Free Republic

May 31, 2016 Jeff_Berwick It seems barely a day passes now without some big name person warning of imminent collapse. The latest is Alan Greenspan. In an interview on Thursday he told Fox News that Venezuela is now under martial law and that “America is next.” He said that what was happening in Venezuela was inevitably going to take place in the US. I agree with this. In fact, we said this exact thing just last week with our article, “Venezuela Descends Into Chaos… Europe and US Next.” Funny enough, a few brainwashed sheeple said we were crazy for saying...

Hamburg, Germany — WE Germans can never escape the trauma of our recent history. That has rarely been clearer than today, as we look around our Continent and across the Atlantic. There are almost too many differences to mention between what happened in the 1930s over here and what is going on today. And it goes without saying that Donald J. Trump and Austria’s Norbert Hofer are not Adolf Hitler. Still, Germany’s slide into a popular embrace of authoritarianism in the 1930s offers a frame for understanding how liberal democracies can suddenly turn toward anti-liberalism. Setting aside debate about whether...

There’s a dark cloud hanging over the progressive push to turn America into a collectivist paradise. Things are so bad in socialist Venezuela, whose economy is cratering, that even the liberal news media have taken notice. Day after day, stories emerge from the oil-rich South American nation about power outages, bankruptcies, long lines for toilet paper, urban unrest, and now even food shortages. Millions of Venezuelans, no longer smitten by the kind of envy-laden appeals that Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton dish up on a daily basis, are having big-time buyers’ remorse since approving Hugo Chavez’s socialist uprising back in...

Bernie Sanders’ appeal among young people has increasingly focused on delivering the supposed benefits a socialist society can give them; free education, free health care, and a government-mandated ‘living wage.’ But his vision for a socialist utopia flies in the face of reason – and the saddening saga of socialism in Europe. Sanders’ latest missive accusing Senator Mitch McConnell of denying pensions to coal miners in Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania typifies a fervent belief that the government can be a cure to all ills. The coal industry has been hit hard over recent years – in particular because of...

European Union ministers meeting in the Dutch capital have endorsed a “Pact of Amsterdam” aimed at improving living conditions in towns and cities throughout the 28-nation bloc. With 70 percent of the EU’s 500 million people living in urban areas, the deal signed Monday gives cities more influence in EU legislation and easier access to funds for urban projects. The Dutch government says key themes include integrating migrants into urban populations, improving air quality and tackling poverty. …

Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster. While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their...

The courts? Closed most days. The bureau to start a business? Same thing. The public defender’s office? That’s been converted into a food bank for government employees. Step by step, Venezuela has been shutting down. This country has long been accustomed to painful shortages, even of basic foods. But Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory. In recent weeks, the government has taken what may be one of the most desperate measures ever by a country to save electricity: A shutdown of many of its offices for all but two half-days each week. But that is only the start of...

 Suddenly Bernie wants to keep his opinions to himself? In order to focus on running for President of the United States where, I guess, we are to assume that a candidate’s opinions are irrelevant. Or something: LEÓN KRAUZE, UNIVISION: I am sure that you know about this topic: various leftist governments, especially the populists, are in serious trouble in Latin America. The socialist model in Venezuela has the country near collapse. Argentina, also Brazil, how do you explain that failure?BERNIE SANDERS, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE: You are asking me questions…LEÓN KRAUZE, UNIVISION: I am sure you’re interested in that.BERNIE SANDERS, DEMOCRATIC...

<p>It's official: years of warnings that Obamacare will lead to dramatic increases in healthcare premiums are about to be validated.</p> <p>As the WSJ writes, big health plans stung by losses in the first few years of the U.S. health law’s implementation are seeking hefty premium increases for individual plans sold through insurance exchanges in more than a dozen states.</p>

The Democrats’ socialist candidate for President of the United States, Bernie Sanders, was seriously tripped up this week in an interview with Univision’s León Krauze. When asked to explain the failure of socialist governments in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil, Sanders completely clammed up, saying he has an opinion on the subject, but was unwilling to share it, as he is “focused on my campaign.”

The latest auction in California's cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gases fell sharply below expectations, as buyers purchased just 2% of the carbon credits whose sale funds a variety of state programs -- notably, the proposed high-speed rail project. The quarterly auction, conducted May 18 and announced Wednesday, will provide just $10 million for state programs, including $2.5 million for the bullet train. The rail authority had been expecting about $150 million. Whatever prompted the lack of buyers, the auction is a stark example of the uncertainty and risk of relying on actively-traded carbon credits to build the bullet train. The...

Venezuela’s gold reserves have plunged to their lowest level on record after it sold $1.7 billion of the precious metal in the first quarter of the year to repay debts. The country is grappling with an economic crisis that has left it struggling to feed its population.

When socialist Hugo Chavez became president of Venezuela after the 1998 election, he promised a path he described as "revolutionary," the same word Bernie Sanders uses for his "movement" to fight "income inequality." Useful American idiots like actors Sean Penn and Danny Glover, who got rich making movies for capitalist Hollywood, sang Chavez's praises. Penn described him as "one of the most important forces we have had on this planet." Glover praised Chavez as "a social champion of democracy, material development, and spiritual well-being." Chavez promised to help finance films for Glover. The Venezuelan National Assembly even reportedly gave Glover...

The Washington Post sure knows how to very carefully nibble around the edges when it comes to criticizing the economic system that brought disaster to a country. In this case, the Post's editorial board managed to severely criticize Venezuela for being a complete economic failure despite have the largest known oil reserves of any nation in the world. It had to be an incredibly disastrous economic system to bring such a nation so low that now it is running out of food, toilet paper, and beer. So do you think the Washington Post editorial named that system? Nope. Instead they...

When a young Inuit hunter took aim with his rifle he thought he had spotted a polar bear or an Arctic fox in northern Canada. But the photographs of his kill posted on social media by Didji Ishalook, 25, have sparked feverish interest among scientists and a fascinated public. "They're saying it's a grizzly-polar bear hybrid," he said. Mr Ishalook had actually shot a rare cross between the two species, who normally live in very different climates. Determining whether it is a grolar or a prizzly will have to wait for the results of DNA testing. But its existence adds...

In the year 2000, fresh out of college, I cast my second-ever presidential election vote for Ralph Nader. Now, 16 years later, I look back on my young, Nader-voting self and see plenty of parallels with the college students who are feeling the Bern. Hillary Clinton is a wonkish, often uninspiring candidate, just as Al Gore was. And Bernie, as Nader did, promises to dial back the influence of big-money corporate donors and bring about real change. He even has Bill Murray, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, and Eddie Vedder on his side. But if Bernie splinters the left and erodes...

A transgender rights organization is calling out Hillary Clinton for failing to complete a trans-focused questionnaire it distributed to the presidential candidates. Trans United Fund, the first tax-exempt political advocacy group to focus specifically on transgender issues, announced Monday that both Clinton and Bernie Sanders had committed to completing the survey, but that only Sanders' campaign had filled it out. They also sent presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign the questionnaire, but did not receive a response. The Clinton campaign called the TUF to say that the survey was too long and the campaign couldn't complete it on time. The...

Venezuelans on Tuesday woke up to discover that the government-controlled price of corn flour -- used to make corn patty arepas, a staple of local cuisine -- has risen 900 percent. The socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro had kept the price of corn flour frozen for 15 months at 19 bolivares a kilogram (two pounds).

Study forecasts global temperature increases of up to 9.5 degrees C. The unmitigated burning of Earth's remaining fossil fuels would cause global warming on a scale bigger than previously anticipated, according to a new study out of the University of Victoria. Katarzyna Tokarska, a PhD student at the university, is the lead author of a new paper titled "The climate response to five trillion tonnes of carbon". Previous modelling, including those used by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, use projections that assume just two trillion tonnes of carbon would be released.

Many are the facts that the national media refuses to address. One such fact is that concerning the pattern of violence that’s emerged on the part of the supporters of self-declared “socialist,” Bernie Sanders. In addition to the fact that they conflict wildly with those held, traditionally, by Americans generally, socialists hold moral beliefs that demand the deployment of the overt coercion of others of those who don’t share those values.