Fresh from his brush with European Royalty, little Emperor wannabe, Hugo, has set his sites on the conquest of Chile as the next stop in his World Domination Tour.
Chavez, who knows how to buy friends and influence people, has offered to use some of “his” , I mean Venezuelan, oil money to buy, I mean help, Chilean socialist president Michelle Bachalet regain her declining popularity by subsidizing the construction of a new transportation program called Transantiago. The implementation of the system has been botched and overbudget, leading to street demonstrations in Santiago.
The Bachalet administration emphatically refused Chavez’s offer to make Chile one of his “client states”:
“We are not used to outsiders telling us what we have to do”
A slightly more diplomatic, yet just as effective ¿por que no te callas?
Hugo, you see is the “brains” behind 21st Century Socialism, which seems to be a very close relative of 20th Century Socialism – stealing.
As far as I can tell, 21st Century Socialism consists of taking your national wealth and packing it in suitcases that are then delivered to other countries to buy , I mean help, foreign politicians who don’t mind prostituting themselves get elected or stay in power.
Typically, Socialism had a romantic Robin Hood appeal in that it aimed to redistribute society’s wealth by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor-in essence making everyone poor.
Hugo’s version of socialism seems to be steal from the Venezuelan poor and give it to his friends so they in turn can steal from their people. Already, there are shortages of basic food staples in Venezuela, a country with an astronomical inflation rate and plenty of oil money coming into its treasury from the nationalized oil fields. The culprit according to “the brain” is the free market and the solution to the problems lie in constitutional reforms that will make him omnipotent to implement his vision of 21st Century Misery, I mean Socialism.