New York Times Venezuela Coverage Hits New Low

The Paper of Record has given a "Venezuelan-American writer and comedian" named Joanna Hausmann a video platform from which to hilariously smear the growing anti-regime change protests in the United States. In the written warm-up intro to her stand-up routine of an op-ed, she writes:

From Noam Chomsky to Ilhan Omar, there is a growing movement on the American left known as “Hands Off Venezuela,” protesting America’s backing of the opposition leader Juan Guaido. Some of them even chant, “Maduro, friend, the people are with you.” In this video Op-Ed, a Venezuelan-American comic argues that these people are living on another planet and ignoring a dire humanitarian crisis.

What neither she nor the New York Times sees fit to disclose to their audience is that Joanna is the daughter of neoliberal Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, who has been named a chief adviser to self-declared interim president Juan Guaido.

As Bloomberg reported in January, Hausmann's reconstruction plan for a post-coup Venezuela would include the usual prescription: austerity for the masses and enrichment for the US-based oil companies which would swoop in and rescue the country from socialism.

In this case, that (rescue) fuel will come from the IMF rescue package, according to Hausmann. The influx of hard currency would go to investment in the all-important energy industry, fund imports and cover the government’s deficit, helping wean the country off the frenetic money-printing that has fueled inflation that’s counted in the hundreds of thousands. He doesn’t believe dollarization is the solution to the country’s inflation problem.

For some reason, the Times also has not see fit to print my submitted comment on the video op-ed, in which I point out this apparent oversight on their part:

It would have been nice if the Times had disclosed that Ms. Hausmann is the daughter of Ricardo Hausmann, the Harvard economist who is currently advising self-declared interim president Guaido.

 As an International Monetary Fund official in the 90s, Ricardo Hausmann was an integral part of the so-called Washington Consensus, which "advised" Latin American countries to sell off their state-owned resources to private investors in payment for IMF loans. He is also the pre-Chavez era former minister of planning for Venezuela.

Hausmann is yet to be confirmed to the cabinet of Guaido's "parallel government," and therefore reportedly demurs at commenting directly on the situation in Venezuela. So it must be nice to have a daughter to do the job in the guise of "comedy."

 https://www.voanews.com/a/guaido-names-hausmann-as-venezuela-s-idb-representative/4813590.html

Smearing anti-imperialist activists and intellectuals like Noam Chomsky by calling them "Maduro sanitizers" is indicative of the growing desperation of the neocon regime-changers in the Trump administration. And by the way, Chomsky is not a "fellow liberal." He is a leftist, which is not the same thing as a liberal.

Ms. Hausmann's video is reminiscent of the infamous 1992 congressional testimony from a 15 year old Kuwaiti girl in the run-up to the first Gulf War. Too fearful to even give her real name, she tearfully described personally seeing newborn babies thrown to the floor from their incubators by Saddam Hussein's invading soldiers. Neither she nor her hosts disclosed that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and that her eyewitness testimony was, in fact, a piece of total fiction dreamed up by a public relations firm for the purpose of manufacturing public consent for another US regime-change invasion.

The Times editorial board was duly outraged about that particular deception and demanded an immediate investigation of the congress critters who had participated in the subterfuge, revealed as such by a journalist from Harper's Magazine and not by the Times.

So when the conflict of interest and (easily discoverable) undisclosed nepotism inherent in Joanna Hausmann's video op-ed is pointed out to them by a mere reader, therefore, it must be an easy no-brainer for them to just ignore it and censor it. Publishing it might put on a damper on the public consent being so carefully manufactured for consumption by "fellow liberals" too squeamish to support Venezuela regime change. Her piece was trending at #4 in the popularity ratings the last time I checked.And the published comments are generally supportive of Joanna Hausmann's slick, heartfelt pleading for humanitarian intervention and as well as her gratuitous smearing of the left.

You'd think that since the Times has just been caught with rotten egg on its face after the Russiagate debacle, the paper would be a bit more careful about their propaganda. You'd think that at long last, they might have developed some shame, if not some actual journalistic ethics. And you'd be thinking very, very wrong.