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you cannot leverage reserves which you do not control. that damage is also done when the assets are instead seized by hostile governments. i don't see your alternative scenario here - dollarisation might have been avoided through a different policy, but this is not obviously pertinent to the question of whether the seizing of venezuela's gold assets by foreign governments is a net negative for venezuela/the venezuelan people. i have no interest in defending venezuelan monetary policy on its own terms. paying a bunch of people to do useless work has, on its surface, greater social utility than having the money seized by foreigners. that is what you need to disprove, and i deliberately constructed the premise in this way for reasons i have previously stated. what i mean is, as far as i can tell, pretty straightforward: it is better for a country to not have its money stolen by foreigners, even if that money would be very poorly spent. the reason i'm interested in making this statement and why i'm being so anal about this is what i tried to explain in the previous post. "close to zero" doesn't cut it - the criterion is deliberately structured as "actually zero".
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Nov 15, 2022 11:15
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V. Illych L. posted:you cannot leverage reserves which you do not control. that damage is also done when the assets are instead seized by hostile governments. i don't see your alternative scenario here - dollarisation might have been avoided through a different policy, but this is not obviously pertinent to the question of whether the seizing of venezuela's gold assets by foreign governments is a net negative for venezuela/the venezuelan people. i have no interest in defending venezuelan monetary policy on its own terms. It is pretty pertinent. I'd say it's the crux of the matter, because Venezuelan monetary policy is a huge, huge driver of the entire crisis, and it's something that is squarely lies on Maduro's head. There's an actual serious argument to make that Venezuela would have been better off had his monetary policy been to not do anything. The genesis of the Venezuelan crisis is deficit spending and poor macroeconomic handling of the economy, it precedes sanctions by nearly 4 years. I don't see what social utility a cardiological hospital that serves 0 patients a year may have, because it is not actually a cardiological hospital, it is a big concrete wreck, but I guess we digress on that part. The second part however is a lie. The money is not being stolen by foreigners, the implication there being that it is literally being seized. It's not, it's still there, it's not even under Guaido's control, it's in the vault pending litigation. The evidence for it being of actually zero use to the Venezuelan people is the gold that was already taken from the vaults at the BCV in Caracas having no accountability of any sort. If it was legitimately to buy medicines or food, the government could demonstrate it easily, but they can't, because there's no trace for most of these transactions other than the gold being gone. What's the most obvious explanation here? That the money isn't "poorly spent", it's embezzled, i.e, the public sees none of it, and nobody knows what it's being used for.
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Nov 15, 2022 11:44
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I just finished going through all your posts in the thread. Out of curiosity, what other Venezuela centric threads/forums do you look at fnox? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 15, 2022 12:30
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fnox posted:Sorry that the numbers scare you but that's the Brent Crude Oil price over the last 3 years. It's been going up, maybe dipping slightly now, but it was near the peak oil levels Chavez saw. This is also the highest it's been in the entirety of Maduro's rule, a fact you can check by yourself if you plot that same chart until 2013. No need to be a prick about it, you posted an unlabeled graph of time against money and expected me to divine you were talking about Brent Crude Oil prices. In the future leave the title on the graph like I've done, it makes it easier to debate when everyone can follow along. So my posit was that they were selling gold to cover for the low price of oil.   The sell off in gold reserves lines up neatly with the mid 10s drop in oil price, and has flattened off as the price has gone back up. That was my original point, I thought me mentioning "the falling price of oil" was clear that I was the talking about the well known dip in the mid 10s. And not the recent rebound in oil prices as the gold sell off seems to have slowed. quote:"Remove any claims of corruption" is quite a strong claim for an agreement that isn't even public or seemingly in writing. I mean you could read your own link which states part of the sales was used to purchase supplies to process gasoline. quote:Part of the money obtained from the sale of gold was used to purchase supplies to process gasoline, under a chronic fuel shortage that the country has been experiencing since March Was it 8 years of mismanagement, or 8 years of sanctions that has crippled Venezuela's ability to refine gasoline?
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Nov 15, 2022 13:28
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Marenghi posted:No need to be a prick about it, you posted an unlabeled graph of time against money and expected me to divine you were talking about Brent Crude Oil prices. In the future leave the title on the graph like I've done, it makes it easier to debate when everyone can follow along. Your chart is incorrect, btw. Currently Venezuela has under 80 tons of gold, not 150, the lowest level it has been in 50 years. The gold sell off did not stop, it merely stopped getting reported as often. This inversely correlates with the price of oil as it stands right now. Hilariously you can also see that the moment the sell off began was roughly when Maduro took over. Marenghi posted:Was it 8 years of mismanagement, or 8 years of sanctions that has crippled Venezuela's ability to refine gasoline? 2017 to today is 5 years going to 6. The crisis started truly kicking in on 2014, although you could already feel it in 2013. We can go down that rabbit hole of how the individual sanctions applied on 2014 somehow caused oil production to plummet despite how not even the government claimed that at the time, but I don't think you'll find that argument compelling because the numbers don't add up. Venezuela hasn't been able to satisfy domestic demand ever since the Amuay tragedy in 2012, a large explosion at a refinery which you can feel free to look up. Gasoline and food rationing was already a thing in 2014, a mere year after Maduro took over. Gasoline was however still fully subsidized, at that point still cheaper than water, 50 cents for 50 litres, which meant the country was paying to keep the gasoline pumps open. fnox fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Nov 15, 2022 |
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Nov 15, 2022 14:35
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fnox posted:Your chart is incorrect, btw. Currently Venezuela has under 80 tons of gold, not 150, the lowest level it has been in 50 years. The gold sell off did not stop, it merely stopped getting reported as often. This inversely correlates with the price of oil as it stands right now. I did see varying recent data through different news articles, but that was the best data I could find over the last 25 year period. Even given the recent sell offs, the actual tonnage of gold sold has slowed dramatically from the 2015-2017 peak. Again that can be seen in the article you've shared. Their graph 'Balances BCV' shows the gold reducing by over half in a 3 year period from 361 to 162. While the 6 year period 2017-2022 it dropped a little over half from 162-73. 199 tonne reduction in 3 years versus a 89 tonne reduction in 6 years. Seems to align with my position that the gold sell off was driven by the massive dip in oil prices starting in 2014. quote:Hilariously you can also see that the moment the sell off began was roughly when Maduro took over.  Zoomed in the timeline to make it easier to see, it didn't start until 2015 where he was elected early 2013 so seems to align more with oil price than specifically his presidency.
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Nov 15, 2022 15:17
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Speaking of leaders financially ruining their nation, if you remember how El Salvador invested big into Bitcoin and tried to make it legal currency, they're not doing well with recent drops in bitcoin's value. https://english.elpais.com/international/2022-11-14/bitcoins-decline-in-value-is-deadly-blow-for-el-salvador.html
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Nov 15, 2022 16:16
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Marenghi posted:I did see varying recent data through different news articles, but that was the best data I could find over the last 25 year period. Even given the recent sell offs, the actual tonnage of gold sold has slowed dramatically from the 2015-2017 peak. Again that can be seen in the article you've shared. Their graph 'Balances BCV' shows the gold reducing by over half in a 3 year period from 361 to 162. While the 6 year period 2017-2022 it dropped a little over half from 162-73. 199 tonne reduction in 3 years versus a 89 tonne reduction in 6 years. Under what circumstances is a reduction by 25% year over year a slowdown? It went from 150 to under 80 right at the end of your graph, that's not a slowdown at all. They want to sell those 30 tons that are in the Bank of England, that'd put the total at just under 50 tons, and yet Maduro started with over 350 tons. How long do you think it's going to take for a government after Maduro's to get back to those levels? In any case, you're wrong again, Venezuela entered a liquidity crisis almost immediately as Maduro took power, preceding the oil price crash. The BCV was engaging in cash-for-gold deals with Goldman Sachs, yes, the one and only, in late 2013. The average price of crude in 2013 (Brent crude, as before) was 108.56. Listen, I don't blame you for getting incomplete info, the Venezuelan government is very adept at covering their tracks with this kind of stuff, and they lie basically by default. For many years they didn't even publish inflation figures. But understand that there's a pattern here. They say one thing, another thing happens, money disappears. fnox fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Nov 15, 2022 |
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Nov 15, 2022 17:52
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fnox posted:It is pretty pertinent. I'd say it's the crux of the matter, because Venezuelan monetary policy is a huge, huge driver of the entire crisis, and it's something that is squarely lies on Maduro's head. There's an actual serious argument to make that Venezuela would have been better off had his monetary policy been to not do anything. The genesis of the Venezuelan crisis is deficit spending and poor macroeconomic handling of the economy, it precedes sanctions by nearly 4 years. the reason that venezuelan monetary policy is non-relevant is because it has nothing obvious to do with my point, which is as said deliberately very narrow. i do not think it's reasonable to conclude that the US and UK's hostility towards the venezuelan government stems from deep concerns over monetary policy. again, i have explained the non-zero social utility of a failed construction site - it gets hard currency into circulation, in practice an inefficient stimulus. i don't know how much clearer i can be about this. from this it follows that your illustration of gold taken from the BCV having actually-zero utility fails. imo the most obvious use for the gold is, as you said, as a foreign reserve to facilitate imports of some sort. i do not think that the accounting sheets in question are likely to be detailed enough to elucidate this, but again, almost any imports other than pure outrageous luxury spending by the venezuelan ruling set has, strictly speaking *non-zero public utility*. the reason why it has *zero* utility as frozen (effectively stolen by use of a proxy who's promised it away a bunch of times already) is because it formally and literally cannot be used in this state for *any* purpose. for your point to work we would have to assume that 1) all available gold reserves are immediately embezzled and stashed in a bank vault in some tax haven, and 2) that this fate would also befall the foreign gold reserves. both require rather more legwork than you've done thus far and, indeed, seem contradicted by marenghi's graph which seems to demonstrate that a non-zero amount of gold available to the venezuelan government has *not* been embezzled and stashed in a bank vault in some tax haven and is, in fact, fulfilling a non-zero-value function.
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Nov 15, 2022 19:20
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fnox posted:Under what circumstances is a reduction by 25% year over year a slowdown? It went from 150 to under 80 right at the end of your graph, that's not a slowdown at all. We've already agreed that graph didn't account for the last few years correctly. But working off the graph from the article you posted, i updated the missing years data.  I thought it was pretty clearly laid out in the figures i listed. quote:199 tonne reduction in 3 years versus a 89 tonne reduction in 6 years.
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Nov 15, 2022 20:43
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V. Illych L. posted:the reason that venezuelan monetary policy is non-relevant is because it has nothing obvious to do with my point, which is as said deliberately very narrow. i do not think it's reasonable to conclude that the US and UK's hostility towards the venezuelan government stems from deep concerns over monetary policy. I don't know how you want me to engage with this because, obviously, the issue at hand isn't the absolute, total mismanagement of the money, the issue is if the next government would use the resources better. I think this is relatively straightforward, right? It's a very simple extrapolation, if you're arguing that the public utility right now is 0 and if it were to be released to Maduro it would be greater than 0, then the public utility that a government not nearly as corrupt as Maduro's would give those resources would potentially be far greater. I don't know if that's Guaido's, that's besides the point, it could just as easily be a transitional government. Just btw, Venezuela tops the charts in terms of suspicious money in Swiss accounts. Venezuelan politically exposed persons feature prominently in the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers among others. Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention, Venezuela has loving gold mines. The country is a major player in the illegal gold trade, and Maduro is tearing through the biosphere of the Orinoco through his Arco Minero, all to mine gold, which then can be laundered through the BCV. Read that report, it's really, really detailed, and can probably do a better job than I can in explaining why the issue is not as trivial as you portray it. Marenghi posted:Average 66 tonnes a year when oil was low in price versus 15 tonnes a year when they rebounded. I'd consider that a slowdown. I don't know like, should we really be congratulating these people for not managing to sell off all the foreign reserves? Is that the point, that the chart does not trend to 0? Is that good at all? Does it seemingly not matter that on the years prior, Chavez managed to call George W. Bush the literal devil and yet not have foreign reserves drop at all? Oil prices dipped in 2008 too, how come there's no concurrent fall in foreign reserves?
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Nov 15, 2022 23:05
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V. Illych L. posted:i am quite confident that the gold would do more to benefit the venezuelan people if not stolen by a foreign actor, because the leader of venezuela needs some base level of legitimacy among his constituency, and that constituency cannot be limited entirely to the military/political capitalist elite to which the PSUV seems to have reverted in the face of crisis and extreme outside pressure. quote:applies to the pathos-filled poverty of some area or failure of individual project doesn't actually demonstrate anything other than "this place is poor and corrupt", which was never in question - 100% theft is an extraordinary claim and you really are going to have to justify it with something other than your contempt for people with whom you disagree. 100% theft means that *every* public works initiative exists for *nothing* except stealing money, and not just skimming stuff through bad building contracts and -practices, just outright embezzling all the funds. this is a tall order V. Illych L. posted:paying a bunch of people to do useless work has, on its surface, greater social utility than having the money seized by foreigners. that is what you need to disprove, and i deliberately constructed the premise in this way for reasons i have previously stated. what i mean is, as far as i can tell, pretty straightforward: it is better for a country to not have its money stolen by foreigners, even if that money would be very poorly spent. the reason i'm interested in making this statement and why i'm being so anal about this is what i tried to explain in the previous post. "close to zero" doesn't cut it - the criterion is deliberately structured as "actually zero". i fly airplanes fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Nov 16, 2022 |
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Nov 16, 2022 00:04
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So is the argument that it is good the UK stole Venezuela's gold reserves because hypothetically they or another foreign power might successfully carry out a coup and install a friendly government that would be a better steward of the reserves and use them to help out the people
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Nov 16, 2022 00:08
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The two objectives of freezing the gold reserves (make Maduro reverse his wildly antidemocratic poo poo, and ensure it isn't blown and /or stolen before that happens) have both failed, and at this point they've been a failure for quite a few years. Unless there's something I'm not aware of re immediate future of Venezuelan politics, the least bad choice is probably to return the gold. If the PSUV's remaining period of dominance is in the low two figures at minimum any utility derived from a not poo poo government getting the gold after that is probably outweighed by the PSUV spending some of that gold on badly implementing good ideas.
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Nov 16, 2022 00:16
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bonus: instead of sitting in vaults that gold will rapidly find its way into the coffers of global capital 
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Nov 16, 2022 00:17
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I think the US & Uk should just take control of everyone's reserves. Those other countries will only waste the money on things like literacy programs and healthcare. They can access their reserves if they hand over their budgets to the US to administer, that way we know the money is being well spent. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 16, 2022 00:23
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Marenghi posted:Those other countries will only waste the money on things like literacy programs and healthcare. I think the problem is that you think Maduro is your guy. Chavez is your guy, he's not. No money is actually going to any of that, healthcare is in a total and absolute state of crisis and it has nothing to do with sanctions. For years Maduro refused international aid aimed at helping with the humanitarian crisis at its peak. Look at the state of it in 2014 through 2016, every single social program was in total decline. This is the stupidest thing about talking about Venezuela, you're all so sure Maduro is being punished for attempting socialism, that you never bothered to check what he's actually done. GreyjoyBastard posted:The two objectives of freezing the gold reserves (make Maduro reverse his wildly antidemocratic poo poo, and ensure it isn't blown and /or stolen before that happens) have both failed, and at this point they've been a failure for quite a few years. Unless there's something I'm not aware of re immediate future of Venezuelan politics, the least bad choice is probably to return the gold. If the PSUV's remaining period of dominance is in the low two figures at minimum any utility derived from a not poo poo government getting the gold after that is probably outweighed by the PSUV spending some of that gold on badly implementing good ideas. So I actually agree, the sanctions have been primarily to the benefit of Maduro because he now has an easy explanation for the failures of his government. Maduro's government has been successful in rewriting history, just somehow ignoring the chaos that existed in 2013 through 2016 and made it seem like the sanctions packages from 2017 onwards actually have always been around since the beginning of the crisis. Should we be rethinking the approach of the Trump admin? Probably yes. Maduro will attempt to sell off state oil assets, just like he was doing in 2017, he will sell off gold, but at least there's a hope he won't fully loot the country before he's gone. Now, should we be just fully dismantling the sanctions without any sort of compromise from Maduro? No, that'd be a huge setback for whatever remains of the opposition. If removing them would imply that we can get Maduro to agree to holding a real presidential election in 2024 which includes votes abroad and international observers, at the very least then that's something to look towards.
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Nov 16, 2022 10:09
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i fly airplanes posted:Why do you assume leaders need legitimacy among their constituency? They just need control of the military: that's how autocratic regimes like Iran and North Korea operate. what? the dilemma is literally made up of the options on the table, so i don't see what's false about it. the point i'm driving at is that the only way you can justify seizing these reserves is as a step in a regime change operation, which i then argue has made the issues at hand worse than the alternative. i tried to design the premise for this argument to be so generous that everyone would have to agree with it regardless of their view on the precise degree of venezuelan government corruption (unless it's literally 100%, i.e. that it makes no difference to the venezuelan people whether resources are controlled by their own government or foreign governments), which is an issue that i feel has been adequately litigated by others and to which i don't have anything to contribute. i don't think that this discussion is especially interesting, but the premise that i made to be unchallengeable got challenged and so here we are. no government can function without the consent of a mass constituency. if your model of a country is that it is hated by literally everyone who's not directly in the military (how would this kind of divide even happen?) it's probably a bad model. at the very least, you have military-related industries and a political apparatus as well as various client networks giving a minimum of mass legitimacy. one good example of this is egypt, which is very much not a mass-political project but where the military regime is so deeply enmeshed in the political economy that they find a large-enough constituency almost by default, and even then they do stuff like food subsidies despite being an actual military dictatorship. PSUV's present support seems to be at about 10-20% of the population (from polls and recent elections), which is very little for a governing party but which also indicates that there is indeed a degree of mass base remaining. fnox posted:I don't know how you want me to engage with this because, obviously, the issue at hand isn't the absolute, total mismanagement of the money, the issue is if the next government would use the resources better. I think this is relatively straightforward, right? It's a very simple extrapolation, if you're arguing that the public utility right now is 0 and if it were to be released to Maduro it would be greater than 0, then the public utility that a government not nearly as corrupt as Maduro's would give those resources would potentially be far greater. I don't know if that's Guaido's, that's besides the point, it could just as easily be a transitional government. i don't think we should be congratulating anyone for anything at this point; once again, i'm not really invested in the particulars of the venezuelan government's monetary policy, and i have no interest in denying that a serious amount of corruption is taking place. as i have tried to indicate - apparently unsuccessfully, and i do apologise or that - i was setting up this point as a premise for another discussion which i think is more interesting and to which i think i can contribute, i.e. the nature and political function of this corruption and its connection to the asset freeze. regime change operations of this sort tend to exacerbate, not ameliorate, this kind of issue. the point being this: when you freeze assets in this way, you're not just keeping it in stewardship for a future government, you're trying to change the government. a regime under pressure will tend to alter the composition of its support. you yourself have remarked on a kind of neoliberal turn (which i would argue is actually a turn to domestic political capitalism) in the PSUV regime after the failure of price controls to keep the shelves stocked etc. - this signifies a regime altering its domestic power base to survive under pressure. a not-insignificant part of that pressure is the ongoing foreign regime change operation, of which this asset freeze is a part (if they were keeping it for a future, more responsible government - which is not what they're doing, the legal basis for the move is the idea that guaido's the legitimate ruler of venezuela - this would still amount to an attempt at regime change unless the terms under which the assets could be frozen were in set in a bilateral way). basically, i'm arguing that in every hitherto observed case, economic warfare with a goal of regime change doesn't work and, indeed, tends to make the government one attempts to overthrow worse because it has to change its focus away from whatever expensive demands the mass components of its coalition has and over to ensuring elite loyalty - because the bourgeoisie is naturally internationally oriented, this typically means either cementing the party or security apparatus as actors tied to the domestic political economy, or nurturing a class of domestic political capitalists. as the government has increasingly fewer domestic power blocs to play against each other, the remaining power brokers become more powerful. thus, regime change as a way of fixing the problem doesn't work - and so freezing the assets only serves to make things worse. something vaguely similar can be seen in cuba, though the cuban communist party has held on to much more of its civil society component and managed to avoid creating an obvious political capitalist class - the economic pressure of the blockade is one of the reasons that it's unable to satisfy a lot of reasonable demands, and because the regime wants to remain in power, it has a strong incentive to repress and monitor non-loyal parts of civil society (so e.g. religious groups, various cultural institutions etc) because that's where any real internal threats are going to gestate. the external pressure doesn't make the government more responsive to even non-counterrevolutionary domestic interests; it makes the government more repressive because it lacks the resources to address those interests' demands. this is not saying that more focussed economic sanctions cannot work - i have no problem imagining that e.g. the threat of an arms embargo against the UAE could make them stop or scale back their yemeni adventures - but as a means of bettering the target society, economic warfare is a very bad tool. V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Nov 16, 2022 |
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Nov 16, 2022 13:10
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fnox posted:I think the problem is that you think Maduro is your guy. Chavez is your guy, he's not. No money is actually going to any of that, healthcare is in a total and absolute state of crisis and it has nothing to do with sanctions. For years Maduro refused international aid aimed at helping with the humanitarian crisis at its peak. Ah yes the AID trucks from USAID, well known US front for implementing coups. The aid trucks that the media were claiming Maduro tyrannically set on fire, which was being used as evidence for the need to intervene. Except it was all lies, it was the opposition protesters who set them on fire as a false flag that the US ran with. https://web.archive.org/web/20220218063216/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-aid-fire-video.html posted:The narrative seemed to fit Venezuela’s authoritarian rule: Security forces, on the order of President Nicolás Maduro, had torched a convoy of humanitarian aid as millions in his country were suffering from illness and hunger. This event then lead into the attempted coup carried out by US mercs who thankfully were captured. quote:Look at the state of it in 2014 through 2016, every single social program was in total decline.  Why do you think Venezuela will be better as a US neo-colony? Is Haiti a better place to live than Cuba for it's place as a US neo-colony? I believe Venezuela could be a better place to live if not for US interference, well documented interference that you seem to always gloss over in your analysis. Having Guaido in power might improve the life of select compradors and associated classes, but for the working class I can't see things improving over their current sanction imposed suffering.
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Nov 16, 2022 14:03
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Marenghi posted:Wonder was there any change in Venezuela's material conditions between 2014 and 2016 that would lead to those declines. Maybe something discussed on this very page. Oh cool this again. I'm not even gonna bother anymore, we take one step forward into having any, any culpability lie in Maduro's government, it has to slip back to having it all be "US interference". Feel free to read my previous posts on all the complaints the remaining socialist parties have had about Maduro, about the quality of life of the working class in Venezuela under Maduro, about the defacto dollarization and the presence of American food and medicines on shelves when once all that stuff was locally made, on the ecological disaster unfolding in the Orinoco over greed, on the privatization of Venezuela's resources, about the billions upon billions looted through infrastructure projects and through grifts.
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Nov 16, 2022 14:50
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You're the one who brought it back around to the US. You literally brought up the US AID trucks requested by Guaido which precipitated Operation Gideon to overthrow Maduro by mercenary coup. You say you want a discussion about Venezuela but then you also expect me to ignore historical material and the conditions surrounding it such as American interference and the price of oil, their key export. Why should the debate have artificial constraints on it and try to analyze Venezuela through an isolated lens of idealism? Edit: We have articles in 2019 from the NYT admitting sanctions were hurting Venezuela's economy and ability to produce oil. There's this strange belief around sanctions that denying a nation access to energy is somehow separate from that nations economic output. The energy crisis in Europe is highlighting just how inexorably linked energy is to the economy. https://web.archive.org/web/20220417051222/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/world/americas/venezuela-blackout-power.html posted:The blackout will further depress Venezuela’s already collapsing economy, which is being squeezed by bad governance, graft and sanctions imposed by the United States. The sanctions have affected Venezuela’s ability to import and produce the fuel required by the thermal power plants that could have backed up the Guri plant once it failed. Marenghi fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Nov 16, 2022 |
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Nov 16, 2022 15:38
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Bad news for Bolsonaro's party. They've been fined for bad faith litigation in disputing the election results. https://twitter.com/SCMPNews/status/1595611093644214272
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Nov 24, 2022 21:14
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do regular people donate to brazilian political parties ActBlue style or is it all mostly rich people/corporate donations/membership fees? is there public funding?
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Nov 24, 2022 21:16
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Marenghi posted:Bad news for Bolsonaro's party. They've been fined for bad faith litigation in disputing the election results. Wish we could do this in the US of A.
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Nov 24, 2022 21:27
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Badger of Basra posted:do regular people donate to brazilian political parties ActBlue style or is it all mostly rich people/corporate donations/membership fees? is there public funding? There is public funding from a mutual pool, but there's also private donations. also, that decision is even harsher than it looks, because it locked that party OUT of that funding pool. They'll have to find the cash somewhere else, and their allied parties (friendly parties can 'link' up for a larger share) are pissed off and threatening to break.
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Nov 24, 2022 21:38
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Does anyone have a good resource on the Brazilian natural resource licensing law? I can't find any straightforward explanations of it that aren't couched in overly general language. I have a lot of trouble telling what the scope of the behavior is that it's intended to cover. Some explanations make sense (you're turning our native population's natural remedy into a drug, pay them) and some seem bonkers (you're growing a plant in Spain that was once native to Brazil and several other SA countries centuries ago, and was introduced into Spain in the 1800s, pay us licensing fees).
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Nov 24, 2022 21:41
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Discendo Vox posted:Does anyone have a good resource on the Brazilian natural resource licensing law? I can't find any straightforward explanations of it that aren't couched in overly general language. I have a lot of trouble telling what the scope of the behavior is that it's intended to cover. Some explanations make sense (you're turning our native population's natural remedy into a drug, pay them) and some seem bonkers (you're growing a plant in Spain that was once native to Brazil and several other SA countries centuries ago, and was introduced into Spain in the 1800s, pay us licensing fees). Both of those could theoretically be fair and workable systems, and might even both be describing the same system. It all comes down to implementation.
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Nov 25, 2022 04:40
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Fuschia tude posted:Both of those could theoretically be fair and workable systems, and might even both be describing the same system. It all comes down to implementation. Okay, so I'm trying to find out which of these actually exists, and what the implementation actually is.
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Nov 25, 2022 07:00
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https://www.foreignaffairs.com/haiti/haiti-needs-help US still trying to manufacture consent for sending troops into Haiti. The problem remains that the US wants the force lead by African, Caribbean and Latin American countries to avoid it appearing as white America being world police again. quote:the United States are looking for African, Caribbean, and Latin American countries to offer personnel, but no country has so far agreed to lead Within the article they let on the actual reason for intervention. The US puppet is unpopular and a military intervention would go a way to propping up his regime. quote:Perhaps the biggest risk is political. Henry, who was appointed in the aftermath of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, is unpopular, yet he remains in power thanks to the support of the so-called Core Group of ambassadors from Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the United States, and the EU, as well as representatives from the UN and the Organization of American States. The article concludes that intervention is the best humanitarian option. The article written by Deputy Program Director for Latin America and Caribbean at International Crisis Group. ICG has been previously described as "styles itself as independent and non-partisan, but has consistently championed NATO's wars to fulsome transatlantic praise".
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Dec 2, 2022 13:20
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Marenghi posted:https://www.foreignaffairs.com/haiti/haiti-needs-help Is that why Russia is stepping in? https://tass.com/politics/1524055 "Meddling in the political processes in Haiti, bringing the country under the control of ambitions of known regional players, which consider the American continent as their interior court, is unacceptable," First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky said. And why China continues to push for more involvement in Haiti? https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/US-China-rivalry-hangs-over-Haiti-a-month-after-president-s-killing How did Haiti manage to find Russia and China as states to back them up against the US?
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Dec 2, 2022 16:31
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I'm not sure what your point is. Russia's UN envoy opposed US intervention which doesn't seem out of the ordinary. And your second link is over a year old from not long after the assassination. And only contains only one milquetoast statement from a Chinese official about hopes for stability. quote:We hope Haiti can restore social stability at an early date, achieve sound economic development and safeguard people's well-being, " Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a news conference in July. The rest of the article is American officials claiming that China will exploit the crisis with no evidence to back that up.
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Dec 2, 2022 16:55
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i fly airplanes posted:And why China continues to push for more involvement in Haiti? lol come on (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 2, 2022 17:46
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I have no idea what's best for Haiti right now, but everything's breaking down and the country is not capable of basic functions and people keep dying. International aid can't go through to people who need it. The people doing the blockades are responsible for many deaths directly and indirectly and don't seem interested in setting up a working state. It's a humanitarian crisis with no good solutions, so the people who care are left pondering bad ones.
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Dec 2, 2022 20:03
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SlothfulCobra posted:I have no idea what's best for Haiti right now, but everything's breaking down and the country is not capable of basic functions and people keep dying. International aid can't go through to people who need it. The people doing the blockades are responsible for many deaths directly and indirectly and don't seem interested in setting up a working state. Haiti's slavedriver overlord militarily raping it again would be a terrible crime, full stop. There's no complexity here on that issue.
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Dec 5, 2022 01:43
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Marenghi posted:https://www.foreignaffairs.com/haiti/haiti-needs-help you're making some unwarranted assumptions here and one of them is that the guy who also that a UN intervention would be controlled from behind the scenes by the US and/or France to screw over Haiti more than the Current Situation, but that first paragraph is bigger Zedhe Khoja posted:Haiti's slavedriver overlord militarily raping it again would be a terrible crime, full stop. There's no complexity here on that issue. seems like a reasonable take, too bad that isn't the only non-do-nothing choice on the table
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Dec 5, 2022 01:47
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If we're talking foreign intervention it absolutely is unless you're a rube. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 5, 2022 01:53
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Google Jeb Bush posted:you're making some unwarranted assumptions here and one of them is that the guy who I've been following Haiti news through twitter long before the assassination. There was unrest for ages and questions about who was arming the gangs. The consensus was that Moïse was using gangs to suppress dissent armed with US weapons. But that was becoming too big a problem for the US so they had him killed and replaced with a new puppet, which they hoped would quell some of the unrest. The assassination was planned by men in Miami which tends to be where US coups in the Caribbean are launched from. Again it's conjecture but that's all we really have from Haiti, the gangs are supposed to be looking for the same arrangement they had with the assassinated president as an extra state police force. The new guy is regarded as a puppet and wouldn't survive without US support. Which is why they need the intervention to solidify his position. https://twitter.com/ComradeKimDawn/status/1570395166636384256
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Dec 5, 2022 14:02
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Google Jeb Bush posted:you're making some unwarranted assumptions here and one of them is that the guy who
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Dec 5, 2022 14:48
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Sure every other foreign intervention in Haiti justified on humanitarian grounds has been has wound up being a horrible disaster in the long run that was really all about naked imperial oppression, but this time is different.
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Dec 5, 2022 16:16
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cat botherer posted:Sure every other foreign intervention in Haiti justified on humanitarian grounds has been has wound up being a horrible disaster in the long run that was really all about naked imperial oppression, but this time is different. "Naked imperial oppression" from the richest country in the Americas against the poorest country? Heavy rhetoric here. Nobody gains from Haiti collapsing, especially not the US wanting to deal with more migrants coming across the border while political capital for immigration reform is nonexistent.
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Dec 5, 2022 22:34
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