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Vlex posted:So do the new denominations of bolivares stand any chance of actually appearing in the next week or two? How will people pay for goods and services if not? Maduro had the best plan for that really: if there are no goods to buy in the shops and no services because no one can afford anything, paying for them isn't a problem anymore! 
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Jan 4, 2017 21:59
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fishmech posted:Maduro had the best plan for that really: if there are no goods to buy in the shops and no services because no one can afford anything, paying for them isn't a problem anymore! A true socialist utopia, as envisioned by the Liberator! But seriously, I can only see this causing outlying communities (especially in border areas) to just switch over to either pesos or reais. Delete as appropriate.
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Jan 4, 2017 23:40
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Any particular insight about El Aissami and the appointment? Does this mean bad tidings for Diosado?
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Jan 5, 2017 03:31
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:Any particular insight about El Aissami and the appointment? Does this mean bad tidings for Diosado? A bit of context: Maduro shuffled his cabinet today, and replaced Aristobulo Isturiz was vice-president with Tarek El Aissami. El Aissami has been the governor of Aragua since 2012, and before that he was the Minister of the Interior. El Aissami been linked to the drug trade via Walid Makled, a Venezuelan drug lord who was once one of the most wanted drug traffickers on earth. In 2015, when news started to leak that the Drug Enforcement Agency was working on a case involving high-ranking Venezuelan officials, El Aissami was named as one of the officials under investigation. The same leak named Nestor Reverol as another target of DEA investigation, and that information turned out to be accurate (Reverol was indicted in early January for drug trafficking, but the indictment remained sealed until August of last year). Aside from his suspected connections to drug trafficking, El Aissami is considered to be one of the more hard-line and devoted chavistas around, whereas Isturiz is seen as a bit of a more reasonable moderate. As far as I'm aware (based on the media reports and rumours I've read over the years), El Aissami and Cabello head competing factions inside the PSUV, given the fact that they're both fairly powerful men inside the party. I don't know what kind of infighting or jockeying for position is going on inside the PSUV right now, but I can imagine that the Cabello camp is probably not too happy with this appointment. EDIT: Maduro made a total of twelve changes to his cabinet today. One of the biggest one was the consolidation of all ministries/positions related to commerce, finance into a single entity: the Ministry of the Economy and Finance. Here is a list of the changes that Maduro made:
In another bit of news, the national worker's union announced today that 10,000 public sector workers have lost their jobs since December 30 because the government is trying to cut 300,000 workers from its payroll. The Venezuelan government currently has 2.8 million employees. The workers are apparently being terminated through as their contracts expire through a loophole in the law. Under Venezuelan law, anyone working on contract must be made into a permanent worker at the one year mark. The national worker's union said that some of the people who have been terminated this week have been employees for years, but because they government never actually complied with the law and turned them into permanent staff, they're being let go as if their contracts simply expired. Vlex posted:But seriously, I can only see this causing outlying communities (especially in border areas) to just switch over to either pesos or reais. Delete as appropriate. Chuck Boone fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Jan 5, 2017 |
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Jan 5, 2017 04:07
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This is going around: https://historyjack.com/2017/01/03/starvation-and-silence-the-british-left-and-moral-accountability-for-venezuela/
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Jan 5, 2017 13:18
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As late as 2014 Owen Jones(one of the British cheerleaders for Chavez/Maduro) posted an article for The Independent, "Socialism’s critics look at Venezuela and say, ‘We told you so’. But they are wrong", which has subsequently been deleted from their website without comment. I'm still waiting for the likes him and Jeremy Corbyn to be put on the spot regarding their vocal support for the Venezuelan government, but what's annoying is their radio silence on the issue. Idealogues are incapable of admitting the failure of their ideology, so they just don't talk about the fact that they threw in their lot with a government that hosed up this badly and tyranically. They shouldn't be allowed to get away with it but I'm not aware of any of them being put on the spot over the issue.
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Jan 5, 2017 23:15
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Mukip posted:As late as 2014 Owen Jones(one of the British cheerleaders for Chavez/Maduro) posted an article for The Independent, "Socialism’s critics look at Venezuela and say, ‘We told you so’. But they are wrong", which has subsequently been deleted from their website without comment. What passes for the Left in Britain is completely pathetic, to be honest.
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Jan 6, 2017 00:31
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Mukip posted:As late as 2014 Owen Jones(one of the British cheerleaders for Chavez/Maduro) posted an article for The Independent, "Socialism’s critics look at Venezuela and say, ‘We told you so’. But they are wrong", which has subsequently been deleted from their website without comment. well, the only good thing i take from this is that the only people supporting maduro openly anymore (outside of the country) are WOKE tankie clowns who mostly stay on twitter and right lovely thinkpieces about how great maduro is(which are rairer now a days) or "academics" like Ciccariello and my old government professor who are basically old hippies or tankies who somehow survived the bush years and jerk off about the glory days when they had the USSR to worship and now they can only worship smaller failing states. No one real is defending them anymore. Vlex posted:What passes for the Left in Britain is completely pathetic, to be honest. least you have them lefties. in america we just have old school republicans, fascists, and WOKE liberals who care more about stupid bullshit then actual things.
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Jan 6, 2017 04:12
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When reading about underdeveloped countries with ineffective government institutions with an unhealthy media landscape that has news organizations that lack journalistic integrity is we cannot look at these countries in terms of right or left. With the lack of effective government institutions most of the socialist programs fall victim to corruption and waste(Venezuela). With the lack of effective government institutions right wing governments tend to allow wealthy business owners to exploit workers(China). Without a healthy news landscape that has more than one source of media that has journalistic integrity leaders can misdirect the frustration of the people against their enemies(like North Korea in extreme cases or in mild cases far left/far right media in the US). Without healthy democratic institutions leaders can alter how the government operates to serve their needs instead of that of the people and turn the country into a patronage dictatorship like Venezuela and many African countries. Without an educated and properly informed middle class the people cannot seize the reigns of their own state to take it off the path to a failed state. With Venezuela you are seeing country take a long march down a road from an unhealthy democracy to a patronage dictatorship overseeing a failing state. I sometimes like reading these threads about Venezuela and the Middle East because it is history in action and teaches everyone here the telltale signs of a country going down the wrong path and how to effectively guard our own countries against abuses of the state when it starts to follow in their footsteps. This is not a lesson about right or left but about the abuses of unchecked power. At least that's what I gather.
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Jan 6, 2017 05:29
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Dapper_Swindler posted:well, the only good thing i take from this is that the only people supporting maduro openly anymore (outside of the country) are WOKE tankie clowns who mostly stay on twitter and right lovely thinkpieces about how great maduro is(which are rairer now a days) or "academics" like Ciccariello and my old government professor who are basically old hippies or tankies who somehow survived the bush years and jerk off about the glory days when they had the USSR to worship and now they can only worship smaller failing states. No one real is defending them anymore. That article is good and notes that the absence of commentary among the left in Western Europe is a very real issue. In Latin America though a lot of those people are still very vocal, and our governments fail to act even though Venezuela breaks every democratic accountability rule in Mercosur, Unasur, OEA, etc.
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Jan 6, 2017 12:43
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owDAWG posted:This is not a lesson about right or left but about the abuses of unchecked power. It can be, and is, a lesson about both unchecked power in general and leftism. You don't have to rely on the words of right-wingers to identify Venezuela as an exemplar of a socialist state, you can just look at what every socialist group in the world was saying about Venezuela from 1998 to a year and a half ago.
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Jan 6, 2017 13:12
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The chorus of 'actually that isn't socialism's fault' for almost every implementation of socialism in history is kind of funny.
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Jan 6, 2017 15:06
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owDAWG posted:This is not a lesson about right or left but about the abuses of unchecked power. That's my view as well. I remember when I started reading these threads around four years ago and tried to convince people that Chavez was dangerous because of his abuse of power, a common sentiment was that it wasn't a big deal. It was all, "No no, he's just throwing off the oppression of the oligarchs", "You're only complaining because you're middle class", "Common people love him, he's doing the right thing". All in all, it always felt condescending how lots of people were quick to dismiss the dangers of authoritarianism in Venezuela because they wanted to root for the plucky socialist state that gave the middle finger to the USA. It didn't really matter to them that Chavez already had political prisoners (some of which were tortured even back then), arrested others without any judiciary process, ignored the results of elections when they didn't suit him, dismantled every check and balance against his power, essentially ruled by decree, and repeatedly called for violence among Venezuelans. Rant over, that's just something that's always bugged me.
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Jan 6, 2017 15:12
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The 2017 National Assembly had its inaugural session yesterday, during which the executive committee for the year was sworn in. Henry Ramos Allup has been replaced as president of the legislature by Julio Borges. This was an arrangement that was announced in December of 2015 after the MUD won the parliamentary elections, with the four big parties who make up the MUD agreeing to rotate the presidency among them in one-year terms. Borges gave a speech in which he repeated some of the same stuff we heard from the opposition last year. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit to come from Borge's speech was his assertion that the National Assembly will go ahead with declaring Maduro's post abandoned, which he said would "open the doors" for elections. I'm not 100% clear on what exactly the opposition means when they say they will "declare Maduro abandoned his position", and I'm not entirely sure that anyone in the opposition is either. This is because the constitution does not offer any kind of guideline for how to declare a post abandoned, or under which circumstances the declaration can be made. "Abandonment of postition" is a phrase that only appears once in the document, in article 233 (emphasis mine): quote:Article 233: The President of the Republic shall become permanently unavailable to serve by reason of any of the following events: death; resignation; removal from office by decision of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice; permanent physical or mental disability certified by a medical board designated by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice with the approval of the National Assembly; abandonment of his position, duly declared by the National Assembly; and recall by popular vote. Two things to note: First, the article doesn't define what "abandonment of his position" means. Maduro hasn't physically left his position; he hasn't resigned; he hasn't expressed a willingness to not be president anymore. So how has he abandoned his position? If the MUD does go ahead with this, it'll be interesting to see how they try to frame the argument. Second, you'll notice that the bottom of the article says that, "When an elected President becomes permanently unavailable", as Maduro would become were his position to be declared abandoned, "during the last two years of his constitutional term of office, the Executive Vice-President shall take over the Presidency...". This means that if the National Assembly declares Maduro's position to have been abandoned on or after this Tuesday, January 10, then Tarek El Aissami would become President of Venezuela on that same day until the next presidential elections, which are supposed to take place in 2018 but... who knows now. The only way that Maduro would react to a move like this by actually leaving his position would be if he were forced at gunpoint to do so by the PSUV in order to get El Aissami in and breathe some new life into the project. I think lots of people were expecting Maduro to name Diosdado Cabello VP during this first week of February in order to scare the MUD away from trying to get rid of him constitutionally in 2017, but I'm not sure that El Aissami in charge would be any better.
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Jan 6, 2017 15:47
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Labradoodle posted:That's my view as well. I remember when I started reading these threads around four years ago and tried to convince people that Chavez was dangerous because of his abuse of power, a common sentiment was that it wasn't a big deal. It was all, "No no, he's just throwing off the oppression of the oligarchs", "You're only complaining because you're middle class", "Common people love him, he's doing the right thing". Oh yeah, this was me as well. I even got probated when I decided to leave the "discussion" because a bunch of armchair socialist decided that a Venezuelan's take on his own loving country wasn't valid since it clashed with their beautiful fantasy. owDAWG posted:This is not a lesson about right or left but about the abuses of unchecked power. This is 100% true, and our government since Chavez has only made the effort to appear like a Socialist project when in reality they've been gathering power and wealth to use the country as their own private Ranch.
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Jan 7, 2017 17:31
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On Friday, the Ministry of Defense released a response to a speech at the National Assembly on Thursday by Julio Borges, in which Borges called for the armed forces to essentially rebel against the Maduro regime. We've heard this kind of talk before from Henry Ramos Allup, Henrique Capriles and others over the past year. What Borges and other did is that they were careful not to say "rebel against Maduro!". Instead, they said things like, "I"m not asking you to rebel against Maduro: I'm asking you to defend the constitution". The context in those kinds of statements is that the Venezuelan constitution makes it abundantly clear that the armed forces must 1) be non-partisan, and 2) serve the country/the constitution, not a particular political party or a particular president. On paper this sounds nice because it makes the armed forces a last line of defense against authoritarianism, since they can come in and save the day if any particular president violates the constitution. These relevant bits of the constitution are below: quote:Article 328: The National Armed Forces constitute an essentially professional institution, with no political orientation, organized by the State to guarantee the independence and sovereignty of the Nation and ensure the integrity of its geographical space, through military defense, cooperation for the purpose of maintaining internal order and active participation in national development, in accordance with this Constitution and the law. In performing their functions, they are at the exclusive service of the Nation, and in no case at the service of any person or political partisanship. Over the last decade or so, however, the military has become a 100% chavista organization, thanks to the doctrine of union-civico militar [civil-military union]. This term comes up every once in a while in the thread, and it's kind of slippery to pin down. Essentially, Chavez began to feel (specially in the second half of his rule) that the military and civilian spheres should blend together; that the military should have more and more influence and say in the way things operate in the civilian sphere. This is why roughly 1/3 of cabinet positions are now filled by active-duty members of the armed forces. Anyway, Minister of Defense General Vladimir Padrino Lopez released a statement on Friday in response to Borges' speech on Thursday that is a really good example of how much contempt the PSUV/the military have for the constitution. Here is the statement: quote:The National Bolivarian Armed Forces ratify to the Venezuelan people its indomitable call to serve their highest interests, and its unbreakable promise to respect and enforce the Supreme Law of the Republic as we have always done, specially over the past 17 years during which we have faced serious attacks such as coup d‘etats, an oil strike, terrorist guarimbas [street barricades], paramilitary crime and political violence; all events that the enemies of the homeland have failed at spectacularly thanks to the overwhelming roll played by the Bolivarian government and the military to protect peace and democratic stability. On the Labradoodle and Hugoon Chavez stories: I got shouted out of a Venezuela thread many years ago here also, when I told a story about how my family was having trouble finding a nurse to take care of my grandmother at home for some reason. My family got called all sorts of bad things because how dare they be so fabulously wealthy that they should expect home care for an elderly loved one. It's ridiculous to think that there was a time when a thread like this was devoid of Venezuelans because they keyboard warriors had locked down their defense for the revolution. I've also noted a gradual decrease in the "real-life" support that Venezuela gets. I've been to a few anti-government demonstrations here in Toronto over the years, and I remember that many years ago we could always count on a counter-demonstration by a group whose name escapes me now, but I think it was something like "The Venezuela Solidarity Network". Anyway, we would set up in a square or a park or something with out banners and whatever, and this group would set up across a street with Venezuelan flags and flags from many other countries too (Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, etc.). I haven't seen them at the handful of demonstrations that I've been to since at least 2013.
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Jan 8, 2017 17:33
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Chuck Boone posted:On the Labradoodle and Hugoon Chavez stories: I got shouted out of a Venezuela thread many years ago here also, when I told a story about how my family was having trouble finding a nurse to take care of my grandmother at home for some reason. My family got called all sorts of bad things because how dare they be so fabulously wealthy that they should expect home care for an elderly loved one. It's ridiculous to think that there was a time when a thread like this was devoid of Venezuelans because they keyboard warriors had locked down their defense for the revolution. As soon as the collapse of Venezuela is complete these same people will be back with "of course it was all a CIA plot and we have to appreciate the nuance in Chavism." They are only being strategically silent for the time being.
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Jan 8, 2017 20:36
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Calling for a military coup when the military is propping up the anti-democratic government is pretty nuts even by Latin American standards.
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Jan 8, 2017 21:50
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Mukip posted:As late as 2014 Owen Jones(one of the British cheerleaders for Chavez/Maduro) posted an article for The Independent, "Socialism’s critics look at Venezuela and say, ‘We told you so’. But they are wrong", which has subsequently been deleted from their website without comment. The reason why people aren't being put on the spot about their views on Maduro's regime is because the people don't actually care about Venezuela beyond having something to harrumph about. Dunno who Owen Jones is, though I'm sure it's still possible to disagree with his him. Well, until Jeremy leads the proletarian seizure of power and enemies of the people get to have a free vacation in re-education camping. Which is gonig to happen any day now.
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Jan 9, 2017 00:16
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Chuck Boone posted:It's ridiculous to think that there was a time when a thread like this was devoid of Venezuelans because they keyboard warriors had locked down their defense for the revolution. Yeah, but it's not easy to try and maintain a civil discussion with a bunch of wanna be activists that are ready to dismiss your actual real life experiences and struggles because it doesn't fit their idolized version. I remember someone saying my view was exaggerated because I was obviously from a rich family. Yeah man that's why I went dumpster diving when I was a teen because we had no money and telling my mom I was hungry broke her heart so I did whatever to avoid that while my family lived on a lentils and plain spaghetti for years. Or how about being told you're making poo poo up when you share the story of how you've been shot at by the police for being at the wrong place and wrong time. Or that you're spreading lies when you say you basically have PTSD after growing up in Caracas. I'm not glad that things have gotten so bad that these armchair Marx cosplayers have dissapeared, tough.
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Jan 9, 2017 11:11
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Tankies will be tankies, and tankies are the worst.
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Jan 9, 2017 11:32
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Hugoon Chavez posted:Yeah, but it's not easy to try and maintain a civil discussion with a bunch of wanna be activists that are ready to dismiss your actual real life experiences and struggles because it doesn't fit their idolized version. I really wish we could just send them to Caracas for a week, see if they still think the same way after that.
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Jan 9, 2017 12:00
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fnox posted:I really wish we could just send them to Caracas for a week, see if they still think the same way after that. Oh, my thoughts exactly. Give them minimum wage and let them run around for a full week trying to feed themselves.
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Jan 9, 2017 12:40
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Hugoon Chavez posted:Oh, my thoughts exactly. Give them minimum wage and let them run around for a full week trying to feed themselves. "You're rigging it so I can't you bougie cuck!" 
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Jan 9, 2017 13:53
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Self-pitying navel gazing about being shouted down by unnamed retards is not interesting. Not that I'm dismissing anyone's real experiences about living in Venezuela, but I find it hard to believe that what has happened can just be boiled down to 'Chavez bad'. There was a military coup iirc, the regime does have some valid reasons to feel paranoid about political opposition.
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Jan 9, 2017 14:01
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Haha it begins! I'm flying out to Caracas on this weekend, would you like to join me and see for yourself?
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Jan 9, 2017 14:08
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Friendly Humour posted:There was a military coup iirc, the regime does have some valid reasons to feel paranoid about political opposition. I suppose the Chavismo regime would understand the consequences of a military coup, seeing as the Eternal Commander Of The Revolution himself led two of them.
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Jan 9, 2017 14:11
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Friendly Humour posted:Self-pitying navel gazing about being shouted down by unnamed retards is not interesting. Not that I'm dismissing anyone's real experiences about living in Venezuela, but I find it hard to believe that what has happened can just be boiled down to 'Chavez bad'. There was a military coup iirc, the regime does have some valid reasons to feel paranoid about political opposition. As for the military coup, I think you might be referring to the 2002 April 11 attempted coup d'etat. We can have a discussion about what type of coup this was, and I'd start by saying that calling it a military coup would be too simplistic. The military returned Chavez to power; he was driven out of office after hundreds of thousands people marched in Caracas and on the Presidential Palace. Again, we try to dissect the coup as many have done since it took place as it was a very complex event, but I'd be careful of painting it as simply a "military coup". The regime does in fact feel paranoid about political position, but I would argue two points on this. First, any regime will feel paranoid about any political position. That is a statement that you can make about any political party in power anywhere. Second, speaking specifically about Venezuela, the regime does in fact feel paranoid about political opposition, but not in the way that you seem to be suggesting (i.e, because there was a coup once). Every survey that we've seen since the end of 2014 has Maduro's approval rating at around the 20% mark. That means that 8 out of 10 Venezuelans disapprove of his job as president. Last week, a survey by the Datanalisis firm found that support for the PSUV has fallen to just 18%. When Chavez left office in 2013, the party enjoyed support from 40% of voters. The regime is absolutely paranoid of the opposition because it knows that it is extremely unpopular and would likely lose any election. We saw how poorly the PSUV performs in elections recently during the 2015 parliamentary elections (PSUV lost 40.9% of the opposition's 56.2%). That was an unprecedented defeat for the PSUV and a sign of the collapse of its support given the fact that the party has presided (and is widely understood to be responsible for) the worst socio-economic collapse of the country's modern history. This is the same reason why the regime refused to allow a recall referendum to take place against Maduro (a wholly legitimate process found in the constitution), and why it suspended regional elections that had to happen last year until this summer (maybe, if we're lucky). In short: yes, the PSUV is paranoid, because it knows that it will lose any election that takes place from here on out, and that is because the Venezuelan voter by and large understands that the crisis was caused and is being made worse by the people in power today. Vlex posted:Haha it begins!  How long are you going for? I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the trip when you get back. Good luck!
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Jan 9, 2017 14:49
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Vlex posted:Haha it begins! Finnish beer is euro for a can. We got our woes as well mate. kapparomeo posted:I suppose the Chavismo regime would understand the consequences of a military coup, seeing as the Eternal Commander Of The Revolution himself led two of them. Huh, didn't know. The article does point out some fairly good reasons to have a coup though. Chavez was democratically elected later on, wasn't he? If people did vote for Chavez, there must've been some reasons why they did that, no matter how things turned out in the end. That's what I'm trying to wrap my head around, because afaik the poorer classes really did suffer under the regime that Chavez replaced. My impression is that they weren't exactly democratically legitimized, but propped up by the very same corrupt structures and institutions that allowed Maduro to take over after Chavez died. Or am I completely off the track here?
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Jan 9, 2017 14:51
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quote:The article does point out some fairly good reasons to have a coup though.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:30
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Cicero posted:And there are even better reasons to have a coup now. I mean, it'd be one thing if the current government was oppressive but at least somewhat competent at running the country, but instead the whole thing is collapsing because of hilariously terrible mismanagement. I don't disagree. I got exactly zero sympathy for Venezulan government. I do however, have sympathy for the people who voted for Chavez. And my impression is that they had some reasons to do that, and that your current political opposition doesn't publically seem to be very interested, again based on what I've read here, in addressing or admitting those reasons. You don't end a class war just by overthrowing the government, you do actually have to do something about the underlying reasons for the conflict. And I can't say I've seen much introspection about why your country is where it's at besides 'maduro bad'. Sorry if I'm out of line here.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:46
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Friendly Humour posted:Finnish beer is euro for a can. We got our woes as well mate. Basically: The regime Chavez replaced was bad. Seriously bad, for lots of people. The regime Chavez installed to replace it, it turns out, was actually worse, but not immediately so. This is actually really common for revolutions.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:50
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Friendly Humour posted:Finnish beer is euro for a can. We got our woes as well mate. Yes, Chavez was elected on three different occasions, although the latter two weren't exactly fair fights, he did win them. To put it simply, things were a clusterfuck when he came to power in the first time – two parties had been splitting the power for a long time and people were fed up, then Chavez swooped into the scene at the right time to clean up. It didn't hurt that the guy was charismatic either. Concerning the corrupt government structures – corruption was certainly a problem back then, it's always been, but Chavez took things to a whole new level by basically stuffing the whole government with his supporters, to the point where we don't have any independent powers. Except for the National Assembly, of course, but they've been declawed. Chavez's whole government was built around the concept of crushing the enemies of the revolution and surrounding himself with staunch henchmen. People rose to power and fell out of favor depending on his whims, which fostered a toxic government culture. Since Chavez treated the opposition with disdain, all his cronies did as well, trying to constantly one-up each other. Chavez mistrusted private businesses, so his ministers threw around threats of expropriation around as others do greetings. Nothing changed after he passed away, the structure is still held together by the same toxic culture, except now they're more vicious since they have neither money nor popular support to fall back on. Plus, the longer they present a united front, they longer the may stick around and continue to loot the nation's coffers. On the topic of whether the government is right to fear the opposition, they really shouldn't, and they probably don't. After the 2002 coup (or whatever we're calling it), the opposition went into overcorrection mode, to the point where they won't take a sip of coffee in the mornings without wondering if it may come off as a violent attempt to seize power. They've proved over and over again they will only get off their asses come election time, so painting them as a threat is very exaggerated. Right now, they're only a threat in the sense that when people finally get fed up and power shifts, they'll probably be the ones left holding the trophy by default.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:53
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GlyphGryph posted:Basically: Thanks for the oversimplification. If it wasn't "immediately" worse, then it was better.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:55
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Friendly Humour posted:Thanks for the oversimplification. If it wasn't "immediately" worse, then it was better. Next quarters profits are all that matters anyway.
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Jan 9, 2017 16:23
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Is Maduro's government still shutting down and bulldozing factories etc run by people they don't like, instead of doing something that would make sense like seizing them as punishment? That's the kind of incompetence that's really killing Venezuela.
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Jan 9, 2017 16:42
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Friendly Humour posted:Thanks for the oversimplification. If it wasn't "immediately" worse, then it was better. Uh... what? Injecting HIV into your bloodstream is not immediately worse than breaking your leg, but it is still definitively worse than breaking your leg.* The idea that a quick fix can make things temporarily better but gently caress you over even harder down the road is, uh... that's not a controversial thing? * Unless you're going to die next week, in which case case the HIV injection is probably the better choice. Context matters. For a small subset of the population the legacy of Chavez was probably a step up, but for most of them it turned out worse.
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Jan 9, 2017 17:18
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Chuck Boone posted:You still owe us a report from the last time when you were there! I thought people had forgotten and wouldn't be interested  This is my third and final trip to Venezuela on this project, and I can't say I'm all that upset about it. I may as well do an effortpost when I get back in April.
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Jan 9, 2017 17:45
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fishmech posted:Is Maduro's government still shutting down and bulldozing factories etc run by people they don't like, instead of doing something that would make sense like seizing them as punishment? That's the kind of incompetence that's really killing Venezuela. They never bulldoze them. Just make a big show of giving them to 'the workers' and instead put their friends in charge. Said friends proceed to drive the company to the ground because, often, they have no freaking clue what they're doing and are just interested in milking the company/factory until it goes dry. The workers in question continue to get screwed, only now they can't even protest because the government can just send some goons to keep everybody in line. I haven't heard about any major expropriations lately, though. I guess no one wants to get put in charge of those these days when there's so much money to be made from importing stuff at an exorbitant markup using preferential dollars.
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Jan 9, 2017 17:56
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Friendly Humour posted:Thanks for the oversimplification. If it wasn't "immediately" worse, then it was better. Man, if you want to believe Chavez was a people's hero and did bad stuff because he was fighting the powerful and terrible and had to set everything right, you can go ahead and do that. But at the end of the day before he bought the farm he never replaced the corrupt institutions he tore down with something actually good for the people and more or less left his cronies in charge of everything 'positive' he ever did and they absolutely only wanted to use Venezuela to enrich themselves. Maybe it was a mistake and he didn't understand that critical last step in the revolution. Maybe by the time it got to that point he'd already lost the reigns on his immediate support base. Maybe he was just a kleptocrat like Maduro but with a better face. Either way, Venezuela is in unprecedented crisis right now and the Bolivarian revolution had the biggest hand in that. If that's an acceptable risk that comes alongside fighting corrupt regimes go ahead and claim that, but there's no way to not blame what he did for what is happening today.
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Jan 9, 2017 20:12
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