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And now slavery: Venezuela’s socialist policies lead to forced labor camps

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Two socialists shake hands: Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez
Two socialists shake hands: Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez

How well are Democrat Party policies working out in Venezuela?

Here’s the latest from CNBC: (H/T William)

The government of Venezuela has issued a decree that “effectively amounts to forced labor” in an attempt to fix a spiraling food crisis, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

A Venezuelan ministry last week announced Resolution No. 9855, which calls for the establishment of a “transitory labor regime” in order to relaunch the agricultural and food sector. The decree says that the government must do what is “necessary to achieve strategic levels of self-sufficiency,” and states that workers can be forcefully moved from their jobs to work in farm fields or elsewhere in the agricultural sector for periods of 60 days.

[…]The law is vague in laying out exactly which workers can be forced to work in the farm sector, though it indicates that both public- and private-sector workers may be included. While working in food production, workers will be suspended from their regular jobs. They’ll be allowed to return to their original jobs upon the completion of service.

[…]Under President Nicolas Maduro, the country has been gripped by skyrocketing inflation and food shortages that have led to rising unrest this year.

Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy capsized with the fall in crude prices in 2014, leaving whole swaths of the country’s 31 million people without enough food or other necessities. Inflation is expected to hit almost 720 percent this year, and gross domestic product is seen falling by 8 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, left the nation in a vulnerable economic position by nationalizing energy assets while oil prices were high and spending proceeds on widespread social programs. Oil’s global drop in 2014 left the government far short of its revenue needs and with only an anemic private sector to generate taxes or jobs.

How did Venezuela get to this point where their economy is in such a shambles that they can neither produce nor even purchase enough food to feed their people?

Answer: socialism.

Here is an article from March 2013 from the radically leftist Slate. The headline is “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle: The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains”. The author is “a senior writer for the International Business Times”.

He writes:

Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.

What did Chavez do, precisely, that caused the Venezuelan economic to boom? Well, he nationalized private industry and redistributed wealth from job creators and entrepreneurs to the poor.

As The Week correctly put it, while “Chavez’s policies of redistribution and nationalization of oil assets endeared him to Venezuela’s working class” and produced many laudable results, the country’s “oil-centric economy has taken away resources from other areas that are badly in need of development.”

And now we know what happened after socialist policies were such as nationalizing private companies were adopted. But would you learn anything about what socialist policies actually do, in our government-run public schools, or universities, or in the mainstream media, or from the celebrities in pop culture?

In the United States, we ought to have an electorate that has more understanding of economics than a hamster does. Otherwise we run the risk of electing people who will take us down the same road to serfdom that Venezuela has walked under socialist policies.

Maybe instead of giving ignorant, spoiled millenials free tuition, so they can study English and philosophy, we should be giving them a 2 year missions trip to Venezuelan forced labor camps. They would learn a lot more about America and economics from that, than they would learn from Ivy League professors.

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Four points in the gay agenda that should concern Christians and conservatives

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Hillary Clinton and her ally, the Human Rights Campaign
Hillary Clinton and her ally, the Human Rights Campaign

This article by Kelsey Harkness appeared in the Daily Signal, and it’s a must-read.

Excerpt:

More than 25 prominent leaders of the national LGBT movement, including elected officials and other influential voices, gathered for the four-day event called the Equality Forum.

The Daily Signal attended several panel discussions featuring speakers such as Janson Wu, executive director of the advocacy group GLAD; James Esseks, director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and AIDS project at the American Civil Liberties Union; and Evan Wolfson, former president of Freedom to Marry, a campaign largely credited with winning the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Looking forward, speakers said, priorities include defeating “anti-LGBT” bills, supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth through new school policies and curriculum and partnering with outside organizations on minority-driven issues such as gun control and criminal justice reform. They called for Congress to amend the Civil Rights Act to add protections in places of public accommodation, among other changes.

LGBT advocacy groups also are involved in an array of lawsuits they believe could have a major impact, including a Pennsylvania case where a transgender women alleges discrimination by her former employer.

Kelsey has a four point list summarizes the main priorities of the gay rights movement:

  1. Passing the Equality Act
  2. Defeating State and Local Laws
  3. Going to Court
  4. Partnering With Black Lives Matter and Others

I’ve written before about the Equality Act and about how it will threaten religious liberty in all 50 states, so let’s look at the state and local laws in her point #2.

It says:

The biggest threat LGBT leaders said they’re facing is what they call “anti-LGBT” legislation proposed by conservatives in state and local governments.

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on same-sex marriage, many people of faith concluded they needed laws to protect their conscience rights so that they can run businesses, adoption agencies, and charity organizations in accord with their deeply held religious beliefs.

Specifically, these state laws—which advocates call Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRAs) after the 1993 federal law—aim to protect from discrimination or punishment those who believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, that sexual relations should be reserved for marriage, and that gender identity is based on biological sex.

Wolfson, who spent decades advocating same-sex marriage, didn’t pay much mind to those concerns.

“Religion is not the reason people are bigots,” he said. “It’s the excuse.”

With more than 200 such measures popping up last year, Equality Forum panelists said they were dealt a major challenge from opponents who they believe are trying to use religion as a reason to discriminate.

“We knew there was going to be a backlash, but the backlash was bigger than I thought it was going to be,” the ACLU’s Esseks said, speaking of the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision. “That’s an enormous onslaught of organized legislative activity coming at us.”

To defeat their opponents, LGBT groups plan to go state by state to strike down religious freedom measures and, instead, implement their own laws on sexual orientation and gender identity.  They said they intend to do this until new federal law or court decisions negate that necessity.

“The national conversation around this is night and day different from where it was last fall,” Esseks said, expressing confidence the tide is shifting in their favor. “We finally got over being awkward and shy about talking about restrooms.”

Hillary Clinton has previously said that religious liberty and conscience is no defense to being forced to fund abortions. There’s no reason to think that she has any objection to using the law and the courts to compel Christians and conservatives to celebrate and participate in the agenda of the gay activists.

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Hillary Clinton gets Four Pinocchios rating for Fox News interview

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What difference does national security make?
What difference at this point does national security make? How dare you question the Queen?

There was an interview on Fox News Sunday featuring centrist Chris Wallace and Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Full video:

It was hard work to find any news articles that mentioned the exchanges about Benghazi, her private, unsecure e-mail server and alleged peddling of Secretary of State influence for foreign donations, through the Clinton foundation,

Regarding Benghazi, the Washington Free Beacon noted that Clinton called one of the gold star moms a liar, for contradicting Clinton’s story that the terrorist attack was caused by a YouTube video:

 

With Benghazi playing a major theme in the attacks against Clinton, Wallace played a video clip from the Republican National Convention (RNC) of Pat Smith blaming Clinton for her son’s death.

“I blame Hillary Clinton. I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son. That’s personally,” Smith said.

Wallace asked Clinton about Smith’s comments that Clinton lied to her and the other families on the day when the Benghazi victims’ bodies returned to the United States.

“I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said,” Clinton said.

Wallace played the video of Clinton blaming the attack on YouTube video. She’s not just calling the gold star mom a liar, she’s calling the video of her blaming the video a liar, too.

Breitbart News reported on the questions Wallace asked about the Clinton Foundation:

Wallace, in an exclusive sit-down interview, asked Clinton about allegations first made in Clinton Cash, the book and now film/graphic novel, that Clinton used the multi-billion-dollar charity for international “pay-to-play” deals while she served as Secretary of State. Author and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer says that Clinton Foundation donors were on the receiving end of corrupt deals approved by Hillary’s State Department — including the sale of U.S. uranium to Russia and a rare, lucrative mining permit in Haiti.

Clinton retorted that she is “really proud of the Clinton Foundation,” yet not a single speaker at the DNC last week — not even Bill or Chelsea Clinton — mentioned the Foundation or its spinoffs such as the Clinton Global Initiative.

[…]This week, news broke that the IRS is investigating the Clinton Foundation. Earlier this month, FBI Director James Comey would not confirm or deny whether the bureau is investigating the Foundation during congressional testimony. Just days later, The Globe and Mail reported that “The Canadian affiliate of the Clinton Foundation is spending an astounding 78 percent of the money it raises on administrative costs.”

And finally, she got a Four Pinnochios rating from the far-left Washington Post for her comments about her private, unsecure e-mail server – which she used to prevent her employer from reading her e-mails when she was Secretary of State:

The Facts

“Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.”
—Hillary Clinton, interview on “Fox News Sunday,” July 31, 2016

Clinton made these remarks after “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace played a video of her saying: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified materials. I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time. I had not sent classified material nor received anything marked classified.”

As Wallace put it, “After a long investigation, FBI Director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true.”

After Clinton denied that, Wallace played another video of an exchange between Comey and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi:

GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails either sent or received. Was that true?
COMEY: That’s not true.
GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” Was that true?
COMEY: There was classified material emailed.
So what’s going on here?

The Facts

Clinton is cherry-picking statements by Comey to preserve her narrative about the unusual setup of a private email server. This allows her to skate past the more disturbing findings of the FBI investigation

[…]The Pinocchio Test

As we have seen repeatedly in Clinton’s explanations of the email controversy,she relies on excessively technical and legalistic answers to explain her actions. While Comey did say there was no evidence she lied to the FBI, that is not the same as saying she told the truth to the American public — which was the point of Wallace’s question. Comey has repeatedly not taken a stand on her public statements.

And although Comey did say many emails were retroactively classified, he also said that there were some emails that were already classified that should not have been sent on an unclassified, private server. That’s the uncomfortable truth that Clinton has trouble admitting.

Her final rating:

Four Pinocchios

It’s a firing offense – unless you’re Hillary Clinton. And when you are dealing with classified information, it’s a treason offense – unless you’re Hillary Clinton.