As Venezuela Burns

Venezuela
a) not a friend of US corporations
b) depending on oil sales for it's prosperity

There you go. US (along with Saudi Arabia) keep the oil price low to make nations that are not their friends suffer, especially Russia.
In the case of Venezuela, after a long phase of suffering and when in need of international financial help, the US loan sharks in form of the IMF will step in.
US friendly government will be established, Venezuela will join whatever trade treaty the US wants them to join.
People in Venezuela are still fucked. Flawless victory.
 
Venezuela
a) not a friend of US corporations
b) depending on oil sales for it's prosperity
c)One of the most inept governments in history

There you go. US (along with Saudi Arabia) keep the oil price low to make nations that are not their friends suffer, especially Russia.
In the case of Venezuela, after a long phase of suffering and when in need of international financial help, the US loan sharks in form of the IMF will step in.
US friendly government will be established, Venezuela will join whatever trade treaty the US wants them to join.
People in Venezuela are still fucked. Flawless victory.

Corrected.
 
I think the US should pool its sovereignty with the whole of South America and get a kind of...EU thing going.

That'll do it...
 
Things are worst than they look, but if you have dollars then nothing to worry about.

My inmediate family are doing fine because they have plenty of dollars so they can afford pretty much anything, my uncles and aunts and so forth is a completely different story.
 
I think the US should pool its sovereignty with the whole of South America and get a kind of...EU thing going.

That'll do it...

Ha.

Fine by me, but the Americas haven't taken kindly to the US telling them what to do, which is the arrangement it would be.
 
Actually, we tried back in 50s. Venezuela poured a lot of money into it, but the US didnt like that back then. It happened in october 1957 iirc then a year later the president was ousted through a coup d etat. How weird right?
 
Ha.

Fine by me, but the Americas haven't taken kindly to the US telling them what to do, which is the arrangement it would be.

We haven't taken kindly to the Americans teling us what to do either. So I know how they feel...;)
 
Venezuela needs someone with a strong will and a strong hand to do what it needs to be done. Unless that does not happen then the country will be in deep shit for a while. The only thing that is barely keeping us afloat is the little oil that is sold and chinese loans which well are shit. Lets see how all this unwraps in a year or two on the next global meltdown.
 
You need to be like Canada. Obama saying he sees America in us and himself in Trudeau Jr. makes us forget we get told what to do

"We see so much of ourselves in you. Now spend more fucking money on defense you idiots, we are tired of you providing cooks and clerks for our joint wars"
 
You need to be like Canada. Obama saying he sees America in us and himself in Trudeau Jr. makes us forget we get told what to do

"We see so much of ourselves in you. Now spend more fucking money on defense you idiots, we are tired of you providing cooks and clerks for our joint wars"

Well, you give us maple leaf patches for our backpacks so we can pretend not to be American when we are overseas, so I call it a wash.
 
We have an office in Caracas, I've been hearing about the country imploding since Chavez died. It's probably telling that the office is now 1/3 of what it used to be as folks have moved to the Bogota office.

We told them last year their computer server is dying and to get our approved brand - Dell. They said can they use an old workstation as a server as they can't get Dell there unless through black market. Every time there is a blackout, the yanks try their best to shut equipment down gracefully so no one has to fly a new phone system or something down there. Never mind the random timezone changes.
 
I'm a frequent visitor to Fark.com. One of the more amusing things on that site were the Chavez threads. Dozens of liberal American Farkers arguing with Venezuelan Farkers about how their country was a paradise and that they were just exaggerating how bad it was.

And I don't suspect Sean Penn is planning any trips down there anytime soon.
 
I'm a frequent visitor to Fark.com. One of the more amusing things on that site were the Chavez threads. Dozens of liberal American Farkers arguing with Venezuelan Farkers about how their country was a paradise and that they were just exaggerating how bad it was.

And I don't suspect Sean Penn is planning any trips down there anytime soon.

Wonder if Jeremy Corbyn was on there pretending to be an American lefty telling them how good it was. Or maybe Alex Tsipras. Because I think even American partisans are pretty aware of how grim it is.
 
I remember when Chavez came to power when I was in Bolivia. Bolivian TV used to air his fucking endless speeches because he invoked Bolivar all the time and they thought the revolution was coming back to them as well.
 
I remember when Chavez came to power when I was in Bolivia. Bolivian TV used to air his fucking endless speeches because he invoked Bolivar all the time and they thought the revolution was coming back to them as well.

It's funny how popular Bolivar was at one point in time in American history. There are streets all over the South named for him (some have been corrupted over time, Tampa and Tallahassee both have Boulevard Streets). The feeling at the time was more of a communal "screw European colonists". Seemed to change in the late 1800's.
 
I was talking to my mom today, they took my siblings to the movies and it costed them 8000 bolivares, the typical venezuela makes 10000 bolivares a month. A can of tuna is 3.500 bolivares. Lolz
 
Wonder if Jeremy Corbyn was on there pretending to be an American lefty telling them how good it was. Or maybe Alex Tsipras. Because I think even American partisans are pretty aware of how grim it is.

Note my use of the word "were". They've been pretty scarce. The narrative is now that it was been great, but American corporations screwed them over. It's a tale as old as time.
 
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/venezuela-food-crisis-hospital-1.3687513

"Margelys Cardona sits in a hospital bed in Caracas, Venezuela, eating a cracker slowly, surrounded by flies and cockroaches as she thinks of happier times when she wasn't starving and in desperate need of a kidney transplant.

She's pale and looks at the bowl of yellow water that the University Hospital calls soup. She's saving it for her husband, who's off on a hopeless search for protein shakes in a country without many of the most basic foodstuffs."
 
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/venezuela-food-crisis-hospital-1.3687513

"Margelys Cardona sits in a hospital bed in Caracas, Venezuela, eating a cracker slowly, surrounded by flies and cockroaches as she thinks of happier times when she wasn't starving and in desperate need of a kidney transplant.

She's pale and looks at the bowl of yellow water that the University Hospital calls soup. She's saving it for her husband, who's off on a hopeless search for protein shakes in a country without many of the most basic foodstuffs."

She doesn't need to be eating HoHo's & Ding Dongs if she's waiting for her kidney transplant.

Protein shakes? She can eating the fucking bugs for protein. Elitist-waiting-for-a-kidney-HO
 
Animals go hungry in Venezuela zoos due to shortages

"About 50 animals in one of Venezuela's main zoos are reported to have died of hunger over the last six months because of chronic food shortages. A union leader for employees in the state parks, Marlene Sifontes, told Reuters news agency some had spent two weeks without food before they died. She said lions and tigers in the zoo in Caracas were fed mango and pumpkin to make up their meat rations."

Lions and tigers eat fruit? I thought that only happened in Lion King.

In the caption for a photograph, it reads, "Some of the animals at the Caracas zoo are reported not to have eaten for weeks."

So why pray tell didn't someone think to kill the animals if they knew they would starve for weeks and feed them to the lions?
 
Malaria returns to Venezuela

"As a computer technician from a big city, Mr. Balocha was ill-suited for the mines, his soft hands used to working keyboards, not the earth. But Venezuela’s economy collapsed on so many levels that inflation had obliterated his salary, along with his hopes of preserving a middle-class life.

So, like tens of thousands of other people from across the country, Mr. Balocha came to these open, swampy mines scattered across the jungle, looking for a future. Here, waiters, office workers, taxi drivers, college graduates and even civil servants on vacation from their government jobs are out panning for black-market gold, all under the watchful eyes of an armed group that taxes them and threatens to tie them to posts if they disobey."

"Five hours away in Ciudad Guayana, a rusting former industrial boomtown where many are now jobless and have taken to wildcatting in the mines, a crowd of 300 people packed the waiting room of a clinic in May. All had symptoms of the disease: fevers, icy chills and uncontrollable tremors.

There were no lights because the government had cut power to save electricity. There were no medicines because the Health Ministry had not delivered any. Health workers administered blood tests with their bare hands because they were out of gloves."
 
Venezuela on the brink

"In the capital’s Dr. José María Vargas hospital, a doctor watched a 73-year-old woman die of kidney failure because the hospital lacked the medicine to perform a routine dialysis. In a Caracas police station, more than 150 prisoners crowded into a cell made for 36, standing shirtless (there was no room to sit) in the stench of sweat and feces."
 
Radical tourists have been deluded pimps for Venezuela
June 28, 2016 ~ Nick Cohen

4928.jpg


The Observer 22 May 2016

Radical tourism is no different from sex tourism. In both the political and the coital, the inhabitants of the rich world go to the poor to find the thrills no one will give them at home.

Western men and women with nothing to recommend them except their wealth escape their sexless lives and buy prostitutes, who are not like those indifferent boys and girls who pass them in the street. They will play their part and pretend for a few hours or days to find the westerners sexually desirable. Sex tourist guides, in print and online, feed visitors’ illusions. In the Caribbean, readers are told that prostitutes aren’t prostitutes, just “nice” girls looking for a good time. In Thailand, bar girls aren’t exploited but engaged in a “fair trade”.

Pleasures sated, the tourists fly away from the poverty and the corruption. The lies they have lived and paid others to live on their behalf don’t bother them. They never noticed human trafficking in Thailand or chronic poverty in the Dominican Republic.

For their part, political tourists are stuck in a sexless marriage to a Britain that offers them no excitement. The proletariat has refused their entreaties to revolt. Their radical fantasies are never fulfilled. So they, too, scour the world. For years, the top radical tourist destination, the political equivalent of the Pattaya Beach brothel, has been Chavista Venezuela. Hollywood stars, the leaders of the British Labour party and Spanish “popular resistance”, and every half-baked pseudo-left intellectual from Noam Chomsky to John Pilger has engaged in a left orientalism as they wallowed in “the other’s” exotic delights.

Venezuela stroked all their erogenous zones. Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro were anti-American and “anti-imperialist”. That both allied with imperial powers, most notably Russia, did not appear to concern them in the slightest. Venezuela, cried Seumas Milne in the Guardian, has “redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination”. What more could a breathless Western punter ask for?

Never underestimate the power worship of those who claim to speak for the powerless, or the credulity of the supposedly wised-up critical theorist. For those who yearn in their dark hearts for strong men, who can crush all enemies, Chavismo reeked of machismo, and provided the great leaders they could adore.

“Hated by the entrenched classes,” burbled a star-struck and grief-stricken Oliver Stone on the day of the leader’s death, “Hugo Chávez will live for ever in history. My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.”

There was even a conspiracy theory to crush all doubts – all opposition came from a US-backed elite. As there was a failed coup attempt in 2002 against Chávez, that theory had more justice than most.

The show is over now. Their fantasies fulfilled, the western tourists have left a ruined country behind without a guilty glance over their shoulder. Venezuela looks as if it has been pillaged by a hostile army, though there has been no war.

It is not fanciful to imagine that the international community will need to launch a disaster appeal soon. Water is rationed, electricity is rationed and basic medicines are vanishing. Inflation is expected to hit 481% this year and 1,642% next year. The murder rate is the world’s second highest. The exchange rate has collapsed so fast that a McDonald’s Happy Meal cost the equivalent of $146 in February.

I could go on, but a last desperate excuse needs to be dismissed. Every oil-producing economy has been hit by falling prices, but none, not even states as ill-governed as Nigeria and Russia, has experienced the social collapse of Venezuela. Even they did not engage in the Weimar-scale money-printing of the Chavista regime. Even they, despite all the stout efforts of their leaders, were not as corrupt as the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela. Transparency International puts Venezuela among the top 10 most corrupt countries in the world. First Chávez and then Maduro did, indeed, redistribute oil wealth to the poor, but they distributed most of it to their clients.

Why go on about the moral disgrace of western dupes? Isn’t that a job for the “Tory press”? Not so. We should have learned where the notion that there must be no criticism of “our” side leads. A generation of American conservatives is being disgraced right now for their failure to stand up to Donald Trump – whose paranoia and mendacity, incidentally, imitates the Latin American caudillos in the Peronist and Chavista mould.

The thoughts of Venezuelans, who watched as westerners treated their country as an ideological playground, cannot be dismissed lightly, either. “There should be a special circle in hell for them,” Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, told me. The regime shot his mother and jailed his Venezuelan father. It holds his cousin, the opposition leader, Leopoldo López, as a political prisoner because he had the nerve to oppose it. Halvorssen thinks the Chavistas would not have gone so far in debasing the constitution and looting the state if it had not been able to count on a herd of bovine leftists mooing down all who raised concerns about fundamental rights.

These are the worst leftists imaginable as they show solidarity with oppressive states rather than oppressed peoples. So they stayed silent when Chávez – in the words of the International Trades Union Confederation – engaged in persistent discrimination against organised labour. They neither knew nor cared that corruption is the most brutal of burdens on the poor because the poor cannot pay bribes to obtain the services they should receive by right.

If free trade unions were suppressed in the west, and leaders of the opposition arrested, if western governments – to borrow Human Rights Watch’s words about Venezuela – sought to “intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics”, the Seumas Milnes and Oliver Stones would scream their heads off.

That they screamed at the regime’s critics instead shows how deep a leftwing version of racism has sunk. Sex tourists need to believe that the women they buy are not like the women at home, who reject them as ugly and dull. These girls just want to have fun. Radical tourists need to believe foreigners do not want the rights they themselves take for granted at home. As they ask others to act out their “anti-imperialist” fantasies, they manage the unique and uniquely degrading feat of combining the delusions of the client, the neediness of the prostitute and the lies of the pimp.
 
Radical tourists have been deluded pimps for Venezuela
June 28, 2016 ~ Nick Cohen

4928.jpg


The Observer 22 May 2016

Radical tourism is no different from sex tourism. In both the political and the coital, the inhabitants of the rich world go to the poor to find the thrills no one will give them at home.

Western men and women with nothing to recommend them except their wealth escape their sexless lives and buy prostitutes, who are not like those indifferent boys and girls who pass them in the street. They will play their part and pretend for a few hours or days to find the westerners sexually desirable. Sex tourist guides, in print and online, feed visitors’ illusions. In the Caribbean, readers are told that prostitutes aren’t prostitutes, just “nice” girls looking for a good time. In Thailand, bar girls aren’t exploited but engaged in a “fair trade”.

Pleasures sated, the tourists fly away from the poverty and the corruption. The lies they have lived and paid others to live on their behalf don’t bother them. They never noticed human trafficking in Thailand or chronic poverty in the Dominican Republic.

For their part, political tourists are stuck in a sexless marriage to a Britain that offers them no excitement. The proletariat has refused their entreaties to revolt. Their radical fantasies are never fulfilled. So they, too, scour the world. For years, the top radical tourist destination, the political equivalent of the Pattaya Beach brothel, has been Chavista Venezuela. Hollywood stars, the leaders of the British Labour party and Spanish “popular resistance”, and every half-baked pseudo-left intellectual from Noam Chomsky to John Pilger has engaged in a left orientalism as they wallowed in “the other’s” exotic delights.

Venezuela stroked all their erogenous zones. Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro were anti-American and “anti-imperialist”. That both allied with imperial powers, most notably Russia, did not appear to concern them in the slightest. Venezuela, cried Seumas Milne in the Guardian, has “redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination”. What more could a breathless Western punter ask for?

Never underestimate the power worship of those who claim to speak for the powerless, or the credulity of the supposedly wised-up critical theorist. For those who yearn in their dark hearts for strong men, who can crush all enemies, Chavismo reeked of machismo, and provided the great leaders they could adore.

“Hated by the entrenched classes,” burbled a star-struck and grief-stricken Oliver Stone on the day of the leader’s death, “Hugo Chávez will live for ever in history. My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.”

There was even a conspiracy theory to crush all doubts – all opposition came from a US-backed elite. As there was a failed coup attempt in 2002 against Chávez, that theory had more justice than most.

The show is over now. Their fantasies fulfilled, the western tourists have left a ruined country behind without a guilty glance over their shoulder. Venezuela looks as if it has been pillaged by

It is not fanciful to imagine that the international community will need to launch a disaster appeal soon. Water is rationed, electricity is rationed and basic medicines are vanishing. Inflation is expected to hit 481% this year and 1,642% next year. The murder rate is the world’s second highest. The exchange rate has collapsed so fast that a McDonald’s Happy Meal cost the equivalent of $146 in February.

I could go on, but a last desperate excuse needs to be dismissed. Every oil-producing economy has been hit by falling prices, but none, not even states as ill-governed as Nigeria and Russia, has experienced the social collapse of Venezuela. Even they did not engage in the Weimar-scale money-printing of the Chavista regime. Even they, despite all the stout efforts of their leaders, were not as corrupt as the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela. Transparency International puts Venezuela among the top 10 most corrupt countries in the world. First Chávez and then Maduro did, indeed, redistribute oil wealth to the poor, but they distributed most of it to their clients.

Why go on about the moral disgrace of western dupes? Isn’t that a job for the “Tory press”? Not so. We should have learned where the notion that there must be no criticism of “our” side leads. A generation of American conservatives is being disgraced right now for their failure to stand up to Donald Trump – whose paranoia and mendacity, incidentally, imitates the Latin American caudillos in the Peronist and Chavista mould.

The thoughts of Venezuelans, who watched as westerners treated their country as an ideological playground, cannot be dismissed lightly, either. “There should be a special circle in hell for them,” Thor Halvorssen, the founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, told me. The regime shot his mother and jailed his Venezuelan father. It holds his cousin, the opposition leader, Leopoldo López, as a political prisoner because he had the nerve to oppose it. Halvorssen thinks the Chavistas would not have gone so far in debasing the constitution and looting the state if it had not been able to count on a herd of bovine leftists mooing down all who raised concerns about fundamental rights.

These are the worst leftists imaginable as they show solidarity with oppressive states rather than oppressed peoples. So they stayed silent when Chávez – in the words of the International Trades Union Confederation – engaged in persistent discrimination against organised labour. They neither knew nor cared that corruption is the most brutal of burdens on the poor because the poor cannot pay bribes to obtain the services they should receive by right.

If free trade unions were suppressed in the west, and leaders of the opposition arrested, if western governments – to borrow Human Rights Watch’s words about Venezuela – sought to “intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics”, the Seumas Milnes and Oliver Stones would scream their heads off.

That they screamed at the regime’s critics instead shows how deep a leftwing version of racism has sunk. Sex tourists need to believe that the women they buy are not like the women at home, who reject them as ugly and dull. These girls just want to have fun. Radical tourists need to believe foreigners do not want the rights they themselves take for granted at home. As they ask others to act out their “anti-imperialist” fantasies, they manage the unique and uniquely degrading feat of combining the delusions of the client, the neediness of the prostitute and the lies of the pimp.


I could see Bop doing this.
 
The Venezuelan oil company hasn't been able to pay it's contractors since the beginning of this year in Europe and China. The Chinese have ditched their line of credit. In the jails they are resorting to cannibalism. Once their refineries start going off-line and they will, it's revolution time.
 
Seems to me like the socialist paradise is in need of wealthy socialists with big ideas. There seem to be quite a few who want to leave the US at the moment, sounds like a perfect match.
 
The good news is that the Venezuelan state oil company is starting to address the aged debt they have with their suppliers.....the bad news is that there's no logistic company who will ship any equipment to them.
 
I believe our Caracas office will call it quits this year; at least what's left of it.
 
It pains me to see the current status of my country, but I tell myself that whats going on was/is not my fault.
 
Help us Leitmotif Leitmotif , you're our only hope.


Yep, it is the big news today and nothing that we can do about it. My step dad its over there at the moment and there hasnt been electricity since yesterday. It is sad. Hope those assholes are never taken to court, just outside and let people lynch them.
 

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