Rome burns, Nero fiddles; Venezuelan poverty increases, NYT can’t see it
At The American Thinker:

Aleksander Boyd of Vcrisis.com caught the New York Times suggesting that povery in Venezuela has eased due to the vast increase in oil revenues. In fact, the Venezuelan government’s own figures reveal that poverty has actually increased despite the huge windfall received by the regime of Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez. Whatever else Chavez is spending the money gusher on, it isn’t making life better for Venezuela’s poor.

The NYT’s response?

I raised your concern with a senior editor who did not believe a correction was merited. Thanks for writing.

Maybe the senior NYT editor should be reading The Miami Herald:

poverty in Venezuela rose from 43 percent to 54 percent of the population during Chávez’s first four years in office. And extreme poverty — the percentage of the population that lives on less than $1 a day — grew from 17 percent to 25 percent during the same period, the figures show.

Not that the NYT would bother to notice.

Free trade is an alternative: Stephen Johnson writes,

Congress will have an opportunity in coming weeks to strike a blow against gang and criminal activity and for freedom, prosperity and trade when it takes up the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (search). Lawmakers should remember that our security depends not only on our prosperity but on that of our neighbors as well, and that economic growth helps bolster political stability and create jobs for workers who otherwise might migrate illegally to the United States.

They also should recall that struggles to establish democracies and market economies can cost lives and that locking in positive change can help these emerging countries avoid having to revisit these issues.

The agreement, modeled on those already in place with Canada and Mexico as well as with Morocco and Jordan, would reduce barriers to trade with the Dominican Republic as well as Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and, of course, El Salvador. It would cost the United States little because these countries already have duty-free access to our markets for most products, but it will reduce some barriers for them and substantial barriers for us.

Moreover, the agreement will open sectors of those economies to U.S. investment, which will help them overcome challenges from Asian countries whose economies benefit from subsidies and cut-rate or even slave labor.

Not only would it be a strike against the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas (ALBA) proposed by Castro and Chávez, it might even rattle The Torturers’ Friends in Geneva, if not the torturers themselves.

Also posted at Blogger News Network

Note The statistics on poverty come from the Venezuelan government’s own Instituto Nacional de Estadisticas (zip file) Reporte Social.