Free Republic

With crucial legislative elections less than four months away, Venezuela is tilting toward a major social crisis. Endemic food shortages have plagued Venezuela for years, worsening with the decline of global oil prices in late 2014. Now they are the norm across the country. This has stoked public discontent and led to the isolated looting of food stores and supermarkets.

Apparently all of that “anti-imperialist” rhetoric from Caracas was just a farce for public consumption. As Venezuela’s economy implodes amid skyrocketing inflation and crippling shortages of practically everything, Socialist strongman Nicolás Maduro (shown) has a new plan to prop up his imploding regime: annex two thirds of neighboring Guyana’s territory and almost one third of its population. The area eyed by Maduro’s autocracy is especially noteworthy now that potentially lucrative oil deposits have been discovered offshore. Unsurprisingly, a powerful alliance of the region’s socialist strongmen and their allies has sided with the regime in Venezuela. Talk of war is escalating....

It’s the law of the jungle in Venezuela, as shopping for groceries becomes an increasingly dangerous activity. As the shortage crisis worsens, more and more angry mobs are raiding the nation’s supermarkets, looting whatever basic goods they can find.+ During the first half of 2015, the Venezuelan Observatory for Social Conflict (OVCS) registered no fewer than 132 incidents of looting or attempted looting at various stores throughout the country. In addition, Venezuelan consumers staged over 500 protests that condemned the lack of available products at state-run grocery stores, markets, and pharmacies.+ The OVCS has documented at least 132 incidents of...

It was in Macaracuay, in front of a small shopping center called CC Macaracuay which has the misfortune of its grocery store (former C.A.D.A.) become a public shop, Bicentenario after the expropriation of EXITO chain. I drove in front around 7:30 and the line was much bigger. Driving in front again around 10 AM I was so surprised at the remaining extent of the line that I filmed it.

Venezuelan supermarkets are increasingly being targeted by looters as swollen lines and prolonged food shortages spark frustration in the OPEC nation struggling with an economic crisis. Shoppers routinely spend hours in lines to buy consumer staples ranging from corn flour to laundry soap, turning lines into venues for shoving matches and now more frequent attempts to plunder shops.

Socialist Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is blaming a United States conspiracy for a supermarket riot over the weekend that left one 21-year-old man dead–a man witnesses say was shot to death by Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard. A mob attacked a supermarket warehouse in San Félix, Bolívar, on Friday, attempting to tear down the walls of a warehouse and acquire basic food items, such as milk and flour. Video shows a crowd of dozens organizing in front of the building and attempting to break through, with Bolivarian National Guard troops attempting to violently disperse the crowd. When police finally managed to...

The Socialist Utopia has come to Venezuela and so has triple-digit inflation. Inflation is soaring at about 65%, murder rates are the second highest in the world, they don’t have food, chocolate,cooking oil, sugar, beer, shampoo, chicken, beef or even toilet paper. Businesses put the blame on the socialist government’s economic policies and the government blames it on everyone else. A number of U.S. movie stars have gone to Venezuela many times to applaud their regime and compare their economy to ours. Sean Penn was one. ... American leftists cheered the Socialist government and the social justice he forced on...

HyperinflationOver the years, we have repeatedly poked fun at the transformation of Venezuela into a "socialist utopia" - an economy in a state of terminal collapse, where the destruction of the currency (one black market Bolivar is now worth 107 times less than the official currency's exchange rate) and the resulting hyperinflation is only matched be barren wasteland that local stores have transformed into now that conventional supply chains are irreparably broken. Just this past Wednesday we showed a clip of what is currently taking place inside Venezuela supermarkets, noting that "the hyperinflationary collapse in Venezuela is reaching its terminal...

One person was killed and dozens were detained following looting of supermarkets in Venezuela's southeastern city of Ciudad Guayana, the state governor said on Friday, amid the ongoing food shortages in the recession-hit OPEC nation. Shoppers seeking scarce consumer staples including milk, rice and flour broke into a supermarket warehouse on Friday morning, leading businesses in the area to shut their doors, local newspaper Correo del Caroni reported.

Venezuelan troops occupied a Caracas warehouse complex used by local food giant Empresas Polar and Nestle to distribute food and beverages, workers and company officials said on Thursday. The move follows months of accusations by President Nicolas Maduro that Polar, the country's largest private employer, is working to sabotage the economy. The company denies the accusations.

Venezuela used to have oil literally coming out of the ground. Then the Socialists took over and under Hugo Chavez made it a model for the world... to run away from. Here's what's going on in Venezuela now. Universal Health Care - Venezuela's widely praised government health care system is doing great. Doctors are being paid $15 a month In some hospitals, they had less than a third of the medical supplies they require. Almost every patient told me they had to buy at least some of their drugs on the street. Oncologists said that people who were diagnosed...

Venezuela could stop making beer by August, as local breweries run out of ingredients needed to produce the country’s most popular alcoholic drink. A brewery shutdown would reduce the country’s beer supply by a terrifying 80 percent, according to industry leaders. Local breweries say they are down to their final batches of barley, malt and other imported products needed to make beer, thanks to Venezuela’s strict currency controls that have made it almost impossible to purchase supplies. The industry, which is calling the situation an “unprecedented crisis,” is already some $200 million in arrears to suppliers around the world. “Beer...

Venezuela's embattled government has taken the drastic step of forcing food producers to sell their produce to the state, in a bid to counter the ever-worsening shortages. Farmers and manufacturers who produce milk, pasta, oil, rice, sugar and flour have been told to supply between 30 per cent and 100 per cent of their products to the state stores. Shortages, rationing and queues outside supermarkets have become a way of life for Venezuelans, as their isolated country battles against rigid currency controls and a shortage of US dollars – making it difficult for Venezuelans to find imported goods.

Private companies in Venezuela say the government has ordered them to distribute food staples to a network of state-run supermarkets amid chronic shortages of basic goods. The Food Industry Chamber said Monday that authorities ordered producers of milk, pasta, oil, rice, sugar and flour to supply between 30 percent and 100 percent of their products to the state stores. …

If the Greeks were to vote ‘No’ what would happen next? Well no one can say. But here is a quick thought on what I hope the Greek government might have been exploring if they are excluded from the euro. It’s just food for thought nothing more. They have to be prepared to have a currency that does not depend on Europe supplying Euros. So they will need another currency – hopefully their own. I think we can be sure no western company has been printing them. There are few such companies and there is, I think, no possibility that...

(Reuters) Vladimir Putin with Jose Maria Aznar, then Spain's prime minister, at Moncloa Palace on June 13, 2000. One of Russia's largest organized-crime syndicates allegedly operated out of Spain for more than a decade with the help of close allies of President Vladimir Putin, then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Bloomberg reports. Prosecutors in Madrid have filed a 488-page petition to charge 27 people with money laundering and fraud in connection to the St. Petersburg-based Tambov crime syndicate's setting up shop in Spain in 1996. Vladislav Reznik, now the deputy head of the finance committee in Russia's lower house...

MOSCOW, June 16 (UPI) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday Russia's nuclear arsenal would be would increase by 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles in 2015. Speaking at Army-2015 Expo, an international military trade show near Moscow, Putin said the new missiles could "overcome even the most technically advanced anti-missile defense systems," adding a new long-range early-warning radar "to monitor in the western direction" was also being prepared. It was a reference to plans by NATO to permanently place troops and heavy armaments in Poland, a Russian neighbor and former Warsaw Pact country. In reference to apparent plans to reinforce NATO's...

Dancing With Another Dictatorship The most plausible answer is that the Obama administration is once again working to save a police state that is about to collapse under its own weight. The trouble is that every time team Obama sits down at the poker table with thugs—think Russia, Iran and Cuba—it gets cleaned out. The region’s democracy advocates are right to be nervous. The rest of the aricle http://www.wsj.com/articles/dancing-with-another-dictatorship-1434922282

As Venezuela's economy continues to collapse, the U.S. can expect the number of fraudulent asylum seekers to increase A report from El Universal documents skyrocketing asylum applications from Venezuelans seeking to enter the United States in recent years. According to American immigration authorities, the number of applications from this South American country tripled between 2013 and 2014. The U.S. government is becoming increasingly concerned about immigration fraud from this region, likely linked—at least in part—to Venezuela’s economic decline. In 2013, Venezuela’s economy grew by only 1.3 percent. In 2014 it contracted by four percent, and it is forecast by the...

What has a Papal Encyclical calling on the world to end its use of fossil fuels and to pray to God for the success of the global “climate summit” in December got in common with the Greek euro crisis, the ominous rift between the West and Russia, and the shambles Europe is making over the desperation of African and Syrian refugees to find safety this side of the Mediterranean? They are all different aspects of the two greatest acts of political make-believe of our time, so all-pervasive that it is hard for us to grasp just how much effect they...