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The left brought out the useful idiots on the occasion of Hugo’s death. IBD Editors say contrary to Jimmy Carter, Chavez was no help to the poor.
The left is out in force, bleating its praise for deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez as a champion of the poor. It’s a big lie. Fact is, Chavez hurt the poor, not just in Venezuela, but all over the world.
Chavez’s death from cancer Tuesday set off a chorus of wailing from the left’s politicos, media and movie stars, hailing Chavez as a friend of the poor.
“President Chavez cared deeply about the poor,” declared Citizens Energy President Joe Kennedy, who’s made it his business to distribute Chavez’s oil handouts to the poor to help the dictator’s political ends.
“His legacy in his nation, and in the hemisphere,” said Rep. Jose Serrano, a Bronx Democrat, will be “a better life for the poor and downtrodden.”
Chavez’s “positive legacies,” said forever-naive ex-President Jimmy Carter, was for “the gains made for the poor and vulnerable.” …
More from Slate.
… What has Chávez bequeathed his fellow Venezuelans? The hard facts are unmistakable: The oil-rich South American country is in shambles. It has one of the world’s highest rates of inflation, largest fiscal deficits, and fastest growing debts. Despite a boom in oil prices, the country’s infrastructure is in disrepair—power outages and rolling blackouts are common—and it is more dependent on crude exports than when Chávez arrived. Venezuela is the only member of OPEC that suffers from shortages of staples such as flour, milk, and sugar. Crime and violence skyrocketed during Chávez’s years. On an average weekend, more people are killed in Caracas than in Baghdad and Kabul combined. (In 2009, there were 19,133 murders in Venezuela, more than four times the number of a decade earlier.) When the grisly statistics failed to improve, the Venezuelan government simply stopped publishing the figures.
The political ideology Chávez left behind, Chavismo, was a demonstrable failure for the Venezuelan people, but it is not as if it ever failed Chávez himself. Despite his government’s poor showing, the Comandante’s platform secured him another six years in office, with a decisive 11-point victory, only five months ago. Will Maduro, Chávez’s handpicked successor, and his other cronies be able to pick up where the former president left off?
His successors would be in better shape if Chávez had been a typical South American strongman. But he wasn’t just another caudillo who stuffed ballot boxes and rounded up his enemies. As I describe in my book The Dictator’s Learning Curve, Chávez’s rule was far more sophisticated than such heavy-handed regimes. Like many authoritarian leaders, Chávez centralized power for his own use. Not long after taking office in 1999, he controlled every branch of government, the armed forces, the central bank, the state-owned oil company, most of the media, and any private sector business he chose to expropriate. But Venezuela never experienced massive human rights abuses. Dissidents didn’t disappear in the night, and for all Chavez’s professed love for Fidel Castro, his regime was never as repressive as Castro’s tropical dictatorship. …
Seth Mandel has the story of one of Kerry’s first disasters at State.
Yesterday, Samuel Tadros reported in the Weekly Standard that John Kerry was handling his transition to running the State Department about as adroitly as one would imagine. He had an idea, and Foggy Bottom sent out a press release excitedly announcing that First Lady Michelle Obama was going to enthusiastically partake in this idea. The State Department would confer Women of Courage awards on several worthy recipients. Unfortunately, one of them happened to have a bad habit, apparently, of proclaiming viciously anti-Semitic hate speech on Twitter and was pretty happy, according to her timeline, about the September 11 terror attacks. Tadros wrote:
On July 18 of last year, after five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver were killed a suicide bombing attack, Ibrahim jubilantly tweeted: “An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.” …
Henry Payne of the Detroit News says Bob Woodward has learned about “the Chicago Way.”
The Media Church of the Holy Obama quickly excommunicated Watergate icon and journalist Bob Woodward last week when he suggested the Obama administration threatened him after he revealed the anti-sequester White House had originated the sequester idea. But Woodward’s accusation rings true because it echoes other accounts of the ex-Illinois senator’s “Chicago Way” tactics.
Exhibit A is the 2009 Detroit Auto Bailout and the administration’s threats against Chrysler bondholders that refused to knuckle under to Obama’s plot to favor his Big Labor cronies.
The administration has treated obstacles to its agenda with ruthless tactics. In April 2009, that agenda was to hand an outsized, 55 percent majority interest of embattled Chrysler to the United Auto Workers in a government-orchestrated bankruptcy. But by law secured creditors are first in line in bankruptcy, and bondholders — representing their working-class pension clients — refused to accept Obama’s unfair deal for a measly 29 cents on their investment dollar.
Send in the muscle.
“One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight,” said Tom Lauria, lawyer for Perella Weinberg investment firm, on Frank Beckmann’s Detroit radio program. …”
Someone has to do it. Higher Ed Chronicle tells the story of NYU’s Dr. Garbage who wrote the book on collecting.
… Picking Up, which is due out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explains that seniority determines almost everything about a sanitation employee’s work life—whether he gets the choice assignments and the best overtime opportunities, where he falls in the bidding for vacation time (about 95 percent of sanitation workers are men, Ms. Nagle says). The book also decodes, among many other things, the tags arrayed in clear slots inside the big window between the inner office and the garage. That’s “the board”—an at-a-glance representation of which workers are assigned to which trucks on which routes, who is home sick, which trucks are out of service, and so forth.
Ms. Nagle describes the book, which was written for a general audience, as “an introduction to the most important work force in the city,” but for an introduction to trash collection and snow removal it is delightfully erudite and entertaining, quoting a Richard Wilbur poem here and sending you to the dictionary there, to look up “susurrus” (as in “the susurrus of its machinery”). It’s also funny, naming the four seasons from a sanitation worker’s perspective: spring, maggot, leaf, and night plow, the last being the November-to-April span when half the department is on night shift in case snow starts falling.
The book even includes a glossary, titled “How to Speak Sanitation.” The term “mongo,” for instance, is both noun and verb, referring to either “objects plucked/rescued from the trash” or, as a verb, to what is also known as “hopper shopping.” Once, when Ms. Nagle was working out of Manhattan 7, she and a partner who ranked as the third-best mongo collector in the district found in the trash “a flimsy pair of black-and-gold women’s stretch pants by Armani” that were in good shape and still had the price tag attached—$1,325. They were several sizes too small for a woman as tall as Ms. Nagle, so her partner gave them to a waitress at a diner he sometimes patronized.
“What do you dream to teach that no one else teaches?” an NYU administrator asked Ms. Nagle not long after she went to work there. The answer, it turned out, was trash, a fascination she traces to a garbage dump she encountered on a family camping trip when she was 10. In the past two decades, she has studied trash, loaded it onto trucks and dumped it out, written about it, led seminars devoted to it, become known as “Dr. Garbage,” and earned her chief’s windbreaker as the first DSNY anthropologist (an unpaid position, by the way). …