Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation

New York Times ^ | JUNE 19, 2016 | NICHOLAS CASEY

[grundle]

A staggering 87 percent of Venezuelans say they do not have money to buy enough food, the most recent assessment of living standards by Simón Bolívar University found.

About 72 percent of monthly wages are being spent just to buy food, according to the Center for Documentation and Social Analysis, a research group associated with the Venezuelan Teachers Federation.

In April, it found that a family would need the equivalent of 16 minimum-wage salaries to properly feed itself.

Ask people in this city when the last time they ate a meal, and many will respond that it was not today.

Among them are Leidy Cordova, 37, and her five children — Abran, Deliannys, Eliannys, Milianny and Javier Luis — ages 1 to 11. On Thursday evening, the entire family had not eaten since lunchtime the day before, when Ms. Cordova made a soup by boiling chicken skin and fat that she had found for a cheap price at the butcher.

“My kids tell me they’re hungry,” Ms. Cordova said as her family looked on. “And all I can say to them is to grin and bear it.”

Other families have to choose who eats. Lucila Fonseca, 69, has lymphatic cancer, and her 45-year-old daughter, Vanessa Furtado, has a brain tumor. Despite also being ill, Ms. Furtado gives up the little food she has on many days so her mother does not skip meals.

“I used to be very fat, but no longer,” the daughter said. “We are dying as we live.”

Her mother added, “We are now living on Maduro’s diet: no food, no nothing.”

[antceecee]

Afraid they are accelerating us into civil war.

[wastoute]

So you are saying we have 24 years of oil? Do you realize how many times that has been said and starting when?

[Jack Hammer]

Another success story for socialism.

And yet Bernie garners a following.

[Laser_Ray]

The frustrating thing is that all the young people flocking to Bernie don't really love socialism but are fed up with a passel of broken promises of prosperity. When a young person's initial experience with capitalism is to live without any disposable income after overpaying for rent and necessities, find that their degree not only doesn't bring them an increase in income but may actually disqualify them from jobs (HR is often classifies degreed people as 'overqualified' on the idea that they'll jump ship for a better job, which is idiotic even if there WERE better jobs) and they have to make coffee for min-wage at Starbucks while getting treated like sh!t by not only their boss but every a$$hole who walks in the door, all without a single word of complaint so they aren't fired the same day, they're going to come to the not-unreasonable conclusion that This Really Sucks. So when someone comes along with a system that they've (mostly) never heard about and says "what you have stinks. How about something new?" what do you THINK they're gonna say? "Heck no, I like watching my dreams crumble and living like a sharecropper, God Bless America!" They're gonna jump on it like a kangaroo on a life raft from a sinking ship.