Madurito’s pajarito seems to be relaying instructions from the nearly-dead Fidel Castro rather than the dead-and-gone Hugo Chavez.
And, as things fall apart, el Platanito Maduro continues to devour what is left of himself and his pathetic banana republic.
Echoes reverberate in an alabaster city on the Potomac, where falling apart has reached epic proportions and another overripe autocrat is doing his utmost to turn the USA into a cheap imitation of Caracastan.
From Mac Margolis at The Daily Beast:
How Nicolas Maduro Is Strangling Democracy In Venezuela
In the superheated political conversation of Venezuela, smearing the other side is an age-old tradition. So it was hardly unusual to hear the National Assembly howl with invective this week over how political “parasites” are indulging in “speculation, hoarding, smuggling and black marketeering.
What was jarring was the orator in question—President Nicolas Maduro. Ostensibly, the Venezuelan national leader was letting loose against the perils of corruption, which he said threatened to wreck the economy and drive the country “far from socialism.” In practice, he was asking the legislature to grant him extraordinary powers to run the country as he pleases for the next year.
The government’s gambit for superpowers is not a foregone conclusion. To win “enabling powers,” as the handlers in Caracas call them, Maduro needs 99 votes, or three fifths of the 165-seat National Assembly. At present, his ruling coalition is one vote short, and so must convince at least one member from the national opposition front to turn coat.
The political opposition, led by Miranda state governor Henrique Capriles Radonski, is scrambling to block the initiative, and has even called on his supporters to boycott the law should it pass.
Many analysts see desperation at work at the Palacio Miraflores. “The country is in such a dire state of political and social unraveling, the regime has few options to survive,” says Diego Arria, a former diplomat who backs the Venezuelan opposition. “These enabling powers have little to do with a campaign to fight corruption. This is to put a nail in the coffin of the few freedoms we still have left.”
Venezuelans have seen this script before. In his 14-year rule, Hugo Chávez issued 200 separate decrees, each crafted to allow him to bypass the legislature, the courts, public dissent and all the other impedimenta to a normal constitutional democracy.
From Bolivia’s Evo Morales to Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Chavez’s compañeros in the so-called Bolivarian alliance for 21st-century socialism have done much of the same, leveraging victories at the ballot box and the national purse strings to turn the screws on political and economic liberties.
Continue reading HERE.