Juan Carlos Gabaldón has a great piece posted at Caracas Chronicles on the secondary effects of the electrical blackout. He points out that water systems need electricity to pump into homes so that many parts of Caracas have been out of water for nearly a month now. And the sewer systems require water to drain…
I’ve felt obliged by the current polarized politics to engage in polemics recently, taking on Noam Chomsky and the solidarity Left in two recent articles. My new tack has caused one acquaintance to criticize me and unsubscribe from my mailing list (yes, you CAN subscribe by sending me an email to clifross [at]gmail.com or scrolling…
“President” Nicolás Maduro has never been good at taking responsibility for anything at all but he, like his US homologue, Donald Trump, is very good at deflecting blame and lying to cover up his irresponsibility, incompetence and crimes. And so as the blackout dragged into its third day in Venezuela Maduro claimed on Twitter that…
I wrote about the blackouts in Venezuela three years ago in a post I put up at Dissident Voice. It gives some background on the possible reasons for the nation-wide blackout over the past couple of days (March 7-8). I’ve been out of the country for the past month and without a computer so I…
The transcript of my interview with Bob Zadek is now up at the Medium.com website along with a link to the interview itself. You can read it or listen to it here. I’m now in Argentina en route to Uruguay where my co-director Arturo Albarrán and I will be showing our movie and working on…
I’m tired of reading about myself as I’m not likely to learn anything at all new from the interviews I’ve done. But they may be of interest to you, and I’m grateful to Emily Avendaño for taking an interest and doing a nice job on this (even if I only skimmed it). La conversión de…
I’m posting this as it came to me today from Rafael Uzcátegui. Given the nature of a group letter, the statistics seem to me to be conservative, but the statement and intentions are clear. to our friends throughout the world Translated by Daniel Cooper Bermúdez We, the organizations and people who defend human rights, activists…
This will be a short entry because, as the world is now witnessing, there’s not a lot of there there. I was on WhatsApp today with a friend in Venezuela and she asked, “Do you have any news about the humanitarian aid? We have no news here.” Hmm. Get it? Yeah. She lives in Venezuela…
Photo of demonstration in solidarity with Venezuelans in Spain. I was deeply moved by the number of comments, tweets and emails I received in the wake of the publication of “The Bolivarian God that Failed.” My thanks goes out to Jamie Palmer there who did such a wonderful job of editing that this piece shines…
My new piece is up at Quillette. Many thanks to Jamie Palmer, the editor who shepherded the story along over a couple of months and did really fine work on smoothing it out. There’s so much more to say than I could put into this 5,000+ piece, but I think the real limitation is the…