Venezuela and Socilism, and People want this because??????????

I'm taking Comparative Politics this semester in school and my  professor has links on the class's Moodle site for a few different new sources.  On my break I go and check to see what's going on in the world.  And today we are going to talk about Venezuela.  The article was titled, "Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why."    I have the link at the bottom for you to see the article itself. 

Well it turns out Venezuela is violent, like crazy violent.  In 2009 the number of civilian deaths were above 16,000.  But people live with this, however when a newspaper published an article with a picture of murder victims on the front page, the government didn't like that to much.  They told the newspaper to stop publishing pictures of violence.  To quote Teodoro Petkoff an editor from a different newspaper, "Forget the hundreds of children who die from stray bullets, or the kids who go through the horror of seeing their parents or older siblings killed before their eyes.  Their problem is the photograph.”  I'm glad for the citizens of Venezuela that their government has their priorities straight.  Venezuela is currently under a decade long surge in homicides since the election of Hugo Chavez.  Of course crime problems do not appear over night, but the number of homicides this last year are three times higher than before Hugo Chavez stepped into office.


Socialism is supposed to be great, it's on the road to communism, it's for the people, everyone is equal and everyone is happy, right?  Well not in Venezuela.  But let's look into why the crime rate is so high.


While other countries economies around Venezuela are growing, the economy of Venezuela is shrinking, and the gap between rich and poor is growing, despite spending on anti-poverty programs.  Wait, you mean the government can't help people be less poor????????  I know shocking, to some people.  I'm here to tell you people that the government can't fix the people's problems.  That's not what they are here for.  All that spending and it isn't doing any good, I wish my government would realize this and stop spending.

Another reason for the high crime rate is that the salaries of police officers are low, and with the highest inflation in the hemisphere, more than 30 percent, police officers are turning to kidnapping and other means to supplement their income.  Ohhhh wait, you mean lots of government spending and higher taxes, generally both found in more left leaning governments leads to inflation, which everyone thinks is bad?  Talk about corruption, like in Batman Begins, you know you have problems when the police are crooked. 

Other people put blame for the high crime rate more on the government.  Apparently the judicial system of Venezuela is becoming more political which means that the judges lose their interdependency and are aligning themselves more with the political movement of Hugo Chavez.  A lot of state employees are being forced to leave their jobs, and in some cases the country.  Henrique Capriles, the governor of Miranda, a state that encompases parts of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, says the Hugo Chavez has made the homicide rate worse by cutting money for state and city governments led by political opponents and by taking about thousands of guns from their police forces after losing elections.  Great this just gets more and more corrupt. 

Now they are trying, Venezuela is getting help from Cuba and Nicaragua, two countries that have maintained the lowest murder rates in Latin America.

However the issue of the picture in the paper are sparking into discussions of the governments efforts to have more control over new sources they are not in charge off.  What ever happened to freedom of the press??????  Government officials are also threatening an inquiry into "Rotten Town,"  a music video by a Venezuelan reggae singer which shows a young child killed by a stray bullet.  "We elected him to crack down on the problems we face,” he said. “But there’s no control of criminals on the street, no control of anything.” From Hector Olivares a citizen of Venezuela, who has lost two sons.

So overall, Hugo Chavez, and socialism has know control of the press, a higher crime rate, corruption, inflation, a huge gap between rich and poor despite spending on anti-poverty programs, limited freedom of speech, I mean wow I now understand why people want socialism, is sounds great to me.  I pray for the people of Venezuela, I really do, that God will keep them safe, and that their government can solve this problem of all these murders, and that their new efforts to combat this problem will work.









Sources

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/world/americas/23venez.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss