Hugo Chavez

[GG]

Yes, it did. I was involved with part of it.

 

In 2010?

[Bigfatbillsfan]

The problem with jokes like that is that when you're as big an idiot as you are, people can't tell the joke from your normal, everyday stupidity. You are joking, right?

 

Yes dipshit. That was a joke.

[DC Tom]

Yes dipshit. That was a joke.

 

Looked like your everyday stupidity.

 

In 2010?

 

Circa 2007.

[Magox]

So here is a stat provided by ECLAC United Nations Economic Commission and Latin America and the Caribbean ... Credible enough

 

edit: I tried to drag the chart here but was unable to

 

Here is the link below to see the chart, it's at the bottom

 

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21573095-after-14-years-oil-fuelled-autocracy-hugo-ch%C3%A1vezs-successors-will-struggle-keep

 

 

So the big stat that some of the sympathizers were bringing up was the Poverty rate. On the surface it looked pretty good, but when you decide to delve into the numbers there are some obvious reasons to why this happened. The chart in the link shows the poverty rate of Peru, Brazil and all of Latin America. The Poverty rate declined even more so Peru and Brazil and virtually just about the same through out all of America. Relatively speaking, the decline in the poverty rate in Venezuela was nothing out of the norm. It's quite natural to see a country who benefited off the explosion of Oil revenues to see the poverty rate decline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another interesting stat that I read was that the public sector force more than doubled during his tenure. Considering that he ran large deficits and was completely at the mercy of elevated oil prices, what would happen to that public sector force once prices decide to drop? I think the answer is obvious.

[B-Man]

Dramatic exit: Heads of state gather for Hugo Chavez's funeral

 

More than two dozen world leaders bid farewell Friday to the late Hugo Chavez at a lengthy, emotional funeral where the Rev. Jesse Jackson portrayed the Venezuelan president as a hero of the poor, while pushing for the nation’s rapprochement with the United States.

"How do we measure a great leader? By how he treats the least of these," Jackson said in his eulogy, standing before Chavez’s flag-draped coffin at the military academy in Caracas. "Hugo fed the hungry. He lifted the poor. He raised their hopes. He helped them realize their dreams."

 

Jackson was joined at the service by row after row of dark-suited heads of state – including Cuban President Raul Castro and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Movie star Sean Penn appeared — a testament to the socialist showman’s Hollywood appeal

 

 

 

 

 

Hmmm, row after row of heads of state.....................but those are the four identified by MSNBC

 

perhaps the bigger countries are sitting in the back ?

 

or perhaps, "world reaction" to this 'leader's' funeral isn't quite what some would want you to believe.

 

 

.

[B-Man]

What the Left Doesn’t Know about Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan Supporters

Mario Loyola

 

As was the case with Fidel Castro, there are basically two kinds of people who supported Hugo Chávez. The kind that predominated outside of Venezuela liked him because (a) he was anti-American like them, and (b) they don’t know anything. The kind that predominated inside Venezuela supported him because (a) he was lower class like them, and (b) he gave the upper classes their long-overdue comeuppance, by whatever means necessary.

 

Presumably, even a ranting idiot such as London’s Ken Livingstone didn’t support Chávez in overturning the Venezuelan constitution by fiat, silencing the free press, and ransacking opposition offices, TV stations, and Jewish community centers. Like the fellows over at The Nation , most Chávez supporters outside of Venezuela don’t know anything about all that. They’re like the left-wing journalists who spent decades travelling to Cuba without ever noticing Castro’s terror-police dictatorship. They couldn’t be accused of justifying it — they never even knew it was there!

 

There is a very big difference between that and Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan supporters. The latter don’t have the excuse of utter ignorance. They know all the cruel things he did. They love him for it. They love the fact that he punished those “squealing pigs” and “vampires” in Venezuela’s capitalist classes, and never let bourgeois constructs like “due process” get in his way. They s!@#$ed when his thugs beat up “pro-democracy” activists among university students and ransacked the offices of opposition television stations and political candidates. They pumped their fists when they heard the nationalist-socialist slogan of his revolution — “Fatherland! Socialism! Or Death!” They nodded approvingly when he warned Venezuela’s Jews to tell “their government” to stop enslaving the Palestinians. When he humiliated opposition leaders in public, dismissing them as “flies,” they beamed.

 

The moral of the story in Venezuela is the same as for the Cuban Revolution. Never underestimate how much people enjoy being sadistic toward one another once the politics of vengeance has given them a taste of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Edited March 8, 2013 by B-Man