Ah, Chavez No Se Va!

[Socialistlemur]

1. Sheer baloney

Chavez left a mess behind. All this Chavez worship is going on against a backdrop of urgent measures, sackings, arrests, and other moves made by the new Venezuelan government to fix what was essentially a sinking ship and a failing society.

What are we seeing? Moves to place the military on the street and a new gun control law to try to curb crime, which is horrendous. A tougher stance against corruption which had become a real cancer, a new lady Defense Minister, much more honest than the guy Chavez left behind. A devaluation (unfortunately this was botched because they shut down the secondary market). And we've seen timid moves by the government to raise price controls.

They still have a long, long, long way to go because their moves seem to have a heavy dose of Cuban advice, and the cubans aren't exactly rocket scientists right now....they are changing to a Chinese style capitalist system and they have internal conflicts as the Castro system is dismantled. Overall I think having Cubans give Maduro advice is good, but the Cubans themselves ought to realize Chinese style fascism isn't a good idea.

And somebody please tell me why it's a good idea for Venezuela to give away gasoline. This was a practice which became much worse under Chavez when they failed to raise prices even though inflation was running 10 to 30 % per year.