I believe that black lives matter. But here are 50 reasons why I do not support the organization that calls itself “Black Lives Matter.”
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
September 12, 2020
I believe that black lives matter. But here are 50 reasons why I do not support the organization that calls itself “Black Lives Matter.”
1) In this video, Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors says, “We are trained Marxists”
Black Lives Matter was founded by three people: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.
In this video, Cullors says, “We are trained Marxists.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EvOyW5vIdg
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels says:
“In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
Marxism is such a horrible system that even the people who claim to be in favor of Marxism never actually move to Marxist countries.
On the contrary, all immigration related to Marxist countries is away from Marxist countries, and never into them.
Every year, thousands of Cubans risk their lives on homemade rafts to leave the country.
Meanwhile, none of the U.S. college professors, celebrities, or social justice warriors who praise Cuba ever actually moves there.
When the Berlin Wall came down, all of the immigration was from east to west, not the other way around.
In the U.S., none of the college professors, celebrities, social justice warriors, or other people who claim to be in favor of communism, ever actually moves to a communist country.
No one who was born in South Korea ever moves to North Korea. But people who were born in North Korea risk getting shot and killed by armed border guards while trying to escape to South Korea.
Marxists are so evil that they have actually murdered far, far more innocent civilians than the Nazis did.
Marxism is an absolutely despicable and evil ideology.
2) Here’s a video from Oakland, California, from August 2020, of Black Lives Matter protestors saying “Death To America”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2ACQm06xlM
3) Here’s a video from Seattle, from August 2020, where Black Lives Matter protestors demand that homeowners give up ownership of their homes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFrZJyggwgE
Communist Bernie Sanders wants to crash the stock market in order to “help” the millions of people who lost their jobs due to the government mandated lockdown of private businesses
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
August 7, 2020
Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill called “The Make Billionaires Pay Act.”
The bill would impose a 60% wealth tax on the urealized capital gains that billionaires made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The only way that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others could get the money to pay this tax would be by selling their stocks in the very companies that they themselves created.
That would push stock prices down and crash the stock market.
Sanders thinks this is the way to “help” the millions of people who lost their jobs due to the government mandated lockdown of private businesses.
Sanders is upset that amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been successfully delivering essential goods to the homes of millions of Americans during the government lockdown.
Sanders is also upset that Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk has been successfully manufacturing huge numbers of electric cars.
So Sanders wants to punish them for their success.
And in punishing these billionaires for their success, Sanders would also end up punishing anyone who has a job or wants a job.
Sanders doesn’t like it when private businesses sell customers the goods and services that customers want. Instead, Sanders prefers that people have to wait in line. Sanders said it’s a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food. These are Sanders’s exact words:
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, cause people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
You can see and hear Sanders saying those words in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBjjP8WSbc
While Sanders thinks it’s a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food, I wrote this blog post about what it’s actually like in the real world when people have to wait in line for food: The Maduro diet: How most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, plus another 24 pounds in 2017
Sanders also said the following:
“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers”
Well, as it turns out, the communist policies of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro have caused shortages of both deodorant and shoes in Venezuela.
In addition, Vermont has declared clothing to be “non-essential,” and has ordered Target, Wal-Mart, and other stores to stop selling it.
The people who elected Sanders to the U.S. Senate are the same people who elected the politicians in Vermont who ordered Target, Wal-Mart, and other stores to stop selling clothing.
Sanders is a communist who said:
“I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries”
Sanders’s entire economic policy is based on his envy and jealousy of those who are more financially successful than himself.
Sanders’s proposal is called “The Make Billionaires Pay Act.”
It would have been “Millionaires and Billionaires,” except hypocrite Sanders stopped using that phrase after the New York Times reported that Sanders himself was a millionaire.
Sanders then proceeded to defend his own millionaire status by saying:
“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
I agree with Sanders on that one point.
But Sanders is a hypocrite because he does not apply the same justification to the wealth of Bezos, Musk, etc., that he applies to his own wealth.
Sanders claims that his proposed tax on billionaires’ wealth would be a “one time” event.
However, in the past, Sanders proposed an annual wealth tax that billionaires would have to pay every year, until they were no long billionaires.
Sanders tried to justify his proposed annual tax on billionaires’ wealth by saying:
“Billionaires should not exist”
https://twitter.com/berniesanders/status/1176481898685710337
The reason that Sanders thinks billionaires should not exist is because he is against allowing people to spend their own money on the goods and services that they want. Sanders prefers that people have to wait in line for food, and that there be fewer choices when it comes to everyday consumer products such as shoes and deodorant.
That’s not “democratic socialism” like they have in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.
That’s communism, like they have in Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.
Here’s an article about Sanders’s new bill:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bernie-sanders-tax-billionaires-pandemic-health-care-204709337.html
Bernie Sanders wants to tax billionaires’ pandemic gains to fund health care
By Adriana Belmonte
August 6, 2020
A new bill introduced by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Ed Markey (D-MA) would implement a one-time 60% tax on billionaires to cover the health care costs of every American for a year.
The Make Billionaires Pay Act would tax the $731 billion in wealth accumulated by the richest 0.001% of America between March 18 through August 5. This would apply towards 467 individuals.
“The legislation I am introducing today will tax the obscene wealth gains billionaires have made during this extraordinary crisis to guarantee healthcare as a right to all for an entire year,” Sen. Sanders said in a statement. “At a time of enormous economic pain and suffering, we have a fundamental choice to make. We can continue to allow the very rich to get much richer while everyone else gets poorer and poorer. Or we can tax the winnings a handful of billionaires made during the pandemic to improve the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans.
The money generated from this 60% tax would go towards covering out-of-pocket expenses for the uninsured and underinsured for one year.
The top five richest Americans – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft Founder Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, and Oracle Founder Larry Ellison —-would pay a combined $87.1 billion under the bill. In total, the tax would generate over $421.6 billion.
“In my view,” Sanders added, “it is time for the Senate to act on behalf of the working class who are hurting like they have never hurt before, not the billionaire class who are doing phenomenally well and have never had it so good.”
‘Demanding that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes’
The Make Billionaires Pay Act would cover all medical bills, including prescription drugs and coronavirus-related expenses, over the next 12 months with the tax staying in effect until January 1, 2021.
“Instead of more tax breaks for the rich while more Americans die because they cannot afford to go to a doctor, let us expand Medicare and save lives by demanding that billionaires pay their fair share of taxes,” Sanders said.
The popular senator also lambasted the fact that CEOs like Bezos and Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk saw their net worth surge during the pandemic — Bezos’ wealth increased by 63% while Musk’s nearly tripled.
In that same period of time, over 5 million Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health care. And although President Trump pledged to reimburse hospitals for any coronavirus-related expenses for the uninsured, that still leaves non-coronavirus expenditures that could add up.
“During this unprecedented economic and public health crisis, millions of Americans are out of work and struggling to put food on the table while billionaires are getting even wealthier,” Gillibrand said in a statement. “Requiring billionaires to pay their fair share will help support workers and families dealing with job losses, food insecurity, housing instability and health care. Not only is this a common-sense proposal, but it’s a moral one and Congress should be doing all we can to assist Americans struggling right now.”
This isn’t the first wealth tax that’s been floated through Congress: Both Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) frequently targeted the ultra wealthy throughout their presidential campaigns and each proposed their own kind of wealth tax that would go towards funding Medicare for all.
The Maduro diet: How most Venezuelans lost an average of 43 pounds in two years
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
July 15, 2020
In May 2017, the Washington Post reported:
In a recent survey of 6,500 Venezuelan families by the country’s leading universities, three-quarters of adults said they lost weight in 2016 — an average of 19 pounds… a level of hunger almost unheard-of outside war zones or areas ravaged by hurricane, drought or plague.
In February 2018, Reuters reported:
Venezuelans reported losing on average 11 kilograms (24 lbs) in body weight last year… according to a new university study…
That’s 43 pounds in two years.
Before I explain how this came to happen, I want to start out by explaining what did not cause this to happen.
(more…)
Black Lives Matter founder an open supporter of socialist Venezuelan dictator Maduro
Black Lives Matter Founder an Open Supporter of Socialist Venezuelan Dictator Maduro
By Rafael Valera
June 13, 2020
One of the most high-profile founders of the Black Lives Matter organization – now one of the most influential and powerful political movements on the planet – has a long history of supporting Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Maduro has presided over one of the world’s most repressive regimes since 2013 when his predecessor Hugo Chávez died. Under Maduro, Venezuelan police forces have committed a long list of human rights atrocities including the torture, kidnapping, rape, and killing of unarmed protesters. Under Maduro, Venezuela has become an especially dangerous place for minors.
In light of the prominence of Black Lives Matter – a global non-profit currently receiving millions in donations – photos have begun to circulate of Opal Tometi, a founder of the organization, hugging Maduro at the 2015 People of African Descent Leadership Summit in Harlem, New York, where several high-rank officials of the Venezuelan regime also participated. Maduro, currently banned from the United States, was in town for the annual United Nations General Assembly.
Tometi appears alongside Maduro on a Venezuelan government propaganda site’s news report from the event, raising a fist and embracing him. The photo appears to be taken in front of a giant photo of Maduro’s face.
Tometi spoke at the summit, standing in front of a Venezuelan flag for the speech and thanking Maduro’s government for the opportunity. Among her targets during the speech were the government of the Dominican Republic for deporting Haitians and “Western economic policies, land grabs, and neocolonial financial instruments like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund” for, she argued, creating the Mediterranean migrant crisis.
“I am aware that justice also has to do with racial aspects,” assured Tometi, according to Venezuelan state media. “What we are experiencing is the manifestation of anti-black racism and this is state violence. It must be called by its name. Police brutality, the murders of blacks, violence against the Afro-descendant community, all is proof of the violence of the State,” said the Black Lives Matter founder.
Tometi also quoted Joanne Chesimard, a radical Marxist convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in 1973 who has lived for decades as a fugitive in Cuba, as urging, “you must fight until all black lives matter.” Tometi referred to Chesimard, who renamed herself “Assata Shakur,” as the summit’s “dear exiled sister.”
The Black Lives Matter non-profit identifies Tometi, no stranger to red carpets as a result of her activism, as one of its founders, a “student of liberation theology and her practice is in the tradition of Ella Baker, informed by Stuart Hall, bell hooks and Black Feminist thinkers.” On her own website, Tometi claims to be a “human rights advocate” and pro-immigrant activist.
In addition to meeting with and applauding Maduro at the New York summit, Tometi also served as an election observer in socialist Venezuela during the 2015 legislative elections. She praised the socialist dictatorship as “a place where there is intelligent political discourse” on Twitter during one of the bloodiest years of police brutality in the country.
https://twitter.com/opalayo/status/672537450066128899
Her praise remains online at press time. Since the election, widespread evidence of fraud on the part of Maduro’s regime during that election has surfaced.
Tometi also applauded Venezuela in an article that year stating, “in these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world.”
Tometi’s ideology does not appear to be an outlier within the Black Lives Matter movement. In a eulogy, the organization mourned the passing of brutal Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in 2016.
“There is an overwhelming sense of loss, complicated by fear and anxiety. Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante,” a eulogy by the official “Black Lives Matter” organization read.
After some thoughts on revolution, the piece ends: “As Fidel ascends to the realm of the ancestors, we summon his guidance, strength, and power as we recommit ourselves to the struggle for universal freedom. Fidel Vive!”
Cuba is socialist Venezuela’s closest ally.
Few governments in the Western Hemisphere have engaged in police brutality to the extent that Maduro’s regime has, especially against underprivileged Venezuelans of indigenous and African descent. One year prior to Tometi’s celebratory tweet, Maduro’s regime corps killed 43 protestors and incarcerated over 3,400 during the wave of protests that took over the country demanding Maduro’s ousting.
That same year, the Venezuelan Penal Forum, an NGO, documented 138 cases of torture. One of the most shocking cases was Juan Manuel Carrasco’s, who was raped with a rifle by several Bolivarian National Guard officers. Between Maduro’s rise to power and 2019, he has detained at least 388 political prisoners, including Americans since freed through pressure by President Donald Trump. For comparison, Chávez, who founded the deadly regime, reportedly only held 161 known political prisoners.
Maduro’s totalitarian state particularly harms underaged Venezuelans. Nearly 1,500 minors died in violent circumstances in 2018, most of them at the hands of police or collectives, Maduro’s paramilitaty gangs. Nearly 10,000 died two years prior; in 1997, that number was 440.
Tometi has largely kept silent on Maduro’s police brutality. She did not speak out when Maduro’s colectivos shot 17-year-old Carlos Moreno in the head, or when police shot 14-year-old Kluiverth Roa dead for being near the vicinity of a protest while walking home from school.
The links between Black Lives Matter, the organization, and the Maduro regime are particularly concerning given that White House said last Friday it has information that individuals linked to Maduro have incited violence at protests in the United States spurred by George Floyd’s death, according to an article in the Miami Herald.
Bernie Sanders wants to do the same things to the U.S. that Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro did to Venezuela
Bernie Sanders has described his proposals for the Green New Deal on his website. (Original, archive.)
And here is a link to a blog post that I wrote about the things that Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro did in Venezuela. It includes links to verify each and every one of my claims.
The two things are very similar in many ways.
Both Chavez’s and Sander’s plans call for massive government control of the agricultural, energy, transportation, manufacturing, construction, and steel industries.
Both plans call for replacing the free market with government decision making.
In the U.S., lots of people on the political left praised Hugo Chavez’s actions in Venezuela. In addition to the many college professors and social justice warriors who praised Chavez, Chavez also received praise from Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Naomi Campbell, Michael Moore, Don King, Noam Chomsky, and Danny Glover.
The things detailed in Sanders’s plan sound a lot like the things that Chavez was talking about when he started implementing his policies. Before Chavez died, he personally chose Nicolas Maduro to be his successor. Since Chavez died in 2013, Maduro has been continuing Chavez’s policies.
The results of these policies in Venezuela have been horribly disastrous.
For example, in May 2017, the Washington Post reported:
In a recent survey of 6,500 Venezuelan families by the country’s leading universities, three-quarters of adults said they lost weight in 2016 — an average of 19 pounds… a level of hunger almost unheard-of outside war zones or areas ravaged by hurricane, drought or plague.
Then in February 2018, Reuters reported:
Venezuelans reported losing on average 11 kilograms (24 lbs) in body weight last year… according to a new university study…
That’s 43 pounds in two years.
You can read all about how this came to be in my blog post.
And then you can read about Sander’s proposals in his very long and detailed article on his website. (Original, archive.)
Just as huge numbers of progressives and other left wingers in the U.S. had praised Chavez’s policies, a lot of these same people are now praising Sanders’s proposals.
Both Chavez’s and Sander’s policies have massive government takeovers of the agricultural, energy, transportation, manufacturing, construction, and steel industries. Both plans involve replacing the free market with government control.
What makes Sanders think that the results of his policies would be any different than the results of the policies of Chavez and Maduro?
In fact, Sanders actually said that it was a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food.
These are Sanders’s exact words:
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, cause people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
You can see and hear Sanders saying those words in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBjjP8WSbc
Here’s a photograph from 2014 of people in Venezuela waiting in line for food: (posted here under fair use from http://www.businessinsider.com/long-food-lines-are-in-venezuela-2014-2 )
Sanders also said the following:
“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”
Well, as it turns out, the policies of Chavez and Maduro have caused a shortage of both deodorant and shoes in Venezuela.
Sanders has repeatedly criticized the existence of “millionaires and billionaires.” (Although he stopped doing so after the New York Times reported that he was one of them.)
Sanders defended his own millionaire status by saying the following:
“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
I agree with Sanders.
But here’s the difference between what I believe and what Sanders believes: I believe that it’s a good thing when any person becomes a millionaire or billionaire by providing their customers with the goods and services that their customers choose to buy. By comparison, the only person whose millionaire or billionaire status Sanders has ever defended is his own.
Chavez and Maduro managed to scare many of the millionaires and billionaires, as well as their capital, investment, skills, innovation, and jobs, out of Venezuela. And when Chavez and Maduro scared away those millionaires and billionaires, they also scared away the production of the goods and services that those millionaires and billionaires had been engaged in.
Sanders wants to “break up big agribusinesses” and encourage “urban, rural, and suburban Americans” to “transform their lawns into food-producing … spaces.”
Chavez seized more than 10 million acres of farmland from private owners, and now Maduro is encouraging everyone to grow their own food.
The industrial revolution was powered by fossil fuels. Before the industrial revolution, 90% of people in the U.S. were farmers. Today, with the use of fossil fuels as both fertilizer and fuel, it only takes 2% of the U.S. population to feed the entire country. Truck drivers whose trucks are powered by fossil fuels then transport that food to the other 98% of the population.
Chavez reversed that trend in Venezuela, and now Sanders wants to do the same thing in the U.S. Just as the Venezuelan government took over big agribusiness and is now encouraging everyone to grow their own food, Sanders wants to do the same thing in the U.S.
Sanders wants to replace private automobile ownership with mass transit, even in “rural communities.” While I myself think that mass transit in densely populated cities is a great thing, I also understand that it’s not practical in “rural communities” with much lower population densities.
Chavez and Maduro caused sales of new cars to fall by 99.4%.
Sanders said:
“I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries.”
CNN reported that Sanders was in favor of nationalizing
“the energy industry, public ownership of banks, telephone, electric, and drug companies and of the major means of production such as factories and capital”
Chavez nationalized all of those things, and it destroyed each and every one of them. Venezuela now has long term, chronic shortages of pretty much everything.
In 2011, Sanders published the following on his official U.S. Senate website: (Original, archive.)
“These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina”
Of course, Sanders didn’t explain why so many Venezuelans have fled the country and relocated in the U.S.
Sanders also didn’t explain why no one in the U.S. is moving to Venezuela for these so-called better opportunities.
Sanders wants to get rid of fossil fuels.
Chavez and Maduro waged war against the oil industry, and now Venezuela has frequent blackouts.
After Chavez took over the country’s oil industry, he did such a terrible job of running it that he actually managed to create a shortage of gasoline in a country that has some of the world’s biggest oil reserves.
And that reminds me of this quote from Milton Friedman:
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
So, to summarize:
1) Sanders said that it’s a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food.
2) Sanders said that people have too many choices when it comes to deodorant and shoes.
3) Sanders hates millionaires and billionaires (not withstanding the singular exception of himself).
4) Sanders wants to replace the free market with government control of the agricultural, energy, transportation, manufacturing, construction, and steel industries.
5) Sanders wants to replace large scale, industrial farms with urban gardens where everyone grows their own food.
6) Sanders wants to reduce private ownership of automobiles, even in rural areas with low population densities, where mass transit is not practical.
7) Sanders wants to nationalize major industries.
8) After Chavez had already adopted many of his own destructive policies, Sanders specifically cited Venezuela as being better than the U.S.
The more and more that Sander’s proposals get examined, the more and more it becomes apparent that they resemble those of Chavez and Maduro.
Bernie Sanders wants to do the same things to the U.S. that Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro did to Venezuela.
Bernie Sanders said it’s a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food. Meanwhile, in the real world, this is what it’s actually like to wait in line for food in Venezuela.
Bernie Sanders said that it’s a “good thing” when people have to wait in line for food.
These are his exact words:
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, cause people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
You can see him saying it in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBjjP8WSbc
Meanwhile, in the real world, this is what it’s actually like to wait in line for food:
Venezuela’s Collapse Is the Worst Outside of War in Decades, Economists Say
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/world/americas/venezuela-economy.html
Venezuela’s Collapse Is the Worst Outside of War in Decades, Economists Say
Butchers have stopped selling meat cuts in favor of offal, fat shavings and cow hooves, the only animal protein many of their customers can afford.
May 17, 2019
MARACAIBO, Venezuela — Zimbabwe’s collapse under Robert Mugabe. The fall of the Soviet Union. Cuba’s disastrous unraveling in the 1990s.
The crumbling of Venezuela’s economy has now outpaced them all.
Venezuela’s fall is the single largest economic collapse outside of war in at least 45 years, economists say.
“It’s really hard to think of a human tragedy of this scale outside civil war,” said Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard University and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “This will be a touchstone of disastrous policies for decades to come.”
To find similar levels of economic devastation, economists at the I.M.F. pointed to countries that were ripped apart by war, like Libya earlier this decade or Lebanon in the 1970s.
But Venezuela, at one point Latin America’s wealthiest country, has not been shattered by armed conflict. Instead, economists say, the poor governance, corruption and misguided policies of President Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, have fueled runaway inflation, shuttered businesses and brought the country to its knees. And in recent months, the Trump administration has imposed stiff sanctions to try to cripple it further.
(more…)
Venezuelans Send Message To Americans Who Want Socialism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJhRMEW-5ws
The paperback version of my book “The Maduro Diet” is amazon’s #1 New Release in Venezuelan History
The paperback version of my book “The Maduro Diet” is amazon’s #1 New Release in Venezuelan History.
The full title of the book is “The Maduro Diet: How three-quarters of adults in Venezuela lost an average of 43 pounds in two years.”
Here’s the link to the book:
Here’s a screen capture showing that it’s #1. Click on the image to see a larger version:
And because it won’t always be #1, here’s a link to the Internet Archive from when it was #1:
Trying to figure out the real reason Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bans reporters from her town hall events
The New York Times reports that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has banned the media from two of her town hall meetings.
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted the following explanation for the ban:
“Our community is 50% immigrant. Folks are victims of DV, trafficking, + have personal medical issues.”
“This town hall was designed for residents to feel safe discussing sensitive issues in a threatening political time.”
“We indicated previously that it would be closed to press.”
Ben Jacobs, a reporter for The Guardian, responded with the following tweet:
“And how does the presence of reporters make people feel unsafe?”
I think Jacob’s question is an excellent one.
I’d also like to point out that all of the other Congressional districts also have constituents who are “victims of domestic violence” and who have “personal medical issues,” but that the Congressional representatives and candidates of those other districts haven’t banned the media from their town hall events.
In the video below, YouTuber Styxhexenhammer666 says that one possible reason for Ocasio-Cortez’s media ban is that any illegal aliens in attendance would – justifiably – worry about being filmed by the media. However, he then goes on to say that Ocasio-Cortez could ask the media to keep their cameras focused on her and not the audience, and that they would likely comply.
Styxhexenhammer666 then goes on to say that he thinks her real reason for banning the media is that there might be a constituent in attendance who asks her a tough question about economics that she can’t answer. Specifically, he says that she doesn’t seem to understand that the only reason that democratic socialism in countries like Norway works is because there is a strong, healthy private sector to pay the taxes to fund it. Take away that strong, healthy private sector, and your country ends up like Venezuela.
I agree with him on both of these points.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkk1_J6tucQ
Does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agree or disagree with the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter’s call to “abolish profit”?
This is a link to a recent tweet from the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
And this is a link to an archive of the same tweet, in case the original ever gets deleted.
The tweet states:
“Abolish profit”
I’d also like to point out this link to the constitution and bylaws of the Democratic Socialists of America, where they write:
“we reject an economic order based on private profit”
So both the national organization and the New York City chapter both support getting rid of profit.
If anyone wants to see the real world results of what happens when a country tries to stop businesses and corporations from making a profit, I suggest read this lengthy, well sourced blog post that I wrote four months ago, which is called, “The Maduro diet: How most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, plus another 24 pounds in 2017.”
One would think that the lessons of the 20th century would have taught people that getting rid of profit also means getting rid of incentive. But one would be wrong. In Venezuela, during the 21st century, presidents Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro did everything they could to stop businesses and corporations from making a profit from growing and selling food, and the results have been disastrous.
In New York City, a self described “socialist” named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just beat long term incumbent Joseph Crowley in the Democratic primary election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Unless something really weird and unexpected happens, there is a near 100% chance that Ocasio-Cortez will be elected to the U.S. Congress in November.
Since Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, I would like to know if she agrees or disagrees with their proposal to “abolish profit.”
I would also like to know if Ocasio-Cortez supports or opposes the policies of Venezuelan presidents Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, which I describe in great detail in this blog entry.
Chavez referred to his policies as “21st century socialism,” and he was constantly saying that it was wrong for businesses and corporations to make a profit. He set price controls on food, seized more than 10 million acres of farmland, and had the government take control of many food processing plants and supermarkets. Before Chavez died in 2013, he had appointed Maduro as his successor. Since Chavez’s’ death, Maduro has continued Chavez’s policies. Because the profit motive to grow and sell food has been eliminated in Venezuela, there has been a very severe, long term, chronic shortage of food. Most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, plus another 24 pounds in 2017.
I would like Ocasio-Cortez to please read my blog post, please check out all the links to the sources that I cite to prove that everything I wrote is true, and then please state whether she supports or opposes the policies of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro that are in my blog post.
The Democratic Socialists of America supports the same policies that have destroyed Venezuela’s ability to feed itself
The New York Times just published this article, which is titled “The Millennial Socialists Are Coming.” The article talks about the growing popularity of socialism among Millennials, and points out several examples of socialist candidates beating long term Democrats in primary elections.
The New York Times article includes this link to the constitution and bylaws of the Democratic Socialists of America. Here is a brief excerpt from it (the bolding is mine):
“We are socialists because we reject an economic order based on private profit, alienated labor, gross inequalities of wealth and power, discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, disability status, age, religion, and national origin, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”
Let’s take a look at what those two bolded parts manage to achieve when they are adopted in the real world. Specifically, let’s take a look at what’s currently going on in Venezuela, which I have previously described in great detail in this lengthy and well sourced blog post, which I have titled, “The Maduro diet: How most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, plus another 24 pounds in 2017.”
The Democratic Socialists of America claim that they “reject an economic order based on private profit.” That’s exactly what Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was doing when he started implementing price controls on food in Venezuela in 2003. These price controls caused shortages of food. Anyone who understands Economics 101 knows that price controls cause shortages.
The Democratic Socialists of America claim that they support “popular control of resources and production.” This is exactly what Hugo Chavez did when he had the government seize more than 10 million acres of farmland from private owners. As a result of these land seizures, food production fell substantially.
Before Chavez died, he appointed Nicolas Maduro to be his successor. After Chavez died in 2013, Maduro continued Chavez’s policies.
In 2018, all of Chavez’s food policies are still in effect. The profit motive has been taken away from food production. Ownership of the means of producing food has been collectivized.
Because the Venezuelan government adopted the exact same polices that are supported by Democratic Socialists of America, most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, plus another 24 pounds in 2017.
And you don’t have to take my word for this. My blog entry that I mentioned earlier contains a very large number of links to sources which document exactly how this happened.
One thing that’s interesting about the links in my blog entry on Venezuela is that many of my sources are links to articles in the New York Times. And yet the current article form the New York Times on the Democratic Socialists of America makes absolutely no mention of the the kinds of horrible disasters that happen when such policies are adopted in the real world.
And before anyone goes and mentions the Scandanavian countries, I would like to point out that those countries have by no means adopted the polices supported by the Democratic Socialists of America that I quoted and bolded above. They have not abandoned the profit motive, and they have not turned their means of production over to collective ownership.
On the contrary, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark all have thriving private sectors with huge corporations that make massive profits.
Washington Post opinion columnist Elizabeth Bruenig wants the U.S. to adopt the same policies that are currently causing Venezuelans to starve to death
Washington Post writer Elizabeth Bruenig recently wrote this opinion column.
She writes,
“I think the problem lies at the root of the thing, with capitalism itself.”
Capitalism merely means that property is privately owned. So she has a problem with private ownership of property.
She writes,
“Americans appear to be isolated, viciously competitive, suspicious of one another and spiritually shallow; and that we are anxiously looking for some kind of attachment to something real and profound in an age of decreasing trust and regard — seem to be emblematic of capitalism.”
I think these are things of human nature, and would exist regardless of the kind of economic system that we had.
She says that capitalism
“… encourages and requires fierce individualism, self-interested disregard for the other.”
I wonder how many repeat customers a business would have if the business owner had “disregard” for those customers.
She writes,
“As a business-savvy friend once remarked: Nobody gets rich off of bilateral transactions where everybody knows what they’re doing.”
When I buy a loaf of bread at the supermarket, it’s a win-win situation. There are no losers. And the owner of the supermarket is rich.
She said she supports
“decommodifying labor”
So she would let herself be operated on by a surgeon who gets paid no more than a janitor who dropped out of high school?
She said she supports
“reducing the vast inequality brought about by capitalism.”
In the capitalist U.S., where inequality is huge, poor people make $15,000 a year, while rich people make $15 million a year.
In Cuba, where there is equality, all government employees make $20 a month.
Bruenig wants the U.S. to adopt the same policies that are currently causing Venezuelans to starve to death. Everything that Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro have done was done because they hate capitalism just as much as Bruenig does. There is no basic difference between her views and theirs.
Venezuelan government tells doctors and hospitals not to list starvation as cause of death for babies and children who starve to death
For a detailed explanation of how Venezuela went from being a rich well fed country, to a poor country with severe shortages of food, please see this previous blog post that I wrote, which is called “Here’s how most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again in 2017.”
Now the latest news.
The New York Times just published this article about the situation in Venezuela.
According to the article, even though large numbers of babies and children are starving to death, the government is telling doctors and hospitals not to list starvation as the official cause of death.
In addition, the Times kept track of 21 pubic hospitals over a period of five months. During that time period, the Times was unable to get any kind of official starvation counts from any of those hospitals. However, doctors at nine of those hospitals told the Timed that they had kept at least a partial count, and that of these partial counts at nine hospitals, nearly 400 children had starved to death. The cause of these deaths was not listed as starvation in the hospitals’ official records, but the doctors know that starvation was their true cause of death.
The Times also reports that the food shortages are so severe that even most hospitals do not have enough baby formula to meet the needs of their patients.
And it’s not just food that’s in short supply. The Times also reports that many of these hospitals don’t have enough of basic supplies such as soap, syringes, gauze, diapers, and latex gloves.
Please keep in mind that before Hugo Chavez implemented price controls and seized farms, factories, businesses, and other private property, the country was quite affluent and had a first world standard of living.
There’s a huge lesson in all of this.
No matter how well off and prosperous a country is, it simply cannot maintain anything even remotely close to such levels of prosperity when it adopts communism.
In Venezuela, they were teachers and doctors. To buy food, they became prostitutes.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article174808061.html
In Venezuela, they were teachers and doctors. To buy food, they became prostitutes.
September 22, 2017
ARAUCA, Colombia – At a squat, concrete brothel on the muddy banks of the Arauca River, Gabriel Sánchez rattled off the previous jobs of the women who now sell their bodies at his establishment for $25 an hour.
“We’ve got lots of teachers, some doctors, many professional women and one petroleum engineer,” he yelled over the din of vallenato music. “All of them showed up with their degrees in hand.”
As Venezuela’s economy continues to collapse amid food shortages, hyperinflation and U.S. sanctions, waves of economic refugees have fled the country. Those with the means have gone to places like Miami, Santiago and Panama.
The less fortunate find themselves walking across the border into Colombia looking for a way, any way, to keep themselves and their families fed. A recent study suggested as many as 350,000 Venezuelans had entered Colombia in the last six years.
But with jobs scarce, many young — and not so young — women are turning to the world’s oldest profession to make ends meet.
Dayana, a 30-year-old mother of four, nursed a beer as she watched potential clients walk down the dirt road that runs in front of wooden shacks, bars and bordellos. Dressed for work in brightly-colored spandex, Dayana said she used to be the manager of a food-processing plant on the outskirts of Caracas.
But that job disappeared after the government seized the factory and “looted it,” she said.
Seven months ago, struggling to put food on the table, she came to Colombia looking for work. Without an employment permit, she found herself working as a prostitute in the capital, Bogotá. While the money was better there, she eventually moved to Arauca, a cattle town of 260,000 people along the border with Venezuela, because it was easier to send food back to her children in Caracas.
The previous night, her sister had traveled by bus for 18 hours from Caracas to pick up a bundle of groceries that Dayana had purchased — pasta, tuna, rice, cooking oil — and then immediately jumped on a bus back home.
“If you had told me four years ago that I would be here, doing this, I wouldn’t have believed you,” said Dayana, who asked that her last name not be used. “But we’ve gone from crisis to crisis to crisis, and now look where we are.”
“The Venezuelan people are starving and their country is collapsing,” President Donald Trump stated before the United Nations on Sept. 19, 2017. He later called on other countries to do more to address the crisis in Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro which “has inflicted terrible misery and suffering on the good people of that country.”
With inflation running in excess of 700 percent and the bolivar currency in free fall, finding food and medicine in Venezuela has become a frustrating, time-consuming task. Dayana said she often would spend four to six hours waiting in line hoping to buy a bag of flour. Other times she was forced to buy food on the black market at exorbitant rates. Hunger in Venezuela is rampant.
That has fueled a scramble to earn hard currency — Colombian pesos or, even better, the U.S. dollar, which is the legal tender of Ecuador and Panama.
Dayana said that on a good night she makes the equivalent of $50 to $100 dollars, selling her services 20 minutes at a time.
“Prostitution obviously isn’t a good job,” she said. “But I’m thankful for it, because it’s allowing me to buy food and support my family.”
Selling sex is legal in Colombia, and even small towns have red-light districts where authorities look the other way. So while immigration police were actively hunting down Venezuelans selling trinkets and panhandling in Arauca’s central square, the women along brothel row said they were rarely harassed.
Marta Muñoz runs the Casa de la Mujer, a municipal program that focuses on women’s health and rights. She said that prostitution is something of a blind spot for local authorities who are more focused on blatant crimes, like child trafficking, rape and the abuse of minors.
“I know that some of them are being paid unfairly and being treated very poorly,” Muñoz said of the Venezuelan prostitutes. “But how do we protect them without strong public policies?”
Sánchez and others in the sex industry say Venezuelans dominate the trade now because they’re willing to work for less pay.
“I would say 99 percent of the prostitutes in this town are Venezuelan,” he said. All 12 of the women who work for him are from the other side of the border.
It’s not just a border phenomenon. Fidelia Suarez, the president of Colombia’s Union of Sex Workers, said her organization has seen a dramatic influx of “Venezuelan women and men working in the sex trade” across the country.
While it’s impossible to quantify how many might be working in the trade, Suarez said her organization is trying to safeguard the vulnerable migrants.
“We want to make sure they’re not being harassed by authorities or taken advantage of,” she said. “Being sexually exploited is very different than being a sex worker.”
In a sense, Venezuela’s economic crisis has been so severe that it has even upended long-held social norms.
Marili, a 47-year-old former teacher and grandmother, said there was a time when she would have been ashamed to admit she’s a prostitute. Now she says she’s grateful to have a job that allows her to buy hypertension medication for her mother back in Caracas.
“We’re all just women who are working to support our families,” she said. “I refuse to criticize anyone, including myself. We all have to work.”
Both Marili and Dayana said they had told their families how they make a living. “I don’t like to keep secrets,” Dayana explained.
Even Sánchez, the 60-year-old brothel owner, says he was forced into the business by the Venezuelan crisis. Like many Colombians, Sánchez moved to the neighboring country 30 years ago, when the oil rich nation was booming economically and Colombia was mired in violence.
There, he had solid work in Caracas repainting cars. When the crisis killed that job several years ago, he began smuggling Venezuelan wood and its cheaper-than-water gasoline into Colombia.
Eventually, things got so bad he decided to return to Colombia permanently. He and his wife opened the brothel, called “Show Malilo Night Club.” Sánchez’s nickname is Malilo.
“This place is mine, thank God,” he said of the modest building, strung with Christmas lights to provide ambiance. “But it hurts me deeply what’s happening over there.”
Marili said the couple had been lifesavers — giving her a place to stay and a way to make a living.
“Not just anyone will lend you a hand,” she said. “These people are humanitarians.”
There seems to be no end in sight for Venezuela’s economic pain. Last month, the Trump administration restricted Caracas’ ability to borrow money from American creditors, which will undoubtedly deepen the crisis. And yet, President Nicolás Maduro has been digging in, avoiding the economic reforms that economists say are necessary.
Dayana dreams of a day when she’ll be able to go home and start a small clothing boutique. Asked when she thought that might happen, she shook her head.
“No one knows,” she said. “We just have to be patient.”
My new book “The Maduro Diet” is ranked #1 in the amazon sales category Books > History > Americas > South America > Venezuela
My new book The Maduro Diet is ranked #1 in the amazon sales category Books > History > Americas > South America > Venezuela
Here’s a partial screen capture:
Full title: The Maduro Diet: How three-quarters of adults in Venezuela lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075W2LXT8
I just published this new book about the food shortages in Venezuela
I just published this new book about the food shortages in Venezuela:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075W2LXT8
Price controls and nationalization of more than 10 million acres of farmland have destroyed Venezuela’s ability to feed itself
Venezuela’s paradox: People are hungry, but farmers can’t feed them
May 22, 2017
Above: A once-packed henhouse stands empty on Saulo Escobar’s farm in Aragua state, Venezuela, earlier this month.
YUMA, Venezuela — With cash running low and debts piling up, Venezuela’s socialist government has cut back sharply on food imports. And for farmers in most countries, that would present an opportunity.
But this is Venezuela, whose economy operates on its own special plane of dysfunction. At a time of empty supermarkets and spreading hunger, the country’s farms are producing less and less, not more, making the caloric deficit even worse.
Drive around the countryside outside the capital, Caracas, and there’s everything a farmer needs: fertile land, water, sunshine and gasoline at 4 cents a gallon, cheapest in the world. Yet somehow families here are just as scrawny-looking as the city-dwelling Venezuelans waiting in bread lines or picking through garbage for scraps.
Having attempted for years to defy conventional economics, the country now faces a painful reckoning with basic arithmetic.
“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.”
Several of his cavernous henhouses sit empty because, Escobar said, he can’t afford to buy more chicks or feed. Government price controls have made his business unprofitable, and armed gangs have been squeezing him for extortion payments and stealing his eggs.
Venezuela’s latest public health indicators confirm that the country is facing a dietary calamity. With medicines scarce and malnutrition cases soaring, more than 11,000 babies died last year, sending the infant mortality rate up 30 percent, according to Venezuela’s Health Ministry. The head of the ministry was fired by President Nicolás Maduro two days after she released those statistics.
Child hunger in parts of Venezuela is a “humanitarian crisis,” according to a new report by the Catholic relief organization Caritas, which found 11.4 percent of children under age 5 suffering from moderate to severe malnutrition, and 48 percent “at risk” of going hungry.
‘The Maduro diet’
The protesters who have been marching in the streets against Maduro for the past seven weeks scream, “We’re hungry!” as riot police blast them with water cannons and tear gas.
In a recent survey of 6,500 Venezuelan families by the country’s leading universities, three-quarters of adults said they lost weight in 2016 — an average of 19 pounds. This collective emaciation is referred to dryly here as “the Maduro diet,” but it’s a level of hunger almost unheard-of outside war zones or areas ravaged by hurricane, drought or plague.
Venezuela’s disaster is man-made, economists point out — the result of farm nationalizations, currency distortions and a government takeover of food distribution. While millions of Venezuelans can’t get enough to eat, officials have refused to allow international aid groups to deliver food, accustomed to viewing their oil-rich country as the benefactor of poorer nations, not a charity case.
“It’s not only the nationalization of land,” said Carlos Machado, an expert on Venezuelan agriculture. “The government has made the decision to be the producer, processor and distributor, so the entire chain of food production suffers from an inefficient agricultural bureaucracy.”
With Venezuela’s industrial output crashing, farmers are forced to import feed, fertilizer and spare parts, but they can’t do so without hard currency. And the government has been hoarding the dollars it earns from oil exports to pay back high-interest loans from Wall Street and other foreign creditors.
Escobar said he needs 400 tons of high-protein imported animal feed every three months to keep his operation running, but he’s able to get only 100 tons. So, like many others, he’s turned to the black market. But he can only afford a cheaper, less nutritious feed, meaning that his hens are smaller than they used to be — and so are their eggs.
“My quality went down, so my production went down, too,” he said.
Escobar’s hogs also are skinnier. An average full-size pig weighed 242 pounds two years ago, he said. “Now they weigh 176.” Last year, he lost 2,000 hogs in three months when the animals got sick and he couldn’t find vaccines.
The piglets born since then are undersized. Many have bloody wounds at the tips of their ears. “When an animal has a poor diet, it looks for nourishment elsewhere,” explained Maria Arias, a veterinarian at the farm. “So they end up chewing off the ears of other pigs.”
‘There are no profits’
Venezuela has long relied on imports of certain foodstuffs, such as wheat, that can’t be grown on a large scale in the country’s tropical climate. But trade statistics show that the land policies of the late Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, made Venezuela more dependent on imported food than ever.
When oil prices were high, that wasn’t a big problem. Now Venezuela’s blend of heavy crude is worth barely $40 a barrel and the country’s petroleum output is at a 23-year low, in part because refineries and pipelines are breaking down and investment in new infrastructure isn’t keeping pace.
The government hasn’t published farming data in years. But Machado, the agriculture expert, said annual food imports averaged about $75 per person until 2004, then soared after Chávez accelerated the nationalization of farms, eventually seizing more than 10 million acres. The government expropriated factories, too, and Venezuela’s domestic food production plummeted.
By 2012, annual per capita food imports had increased to $370, but since then, oil prices have slumped and imports have dropped 73 percent.
Instead of spurring growth in domestic agriculture, the government has strangled it, farmers say. Domestic production of rice, corn and coffee has declined by 60 percent or more in the past decade, according to Venezuela’s Confederation of Farmer Associations (Fedeagro), a trade group. Nearly all of the sugar mills nationalized by the government since 2005 are paralyzed or producing below capacity.
Only a small, well-off minority of Venezuelans can afford to buy much food on the black market, where a pound of rice imported from Brazil or Colombia sells for about 6,000 bolivares. That’s roughly $1 at the black-market exchange rate, but for an ordinary Venezuelan worker it’s an entire day’s wage, because the bolivar has lost 99 percent of its value in the past five years.
Venezuelans who don’t have access to hard currency depend on government-subsidized groceries doled out by pro-Maduro neighborhood groups, or wait in supermarket lines for rationed, price-capped items. Those who join anti-government protests have been threatened with losing their food supplies.
The price controls have become a powerful disincentive in rural Venezuela. “There are no profits, so we produce at a loss,” said one dairy farmer in the state of Guarico, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation from authorities. To get a new tractor, he said, he would have to spend all the money he earns in a year. “It’s a miracle that the industry is still alive,” he said.
Four of his cows were stolen this month, probably by hungry families in the nearby village, he said.
According to Vicente Carrillo, the former president of Venezuela’s cattle ranchers’ association, the overall size of the country’s herd has dropped in the past five years from 13 million head to about 8 million.
Carrillo sold his ranch more than a decade ago, tired of threats from squatters and rural activists who accused him of being an exploitative rural capitalist. His family had owned the land for more than a century. “I dedicated more than 30 years of my life to this business, but I had to leave everything behind,” he said.
Escobar, the chicken and hog farmer, said the only way for farmers to remain in business today is to break the law and sell at market prices, hoping authorities look the other way.
“If I sold at regulated prices, I wouldn’t even be able to afford a single kilogram of chicken feed,” he said.
If it’s not a fear of the government that keeps Escobar awake at night, it’s criminal gangs. Since one of his delivery trucks was robbed in December, he has been forced to make “protection” payments to a mafia boss operating out of the local prison. Every Friday, three motorcycles stop by the farm to pick up an envelope of cash, he said. Calling the police would only escalate the danger.
“I know how to deal with chickens and pigs,” Escobar said, “but not criminals.”
Venezuela bans the importation of “war materials” such as first aid kits, eye drops, antacids, gauze, surgical tape, and burn cream
Medicines, Supplies Grounded in U.S. After Venezuela Tags Them ‘War Material’
June 2, 2017
MIAMI — After four years of sending monthly shipments of medicine and food for hospitals and needy people in Venezuela, Move Org, a non-profit based in Miami, abruptly stopped three weeks ago.
Move Org had been sending up to five to seven pallets of donations monthly to help alleviate the burden that the economic and political crisis gripping the South American nation has had on its people.
But recently, the Venezuelan government banned the import of a series of items they deem “war material.”
Some of the products banned are… medical products such as first aid kits, eye drops, antacids, gauze, surgical tape, and burn cream, among others.
“… how can they ban medicine?” questioned Milagros Ramirez, CEO of the nonprofit, Sanando, which means “healing” in Spanish. She founded the group in Venezuela over ten years ago.
She has been living in South Florida for the past two years and has been sending medicine and food for hospitals, orphanages, and nonprofits. Like Move Org, she also stopped the group’s weekly shipments to Venezuela three weeks ago.
“Everything you can think of is needed in Venezuela,” she said. Ramirez said something as simple as denture adhesive is important. “Without it, people who wear dentures cannot eat.” Many of the items Sanando sends are now banned. She feels terrible for the children and senior citizens who badly need them.
Courier services can be found throughout Miami and they are used to send mostly food and medicine back home to relatives. In the midst of the allegations from officials and rumors that boxes are being opened and confiscated, some Venezuelan courier companies have completely stopped shipping food and medicine over an abundance of caution.
Alcala, the Vice-President of Move Org, says she relies on acquaintances traveling from Miami to Caracas to hand-carry medicines to her mother. At 90, she suffers from Alzheimer and is diabetic. She said tear gas often seeps into her mother’s home through cracks in windows and doors. She wants to send her surgical masks to moisten with Maalox in order to protect her from the gas effects. But she says both are banned and hasn’t found a way to get them to her. “It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.”
Some Venezuelans have not had a full meal in days
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/hungry-venezuelans-turn-colombia-plate-food-49206924
Hungry Venezuelans turn to Colombia for a plate of food
Associated Press
CUCUTA, Colombia — Aug 14, 2017
Under a scorching sun just a short walk from Colombia’s border with Venezuela, hundreds of hungry men, women and children line up for bowls of chicken and rice — the first full meal some have eaten in days.
An estimated 25,000 Venezuelans make the trek across the Simon Bolivar International Bridge into Colombia each day. Many come for a few hours to work or trade goods on the black market, looking for household supplies they cannot find back home.
But increasingly, they are coming to eat in one of a half-dozen facilities offering struggling Venezuelans a free plate of food.
“I never thought I’d say this,” said Erick Oropeza, 29, a former worker with Venezuela’s Ministry of Education who recently began crossing the bridge each day. “But I’m more grateful for what Colombia has offered me in this short time than what I ever received from Venezuela my entire life.”
As Venezuela’s economy verges on collapse and its political upheaval worsens, cities like Cucuta along Colombia’s porous, 1,370-mile (2,200-kilometer) border with Venezuela have become firsthand witnesses to the neighboring South American nation’s escalating humanitarian crisis.
According to one recent survey, about 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds (8.7 kilograms) last year.
The Colombian government has crafted contingency plans in the event of a sudden, mass exodus, but already church groups and nonprofit organizations are stepping in, moved by images of mothers carrying starving babies and skinny men trying to make a few bucks on Cucuta’s streets to bring back home.
Paulina Toledo, 47, a Colombian hairstylist who recently helped feed lunch to 900 Venezuelans, said seeing how hungry they were “hurt my soul.”
“Those of us here on the border are seeing their pain,” she said.
People living on either side of the Colombia-Venezuela border have long had a foot in both countries: A Colombian who lives in Cucuta might cross to visit relatives in San Cristobal; a Venezuelan might make the reverse trip to work or go to school.
In the years when Venezuela’s oil industry was booming and Colombia entangled in a half-century armed conflict, an estimated 4 million Colombians migrated to Venezuela. Many started coming back as Venezuela’s economy began to implode and after President Nicolas Maduro closed the border in 2015 and expelled 20,000 Colombians overnight.
Oropeza said he earned about $70 a month working at the Ministry of Education and selling hamburgers on the side — twice Venezuela’s minimum wage but still not enough to feed a family of four. Once a month his family receives a bundle of food provided by the government, but it only lasts a week.
“So the other three weeks, like most Venezuelans, we have to make magic happen,” he said on a recent afternoon.
Desperate for money to feed his family, he left his job and traveled to the Venezuelan border town of San Antonio. He wakes up at 4 a.m. each morning to be among the first crossing the bridge into Cucuta, where he earns money selling soft drinks on the street.
He goes straight to the “Casa de Paso,” a church-run shelter that has served 60,000 meals to Venezuelans since opening two months ago. On an average day, 2,000 Venezuelans line up for meals, getting a ticket to reserve their spot and then waiting four hours for a meal served at outdoor plastic tables.
Workers stir gigantic metal pots filled with chicken and rice set on the bare dirt floor. Volunteers hand out boxes of juice to tired-looking children. Adults sit quietly, savoring their bowl of food as chickens waddle between them.
“Every day I have to remind myself why I am here,” said Oropeza, dressed in a faded striped collared shirt. “I try to repeat it to myself so that I won’t, you know, so those moments of weakness don’t affect you so much.”
When he’s not helping out or waiting in line at the shelter kitchen, Oropeza sells malted soft drinks for about 50 cents each. He’s been able to bring money back to his family and has earned enough to buy a cellphone, which he’d lacked for two years.
Jose David Canas, a priest, said his church will continue to serve food “as long as God allows.”
“Until they close the border,” he said. “Until everything is eaten or until the province tells us that they no longer have lunches to give out. And then it’s the end.”
Venezuelan jail reveals emaciated prisoners left starving to death (two minute video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cks4OBHGG5U
Venezuelans wait in line for five hours for one pound of bread
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/world/americas/venezuela-oil-economy.html
September 20, 2016
One hundred people waited in line for five hours in June to buy a ration of about a pound of bread from a small bakery in Cumaná.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 
