From the Chicago Tribune comes this about how Chicago Teachers Union members found nothing wrong when visiting Venezuela.
Asked on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight” last week about “some controversy” surrounding the excursion, union President Jesse Sharkey said: “Members go all kinds of places in the summer.
This was neither an official trip nor something that was funded by the union. This is a group of people who are members of the CTU who decided to go to Venezuela.
”Yet, the official CTU Twitter account retweeted some of the group’s updates, including a blog post titled “Introduction to CTU Delegation to Venezuela.”
CTU also retweeted another post by teacher Sarah Chambers, one of the travelers and a member of the CTU executive board, which read:
“While staying in #Venezuela, we didn’t see a single homeless person. USA is the richest country in the world; yet, there are homeless people everywhere. Over 17k CPS students are homeless… This is why @CTULocal1 is fighting for fair housing #CTUAgainstVezIntervention.”
I have talked to immigrants from Venezuela.
Four years ago I was told middle class families were scouring garbage dumps for food.
Hard to believe with all the stories that the Tribune has written on the situation in that country that these teachers found only things to praise.
Sorry your stay was unsatisfactory ladies.
Next time Venezuelan Authorities will spray everything down with hobo piss, used needles and feces, to accommodate a more Chicago feel to your next visit.
Seriously if these people found only things to praise in a socialist country why don’t they just take their families and go live in this socialist country?
How long were they in the socialist country and what part of the socialist country were they in?
Do they really think that they got to travel freely around this socialist country?
They saw the best part of this socialist country not the worst
they didn’t get to see the homeless people because the government didn’t want them to.
There are slums over there just like there are over here
there are people over there digging through trash that’s like there are over here difference is people like you are trying to change people here in to socialist that’s a big problem.
We are free they are not.
The “teachers” said this:
While staying in #Venezuela, we didn’t see a single homeless person. USA is the richest country in the world; yet, there are homeless people everywhere.
I’ve been to Venezuela.
It is a sh*t hole, with the exception of some coastal areas.
And these twinkies are teaching children these lies.
According to the World Bank, the 2016 homicide rate was 56 per 100,000, making Venezuela third in the world, after El Salvador and Honduras. OVV data has 23,047 homicides committed in Venezuela in 2018, a rate of 81.4 per 100,000 people, with the decline being attributed to emigration.
Homelessness and hunger widespread in Venezuelan capital of Caracas.
https://america.cgtn.com/2018/11/28/homelessness-and-hunger-widespread-in-venezuelan-capital-of-caracas
Good try at deflection but please do not change the subject. Compassionate conservatives do not care about Venezuela. The United States’ government does not care about Venezuela, nor about democracy, nor about freedom, nor about its people. The United States and its global economic empire only cares about oil and power. Save your outrage for every time you see a homeless person in our great United States, the land of endless opportunity. These compassionate conservatives call Chicago every type of name because of its high levels of minority population. They even dare to suggest McHenry County is about to collapse because minorities keep moving here. Well, it is about time you make up your mind, or what is left of it. Is the alarming level of poverty in these great United States the responsibility of its own people, or is it our beloved capitalist system? Because both can’t be true. Is the poverty and violence in Venezuela caused by Socialism, or is it the result of the constant siege and economic warfare from the greatest economic power in the world? Because both can’t be true. Please do not entertain the masses with the ridiculous theory of the grotesque poverty and economic injustice in the United States being an unavoidable by-product of a benevolent capitalist economic system while the poverty in Venezuela is the consequence of an evil socialist economic system. Stay tuned…tic, tock, tic, tock, tic, tock, tic, tock, tic, tock…
“Four years ago I was told middle class families were scouring garbage dumps for food”. Our second amendment, sunshine blogger likes to brag about his selfless service in the food pantry. Has anybody taken a minute to ask why is it that we have thousands of food pantries all across our great United States? Is it because we need to provide volunteer opportunities to retired, irrelevant, failed career politicians turned into fake journalists? Or is it that we live under a brutal system of economic exploitation and oppression sugar coated with nice sounding cliches such as “the survival of the fittest” or “lift yourself up by your bootstraps?” Sunshine blogger, the next time you brag about your heroic service at the food pantry, make sure you remind your immense readership (approximately 8 people) they exist so less Americans need to dig into garbage dumps for food. Stay tuned…tic, tock, tic, tock, tic, tock, tic, tock, tic, tock…
Somebody here needs some remedial writing classes, grammar school level.
@ Good ole Angel! With 7,000,000 job openings that companies can’t fill, record unemployment, and wage growth better than under Obama please tell me why people are not in those jobs?
Obama made a generation of get in line the government will give you what you need.
Now Trump gets in there and changes how the economy is suppose to work and the Millennials continue to live at home.
If you work hard in this country you/family can do ok.
Have a house, car, food but realize that not everyone is going to make $100k working 40 hours.
Sometimes you will have to work more hours to achieve these things if you don’t have the skills.
But you just can’t play video games and on your phone and expect to be successful!
You miss my point no Angel, and that is those swell overfed twinkie teachers are liars, and worse, spreading those lies to school children.
It is most disturbing that Illinois teachers do not acknowledge they THEY are the 1%-ers: multimillionaires on the basis of present values of their pensions and free health insurance premiums beginning from age 55 retirement, at which time they will become double-dipping substitutes if they so desire.
Docs and nurses who can afford to remain in Illinois (or are so stuck they have no choice) make roughly half the hourly total compensation package values as teachers/administrators.
Children (and adults) on Medicaid here have a difficult time finding ACTUAL HEALTHCARE (as opposed to insurance).
This is due to Medicaid reimbursement practices.
Yet teachers and administrators (who pay only 10% of insurance premiums)have wildly open-access and zero-cost (to themselves) availability of medical care to extend their own QALY.
Do teachers and administrators stand ready to concede some of their own incomprehensibly all-encompassing virtually-free healthcare access in favor of funding survival-level access for children covered by Medicaid?
It is extremely disturbing that these entitled ‘professionals’ (public education field) expect OTHER professionals (medical field) to work under conditions which teachers and administrators would NEVER accept (as evidenced by strikes).
See a teacher, thank a teacher … for brainwashing little kids and ripping taxpayers off big time!
The question remains unanswered. Is capitalism the reason for the hundreds of thousands of homeless human beings in our great United States? Is capitalism the reason for the nearly 40 million Americans who are in need of services from a local food pantry on any given year? Or should we blame Venezuela’s Socialism? Any roaring? Stay tuned…tic, tock, tic, tock, tic, tock, tic, tock, meeeeeeoooooooowwwwwwwwwwww…
“If you work hard in this country you/family can do ok” Don’t you love compassionate conservative “simplistinomics”? Stay tuned…tic, tock, tic, tock, tic, tock, meeeeeeoooooooowwwwwwwwwwww…
Angel, the free market is not the source of suffering.
The history of Russia, China, Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and the Ukraine starvation by Russia (as Stalin took their grain for questioning his brilliant plan for their lives).
These are excellent real examples of the terrible suffering and death under a large, intrusive government.
No spin, just oppression and slaughter of their own people.
Suffering springs from a variety of sources, but never individual opportunity and freedom to find a job or service or create a business or trade to provide what others want or need – short of a famine or plague.
In reality, human suffering comes from individuals.
The most powerful individuals in spreading suffering are found in oppressive large, centralized government.
The trend of US policies which have discouraged individual worth, opportunity and initiative have caused suffering.
The US policies that influenced able bodied persons not to work and, sadly, to dissolve family units where support, encouragement and boundaries aid the next generation to succeed began a decline that regulation and trade agreements further complicated.
Many Americans are “married to the government.”
They have been abused so long they recognize the abuse.
They are so conditioned that they believe the false promise that is will soon be the land of milk and honey.
This has been going on since the 60s at an accelerating rate.
The horrible outcomes of US urban school are the greatest source of de facto institutional racism in the US.
The children are doomed and the politician accept the union bosses money in exchange for the union keeping them in office.
There’s nothing about children and opportunity in that scheme.
There are good teachers and they are suffocating in these conditions.
The kids know they will be in jail, end up dead or just drop out.
I know them.
They freely admit this in CPS in the poor areas.
These politicians reward friends of Goldman Sachs and others too big to fail; that is the root of suffering.
Nationalizing oil and utilities in Venezuela was the beginning of the riches oil country in South American being unable to provide a grid for lighting and general power.
Politician cannot produce goods and services, but they can surely make them scarce.
Sharkey married into millions and is a classic takers.
Suffering comes from policies that ensure jobs disappear and policies regulatory system that crushes private individual potential.
Sorry about my typos above. Too bad I can’t fix. You are welcome to add the missing letters.
It will be be quite entertaining to watch the meltdown when their pension fund finally goes bust.
An unregulated free market economic system where the decision-making power is concentrated in an elite is a very oppressive economic system; all essential elements of a market economy are human-designed, not the consequence of an uncontrollable impersonal system of forces. Stay tuned…tic, tock, tic, tock, tic, tock…
An excellent post by W R Helander at 4:21 PM.
The uneducated, the ignorant and the fools will disparage Helander remarks.
Angel certainly has all the answers.
Maybe he should go to Venezuela and fix all their problems.
No Angel can’t get over the fact these teachers are liars.
Angel, did you punch yourself in the head yet today?