View Full Version : Venezuela, a month left at best?
Team Sergeant
05-22-2016, 09:52
I give Venezuela 30 days before full blown anarchy. This is a good article, I'm surprised the progressive/socialist/communist "president" (dictator) has not clamped down on the media yet. I'm sure after the government starts killing it's own people that will happen.
I'm amazed that this is what half of "America" wants, a socialist government.
Anyone notice who's carrying the news on Venezuela? It ain't cnn, msnbc or even foxnews....... I'm guessing it's not a good idea to lead with a socialist catastrophe while an "American socialist hitlery clinton" is running for office.
Venezuela, where a hamburger is officially $170
Marc Burleigh
•May 20, 2016
Caracas (AFP) - If a visitor to Venezuela is unfortunate enough to pay for anything with a foreign credit card, the eye-watering cost might suggest they were in a city pricier than Tokyo or Zurich.
A hamburger sold for 1,700 Venezuelan bolivares is $170, or a 69,000-bolivar hotel room is $6,900 a night, based on the official rate of 10 bolivares for $1.
But of course no merchant is pricing at the official rate imposed under currency controls. It's the black market rate of 1,000 bolivares per dollar that's applied.
But for Venezuelans paid in hyperinflation-hit bolivares, and living in an economy relying on mostly imported goods or raw materials, conditions are unthinkably expensive.
Even for the middle class, most of it sliding into poverty, hamburgers and hotels are out-of-reach excesses.
"Everybody is knocked low," Michael Leal, a 34-year-old manager of an eyewear store in Caracas, told AFP. "We can't breathe."
- Shuttered stores -
In Chacao, a middle-class neighborhood in the capital, office workers lined up outside a nut store to buy the cheapest lunch they could afford. Nearby restaurants were all but empty.
cont:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-where-hamburger-officially-170-184605711.html?ref=gs
First the beer - and now Coca-Cola
Production of Coke halted in Venezuela for lack of sugar
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/production-coke-halted-venezuela-lack-213230031.html
"May 23 (Reuters) - The Venezuelan bottler of Coca-Cola has halted production of sugar-sweetened beverage due to a lack of sugar, a Coca-Cola Co spokeswoman said on Monday.
Venezuela is in the midst of a deep recession, and spontaneous demonstrations and looting have become more common amid worsening food shortages, frequent power cuts and the world's highest inflation.
Production of sugar-sweetened drinks has stopped, but output of diet drinks such as Coca-Cola light and other zero-sugar beverages continued, spokeswoman Kerry Tressler wrote by email. The local bottler, Coca-Cola Femsa SAB, said it would issue a statement later on Monday.
"Sugar suppliers in Venezuela have informed us that they will temporarily cease operations due to a lack of raw materials," Tressler added."
Price of corn flour in Venezuela soars 900 percent
https://www.yahoo.com/news/price-corn-flour-venezuela-soars-900-percent-115846076.html?ref=gs
"Caracas (AFP) - Venezuelans on Tuesday woke up to discover that the government-controlled price of corn flour -- used to make corn patty arepas, a staple of local cuisine -- has risen 900 percent.
The socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro had kept the price of corn flour frozen for 15 months at 19 bolivares a kilogram (two pounds).
But late Monday the government's Superintendent of Fair Prices increased the price to 190 bolivares a kilo, or $19 at the government rate used for imports such as medicine and scarce food...."
And the hits just keep on coming.
Streck-Fu
05-24-2016, 10:18
How you know you live in a failed system....
Superintendent of Fair Prices
RomanCandle
05-24-2016, 14:47
Scary thought is what happens to the rest of the world when the derivatives bubble bursts?
This could be all of us in short order.
Maple Flag
06-20-2016, 13:35
I give Venezuela 30 days before full blown anarchy.
I like predictive analysis with a pretty well defined future state and a clear timeline, so I've been watching for this one after Team Sergeant made his prediction last month.
Solid call from what I read now at the 28 day mark!
Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation
"CUMANÁ, Venezuela — With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.
Venezuela is convulsing from hunger."
"In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.
This is precisely the Venezuela its leaders vowed to prevent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/world/americas/venezuelans-ransack-stores-as-hunger-stalks-crumbling-nation.html?_r=0
Go Devil
06-20-2016, 14:44
Think it will be any different here?
I like predictive analysis with a pretty well defined future state and a clear timeline, so I've been watching for this one after Team Sergeant made his prediction last month.
Solid call from what I read now at the 28 day mark!
Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation
"CUMANÁ, Venezuela — With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.
Venezuela is convulsing from hunger."
"In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.
This is precisely the Venezuela its leaders vowed to prevent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/world/americas/venezuelans-ransack-stores-as-hunger-stalks-crumbling-nation.html?_r=0
Venezuela and Brazil both failing.
Team Sergeant
06-20-2016, 15:14
Soon, very soon, there will be a trigger event...... I'd say the "trigger" will come from the "government"..... but it's a 50/50 call.
I feel sorry for the poor folk there...... cause the "elite socialists/communists are eating very well.
Team Sergeant
06-20-2016, 15:16
Venezuela and Brazil both failing.
Brazil is huge, needs more to fail before it falls into chaos. Which is not long if it continues down the corrupt socialist/communist path.
Badger52
06-20-2016, 16:39
Brazil is huge, needs more to fail before it falls into chaos. Which is not long if it continues down the corrupt socialist/communist path.From some reading I've done their previous prez had a pretty good model going & some success; Brazil was looked at as an example. Then came their current administration & no self-discipline on spending, or saving anything in the event of int'l market changes; kinda sounds familiar. (Their current prez is sidelined via impeachment.)
Now they're throwing people at trying to support the Olympics that they can't even pay...
I think you're right; they're not there yet but they are definitely on steep glide path.
Huge, with socialists/communists in high office...and running for President...are we still talking South America?
Vin Scully nails it on-air during a Dodger's game: http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/18/legendary-baseball-announcer-vin-scully-absolutely-destroys-socialism-during-broadcast-video/
Pat
Team Sergeant
06-21-2016, 07:42
Huge, with socialists/communists in high office...and running for President...are we still talking South America?
I agree, but unlike Brazil and Venezuela our military is sworn to defend the Constitution and not the president, senate or congress. While I believe the current socialist/muslim administration has the Department of Homeland Security , the DOJ, FBI, IRS, EPA etc. in their pocket by placing incompetent and spineless individuals in leadership roles, (who will say and do anything barry soetoro asks them to do like change, omit, delete the facts in an islamic terrorism attack), barry soetoro does not control the military.
In Central and South America's the corrupt socialist/communist leadership has full control and support of the military right up until their military leaders realize that the population has had enough and that their lives are now at stake because of the corrupt socialist/communist dictatorship. Then and only then will the SA military change sides and assist the "people" in ousting the current socialist/communist dictatorship and install a new corrupt socialist/communist dictatorship. Rinse and repeat.
Also, the people of SA lead hard lives, no EBT cards, no obama phones, in Central South America its work or starve. (Hence millions of them coming north). They are not going to put up with the socialist/communist corruption when their kids are starving. That's when they will revolt by the millions. Venezuela is days away from such a revolt and I'd bet barry soetoro's koran that the Venezuelan "leadership" has a plane sitting and ready to fly its "leaders" to Cuba as soon as the revolt begins. (Along with billions of Venezuelan gold.) This is socialism/communism , corrupt and brutal.
Here in the USA we tend to blame everything else instead of the real problem, socialism and corruption. We blame guns, hate speech, domestic terrorists, climate change, the EU, military industrial complex (WTF that is I'll never know), education, the wealthy, lack of diversity, lack of safe space, George Bush, micoaggression, assault weapons, we blame everything but the real problem, socialism.
The only reason barry soetoro and his incompetent followers do not attempt to nationalize the food industry, banking, airlines etc is because a few million patriots will say "NO" and say no with force. And IMO this is the real reason for the left-wing, socialist, progressive, communist grab for Americans guns, disarm the public and you control the sheep.
I do like the masked attempts at creating economic chaos in the American economy like the left-wing socialist democrats forcing the American banks make subprime low interest loans to individuals that didn't have a snowballs chance in hell to pay them back. This is how American socialism works, insidiously gnawing at the very fabric of a strong free society until it collapses under its own burdens, then blaming everything except what really brought us down.
IMO the only thing standing in the way of an "American Venezuela" is the patriots of this great country and the socialists/communists know it.
Food for thought, just imagine what life in "America" would be like if the United States Military acted like a South American military....... interesting no?
Great food for thought TS.
"IMO the only thing standing in the way of an "American Venezuela" is the patriots of this great country and the socialists/communists know it."
This sentence 'bout sums it up nicely for me.
The current presidential election may be the Nation's tipping point - certainly for the make up of The Supreme Court.
Back to Venezuela - they are in a socialist-made world-of-hurt - your observations are spot on.
While I believe the current socialist/muslim administration has the Department of Homeland Security , the DOJ, FBI, IRS, EPA etc. in their pocket by placing incompetent and spineless individuals in leadership roles, (who will say and do anything barry soetoro asks them to do like change, omit, delete the facts in an islamic terrorism attack), barry soetoro does not control the military.
I am sorry but I would have to disagree with you. Barry most certainly DOES control the military.
Submitted for review: the last 7 years of cultural change championed by the CINC. From the repeal of DADT, to the expansion of women in direct combat roles, to the appointment of a Secretary of the Army that is quite vocal in his support of allowing transgender service members to serve openly.
...the deafening silence of senior military leaders speaking out publicly against social experimentation using the military as a petri dish signals to me that the POTUS is very MUCH in control of the military. Hell we even published some YouTube videos to explain why we were not even going to ASK for an exception to the women in service policy.
It only takes a brief look at the willingness of retirees like Clark, McChrystal, Petraeus, and others to jump on the anti-gun bandwagon before I start to think...
...even that republican Secretary of State that only seems to vote democrat paints a picture of senior leaders that are worried more about politics than the freedom of the people in his charge.
"yes, United States Military leaders ARE starting to act like a bit the South American military"
US militicians have been polishing their act for a generation now. I am afraid it will be hard for someone to convince me that the POTUS is NOT firmly in control of the military.
Just my two cents... I could be wrong.
Streck-Fu
06-21-2016, 09:08
I am sorry but I would have to disagree with you. Barry most certainly DOES control the military.
The dismissal of Mattis perfectly illustrates how senior leadership is chosen for compliance.
Badger52
06-21-2016, 10:15
IMO the only thing standing in the way of an "American Venezuela" is the patriots of this great country and the socialists/communists know it.+1 Thus, their perpetual efforts at our disarmament. Sigline quoted from Peregrino appropriate.
I wonder how many millions of them will cross our southern border?
Team Sergeant
07-06-2016, 12:10
Good article concerning the hollywood elites and the socialist/communist murder they help commit. Amazing how the left-wing America media is now silent. I've neo heard of one hollywood elite assisting Venezuela.
Well done Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Michael Moore, Kevin Spacey, Susan Sarandon, Oliver Stone, and Naomi Campbell, I hope you all sleep well at night knowing Venezuela's poor are hungry because of your efforts.
Morons one and all.
Sean Penn And Other Hollywood Tools Bear Responsibility For Venezuela’s Condition
POSTED BY: ALEX DAVID MAY 16, 2016
Venezuela is about to collapse. The people there are starving. There are rumors that some are eating cats to survive. Protests and riots materialize every day. Stores ransacked. The country is in chaos.
American celebrities have power due to their popularity and a sizable audience. Some use this gift for great causes and purposes. Then there are boneheads like Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Michael Moore, Kevin Spacey, Susan Sarandon, Oliver Stone, and Naomi Campbell. These wealthy, pampered celebrities supported Hugo Chavez while he transformed Venezuela into an oppressive socialistic government model and they continue to support his replacement, the current President, Nicolas Maduro.
I do admit that they are great actors and entertainers, and I certainly do not begrudge their economic success. In fact, I applaud it. But they don’t. They openly criticize and abhor the capitalism that made them incredibly wealthy. Moreover, they believe that only a Socialist form of government can ensure true equality, “a sea of happiness” and a content citizenry. To wit, some of them traveled to Venezuela many times to support Hugo Chavez during the beginning of the run up to a Socialist government there. Sean Penn, notably, acted as an eager surrogate for Chavez, encouraging the people there to vote for the strongman.
Hugo is dead and gone now. When he died, his Hollywood fans wrote weepy words of sympathy and condolences.
Since the death of Chavez, his self-proclaimed “son,” President Nicolas Maduro, like a “mini-me”, has taken his place and has been enthusiastically continuing his “father’s” vision of a Socialist Utopia. Sean Penn was fully on board with Maduro, stating: “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President Maduro.”
Now look at the country. The latest “Global Misery Index” which has been used for years to measure the level of misery one endures living in any of the 59 countries surveyed, has awarded Penn’s glittering country of Venezuela the winner and Grand Master Champion of misery. It beat top contenders like The Dominican Republic, The Palestinian Territory, and……Bangladesh. Congratulations!
Not content with being the Misery King, the country was also awarded the top spot in a Gallup Poll showing it to be the most dangerous, crime-ridden nightmarish hellhole on planet earth. Awesome!
To all those Hollywood celebrities who expressed their undying support and love, here’s a fun fact: their combined net worth is close to the annual GDP of their beloved country. Of course, I’m sure they won’t be donating any of their wealth anytime soon to the tormented and starving people who have to live in their version of Shangri-la.
These rich, arrogant Hollywood elites are culpable for the hellhole Venezuela has become. They helped sell, with their “star power,” the glory of a Socialistic Government to the citizenry of Venezuela.
Sean Penn and the other Hollywood supporters of Venezuela’s Socialist system should be dragged out of their McMansions and flown over, empty-handed, to Venezuela. Then forced to live as one of the oppressed citizens entrenched in the daily nightmare of life in the slums of Caracas.
http://politistick.com/sean-penn-hollywood-tools-bear-responsibility-venezuelas-condition/#
...they should be packaged up and sent to Venezuela to live among the people
but they wont
hypocrites don't like peasant flavored kool-aid
mark46th
07-06-2016, 19:39
I feel sorry for the poor folk there......" TS
I don't feel sorry for the people of Venezuela at all. They allowed this mess to happen, they can clean it up.
I feel sorry for the poor folk there......" TS
I don't feel sorry for the people of Venezuela at all. They allowed this mess to happen, they can clean it up.
With all due respect, look at the mess our country is in, and by the same token, we allowed THIS mess to happen as well.
I think it's time for some freedom tree watering, and I fear that we will allow our rights and freedoms to be eroded past the point where anyone will have the will, arms, or supplies to affect more than a minor bump in the road to tyranny.
I hope I'm wrong though.
Team Sergeant
07-11-2016, 08:19
Will not be long now. This is exactly what Hillary wants for America, complete failure due to socialist corruption. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Socialists, Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Michael Moore, Kevin Spacey, Susan Sarandon, Oliver Stone, and Naomi Campbell, are all eating caviar on $1000 dollar plates while the people of Venezuela starve.
The "trigger" event should happen soon. When it does the dictator Maduro and his henchmen will murder Venezuelans by the hundreds, maybe thousands and then flee to Cuba. It's coming.
In just 12 hours, more than 35K Venezuelans cross Colombian border to buy food, medicine
Published July 11, 2016/
EFE
Cucuta – In just 12 hours, more than 35,000 Venezuelans crossed the border into Colombia on Sunday to buy food and medicines in the city of Cucuta, when the Venezuelan government agreed to opened border crossings for one day only.
People began crossing the Simon Bolivar international bridge at 5:00 a.m. to purchase products that are scarce in Venezuela.
"We're from here in San Antonio (and), honestly, we don't have any food to give our children, so I don't think it's fair that the border is still closed," a Venezuelan woman told EFE in Cucuta.
The woman, who preferred to not give her name, crossed the international bridge with her husband and children ages 5 and 2.
The border crossings between Tachira state and Norte de Santander province were closed on Aug. 19, 2015, by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who said he took the measure to fight smuggling and prevent members of paramilitary groups from entering Venezuela.
Maduro later ordered all crossings along the 1,378-mile border closed.
cont:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2016/07/11/in-just-12-hours-more-than-35k-venezuelans-cross-into-colombia-to-buy-food-medicine/
Badger52
07-11-2016, 10:56
Will not be long now. This is exactly what Hillary wants for America, complete failure due to socialist corruption. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Socialists, Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Michael Moore, Kevin Spacey, Susan Sarandon, Oliver Stone, and Naomi Campbell, are all eating caviar on $1000 dollar plates while the people of Venezuela starve.Fast-food money; they shell-out about $35K per for their little fund-raisers in support of the Empress-Wannabe while host George Looney pontificates there's too much money in politics.
They can live there (or try). Screw 'em.
Venezuelans cross into Colombia to buy food
BBC
July 10, 2106
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-36759102
Venezuela police arrest 400 for looting in food shortage
BBC
June 16,2016
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-36547300
mark46th
07-11-2016, 15:53
A profiteer's dream. Wish I had a boatload of canned goods, toilet paper and diapers.
Venezuela Seizes Local Kimberly-Clark Factory
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-11/venezuela-seizes-local-kimberly-clark-factory
".....Labor Minister Owaldo Vera said Monday that the socialist government took the action at the request of the 971 workers at the factory that the company decided to shutter. The seizure follows a similar takeover from 2014 when Clorox announced it was closing its doors.
"Kimberly-Clark will continue producing for all of the Venezuelans," Vera said in a televised statement from the factory surrounded by workers chanting pro-government slogans. That statement was not exactly true: former workers of the company would continue producing under the observation of government management. We doubt this "forced restructring" will survive more than a few months...."
"...workers chanting pro-government slogans...." You just can't fix stupid.
"...workers chanting pro-government slogans...." You just can't fix stupid.
Sheep will continue to vote for and support the rancher who feeds them and then who eventually slaughters them.
Team Sergeant
07-12-2016, 06:09
".....Labor Minister Owaldo Vera said Monday that the socialist government took the action at the request of the 971 workers at the factory that the company decided to shutter. The seizure follows a similar takeover from 2014 when Clorox announced it was closing its doors.
I'm thinking they have gone full commie/dictator. And seem to have the full backing of their "military".........
Going to get real interesting real quick.
Could THIS be the spark ???
Venezuelan president puts armed forces in charge of new food supply system
Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro put the armed forces in charge of a new food supply system aimed at alleviating crippling shortages, ceding yet more power to a military apparatus that is already involved in everything from banking to imports.
The head of the armed forces, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, will be in charge of transporting and distributing basic products, controlling prices and stimulating production, according to a decree published Tuesday in the official gazette.
“All the ministries, all the ministers, all the state institutions are at the service and in absolute subordination” to Mr. Padrino’s so-called Great Sovereign Supply Mission, Mr. Maduro said in a televised address Monday night.
The elevation of Mr. Padrino makes him among the most powerful people in the socialist government, reducing the influence of Vice President Aristóbulo Istúriz, Industry Minister Miguel Pérez Abad and other ministers who held various economic roles.
“This is now a completely militarized government,” said Luis Manuel Esculpi, a security analyst in Caracas and former head of the armed forces commission in the congress. “The army is Maduro’s only source of authority.”
Since coming to power three years ago, Mr. Maduro has relied increasingly on the armed forces as a spiraling economic crisis pushed his approval ratings to record lows and food shortages led to lootings. Generals are already in charge of state companies importing the bulk of Venezuela’s food; they run the country’s largest bank, a television station and a state mining company.
The armed forces have swiftly repressed all opposition rallies as well as the food riots that flare up daily across the country.
“Maduro is giving the keys to Miraflores [presidential palace] over to a military leader who is unable to confront the economic crisis,” said opposition deputy Julio Borges. “What this means is more roadblocks, more corruption and less production.”
Fox news link with video ... http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/07/12/venezuelan-president-puts-armed-forces-in-charge-new-food-supply-system.html
....you mother fuckers will eat what we tell you to eat
Maybe Darth Vader Ginsburg and Sean Penn should move to Venezuela
Could THIS be the spark ???
Isn't this the same type of thing that led to Operation Gothic Serpent?
Team Sergeant
07-13-2016, 11:23
Isn't this the same type of thing that led to Operation Gothic Serpent?
Venezuela is a 3rd world socialist/communist country.
Somalia is not even rated as a "civilized" nation. (The left-wing will say otherwise.)
Suffering under socialism continues.
123,000 VENEZUELANS CROSS BORDER SHOPPING FOR SCARCE FOOD
BY HANNAH DREIER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jul 17, 8:02 PM EDT
SAN ANTONIO DEL TACHIRA, Venezuela (AP) -- More than 100,000 Venezuelans, some of whom drove through the night in caravans, crossed into Colombia over the weekend to hunt for food and medicine that are in short supply at home.
It was the second weekend in a row that Venezuela's socialist government opened the long-closed border with Colombia, and by 6 a.m. Sunday, a line of would-be shoppers snaked through the entire town of San Antonio del Tachira. Some had traveled in chartered buses from cities 10 hours away.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_VENEZUELA_COLOMBIA_BORDER?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-07-17-20-02-11
Badger52
07-19-2016, 04:59
Guess none of the lofty-thinkers want to contemplate a 70-yr old woman hauling along her grand-daughter in a quest to acquire food.
----
Oddly silent: As Venezuela decays, Hollywood socialists and ‘first-world idealists’ bite their tongues
The tragic plight of Venezuela has become undeniable: its brand of socialist populism ruined its economy and society.
“Venezuela has become the world’s most visibly failing state,” Francisco Toro wrote in Vox. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Not so long ago, Venezuela’s socialist revolution attracted its share of fellow travelers — first-world idealists hungry for the next earthly utopia. Those folks are thin on the ground these days.”
Those first-world idealists have rarely admitted their mistakes. They run the gamut from economically illiterate journalists to Hollywood directors to the leader of the British Labour Party.
...
The time for mockery of illogical policy in the name of “the people” and “anti-imperialism” passed long ago. Venezuela is a brutal reminder of national decay.
Non-MSM link about Hollywood ostriches (http://redalertpolitics.com/2016/05/26/oddly-silent-venezuela-decays-hollywood-socialists-first-world-idealists-bite-tongues/)
For the most part, crickets...
Team Sergeant
07-19-2016, 10:15
Guess none of the lofty-thinkers want to contemplate a 70-yr old woman hauling along her grand-daughter in a quest to acquire food.
----
Oddly silent: As Venezuela decays, Hollywood socialists and ‘first-world idealists’ bite their tongues
Non-MSM link about Hollywood ostriches (http://redalertpolitics.com/2016/05/26/oddly-silent-venezuela-decays-hollywood-socialists-first-world-idealists-bite-tongues/)
For the most part, crickets...
We need a reporter like this guy to track down Sean Penn and ask him some pointy questions..........
Team Sergeant
07-30-2016, 07:35
Socialist/communist slave labor.......and sean penn approves!
Amnesty International criticizes Venezuela's 'forced labor' decree
By Andrew V. Pestan
CARACAS, Venezuela, July 29 (UPI) -- Amnesty International has slammed a recent "forced labor" decree by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro that could draft public and private workers to increase food production.
At the end of last week, Maduro signed a decree that would give Venezuela's Ministry of Popular Power for Social Process of Work the ability to order any Venezuelan with the physical or technical capabilities to join a government effort to work in the agriculture sector for up to 120 days.
Venezuela is facing a deepening economic crisis in which basic goods, such as food, medicines and toiletries, are in short supply. Tens of thousands have traveled outside the country, mainly to Colombia, to restock supplies as store shelves and kitchen cupboards are nearly empty. Venezuela's farming association in June said only 25 percent of the country's agricultural land is being used to farm.
cont:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2016/07/29/Amnesty-International-criticizes-Venezuelas-forced-labor-decree/2021469794834/
Tree Potato
07-30-2016, 08:49
Once again PS is full of good info, so thanks for letting us guests enjoy the insights.
TS and others, do you see Venezuela headed toward Soviet style farm collectivation? Recalling the Holodomor, it foreshadows another leftist failure resulting in mass starvation.
Once again PS is full of good info, so thanks for letting us guests enjoy the insights.
TS and others, do you see Venezuela headed toward Soviet style farm collectivation? Recalling the Holodomor, it foreshadows another leftist failure resulting in mass starvation.
Leftist, rightist, whatever; it's SA. Expect political upheaval every few years.
Workin' down there was like surfin'.
Team Sergeant
07-30-2016, 11:46
Once again PS is full of good info, so thanks for letting us guests enjoy the insights.
TS and others, do you see Venezuela headed toward Soviet style farm collectivation? Recalling the Holodomor, it foreshadows another leftist failure resulting in mass starvation.
Insurgencies & Guerrilla Warfare
You don't need to be a hollywood writer to finish this "story". This failed socialist/communist experiment will result in bloodshed, it always does. This has happened enough times that it brings up the insanity definition, doing the same experiment again and again and expecting a different outcome.
Except these days the world is watching so the Che/Castro communist takeover will not work. Soon a not too bright but brave individual will start verbally attacking the "people's government and President Nicolas Maduro. Conflict will ensue, the government will call the "protesters" criminals or terrorists and hunt them. They will hunt them right up until they become extremely powerful and have the full support of the "people". (Yeah, the same idiots that put President Nicolas Maduro in office in the first place.)
When that happens President Nicolas Maduro will leave the country on a fuelled and waiting Lear jet and take billions in Venezuelan money with him, probably to Cuba.
And I would not doubt that some of that socialist/communist money will find its way into the coffers of the American DNC.......... but that's another story.
Enjoy the show and stay out of Venezuela for the foreseeable future.
Team Sergeant
08-02-2016, 12:08
Keep telling yourself this cannot happen in America. This is why Mr. Trump needs to win, this country will not survive another four years of socialist rule. Another few trillion dollars of taxpayers money wasted social justice programs will destroy this "nation".
'Socialist experiment' Venezuela in ruins as soldiers delete videos of 12-hour food queues
VENEZUELANS face 12-hour queues for food as the Latin American nation’s economic and political crisis has lead to a severe shortage of essential resources.
By JOE BARNES
PUBLISHED: 00:01, Tue, Aug 2, 2016 | UPDATED: 17:22, Tue, Aug 2, 2016
A BBC journalist, who attempted to film the crisis, was stopped and forced by soldiers to delete footage of a protest outside a supermarket as desperate Venezuelans waited for food.
Baying crowds shouted “We want to buy stuff!” as they grouped outside the store in the country’s capital, Caracas.
BBC journalist Vladimir Hernandez reports that many people approached him to say they had queued for 12 hours without being able to buy what they wanted.
In the short clip, the crew are warned by a demonstrator that they have been spotted by members of the Venezuelan army.
They are soon surrounded by soldiers as the crowd screams: “Let them film!”
Soldiers can then be heard saying: “Delete that video right now in front of me,” as the journalists are moved away from the demonstrations.
During his report on BBC Newsnight, the journalist said: “Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro faces an economic crisis unlike any Venezuela has seen before.
“The socialist experiment his predecessor Hugo Chavez began 17 years ago is failing, triggering massive food shortages and inflation.
“Maduro inherited Chavez’s socialist experiment but not the high oil prices that financed his public spending.
“There’s some food on sale but most people can’t afford to buy it. Venezuela has the highest inflation in the world and it’s hitting the poor the hardest.
“The government has made some staples like flour and rice available at pre-inflation pricesbut there is not enough to go round.”
President Nicolas Maduro took over three years ago after long-serving leader Hugo Chavez died.his popularity has plunged as many Venezuelans blamed their hunger on his economic mismanagement.
His popularity has plunged as many Venezuelans blamed their hunger on his economic mismanagement. However, the government blames it on an economic war being waged by speculators and foreign powers seeking a regime change in the country.
President Maduro’s official term ends in 2019, but a petition movement is pushing for a referendum to remove him from power early.
Jamaica is set to enter into an agreement with the Latin American country to provide food and medicine in exchange for paying off oil debts.
cont:
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/695662/venezuela-food-queues-soldier-delete-video
Streck-Fu
08-02-2016, 14:22
Forced labor.... Venezuelan's are now slaves.
LINK (http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/glenn-garvin/article93236572.html)
Now that Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is finally over, maybe he’ll have time to read the news from Venezuela, a country where Sanders’ proudly proclaimed “democratic socialist” ideas are in full flower. Venezuela’s latest innovation: slavery. Not rhetorical or metaphorical slavery, but actual we-own-you-and-you’ll-do-what-what-we-say involuntary servitude.
In an executive order that bypassed the muss and fuss of congressional approval, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro decreed that both public- and private-sector employees (that is, anybody at all) can be forced to work in farm fields for up to 60 days at a time — or longer, “if circumstances merit.”
If Maduro’s decree tells you something about how socialists define “democracy,” the problem it’s intended to address — the complete implosion of Venezuelan agriculture, to the point where millions of citizens have literally nothing to eat — tells you a lot about socialist economics.
Badger52
08-02-2016, 14:46
...Venezuela, a country where Sanders’ proudly proclaimed “democratic socialist” ideas are in full flower.My wife has taught me that dead/dying blossoms need to be plucked off to allow new growth.
That shit could never happen here; aMEricans are too well informed to fall for that kind of political shenanigans
...plus, slavery was abolished with the passage of the 13th amendment
Peregrino
08-02-2016, 19:34
That shit could never happen here; aMEricans are too well informed to fall for that kind of political shenanigans
...plus, slavery was abolished with the passage of the 13th amendment
Fixed it for you.
...ok
so maybe there was a tad of sarcasm in that post.
but still...
Team Sergeant
08-02-2016, 23:31
Should not be long now, they're eating the zoo animals.......
This "Hope and Change" Venezuela. This is progressive socialism nothing but socialist corruption that destroyed Venezuela. This is what Americans now want, progressive socialism.
Crisis hits Venezuela's main zoo, where 50 animals have died of malnutrition this year
By Franz von Bergen/
Published August 02, 2016/
Fox News Latino
Caracas, Venezuela – An emaciated lion whose skin hangs loosely because it hasn’t eaten in days. Elephants, bison and monkeys that have gone hungry because there is no food to feed them.
This is the dire situation at the zoos in Venezuela, where at least 50 animals have died in one zoo the past seven months because of problems related to malnutrition. The country is suffering from a massive food shortage that has left almost the entire country hungry – including its furry animals.
According to Marlene Sifontes, a member of the National Institute of Parks workers union, these are the worst days the Caricuao Zoo has seen in its nearly four decades of operation.
“Animals have gone 15 days without eating anything during some periods. We have registered the death of Vietnamese pigs, tapirs, rabbits, birds, peccaries and porcupines,” Sifontes told Fox News Latino.
One case two weeks ago astonished the community. A beloved dark horse that had been in exhibit for years was attacked in the middle of the night and quartered for meat. The next day staff members found just the head and the mutilated body.
“We imagine that people took it to eat it,” a zoo guide shrugged, when inquired by Fox News Latino.
A few visitors were strolling around the 630-acre zoo last week.
Anabel Conde, who was visiting with her family said she is appalled at the deterioration of the zoo’s facilities.
“We came in January and things have gotten worst,” she said. “We just saw some pigs fighting for the food people threw.”
cont:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lifestyle/2016/08/02/crisis-hits-caracas-main-zoo-where-50-animals-have-died-nutrition-just-in-2016/
“We just saw some pigs fighting for the food people threw.”
...who knew Pelosi and Warren were vacationing down south this time of year...
The Reaper
08-03-2016, 09:41
...who knew Pelosi and Warren were vacationing down south this time of year...
Don't forget the Hildebeast.
TR
The Reaper
08-03-2016, 09:54
Cloward and Piven spelled the plan out a long time ago, and our POTUS is eagerly pursuing the program, by executive order when the RINOs in Congress won't just roll over and give it to him.
Venezuela is just a little further down the road than we are.
If you are not prepared for at least a month without buying groceries, you are seriously deficient.
TR
Badger52
08-09-2016, 20:17
From the blogosphere comes this:
This is not a joke nor even an exaggeration. I just found out that my sister in law’s other brother-in-law was arrested in Venezuela at the airport while trying to leave the country. His crime, he was an employee for a company that went out of business. Waiting for more? There isn’t any. Maduro has decreed that any business that goes out of business has committed economic treason and its employees are subject to arrest. They had already arrested numerous owners and managers but this is the first time they went after rank and file worker bees.
Socialism is about caring. *
LINK (https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/240560/)
* Font color is mine; had to.
:munchin
Venezuelan police crushed and chopped up nearly 2,000 shotguns and pistols in a Caracas city square on Wednesday, as the new interior minister relaunched a long-stalled gun control campaign in one of the world's most crime-ridden countries.
Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said the event marked the renewal of efforts to disarm Venezuelans, through a combination of seizures and a voluntary program to swap guns for electrical goods.
Venezuela has the world's second highest murder rate and the street gangs that plague its poor neighborhoods have become increasingly heavily armed in recent years, at a time when a deep recession has reduced resources available to police.
Gangs often get weapons from the police, either by stealing them or buying them from corrupt officers, experts say.
With inflation of 185 percent in 2015 and a currency collapse, police salaries have fallen far behind rising prices creating more incentives for corruption.
President Nicolas Maduro promoted Reverol this month, days after the United States accused the former anti-drugs tsar of taking bribes from cocaine traffickers.
"We are going to bring disarmament and peace," Reverol told reporters, while police officers drilled and sawed at rusty shotguns, home made pistols and some newer weapons.
Other guns were crushed in truck-mounted presses. Some members of the public watched, although more danced to a nearby sound system playing salsa music.
Venezuela has also bought laser technology to mark ammunition, Reverol said, in an attempt to keep a registry of the bullets given out to the South American nation's many state and municipal police forces.
Experts say that much of the ammunition used in crimes in Venezuela is made at the country's government munitions factory and sold on by corrupt police.
Source. (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-crime-idUSKCN10S2I9)
There is an interesting confluence of views spattered throughout this article.
The government is crushing guns to remove them from the hands of criminals. ("Common sense legistlation")
The guns that the criminals are using are obtained from the police.
Wouldn't the direct path be to fix the police? I know this seems shallow, but with Venezuela spiraling into hole their leaders have dug for them, would there be a truly effective method to lowering crime and reducing gang activity? Further, is the increase in drug cartels and gangs, the rise in crime and the deterioration of law, order, civility, social and industrial growth direct results of the spiraling economy or is there a more nuanced cause/causes?
Badger52
08-18-2016, 11:54
Interior Minister Nestor Reverol said the event marked the renewal of efforts to disarm Venezuelans, through a combination of seizures and a voluntary program to swap guns for electrical goods.('Cause nobody needs food.) At least he called it what it is.
:rolleyes:
Almost universal throughout the planet while people (the Eloi) dance to (or eat) salsa. The denial of the fact that it's never about guns, it's about CONTROL.
National mechanisms just prepping the people for their firmly peened chains so they can emulate North Korea.
The Venezuelan gun crushers will no doubt become another shining example for Komrade Clinton to cite in her quest to make America a safer place. In the meantime when the electrical grid collapses down there, those electrical goods are not going to be of much use are they?
GreenSalsa
09-04-2016, 08:39
Not too much longer now, the "masses" are restless and would probably welcome the "oppression" offered here at the US where our "down trodden" worry about obesity.
My only "regret" is this wasn't done to Chavez.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/world/americas/venezuelan-president-is-chased-by-angry-protesters.html?_r=0
Badger52
09-04-2016, 08:45
Sheesh, a guy can't even go a little offshore (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/09/04/venezuela-leader-maduro-met-with-insults-by-angry-protesters-during-island-visit.html) these days...
CARACAS, Venezuela – Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro reportedly was greeted by angry pot-banging protesters during a visit to Margarita Island.
Grainy cellphone videos said to be from the Friday night encounter were picked up by Venezuelan news sites and were trending on social media. The socialist leader is seen jogging through a crowd as residents loudly bang on pots and hurl obscenities.
bblhead672
09-06-2016, 08:03
Not too much longer now, the "masses" are restless and would probably welcome the "oppression" offered here at the US where our "down trodden" worry about obesity.
Our obese down trodden probably wouldn't take to the streets in the hundreds of thousands...at least not until their EBT cards quit working.
Badger52
09-06-2016, 16:30
This'll fix EVERYthing. (http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2016/09/06/venezuela-appoints-group-generals-to-handle-distribution-18-basic-products/)
In an effort to contain the increasing scarcity of food and medicine, the government of Venezuela is moving forward with an initiative launched a couple of months ago that many at first took as a joke: the Great Mission of Sovereign Supply, headed by Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino.
Over the weekend, Gen. Padrino announced the appointment of 18 military generals and admirals to oversee the production, distribution and commercialization of 18 categories of food and items considered basic staples for Venezuela’s economy.
The categories to be supervised are rice, food oil, sugar, coffee, beans, corn, corn wheat, dairy, butter, wheat, soy, cattle, fish products, porcine, poultry, toilet paper and diapers, personal hygiene products and medicines.
:munchin
This'll fix EVERYthing. (http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2016/09/06/venezuela-appoints-group-generals-to-handle-distribution-18-basic-products/)
:munchin
So who would not want to be the " Diaper Czar " ?
So who would not want to be the " Diaper Czar " ?
Depends...
Too bad Venezuelan's climate is not conducive to farming. Wait a minute, did I say that?
x/S
The Venezuelan military is now confiscating medical and surgical supplies.
Socialists/Communists will never learn.
Managing an economy effectively and efficiently from the top down is impossible.
Too many variables.
Venezuelan military to take over distribution of medical and surgical supplies amid shortages
As Venezuelans struggle with widespread shortages in everything from basic food stuffs to toilet paper, the socialist nation’s defense minister announced on Wednesday that the military will take control of the distribution of "all medical and surgical supplies managed in all hospitals."
Read it all (http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2016/11/03/venezuelan-military-to-take-over-distribution-medical-and-surgical-supplies/)
Too bad Venezuelan's climate is not conducive to farming. Wait a minute, did I say that?
x/S
Coincidentally...
CARACAS, Venezuela — Some Venezuelan city dwellers are trying to grow their own produce to offset the country’s severe shortages following socialist President Nicolás Maduro’s calls for “food sovereignty.”
But in a country where families are going hungry as a result of government mismanagement and sky-high inflation, many view the “Great Agro-Venezuela Mission” with skepticism.
“Agriculture shouldn’t be a solution” to the country’s shortages, said former landowner Iraima Pacheco de Leandro, 54, a well-to-do government opponent who lives in Caracas.
Critics have taken to social media to accuse the government of downplaying the country’s critical situation, and ridicule Maduro for trying to solve Venezuela’s dire food crisis through getting urbanites to farm small plots of land.
“Urban Farming in Venezuela. Thanks to @Nicolas Maduro” read one tweet accompanied by a photograph of a man and a dog sifting through trash, a common sight in Caracas as food supplies dwindle and black market prices soar.
“BBC Venezuela report has Chavistas explaining how they're going to feed people, grow medicine, through urban farming. No, really,” mocked another Twitter user.
When the project was presented in February, the newly created Ministry of Urban Agriculture announced that 12,000 square kilometers — about 4,600 square miles — would be planted in the first 100 days. The government promised to invest $300,000 in seeds, equipment and educational projects, and to help with logistics.
The government urged citizens to plant in every available space — private terraces, communal areas, jails and schools, among other sites — but did not itself provide the land.
Eight months into the project, only 21 square kilometers (about 8 square miles) of land have been cultivated, according to the ministry.
“How are you going to tell someone with no space for a plot to grow [their own food]?” asked De Leandro, whose family-owned farm was expropriated, like many other businesses, under former president Hugo Chávez's nationalization program.
Some Venezuelans try to look on the bright side of the experiment: Producing their own food can reduce the time spent on the streets of Caracas, where crime is skyrocketing. For De Leandro, who was once kidnapped for ransom, this is a comforting thought. She grows a stunning array of vegetables on one of her terraces.
But not all Caraquenians have enough land to cultivate produce, and water is also in short supply due to a drought.
Barbara D’Ambruoso, 24, whose vegetable plot overlooks the sprawling city, has learned to carefully measure her water usage. “They cut our water supply from Saturday afternoon until Wednesday,” she said, alluding to government measures in response to the nationwide shortage
The Venezuelan military is now confiscating medical and surgical supplies.
Socialists/Communists will never learn.
Managing an economy effectively and efficiently from the top down is impossible.
Too many variables.
Just read that article - the failure of socialism on full display.
Badger52
11-04-2016, 13:07
Stupid of them to put this on their Fox Latino news page. They should be running it as one of the top-3 on their regular page as an object lesson. How to get to a Venezuelan commie paradise without leaving your couch. (Commies having no reservation about openly making you do their will at the explicit point of a gun, vs. the implied one most Americans have yet to imagine because they can't play the tape to the end.)
Badger52
11-25-2016, 12:03
(Forrest Gump voice) "Ala-BA-Ma!"
This story has been out for several days but (finally) got picked up by a mainstream source, not a bad thing.
From Home Depot lunchroom, salesman wages war against Venezuela's government
A key source of Venezuelan socialist leader Nicolas Maduro’s headaches may be traced to – wait for it – a Home Depot store in Alabama.
That is where Gustavo Diaz earns his living, guiding customers on matters of shelving and how to select the right screw size.
But on his lunch break, and during virtually every spare, non-working moment, Diaz figuratively sheds his orange apron and dons his superhero cape, waging war against the Maduro government. His weapons? A wildly popular website named DolarToday.com, and a Twitter account that has surpassed 2 million followers.
Diaz, a 60-year-old retired colonel in the Venezuelan army, took part in the coup attempt against the late President Hugo Chavez in 2002, briefly becoming part of the new administration before Chavez regained power.
He fled to Alabama, where a sister and brother live, about 10 years ago after his car, which he was not inside at that moment, exploded in an assassination attempt that was linked to Chavez. The U.S. government quickly gave Diaz political asylum, and he became a U.S. citizen a few years later.
Full story at FNC. (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/11/25/from-home-depot-lunchroom-salesman-wages-war-against-venezuelas-government.html)
Team Sergeant
11-26-2016, 08:36
"From Home Depot lunchroom, salesman wages war against Venezuela's government"
Bad headline, motivated by money I'm sure, don't want to risk losing advertising & money.
Should say:
"From Home Depot lunchroom, salesman wages war against Venezuela's liberal-socialist government"
I'd bet about 90% of Americans have no idea what sort of gov Venezuela is currently operating under.......
Ret10Echo
11-26-2016, 09:57
I'd bet about 90% of Americans have no idea what sort of gov Venezuela is currently operating under.......
Or where Citgo is based.
Badger52
11-26-2016, 14:08
I'd bet about 90% of Americans have no idea what sort of gov Venezuela is currently operating under.......Heh, I will not throw the bones with you on that. I usually have to explain to anyone under 40 where it actually is.
:rolleyes:
Venezuela orders stores to get into the Christmas spirit
https://www.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-orders-stores-christmas-spirit-064847254.html
"Caracas (AFP) - Ever since Venezuelan government agents put up a giant "Sale" sign in his storefront, crowds have been lining up outside Juan Vieira's shoe shop.
But he's having a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit.
"What good is it to sell shoes if I'm giving away my product?"...."
Then
"...Many customers are thrilled with the sales, however.
"This is the best thing the government could have done this year because you have to give up eating just to buy yourself a shirt," said Yaroski Mendoza, a 19-year-old cook waiting in line to buy a shirt, her baby in her arms...."
So the government is forcing the stores to sell their products below cost and the people are lining up to get the product. And they will not have a clue next year as to where all the stores have gone.
Venezuela orders stores to get into the Christmas spirit
So the government is forcing the stores to sell their products below cost and the people are lining up to get the product. And they will not have a clue next year as to where all the stores have gone.
Fake capitalism...where are the Russians...
Oldrotorhead
12-11-2016, 13:24
I'll trade 6 months of rice and beans to feed a family of four for clear title to a beach front estate on Isla de Margarita. ( the east side!):D
Badger52
12-11-2016, 15:40
Venezuela orders stores to get into the Christmas spirit
Whole post.
This real-estate formerly known as a country is a prime example, with its accelerator to the floor, that should be used in schools now as an illustration for progression of the socialist model.
No cake? Let 'em eat shoes. Oh, wait; none of those either.
Badger52
12-20-2016, 10:45
Well, who saw that comin'?
Looting leaves stores in ruins in Venezuela's Ciudad Bolivar
CIUDAD BOLIVAR, Venezuela – Hundreds of people in Venezuela's Ciudad Bolivar are massing outside the few supermarkets that survived massive looting over the weekend, waiting for them to open.
Dozens of businesses were destroyed or ransacked. Streets are full of trash, rubble and burned motorcycles from the protests and looting that wracked the riverside city in Venezuela's interior.
Rest of the story. (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/12/19/looting-leaves-stores-in-ruins-in-venezuela-ciudad-bolivar.html)
Team Sergeant
12-21-2016, 11:19
Well, who saw that comin'?
Looting leaves stores in ruins in Venezuela's Ciudad Bolivar
Rest of the story. (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/12/19/looting-leaves-stores-in-ruins-in-venezuela-ciudad-bolivar.html)
Yeah, and we keep placing incompetent social experiments in the White House and that will also happen to the United States.
Badger52
01-18-2017, 16:20
The new decorator-motif toilet paper (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/01/18/hyperinflation-renders-venezuela-nation-broke-millionaires.html) should be welcome.
Ahhhh, me oh my.
Everytime a socialist economic model doubles-down on a proven Rx for disaster someone at the Mises Institute gets their wings. So I guess it all balances out.
:munchin
The new dictator-motif toilet paper (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/01/18/hyperinflation-renders-venezuela-nation-broke-millionaires.html) should be welcome.
Fixed your spelling for 'ya. :D
Pat
Badger52
01-18-2017, 19:23
Fixed your spelling for 'ya. :D
PatI liiiike it! :cool:
Streck-Fu
01-19-2017, 06:52
The new decorator-motif toilet paper (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/01/18/hyperinflation-renders-venezuela-nation-broke-millionaires.html) should be welcome.
Ahhhh, me oh my.
Everytime a socialist economic model doubles-down on a proven Rx for disaster someone at the Mises Institute gets their wings. So I guess it all balances out.
:munchin
Speaking of history:
Tastes like Statism, I mean chicken...complete article at link. And the Statists/Globalists want to spread the chaos and misery...
Venezuelans killing flamingos and anteaters to stave off hunger amid mounting food crisis
By Andrew O'Reilly Published February 10, 2017 FoxNews.com
Venezuela’s food crisis has gotten so bad that people are apparently killing pink flamingos and other protected animals in order to stave off hunger.
While flamingo hunting is both illegal and uncommon in the South American nation, investigators from Zulia University in the northwestern Venezuelan city of Maracaibo have noted at least 20 cases of bird carcasses being discovered with their breasts and torsos removed.
And flamingos aren’t the only unusual animal to become a victim of Venezuela’s worsening food crisis. Remains of everything from dogs and cats to donkeys and even giant anteaters have been found in garbage bags at city dumps around the country.
“Sometimes we only find the animal’s heads, guts and legs. We used to see this very little in the past, but this practice is now out of control and on the rise,” Robert Linares, a Maracaibo waste disposal worker, told the Miami Herald. Linares added he recently found on the street the remains of a dog that had been skinned and dismembered.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/02/10/venezuelans-killing-flamingos-and-anteaters-to-stave-off-hunger-amid-mounting-food-crisis.html
Badger52
02-11-2017, 06:56
It's the new "bush meat" - which does not bode well.
bblhead672
02-13-2017, 10:08
Tastes like Statism, I mean chicken...complete article at link. And the Statists/Globalists want to spread the chaos and misery...
Venezuelans killing flamingos and anteaters to stave off hunger amid mounting food crisis
By Andrew O'Reilly Published February 10, 2017 FoxNews.com
Venezuela’s food crisis has gotten so bad that people are apparently killing pink flamingos and other protected animals in order to stave off hunger.
While flamingo hunting is both illegal and uncommon in the South American nation, investigators from Zulia University in the northwestern Venezuelan city of Maracaibo have noted at least 20 cases of bird carcasses being discovered with their breasts and torsos removed.
And flamingos aren’t the only unusual animal to become a victim of Venezuela’s worsening food crisis. Remains of everything from dogs and cats to donkeys and even giant anteaters have been found in garbage bags at city dumps around the country.
“Sometimes we only find the animal’s heads, guts and legs. We used to see this very little in the past, but this practice is now out of control and on the rise,” Robert Linares, a Maracaibo waste disposal worker, told the Miami Herald. Linares added he recently found on the street the remains of a dog that had been skinned and dismembered.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/02/10/venezuelans-killing-flamingos-and-anteaters-to-stave-off-hunger-amid-mounting-food-crisis.html
Wonder how they'll spin the socialist experiment when the cannibalism begins. I'm sure somehow it will be countries who espouse capitalism fault that Venezuela failed so miserably.
PedOncoDoc
02-13-2017, 11:04
Wonder how they'll spin the socialist experiment when the cannibalism begins.
A novel program of combined population control and food sustainability.
A novel program of combined population control and food sustainability.
What's old is new again...
Soylent verde es la gente !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9IKVj4l5GU4
The socialist diet.
Study: Venezuelans lost 19 lbs. on average over past year due to lack of food
Published February 20, 2017 FoxNews.com
In a new sign that Venezuela’s financial crisis is morphing dangerously into a humanitarian one, a new nationwide survey shows that in the past year nearly 75 percent of the population lost an average of 19 pounds for lack of food.
The extreme poor said they dropped even more weight than that.
The 2016 Living Conditions Survey (Encovi, for its name in Spanish), conducted among 6,500 families, also found that as many as 32.5 percent eat only once or twice a day — the figure was 11.3 just a year ago.
In all, 82 percent of the nation's households live in poverty, the study found.
The lack of food has even earned a nickname: “The Maduro Diet.”
<snip> complete article at link.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/02/20/study-venezuelans-lost-19-lb-on-average-over-past-year-due-to-lack-food.html
I suspect that the advice "find the socialists and kill them" would be discarded as being simplistic.
Maybe next year.
If there are any free citizens of the country alive.
DIYPatriot
03-02-2017, 14:07
Who could've ever imagined?
Over the remainder of 2017, Caracas needs to fund $7.2 billion in debt payments – an amount that it can only meet if oil prices spike far higher than the ongoing boosts caused by OPEC’s output reduction agreement. Current reserves stand 66 percent lower than levels in 2011, when the government held $30 billion in foreign currencies to spend on loan repayments and other official business. "The question is: Where is the floor?" Siobhan Morden, head of Latin America fixed income strategy at Nomura Holdings, told CNN Money. "If oil prices stagnate and foreign reserves reach zero, then the clock is going to start on a default."
Venezuela’s financial report for 2016 stated that roughly $7.7 billion of the remaining $10.5 billion in foreign reserves had been preserved in gold. Last year, in order to fulfill debt obligations, Caracas began shipping gold to Switzerland. The drastic fall in oil prices in 2014 and widespread corruption have both caused an economic meltdown in the South American country, where citizens had become accustomed to imported goods paid for by fossil fuel revenues. President Nicolas Maduro has resorted to opening the country’s border with Colombia to allow Venezuelans to purchase necessary medical and day-to-day supplies.
Venezuelan state-run oil company PDVSA’s default is probable (http://lta.reuters.com/article/idLTAL1N1FL14L?rpc=401&), according to the ratings agency Fitch, which cited the oil giant’s weak liquidity position and high amortization scheduled for 2017 as the causes of the default problem last month. "Should oil prices remain around current levels, average recovery may lead to additional future defaults to further reduce obligations and allow for necessary transfers to the government," said Fitch’s senior director Lucas Aristizabal. The company has projected that its oil production will maintain its 23-year-low in 2017.
Article (http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Venezuela-Is-Down-To-Its-Last-10B-As-Debt-Payments-Loom.html)
Meanwhile, our foreign policy with Latin America, most notably Venezuela, is beginning to take shape.
During the first month of President Trump’s administration, the question of U.S. policy on Venezuela and other Latin American countries remained largely unknown. But recently, political leaders in Venezuela have a good idea of what America’s new position might look like. We could be seeing a much more hardline approach compared to the policy under former President Obama. In early February a bipartisan group of congress members called for sanctions on Venezuela and demanded for the release of political prisoners. They specifically pointed to Venezuela’s Vice President Tareck El Aissami, and his possible links with drugs and terrorism. In response, last week the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against El Aissami for drug trafficking under the Kingpin Act along with other prominent Venezuelans. This first act sent a sharp message to Venezuela’s socialist leader, President Nicolás Maduro Moros, known as Maduro.
Following this, Trump used his Twitter account to post a picture of himself with Vice President Pence and Senator Marco Rubio (FL-R) along with Lilian Tintori, the wife of a prominent Venezuelan opposition politician, now being held as a political prisoner. In the tweet, Trump called for the release of Tintori’s husband, Leopoldo Lopez. Then the U.S. Department of State called for the release of more than 100 prisoners of conscience, including Lopez. In addition to calling for the release of political prisoners, the sanctions against Venezuela are also a way of condemning the human rights abuses (including the imprisonment of Lopez) happening in this south American country
For opposition activists, such as youth party leader Carlos Graffe, recent U.S. actions are welcome. Graffe, youth wing leader for Proyecto Venezuela spoke with Opportunity Lives almost a year ago about the protest movement in Venezuela and his hopes for the future, which include overturning President Maduro’s government.
Continued (http://opportunitylives.com/trump-shifts-u-s-policy-towards-venezuela-but-will-it-last/)
Badger52
03-02-2017, 16:56
DIY, thanks for those. Hey, Maduro, is that foreign policy too nuanced for ya?
I'll have to fire up the key this weekend & CQ YV and see if there's anyone down there yet that hasn't sold their radio to buy bread.
The socialist diet.
Study: Venezuelans lost 19 lbs. on average over past year due to lack of food
Published February 20, 2017 FoxNews.com
In a new sign that Venezuela’s financial crisis is morphing dangerously into a humanitarian one, a new nationwide survey shows that in the past year nearly 75 percent of the population lost an average of 19 pounds for lack of food.
The extreme poor said they dropped even more weight than that.
The 2016 Living Conditions Survey (Encovi, for its name in Spanish), conducted among 6,500 families, also found that as many as 32.5 percent eat only once or twice a day — the figure was 11.3 just a year ago.
In all, 82 percent of the nation's households live in poverty, the study found.
The lack of food has even earned a nickname: “The Maduro Diet.”
<snip> complete article at link.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/02/20/study-venezuelans-lost-19-lb-on-average-over-past-year-due-to-lack-food.html
When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did aid to Cuba.
Cuba's economy went into freefall and Cubans on average also lost a considerable amount of weight.
Rates of cardiovascular disease in Cuba also collapsed in the period following the weight loss.
I'm waiting for Maduro/Venezuela to start promoting the benefits of the new "Venezuela Diet" from dumpster diving, eating flamingos, and just going hungry.
-----
It would be very interesting to see real time data(such as realtime "in the moment" smart phone surveys/polls) with a visual representation of when/where all those little guys transform from voting for anyone who promises to end their pain(parental pain of watching their kids go hungry) to eliminating the very people who are creating/enhancing that very pain.
Obviously Maduro and his Cuban/Russian/Iranian buddies will use every tool available to prevent/disrupt effective opposition from forming.
But ubiquitous mobile phone distribution globally must be one of the most disruptive pieces of technology to move at least slightly closer towards "science" on the art/science revolution continuum.
-----
Cuba is broke and dependant on Venezuela for free/cheap energy so I'm guessing is dug in like a tick to maintain the influence and gravy train.
Russia is going broke fast with cheap commodity prices, increasing foreign adventures to pay for its disruptive/influence foreign policy model.
Iran has access to more money due to nuclear deal, but has some very expensive foreign military adventures going on.
Outside of Cuba's undivided attention, I wonder how high on the list of priorities Venezuela is for Russia/Iran?
Would Maduro popping up in Pyongyang before Xmas be outside the realm of possibility?
Would Maduro popping up in Pyongyang before Xmas be outside the realm of possibility?
What, like Kim Jong Nam?
...the Venezuelan people can only hope.
Tree Potato
03-03-2017, 08:56
...
I'll have to fire up the key this weekend & CQ YV and see if there's anyone down there yet that hasn't sold their radio to buy bread.
It would be interesting to hear unfiltered first person accounts.
Is there anything coming out from Venezuela similar to what "ferFAL" provided from Argentina, written by someone experiencing the crisis first hand?
The misery continues:
Venezuela threatens to expropriate bakers that don't obey new bread regulations
According to Roman poet Juvenal, people hope for just two things: bread and circuses.
While there is no word on the circus, Venezuela’s beleaguered government is demanding that bakers at least give the people bread.
The socialist government of President Nicolás Maduro threatened earlier this week to expropriate bakeries in Caracas that fail to adhere to new regulations aimed at tackling widespread bread shortages.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/03/15/venezuela-threatens-to-expropriate-bakers-that-dont-obey-new-bread-regulations.html
Another article on the bread situation
Venezuela has a bread shortage. The government has decided bakers are the problem.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article138964428.html#storylink=cpy
OGOTA, Colombia
"Facing a bread shortage that is spawning massive lines and souring the national mood, the Venezuelan government is responding this week by detaining bakers and seizing establishments.
In a press release, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights said it had charged four people and temporarily seized two bakeries as the socialist administration accused bakers of being part of a broad “economic war” aimed at destabilizing the country...."
Right out of ATLAS SHRUGGED.
Bakeries can't produce bread? Just have the government FORCE them....
That's some progressive thinking right there.
Badger52
03-17-2017, 07:31
Right out of ATLAS SHRUGGED.
Bakeries can't produce bread? Just have the government FORCE them....
That's some progressive thinking right there.+1 They must have an ex-pat named Wesley Mooch advising them. Watch the experiment fail, kiddies - let's see if it ever makes it to the history books that make their way into schools (holding breath not).
Bakeries can't produce bread? Just have the government FORCE them.....
And if their business fails, they are de facto criminals and arrested as such and put on Venezuela's no-fly list. (I'll have to go back and find the article--it was linked from one of the other articles in this thread.
sfshooter
03-17-2017, 11:36
Right out of ATLAS SHRUGGED.
Bakeries can't produce bread? Just have the government FORCE them....
That's some progressive thinking right there.
Your right Jim, this story has already been written with the title of ATLAS SHRUGGED. I am currently in the middle of this book right now.
Team Sergeant
03-17-2017, 18:16
Venezuela, can we predict what will be the tipping point? Where the people attempt to overthrow the current corrupt socialist/communist "leadership"?
I've not studied South America as much as other parts of the world. What's next a prolonged civil war?
I am amazed at how far they have fallen. Worked there in the 80s, and while they had a big underclass, it was a modern country, with anything you wanted available. Good sized middle class. They were proud of their history, and always told you about their Constitutional Democracy...Heh. Look what the Commies brought you to. And look how fast our Hollywierd celebs abandoned talking about the "new way" in VZ. They can all go to hell. Get exactly what they asked for...
DIYPatriot
03-27-2017, 09:59
Isn't the first step to admit that one has a problem and that their life has become unmanageable?
Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro has said he asked the United Nations for help in boosting his country's medicine supplies. Hospitals in the country are reportedly running on just 3 percent of the supplies they need. Maduro's admission on Friday that Venezuela was battling a crippling medicine shortage was a rare public admission of the desperate state the cash-strapped country finds itself in. "I have asked the United Nations to regularize the whole medicine issue," Venezuela's president said in a broadcast on national television. "The United Nations has the most advanced plans to recover the pharmaceutical industry's productive capacity."
Story Continued (http://www.dw.com/en/venezuela-pleads-to-un-for-help-as-medicine-supplies-dry-up/a-38117698)
Meanwhile, fourteen other countries urge Venezuela to re-establish a democracy.. (http://www.dw.com/en/regional-countries-urge-venezuela-to-hold-elections/a-38101323).
Badger52
03-27-2017, 10:15
"...regularize the whole medicine issue." = the whole world should gimme free stuff.
Has it been a month yet? Ten fingers says ten months and carry a few toes is another week. Hmmm...
:munchin
Peregrino
03-27-2017, 11:25
Has it been a month yet? Ten fingers says ten months and carry a few toes is another week. Hmmm...
:munchin
This could drag on a lot longer. Leftists don't admit failure or concede power unless forced to at the muzzle of a gun. Venezuela won't recover without bloodshed - a lot of it. I'm watching to see if I can recognizable the triggering event/tipping point when it happens and to determine if it's a unique event (special circumstances applicable only in Venezuela) or something with broad implications, replicable in other environments, that can be incorporated into a 21st Century "theory of revolutionary war" and put to practical application elsewhere.
"...regularize the whole medicine issue." = the whole world should gimme free stuff.
"The United Nations has the most advanced plans to recover the pharmaceutical industry's productive capacity."
Meaning, of course, that Maduro believes that the UN can and should seize the world-wide pharmaceutical industry and force them to provide medicines to Venezuela, gratis, as you said. Socialism at its "finest".
DIYPatriot
03-31-2017, 07:15
Well, this sure escalates things.
Venezuela slid closer toward dictatorship after the country’s Supreme Court gutted the only opposition-run institution -- the Congress -- seizing its powers and declaring the elected body invalid. The court’s ruling late on Wednesday night was, in the words of lawmakers, nothing short of a coup. Several opposition leaders called for street demonstrations and other forms of “democratic resistance.” As the once-wealthy oil power descends into a chaos of hunger and crime, however, it remained far from clear whether the increasingly despondent population will view the court’s move as a genuine turning point or just another step in the nation’s bottoming out toward hopelessness.
“This is not only going to cause alarm for concern within the region, but also actions, and at this point, it will be very difficult for countries to remain neutral,” said Carlos Romero, a political scientist at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas. “The government is provoking; not only has it not made a single gesture toward dialog, it has become completely entrenched.”
Opposition deputies said they would appeal to international bodies for help. But that may yield little. Two days before the court’s ruling, the Organization of American States met to urge Venezuela to respect the congress that has now been neutered. The U.S. State Department condemned the Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday, saying the move "greatly damages Venezuela’s democratic institutions," according to a statement.
Continued (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-30/venezuela-s-supreme-court-takes-over-national-assembly-duties)
Team Sergeant
03-31-2017, 15:04
Well, this sure escalates things.
Continued (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-30/venezuela-s-supreme-court-takes-over-national-assembly-duties)
I think that train has already left the station.......
Venezuela rule is now a total dictatorship. Castro, Mao, Stalin and Che would all be proud.
Badger52
03-31-2017, 16:15
The international community will go a little batshit crazy (full-on batshit is reserved for their views of Trump, Orban, Le Pen, etc); there will be some candles lit, some diplomatic outrage, lots of hand-wringing & denouncements, followed by... nothing. Stick a spork in it, it's done.
Team Sergeant
04-12-2017, 11:19
Socialist Dictator Nicolas Maduro your days are numbered. Just wait until the United States sends 10 pallets of weapons and ammunition to the "opposition". I'm sure sean penn will come and save you as soon as he's done shooting up.
Venezuela protesters throw eggs, objects at president during rally as unrest grows
By Alex Vasquez S.
·Published April 12, 2017
· FoxNews.com
Unrest in Venezuela went up a few notches in the last seven days, as protests against Nicolas Maduro’s government have become part of the daily agenda for the increasingly fiery opposition.
Demonstrators in Caracas were bombarded with tear gas from helicopters and police have not been shy to use their weapons — two 19-year-old protesters died after being shot and hundreds have been wounded, including a baby at a hospital that was hit by gas bombs.
“We have seen helicopters throwing bombs, collectives that encircle people and activate tear gas bombs [on them] — it happened to me,” said lawmaker Delsa Solorzano, who is among the victims of the government repression with a fractured rib.
Meanwhile, angry Venezuelans threw objects at President Maduro during a rally on Tuesday, as the unpopular leftist leader waved goodbye at the end of a military event. The state broadcaster then halted transmission.
cont:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/04/12/venezuela-protesters-throw-eggs-objects-at-president-during-rally-as-unrest-grows.html
bblhead672
04-12-2017, 12:07
hundreds have been wounded, including a baby at a hospital that was hit by gas bombs.
Someone in Venezuela needs to send Ivanka Trump a picture of the wounded baby and stand by for Tomahawks to arrive.
Peregrino
04-18-2017, 12:12
This is going to get ugly. Reminds me of when Noriega formed the Di(n)gbats (Batallones de la Dignidad). They were bad enough oppressing the opposition populace but at least they weren't armed.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/04/18/venezuelas-maduro-to-provide-guns-to-400000-loyalists-amid-peaking-tension.html
Team Sergeant
04-18-2017, 16:30
This communist dictator needs a dirt nap. Time to change the "elites rules" kill them first.
"Embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro"
I don't think so, how about:
"Bottom-feeding communist dictator Nicolas Maduro"
Yeah that's better.
At least the left-wing news media is also carrying this story.
Apr 17, 9:06 PM EDT
VENEZUELA'S MADURO SEEKS TO EXPAND ARMED CIVILIAN MILITIAS
BY FABIOLA SANCHEZ
ASSOCIATED PRESS
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced plans Monday to expand the number of civilians involved in armed militias as tensions in the crisis-wracked South American nation continued to rise.
Maduro said he hopes to expand the number of civilians involved in the Bolivarian militias created by the late Hugo Chavez to 500,000, up from the current 100,000, and provide each member with a gun.
Speaking to thousands of militia members dressed in beige uniforms gathered in front of the presidential palace to mark the force's seventh anniversary, Maduro said it is time for Venezuelans to decide if they are "with the homeland" or against it.
"Now is not the time to hesitate," he said.
The announcement comes as Maduro's opponents are gearing up for what they pledge will be the largest rally yet to press for elections and a host of other demands Wednesday.
Thousands of Venezuelans have taken to the streets since the Supreme Court stripped the National Assembly of its last vestiges of power nearly three weeks ago, a decision it later reversed. At least five people have been killed, dozens hurt and more than 100 detained in the demonstrations.
The Maduro government has vowed to hold a counter mass gathering Wednesday in defense of the socialist movement started by Chavez.
cont:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_VENEZUELA_POLITICAL_CRISIS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-04-17-21-06-15
Badger52
04-18-2017, 18:16
Would say time for some night letters, but looks too late.
Badger52
04-19-2017, 16:25
Many pics and a few local accounts, courtesy RT. (https://www.rt.com/news/385327-venezuela-march-government-maduro/)
Sean Penn was unavailable for comment.
And word is just getting out the government has taken over management of the GM plant.
I was a little surprised they hadn't done it sooner.
BrokenSwitch
04-20-2017, 08:21
https://www.wsj.com/articles/many-poor-venezuelans-are-too-hungry-to-join-antigovernment-protests-1492680607
...
Until the slums rise up, Mr. Maduro will likely hang on, analysts say.
...
Many slum residents in Caracas and across Venezuela, however, say they are only vaguely aware of the protests and too busy trying to survive to worry about changing the government.
More than four in five Venezuelans say they don’t earn enough to meet basic needs and three-quarters say they have lost an average of 19 pounds of weight last year, according to the Encovi survey by Venezuela’s top three universities.
...
The lower classes have also been instrumental in giving the opposition alliance a record two-thirds congressional majority in the last electoral contest, held in December 2015. Polls show the poor would hand the government a drubbing in any vote held this year.
Yet that growing disillusionment hasn’t translated into organized protest, said pollster Luis Vicente León. Part of the reason, he added, is the opposition itself, whose predominantly upper-middle-class leaders have ignored the slums for years, believing they can oust Mr. Maduro or his predecessor Hugo Chávez by marching in opposition strongholds or triggering a coup.
...
Without support in the shantytowns, many opposition supporters fear the current protests will end like the previous wave of unrest in 2014, when three months of demonstrations in middle-class neighborhoods left 43 people dead—without achieving any political change. The failure of those protestshas demoralized and fractured the opposition alliance for years.
“For the masses to come out, they need to feel that they are at a point of no return,” said Félix Seijas Jr., director of pollster Delphos. “We’re still some ways away from that.”
It sounds like the people most badly hurt by the current state of affairs are apathetic toward any solution that involves working within Venezuela's political system, because even the organized opposition doesn't offer them any help. The only remaining options are to rebel, leave, or starve, and this article is leaning toward "starve."
Meanwhile, the protests continue, seemingly unabated....
DIYPatriot
04-20-2017, 11:32
And word is just getting out the government has taken over management of the GM plant.
That puts a whole new spin on GM needing a gov't bailout ;)
[It sounds like the people most badly hurt by the current state of affairs are apathetic toward any solution that involves working within Venezuela's political system, because even the organized opposition doesn't offer them any help. The only remaining options are to rebel, leave, or starve, and this article is leaning toward "starve.".
80% of the population starving, and they aren't allowed to leave. When they get hungry enough, it's going to get really ugly, and both the Maduro supporters and the organized opposition are likely to fare equally poorly.
Team Sergeant
04-21-2017, 12:25
jamie foxx and sean penn will save the starving people of Venezuela, oh maybe not.
Funny how the hollywood celebrities go mute when people are starving and being murdered by a socialist/communist dictator. They were sure yucking it up last year.
Never ever give up your guns, ever.
In surprising role, Jaime Foxx visits with President Maduro in crumbling Venezuela
Published October 05, 2016 FoxNews.com
Amid widespread unrest, massive shortages of food and basic supplies and a crumbling economy, on Tuesday Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro took the time to rub shoulders with two visiting Hollywood luminaries.
Jamie Foxx and actor/musician Lukas Haas paid a visit to the embattled head of state at the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas. Maduro reportedly invited the pair so they could visit the government-funded film and TV studio, Fundación Villa del Cine, and other tourist attractions in the socialist nation.
Neither Foxx nor Haas spoke to the media during their visit, but Venezuelan media reported that the movie stars were in the country to “show support for the policies of the Bolivarian Government, in particular its social missions,” and “to learn about Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission,” a project which has purportedly built more than a million government-funded homes.
The actors were also invited by Maduro to attend the signing of an agreement between Venezuela and Jordan, Dubai and Italy for the construction of 13,912 homes in the central state of Aragua.
“We have given a warm welcome to two actors who are very admired by our people … Thank you for supporting this project, and its vision to add housing as a benefit for the people of the world,” Maduro said on state-owned VTV.
cont:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/10/05/in-surprising-role-actor-jaime-foxx-visits-with-president-maduro-in-venezuela.html
“to learn about Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission,” a project which has purportedly built more than a million government-funded homes.
Exactly why would Venezuela need a million government funded homes? They were doing just fine, in their own homes, before Hurricane Hugo Chávez hit.
Pat
Badger52
04-21-2017, 15:30
...purportedly built...Nothing to see here (literally). This sounds like the same way all those donations to the Clinton Foundation for Haiti got channeled to the people who need 'em. 'Tis the way of these clowns, which is why we should NEV-uh throw a dime to such a regime.
A very liberal newspaper, in an editorial piece finally acknowledges this obvious socialist failure - from South America's richest country to dangerous levels of poverty.
Complete article at link below.
The Guardian view on Venezuela: a country in pain
Editorial
Tuesday 25 April 2017 14.33 EDT
Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro has failed his country. Picked by Hugo Chávez as successor just before his death in 2013, President Maduro has been an incompetent leader in hard times. He has failed to address the economic crisis triggered when the fall in the price of oil exposed the weaknesses of Chavismo, his predecessor’s ambitious experiment in poverty alleviation and social ownership. Now, in what was once South America’s richest country, more than four households in five are in poverty, twice the level of when he came to power. Babies and children die for lack of access to commonplace medicines. Murder and kidnapping for ransom are rife. Inflation is running above 800%; the economy is contracting sharply. Democracy itself is being eroded as the president defends his faltering grip on power. Weeks of protests have been met by state violence, semi-official vigilantes and, increasingly, counterattack from some opposition groupings. There is a wretched stalemate; and there is a real fear that violence could soon escalate out of control.
<snip>
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/25/the-guardian-view-on-venezuela-a-country-in-pain
MF Commies on display...we are not magically immune.
Venezuela Is Starving
By Juan Forero
WSJ
Updated May 5, 2017 12:39 p.m. ET
Once Latin America’s richest country, Venezuela can no longer feed its people, hobbled by the nationalization of farms as well as price and currency controls.
YARE, Venezuela— Jean Pierre Planchart, a year old, has the drawn face of an old man and a cry that is little more than a whimper. His ribs show through his skin. He weighs just 11 pounds.
His mother, Maria Planchart, tried to feed him what she could find combing through the trash—scraps of chicken or potato. She finally took him to a hospital in Caracas, where she prays a rice-milk concoction keeps her son alive.
“I watched him sleep and sleep, getting weaker, all the time losing weight,” said Ms. Planchart, 34 years old. “I never thought I’d see Venezuela like this.”
Her country was once Latin America’s richest, producing food for export. Venezuela now can’t grow enough to feed its own people in an economy hobbled by the nationalization of private farms, and price and currency controls.
Venezuela has the world’s highest inflation—estimated by the International Monetary Fund to reach 720% this year—making it nearly impossible for families to make ends meet. Since 2013, the economy has shrunk 27%, according to local investment bank Torino Capital; imports of food have plunged 70%.
Hordes of people, many with children in tow, rummage through garbage, an uncommon sight a year ago. People in the countryside pick farms clean at night, stealing everything from fruits hanging on trees to pumpkins on the ground, adding to the misery of farmers hurt by shortages of seed and fertilizer. Looters target food stores. Families padlock their refrigerators.
Three in four Venezuelans said they had lost weight last year, an average of 19 pounds, according to the National Poll of Living Conditions, an annual study by social scientists. People here, in a mix of rage and humor, call it the Maduro diet after President Nicolás Maduro.
For more than a month, Venezuelans have protested against the increasingly authoritarian government of Mr. Maduro; by Friday, more than 35 people had been reported killed in the unrest. The country’s Food Ministry, the president’s office, the Communications Ministry and the Foreign Ministry didn’t return calls or emails requesting comment for this article.
<snip>
Complete article at link.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuela-is-starving-1493995317
"they just need to try HARDER; enforce MORE sanctions; nationalize MORE industries. They just aren't trying hard enough!!"
such are the cries of the Taliban-left. " It would work if they would only make the penalties harsher!! "
Liberalism is truly a mental disease. As TS stated: Don't ever give up your guns....EVER.
Badger52
05-07-2017, 09:44
Pish-tosh says their UN ambassador (who looked pretty well-fed & groomed last August). (http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2016/08/15/Venezuelas-UN-ambassador-We-have-problems-but-no-humanitarian-crisis/3781471262385/)"We have problems here, but it's nowhere near a humanitarian crisis," Ramirez said during an interview with Venezuelan broadcaster Televen, adding that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro will speak to Ban in September during a summit in Caracas.
"I do not know where he gets these figures and assertions," Ramirez said.Maybe someone should ask these sycophants (http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/04/24/hollywood-adulation-venezuela-s-socialist-government-proven-wrong-again.html)"wha' hoppened?"
The problem is socialism never really had a chance. The evil Capitalist are behind the problems. If they all just stand together behind their government and implement more social programs it will be fine.
Well said, you nailed the bernie supporter's dogma right there!
The only bright side out of this is:
Cardiovascular disease in Venezuela will pretty much disappear.
Same thing happened in Cuba in slower motion in the 90's when Soviet subsidies evaporated and Cubans, on average, lost a huge amount of weight.
But their leadership seem too stupid to leverage the only "win" out of this disaster.
They're not too embarrassed to blame the capitalists and their CIA lackeys for everything.....I would think they wouldn't be too embarrassed to claim credit for the only benefit coming from their totally avoidable famine.
Does anyone know how this will impact on Venezuela's greatest export market, Miss Universe contestants?
SHTF Latin style...
Excerpts below - complete article at link.
In secret recording, Venezuelan general pushes for snipers to control demonstrators
BY ANTONIO MARIA DELGADO AND SONIA OSORIO
adelgado@elnuevoherald.com
MAY 18, 2017 3:46 PM
In the end, “it will only be us [the military] that pulls through because … once people start to see dead bodies, and dead bodies begin to appear, then everyone will begin to stay at home,” Torrealba said. “You will remember my words, the armed forces are the ones that have to solve this problem.”
One of the generals in the room claimed the demonstrations are no longer peaceful.
“Sadly, this is the beginning of a war, gentlemen,” he said. “They [the protesters] will continue until reaching the point where an [international] intervention is justified. Let’s not fool ourselves. Sadly, it fell to our generation to live with this conflict, and we have to assume it to the degree that is being demanded by our country.”
****
Retired National Guard Colonel Antonio Semprun, who lives in South Florida, said the violence that is taking place in Venezuela against the demonstrators surpasses all that has previously been experienced in the country in what seems to be the government’s last-ditch attempt to keep Maduro in power.
“The Venezuelan population has reached a point of no return. It is committed to reaching what is being demanded on the streets, the freedom of the nation,” he said. “And what they are doing against the people — who are unarmed, protesting in the streets — are crimes against humanity.”
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article151329772.html#storylink=cpy
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article151329772.html
Team Sergeant
05-19-2017, 11:14
SHTF Latin style...
Excerpts below - complete article at link.
In secret recording, Venezuelan general pushes for snipers to control demonstrators
BY ANTONIO MARIA DELGADO AND SONIA OSORIO
adelgado@elnuevoherald.com
MAY 18, 2017 3:46 PM
In the end, “it will only be us [the military] that pulls through because … once people start to see dead bodies, and dead bodies begin to appear, then everyone will begin to stay at home,” Torrealba said. “You will remember my words, the armed forces are the ones that have to solve this problem.”
One of the generals in the room claimed the demonstrations are no longer peaceful.
“Sadly, this is the beginning of a war, gentlemen,” he said. “They [the protesters] will continue until reaching the point where an [international] intervention is justified. Let’s not fool ourselves. Sadly, it fell to our generation to live with this conflict, and we have to assume it to the degree that is being demanded by our country.”
****
Retired National Guard Colonel Antonio Semprun, who lives in South Florida, said the violence that is taking place in Venezuela against the demonstrators surpasses all that has previously been experienced in the country in what seems to be the government’s last-ditch attempt to keep Maduro in power.
“The Venezuelan population has reached a point of no return. It is committed to reaching what is being demanded on the streets, the freedom of the nation,” he said. “And what they are doing against the people — who are unarmed, protesting in the streets — are crimes against humanity.”
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article151329772.html#storylink=cpy
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article151329772.html
Progressive/liberal/socialist morons.
Speaking of morons where's all the hollywood idiots that are in love with the Venezuelan dictator?
Badger52
05-19-2017, 11:30
Speaking of morons where's all the hollywood idiots that are in love with the Venezuelan dictator?What a helluva red carpet question; can't wait to hear their answers on the E! News. Except the mic-holding preeners don't have the stones & are probably in the group that doesn't know where Venezuela is. Someone who's into that social-media stuff like Fakebook should carpet their pages with that question.
Badger52
05-19-2017, 19:39
Sean Penn was unavailable for comment. (http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/05/19/venezuela-incredible-legacy-experiment-with-socialism.html)
Socialism...inevitable failure...equally inevitable denial...have a good look Bernie supporters.
Chavista celebrities refuse to say they were wrong about socialism
By John Dietrich
American Thinker
June 14, 2017
The New York Times published an article on Venezuela titled “Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela’s Failing Hospitals.” It reads like an apocalyptic horror story and begins, “By morning, three newborns were already dead.” The author provides an explanation for this tragedy: “This nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high. Now that prices have collapsed — they are around a third what they were in 2014 — the consequences are casting a destructive shadow across the country.” No other explanation is offered. Perhaps we will be receiving report of massive starvation in Saudi Arabia soon.
The article is a far cry from the glowing reports that greeted the assumption of power by Hugo Chavez. When Chavez was elected Venezuela’s people were the wealthiest in Latin America. Celebrities flocked to Caracas to pay homage to the new socialist leader. Sean Penn, Michael Moore, Danny Glover, and Harry Belafonte are just a few of the entertainers who have visited. Oliver Stone has made a film, Mi Amigo Hugo, about the Venezuelan leader. Now Venezuela appears to be suffering a food shortage. A survey by three universities found 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average 19 pounds this year.
Have the Venezuelan revolution’s early supporters admitted they were wrong? Are they at all embarrassed? According to John Stossel they believe they were right to praise Venezuela’s move to socialism. Stossel corresponded with college professor Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s reply to Stossel’s question about his support for Chavez was, “I was right." Chomsky blamed Venezuela’s problems on capitalists: “Capitalists were free to undermine the economy in all sorts of ways, like massive export of capital." Stossel quotes Marian Tupy, editor of HumanProgress.org. who said, “More countries will refuse to learn from history and give socialism 'a go.' 'Useful idiots,' to use Lenin's words ... will sing socialism's praises until the last light goes out."
Socialism has failed repeatedly. How can apparently well-educated intelligent people maintain their faith in a failed system? The answer is that in spite of their claims of being based on science, socialism is a religion. It is the official religion taught in many public schools in the U.S. It is a form of Christianity without Christ. Millions of adherents will swear a vow of poverty to further their programs. The socialist elite, however, is another matter. This brings us to Maria Gabriela Chavez, Hugo’s daughter. According to Diario las Americas she has $4.2 billion in American and Andorran banks. The socialist elite does very well for itself. They apparently see no contradiction in living well as others starve. Communist defector Victor Kravchenko described this phenomenon when he was a member of the Soviet elite: “I found myself among men who could eat ample and dainty food in full view of starving people not only with a clear conscience but with a feeling of righteousness, as if they were performing a duty to history.”
Reuters published an article describing the role played by social media in the opposition to the government. Activists are posting details of the lifestyles of government officials and their families. They expose them as thriving from corruption while the “common man” is starving. One estimate suggests that $350 billion dollars have been misappropriated by Venezuelan officials. The Atlantic reported on a blog, “Relojes del Chavismo” that lists the brands and prices of watches worn by the Venezuelan elite. Vladimir Lopes, the Minister of Defense sports a $11,900 Rolex while the President of a state TV channel wears a $12,600 watch. Still these officials may be considered frugal compared to our own champions of the downtrodden. Former member of the House of Representatives, Jesse Jackson Jr., reportedly had a $43,000 Rolex.
The success of socialism seems to depend upon having the “right people” running the government. Are our advocates of wealth redistribution setting a good example for their followers? Do Bernie Sanders, Mark Zuckerberg, and the hundreds of entertainers and academic who advocate for socialism, wear hair shirts? Or do they live lives of incredible opulence maintaining several residences that remain vacant in their absence?
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/06/chavista_celebrities_refuse_to_say_they_were_wrong _about_socialism.html
Badger52
06-14-2017, 15:37
Socialism...inevitable failure...equally inevitable denial...have a good look Bernie supporters.
Good link, thanks.
A socialist is simply a communist that hasn't pulled their gun. Yet.
Great article Tonyz!
I saw the name John Stossel in the article you linked. I remember him from his 20/20 days.
He is one of the very, very few journalists who I hold in high regard.
Here's the link thru article John Stossel wrote from your linked article:
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2017/05/31/chomskys-venezuela-lesson-n2333521
Chomsky is a danger to freedom simply due to the large audience he has jedi mind tricked into thinking socialism could possibly work.
Socialism and Venezuela...the bodies and the denial just keep piling up.
Team Sergeant
06-15-2017, 07:02
Socialism and Venezuela...the bodies and the denial just keep piling up.
nancy pelosi & maxine waters blame the gov failure, government murder and protesting in Venezuela on climate change.
Good enough for me. :munchin
mark46th
06-15-2017, 07:53
nancy pelosi & maxine waters blame the gov failure, government murder and protesting in Venezuela on climate change." TS
Yup- A failed socialist economic ideology and an ignorant, self serving leadership have nothing to do with it...
DIYPatriot
06-28-2017, 10:42
A helicopter has attacked Venezuela's Supreme Court in what President Nicolás Maduro called a "terrorist" incident. Four grenades were dropped on the court and 15 shots fired at the interior ministry on Tuesday, officials said. Rogue policeman Oscar Pérez said he had piloted the stolen helicopter to attack what he called a "criminal government". His whereabouts are unknown.
Article w/video (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-40426642)
Badger52
06-28-2017, 12:48
Hope he's got a safe haven; not like hiding a Mini-Cooper in the LA river basin.
:munchin
"criminal government"
Lotsa that goin' around...
Badger52
07-11-2017, 14:24
Someone has upped the ante.
National Guard patrol hits roadside bomb in Venezuelan capital
A powerful roadside bomb went off during massive anti-government protests in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, leaving seven members of the National Guard injured.
Footage taken at the scene shows a powerful explosion hitting a convoy of National Guard officers riding motorcycles.
Seven officers were injured in the blast, commander-in-chief of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) Major General Sergio Rivero Marcano confirmed to the Venezuelan media, adding that five of them suffered third-degree burns while two others received second-degree burns.
The information about the casualties was also confirmed by Interior Minister Nestor Reverol and Information Minister Ernesto Villegas.
...
President Maduro has blamed external forces, especially the US, for triggering the unrest. He issued a statement to Washington last month, telling President Donald Trump to stop meddling in Venezuela’s affairs.
RT's story, which contains several video aspects.
(https://www.rt.com/news/396039-venezuela-blast-national-guard/)
Commie/socialist/globalist/big government on full display for those who want to see...
Police believe thieves steal Venezuela zoo animals to eat them
#WORLD NEWSAUGUST 16, 2017 / 6:54 PM / 21 HOURS AGO
Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-animals-idUSKCN1AW2NN
Badger52
08-17-2017, 14:26
Commie/socialist/globalist/big government on full display for those who want to see...
Police believe thieves steal Venezuela zoo animals to eat them
#WORLD NEWSAUGUST 16, 2017 / 6:54 PM / 21 HOURS AGO
Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-animals-idUSKCN1AW2NN
The government denied the animals had starved, insisting they had been treated "like family." LOL. That's the problem.
LOL. That's the problem.
Gotta love it.
In Venezuela, they were teachers and doctors. To buy food, they became prostitutes.
BY JIM WYSS
Miami Herald
SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 12:08 PM
Excerpt:
Dayana, a 30-year-old mother of four, nursed a beer as she watched potential clients walk down the dirt road that runs in front of wooden shacks, bars and bordellos. Dressed for work in brightly colored spandex, Dayana said she used to be the manager of a food-processing plant on the outskirts of Caracas.
But that job disappeared after the government seized the factory and “looted it,” she said.
<snip>
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article174808061.html#storylink=cpy
I am just happy that we have finally expanded the muslim ban on immigration to include all of the socialist muslims coming from Venezuela ...
...gosh danged Venezuelan muslims - quit ruinin' my life !!!
frostfire
09-25-2017, 15:40
Wonder why they have not called it a day and go north.
As long as they don't bring the wonderful socialism with them, aren't these the high skilled immigrants SOTB we want?
In Venezuela, they were teachers and doctors. To buy food, they became prostitutes.
BY JIM WYSS
Miami Herald
SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 12:08 PM
Excerpt:
Dayana, a 30-year-old mother of four, nursed a beer as she watched potential clients walk down the dirt road that runs in front of wooden shacks, bars and bordellos. Dressed for work in brightly colored spandex, Dayana said she used to be the manager of a food-processing plant on the outskirts of Caracas.
But that job disappeared after the government seized the factory and “looted it,” she said.
<snip>
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article174808061.html#storylink=cpy
Wonder why they have not called it a day and go north.
As long as they don't bring the wonderful socialism with them, aren't these the high skilled immigrants SOTB we want?
Miami has a significant population from Venezuela.
Nowadays, seems some are trading Lewinskys for bread - so air travel probably a stretch.
Caracas shops mobbed as Venezuela's Maduro forces price cuts
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-economy/caracas-shops-mobbed-as-venezuelas-maduro-forces-price-cuts-idUSKBN1EV0K1
"CARACAS (Reuters) - Mobs gathered outside some Caracas supermarkets on Saturday after the government ordered shops to slash prices, creating chaos as desperate Venezuelans leapt at the chance to buy cheaper food as the country’s worsening economy causes severe shortages. ..."
But
"...Armed National Guard soldiers later arrived at the store and ordered people into clear lines, warning that they would not be allowed in otherwise. They eventually let the crowd through in small groups just before midday, but people quickly emerged disappointed as only crackers and washing liquid were discounted.
“I can’t feed my kids with this,” said Jesus Gudino, a 29-year-old moto-taxi driver and father of three, sneering at the small plastic bag in his hand. “I’ve been here since 4 a.m. This is a mockery. What can I do? I have to leave this country.”
The Reaper
01-07-2018, 19:30
“I can’t feed my kids with this,” said Jesus Gudino, a 29-year-old moto-taxi driver and father of three, sneering at the small plastic bag in his hand. “I’ve been here since 4 a.m. This is a mockery. What can I do? I have to leave this country.”
Get a gun and go to work for the revolution. Viva!
TR
Unrest over food shortages spreads through the country
https://news.trust.org/item/20180112035017-q9adf
".....Looters plundered a truck carrying corn, a food collection center, and a state-run supermarket, according to Paparoni, and a vet who witnessed the mayhem.
A video on social media also showed around a dozen men running into a lush pasture, chasing a cow, and then apparently beating it to death....."
Starting to get nastier down there.
A video on social media also showed around a dozen men running into a lush pasture, chasing a cow, and then apparently beating it to death....."
Starting to get nastier down there.
Watch here: http://www.wmal.com/2018/01/12/video-starving-venezuelan-mob-beats-a-cow-to-death-because-socialism-is-awesome/
Pat
Didn't some guy just describe countries like this as "shitholes" ????
tom kelly
01-13-2018, 05:34
ALL THE ASSHAT DEMOCRATS SHOULD GO THERE ON VACATION & TAKE THEIR FAMILIES....AND AS FAR AS THE STATUE OF LIBERTY !!! SEND IT BACK TO FRANCE WITH THE DACA.... THEY CAN DREAM IN PARIS.
Chaotic, impoverished, dysfunctional, crime-ridden, unsanitary, grid failures, lack of medical care...
...sure sounds like a SHITHOLE.
Ret10Echo
01-13-2018, 21:18
Chaotic, impoverished, dysfunctional, crime-ridden, unsanitary, grid failures, lack of medical care...
...sure sounds like a SHITHOLE.
Does having your own cryptocurrency elevate you above shithole status perhaps?
But wait, you need electricity to mine them. Hmm... a conundrum.
Does having your own cryptocurrency elevate you above shithole status perhaps?
But wait, you need electricity to mine them. Hmm... a conundrum.
Nothing all that oil and a little capitalism and individual freedom can't fix !
Team Sergeant
01-14-2018, 08:50
Nothing all that oil and a little capitalism and individual freedom can't fix !
saudi, iraq, iran, syria, yemen all shitholes........ even capitalism can't fix everything.
saudi, iraq, iran, syria, yemen all shitholes........ even capitalism can't fix everything.
A common denominator to many shitholes appears to be widespread corruption.
Perhaps we were a mere HRC away from our own shithole... :eek:
The socialist implosion continues.
Wave Of Looting Shutters Stores, Spreads Fear In Venezuela
January 17, 2018
By Alexandra Ulmer and Anggy Polanco
OANN
CARACAS/SAN CRISTOBAL, Venezuela (Reuters) – A wave of looting by hungry mobs across Venezuela has left streets of shuttered shops in provincial towns and pushed some store owners to arm themselves with guns and machetes, stirring fear that the turmoil could spread to the capital Caracas.
Worsening food shortages and runaway inflation have unleashed the spate of pillaging since Christmas in the South American country, in which seven people have reportedly died.
The unrest was sparked by shortages of pork for traditional holiday meals, despite socialist President Nicolas Maduro’s promise of subsidized meat to alleviate shortages.
Looters have ransacked trucks, supermarkets and liquor stores across the nation of 30 million people, which ranks as one of the most violent in the world.
The plunder is heaping more pain on battered businesses, raising questions about how much longer they can survive. Venezuela, once one of Latin America’s richest countries, is suffering a fifth straight year of recession and the world’s highest inflation rate, which the opposition-run Congress says topped 2,600 percent last year.
In the first 11 days of January alone, some 107 lootings or attempted lootings have taken place, according to the Venezuelan Observatory for Social Conflict, a rights group.
In one of the most dramatic incidents, a mob slaughtered cattle grazing in a field in the mountainous western state of Merida.
Skeptical that authorities can protect them, shopkeepers in the Andean town of Garcia de Hevia in the neighboring state of Tachira have taken matters into their own hands.
“We’re arming ourselves with sticks, knives, machetes, and firearms to defend our assets,” recounted William Roa, the president of the local shopkeepers’ association.
Roa, who owns a restaurant and liquor store, estimated that more than two-thirds of stores in the small town near the Colombian border were shut.
“A person spends the night in each store and we communicate using WhatsApp groups, coordinating by block 24 hours a day,” he said.
In Ciudad Guayana, a former industrial powerhouse on the Orinoco river in eastern Venezuela, many stores remain closed after a wave of nighttime lootings.
Garbage fills the streets and few cars circulate, though buses crammed with people crisscross town looking for places to buy food.
Businessmen in Caracas now fear the lootings, so far concentrated in the poorer and more lawless provinces, will spread to the sprawling capital, with its teeming hillside slums.
The owners of patisserie Arte Paris, in the city’s gritty downtown, reinforced the storefront with metal shutters last month. They now only stock ingredients like sugar for a handful of days and have considered hiring a costly nighttime guard.
“The fear is real,” said Sebastian Fallone, one of the owners, as men and children begged patrons for food. “I leave at night without knowing what I will find the next morning.”
‘NO HOPE’
Government critics say Maduro’s refusal to reform the OPEC nation’s floundering economy is to blame for the chaotic fight for survival in the country home to the world’s largest crude reserves.
With a presidential election looming this year, Maduro retorts that Venezuela’s oil-reliant economy is under attack by U.S.-backed saboteurs seeking to stoke conflict and discredit socialism in Latin America.
While videos of ransacking have gone viral, Maduro’s government has stayed largely mum. The Information Ministry did not respond to a request for information on the scale and impact of the looting.
The unrest has also stoked fears Venezuelan society could unravel as chaos sets in, fuelling mass emigration to nearby South American countries or a full-blown social explosion at home.
“Small-scale protests will be numerous and increasingly violent; any of these protests could contain the spark to serious unrest,” said consultancy Teneo Intelligence in a note to clients about the year ahead in Venezuela.
In an effort to curb voter anger over inflation, the government agency tasked with ensuring “fair prices” ordered some 200 supermarkets to slash their rates this month, triggering frenetic buying.
Roadside lootings have also scared truck drivers, disrupting the food distribution chain that is traditionally slower anyway in January because of holidays.
For Mery Cacua, manager of La Gran Parada, a supermarket chain in Tachira’s state capital San Cristobal, it has become too much to handle.
“We’re closing in two weeks. There’s no hope anymore,” said Cacua, adding she and her siblings had not yet mustered the strength to break the news to their 87-year-old father, who founded the business 60 years ago.
The family does not know what to do but is considering starting from scratch in Colombia.
Venezuelan supermarkets that remain open are often a shadow of what they once were. Many shelves are barren and poor Venezuelans increasingly mass outside stores, imploring entering shoppers to buy them goods.
“What are they going to loot here? There’s nothing. The warehouse is empty,” said an employee at a big supermarket in Caracas, as a colleague behind him filled empty shelves with water bottles to make them look stocked.
http://www.oann.com/wave-of-looting-shutters-stores-spreads-fear-in-venezuela/
Badger52
01-17-2018, 12:42
Gen Z'ers, this was Socialism-101
Katya: I will take you to where we can have lunch. If you do not mind, I will first buy shoes.
Barley: Shoes?
Katya: Today there is a shipment of shoes. With perestroika, there is even less available than before.
Barley: Really? I thought things were improving.
Katya: Everything is corrupt and incompetent. Perhaps different people are now stealing. I don't know.
Barley: Keep your voice down.
Katya: Complaining is our new human right. Glasnost gives everyone the right to complain and accuse... but it doesn't make more shoes.
Venezuela is an AP-class; study hard.
"Katya: Complaining is our new human right. Glasnost gives everyone the right to complain and accuse... but it doesn't make more shoes."
Just like BIGGOV creating "universal health care" ...it does NOT create more medical professionals.
The curtain has been pulled aside for all to see in real time - on that scam that is communism/socialism.
Equal misery...and an untouchable elite.
Venezuela’s Oil Production Is Collapsing
https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-oil-industry-takes-a-fall-1516271401
Behind the WSJ wall but you get the idea from the first paragraph.
"CARACAS, Venezuela—Venezuela’s oil output is collapsing at an accelerating pace, deepening an economic and humanitarian crisis and increasing the chances the country will default on its debts...."
Down 216,000 barrels from November to December. Total for December 1.6 million barrels.
November article from Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-oil/venezuela-crude-output-hits-28-year-low-opec-idUSKBN1DD1QD
Atlas is shrugging in Venezuela. In an oil-rich country, only progressives could screw up oil production.
Even the hydro-cepheletics in the middle-east had enough sense to hire capitalists to develop their oil industry.
Team Sergeant
01-18-2018, 10:57
Even the hydro-cepheletics in the middle-east had enough sense to hire capitalists to develop their oil industry.
Not much of an option when the national IQ is only 2 point higher then the camels they herd.
If every foreigner left the middle east they would collapse under the weight of millennia of incestuous breeding.
If they didn't possess oil they would not be on the worlds radar.
Atlas is shrugging in Venezuela. In an oil-rich country, only progressives could screw up oil production.
Even the hydro-cepheletics in the middle-east had enough sense to hire capitalists to develop their oil industry.
He had them and then fired them. Siphoned oil $$ to line his cronies pockets and fund socialist giveaways. Not enough $$ re-invested into production + expensive to produce oil + low oil prices = not good
Peak oil production occurred in Chavez's first year in office. Been in decline ever since. Reserves are NOT the issue.
tom kelly
02-13-2018, 21:58
REPORTED ON FOX NEWS TODAY 2/13/2018 71% of VENEZUELA'S CHILD POPULATION HAVE BEEN ABANDONED BY PARENT'S BECAUSE OF FOOD SHORTAGE
BRV-BRV-BRV
come on folks, say it with me....
BRV-BRV-BRV-BRV
A once rich nation descends into darkness under 20 years of socialism.
A lesson in real time for all those young Hillary and Bernie voters to see...if they will open their eyes and their minds...
A ‘Caravan Of Misery’ As Desperate Venezeulans Flee Their Country To Survive
JOHN SEXTONPosted at 7:01 pm on March 3, 2018
Hot Air
Venezuela was a socialist paradise until it became a nightmare. Now no one on the left wants to talk about it. All the more reason to talk about it and to study closely the complete collapse of a society that elected a socialist goon promising to wipe out inequality. He did that in a sense. Money is so worthless in today’s Venezuela that almost anyone can be a millionaire and almost everyone is equally starving and miserable. The only solution for many people is to flee the country. Venezuelan socialism has led to one of the largest mass migrations in South American history, with up to 1.5 million Venezuelans fleeing the country in the past two years.
Yesterday the Washington Post and Reuters both published lengthy stories focused on the exodus of starving and desperate people. Reuters reporters spent 9 days on a bus full of people hoping to find work in neighboring countries most had never even visited.
On board the bus, web developer Tony Alonzo had sold his childhood guitar to help pay for his ticket to Chile. For months he had been going to bed hungry so that his 5-year-old brother could have something for dinner. Natacha Rodriguez, a machine operator, had been robbed at gunpoint three times in the past year. She was headed for Chile, too, hoping to give her baseball-loving son a better life. Roger Chirinos was leaving his wife and two young children behind to search for work in Ecuador…
By the time dawn rises over Caracas, hungry people are already picking through garbage while kids beg in front of bakeries. Come dusk, many Venezuelans shut themselves inside their homes to avoid muggings and kidnappings. In a country with the world’s largest proven crude reserves, some families now cook with firewood because they cannot find propane. Hospitals lack supplies as basic as disinfectant. Food is so scarce and pricey that the average Venezuelan lost 24 pounds last year.
“I feel Venezuela has succumbed to an irreversible evil,” Chirinos said…
Venezuelans elected Chavez, the late leftist firebrand, in 1998 with a mandate to fight inequality. A charismatic former lieutenant colonel, Chavez transformed the country during his 14-year rule, pouring oil revenue into wildly popular welfare programs. But he also nationalized large swaths of the economy and implemented strict currency controls, state meddling that economists say is the root of the current crisis…
Now, financially ravaged Venezuelans with fewer skills are pouring across South America in a frantic search for work in restaurants, stores, call centers and construction sites. Some travel only as far as their savings will stretch: A one-way bus ticket to neighboring Colombia from Caracas costs the U.S. equivalent of around $15; the fare for a trip to Chile or Argentina can run as high as $350, a small fortune for many. The plunging currency and rocketing inflation make financing the voyage more expensive with each passing day.
Sociologist Tomas Paez, an immigration specialist at the Central University of Venezuela, estimates that almost 3 million people have fled Venezuela over the past two decades. He believes nearly half of them have left in the last two years alone, in one of the largest mass migrations the continent has ever seen.
All of that means that the worst is probably yet to come in Venezuela. What we’re seeing now is probably just the beginning of a mass exodus that could create chaos throughout South America. No wonder American socialists don’t want to talk about it.
<snip>
https://hotair.com/archives/2018/03/03/caravan-misery-desperate-venezeulans-flee-country-survive/
So - Venezuelans elected Chavez to fight inequality. They wanted equality and Chavez dove into the task; in the years that followed Chavez took the countries massive oil resources and used them to fund revolutionary welfare programs. Programs that were incredibly popular with the less equal - but not so popular with the more equal that skippered the evil, profit-driven petroleum-based economy.
Stingy fucking capitalists.
Chavez essentially usurped control of Venezuela's economy and implemented his own brand of equality...
...the same brand of equality that America's liberal elitists can't wait to implement here in the USA. Now, Venezuelans from all of the different socioeconomically equality levels are fucked. They are evacuating their beloved Venezuelan equality like rats from a sinking ship.
Where are these people going? Why would they leave such a liberal utopia?
Where in the fuck is Sean Penn and the Clinton Foundation when we need them the most?
What we need is more of that Venezuelan equality to level the playing field.
tom kelly
03-04-2018, 16:16
The Bitcoin is now the "NEW CURRENCY", Let's see how well that works...
Badger52
03-04-2018, 16:46
Where in the fuck is Sean Penn and the Clinton Foundation when we need them the most? I heard there was going to be a "Concert for the People of Venezuela" but there's no electricity to plug in the amps. I'm sure it'll be all the talk at the Oscars tonight.
I heard there was going to be a "Concert for the People of Venezuela" but there's no electricity to plug in the amps. I'm sure it'll be all the talk at the Oscars tonight.
Unplugged. :D
tom kelly
03-09-2018, 01:35
Bernie Sanders should go down there with his "less than brilliant ideas" on running a country....Tom Kelly
Socialists sitting on some of the worlds largest oil reserves...last one out...please shut the lights...oh, never mind.
Venezuela begins power rationing as drought causes severe outages
By Anggy Polanco and Isaac Urrutia
Reuters
March 16, 2018
SAN CRISTOBAL, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela imposed electricity rationing this week in six western states, as the crisis-hit country's creaky power grid suffered from a drought that has reduced water levels in key reservoirs needed to run hydroelectric power generators.
The four-hour formal outages began on Thursday. But many residents scoffed at the announcement, wryly noting that they have been suffering far more extended blackouts during the last week.
"We have spent 14 hours without electricity today. And yesterday electricity came and went: for six hours we had no power," said Ligthia Marrero, 50, in the western state of San Cristobal, noting that her fridge had been damaged by the frequent interruptions.
Crumbling infrastructure and lack of investments have hit Venezuela's power supply for years. Now, the situation has been exacerbated by dwindling rains.
In the worst-hit western cities, business has all but ground to a halt at a time when the OPEC nation of 30 million is already suffering hyperinflation and a profound recession. Many Venezuelans are unable to eat properly on salaries of just a couple of dollars per month at the black market rate, sparking malnutrition, emigration and frequent sights of Venezuelans digging through trash or begging in front of supermarkets.
Maybelin Mendoza, a cashier at a bakery in Tachira state, said business has been further hit because points of sale stop working during blackouts - just as Venezuelans are chronically short of cash due to hyperinflation.
In the most dramatic cases, the opposition governor of Tachira state said three people, including a four-month-old, died this week because they failed to receive assistance during a power outage.
"Because of electrical failures, the machines weren't able to revive the people and they died," said Laidy Gomez.
Reuters was unable to confirm the report.
Authorities have acknowledged that interruptions will continue for at least two weeks, but they have not said whether they will spread to other states.
"Of a possible 1,100 megawatts, we are only generating 150 right now," Energy Minister Luis Motta told reporters referring to the Fabricio Ojeda dam, in the western Andean state of Merida.
Capital city Caracas and other major cities have not been hit by rationing yet. Two years ago, rationing there lasted five months when a drought hit the Guri dam, the country's largest hydroelectric dam.
But because of the economic crisis, Venezuela has reduced electricity consumption to about 14,000 megawatts at peak hours, according to engineer and former electricity executive Miguel Lara. Two years ago, state-run Corpoelec put the figure at 16,000 megawatts.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-begins-power-rationing-drought-causes-severe-outages-193846729.html
Well, at least they are still being reported at the tops of the list for cheapest gas in the world at 0.01 US Dollars per liter.
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Venezuela/gasoline_prices/
Hooray for cheap Venezuelan gasoline !!!
Badger52
03-17-2018, 06:41
"Of a possible 1,100 megawatts, we are only generating 150 right now," Energy Minister Luis Motta told reporters referring to the Fabricio Ojeda dam, in the western Andean state of Merida.
Bread-math becomes electrical-math.
Too bad gasoline is neither nutritious nor filling.
x/S
Team Sergeant
03-18-2018, 09:48
Too bad gasoline is neither nutritious nor filling.
x/S
LOLOL
Too bad gasoline is neither nutritious nor filling.
x/S
But...it works great for commie helicopter rides...
bblhead672
03-18-2018, 13:50
But...it works great for commie helicopter rides...
and molotov cocktails....
and molotov cocktails....
Absolutely !
And, in yet another teachable moment involving Commies for all to see...at one point Maduro outlawed private ownership of firearms !
...some time later, Maduro reversed himself and actually started issuing small arms ...but...only to his supporters...
Venezuela is a modern Petri dish in progress...
Badger52
07-27-2018, 12:19
I'll admit; I pondered between cleaning patches as to whether to post this here or in Comedy Zone. Is this the opposite of just printing more money with Art Linkletter's portrait on it?
One Million Percent Inflation: Venezuela Removes Five Zeroes from Currency
Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has removed five zeroes from the country’s bolivar currency amid inflation that is expected to reach one million percent by the end of the year.
The announcement comes two days after the International Monetary Fund predicted that Venezuela’s inflation would reach one million percent by the end of 2018. Maduro said the monetary conversion would spark “great revolutionary changes in the economy, which Venezuela demands.”
Such a measure is indicative of the unprecedented levels of inflation experienced by the bolivar currency, which has lost over 99.999 percent of its value since 2010 as a result of socialist economic policies started under Hugo Chávez that created a highly inefficient, nationalized economy.
At current exchange rates, one U.S. dollar is equivalent to 3.52 million bolivares, leading to a total collapse of people’s savings and livelihoods that has left large swathes of the population in desperate need of economic and humanitarian assistance.
Back in March, Maduro announced that the government would print money with three fewer zeros, although the plan was never carried out in full. He has also tried to solve the inflation crisis by repeatedly raising the country’s minimum wage, as well as releasing higher denomination bank notes to prevent people from thousands of banknotes to buy simple products.
Rest of the article here (https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/07/27/one-million-percent-inflation-venezuela-removes-five-zeroes-from-currency/).
Damn, now I got David Gilmour's tremelo'd guitar licks & Roger Waters' voice in my head... better fire up the Strat.
Money, get away
Get a good job with good pay and you're okay
Money, it's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream
Think I'll buy me a football team
Money, get back
I'm all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack
Money, it's a hit
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit
I'm in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet
Money, it's a crime
Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a raise it's no surprise that they're
Giving none away, away, away
tom kelly
07-29-2018, 14:15
I guess those "refugees" will be fleeing their homeland and heading up to the U S / Mexico border for Asylum in the U S A...I believe it is the goal of the Mexican Government to destabilize and destroy the U S A Now is the moment to attack the Narco-Terrorist state of Mexico & it's CRIMINAL Gov. about 200 cruise missiles dispersed around the cartel's drug operation centers would send the right message.... BY THE WAY WHERE IS THE UNITED NATIONS, still hiding in NYC living the good life. tom kelly
There is nothing wrong with Venezuela.
It is a well-governed socialist paradise performing as designed. Why would the UN ever want to declare a wonderful place like Venezuela a failed state?
Badger52
07-29-2018, 18:05
Well, the UNHCR did send out a nice note (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article204753119.html) asking other countries to play nice & do what the US seems to be doing.
BOGOTA, Colombia
Amid the growing exodus of Venezuelans, the United Nations for the first time is asking the region to treat the population as “refugees” who are unable to go home — rather than mere economic migrants.
In a three-page report, the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, also recommends that countries that have received Venezuelans not deport, expel or forcibly return them “in view of the current situation in Venezuela.”
In the document, titled “Guidance Note on the Outflow of Venezuelans,” the agency asks countries to guarantee Venezuelans residency and the right to work, even if they entered the country illegally or don’t have the proper identification papers.
The guidelines would seem to be a rebuke to neighboring Colombia, which has increasingly been deporting Venezuelans and restricting their entry.
Last month, Colombian immigration began requiring new Venezuelan arrivals to present passports — although that document has become difficult, if not impossible, for most people to obtain. New Venezuelan arrivals in Colombia have also been barred from getting work permits except under exceptional cases.
Those measures, Colombian authorities say, have decreased the number of Venezuelans entering the country on a daily basis by 30 percent. (Nah, they're just headed a different direction.)
I'm with Box - the place, like a really bad old McNamara project, passes its gates & is functioning as intended.
Families fleeing a commie utopia...once again and again and again...ya don’t say.
Are the youngsters paying attention ?
Communism damn sure ain’t no safe space...hundreds of millions of shattered lives attest to that over the years.
Families fleeing a commie utopia...once again and again and again...ya don’t say.
Are the youngsters paying attention ?
Communism damn sure ain’t no safe space...hundreds of millions of shattered lives attest to that over the years.
It is because communism and socialism just haven't been administered properly...
if uncle bErnie, Felonia vonPantsuit, jimmy k1mmel, nAncy peLosi, and chucky shumer could run things, it would work just fine
dont you guys pay attention?
rsdengler
07-31-2018, 04:53
It is because communism and socialism just haven't been administered properly...
if uncle bErnie, Felonia vonPantsuit, jimmy k1mmel, nAncy peLosi, and chucky shumer could run things, it would work just fine
dont you guys pay attention?
LOL...then let's just blindfold the lot of them and kick them out of the back of a nice C-130 over the land of "Non-Plenty" Venezuela....Do your jobs you commie-knockers...enjoy your stay in the land of Utopia....love it, "Felonia vonPantsuit"....especially the "prison" orange outfit.....Hee, Hee.....:D
Venezuela's president admits economy has failed
Now you would think this is a good thing but if you read the story you'll see he still blames others outside the country for it's problem. Nothing socialism has done.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/venezuelas-president-admits-economy-failed-193020358.html
"..."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...."
Powerful lessons for would-be young Socialists - prolly too late for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and our other committed Socialists like Bernie and his supporters...but maybe some of them can be persuaded with facts...
As Pete pointed out in his post, Maduro largely blames others for his nation’s problems - but he acknowledges that his economic models have FAILED.
In the article posted here reinforcing the reports of undeniable failure - Maduro does take some responsibility and the photos and personal accounts are compelling. Edited excerpts below with complete article at link.
The Venezuelan city where nothing works: Running water comes once a month and cash machines are empty - as president Maduro finally admits his socialist economic policies have 'FAILED'
Daily Mail
By AFP and JULIAN ROBINSON FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 05:50 EDT, 1 August 2018 | UPDATED: 06:07 EDT, 1 August 2018
'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.
Industry is operating at just 30 percent, perhaps best reflected by the farming sector which supplies barely a quarter of national consumption having provided 75 percent a few years ago, the National Farmers Federation said.
In San Juan, Florimar Nieves, a 39-year-old primary school teacher said of life in the city: 'They send (running) water once a month. The rest of the time we have to buy it.
'There have been times where we've had no electricity for 24 hours.'
'No more whining, I want solutions comrades!'
Venezuela's economic crisis that saw the International Monetary Fund predict inflation would reach one million percent this year, has hit San Juan hard.
And this in the country that was once one of the top 10 oil producers in the world.
Adults and children alike, dressed in shabby, ill-fitting clothes, walk long distances to get to work or school, tired of waiting hours for one of the few buses still running.
Those who cannot buy water and haven't received any for weeks face trips to the 'tap' in the center of town, supplied by a system of pipes leading from a well.
'We come here two or three times a week. We haven't had water for 12 days,' said Arelis Oliveros as she filled up several containers.
The problem has reached such desperate levels that 17-year-old Alejandro often washes in rain water because his grandfather's house, where he lives, regularly goes days without receiving water.
'Sometimes I get fed up with washing this way because I smell bad, so I treat myself, blowing 10,000 bolivars on the bus to go and wash at my mother's house,' he said.
It's luxury in a country where the currency is losing value at such an alarming rate that the largest denomination bank note, 100,000 bolivars, which once would buy five kilograms (11 pounds) of rice, is barely enough for a single cigarette.
Cash has practically vanished from circulation throughout the country, but in San Juan the cash machines don't work anyway and residents have to queue for hours at banks to withdraw money.
In any case, they are only allowed to withdraw a maximum of 100,000 bolivars, half the price of single egg.
President Nicolas Maduro's government has announced it will try to ward off economic collapse by stripping five zeros off the currency, but a similar move by his predecessor Hugo Chavez 10 years ago - he knocked off three - didn't stop the country descending into today's crisis.
The socialist government has over recent years nationalized various industry sectors such as cement and steel, expropriated hundreds of businesses, including supermarket chains, and lately brought in the army to control street markets to guard against rising prices.
It has also fixed prices on various goods and imposed a monopoly on foreign exchange.
<snip>
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6014493/The-Venezuelan-city-running-water-comes-month-cash-machines-empty.html
bblhead672
08-01-2018, 09:36
Powerful lessons for would-be young Socialists - prolly too late for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and our other committed Socialists like Bernie and his supporters...but maybe some of them can be persuaded with facts...
As Pete pointed out in his post, Maduro largely blames others for his nation’s problems - but he acknowledges that his economic models have FAILED.
In the article posted here reinforcing the reports of undeniable failure - Maduro does take some responsibility and the photos and personal accounts are compelling. Edited excerpts below with complete article at link.
The Venezuelan city where nothing works: Running water comes once a month and cash machines are empty - as president Maduro finally admits his socialist economic policies have 'FAILED'
Daily Mail
By AFP and JULIAN ROBINSON FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 05:50 EDT, 1 August 2018 | UPDATED: 06:07 EDT, 1 August 2018
'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.
Industry is operating at just 30 percent, perhaps best reflected by the farming sector which supplies barely a quarter of national consumption having provided 75 percent a few years ago, the National Farmers Federation said.
In San Juan, Florimar Nieves, a 39-year-old primary school teacher said of life in the city: 'They send (running) water once a month. The rest of the time we have to buy it.
'There have been times where we've had no electricity for 24 hours.'
'No more whining, I want solutions comrades!'
Venezuela's economic crisis that saw the International Monetary Fund predict inflation would reach one million percent this year, has hit San Juan hard.
And this in the country that was once one of the top 10 oil producers in the world.
Adults and children alike, dressed in shabby, ill-fitting clothes, walk long distances to get to work or school, tired of waiting hours for one of the few buses still running.
Those who cannot buy water and haven't received any for weeks face trips to the 'tap' in the center of town, supplied by a system of pipes leading from a well.
'We come here two or three times a week. We haven't had water for 12 days,' said Arelis Oliveros as she filled up several containers.
The problem has reached such desperate levels that 17-year-old Alejandro often washes in rain water because his grandfather's house, where he lives, regularly goes days without receiving water.
'Sometimes I get fed up with washing this way because I smell bad, so I treat myself, blowing 10,000 bolivars on the bus to go and wash at my mother's house,' he said.
It's luxury in a country where the currency is losing value at such an alarming rate that the largest denomination bank note, 100,000 bolivars, which once would buy five kilograms (11 pounds) of rice, is barely enough for a single cigarette.
Cash has practically vanished from circulation throughout the country, but in San Juan the cash machines don't work anyway and residents have to queue for hours at banks to withdraw money.
In any case, they are only allowed to withdraw a maximum of 100,000 bolivars, half the price of single egg.
President Nicolas Maduro's government has announced it will try to ward off economic collapse by stripping five zeros off the currency, but a similar move by his predecessor Hugo Chavez 10 years ago - he knocked off three - didn't stop the country descending into today's crisis.
The socialist government has over recent years nationalized various industry sectors such as cement and steel, expropriated hundreds of businesses, including supermarket chains, and lately brought in the army to control street markets to guard against rising prices.
It has also fixed prices on various goods and imposed a monopoly on foreign exchange.
<snip>
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6014493/The-Venezuelan-city-running-water-comes-month-cash-machines-empty.html
What Venezuela needs is the US to export a few million leftist SJW's down there to straighten the government out. One way tickets of course. Any SJW's who survive may reapply for entry back into US after passing citizenship exam. :D
Badger52
08-01-2018, 09:52
One way tickets of course. Any SJW's who survive may reapply for entry back into US after passing citizenship exam. :D"Your number is 3,176,483. Now serving #4...number FOUR?"
What Venezuela needs is the US to export a few million leftist SJW's down there to straighten the government out. One way tickets of course. Any SJW's who survive may reapply for entry back into US after passing citizenship exam. :D
I like it...for all who aspire to be a Lefist...travel to Cuba or Venezuela...weather isn’t bad...Michael MoorON says healthcare rocks...system is already in place and just needs your “brilliant” ideas.
rsdengler
08-01-2018, 12:10
"Your number is 3,176,483. Now serving #4...number FOUR?"
Now serving number.........4.5......LOL......:p
Now serving number.........4.5......LOL......:p
Link
(https://www.***.com/watch?v=hiJ0_Ht9l48)
:D
Badger52
08-01-2018, 16:52
Link
(https://www.*******.com/watch?v=hiJ0_Ht9l48)
:DNo linkee.
No linkee.
It's there, you just have to know how to get around TS's YT ban. ;)
No linkee.
Replace the **** with that video viewing website name.
Badger52
08-01-2018, 19:40
Ahh, roger. Gracias.
rsdengler
08-02-2018, 04:55
Replace the **** with that video viewing website name.
Am I "computer challenged", or should the link be a NASA video?....LOL.......:p Or am I number 4.6?......Ha.....
Replace the **** with that video viewing website name.
Am I "computer challenged", or should the link be a NASA video?....LOL.......:p Or am I number 4.6?......Ha.....
See the quote above...
Badger52
08-19-2018, 05:19
Petro CRYPTOCURRENCY to become official currency alongside bolivar
VENEZUELA is to make its homegrown cryptocurrency, the Petro, an official currency alongside the bolivar as the South American nation continues to battle hyperinflation which has left it on the brink of economic collapse.
President Nicolas Maduro announced state-owned oil giant Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) will begin using the digital token from Monday, August 20.
In a television address, the Venezuelan leader revealed the country would soon have two units of currency: the digital Petro and the ‘sovereign bolivar’, ABC International reports.
He said his government would also introduce a new salary and pricing systems which will be pegged to the cryptocurrency.
The announcement comes as the oil-rich nation grapples with hyperinflation which some forecasters have warned will soon hit one million percent.
Rest of story w/photos here (https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1003908/venezuela-petro-cryptocurrency-latest-venezuela-economic-crisis-maduro).
Directly linking a crypto currency that isn't legal in the US against the dollar to an already-failed hard currency of your country... what could go wrong? (or maybe it's 'wrong-er')
:munchin
Ret10Echo
08-19-2018, 06:43
Petro CRYPTOCURRENCY to become official currency alongside bolivar
Rest of story w/photos here (https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1003908/venezuela-petro-cryptocurrency-latest-venezuela-economic-crisis-maduro).
Directly linking a crypto currency that isn't legal in the US against the dollar to an already-failed hard currency of your country... what could go wrong? (or maybe it's 'wrong-er')
:munchin
More proof that Socialism works
More proof that Socialism works
I thought people support Socialism so the don’t have to work.:D
Team Sergeant
08-19-2018, 11:19
More proof that Socialism works
Petro CRYPTOCURRENCY to become official currency alongside bolivar
The accepted currency of drug trafficking cartels worldwide.
CRYPTOCURRENCY, 1% legit uses, 99% criminal use. Perfect for corrupt socialist communist countries worldwide.
The progressives here should spend a few years down south and see if their “elite” ideas can actually fix this mess - before they continue to foist their socialist ideas on the rest of the USA.
U.S. charges Venezuela's socialist elites with stealing even the food
September 12, 2018
American Thinker
Monica Showalter
For socialists, socialism isn't about equality: It's about getting rich.
And as Venezuelans grow hungry from the economic mismanagement of socialist policies, whether through the devaluation of their currency, or the price and currency controls that have triggered shortages, losing an average of 19 pounds in the ordeal, sure enough, Venezuela's socialists have found a new way to get rich. According to the BBC:
The US has accused Venezuela's government of stealing from a state-run food programme while its own people go hungry.
Marshall Billingslea, a US treasury official, said Venezuelan government officials were over-charging for food.
He said corruption by President Nicolás Maduro and his inner circle had "impoverished millions" of Venezuelans.
The Venezuelan government blames US sanctions for the food shortages the country is experiencing.
Mr Billingslea, who is the Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing at the US treasury department, accused President Maduro of "rapacious corruption" and of operating "a kleptocracy".
Gad. Stealing from the starving. Always gotta get some, is that it? Funny how socialism always seems to lead to stealing, while all the while, its proponents, such as Bernie Sanders, call it 'sharing.'
I have not found any information about this so-called state food program, but there were some when I visited Venezuela in late 2005. One was called Mercal, which was put in place to provide discount foods to the poor because the small local groceries were supposedly charging too much. The 25% to 50% state-store discount put those mom-and-pops out of business, leaving just the government food programs, run by Venezuela's military. With their monopoly established, the stealing opportunity was there, given that there would be no need to satisfy customers, either through price or availability of goods.
Which would match the U.S. official's description of Chavista socialist elites overcharging for food while the country starves.
Chavista socialist elites have always been famous for their stealing. The U.S. is currently investigating massive amounts of thievery around Miami from Venezuela's state oil company, according to many reports. Like any bank robbers, the greediest ones go where the money is. But downwind, the Chavista elites steal, too, because socialism is essentially about thievery; I mean, 'redistribution.' They do it with votes, too.
What we see here is a particularly horrific example of the rapacious nature of socialism. They steal even the food from the starving people. As President Trump said at the United Nations recently:
Venezuela's socialism hasn't failed because it wasn't properly implemented. It failed because it was faithfully implemented.
Obviously, stealing does that. Are you listening, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/us_charges_venezuelas_socialist_elites_with_steali ng_even_the_food.html#ixzz5QtcTXFgQ
Volunteer
11-15-2018, 15:13
A new Venezuelan ID, created with China's ZTE, tracks citizen behavior.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/venezuela-zte/
miclo18d
11-28-2018, 06:10
A very well written history brief of Venezuela’s decent into madness. The last paragraph is bent into a pro 2nd amendment view. https://ammo.com/articles/venezuela-economy-collapse-socialism-oil-envy-demagogues
This should be required reading to understand the glories of the “workers paradise”; it’ll never happen.
Venezuela and the Paradox of Plenty: A Cautionary Tale About Oil, Envy, and Demagogues
As Venezuela falls into the abyss of economic collapse – the economy has halved in five years, a contraction worse than the Great Depression or the Spanish Civil War – a simplistic narrative in the American press has formed, which starts with the Chavez regime seizing control of the country in 1998. *
(The charismatic populist Hugo Chavez is, after all, the leader most Americans are familiar with when talking about Venezuela, as he made worldwide headlines with his 2006 UN speech where he called U.S. President Bush "a devil" while celebrities like Sean Penn and Michael Moore cheered him on.)
In the 1950s, Venezuela enjoyed its place among the top 10 richest countries on a per-capita basis. How has it turned into a country where more than 2.3 million of its 30 million citizens have fled since 2015 due to starvation? A toxic mix of creeping interventionism, institutional decay, private property seizures, irresponsible fiat monetary policy, and wide-ranging corruption are the main culprits. But Chavez wasn’t the instigator of this mess; the story goes back much further and should serve as a cautionary tale about one country’s faithful adherence to the tenets of socialism to the bitter end.
The Early Venezuela Economy: From Backwater to Boom Country
Gaining its independence from Spain in 1811, Venezuela started out as one of Latin America’s most politically unstable countries, remaining that way until the early 20th century. During this period, Venezuela was primarily a coffee exporter, but the game changed when its first oil field was completed in 1914. From that point forward, Venezuela went from a regional backwater to Latin America’s richest country in a matter of decades.
Oil reserves weren’t the only factor behind Venezuela’s economic success. Property rights were respected, regulations were low, sound money was the norm (Venezuela did not have a central bank unitil 1939) and the country was able to attract skilled immigrants from Italy, Portugal, and Spain. These factors helped catapult Venezuela to one of the richest countries in the world by the 1950s. Some estimates had Venezuela in the top 10 richest countries on a per capita GDP basis.
Venezuela Transitions into Military Rule
Interestingly, Venezuela was governed by numerous military dictatorships during this time period. Juan Vicente Gómez, who helped consolidate the modern-day Venezuelan state, ruled from 1908 until his death in 1935. Although Gómez had a tyrannical reputation for his suppression of free speech and other basic civil liberties, he did not tamper with the Venezuelan economy. After Gómez’s death, democracy advocates struggled to reform the government for nearly 15 years. Despite the democratic activists’ efforts, Venezuela reverted back to military rule in 1948, under the tutelage of Marcos Peréz Jiminéz.
Under the regime of Peréz Jiminéz, Venezuela received international praise for its economic performance. That being said, the Peréz Jiminéz regime did experiment with certain interventionist policies such as the creation of the state-owned steel company SIDOR and the government’s encroachment into the hospitality industry. But these interventionist policies would pale in comparison to the welfare statism pursued in the following decades.
Enter Democracy and President Rómulo Betancourt
Nevertheless, trouble was brewing. Peréz *Jiminéz was no saint, and turned to repression to quell opposition to his regime. Peréz Jiminéz's heavy-handed responses to protests generated a strong opposition movement from leftist activists. It did not help that the business class in Venezuela was also growing weary of Peréz Jiminéz's spending programs. These factors turned into the perfect storm in 1958. A coup organized by high-ranking military officials and the Patriotic Junta – a political coalition made up of the Democratic Action, COPEI (Christian Democrats), and the Communist Party of Venezuela – succeeded in toppling Peréz Jiminéz.
Once Venezuela rid itself of Peréz Jiminéz, the country began its transition to democracy. One of the renowned leaders of Venezuela’s democracy movement was Rómulo Betancourt, who eventually became the country’s president in 1959. In previous decades, Betancourt made a name for himself as a left-wing student activist. His political rabble-rousing against then dictator Juan Vicente Gómez would get him exiled from the country. Betancourt was a former member of the Communist Party while exiled in Costa Rica. And although he eventually renounced his Communist approach, Betancourt still believed in a massive state role in the economy.
Betancourt’s socialist lite vision was reflected in the Venezuelan Constitution of 1961, which set the foundation for a vast series of government interventions – labor rights, land reform, and oil industry regulation. In his article, Hugo Chavez Against the Backdrop of Venezuelan History, economist Hugo Faria details the extent of Betancourt’s government interventions:
“One of Betancourt’s first decisions as president was to undertake a land reform aimed at breaking up large landholdings (latifundia). New “owners” of the redistributed land received titles of use, but not full ownership rights. Betancourt’s government established a central planning office called CORDIPLAN, adapted to a mixed economy..
...Betancourt devalued the currency, raising the bolivar price of the dollar from 3.30 to 4.50, and implemented exchange controls. He also increased overall government expenditures, especially consumption outlays. His government tripled the income tax rate, raising it from 12 percent to 36 percent, made the tax more complex, and introduced numerous graduated brackets. Years of successive fiscal deficits made their first appearance and then became a hallmark of Venezuela’s public finance.”
Although Betancourt’s government did not do much damage off the bat, it sowed the seeds for much bigger reforms. These reforms came into fruition in the 1970s, when Venezuela had its first oil bonanza.
The Rise of Petro State Social Democracy
When President Carlos Andrés Pérez came into power in 1974, he ushered in an unprecedented era of government growth. At the time, the world was going through a profound energy crisis, from which Pérez sought to profit. Like any sympathizer of big government, Pérez channeled petroleum rents to finance his extravagant spending program. The nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry was a crucial step in consolidating Pérez’s vision.
The government did not stop there. Fashioning itself as an all-powerful steward of economic affairs, the Venezuelan government also nationalized the iron industry during the Pérez era. Additionally, the Venezuelan state played the crony capitalist game of choosing winners and losers in the market. Protectionism also became entrenched during this period, as tariffs were placed on a wide array of goods and non-tariff barriers such as import quotas were enacted.
However, no government spending binge is complete without an easy money policy. The Pérez administration made sure to politicize its Central Bank by effectively nationalizing it. From there, Venezuelan politicians had a printing press and a petroleum revenue piggy bank to finance their government largesse.
The Beginning of a Lost Decade
Once the 1980s arrived, Venezuela was drunk on debt and was forced to make several tough calls. Pérez’s successor, Luis Herrera Campins, stated that he inherited a “mortgaged” country.
And in 1983, the first major domino fell. Venezuela was forced to devalue its currency during Black Friday. Once Latin America’s strongest currency, the Bolívar’s 1983 devaluation opened the floodgates for subsequent monetary malfeasances.
Institutional inertia remained strong in Venezuela as the Herrera administration responded with exchange controls to curtail capital flight. Venezuela’s system of multi-tiered exchange rates would fall under the purview of the “Differential Exchange Rate Regime” (RECADI) agency. Following the Herrera administration, Jaime Lusinchi’s presidency was riddled with scandals. Members of the political class profited off of Venezuela’s exchange rate boondoggle through sweetheart deals and favorable exchange rates that would otherwise not exist in a functioning market economy.
Public outrage and political pressure forced the Venezuelan government to abolish the RECADI exchange control system. However, RECADI’s legacy would be etched in the Venezuelan political economy. It served as an inspiration to the Commision for the Administration of Currency Exchange (CADIVI) and its successor, the National Center for Foreign Commerce (CENCOEX) – two hallmarks of United Socialist Party of Venezuela’s reign throughout the 2000s.
What looked like an unstoppable growth miracle, Venezuela faced its first decade of economic stagnation during the 1980s.
The IMF’s Mixed Bag of Reforms
Like any ambitious politician, Carlos Andrés Pérez re-entered the political scene in the late 1980s. His presidential campaign promised a return to the 1970s bonanza. But once in office, *Pérez would be surrounded with several uncomfortable truths. Not only was Venezuela heavily indebted due to its extravagant spending programs, but it was non-competitive at the international level thanks to its protectionist policies. Furthermore, Venezuela’s golden goose, oil, could not bail it out thanks to the low prices throughout the 1980s.
miclo18d
11-28-2018, 06:11
Part II
Pérez would immediately turn to the International Monetary Fund for help. The IMF’s suggestions were ultimately a mixed bag. On the positive side, they encouraged tariff reductions and privatization of state-run industries. That being said, the government could not tame inflation, implemented a value-added tax on top of the income tax system, and did not even bother to privatize its state-owned oil company.
Nevertheless, the tariff reductions and privatizations gave the economy some breathing room. But Pérez’s market reforms weren’t without political pushback. In fact, his attempts to restore some semblance of normalcy to the Venezuelan economy would lead to his undoing.
Hugo Chavez and Political Breakdown
Unfortunately, in the middle of these reforms, political drama began to rear its ugly head. Pérez’s own party, Democratic Action (AD), was not a fan of Pérez’s economic program. Fearing that his economic liberalization schemes would undermine their political privileges, they worked tirelessly behind the scenes to stop Pérez’s reforms.
Additionally, AD had plenty of help on the streets. An assortment of leftist groups took to the streets and protested Pérez’s “austerity” policies. These protests snowballed into the infamous “Caracazo” incident of 1989. In this instance, the Venezuelan government put down a series of protests in the capital city of Caracas, leaving hundreds dead.
Even with this repressive incident, radical groups continued to mobilize throughout the country. One group that stood out was then Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez´s organization, Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (MBR-200). Chávez exploited the ever-growing political disarray by organizing an anti-government movement within the Venezuelan military. The MBR-200 attempted to flex its muscles in 1992, with two failed coup attempts.
As punishment for his failed uprising, Chávez was imprisoned. Nevertheless, the damage to the bipartisan model had already been done. As social unrest snowballed, the Pérez administration gradually lost the public’s trust. Pérez’s fate was sealed when he was impeached for corruption charges in 1992.
By then, the Punto Fijo model had completely collapsed. The Venezuela of the 1950s to 1970s – an era of robust growth and political cohesion – soon became a distant memory. The Punto Fijo model then gave way to a new coalition, Convergence (Convergencia), of disgruntled political parties. Headed by President Rafael Caldera, Convergence attempted to reassemble the broken pieces of Venezuela’s political machine.
In terms of policy, Rafael Caldera maintained Venezuela’s statist model of economic organization. Caldera continued implementing certain lukewarm IMF measures, but inflation raged on, peaking at 100 percent in 1996. Structural problems like privatizing Venezuela’s national oil industry were never addressed. Big business’ cozy relationship with the government also remained intact.
The Failure of Soft Socialism
No matter how apologists of Venezuela’s democratic era (1958-1998) slice it, its political class delivered sub-optimal results. From 1958 to 1998, Venezuela’s per capita GDP growth was a disappointin -0.13 percent. In essence, Venezuela grew poorer during the Punto Fijo period.
Charles Jones, the author of Introduction to Economic Growth, categorized Venezuela as a “growth disaster” for its lackadaisical economic performance. The only other Latin American country in this economic hall of shame was Nicaragua – a country under the iron grip of a socialist regime and the victim of a bloody civil war.
By the time Chávez entered the political ring, Venezuela was ripe for the taking. Its disillusioned masses were looking for a savior outside of the political status quo, and Chávez fit the bill. At first, Chávez masked his radical Marxist intentions by positioning himself as an anti-corruption candidate.
However, his actions betrayed his neutral rhetoric. Out-and-out Marxists would join Chávez’s brain trust and move him towards radical socialism once in office. Sadly, Venezuela’s fed-up voters were not aware of this when they casted their ballots for Chávez. Unbeknownst to them, Chávez was about to take Venezuela on a dangerous ride.
The Rise of Socialism
Chávez was correct in his assessment of the previous Punto Fijo order’s corruption. Unfortunately, he continued the same failed policies, expanding their reach and enacting them in a tyrannical manner.
Property rights went out the window once Chávez had full control of the state apparatus. Expropriation of private property became the norm during the Chávez years. According to some reports, the Venezuelan government confiscated upwards of six million acres of farmland. Foreign companies such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips also fell on the wrong side of the Venezuelan government’s expropriation crusade.
Economic ignorance continued with currency and price controls, which have caused massive distortions in the Venezuelan economy. In fact, price controls are the main culprit behind Venezuela’s infamous shortage crisis.
Making matters worse, Chávez politicized Venezuela’s Central Bank and state-owned oil company, which were already under too much government influence. State-owned PDVSA was used as a money spigot to finance Chávez’s social spending projects. The Venezuelan Central Bank cranked up the printing press and increased the money supply at astronomical rates. Consequently, hyperinflation is now a reality in Venezuela and is on par with Germany in 1923, the year of Hitler’s infamous Beer Hall Putsch that sought to capitalize on the Weimar Republic’s failed economic policies.
Although Chávez died in 2013, his tyrannical socialist system lives on with his successor Nicolás Maduro. Maduro has continued Chávez’s policy of plundering PDVSA, stripping it of investment, sacking experienced managers, and replacing them with sycophantic military officers.
Even though Venezuela has the world’s largest energy reserves according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the corruption and mismanagement of state-owned PDVSA is symbolic of the larger collapse of Venezuela. In many regards, Venezuela is a failed state and has reverted back to its historical mean – an increasingly fragmented, political backwater.
What’s Next for Venezuela?
Long lines to get basic food items. Hospitals running out of medical supplies. Starving people eating zoo animals.
These look like scenes from a post-apocalyptic film. However, these are lurid images of what present-day Venezuela is going through. By opting for the “death by a thousand cuts” route of state intervention in the marketplace, widespread institutional decay, private property seizures, fiat money, and rampant corruption – all pursued in the name of a socialist utopia – Venezuela is bleeding to death from self-inflicted wounds.
One can only wonder how this film would have played out had the Venezuelan populace been armed. Countries like the U.S. have avoided Venezuela’s fate in part due to the presence of armed civilians as a check against would-be tyrants.
If Venezuela had any semblance of a Second Amendment, the Venezuelan people could have stood up against Chávez or Maduro’s tyranny. Human history features repeated episodes of tyrants running roughshod over defenseless subjects, and the Venezuelan case is no different. Political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli was correct in his observation that force is the option of last resort against despots:
“You must know, then, that there are two methods of fighting, the one by law, the other by force: the first method is that of men, the second of beasts; but as the first method is often insufficient, one must have recourse to the second.”
For this tragic chapter of the Venezuelan story to come to a close, the Venezuelan people will have to choose a different path – a path in which property rights and free markets are respected. From there, this horror story will eventually become a distant memory.
Until then, Venezuela is joining South Africa as yet another 21st-century casualty of socialism.
Badger52
11-28-2018, 06:24
A very well written history brief of Venezuela’s decent into madness.Thanks; I've shared this with several who're in the "here; you need to catch up..." category.
Thank you for that summary miclo18D.
We should be more like Venezuela - think of how grand it would be -
We would just be BETTER at being Venezuela than the Venezuelans because OUR socialists are so much smarter than theirs......
bblhead672
11-28-2018, 10:18
Exactly the utopia Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America want to implement in the United States.
tom kelly
11-29-2018, 16:05
Exactly the utopia Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America want to implement in the United States.
WHO WILL BE IN ACTUAL CONTROL OF THE TRIDENT D-5's.... PEOPLE STILL BELIEVE THAT BULL SHIT ABOUT THE LAUNCH CODE RESIDING WITH THE POTUS. Each of the nuclear subs has two crews a blue and a gold who are deployed for an equal number of months on the boat. The knowledge and intellect of the crews is IMHO sufficient to program & launch the weapons on board; NO NEED FOR THE FOOTBALL, THE AGREEMENT AMONG ADVISORS, THE TURNING OF THE 2 KEYS as seen in the movies...I think that as few as 10 people on the boat could launch the D-5's tom kelly
rsdengler
11-30-2018, 12:14
Exactly the utopia Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America want to implement in the United States.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez needs to be skewed with spikes through her hands and feet and laid out on the hot desert sand covered with fire ants......so, what's for lunch? :D
Old Dog New Trick
11-30-2018, 13:47
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez needs to be skewed with spikes through her hands and feet and laid out on the hot desert sand covered with fire ants......so, what's for lunch? :D
Why do you hate fire ants? :D
She is going to be the gift horse that keeps on giving. The 17,500 New York voters that elected her, have given the Republicans a chance to retake the House, Senate and Presidency in 2020. Every time she opens her mouth stupid and ignorance gleefully spews out.
Why do you hate fire ants? :D
She is going to be the gift horse that keeps on giving. The 17,500 New York voters that elected her, have given the Republicans a chance to retake the House, Senate and Presidency in 2020. Every time she opens her mouth stupid and ignorance gleefully spews out.
Maxine Waters is gonna have some competition for who is the looniest congress critter, Cortez the sister she always wanted.
Badger52
11-30-2018, 15:07
Maxine Waters is gonna have some competition for who is the looniest congress critter, Cortez the sister she always wanted.Wait till Waters gets a coveted Financial Committee assignment and can pretend to speak about economic matters thinking she'll be taken seriously.
:cool:
Lol, yeah...if only...
Caravan Of Liberal Americans Makes Way Toward Socialist Paradise Of Venezuela
Babylon Bee
October 25th, 2018
MEXICO—A migrant caravan full of leftists desiring to enter the socialist paradise of Venezuela departed the United States Thursday and began marching toward through Mexico, stating they will demand asylum so they might experience the far better life that socialism offers.
The migrants claim they are leaving America because of its high standards of living, strong economy, and record employment numbers, and hope to find a better life in Venezuela's much more equitable system.
"Everyone there has the same quantity of possessions and food," said one marcher. "Everyone makes millions of dollars, and very few people work. It's a real paradise." The refugees have complex motivations, but the vast majority simply want to see everything socialism has to offer after suffering the amazing benefits of capitalism for too long.
Caravan organizers dispelled rumors that they were funded by Bernie Sanders, claiming the caravan was an organic grassroots movement.
At its current pace, the caravan is expected to arrive just in time for Venezuela to run out of food entirely.
https://babylonbee.com/news/caravan-of-liberal-americans-makes-way-toward-socialist-paradise-of-venezuela
Badger52
12-02-2018, 10:53
Lol, yeah...if only...
Oh. Please. From your keyboard to God's clue-bat applied to their ears. Please.
:cool:
Seriously, that was well done.
I understand Sean Penn was not available for comment.
rsdengler
12-02-2018, 12:41
Why do you hate fire ants? :D
She is going to be the gift horse that keeps on giving. The 17,500 New York voters that elected her, have given the Republicans a chance to retake the House, Senate and Presidency in 2020. Every time she opens her mouth stupid and ignorance gleefully spews out.
Ha.......As long as they keep stinging that Bitch; well hating is easy...LOL:D
Every time she opens her mouth, makes me want to knock her teeth down her throat....
Maxine Waters is gonna have some competition for who is the looniest congress critter, Cortez the sister she always wanted.
Yep, and for the life of me why would any person with a sound mind, and some form of intelligence vote for those ignorant cows? Wait, it's the "looney left", or should we say "looney tunes". It boggles the mind; Maxine Waters, James Brown in drag. What a total POS; both of them....LOL...;)
If you ain't got a pot to piss in - they'll promise you your own pot - and you'll vote for them - and you'll get it because it's "free" - but you could have bought your own pot if you would have worked a little harder.
And when they keep telling you somebody is after your pot you'll keep voting for them just to keep your pot.
So after a while you'll still have your pot - but nothing to put in it but piss.
Badger52
12-11-2018, 17:41
Some interesting numbers from an RT article (https://www.rt.com/business/446144-venezuela-hyperinflation-over-million-parliament/), ostensibly from the National Assembly itself:
As of end of November:
Inflation at 1,300,000 per cent
Oh, yeah, the good news...
The monthly RATE of inflation is down:
According to the report by the National Assembly, the figure declined to 144 percent in November compared to 148 percent the previous month and 233 percent in September.
Whew, they almost had me worried there for a minute.
Remain calm, All is well.
ALL IS WELL !!!
The machine is working exactly the way it was designed.
rsdengler
12-12-2018, 09:25
Yeah.....they are going to "Implode".....and when they do, lets just throw in a few of our wonderful, leftist-socialist scumbags from the Entertainment world and a few of our elected ass clown politicians.....Implode Baby...:lifter
Venezuelans regret gun ban, 'a declaration of war against an unarmed population'
Hollie McKay
Fox News Digital staff
3 hrs ago
CUCUTA, Venezuela/Colombia border – As Venezuela continues to crumble under the socialist dictatorship of President Nicolas Maduro, some are expressing words of warning – and resentment – against a six-year-old gun control bill that stripped citizens of their weapons.
“Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear declaration of war against an unarmed population.”
Under the direction of then-President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2012 enacted the “Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law,” with the explicit aim to “disarm all citizens.” The law took effect in 2013, with only minimal pushback from some pro-democracy opposition figures, banned the legal commercial sale of guns and munitions to all - except government entities.
Chavez initially ran a months-long amnesty program encouraging Venezuelans to trade their arms for electrical goods. That year, there were only 37 recorded voluntarygun surrenders, while the majority of seizures - more than 12,500 – were by force.
In 2014, with Nicolás Maduro at the helm following Chavez’s death but carrying through his socialist “Chavista” policies, the government invested more than $47 million enforcing the gun ban – which has since included grandiose displays of public weapons demolitions in the town square.
A former gun store owner inside Venezuela – who told Fox News he has now been relegated to only selling fishing supplies since the ban – said he can’t sell any type of weaponry - even a slingshot - and underscored that even BB ammunition and airsoft guns are only issued to police and military officers.
The punishment for illicit carrying or selling a weapon now is 20 years behind bars.
Prior to the 2012 reform, there were only around eight gun stores in the entire country. And the process of obtaining a legal permit to own and carry was plagued by long wait lines, high costs and bribery “to make the process swifter” at the one department allowed to issue licenses, which operated under the umbrella of the Ministry of Defense.
“Venezuelans didn’t care enough about it. The idea of having the means to protect your home was seen as only needed out in the fields. People never would have believed they needed to defend themselves against the government,” Vanegas explained. “Venezuelans evolved to always hope that our government would be non-tyrannical, non-violator of human rights, and would always have a good enough control of criminality.”
He said it didn’t take long for such a wide-eyed public perception to fall apart. “If guns had been a stronger part of our culture, if there had been a sense of duty for one to protect their individual rights, and as a show of force against a government power – and had legal carry been a common thing – it would have made a huge difference,” he lamented.
Since April 2017, almost 200 pro-democracy protesters in Venezuela – armed mostly with stones – were shot dead by government forces in brutal retaliation to their call to end the oppressive socialist regime. The once oil-wealthy nation has continued its downward spiral into financial ruin, extreme violence, and mass human rights violations. An estimated three million Venezuelans have been forced to flee since 2015.
“Venezuela shows the deadly peril when citizens are deprived of the means of resisting the depredations of a criminal government,” said David Kopel, a policy analyst, and research director at the Independence Institute and adjunct professor of Advanced Constitutional Law at Denver University. “The Venezuelan rulers – like their Cuban masters – apparently viewed citizen possession of arms as a potential danger to a permanent communist monopoly of power.”
Although the bill was sold to the population as a hardline effort to improve security, and sharply reduce crime, many now point to Venezuela as a case study for how gun prohibition can actually produce the opposite effect.
The violent crime rate, already high, soared. Almost 28,000 people were murdered in 2015 – with the homicide rate becoming the world’s highest. Compare that, according to GunPolicy.org – an international firearms prevention and policy research initiative – to just under 10,000 in 2012, and 6,500 thousand in 2001, the year before Chavez came to power.
The total number of gun deaths in 2013 was estimated to 14,622, having steadily risen from 10,913 in 2002. While comprehensive data now goes unrecorded by the government, in September this year, Amnesty International declared Venezuela had a murder rate “worse than some war zones” – 89 people per 100,000 people - and three times that of its volatile neighbor Brazil.
Much of the crime has been attributed by analysts to government-backed gangs – referred to in Spanish as “collectivos” – who were deliberately put in place by the government.
“They were set up by the government to act as proxies and exert community control. They're the guys on the motorcycles in the poor neighborhoods, who killed any protesters,” said Vanessa Neumann, the Venezuelan-American president and founder of Asymmetrica, a Washington, D.C.-based political risk research and consulting firm. “The gun reform policy of the government was about social control. As the citizenry got more desperate and hungry and angry with the political situation, they did not want them to be able to defend themselves. It was not about security; it was about a monopoly on violence and social control.”
So while Venezuelan citizens were stripped of their legal recourse to bear arms, the “collectivos” – established by Chavez when came to power – were legally locked and loaded. Deemed crucial to the survival of the socialist dictatorship, the “collectivos” function to brutally subjugate opposition groups, while saving some face as they aren’t officially government forces, critics contend.
Eduardo Espinel, 35, who serves as a representative for the rapidly growing Venezuelan population in the Colombian border town of Cucuta – having fled his ailing nation two years ago under the threat of being kidnapped by local gangsters – said the law had proliferated the violence by allowing the collectivos to freely and legally shoot and kill.
“Everyone else but the common citizen. This law asks for the disarming of the common people, but everyone else can carry,” Espinel said. “The kind of law might make sense in a normal country, but in Venezuela, it makes no sense. People are faced with crime and have no easy means to defend themselves.”
And Maribel Arias, 35, who was once a law and political science student at the University of Los Andes in her home state of Mérida but fled to the Colombian border with her family two years ago – living mostly on the streets as she and her husband take turns finding odd jobs such as selling water and attending bathrooms and while sharing the parenting duties of tending to their four children – bemoaned that they simply cannot rely on the nation’s law enforcement.
“The people of Venezuela should have rights for gun carrying because there is just too much crime and people should have the right to defend themselves because the justice system is not working,” Arias asserted. “If you call the police, the police come only if they want. If they capture the criminal maybe they will take away whatever they stole, but they normally go free again. It’s a vicious cycle.”
Many contend the gun ban has in some ways hurt police and law enforcement, who have themselves become a more fervent target of street gangs. There was a 14 percent increase in police murders in 2016. And more than 80 percent of assailants subsequently stole the officer’s gun, according to Insight Crime.
Some experts contend many of the weapons and ammunition used by gangsters were once in the hands of government forces, and obtained either through theft or purchase from corrupt individuals.
And adding to the complication, the ranks of the police force are beleaguered by crime and corruption. “Crimes are committed by police, a lot of the criminals are police themselves,” said Saul Moros, 59, from the Venezuelan city of Valencia.
Luis Farias, 48, from Margarita, said that gun violence was indeed bad when guns were freely available for purchase. But it became much worse after the gun ban was passed. “Now the criminal mother is unleashed,” Farias said. “Trying to ban guns didn’t take guns off the streets. Nobody cares about the law; the criminals don’t care about the law.”
A black market in weapons is also thriving. There are an estimated six million unregistered firearms circulating in Venezuela, but they remain far from reach for the average, non-criminal Venezuelan.
Continued from article above...
“The black market of weapons is very active, mostly used by violent criminals,” said Johan Obdola, a former counter-narcotics chief in Venezuela and now president of Latin America-focused, Canada-based global intelligence and security firm IOSI. “Venezuelans simply looking to protect themselves from the regime are totally vulnerable.”
Prices vary daily. But an AR-15 rifle goes for around $500, sources said, while handguns sell for about $250. Those prices are far beyond the reach of the average Venezuelan.
“Most guns can be bought illegally in a sort of pyramid structure. A big irregular group or criminal organization has the best access to weapons directly from the government, and they sometimes even get access to basically new unused weaponry," explained Vanegas. "The longer down the pyramid you are, you must get your weapon from the nearest big irregular group that overpowers you within your territory. This is not an option for any moral person, due to the fact that you need to deal with criminals in order to get an illegal gun. And for many obvious reasons, people will not even consider this.”
The Venezuelan government denies it is in a deeply deteriorating crisis, caused by its own policies. Rather, it blames the United States and opposition leaders for waging an “economic war.”
According to Omar Adolfo Zares Sanchez, 48, a lawyer, politician, and former mayor of Campo Elías municipality in the Venezuelan state of Mérida, it is now all but too late to make guns legally accessible to the average person.
“Without a doubt, if there had been a balance of armed defense we could have stood up and stopped the oppression at the beginning,” he contended. “But there is too much anarchy on the streets now. Making guns easier for anybody to buy now would start a civil war.”
Other Venezuelans argue that while violence has indeed rapidly increased in the years since the gun ban, it might have been that much worse as the economy collapsed, and the country deteriorated. “The problem from the beginning and still now is that there are too many people in Venezuela who are lawless. Crime is a way of living,” said Emberly Quiroz, 25, mother of three. “Access to weapons won’t solve the problem.”
https://www.foxnews.com/world/venezuelans-regret-gun-prohibition-we-could-have-defended-ourselves
Let me drill it down for all of you that are getting confused...
We need to listen to the Sean Penns, Jim Carneys, Danny Doritos, Sammy Silver-men, and Bernie Sandunes of the world - Venezuela did socialism wrong. The fact that Vuvuzelans are starting to complain about gun control IS NOT proof that social-ism is a bad ism - it is proof that conservative views about freedom and liberty are bad.
The people in V-town that are bitching about gun control are WHAT is wrong with Vuvuzela. Vuvuzela was doing just fine until conservatives tried to get all buisnessy and profity. It was doing just fine until all of the damn missionaries showed up and subverted the government.
Vuvuzela was doing JUST FINE with gun control until their citizens got all "woke" and decided they wanted a little bit of freedom and liberty...
...and food, they wanted some food too.
They had to get all 'woke' and then they strated clamoring about freedom and liberty and food - and look what it got them.
Turn-in your guns - do what the governing class tells you to do - and the governing class will be just fine.
Otherwise, you fuck things up for everybody.
Or as 'The Rock' would say - "know your role and shut your mouth"
silly capitalists - get with the program
Badger52
12-18-2018, 20:52
Gee, I guess we all just misinterpreted what Bernie knew all along... (https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-gaps-disparities-that-threaten-america)
These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now? (written in 2011)
TTFN, I'm off to bake some more Schadenfreude Pie. (Because I have a kitchen in my house, food in that kitchen, and am healthy enough to do it, and, ah screw it, just because I can.)
Gee, I guess we all just misinterpreted what Bernie knew all along... (https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-gaps-disparities-that-threaten-america)
TTFN, I'm off to bake some more Schadenfreude Pie. (Because I have a kitchen in my house, food in that kitchen, and am healthy enough to do it, and, ah screw it, just because I can.)
Bernie Sanders is a symbol of all that is wrong in our country. A rich old white guy from new england who essentially makes his money by preaching about how damaging it is to our country to have rich old whitre men in charge of our country...
...and then campaigns for the job of "runner of the country" - And people fucking love him!!! In our current climate - it is very possible that he could have beat trump him 2016 - but hey, Vuvuzela is where the American dream is
Come and listen to a story 'bout a man named Ed
Poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed
Then one day he was beggin’ for some food,
And up through the ground come a bubbling crude
(Oil that is, black gold, Venezuelan tea)
Well the first thing you know old
Ed’s a millionaire
Kin folk said, Ed move away from there
Said Venezuela is the place you oughta be
So they loaded up the truck
and they moved to next to the sea
(Caribbean that is, cess pools, movie stars)
rsdengler
12-19-2018, 11:13
Bernie Sanders is a symbol of all that is wrong in our country. A rich old white guy from new england who essentially makes his money by preaching about how damaging it is to our country to have rich old whitre men in charge of our country...
...and then campaigns for the job of "runner of the country" - And people fucking love him!!! In our current climate - it is very possible that he could have beat trump him 2016 - but hey, Vuvuzela is where the American dream is
This Country is soooo F'd up..(sort of like my life). Bernie Sanders is a perfect example of a putrid, slimy cesspool and the people who follow him drank the freakin contaminated kool-aid. They don't want to contribute, they don't want to work, they want everything handed to them, and they expect something that is not earned. People who think extreme leftist socialism is "good" for society have a rude awakening. It's an illusion, and they fall for it every time. Yeah, Bernie is a rich, fat, old POS white guy who's wife is corrupt and it's freakin OK...because he's BERNIE....and he will give you everything; for a price that is.....The New Venezuela...come on over you filthy animals, and drink the f'ing kool-aid.....;)
Five of Maduro’s Big Lenders Want Their Money Back. Good Luck.
https://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/south-america/item/30955-five-of-maduro-s-big-lenders-want-their-money-back-good-luck?vsmaid=2563&vcid=8714
Get in there first before it's all gone. Well, it is all gone so they're going to be fighting over scraps.
"Five investment firms holding $380 million of one of Venezuela’s bonds demanded payment of both the principal and unpaid interest on Monday. This could be the trigger that unleashes an avalanche of claims by more than 40 creditors holding $150 billion of Venezuela’s debt.
The Marxist regimes that have controlled Venezuela for the last 20 years have finally run out of other people’s money, and now those other people want it back....."
Badger52
12-19-2018, 15:18
The Marxist regimes that have controlled Venezuela for the last 20 years have finally run out of other people’s money, and now those other people want it back....."I'm thinking (laughing, actually) of a really good soliloquy from "The Goodfellas"...
:D
I guess to big to fail is not in their vernacular.
tom kelly
12-19-2018, 17:43
I think that the "problems " in Venezuela are self-correcting they will have an all-out civil war and the winner is ????? Not Socialism. tom kelly
I suspect that the advice "find the socialists and kill them" would be discarded as being simplistic.
Maybe next year.
If there are any free citizens of the country alive.
Badger52
12-19-2018, 22:38
I suspect that the advice "find the socialists and kill them" would be discarded as being simplistic.
Maybe next year.
If there are any free citizens of the country alive.Such a good idea I'm stunned that someone hasn't thought of it before.
Triple intra-thread points on your Player's Club Card.
:D
Badger52
01-18-2019, 13:03
Sportier times, and with many countries regarding the recent elections as illegitimate and recognizing the Venezuelan Nat'l Assembly as the only legitimate auth in Venezuela; we'll see how far Maduro wants to take this.
It may be Venezuela’s last chance to oust Maduro — if Trump and others act fast
For the first time in many months, Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro finds himself on the defensive as a newly invigorated opposition mounts an internationally backed effort to restore democracy. It may be Venezuela’s last chance to avoid becoming another Cuba.
President Trump, alongside the leaders of Brazil, Colombia, and other Latin American democracies, could help expedite Maduro’s ouster if they move fast and declare Juan Guaidó — president of the country’s opposition-controlled National Assembly — as the acting president of Venezuela.
That could set off a series of potentially devastating events for the Maduro regime.
Full article at the Miami Herald HERE (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andres-oppenheimer/article224622595.html).
Five of Maduro’s Big Lenders Want Their Money Back. Good Luck.
https://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/south-america/item/30955-five-of-maduro-s-big-lenders-want-their-money-back-good-luck?vsmaid=2563&vcid=8714
Get in there first before it's all gone. Well, it is all gone so they're going to be fighting over scraps.
"Five investment firms holding $380 million of one of Venezuela’s bonds demanded payment of both the principal and unpaid interest on Monday. This could be the trigger that unleashes an avalanche of claims by more than 40 creditors holding $150 billion of Venezuela’s debt.
The Marxist regimes that have controlled Venezuela for the last 20 years have finally run out of other people’s money, and now those other people want it back....."
A classmate of mine from grad school is a very experienced lawyer specialising in international recovery of assets/debts including debt owed by sovereign nations.
Some pretty interesting stuff.
She’s had all kinds of assets seized.
Maybe Venezuela has identifiable foreign assets worth seizing.
I recently finished an outstanding book called Covert Action:
https://www.amazon.com/Covert-Action-Reagan-Struggle-Poland/dp/0393247007
A great read on President Reagan’s CIA backed non kinetic effort to support Solidarity and implode Communism in Poland, the Warsaw Pact, and eventually the Soviet Union.
What I took from it was the simplistic “good versus evil” capitalism versus communism battle of ideologies was successful when partnered with and supporting an indigenous freedom movement.
Hopefully the sme result is achieved in Venezuela.
However, with how long Zimbabwe was kept on life support under Mugabe and drip fed by China.....perhaps it may take much longer with subsidy from China.
My concern would be China looking at Venezuela like the US/UK did in 1953.
Monroe Doctrine be damned.
Ret10Echo
01-21-2019, 14:03
Things continuing to spiral:
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela plunged deeper into turmoil on Monday as security forces put down a pre-dawn uprising by national guardsmen that triggered violent street protests and the Supreme Court outlawed the opposition-controlled congress’ defiant new leadership
Story here (https://www.apnews.com/f54498b2dc9a430aa04d1d2b82d629c1)
Look through the photos associated I noted two things:
1. A disarmed populace throwing rocks.
2. A well armed national police force.
Just an observation
Badger52
01-21-2019, 14:06
1. A disarmed populace throwing rocks.
2. A well armed national police force.
Just an observationDemocrat Socialists' wet dream.
Always remember, you can’t have a so called “socialist paradise” with a truly free and well armed citizenry.
Ret10Echo
01-22-2019, 14:33
Meanwhile in neighboring Brazil:
SAO GONCALO, Brazil (AP) — Fearing for his safety amid rising crime in Latin America’s largest nation, Paulo Alberto joined a gun club three years ago and learned to shoot. But he says Brazil’s tight carry laws that mean he can’t take his gun anywhere but to the club limit his ability to protect himself outside his home.
“The current laws are very strict and end up helping out the thugs,” Alberto said between rounds at the Calibre 12 gun club in this city across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro. “We need laws to make it easier to both possess and carry guns.”
It’s a view held by many, including Brazil’s new President Jair Bolsonaro. On Tuesday, Bolsonaro, a former army captain who waves to supporters with his hands in the shape of pistols, took a first step toward dramatically increasing the number of guns in Brazil, the nation that leads the world in total homicides.
By decree, Bolsonaro eliminated the requirement that aspiring gun owners justify to federal police officials why they need a firearm, creating instead a wide range of qualifying circumstances. The categories are so broad — citizens living in rural areas, those in urban areas with high levels of homicide, business owners, gun collectors and hunters — that just about any citizen age 25 or older wanting a firearm could effectively get one.
Old Dog New Trick
01-22-2019, 14:47
Meanwhile in neighboring Brazil:
How long before the homicide rate plummets and crime drops to historic levels?
How many times has it been said - "gun control has nothing to do with guns"
Central America - South America - North America - North Pole - south Pole - South Bronx - Bucking Broncs....
We might as well blame spoons for obesity.
If we controlled the size of spoons - fat people wouldn't be able to eat as much.
If we ban spoons, well - we'll all get skinny.
I mean for fuck sake - if you want to see a success story that correctly illustrates what a successful socialist society looks like - go no further than Venezuela.
Venezuela is NOT a failing state - at least not in the context of socialism - it is a socialist success story.
Ret10Echo
01-22-2019, 15:50
Meh.... Who cares. According to O-C the LIKE world is going to LIKE end in LIKE 12 years due to LIKE climate change.....
Badger52
01-22-2019, 16:00
Meh.... Who cares. According to O-C the LIKE world is going to LIKE end in LIKE 12 Months due to LIKE climate change.....Oh, SNAP! I thought I had 12 years left.
Whenever things settle down POTUS should approve a CODEL junket for her to Venezuela - one way.