ronya posted:

I continue to underscore that mass expropriation by a regime enmeshed in a violent socialist, anti-imperialist politics is not automatically linked to dysfunction. You can find it in, e.g., the economic policy record of Chiang Kai-Shek in Taiwan.

My Imaginary GF posted:

Excuses. You're clearly able to type --- organize some project proposals, make connections, start an org, and offer him a placement.

Hugoon Chavez posted:

And suddenly it's raining so loving much in Caracas and Valencia (that I know of) that it's causing severe damages.

Just saw a video of a flood making cars roll down the hill, and my friends from Valencia have been sending pictures for a few hours. It's The Biblical Flood come to punish the wicked, and honestly Venezuela is a good place to find them.

Hope you Venegoons are ok, and with electric power.

Kinda funny, Maduro went out and prayed for rain on camera and now it can't stop raining and its loving everything up and oh god Maduro stop trying to do stuff.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

arnt most of those countries in deep poo poo too. especially Nicaragua? I mean gently caress, didnt the circlejerk known as ALBA fall flat on its face.

Celexi posted:

according to news, there was no bread nor wheat flour nor corn flour today in most of caracas!

My Imaginary GF posted:

Christ, you don't loving funnel 100% of a contract to a shell, you take only 3-6% max. Less outright greed means more overall money to take a percentage off of.

Demiurge4 posted:

I like this one, because it justifies limited corruption.

Chuck Boone posted:

Caracas has only one morgue: Bello Monte. That means that every one of the hundreds of murder victims in the city each month have only one place to go.

In 2010, El Nacional published a picture taken inside the morgue. The picture showed dead bodies sitting out on the open; bloodied, some half-covered in filthy rags, some laying on the floor and others stacked on top of each other. (This news article contains the picture - needless to say, it's and : picture).

When the picture was released, it set off a debate about the general state of decay in Venezuela. The government threatened to sue El Nacional for a bunch of reasons. The government said that the picture wasn't recent, that the picture was part of a smear campaign against Chavez, that the picture violated the law by exposing minors to shocking material, etc. I'm not sure what ever came of those threats, but they go to show that the PSUV refusing to engage with reality and deflecting blame to everything/everyone else isn't a new thing.

themrguy posted:

Jesus a loving country in collapsing in real time around us and no-one in the international media seems to care that much. I guess Venezulans are going to be the next big expat community here in the states huh.

I hope the goon who was going to Sweden makes it out

Constant Hamprince posted:

Most economic metrics aren't designed to handle what happens when you run a country as an enormous Forex scam

Constant Hamprince posted:

In comparison to all the real implementations of socialism like

Best Friends posted:

It's Borneo Jimmys all the way down.

MothraAttack posted:

Here's a video of some cameramen getting robbed by colectivos:

https://twitter.com/ferchomr90/status/738433428991946753

Chuck Boone posted:

fnox posted:

I haven't been able to get some corn flour, sugar and medicines to my grandparents in Margarita because the motherfucking National Guard at customs keep opening the box and taking my poo poo.

fnox posted:

Yeah, but of loving food and medicines? No amount of heart medicine will fix the stone cold heart you need to have to steal from an old man.

They can't even sell that poo poo.

Demiurge4 posted:

It's kind of politics 101. If you know that poo poo is about to hit the fan, if you are absolutely certain that it loving will, you don't want to be the one in charge when it does. It's lovely but they probably believe they have a better shot picking up the pieces than they have taking over the house of cards the day before it tumbles and have the PSUV pin it all on them.

eigenstate posted:

(post retracted)

Sergg posted:

How hosed up is it that they are blocking your signatures to recall a guy who can't even loving spell his own drat name? This is literally Maduro's signature from his Wikipedia page.

Demiurge4 posted:

I can see Kerry pushing the referendum and quiet amnesty in return for stable government and financial support. There's no price too high for stability in SA.

El Hefe posted:

La Guaira port today:



not a single ship, this is loving terrifying, anyone expecting to find some medicine might as well give up.

Xandu posted:

Wonder how the government will spin this


http://www.voanews.com/content/vete..._medium=twitter

MysteriousStranger posted:

Any foreign aid from the US is either directly from government or a corporation. Even if you get an NGO, that NGO is getting it's money from USAID/US STATE/US DOD or the same corporations. So if you really believe that the US and corporations are bad, then taking any aid from the US is suicidal because there are no sources of aid that aren't directly linked to the intelligence, defense, and corporate entities.

Speaking as someone who worked for various NGOs giving aid and not letting STATE/DOD or a corporation control it is a non starter and should be laughed out of the room and the person suggesting it locked up in an asylum. Because if your security forces aren't there controlling it the local strongman does, entrenches his power, and the people who need it get squat. You go in there with the military or private security contractors or you don't go at all. So unless Maduro is willing to let the US Navy and US Marines post up and do this with some NGOs it's probably a non starter.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. USN/USMC are actually pretty drat good at distributing food and medical supplies, it's a huge part of what they do. But I'm not sure how well the Maduro government will take USN carriers and hospital ships rolling up there with a cross mix of sailors and marines working with NGOs to distribute things and make sure it doesn't get out of hand. And I'm not sure how keen the Obama administration would be with "LOL no just give us all the supplies and we distribute them", generally once you're in the situation where you need food and medicine by the ton shits so out of control you don't have the ability, or are to corrupt to be trusted, to run proper distribution channels.

Which is why it's usually better to accept foreign aid before it reaches the point where the security and logistical issues are so large. It's also not a good idea to make boogeymen out of the people who are able to pull this off. But this situation has festered for a while.

El Hefe posted:

The government from all these countries voted no to even discussing the possible application of the democratic charter



all enemies of the Venezuelan people, and they are all obviously in the PSUV's pocket.

ComradeCosmobot posted:

Good luck fnox. Everyone but Borneo Jimmy is rooting for you.

Hugoon Chavez posted:

I'm glad your family got him back Chuck, that's really scary.


Yeah I agree. Long-term kidnappings are planned and scouted out, so they must know your family, I hope nothing like it happens again but I'd be scared shitless.

One of my wife's long time neighbors had to flee the country a couple years ago because one of his daughters was kidnapped and killed, and they didn't want a repeat for their second. They had a bunch of business across Valencia. Being successful paints a target on your back.

El Hefe posted:

yup

Fuschia tude posted:

This is literally the reason soldiers break step when crossing bridges, by the way.

Kurtofan posted:

What the gently caress, how long has it been that way?

El Hefe posted:

Someone tried to steal my front tires and left them barely screwed in and I almost killed myself driving home jfc

mobby_6kl posted:

To make sure you can actually get them all loose while still on the grouns, I guess. That's how I do it, when changing my wheels of course.

El Hefe posted:

Maduro sent a bunch of armed thugs to greet Capriles in Margarita and people in the airport couldn't get out and were scared shitless...

Chuck Boone posted:

I went to a presentation yesterday by Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, who is an economist and political commentator on Venezuela. He's written pretty extensively on Venezuela (he's been published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic) and he's appeared on CNN and Al Jazeera. Anyway, I picked up a couple of interesting tidbits at this talk:

• He's very sure that the recall will not happen this year. He believes that Maduro will resign on January 11 (the day after the "magic" halfway point of his term) to avoid the humiliation of losing the recall. He believes that before resigning, Maduro will name a general as VP, most likely Vladimir Padrino Lopez. This general will then automatically become President of Venezuela as per the constitution.
  
• He believes that the government is "stocking up" on political prisoners for a reason. He said that when Maduro is replaced next year, the new president will probably release some of the political prisoners they've saved up in bulk as a way of saying, "Look, things are going to get better! The problem wasn't with chavismo, it was with Maduro!".
  
• I asked him about the news reports that China was going to turn off the tap lending-wise to Venezuela, and he said that he thinks China is stuck between a rock and a hard place but that it will not allow Venezuela to default. He says that China is indeed less willing to give Venezuela money, but that it is afraid of letting Venezuela default because a default might result in some kind of upheaval that could see the opposition come to power. He said that an opposition president would be extremely unlikely to want to repay China, because the opposition sees China as an active player in helping to prop Maduro up via these loans. In other words, China doesn't want to loan Venezuela more money, but it certainly doesn't want it to default.
  

In another bit of news, there's apparently a tuberculosis outbreak in the Penitenciaria General de Venezuela (PGV), a prison in Guarico state. In Venezuela, prisons are usually run by a "king" prisoner (called the pran). The pran oversees illicit activities in the prison, controls smuggling of goods in and out of the installation, and charges prisoners "rent" for certain benefits.

The pran at PGV is a man named Franklin Hernandez (a.k.a. "Franklin Masacre", a.k.a. "Viru Viru"). Franklin has recorded two YouTube videos this week and addressed them to Minister of Penitentiaries Iris Varela. In the videos, Franklin accuses Valera and national authorities of trying to kill the prisoners through "attrition": that is, by starving them of food and medicine.

The first video, released on Monday, shows what appear to be the dead body of an inmate. Franklin claims that the inmate has just died of tuberculosis, and that 24 other inmates have the disease. The video is here ( and since it shows a dead body). I've translated the video below:


In the second video, which was published on Tuesday, Franklin shows some inmates receiving food. He again blamed Varela and prison officials of trying to kill the prisoners:


Franklin was also in the news this week for another video, which I won't post here. In that video, an inmate at PGV talks about how Franklin amputated both of his thumbs over a dispute involving Bs. 200.

The thing about Venezuela is that what we might consider to be huge controversies happen on a near daily basis, so any single controversy is only a big story for about a week at most. As far as I'm aware that law is still in the books. I'm going to guess that it has not been applied on a massive scale, but the threat of that exists as long as the law does.

As for the work week and electricity rationing, I don't remember reading about the hours switching back to "normal". Maybe the Venegoons can tell us more about this? I know that my family in Valencia is often without electricity, but I don't know if that's due to rationing or just your run-of-the-mill electrical grid failure.

Negrostrike posted:

Ask for some air-dropped MRE rations. Better than mangoes everyday and some even have candy (although probably long expired).

Gaj posted:

Side note; the postal system in Eastern Europe runs the same way. Whenever we send hand me downs to my cousins or blankets and poo poo we literally use a Ukrainian mob front parcel service. They cost a lot but their warehouses are guarded by only the finest of paid killers.

fnox posted:

People apparently have 72 hours to convert all of their 100 Bs bills into the new bills, since it's apparently the only bill that is going out of circulation.

El Hefe posted:

$1 is about Bs4500 do the math

but yeah they are worthless

Vlex posted:

I'm going to be returning to Amazonas for fieldwork and will have downtime in our camp to discuss all and sundry. We try to keep politics off the table though, since we have chavistas and opposition people on our dig crew.

Edit:


This really is my main concern, but mining operations and associated gangs are more in the interior of the state and to the north. We are to the south and west of the principal activity, and squarely in GNB/Army/Navy territory - people who we are generally on good terms with.

Of course, I could still die.