We're supposed to believe that Venezuela's socialist experiment has resulted in toilet paper shortages and unchecked crime, remember?

by telenovelas and spiderman. And the government's policies and corruption have indeed caused tp shortages and unchecked crime to flourish.

the Millennium Project and other outside entities, on Venezuela's previous, amazing accomplishments on reducing poverty. Last year, the UNECLAC designated Venezuela "THE most equal country in Latin America" on income distribution. No reason to disbelieve these recent stats.

TP shortage (manipulated by RW businessmen, re "make the economy scream&quot (Henry Kissinger) and gov't jawboning about media violence have nothing to do with poverty statistics, except that both negative stories are played up by the RW/corporate media and their blogger echo-chamber, while Venezuela's repeatedly confirmed poverty reduction is completely ignored.

Scoffing, sneering, snorting, braying, disinforming, lying about this, like Venezuela's own fascists and their Washington DC tutors, doesn't change the reality that Venezuela's socialists have drastically reduced poverty, but it does, and has, confused a lot of people HERE. That is what "lying liars" do, as Al Franken pointed out. If you get your information from the Wall Street Urinal & brethren, you're bound to miss and/or piss on the truth about poverty reduction in Venezuela, among other things.

to make continual noise about the repeating items on a list, all arranged to cycle endlessly, in order to conceal the deep, and vast change taking place quietly as the foundation gets rebuilt.

Our own right-wing pushers, shovers, and grabbers don't want a single citizen here to know how important this change is, as they absolutely won't allow their choke hold on the US public to lessen, not one bit, and they will spend every cent of our tax dollars to prevent it, and protect themselves with every last drop of the country's soldiers' blood.

Unless you mean the foundation for a country wide gulag. Venezuela is doomed. It's Cuban masters just can't handle the transition to their irrational fascism, which only works because they know how to abuse human rights so well. Maybe the flight of oil field workers and experts will get them. No oil, no petrodollars, bye bye Cuban parasites.

All your friends are moving to the poshest properties. And you should see their yachts and Florida bank accounts.

It's more a mish mash of populist militaristic fascism with communists sprinkled in like chocolate chips on a cookie. The crime wave is real. Poverty is up this year due to massive inflation. There are food shortages. And things really look grim, with democracy finished off. The brain drain continues, they devalued the currency this week. But the new rate is 11.4 and the black market is 75 bolivars per dollar (when Chavez was president the rate was 4.3 official and black market was 9).

So it looks really grim. Argentinas currency collapsed when foreign reserves hit $30 billion. Venezuela's are at $21 billion so this explains why Venezuela is in such bad shape. They are nearly broke.