Observations From the Back Row

 By Rich Kozlovich

Recently I posted this piece on fraud and government waste, Fraud and Government Waste is Rampant and Ubiquitous, and as I was doing my searches this morning this caught my eye.  Two federal agencies routed taxpayer dollars to terror-linked charities, new reports find saying:

Two federal agencies gave away roughly $2 billion in taxpayer-funded health and humanitarian contracts to charities that watchdogs and a Senate committee have flagged for terror ties, meaning the government's own vetting either missed those records or decided their terrorist-linked status didn't disqualify the groups. .....

The Middle East Forum (MEF) recently reported that 14 terror-linked and extremist organizations, led by CAIR, collected nearly $80 million from HHS through the Refugee Resettlement, Health, and Mosque Renovation grants. Through this fund, the Council on American-Islamic Relations' (CAIR) California chapter received the most of any Islamist group, collecting $42.2 million in funding from the HHS to provide legal and social services to Afghan refugees.

I have three questions.  First, how in the world did it become American's responsibility to fund efforts to "provide legal and social services to Afghan refugees"?  Second, why are these terrorist associated groups even to be in this country?  Third, how did these agencies fail to vet them properly?  I can answer all three.  We shouldn't, they shouldn't and the federal government is filled with corrupt Deep Staters.    

As it turns out, this is the tip of the iceberg, as Sharia Financing Is Becoming Government Policy Across America.  

Sharia-compliant finance is being woven into government policy across the United States. Cities have restructured public lending programs to accommodate Islamic prohibitions on interest. States have changed laws and tax treatment for Sharia financing. Federal banking regulators have formally approved Islamic financial structures and explained how existing rules can accommodate them. Here are the government’s own receipts showing how Sharia-compliant finance is being normalized across America.

 In Texas schools are busing kids to mosques in order for them to experience Islam. Why?  "Their teachers wanted them to see a different side of the Muslims, the diversity within our community, and these are brothers and sisters."  So they wanted to have them believe all this "brotherhood" propaganda and ignore the terror, murder, rape, and genocide Islam perpetrates worldwide.  The true  history of Islam is a bloody one far beyond Europe's bloody history.  All anyone needs to understand about Islam are the deaths of 2977 victims of Islam that occurred on September 11, 2001, and whomever organized this needs fired. 

• WARNING TEXAS: Islamic Enclave Rising Next to Active U.S. Army Training Base Outside San Antonio — Led by Imam Who Celebrated Hamas’ Oct 7 Massacre as a 'Day of Remembrance' (Video)
• Pakistanification of Texas Law Enforcement: How a Wealthy Pakistani Immigrant Became Constable - A wealthy Pakistani is running a Texas police station, courting foreign officials from a terrorism hub – all under a Republican ballot.
•  What has happened to our country?  When I think about the changes I’ve seen in this great nation over the course of my life, I’m stunned at the many bizarre deviations that have occurred right under my nose.  Did I not see it coming?  Was I so confident that the U.S. would always be rooted in moral values that I let down my guard? Looking back, I’m reminded of the maxim about the frog placed in a pot of comfortable room-temperature water while the heat gradually turns up until the frog is boiled alive.  How many of us are so comfortable that we pay scant attention to the rising fever of corruption that has become SOP?............

This article appeared at the Issues and Insights web site,  Defund The U.N. Green Climate Fund, saying:

The United Nations GCF is nothing but a racket. “It is neither green nor about climate,” it is “a wasteful fraud,” says David Wojick of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. The fund has received and spent more than “$20 billion to date, with more billions coming.” As if in defiance of the extravagance, Earth’s temperature has refused to respond.  Despite its name, the GCF is simply another vendor of foreign aid............. Unlike USAID, which doubled as a taxpayer-bankrolled slush fund for Democrats, the GCF hasn’t been taken down. But it needs to be dismantled, just as its parasitic parent, the United Nations, should be shut down and run out of the country. The world would be better off without this meddlesome, venal, and baleful organization. And its many poisonous tentacles.

Since the corruption of USAID was exposed as a vast wasteland of fraud and abuse the Trump administration ended it.  It also ended it's real function. A slush fund for the Democrats, but now they're claiming as a result of shutting USAID down millions around the world are starving, and it's a lie.  

• Despite Media Claims, USAID Cuts DID NOT Kill 14 Million People

But the left embraces the first rule of the criminal mind.  Never give up the con.  Cindy McCain, who is the Executive Director of  the World Food Program is telling the Trump administration: ‘We need help’ with food aid." 

If we see starving children most of us will find that unacceptable, and that's the hook they use to reel everyone in.  Helping the needy is a foundational Judaic/Christian moral principle.  But how far should that go?  How long should it go on? How did it become America's responsibility to feed the world?  Why are these nations starving in the first place? How many people in the world should we be feeding?  How many of those millions of dollars were squandered on keeping tyrants in power, versus actually feeding their societies?  I think perhaps Cindy McCain needs to provide some answers to those questions first.  

1. McCain-Feingold, USAID and the NGO Network
2. Seven ‘Far-Right’ Candidates Have Won in Latin America Since USAID Was Defunded 
3. GAO Faults State, USAID For Poor Oversight Of $1.2 Billion China Counter-Influence Effort

I saw this article, Democratic senators demand answers about conditions aboard USS Abraham Lincoln, and it touched a nerve.  I served in the Navy and on one occasion had an extended line period and I can tell you it gets difficult being cooped up in tight spaces working 12 on and 12 off seven days a week, and eating food that's reconstituted, and that was nowhere near as long as what this crew is facing.   I can only imagine how difficult an extended tour of  "more than 250 days" at sea must be like, and I have no doubt about how it's taking a toll in the mental health of the crew.  

Let's face it, just as in the normal world there are those who just can't face adversity as well as others.  I can also say...... this is the military, it's not meant to be a regular job,...... and anyone who joins has to know that. Fortunately, as it stands now another carrier is on it's way to replace the long serving USS Lincoln.  The real question that needs answering is why they weren't they relieved long before this?

Update, 8/18/26:  

• Somali “Outstanding Refugee” Winner Charged in Sex Trafficking Health Care Fraud By Daniel Greenfield • August 19, 2026 - What does it take to be an ‘outstanding refugee’ in Minnesota?   What does it take to be an ‘outstanding refugee’ in Minnesota? It’s not enough to be involved in Medicaid fraud. Any halfway competent Somali refugee who can invent his or her own health care company can do that.  To be truly outstanding, there also needs to be some sex trafficking allegedly involved.  So let’s honor the truly outstanding refugee achievements of Salman Elhi who raised the bar for Somalis all across Minnesota.......

The Gaza Starvation and Genocide Farce

By Rich Kozlovich

I keep reading where mental midgets on the left and their media catspaws keep screaming how Israel is perpetrating genocide against Gazans.  The word genocide has been cheapened by these claims. There is no genocide in Gaza, unless you consider the fact that Hamas has willingly sacrificed their own people for political gain, including stealing their food.   

Has there been civilian loss of life among Gazans in this war? Yes, that's why they call it war, and it was a war the Gaza leadership started, and it was Gazans who celebrated dancing in the streets at the atrocities Hamas perpetrated against Israeli civilians in including baking a baby alive in an oven, filming it for public consumption, and Gazans cheered.  

What did the world think was going to happen after the atrocities of October 7th?   There are no innocent Gazans as there were no innocent Germans during WWII with the fire bombing of Dresden, or innocent Japanese during the bombing raids of Japan and the dropping of two atom bombs.  That's the horror of war, and if people don't want to face that horror, they shouldn't start a war.  

If Israel was actually wanting to perpetrate Gazan genocide they could have done it on day one of their retaliation.  If they wanted to perpetrated genocide why is Israel providing massive levels of aid to Gazans, something no military has ever done for an enemy population, and Gazans are Israel's enemy, and yet we've seen a massive public relations effort to claim Israel is attemptiong to starve Gazans to death. 

Democrat Senator from Delaware Chris Van Hollen, whose record for idiotic leftist views is almost legendary, claims Netanyahu is using food as a weapon of war, as if that's never been done before, but is it true?

• ‘Global Campaign of Lies’: Netanyahu Rejects Starvation Allegations, Says IDF Will Open Gaza to Journalists – National Review

The fact is this claim of wide spread starvation among Gazans was invented by Hamas and the United Nations.   If aid isn't getting to the civilian population is being caused by "a combination of United Nations policies, Hamas looting, and black-market profiteering."  

• Anti-Israel Photographer Stages Photographs of Hunger in Gaza

This article by Daniel Greenfield, UN Admits 95% of its Gaza Aid Trucks Were “Intercepted”, clearly depicts just how corrupt the UN has been over this issue saying:

Back when the UN had been in charge it had faked its own famine by refusing to deliver food and letting it pile up instead. Since then the UN’s food aid has kept on piling up even while GHF, an American Christian aid group, has managed to deliver millions of meals to Gaza residents, despite being smeared by the media as “controversial” for feeding those whom the UN wouldn’t........... 

The UNOPS ‘Mechanism for Gaza’ revealed that of the around 2,600 aid trucks entering Gaza, only 300 made it to their destination. 2,310 trucks or 88% of them were ‘intercepted’............ The UN’s WFP recently claimed that it has run out of food stocks and needs $265 million for just the next 6 months to feed Gaza. Where did its food stocks go? Certainly not to aid stations............ 

The best evidence of it is that Hamas made the restoration of UN control over aid into Gaza one of its conditions for a deal. Why would an Islamic terrorist group care who distributes the aid?.........After an aid delivery success ratio in the single digits, the UN is terrible at delivering aid in Gaza, but it’s a stunning success when it comes to its political and economic support of Hamas.

As for this starvation .... the children are dying.... scheme we're seeing in Gaza, it's not unique to Gaza.  In fact it seems to be one of the go to plans used by these terrorist monsters, much of which are predicated on deliberate and outright lies. 

Do you want to see real starvation and genocide? 

• Hypocrisy Exposed: International Outlets Largely Ignore Emaciated Israeli Hostages After Featuring False Starving Gaza Children Pictures
•  Israel Challenges New York Times to Publish Photo of Starving Hostage 
• Report: Hamas Video Shows Israeli Hostage Forced to ’Dig Own Grave’

 Hamas could not defeat Israel militarily, so their go to plan is to claim they're the real victims, not the hostages and innocent men they murdered, the innocent women they raped and murdered, and the innocent children they murdered, all actions lauded by Gazans.  And they get away with it because they understand western leaders live in a moral vacuum.  

• Hamas Understands the Myopia and Moral Imbecility of the West: Hamas understands that if it forces the suffering of its own people, if it maximizes and even falsifies media coverage of that suffering, then the West will rehabilitate Hamas and grant it its demands.  Hamas understands that Westerners are utterly ignorant to the true evil of Hamas, their willingness to multiply the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis alike, to starve their own citizens as well as Israeli hostages, to sacrifice Palestinian children by placing them in the line of fire, all for the cameras; Hamas understands that myopic and self-centered Westerners will simply project their own biases and values onto Hamas, thus granting them unearned innocence and sympathy; Hamas understands that the media would facilitate all of this, elevating a false oppressor/oppressed narrative above the truth.

Hamas is death cult, it really is that simple. 

UN Admits 95% of its Gaza Aid Trucks Were “Intercepted”

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Over the past few weeks, the UN, the EU, the media and Hamas banded together to demand that aid deliveries shift back from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to the United Nations. The campaign played out with Hamas kidnapping, torturing and killing employees of the U.S. aid group, while the media spread false claims that Israel was using GHF distribution sites as ‘death traps’ for killing Gazans, and world leaders demanded that the UN be put back in charge of aid.

Back when the UN had been in charge it had faked its own famine by refusing to deliver food and letting it pile up instead. Since then the UN’s food aid has kept on piling up even while GHF, an American Christian aid group, has managed to deliver millions of meals to Gaza residents, despite being smeared by the media as “controversial” for feeding those whom the UN wouldn’t.

Whom was the UN actually delivering aid to back when it even bothered trying to deliver it?

The UNOPS ‘Mechanism for Gaza’ revealed that of the around 2,600 aid trucks entering Gaza, only 300 made it to their destination. 2,310 trucks or 88% of them were ‘intercepted’.

Much of the ‘aid’ being brought in by the UN and its allies, including the UN’s WFP, UNICEF, the International Red Cross, the International Medical Corps and the World Central Kitchen, whose founder Jose Andres, has been constantly attacking Israel in the media, was ‘intercepted’.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP), which has been front and center in the media, crying for more money and denouncing Trump and Israel, only successfully delivered 1,864 pallets of aid since May while losing 29,673 pallets or 93% of it to “interceptions”.

The UN’s WFP recently claimed that it has run out of food stocks and needs $265 million for just the next 6 months to feed Gaza. Where did its food stocks go?

Certainly not to aid stations.

The WFP’s track record of successfully delivering pallets is 6%. That’s bad even for the UN. Who is all that aid going to? The UN, which is happy to break down everything by weight and pallet, is deliberately vague on the subject, saying only that it had been “intercepted either peacefully by hungry people or forcefully armed actors, during transit in Gaza”.

Who might those “armed actors” be? Alec Baldwin? Clint Eastwood? Hamas?

The UN, which condemns Israel every other day of the week, isn’t talking, but what we know is its aid groups aren’t actually delivering to any aid groups, they’re ‘delivering’ them to “armed actors” and those armed actors probably aren’t members of the Academy of Motion Pictures.

And the UN’s deliberate ambiguity about how many trucks are being “peacefully” intercepted and how many are being seized by “armed actors” with green headbands is likely a deliberate attempt to obfuscate how many of its ‘aid trucks’ are being used to run supplies to Hamas.

In a recent press release, the UN’s WFP claimed that “a total of 1,833 trucks have been dispatched to reach starving civilians inside Gaza”, it neglected to mention that only 140 of those trucks (currently estimated at 2095) or 5% of the trucks actually reached anyone.

Even assuming the best possible intentions by the WFP, why in the world would anyone hand the UN organization its requested quarter of a billion dollars for a 5% success ratio?

And there’s no reason to assume any good intentions on the part of the UN or the WFP.

After years of doing this, even a bunch of rickshaw drivers could manage a better ratio than 95% enemy intercepts. It’s hard to believe that the 5% deliveries to 95% interceptions ratio reflects anything other than extensive collaboration between the UN’s Gaza employees, many of whom are Hamas, and Hamas. The UN’s refusal to deliver much of the aid under its control reflects a deliberate effort to create shortages in order to put pressure on Israel and drive up the price for the aid that Hamas steals. There’s no famine in Gaza but there are artificial shortages being created by the UN-Hamas alliance meant to financially and politically benefit the terrorists.

The best evidence of it is that Hamas made the restoration of UN control over aid into Gaza one of its conditions for a deal. Why would an Islamic terrorist group care who distributes the aid?

After losing 95% of its aid trucks, you would think that the UN would turn to Israel to provide security, but unlike the Gaza Humanitarian foundation, the international aid groups have repeatedly rejected any Israeli military protection. Lately, UN officials have taken to complaining that their trucks are being looted because they’re forced to use “unsecured routes”.

But if they don’t want Israel to secure those routes, who do they want securing the routes?

According to a New York Times story, “the United Nations does not allow Israeli soldiers to protect aid convoys, fearing that would compromise its neutrality, and its officials have called on Israel to allow the Gaza police, which are under Hamas’s authority, to secure their convoys.”

Having Hamas escort its trucks doesn’t compromise the UN’s neutrality, but having Israel does.

Last year, Farhan Haq, the Deputy Spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, in response to a question about Israel taking out the Hamas ‘General’ in charge of the ‘Gaza Police’, and “responsible for securing the aid and the aid trucks” admitted that “we have contacts with everyone involved in the grounds who can play a role in making sure that trucks can travel safely through Gaza, and that includes people in the de facto authorities” and vowed that “we will continue our discussions with anyone on the de facto authorities who is capable of working with us to make sure that the flow of goods into Gaza continues.” “De facto authorities” are how nonprofit aid groups tend to refer to illegal Islamic terrorist groups. In this case, that’s Hamas.

The AFP reported that “the Gaza police – which includes many Hamas members – helped secure humanitarian convoys” while NBC News claimed that “Gaza’s police force was also more present and provided security, but months of Israeli bombing have crippled the police.”

The Biden administration, after falsely assuring Israel that Hamas would not intercept the aid, was not only aware that this was going on, but David Satterfield, Biden’s ‘humanitarian’ envoy, condemned Israel for taking out the Hamas ‘police’ including, according to him, “a commander whose units had been involved in providing escorts”, admitted that the Gaza ‘police’ “certainly include Hamas elements” but that “with the departure of police escorts, it has been virtually impossible for the U.N. or anyone else… to safely move assistance in Gaza.”

With Hamas helping to “secure” aid trucks, it’s a mystery how so many of them disappear.

After an aid delivery success ratio in the single digits, the UN is terrible at delivering aid in Gaza, but it’s a stunning success when it comes to its political and economic support of Hamas.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

 

Israel is Killing Gaza With Obesity

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

In 2015, a decade after Israel had withdrawn from Gaza leaving it, as terrorist apologists in the media insisted, an “open-air concentration camp”, weight loss centers began to pop up.

Gaza’s Arab Muslim population was overeating badly.

A 2013 study found 1 out of every 5 adolescents in Gaza was overweight or obese which was comparable to rates in the United States. By 2020 in the combined ‘Palestinian’ occupied areas of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, overweight rates shot up from 20% to 34% among boys and from 24% to 32% among girls. If the Arab Muslim populations were living under oppression and terror, how had their adolescent obesity rates gone from 1 in 4 to as much as 1 in 3?

And it’s not just the adolescents.

A global nutrition report found that nearly 30% of men and 42% of women in the combined areas are obese. In Gaza specifically, 64% of mothers were overweight or obese. How could this wave of obesity be reconciled with the simultaneous claim that 60% of households in Gaza are “food insecure’” The mothers of quite a few of those “food insecure households” are obese.

The shortage of research studies being carried out under Hamas rule makes it difficult to estimate how fat Gaza’s occupiers were, but a revealing data point is that a study conducted in 2019 estimated that among adults over the age of 42, 45% had Type 2 Diabetes and 16.8% had undiagnosed Type 2.

Another Gaza report citing Hamas Ministry of Health numbers claimed that 9.6% of the population in Gaza has diabetes and it’s the cause of 11.2% of one out of nine deaths. If Gazans were living in hunger, why do their diabetes rates look like those of America or Europe?

In 2015, a decade after Israel had withdrawn from Gaza leaving it, as terrorist apologists in the media insisted, an “open-air concentration camp”, weight loss centers began to pop up.

Gaza’s Arab Muslim population was overeating badly.

A 2013 study found 1 out of every 5 adolescents in Gaza was overweight or obese which was comparable to rates in the United States. By 2020 in the combined ‘Palestinian’ occupied areas of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, overweight rates shot up from 20% to 34% among boys and from 24% to 32% among girls. If the Arab Muslim populations were living under oppression and terror, how had their adolescent obesity rates gone from 1 in 4 to as much as 1 in 3?

And it’s not just the adolescents.

A global nutrition report found that nearly 30% of men and 42% of women in the combined areas are obese. In Gaza specifically, 64% of mothers were overweight or obese. How could this wave of obesity be reconciled with the simultaneous claim that 60% of households in Gaza are “food insecure’” The mothers of quite a few of those “food insecure households” are obese.

The shortage of research studies being carried out under Hamas rule makes it difficult to estimate how fat Gaza’s occupiers were, but a revealing data point is that a study conducted in 2019 estimated that among adults over the age of 42, 45% had Type 2 Diabetes and 16.8% had undiagnosed Type 2.

Another Gaza report citing Hamas Ministry of Health numbers claimed that 9.6% of the population in Gaza has diabetes and it’s the cause of 11.2% of one out of nine deaths. If Gazans were living in hunger, why do their diabetes rates look like those of America or Europe?

The suffering of diabetes patients in Gaza during their Jihadist campaign against non-Muslims has been one of the narratives put out by the pro-Hamas humanitarians, none of whom have thought to ask why the condition is so prevalent in a place that supposedly has no food.What was the cause of these high rates? According to the study, “Palestinians consume large amounts of homemade desserts, cakes, sweetened tea, and coffee” and have a massive sugar intake. They eat too much and too well despite supposedly being “refugees” while starving to death in an “open air concentration camp” complete with lavish malls, restaurants and hotels.

Since Hamas launched the Oct 7 genocide campaign, its occupying population in Gaza has been painted as victims and bombarded with massive amounts of food supplies. Over the course of the war, the terrorist population was sent 92,000 truckloads of aid. The amount of aid coming into Gaza actually doubled after its residents began a genocidal campaign of murder, rape and kidnapping of regional minority groups. Compare that to 1,500 truckloads of aid for Sudan and even less for many struggling African populations dealing with actual famine.

Massive amounts of food were dumped on Gaza. The Biden administration, falsely claiming that there was an urgent famine and the population, according to Vice President Kamala Harris, had been reduced to eating “leaves”, air dropped supplies which the local population rejected and criticized on social media. It built a failed $250 million pier to deliver aid that cost the life of an American soldier and injured many others all to deliver food to the non-starving Gazans.

What’s been the result of this massive outpouring of free food? Hamas leaders, terrorists, spokesmen and media operatives have grown unmistakably fat as food has become a form of currency. Not only is there no famine, but Gazans are gorging themselves and even Hamas’ own dubious numbers show Americans are three times as likely to die of malnutrition as they are.

1.8 million tons of aid, including 1.3 million tons of food, have been delivered to Gaza since the launch of their genocidal Hamas campaign. That’s over 1 ton of aid for every adult in Gaza.

Is this good for the enemy population in Gaza? Probably not. When deaths due to diabetes and out of control glycaemic rates are soaring, the last thing it needs is more free food. The UN’s WFP deliveries included snack bars and the current GHF program overseen by the U.S. and Israel is likely also delivering foods not ideal for a population already eating itself to death.

The false claims that Israel is killing the invasive population in Gaza with hunger is false, but the massive truckloads of aid being brought in to save the Hamas supporters from a famine that doesn’t exist may be even more lethal. Gaza, like the rest of the ‘Palestinian-occupied’ territories is a massive welfare state subsidized by the U.S., the UN and the Europeans. And people in welfare states tend to do very little work, eat all the free food they can get, grow fat and violent, and then go off looking for something to destroy. Gaza may be the worst welfare state in the world, but it is a welfare state and its own habits are deadlier to it than Israel.

If Israel is killing Gaza’s enemy population with anything, it’s not hunger, it’s obesity.

But the obesity epidemic in Gaza is fed by the UN, international pressure from world leaders and diplomats, and their own lies about being reduced to eating leaves and dirt.

Gaza’s Arab Muslims are eating themselves to death on their own lies. The torrent of free food will lead to greater obesity, worse diabetes trends and other dietary diseases. And it’s their political allies and international enablers who are killing them with endless free food.

The UN and the EU can promise to save Gaza, but no one can save them from themselves. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

UN Official: North Koreans Are Hungry, Desperate

By Newser Editors and Wire Services Aug 17, 2023

Volker Turk, UN human rights chief, speaks via video call Thursday at UN headquarters.   (AP Photo/John Minchillo) North Korea is increasing its repression of human rights, and people are becoming more desperate and reportedly starving in parts of the country as the economic situation worsens, the United Nations rights chief said Thursday. 

Volker Türk told the first open meeting of the UN Security Council since 2017 on North Korean human rights that in the past the nation's people have endured periods of severe economic difficulty and repression, but "currently they appear to be suffering both." He added, "According to our information, people are becoming increasingly desperate as informal markets and other coping mechanisms are dismantled, while their fear of state surveillance, arrest, interrogation and detention has increased." 

 North Korean leader Kim Jong Un closed the borders of the northeast Asian nation to contain COVID-19. But as the pandemic has waned, Türk said the government's restrictions have grown even more extensive, with guards authorized to shoot any unauthorized person approaching the border and with almost all foreigners, including UN staff, still barred from the country. As examples of the increasing repression of human rights, he said, anyone found viewing "reactionary ideology and culture"—which means information from abroad, especially from South Korea—may now face five to 15 years in prison. And those who distribute such material face life imprisonment or even the death penalty, he said..........To Read More........

Zero Hunger (SDG 2) Means Starvation for All!

Sustainable Development Goals: Fight against the government’s idea that THEY define YOUR hunger! Their mandated ‘outcomes’ for your family are NOT their jurisdiction! 

By Guest Column -- Lynne M Taylor——Bio and Archives July 28, 2023

If you’re familiar with Tom DeWeese’s extensive work on Agenda 21 (now Agenda 2030), you certainly are aware of the United Nations’ SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). The “Goals” are a railroading system being used to force all nations into compliance. The United States is NO exception.

What better way to do that, than by controlling our food supplies? This includes the water and land which grow our crops and feed our livestock. It also will overtake EVERYTHING in agriculture, food sales, food deliveries, and quite possibly even your own backyard gardens.

SDG 2 is known as ‘Zero Hunger’. Its wording is to suggest that everyone will be fed by the government, as well as by the United Nations out of caring for us. However, a closer look into SDG 2 needs to be taken. The ‘zero hunger’ is NOT about caring for us, it’s about controlling us............To Read More...

The UN, WEF, and Bill Gates are Really Trying to Starve Us into Submission

Dr. Jay Lehr | Oct 2, 2022 | Global, Politics @ America Our Loud

Awake everyone, the evil folks behind the Communist takeover of the world have put a plan in place to starve us all into submission, but we will defeat Bill Gates and his tyrannical forces in the end.

Do not doubt that there is now underway a global war on farming. How better to bring the population to its knees than cutting off its food supply? Better even than energy shortages that are already long underway. The World Economic Forum led by Klaus Schwab, the author of the Great Reset, the United Nations led by Antonio Gutierrez, and a phalanx of truly evil-doers none worse than Bill Gates, controller of the World Health Organization in concert with the Chinese Communist Party.

Neither the WEF nor the Rockefeller Foundation responded to requests for comment on their role in Agenda 2030 and on the agricultural policies being pursued around the world.

Other organizations and entities involved in the push include powerful tax-exempt foundations such as the Gates Foundation, the EU-style regional governments proliferating worldwide, and various groups funded by them. 

All over the globe, UN SDG-aligned government policies are squeezing farmers-especially smaller, independent producers unable to absorb the added costs of added regulation and control.

He was celebrating UN sustainability ideas, recently ousted Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced at the UN COP 26 climate summit in 2021 that his government was banning chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Sri Lanka recently restricted the imports of chemicals, fertilizers, and pesticides, which include herbicides, to control weeds due to public health concerns, water contamination, soil degradation, and biodiversity impacts, Rajapaksa told world leaders, to widespread acclaim, as starvation swept the Island Nation. There is joy among these monsters as they see their populations suffer.

Although opposed by entrenched lobbies, this has created opportunities for innovation and investment into organic agriculture that will be healthier and more sustainable in the future as yields shrink massively and more people starve.

Even though these draconian measures were rapidly rolled back, the policies produced catastrophic food shortages, widespread hunger, and eventually a popular revolt that ousted the president and his government. But these disasters will be widely repeated before the evil; tyrannical leaders can be unseated.

In 2019 the socialist Sri Lanka government partnered with the UN  to establish the UN Global Nitrogen Campaign, which promotes the UN-backed policies on nitrogen that are now proliferating worldwide. 

In the Netherland headquarters for the WEF Food Innovation Hub, secretariat authorities are imposing nitrogen policies that are expected to decimate the nation’s highly productive agricultural sector. The plans also include widespread expropriation of farms. A once free nation is all but becoming a prison camp.

The expropriation plans of the cabinet are a downright declaration of war on the agriculture sector, said Dutch member of Parliament Gideon van Meijeren of the Forum for Democracy Party, as cited by De Dagelijkse Standard. Under false pretenses, farmers are being robbed of their land, centuries-old farms are being demolished, and farmers’ families are being totally destroyed. 

Experts warned of dangerous consequences from such sustainability policies, including food shortages, skyrocketing prices, social unrest, etc. You can glimpse the green sustainable future by beholding Holland and Sri Lanka now, Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told the Epoch Times.

And yet the plan is spreading rapidly. Canadian federal authorities recently announced similar fertilizers and nitrogen restrictions after energy production restrictions were put in place, sparking outrage from provincial officials and farmers.

Various government entities in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and other European nations are also working to slash agricultural production under sustainability programs. This is not crazy or insane, or wrongheaded. It is a perfect plan to subjugate a population under the thumb of megalomaniac government power-mad individuals.

Aside from continuing with policies that pay farmers not to grow food, the Biden Administration seeks to impose WEF-backed policies such as ESG and reporting on companies through the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Farm associations and more than 100 members of Congress argue that the plan would bankrupt owners of small and medium-sized farms unable to comply with climate reporting requirements to do business with public firms even as the world moves toward widespread food shortages.

In part, experts say the insistence on these sorts of policies is because those imposing are largely insulated from the damage they are causing.

Global elites in government, trans-national organizations, and corporate boardrooms – well represented in the WEF are so caught up in their climate virtue signaling from which many hope to benefit financially through investments in green energy they are slow to notice that they are completely detached from reality said National Center for Public Policy Research’s Cohen who specializes in environmental issues.

Few of those imposing regulations on farmers have ever set foot on a farm. By virtue of the power and wealth, these people already have, they are shielded from the consequences of misguided policies they impose on the rest of the world. That burden is borne by ordinary people around the world, about whom the Davos crowd and their partners in crime know nothing.

According to Sterling Burnett, who holds a doctorate in environmental ethics and leads The Heartland Institute’s Center, Sri Lanka’s disaster offered a review of what will happen to the United States and Europe if policymakers continue to follow the UN sustainability plan on Climate and Environmental Policy.

‘It’s not a war on farming; it’s a war on small agriculture and independent farmers, he told Epoch Times. It’s a war in support of elite large-scale agricultural industries.

Even though the UN SDGs speak of helping small-scale food production, Burnett argued that independent farms and ranches are in the cross hairs to help consolidate control of the food supply.

He said that policymakers are in the pocket of primary corporate interests, including Conagra, Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, and others. They would just as soon have all their small competitors put out of business.” He said, echoing concerns expressed by numerous other experts. Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, whose firm manages more money than any other company in the world, wants to impose his values on companies using other people’s money, Burnett said.

Fink, who serves on the board of the influential Council on Foreign Relations and works closely with WEF, is a crucial architect of the push to impose environmental, social, and governance requirements on US companies. This is the super-rich forcing their values on the rest of us, said Burnett pointing to those he says are happy to work with communities on the effort. 

As far as The World Economic Forum is concerned, he said you couldn’t have a Great Reset as long as you don’t reset the food supply because food is necessary to everybody. Stalin recognized this. Whoever controls the food supply controls the people, and it’s the same with energy.

As prices soar and farmers go bankrupt, major corporations in league with governments and international organizations will pick up the pieces.

In the meantime, as seen recently in Sri Lanka, hungry people are being pushed to the brink and are likely to react. People were not starving on January 6, said Burnett referring to the protest and breach at the US Capitol. The supply chain crisis is happening! Shelves are already empty, and people will not sit around and do nothing when people are hungry.

American Policy Center Founder Tom De Weese a leading expert and critic of UN notions of sustainability, warned that the war on farmers was part of a broader plan to strip people of freedom. Always in the past, when tyrannical forces wanted to rule the world, they built armies and invaded. They destroyed a lot of property, killed a lot of people, and forced subjugation on the rest; De Weese told Epoch Times. We are now dealing with a more diabolical force that has figured out a way to get us to surrender our liberties and help them subjugate us voluntarily.

He said the threat is Environmental Armageddon, pointing to the climate change narratives as the prime example. What else could be a more powerful tool?

The end goal of the efforts is to reduce the sovereignty of both individual nations and people, said Craig Rucker, President of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a public policy organization specializing in environmental issues. 

Citing numerous UN officials and documents, DeWeese says the plan isn’t to save the climate but to transform the planet and centralize control over the populace. Aside from the UN and the WEF, major companies such as Vanguard and Blackrock are working to take over and control the food supply, he said.

Already a handful of companies in which those two investment firms are top shareholders dominate the global food supply and beverage industry. By taking over farming, they will control it all.

The goal is to take control over food production, noting that they seek to own all seeds and even grow synthetic meat in facilities already backed financially by Bill Gates and other billionaires. Genetically engineered crops are high on the agenda also.

The UN and the WEF, and others are also moving forward with promoting insects and weeds as food. Across the western world, insect protein production facilities are popping up rapidly, but it gets ever darker. De Weese says that if people are starving, they are much easier to subjugate, adding that depopulation and control over humanity have been on the agenda of global elites for decades.

The war on farmers also comes amid what critics have described as a government-backed war on energy affecting agriculture and virtually every other sector.

This includes limiting energy exploration shutting down power plants charging special fees and taxes, and other policies that have resulted in rapidly rising costs across the western world, although not in places like China.

Experts urge Americans to resist the war on farmers and the UN-backed sustainability policies using various means. These include getting involved politically, adopting different shopping habits, finding alternative food sources such as local farmers, and other measures. Officials at the UN did not respond to requests for comment.

These people can accurately be compared to the most brutal murderers in the class of Hitler and Stalin.

Dr. Jay Lehr

Dr. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author, and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government and many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he received the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers.

Do The Political Elites Intend To Starve People To Death?

I & I Editorial Board  August 11, 2022 5 comments

 

Sri Lanka is the case study. Cruel and pointless green agricultural policy has caused a crisis of hunger, shortages, rising prices, a crippled economy, and violence. The country’s president and its prime minister were chased from the country, and have been replaced. It should be a lesson to the rest of the world. Instead, it’s more likely a preview of the future.

What happened in Sri Lanka – “the systematic destruction of Sri Lankan agriculture by a regime so focused on appearing environmentally conscious that it blinded itself to the humanitarian disaster it was creating” – is also taking place in the Netherlands, one of the world’s top producers of farm products. There, policymakers have placed limits on agricultural waste emissions, which the eco-zealots are now at war with. The “tractor-riding rebels” understandably rose “up against their government.” What else should be expected when the rules could force as many as 30% of producers out of business?

Farmers in Spain, Ireland, and New Zealand are also rising up. It’s more than enough for any open-minded lawmaker anywhere on Earth to look at these events and rethink the policies that have caused such turmoil. But not Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Boy Prime Minister, who like the rest of the immature left is fixated on making points with the “right” people, as if he never left high school. Despite the clear warning signs, he’s moving “ahead on fertilizer reduction as provinces and farmers cry foul,” the Toronto Sun has reported. There are factions that must be impressed..............Do The Political Elites Intend To Starve People To Death?

UN deletes article on “benefits” of world hunger after CFACT reporting

By CFACT July 7th, 2022 News 85 Comments

CFACT's reporting has made the UN "blink." 

The UN Chronicle, the “magazine of the United Nations,” has deleted an article from 2008 titled “The Benefits of World Hunger,” after CFACT’s Marc Morano, editor of ClimateDepot.com, published an interview with the author of the UN article, professor George Kent of the University of Hawaii.

While the UN Chronicle claims the article was “satire,” Kent, the author of the piece, said the article is definitely not a “satire” but was intended to be “provocative.” After CFACT’s interview with Kent was published, the UN Chronicle deleted the article 14 years after its original publication.

Here is an excerpt from Kent’s UN Chronicle article:

“Hunger has great positive value to many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour…How many of us would sell our services if it were not for the threat of hunger?

“More importantly, how many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger?

“For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.”

CFACT’s Morano had this to say about the article:

“This is a UN article and was published in 2008 in the UN Chronicle. It is now just getting media attention and the author of the article, Professor George Kent, told Climate Depot on July 6, 2022, that the UN article is most definitely not a ‘satire’ but intended to be ‘provocative.’ The UN is now trying to erase history by deleting the essay and falsey pretending that it was merely a “satire.”

“Given how the world has been transformed under the ‘new normal’ of COVID lockdowns, it seems this old UN Chronicle article presciently reveals how the World Economic Forum and the UN & the WHO, seek to rule humanity with an iron bureaucratic fist and wish to keep the ‘masses’ poor, tired, and hungry.”

More information can be found on ClimateDepot here.

•   CFACT

  CFACT, founded in 1985 by Craig Rucker and the late (truly great) David Rothbard, examines the relationship between human freedom, and issues of energy, environment, climate, economics, civil rights and more.

God Help the Millions Raising Families When Access to Food Runs Out

By Judi McLeod ——Bio and Archives--January 9, 2022

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Just as their Communist role model Joseph Stalin once did in starving his own people, both leaders of Canada and the U.S. seem headed toward an attempt at starving their masses to bring them under control. And by all but ignoring the reduction of truckers who can't cross either the Canadian or American border without proof of Covid vaccines, they're risking their own masses to hunger seems to be deliberate.

“Cruel efforts under Stalin to impose collectivism and tamp down Ukrainian nationalism left an estimated 3.9 million dead. At the height of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine under Joseph Stalin, starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat. (History, April 16, 2017)

It’s now Winter in North America with nothing much edible growing under the snow and ice. What’s about to happen in North America is not the stuff of a Netflix movie,  something streamed on a cable television network,  or a bogus escape into the Metaverse with Mark Zuckerberg, because it’s true life reality. The trucking of goods across all of North America is coming to an incremental dangerous halt.

The political leaders of both Canada and the U.S. are fixated on preventing the Covid unvaccinated from doing their jobs—even when those jobs mean the delivery of food.......To Read More.....

North Korea tells starving citizens to eat less: Report

by Misty Severi, Breaking News Reporter October 27, 2021

North Korea is telling its hungry citizens to be prepared to eat less for a few years.  Pyongyang, which closed its Sino-Korea border early last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, said there is only a slim chance of it reopening before 2025. This situation, which includes the restriction of trade, puts a significant pinch on the country of 25 million where people are already starving to death because of skyrocketing food prices, according to Radio Free Asia . 

“The food situation right now is already clearly an emergency, and the people are struggling with shortages. When the authorities tell them that they need to conserve and consume less food until 2025 … they can do nothing but feel great despair,” an unnamed resident of the northwestern border city of Sinuiju told the outlet this month..........To Read More....

 My Take - It appears there's more than enough money for it's military and advanced weapons production, but not enough to feed the people.  That's the "utopia" the communists offer.  We call it dystopia, and that's where the Biden administration and the leftist lunatics in his government are taking America.  

 

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un: Citizens Suffering from ‘Grim’ Economy

Gabrielle Reyes 11 Oct 2021 

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Sunday urged officials of his country’s ruling party to work on improving citizens’ quality of life amid a “grim” economic situation, the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Monday.

North Korea faces “huge tasks for adjusting and developing the state economy,”.......“The only way for dynamically pushing forward the unprecedented crucial work despite grim situation is for the entire Party to get united [sic],”............North Korean government officials “should always consider whether their work infringe upon the interests of the people or cause trouble to the people [sic],........“People’s access to food is a serious concern and the most vulnerable children and elderly are at risk of starvation,”..................“Essential medicines and medical supplies are in short supply and prices have increased severalfold as they stopped coming in from China, and humanitarian organizations have been unable to bring in medicines and other supplies,” the report states..............“The current worsening humanitarian situation could turn into a crisis and must be averted".............To Read More....

 My Take - The little piglet isn't going to tighten his belt I'm willing to bet.  This "humanitarian crisis that must be averted' is a cyclical pattern in North Korea because of Kim and his band of commie misfits.  He also seems to have plenty of cash for his military as noted in this piece,  Kim Vows North Korea Will Build 'Invincible Military".  And how can he do that economically?  The same way Mao did.  Starve the people of North Korea to death.  

North Koreans are ordered to hand over 'decadent and bourgeois' pet dogs for 'restaurant meat' as the country is rocked by food shortages

Daily Mail, by Julian Ryall Original Article

Kim Jong-un has declared that pet dogs are a symbol of capitalist 'decadence' and ordered that dogs in Pyongyang be rounded up - and owners are fearful that their beloved pets are being used to solve the nation's food shortages. Dictator Kim announced in July that owning a pet is now against the law, denouncing having a dog at home as 'a tainted trend of bourgeois ideology'. 'Authorities have identified households with pet dogs and are forcing them to give them up or forcefully confiscating them and putting them down', a source told South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper........... Original Article

My Take -  Dog is a very fine meal quite common in Asia.  So what's the problem?  It's just being  omnivorous.  When they run out of dogs, then they can eat the rats.  This is known as Communist pest control, and most importantly, it's an "all natural" pest control solution.   

Just think how much better off they're going to be after the rats are all gone.  That way they can then eat the cats.  Cat is a very fine meal too.  Tastes like chicken I'm told!  Of course none of this changes the need to build rockets and nuclear bombs, no matter how expensive that may be.  

Now ,there are those who may pooh pooh this analysis and think this is an excellent example of socialist dystopia.  Starvation, disease, misery, poverty, squalor and early death, but that's..........oh....wait....that's what it is.  

Feel the Bern: Another North Korean Nightmare.

By Rich Kozlovich

On July 18, 2019 Josh Smith posted an article with Reuters entitled, Malnutrition, disease rising in North Korea: aid organization, saying:

"Rates of malnutrition and disease are increasing in North Korea as it faces a harvest that is half of what was expected, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said on Thursday."

As a result of “erratic weather with drought and floods, and a lack of access to resources could lead to a food crisis in a country”.

Let's take a moment and think about this.  If weather is the reason for their crop failures, why isn't South Korea facing the same problem?

Why is there a lack of access to resources? Well, I guess that makes it our fault....right?  Because N. Korea is “under strict international sanctions over leader Kim Jong Un’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.”

It isn’t because of corruption of the N. Korean government. It isn’t because of the incompetence, greed and stupidity of those in power. It isn’t due to an economic system that has never failed to deliver anything except suffering, misery, disease, starvation and early death.  It isn't because they keep threatening the world with missiles and nuclear weapons.  By implication - it’s our fault because the sanctions caused “widening trade deficits, foreign currency shortages and a deepening cash crunch”.

Well, isn’t that what sanctions are supposed to do?

Unfortunately, “rates of malnutrition and water borne diseases like diarrhea and colitis are on the rise”. Furthermore, “North Korea is expected to exhaust its crop reserves earlier than usual this year”.

This isn't anything new for North Koreans. "In the 1990s, a nationwide famine killed as many as one million people.” In 2014 this was a nation of 25 million people, and in 1990 the population may have initially been larger since in the mid nineties North Korean birth rate dropped about 50%.  Based on the 25 million number, the million people who starved to death amounts to about 4% of N. Korea's population.  To get the full impact of that we have to realize if that happened in America that would amount to 12,400,000 people starving to death.  A national human disaster by any calculation. 

To expand on this please note that almost 5% of the North Korean population is serving in the military.  That's close to 1.3 million people in a nation of 25 million people!  How can any nation justify that kind of military spending when the people of the nation are starving? 

The United States has a population of over 325 million people and only has "1.3 million men and women on active duty," and "another 1.1 million serve in the National Guard and Reserve forces." That comes to just a little over 2.4 million people.  Approximately .75%.  If you add in civilian employees, which I doubt North Korean figures do, that's another 669,281 coming to just under 1%.  And America has been actively involved in military action for decades. 

What war is Kim fighting?  Well, actually the Korean War.  It never ended with a treaty, just an armistice.  So Kim keeps telling his people they have to suffer in order to keep the United States and South Korea from conquering them.  Wouldn't that be terrible with starvation and oppression ending.  Of course the people are left in the dark about that by a lunatic who not only kills his own people, he kills his own family. 

The world is now producing food in such quantities there's absolutely no reason why any nation should have starvation.  How could any national leader allow that to happen when the world's food supply is so amazingly abundant unless he's insane. 

What has Kim Jong Un and his cutthroats done to keep this from happening again?   He and his gang continue “to import millions of dollars worth of luxury goods, including at least two armored limousines valued at $500,000 each”.  All for their own benefit without one iota of concern about the poor suffering North Korean people.

It’s reported:

“South Korea will donate $4.5 million to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), and announced it was also providing 50,000 tonnes of rice for delivery to its northern neighbor. South Korea also recently donated $3.5 million to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) for humanitarian projects in North Korea.”

First of all, I have to wonder how much of that will really get to the people.  N. Korea has in the past imposed a "military first" policy for food and allowed the civilian population to starve.  A population divided into three castes based on loyalty to the regime.  About 25% are in the third caste, which are considered a threat to the regime, and make no mistake about it, they starve.  Secondly, what did South Korea get in return for their generosity and humanity? Kim just recently announced his bankrupt starving country might start testing missiles again.

He can’t find the money to feed his people but he can find the money for luxuries and missile testing?

So he threatens to double down on the activity that caused sanctions and the resulting suffering in the first place.  Why?  I have to believe this is an attempt to intimidate the west into giving him money and food for his starving people. Which will free up money - money he doesn't really have - to promote insanity.  Why insanity?  Because if he ever used any of those missiles with a nuclear device, he and his nation would cease to exist in 24 hours. 

But what about the starving people of his nation? 

He clearly doesn't care about them.  If you're a moral person you have to feel for the pain, suffering and the terrible impact this will have on the people of this nation.  Especially the children. Even if they survive, malnutrition during those development years impacts them negatively for the rest of their lives.

What should be done? 

One thing has been made clear to me over the years is governments like N. Korea, with the Kims, Venezuela with Muduro, Zimbabwe with Mugabe for decades, and others, devastate their citizens to the point it seems impossible for them to rid themselves of these monsters.  And in the cases where outside forces cleared them out and attempted to bring Democratic principles into play, they vote in the same kind of people that devasted them, which we've seen in Muslim controlled nations. 

If we provide medical care and food for these people it merely helps keep the monsters running these countries in power, prolonging the misery and agony they impose.   If we refuse to aid them innocent people suffer and die now.  Either way, these nations represent no threat to the rest of the world because of the greed, corruption and mismanagement of their governments.  North Korea is the exception.  They represent a danger to their neighbors and even the United States because of their missile and nuclear programs, which would have never come into being except for Jimmy Carter and the Clintons.

That, in my opinion, leaves only the military, and not the senior military personnel.  The younger members at the next level down is where any overthrow would have to come from. Is that possible?  No one has any idea, and no one has connections in North Korea to tell anyone, at least as far as has been published, but who knows, except there's a possibility either China or Russia could have access to personnel in N. Korea who they would support in secret.  But they won't!

What would I do? 

Let it all play out no matter how miserable it would make me feel. Stand firm and expand the sanctions.  Prevent their ability to import "luxuries", including food.  Let the leadership survive on what the nation produces and hope someone has what it takes to overthrown the Kim dynasty.  But will they be any better? 

Sometimes you don't have the privilege of being able to pick between a good choice and a bad choice.  Sometimes you're only left with the best bad choice. 

If doubt what I've said please feel free to peruse my N. Korea files, and you may find my article, N. Korean Crisis: Will This Lead to WWIII? profound and provocative. 

Int’l Red Cross warns of food crisis in North Korea

By Thomas Lifson August 11, 2018

A heat wave in North Korea has led to rice, maize and other crops withering in the fields, “with potentially catastrophic effects”, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said on Friday.   The world’s largest disaster relief network warned of a risk of a “full-blown food security crisis” in the isolated country, where a famine in the mid-1990s killed up to three million people. It said the worrying situation had been exacerbated by international sanctions imposed due to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs........

The real source of North Korea’s food shortage should be obvious: socialism. Just like Venezuela and Zimbabwe. But the patch of drought and heat no doubt is increasing pressure on Kim to fund a means of easing the sanctions and getting some food aid shipments. Dependence on foreign charity is not a good look for dictators negotiating with Donald Trump........... .....Read more

Feel the Bern: After killing of rebel cop, Maduro’s grip on Venezuela’s military may be loosening

By Antonio Maria Delgado
adelgado@elnuevoherald.com 

January 26, 2018                

                                           

The government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, hated by much of the country's population and sanctioned by a growing number of countries, is facing problems keeping the police and military happy as food shortages and hyperinflation start to hit their barracks.

Recent meetings and internal documents of the Venezuelan armed forces point to concern in the Maduro regime as troops grow more demoralized and commanders report an increase in the number of insubordination cases and desertions.

In addition to the signs of unrest among the Army and National Guard units, the government also faces a tense relationship with the investigative police agency known by its initials in Spanish, CICPC, after the recent public execution of rebel policeman Oscar Perez, who was killed by security forces in an assault broadcast live through social media. “There is unrest, and there's a lack of discipline. The soldiers are demoralized,” said Gen. Herbert Garcia Plaza, a former Maduro cabinet minister, in a phone call from Washington. “Military installations have declared a state of alert, which is not normal [at this time] because there are not even street protests now. It seems like they think the enemy is inside.”..........To Read More.....

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article196828514.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article196828514.html#storylink=cpy

 

  

Feel the Bern: Hunger eats away at Venezuela’s soul as its people struggle to survive

Emma Graham-Harrison Saturday 26 August 2017

 

This the reality of a Socialist Paradise

Hunger is gnawing at Venezuela, where a government that claims to rule for the poorest has left most of its 31 million people short of food, many desperately so. As night falls over Caracas, and most of the city’s residents lock their doors against its ever more violent streets, Adriana Velásquez gets ready for work, heading out into an uncertain darkness as she has done since hunger forced her into the only job she could find at 14.

She was introduced to her brothel madam by a friend more than two years ago after her mother, a single parent, was fired and the two ran out of food. “It was really hard, but we were going to bed without eating,” said the teenager, whose name has been changed to protect her........The number of children with severe malnutrition who were admitted to the hospital rose from 30 in 2015 to 110 last year, and looks set to climb further this year based on figures from the first half of the year, she said. There has been a subtle shifting in the nature of the problems parents face. Formula for babies who can’t be breastfed was hard to track down anywhere last year, with shortages so severe they claimed the lives of newborns...........To Read More......


My Take -  The long-term effects on malnourished children is incalculable because so much development occurs in the first few years of life.  Nutrient deficiencies early in life can have major implications for these young children and the society in which they live. 

We must understand there's so much foundational development taking place in these children’s first years of life the lack of proper nutrition will not only have short term consequences - but major long-term consequences that will plague a society for decades. 

Immunization deficiencies.  Growth problems. Cognitive issues such as ADD, poor learning ability, lower IQ, difficulty socializing, poor problem solving abilities and even a difficulty in language development.  None of these issues can be resolved with proper nutrition later in life. This is the doom of these poor children This is the crime against humanity Chavez, Maduro and their socialist mob are guilty of.

Let's see if the World Court goes after them. 

 

Feel the Bern: Dan Mitchell on the Soviet Union, Cuba, N. Korea and Venezuela

The Texas Grocery Store that Helped Push the Evil Empire on to the Ash Heap of History

October 4, 2015 by Dan Mitchell

Whenever I need to explain the difference between socialism and capitalism, I start by noting that socialism technically is different from Obama-style big-government redistributionism and cronyism.
Socialism involves something more pervasive, involving government ownership of the means of production (which, if you read this postscript, is why Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom is far more radical than previous Labour Party leaders).

It also means eviscerating the competitive price system as a means of determining value and allocating resources, relying instead on politicians and bureaucrats to arbitrarily wield that power (some American politicians favor this latter approach in certain circumstances).

Needless to say, socialism has an unmatched track record of failure. It was such a disaster than only a few supposedly high-ranked academics (see this postscript) thought it worked.

But what about high-ranked communists who grew up under socialism. Did they think it worked?

The Houston Chronicle dug into its archives to produce a story about an incident that may have played a big role in history. It’s about a senior communist functionary who was exposed to a slice of capitalism.

Yeltsin visited mission control and a mock-up of a space station. According to Houston Chronicle reporter Stefanie Asin, it wasn’t all the screens, dials, and wonder at NASA that blew up his skirt, it was the unscheduled trip inside a nearby Randall’s location. Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,” wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.” …In the Chronicle photos, you can see him marveling at the produce section, the fresh fish market, and the checkout counter. He looked especially excited about frozen pudding pops. “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said.

This random trip to a typical supermarket may have changed history.

About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia. In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia. …“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”

Since the Soviet Union was mired in poverty at the time, Yeltsin presumably was speculating about the potential wealth of his country.

And the good news is that the rigid communism of the Soviet Union is gone. Heck, the Soviet Union doesn’t even exist. Reagan was right when he predicted  the triumph of freedom, with Marxism being relegated to the “ash heap of history.”

But the bad news is that Russia (the most prominent of the 15 nations to emerge after the crackup of the Soviet Union) is a laggard on economic reform. There was a shift away from close-to-pure communism in the 1990s, to be sure, but the country still has a long way to go before it can be considered capitalist.

Here’s a back-of-the-envelope “statism spectrum” that I created. It’s designed to show that there are no pure libertarian paradises, not even Hong Kong. And there are no pure statist dystopias, not even North Korea (though that despotic regime is as close to pure evil as exists in the world).

Russia, I’m guessing, would be somewhere between China and Mexico.



And this gives me a chance to close with an important point.

Perfect economic policy almost surely is an impossible goal. But that’s fine. We can still enjoy good growth so long as we strive to at least move in the right direction. As I explained back in 2012, the private sector is capable of producing impressive results so long as it has sufficient breathing room to operate.

P.S. If you want a simpler and more amusing explanation of different economic systems, here’s the famous “two cows” approach.

P.P.S. The United States isn’t a socialist nation, but we’re not fully immune to that destructive virus. After all, we have a government-run rail company in America, a government-run postal service, a government-run retirement system, and a government-run air traffic control system, all things that would function far more efficiently in the private sector.

The Horrifying Death Throes of Venezuelan Socialism, Captured in 28 Headlines

April 21, 2017 by Dan Mitchell

 

I wrote last year that Venezuela was entering the “fourth circle of statist hell.”
How else, after all, can you describe a government that is so venal and incompetent that it resorts to confiscating toys in an effort to strengthen its hold on power?

I also wrote last year that Atlas was “shrugging” in Venezuela.

But shrugging may soon turn to shrugged. It’s hard to see how Maduro’s despotic regime can hold power much longer. Consider this collection of horrifying stories.
The Washington Post reported:

With inflation spiraling out of control, food and medicine supplies dwindling and violent crimes on the rise, women as young as 27 are seeking out surgeons to avoid unwanted pregnancies. A study by PLAFAM, the biggest family planning clinic in the country, estimates that about 23 percent more Venezuelan women are being sterilized today as compared to four years ago, said the clinic’s director, Enrique Abache. “The financial crisis is one of the main causes for this,” he explained. Years of government mismanagement have fueled what is now a full-blown humanitarian crisis in a country where infant mortality has almost doubled in recent years. …mothers often spend whole days searching for milk powder or diapers. Those who can’t find them are simply forced to go without.

From a story in CapX:

How serious is Venezuela’s crisis? Bad enough that, in 2016, Venezuelans became the top US asylum-seekers… Venezuelan asylum claims increased by 150 per cent from 2015 to 2016. Though Venezuela does not publicly circulate emigration information, estimates suggest that between 700,000 and two million Venezuelans have emigrated since 1999. …Sometimes, from here, it can seem as though the entire population – fed up with shortages of medicine and food, with crime and with the political trajectory of the nation – wants to leave.

Some grim news from the Japan Times:

Julio Noguera…spends his evenings searching through the garbage for food. “I come here looking for food because if I didn’t, I’d starve to death,” Noguera said as he sorted through a pile of moldy potatoes. “With things like they are, no one helps anyone and no one gives away meals.” Across town, unemployed people converge every dusk at a trash heap on a downtown Caracas sidewalk to pick through rotten fruit and vegetables tossed out by nearby shops. They are frequently joined by small business owners, college students and pensioners — people who consider themselves middle class even though their living standards have long ago been pulverized by triple-digit inflation, food shortages and a collapsing currency. …Nearly half of Venezuelans say they can no longer afford to eat three meals a day, according to a recent poll.

The Wall Street Journal opines:

cities around the country…have been hit hard by police, national guard troops and the regime’s paramilitary forces as the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro tries to contain a wildfire of rebellion. …The government is running out of money to buy imports, and since it has crippled domestic production, privation is growing more profound. …Roving bands of government-sponsored militias terrorize civil society as they have for more than a decade. …a 16-year-old girl politely informed Mr. Maduro that students in her school often faint from hunger. …Mr. Maduro was pelted with stones as he left a military rally in Bolívar state… Meanwhile, Mr. Maduro is doubling down on centralized control of a shrinking food supply. …Those who do not support the regime can be cut off.

The thuggery will worsen according to the Washington Free Beacon:

The socialist leader of Venezuela announced in a speech to regime loyalists his plan to arm hundreds of thousands of supporters after a years-long campaign to confiscate civilian-owned guns. …The Venezuelan government justified the gun bans and confiscations by saying they were needed to combat the country’s violent crime and murder epidemic. However, statistics reported by the nonprofit Venezuelan Violence Observatory show the murder rate in Venezuela increased from 73 murders per 100,000 inhabitants the year the gun ban was instituted to 91.8 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016. …As protests and unrest increase in Venezuela, Maduro’s regime has created a landscape where civilians are disarmed but his supporters are not. The latest round of mass demonstrations in the streets of Caracas have already claimed five lives.

Even zoo animals are suffering, as reported by the Miami Herald:

An apparently malnourished African elephant in a Venezuelan zoo — her ribs showing through her sagging skin — has become the latest symbol the deep economic crisis in what was once one of Latin America’s most prosperous nations. …Ruperta is suffering from diarrhea and dehydration after zoo officials only had squash to feed her for several days. According to the newspaper, when neighbors tried to bring food to the elephant over the weekend, the donations were turned away by zoo officials… in a nation where a grinding economic crisis is forcing many to skip meals and go hungry, Ruperta’s fate has touched a nerve. …Román Camacho, a local reporter who broke the story, said a whistle-blower within the park service alerted him that Ruperta had grown so hungry that she collapsed last Thursday. …Also last year, a horse at a local zoo was reportedly butchered by hungry Venezuelans.

The New York Times has noticed:

Venezuela was once one of Latin America’s economic powerhouses… A growing number of Venezuelans are going hungry in a food shortage, and dying from treatable ailments in squalid, ill-equipped hospitals. …Until political prisoners are released, the prospects for a restoration of democratic rule are very dim. …Inflation has soared to an estimated 700 percent, while people in this oil-rich nation are left digging through piles of trash for scraps of food.

Productive people are escaping, Bloomberg reports:

For Venezuelan exiles with money, Madrid has become a home away from home. They are increasingly turning to the Spanish capital as a place to invest as their home country falls further into economic chaos and the political mood turns more sour in U.S. havens such as Miami. The number of Venezuelans arriving in Spain rose more than 50 percent in 2015, according to the Spanish statistics office.

The monetary system is also a disaster reports the New York Times:

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela made a baffling announcement…, saying that his government intended to yank the 100 bolívar note from circulation… Venezuelans, who have endured months of chronic food and medicine shortages, mobbed banks and A.T.M.s in a desperate attempt to offload their stacks of the highest denomination bill, which has become so devalued it is now worth roughly 3 cents in American dollars. …the Maduro government…has spent years…imposing arbitrary currency controls that have made a once prosperous economy one of the world’s most dysfunctional. …Venezuela was expelled from the regional trade bloc Mercosur in early December.

The outflow of people is staggering according to Fox:

Along with basic food, medicine and even toilet paper, Venezuela now lacks the materials to meet to the soaring demand for new passports – making it almost impossible for those few Venezuelans with the monetary means of escaping the troubled Latin American nation to do so. While estimates of how many passport requests the socialist government received last year vary from between 1.8 million to 3 million, only 300,000 of the elusive documents were doled out. Everyday, hundreds of people line up outside the passport agency, known as Saime, in the capital of Caracas in the hopes of obtaining one. It’s an ironic, and yet sad situation, for a country that used to be one of Latin America’s wealthiest and one that was used to seeing people flock to, not away from. …Adding to the overall misery are a drastic rise in violent crime – especially in the capital city of Caracas – rolling blackouts and widespread and often times bloody protests against the government. …since Chávez took power in 1999 nearly 2 million Venezuelans have fled the country and hundreds of thousands are marking their time until they obtains the funds and the passport that will allow them to leave.

Government insiders are getting rich, as noted by the New York Post:

Venezuela is no longer a country with a government, institutions and a civil society. It’s a geographic area terrorized by a criminal enterprise that pretends to govern, with a civil society made up of two sets of people: accomplices and victims. More than 30 million of the latter. …The Hugo Chavez-led looting spree began in 2000. …More than $1 trillion has disappeared… Loving parents are putting their children up for adoption because they have nothing to feed them; the elderly are starving; patients with treatable conditions are dying in hospitals that lack basic medicine like insulin and oxygen, where vital equipment has been pilfered and emergency rooms operate without electricity. …Meanwhile, those in power can focus on what they do best: looting the country’s natural-resource wealth and manufacturing and trafficking illegal narcotics. In fact, Maduro just upped his game by appointing Tareck el-Aissami, a drug kingpin, as vice president.

CNN shares some bad news:

Venezuela only has $10.5 billion in foreign reserves left, according to its most recent central bank data. For rest of the year, Venezuela owes roughly $7.2 billion in outstanding debt payments. In 2011, Venezuela had roughly $30 billion in reserves. In 2015, it had $20 billion. The trend can’t persist much longer, but it’s hard to know exactly when Venezuela will run completely out of cash. …The thinning reserves paint a scary financial picture as the country faces a humanitarian crisis sparked by an economic meltdown. Venezuelans are suffering massive food and medical shortages, as well as skyrocketing grocery prices. Massive government overspending, a crashing currency, mismanagement of the country’s infrastructure and corruption are all factors that have sparked extremely high inflation in Venezuela. Inflation is expected to rise 1,660% this year and 2,880% in 2018, according to the IMF.

A dour column from Real Clear World:

Socialist economic policies and government corruption have destroyed a once-thriving economy sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves. …Index of Economic Freedom…looks at the economic freedom of countries throughout the world. In that period of time, Venezuela’s score has declined the most out of any country, going from 59.8 to 27.0 (on a scale of 1-100). It is now in second-to-last place, right behind Cuba and better only than North Korea. …The World Health Organization estimates that there are shortages for 75 percent of necessary medications and medical supplies such as antibiotics, vaccines, and scalpels. Blackouts resulting from a crumbling energy infrastructure are a daily occurrence. The death of newborns has become a common phenomenon… All the while, Venezuelan government officials have been using oil revenues to line their own pockets.

The Washington Post opines on the disaster:

Venezuela, which was once Latin America’s richest country, has become an unwilling test site for how much economic and social stress a modern nation can tolerate before it descends into pure anarchy. …Venezuelans have struggled with mounting shortages of food, medicine and other consumer goods, as well as triple-digit inflation that has rendered the national currency, the bolivar, worthless. … President Nicolás Maduro, an economically illiterate former bus driver, …also closed Venezuela’s borders with Colombia and Brazil, on the theory that traders were hoarding currency in those countries. …the president is doing his best to blame the United States for the fiasco… Venezuelans no longer believe such nonsense. A survey released this month by pollster Alfredo Keller showed that only 1 percent said the United States was to blame for the country’s crisis, while 76 percent blamed Mr. Maduro and the regime founded by Hugo Chávez. …Only 19 percent said they still supported the regime.

Investor’s Business Daily piles on:

Want to lose weight fast? …Just move to Venezuela. There, the new Socialist Diet has caused the population to lose millions of pounds in 12 months. Unwillingly, of course. …A new study of Venezuela’s stunning decline under Hugo Chavez’s socialist model…reports that the average Venezuelan lost 19 pounds in the last year. Today, the 2016 Living Conditions Survey finds, 32.5% of Venezuelans eat only once or twice a day, up from 11.3% just one year ago. And 93.3% of all people don’t earn enough to buy sufficient food. …Bring socialism to your country, and you bring misery. It’s the one thing that socialism produces an abundance of. …formerly middle-class Venezuelans scavenge for food — some even stooping to dumpster diving and eating formerly beloved pets just to stay alive — socialists allied with Maduro have changed nothing. …rule of law has been rejected for the rule of one tyrant. Children aren’t spared; they’re dying by the hundreds from curable diseases, a lack of medicine, electricity outages and no incubators for newborns.

Some heartbreak from the New York Times:

Kevin Lara Lugo…died on his 16th birthday.He spent the day before foraging for food in an empty lot, because there was nothing to eat at home. Then in a hospital because what he found made him gravely ill.Hours later, he was dead on a gurney, which doctors rolled by his mother as she watched helplessly. She said the hospital had lacked the simplest supplies needed to save him on that day last July. … Inflation has driven office workers to abandon the cities and head to illegal pit mines in the jungle, willing to subject themselves to armed gangs and multiple bouts of malaria for the chance to earn a living. Doctors have prepared to operate on bloody tables because they did not have enough water to clean them. Psychiatric patients have had to be tied to chairs in mental hospitals because there was no medication left to treat their delusions. Hunger has driven some people to riot — and others into rickety fishing boats, fleeing Venezuela on reckless journeys by sea. But it was the story of a boy with no food, who had gone searching for wild roots to eat but ended up poisoning himself instead, that seemed to embody everything that had gone wrong in Venezuela.

Peak socialism, as reported by Foreign Policy:

A fleet of rundown Venezuelan oil tankers carrying some 4 million barrels of oil and other fuels is wallowing in the Caribbean Sea. Not because of bad weather, or mechanical problems, but because Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, doesn’t have the cash to get them to their final destinations. …it’s doubly bad news for Venezuela, a country in dire economic straits and full-fledged crisis, with a political impasse, looting, dangerous food and health supply shortages, and massive protests. Venezuela is massively reliant on oil exports to bankroll government services. But the cash-strapped country can’t even find the money to service the vessels that carry its exports. …Venezuela, once Latin America’s most powerful petrostate, is on the brink of collapse after decades of economic mismanagement.

More on insider corruption, exposed by the Washington Post:

Formerly a stable, sophisticated, middle-income country awash in oil wealth, Venezuela has experienced a dizzying downward spiral over the past two years. Today, Venezuela’s is arguably the world’s worst-run economy. Food shortages are pervasive, and food prices are rising fast — a deadly combination that has left millions unable to find enough to eat. …Why doesn’t the army rebel? …we have the genuinely shocking answer: Far from rebelling, Venezuela’s armed forces actively profit from their countrymen’s hunger.This year, President Nicolás Maduro granted the armed forces virtually unlimited authority over the nation’s food imports and distribution. Domestic food production is down sharply in the wake of a botched land reform program, meaning imports now account for most of the nation’s food. But putting the military in charge of this delicate domain has led to an explosion of corruption, as well-connected officers mercilessly prey on every part of the distribution chain, from the initial contracts and the foreign currency needed to fund them to storage, transportation and distribution. …A government that bills itself as radically pro-poor in fact drips with contempt for the poor.

More tragic sadness, this time from Reuters:

Struggling to feed herself and her seven children, Venezuelan mother Zulay Pulgar asked a neighbor in October to take over care of her six-year-old daughter, a victim of a pummeling economic crisis. …”It’s better that she has another family than go into prostitution, drugs or die of hunger,” the 43-year-old unemployed mother said… With average wages less than the equivalent of $50 a month at black market rates, three local councils and four national welfare groups all confirmed an increase in parents handing children over to the state, charities or friends and family. …the trend highlights Venezuela’s fraying social fabric and the heavy toll that a deep recession and soaring inflation are taking on the country with the world’s largest oil reserves. …most economists pin the responsibility on socialist policies introduced by former president Hugo Chavez, which his successor Nicolas Maduro has doubled down on… Two-thirds of 1,099 households with children in Caracas, ranging across social classes, said they were not eating enough in a survey released last week by children’s’ rights group… In some cases, parents are simply abandoning their kids. Last month, a baby boy was found inside a bag in a relatively wealthy area of Caracas and a malnourished one-year-old boy was found abandoned in a cardboard box in the eastern city of Ciudad Guayana, local media reported. …There are also more cases of children begging or prostituting themselves

Even Vox is aware of the problem:

…new data capturing the woes of the once well-heeled South American nation is shocking: According to new results from an annual national survey, nearly three-quarters of respondents reported losing an average of 19 pounds between 2015 and 2016. …Shortages of food, medicine, and many basic items abound in what was once the richest country in South America per capita in the 20th century. Malaria is ravaging a country that was the first in the world to eliminate the disease in its populated areas. Now there’s evidence that the economic chaos is translating into a malnutrition crisis… Alejandro Velasco, a scholar of Latin American history at New York University, believes Chávez’s model of socialism…”strangled the already meager productive apparatus of Venezuela,” he explained during an interview in January. …Chávez’s spending regime also left the country acutely vulnerable to emergency. Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Center for International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School, notes…that Chávez’s government.. “over-spent and quintupled the public foreign debt.”

The Economist has given up on Venezuelan statism:

Every weekday morning, a queue of several dozen forlorn people forms outside the dingy headquarters of SAIME, Venezuela’s passport agency. As shortages and violence have made life in the country less bearable, more people are applying for passports so they can go somewhere else. …As desperation rises, so does the intransigence of Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” regime, whose policies have ruined the economy and sabotaged democracy. The economy shrank by 18.6% last year, according to an estimate by the central bank, leaked this month to Reuters… Inflation was 800%. …In 2001 Venezuela was the richest country in South America; it is now among the poorest.

Venezuela is even begging at the UN according to the Associated Press:

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has asked the United Nations for “help” boosting medicine supplies as he struggles to combat crippling shortages. …acknowledging that Venezuela needs outside help is a telling sign of how far the nation sitting atop the world’s largest petroleum reserves has fallen under Maduro. …Venezuelans…have been suffering from widespread shortages and triple-digit inflation… OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro is pushing to expel Maduro’s government from the group for breaking the country’s democratic order and violating human rights. Maduro’s government disavowed a landslide loss to the opposition in legislative elections in 2015, and then suspended a recall campaign seeking to force him from office before the 2018 election.

Bloomberg notes that an oil-rich nation even has shortages of gas:

…drivers lined up at filling stations amid a worsening shortage of fuel. While Petroleos de Venezuela SA says the situation is normalizing and blamed the lines on transport delays, the opposition says the company has had to reduce costly fuel imports as it tries to preserve cash to pay its foreign debt. …As the company’s crumbling refineries fail to meet domestic demand, imports have become a financial burden because the country buys fuel abroad at market prices only to sell it for pennies per gallon at home. … “It’s unbelievable that this is happening in an oil producing country.” …The hunt for gasoline is just the latest headache for consumers after years of severe economic contraction and triple-digit inflation have produced shortages of everything from bread to antibiotics.

The Miami Herald reports the government is making it even harder for hungry people to get fed:

Facing a bread shortage that is spawning massive lines and souring the national mood, the Venezuelan government is responding this week by detaining bakers and seizing establishments. In a press release, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights said it had charged four people and temporarily seized two bakeries as the socialist administration accused bakers of being part of a broad “economic war” aimed at destabilizing the country. …The government said bakeries are only allowed to produce French bread and white loaves, or pan canilla, with government-imported flour. …The notion that bread could become an issue in Venezuela is one more indictment of an economic system gone bust. The country boasts the world’s largest oil reserves but it has to import just about everything else. …President Nicolás Maduro launched “Plan 700” against what he called a “bread war,” ordering officials to do spot checks of bakeries nationwide.

And there’s always more bad policy, as Reuters reports:

Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro announced on Sunday a 50 percent hike in the minimum wage and pensions, the fifth increase over the last year… “In times of economic war and mafia attacks …we must protect employment and workers’ income,” added Maduro, who has now increased the minimum wage by a cumulative 322 percent since February 2016. …critics say his incompetence, and 17 years of failed socialist policies, are behind Venezuela’s economic mess. They say the constant minimum wage hikes symbolize Maduro’s policy failures… Venezuela’s inflation hit 181 percent in 2015, according to official data, though opponents say the true figure was higher. There is no official data for 2016, but…inflation was more than 500 percent in 2016, while the economy shrank 12 percent.

Which means, per the AP, more people want to leave:

Venezuelans for the first time led asylum requests to the United States as the country’s middle class fled the crashing, oil-dependent economy. Data from the U.S. government’s Citizenship and Immigration Services show that 18,155 Venezuelans submitted asylum requests last year, a 150 percent increase over 2015 and six times the level seen in 2014. …The vast majority leaving are middle-class Venezuelans who don’t qualify for refugee status reserved for those seeking to escape political persecution, according to Julio Henriquez, director of the Boston-based nonprofit Refugee Freedom Program, which has been drawing attention to the trend. “The pace at which requests are increasing is alarming,” said Henriquez, whose group obtained the still-unpublished data in a Feb. 8 meeting between U.S. officials and immigration lawyers.

And the government is engaged in more looting, MSN reports:

General Motors said it has been forced to stop operating in Venezuela on Wednesday after one of its plants was illegally seized by local authorities. The seizure, in the country’s industrial hub of Valencia, comes amid a deepening economic and political crisis that has sparked weeks of deadly street protests. …The auto giant did not provide any details about its plant being seized, other than saying it “was unexpectedly taken by authorities, preventing normal operations.” It said other assets, “such as vehicles,” had also been stripped from the site. …Venezuela’s car industry has been in freefall, hit by a lack of raw materials stemming from complex currency controls and stagnant local production, and many plants are barely producing at all. Venezuela’s government has taken over factories in the past. In 2014 the government announced the “temporary” takeover of two plants belonging to U.S. cleaning products maker Clorox Co.

Last but not least, here’s a column from the Week:

Venezuela cannot wake up from its socialist nightmare. …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. …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…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. …The whole of Venezuelan society is breaking down at a fundamental level. …It is truly heartbreaking. …And I blame socialism. …And now it’s Venezuelans, especially the poorest and more marginal among them, who are paying the price for this madness.

Let’s close with a video on the tragic situation in Venezuela.



I wonder if Bernie Sanders still thinks this is a system worth supporting?

P.S. I have to confess that this huge collection of 28 stories accumulated because I was dating someone who is a fervid supporter of Maduro’s government (a lovely but misguided lass), and I decided that it wouldn’t be very diplomatic for me to write about the mess in that country. Now that the relationship is over, there’s no downside if I vent my spleen on that cesspool of corrupt statism.

The Economic Misery of Cuban Communism

September 4, 2016 by Dan Mitchell

 

Communism should be remembered first and foremost for the death, brutality, and repression that occurred whenever that evil system was imposed upon a nation.

Dictators like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the North Korean Kim dynasty either killed more than Hitler, or butchered higher proportions of their populations.

But let’s not forget that communism also has an awful economic legacy. The economic breakdown of the Soviet Empire. The horrid deprivation in North Korea. The giant gap that existed between West Germany and East Germany. The mass poverty in China before partial liberalization.

Today, let’s focus on how communism has severely crippled the Cuban economy.

In a column for Reason a few years ago, Steven Chapman accurately summarized the problems in that long-suffering nation.

There may yet be admirers of Cuban communism in certain precincts of Berkeley or Cambridge, but it’s hard to find them in Havana. …the average Cuban makes only about $20 a month—which is a bit spartan even if you add in free housing, food, and medical care. For that matter, the free stuff is not so easy to come by: Food shortages are frequent, the stock of adequate housing has shrunk, and hospital patients often have to bring their own sheets, food, and even medical supplies. …Roger Noriega, a researcher at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, notes that before communism arrived, Cuba “was one of the most prosperous and egalitarian societies of the Americas.” His colleague Nicholas Eberstadt has documented that pre-Castro Cuba had a high rate of literacy and a life expectancy surpassing that in Spain, Greece, and Portugal. Instead of accelerating development, Castro has hindered it. In 1980, living standards in Chile were double those in Cuba. Thanks to bold free-market reforms implemented in Chile but not Cuba, the average Chilean’s income now appears to be four times higher than the average Cuban’s. …In its latest annual report, Human Rights Watch says, “Cuba remains the one country in Latin America that represses virtually all forms of political dissent.”

The comparison between Chile and Cuba is especially apt since the pro-market reforms in the South American nation came after a coup against a Marxist government that severely weakened the Chilean economy.

Chapman points out that the standard leftist excuse for Cuban misery – the U.S. trade embargo – isn’t very legitimate.

The regime prefers to blame any problems on the Yankee imperialists, who have enforced an economic embargo for decades. In fact, its effect on the Cuban economy is modest, since Cuba trades freely with the rest of the world.

Since the U.S. accounts for nearly one-fourth of world economic output, I’m open to the hypothesis that the negative impact on Cuba is more than “modest.”

But it still would be just a partial explanation. Just remember that communist societies have always been economic basket cases even if they have unfettered ability to trade with all other nations.

Writing for the Huffington Post (hardly a pro-capitalism outfit), Terry Savage also explains that Cuba is an economic disaster.

…the economic consequences of a 50-year, totalitarian, socialistic experiment in government are obvious today. Cuba is a beautiful country filled with many friendly people, who have lived in poverty and deprivation for decades. Socialism in its purest form simply didn’t work there. I was immediately reminded of that old saying: “Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth – but socialism is the equal distribution of poverty.” Once-magnificent buildings are literally crumbling, plaster falling and walls and stairways falling apart, as there are no ownership incentives to maintain them – or profit potential to incent their preservation. …Every Cuban gets a ration book and an assigned “bodega” in which to purchase the low-cost, subsidized food. The one I visited looked like an empty warehouse, with little on the shelves. If the rice, beans, eggs, and cooking oil are not in stock, the shopper must return the following week. Allowed five eggs per month, the basics barely cover a starvation existence. …the economic results of their 50-year rule have been abysmal. Cuba became a protectorate of the old Soviet Union (remember the Cuban missile crisis) -and that worked until the early 1990s, when the USSR fell apart. No longer receiving aid from its protector, Cuba entered a long period now remembered as “the special times” – when Cubans were literally starving, when there was electricity only two hours per day, and people turned any patch of dirt into a garden to survive. Cubans bear the scars of that terrible time, and for many the current situation is still not that much better.

So Cuba was a basket case that was subsidized by the Soviet Union. When the Evil Empire collapsed and the subsidies ended, the basket case became a hellhole.

The good news, if we’re grading on a curve, is that Cuba has now improved to again being a basket case.
But that improvement still leaves Cuba with a lot of room for improvement. It may not be at the level of North Korea, but it’s worse than Venezuela, and that’s saying something.
My friend Michel Kelly-Gagnon of the Montreal Economic Institute echoes the horrid news about Cuba’s economy.

As anyone who has spent any amount of time in Cuba outside the tourist compounds can tell you, socialism, particularly the unsubsidized version that we have seen since the fall of the Soviet empire, has been a disaster. …The hospitals which supposedly offer free care only do so quickly and effectively to the politically connected, friends and family of staff members, and to those who pay the largest bribes… That “free” university education that many Cubans get in technical fields is rarely worth much more than what students pay for it. There are few books in the country’s schools, and those that can be found are years, if not decades old. The country’s libraries are empty… The guaranteed jobs that all Cubans have are fine, until you realize that the average salary is in the range of $20 a month. Worse, the food and other staple allotments that Cubans have long felt entitled to, have shrunk over the years. Tourists often marvel at how thin and healthy Cubans look. Sadly many of them are outright hungry.

Though Michel includes a bit of optimism in his column, pointing out that there’s been a modest bit of economic liberalization (a point that I’ve also made, even to the point of joking about whether we should trade Obama for Castro).

Communist Cuba, beset with an oppressive bureaucracy, an anachronistic cradle-to-grave welfare state, a hopelessly subpar economy, and widespread poverty, is gradually shifting to private sector solutions. Starting when Raul Castro “temporarily” took over power from his brother Fidel six years ago and culminating with the Communist party’s approval of a major package of reforms…, Cuba has taken a series of increasingly bold steps to implement free market reforms. These range from providing entrepreneurs with increased flexibility to run small businesses, and use of state agricultural lands by individual farmers, to the elimination of a variety of burdensome rules and regulations. Ironically, there is a lot that Canadians…can learn from that shift.

And there’s a lot the United States can learn, particularly our President, who is so deluded that he said there are (presumably positive) things America can learn from Cuba.

One common talking point from Cuban sympathizers is that the country has done a good job of reducing infant mortality. But, as Johan Norberg explains, that claim largely evaporates upon closer examination.



The bottom line is that communism is a system that is grossly inconsistent with both human freedom and economic liberty.

And because it squashes economic liberty (thanks to central planning, price controls, and the various other features of total statism), that ensures mass poverty.

Amazingly, there are still some leftists who want us to believe that communism would work if “good people” were in charge. I guess they don’t understand that good people, by definition, don’t want to control the lives of others.

 

P.S. No analysis of Cuba would be complete without noting the bizarre fetish of some leftists to wear t-shirts celebrating the homicidal racist Che Guevara. What’s next, baseball caps featuring Kim Jong-un. Computer screen savers featuring Hermann Göring? Pol Pot bobble head dolls?

There are some sick weirdos in this world to defend any form of coercive statism.


P.S. Here’s my only communist-themed joke (other than the video of Reagan’s jokes about communism).

P.P.S. At the advice of a reader, let me add one more point. Probably the most amazing indictment of communism is that living standards in Cuba when Castro took power were about even with living standards in Hong Kong. Today, the gap between the two is enormous.

 

The Brutal Impact of North Korean Statism

December 19, 2011 by Dan Mitchell

 

One hopes that the dictator of North Korea suffered greatly before he died. After all, his totalitarian and communist (pardon the redundancy) policies caused untold death and misery.

But let’s try to learn an economics lesson. In a previous post, I compared  long-term growth in Hong Kong and Argentina to show the difference between capitalism and cronyism.

But for a much more dramatic comparison, look at the difference between North Korea and South Korea. Hmmm…, I wonder if we can conclude that markets are better than statism?

 

And if you like these types of comparisons, here’s a post showing how Singapore has caught up with the United States. And here’s another comparing what’s happened in the past 30 years in Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela.