At long last Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his mafia have been indicted in the US for cocaine trafficking. Back in November 2015 when the First Lady’s nephews, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, were busted for attempting to smuggle 800 kilos (that’s roughly one ton) of cocaine into the US it…
(This is a revised version of a piece first published at Caracas Chronicles. I think that piece lacked nuance, so I’ve worked it over here) Imagine my surprise to hear that my Venezuelan friend’s parents “like” Trump. I suppose that “distance makes the heart grow fonder” since for many years it had the same…
My post was “Editor’s Pick” at Caracas Chronicles this week. Thanks. Go figure. I spend hours on some articles that no one seems to notice, and other posts, like this one, take about an hour out of a morning. I clearly don’t understand the secret to “success.” If I did, I might have the misfortune…
A Venezuelan friend recently told me that he thought Trump will win re-election. “He sounds every day more like Chávez,” he wrote me. I’ve been thinking the same things, myself, these days as I’ve tuned in and out of the impeachment hearings. And I also recall another Venezuelan telling me once, some fifteen or…
(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…
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…
In May I published my critique at Caracas Chronicles of the Weisbrot-Sachs’ paper on the US sanctions on Venezuela. I titled it, “Pandering to the Imperial Left.” Now a much better critique (I’m not ashamed to say) has come out with the Brookings Institute, a collaboration between four real economists. It’s available for downloading at…