Our planet’s burning up, but people like Donald Trump and Brazil’s very far right and very pro-business president, Jair Bolsonaro, don’t get it.
We’ve had quite a bit to say recently about Bolsonaro (https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2019/08/24/bolsonaro-and-trump-meet-up-in-biarritz/) and https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2019/08/23/two-big-liars-bolsonaro-and-trump-overstock-com-s-ceo-s-resignation/.
Time was, that Venezuela, a nation rich in natural resources, was a more or less stable place to live. A few coups here and there, but.
Then along came Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. Chavez, a former paratroop lieutenant-colonel who tried unsuccessfully to lead a coup in 1992, got himself elected president in 1998, changed the name of his country to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, got himself a new constitution, made a lot of people happy and others unhappy, allied himself with Cuba and Russia, and died, and was succeeded by a thug named Nicolas Maduro who wears a mustache.
Maduro loves to show up for the cameras dressed in extravagant and unnecessary costumes.
In October 2013, Maduro announced the creation of a new agency, the Vice Ministry of Supreme Happiness, to coordinate all social programs. At last report, in Caracas, there are many many household goods that cannot be bought there, so the Vice Ministry of Supreme Happiness seems to have flunked.
Maduro cheated big time in the presidential election in 2017 after he created a constitutional crisis so he could stay in power. Juan Guaido (Venezuela’s equivalent of Barack Obama) is the legitimate president of Venezuela, recognized as such by the United States and many other nations, but Maduro won’t leave, and hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans are now refugees in south Florida, Columbia, and Brazil, which borders Venezuela.
Because of language differences, it’s a bit tough for the Venezuelan refugees in Brazil to survive.
Assording to our South American correspondent, associate solitary reporter Sylvania Juguete, Bolsonaro — a big time climate change denier, just like his close personal friend Donald Trump — has dragooned thousands of Venezuelan refugees to serve in his Army, which is poorly equipped to fight the thousands and thousands of forest fires in the Amazon that have been illegally started by farmers who want to raise lots of cattle so they can send beef to us here in the US.
Elsewhere, Trump, at a fancy fancy resort in Biarritz, was observed by our chief international correspondent, associate solitary reporter Larry Theis, sneaking into the room of Iran’s Foreign Minister, محمدجواد ظریف (Mohammad Javad Zarif), with whom Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated a most appropriate deal for Iran to quit making nukes.
As Theis watched from the hallway, Trump and several of his Russian thugs busted into Zarif’s room and kicked him in the cojones.
This resulted in certain consequences in Teheran; but French President Emanuel Macron told his G-7 guests, other than Trump, that he is very pleased that he invited Zarif to Biarritz, in order to embarrass Trump.