A left-wing journalist just added to the staff of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., once celebrated Hugo Chavez’s leadership in Venezuela, claiming that “his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains.”
The Sanders campaign announced Tuesday morning that David Sirota would be joining as a communications adviser and speechwriter, further solidifying Sanders as the socialist alternative in a growing field of 2020 candidates.
In 2013, Sirota wrote a lengthy defense for Slate on Chavez’s reign in Venezuela shortly after the dictator’s death, which he called an “economic miracle.”
“When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela’s did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter — and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on,” Sirota wrote.
Six years after Sirota’s column, Venezuela is currently teetering on complete economic and social collapse. As early as 2014, the country’s economy begun it’s downturn, leading to deadly clashes in the street between the police and citizens, despite having one of the largest oil reserves in the world.
“And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chavez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?” Sirota asked.
By 2016, inflation hit 141 percent and food shortages have led to millions of Venezuelan’s to flee the country in what is a migration crisis that could soon outnumber Syria’s.
Critics say that Sirota’s defense of Venezuelan-style socialism finds an appropriate home in the Sanders campaign. Earlier this year, video surfaced of Sanders defending breadlines in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s.
“It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death,” Sanders said at the time.
