Venezuela: chaos and thuggery take the place of the pretty revolution

Hugo Chávez's dream world has become a nightmare of shot-down protesters, jailed oppositionists, economic meltdown and a brutal war waged against a defiant middle class.

Hugo Chávez used to call it la revolución bonita (the pretty revolution), but the world looked at Venezuela last week and saw only ugliness. Protesters gunned down in the streets, barricades in flames, chaos. One of the dead was a 22-year-old beauty queen shot in the head.

With the government censoring and cowing TV reports, many of the images came from smartphones, grainy and jerky snippets filled with smoke and shouts. One fact loomed through them all: Chavismo, a hybrid system of democracy and autocracy built on populism, petro-dollars and quasi-socialism, was reaping the consequences of misrule.

Demonstrations in Caracas, Valencia, Mérida and other cities turned lethal, with student-led rallies provoking a fierce backlash from National Guard units and paramilitaries. They roared on motorcycles into "enemy" neighbourhoods, guns blazing. Families piled mattresses against windows to shield against bullets.


Human Rights Watch accused security forces of excessive and unlawful force by beating detainees and shooting at unarmed crowds. Worse may come. Jailings, beatings and killings have galvanised rather than deterred the mostly middle-class protesters. They vowed to continue until la salida, the exit of a government that has held power under Chávez, and now President Nicolás Maduro, for 15 years. "Change depends on every one of us. Don't give up!" Lilian Tintori, the wife of a jailed opposition leader, Leopoldo López, said via Twitter. Banners fluttered from buildings and barricades. "I declare myself in civil disobedience," read one.

In a televised speech to red-shirted supporters, Maduro accused the US of fomenting a coup and threatened Táchira, a particularly rebellious eastern state, with martial law. A local mayor would soon join López behind bars, he vowed. "It's a matter of time until we have him in the same cold cell." An official policy of "communicational hegemony" harnessed state media for propaganda, intimidated privately owned broadcasters, yanked one TV channel off the air and revoked work permits for four CNN journalists.

Venezuela dispute: US expels three diplomats in retaliation
2 Oct 2013
It may have resembled a regime's desperate battle for survival, affecting not just Venezuela but also its ally Cuba, which depends on Caracas for subsidised oil and supporters in the west who consider it a leftist beacon.In reality, though protests continue, the outcome is not in doubt. The government controls the police, army and courts and retains support among the poor. It remains an entrenched, formidable system of power untroubled by external threats. Despite the expulsion of three US diplomats a staple of chavista political theatre – there is no evidence of a Washington plot.

The convulsions were partly confected. López, an ambitious, Harvard-educated politician, steered student protests against crime and economic problems into a wider challenge to authority. A radical minority attacked state property with stones and petrol bombs, prompting the ferocious response by security forces and militias known as colectivos, leaving at least six dead, scores wounded and cities echoing to the sound of enraged pot-banging, a traditional form of dissent.

"I recommend they buy some stainless steel pots to last for a good 10, 20, 30 or 40 years," Maduro mocked. "Because the revolution is here for a long time!"History suggests that the president will prevail. Street protests briefly ousted his mentor in 2002 with the aid of a military-led coup tacitly backed by Washingon. Chávez bounced back. Protesters tried and failed again in 2003 by shutting down the oil industry, Venezuela's lifeblood. This time the generals and drillers appear firmly under government control. By rallying his fractious ruling coalition, Maduro could emerge even stronger.

That will not mean the revolution has won. On the contrary. In a broader, historical sense, it has already lost. This tropical would-be alternative to capitalism is a husk. It faces an existential threat not from youths chanting in plazas but from the fact that Venezuela is a shambolic, crumbling, dysfunctional ruin.

Start with the economy. The official inflation rate, 56%, is among the world's highest. There are shortages of bread, flour, meat, toilet paper and other basics. The bolívar currency has collapsed in value and is virtually unconvertible. Agriculture and industry are gasping. Newspapers are running out of paper. Airlines are threatening to cut services because the government owes them $3.3bn. Food companies are owed $2.4bn. Bond prices have plunged to levels associated with default. Recession hovers. An infrastructure once the envy of South America has suffered from lack of investment and maintenance. Power cuts leave cities in darkness. Potholes make highways look like they have been mortared. Cobwebs shroud abandoned cable cars. Even the facade of the presidential palace, Miraflores, peels and rots.

Crime is out of control. The government has stopped publishing regular statistics, but NGOs estimate the murder rate at 25,000 annually, one of the world's highest per capita rates, deadlier than Iraq. Kidnappings – people are snatched for ransom from bus stops, universities, shopping malls, airports compound public anxiety. Corrupt police and politicized, overwhelmed courts breed impunity. An estimated 97% of murders go unpunished. The list goes on. A catalogue of neglect and decay. This does not signify collapse. Venezuela is the original El Dorado, a land that seduced conquistadores with a false promise of gold only to find itself atop the world's biggest oil reserves. Billions of petro-dollars gush into the treasury every month, a replenishing source of patronage. Yet the nation's stitches are coming loose. Venezuela is unravelling.

Even if the protests abate, Maduro faces a desolate vista that mocks chavismo's grandiose rhetoric. An anti-imperialist beacon? A new path for humanity? Not while fistfights break out in supermarkets over scarce chickens. Or a diaspora of the best and brightest scatters around the world.

Middle-class anger the government can canalise and convert into polarisation, a venerable, successful strategy. But danger lies in discontent in the barrios and pueblos, the hillside slums and dusty villages that comprise core support. It almost sank the revolution a month after Chávez's death from cancer last March when Maduro, despite lopsided advantages in money, media and institutional control, managed just a narrow, contested election victory over opposition leader Henrique Capriles. That was a sign that government patronage and handouts – jobs, subsidies, houses, electrical goods were no longer sufficient compensation for the shortages, inflation and crime.

Chávez, first elected in 1998, created the system. A gifted politician and communicator, he expanded social programmes that sharply reduced poverty, cementing his image as champion of the underdog. But he proved to be a disastrous manager. Expropriations, subsidies and currency and price controls trapped the economy in a populist labyrinth. A historic oil boom and manic spending sustained the illusion of a new Jerusalem. You could fill an SUV tank for 60p. Chávez dreamily spoke of the population doubling, even quadrupling. He changed the clocks, the flag, the country's name, vowed to build new cities, artificial islands, a transcontinental pipeline.

There was a whiff of Ozymandias to it all, but foreign supporters applauded the fantasy. Oliver Stone, visiting Caracas to make a documentary, looked blank when I asked about the distortions and corruption haemorrhaging the economy. Shrewder observers writers and academics would visit and confide over rum that, yes, it all seemed a bit chaotic, then return home and publicly laud the revolution's progress.

The squandering reached such proportions that even amid record oil revenues Chávez had to borrow billions from China to confect artificial booms before elections. Maduro inherited this model and made it worse. Where Chávez had the confidence to bow to economic sanity and make painful adjustments, his successor, weaker and unloved by many on his own side, has plumped for even more reckless populism, ordering supermarkets to slash prices, jailing business owners as "speculators", sending troops to stores to liberate washing machines "for the people".

"We are in a critical situation of shortages and that's only the tip of the iceberg," said Luis Vicente León, a Caracas pollster. He predicted the difficulties would soon worsen. Workers at state-owned factories in Ciudad Guayana are in near open revolt. Teachers, doctors and nurses take turns striking. Chávez's gift for showmanship enabled him to create distractions and defuse frustration, but Maduro, stiff and wooden in comparison, relies more on thuggery. Hence the coordinated and symbolic assaults by "motorizados" on middle class neighborhoods.

There is no more pretence that the revolution is pretty. It is in the business of keeping power, no more, no less. It offers no solution to the fiasco, the tragedy, that is Venezuela.

Rory Carroll was based in Caracas as the Guardian and Observer Latin America correspondent from 2006-12. He is the author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela.

This blog is sponsored by: http://visitwebpages.info/paypalchecks

Violent protest will not help Venezuela

We deplore the wave of violence from minority and extremist sections of Venezuela's opposition, that left three dead, 60 injured and saw physical assaults on government institutions, including shots and Molotov cocktails attacks on the state TV channel and a state governor's residency (Jailed López tells his allies to keep fighting, 22 February). This followed a recently launched campaign by Venezuela's extreme right for La Salida (the ousting) of the government of President Maduro before his constitutional mandate ends in 2019. La Salida is led by extremist politicians Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado, who were both implicated in the 2002 coup in Venezuela. This is not the first time that the sections of the opposition have sought to oust the elected government by unconstitutional means, having lost at the ballot box.

We believe that while people in Venezuela have the right to protest – and that the Venezuelan constitution guarantees these and other democratic rights – this must be done peacefully. There is no justification for violent opposition to the elected government in Venezuela. We strongly support the statement of the Union of South American Nations that violence to seek to overthrow the elected, constitutional government is unacceptable. We join them in both condemning the wave of violence and in supporting calls for dialogue and peace.
Grahame Morris MP Chair, Labour Friends of Venezuela, Colin Burgon Chair, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, Ken Livingstone, Tariq Ali, Billy Hayes CWU, Peter Hain MP, Professor Doreen Massey, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Sandra White MSP (SNP), Ken Loach, Professor Julia Buxton, John Pilger journalist & filmmaker
Bruce Kent peace campaigner
Dave Anderson MP Labour
Michael Connarty MP Labour
Richard Gott writer & journalist
Andy De La Tour actor
Paul Flynn MP Labour
Roger Godsiff MP Labour
Ian Lavery MP Labour
Elfyn Llwyd MP Plaid Cymru
John McDonnell MP Labour
Chris Williamson MP Labour
Mike Wood MP Labour
Baroness Gibson APPG on Latin America
Murad Qureshi London Assembly Member, Labour
Professor Julia Buxton academic & consultant
Dr Francisco Dominguez Head of Centre for Brazilian and Latin American Studies, Middlesex University
Tim Potter Barrister & Haldane Society

This blog is sponsored by: http://visitwebpages.info/paypalchecks

Dear beautiful America, please, stop moving Forward

Upon migrating to the United States many years ago, I embraced my new home and left the past behind. Never could I imagine that, at some point, that past would become relevant.

dear1
But now, I am compelled to talk about it again.

In the USSR, we had state-controlled media which shaped the narrative entirely.

Our founder, Vladimir Lenin, was portrayed as a noble, charismatic, and smart man — the champion of the underdog (the working class), the seeker of equality, defeater of the rich. The humble man with common ideas who was destined for greatness.

Lenin peered at us intently from textbooks and walls. His was the face behind the good intentions that shaped our everyday life.

As a kid, I was largely shielded by my family they took the brunt of “adult tasks” in everyday life. They bribed officials to accomplish the most basic of things, they conserved every kopek and piece of bread, they got me the rare medicines I needed, all through means I didn’t dare fathom.

Of course, there was nothing special about those medicines, those favors, or anything else that took such effort to obtain in America, you can just go out and get it in a corner store. In the Soviet Union, the word “deficit” was commonly used in everyday language.

“This and this product are in deficit.” This meant that you couldn’t buy them. Maybe for the next three months or maybe forever, unless someone was bribed or the product was obtained via the black market, friends, or contraband. Fruits and vegetables had their “seasons” when they made an appearance in local stores we didn’t have advanced technology like hydroponic farms.

Instead, adults were herded into collective farms, which were the Soviet antithesis of family or individual-owned farms. Under cheerful banners of “accomplishing a five-year plan in four,” they usually underperformed and the bureaucrats responsible faked the numbers, which moved up the chain of command.


“Deficit.” I heard this term a lot, as I stood in long lines for bread and milk in stores with cheerfully generic names like “Progress” or “Sunrise.”

The lines resembled those formed by hipsters in America lining up for the sale of the next iPhone model except we stood in them every day.

As much as my family shielded me from their troubles, they couldn’t protect me from factors beyond their control. They couldn’t raise my level of living above theirs. And they certainly couldn’t get me anesthetics for dental visits. Sitting in the gray, sterile corridor for two hours, hearing the sobbing of the kids already in the dental chair as their teeth were drilled without anesthetics, water, or suction, and knowing that your turn was coming some handled it better than others.

In the local clinic, needles were resterilized and reused. Ambulances took three hours to arrive, if they came at all. That was our “free” healthcare.


We also lived in a “free” apartment, which was suffocatingly small by American standards, and it took years, if not decades, for an average couple to obtain such a place. Usually, several generations of a family lived under one roof until the government bestowed upon its citizens another gray five- to sixteen-story building that looked just like its gray neighbor and had the same exact green-painted swings in the yard.

Since almost nobody had cars, people could rarely afford to move to another city or republic.

Public transportation, which we all had to use, consisted of cranky people squeezed tightly like sardines inside a rusty box on wheels. Despite that, when I was eight, I wanted to be a trolley bus driver. Partially because of all the buttons he flipped to open and close doors, but mostly because there was a wall between him and the sardine can.

The walls in Soviet apartments were poorly insulated from noise and cold. Therefore, wall carpets were dominant in Soviet culture. They all looked similar, usually colored red with abstract, curving patterns.


Soviet factories were state-controlled. Variety was not a concept. The color red was all over the place it garnished the banners hanging off the sides of gray five-story buildings, with profiles of Lenin, Marx, and Engels fluttering lightly in the wind, proclaiming that “Marxism-Leninism is the symbol of our times.” Others stated, “Forward toward Communism!”

Red was splattered on our classroom walls and our school uniforms.

In grade school, you became an “Octyabronok” (named after the October 1917 revolution) and wore a Lenin-faced star on your lapel. You got a free newspaper, the “Young Leninist.” Later, you became a “Pioneer” and swapped the star for a red tie. After that, you moved on to “Komsomol” (All-Union Leninist Young Communist League). Those who did not follow the groupthink enough to make it to “Komsomol” lost access to crucial resources and careers later in life.

I grew up with no concept of “brands.” If I wanted to get that shoddy water pistol that suddenly appeared in a store, and my parents let me, then that was the water pistol. It broke in two weeks, of course.


Bread in the stores was the bread. Milk was the milk. Kolbasa was the kolbasa. Everything was manufactured by the state to provide the minimum required survivability, and minimum expected functionality. Improvements in design and the manufacturing process did not exist.

When I came to America and laid down on an American bed, it struck me that it was more comfortable than any bed I’d ever experienced. It was the result of evolving design oriented toward customer satisfaction — a concept alien to my former homeland.

The two famous brands of Soviet cars, Zaporozhets and Moskvich (both named after their places of origin), just… existed. We didn’t really have Zaporozhets 1980 followed by a new and improved Zaporozhets 1981 — now with power steering! No such thing. It was a car, and it required no further improvement. There was no customer demand, because people were poor, the state-controlled prices were very high, and product evolution crawled at snail’s pace.

The very concept of “customer convenience” did not exist. We didn’t have bottles sculpted to fit the shape of your hand, nor did we have polite cashiers, for they were under no obligation to please anyone they worked for the state. The abacus was still in common use in our stores while American stores had electric change machines, credit card readers, and sliding doors.

Like most things, clothes were in “deficit” and thus traveled from older to younger siblings in every family over time. Broken things weren’t thrown away but repaired.


Our giant lamp television was carried in the family since about the time I was born. It received three channels all State-controlled. On our evening news program, the Chernobyl disaster announcement was calm and lasted fifteen seconds. Our state papers, such as Pravda and Izvestia, were not read but used as invaluable sources of free toilet paper. This is not a joke.

Our propaganda put the big focus on the noble working class and how there was no such thing as a “lower” profession. Much emphasis was made on the nobility of simple working man, and certainly there is something to that.

But when the janitor receives roughly the same salary as a teacher who is paid roughly the same as a surgeon who is paid roughly the same as a programmer, all of them surrounded by peers who get paid the same no matter how well or poorly they perform, some people start carrying the team, and then they just give up. Everyone performs poorly in the end.

It was painfully obvious to everyone just how low the desire of the average person is to produce goods for other people. Without competition or opportunity to get ahead, with the state controlling production and paying equal salaries to workers regardless of their contributions, we had no concept of abundance.

With our “free” services, we regularly experienced water and electrical outages and sometimes went to a nearby forest to get water. Once you fill that bathtub with water, you can’t use it for anything else.

The first time I entered an American food market at the age of seventeen, I froze.

Older Soviets who visited American stores for the first time, got hit harder all the lies they were taught from childhood through the decades of their lives until that last moment, they expected them to be at least partially true.


Sure, they heard stories from overseas, but come on, those were just the Potemkin villages, mirages created to make the Soviets jealous. How can one imagine the unimaginable?

“They told us in Odessa, that in San Francisco it’s hard to find milk.”

This is the typical Soviet mentality, and they were used to it, and they bought into it, and then they entered that American supermarket and saw the rows upon rows of milk of different brands and kinds and fat percentages.

This is where some have been known to cry. It is the realization that their lives were stolen from them by the regime. A realization of what could’ve been, if they had been lucky enough to be born in this place which, from everything they knew, could not possibly exist.

I now live in Northern California, in the heart of the Bay Area, thousands of miles away from my homeland.


And yet the poison of Soviet propaganda seeps through college dorms just as it did in Soviet classrooms.

Stop a random youth on the street and you’ll find out what he thinks about capitalism (bad!) and communism/socialism (good!). Their favorite news programs are the “Daily Show” and the “Colbert Report,” where comedians reinforce their brainwashing via short, catchy clips.

Walk through Berkeley and you will see wall graffiti of the same hammer and sickle that adorned the big red flags of the Soviet era.

This doesn’t extend to just youths. People of all ages, even acquaintances that I otherwise respect and admire, are like this. They support the “progressive” leader Barack Obama, worship the nanny state, and believe in equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.

They badmouth capitalism and complain that only one percent of the American population has the “American dream.” They buy into the class warfare rhetoric hook, line, and sinker. They want artificially raised minimum wage, government handouts, and believe that Obamacare is the greatest thing since the invention of pockets.

I look at them and the red ties materialize, familiarly, around their necks.


There are “academic” speakers now who advocate that having too many choices is “bad for you.” Too stressful to choose, you see.

Living in the Soviet Union, being bombarded with similar nonsense, we had nothing to contradict it. When we walked outside the school, the everyday reality had no traces of the wealth afforded by capitalism. We lived in the grayness and that grayness was all there was.

Americans leave school to go home and they drop by a mall to buy something from an incredible selection of wealth and choice afforded by capitalism. They drop by a small corner store, which could probably feed a savvy Soviet village for a month (dog food is food, too, you know), and they pick up some “entertainment food” that did not exist in the USSR, in quantities that weren’t affordable for an average Soviet family.

Then they go home and write essays on their expensive iPads about how they don’t have the American Dream.

Now, most American news sources are no different than Pravda and Izvestia. Now, the government used the IRS to stifle political opposition. Now, ObamaCare is a wealth redistribution platform disguised as a common good. Now, Obama is being portrayed in academia and the media alike as a charismatic, messianic, “progressive” figure, fighting for the “underdog.” He would feel right at home as the General Secretary of the Communist Party. Now, Obama Youths are me, from decades ago. Leninist academia has had its way with them. Now, just like Soviet leaders, American leaders give lip-service to “social justice” while stocking up on personal wealth for their families.

There’s nothing new under the sun. I’m hardly the only ex-Soviet to point out the parallels. But some things matter enough to bear repeating.

Dear beautiful America, please, stop moving Forward.

This blog is sponsored by: http://visitwebpages.info/paypalchecks

Venezuelan police and opposition activists clash in Caracas

Venezuelan police and opposition demonstrators have clashed at the end of a march that gathered tens of thousands of people in Caracas.

Several people were injured, as police fired tear gas and activists hurled stones in the Altamira district.

Supporters of left-wing President Nicolas Maduro marched in central Caracas and other cities.

Ten people have now died in nearly two weeks of protests, which Mr Maduro has called a coup attempt.

He says the violence is part of a strategy devised by right-wing groups, with the support of the US, to destabilise his government.

"We have a strong democracy. What we don't have in Venezuela is a democratic opposition," Mr Maduro told thousands of his supporters in Caracas.

Mr Maduro was elected last April, following the death of Hugo Chavez, who was in office for 14 years.

Opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who was defeated in last year's presidential election, led a march in the capital.

Protesters in Caracas
The clashes took place in the eastern Caracas neighbourhood of Altamira, an opposition stronghold
He spoke against the arrest, on Tuesday, of fellow opposition politician Leopoldo Lopez, accused by the government of inciting violence.

Mr Capriles called on his supporters to carry on protesting, but to avoid any form of violence.

"There are millions of reasons to protest, there are so many problems, so many people suffering. But his movement we have built must be different," he said.

The opposition's main grievances are rampant crime, high inflation and the shortage of many staples. It blames the economic problems on the left-wing policies of the past 15 years.

Opposition demonstrators also took part in marches in western Tachira and Merida states.

The current wave of protests began on 12 February. Three people were shot dead at the end of those marches in Caracas by unknown gunmen.

Daily protests have been held in the capital for the past 11 days.

This blog is sponsored by: http://visitwebpages.info/paypalchecks

A Look Back: 7 Instances of Wasteful Spending in the Stimulus Package

Five years ago this week, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act the stimulus package into law. Here’s a quick reminder of how some of this $862 billion of taxpayer money was spent:

New Buses Without Riders $2.4 Million: The Winter Haven Area Transit Authority (WHAT) in Florida, which averages two to three riders per hour, used $2.4 million in federal stimulus funds to buy five new buses. Polk County commissioner Randy Wilkinson observed that WHAT spends more on the bus service than if the agency hired a cab for each rider.

 Renewable Energy Subsidies $14 Billion: Despite more than $14 billion in cash payments to solar, wind, and other renewable energy project developers between 2009 and 2012, the projects brought online represented less than 1.2 percent of overall electricity generation. Subsidies for renewable electricity also wreaked havoc in electricity markets, allowing some wind electricity producers to pay suppliers to take their electricity and still turn a profit.

 Subsidizing Electric Car Owners $7,500 per car: In the President’s stimulus bill, a substantial $7,500 tax subsidy was offered to electric car buyers, reducing sticker price of the Chevy Volt, a poster child for the Obama Administration’s crusade for green technology, to $41,000. The government, which previously bailed out the failing automaker General Motors, also used taxpayer money to buy 116 Volts for the federal fleet, despite the availability of cheaper options.

 “Green” Jobs Training $500 Million: After two years and hundreds of millions of federal dollars, job placement for the Green Jobs Program was only at 10 percent of the target level. Furthermore, what qualifies as a “green” job does not always match the high-tech, high-skill profile the President often touts. There were 33 times as many green jobs in the septic tank and portable toilet servicing industry as there were in solar electricity utilities, according to a report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as more green jobs selling used merchandise (eg. The Salvation Army) than in engineering services.

Weatherization Assistance Program $5 Billion: The Obama Administration’s original stimulus package includes $5 billion for an inefficient weatherization program riddled with corruption and shoddy work. Subsequent audits found contractors that charged $27 for light bulbs normally priced at $1.50, as well as $75 for carbon monoxide detectors valued at $22.

Assistance to Bankrupt Green Energy Companies $2.6 Billion: Heritage has identified 19 bankrupt green energy companies that failed despite $2.6 billion in federal investment. Whether these companies failed in grand fashion like Solyndra, or succeeded like Tesla, the government has no role playing market investor. Companies that are innovating and creating real value for consumers are the true engine of economic growth and they’re doing it without millions in taxpayer funding.

Renovations for an Abandoned Train Station $9.4 million: A vacant train station in Lancaster County, PA received $9.4 million in stimulus funds for renovation costs, including funding for a new elevator and offsite parking. The building had been empty for three decades. Taxpayer subsidies to cover the costs of the renovation totaled $117 per passenger traveling on the Amtrak line.

This blog is sponsored by: http://visitwebpages.info/paypalchecks

Heritage Takes the Message of Economic Freedom to Ukraine

The Heritage Foundation sought to bring a small measure of encouragement to Ukrainians this week as they continue their months-long protests for democratic and market reforms in the streets of Kyiv and throughout Ukraine.
At a presentation sponsored by the U.S.–Ukraine Business Council and the Bleyzer Foundation on February 13, Heritage analysts reviewed Ukraine’s economic freedom scores in the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom and urged the adoption of reforms by the Ukrainian government.
Although there have been some improvements in Ukraine’s economic freedom performance since the Index began in 1995, the country’s score of just 49.3 means that its economy remains in the bottom Index category “repressed.” Ukraine is the 155th freest out of 178 countries ranked in 2014 and is last among the 43 countries measured in the European region.
Heritage analysts noted that the protest movement in Ukraine is about more than just local politics and Russian political interference it is also a cry by the Ukrainian people for economic freedom. Ukraine has lost many of the gains it enjoyed after the fall of communism two decades ago, but even the modest improvements in economic freedom in recent years has whetted the appetites of Ukrainians for more.
Also featured at the February 13 Heritage event was Oksana Kuziakiv from the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting in Kyiv. Kuziakiv reviewed her recently published study on the key impediments of business development in Ukraine. She noted that increased regulatory pressure, on top of economic uncertainty due to political unrest, has had a very negative effect in investment and economic growth in Ukraine.
Over the 20-year history of the Index, Ukraine’s economic freedom score has advanced by over nine points with gains in half of the 10 freedom indicators, including better monetary stability and greater openness to global trade. Since President Viktor Yanukovych took office in 2010, however, the country has registered steadily deteriorating scores on property rights, corruption, financial freedom, and investment freedom.
As Heritage Vice President Jim Carafano notes, the period of maximum danger for Ukraine will begin the moment the Olympic torch in Sochi is snuffed out. That is when Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to give the all-clear signal to his buddy Yanukovych to start up the rough stuff again with the protesters. And that is why the message of economic freedom is so important today.

This blog is sponsored by: http://visitwebpages.info/paypalchecks