Venezuela's creeping dictatorship

The corrupt and incompetent Chavez government hasn't delivered on populist promises of housing for all Venezuelans:

There is a shortage of two million homes in this South American country of nearly 29 million people, according to the Venezuelan Builders' Association.

So rather than do something constructive Chavez goes for the Robert Mugabe distract-the-masses-ploy by seizing private farms. The results parallel the Zimbabwe model:

The national farming union Fedenaga said it has already seen a drop from 70 percent to 45 percent in banana production in the region, and has predicted beef production will drop by 30 percent and dairy by four percent as the seizures continue.

The Guardian reports that Chavez has also urged the less fortunate to "occupy" the land of the better off, with the poor seizing the opportunity.

Chavez's socialist experiment will eventually end, as do all such social engineering projects, badly. Somewhat ironically, in the right margin of the article is an advert for the Guardian bookshop which unsurprisingly features Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World as the number one seller. The book, featuring on its cover the famous shot of Che, should really be titled How to Fuck the World.