Venezuela: The Empanada Summit

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Venezuela: The Empanada Summit

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

MonsieurChoc posted:

Kinda, actually. The whole situation is the same playbook they used against Allende back in the day, including "making the economy scream".

The country hadn't collapsed to anywhere near the same degree; Allende hadn't been in power nearly as long as Chavez-Maduro's tenure; Allende was flagrantly ignoring directions from superior courts and declaring judicial views would only be given force to if the executive government agreed with what court decision said (which isn't to say Maduro's court endorsement is particularly legitimate)... There were some significant distinctions even if you can see some resemblances. But you say 'playbook' so the distinctions may be orthogonal to your argument here.

Neurosis fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Mar 19, 2019

# ¿ Mar 19, 2019 15:35

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 05:02

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:

How is it imperialism if they were invited by the sitting president?

Uh imperialism often involved colonial powers playing off internal struggles to get influence on thin pretexts to legitimacy

# ¿ Mar 25, 2019 03:58

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

Huh. Guess the sanctions aren't hurting people that much then

# ¿ May 27, 2019 00:33

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

Kavros posted:

I know by now the discussions about the recent venezuelan power troubles are stuck well in the depths of this thread, but much like with Venezuela's hyperinflation and the crisis imposed by the price fixing programs, the problems in many parts of Venezuela's electrical grid remained inconsistent with sabotage and were absolutely inconsistent with the specific conspiracies that Maduro claimed as official account of the crisis at the time.

The power failures were the kind which come about from continued institutional neglect and mismanagement. Party fixtures throughout Venezuela were appointed to spoils posts all throughout Corpoelec and gradually inflicted on it the exact same things that occurred rampantly in PVDSA. Like petro engineers, electrical engineers are among the first to fly the coop when rampant mismanagement and labor shortage makes their work potentially lethally dangerous, especially when their paychecks stopped coming reliably. A serious quantity of technicians and electricians are no longer involved or invested in Corpoelec maintenance compared even a few years ago, a tremendous quantity of the substantially skilled operators are long gone from the state's power monopoly, and places like Guri have only a handful of senior level staff with any ability to attempt sync turbine restarts that are in little condition to endure stressful restarts. Each time there's an attempt, poorly maintained substations may literally explode, which is exactly what happened last time. It would have been one thing if the official government account of the situation was remotely plausible, but what ended up happening is that Venezuelan state government offered accusations of sabotage dressed up to fit language that Maduro had used directly in public account which was essentially impossible, if not entirely.

Yeah. Some posts were inconsistent with my recollection of how thread discussion went. My memory is people said direct US involvement was improbable although not totally impossible. The derisive laughter was at Maduro's claim of a 'cybernetic' and 'electromagnetic' attack.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2019 05:30

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

Moridin920 posted:

Venezuela has its own special set of problems I'm talking more like national debt doesn't really matter if you have a fiat currency but if you are like Greece and you use Euros and owe your sovereign debts in Euros then it does matter.

e: A lot of countries issue debt in their own currency. Most sovereign debt is issued like that, actually, it's just that more unstable countries have to go through the World Bank or similar.

If you devalue your currency to deal with domestic currency denominated debt your borrowing costs will sky rocket.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2019 03:40

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

Ardennes posted:

Btw, at least personally, MMT doesn't work unless your currency is a major reserve currency (Euro, USD, Yen) otherwise it will also certainly devalue. Major reserve currencies may slightly devalue but due to their place in international finance as stores of value they hold up.

In the short to medium term, and depending on how much reserve currency govs rely on devaluation. But this is way beyond Venezuela, which doesn't have an important reserve currency, so we can put that to one side.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2019 06:15

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

Corky Romanovsky posted:

Anyone know if joint ventures typically include terms and conditions for one party's exit?

Pretty much always. Which isn't to say it's easy to do it - there will be things there designed to protect the continuing party's interests (the lowest cost to comply with would be where a replacement party can be found who the co venturer agees is suitable).

# ¿ Jun 25, 2019 15:45

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

Condiv posted:

Doesn’t seem to. The opposition are starving more and more people with their policies, especially with the embargo

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

(The original quote was about 10s of ms so not Venezuela specifically even though that's what Condiv is talking about.)

# ¿ Aug 13, 2019 01:14

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

Pharohman777 posted:

Please, explain how the Holodomor, a real historical famine-genocide, is nazi propaganda.

The genocide label might be inaccurate because as I recall there's legitimate debate about the degree to which starvation was the intention, but even if it wasn't the outcome sought the authorities at least showed gross negligence, and probably reckless indifference, so I'm also curious how it can be written off as fascist propaganda.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 06:54

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# ¿ May 1, 2024 05:02

Neurosis: Jun 10, 2003; Fallen Rib

SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:

I mean the word itself. Not denying there was a famine which was exacerbated by mismanagement. Holodomor is, as far as I can tell, a word chosen by Ukrainian nationalists to try to conflate it with the holocaust to make USSR sound worse/Germany not as bad. Hell, one of the earlier people pushing the term wrote a long-form attack on Jewish people for not being anti communist enough.

None of this has much to do with Venezuela though,and the Maduro regimes ability to gently caress up in new and unexpected ways.

Looking at Wikipedia, it looks like the use of the word antedates the Holocaust, being used in Ukrainian diaspora publications - it literally translates to 'death by hunger' or 'killing by hunger/starvation', so I'm not sure it's fair to think it's more than the word that has caught on to refer to the event, although, sure, the phonetic similarity might be one reason it caught on (The source Wikipedia quotes is Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (Doubleday, 2017) 363, if anyone's deathly interested in fact-checking.)

# ¿ Sep 9, 2019 12:32

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Venezuela: The Empanada Summit