“Come on out, stupid, Marcelo and the boys are here, showing off the tent we brought from Monaco. We’ve already ordered sushi and later we’re going out partying but we’re coming back to go on protesting too much!” #OccupyVenezuela? Hardly. Try a bad glamping trip. #fail
Up here in the northern hemisphere, people tend to take to the streets when the rich get too greedy and leave nothing to the rest of us. A few windows get broken, the cops round the protesters up and arrest them, and everything goes back to “normal” within a day or two. And, as Bruce Cockburn memorably sang, the trouble with “normal” is it always gets worse.
Well, in Venezuela, something very different happens. The trouble with “normal” there, is that it always gets better, and some who are already very well off don’t like that, so they organize some little “protests” of their own. Here are the youngsters from VTV’s Zurda Konducta, explaining how it goes…with a little help from two oppos making a rather revealing phone call:
For those who don’t know Spanish, here’s the basic gist:
Two “youth leaders” of the right-wing party Voluntad Popular (Popular Will, headed by Leopoldo López, currently in jail for criminal instigation), Israel Hernández and Javier González, are talking about how to get more kiddies into the street to protest the evils of Maduro & Co. Their method? Cash “incentives”.
Yes, that’s right. They get PAID to “protest”, illegally block roads (with tents!), and smash things in Venezuela! But only if you’re a rich right wing spoiled brat who’s already being handed everything in life on a silver plate. If you were poor and you tried this in a “middle-class” (translation: slightly less than filthy stinking rich, but only slightly) neighborhood, you’d get clobbered to death.
