There’s a hint of nostalgia in this, in that we remember a leader a little closer to home voicing similar sentiments to those Venezuelan communist dictator Nicolas Maduro blurted out yesterday. Specifically…

The difference being that none of the people in Barack Obama’s audience that day were diving in dumpsters for food and dying for lack of basic medicine.

Which is what you have in Venezuela – to such an extent that Maduro doesn’t see any point in denying the obvious anymore…

CARACAS (AFP) – Under-fire Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro admitted his economic model has “failed” in the wake of food and medicine shortages and public service paralysis, such as Tuesday’s power failure that affected 80 percent of Caracas.

“The production models we’ve tried so far have failed and the responsibility is ours, mine and yours,” Maduro told his ruling PSUV party congress, as Venezuela looks to tackle chronic inflation the International Monetary Fund predicted would reach one million percent this year.

“Enough with the whining… we need to produce with or without (outside) aggression, with or without blockades, we need to make Venezuela an economic power,” he added late Monday, with the country grappling with a four-year long recession.

“No more whining, I want solutions comrades!”

Solutions? He wants solutions?

He’s shot and imprisoned all the people with solutions – at least, the ones who couldn’t light out of Venezuela. Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez wiped out the private economy of that country and stole everything they could get their hands on. It’s all gone, and what’s left is the prospect of a bloody revolution which ends with he and his remaining cronies shot in the streets or in exile, with eyes in the backs of their heads the rest of their lives.

How bad is it? Well, inflation is now a million percent. A million!

But Maduro is a man with a plan – so he says…

“I estimate it will take about two years to reach a high level of stability and see the first symptoms of new and economic prosperity, without for one second affecting social security and protection,” added the president.

Maduro’s economic recovery plan includes increasing oil production to “six million barrels a day by 2025 or before.” Oil production has crashed from a high of 3.2 million barrels a day in 2008 to a 30-year low 1.5 million this year.

As well as the IMF’s mind-boggling inflation prediction, it says Venezuela’s GDP will plummet 18 percent this year, meaning a fourth consecutive year of double-digit falls.

The economic crisis has hit so hard that the public transport system has almost ground to a halt, with the government and local councils offering free rides in unsafe and uncomfortable pick-up trucks — branded “kennels” by users — after many bus service providers couldn’t afford to keep their vehicles on the road.

Think he’s got two years? We think it’s more like two months. That government is going to disintegrate, and soon.

We’ve talked about this before, but one wonders whether it wouldn’t be a good idea for the United States to intervene with humanitarian aid in Venezuela – setting up refugee camps inside the country’s borders and daring the Maduro regime to do something about it. As is, U.S. sanctions on the regime are being blamed, fraudulently, for the country’s troubles. The way to trump that politically would be to ride in with the Marines bearing food supplies in shock-and-awe quantities, taking over strategic locations which can be used as refugee camps when they’re made safe. That would be a major affront to the regime, and perhaps militarily provocative, but it would be the surest way to turn the public sentiment hard against Maduro and lead to him being deposed.

The other potential solution would be for the country’s National Assembly, which Maduro essentially fired after it became an opposition body, to declare a government in exile and formally request military assistance from the Organization of American States. Were that granted the U.S. military could then intervene. This is unlikely – and it certainly wouldn’t happen before the mid-term elections because it would be political suicide for Trump to send troops to Venezuela while there’s an election going on. President Trump has floated the idea in foreign policy circles, leading to an AP story last month about what a crisis that created.

Although for purely domestic political purposes it isn’t the worst thing in the world to position the Hard Left in the Democrat Party on the side of a Venezuelan communist dictator who’s been offering the same policies the Democrats are offering and has utterly destroyed what used to be the richest country in Latin America with them.

We doubt that will happen and it might not even need to. It’s hard to imagine Maduro will be around long enough for the U.S. military to go in and take him out anyway.