posted by like_that
I feel bad for the people of Venezuela, but it is funny how the progressives in the US all of a sudden are pretending that they never believed that Venezuela was the model country for all of their progressive ideology. It wasn't even 10 years ago when progressives were fawning all over Venezuela. A lot of them are still too stubborn to admit they are wrong and would rather blame the US. So far in the span of 10 years the following progressive ideology has gone to Venezuela to die:
-"Democratic" socialism (this can encompass many things)
-Popular vote replacing an electoral college
-Gun control
-Raising the minimum wage
-Modern Monetary Theory
Am I missing anything?
This is a perfect example of progressive derangement syndrome. I did a quick search of "progressives praising Venezuela" and what I found are three non-politicians - Sean Penn and Oliver Stone mostly praising Hugo Chavez personally for nationalizing the country's oil wealth and Michael Moore praising Venezuela generally under Hugo Chavez. And then, of course, the Editorial that quoted Bernie Sanders.
Here's a post from a Conservative blog titled "Bernie Sanders and other Liberals once praised Venezuela. Where are they now?" - for a compilation of liberal Venezuelan praise, it doesn't seem to have much! Just Penn, Stone, Moore and Bernie.
As far as Bernie's vast praise of Venezuela - it all comes down to this one quote from an article written in 2011:
These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?
And - what do you know? Bernie didn't even write it. It was from an article titled "Close the Gaps: Disparities That Threaten America" written by the Valley News Editorial Board - a Newspaper that serves Vermont and New Hampshire. Bernie simply posted it on his website lol. And yet - conservatives spread this around that this is Bernie's thinking as if it were fact like wildfire. It is the equivalent of a retweet! This is a perfect example of how the conservative bubble is a cess pool of fake news spreading like wildfire. Mainstream outlets like the National Review even spread it and hey - I accepted it as fact that something Bernie actually wrote until I took the time to see that he did not in response to this post. Hey, fake news works!
Here is the link to the article on Bernie's Website:
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-gaps-disparities-that-threaten-america
Close The Gaps: Disparities That Threaten America
By: Valley News Editorial Board
Valley News
Friday, August 5, 2011
Washington, it seems to us, is focusing on one gap -- between spending and revenue -- to the exclusion of others. That's unwise, because these other gaps also pose threats to America and its social structure. They, too, ought to be closed.
Take the jobs gap, which doesn't need much explanation. There are far fewer jobs than people seeking work, which is why unemployment is close to 10 percent or higher, if you count those who would like a job but have given up looking. According to economist Laura D'Andrea Tyson, writing last week in The New York Times, the U.S. economy would have to add about 12.3 million jobs to return to employment levels that existed before the 2008-2009 recession blindsided America. A quarter of a million people enter the labor force each month. At the current pace of recovery -- which is to say slower than slow -- closing this gap could take 10 years or more. Talk about a lost decade.
Closing the jobs gap might be easier if there were a solid commitment to closing the investment gap. Unlike other rich nations and, we hasten to add, developing countries such as India and China, the United States doesn't spend nearly enough on education and work force training; research and development; and vital infrastructure such as bridges, roads and air traffic control. This is what's known as "non-security discretionary spending," which is a misnomer. Investing in these areas would actually help strengthen America and secure the future. Yet spending in these categories accounts for less than 10 percent of all federal expenditure, and the share has been falling and is likely to fall further in the grip of the Scissorhands caucus that has taken control of Congress.
Finally, and most worryingly, there's the widening wealth gap. The inequality of incomes in this country has been well documented and much commented on, to wit: The richest 1 percent of Americans now account for almost a quarter of the nation's income, creating an imbalance even worse than the days of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts.
Less remarked, however, is the fact that America's wealth gap is also a race gap. As the Pew Research Center reported last week, the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households. Think about that. In 2009, the typical black household had $5,677 in wealth -- defined as assets minus debts; the typical Hispanic household had $6,325; the typical white household, by contrast, had $113,149.
The disparity is twice as large as it was in the two decades prior to the Great Recession and the largest since the government began publishing such data a quarter century ago. The downturn has been particularly hard on blacks, who are twice as likely to be unemployed as whites.
Moreover, according to the Pew analysis, the wealth gap widened between 2005 and 2009 because minorities disproportionately reside in states hit hardest by plummeting house values -- Michigan, California, Arizona, Florida and Nevada, where median house prices fell as much as 50 percent .
White households saw house values decline as well, of course, but they tended to be cushioned by other assets that many black and Hispanic households don't have, including savings accounts, pensions and stocks.
"What's pushing the wealth of whites is the rebound in the stock market and corporate savings, while younger Hispanics and African Americans who bought homes in the last decade -- because that was the American dream -- are seeing big declines," Timothy Smeeding of the University of Wisconsin told The Associated Press.
These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?
-Valley News Editorial Board
And what do you know here's a quote from the Valley News confirming that the Editorial Board wrote it not Bernie.
So did Sanders write it? This mystery was resolved with a single email to the Valley News Editorial Board. An editor named Ernie Kohlsaat replied:
The Aug. 4, 2011, piece you are referring to, headlined “Close the Gaps: Disparities That Threaten America,” was an editorial, not a news article. It was written by a member of the Valley News Editorial Board and as such reflects the opinion of the newspaper. The version on Sen. Sanders’ website appears to be an accurate rendition of the editorial as published on Page A8 of the Valley News on that date.
Sanders’s critics would doubtless reply that cross-posting the article without clarification or caveat amounts to an endorsement. But an endorsement of what? The article is not about Venezuela or Bolivarianism (or Equador or Argentina, for that matter) but American inequalities, poverty, and lack of opportunities. The “Gaps that Threaten America” are domestic inequality, ‘the wealth gap,’ ‘the jobs gap,’ and racial disparities in property ownership. The only mention of Venezuela in the 600 word editorial comes in the endlessly circulated final two lines. It ought to be obvious to fair-minded people that, in the context of the article, this final rhetorical flourish was intended to shame America for failing to live up to its promise.
https://quillette.com/2018/03/10/sanders-venezuela-meme/
When Bernie most recently talked about Venezuela he said this:
“When I talk about democratic socialism, I’m not looking at Venezuela. I’m not looking at Cuba. I’m looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden.”
But then of course the new meme on the right is "l00k at Th1s gUy fRom DenMaRK who says They're N0t Socialist!" - even while Denmark and Sweden spend significantly higher amounts of GDP to social welfare expenditures (which is what conservatives typically mean when they deride things as "Socialism"):
So what is it then? Is Bernie not actually a socialist then since Denmark and Sweden aren't actually socialist and he wants to be them?
And so, other than the Hollywood cooks and the Bernie fake news, we have a 2004 letter of support for Chavez' oil nationalization signed by Dennis Kucinich and a handful of other leftists. https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/633
Basically - the meme that there is this large swath of the American left that was ever fawning over Venezuela is a complete falsehood. But you are being a good soldier Like_That in spreading the Fake News!
***P.S. MMT is politically neutral and wholly separate and distinct from any kind of "ism" let alone socialism. The GOP has functionally been enacting MMT based fiscal policy for longer than I have been alive and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act conjoined with massive increases in public expenditure is a perfect example. It is perfectly compatible with small government but taxes must be cut much more substantially if you're going to reduce public expenditure.