Collectivist Fun!

Ah Chavez, your grinding your country into the ground, but you're getting more personal power.

But it’s not only the big fish who are in the crosshairs: The chocolate factory in Devon, England which produces “Venezuelan Black” chocolate owns a cacao plantation named El Tesoro (The Treasure) in the Venezuelan mountains. Now the plantation and the business are under investigation by the Chavez regime because, in Chavez’s own words, “The production and distribution is done from his factory in Devon, England, and this gentleman is getting rich.”

That really says it all. People out of his control are getting rich, and you can't have any of that.

Related...

The telephone company, CANTV, was certain to be a target. The Venezuelan Constitution had already granted Chavez control of the Internet. Having the state own the company ensures that Venezuelans’ communications with the world at large are fully under the watchful eye of the government.

And like the retro collectivist totalitarian (or should I say holistic) you're giving lots of money to your "revolutionary brothers".

Though FARC isn't doing so well lately, despite the anti-Columbian sentiment by some in the US legislature.

StrategyPage has a great post on the implosion of FARC and the extensive links between Chavez and FARC

Victor Davis Hanson also notes this collectivist bent.

Care to guess who said this bit of claptrap?

We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK

Needless to say Hanson has a reply to that

In fact, we had nothing to do with, say, a Zimbabwe going from a successful exporter of food to a net importer, much less with the mass collectivization programs in Asia, Africa, and South America that depressed food production for most of the 1950s-1990s. U.S. technology, open markets, and capitalist practices taught the world that they were quite able to "eat as much as [they] want"—should they use their resources wisely.

As always Victor has other good info.

And to round out the post StrategyPage has info on Zimbabwe's implosion.