Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been channeling his best Marie Antoinette this month in responding to widespread and growing hunger in the country. Maduro went on the news to told citizens to eat rabbits. The problem is that Venezuelans have been putting bows on the rabbits and adopting them as pets rather than eating them.
After the late former President Hugo Chavez and Maduro destroyed South America’s most successful economy and turned the country into an economic basket case, Maduro is out of ideas beyond his assuming authoritarian powers. The “Rabbit Plan” was the idea of his government to address rising starvation. A study published earlier this year reported that roughly 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in the last year due to food shortages.
Maduro announced on television that “For animal protein, which is such an important issue, a ‘rabbit plan’ has been approved because rabbits also breed like rabbits.” That is when his Minister of Urban Architecture Freddy Bernal flagged with the worrisome fate of the rabbits Maduro distributed to 15 communities. Bernal is quoted as saying that “to his surprise he found people had put little bows on their rabbits and were keeping them as pets, it was an early setback to Plan Rabbit.” He referred to this as a “cultural problem” and insisted that the government need to convince people that “rabbits aren’t pets but two and a half kilos of meat.”
I think the problem is more severe than wanting to see bows on bunnies. Just as Maduro blames every economic problem on the United States, it is clear that these are running dog capitalist rabbits. After all. Maduro has denounced the colonist tendencies of the United States but selected an animal known to live in colonies. However, before Maduro goes to face these resilient rabbits, he might want to watch this video:
Apparently, President Maduro hasn’t heard of Protein Poisoning, commonly known as Rabbit Starvation.
Maybe it’s crow that he should be eating.
Industrial socialism always leads to privation. Is this still a question?
The government should have handled the rabbit giveaway better. Heifer International includes rabbits in their offerings, but they require the recipients go through training and follow up.
A flock of chickens would have made more sense. They could have eggs to eat every day and eat the cockerels. Kids could forage for bugs and greens to help feed the chickens and reduce their ration requirements. Rabbits do make a good, lean meat source. My grandfather raised rabbits in the Depression, and still had them into the 1940s. Then there was an unpleasant scene were my father discovered what happened when a cute little bunny went missing. They do also make lovely, house trainable pets.
Any of the above measures would be merely stop gaps. Socialism and mismanagements collapsed Venezuela, but it is still in denial, refusing international aid. That is reprehensible. I cannot get over the images of skeletal kids. I read a story a month ago about a gaunt boy who gave his food to his little brother. The big brother looked like he was going to die in a few weeks. Journalists don’t seem to follow up on the heartbreaking stories that gain them clicks. What happened to the boy? Is he still alive? I can’t’ stand it.
HIV infection is now one of the highest in the world in Venezuela, because condoms cost too much. (By the way, STDs are rising here, too. Perhaps free birth control instead of condoms was a bad call. There were 400,000 cases of gonorrhea and 24,000 cases of syphilis last year alone.) Antiretroviral drugs are in shortage, so patients are starting to look like Old Man Bones, the unmistakable look of untreated AIDS.
Hospital operating tables are bloody and full of pathogens (in a country with one of the highest HIV transmission rates) because they have run out of disinfectant and clean water.
Hospitals are out of saline and other basic medical supplies, let alone any advanced medicine. I read the other day about a boy who died the night before his 16th birthday. He was starving and foraged for bitter yucca in an empty lot. He failed to properly soak out all the toxins, and died after languishing all day in a hospital that lacked any way to treat him. All they can prescribe at this point are water bottles, because their own tap water is fetid.
The people of Venezuela are starving to death because their government can’t admit they made a mistake with socialism, and eroding individual rights in the name of the common good. The government would rather rule over bones than admit it was wrong.
I can’t stand this. There are kids dying right now, snuffed out every hour, from starvation in a world where more people are now obese than too thin. There are thousands of individuals and many countries willing to lend a helping hand, but Venezuela refuses. Those kids deserve to be saved. Enough of this. How many more babies have to die before they do something? Can’t the UN see Venezuela’s refusal of aid as a crime against humanity?
Karen S, your first sentence is false. Consider the People’s Republic of China.
Augusto Pinochet assumed power in Chile following a United States-backed coup d’état on 11 September 1973 that overthrew the democratically elected socialist Unidad Popular government of President Salvador Allende and ended civilian rule. Several academics – including Peter Winn, Peter Kornbluh, Tim Weiner, and Christopher Hitchens – have stated that the support of the United States was crucial to the coup and the consolidation of power afterward.[5][6][7] Pinochet had been promoted to Commander-in-Chief of the Army by Allende on 23 August 1973, having been its General Chief of Staff since early 1972.[8] In December 1974, the ruling military junta appointed Pinochet Supreme Head of the nation by joint decree, although without the support of one of the coup’s instigators, Air Force General Gustavo Leigh.[9]
Following his rise to power, Pinochet persecuted leftists and political critics, resulting in the executions of from 1,200 to 3,200 people,[10] the internment of as many as 80,000 people and the torture of tens of thousands.[11][12][13] According to the Chilean government, the amount of executions and forced disappearances stands at 3,095.[14]
Under the influence of the free market-oriented neoliberal “Chicago Boys”, the military government implemented economic liberalization, including currency stabilization, removed tariff protections for local industry, banned trade unions and privatized social security and hundreds of state-owned enterprises. These policies produced what has been referred to as the “Miracle of Chile,” but critics state that economic inequality dramatically increased and attribute the devastating effects of the 1982 monetary crisis on the Chilean economy to these policies.[15][16] Chile was, for most of the 1990s, the best-performing economy in Latin America, though the legacy of Pinochet’s reforms continues to be in dispute.[17]
His fortune grew considerably during his years in power through dozens of bank accounts secretly held abroad and a fortune in real estate. He was later prosecuted for embezzlement, tax fraud and for possible commissions levied on arms deals.[18]
Pinochet’s 17-year rule was given a legal framework through a controversial 1980 plebiscite, which approved a new Constitution drafted by a government-appointed commission. In a 1988 plebiscite 56% voted against Pinochet’s continuing as president, which led to democratic elections for the Presidency and Congress. After stepping down in 1990, Pinochet continued to serve as Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army until 10 March 1998, when he retired and became a senator-for-life in accordance with his 1980 Constitution. However, Pinochet was arrested under an international arrest warrant on a visit to London on 10 October 1998 in connection with numerous human rights violations. Following a legal battle he was released on grounds of ill-health, and returned to Chile on 3 March 2000. In 2004, Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia ruled that Pinochet was medically fit to stand trial and placed him under house arrest.[8] By the time of his death on 10 December 2006, about 300 criminal charges were still pending against him in Chile for numerous human rights violations during his 17-year rule, and tax evasion and embezzlement during and after his rule;[19] he was accused of having corruptly amassed at least 28 million USD.[20] Despite the indictment and 300 charges, he only served time in house arrest.
Wikipedia
Augusto Pinochet, A Good American, which is better, far better, than A Good German.
dennis hanna
And how is this relevant?
Not mentioned here of course is the fact that the US has been doing all it could to undermine the democratically elected government of Venezuela ever since Bush was President including encouraging a failed coup and engineering the destruction of the Venezuelan economy in order to return the oil industry into private hands. That is what this is all about. It isn’t about Maduro at all. The last thing the US has ever cared about in South and Latin America is the human rights situation or the political freedoms available to citizens in those nations. See Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Panama and other nations where we have destabilized or overthrown governments or supported brutal but cooperative dictators.
LOL! The oil industry has always been in “private hands” those being Chavez family hands. The family became billionaires while their people now have to eat hasenpfeffeer.
My Italian uncle made some great recipes w/ rabbit. The problem w/ rabbit is that it is about the leanest meat you can eat. And these poor people suffering under socialism need calories.
We obese Americans should be eating more rabbit and elk, another lean meat.
Rabbits as “Pets or Meat” seems to be a question invariant of the underlying failing economics of a capitalist OR socialist society
I’m not defending Maduras, or Michael Moore, but this does remind me of the Bunny Lady in Roger & Me who would sale rabbits as either “Pets or Meat” and who we later saw in the follow up PBS documentary “Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint”
> The so-called Bunny Lady “grossed out millions by skinning a soft furry creature in the first film, tops her original performance. Her newest venture, designed to supplement her garnisheed K-mart wages, is raising mice and rabbits as snake food. This time, Moore’s critique of modern capitalism features footage of a huge snake devouring another fluffy pet.”[2] The Boston Globe notes, “if you’re disturbed by the graphic scene of a snake crushing the life out of a rabbit, you should be more upset, the director is saying not too subtly, by the constricted lives of out-of-work, under-served human beings.”[3]
> In an earlier interview for Roger & Me, Moore explained the meaning of “pets or meat” in his own words: “That’s the town. Either you’re working or you’re meat. That’s GM’s attitudes toward its serfs. The clubbing and skinning of the rabbit stands for the violence. Why aren’t people upset by the violence of a black man getting shot two minutes later in the film? Why are there walkouts during the rabbit section, but not during the shooting? That’s the image they’re used to, but they eat their meat every night.”[4]
> The documentary opens with the warning: “The following program contains scenes of explicit corporate behavior which may be offensive to young children, vegetarians and General Motors shareholders. Viewer discretion is advised.”[2]
So Rabbits as “Pets or Meat” seems to be a question invariant of the underlying failing economics of a capitalist OR socialist society
“Let Them Eat Rabbits” – great line – Rabbit Cake.
They already have the capybara, whose meat is reportedly delicious. Why aren’t they raising/hunting more of them?
Venezuela needs a Pinochet.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Has one.
Let Them Eat Rabbits: Maduro’s Food Program Backfires As The Proletariat Sees Pets Rather Than Meat
If a person goes 72 hours without eating any food they will eat tree bark, grass, rabbits, dogs, cats, shoe leather and even other humans in an attempt to sate their hunger.
Frogs, snakes, and bugs before grass. Our GI tract biome isn’t set up to digest grass.
Rabbits are good eating, but they do take a while to grow to an adequate size.
Maduro makes Chavez seem like a Rhodes Scholar.
I’m pretty sure Venezuelans ate their ducks, rabbits, and horses last year.
Has anybody seen any cats or dogs around?
I would think the US and other counties are providing some kind of food aid and seed program??
Bueller, anyone?
Maduro is the most recent face and voice of socialism. At what point does this depraved philosophy die?
More precisely, neo-Peronism. You had these bouts of praetorian populism in Latin America ca. 1950 and again twenty years later. The 2d bout came to an end with Peron’s death in 1974, the overthrow of Velaco Alvarado in Peru in 1975, and the overthrow of Peron’s widow in March 1976. The current neo-Peronist push has extended to Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Nicaragua; none of these other loci has suffered quite the way Venezuela has. (Bolivia’s president came out the commercial ag sector and Ecuador’s was an academic economist; that knowledge base may have circumscribed the degree to which they were inclined to do stupid things).
After the late former President Hugo Chavez and Maduro destroyed South America’s most successful economy and turned the country into an economic basket case,
Um, no. The country was suffering severe economic mismanagement for a generation before Chavez was elected and was less affluent in 1995 than it had been in 1970. Chavez and Maduro proceeded to make a bad situation worse.
South America’s most successful economies in recent decades have been Chile and Uruguay.
looks like Maduro has been eating well and I doubt it was rabbit
They are removing the running horse from the national flag and exchanging it for an image of Bugs Bunny and the national moto has been changed to “What’s Up Doc”
Seems appropriate:
https://youtu.be/HeERupuicHE
“Bring up the Holy Hand Grenade!”
Debbie Barnhart – wasn’t it the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch? 😉
The French and the English have no problem eating rabbit. However, if you are just giving each family one rabbit they are unlikely to breed by themselves. And they do make nice pets. I speak from experience.
We had a Flemish Giant for a few years. We trained her to use a litter box. She’d lie on the sofa with us like a dog.
When my sister raised rabbits she gave them names like Supper and Dinner so that there was no doubt about their role.