What Pilate Said One Midnight

I am glad you stayed after the others retired, Gaius. I want to talk. I'm not at all certain what I want to say, but I want to talk. It was a wretched dinner, wasn't it? No, don't rally your fine patrician manners and protest that you enjoyed it. It's too late in the night for even courteous lies. Lies use up so much strength. Past midnight there's only enough strength left for truth.

What? No, I'm all right. It's that word I used, that word "truth." It slips up on me. I use it before I think. And then wince always, as if I had jabbed that old spear scar on my thigh.

But full apologies for the dinner, Gaius. You've never heard Pontius Pilate apologize before? Yes, I know the food was good. This is the best resort in all Helvetia. And the air here in the Alps should whet an appetite like Damascene dagger. But you didn't eat, nor did any of the other guests. And they excused themselves noticeably early for holidaying Romans. Because of me. Because I can no longer entertain. Because I poison the air with both my silences and my remarks, with a restlessness of eye, yet a vinegar of words that blisters even Roman hides. But I want to know why, Gaius. Because I know you'll head back to Rome when the summer heat subsides there. And you'll cover its seven hills with your gossip within a week. There won't be a cloistered, intimate salon along all the Appian Way in which you won't have served up the rarebit of your news – that you saw me, Pilate, at Lucerne this summer. That it's true that I've lost my grip. That I've aged twenty years in the few that have sped by since I lost my post in Judaea. That I spend my self-imposed exile gnawing the bleeding knuckles of melancholy, while Claudia looks on and pleads and weeps and babbles about the Gods.

Oh, come, I can hear you, Gaius! How all the bleary eyes of your friends, and the jades they call their wives, will flock to you to hear a report that so suits their hopes. But whatever you tell them, I wanted you to know. Because – oh because we once were close, before my failures isolated me. Or because, perhaps, confession needs no reason after midnight, since a burned-out heart must now and then blow its smoke in a different face. So here it is, Gaius. Let the slave fill your glass, and clutch it tight! I didn't just lose my post in Judaea. That in itself would have been release from prison. It was something else I did, and what maddens me is that I don't know what I did. But you might get an inkling if I say that I may have killed Caesar!

Oh, not our Caesar. No, I was serving him. The day I married Claudia, Gaius, Caesar said to me with that divine smirk, "Congratulations, Pontius. To marry a woman of royal blood is the best training for statesmanship that Rome can offer her sons." That's why I was so determined to rule well over the Jews. When the appointment came and the senate sneered knowingly, "Family connections," I had to show them I was something other than a career soldier from the wrong side of the Tiber. And Claudia was with me. Imagine her going! What other provincial governor do you know whose wife shared his whole term of office? That isn't the pattern Caesar encourages. Wives stay in Rome, vegetating luxuriously and pretending to pine, while the husband is abroad squeezing enough tax and graft from the provinces to come home and retire on.

Don't squirm so, Gaius. Yes, the slaves can hear, but it isn't news to them that I mutter treason.

We were to be the royal pair, Claudia and I. But you don't rule the priests of Jewry. You bluff authority and they bluff humility, and each knows the other's lying. You scheme and plan and awaken one morning to find yourself a child at cunning. And you lose dignity, and you lose respect, and you fear for your job, and you hate.

Here's just one sample of how my record ran. I found no images of Caesar in Jerusalem. So I put them up. Placed them on the garrison of Antonia, overlooking the Jewish temple. The priests said nothing. But that night six thousand Jews surrounded the palace with a roar of prayer and chanting that went on night and day. I threatened a massacre and they bared their necks and chanted louder, six thousand of them, waiting for the sword. I removed Caesar's image, and back home the Emperor whined that he'd lost face!

That began it, and your busy ears have heard long since how it went. Every feast day a threat of revolt. Every revolt more blood. Every throat that was cut for Caesar bringing a sharper rebuke from Caesar. We built a summer place in their north country. We ate their sickening buttered quail. we conspired with their native rulers. But there was no avoiding trouble, and I grew sullen and Claudia had her dreams. Her dreams and her gods.

Suppose it helps, Gaius, to believe that there's more to the world that you can see there? Does it help to endure what you do see there? I'd always boasted in the Roman code – if you can't see it or touch it or use it or spend it or wear it, then it isn't real, it doesn't exist. But not Claudia. She had a Jewish hairdresser who talked to her of the Jewish God. One God, mind you! Which struck me as a sensible economy till I heard what He was like. An interfering God, one I'm afraid wouldn't leave room in His kind of world for Rome. And it was from this Jewish servant girl we first heard of this Nazarene. I don't know what He was. If I did – But I checked Him with spies. He seemed a harmless kind of traveling teacher such as thrive in that climate. And I couldn't understand why the Jews were so upset by Him. Claudia heard Him twice when He was in the city, convinced me that His quarrel was with the Jews, not with us.

Well, we had just arrived in Jerusalem that night. It was the time of the great feast, and the air reeked as thick of revolt as it did of pilgrims. And toward morning I was hauled from bed by their high priest, a certain Caiaphas, my nominee for the Prince of Rats. How our Roman senate could have used him! He'd managed to get me heavily in debt to him. Temple funds he had loaned me that he knew I didn't intend to repay. And he had grown quite bold with his personal demands, and I was sick of it. Late this night he rouses me, all secrecy, all very much the sinister conspirator, to announce to me they had arrested this Nazarene. By night, mind you! Had tried Him at a hurried, trumped-up session of their Jewish court. Had convicted Him of blasphemy, a charge I just don't understand. Somehow, it's all tied up with their monopoly on God. But they were bringing Him to me at dawn, to be condemned to death by Roman law for sedition.

The high priest’s warnings were always well staged. Never spelled out, but plain as the knifelike nose of his holy face that either I convict this Man or there'd be trouble with the Jews at feast time, the brand of trouble I couldn't afford. I couldn't sleep after he left. I paced those hot corridors. I finally dressed, full an hour before the dawn. It had all tumbled in on me, the impact of how trapped I was. The proud arm of Rome, with all its boast of justice, was to be but a dirty dagger in the pudgy hand of priests!

I was waiting in the room I used for court, officially enthroned, with clerk and guards, when they led Him in. Well, Gaius, don't smile at this, as you value your jaw, but I've had no peace since He walked into my judgment hall that dawn! It has been years, man, but these scenes I'll read from the back of my eyelids every night. You've seen Caesar when he was young inspect the legions. His air of command was child play compared with the manner of this Nazarene! He didn't have to strut, you see. He walked toward my throne, arms bound, with a stride of mastery and control that by its very audacity silenced the room for an instant and left me trembling with an insane desire to stand and salute!

The clerk began reading the absurd list of charges, the priestly delegation punctuating these with the palm-rubbings and the beard-strokings and the eye-rollings and the pious gutturals I had learned to ignore. But I more felt it than heard it. I questioned mechanically. He answered very little. But what He said and the way He said it! It was as if His level gaze had pulled my naked soul right up into my eyes and was probing it there. And a voice kept singing in my ear, "Why, you're on trial, Pilate!" And the Man wasn't listening to the charges. You'd have sworn He had just come in out of friendly interest to see what was going to happen to me. And the very pressure of His standing there had grown unbearable, when a slave rushed in all atremble at interrupting court, bringing a message from Claudia. She had stabbed at the stylus in that childish way she has when she's distraught. "Don't judge this amazing Man," she wrote, "I was haunted by Him this night!"

Gaius, I tried to free Him. From that moment on I tried, and I'll always think He knew it. I declared Him out of my jurisdiction, being a Galilean. But the native king Herod discovered He was born in Judaea and sent Him back to me. I appealed to the crowd that had gathered in the streets, hoping they were His sympathizers. But Caiaphas had stationed agitators to whip up the beasts and cry for blood, and you know how any citizen loves, just after breakfast, to cry for another's blood. I had Him beaten, a thorough barracks-room beating. I'm not sure why. To appease the crowd, I guess. But do we Romans need a reason for beatings? That's the code, isn't it, for anything we don't understand?

Well, it didn't work. The crowd roared like some slavering beast when I brought Him back. If only you could have watched Him! They had thrown some rags of mock purple over His pulped and bleeding shoulders. They had jammed a chaplet of thorns down over His forehead. And it fitted! It all fitted! He stood there watching them from my balcony, swaying from weakness by now, but royal, I tell you! In the teeth of that mob, not just pain but pity shining from His eyes and seaming His face. And I kept thinking, somehow this is monstrous; somehow it's upside down. That purple is real! That crown is real! Somehow, these animal noises the crowd is shrieking should be praise! And then Caiaphas played his master-stroke on me. Announced there in public that this Jesus claimed a crown. That this was treason to Caesar. And the guards began to glance at one another. And that mob of spineless filth began to shout "Hail Caesar!" And I knew I was beaten. And I gave the order. And I couldn't look at Him. And I did that childish thing, I called for water and there on the balcony I washed my hands of the whole affair. But as they led Him away I did look up, and He turned and looked at me. No smile, no pity, just glanced at my hands, and I'll feel the weight of His eyes on them from now on.

But you're yawning, Gaius. I've kept you up. And as active a man as you are needs his rest on holidays. Claudia will be asleep by now. Rows of lighted lamps near her couch. She can't sleep in the dark any more. Not since that afternoon. You see the sun went out when my guards executed Him. That's what I said! I don't know how or what. I only know I was there, that though it was midday it turned as black as the tunnels of hell in that miserable city, while I tried to compose Claudia, and explain how I'd been trapped, and she railed at me with her dream. She's had the dream ever since when she sleeps in the dark. Some form of it. That there was to be a new Caesar, and that I killed Him.

Oh, we've been to Egypt, to their seers and magicians. We've listened by the hour to oracles in the musty temples of Greece, chattering their inanities. We've called it an Oriental curse that we're under, and we've tried to break it a thousand ways. But there's no breaking it. Except – and even that might not, you see.

But do you know why I've kept going? Deeper than the curse is the haunting, driving certainty that He's still somewhere near. That I've unfinished business with Him. That, now and then, as I walk by the lake He's following me. And much as that strikes terror, I wonder if that isn't the only hope. You see, if I could walk up to Him and this time salute! Tell Him I know now, whoever He is, He was the only Man worth the name in all Judaea that day. Tell Him I know I wasn't trapped, that I trapped myself. Tell Him here's one Roman who wishes He were Caesar! I believe that would do it. I believe He'd listen, and know I meant it, and that at last I'd see Him smile!

Yes, quiet tonight, isn't it, Gaius? Not a breeze stirring down by the lake. Yes good night. You had better run along. No, no, I think – will you waken the slave outside the door and tell him to bring me a cloak, my heavy one. I believe I'll walk by the lake. Yes, it is dark there, but I won't be alone. I guess I never really have been alone. Yes, goodnight, Gaius!

From The Salty Tang by Frederick B. Speakman, 1954

The Sequester That Cried Wolf

In the run-up to the sequester, which began March 1, Obama made every effort to scare the American public into believing the sky would fall as a consequence of cutting $85 billion out of a $3.8 trillion budget – about 2%. That’s decimal dust in a $12 trillion economy. Nevertheless, for political gain Obama has done his best to choose spending cuts that are as painful as possible, hoping that Republicans would cave, as they have before, and agree to more taxes on the rich.

Air traffic controllers have been furloughed to absorb the $600 million that was cut from the Transportation Department budget. That prompted a letter from Senator Tom Coburn to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood detailing how he could save $1.2 billion instead of intentionally inconveniencing travelers with average flight delays of 90 minutes to score political points. One of Coburn’s suggestions was to terminate federal subsidies to “Airports to Nowhere” – so-called because they service fewer than 10 passengers daily. Coburn also reminded LaHood that his department had $34 billion in appropriated but unused funds from prior year budgets.

Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano released 500 illegal immigrants from detention facilities and promised to release as many as 10,000 detainees awaiting deportation, saying

All I can say is look, we’re doing our very best to minimize the impacts of sequester. But there’s only so much I can do. I’m supposed to have 34,000 detention beds for immigration. How do I pay for those?

Napolitano also furloughed TSA screeners, slowing down the time required to get through security. She gave no thought to canceling an HSA grant enabling the purchase of an underwater robot by Columbus OH – which has no major rivers or lakes nearby. No thought given to canceling a grant to Keene NH, population 23,000, enabling the town to buy a $300,000 BearCat armored personnel carrier to guard its annual pumpkin festival. Not enough pain involved in either of those. Trimming its ridiculous grant programs by a third could eliminate TSA furloughs entirely.

Coburn noted that if cabinet secretaries are going to use furloughs to deal with sequester cuts why not furlough employees who don’t bother to show up for work at all. The notoriously inept Civil Service System reported about 3.5 million hours were lost by AWOL federal employees – enough to scan almost two billion checked bags … enough to avoid security delays for four years.

Obama did his share by canceling White House tours and threatened to cancel the annual Easter egg roll on the White House lawn. So, school kids who visit Washington during spring break are denied access to a house that the American people, not the occupant, own. This stunt will save about $2 million annually according to the Secret Service. Are there other ways the White House could save $2 million? You betcha’.

How about cutting back on travel? Despite the fact that his home and office is in the White House, Obama has averaged 184 travel days per year for every year he has been in office – a trip every other day. Every time he cranks up Air Force One it costs the taxpayers $180,000 per hour to operate that thing and that doesn’t include the support cost. So eliminating one coast-to-coast round trip would open the White House for tours again.

How about a little less partying? The annual Obama clan soirée to Hawaii costs taxpayers $4 million and they’ve been there five times – $20 million bucks so far and counting. Obama had to return to Washington from there this year to sign the fiscal cliff paperwork, which added another round trip because he rejoined the family. Are there no fax machines, no FedEx deliveries in Hawaii? Their late summer vacation in Martha’s Vineyard costs taxpayers a couple of million. His recent golf outing with Tiger Woods cost a million dollars (now there’s a golf outing!) and the dinner party he threw for Mexican President Calderon in 2010 cost a million bucks. British taxpayers pony-up $58 million annually to support their royal family. American taxpayers cough up $1.4 billion to support our royal family.

How about a little less staff? Obama has a larger White House staff than any administration in the history of the Republic and he pays them more. A third of the 457 people who work there – three of whom are calligraphers – make six figure salaries.

Even as the White House was slamming the doors on tours, employees of the Agriculture Department were packing their bags to attend a California farm conference that would feature sipping “exceptional local wines” and sampling “tasty dishes” prepared by “special guest chefs.” So while meat inspectors were being furloughed other people in the same government agency schlep out to Fresno to indulge in what the conference organizers said would be a “mouthwatering event” with “fine wines and exceptional micro-brews paired with seasonally driven culinary delicacies,” not to mention field trips and other fun events. Furloughing meat inspectors causes pain. Canceling a junket doesn’t.

The National Institutes of Health is wasting $1.5 million to study why lesbians get fat. Why does anyone get fat? They eat too much. The National Science Foundation is wasting $325,000 to build a robot squirrel. Why a robotic squirrel? I’ve got an epidemic of the real thing in my back yard that I’d be glad to donate. The EPA gave China $141,000 to study pig manure. Have we run out of pig manure in this country? Will the sequester shut down any of these boondoggles? Not a chance. Who would miss them?

In a government that costs $3.8 trillion to operate, you’d think there would be some fat that could be cut somewhere. Federal spending has doubled since 2000 so it’s hard to believe 2% can’t be whacked back. When the payroll tax holiday expired, wage earners had their incomes cut by 2%. Somewhere they had to cut 2% of spending. They did and they survived. In the last decade the median household income fell 5% and median wealth fell 23%. Over the same period, government spending increased 90%. Families creatively found ways to do more with less while government says it will have to do less with more. Obama and his big government liberal pals would have us believe that whatever size the government is at the moment, that is the smallest it can ever be to avoid unbearable suffering.

Yet the Government Accountability Office has studied the cost to taxpayers for overlapping and duplicated programs and found that $364 billion is wasted every year on 15 financial literacy programs run by 13 separate agencies, 209 science, technology, engineering, and math education programs run by multiple agencies, 44 overlapping job training programs, 18 nutrition assistance programs, 82 teacher quality programs, and 20 homeless programs – just to name a few.

Ronald Reagan famously said the closest thing on earth to eternal life was a government program. Don’t expect to see any of this waste eliminated. No one would notice they were gone. Instead furlough some highly visible first responders, or as Charles Krauthammer recently observed:

It’s firemen first. That’s the phrase coined in 1976 by legendary Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters to describe the way government functionaries beat back budget cuts. Dare suggest a nick in the city budget, and the mayor immediately shuts down the firehouse. The DMV back office, stacked with nepotistic incompetents, remains intact. Shrink it and no one would notice. Sell the fire truck – the people scream and the city council falls silent about any future cuts.

Obama’s wolf cries are causing him a serious credibility problem. His approval ratings have been falling since mid-December and are now at 48% with equal disapproval rating. Calling a press conference – his standard propaganda method – he bemoaned that Capitol Hill employees will be getting a pay cut due to the sequester, which a Capitol supervisor almost immediately denied, making him look foolish. Saying that 70,000 kids would be kicked off the Head Start program when the Annie E. Casey Foundation, an organization that compiles numbers on Head Start enrollment, shows enrollment rose by 3,000 between 2011 and 2012 to 1,128,000 makes him look clueless. A 70,000 enrollment reduction would be 16% of the kids in the program, which belies belief.

We have a government that must borrow over 35% of what it spends and Obama denies that government has a spending problem. Erasing the deficit, he says, must be done with a balanced” approach – i.e. spending reductions matched by tax increases – but I don’t recall the deficit being caused by spending increases matched by tax reductions. Seems to me that it was disproportionate spending increases on the heels of comparatively small tax reductions. The way the deficit went up is the way it ought to come down.

No matter. Taxes can’t be increased that much anyway without putting the economy in a tailspin. But as long as we’re on the subject of “balance,” I recall the outcome of the fiscal cliff negotiations being a dollar of reduced spending for $40 in increased taxes. That’s Obama’s idea of “balance.” And despite the fact that 100% of the federal taxes are being paid by about half the income earners, Obama constantly continues to carp about the rich not paying their fair share. Fair share? Let’s talk about “fair share.” The IRS recently reported that federal employees and retirees owe $3.5 billion in back taxes, and $833,000 in back taxes is owed by 36 officials in Obama’s executive staff. Obama ought to be hanging his head in shame. But he isn’t. His guys and gals don’t seem to be paying their “fair share.” Why is that? Why hasn’t the IRS garnished the wages of the delinquent federal employees and retirees as they do to private sector employees and retirees?

If private businesses want to stay competitive they must continuously improve productivity – they must do more with less. If they want to stay competitive, they must provide products and services that customers will buy, which is a different way of saying they must solve problems for customers in ways that the value of the solution is much greater than the cost of the solution (i.e. the price customers pay.) Thus, in a very real sense, customers “hire” the products and services businesses sell. What do they hire them to do? To help them get their own jobs done and/or solve their problems.

Fall short of that and customers become ruthless. If a product or service fails to deliver a distinct and superior benefit for considerably less than customers pay for it, they will drop it in a heartbeat and tell all of their friends about their miserable experiences. That may not seem fair but that’s the way the real world works.

Not so with government. It has no competitors and therefore no incentive to improve. They can hire five people to do a job easily done by three … charge you for all five people … and what are you going to do? Call Ghostbusters? Government can turn out a lousy service and what is your alternative? Hire another government? We have sub-standard public schools because government has a monopoly in public education, and liberals have proved that by fighting every effort to introduce school choice and competition. How efficient is public education in delivering its product? Over a recent 20-year period, the number of full time public school employees increased 250% faster than the number of students and yet test scores fell. What does that tell you?

Stand in a checkout line at Kroger’s, and additional registers will be opened to reduce the queue. Stand in a line for a government service (Social Security, the county tag and license office, Post Office) and you may see service windows closed so somebody can take their break or lunch. I have. The last thing a public servant wants to be is a servant.

No business would operate like Obama is responding to the sequester. Faced with the necessity to cut costs, businesses would reduce frills, unnecessary travel, surplus and duplicative services, unused and underused facilities and resources, and services with such low demand that continuing them can’t justify their cost (think Amtrak.) If government were a real business, it would fire managers who punish customers by cutting services before cutting waste, redundancy, and surplus assets. Because that doesn’t happen, government costs more each year to do less each year.

But despite the petty politics that Obama is playing to inflict pain that will pressure the Republicans to raise taxes – e.g. “sell the fire truck” – a new reality is settling in on Washington. Although the sequester was invented in the White House, it isn’t producing the anticipated pain. A recent Gallup poll revealed that 60% of the people surveyed said it hadn’t affected them personally.

An ABC/Washington Post poll showed by nearly a 2 to 1 margin (61% versus 33%) the public supports the budget cuts imposed by the sequester. But by nearly an identical margin, Americans oppose an 8% across-the-board cut in military spending, favoring domestic cuts but not military ones. Not good news for the Obama camp.

The Senate passed a Continuing Resolution by a margin of 73 to 26 this past Wednesday that will keep the government running when current funding ends March 27. It passed in the House by a 318 to109 vote and now heads to the White House. The $85 billion in automatic spending cuts known as a sequester remains in place, although the Defense Department has more flexibility in allocating its cuts. In other words, the sequester is the new normal. But at the end of the day, the Continuing Resolution just kicked the can down the road. The debt ceiling limit is looming. And the CR will run out.

If the sequester kerfuffle has showed anything, it showed Washington’s inability to tolerate even small cuts in spending. The sequester requires a reduction in federal spending from $46 trillion to $45 trillion OVER TEN YEARS! Hardly a sky splitter. If spending reductions this small can’t be contemplated without teeth gnashing, the federal government will never be able to make real cuts – which compel reductions in entitlement spending.

Absent cuts in entitlements, the sky really will fall. And the US will cease to be the world’s economic powerhouse.

The Left Loses a Friend

Hugo Chávez died March 5 – ironically on the same date that Joseph Stalin died 60 years ago. The two had similar genes in life and are probably comparing notes in the after-life on how they wrecked lives and national economies.

Hearing that Chávez had shaken off his mortal coil, however, the American Left went into a deep funk.

Jimmy Carter, cheerleader of anti-American sentiments around the world, released a statement of condolences to the family of Hugo Chavéz, who like Hugo won’t live long enough to spend the $2 billion that he stole from the Venezuela’s coffers. “We met Hugo Chávez when he was campaigning for president in 1998 and The Carter Center was invited to observe elections for the first time in Venezuela.  We returned often, for the 2000 elections, and then to facilitate dialogue during the political conflict of 2002-2004.”

Ah, yes. Chávez had a unique campaigning style. He shredded the country’s constitution in order to keep himself in office for life, he limited his opponents campaigning for the office of President to three minutes of air time per day whereas he could disrupt regularly scheduled programming at any time to harangue on air for hours. Opponents who “slandered” him in their campaigning would find themselves in prison. It was the kind of electioneering that only Carter could love. The “political conflict of 2002-2004” was a coup attempt to overthrow him.

Sean Penn opined that, “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion. I lost a friend I was blessed to have.” How quaint. Two years ago Penn said that anyone calling Chávez a dictator should be arrested. So much for free speech. In other words, Sean, you have the right to make stupid statements but deny Venezuelans the same right?

"He used the [money from] oil to eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free healthcare, [and] education [for] all," tweeted filmmaker Michael Moore. Ssooo, Michael, if I rob a bank and give the money to the poor, should I go to jail? You conveniently ignore that neither the oil nor the money from its sale was his to do with what he wished – which further proves that he was a dictator not a constitutional President.

Roseanne Barr tweeted her eulogy to the world assuming someone other than herself was interested in it: “ruling classes hated Hugo Chavéz. RIP.” Huh? Did Chávez answer to anyone? I didn’t think so. That makes him “ruling class.”

"His legacy in his nation, and in the hemisphere," said US Representative Jose Serrano, a Bronx Democrat, will be "a better life for the poor and downtrodden." Well, tell that to the poor and downtrodden, Jose. They’re still poor and downtrodden.

Last but not least … Oliver Stone, the man who believes the Soviet blockade of Berlin (June 1948 to May 1949) never happened. Someone tell my uncle who flew the airlift for a year to keep West Berlin from freezing and starving.  “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place,” said Stone. “Hated by the entrenched classes … My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.” Well, they weren’t that entrenched, Ollie. The ones I personally know had to abandon their assets and flee for their lives, including half the Jews who were citizens of Venezuela.

These encomiums would be laughable if they weren’t so pathetic. Lenin called enablers like these “useful idiots” whom he cynically used while despising their naiveté. Similarly, the real Chávez was not the saintly liberal his “useful idiots” believed he was.

A graduate of the national military academy, Chávez engineered and incompetently executed a coup attempt against the corrupt government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992 for which he was imprisoned two years. The presidential successor to Andrés Pérez, Rafael Caldera, released him from prison with the understanding that Chávez would not return to the military where he might launch another coup attempt. Therefore Chávez traveled around the country preaching a populist brand of Bolivarism – so-called after Simon Bolivar, an early 19^th century Venezuelan hero who liberated his country from the Spanish Empire as well as freed the countries of Colombia, Peru, Panama, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Bolivar hoped to recreate a version of the American Revolution that would draw these countries into a confederacy which he would govern as president. When that failed, he declared himself a dictator.  

Likewise, Chávez hoped to create a socialist United States of South America, which he would presumably govern as supreme leader. As he traveled about Venezuela and Latin America, his popularity rose among the Venezuelan poor and people in other countries in the region. His revolutionary radicalism caught the attention of Fidel Castro who saw him as a potential protégé for spreading communism throughout the region. With his election as President in 1998, Chávez renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. In the swearing in ceremony, he refused to repeat the prescribed words of the oath of office, substituting "I swear before my people that upon this moribund constitution I will drive forth the necessary democratic transformations so that the new republic will have a Magna Carta befitting these new times," – code words for “I plan to trash this constitution and write one to my own liking.” He did and he became president for life.

Once in office, Chávez raised the kleptocracy of previous regimes to a new high.

As other charismatic demagogues peddling socialist policies have done, Chávez promoted class hatred. Then, using his keen oratorical skills, he leveraged his Bolivarian vision of hope to establish himself as a messiah to the majority of Venezuelans, notably the poor who had everything to gain and little to lose. He silenced the free press. Venezuelans got indoctrination instead of objective news.

All of these moves enabled Chávez  to steal the Venezuelan crown jewel – the oil industry – which he used to buy influence throughout the region by giving (either by outright gift or under-priced) billions of dollars’ worth of oil to Cuba, Nicaragua and others. His oil gifts helped populists in Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador join him to push a trade bloc that excluded the hated US.

During the 14 years that Chávez was in power, the world and Venezuela enjoyed a fortuitous rise in oil prices that brought an estimated $1 trillion into the Venezuelan economy. Where did it go? The Venezuelan economy should have boomed. The growth rates of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru averaged 3% to 5% during the time Chávez held office. Venezuela averaged only 2.8%. Every member of OPEC out-performed Venezuelan growth, even Iraq.

The Criminal Justice International Associates believes that Cuba has been receiving about $5 billion per year from Venezuela in money payments, oil shipments, and other resources. According to Jerry Brewer, president of CJIA, “the personal fortune of the Castro brothers has been estimated at a combined value of around $2 billion. The Chávez family in Venezuela has amassed a fortune of a similar scale since the arrival of Chávez to the presidency in 1999. We believe that organized Bolivarian criminal groups within the Chávez administration have subtracted around $100 billion out of the nearly $1 trillion in oil income made by Venezuelan state oil since 1999”

Chávez fired 19,000 well-trained employees who ran the national oil infrastructure and replaced them with his cronies, turning the industry into his personal cash cow. Rather than reinvesting in infrastructure maintenance, the oil system has essentially been stripped for parts. It has never recovered from the Chávez management regime. Production during his control of it fell almost 30% to 2.3 million barrels per day. Most of the wealth it produced can’t be accounted for. Some was used to buy reelection votes by giving cash handouts, state-run grocery stores, and other wasteful and ineffective social programs that superficially improved poverty rates, albeit at a high social cost.

Even as he was grabbing the national oil industry, Chávez turned his lustful gaze to privately-owned land, most of which was efficiently employed in food and cattle production by owners who knew what they were doing. Unfortunately, many of the landowners were rich by national standards, making them Public Enemy No. 1.

Chávez began seizing private farms, ranches, and land as part of his wealth redistribution scheme. He justified his theft by appealing to fairness. "Let's not forget that Bolivar has also a deep passion for justice and equality. There was no better way to honor his memory than taking over 47 large estates …” he said on the occasion of one expropriation. There were many more.

In a television appearance, Chávez said, "To those who own the land, this land is not yours. The land is not private … [it is] the property of the nation." Hmm. Sounds like an American president who claimed business owners didn’t create their businesses – the government and others did.

According to the International Property Rights Index, Venezuela under Chávez ranks 121 among 125 economies in terms of property rights protection. Predictably the disenfranchised owners have left the country, poorer for sure, but now employed in making the lands of freer countries more productive with their know-how.

The land theft program turned once productive crop farms and cattle ranches, which Chávez gave to the poor, into arid and unproductive lands because the poor are incompetent to manage them. El Commandante’s scheme to make Venezuelan food production self-sufficient has now made the country six times more dependent of foreign food imports than before he took office.

In addition to the three million acres of land that he stole, Chávez expropriated 1,600 private companies – some Venezuelan, some international. These included cement production owned by Mexico, supermarkets owned by France, glass making owned by an American company, steel, rice production and packaging, and many more. Capital fled the country, leaving Venezuela poorer. When Chávez imposed capital controls to prevent capital flight, assets had to be abandoned and those who could afford to flee – the intelligentsia, the real assets a country has – left. Those who remained are incapable of rebuilding the economy, if that ever happens.

As food scarcities appeared, price inflation in foods soared. Chávez responded like a true socialist. With no understanding of how markets work, he imposed production quotas and price controls. Private business owners who attempted to survive by selling products for more than they had to pay for them were called “saboteurs” and arrested. Forty butchers were arrested for selling beef above the government authorized price – about $4 (in bolivars) per kilo versus a $3 cost, which the butchers said didn’t allow them to cover their overhead and make a living at their trade.

Under orders from Chávez, who became frustrated that his communist model wasn’t working, agents stormed warehouses and seized allegedly hoarded food that wasn’t being sold at ridiculous prices. But the economic liberation so admired by Carter, Penn, Barr, and Stone has failed to fill the empty shelves of grocery stores. Supermarkets in downtown Caracas don’t have chicken, milk, cooking oil, beef, sugar, coffee, and cornmeal needed to make the national staple, arepas, which are corn cakes stuffed with chicken, meat, cheese, and other fillings.

Under Chávez the national currency has been devalued five times in the last decade. It lost 66% of its value in the last four years. Prices have risen 20-fold since he took over. Inflation has risen to 23% per year, making everything more expensive and hurting the poor more than anyone. The percentage of families living in poverty isn’t as large as before Chávez, but that’s not because they have been lifted up. Everyone has been pushed down.

Bridges and roads are in disrepair which makes internal commerce less efficient. The national electric power system was seized in 2007. Since then it has been so poorly maintained that blackouts several times per week are the norm.

And then there is Venezuela’s wretched education and healthcare system. In return for low-priced oil, Cuba provided Cuban doctors and nurses to help staff the Venezuelan healthcare system when it essentially collapsed as competent healthcare providers fled the country. Educators followed them. Cuba therefore supplied teachers to help indoctrinate the next generation of Venezuelans on the virtues of socialism. These Cubans were part of the Chávez “missions” programs for the poor. But the hospitals are nevertheless falling down and the quality of care is third world. While people may be better educated than they were, for what? The economy doesn’t produce enough jobs, and those that exist don’t pay an adequate income.

Cuba also flooded the country with intelligence and security agents who will spy on citizens and turn them into stool pigeons to spy on each other. It worked well in East Germany during the Cold War. Where do you think Cuba learned it?

A country in an economic straitjacket is a haven for crime. Crime was high during the corrupt regimes that preceded Chávez. But the murder rate has tripled since he arrived on the scene. Murders in Caracas make it the most dangerous city on earth. The country of Venezuela has more murders than the US and the European Union combined, despite having a population that is only 3.5% of the combined US and EU. Who suffers most from high criminal activity? The poor, of course.

Venezuela had every opportunity to be among the wealthiest countries in the world. It has one of the biggest recoverable oil reserves. It is among the top five oil suppliers to the US. It had a large educated and urban middle class. And then it elected a socialist who promised to transform the country, preached class envy, ignored the constitution, and destroyed the democratic institutions. His Chavista legacy probably can’t be undone.

After Chávez assumed room temperature, the Weekly Standard published one of many commentaries on his legacy. The author, a Venezuelan, recalled speaking to a poor Cuban, asking why he liked Chávez . He answered, “Because he looks like me, he sounds like me …”

Like the Chávez regime, the first Obama term caused considerable economic pain like no other administration except inept Jimmy Carter, who because of it, was denied a second term. Yet Obama won a second chance, as Chávez did, and did, and did – four terms in all and too sick to take the inaugural oath in the last one. Asked in exit polls which candidate “cares about people like me,” Obama was chosen 80% of the time versus Romney’s less than 20%.

Romney may have been patrician, but Obama is hardly warm and fuzzy. So did voters choose between the candidates or their politics – a choice between Left or Right?

My opinion: there’s little difference in the Venezuelan voter and the American. Every nation is corruptible if the makers are despised and the takers become the majority and dependent on government. We are a left-leaning nation now and proved it in 2012.

Maybe that’s worth a blog in the future.