Free Republic

Kyle Dishman can't afford to shop at the local grocery store anymore. Instead he goes to Dollar General, where he can make $40 stretch into a week's worth of groceries and the occasional can of motor oil for his Chrysler 300. He sticks with pasta, frozen pizza and canned vegetables, fully aware that "any food you can buy for only $1 is not the greatest for you." But Dishman says prices have gone up so much that he's started rationing his food. "When you only have a certain amount to spend, it's like, why not just go to the dollar...

The Biden administration’s plea for more oil production has been rejected by OPEC and its allies, including Russia, according to Reuters.The group of big oil producers believe oil markets do not need more oil than they plan to release in the coming months, Reuters reported.The report cited “four sources” but did not name them. Reporting on internal OPEC decisions is often based on unnamed sources.The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is a cartel of 13 nations that includes Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. A larger group, that also includes Russia, Mayalasia, and Mexico, is known as OPEC+.The...

Nineteen House Democrats wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday calling on the Biden administration to remove all sanctions against Venezuela, arguing that the "maximum pressure" campaign against the authoritarian regime of Nicolas Maduro hasn't worked. Members of Congress who signed the letter include Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona, Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García of Illinois, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair fo the House Progressive Caucus. "By any measure, the current 'maximum pressure' policy towards Venezuela has been a total failure," read the letter.The lawmakers...

As Venezuela falls into the abyss of economic collapse – the economy has halved in five years, a contraction worse than the Great Depression or the Spanish Civil War – a simplistic narrative in the American press has formed, which starts with the Chavez regime seizing control of the country in 1998. (The charismatic populist Hugo Chavez is, after all, the leader most Americans are familiar with when talking about Venezuela, as he made worldwide headlines with his 2006 UN speech where he called U.S. President Bush "a devil" while celebrities like Sean Penn and Michael Moore cheered him on.)...

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Yosmar Sanguino says she struggles to put food on the table for her two daughters and three grandchildren in a low-income neighborhood of Venezuela’s capital. She often whips up arepas — traditional flat, round corn patties — with butter and cheese. But it’s hard to afford even those few ingredients. “There is food, but the money is lacking. Because if you buy one thing, you can’t buy the other,” she said. “If you buy butter, you can’t buy cheese. Or if you buy the cheese, you can’t buy the butter.”

Caracas (AFP) - Working at her vegetable stall in Caracas, Marisela Lopez wonders what she's going to do with the sudden flood of cash customers have been unloading on her. Venezuela announced Thursday it would knock six zeroes off its currency -- the third time in 13 years it has redenominated the bolivar. Faith in physical bank notes is at an all-time low, and people want rid of them. "We also have to quickly get rid of the cash because if we keep collecting the cash, what next? What will we do with the banknotes?" said Lopez, 34. The new...

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela says it will make a million-to-1 change in its currency soon, eliminating six zeros from prices in the local currency as hyperinflation continues to plague the troubled South American nation. Venezuela’s central bank on Thursday announced the change to the bolivar will go into effect Oct. 1. The new 100 bolivar bill will be the highest denomination. It is equivalent to 100,000,000 of the current bolivar. This is the third adjustment since socialist leaders began governing Venezuela. The bolivar lost three zeros in 2008 under now-deceased President Hugo Chávez, while his successor, Nicolás Maduro, eliminated...

Peru’s new president Pedro Castillo, 51, deserves credit for vowing to focus his government on improving the lives of the country’s poverty-stricken indigenous population. But his first steps in office raise fears that he will scare away investors, generate capital flight and — after a short-lived populist fiesta — create more poverty. Castillo, a leftist former elementary school teacher who had never before held public office, assumed the presidency on July 28 after winning the runoff elections with a razor-thin 0.3 percent of the vote. He controls only 37 seats in the 130-member Congress. Some hoped that Castillo’s minority in...

ere's What You Need to Remember: That the Soviet Union withdrew its ballistic missiles from Cuba in 1962 is well known. And also well known is that in return, the United States quietly agreed to withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. With the United States developing a new generation of cruise missiles in response to alleged Russian arms control violations, a response from Moscow was inevitable. But Russian missiles in Venezuela? That’s what some Russian commentators are calling for in retaliation for the Trump administration withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The Pentagon has already tested a new...

There’s a country where protesting against the government will land you in jail. Or result in detention on trumped-up (no pun intended) charges.Hundreds of Cubans are still detained after anti-government protestsWhere the government will blame the citizens’ unrest on something/anything other than their own malfeasance.Where the government essentially controls the technology that in turn controls your access to the internet and social networks. Yes, hard to believe but there really is a country like that. And then…there’s Cuba. Who, along with Venezuela, has a message for Americans.Posted from: MOTUS A.D.

New York City prosecutors have charged four Iranian spies with plotting to kidnap a U.S. journalist from Brooklyn, smuggling her out of the city on a speedboat then sailing down to Venezuela before flying to Tehran, after she criticized the regime for its human rights abuses. Masih Alinejad, 44, a producer with Voice of America, told NBC News that she was the target of the plot. She was not named in court documents. The conspirators, described as intelligence officials, had also plotted to lure a person in the UK and three others in Canada to Iran, an indictment said. They...

Anti-communist protests in Cuba are threatening to dismantle one of the last vestiges of former president Barack Obama's diplomatic legacy. The unrest has come as a shock to journalists and other Democrats who cheered the Obama administration's efforts to normalize U.S. relations with the communist regime. The controversial initiative, spearheaded by failed novelist Ben Rhodes, culminated in 2016 with Obama's visit to Havana, where he attended a baseball game with Cuban dictator Raúl Castro. The New York Times report on the Cuban protests opens with the following oddly worded passage: Shouting "Freedom" and other anti-government slogans, thousands of Cubans took...

I think what’s happening in Cuba, right before our very eyes, is the latest in the continuous crack-up of the old Cold War political order and the rising up of a new one. A worldwide political order that’s re-defining politics and nationhood for the foreseeable future. So let’s unpack that a bit. Believe it or not, scholars have been predicting something like this for decades, particularly after the Soviet Union fell on Christmas Day, 1991. Now, if you remember, there were a number of scholars who believed that with the fall of the Soviet Union, we had reached an era...

As unprecedented, large-scale protests in Cuba driven by economic instability and food and fuel shortages also amid a deeply mismanaged pandemic response continue, the US Coast Guard has a message for Cubans wishing to flee the increasingly chaotic Communist-ruled island: don’t come. “Please don’t take to the sea,” Rear Admiral Eric C. Jones said in a statement. “The Coast Guard along with our local, state and federal partners are monitoring any activity” that looks suspicious or unsafe in the Florida straits “including unpermitted vessel departures from Florida to Cuba.” Illustrative image via US Coast Guard But the words also appear...

The U.S. Department of the Treasury on Monday lifted sanctions on the export of gas to socialist Venezuela, a boon to the dictatorship in Caracas and its patron government in communist Cuba, which struggles to suppress mounting opposition and calls for the regime’s total abolition. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a general license number 40, permitting “all transactions and activities related to the exportation or reexportation, directly or indirectly, of liquefied petroleum gas to Venezuela” as well as the socialist regime’s state-owned affiliates, specifically rescinding restrictions that then-President Donald Trump imposed via three executive orders in 2018...

The Democrats’ Topsy-Turvy Spin Machine The media can’t cover for Joe Biden’s “Gong Show” administration indefinitely.The guessing game of how long the levitation of the Biden presidency can be taken seriously seems to be entering a new phase. The deluge of illegal entries into the United States at the southern border is now running at a rate of closer to 3 million than 2 million a year and yet we still see and hear the bobbling talking head of the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas assuring us, “The southern border is closed.” The media has provided almost no coverage of...

CNN’s knee-jerk reaction to spiking gas prices was to protect President Joe Biden, and Twitter users jumped all over the outlet for it. CNN Business published a ridiculous story headlined, “Gas prices are above $3. Biden doesn’t have a magic wand to fix that.” CNN Business Lead Writer Matt Egan patronized readers by saying, “President Joe Biden is being attacked for $3 gasoline. But the truth is the White House isn’t to blame for high gas prices – and has few options to lower them.” The CNN Business tweet of Egan’s pro-Biden propaganda was heavily ratioed. Did Egan forget that...

The price of oil surged to $75 a barrel the other day under President Joe Biden's green energy policies. The price was as low as $35 a barrel under former President Donald Trump because he believed in American energy dominance ("Drill, baby, drill"). So, more oil meant lower prices at the pump. It was effectively a massive, multibillion-dollar tax cut for lower- and middle-income earners of tens of billions of dollars a year. But now, with the exploding demand for energy as the world economy reopens, the self-defeating Biden policy is to curtail oil drilling here at home, which is...

The Miami area is looming ever larger as investigators question the men held in the plot to assassinate Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Seventeen Colombians and two Haitian Americans from South Florida are in custody in Haiti. A person who interviewed the detained Colombians in Haiti told the Miami Herald that the men claimed to have been recruited to do work in Haiti by an under-the-radar firm in Doral called CTU Security. It is run by a Venezuelan émigré, Antonio Enmanuel Intriago Valera. The Miami Herald visited the company’s offices on Thursday, where a doorbell rang to a phone, and a...

Heavily armed criminal groups have moved in the past month to residential and commercial areas from slums in the city’s hills, and violence has exploded over the past 24 hours with firefights breaking out in at least five populous neighborhoods. President Nicolás Maduro’s government has not mentioned any casualties as a result of the clashes. Human rights activists in the area have said at least four civilians were killed on Wednesday and half a dozen have been wounded. The gangs want to control one of the main corridors linking the capital with the west of the country, said a human...