Tag Archives: Venezuela

Selling the Golden Goose, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on April 29, 2017 | Leave a comment

Venezuela is selling off its most valuable resource—oil—in a desperate and undoubtedly vain attempt to forestall disaster. From Jeff Thomas at 321gold.com:

Venezuela is a naturally rich nation. It’s ranked seventh worldwide for biodiversity and has the world’s largest reserves of oil. This is a country that deserves, more than most, to thrive. However, as in all countries, it passes through economic cycles and, when on a downward curve, would-be leaders take the opportunity to claim that the “greedy rich” have sent the economy into a tailspin (which can sometimes be the case) and that the solution is to adopt a collectivist approach to governance.

In 1989, Venezuela was experiencing a downturn. Riots broke out, followed by two attempted coups in 1992. The following year, President Pérez was impeached for embezzlement of public funds and the red carpet of opportunity was rolled out for the charismatic former-coup participant Hugo Chávez. He took office as president. A new constitution was drawn up in 1999 and, as in so many countries previously, the people enthusiastically welcomed the new collectivist regime.

“When people can vote on issues involving the transfer of wealth to themselves from others, the ballot box becomes a weapon with which the majority plunders the minority. That is the point of no return, the point where the doomsday mechanism begins to accelerate until the system self-destructs. The plundered grow weary of carrying the load and eventually join the plunderers. The productive base of the economy diminishes further until only the state remains.” – G. Edward Griffin

As in all collectivist experiments, the new entitlements meted out to the population had to be funded somehow and, as is customary, those who create the wealth in Venezuela were required to pay for its distribution to those who were less productive.

In the beginning, this form of theft appears to work well and, not surprisingly, many of the supporters of Mister Chávez saw him as the messiah of the common man. Unfortunately, as is always the case, bleeding the wealth from those who create it makes it increasingly difficult for them to continue to expand the creation of it and, as the wealth continues to be drained, contraction eventually takes place, making the entire nation poorer in every way.

To continue reading: Selling the Golden Goose

 

 

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Posted in Currencies, Debt, Energy, Government, Uncategorized

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Eight Venezuelans Electrocuted To Death While Looting Bakery Amid Massive Protests, by Tyler Durden

Posted on April 22, 2017 | Leave a comment

Venezuela is falling apart. The over/under on the present government surviving is perhaps six months. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Venezuela’s ongoing protests against the Maduro regime took tragic turn when at least 12 people were killed overnight during looting and violence in Venezuela’s capital. Most of the deaths took place in El Valle, a working class neighborhood near Caracas’ biggest military base where opposition leaders say a group of people were hit with an electrical current while looting and trying to steal a refrigerator from a bakery.

The chaos turned deadly when looters entered a bakery protected by an electric fence and tried to remove a refrigerator. The accounts varied, but one opposition leader said 13 people were hit with an electrical current after tossing containers filled with water and making contact with the refrigerator’s power cord.


Criminal investigators look for evidence in front of a bakery, after it was looted

Daniela Alvarado, 25, who sells vegetables in the El Valle area, said the looting on Thursday night began after police officers fired tear gas and buckshot at demonstrators blocking a street with burning tires.

“People starting looting the businesses and yelling that they were hungry and that they want the government out,” said Alvarado. “We’re afraid (the stores) are going to run out of everything, that tomorrow there won’t be any food.”

“Yesterday around 9 or 10 (p.m.)things got pretty scary, a group of people carrying weapons came down … and started looting,” said Hane Mustafa, owner of a small supermarket in El Valle cited by Reuters, where broken bottles of soy sauce and ketchup littered the floor between bare shelves.


Empty shelves, a day after a night of looting in El Valle neighborhood in Caracas

To continue reading: Eight Venezuelans Electrocuted To Death While Looting Bakery Amid Massive Protests

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He Said That? 10/16/16

Posted on October 16, 2016 | Leave a comment

From Jesus Barrios, Venezuelan shopper in Maracaibo, the capital of Zuija in Venezuela:

Before there was nothing; now there’s everything.

The Wall Street Journal, “Amid Shortages, Venezuela Frees Prices,” 10/15-16/16

The Venezuelan government is selectively lifting price controls, and miracle of miracles, goods can be found in shops and stores whose shelves had previously been empty. The prices set under controls were so low that the new prices are multiples of the old ones, but isn’t it better to be able to buy something at a high price than buy nothing at a low one? If the Venezuelan government is smart enough to eliminate the controls for good (it may not happen) prices will come down as business people compete to supply goods and services. Sometimes reality gets so bad that even Socialists have to abandon dogma.

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Venezuela’s democratic façade has completely crumbled, by Moisés Naim and Francisco Toro

Posted on July 3, 2016 | Leave a comment

A national guard member patrols a supermarket in Caracas in February of last year. (Juan Barreto/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/Getty Images)

Got any socialist acquaintances? Offer to buy them a one way ticket to Venezuela. You already know the response: “That’s not what I mean by socialism.” Real life socialism is never what socialists mean by socialism. From Moisés Naim and Francisco Toro on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

Moisés Naim is a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry from 1989 to 1990. Francisco Toro is the founder and editor in chief of the Caracas Chronicles news site.

Today, Venezuela is the sick man of Latin America, buckling under chronic shortages of everything from food and toilet paper to medicine and freedom. Riots and looting have become commonplace, as hungry people vent their despair while the revolutionary elite lives in luxury, pausing now and then to order recruits to fire more tear gas into crowds desperate for food.

[see article, linked below, for video]

Surveillance camera footage shows violent looting take over a bakery in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas as the country battles widespread shortages of basic goods amid a reeling economic crisis. (Reuters)

Not long ago, the regime that Hugo Chávez founded was an object of fascination for progressives worldwide, attracting its share of another-world-is-possible solidarity activists. Today, as the country sinks deeper into the Western Hemisphere’s most intractable political and economic crisis, the time has come to ask some hard questions about how this regime — so obviously thuggish in hindsight — could have conned so many international observers for so long.

Chávez was either admired as a progressive visionary who gave voice to the poor or dismissed as just another third-world buffoon. Reality was more complex than that: Chávez pioneered a new playbook for how to bask in global admiration even as he hollowed out democratic institutions on the sly.

Step one was his deft manipulation of elections. Chávez realized early that, as long as he kept holding and winning elections, nobody outside Venezuela would ask too many questions about what he did with his power in the interim. And so he mastered the paradoxical art of destroying democracy one election at a time.

Venezuelans have gone to the polls 19 times since 1999, and chavismo has won 17 of those votes. The regime has won by stacking the election authorities with malleable pro-government officials, by enmeshing its supporters in a web of lavishly petro-financed patronage and by intimidating and marginalizing its opponents. It worked for more than a decade — until it didn’t work anymore.

After every election, another little piece of the constitution would be chipped away: Courts and oversight bodies were stacked high with supporters, checks and balances stripped, basic freedoms eroded.

The key was the torrent of oil dollars that poured into the country during the long oil boom of 2003 to 2014, complemented by massive debt now estimated at $185 billion. (Argentina defaulted on a $100 billion debt.) An enormous import-led consumption boom created an illusion of harmony even as the economy crumbled just out of sight.

When oil prices fell, the illusion ended, and the government fell back on Plan B: Allow elections to go on, but strip virtually all power from every institution it lost control of.

When Caracas elected an opposition mayor, his powers were stripped out from under him, and he was eventually jailed. When voters mischievously gave the opposition a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, a newly packed Supreme Tribunal took to overturning its acts. The government’s faith in democracy lasted exactly as long as its majority.

To continue reading: Venezuela’s democratic façade has completely crumbled

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How to Create Starvation in 2016, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Posted on June 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

Never underestimate the ability of governments to screw things up. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at the Foundation for Economic Education, fee.org:

One of the great achievements of the human mind is having produced a solution to the single greatest challenge of life on earth: getting enough to eat. Shelter and clothing are no brainers by comparison. You find a cave, you snag a pelt, and you are good to go.

But finding food to eat is a daily issue for human beings, never finally solved. You need more than a stock of food; you need a system that produces a continual flow.

In 2016, we finally have such a system in place, one capable of supporting 7.4 billion people. It’s so robust at this point that the developed world has the opposite problem of obesity, which, in the course of social evolution, is a nice problem to have.

The creation of this system – which you can see on display at any grocery store in your own neighborhood – defied the expectations of legions of doubters in the 19th century. Population was booming beyond belief. How would they be fed? Most intellectuals couldn’t imagine how it could happen.

And yet it did. So complex, well developed, and productive is the global market for food that it turns out to be extremely hard to break the system. To create starvation in 2016 requires extraordinary effort. It requires a comprehensive system of coercion that attacks all the institutions that make abundance possible: ownership, international trade, an adaptive price system, the right of commercial innovation.

Socialism Strikes Again

Such a system does exist, however. It goes by the name “socialism.” It is being tried today in a country that was once wealthy, comfortable, and civilized: a country with the largest oil reserves in the world.

Yes, it seems like fiction. It’s not. In one country in particular, over the course of 16 years of unrelenting destruction of property rights and human rights, step by gruesome step, socialism has resulted in unthinkable scenes of human suffering.

That country is Venezuela. It began under the rule of Hugo Chavez and now continues under the rule of his successor Nicolás Maduro. As bad, grafting, and despotic as their intentions, it is not likely the case that they intended to create starvation. Rather, they sought to bring about all the promises of socialism: fairness, equality, an end to exploitation, justice, and so on. But you look around and what you see instead is the end of everything we call civilization.

To continue reading: How to Create Starvation in 2016

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Socialism’s One Percenters, by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on June 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

LewRockwell.com has been reposting some SLL posts and SLL is happy to return the favor, reposting a favorite, Thomas DiLorenzo, (his book The Real Lincoln is highly recommended), at lewrockwell.com:

A defining characteristic of socialism in all its forms in all places and at all times is a relatively small political elite (and its “private sector” cronies) that lives lavishly by plundering its population, destroying its economy, imposing a regime of equality of poverty and misery; and turning almost everyone into a dependent on the state for survival. Joseph Stalin was the wealthiest man in the world during his time, not the Rockefellers, Morgans, or anyone else, as the de facto “owner” of the entire Soviet Union. African and Latin American socialist political thugs in the “post-colonial era” have long been notorious for becoming millionaires or billionaires, with Swiss bank accounts galore, while their people starved and begged them for subsistence. Socialism’s one percenters make today’s Wall Street plutocrats seem impoverished by comparison.

The latest glaring example of the disgusting and immoral corruption of socialism’s one percenters is Venezuela, a country that has “long been the darling of the [socialist] Left,” according to a June 16 article in the Daily Mail. The article, authored by Jake Wallis Simons, has the headline: “Super-rich socialists quaff champagne in Venezuelan country clubs while middle-class mothers scavenge for food in the gutter . . . even the dogs are starving.”

Venezuelan socialism, known as “Chavismo,” after the wealthy socialist one percenter Hugo Chavez, has indeed destroyed the country’s economy. Thanks to government-imposed price controls that hold prices below costs, supermarkets are empty, everything is in short supply or simply unavailable, and middle-class people are literally “rummaging in stinking piles of rubbish for cabbage leaves . . . and fetid meat,” according to the Daily Mail article, which includes dozens of pictures of these pathetic scenes. Among the most disturbing pictures are those of starving dogs and other animals in this socialist “paradise.”

Nationalization, price controls, and suffocating government regulations have so destroyed the remnants of capitalism that hospitals can’t afford toilet paper, let alone medicine; people wait in queues for ten our twelve hours a day, just like in the old Soviet Union, in hopes of buying something – anything – that might come up for sale in hopes of trading it for things they actually need; there is raging hyperinflation as the government tries to print money like mad to continue paying for its socialist fantasies; and crime is the worst of anywhere on earth. One middle-class woman is quoted in the article as saying “Chavez’s legacy is people like me looking for food in the garbage.”

To continue reading: Socialism’s One Percenters

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8 Lessons That We Can Learn From The Epic Economic Meltdown In Venezuela, by Michael Snyder

Posted on June 5, 2016 | Leave a comment

SLL has a sneaking suspicion that the US is not as far behind Venezuela as we like to think. From Michael Snyder at endoftheameriandream.com:

We are watching an entire nation collapse right in front of our eyes. As you read this article, there are severe shortages of just about anything you can imagine in Venezuela. That includes food, toilet paper, medicine, electricity and even Coca-Cola. All over the country, people are standing in extremely long lines for hours on end just hoping that they will be able to purchase some provisions for their hungry families. At times when there hasn’t been anything for the people that have waited in those long lines, full-blown riots have broken out. All of this is happening even though Venezuela has not been hit by a war, a major natural disaster, a terror attack, an EMP burst or any other type of significant “black swan” event. When debt spirals out of control, currency manipulation goes too far and government interference reaches ridiculous extremes, this is what can happen to an economy. The following are 8 lessons that we can learn from the epic economic meltdown in Venezuela…

#1 During an economic collapse, severe shortages of basic supplies can happen very rapidly…

“There’s a shortage of everything at some level,” says Ricardo Cusanno, vice president of Venezuela’s Chamber of Commerce. Cusanno says 85% of companies in Venezuela have halted production to some extent.

At this point, even Coca-Cola has shut down production due to a severe shortage of sugar.

#2 If you have not stored up food ahead of time, your diet could quickly become very simple during a major emergency. The Los Angeles Times recently covered the plight of a 42-year-old single mother in Venezuela named Maria Linares, and according to the story her family has not had any chicken to eat since last December…

In December, she was spending about half her salary on groceries. It now takes almost everything she earns to feed her two children, who subsist on manioc (also known as cassava or yuca), eggs and cornmeal patties called arepas, served with butter and plantains.

“The last time we had chicken was in December,” she said.

The best deals are generally at government-run stores, such as Mercal and Bicentenario, where the prices are regulated.

To shop there, however, Linares said, she has to line up overnight. Even then, she might come home empty-handed if everything sells out before she gets to the front of the line — or if she is robbed leaving the store.

#3 When people get hungry, they become very desperate. And very desperate people will eat just about anything.

In a recent article, I detailed the fact that some people down in Venezuela have already become so desperate that they are actually hunting dogs and cats for food.

Could you ever do that?

I couldn’t, but just like in Venezuela there are people in this nation that will eat anything that they can get their hands on when they are desperately hungry and their children are crying out for food.

To continue reading: 8 Lessons That We Can Learn From The Epic Economic Meltdown In Venezuela

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