Top Defector Tells of Spying, Stealing and Mutiny in Venezuela

This is what Socialism looks like.

Days after being named chief of Venezuela’s feared Sebin intelligence agency last fall, General Manuel Ricardo Cristopher Figuera was called in by President Nicolas Maduro and asked where the enemy was.

“I don’t understand the question, sir,” Figuera says he responded.

“I want a report every two hours of what the political opposition is doing,” Maduro replied, listing some of the 30 politicians whose whereabouts and activities were to be surveilled. Reports, he said, needed to be sent not only to him but to his wife, Cilia Flores, and to Vice President Delcy Rodriguez. The monitoring involved spreadsheets with photos, mobile phone taps and round-the-clock shifts of on-the-ground four-agent teams observing movements and meetings.

Figuera, the most significant Venezuelan defector of the past two decades, is in the U.S. offering details of Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian rule and the schemes by which he, his family and associates embezzle the proceeds of oil, gold and other national treasures as the once-wealthy nation of 30 million descends into chaos and starvation.

Read the whole thing.

An 'Almost Unimaginable' Crisis In Venezuela

Keep in mind that only a few years ago American Leftists (that includes Hollywood stars and the MSM) hailed Venezuela as a beacon of light in South America.  They said it was the way Socialism should be implemented.

Green Poverty

How rapidly can Democrats turn the U.S. into Venezuela?

Senator Kamala Harris has pledged to follow the “New Green Deal” currently championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In other words, if enacted, the Democrats, within ten years of passing the bill, would favor ending all “nonrenewable” sources of electrical generation (natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear) — or 83 percent of all the current ways that we produce electrical energy. Would the government go after classic Corvettes, confiscate Priuses, and electrify NASCAR? Outlaw gas lawn mowers and chain saws? Confiscate leaf blowers? Would Nancy Pelosi board a private solar- or battery-powered jet? Would Silicon Valley yachts rely on wind and sail?

We get almost no information about the real costs, much less the effect on the now booming U.S. energy sector. America is currently the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. Energy production is a vital source of national wealth, central to millions of American workers, and perhaps the greatest subsidy of middle-class lifestyles, through inexpensive fuel. Would fracking and horizontal drilling become like corn-mash stills during Prohibition?

The New Green Deal would wipe out the economies of a broad swath of states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Such legislation would make Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign blunder—“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—seem in comparison not a major gaffe, but timid and counterrevolutionary.

Are they everywhere or are we paranoid?

Richard Fernandez @ Belmont Club

To hear tell there are now racists and Nazis everywhere. They lie in wait on freezing streets waiting to victimize people of color. They surround hapless native Americans in Washington with insulting smirks. They are depicted as driving around in trucks flying confederate flags chasing minority children. Racists are even able to masquerade as Democratic officials. Is there nothing they can't do?...

The year 2016 was a traumatic experience, shattering left wing sense of safety and dominance. Hillary's defeat -- and to a lesser extent Brexit and the rise of populism in Europe -- demonstrated the astonishing fragility of the mainstream liberal project and provided shocking proof that "the plague never dies". The boogeymen the progressives seek to exterminate can apparently resist any fumigation, indoctrination or persuasion leaving liberal activists like those characters in horror movies who shoot at Dracula without effect. This in turn led to renewed interest in outright socialism among Democrats. If Hillary and her billions proved useless against the MAGA werewolf perhaps Bernie Sanders and AOC have the silver bullet.

The alternative explanation is that there were serious defects in the liberal project and the pushback is due to those defects and not to some racist virus. That would explain 2016 too. Perhaps the most powerful contribution of the revolt against Bolivarianism in Venezuela is how it demonstrates that poor brown people can rise up against socialism without being members of the KKK. It's not always race but the economic system that makes the difference.

But this can hardly be persuasive to true believers for whom gender, race and sexual politics explain history. For them abortion, high taxes and a giant state are articles of faith and challenging them is evil. Words, arguments or symbolic proofs are largely useless against strongly held beliefs. Only experience can falsify -- and only temporarily -- cultic belief. In this respect Venezuela is also instructive. It changed. For decades Venezuela's poor held loyal to the belief that the socialists were on "their side". Now they are fighting Maduro....

Is the return of racists and Nazis the explanation for the current headlines? Or are people genuinely rising up against bloated incompetence? Time will tell. Reality always tells us which model is correct.

Venezuela is now a dictatorship

Looting the country is the entire point of stealing elections

In Venezuela, hungry child gangs use machetes to fight for ‘quality’ garbage

Where socialism always ends.

Lose weight the Venezuela way.

Being the ex-President's daughter pays off: Hugo Chavez's ambassador daughter is Venezuela's richest woman

FUNNY, YOU SEE THIS KIND OF COINCIDENCE A LOT IN SOCIALIST PARADISES

After her father's death in 2013 and until her appointment to the United Nations as alternate ambassador, Chavez continued to live in the presidential mansion, forcing the current president Nicolas Maduro to remain at the vice presidential home

The daughter of Hugo Chavez, the former president who once declared 'being rich is bad,' may be the wealthiest woman in Venezuela, according to evidence reportedly in the hands of Venezuelan media outlets.

Maria Gabriela Chavez, 35, the late president's second-oldest daughter, holds assets in American and Andorran banks totaling almost $4.2billion, Diario las Americas reports.

The figure would make Gabriela Chavez wealthier than media mogul Gustavo Cisneros, whom Forbes named the wealthiest Venezuelan earlier this year with $3.6billion in assets.

It seems that one of the best roads to riches is to be a socialist denouncing the rich while taking huge bribes.

Oh, Hillary?