Today is a big media day in Venezuela. Today, Friday, March 11, 2016, the news is all about the news and it’s as if the Bolivarian government was taking a page out of President Obama’s playbook to make a whole movie. Yet while the U.S. president can only go after individual whistleblowers (and boy does he ever! with more whistleblowers serving more jail time under Obama than all previous presidents combined) in Venezuela the government shuts down whole newspapers.
There are, of course, other differences between a capitalist national security state like the U.S. where some checks and balances remain as echoes of liberal democratic moments of national history and an…