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Labradoodle posted:Unless I'm mistaken, that means the electoral council just bought themselves almost four months to review the 1% of signatures collected, and then an additional four months to review the subsequent 20%. The Onion or the Chiguire couldn't make this poo poo up. This should supposedly last only as long as there is electricity rationing. But of course, the government will find a way to make it last longer.
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Apr 27, 2016 00:14
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M. Discordia posted:There is a point at which complying with the illegitimate orders of the anti-democratic occupation government of Venezuela becomes collaboration. The elected legislature needs to have the courage to follow through on its mandate. It does seem like at some point the legislature has to poo poo or get off the pot in terms of whether they'll continue to allow the president and courts to invalidate their mandate and destroy the country. Maybe they know they'd lose in any conflict right now and that's why they're playing along, and there's always the danger that joining the PSUV in undermining the institutions of government will only weaken them for the future, but the current situation seems bad enough that some risks may be worth taking and they should consider asking for help from the people to implement their will. Of course that's easy for me to say from my safe location in the US, and I'm not trying to suggest I personally would have the bravery to rush barricades and put myself in danger, so I fully understand why the legislators and people of Venezuela in general may prefer caution. I know I just said undermining the institutions of government is a dangerous game, but it would be really great if a Latin American country would take the opportunity one of these days to switch to a less presidential system after a major change in power. Obviously the new government usually has incentives to utilize that power once they have it, but presidential systems (arguably the worst American export) have proven to be particularly prone to this sort of takeover by strongmen pretty much everywhere outside of the US (so far), so setting some precedent for moving away from that model might be a good thing if possible.
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Apr 27, 2016 00:38
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What can they do? Maduro has the courts and the military. The only next step is actual violent revolution, which the Council can't call for openly.
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Apr 27, 2016 01:12
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The Lone Badger posted:What can they do? Maduro has the courts and the military. The only next step is actual violent revolution, which the Council can't call for openly. I'm sure they know what they're doing better than I do, so I'm not trying to play armchair general. It just seems like the situation with bread lines and poo poo is about as ripe for a revolution (or at least making clear that the people are behind you if it does turn into a street fight) as you can get. Surely even members of the military have families who are suffering from a lack of basic goods and services by now?
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Apr 27, 2016 01:30
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Sinteres posted:I'm sure they know what they're doing better than I do, so I'm not trying to play armchair general. It just seems like the situation with bread lines and poo poo is about as ripe for a revolution (or at least making clear that the people are behind you if it does turn into a street fight) as you can get. Surely even members of the military have families who are suffering from a lack of basic goods and services by now? Nah, they really aren't. Even privates, or National Guard, can get away with just showing up at a supermarket and ask for products that everyone else is in queue for. The military isn't unhappy, at best, they're concerned about the real threat of escalated violence across the country. But the government knows very well that they have to keep them satisfied for this poo poo to work. Although I think that all goes to hell the moment they're actually asked to shoot against civilians. Most of them are at least decent enough to know that shooting at unarmed civilians is hosed up. At this moment I'm really starting to think that the opposition is an accomplice to why Maduro is still in power. There is a political game going on there. fnox fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Apr 27, 2016 |
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Apr 27, 2016 02:35
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Also, it's easy to yell for civil disobedience and revolution, but most of the guns in the country are in the hand of people that support Maduro, or delinquents that will probably take the chance to align themselves with the government for (even more) free reign. Mounting up a revolution would end in a giant bloodbath.
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Apr 27, 2016 06:58
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Hugoon Chavez posted:Also, it's easy to yell for civil disobedience and revolution, but most of the guns in the country are in the hand of people that support Maduro, or delinquents that will probably take the chance to align themselves with the government for (even more) free reign. Revolution would be a bloody affair, but the situation already seems to be that you could die from a single bullet anyway (depending on how bad the crime is and gets), or suffer the slower death of a thousand privations because there's no reliable power, water, food, medicine, and other necessities available in the country. And if the government collapses or ceases to effectively govern much of the country (as Labradoodble mentioned on the 23rd in regards to criminal gangs basically getting cities to shut down for their mourning ceremonies), then it's hard to say the situation will be all that much better. Hopefully, the opposition will manage to prevail through the established methods of governance and begin getting the country on the right track, but holy heck does that seem like a tall order from what's been reported in this thread.
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Apr 27, 2016 09:37
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At this point, how many people wish the conspiracy theories about the CIA annexing Venezuela to the U.S. were true?
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Apr 27, 2016 12:58
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M. Discordia posted:At this point, how many people wish the conspiracy theories about the CIA annexing Venezuela to the U.S. were true? OR: How many people think that Maduro is a CIA plant sent by the US to destroy the legacy of Chavismo? And do they outnumber the people who think that Maduro is fighting against a CIA-backed economic war? I don't know why anyone thinks the CIA cares about Venezuela when they're busy fighting a shadow war with the Martian greys and plotting the next 9/11, but  .
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Apr 27, 2016 14:06
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The CIA is the biggest gift the US ever gave to lovely regimes around the world. For every government they've toppled, there are ten out there who get to blame the effects of their terrible mismanagement on a "secret CIA plot".
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Apr 27, 2016 14:46
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Don't forget that whenever they do topple a regime, the one that replaces it is worse! 
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Apr 27, 2016 15:18
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Woolie Wool posted:Don't forget that whenever they do topple a regime, the one that replaces it is worse! Maduro and the VP Aristobulo keep saying Chavez was assassinated by the CIA so yeah thanks for nothing CIA I'd prefer ol Chavez at least he knew how to tell a joke
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Apr 27, 2016 15:22
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-27/venezuela-faces-its-strangest-shortage-yet-as-inflation-explodes Apparently Venezuelas money printers are abandoning them due to huge payment delays. And apparently Venezuela largest banknote is 100 bolivars, and citizens still have to haul cash sacks around.
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Apr 27, 2016 16:07
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There's a bit of hyperbole in that article but yeah, yesterday I bought a pizza and it was 5800 bolivares, that is 58 of the highest denomination bills we have, imagine if you needed 58 $100 bills to buy a pizza in the U.S.
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Apr 27, 2016 16:37
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El Hefe posted:There's a bit of hyperbole in that article but yeah, yesterday I bought a pizza and it was 5800 bolivares, that is 58 of the highest denomination bills we have, imagine if you needed 58 $100 bills to buy a pizza in the U.S. How hard is it to actually buy dollars on the street? At some point dollarization becomes defacto for high value transactions I would imagine. How do you pay for doctor visits (I assume you have to pay the doctor under the table to get prompt service) or other high value services/goods? Are credit/debit cards still in use?
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Apr 27, 2016 16:49
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hypnorotic posted:How hard is it to actually buy dollars on the street? At some point dollarization becomes defacto for high value transactions I would imagine. How do you pay for doctor visits (I assume you have to pay the doctor under the table to get prompt service) or other high value services/goods? Are credit/debit cards still in use? 1- not hard but illegal so you have to do it under the table meaning if you get ripped off then you have no recourse and there are a lot of fuckers taking advantage of the situation and ripping people off 2- dollarization is already de facto yeah 3- they are still in use of course and that's how you pay for most stuff because banks refuse to cash checks or allow you to withdraw more than 10000 or 20000 Bs. per transaction depending on the bank.
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Apr 27, 2016 17:02
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Pharohman777 posted:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-27/venezuela-faces-its-strangest-shortage-yet-as-inflation-explodes What's kind of interesting is even Zimbabwe was not so hosed that it could not pay its money printers to keep tacking on zeroes to the ends of the bills. On the plus side, since Maduro's government can't manage that, maybe the hyperinflation spiral will break down a few months sooner than it otherwise would? It seems that in another year or so, you will literally need a suitcase full of bills to buy a pizza. I can't imagine Maduro's government will do anything to restore people's faith in the bolivar either.
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Apr 27, 2016 17:13
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A year from now if Maduro is somehow still in charge there won't even be a pizza to buy.
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Apr 27, 2016 17:20
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El Hefe posted:A year from now if Maduro is somehow still in charge there won't even be a pizza to buy. I keep telling ya, now is the time to practice your skills at baking mudcakes. When there is no more food, the man with the baked mudcakes will be king.
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Apr 27, 2016 17:32
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My Imaginary GF posted:I keep telling ya, now is the time to practice your skills at baking mudcakes. When there is no more food, the man with the baked mudcakes will be king. what if I'm allergic to mudcakes though
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Apr 27, 2016 17:37
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Saladman posted:What's kind of interesting is even Zimbabwe was not so hosed that it could not pay its money printers to keep tacking on zeroes to the ends of the bills. On the plus side, since Maduro's government can't manage that, maybe the hyperinflation spiral will break down a few months sooner than it otherwise would? It seems that in another year or so, you will literally need a suitcase full of bills to buy a pizza. I can't imagine Maduro's government will do anything to restore people's faith in the bolivar either. Well, part of the problem is that they refuse to just go ahead and add a couple of zeros to those bills. By logic alone they should have already released 500 and 1000 bolivares bills, which would cut down sharply on how much they spend buying them and make a lot of transactions much simpler. But as always, the government absolutely refuses to take any half-rational measure until the last possible second.
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Apr 27, 2016 17:37
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Do they print anything other than 100 notes currently? The idea of printing mountains of 1 Bs notes is humorous.
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Apr 27, 2016 17:59
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JohnGalt posted:Do they print anything other than 100 notes currently? The idea of printing mountains of 1 Bs notes is humorous. There are 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 Bs. notes, also a bunch of useless coins. It costs more to photocopy a Bs. 100 bill than the bill itself.
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Apr 27, 2016 18:07
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the 1 bolivar coins are almost the same as 1 euro and often given to a unsuspecting teller in Europe as if it was an euro, or given to you in return, i was so mad when i was given one and only noticed home that i thrown it down the toilet
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Apr 27, 2016 18:12
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Celexi posted:the 1 bolivar coins are almost the same as 1 euro and often given to a unsuspecting teller in Europe as if it was an euro, or given to you in return, i was so mad when i was given one and only noticed home that i thrown it down the toilet Waste of a good flush. Assuming the Bolivar and the Euro are equivalent in weight (it's a dumb assumption but it should be close enough), you'd need around 43 kilograms of coins to pay for El Hefe's pizza. edit: more anecdotal content Alright guys a funny anecdote from, literally, just now. My group of friends in Valencia just wrote me: quote:Fred: mom went out to eat some Parrilla (think barbeque) right now near [street] and a dude with a gun went in to rob the place. It's pretty wild living there, and kinda surreal hearing the stories of your friends. Hugoon Chavez fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Apr 27, 2016 |
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Apr 27, 2016 18:27
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El Hefe posted:There's a bit of hyperbole in that article but yeah, yesterday I bought a pizza and it was 5800 bolivares, that is 58 of the highest denomination bills we have, imagine if you needed 58 $100 bills to buy a pizza in the U.S. Also, the minimum monthly salary is Bs. 11,577.81. So (for those making minimum salary), imagine paying for a pizza with 58 $100 bills and that one pizza being 50% of your monthly income. Chuck Boone fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Apr 27, 2016 |
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Apr 27, 2016 20:50
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Who is actually making the minimum however(wouldn't it just be rendered obsolete by inflation) ? Or rather, that pizza is not indicative of purchasing power if you are willing to stand in line and play the rationing lottery, so what is a more apt comparison of what your average employed person may be able to afford? Assuming you have dependents who are able to stand in line while one works? I'm just trying to comprehend how people are still able to get by, because it's now reached the point where it sounds so dire that it beats the crap my own parents would tell me about having to put up with when they were kids in regards to lining up for food and such (and back then it wasn't anywhere as violent in terms of street crime etc.) In other news the 25th anniversary of the foundation of Mercosur was an absolute disaster. No presidents except for Uruguay's attended, a lot of Brazilian deputies walked out in protest about Dilma and then Venezuelan deputies interrupted speeches complaining about the changes made to the court. So not only has Mercosur stagnated over 90% of its lifespan, but it can't even hold a self-congratulatory meeting.
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Apr 27, 2016 22:30
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:Who is actually making the minimum however The vast majority of Venezuelans, to pull a number out of my rear end I'd say 70% easily. Let me give you another example, the government sells chickens at a regulated price of Bs. 120 or so but to get one of those chickens not only do you have to stay in line for 6 or more hours, you also have to be lucky enough to be one of the first few to get in line and you also have to hope someone from the national guard, police or military doesn't show up and take a bunch of chickens for themselves to re-sell elsewhere. Or, you just pay ten times that price and you get a chicken without any of the hassle but of course if you earn minimum wage you can't afford it.
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Apr 27, 2016 22:50
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El Hefe posted:It costs more to photocopy a Bs. 100 bill than the bill itself. So how long until bolivars are more valuable as firewood?
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Apr 28, 2016 07:18
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:Who is actually making the minimum however(wouldn't it just be rendered obsolete by inflation) ? Or rather, that pizza is not indicative of purchasing power if you are willing to stand in line and play the rationing lottery, so what is a more apt comparison of what your average employed person may be able to afford? Assuming you have dependents who are able to stand in line while one works? I'm just trying to comprehend how people are still able to get by, because it's now reached the point where it sounds so dire that it beats the crap my own parents would tell me about having to put up with when they were kids in regards to lining up for food and such (and back then it wasn't anywhere as violent in terms of street crime etc.) This is a difficult question to answer, in fact, I wasn't able to find any studies which track this variable. However, a 2015 study made by three of the top colleges in the country found out that 49% of the population then fell under the category of extreme poverty. That is to say, they weren't even able to afford to buy the bare minimum of food to meet a daily caloric intake of 2.200 calories. General poverty was calculated to be at 76%, which also includes people who were able to afford that minimum daily caloric intake, but whose incomes fell short in other areas. The minimum income required to meet that basic caloric intake was calculated to be approximately BsF14.500 a year ago, when the study was made and the minimum wage was approximately BsF7000 at that point if I remember correctly. Nowadays the minimum wage is approximately BsF10000 with an additional allotment of food tickets which nearly doubles it. That year closed with an inflation of approximately 270%. This is by far the highest registered percentage of poverty ever recorded in the country, at least 15% higher than during the events of the Caracazo and the years after, when Chavez executed his failed coup, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
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Apr 28, 2016 14:28
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Hopefully I don't jinx it but power hasn't gone out the last 3 days since the rationing plan started, hurray thanks Maduro for granting me the gift of electricity, only possible in socialism.
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Apr 28, 2016 18:30
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If nobody has anything, everybody shares everything... The purest socialism! Personally I can't comprehend how people are still making it through the months down there - hope there is good luck of some sort, on some front, sometime...
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Apr 28, 2016 18:32
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So the National Assembly has for the first time used its power to remove ministers in order to remove Rodolfo Marco Torres, Minister of Nutrition, arguably the most criminally incompetent member of Maduro's cabinet barring Maduro himself.
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Apr 28, 2016 19:09
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fnox posted:So the National Assembly has for the first time used its power to remove ministers in order to remove Rodolfo Marco Torres, Minister of Nutrition, arguably the most criminally incompetent member of Maduro's cabinet barring Maduro himself. Will it actually stick? Or will they just say "no thanks" and continue like nothing happened?
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Apr 28, 2016 23:35
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wdarkk posted:Will it actually stick? Or will they just say "no thanks" and continue like nothing happened? If the national government followed the law, what would happen next is that Maduro would have to remove Torres from his post. The National Assembly voted for it, but the President is the one who has to carry out the act. That's how I understand it. If that is the case, then there's a 100% chance Maduro will just ignore the vote/the TSJ will rule it unconstitutional, and Torres will stay as Minister of Nutrition until whenever Maduro decides otherwise. Torres was summoned twice to go to the National Assembly to speak about the food scarcity crisis in the country (once for last Tuesday and once for today), and both times he refused to appear. This is the immediate reason for the National Assembly's vote today, the other being the crisis affecting the country. In today's session, MUD deputy Carlos Berrizbeitia presented documentary evidence linking Torres to shady transactions to three sell companies owned by a man named Naman Wakil. Berrizbeitia provided evidence that Torres personally approved contracts with three shell companies owned by Wakil to buy food products at above-market prices. For example, Berrizbeitia had documents that showed that Torres approved the purchase of 15,000 tonnes of meat in 2008 at a price of $4,740 per tonne, when the average price was $2,071. As a result, the contract funneled $31 million "extra" dollars into Wakil's shell company. EDIT: Henrique Capriles, one of the big cheeses over at the opposition, just said that they had collected 1,102,236 signatures for the recall referendum in just 48 hours. They collected 600,000 yesterday alone. The CNE only requires that they collected ~195,000, so it looks like they're going for overkill. This might backfire on the opposition, though: the one guy they'll have at the CNE verifying the signatures is going to take that much longer now. Chuck Boone fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 00:02
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Chuck Boone posted:If the national government followed the law, what would happen next is that Maduro would have to remove Torres from his post. The National Assembly voted for it, but the President is the one who has to carry out the act. That's how I understand it. If that is the case, then there's a 100% chance Maduro will just ignore the vote/the TSJ will rule it unconstitutional, and Torres will stay as Minister of Nutrition until whenever Maduro decides otherwise. Christ, you don't loving funnel 100% of a contract to a shell, you take only 3-6% max. Less outright greed means more overall money to take a percentage off of.
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Apr 29, 2016 01:15
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Chuck Boone posted:EDIT: Henrique Capriles, one of the big cheeses over at the opposition, just said that they had collected 1,102,236 signatures for the recall referendum in just 48 hours. They collected 600,000 yesterday alone. Since there is no chance in hell the referendum will happen this year with how openly hostile the TSJ and CNE are acting, I am now fully convinced that Capriles and Primero Justicia have a plan to get one of their guys in the vice presidency so they can rule from 2017 to 2019 unopposed, exploiting just how unelectable anybody in the PSUV is. If you really think of it, the recall referendum is far too vulnerable of a process, advocating for it as the "easiest" way to get rid of Maduro seems extremely unusual, considering just how easily they allowed the constitutional amendment to die in the TSJ's chopping block, which was the honest-to-god fastest method to change this government. They've also completely loving forgot about Leopoldo Lopez, Capriles' biggest contender and the man who would actually win an election for the opposition, but not for Primero Justicia. He also cancelled the protests in front of the CNE headquarters in Caracas which would have been a huge success. Political games are still being played here and it's pissing me off. I just want this fucker out already.
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Apr 29, 2016 02:16
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If the MUD's candidate is Capriles again then we deserve to have Maduro as president for the rest of his life.
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Apr 29, 2016 02:27
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El Hefe posted:If the MUD's candidate is Capriles again then we deserve to have Maduro as president for the rest of his life. MUD should really troll PSUV by nominating Obama.
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Apr 29, 2016 02:50
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El Hefe posted:If the MUD's candidate is Capriles again then we deserve to have Maduro as president for the rest of his life. Not a candidate. If they wanted a candidate, Leopoldo Lopez would be out of jail already. Hell, if they REALLY wanted to annihilate PSUV they would be preparing Lorenzo Mendoza, arguably the best man for the job with a solid lead over everyone in polls. They don't want an election, they don't want an amendment that limits reelection, they want to get 2 years with a president they like so they can then win the 2019 elections and get a grasp over the country for a good solid 8 years total. The MUD is a very flimsy coalition, it's no wonder that the parties within it are already making games to try and wrestle control of the country once the titan that was once PSUV is dead. I'm also not fully sure if they'll try and seriously get Capriles as president. Maybe Henri Falcon or any other fringe politician that can appeal to PSUV moderates.
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Apr 29, 2016 03:18
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