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thought u guys might want to puke so I brought you this..."wonderful"...crosspost...
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May 31, 2017 17:10
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Punkin Spunkin posted:thought u guys might want to puke so I brought you this..."wonderful"...crosspost... I love chapo podcast and the chapo thread. But they are going tankie right now.
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May 31, 2017 19:15
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Pharohman777 posted:Wait, do they PREFER the soviet union!? Say what you will about the Soviets, at least they weren't as bad off as Venezuela is now.
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May 31, 2017 19:32
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Dapper_Swindler posted:I love chapo podcast and the chapo thread. But they are going tankie right now. After reading the last couple pages of that thread, I'm honestly surprised there are not more Borneo Jimmy's in this one.
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May 31, 2017 20:52
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I dont know posted:After reading the last couple pages of that thread, I'm honestly surprised there are not more Borneo Jimmy's in this one. Ehh. They don't like d&d in general on principle. I mean I am lefty of some stripe and I am worried the country could go hard right when everything collapses. But maduro and the psyche have proven they are unfit to lead and are killing their country while lining their pockets. So gently caress him and them.
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May 31, 2017 21:24
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Dapper_Swindler posted:Ehh. They don't like d&d in general on principle. I mean I am lefty of some stripe and I am worried the country could go hard right when everything collapses. But maduro and the psyche have proven they are unfit to lead and are killing their country while lining their pockets. So gently caress him and them. I mean part of being a real leftist as opposed to a tankie piece of poo poo is being able to recognize when someone is using leftist rhetoric to disguise massive abuses, as Maduro and his gang do.
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May 31, 2017 21:56
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Dapper_Swindler posted:Ehh. They don't like d&d in general on principle. I mean I am lefty of some stripe and I am worried the country could go hard right when everything collapses. But maduro and the psyche have proven they are unfit to lead and are killing their country while lining their pockets. So gently caress him and them. It certainly doesn't help that the current PSUV policy has to gently caress up most of the left, most of the center and most of the right wing from being able to take power from them. It's made it really easy for it to end up being a hard right coup when it could have been a centrist or even left-center takeover by people actually interested in good governance.
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May 31, 2017 23:30
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fishmech posted:It certainly doesn't help that the current PSUV policy has to gently caress up most of the left, most of the center and most of the right wing from being able to take power from them. It's made it really easy for it to end up being a hard right coup when it could have been a centrist or even left-center takeover by people actually interested in good governance. Is this currently the case? From what I've gathered in the thread, it seems like the opposition is super fragmented about everything other than an agreement that PSUV has to go.
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Jun 1, 2017 00:46
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Good loving luck to whoever takes control after Maduro is gone. This kind of damage will take decades to repair.
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Jun 1, 2017 00:48
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fishmech posted:It certainly doesn't help that the current PSUV policy has to gently caress up most of the left, most of the center and most of the right wing from being able to take power from them. It's made it really easy for it to end up being a hard right coup when it could have been a centrist or even left-center takeover by people actually interested in good governance. Not to mention all the 'We're socalist! No, really. Go Marx!' cries by the PSUV and its allies make any real leftists look bad as socialism is used to try and excuse a kleptocracy. In fact, considering how nationalistic and us vs. them the government has become, as well as how the will of the people is ignored for 'chavez's revolution', and how much the military now controls... Venezuela is one step away from the military explicitly taking control, and completing the transformation into a fascist military junta. Pharohman777 fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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Jun 1, 2017 00:51
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I'm on book 2 of the scifi series 3 body problem and I just got to the part where Maduro turns Venezula full communist and rises to a super power and defeats the US in open warfare, only to be recruited into the UN as one of the four grey eminences to hatch a plan to defeat a massive alien invasion fleet. Despite the book having an telepathic alien invasion coming and all-knowing hyper-intelligent robots that fold up into the 11th dimension, this part about Venezula has really shattered any kind of immersion.
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Jun 1, 2017 01:16
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I dont know posted:Is this currently the case? From what I've gathered in the thread, it seems like the opposition is super fragmented about everything other than an agreement that PSUV has to go. Something, something, the CIA is behind it or Chavez didn't go reign of terror.
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Jun 1, 2017 01:25
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I dont know posted:Is this currently the case? From what I've gathered in the thread, it seems like the opposition is super fragmented about everything other than an agreement that PSUV has to go. They used to be at least theoretically able to function in government. But especially in the Maduro administration, the PSUV has really been ramping up arrests/intimidation/exile of competent opposition leadership and rank and file. That's why the opposition is such of a mess right now and only getting worse. They've run off enough of the membership of the other parties that few of them could reasonably take over, alone or in coalitions, from the PSUV. It is kinda like how after the Nazis were defeated in World War II, there just weren't that many people left to replace all the Nazis in government roles anymore, hence how de-Nazification efforts were quickly watered down in different ways in all 4 Allied Control Zones.
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Jun 1, 2017 02:25
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:Man, reading TeleSUR these days is like a portal into a parallel universe. cosmopolitan elites
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Jun 1, 2017 10:25
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Things are getting pretty bad when semi-organized volunteer medics are joining to actively treat protesters. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-4563190/First-aid-volunteers-risk-lives-Venezuela-protests.html "Government supporters have attacked the first-aid group, which has attended to dozens of injured, as part of a terrorist movement. A prominent presenter on state television called the rescue workers a "paramilitary group" and accused them of creating "false positives" to tarnish the image of Maduro's government." Calling a bunch of unarmed medics a paramilitary group is a new low for the PSUV government.
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Jun 1, 2017 19:05
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Pharohman777 posted:Things are getting pretty bad when semi-organized volunteer medics are joining to actively treat protesters. Didn't they already kill one of those people, who we had footage of saving a bunch of kids from being tear-gassed like the day before they murdered him?
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Jun 1, 2017 19:13
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Night10194 posted:Didn't they already kill one of those people, who we had footage of saving a bunch of kids from being tear-gassed like the day before they murdered him? Yes. You're talking about Paul Moreno. He was a medical student and volunteer with the Green Cross. He was killed at a protest in Maracaibo on May 18. I think the evacuation of the kindergarten happened a few days earlier. Moreno likely participated in the evacuation because he had a video on Instagram of a man (very likely himself) carrying a child away from the area. tekz posted:e: while i'm here, have there been any arrests/prosecutions of the people who've killed or attacked protestors so far? The administration of justice (including arrests/prosecutions) is run by the Public Ministry. The head of the Public Ministry right now is attorney general Luisa Ortega Diaz. She's right in the middle of an unprecedented public break with the regime. She's been in the media recently unequivocally condemning the regime's systemic human rights violations in very clear terms. Just today she called a Supreme Court ruling from yesterday declaring that Maduro did not need to put the creation of the Constituent Assembly to a referendum vote "a step back for human rights" in the country. All of that is to say that the Public Ministry has charged official authorities with crimes involving harm caused to protesters. I can't think of any particular cases off the top of my head, but I know for a fact that there are at least half a dozen open investigations into National Guard soldiers who are suspected of having killed/injured protests. The number is likely higher, but I haven't been tracking those figures.
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Jun 1, 2017 23:20
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tekz posted:Anyone have links to good articles on Venezuela's post-Chavez economic crises? I'm specifically interested in the goods shortages, and how those shortages came about. In all honesty, I haven't seen anything that has gone in the depth it needs to. We might have to wait a few years.(If anyone has a link, send it over). That said, looking at the Bolivar, in early 2013 it beginnings rapidly devalue form the 8-15:1 band where is generally considered still a viable currency to 80-90:1 by the end of 2013 where is basically a non-viable currency( anyone with any savings has almost certainly has tried to stash somewhere else). As I mentioned a few times before, I think the most penitent explanation is simply the government started printing in order to subsidize its (even then) dwindling reserves in order to subsidize imports for its rapidly destabilizing price control system. It certainly can be argued there were shortages before 2013, but it seemed as long as the Bolivar still had some value, producers (may) have had a reason to keep on producing . Once the real value of the Bolivar fell then producers had little incentive to produce at what was effectively a loss (sometimes a significant loss). At that point, the government essentially had to buy more from abroad since there was no way to produce it internally. Nationalization didn't work because those now publicly owned producers were under the same restraints as the private ones. The Bolivar completely unraveled soon after in 2014 when oil prices took a giant hit, and the government started printing what had already became a deeply devalued currency. They only kept printing further and took very few steps to actually try to support the currency in any real manner. There are a lot of sins for the PSUV to account for, but I think their lack of basic understanding of how currencies and prices functioned was at the core of why Venezuela began to meltdown in 2013-2014. High crime rates and then political repression had further destabilized the country after it became complete economic cluster gently caress. The Soviets obviously had their own issues with prices, but at least using a completely closed currency system and putting an emphasis on economic planning had some type of logic to it. The PSUV, even besides the corruption, had no loving idea what they were doing and I still don't know if they do. Also, the example of Venezuela blows a complete hole in MMT theory, at least as it applies to countries that aren't the US. (One thing is that probably should be mentioned though is that the public basically elected a scarecrow in October 2012 and Chavez himself is out of the picture in around November-December 2012 as his cancer as already metastasized. Granted, at that point, his cult of personality had done its damage.) Ardennes fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 13:47
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Pharohman777 posted:Wait, do they PREFER the soviet union!? Chavez quite literally stressed that the Soviet Union wasn't democratic and that 21st century socialism would have to go forward learning from past mistakes. Dutch Disease makes you forget tons of poo poo.
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Jun 2, 2017 13:59
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Hey the current government is very democratic they will hold elections as soon as they've made all parties but the PSUV illegal!
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Jun 2, 2017 14:43
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Ardennes posted:Also, the example of Venezuela blows a complete hole in MMT theory, at least as it applies to countries that aren't the US. I don't want to create a huge derail, but care to elaborate on what actually happened in Venezuela that blew such a hole? My fairly uneducated understanding of what happened is that essentially none of the new money was used in productive investment in either the public or private sectors, because the public sector is essentially a kleptocratic money funneling operation and the terrible design of the Venezuelan economy makes useful private investments unprofitable. For people barely aware of what MMT says about economics, it doesn't claim that money creation can be used freely and that it causing inflation is a lie (like the finance minister of Venezuela did IIRC). Instead, it outlines a bunch of conditions where it should never cause inflation. One of those conditions is when the money spent creates a proportional increase in value-creation by creating the conditions for the economy to utilize previously unused real resources (unemployed people, closed factories, stored raw materials...). Sort of like Keynesian stimulus has to actually stimulate private spending rather than just being a magic bullet that makes everything great through more public spending. And to prove Keynesianism wrong using a counterexample, you'd have to point to one where public spending increased private spending in an economy where there was a lack of spending but it didn't help at all, rather than a case where inflation skyrocketed because there was too much spending already, or a case where a ton of public money was spent on corruption and tax cuts for the rich. uncop fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 17:51
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uncop posted:I don't want to create a huge derail, but care to elaborate on what actually happened in Venezuela that blew such a hole? Isn't the fundamental issue that MMT assumes that created money would be put to productive investment, when in reality, it does create a perverse incentive for other uses, especially when the rule of law is weak. Also, in the case of Venezuela capital controls were also used to theoretically "contain" this spending, but this isn't actually solve capital outflows. However, let's say the Venezuela government did the right thing. It is predictable in that case that investment was also going to toward the oil industry, which was theoretically the easiest way for the government to collect rents. However, we know further investment in oil production wasn't going to solve Venezuela's owes. I think there is the problem, to make productive use out of borrowing against a currency, a government absolutely has to make the right decisions with considerable foresight. In the end, I don't see how the population of Venezuela would have gotten much out of borrowing against the Bolivar especially since that borrowing was going to fuel investment in an industry that already has a heavy hand on its future. I honestly don't know how a country that borrowed against its currency the way Venezuela did is going to dig its way out of that hole even if they made saner choices. I admit there is still the possibility only borrows what it needs to and essentially "makes all the right choices" but I think there is just too much baggage to make it a viable solution. (Furthermore, there is absolutely tons of corruption in Venzeuela, but at the same time I don't think it fully explains where the money went which in all honesty I think went to funding imports and as the the value of the Bolivar detached with prices this only put further stress on the system and increased shortages.)
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Jun 2, 2017 18:29
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Well, it depends on how you define further investment. It takes a lot of reinvestment just to keep what you've got running as it is. They didn't do it or even reserve the money to do it, and that's why their output is curling up and dying.
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Jun 2, 2017 19:39
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Just look at how neglect of their ports has meant that tons of crude oil meant for export ends up leaking into the harbors, directly losing them money even before you consider how the ships now need to be cleaned off before they can leave or anything.
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Jun 2, 2017 19:49
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Then there was that incident a few years ago where literally tons of meat rotted in a port. Or that power crisis where there were constant browouts and blackouts in caracas because a dam was drying up and there were no other power plants that could help pick up the slack. Over 5 years ago, when Chavez was still thought of with rose tinted glasses, I read an article where a journalist went to the farms that were nationalized then given back to the people in pieces. He discovered that there was no farming happening at all in most of them, and people were paying others to stay on the land and collect the subsidy. I remember it because the sheer flagrant waste stuck in my mind, as well as the similarity to what happened in zimbabwe where white landowners with huge productive farms had their property seized and given to landless blacks who had no idea how to farm. Some links from back then: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-lt-venezuela-agrarian-revolution-052409-2009may24-story.html http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106620230 Pharohman777 fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 20:04
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Feinne posted:Well, it depends on how you define further investment. It takes a lot of reinvestment just to keep what you've got running as it is. They didn't do it or even reserve the money to do it, and that's why their output is curling up and dying. Yeah, I just don't think printing would have saved them here especially after oil prices tanked. It would have been better than the current state no doubt, but the country would almost certainly still be on a downward slant. Also, there is the whole separate issue of price controls. Admittedly, the state of Venezuela isn't only due to printing but a cascade of poor decisions compounding on top of each other.
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Jun 3, 2017 09:31
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Ardennes posted:Yeah, I just don't think printing would have saved them here especially after oil prices tanked. It would have been better than the current state no doubt, but the country would almost certainly still be on a downward slant. I feel like the price controls without corresponding subsidies are one of the larger problems. One way or another people need to be able to make enough money to live and if you're not going to let certain products sell above a certain point you potentially are going to need to step in and assist people who rely on selling those products for their living.
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Jun 3, 2017 15:35
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What are the organizations doing the most good work on the ground right now if folks want to help out with time/money?
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Jun 4, 2017 13:14
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There are still daily protests taking place all around the country. Today is the 66th day of consecutive anti-regime street action. From what I've been hearing and seeing there aren't as many people showing up to protests as there were earlier in the year, at least in Caracas. During the protest in Caracas today, a group of officers opened fire on demonstrators who had run into a shopping mall (the CCCT). The officers are apparently from the CONAS, which is a unit that responds to kidnapping and extortion cases. You can see the officers discharging their pistols in this video: https://twitter.com/RCamachoVzla/status/871825907954176000 In the video below, you can see National Guard soldiers swarming a woman and stripping her of her belongings. The woman runs away, and the officers make off with several of her possessions, including her backpack. This also happened near the CCCT: https://twitter.com/danizambrano22/status/871844072549437442 The video below, also recorded near the CCCT, shows a National Guard soldier destroying two motorcycles. It's not clear why he targeted the vehicles: https://twitter.com/AlbertoRT51/status/871797195212816384 As in so many previous occassions, people who were not participating in the protests were caught up in the regime's reckless repression. The woman in the video below was hit with a tear gas canister as she walked into the mall with her daughter: https://twitter.com/AlbertoRT51/status/871851350283440128 The unrest isn't limited to Caracas. The video below shows an officer from the Tachira State Police calmly firing his weapon directly into a home in the town of Tabira: https://twitter.com/karimveras/status/871874875589357568 Pryor on Fire posted:What are the organizations doing the most good work on the ground right now if folks want to help out with time/money? Unfortunately I'm not aware of any. If you find any, please let us know. The problem is that the regime isn't letting international aid into the country because it will not admit that there's an ongoing crisis. I've also heard that the regime is cracking down on international shipping companies like DHL sending things like gas masks and first aid supplies to the country because those would presumably go to protesters.
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Jun 6, 2017 01:25
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I've noticed that the BsF is returning to hyperinflation, as it had done in November/December last year (gone from 4300 BsF/dollar to 6500 BsF/dollar in the last month). Any noticeable impact? I'm honestly surprised that anyone still accepts or uses BsF anywhere and that the informal / in-practice-real economy hasn't become primarily dollarized (or Colombian peso-ized, or real-ized). For instance, why would any street vendor still accept BsF instead of demanding a currency that keeps its value worse than toilet paper? Or does the hyperinflation have to be sustained for several months in a row until people realize that it's no better than kindling? I wonder if the currency swapout actually did successful stave off hyperinflation for the last 6 months, or if there was some other reason that the hyperinflation in November-December stopped for a few months, until it started taking off again last month. Although speaking of that, I see that the last line of banknotes is still valid until at least 20 July 2017, which is pretty astonishing considering how many goddamn announcements they made about it. Did all of the new banknotes actually make it into circulation? I see their 20,000 BsF note has already dropped from being worth $10 to being worth $3 in the last 6 months, which really bodes well for any collectors who looking forward to purchasing 1 trillion BsF notes, and really terribly for anyone else. Saladman fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Jun 7, 2017 |
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Jun 7, 2017 20:18
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So the Attorney General, Luisa Ortega Díaz, who already distanced herself somewhat from the government, has come out against the Constituyente. I don't think she will hold that position much longer.
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Jun 9, 2017 12:37
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Chuck Boone posted:There are still daily protests taking place all around the country. Today is the 66th day of consecutive anti-regime street action. From what I've been hearing and seeing there aren't as many people showing up to protests as there were earlier in the year, at least in Caracas. The government's security staff are literally a bunch of conas? 
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Jun 9, 2017 13:01
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Los que le cierran el camino a la revolución pacífica Le abren al mismo tiempo el camino a la revolución Violenta
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Jun 9, 2017 13:07
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Apparently venezuela is running out of tear gas and riot gear, and can't buy any from brazil or china due to their poor credit rating. https://panampost.com/sabrina-martin/2017/06/08/venezuelan-dictatorship-turns-to-chile-as-it-runs-out-of-anti-riot-gear-to-quash-protests/
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Jun 9, 2017 19:08
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Saladman posted:For instance, why would any street vendor still accept BsF instead of demanding a currency that keeps its value worse than toilet paper? Or does the hyperinflation have to be sustained for several months in a row until people realize that it's no better than kindling? On the second question, I think the Venegoons can answer this better but as far as I'm aware all of the new bills have slowly made it into circulation. I seem to remember them being rolled out in earnest at the end of December. The Bs. 100 bill is still in circulation, though. The regime has announced its death something like eight or nine times in the past six months, but they keep pushing the date back. beer_war posted:So the Attorney General, Luisa Ortega Díaz, who already distanced herself somewhat from the government, has come out against the Constituyente. The regime line on Diaz is that she's somehow under the impression that she can play a leading role during the transition to a post-Maduro Venezuela. I haven't been following the news too closely over the past two weeks so I'm not sure how much deeper this line of thinking goes if it goes deeper at all. Diosdado Cabello and Tareck El Aissami have already come out saying that one of the things that the Constituent Assembly will do is "fix" the Public Ministry, i.e. remove Diaz from her position and/or radically reshape the Public Ministry. Mans posted:The government's security staff are literally a bunch of conas?
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Jun 10, 2017 12:27
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So I'll be doing my podcast show on Tuesday at 9:00pm Central time. Labradoodle are you available then? If not, then when?
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Jun 10, 2017 17:25
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Chuck Boone posted:On the first question, I think that the answer lies in the availability of foreign currency. Remember that access to foreign currency is strictly controlled through CENCOEX, and that for the average Venezuelan getting U.S. dollars through this system can be a nightmare. That leaves the black market, which isn't exactly accessible either given the exchange rate. An entire month's salary is only $9.14 at the current black market rate. Thanks! I searched online and couldn't figure anything out about it. English language news media for Venezuela is one or two reports every few months, with the exact same original report re-hashed by several different outlets (speaking, good god Forbes has awful 'journalists'; they all write like 15 year-olds). My limited attempts in Spanish don't really turn up anything additional. Is there any reliable way to get news about Venezuela without personally knowing people there? I looked quite a bit a while back re: the Guri dam, and I couldn't find any original reporting aside from Nicolas Casey, the occasional Economist article, the rare AP article, and a bunch of garbage in Spanish, although I don't know what the best potential sources are, is there like a Jeune Afrique / The Economist equivalent for Latin America? i.e. a weekly magazine that does good, relatively impartial, reporting for the entire region? Also I see the BsF has continued nose-diving since I posted several days ago, dropping from 5000 to the dollar to 7000 to the dollar within the last 30 days alone. Surprisingly, I don't see any articles about this online, whereas they were all over the place in November when the first reports of BsF falling into runaway hyper-inflation were (prematurely) called.
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Jun 10, 2017 19:12
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Saladman posted:(speaking, good god Forbes has awful 'journalists'; they all write like 15 year-olds). Forbes is one of those sites literally anyone can write for online and then they only get paid a small percentage of ad revenue on their articles, but they employ real journalists for the stuff that makes it to the printed Forbes Magazine.
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Jun 10, 2017 19:59
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Saladman posted:Thanks! I searched online and couldn't figure anything out about it. English language news media for Venezuela is one or two reports every few months, with the exact same original report re-hashed by several different outlets (speaking, good god Forbes has awful 'journalists'; they all write like 15 year-olds). My limited attempts in Spanish don't really turn up anything additional. Is there any reliable way to get news about Venezuela without personally knowing people there? I looked quite a bit a while back re: the Guri dam, and I couldn't find any original reporting aside from Nicolas Casey, the occasional Economist article, the rare AP article, and a bunch of garbage in Spanish, although I don't know what the best potential sources are, is there like a Jeune Afrique / The Economist equivalent for Latin America? i.e. a weekly magazine that does good, relatively impartial, reporting for the entire region? Well, I didn't start really seeing the new bills around until March, but I don't use cash for much. Nowadays the BsF100 bills are still the most common on the street and I've yet to see the highest denomination of the new bills in the wild (the BsF20.000 banknote). It makes a few transactions complicated but for the most part, if you live in a city, you hardly use cash for anything except public transport. Even the hot dog streetcarts have points of sale these days so people don't have to carry cash around. punk rebel ecks posted:So I'll be doing my podcast show on Tuesday at 9:00pm Central time. Labradoodle are you available then? If not, then when? Sorry man, I'm really not comfortable speaking in public. Thanks for the offer, though.
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Jun 10, 2017 22:03
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Labradoodle posted:Sorry man, I'm really not comfortable speaking in public. Thanks for the offer, though. Either way, I was hoping you would come on, but it's your choice. I hope you enjoy listening to the finished product. 
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Jun 11, 2017 06:11
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