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Can't wait to see what de-industrialisation looks like. 
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Aug 17, 2018 14:06
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Saladman posted:No idea where you're doing your math, but 90,000 BsF is not even two pennies per liter, and 90k "New New" Bolivars would make it $1600 US per liter, which doesn't sound right, although I guess with inflation that means 90'000 sovereign bolivars will be back to a few pennies by the end of the year. (Edit: I'm guessing you're doing the math by reading the article but mixing up sovereign bolivars for USD? It will be about 0.60 sovereign bolivars per liter) I was working with old numbers from a different site, it happens. It is a frustrating currency to work with. That said, raising the price in bolivars versus wages help the government that much since it is still losing so much potential revenue. Obviously, the answer would to scrap the system, and readjust everything to a more sane standard including wages. At best, it may slow consumption a bit, but fuel smugglers aren't going to be stopped since the price is still so minimal versus international prices. If they issued a new currency that at least had some relationship to its market value they could, in turn, they start readjusting wages and prices across the broad and attempt to at least stem the bleeding and supply issues. Also, it isn't surprising nothing is working if parts for buses/planes/anything etc are internationally priced and fares are cents on the dollar (or less). Btw, the Venezuelan pricing system was clearly designed around the Cuban system in part without some of the key features that make it semi-sustainable such having two currencies essentially pegged to the dollar and of course the fact that Cuba is an island. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Aug 17, 2018 |
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Aug 17, 2018 14:52
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Ardennes posted:Obviously, the answer would to scrap the system, and readjust everything to a more sane standard including wages. At best, it may slow consumption a bit, but fuel smugglers aren't going to be stopped since the price is still so minimal versus international prices. If they issued a new currency that at least had some relationship to its market value they could, in turn, they start readjusting wages and prices across the broad and attempt to at least stem the bleeding and supply issues. Also, it isn't surprising nothing is working if parts for buses/planes/anything etc are internationally priced and fares are cents on the dollar (or less). Yeah, plus Cuba doesn't really produce anything that is worth smuggling out of the country. Like... subsidized sugar and flour? I guess maybe Haitians would buy it. Also Cuba has done a pretty solid job of managing both of its currencies for the past like 15 years, to the extent that they really have no need of two currencies anymore and would do just fine by collapsing them into one without any particularly exceptional amount of tuning required as anyway it's been a stable 1:24 exchange rate for ages. Some accountants would just have their work cut out for them for any Cuban business that makes foreign imports and sells its finished product in regular pesos. I imagine the Sovereign Bolivar will only hold its real value for approximately one day before the real exchange rate and the government-corruption exchange rate diverge, but if they actually let it float that would be the first sane economic choice the PSUV has done in a long rear end time. Of course they won't, as there is absolutely zero need to issue a new currency in order to have one that actually matches reality, and the ability of the exchange rate to make corruption easy is too good of a cash cow to pass up. I mean, smuggling oil is hard work! Currency arbitrage through your private bank is easy.
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Aug 17, 2018 15:39
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Saladman posted:Yeah, plus Cuba doesn't really produce anything that is worth smuggling out of the country. Like... subsidized sugar and flour? I guess maybe Haitians would buy it. Also Cuba has done a pretty solid job of managing both of its currencies for the past like 15 years, to the extent that they really have no need of two currencies anymore and would do just fine by collapsing them into one without any particularly exceptional amount of tuning required as anyway it's been a stable 1:24 exchange rate for ages. Some accountants would just have their work cut out for them for any Cuban business that makes foreign imports and sells its finished product in regular pesos. The funniest thing about it, is that this exchange control nonsense actually started in the Cuarta Republica with Luis Herrera Campins, it was literally a move thought up by the neoliberal fascists Chavez supposedly liberated the country from. Campins implemented something very similar to CADIVI called RECADI, and it had the exact same problems that CADIVI/SICAD/SIMADI/CENCOEX have today, including the tiered exchange rates that end up benefiting people close to the government instead of any part of the Venezuelan economy. It's actually what led to the collapse of the bolivar. The exchange rate was, for almost 20 years before this was implemented, pegged at 4.30 bolivares to the dollar. By the time RECADI was abolished, the bolivar had devalued to Bs. 27 to the dollar and it only lost value ever since then. It is estimated that it resulted in 2-3 billion dollars being directly taken from the nation's coffers from 1983 to 1987. Those are rookie numbers by Maduro's standards, though, if you ignore the currency conversion done by Chavez in 2007 (where he just moved the decimal point 3 digits to the left), the current exchange rate would be 7300000000 "old" bolivares, and the Chavista currency control schemes have resulted in well over 400 billion being stolen. I mean, I know that the numbers sound insane, but seriously 400 billion being embezzled is not that ridiculous if you consider that CADIVI and its successors are a far more distorted system than RECADI ever was. The currency controls have existed since 2003 and the amount of people who have had access to it far exceed those who had access to preferential rates in RECADI. And this is all coming from only one source of corruption in the country. fnox fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Aug 17, 2018 |
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Aug 17, 2018 16:34
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Venezuelans may take a note from Zimbabwe, where eventually the people just stopped even trying to use the local currency. That's various forms of illegal right now, but maintaining enforcement is getting increasingly impractical. We're already seeing heavy amounts of barter.
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Aug 18, 2018 00:47
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ShadowHawk posted:Venezuelans may take a note from Zimbabwe, where eventually the people just stopped even trying to use the local currency. That's already been happening for the last couple of years. Basically any "big" transaction is done in dollars, even if it's used stuff: cars, automotive parts, private health care, electronics, dinner at fancy restaurants. People without access to dollars are just completely unable to afford anything, people with access to them only trade small amounts to bolivares which they then use that same day. And I mean you've seen the state of public transport and public healthcare, so yeah, if you don't have access to dollars in Venezuela you're just counting the minutes until you die of preventable disease.
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Aug 18, 2018 11:42
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Truga posted:Can't wait to see what de-industrialisation looks like. They have plenty of wood for wood gasifiers.
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Aug 18, 2018 18:02
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Yesterday Maduro announced another rise in the monthly salary that sent the country into panic given that it went from 5 millions to 180 millions. I'm in Maracaibo right now and had to go to a state run hospital. I can't put into words what I felt when the entrance to the ER was covered in blood and reeked of urine.
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Aug 18, 2018 21:29
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If I were designing a socialist economy I would set a very high minimum wage, build lots of farms and factories to make basic goods, set a generous limit on the number of groceries a citizen can buy, and give every citizen a special card to buy groceries to enforce the buying limit.
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Aug 18, 2018 21:35
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qkkl posted:If I were designing a socialist economy I would set a very high minimum wage, build lots of farms and factories to make basic goods, set a generous limit on the number of groceries a citizen can buy, and give every citizen a special card to buy groceries to enforce the buying limit. You may be confusing "socialism" with "SimCity."
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Aug 18, 2018 22:04
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So is the PSUV, it seems...
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Aug 18, 2018 22:18
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qkkl posted:If I were designing a socialist economy I would set a very high minimum wage, build lots of farms and factories to make basic goods, set a generous limit on the number of groceries a citizen can buy, and give every citizen a special card to buy groceries to enforce the buying limit. The problem wasn't a lack of farms or factories, Venezuela had plenty of both. Prices of basic goods were also set very low in comparison to wages so everyone could afford them. Unfortunately nobody could afford to sell them, either. Finally, it doesn't matter if you and everyone else get paid a ton of money when the value of the currency goes into a free fall, making it all worthless. Running a planned economy successfully is actually very complicated. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Aug 18, 2018 |
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Aug 18, 2018 22:30
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The US is sending a hospital ship(s) to Colombia and possibly other countries bordering Venezuela by the fall to help with the refugee crisis. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pentagon-prepares-to-dispatch-hospital-ship-to-colombia-amid-refugee-crisis/
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Aug 18, 2018 22:56
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MullardEL34 posted:The US is sending a hospital ship(s) to Colombia and possibly other countries bordering Venezuela by the fall to help with the refugee crisis. There is a large chance for there to be some military escorts coming along with the ship due to piracy concerns. I am already imagining the 'this is economic warfare' arguments maduro is gonna make.
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Aug 18, 2018 23:26
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MullardEL34 posted:The US is sending a hospital ship(s) to Colombia and possibly other countries bordering Venezuela by the fall to help with the refugee crisis. Massing military ships at the border is an act of war.
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Aug 18, 2018 23:33
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LeoMarr posted:What class fills in the capital class being drained in a socialist/communist society LeoMarr posted:Communism created a society where having money was bad. Otherwise, you're sort of on the right track, but only by accident. When you say "mafia class", I think that's pretty spot on for Venezuela, but it has little relationship with the ruling classes of the old Communist Bloc. To take the USSR as an example, there was definitely a new class of owners and exploiters taking the place of the capitalists - the party bureaucracy. They controlled the means of production. They controlled all national resources. They pocketed the profits of the state enterprises. But calling them a "mafia class" shows a misunderstanding of their nature. Their ownership and exploitation was legal, and it was collective. Stalin's daughter never had 600 million USD sitting in some offshore account. The party leadership never took bribes or siphoned money from whatever enterprises they happened to be in charge of. They didn't need to, because the entire Soviet state apparatus was set up in such a way that they reaped all the benefits. They also did not live in the kind of decadent luxury you find in modern cleptocracies. They couldn't, because in USSR society there were no methods for directing wealth to a single individual in that way. Corruption happened on a lower level, brought on by product scarcity and failures of distribution. When it becomes impossible to do your job or even go about your daily life without circumventing the official system, that's what causes corruption. That's when you need contacts, backdoors and bribes to get things done. And that's why you can't directly bribe members of the ruling class - they're not actually part of the distribution chain. If Ivan Ivanovitch needs coal to heat his home, he can slip the local coal distributor a little extra to ensure he gets the right amount in a timely fashion. But there's really nothing you can bribe the People's Commissar of Coal Production with - at that level in USSR society, money literally means nothing. The benefits of belonging to the ruling class are different altogether - they don't have to stand in line for a pair of shoes that might be the correct size. They don't have to wait five years to buy a car. And so on. What you have in Venezuela today is more in line with the kind of super-corrupt mafia-rule of Russia, Turkmenistan etc. Also, the fall of communism in Europe was not anything like "the buddy buddy circle of running the Bloc came to a head". It came about because of a number of things - Soviet refusal to back up its client states' governments with military force, a complete disconnect between the will of the people and the actions of the state, and internal party rivalries. The communist regimes in East Germany, Poland etc. fell rapidly once it became apparent that the USSR would not intervene with military force. The USSR itself fell when Yeltsin made a power grab to circumvent Gorbachev and the CPSU. Following the Baltic states declaring their independence from the USSR and the failed coup against Gorbachev, Yeltsin - then president of the Russian SSR - made a clandestine agreement with the leaders of the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs to have their respective republics also declare their independence from the USSR. This was a unilateral move by Yeltsin and a handful of his cronies, and resulted in the fall of the USSR and the end of communism in Europe.
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Aug 18, 2018 23:42
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qkkl posted:Massing military ships at the border is an act of war. "That hospital ship is coming right at us!"
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Aug 19, 2018 00:08
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One reason the Soviets really couldn't afford to keep on backing the eastern bloc is due to falling energy prices during the early 1980s which put even greater pressure for bloc states to secure Paris club/IMF credit which obviously came with demands attached. Furthermore, another prime reason that the bloc fell was also the growth of open Russian nationalism/xenophobia during the late 1980s, previously it had been heavily suppressed (many dissents came from this group) but there was plenty of anger about Soviet affirmative action policies especially toward Caucasians/Central Asians as well as Moscow having to spend relatively more money on infrastructure projects. The Afganistan war, ethnic tensions in the Caucasus, and obviously the fact that the Baltic states all added their own elements to the mix, but the heart of the matter was still probably energy prices. --------------------------- Anyway, prices in the Soviet Union were heavily price-controlled, but there was almost no way to get cash outside the country and the currency in many ways acted more like coupons. Also, not only certain items were price controlled, but everything was. That said, despite its issues, the Soviet Union could at least point to the fact that generally the system did work to a reasonable enough degree, and while life certainly rougher than the West, it is an improvement over previous conditions generally until the late 1980s. It probably isn't worth replicating just due to so many of the issues that cropped up, but it was also a very different beast than Venezuela.
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Aug 19, 2018 00:16
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Seriously, what is the state of Venezuela's navy? Is Maduro gonna order the ships to set out in a show of force only for the docks to collapse and the ships to sink?
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Aug 19, 2018 00:17
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Nothing sinister about a giant expensive hospital ship anchoring a foot from the Venezuelan border and hoisting a football field sized American flag with a big sign that says "Free healthcare and food!"
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Aug 19, 2018 00:30
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w/r/t USSR the oil price crash in the 80s and Afghanistan being a money pit had a lot to do with it as well.qkkl posted:Nothing sinister about a giant expensive hospital ship anchoring a foot from the Venezuelan border and hoisting a football field sized American flag with a big sign that says "Free healthcare and food!" Pevin will be here shortly saying this unironically constitutes an act of economic war.
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Aug 19, 2018 01:00
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Grapplejack posted:w/r/t USSR the oil price crash in the 80s and Afghanistan being a money pit had a lot to do with it as well. Medfare
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Aug 19, 2018 01:04
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Ardennes posted:One reason the Soviets really couldn't afford to keep on backing the eastern bloc is due to falling energy prices during the early 1980s which put even greater pressure for bloc states to secure Paris club/IMF credit which obviously came with demands attached. Furthermore, another prime reason that the bloc fell was also the growth of open Russian nationalism/xenophobia during the late 1980s, previously it had been heavily suppressed (many dissents came from this group) but there was plenty of anger about Soviet affirmative action policies especially toward Caucasians/Central Asians as well as Moscow having to spend relatively more money on infrastructure projects. Even the Soviet system ended up creating huge grey and black markets. Favors and barter could get you the things that not everyone had access to, without waiting in a queue. You hoard cement or copper wire from your construction job on the sly, so you can trade it for good beef from the guys who work at the butcher shop or some nice clothes for the wife from whoever managed to get in front of the line. But yeah, it wasn't nearly the train wreck Venezuela ended up with. The systems providing basic medical care, staple foods, simple clothing, etc. never utterly collapsed even if they sometimes had shortages.
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Aug 19, 2018 01:11
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qkkl posted:Nothing sinister about a giant expensive hospital ship anchoring a foot from the Venezuelan border and hoisting a football field sized American flag with a big sign that says "Free healthcare and food!" This but unironically.
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Aug 19, 2018 01:14
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qkkl posted:Nothing sinister about a giant expensive hospital ship anchoring a foot from the Venezuelan border and hoisting a football field sized American flag with a big sign that says "Free healthcare and food!"* *Offer not valid to American citizens
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Aug 19, 2018 05:48
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45237368 In response to the refugees arriving, Ecuador now requires a passport for Venezuelans to travel to the country (in most of South America you can legally travel with only your ID card). Given that passports are prohibitively expensive and hard to obtain, that makes Ecuador off limits to all but relatively wealthy Venezuelans. How long until Colombia and Brazil set up no fly “safe zones” inside the borders of Venezuela? (I think this thread needs a /s for that sentence given some of the audience members.) Édit: Peru also requiring passports, but they announced in advance and it starts Aug 25. Saladman fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Aug 19, 2018 |
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Aug 19, 2018 07:27
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qkkl posted:Nothing sinister about a giant expensive hospital ship anchoring a foot from the Venezuelan border and hoisting a football field sized American flag with a big sign that says "Free healthcare and food!" Imagine being able to successfully attack the Bolivarian revolution by just actually doing two of its core tenets. Saladman posted:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-45237368 It was bound to happen. A sad consequence of this is that views on Venezuelan immigrants are rapidly changing. We're seeing a lot more rejection across the continent, with marked differences in attitudes between neighbouring governments, almost like the European migrant crisis but with the sides reverted. Needless to say I wouldn't be surprised to hear that this is the largest population movement in Latin America's history. And it's shockingly under-reported, compared to what the European migrant crisis was. fnox fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Aug 19, 2018 |
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Aug 19, 2018 08:53
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I wonder how long until visa free travel in the EU for venezuelan passports ends
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Aug 19, 2018 18:04
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Oh yeah did anybody mention that Maduro said he's gonna subsidize everyone's salary for the next 3 months because lol.
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Aug 19, 2018 19:05
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Celexi posted:I wonder how long until visa free travel in the EU for venezuelan passports ends It’s far enough away and expensive enough that they’re not going to get huge numbers, and the ones who do come will all be moderately well-off, lucky students, or people with family over there that can support them. Just like their are plenty of countries Syrians can go to — just not any bordering Syria.
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Aug 19, 2018 19:27
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fnox posted:Imagine being able to successfully attack the Bolivarian revolution by just actually doing two of its core tenets. The situation of venezuelan refugees in Brazil is getting worst and worst https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/19/brazil-sends-troops-venezuela-border-residents-drive-migrants/
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Aug 19, 2018 21:24
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Are you guys really discussing whether this mess is Socialism or not? Sure, it's Socialist, Stupid Socialist, but sure Socialist. Socialism works fine, I'm Danish and it works perfectly well. just gotta keep Populism at bay, because that basically destroys everything it touches. Trump, Maduro and the rest of their ilk are just standard Populist arseholes, there really isn't anything else to them.
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Aug 20, 2018 08:38
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What we have in scandinavia isn't socialism - that's a loving american conservative meme, and it's infuriating that people who ought to know better have picked it up. Have the workers seized the means of production? Has the capitalist class been liquidized? Is the nation ruled by the dictatorship of the proletariat? No? What we have in scandinavia are robust, democratic welfare states - capitalist welfare states.
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Aug 20, 2018 10:45
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Mr. Sunshine posted:What we have in scandinavia isn't socialism - that's a loving american conservative meme, and it's infuriating that people who ought to know better have picked it up. I think the term "social democracy" has been almost completely conflated with "socialism" in all non-academic and non-tankie senses of the word, given how many Bernie supports would describe themselves as socialists when really they mean "Nordic model", and they often even include that caveat. I agree, but it's also super ironic that right-wing people refer to social democracies as "socialist" since those countries actually give a positive impression of socialism ( / welfare state / social democracy), whereas 100% countries that actually tried to implement socialism-as-technically-defined-by-academics rather eventually degraded into nightmarish police states, typically in quick fashion.
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Aug 20, 2018 11:14
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Mr. Sunshine posted:What we have in scandinavia isn't socialism - that's a loving american conservative meme, and it's infuriating that people who ought to know better have picked it up. I live in Sweden and I'm like, perfectly OK with this kind of system, which is part of what made it so baffling that Bathtub Cheese would accuse me of being affiliated and financed by right wing American parties, because I think I tend too far left for the democrats. And I've advocated for something like this to be implemented in Venezuela, as a matter of fact, that's pretty much what we had in the 70's. People are quick to forget, but the Universidad Simon Bolivar, the second largest in the country, was founded under Rafael Caldera, PDVSA and the corresponding nationalization of all oil and petrol assets was done under Carlos Andres Perez. Most hospitals were built under that time, and service was free, everyone was covered under public health insurance. As a matter of fact, most large scale public works in the country were built under that period of time, some under Marcos Perez Jimenez but a fair bit during the Trienio Adeco and the first presidency of Carlos Andres Perez. Education, from primary school to university, had been free in the country during that entire period and continued to be free ever since, Chavez and Maduro studied in public liceos. Every president during the history of democracy in the country, bar Chavez (who studied at the Military Academy) and Maduro, graduated from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, which has been independent and completely free since 1971 after the Ley de Universidades came to be. What Venezuela had was far closer to a welfare state like Sweden's than an American style free market economy. Now, what is true is that a lot of these public services degraded significantly during the 80's, but the often repeated lie that they were inventions of Chavez and that before it Venezuela was a neoliberal hellscape is just not true. Venezuela had a working system, which was damaged by corruption and then was completely transformed and effectively destroyed by Chavista policies, when it was previously self sustainable. The concept of Venezuela being ruled by neoliberal, American stooges is also not true, most presidents since the fall of Marcos Perez Jimenez come from what was called the "generacion del 28", a group of students who were put in jail under the dictatorial regime of Juan Vicente Gomez for espousing support for a democratic Venezuela. The better parts of Venezuela were all there before either Chavez or Maduro came along, they just took the credit, and sought to rewrite history by spreading their bullshit.
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Aug 20, 2018 11:45
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Social democratic parties is a part of the socialist international. So ehm yeah, politics change and have to be adapted to reality. Also socialism can be a lot of different flavours, its not one thing set in stone. Edit: capitalism is still bad, and I feel like a lot of social democratic parties should be more to the left. Discussions like what is what and who is a what is just stupid and it's the reason why there is like 1 million version of socialism etc. Zombiepop fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Aug 20, 2018 |
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Aug 20, 2018 11:47
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Saladman posted:I agree, but it's also super ironic that right-wing people refer to social democracies as "socialist" since those countries actually give a positive impression of socialism ( / welfare state / social democracy), whereas 100% countries that actually tried to implement socialism-as-technically-defined-by-academics rather eventually degraded into nightmarish police states, typically in quick fashion. It's almost as if the problem with autocratic socialism (lol) isn't the socialism bit.
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Aug 20, 2018 12:01
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Words have meaning. Specifically, a socialist state is one similar to those of the former socialist nations of Eastern Europe, the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam etc. When you use the same word to also describe both Denmark and Venezuela, you might as well say "It's a country, I guess?".
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Aug 20, 2018 12:15
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So far it seems like the conversion to Bolívar Soberano did work this time.
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Aug 20, 2018 12:23
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Words have meaning. Specifically, a socialist state is one similar to those of the former socialist nations of Eastern Europe, the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam etc. When you use the same word to also describe both Denmark and Venezuela, you might as well say "It's a country, I guess?". It's an umbrella term or whatever you call it in english. But I agree, people should be more specific when describing political ideologies. A lil history, the socialist international started 1889, they decided that 1 may should be the international workers day the same year. But Goons will goon on and be wrong about stuff and think that dictators are socialist cause the internet makes you dumb.
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Aug 20, 2018 12:23
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