Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is your host, Abby Martin. This is the audio of our show.

You can watch the episodes on our YouTube channel or at the Empirefiles.tv.

Okay, so John Oliver on his show last week tonight on HBO, dedicated an entire episode to Venezuela in the week leading up to its election.

Now, this is really no big deal because

basically every major media and news outlet ran their own stories talking about how terrible

of a place Venezuela was and how much of a failure its government was leading up to the election.

So this really was nothing different than any other media outlet was doing. but because John Oliver is considered such a big progressive voice that reaches millions

of progressive-minded people, I thought it was important to address the many, many problems

and distortions in this report that so many people have been talking about. In fact, I've

heard this episode referenced more than any other news story about Venezuela

and its government, both before and after the election.

So let's get started with it.

But what is happening in Venezuela is not just extremely important.

It is absolutely worth paying attention to, because this is not just a story about socialism.

There are plenty of socialist countries that look nothing like Venezuela.

It's a story about epic mismanagement.

Right off the bat, he kind of says what he's going to show in this entire episode

is that the story of Venezuela is just a story of epic mismanagement by the Maduro government.

So he's setting out from the beginning what he wants you to think in this piece

and what he's going to prove.

So epic that a nation of 31 million people with the largest oil reserves in the world have been forced to resort to some pretty creative forms of protest.

Social media ablaze for the past few days encouraging protesters to fill jars and bags with human feces. This is one of our last

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