Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Many Venezuelans prefer capitalism to the common poverty of socialism

AP via Washington Post:

The shopping mall is a blur of Guess jeans, Louis Vuitton purses and Motorola cell phones, a temple of consumerism in a country that is supposed to be on a path toward socialism. So popular is the Sambil Mall that "Sambil society" has become a derogatory term in the Venezuelan socialist vocabulary. Reject it and build a fairer Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez urges his nation of 25 million people.

But for many, it's a hard sell.

"We're capitalists, consumers by nature," said 26-year-old Marbelys Gonzalez, strolling through the mall with two friends, carrying a shopping bag filled with five pairs of designer jeans.

"We're crazy about shopping. If we go out and don't end up buying anything, we don't feel good," she said, sunglasses perched atop her bleached blond hair.

Gonzalez isn't a member of the Venezuelan elite often derided by Chavez, but rather a middle-class university student whose spending money comes from her father, a jeweler, and her boyfriend, a soldier.

While most Venezuelans are too poor to afford luxuries, they live amid conspicuous consumption _ cosmetic surgery, SUVs, highways lined with billboards advertising Swiss watches and Scotch whiskey.

Chavez may regularly voice admiration for Fidel Castro's Cuba, but Caracas bears little resemblance to Havana.

Ritzy social clubs, walled-in mansions and private schools are the norm for the wealthy, while the poor live in vast slums where unemployment runs high and gunfights are common. But even among the poor, the consumerist urge is evident in the Nike sneakers on many feet and the satellite TV antennas on cinderblock homes.

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The affection of Chavez for failed socialism has more to do with power than economic performance. Chavez is a control freak and socialism is for the ultimate control freak. He needs to get busy now planning how many eggs get shipped to Caracus.