Tag Archives: Venezuela

News

Venezuela nationalizes Spanish-owned bank

Leave a comment

More communism from Obama’s communist buddy.

Excerpt:

President Hugo Chavez’s government assumed control of Venezuela’s third-largest bank on Friday – making the state the largest player in the nation’s banking system.

The purchase of the Spanish-owned Banco de Venezuela gives Chavez’s socialist government control over more than one-fifth of bank deposits as he tightens his grip over the economy.

The acquisition will “strengthen the public banking system,” which favors sectors including agriculture, energy, housing and tourism, Finance Minister Ali Rodriguez said in a statement.

…Combined with other state banks, the government will now control about 21 percent of deposits and 16 percent of loans, a payroll of 15,000 employees and 651 bank branches.

…Like the rest of the economy, Venezuela’s banking sector is already highly regulated, with the government dictating interest rates and commissions.

Under Chavez, Venezuela has nationalized major players in the steel, electricity and other sectors, including four major oil projects, since 2007.

The Venezuelan consulting firm Ecoanalitica calculates those nationalizations have cost Chavez’s government some $23 billion.

Things are so much more efficient when no one owns anything except the state bureaucrats. Look how well the Soviet Union did.

News

Obama restores diplomatic ties with Venezuela and Syria

3 Comments

Venezuela

The extremely left-wing Al-Jazeera reports that Obama intends to reinstate diplomatic relations with Venezuela. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

The United States and Venezuela are to reinstate ambassadors to Caracas and Washington, setting aside a diplomatic spat that soured ties last year.

The two nations expelled each other’s envoys last September in a dispute involving allegations by Bolivia, a close ally of Venezuela, that Washington was meddling in its internal affairs.

The normalisation of diplomatic ties “will take place in the coming days, and as soon as the ambassadors have resumed their functions we will move forward to a more fluid communication,” Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan foreign minister, said on Wednesday.

Venezuela is a well-known sponsor of terrorism in neighboring Colombia, as well as a communist nation, with all the standard losses of liberty and prosperity that entails.

Syria

Syria is a puppet of Iran and a supporter of Hezbollah, which menaces Israel from the north with terrorist attacks. George W. Bush withdrew the last ambassador after it came out that Syria was involved in the assassination of Rafik Hariri in Lebanon. But Obama thinks it’s a good idea to re-instate relations with them, as well.

The extremely left-wing Associated Press reports:

President Barack Obama plans to return an ambassador to Syria, filling a post that has been vacant for four years and marking an acceleration of Washington’s engagement with the Arab world, the White House said on Wednesday.

Presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama’s decision was aimed at fulfilling his promise to show more U.S. engagement in the Arab world and not a response to any explicit policy change on Syria’s part.

He cited a series of meetings between Syrian and U.S. officials since Obama took office.

“This strongly reflects the administration’s recognition of the role Syria plays, and the hope of the role that the Syrian government can play constructively, to promote peace and stability in the region,” Gibbs said.

Obama wants to dialogue with ruthless, murdering dictators – the kind of people the left regards as good.

What it means

Briefly, when the US is seen as consorting with terrorist-supporting regimes, it is a blow to all the freedom-loving people in the world. Instead of supporting those who are imprisoned, beaten, tortured and murdered by the dictators, Obama is supporting the dictators, by giving their terrorist-supporting regimes legitimacy in the eyes of the public, and discouraging pro-democracy movements.

News

Rich trust-fund leftists caught spying for Cuba

4 Comments

Heritage Foundation has the story:

Move over, Bill Ayers, you’ve got company. The arrest of retired State Department intelligence analyst Walter Kendall Myers has apparently uncovered yet another overweened Social Register Rebel in our midst. Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, were arrested on June 5 and charged with being espionage agents for Fidel Castro for 30 years.

…Kendall Myers got his PhD and later taught at Johns Hopkins/SAIS…

Myers’s mother’s pedigree (AT&T money and top-drawer National Geographic Society founders) even topped Ayers’s father’s Commonwealth Edison/Chicago fortune. Both of these bad boys seemingly felt so bad about living large off the sweat of their ancestors that they became hard-core leftists and turned on their fellow Americans.

A bit more in a subsequent post:

Cases like those of Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Belen Montes, convicted in 2002 of spying for Cuba, or the five Cubans convicted in Miami in 2001 on 26 counts of spying for the regime, demonstrate the ability of the Cuban operatives to work in the U.S. to the detriment of U.S. national security and interests.

What about Barack Obama?

Barack Obama launched his presidential campaign from the house of his friend, Bill Ayers. He was raised by a rich grandmother and went to expensive private schools, where he took illegal drugs like cocaine. His mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a member of the Communist Party and a Soviet-sponsored activist. I’ve posted before about whether Obama is destroying the United States with his policies. He voted against missile defense, but he favors nuclear plants for Iran.

And we know that Obama is traipsing around with dictators in Venezuela and is even trying to normalize relations with Cuba. Who cares about the torture and unlawful imprisonment that goes on in Cuba and Iran? Obama’s response to North Korea hasn’t been inspiring.