As we wrote about in today’s Morning Bell, Venezuela’s leftist leader Hugo Chavez poses an increasing threat to America. Heritage’s Ray Walser, a senior policy analyst for Latin America, explains in this new Heritage in Focus video. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsOA2GYRB-M[/youtube]
Venezuela’s leftist leader Hugo Chavez isn’t set to arrive until tomorrow to meet with Russian Prime Minister Vladimr Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, but two Russian media outlets are already claiming that Chavez will buy $1 billion to $2 billion worth of subs, helicopters and airplanes while in Moscow. Since 2003, Chavez has bought more than $4.4 billion in arms from Russia. Last year Russia announced plans to build two Kalashinkov assault rifle factories in Venezuela. Unfortunately, arms sales are just a small part of the Russian-Venezuelan axis that is …
Following last week’s Colombia military rescue of hostages held by FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), Venezuela strongman Hugo Chavez and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe agreed to meet this Friday in Caracas. Earlier this year at a presidential summit in Brazil Chavez told Uribe: “We haven’t been giving money to the FARC.” But a laptop found by the Colombian military earlier this year, whose contents have been confirmed authentic by Interpol, suggests otherwise.The documents showed: Venezuela appears to be making concrete offers to help arm the rebels, possibly with rocket-propelled …
Like the new Democratic party under Barack Obama, Venezuela’s socialist government believes that free trade is the cause of, not the solution to poverty. Venezuelan embassy spokesman Gladys Urbaneja Duran, told the UN food summit in Rome that the current food crisis “is the biggest demonstration of the historical failure of the capitalist model. The main reason for the rise in food prices isn’t growing demand from the Indian and Chinese markets, or the rise in petroleum prices. The main reason is that food has been turned into yet another …
Earlier this month the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts rejected a proposed design for the future Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial because “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed statue recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.” If only the commission could make a similar condemnation of the energy policies coming out of liberals in Congress. Like the show trials of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Democrats in Congress summoned the nation’s top oil executives before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday …
What is there in May air that brings out the combativeness in Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez? In less than two weeks, Venezuela’s strident, socialist leader has finished nationalizing his nation’s steel industry, given the green light for new purchases of Chinese and Russian-made arms, and denounced German Chancellor Angela Merkel as an heir of Hitler after she criticized Chávez’s oil-driven “socialism of the 21st century.” Furthermore, Chávez accused Colombia of plotting to start a war with Venezuela in order to draw the U.S. into intervening in his country. Last week Interpol’s …
To compete with Hillary Clinton’s pandering on a gas tax holiday, Barack Obama proposed a windfall profits tax on oil companies of his own last month. The Obama plan is not unlike the windfall oil profits tax passed by Hugo Chavez just two weeks earlier. Obama would slap a 20% tax on the cost of a barrel of oil above $80 for all domestic oil companies. Chavez tax hits only foreign oil companies and charges a 50% rate for the cost of a barrel of oil above $70. The difference …
The import of the recent verification of close ties between Venezuela President Hugo Chavez and the terrorist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) is quickly being accepted as yet another reason to support free trade with Colombia. The Orlando Sentinel editorializes: It’s easy enough to dismiss Hugo Chavez as one of those crazy uncles who isn’t quite right in the head. It would also be quite foolish. Documents that recently linked Mr. Chavez to a plan to arm and finance insurgents in Colombia show just how worrisome he’s become to …
On April 26, Barack Obama supporter Bill Richardson met with Venezuela President Hugo Chavez in an attempt to secure the release of Americans being held in Colombia by the Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Besides helping to legitimize Chavez’s longstanding goal of becoming a regional power, the meeting did not produce any tangible results. Chavez later claimed Venezuela had “lost the contact we had with the FARC.” As the Wall Street Journal reports today, that is unlikely. In early March the Colombian government captured a FARC leader’s laptop …
Fast becoming an official communications appendage of the Barack Obama campaign, the New York Times editorializes today on the “petty pandering” of Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s call for a suspension of the federal gas tax over the summer. Noting that the policy would not deliver lower prices for consumers, the Times asserts that “their demagoguery is growing into a real problem.” The New York Times is at least half right; demagoguery is a real problem that is threatening to significantly worsen our nation’s energy policy. But it is the …
