SOCIALISM UPDATE: Venezuela’s middle class is dumpster diving for food, by CBSNews.

Until recently, Julio Noguera worked at a bakery. Now he spends his evenings searching through the garbage for food.

“I come here looking for food because if I didn’t, I’d starve to death,” Noguera said as he sorted through a pile of moldy potatoes. “With things like they are, no one helps anyone and no one gives away meals.”

Across town, unemployed people converge every dusk at a trash heap on a downtown Caracas sidewalk to pick through rotten fruit and vegetables tossed out by nearby shops. They are frequently joined by small business owners, college students and pensioners – people who consider themselves middle class even though their living standards have long ago been pulverized by triple-digit inflation, food shortages and a collapsing currency.

Bust Times In Oil-Rich Venezuela: ‘The Banks Don’t Have Money To Give Out’, by Nicholas Casey.

GROSS: You’ve visited at least one hospital. Would you describe an example of the worst hygienic situation you saw surgeons operating in?

CASEY: Yeah. I mean, there’s so many to describe at this point. These – you know, these hospitals are really – kind of look like hell on earth. They’re not even something I’ve seen in war situations that I’ve gone to cover. I think often of Gaza as probably the worst place where I’ve seen hospitals in wartime. And at least those hospitals had antibiotics. And these ones don’t.

It’s reversing civilisation at high speed back to the Medieval era.

Isn’t it funny that you have all the post apocalyptic stories in sci-fi about scavengers after a nuclear war or disease or alien invasion or robot uprising or “over-population” like Soylent Green, and in reality we have those things happening because of socialism.

hat-tip Matthew