Squalid posted:

If you already don't trust Treasury why would you even want to hear what they have to say? I'm not going to bother digging it up if you've already dismissed it. It's probably boring and short on detail anyway.

VitalSigns posted:

Who cares, even if 90% of the money were being stolen/wasted, the idea that taking away what food does make it to the people is somehow an improvement is insane.

Well I guess it's only insane if the value of lives in the Global South is worth more than zero in your personal calculus, if poor foreigners don't rate as human than yeah sure starve as many as it takes to mildly inconvenience someone you don't like.

Moridin920 posted:

I want to see what they say they know and how they know it.

By I don't trust I mean I don't believe just whatever they say, esp not second hand no offense. If they just have "yeah Maduro steals 70%" with no evidence then I'm also disinclined to just take it on faith. You don't consider the US Treasury department to be unbiased do you?

Condiv posted:

ok squalid, since you're confused, let me explain things for you. this is not the scenario I envisioned. this is the scenario that guaido's economic advisor envisioned. he wants to use market forces to distribute international aid only to those who really need it. yes it's stupid, but that's just the kind of person guaido is hanging out with

so, on to your issues with privatization. the generals would not be acting in their capacity as military figures, they would be acting as entrepreneurs in this case who would sell the "aid". you might say "that sounds corrupt" but it'd be ok because it'd be capitalism and that'd make trump and the rest of the first world happy. any other issues?

Corky Romanovsky posted:

Sounds like we really don't have good data on CLAP and it is worthless to speculate on the program itself. Similar with claims of mismanagement, particularly without acknowledging the circumstances, both external and internal. This isn't some dril tweet where maduro is pulling levers for "economy", "agriculture", etc.

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:

I reviewed the last several pages and I don't think anyone even argued that it was legal. Kind of an incredible act of gaslighting to not only aver that the seizure was legal but that its legality has already been explained at length, obviating any need to do so further. In fact I am confident that the seizure was not legal, and that the embassy protectors were charged as they were to avoid having to confront that fact.

Of course, these sort of disputes would have been adjudicated by the dispute resolution mechanisms of the Vienna Protocol itself - if the United States had not unilaterally withdrawn from those mechanisms in 2018 as a direct result of a Palestinian challenge to the proposed move of the US embassy to Jerusalem. Now, the United States acts in a lawless manner as usual and justifying itself with "might makes right" after the fact. By that law, and that law only, can the embassy seizure be justified.

Ytlaya posted:

Yeah - also, most of the sort of corruption people mention the Maduro government being guilty of is not particularly unusual for global south nations, and generally represents a tiny fraction of wealth lost for the people in those nations. Acting like it's relevant to severity of the crisis is pretty much nonsense; it's just brought up to try and sell a narrative of "Maduro directly causing his people to starve" (because the "directly causing" part is necessary to their argument that replacing him with anyone can only be an improvement, even if the person in question is someone like Guaido).

Similarly, people repeatedly talk about "gross mismanagement," carrying the implication that some hypothetical "competent" government would have averted the current situation (largely because this implication is necessary to their argument, since they need to argue that Maduro needs to go but don't have any real solutions to offer themselves). But it's hard to really get much specifics on this from the people arguing this point. The closest thing is probably blaming price controls, and while that may have some truth to it it's not like removing price controls by itself would be much of a solution. And I'm very hesitant to blindly trust this sort of point, since it's difficult to quantify the net impact of the US exacerbating the situation (both directly and indirectly, through making Venezuela more of a pariah state through its hostility towards it, though I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn years later that the US actually did more that we're aware of right now). So while it's not possible to lay significant blame for the status quo at the feet of the US, it's also not possible to articulate a clear argument of how the Maduro administration directly caused it (and a replacement would fix it).

Squalid posted:

Firstly Venezuela's corruption really is quite remarkable given compared to its neighbors. on the corruption perception index Venezuela is closer to Iraq and Afghanistan than it is to any other South American country. This is extra surprising because Venezuela was historically the wealthiest and most developed economy on the continent, and income is generally negatively related to corruption. In terms of perceived corruption, Venezuela is more similar to the poorest states in the world and those suffering from ongoing and brutal civil wars than it is to its immediate neighbors. It's a truly terrible performance

Corky Romanovsky posted:

There are some issues with how corruption is defined and reported. Citations Needed did an episode on it that was pretty good: https://m.soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-73-western-medias-narrow-colonial-definition-of-corruption

It also seems like you are generally positing that all of Venezuela's problems started with Chavez, and that if the previous administration and/or neoliberalism was suffered instead, Venezuela would be...what...food self-sufficient and able to weather drops in oil prices?

CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:

I mean christ man, the food corporation of india has some leakage and corruption too and you don't see western liberals readying sanctions and cruise missile strikes. A program like CLAP, while anathema to rich countries, is not all that unique for developing nations.

GreyjoyBastard posted:

i'm not sure who you're arguing with here

536 posted:

I still can't get past the claims from last page that people on the minimum wage can only afford 4 or 5 bags of rice and beans a month. That can't be possible. You'd have people rioting or starving all the time.

Squalid posted:

Firstly Venezuela's corruption really is quite remarkable given compared to its neighbors. on the corruption perception index

Wikipedia posted:

ranks countries "by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys."

Wikipedia posted:

The 13 surveys/assessments are either business people opinion surveys or performance assessments from a group of analysts. Early CPIs used public opinion surveys The institutions are:
African Development Bank (based in Ivory Coast)
Bertelsmann Foundation (based in Germany)
Economist Intelligence Unit (based in UK)
Freedom House (based in US)
Global Insight (based in US)
International Institute for Management Development (based in Switzerland)
Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (based in Hong Kong)
The PRS Group, Inc., (based in US)
World Economic Forum
World Bank
World Justice Project (based in US)[8]

Countries need to be evaluated by at least three sources to appear in the CPI. The CPI measures perception of corruption due to the difficulty of measuring absolute levels of corruption.

Wikipedia posted:

A study published in 2002 found a "very strong significant correlation" between the Corruption Perceptions Index and two other proxies for corruption: black market activity and overabundance of regulation.

Radish posted:

America's Supreme Court ruled you can't be bribed as a politician unless you say it's a bribe so

Bob le Moche posted:

Squalid posted:

edit: oh god i tried reading a transcript of that podcast and it is agonizing. Instead of criticizing sampling methodologies or anything interested they keep going on about how unfair the media is to Africa, it's unbearable. I can't stand proselytizing, they should really focus on their story instead of going on weird rambly moralistic asides. It does make me wonder how much Andrade paid in taxes on the billion dollars he stole from the Venezuelan people though. I hope el Assaimi remembers to report all his narcotrafficking profits.

Radish posted:

America's Supreme Court ruled you can't be bribed as a politician unless you say it's a bribe so LOL at the idea of corruption indexes that we are using as an excuse for sanctions or war.

THS posted:

it’s impossible and not even useful to understand perceptions of corruption, or anything else in geopolitics, without going on “moralistic asides”. What’s the point of analysis without an ethical and moral basis? There’s an extreme of only looking for answers that confirm your own pre-existing bias, and then there’s rudderless and bloodless technocratic “objectivity” which really only serves to reinforce ruling liberal ideology. I’d gamble to say you are closer to the latter, and probably not aware of it because it’d call into question a lot of your assumptions that you likely don’t even conceive of as assumptions.

Squalid posted:

of course you need a moral basis for arguments. The problem is when you start confusing moral arguments with technical and empirical arguments. Western media may be unfair towards the developing world, but that is not actually an argument the methodology of the corruption index is flawed. They keep switching between statements of moral and principle to ones of observation, using highly affective words designed to illicit an emotion response. It is an effective argument strategy because it primes the audience to feel the way the speaker wants, rather than to judge the argument on its merits.

You can see this demonstrated if you can stomach watching Sean Hannity for a few seconds. He'll lead into a story by telling people how they should feel about something, and only then present his argument. Priming the pump

If you think my arguments are based in my pre-existing biases, why don't you try and attack my conclusions? Why don't you defend Chavez's land reform. Tell me all about how actually, it didn't crater corn output, that that is all western lies, and that Venezuelan sugar exports are actually up and FAO statistics on the matter are all capitalists lies. Why don't you defend Chavez on the basis of his own promises.

Why don't you defend the free gasoline, or currency controls? Or does literally no one believe in the Chavez economic program anymore? Maybe if he had been more of a bloodless technocrat who wouldn't have acted like a goddamn moron.

Oh oops, I'm slipping into a moral argument. See Chavez's policies were actually good at getting him reelected. Especially the way he seized the personal right to distribute state money as he saw fit, spending heavily during political cycles and then implementing austerity in between. From a political standpoint it was quite the technical achievement. I'm making the mistake of judging him from my own moral framework in which leaders have a "responsibility" to their people, and that they need to plan for things like "the future". Really this is just another form of cultural imperialism.

536 posted:

I still can't get past the claims from last page that people on the minimum wage can only afford 4 or 5 bags of rice and beans a month. That can't be possible. You'd have people rioting or starving all the time.

Squalid posted:

edit: oh god i tried reading a transcript of that podcast and it is agonizing. Instead of criticizing sampling methodologies or anything interested they keep going on about how unfair the media is to Africa, it's unbearable. I can't stand proselytizing, they should really focus on their story instead of going on weird rambly moralistic asides. It does make me wonder how much Andrade paid in taxes on the billion dollars he stole from the Venezuelan people though. I hope el Assaimi remembers to report all his narcotrafficking profits.

THS posted:

Chavez rolled out massive social democratic welfare programs without fundamentally changing anything regarding the structure of Venezuela’s market economy. The problem is one of merely subsidizing the output of a private economy. That’s a recipe for inefficiency and graft. Chavez made huge blind fuckups because he wasn’t a neoliberal technocrat nor was he much of a Marxist, but tried redistribution anyway, and failed to wrest power from the upper classes who are now trying to win control of the state back with the backing of the US empire.

Squalid posted:

ah there we go, that's the historical materialism I've been missing! I admit I'm sometimes frustrated with people go on and on about narratives, who it often seems have abandoned scientific analysis of our relations to the means of production and embraced some kind of strange psuedo-Nietzschean philosophy, in which the world can be made into anything we will. I'm not sure what to call that world view but it is definitely not Marxism.

Squalid posted:

There are obviously lots of issues with measuring corruption, as it is something that practically by definition goes unregulated and unmonitored. Besides these imperfect scales the best we can do is anecdotes, but those also paint a terrible picture of Venezuela.

All of Venezuela's problems did not start with Chavez. Things like gas subsidies were started under his predecessors. On lots of issues Chavez simply made the same mistakes of people who came before him, only exaggerated to a greater degree. Then of course he also added tons of new stupid problems as well.

Most likely any Venezuelan administration would have had to cut spending in 2014 following the fall in oil prices. However had Chavez built up larger reserves of foreign currency Venezuela would have had a much better buffer and the austerity would have hit less abruptly. I don't think Chavez could have achieved food self sufficiency, but his agricultural policies were a disaster. While his program of distributing state lands seems like it may have worked well, the second wave of land reform was an unmitigated failure by every possible metric. Chavez subsidized foreign food, while punishing domestic farmers with crippling price controls. The beneficiaries of land reform didn't receive promised seed or equipment, and as a result failed to produce, while previously productive land went fallow.

Realistically an alternative timeline without Chavez would not have escaped all the economic problems now facing Venezuela. However they probably would have done less badly in every respect, or at least I can't imagine how they could have done worse. At least a different President wouldn't be actively sabotaging the economy outside the oil sector.

Main Paineframe posted:

None of this is corruption, though. When challenged on your assertions of corruption, you keep deflecting by talking about poor fiscal policy, which isn't even close to the same thing.

Rather than blame, though, I'd prefer to talk about solutions. And even if there's no corruption forever, Venezuela isn't getting out of this hole as long as they're on America's shitlist. Their dependence on global markets made them vulnerable to begin with, and with their production and exports in decline, they won't easily recover even if the US gives up on its program of economic warfare against Venezuela. They've been pushed into a situation where they likely can't pull their economy back together without assistance and patronage from a major power, and the major power that put them into that situation is going to attach plenty of strings to any aid that gets given.

Main Paineframe posted:

None of this is corruption, though. When challenged on your assertions of corruption, you keep deflecting by talking about poor fiscal policy, which isn't even close to the same thing.

Bob le Moche posted:

How the gently caress do you measure a "corruption perception index" and why should anyone take any of it seriously?



Oh ok lol I see, it's basically an updated version of this map:






What a joke lol

Bob le Moche posted:

How the gently caress do you measure a "corruption perception index" and why should anyone take any of it seriously?

GreyjoyBastard posted:

yeah, I've been mulling over what President Sanders should do in 2021 other than drop the sanctions

I'm kinda leaning towards letting it be somebody else's problem and just backing whatever the UN or the ICG decides on _{and maybe doing something domestically to discourage the finance industry from bribing the PSUV into selling the country}. Multilateralism is an inherent good anyway.

Squalid posted:

edit: oh god i tried reading a transcript of that podcast and it is agonizing. Instead of criticizing sampling methodologies or anything interested they keep going on about how unfair the media is to Africa, it's unbearable. I can't stand proselytizing, they should really focus on their story instead of going on weird rambly moralistic asides. It does make me wonder how much Andrade paid in taxes on the billion dollars he stole from the Venezuelan people though. I hope el Assaimi remembers to report all his narcotrafficking profits.

quote:

Adam: The part of the book that really popped was this idea of corruption and you begin to sort of dig into it and then you really start to think about what this concept means. So let’s begin with some basic numbers. According to Hickel’s research, the UN Convention Against Corruption, which targets a very specific and narrow definition of corruption, that which is carried about by the leaders and officials via bribery and theft, it costs poor countries an estimated $20 to $40 billion a year. This is the corruption we typically talk about when we talk about poor countries being corrupt. This is certainly a sizable sum and is worth tackling in and of itself but to put it in proper context as a total percent of illicit outflows from poor countries every year it barely is 3 percent.

Nima: By contrast, the group, Global Financial Integrity or GFI, which is a nonprofit based out of Washington, they calculate that the other 97 percent of illicit outflows — which is basically just a fancy word for any illegal movement of money from one country to another — is of a very different nature, one almost never talked about by our media. 65 percent of this total theft comes in the form of commercial tax evasion. Over a trillion dollars — trillion with a ‘T’ — flows illegally out of developing countries and into illegal tax havens overseas every year. So, just to put some of these statistics about tax havens in context, these are some of the figures. 30 percent of total foreign direct investment flows are booked through tax havens. Basically about one sixth of all private wealth on Earth is stored in tax havens. A total of $32 trillion — again, trillion with a ‘T’ — is held in tax havens, which to put that itself in context, that $32 trillion, that’s nearly half the size of the global GDP.