By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
Nov. 9, 2020 Anno Domini
Wall Street Journal

In an animated video clip posted to Twitter on Nov. 1, Democratic Vice- Presidential candidate Kamala Harris argued that America needs to strive not for equal treatment of individuals but for equity. “Equitable treatment,” she explained, “means we all end up at the same place.”

Efforts to guarantee outcomes are at odds with what it means to live in a free society where equality under the law is the guiding principle. So either Ms. Harris was blowing smoke or she wants to change America into a place where liberty takes a back seat to central planning. The latter is called socialism, a system that is not particularly kind to the poor.

Hugo Chávez also promised to make everyone in his country equally well-off. The concept sold in a nation that believed it was infinitely rich because it was swimming in oil. Intellectuals reasoned that he ought to stick it to the haves. When he did, they packed their bags and left.

Of the more than four million Venezuelans who are estimated to have fled their country since 2015, many are unskilled workers who have been forced into menial labor or lives as mendicants in foreign countries. Images of their march into exile have provoked compassion and grief across the globe.

Yet it is the flight of the knowledge worker that has done the most harm to the nation. As one Venezuelan economist told me recently, “you can be sure that the country’s most skilled professionals were among the first to leave and valued tradesmen were not far behind.”

The Bolivarian revolution’s earliest large-scale assault on know-how came during a lockout at the monopoly oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PdVSA) in December 2002. Union leaders and the largest association of private enterprises called for the labor action in response to Chávez’s antidemocratic tactics. By February 2003 the effort had fizzled out. But the regime used it to purge at least 18,000 PdVSA and related-company employees, gutting the industry of most of its experienced personnel. By replacing fired workers with political loyalists, Chávez believed he was protecting his golden goose. Some of the most sophisticated PdVSA minds saw the future and fled.

In 2009, the regime expropriated Venezuelan companies that served the oil industry in the Lake Maracaibo area and in the eastern part of the country. It was one of many politically motivated mistakes that would lead to the end of investment flows. But as long as oil prices were high, the costs of such recklessness was hidden.

The party ended when prices tanked in 2014, government revenues dropped precipitously, and central bank money-printing led to a mega-devaluation of the bolivar. When PdVSA salaries couldn’t keep up with inflation, another wave of oil engineers— this time led by a younger generation—went abroad to work. In the years that followed, more oil technicians threw in the towel on life in Venezuela.

This vicious circle of declining revenue and human-capital flight has brought the once-mighty Venezuelan petroleum powerhouse to a standstill. Drilling operations and refineries no longer function properly, making the country especially vulnerable to U.S. sanctions.

There has been a loss of competency in a host of other industries as well. Gone is the presumption that one can turn on the tap for running water. This is reality in many poor countries, and people adapt. But for wealthy Venezuela to fall into such an abyss is mind-boggling.

From 1992 to 1999, José María de Viana was president of the state-owned water company, Hidrocapital, serving metropolitan Caracas. In an October interview with the Venezuelan news site TalCual, he spoke about the pain that this crisis is causing the poorest Venezuelans and “patients who are confined to hospitals where, in most of them, there is no water.”

“It was a long process,” TalCual wrote, paraphrasing Mr. de Viana, “that began with professional decline of the [water] companries” that, until 1999, “had the skills to maintain the delicate economic-financial balance that made it possible to cover costs and meet the needs of the population in a timely manner.” The nation’s electrical grid has similarly deteriorated as Venezuelans with the proficiency to maintain the system have left for greener pastures outside the country. Power failures are now routine.

The prospects for reversing Venezuela’s skills gap aren’t good. With incomes of less than $3 a month, many teachers have been pushed out of the profession by the need to survive. Last month the president of the association of professors at the Simón Bolívar University summed up the catastrophe this way: “A country without its children and young people training, learning, as Venezuela is in these gloomy moments, is condemned to continue to being dragged down as a nation and to be more violently devastated.”

It seems like a recipe for all to end up in the same place—to borrow a phrase from Ms. Harris—but not in a good place.

By Timothy Fitzpatrick
July 11, 2019 Anno Domini

It blows my mind that people in the Right-wing movement continue to peddle the idiotic rhetoric that Venezuela and its Soviet backer Russia are thwarting the New World Order.

Instead of accepting the simplest and most logical explanation, that Venezuela is still a Soviet satellite and a failed socialist state carrying on a long-range plan of enslavement, they choose to believe Soviet-seeded propaganda in the “alternative” media that the West is to blame for all evil in the world—exactly the perception that the Kremlin’s Operation SIG has sought to achieve in the world.

Having, myself, spent considerable time in the “workers’ paradise” of Venezuela, I can tell you that it is a complete communist hell hole. While moronic conspiracy buffs—most of whom probably have never stepped foot in South America—romanticize Venezuela for social media likes, channel subscriptions, and shekels, real Venezuelans are starving, being murdered, and are subjected to horrendous living conditions—all thanks to the Soviet Union’s collectivization of Latin America over the last century.

Yet, Madurophiles and Putinphiles alike have the audacity to engage in whataboutism, accusing the West of the all-too-familiar Marxist cliches of “colonialism”, “imperialism”, ad nauseum. Never mind the poverty and violence everywhere in Venezuela, the West is to blame for everything, everywhere, always. Forget that your neighbour is being forced to eat their house pets, we have anti-Zionism and anti-colonialism to save us!

I remember seeing anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian graffiti on slum walls as I rode a bus through Venezuela’s capital city Caracas (Caracas has the highest murder rate in the world) and in other places. Back then, I didn’t understand the close relationship between Marxist states and anti-Zionism. I, too, was almost sucked in to believing that Chavez and his socialist masonic Bolivarian utopia were thwarting the New World Order. Fortunately, I eventually woke up. However, I guess this superficial, Soviet-bred anti-Zionist gambit vindicates the failed socialist state of Venezuela in the eyes of the armchair anti-globalist keyboard warriors who portray themselves as experts. Blinded by their political zeal and bankrupt geopolitical analysis, this shows that they don’t care about real people, like the Venezuelan people. Like with every communist dictatorship, the people are just indispensable tools. These fools are so out of touch with reality that they think that Venezuelans care about rigged dialectical ideology more than what they will eat and with what they will clothe themselves. Also with every communist dictatorhip comes a completely criminal and corrupt regime and utter disregard for the sanctity of human life. In Venezuela, you can hire a hitman for as little as $7 USD—demonstrating that Venezuela is every bit the mafia state that Putinist Russia and its other satellites are.

I also remember communist Cuban agent provocateurs being flown in to Venezuela to murder dissenters and stir riots during the constant unrest and populist discontent with Chavez and his socialist “reforms” towards the last half of the 2000s. There were constant riots and demonstrations. Apparently, Chavez took a page out of Lenin’s handbook: it’s easier for foreigners to kill disseneters than have locals killing locals. It seems that to the world, Chavez would hide all this by spouting shallow, superficial rhetoric about then U.S. President George W. Bush, like rambling on about Bush being a “donkey”. Only a fool wouldn’t see through this cheap opposition. Chavez was engaging in the all-too-familiar Soviet whataboutism while his people starved (the food shortages were going on under Chavez’ rule, too). In the end, Soviet communism remained in power in Venezuela, as it does today. It matters not which puppet president graces the podium.

It’s no surprise that Russia Today television lies when it denies the mass starvation, mass violence, and mass social upheaval in Venezuela, because it could never admit that communism is a failed evil and Satanic system. Furthermore RT, as an organ of the Kremlin, could never compromise one of its satellites, which is so strategic in its destabilization of the West in this final end game. They count on people not checking it out. Well, I was there. It’s all too real.

By Timothy Fitzpatrick
Dec. 4, 2018 Anno Domini

Unlike Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, pretend players at the table of three-dimensional chess, Joseph P. Kennedy and his son John were truly playing the game.

A good example of this is in the brilliantly crafted public relations campaign that Papa Joseph came up with in order to trick the Jews into supporting his son as president: “Kikes for Kennedy, Nazis for Nixon”—even though Joseph and Jack had a plan to undermine Jewish power in the world. The gambit paid off, as Jack would go on to win the U.S. Presidential election in 1960, with a great deal of support from the Jewish community and the masonic establishment. Granted, the power structure was probably still nervous about what Jack would actually do.

It also seems that the civil rights movement that JFK championed was another attempt at 3D-chess; however, in retrospect, this went too far, as it contributed to the Soviet plan of demoralizing the United States—to the point that it has spawned the Cultural Marxist thought-police state we are in today. While it may have worked in the short-term for JFK, it was a huge mistake for the West in general. It also didn’t help JFK’s image to the intelligence community when he attempted to thwart anti-communist war efforts (Vietnam, Cuba, etc.). I have a difficult time seeing a tangible 3-D chess strategy in such manoeuvres and can certainly sympathize with the Western intelligence community’s perception of JFK as a communist saboteur of sorts.

While I don’t believe JFK was a secret communist trying to sabotage Western war efforts, I struggle to find clarity in much of his foreign policy. Perhaps JFK and his father saw the wars as serving as an overall drain on resources and attention—which could otherwise be diverted back to undermining Jewish power and the Rothschild war dialectic. If this could confuse an analyst in 2018, how much more could it do the same to the intelligence and military analysts of the 1960s? JFK should have committed to Vietnam and definitely a Cuba intervention (Cuba went on to serve as a major Soviet narcotics trafficking point and revolutionary bully in South America as a result of a failed Western intervention during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crisis. The failure also contributed to the mess in Nicaragua, Panama, and Mexico. Vietnam is also a key player in the Soviet narcotics network.). On the other hand, perhaps America really never stood a chance in Southeast Asia and Kennedy saw this. The Rothschild war machine wanted the dialectic to continue while Kennedy wanted to end the waste of resources and lives.

Israel orchestrated the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as the late Michael Collins Piper and others have hypothesized, with the participation of Soviet-compromised Western intelligence, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military intelligence, and, of course, other players. If anything, Israel (and probably the USSR) did a good job of leading Western intelligence into believing that their participation in the murder of Kennedy would further the anti-communist cause (keep in mind that Western intelligence had already been heavily infiltrated by the communists by this time). Kennedy was in a no-win situation. Apparently, his 3-D chess had backfired and provoked his backers to turn on him, with Russia and World Jewry the sole beneficiaries of the fallout. The assassination of Kennedy did not stop the communist subversion of the West but, instead, furthered it, primarily by dividing the West and guaranteeing Israel and Russia complete dominance in the Middle East (Kennedy apparently worked to protect the Arab countries from Judeo-Marxist subversion). After JFK’s departure from this planet, the Arab world would undergo a radical Marxist transformation that has served Israel’s interest of divide-and-conquer as well as World Jewry’s Kalergi plan of flooding the West with subsequently displaced Muslims.

The Putinists cry about how NATO supposedly has guns pointing at Russia from all sides; meanwhile, the crypto Soviet Union has satellites surrounding all of the Western powers, especially the United States. And with Great Britain now exiting the European Union, Russia now has their satellite Germany—the largest economy in Europe—as the sole inheritor of Eurasian directorship. JFK’s death allowed all of this to happen.