Posted on 01/12/2018 7:24:31 PM PST by Wally_Kalbacken
SAN CRISTOBAL/BARINAS, Venezuela, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Hungry mobs ransacked a food collection center, and a supermarket in Venezuela's western Andean state of Merida on Thursday and reportedly even slaughtered cattle grazing in a field as unrest over food shortages spread through the country. An opposition lawmaker from Merida, Carlos Paparoni, said four people had died and 10 were injured in the chaos over the last two days, but he did not specify the circumstances. Four years of recession and the world's highest inflation have plunged millions of Venezuelans into poverty, and President Nicolas Maduro's authoritarian socialist regime faces mounting unrest.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.trust.org ...
#1. Look at those bins. Proof that communism succeeds. All the bins are equally empty. Long live the starving masses!
I hate this crap. Hate it. It makes me angry.
It isn’t as if this could not have been foreseen. Real life examples exist. Books have been written. A turnip can figure this stuff out.
Socialism. is a perpetual motion machine sold over and over again by snake oil salesmen.
And like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football Lucy puts down, humankind keeps trying to kick that ball.
It is all so needless. Needless. It is so discouraging and depressing.
The crash is coming here too I fear. We’ve passed the point of no return and it’s inevitable. Youn can’t exist on an ever growing foundation of imaginary money forever. The only question is when.
Critters = livestock, working livestock, dogs, cats, rats, mice, snakes....
After all the critters are eaten then what? Cannibalism?
Where is the fishing industry? Farmers? Eggs? What was Chavez doing with the taxes?
Venezuela used to have a thriving tobacco industry. What happened?
The Mexican elections will be soon. In the lead is a guy worse than Maduro. Build the wall!
What Happened?
The Commies destroyed it.
They stole what they could and squandered it on nonsense like supporting CUBA.
Then they tried to blame the businesses. Then they simply ate the seed corn until the workers were literally starving.
If the citizens had not been disarmed, it would have ended violently instead of starvation.
It is time to Kill Commies.
“I hate this crap. Hate it. It makes me angry.”
Bump
The guy who owns the boat next to ours is from Venezuela. Nice family. He’s talked to me about it a little. He owned a company down there and opened up a branch in another country down there ( he may have told me but I don’t remember which one) as an escape route because he saw it coming. Eventually moved the company to the US and has done quite well. He’s a hard worker. He bought a pos sailboat, that I would never have bought, and has rebuilt it hisself. He works on it every single weekend. Has been 2 years now. What he spent on the boat, slip fees, time and money he put into it he could have bought a super nice boat. But he says it’s his hobby so....shrug.
Venezuela
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela
Corruption in Venezuela is high by world standards and was so for much of the 20th century. The discovery of oil had worsened political corruption,[188] and by the late 1970s, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso’s description of oil as “the Devil’s excrement” had become a common expression in Venezuela.[189]...This corruption is shown with Venezuela’s significant involvement in drug trafficking, with Colombian cocaine and other drugs transiting Venezuela towards the United States and Europe.
It worked just great when oil prices were higher and everybody in Venezuela could cruise on the exported resources of Venezuela.
That’s what’s also happening in Norway, but they are a little more happily situated. They don’t need prices to be as high as what Venezuela needed in order to be viable.
Venezuela needs to believe in some revolutionary ideas now. It has to go capitalist and know how to profitably work, if it is to ascend out of its pitiful situation. But without doing so as a whole, attempts at capitalism will simply be squelched.
Economy of Venezuela
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Venezuela
Venezuela is one of the top four suppliers of foreign oil to the United States. About 500 U.S. companies are represented in Venezuela.[18] According to Central Bank of Venezuela, between 1998 and 2008 the government received around 325 billion USD through oil production and exports in general.[17] Also, according to the International Energy Agency, as of August 2015 the production of 2.4 million barrels per day supplied 500,000 barrels to the United States of America.[18]
This deliberate and cold-hearted defense of the follies of socialism is a crime as great as Walter Duranty's or I.F. Stone's with respect to, as Martin Amis put it bitterly, "Laughter and the Twenty Million" in the Ukraine. We are informed here that the culprit is "recession". It isn't. It's rampant corruption, hyper-inflation, greed, ideological blindness, and pure evil.
WTI crude oil is over $64 per barrel. We’ll see. Venezuela has always been corrupt (as noted in a previous comment with a Wikipedia quote), so a recovery would take a while and only benefit a small portion of the population there much.
Is there enough waste that, if eliminated, Venezuela could still live on its international oil business?
Pray for the people of Venezuela.
Add the history of corruption and ongoing corruption to the following.
Economy of Venezuela
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Venezuela
Revenue from petroleum exports accounts for more than 50% of the country’s GDP and roughly 95% of total exports...During the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s, the economy contracted...commenced a progressive devaluation, and inflation skyrocketed to reach peaks of 84% in 1989 and 99% in 1996, three years prior to Hugo Chávez taking office.
I would largely agree with your post...
Socialism, like a Ponzi scheme, works great when suckers are coming in and propping up those who got in early...in their case, it is their whole country with the oil money, and they squandered it all.
But Venezuela isn’t a shithole, oh no. Leftists make countries shitholes. It’s what they do.
And what makes me really burn is MANY people in our country, who can SEE what is going on even if they can’t study history and see how well it DIDN’T work EVERY other time it has been tried, are still hot and heavy to do it.
They are brain dead.
If the politicians are dumb enough to get within a stone’s throw of these suffering citizens, they will meet the same brutal fate as that cornered Cow. Think of how dangerous the Palestinians have become to the Israelis, armed only with rocks, pebbles and the occasional improvised knife.
That's a great question to which I can only give a partial answer. IF - (1) they can manage to get their experienced oil workers (about 25,000 of them) back from Colombia, where they've increased Colombian output by six times; (2) they can manage to get one of the multinational oil companies that they've already defrauded to come up with some serious investment capital, to (3) rebuild the extraction and especially the storage infrastructure; (4) they climb out from under the $60 billion debt they already owe the Chinese in oil, meaning extract and deliver that much in usable crude, (which they can't at the moment due to inefficiencies in extraction and storage facilities that have been allowed to deteriorate into leakage through lack of maintenance); and (5) restore enough credibility to be able once again to enter into international delivery contracts - if all of these things, then yes, their oil can once again become the foundation of the national economy. Unfortunately, most of these are likely to require a regime change and the establishment of a stable government.
Pray - I know you are, but pray even more - for the people of Venezuela.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.