the establishment, and hes facing accusations of the kind of nepotism widely practiced among the French establishment.

Violent is a term Ive often heard used by Fillons critics to describe the conservative aspects of his program. National Front Vice President Florian Philippot, who walks and talks like a socialist all over French media on behalf of Le Pen, called Fillons attempt at a non-socialist program one of unprecedented violence.

Reducing the number of civil servants? Violent. Wanting to give people the option of private health insurance instead of paying a fortune for a crumbling system with poor reimbursements? Violent. Cutting government spending through austerity? Well, if youre going to do that, then you might as well just go around punching voters in the face.

One way socialism has been able to justify its continued presence in this race is by using former French President and General Charles de Gaulle, who consistently ranks as the countrys favorite historical figure, as its shield. To those running for high office in France, de Gaulle has become what Ronald Reagan is to American candidates: an anachronistic specter evoked in a lazy attempt to justify questionable policies to the unconvinced. You dont like my position? Youre an idiot! Its Gaullist!

Ive only heard Gaullism used to defend socialist policies, however which is funny, because de Gaulle was hardly a socialist. In fact, the Socialist Standard (the monthly magazine of the Socialist Party of Great Britain) wrote of de Gaulle in its July 1958 issue: Socialists are opposed to what de Gaulle stands for on principle, because he stands for French capitalism, and Socialists do not support any capitalist faction anywhere or at any time.

Much has also been made in this race of the role of supranational European Union governance, a socialist straitjacket imposed on the French economy. Nearly all of the candidates agree that its a problem, whether they want to leave the EU or just reform it. Whats rarely mentioned is that even if European governance disappeared tomorrow, France would still be stuck contending with its own socialist economic infrastructure.

Sundays first round of voting will largely determine the extent to which the French electorate can see through the persistent socialist lie that has long worked against their interests.

Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and former Fox News host based in Paris. Contact her through her website: http://www.rachelmarsden.com.

2017, Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Rachel Marsden column: Socialist Party implodes in French presidential race, but socialism still omnipresent - Richmond.com

Campaigning for economic and social justice, they are winning municipal races in states like Illinois and Georgia.

Dylan Parker, a 28-year-old diesel mechanic and DSA member who was recently elected to the city council of Rock Island, Illinois. (Neighbors for Dylan Parker)

Democratic socialists have advised presidents and cabinet members; they have been elected as members of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives, and as as state legislators, judges, sheriffs and school board members. But their primary service has been at the municipal level, as mayors and city council membersleading not just big cities such as Milwaukee but mid-sized cities like Reading, Pennsylvania, and small towns like Girard, Kansas.

So it is worth noting that, at a moment when democratic socialism is experiencing a surge of interest and enthusiasm nationwide, some of the first electoral victories are coming in small and medium-sized cities. The 2016 presidential campaign mounted by Bernie Sanderswho first came to prominence in the early 1980s as the democratic socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermontopened up the constrained American discourse and got millions of Americans thinking anew about an ideology that was deeply rooted in American history. Sanders struck a chord, especially with young working class activists, when he declared: Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy. Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.

Since the 2016 race finished, Democratic Socialists of Americathe group forged over many decades by Michael Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dolores Huerta, Frances Fox Piven, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West and others to give voice to American democratic socialist visionhas experienced rapid growth in states across the country. And now DSA members are campaigning for and winning local races in states like Georgia and Illinois.

Democratic Socialists of Americas Maria Svart hails a shot across the bow for politics as usual nationwide.

More than a dozen DSA members now serve in local posts across the country, and their numbers are growing.

Early this month, Quad Cities Democratic Socialists of America member Dylan Parker was elected to the city council in Rock Island, Illinois. A 28-year-old diesel mechanic who was a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Parker came home and mounted a city council campaign in the city of 39,000. He focused on open government, citizen engagement and economic justice issues and he got specific. Steering attention to the role that an equitable approach to economic development could play in strengthening the whole community, he talked about providing universal high speed broadband internet access for residences and businesses and about expanding Rock Islands publicly-owned hydroelectric power plant. The campaign resonated with voters. Parker won 68 percent of the vote on April 4.

Two weeks later, in South Fulton, Georgia, another DSA member, khalid kamau, won an equally striking victory. A #BlackLivesMatter and #FightFor15 organizer who was also one of the many young Sanders delegates to last years Democratic National Convention, kamau (who lower cases his name in the Yoruba African tradition that emphasizes the community over the individual), outlined an economic and social justice vision that proposed to make the newly incorporated community of South Fulton the largest Progressive city in the South. On April 18, we won 67 percent on the vote.

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Declaring that another world is possible, DSA celebrated kamaus victory, with DSA national director Maria Svart describing kamaus win as a tremendous victory for his community and a shot across the bow for politics as usual nationwide.

America elected thousands of local officials, and it is easy to neglect election results from small towns and small cities. But American democratic socialists have always recognized that big things can begin far from the economic and political power centers of New York and Washington. When a democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, 36 years ago last month, that victory was viewed as an anomaly. In fact, the ripples from that 1981 municipal election in Burlington is still shaking up American politics.

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The Next Generation of Democratic Socialists Has Started Winning ... - The Nation.

If they continue with their guarimbas, we will take over their factories, said Jesus Diaz, spokesperson for the Pio Tamayo Commune in Lara.

Several private companies in Venezuela connected to the countrys right-wing opposition are asking workers not to come in for their shifts next week.

RELATED: Bolivia's Evo Says US Wants to Overthrow Venezuela to Steal Oil

Claiming to defend their workers safety amid ongoing protests, the companies are backing opposition calls for a national strike against President Nicolas Maduro.

But for workers supportive of Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) the strike is merely a trap intended to sabotage Venezuelas economy.

These actions planned against our revolutionary people are a desperate attempt by the empire to overturn our Bolivarian Revolution, Jesus Diaz, a member of the Popular Movement of Lara, told Resumen Latinoamericano.

The Popular Movement of Lara is a coalition of communes and workers organizations in the northwestern state.

We are organized and we will defend our revolution as always.

Diaz, who also serves as a spokesperson for the Pio Tamayo Commune in Venezuelas western state, assured Resumen Latinoamericano that workers in the region will continue work as usual. The Popular Movement of Laras boycott of the right-wing strike is supported by dozens of other communes and workers councils across the country.

Workers supportive of the Bolivarian Revolution have also vowed to take over and manage factories abandoned by right-wing bosses.

RELATED: Latin America's Campesino Movement Denounces 'International Conspiracy' Against Venezuela

One of the opposition-aligned institutions supporting the opposition strike is the Catholic University of Andres Bello, one of Venezuelas largest private universities.

On Friday, the institution announced that all classes and campus activities will be suspended due to the situation of uncertainty and insecurity affecting the country. The Catholic University of Andres Bello wont reopen until April 25, when a session of university officials will be held to reassess the issue," El Universal reports.

Other opposition-aligned institutions backing the right-wing strike include privately-run supermarkets and transportation companies.

If they continue with their guarimbas, we will take over their factories, Diaz told Resumen Latinoamericano.

Guarimbas are street blockades organized by right-wing protesters who use Molotov cocktails, burningtires and rocks to attack police and civilians.

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Defending Socialism, Venezuela Workers Resist Right-Wing Strike - teleSUR English

Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - GM Quits Venezuela Over Plant Seizure Forbes General Motors has had enough and is entirely suspending its operations in that cradle of Bolivarian socialism, Venezuela. You know the one, the country where Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro promised to make things better for the industrial ... and more »

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Congratulations To Bolivarian Socialism - GM Quits Venezuela Over Plant Seizure - Forbes