The New York Times has quite a doozy of a front-page story about the ruins and rubble of socialism in Venezuela.
But instead of using that famous 's' word which brought it on, the Times used 1,375 words to blame the oil industry instead, focusing on environmental pollution.
Here's their nut graf on it:
Venezuela’s oil industry, which helped transform the country’s fortunes, has been decimated by mismanagement and several years of U.S. sanctions imposed on the country’s authoritarian government, leaving behind a ravaged economy and a devastated environment.
Note the dollop of blame about U.S. sanctions, too, as if sanctioning actual drug dealers running that government and stealing elections was somehow a bad thing.
And as if Venezuela's oil industry had not collapsed already before them.
A quick Google search tells us Venezuela's oil industry went to hell a long time ago.
Here's a New York Times piece about Venezuela's shambling oil industry that ran well before President Trump's sanctions were enacted.
and these:
It was once the richest country in Latin America. Now it’s falling apart -Time, June 15, 2016
Some of the many pieces seen through the years blamed the price of oil, as if other nations with oil had become as shambling as Venezuela.
The big thrust of the article now is to blame the oil, despite the obvious signs of socialism being the culprit:
The state-owned oil company has struggled to maintain minimal production for export to other countries, as well as domestic consumption. But to do so it has sacrificed basic maintenance and relied on increasingly shoddy equipment that has led to a growing environmental toll, environmental activists say.
..and this:
The national oil industry’s travails have been worsened by a corruption investigation into missing oil money that has so far led to dozens of arrests and the resignation of the country’s oil minister.
Here are the basic signatures of socialism being the problem:
And yet, paradoxically, widespread fuel shortages in the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves mean virtually no one in this region has cooking gas at home.
Shortages? Gee, where do shortages of this extended kind occur? Any former denizen of the Soviet Union or China would be able to fill us in.
There's also the more blatant stuff:
“The Venezuelan people must pay the consequences of an imbalance caused by the world’s leading capitalist economies,” Mr. Maduro said in a speech at the summit.
A top government minister, Josué Alejandro Lorca, said in 2021 that oil spills were “not a big deal because, historically, all oil companies have had them.” He added that the government did not have the resources to address the problem.
...and, actually, Biden is the hero here, despite lifting sanctions leaving Venezuela in the same environmental mess as it had been:
After grinding nearly to a halt, the oil sector has seen a modest rebound, in part because the Biden administration last year allowed Chevron, the last American company producing oil in Venezuela, to restart operations on a limited basis.
The Times should get some credit for reporting on the scope of the disaster which continues to unfold, with many dramatic pictures showing the destruction.
But there's no excuse for the editing that somehow leaves off the word 'socialism' and focuses solely on the oil industry as the source of the problem. Other countries with large oil industries don't have this problem -- whether the U.S., Canada, or even Saudi Arabia. But Venezuela does. Obviously, the socialist government is the problem here and the country is paying for it. Install more of that in the U.S. against its oil industry and eventually the same problems follow.
Why they have taken a greenie angle now, right around the time Joe Biden is trying to destroy the fossil fuel industy is pretty obnoxious and politically slanted. Blaming oil and not socialism is misleading -- and no way to fix this problem.