an old article by Bernie's new speech writer. Hugo Chavez's economic miracle The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains 30.9K 101 3 DAVID SIROTA MARCH 6, 2013 5:30PM (UTC) . Just to get it out of the way, I'll state the obvious: with respect to many policies, Chavez was no saint. He, for instance, amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting a boom in violent crime. A No, Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving. For instance, according to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez's first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez's brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its "extreme poverty" rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America. Additionally, as Weisbrot points out, "college enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled." When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettabl cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela's did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter - and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on. . : As evidenced by the treatment of everyone from Martin Luther King to Michael Moore to Oliver Stone to anyone else who dares question neoliberalism and economic imperialism, that punishment is all about marginalization - the kind that avoids engaging on substance for fear of allowing the notion of socialism to even enter the conversation in the first place. Instead, the non-conformist is attacked and discredited with vapid invective and caricature, becoming a cartoon villain whose ideas, performance and record are ignored before they can be considered on the merits. He becomes, in other words, the Hugo Chavez we so often saw in American political ads. Likewise, in a United States whose poverty rate is skyrocketing, are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela's policies that so rapidly reduced poverty
All time best tweet ever.... if anyone takes Michael Moore seriously after seeing this, they are a full blown idiot.