Rep. María Elvira Salazar denounces socialism on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 1, 2023.
Transcript
Rep. María Elvira Salazar: Thank you, Mr. Speaker and I rise in support of the rule to bring up to the house the current Resolution Number 9 denouncing the horrors of socialism. And why am I bringing this resolution to the floor of the United States House of Representatives? Because young people in America are being brainwashed by the news media and academia into believing that socialism is an economic model for the greater good of all Americans. And the problem is that they are falling for it, they’re believing it. And here’s the proof.
Almost 40% of GenZ and Millennials think the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx, the father of Marxism, is a better defense of freedom and equality than the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, one of the creators of the American experiment, the American exceptionality, and the document which gave birth to the most prosperous and resilience democracy in the history of the world, ours, the United States of America.
Worse yet, in a recent poll that shows that 40% of Americans of all ages, not only the youth, 40% believe that socialism is good, while 33% of them say that they are likely to support a member of the Democratic Socialist of America, the organization that has shaped the ideology of many of our colleagues with the poison of Neo Marxism. If you go to their website, to the Democratic Socialist of America website, you will read their neo-Marxist positions with pride.
I represent District Number 27 in the city of Miami, or in Florida, the city of Miami a bastion of hundreds of thousands of Cubans Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who have fled, who have escaped from the despicable horrors that you cannot imagine, produced by that ideology. So why did the Venezuelans flee? Well, because Venezuela, why would they do that if Venezuela has almost 20% of the worlds oil, in other words, that means the largest reserves of oil in the world. The Venezuelans have more oil than the Saudi, than the Saudis in Saudi Arabia. In the 50s and the 60s they have the same GDP as Germany. Now inflation is 156% a year, the third largest in the world. The average Venezuelan has lost 15 pounds for lack of food. In the last 20 years over 7 million Venezuelans have escaped the Democratic Socialist paradise anywhere they could go. That is more people than have fled the violence in Syria. So that indicates that socialism is more devastating than a civil war.
Another country who has lost everything is Nicaragua. In the 70s it was the bread basket of Central America, but then the Sandinista arrived. Danielle Ortega took power under the guidance of Fidel Castro in Cuba. He appropriated almost 30,000 properties in few years and right now their citizens are poorer than they were in 1977. But Ortega promised Democratic socialism, but delivered a dictatorship. In the last presidential election seven people dared to run for president and he put them all in jail. Still today they are under house arrest or in jail. Every socialist is a dictator in disguise.
In Cuba, after 60 years of living the Socialist paradise, the average Cuban, 70% of the Cuban eats only once a day. The average Cubans makes $23 a month, that is 40 cents a day, and the retirees, the seniors, make 12 dollars. Cuba, in the 1960’s, had the highest per capita income in the hemisphere and was comparable to Italy. And we know that because hunger is a very powerful motivator, so today Cubans throw, by the thousands, throw themselves to the sharks in the Straits of Florida looking for freedom and hoping to get to the district that I represent on this floor. And that’s just in this hemisphere. In China 55 million died. In Cambodia one million, in the USSR, ten million froze to death in the gulags. Socialists are in the business of power and it only takes one generation to believe their false promises and lose our freedom. It is a lie that socialism will solve your problems, economic or social. And if it’s Democratic socialism, it’s socialism, and socialism is always socialism. We can not let this evil ideology take hold in this country. We are in the United States, the stronghold of freedom and that is why we must pass this resolution. I yield back the balance of my time. Thank you.
