I’ll give our porn star-and-Putin-loving president this: just when you think
there’s no further folly of his that could surprise you, bingo!



Or had he—perhaps on a slow afternoon at Mar-a-Lago—just thrown a bunch of
nation names into a Make America Great Again hat and pulled out Venezuela?
Could we just as easily have been plotting the invasion of Canada?



Artz is a frequently compelling spokesperson for the latter theory. He says
the Bolivarian Revolution was a historic event that overthrew a corrupt
oligarchy and established real democracy, though most people in the United
States don’t know about it. He blames that ignorance on our own for-profit

press, charging that the reporting—even from sources like the New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow—is distorted.

For another take on all this, I contacted Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, who’s
worked in microfinance and municipal government in Venezuela and is now a
consultant and adjunct professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg
School of Management. Lansberg-Rodriguez says the roots of Venezuela’s problems go back to Chávez, who was
“a charismatic leader who turned the country briefly into an international
player by spending a lot of money abroad. Oil was $18 a barrel when Chávez
took office; much of the time he was in power it was over $100. So
everybody was better off, but the government didn’t set up anything
sustainable.” When oil prices fell, Venezuela went into debt in an attempt
to maintain its expenditures, and when more debt was no longer an option,
the system collapsed.



Now, she says, “I have to send my mother food from here because they can’t
afford to buy anything.” They have to stand in line for sugar or rice, she
adds, and are lucky if there’s any left when they get there.



Steeves says that when he was in Venezuela, he “saw with my own eyes how
things improved. By 2011, the poverty rate was cut to 27 percent. . . .
This is one of the greatest peaceful revolutions and turnarounds in world
history. . . . So why are things so bad now? . . . The biggest problem is
not internal. . . . With international sanctions that continue to cause
great suffering, and a U.S. president who wonders aloud why he can’t just
invade Venezuela, we are not letting the Venezuelan people decide their own
fate. We are, instead, the source of most of their problems. . . . I cannot
think of a way to explain it other than class warfare.”