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Borneo Jimmy posted:Interesting because because the government just handed over control of ANTV to the workers. If only he would give them houses as well! Alas, the people must be punished for their disobedience.
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Dec 10, 2015 01:12
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It reminds me of when the premier of East Germany told the people that they had failed the
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Dec 10, 2015 01:19
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Fuel subsidies cost Venezuela about 50 billion a year. If they scrapped the subsidies they could give every Venezuelan around $1600 a year, or provide a $3000 minimum income for the poorest 50% of the country. I just can't imagine how that change could be a political loser. How many poor Venezuelans own cars? And tangentially, maybe Maduro is crazy because he was a bus driver, not because bus drivers are dumb, but because bus drivers had a high exposure to leaded gasoline.
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Dec 10, 2015 01:40
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If they completely eliminate the fuel subsidies and start selling gas at Colombian prices it'd be a massive blow for everyone, no way they are going to do that, what they can do is gradually increase the prices because currently you can go to a gas station and with a couple coins you find on the floor it's enough to drive away with a full tank, it's ridiculously cheap.
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Dec 10, 2015 01:46
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I mean it's not so much that the subsidies exist, as the fact is that practically none of the needed refining is done on Venezuelan soil, so every subsidized liter had to be paid for at a US refinery.
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Dec 10, 2015 01:52
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Venezuela has 147 vehicles per 1000 people. I get that the 30% of households with a car might lose, but the 70% of households without one would be much better off. Does Venezuela have public mass transit? Are people worried about their bus fare going up?
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Dec 10, 2015 02:03
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JeffersonClay posted:Fuel subsidies cost Venezuela about 50 billion a year. If they scrapped the subsidies they could give every Venezuelan around $1600 a year, or provide a $3000 minimum income for the poorest 50% of the country. I just can't imagine how that change could be a political loser. How many poor Venezuelans own cars? You're assuming they'd be able to pay for that gasoline in the first place. You can scrap the subsidies but gas consumption will go way down because people can't afford it without the subsidies. The 50 billion won't just appear out of thin air. It actually has to be collected. JeffersonClay posted:Venezuela has 147 vehicles per 1000 people. I get that the 30% of households with a car might lose, but the 70% of households without one would be much better off. Does Venezuela have public mass transit? Are people worried about their bus fare going up? Yes. Extremely. They can raise the prices but it's not going to be the instant fix you are dreaming of.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:08
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fishmech posted:I mean it's not so much that the subsidies exist, as the fact is that practically none of the needed refining is done on Venezuelan soil, so every subsidized liter had to be paid for at a US refinery. And that every gallon of gas consumed domestically, instead of being exported, is lost revenue. Venezuela consumes as much gas per capita as the UK but without any real industrial sector to show for it. It's the same pattern with Saudi Arabia and the UAE albeit they have taken it to another level.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:14
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JeffersonClay posted:Venezuela has 147 vehicles per 1000 people. I get that the 30% of households with a car might lose, but the 70% of households without one would be much better off. Does Venezuela have public mass transit? Are people worried about their bus fare going up? You're forgetting that it will really hit transportation prices for all goods. Sure most people don't drive but you make the gas prices sane and prices for everything else are going to rise even higher.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:23
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The only city with a proper subway is Caracas. Valencia and Maracaibo have one too but they only have like one or two lines so they might as well not exist, the vast majority of people move around in busses or cars, if gas suddenly costs $40 to fill up the average car then no one would be able to afford it and it'd be essentially a general strike like back in 2003 because no one would be able to get anywhere, so no they aren't going to completely eliminate the subsidies, in fact I doubt they are going to raise prices at all until the PSUV are out completely.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:31
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It strikes me as strange that Venezuela doesn't have oil refineries seeing as both Ecuador and Colombia do.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:34
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fishmech posted:You're forgetting that it will really hit transportation prices for all goods. Sure most people don't drive but you make the gas prices sane and prices for everything else are going to rise even higher. Depending on the distribution of fuel use it might be a decent compromise to only start eliminating the subsidy for private personal vehicles and then apply it to public and commercial vehicles later.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:36
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Borneo Jimmy posted:Interesting because because the government just handed over control of ANTV to the workers. So he waited all this time before handing the station to the employees? Maybe this is how socialism will come about in Venezuela. Have the PSUV nationalize poo poo and then get scared and give government assets to the employees once the opposition wins. This must have been Chavez's plan the whole time. He knew he was going to die due to U.S. interference so he nationalized everything he could until the PSUV inevitably lost the election. This could backfire though as most politicians would be too stubborn or greedy to hand away nationalized entities. So Chavez put in place Maduro, the pure red hearted socialist, who would see the light of the future. Even in death Chavez pulls the strings.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:43
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CalmDownMate posted:It strikes me as strange that Venezuela doesn't have oil refineries seeing as both Ecuador and Colombia do. Venezuelan crude is primarily of a kind that's harder to refine. Currently only the US and maybe a country in Eurasia somewhere have refineries that can handle it. Which incidentally means that the US can collapse the Venezuelan economy anytime it wants simply by holding up ships carrying crude to the US from Venezuela and refined product back.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:43
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CalmDownMate posted:It strikes me as strange that Venezuela doesn't have oil refineries seeing as both Ecuador and Colombia do. Venezuela has oil refineries but all the good engineers left the country and PDVSA has gone to poo poo with massive accidents like the one in Amuay that have crippled production, and our refineries can't process the super heavy oil that its being extracted from the east of the country anyway.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:43
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CalmDownMate posted:It strikes me as strange that Venezuela doesn't have oil refineries seeing as both Ecuador and Colombia do. Hell, we (Uruguay) have one and we don't even have oil. What could a new government do about the money Chavez and Maduro have squandered to buy support in the rest of South America? The only guy I've heard mention it was Capriles. There's lots of people nervous around here about not being able to sell you "books" at $1K a pop anymore, though.
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Dec 10, 2015 03:00
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Woolie Wool posted:It reminds me of when the premier of East Germany told the people that they had failed the that's a bertold brecht poem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung quote:After the uprising of the 17th of June pretty  IMO
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Dec 10, 2015 03:24
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JeffersonClay posted:Venezuela has 147 vehicles per 1000 people. I get that the 30% of households with a car might lose, but the 70% of households without one would be much better off. Does Venezuela have public mass transit? Are people worried about their bus fare going up? Let me start by quoting something I posted a few days ago: AstraSage posted:Well, given I live in times where most people in Valencia want to drive their cars the least possible out of fear of wearing them off (Fixing them is a months-long nightmare with Spare Parts hunting, dealing with Mechanics' costs, Insurance inflations), I could see them willing to accept a rise in the fuel prices as long as the Public Transportation sectors get to keep the fuel discount for a bit longer. To be honest, computer parts summed it up the best but more stuff of the the big picture still seems needed to be seen, so brace for the incoming  :Thanks to the fact the Family's Only Car has been out of commission for the last three months, I have come to familiarize once again with my daily routine depending a lot much more on bus trips (For the last two years, I used to take only the bus when returning home from college no later than at 1PM for security reasons) and how much of a strain it can put in my finances as well as putting a lot of things in the perspective of those without any other means of transport, and it's not pleasing being aware the bus driving cooperatives has been eagerly looking for more than half a year for reasons to get their proposal of increasing the bus fare prices from Bs.18 (in theory, because devaluation has made bills under the Bs. 10 mark practically useless and thus people are actually expected to pay Bs. 20 and not get any change for) to Bs. 50 approved. Considering numbers seem to be looked upon a lot for arguments, here are a few domestic-themed ones to elaborate the implications of such increase: First, keep in mind the average person from the Southern neighborhoods has to take around six buses around the city during a day, spending Bs. 120 that day (by the Bs. 20 per bus trip cost and without the 50% Discount Seniors and Students can get when they don't pay it with a Bs. 20 marked bill and up). If they repeat that amount of trips only on weekdays, they'll be spending around Bs. 600 a week, which in turn during a month the transport expenses accumulate into something inside the Bs. 2400 to Bs. 3000 range. If compared to the current minimum salary of Bs. 9649 (not that I would call it minimum because there are workers that can get paid a lot less than that, such as College Professors), you can see how said monthly transport expenses can easily take a quarter (if not near a third) of that salary and why people was willing to take a lot of risks and embarrassment in order to get enough of the price-regulated products when they can. But that's nothing compared to how much the fare increase wanted by the bus drivers would affect the spending power of the population if it were to get approved, as the resulting transport expenses taken from the example (Bs. 300 a day, Bs. 1500 a week, Bs. 6000 to Bs. 7500 a month) would end up consuming near two thirds of the minimum salary (or alternatively, the entirety of its predecessor from this year's May), and given it's known that people can travel on bus many more times than that during the month, it's simpler to point where it can be disastrous for a generally starving population. This also makes less surprising the fact the Government spent the first few months of the year constantly advertising about how ridiculous the fuel subsidies are and how their proposed increase was needed, only to quietly put it in the backburner at some point (probably somewhere around when the Esequibo debacle started this year) and pretend the ads never happened. Polidoro posted:Hell, we (Uruguay) have one and we don't even have oil. Can you please elaborate on what do you mean by "books"? Usually when we in Venezuela heard anything about importing from Uruguay, it was about food like Cheese, Soy-based Products or something like that.
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Dec 10, 2015 15:07
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AstraSage posted:Let me start by quoting something I posted a few days ago: Add to that the possibility that at any time some rear end in a top hat will get on your bus and rob everyone at any time of the day, seriously, gently caress buses. I'm pretty lucky the subway is a decent way to get around in Caracas. Also, I think he's referring to import shenanigans using preferential dollars, or the people who travel there to cash in their travel allotments and need phony receipts to show CADIVI upon return.
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Dec 10, 2015 15:18
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AstraSage posted:Can you please elaborate on what do you mean by "books"? I mean this http://www.noticias24.com/actualidad/noticia/79592/investigan-extrana-exportacion-de-libros-desde-uruguay-a-venezuela/ That's just the first link I found. I'm on my phone. They were actually books but massively overpriced. There was similar things with prefab houses and the presidents son starting a software company, selling at least 10 million dollars in software to your government and closing down the company in just a month.
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Dec 10, 2015 15:51
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Polidoro posted:I mean this http://www.noticias24.com/actualidad/noticia/79592/investigan-extrana-exportacion-de-libros-desde-uruguay-a-venezuela/ This is actually mild, there are a million cases like this and ones where they steal hundreds of millions in these sort of projects that go nowhere, and the cases where they import hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food/goods that either never show up on port or they find the containers months later with all the food rotten. And of course none of these cases are ever investigated and no one is ever held accountable.
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Dec 10, 2015 17:57
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I know but we are an insignificantly small country and even then we got hundreds of millions from Venezuela. I can't even imagine how much did the bigger countries get in exchange for their support.
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Dec 10, 2015 18:13
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Does anyone know a good English language source that covers MUD's policies or plans? Or I guess any Spanish sources written for 3 year olds would work, too. Babys first MUD policy??
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Dec 10, 2015 19:22
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Tom Smykowski posted:Does anyone know a good English language source that covers MUD's policies or plans? Caracas Chronicle is usually p good.
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Dec 11, 2015 00:35
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Maduro was reading tweets live on tv and he accidentally read one that told him to suck it https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-xft1/t50.2886-16/12344245_845391768891576_842083216_n.mp4 lmao
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Dec 12, 2015 19:09
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Tom Smykowski posted:Does anyone know a good English language source that covers MUD's policies or plans? Here's a good rundown http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Venezuela-Election-Aftermath-Privatization-Looms-20151211-0011.html quote:Thursday evening the MUD published on its website a list of laws its lawmakers plan to overturn once they come into office Jan. 5, including revoking price controls that have kept basic goods affordable; privatizing key enterprises and services; giving foreign companies concessions for infrastructure works; strengthening local police forces; and making public media “independent,” or private.
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Dec 12, 2015 19:59
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Those words literally took the shape of an actual weasel and scurried off being an adorable little predator.
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Dec 12, 2015 20:07
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Borneo Jimmy subtly calls opposition policies bullshit by claiming that telesur is a good source of them.
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Dec 12, 2015 20:23
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One of MUDs proposed laws will be one where all members of the PSUV will be required to wear an armband with the party's logo, they have also started building huge camps all over the country using all the constructions materials they hoarded in their economic war against the government but they still haven't revealed what is the planned use for these camps. Find out more at venezuelaanylisis.com and telesurtv.net
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Dec 12, 2015 20:36
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We should all cheer the MUD's plans to embrace capitalism, the only moral social system.
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Dec 12, 2015 21:44
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M. Discordia posted:We should all cheer the MUD's plans to embrace capitalism, the only moral social system. It's certainly not the worst.
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Dec 12, 2015 22:30
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I wasn't being sarcastic. The strategy at this point from the diehards appears to be to point out that fixing the socialist mess will require ending socialism in at least some aspects of the economy, and pointing out to the other socialists how self-evidently bad this is. But after what the PSUV has done, there should be no need to get defensive about ending socialism, as doing so is a positive good.
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Dec 12, 2015 23:27
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It's not even about ending "socialism" or whatever. It's about ending an autocracy that started seventeen loving years ago and left the country in shambles. Whatever name they want to attach to their political scheme is meaningless. They could have called it electrofunkymarxism and it would still be the same corrupt system based around a guy that treats the country as his personal plantation.
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Dec 12, 2015 23:37
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I'm working on translating the document the MUD published outlining it's proposed laws. I'll try to have it done by this time tomorrow.
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Dec 13, 2015 02:34
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It's awesome that your non-totalitarian party won the election with a large enough majority to enact structural reforms. Question I have is, why'd the military let them? I'm certain Maduro and friends would have coup'd y'all if they could.
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Dec 13, 2015 03:13
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One of the things to watch once the new National Assembly gets to work on January 5 is the possibility of a crisis of governance. The rest of the state might simply choose to ignore the National Assembly's demands. And then what? Imagine, for example, that the new National Assembly passes the law granting property deeds to people living in subsidized housing. The Ministry of Housing would have to administer that new policy, but what if they simply choose not to? Or what if, once the amnesty law is passed, the Ministry of Penitentiaries refuses the order to release the political prisoners? Given the fact that the PSUV leadership is even more arrogant and disconnected from reality today than it was before the election, I think this scenario is not too distant. Just earlier today, Maduro called the election "a crisis of great dimensions" and said that it would lead to "a counterrevolutionary power crisis". My Imaginary GF posted:It's awesome that your non-totalitarian party won the election with a large enough majority to enact structural reforms. Question I have is, why'd the military let them? I'm certain Maduro and friends would have coup'd y'all if they could. The Minister of Defense has publicly stated that the rumours that he had any role in the election are completely false, so we'll probably never know if that event really unfolded. Speaking hypothetically, Padrino Lopez may have seen the writing on the wall (~7.5 million votes for the MUD, 2 million more than for the PSUV) and decided to put his foot down. An armed confrontation in the face of such overwhelming rejection of the government would have been a terrible idea. The PSUV's defeat wasn't close by a long shot.
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Dec 13, 2015 03:38
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As was pointed out earlier in the thread, the MUD published an outline of some of the measures it wanted to take in the National Assembly this year. The outline can be found here in Spanish. I've just finished translating it into English, and you can read it here. I've done my best, but some of the sections are a little bit rougher than others because some of the language got fairly complicated, as you can imagine.
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Dec 13, 2015 19:14
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Chuck Boone posted:As was pointed out earlier in the thread, the MUD published an outline of some of the measures it wanted to take in the National Assembly this year. The outline can be found here in Spanish. If this is accurate than MUD is more left wing than pretty much any other major party in Latin America that isn't PSUV. The whole thing reads as Chavez-lite without the authoritarian undertones. Hell much of it reads even further left than the the PSUV. Such as regarding salaries and pensions.
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Dec 14, 2015 01:13
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punk rebel ecks posted:If this is accurate than MUD is more left wing than pretty much any other major party in Latin America that isn't PSUV. The whole thing reads as Chavez-lite without the authoritarian undertones. Hell much of it reads even further left than the the PSUV. Such as regarding salaries and pensions. Eh yes and no, the English translation is a bit difficult to understand (maybe because of the legalese) but the way I take it is they are asking for 1. An end to the price law 2. Re-privatization of some key industries 3. public-private partnerships 4. An broad anti-corruption campaign 5. re-adjusting salaries and pensions for inflation 6. Lowering corporate taxes/cutting fees 7. decentralization of services to localities More or less, it seems rather centrist overall, probably needed to keep MUD unified at this point. I guess the aim to unwind the power structure created by the PSUV in a phased manner on multiple fronts. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Dec 14, 2015 |
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Dec 14, 2015 01:22
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Ardennes posted:Eh yes and no, the English translation is a bit difficult to understand (maybe because of the legalese) but the way I take it is they are asking for Thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt. There were chunks of it that were too Spanish-legalese for me to translate properly, though. However, your summary is exactly what I took out of it in the Spanish version. Some of the language in there (the public-private partnerships, for example) is making Chavez spin in his grave, I'm sure.
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Dec 14, 2015 01:53
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