(This article was first posted at Caracas Chronicles) A month or so ago, my wife came home growling about a pro-chavista program she’d heard on KPFA radio. Of course, I thought, what’s new? Originally founded by Lewis Hill in 1957 as a “free speech” station that crossed boundaries and included broad swathes of countercultural and…
(This is a second flyer I wrote for the Dan Kovalik event. It’s probably more useful in that it has bullet points and works for concision, but that would be a judgment others would have to make. I tried to avoid redundancies, but there may be some. Here it is, in any case.) Many of…
I wrote this piece as a flyer to hand out at the Dan Kovalik talk in Berkeley. This version contains all the links. Venezuela is suffering today under a set of failed policies and unkept promises made by the late President Hugo Chávez and maintained by the “chavista” loyalists under Nicolás Maduro. Chávez promised to…
My piece on the art of avoiding reality, particularly Venezuelan reality, is up at Caracas Chronicles. It’s short, not-so-sweet, and to the point. I’m learning to economize on words these days… Update: It came out in Spanish at Tal Cual digital here, thanks to the work of Guillermo Useche. How is it that the socialist…
You can read the “Clifnotes” version of the Human Rights Report on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela here. I’ve highlighted it and added colored type so you can skim through the document and still be home for dinner tonight. Those who lived through the terrible years of the 1980s when death squads terrorized Central America,…
I’m writing these reflections after publishing “Fascism: The Left Project that Keeps Giving at Caracas Chronicles. This is a longer post below, wherein I develop some ideas that I only touched on in the CCs piece. Someone asked me recently why I’m always attacking or criticizing leftists. They mentioned that there was plenty on the…
Since I wrote my piece on the situation of Maduro’s “hostages” for Caracas Chronicles (The Human Bargaining Chips of the Maduro Regime) National Assembly Deputy Gilber Caro has been released, likely in anticipation of the visit by Michelle Bachelet. But there are still hundreds being held in Venezuela’s overcrowded prisons (that being said, our own…
“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…
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…
This is a letter I wrote to a left, social movement activist who wrote asking me for my perspective on what was happening in Venezuela. It’s been a long time since anyone on the left came looking for me and asked me for my reflections, so I gave them. For what it’s worth. I’m posting…