Over two weeks ago, the Bolivarian socialist government of Venezuela under de facto dictator Nicolas Maduro decreed that private-sector and government workers can be forced to work on farms if the military, which is now responsible for food production and distribution in that shortage-wracked country, deems it necessary.
Relevant site searches indicate that the country's forced-labor decree still isn't news at the Associated Press or the New York Times. So it's disappointing, though sadly not surprising, that the AP, the Times, and for that matter the vast majority of the rest of the English language establishment press, has failed to report the frightening news that Maduro has hired Alfredo Serrano, a deeply committed Marxist, to be his next economic czar.
As of mid-afternoon Tuesday, based on a Google News search, only the Wall Street Journal had an English language story.
At the AP on August 3, reporter Hannah Dreier, in a dispatch primarily about how Maduro had decided to promote a general indicted by the U.S. on drug trafficking charges, noted that Maduro fired his previous economic adviser (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Also on Tuesday, Maduro removed economic czar Miguel Perez, appointed six months ago, who had been seen as a potential moderate reformer in the socialist president's Cabinet.Together, the moves seemed to signal that Maduro is doubling down on his existing strategy of antagonizing the U.S. and refusing to make significant economic reforms.
The Journal's thorough report (HT Zero Hedge) confirms that take.
Maduro considers Serrano a savior of sorts, despite the fact that the Spanish economist holds a worldview which has ruined or further ruined once-decent economies with authoritarian dictates for a century, leading to tens of millions of deaths:
Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro Looks to a Marxist Spaniard for an Economic Miracle
Alfredo Serrano’s calls for even more state controls have largely shaped the president’s response to the country’s economic crisis
President Nicolás Maduro, hoping for an economic miracle to salvage his country, has placed his trust in an obscure Marxist professor from Spain who holds so much sway the president calls him “the Jesus Christ of economics.”
Alfredo Serrano—a 40-year-old economist whose long hair and beard have also elicited the president’s comparison to Jesus—has become the central economic adviser to Mr. Maduro, according to a number of officials in the ruling United Socialist Party and other government consultants. His rise has come at the expense of advisers who, though also leftist, have urged the president to undertake more conventional steps to address Venezuela’s dysfunctional economy, such as liberalizing the country’s tightly controlled currency, these people say.
Instead, Mr. Serrano’s calls for even more state controls on manufacturing and food supply have largely shaped the president’s response to the country’s economic crisis, the party officials say. Such moves, they argue, risk prolonging the deepest recession in the nation’s history—as well as the hyperinflation and severe food shortages that have accompanied it.
“All the attempts to reform, to coordinate with the private sector, have been blocked by him,” a senior ruling-party lawmaker said.
"This is a very intelligent, very qualified man who’s building new concepts for a new economy of the 21st century,” Mr. Maduro said at a book fair last year, as he admired Mr. Serrano’s 2014 tome “The Economic Thought of Hugo Chávez.” “He’s a man of great courage."
Serrano's book about Chavez, the man who persistently pursued dictatorial control as Venezuela's president for 14 years until his death in 2013, is filled with the kinds of ideas which, if attempted, may presage the worst Marxist-led bloodbath in 40 years:
His 2014 book on Mr. Chávez, in which he called Mr. Maduro’s late mentor and predecessor a virtuoso planner, brought the economist to the Venezuelan president’s attention and catapulted him into the inner power circle, one ruling-party official said.
Among his more unorthodox ideas are that inflation is caused by class struggle and that government bureaucracy should be replaced by revolutionary communes that would handle everything from health care to food production. “The communes must be at the center of gravity of the new state,” Mr. Serrano said in a July speech in Caracas.
Mr. Maduro has followed the advice by ordering community councils and soldiers to distribute basic food directly to families, according to two ruling-party lawmakers.
Meantime, the crisis deepens. ...
(Serrano blames the crisis on) “inefficient distribution system in the hands of speculative capitalism,” which he says allows companies to hoard products. He also says foreign and local reactionary forces are waging an economic war against Venezuela.
Are we allowed to call someone who advocates a commune-based economic system a "communist"? Well, I just did, because that's what Serrano is, in his own words.
He also apparently doesn't like being accurately characterized by a Western media outlet. Reacting to the Journal's attention, he sarcastically tweeted (rough translation from Spanish) about how he "missed Kennedy's death."
Serrano's appointment virtually cements the notion that a one-party, top-down, totally controlled communist state is what Nicolas Maduro wants, regardless of the human cost.
Like so many other communists, Serrano and his comrades, with help from the late Chavez, have exempted themselves from the demands and hardships they place on others. El Universal reported the following in June 2014:
Fundación Centro de Estudios Políticos y Sociales (Center of Political and Social Studies, CEPS), a foundation with ties to some leaders of Podemos, Spain's new left-wing party, received at least USD 5 billion from the government of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in 2002-2012, based on the records kept at the registry of foundations of the (Venezuelan) Ministry of Culture.
During such period, the government of Hugo Chávez was occasionally CEPS's only client. A great deal of the money (USD 2.17 billion) was paid for consulting services provided directly to the then president of Venezuela.
The Journal report also indicates that Serrano's academic bona fides are shaky at best, and fraudulent at worst. Though he claims to be "listed as a professor at eight universities across Spain and Latin America," the Journal's reporters found that "none of the institutions said that he had held a staff position, while five said he had taught courses at the universities only as a visiting professor" — and "The other three said they had no record that he had ever taught any courses there."
Venezuela appears to be preparing to head into the final Stalinist phase of communist serfdom. The death toll involved in recreating an equivalent of Stalin's attempt to manage food production in the Ukraine in the early 1930s in yet another nation with 30 million people — and this is what Serrano says he wants — could easily run into the hundreds of thousands or even millions without international intervention or the unlikely success by Maduro's opposition in effecting a nationwide recall vote.
How is this not news at the AP, New York Times, or virtually anywhere else?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
