AH, VENEZUELA, SOCIALIST PARADISE – AT 11:24 A.M. ET:  The country is in horrible condition.  Movie stars don't even visit anymore to give praise to the socialist government.  Can you imagine that?  From AFP: 

Caracas (AFP) - If a visitor to Venezuela is unfortunate enough to pay for anything with a foreign credit card, the eye-watering cost might suggest they were in a city pricier than Tokyo or Zurich.

A hamburger sold for 1,700 Venezuelan bolivares is $170, or a 69,000-bolivar hotel room is $6,900 a night, based on the official rate of 10 bolivares for $1.

But of course no merchant is pricing at the official rate imposed under currency controls. It's the black market rate of 1,000 bolivares per dollar that's applied.

But for Venezuelans paid in hyperinflation-hit bolivares, and living in an economy relying on mostly imported goods or raw materials, conditions are unthinkably expensive.

Even for the middle class, most of it sliding into poverty, hamburgers and hotels are out-of-reach excesses.

"Everybody is knocked low," Michael Leal, a 34-year-old manager of an eyewear store in Caracas, told AFP. "We can't breathe."

In Chacao, a middle-class neighborhood in the capital, office workers lined up outside a nut store to buy the cheapest lunch they could afford. Nearby restaurants were all but empty.

Superficially it looked like the center of any other major Latin American city: skyscrapers, dense traffic, pedestrians in short sleeves bustling along the sidewalks.

But look closely and you can see the economic malaise. Many stores, particularly those that sold electronics, were shuttered.

"It's horrible now," said Marta Gonzalez, the 69-year-old manager of a corner beauty products store.

"Nobody is buying anything really. Just food," she said as a male customer used a debit card to pay for a couple of razor blades.

COMMENT:  Bernie Sanders would probably call it a paradise in the making.  But it's an amazing thing about those paradises:  they never get fully made.  They eventually collapse. 

There are now all kinds of ideas being floated about what to do to save Venezuela.  Most Latin American countries don't want the United States to intervene.  Shades of colonialism.  But they may have to intervene themselves, for it is unthinkable that a country the size of Venezuela – 28 million people – would go completely under. 

May 22, 2016