moonbattery logo

Search: venezuela

Jan 22 2023

Absolute Tyranny: Individual CO2 Limit

The reason the ruling class is so relentless in pushing global warming ideology is that it provides a pretext to control at not only a macro but a micro level. Klaus Schwab et al. will regulate every industry on behalf of the weather and also every individual:

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) said … that every person should have a limit of three tonnes of C02 emissions per year and those who exceed their limit should be forced to pay for the pleasure.

The amount of harmless CO2 generated by any given purchase or activity will be determined by bureaucrats on an arbitrary basis.

In case you doubted that global warming is an ideology created by and for the well-to-do ruling class:

In a carbon credit style scheme, those who emit over the three-tonne limit by the middle of the century would need to privately purchase credits from those who are under the limit, he suggested: “Every person gets three tons of CO2 per year, but if you need more, you just have to buy it.”

No problem — so long as you have the money.

Three tons are not much:

[T]he average German is far above Schellnhuber’s proposed limit, as ten tonnes of C02 emissions are produced by the average citizen. Citing the Paris World Inequality lab, there are some millionaires within the country that produce over 100 tonnes of CO2 per year, and some thousands of elites worldwide emit over 2,000 tonnes per year.

Two thousand tons puts you in the Davos set with Climate Czar John Kerry.

Just as rich Democrats don’t mind ever higher taxes, they won’t mind paying CO2 fees. Climate ideology is a form of socialism. Its purpose is to pull up the ladder the elite have climbed, so that their position atop society is secure. In the end, their absolute power will ensure that we pick up the tab. To see how it works, look to the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by socialist dictators and their cronies in starving hellholes like they have made of formerly wealthy Venezuela.

Aside from not spelling out how he expects people to drastically reduce their carbon emissions, the German scientist did not elaborate on how exactly this will be tracked and monitored.

Omnipotent, omniscience government will be required — which is the main point of the global warming hoax.

The ChiComs and the WEF will guide the way into our micromanaged low-carbon future:

[A]t last year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Alibaba Group President J. Michael Evans said that the Chinese tech giant is currently developing a digital “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor the emissions of the public.

“We are developing through technology the ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint… where are they travelling, how are they travelling, what are they eating, what are they consuming on the platform,” the former Goldman Sachs banker explained.

Stalin himself never dreamed of this level of coercive control. That’s why global warming ideology is so important to the ruling class that Harvard Medical School plans to embed it into the curriculum.

In related news, cows are being fitted with masks and diapers lest their belches and farts offend progressives’ weather gods.

They have already proven they can make us dehumanize ourselves by wearing senseless masks. Mandatory diapers are only a matter of time.

On tips from ABC of the ANC, Jack D, and Chris Nielson.

Dec 24 2022

The Nice Thing About Sean Penn

You can find good in anyone if you look hard enough — even moonbats like Sean Penn:

Penn has been spewing “jail the unvaccinated” rhetoric for some time now. The difference is that by this point we all know the vaccines are largely ineffective and probably no longer necessary anyway. Dangers of the jab continue to come to light. From the beginning, we have known that they are a bad idea for young people, combining unknown long-term risk with minimal benefit.

The good thing about Penn? As with his sucking up to the socialist dictator who destroyed Venezuela, he provides a valuable warning that beneath the sanctimonious, nicey-nice façade of our leftist ruling class lies mindless authoritarianism.

On a tip from Wiggins.

Nov 12 2022

Spain Issues Stamp Celebrating Communist Party

Communists have killed well over 100 million people. The Spanish contribution has been modest, at only an estimated 4,176 deaths, dwarfed by China with 82 million and Russia with 21 million. But Spain may not be done yet.

The Communist Party of Spain was formed by groups that broke away from the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, which is currently in charge. On Monday, the Spanish government is issuing 135,000 copies of a postage stamp to celebrate a century of attempting to impose slavery and genocide on the country:

Counting Stars has background:

For years [Partido Comunista de España/Communist Party of Spain] was the voice of Stalin in Spain… The organization was linked to all kinds of atrocities during the Spanish Civil War, where -with the support of Soviet NKVD agents- it managed to turn the Republican zone into a de facto Soviet dictatorship, including supporting a purge against the Trotskyists of the POUM [Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification] in the purest style of Stalin’s dictatorship. … [T]oday it continues to support dictatorships like Cuba, communist China, Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 2013, its youth even expressed their “solidarity” with North Korea, the world’s most brutal dictatorship.

The struggle against totalitarian evil did not end when the Berlin Wall fell. It will never end.

At least we don’t have to worry about anyone issuing a stamp with a swastika. All serious threats to liberty now come from the left.

On a tip from R F.

Oct 23 2022

Take a Tour of Fundamentally Transformed Los Angeles

Venezuela was the wealthiest nation in Latin America. Then leftists took control. Now it is the poorest. People eat their pets, zoo animals, and anything quasi-edible that they can find in dumpsters. Leftists also control Los Angeles. It is not turning out any better.

Combine the welfare state, demographic displacement, contempt for law & order, and the rest of the grab bag of pernicious moonbattery that comprises the liberal agenda and behold the results:

Everyone knows how leftist policies always turn out. We know that Democrats are doing to the whole country what they have done to Los Angeles. We just don’t know how to stop them, when they control the media and the media controls the direction of the herd.

Hat tip: Not the Bee.

Oct 10 2022

Mexican Criminal Cartel Profits up 2,500% Thanks to Biden

The economic pain of letting Biden’s leftist handlers take power has been severe. The Dow Jones is down about 1,600 points since Creepy Joe’s inauguration. Inflation is a crippling 8.5%. Because there is no indication that they will stop doubling down on their destructive policies, there is no hope that the economy will improve until Democrats are removed from power. Yet some make out quite well even now. The open border means big profits for Mexico’s criminal cartels:

The US Department of Homeland Security reports that the Mexican cartels’ income from smuggling illegal migrants into America has soared from $500 million in 2018 to $13 billion this year — up 2,500%.

Also up: Border Patrol apprehensions — by a staggering 377% since Biden took power.

Biden made it clear that the entire world is welcome to invade. Illegals who are captured are allowed to stay. Every impoverish village in the Third World knows it. Thus the deluge of undocumented Democrats.

The USA cannot sustain this. Nor is it intended to. America is racist, capitalist, and bad. It must be eradicated and replaced — or as Barack Obama put it, fundamentally transformed.

Ironically, many of the invaders are from Venezuela, which was the wealthiest country in Latin America until people with similar ideology took power and destroyed the economy.

Fourteen House Republicans wrote Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sept. 23 to complain that “between October 2021 and July 2022, more than 130,000 Venezuelan nationals were encountered after entering the United States illegally.” The Marxist Nicolás Maduro regime, they added, “is deliberately releasing violent prisoners early, including inmates convicted of ‘murder, rape and extortion,’ and pushing them to join caravans heading to the United States.”

Also facilitating profits for the cartels is the despair associated with Democrat rule. This has increased the demand for drugs smuggled across the open border.

Fentanyl killed some 71,000 Americans in 2021, up 23% versus 2020. For those aged 18 to 45, fentanyl leads COVID-19, car wrecks, suicides and every other cause of death. …

Under Trump, Border Patrol’s fentanyl seizures for FY 2019 and ’20 (through August 31) totaled 7,595 pounds. Under Biden’s equivalent dates in FY ’21 and ’22: 24,062 pounds — up 217%.

If the federal government has one duty that justifies its existence, it is defense of the border. So long as it willfully neglects this duty, it is not a legitimate government. Because we get nothing in return, the fortunes it extracts from us are not taxation but theft.

On a tip from Anonymous.

Oct 05 2022

How to Reverse Failure of Environmental Movement

The purpose of the environmental movement is not to preserve the environment, or it would not promote the use of electric cars, which are environmentally devastating. It would not cripple the energy industry through the leftist tool Biden (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.), knowing that destroying the US economy will reduce it to a Third World country of the sort that cannot afford the luxury of environmental protection. The actual point is to advance modern leftism. This ideology is built upon a core of cultural Marxism. Yet many environmentalists continue to belong to the hated white race.

Wails Britain’s The Guardian:

The environment sector has failed to act on its ambitions to become more inclusive, suggests new research that finds just one in 20 organisations are enacting plans to increase ethnic diversity.

According to a sector-wide survey, out of 44 environment charities, 84% had considered or were taking action over a lack of inclusion, but only 4% said they had a consistently implemented action plan. …

[W]hile 86% of leaders agreed it should be a top priority for the sector, only 22% felt it actually was. …

[I]n 2021, just 4.8% of environment professionals had an ethnic minority heritage, compared with 12.6% of the workforce overall, according to official figures. Only farming had lower ethnic minority representation.

Only countries populated by whites or Asians are economically successful enough to indulge in environmentalism rather than focus on staving off starvation. Asians don’t seem that interested, and whites are politically unclean.

The current solution to this conundrum is to displace the population of white countries. But as the USA and UK come to resemble Venezuela and Jamaica, they will develop more pressing problems than the imaginary climate crisis.

The LGBT example suggests a more sensible solution. If men can identify as women and vice versa, why can’t the moonbats of the environmental movement identify as members of preferred races? The strategy works for Rachel Dolezal, who has launched a new career as a transracial lingerie model.

Some in the LGBT community identify as nonbinary, meaning that they are neither one sex nor the other. Likewise, environmentalists could identify as nonracial. That way, they could leap ahead to the day when miscegenation blends all races into one. As the ideological homogeneity of college faculties and newsrooms attests, only when we are all the same can we achieve true diversity.

On tips from Steve T and Wiggins.

Sep 21 2022

Illegal Aliens Trade Gratitude for Weaponized Victimhood

It must be admitted that the armies of undocumented Democrats Biden has been importing in part from Venezuelan prisons to displace American voters are assimilating quickly. Compare the following stories.

From Saturday:

Some of the migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard this week said they were grateful to Florida Governor Ron Desantis, calling his move to transfer them to the posh seaside community “a stroke of good luck.” …

“It is a little bit remote,” said immigration lawyer Rachel Self. “But if they want to walk to the gate they can Uber anywhere they want to. They have been given walking around money. They’re resting, catching their breath and meeting with lawyers.”

The meetings with lawyers apparently went well — from a certain point of view. From yesterday:

Migrants who were flown from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, under a new program by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sued DeSantis, a Republican, and other state officials Tuesday, alleging they were victims of fraud for political purposes. …

In addition to seeking damages, they are also asking the court to block DeSantis and others named in the lawsuit from “inducing immigrants to travel across state lines by fraud and misrepresentation.”

In exchange for a jackpot justice payout, they help Democrats force red states to keep the invaders. Given the numbers involved, this should soon turn the red states blue.

See how fast the illegal immigrants abandon gratitude in favor of weaponized victimhood. They will be voting Democrat for generations.

On tips from Lyle, Bluto, and ABC of the ANC.

Sep 20 2022

USA Less Free Than 1 Year Ago per Fraser Institute

As Big Government grows, economic freedom continues to decline:

Each year, the Fraser Institute releases a report entitled “Economic Freedom of the World,” a ranking of countries around the world by economic freedom. … The ranking is calculated using numerous factors, including size of government, respect for property rights, freedom to trade, monetary policy, and regulation.

“Economic freedom is about people being free to mold and shape their own lives,” in the words of James Gwartney, a coauthor of the report.

The United States slots in at 7th place, down one spot from last year. But the U.S.’s score dropped more significantly, down from 8.25 to 7.97 on the index’s 10-point scale. The reason why America lost only one spot in the rankings is because economic freedom around the world fell in 2020…

It would be nice to think that the Land of the Free would stand against this alarming trend. But the USA’s score is the lowest in 4 decades.

Atop the list are Singapore and Hong Kong, where freedom will soon be snuffed out by the ChiComs. Toward the bottom, we find Zimbabwe and Venezuela, two countries that appear to serve as models for Democrats.

Give Biden et al. a few more years and creeping socialism will push America out of the top 10.

On a tip from Mr. Freemarket.

Sep 15 2022

Abbott Buses Illegal Aliens to Kamala Harris Residence

The tactic got such a hilarious reaction from the moonbat mayors of sanctuary cities New York, Washington, and Chicago that Texas Governor Greg Abbott upped the ante by sending a tiny fraction of the literally millions of illegal aliens the Biden Regime has invited into the country to the home of the Border Czarina herself, Vice President Kamala Harris, who on Sunday confirmed that nothing will be done about the border by making the preposterous assertion that it is already secure.

Fox News reports:

Two migrant buses from Del Rio, Texas, arrived near Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., Thursday morning.

Between 75 and 100 people who were picked up in Eagle Pass, Texas, were sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The group includes migrants from Venezuela, Uruguay, Colombia and Mexico. Multiple migrants, asked by Fox News Digital, said they think the border is open, contrary to what Harris said Sunday during an interview.

Everyone knows the border is open, including grasping peasants in Third World countries thousands of miles away. The Biden Regime has gone out of its way to make it obvious in order to draw in vast numbers to displace us from our own country. This is treason on a scale that makes Vidkun Quisling look like a patriot.

Speaking of patriots, Abbott isn’t alone:

This latest convoy of buses arrived just hours after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis followed through on his similar promise to drop off illegal immigrants in progressive states, sending two planes full of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday.

Martha’s Vineyard is to our liberal ruling class what Versailles was to the court of Louis XVI.

If only the illegal aliens could be dumped onto the White House lawn. But unlike our country, that has a wall around it.

On tips from seaoh, Eddie_Valiant, StephaneDumas, and Feet2Fire.

Aug 24 2022

Biden Forces Country to Pay Other People’s Student Loans

If the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” didn’t convince you that Democrats are driving up inflation on purpose so as to apply Vladimir Lenin’s strategy of crushing the middle class “between the millstones of taxation and inflation,” maybe this will do the job:

Biden is set to “forgive” up to $10,000 in federal student debt for those making under $125,000 annually, and $20,000 for Pell grant recipients, transferring the cost of the loans to the American public, the White House announced Wednesday.

The effect this will have on inflation — which is already stratospheric due to Democrats’ massive wasteful spending and war on energy — is so obvious that this move qualifies as economic sabotage. It serves no benign economic purpose.

Politically, it will help Democrats by turning out the vote among people who want others to pay their debts. But it will alienate everyone else with its staggering injustice. Why should members of the working class, who get jobs and raise families instead of goofing around, have to pay to prolong the adolescence of rich kids who would rather marinate in moonbattery that spend their time productively? Note that useless not to mention pernicious liberal arts programs — which these days consist mostly of lunatic left political indoctrination — are to be coercively financed by the public at large.

In a free country, it would not be up to a single man — a corrupt and senile man in this case — to determine whether people are responsible for the debts they willingly incur. In the USSA, we have centralized authority under our system of omnipotent, omnipresent Big Government.

However, even fellow Democrat Nancy Pelosi balks at Biden’s use of executive orders to assume the power of a dictator:

Congress, not the president, is the only body that can cancel student debt, Pelosi said in July of 2021, arguing that “the president can’t do it.”

Even Biden’s own executive branch agrees:

The Department of Education came to the same decision, arguing that the executive branch “does not have the statutory authority to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive, on a blanket or mass basis, principal balances of student loans, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof.”

It would be wonderful if people in Washington were to remember that this is supposed to be America, not the banana republic it is becoming under Biden.

However,

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told Biden to provide as much relief as possible in a phone call Tuesday night, according to Politico, saying its “the right thing to do morally and economically.”

As usual with Schumer, this is a shocking inversion of the truth. Morally, student loan “forgiveness” represents grand larceny and the enslavement of working people to the liberal elite. Economically, it represents sheer malice:

The total estimated cost for Biden’s one-time cancellation is $300 billion, according to a study released Tuesday by the Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania.

That $300 billion comes atop the Inflation Reduction Act’s $740 billion of brazenly wasteful spending on crap like eagle-killing wind turbines and lavish subsidies for the electric moonbatmobiles favored by rich leftists.

We have the same quality of leadership as Venezuela. Consequently, we will soon have the same level of inflation.

On a tip from Varla.

Jul 11 2022

War on Freelancers Will Cause Economic Havoc

If all workers cannot be directly employed by Big Government, they must at least be controlled by Big Unions, which are a lucrative extension of the Democratic Party. Otherwise, workers would be independent — and independence is obscene from the point of view of our leftist ruling class. That’s why the Democrats have conspired to throw tens of millions of Americans out of work by making it illegal to work on a freelance basis.

Biden et al. has intended from the beginning to inflict a federal version of California’s AB5, which demonstrates the Democrat belief in the American dream by criminalizing working for yourself. AB5 is about to cause economic havoc.

The law decrees that

“a person providing labor or services for remuneration shall be considered an employee rather than an independent contractor unless the hiring entity demonstrates that the person is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, the person performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business, and the person is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business.”

Those who find favor with California’s moonbat overlords get exceptions. Truckers are not among them.

A January 2020 injunction saved trucking from the insane and tyrannical law. However:

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra [currently head of Biden’s HHS] called on U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez to reverse the injunction. …

On June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of the California truckers battling against AB5. …

Now, the truckers must be employees of trucking companies and not independent contractors in order to be able to work in California. …

If the law is enforced, California faces a possible mass exodus of the state’s estimated 70,000 independent truckers.

Imagine the chaos this will cause at the Port of Oakland alone:

“There’s 9,000 trucks that serve the port on a daily basis, and 90% of them are independent contractors. So, this is a big, big impact,” said Bill Aboudi owner of AB Trucking in Oakland.

You think we have a supply chain crisis now? You think prices are already high? Just wait. Democrats are not through inflicting their agenda.

The California Trucking Association delivered a warning, “Gasoline has been poured on the fire that is our ongoing supply chain crisis. In addition to the direct impact on California’s 70,000 owner-operators who have seven days to cease long-standing independent businesses, the impact of taking tens of thousands of truck drivers off the road will have devastating repercussions on an already fragile supply chain, increasing costs and worsening runaway inflation.”

If they were merely fools, they might show contrition. But Democrats are pressing full steam ahead toward economic devastation.

Sneers Lorena Gonzalez, currently head of the California Labor Federation, who was the author of AB5:

“The fact that trucking companies will have to abide by basic labor laws in CA takes us one step closer to rebuilding the middle class that was almost deregulated out of existence.”

If there are two things Democrats love, they are regulation and unions. They are more than willing to make us suffer for them.

If you think the economy has been bad since Biden took power, think how awful it would be if he were able to get his favored legislation passed. His Build Back Better lurch deeper into socialism would push inflation into Venezuela territory. The Pro Act — a federal version of AB5 — would do to the whole country what malevolent leftists like Gavin Newsom and Lorena Gonzalez are doing to California.

On tips from Blackjack and Mr. Freemarket.

Jun 15 2022

Biden Menaces Energy Industry With “Emergency Powers”

From Day 1, Biden attacked the oil industry, shutting down pipelines and closing vast areas to drilling, thereby driving up the price of energy and consequently of everything else. Now, despite his administration just confirming that it will continue this policy in the name of the global warming hoax, he blames energy companies for what he has done to them. If they won’t magically overcome his restrictions and produce more oil, he will make like the dollar store dictator he is and inflict emergency powers:

Biden may resort to using emergency powers if American oil companies don’t increase output at their refineries, the president told oil CEOs in a series of letters Wednesday.

The Regime does not say when it will impose emergency powers, only that it will be in the “near term.” The kind of government we live under now likes to keep people guessing.

If refineries are not producing enough gasoline, it could be because Biden has severely restricted the drilling and transportation of oil. Here’s another reason:

[T]he last major refinery to be constructed in the U.S. was Marathon Oil’s facility built in Louisiana in 1977. Industry groups and experts blamed the declining capacity and lack of new refineries on environmental regulation and projected fuel demand decline in the future as governments push green energy alternatives.

Yet again we see that you cannot have both green BS and affordable energy.

Leftists take control of a wealthy country and quickly reduce it to a poor one so as to make their power permanent. If this strikes you as familiar, you may be thinking of Venezuela. It was the richest and most stable democracy in Latin America before Biden types took power. Now it is second poorest. It has the world’s largest oil reserves. But that does it no good, because the corrupt and incompetent government seized control of the oil industry, grinding production to a virtual halt. This is likely to be the consequence of Biden’s “emergency powers.”

On a tip from Bluto.

Jun 08 2022

Chesa Boudin Recall Could Be Turning Point

We have hit peak moonbattery. Now the backlash can begin. Weather Underground scion Chesa Boudin has been recalled as DA in the world capital of degenerate woke lunacy, San Francisco:

Voters in progressive San Francisco on Tuesday overwhelmingly supported the recall of Chesa Boudin, the city’s radical left-wing district attorney, two years after he was elected on a platform that emphasized reducing the jail population and prioritizing “restorative justice.”

“Restorative justice” is Liberalese for mollycoddling criminals.

Boudin’s platform could be summed up as “F the Police.” This was fashionable as the Black Lives Matter riots raged, but less so now that the media-manufactured mania had died down and people are waking up to the inevitable effects of wokeism, which include rampant crime.

Boudin’s liberal credentials are impeccable. He worked as a translator and advisor for Hugo Chavez, whose ruination of Venezuela has served as the primary template for the Democrat agenda. Born into moonbattery, he is the offspring of Weather Underground terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. He was named after cop-killer Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur), the patron saint of Black Lives Matter, who now resides in communist Cuba.

Because his parents were incarcerated for killing two police officers and a security guard during a robbery, he was raised by two other Weather Underground terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. These same two terrorists launched the political career of Barack Obama from their Chicago apartment.

Boudin gave voters what they asked for:

He ended cash bail, stopped prosecuting drug-possession cases stemming from “pretextual” traffic stops, stopped using “enhancements” to extend prison sentences for convicted gang members, and stopped prosecuting so-called quality-of-life crimes — things such as prostitution, public camping, public defecation, and open-air drug use. Supporters of the recall say that sent a message that San Francisco was a consequence-free place to engage in low-level crimes, which simply encouraged more crime in the city generally.

By implementing the Broken Windows theory in reverse, Boudin helped make San Francisco into the uninhabitable hellhole it is today.

In 2021, a year that saw nearly 500 people in the city killed by a worsening fentanyl crisis, Boudin’s office didn’t convict a single person of dealing the drug. They chose instead to emphasize diversion programs and lower-level “accessory after the fact” charges, in part to protect immigrant drug dealers from deportation…

As with Biden, his administration has been a case study in applied liberalism.

That even left-wing San Francisco would overwhelmingly vote to oust one of the progressive-prosecutor movement’s leading figures shows just how much the nation’s mood has changed over the past two years as rising crime has plagued big cities across the country.

What are our rulers in the Democrat Party/mainstream media complex learning from this? Not a thing. Intelligencer honked in advance that if Boudin were to be recalled, it would be because San Francisco isn’t liberal after all. These kooks will continue to double down.

This does not necessarily apply to voters, even in San Franfreakshow:

Boudin’s ouster comes less than four months after San Francisco voters recalled three progressive school-board members who were widely condemned for prioritizing social-justice politics…

Those social justice politics included changing the names of 44 schools named after retroactively canceled thought criminals, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and even insufficiently left-wing former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein. Not even being homosexual has spared whites from cancelation by the San Francisco Board of Education on a racial basis, as Seth Brenzel learned. The school board is so politically correct that it canceled the concept of acronyms for being racist.

Let’s see what voters can do about other Soros-backed maniacs in positions like Boudin’s (e.g., George Gascon [Los Angeles] Alvin Bragg [Manhattan], Kim Foxx [Chicago], Larry Krasner [Philadelphia], Kim Gardner [St Louis], and Marilyn Mosby [Baltimore]). At the national level, let’s see what we can do about prying the pernicious Democratic Party from power.

On tips from Occam’s Stubble, Varla, and Dragon’s Lair. Hat tip: Maggie’s Farm.

May 18 2022

Democrats Target Energy and Food

If you think prices are high now, give Democrats a chance to fix the problem they caused with their excessive spending, repressive regulations, and war on energy. Rather than take responsibility for the crisis, they accuse the people who overcome government hurdles to provide us with energy of “price gouging.” Their solution is Marxism:

Elizabeth Warren and seven Democratic colleagues in the Senate and six in the House want to punish companies that raise prices more than they like.

As everyone who was alive during the 1970s or who knows what has been going on in Venezuela is aware, price controls produce shortages.

The legislation unveiled last week would grant sweeping new powers to the Federal Trade Commission. It bans companies with $100 million or more in revenue from selling goods or services “at an unconscionably excessive price” during a market shock. The public employees in their Beltway offices would define what is “unconscionably excessive,” and they could then slap offenders with a penalty of up to 5% of annual revenue.

That would be crippling. It is intended to be. When disfavored industries like “Big Oil” can no longer function due to government shackles, they will be nationalized, as in Venezuela.

Gasoline is not the only essential product Democrats will make unavailable:

Warren denounced “corporations taking advantage of the current crisis to prey on consumers,” and listed grocery stores, car-rental firms and drug companies as nefarious price gougers.

The profit margin at grocery stores is particularly thin. Putting companies like Kroger — which Warren has denounced by name — out of business will require nationalization of food distribution. Democrats have learned well from Joseph Stalin regarding the effectiveness of the food supply as a political weapon.

Liberals posture ostentatiously regarding their support for Ukraine. Ask a Ukrainian about the Holodomor and you will understand Warren’s game plan.

Venezuela was the wealthiest country in Latin America, sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves. Then people cut of the same cloth as Warren, Biden, and Bernie Sanders took over. The result was empty shelves at the grocery store and no gas at the pumps. It won’t turn out differently here.

The danger is that the idea of price controls spreads beyond the Senate’s Venezuelan caucus and into the Treasury and White House. It’s the definition of economic insanity, which means in this Administration it is all too possible.

Not only possibly, but likely. With Biden’s leftist handlers in charge, the dysfunctional socialist dictatorship in Venezuela is not a problem to solve. It is our likeminded ally:

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador returned from a visit to Havana this month and announced the next day that the U.S. had agreed with Caracas to buy one million barrels of Venezuelan crude daily. This would require lifting U.S. sanctions that are designed to squeeze the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro and help return the country to democracy. …

In March, Team Biden sent three representatives to Caracas to talk to Mr. Maduro. Venezuela later released two of more than a half-dozen American hostages it has been holding. … Rumors persist that back-channel talks continue. …

Venezuelan supply wouldn’t make much of a dent in global oil prices. But it is revealing that American progressives apparently put appeasing the Latin left above their climate-change principles.

In contrast to global warming hogwash, Marxism is something Democrats really do believe in, because it would grant them the absolute power enjoyed by fiends like Stalin, Mao, and Maduro.

The Biden Administration’s sanctions dance with the dictator is taking place even as it acts at every turn to restrict U.S. oil and production.

That is because Venezuela is an ally to the Biden Administration, whereas America is its enemy.

On tips from Varla.

HostingMatters.gif

Alibi3col theme by Themocracy