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How well are Democrat Party economic policies working out in Venezuela?

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I think that when we discuss economics, we should try to identify where specific policies have been tried and then we should observe the consequences to the people who tried them. Often, in college and university classrooms, one view of economics is sold to students by professors as the “nice” view. The professors, many of whom have never worked in the private sector in their entire lives, tell the students that socialism is the “nice” point of view, and anyone who disagrees is “mean”. Is that the right approach to teaching young people what to believe about economics?

Are Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez very different?
Are Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez very different?

Let’s take a look at this article from Yahoo News about socialist dictator Hugo Chavez’s country of Venezuela, a country much admired by people on the socialist left.

It says:

All the lady wanted was some chicken. But in shortage-plagued Venezuela, she waited in line five hours, only to go home empty-handed.

“I got here at 5:30 am and came away with nothing! It is just not fair that you have to work so hard — and then put up with these lines,” said an exasperated Lileana Diaz, a 49-year-old receptionist at a hospital emergency room.
Venezuelans have been enduring shortages of the most basic goods, such as toilet paper, for more than a year.

In Caracas, a cottage industry has emerged with people who will wait in line for you — at a price.

But things are even worse outside the capital.

The problems are staggering here in Valencia, an industrial city west of the capital of this oil-rich country.

Valencia has big factories that produce food and other essentials. Still, the list of goods in short supply is long.

It includes coffee, cooking oil, cornmeal, soap, detergent, you name it.

Chicken is one of the most coveted.

Frustrated shoppers like Diaz are legion.

One tells the story of people who climbed over a fence to get a good place in line outside a store, prompting police to intervene and stop scuffles that broke out.

Another lady shopper shows off a nasty bruise on her right leg, thanks to a fight she got into as she tried to buy disposable diapers.

In recent weeks, the lines of people waiting hopefully outside supermarkets and stores have grown longer in cities away from the coast, such as Maracaibo, Puerto Ordaz and Cumana.

Venezuelan media have reported situations of nerves running very, very high and shoppers coming close to looting.

At times it has gotten that bad, in fact. In late January, one person died and dozens were arrested in the chaos of a looting outbreak at stores in the town of San Felix in the southern state of Bolivar.

[…]In another supermarket in Valencia, a line 50 meters (yards) long snakes away from the entrance.

“We call these ‘holding out hope lines,’ because once you get inside, there is nothing on the shelves,” said Oscar Oroste, a 53-year-old chef.

Oroste said that until recently, people would wait in line knowing what was available to buy. “Now, people are in line but do not even know what they will be sold.”

Venezuelans go from supermarket to supermarket, and store to store, clamoring for basic necessities which have prices regulated by the leftist government.

But some buy just to resell at a handsome profit, and economists say that is another source of the shortages.

Egne Casano, a 28-year-old homemaker, said things are a bit better in Caracas. “I went there not long ago and saw that there is a better supply,” she said.

[…]In the long lines, people digest their woes with a mix of humor, resignation and anger.

At another supermarket in Valencia, a whopping 600 people stood in line under a blazing sun to buy powdered milk.

Graciela Duran, a retiree, got a kilo of it after waiting for four hours.

“I was lucky today, Sometimes I come and there is nothing,” she said.

“Waiting in huge lines is what we do all day, every day,” said Duran, shielding herself from the sun with an umbrella.

A dozen police were stationed at the entrance of the store and around the parking lot through which the queue moved.

A truck drove by and the driver shouted out sarcastically: “Homeland, homeland, beloved homeland.”

That comes from a song that late president Hugo Chavez used to sing and is heard often on government-run media and at official events.

If you’re interested in real statistics on Venezuela, I recommend this recent article from The Economist, which is as far left as Venezuela is, and endorsed Barack Obama.

In socialism, the main purpose of policies is to make the leftist leaders at the top receive applause. They say things that will get them applause from the people. The policies are not intended to lift people out of poverty, otherwise Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. would all be rich and prosperous. The policies are intended to make the leaders feel good about themselves. “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”. “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan”. It’s not true, it’s just meant to make economically-illiterate people applaud.

So why do we keep voting for socialism, when we know it doesn’t work?

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Eighth Planned Parenthood video: StemExpress working with nearly 100 abortion clinics

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Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood
Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood

Here’s the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress:

And the story from Anika Smith writing for The Stream:

Today the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released video of an undercover lunch conversation with the CEO of fetal-tissue distributor StemExpress. This is the video footage that StemExpress tried to stop CMP from releasing by going to the courts in California. The temporary restraining order StemExpress filed against the Center for Medical Progress was dissolved on Friday, making this video one of the most anticipated — and possibly one of the most damaging.

The video contains several admissions by Cate Dyer, StemExpress CEO, that StemExpress gets intact fetuses from the abortion clinics they work with shipped to their laboratory. From the transcript:

Dyer: Realistically, if we were to do an agreement with you, what do we think you could get?
Buyer: Volume-wise?
Dyer: On specifically liver tissue, because that’s such an area of demand for us.
Buyer: So liver, and what about intact specimens, just—?
Dyer: Oh, yeah, I mean if you had intact cases, which we’ve done a lot, we sometimes ship those back to our lab in its entirety.
Buyer: Okay.
Dyer: So that would also be great if you guys have those.
Buyer: The entire case.
Dyer: Yeah, yeah. Because it’s just, and the procurement for us, I mean it can go really sideways, depending on the facility, and then our samples are destroyed, and we’re like, “Really?” This was all so much work, and then just to have them be destroyed is awful. I mean we have researchers wait forever, and they want certain things, you know, perfectly done, so we started bringing them back even to manage it from a procurement expert standpoint.

Another interesting admission in the video is that the baby parts have to be checked for bacteria, because some of the clinics that supply the baby parts are not sanitary. Staph infection is mentioned specifically. Dyer also mentions that Planned Parenthood is profiting from the sale of unborn baby parts.

Another article from The Stream has a breakdown of the admissions in the 8th video.

Here’s one more:

3) Cate Dyer estimates StemExpress is working with nearly 100 abortion clinics nationwide, and still can’t get enough fetal liver:

Buyer: What would make your lab happy? What would make your lab happy?
SE: Another fifty livers a week.
Buyer: Ok, so you can handle that?
SE: Yea. Just so you guys know, on the collection side for us, we’re also — as you see Megan out there in the clinic, we’re working with almost triple digit number clinics. So, it’s a lot on volume a little more than what we do. It’s a lot. So, I don’t think you’ll hit a capacity with us anytime in the next ten years. I think you’ll feel solid with that standpoint. So, I think, with that you’ll feel like doing an agreement with us. It will be consistent growth and our growth has been consistent, and it’s going to continue to grow from that standpoint.

Nearly 100 abortion clinics – this is not an isolated problem, it’s systemic. We need a massive federal investigation to find out what is really going on.

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Seventh Planned Parenthood video: cutting through living baby’s face to get intact brain

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A pre-born baby delivered intact so they could take his brain
A baby delivered intact so they could cut open his face and and sell his brain

Blogging has always been a challenge for me, because it takes up my time for leisure. But recently, I’ve had a new problem where what I want to write about is so depressing that it makes it even harder to write than normal.

Well, here we go again, with the seventh video:

Anika Smith writes about it at The Stream:

O’Donnell tells the story of a woman seeking an abortion at the Alameda Planned Parenthood clinic who was very upset. “Finally she calmed down and the doctor went in to perform the abortion. It takes a little while, and I’m in the hallway. I see the jar come out, goes into the path lab, and Jessica [her coworker] I can hear is preparing it, rinsing out the jar, rinsing out the linen … then I hear her call my name… ‘Come over here, I want you to see something kinda cool, this is kinda neat.’ The moment I see it, I’m just flabbergasted. This is the most gestated fetus and closest thing to a baby I’ve seen.”

Then her coworker takes an instrument, “just taps the heart, and it starts beating.”

[…]Those who harvest these baby parts seem unashamed. One lab official, the executive director of Novogenix, is recorded saying matter-of-factly, “There are times when after the procedure is done the heart is still beating.”

O’Donnell’s coworker’s response to a still-moving child was merely clinical: “OK, this is a really good fetus and it looks like we can procure a lot from it…. We’re going to procure brain.”

O’Donnell clearly struggles as she describes a coworker ordering her to cut open the child’s head. “I remember picking it up and finishing going through the rest … and Jessica picking up the brain … and I’m just sitting there, like, what did I just do? And that was the moment I knew that I couldn’t work for the company anymore.”

[…]“It had a face. Its nose was very pronounced. It had eyelids. And its mouth was pronounced.”

Today’s video made Amelia Hamilton cry, and she explains why at The Stream:

After six videos from the Center for Medical Progress, I have heard and seen such horrifying things that I made it almost 6 minutes into this seventh video, third in the Human Capital series, without reaction.

The descriptions of a “huddle” in which the employees look at a list of abortions to be done that day to determine what to harvest didn’t surprise me. When Procurement Manager Perrin Larton described a baby that “just fell out” because it was already in the vaginal canal, I was disgusted, but I didn’t cry. I made it through Melissa Farrell and Dr. Nucatola talking about altering the process to ensure that the brain is saved. I was angry that they would turn a baby in the womb, forcing it out breech to serve their bottom line, but I wasn’t surprised. I listened with growing horror as former StemExpress employee Holly O’Donnell described the first time she saw an aborted baby with a heartbeat.

I made it through things that would have made me cry in earlier videos, but that I’ve now come to expect.

But, at 5:59 I cried.

At 5:59, I saw footage of a living baby in a pie plate, waiting to have its life ended. I saw a baby with a heartbeat, a baby who was moving. I saw its little legs stretching and kicking as it would have done in the womb. I thought about how the mother must have felt her baby moving inside the womb, and probably didn’t know it would still be moving after the abortion. She can’t have known that they would put scissors through the baby’s chin to end her life while preserving the parts that would yield the most profit. And, so, I cried.

The people who did this were once babies the same size as this little baby, but they cut through his face and took his brain so they could sell it. His future – all that he would ever be, and all that he would ever do – wasn’t as important as the money they could make by selling his brain. They were strong, and he was weak, and they didn’t think that God was watching. They didn’t think that they would have to explain what they were doing to anyone on Judgment Day. Atheism is a necessary pre-condition to perform barbaric acts like this one.

Anyway, in light of these videos, I think Planned Parenthood should be investigated, and de-funded if necessary. And if they are found to be breaking the law, then they should be prosecuted criminally. The Democrats from top to bottom disagree with me on this – they want this business to continue, with taxpayer funding, no questions asked. That’s Barack Obama’s view, that’s Hillary Clinton’s view. There’s money in selling these baby parts, and the Democrat Party gets a cut through political donations.

This post at Newsbusters has all the videos in one post, if you haven’t seen them, including this new one.

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