Venezuela

How inflated is Venezuelan currency? So inflated that even thieves in Venezuela are refusing to steal it.  This has been reported in several media outlets such as the New York Times and Vox but a certain word is very noticebably absent in both reports. It is the S-word that dare not speak its name. One big reason it is taboo in liberal circles to associate that word with economic failure is that…

Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro presides over a country which is falling apart thanks to the socialist policies of his government and that of his predecessor Hugo Chavez. The Economist describes the period since Chavez took over in 1998 as that of "authoritarian misrule" characterized by "by shortages of everything from poultry to pharmaceuticals, by inflation approaching 200% and by rampant…

As Venezuela's Chavista economy under Nicolas Maduro continues to crumble, the Associated Press and others in the media to describe its problems as if they came out of nowhere instead of originating with its statist, oppressive government. Examples follow the jump.

The news out of Venezuela has apparently become so grim that the arguably Chavista-sympathetic press barely bothers to report it in any kind of sutstantive fashion. Inflation has gone wild, the level of violent crime has become frightening, and the government has taken to jailing citizens who dare to tweet their dissatisfaction with the regime of Nicolas Makuro (note that the linked report was…

A Reuters report published late Saturday evening ("Obama meets Venezuela's Maduro at time of high tensions") is astonishing for what it ignores. The unbylined report from Panama City opens by referring to how "the United States recently placed sanctions on Venezuela." Indeed, President Barack Obama did just that in an executive order on March 9, stating that he was "declaring a national…

On Thursday night’s PBS NewsHour, they devoted two segments to the forthcoming Summit of the Americas and like Andrea Mitchell, PBS correspondent Margaret Warner felt it necessary to document how Latin American countries think Team Obama’s actions toward Venezuela “smacked of U.S. bullying” and even “imperialist meddling.” It might seem a bit perverse, but the government-funded channel was…

Throughout her MSNBC show on Thursday from Panama at the Summit of the Americas, host Andrea Mitchell wrung her hands over the Obama administration actually trying to stand up to a Latin American dictator: "...there are other issues here, including recent sanctions by the U.S. against Venezuela, which have really upset the Cubans and a lot of America's close allies here, Costa Rica and Colombia…

Daniel Pardo of BBC Mundo went on a shopping spree to see how many household goods he could find while waiting on the notoriously long lines in Venezuela. On the first day he was able to obtain a grand total of only three items out of a shopping list of eight but promised he would return the next day to see if he could get any of the rest. Well, as far as the world knows tomorrow never came. In…

Daniel Pardo of BBC Mundo provides us with an interesting report, namely how long does it take to purchase basic home products while waiting on the notoriosly long lines at the stores in Venezuela. Unfortunately, although Pardo shows us how tough it is to buy these products he fails to give us the why even though the answer is written on wall posters all over that country. The S-word that dare…

General Electric Vox published a photo essay about the crises in Venezuela.  The photos of the protests were picturesque but something important was missing. It was especially noticeable when the essay by Amanda Taub, 11 stunning photos of the protest movement sweeping Venezuela, touched on the dismal economy. Therefore the most stunning thing about the essay wasn't the photos but the very…

The latest report out of Venezuela by the Associated Press's Hannah Dreier has a time stamp of 1:15 p.m. today. This means that the wire service has had plenty of time to report, and has chosen not to report, a powerful pastoral letter issued yesterday by that country's Catholic bishops (original in Spanish; full Google Translation) denouncing that country's descent into a system they described…

Three results returned in a search at the Associated Press's national site on "Venezuela" tell us almost nothing about that country's deepening economic crisis. An unbylined January 10 item reports on the visit of Nicolas Maduro, the country's de facto dictator, to Iran in hopes of "stabilizing" (i.e., raising) oil prices. A second unbylined report on January 9 tells readers that there's really…

It's amazing how any reporter can cover the deepening economic crisis in Venezuela without saying a word about how the country got there. But Associated Press reporter Hannah Dreier was up to the task. In a bizarre, sickening November 20 report on how its people are having to get "creative" in the face of chronic shortages of basic goods to get by, she acted as if those shortages — and the over…

Does Sean Penn party down with the new socialist owners of Globovision? The upside is that, while discussing Thomas Piketty's tome on income inequality, they can relax in the luxury of one of their South Florida mansions. While the citizens of oil rich Venezuela reap the benefits of Chavista socialism by standing on long lines for hours to buy toilet paper and other basic commodities, if the…