Thread: Venezuela – An Economic Catastrophe In Images The Final Stage of a Crack-Up Boom

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel suddenly concerned Trump may...invade Venezuela

September 21, 2018

What fresh idiocy is this?

By Monica Showalter

(Language warning.)

With all of Chicago's problems and scandals, from its Caracas-level violence to its financial straits to its corrupt and sex-harassing pols to its Obama library sweetheart deal to its issues with illegals to even Catholic Church scandals, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is concerned about...Venezuela – and, more specifically, the prospect that President Trump might invade it, which, in his mind, could only be for political gain.
CNBC's John Harwood reports:

Rahm Emanuel, the former top aide to President Barack Obama who is now Chicago's mayor, is publicly warning that the mercurial commander-in-chief may blow past the hesitation of national security advisors in search of a rally-around-the-flag political boost. He wants Congress to flash caution lights.
"We have a phrase in this country: the October surprise," Emanuel, Obama's first White House chief of staff, told me in an interview. "I think in this situation he is looking to do anything and will do anything."

So the number-one item on his agenda is the inside-baseball speculation that Trump might invade Venezuela to get his poll numbers up – as President Clinton did in the Balkans to get out of the Lewinsky scandal. Right, Rahm – we know that you know all about that.
CNBC doesn't do itself very proud, either, with Harwood buttressing his argument with claims that President Trump is against Latinos over the illegal immigration issue, followed by Marco Rubio's statement that he wouldn't be against such military action. Rubio, for Harwood's information, is Latino.
The response to all of this twaddle, from Venezuela itself, was harsh:

daniel duquenal @danielduquenal
Dear mayor
From Venezuela, a heart felt **** You!
Until Liberal USA comes up with a plan to counter Venezuela dictatorship, be nice enough to shut up.
Thx

Former Obama aide @RahmEmanuel warns Trump may order military action in Venezuela for political gain https://cnb.cx/2xtPQhK
12:51 AM - Sep 20, 2018



Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel warns Trump may order military action in Venezuela for...

Emanuel, a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations, is publicly warning that Trump may blow past the hesitation of national security advisors in search of a rally-around-the-flag political...
cnbc.com

• See daniel duquenal's other Tweets

It goes to show how unserious Rahm is, focusing on Washington issues in exclusively Trumpian terms, as if Trump lives rent-free inside his head, and apparently not recognizing that Venezuela is a real problem. His swamp focus certainly would explain why he's doing nothing in Chicago. You can take the swampster out of the swamp...
More to the point, the mayor doesn't seem to be aware that there's a mass exodus of Venezuelans fleeing a monstrous socialist hellhole, now amounting to at least 3 million people. Amnesty International just reported that Venezuela's extrajudicial killings number about 8,000 they can prove now, a massive crisis of state slaughter. Starvation is rife, and Venezuelans have lost an average of 24 pounds this year. Nicolás Maduro, the country's dictator, was last seen openly dining on steak and cigars in Istanbul. Inflation is heading for a million percent. The currency is garbage. The oil production has slipped to 1948 levels. Mass arrests of shop-owners as hoarders and wreckers have just thrown more than two dozen in jail against the backdrop of 40% of Venezuela's shops shutting down overnight. The chief of the Organization of American States brought up military intervention, and while he's since backtracked and many Latin nations protested, Colombia and Guyana, Venezuela's most menaced neighbors, went mysteriously silent. Something serious is going on over there.
And in Rahm's mind, it's all a matter of Trump wanting to engineer an October surprise, with Venezuela as some ginned up artificial issue.
Nope, Rahm. It's serious. What it really sounds like is that Rahm is trying to distract attention from his own failures as mayor in his own crisis-ridden city, by drawing attention to Venezuela and Trump. Sorry, Rahm: This one's for the big boys. Do what Señor Duquenal tells you.

Image credit: Daniel X. O'Neil via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog...venezuela.html

Chevron to stay in Venezuela as inflation tops 830,000%

Video at the page link

By Brittany De Lea
Published November 09, 2018
Business LeadersFOXBusiness

Venezuela's inflation to hit 1.37M percent in 2018: IMF

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia 0'Grady on the unrest in Venezuela and the election in Brazil.

American energy giant Chevron says it is not considering pulling its operations from Venezuela, despite years of weathering the country’s political and economic problems.
After The Wall Street Journal Opens a New Window. published a report that executives at the second-largest U.S. oil company are mulling whether it is time to exit the poverty-stricken country as its economic crisis deepens, Chevron’s regional executive said during an interview that it is “committed to Venezuela” and plans to be there “for many years to come.”

The company is the last U.S. oil company in the country and has been operating there for nearly 100 years. It is one of the largest foreign investors there.
Earlier this year, Chevron reportedly evacuated executives Opens a New Window. from Venezuela after President Nicolás Maduro’s government arrested two employees. Venezuela has defaulted on more than $6 billion in payments, as reported by the Journal.

The United Nations said on Wednesday that 3 million Opens a New Window. people have left the country throughout recent years as the economic and political conditions have deteriorated. Food shortages, rampant inflation and widespread violence remain serious challenges for residents.

More from FOXBusiness.com...

• Venezuela: Home of the $35,000 fast-food meal? Opens a New Window.

Earlier this week, the opposition-controlled Congress published a report stating that the inflation rate rose more than 833,997 percent over the past year, as reported by Reuters. Month over month, consumer prices rose 148 percent.
The International Monetary Fund cautions inflation could reach 10 million percent next year.
The country’s central bank stopped publishing economic data about three years ago.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/business...hQgfFmu-inyxII

Socialism Can Kill You, But It Won't Bury You



Forget the #Fightfor1... Venezuela, a failing socialist state, has gifted its people with the sixth minimum wage hike in one year...

Fri, 12/28/2018 - 20:25
82 SHARES

Authored by Daniel Greenfield via Sultan Khish blog,

Venezuela, a failing socialist state, has gifted its people with the sixth minimum wage hike in one year. The 150% increase last week won’t help too much because inflation is up to 1.7 million percent.
Yes, you read that correctly.



Minimum wage hikes don’t help when your currency isn’t worth the cost of the paper it’s printed on. That’s literally true in Venezuela, which has tried switching to an even more worthless cryptocurrency.
Forget the #Fightfor15, in Venezuela it’s a fight to afford basic food supplies or even a cup of coffee.
The cost of a cup of coffee rose 285614% in a year and doubled in seven days. Under the new currency, you can grab a cup of the good stuff for 400 bolivars. Too bad that the minimum wage is 4,800 bolivars and 90% of the population is impoverished. It isn’t looking to buy a cup of coffee, but is starving because it can’t actually buy food. Alternatives have included eating zoo animals, pets and wild donkeys.
“Juntos: todo es possible”, the Obamaesque slogan of the regime declaring, “Together, anything is possible”, looms over a frightened starving population from billboards decorated with socialist icons.
The trouble is that anything really is possible. It’s possible to starve to death, to sit in the dark because there’s no power, to be unable to go to work because there’s no fuel, to be killed in food riots by government thugs, to have your savings wiped out, or to die of a treatable illness because there’s no medicine. Socialism has made “anything” possible in Venezuela. But all the possibilities are horrifying.
The regime’s other election slogan was, “Vamos Venezuela”. And Venezuelans are going.
10% of the population has fled Venezuela escaping through Simon Bolivar Airport, which has no water, no working toilets, no air conditioning and barely any power, where government thugs demand money and jewelry from passengers, or just marching on foot to escape the socialist mess any way they can.
Those Venezuelans who remain can’t find medicine, lack drinking water and can’t even afford to die.
The death rate in Venezuela is high. Between gang violence, outbreaks of disease and food riots, the corpses are piling up, and no one can afford to bury the dead.
Two years ago, a public cemetery charged 240,000 bolivars for a burial, while private cemeteries charged 400,000. The casket alone could cost 100,000 bolivars. Not that it matters because caskets have become hard to obtain due to shortages of wood and metal.
The number of zeroes may have changed with the new currency, but has become no more affordable.
Meanwhile, cemeteries, like every business, have seen employees vanish to wait on food lines or work in the black market, which means that not only can’t you bury the dead, but there’s no one to do the burying. Not only did socialism force Venezuelans to wait on line to buy food to live, they also had to wait on line after they were dead. Socialism is defined by the line. You are born into it and die on line.
After funerals became unaffordable, Venezuelans settled for cremating the dead. But the iron law of supply and demand quickly fell into place. As demand for cremation increased, so did the cost.
It wasn’t just the cost of a cup of coffee that doubled in a week: the cost of cremation rose 108%.
Major General Manuel Quevedo , the 2019 president of OPEC, is Venezuelan even as the country’s mourners can’t afford the cost of the gas with which to burn their dead.
Quevedo, a leftist Lenin-praising thug, was dispatched to take control of Venezuela’s collapsing oil industry, but instead dealt it a fatal blow. Protests were put down by force. Anyone who committed the crime of actually knowing anything about the industry was locked up and replaced by a regime loyalist.
The socialist thug ordered workers to denounce anyone who opposed the government. Instead, 25,000 workers out of 146,000 resigned last year. And it’s worse than the numbers make it look because many of those resigning are engineers and managers who can’t be replaced by hiring just anyone.
Under the socialist military regime, oil production fell 29% as drilling rigs lacked crews and fires broke out in refineries. Those workers that haven’t quit have been selling their uniforms in exchange for food.
Fuel shortages broke out in an OPEC nation as its former production of 2 million barrels of oil dropped to 1.2 million. The situation is now so bad that Venezuela will import 300,000 barrels.
Venezuela is so broken that one of the world’s top oil producers and exporters is now forced to import oil to be able to sell it at artificially subsidized low prices to its population and to repay Russia and China. The Maduro regime keeps touting Russian and Chinese deals as the answer, but the problem is that Venezuela only has one thing that Russia and China want, and it’s too socialist to even get at it.
With a worthless currency, Venezuela is paying America, Russia and China in crude and buying back barrels of oil because under military socialist control, its refineries are no longer functional.

It’s also trading natural gas for barrels of oil, and so Venezuela may have the eight largest gas reserves in the world, but the families of the dead can no longer manage to get natural gas to burn the bodies.
There’s no cooking gas, long lines at gas stations and no way to even cremate the dead.
In the final triumph of socialism, Venezuela’s energy industry has collapsed. There isn’t even enough gas left to burn the corpses left in the aftermath of the failed socialist experiment forcing loved ones to dump them in pits and mass graves.
You can’t live under socialism. You can die under it. But you can’t be buried under socialism.
Socialism killed Venezuela as it will kill any country given enough time. First, you run out of other people’s money. Then wage and price controls destroy the supply and demand of the marketplace. And when there’s nothing left in the stores, a government takeover will consolidate the destruction.
It happened in Venezuela. And it can happen here too.
Seven years ago, Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an editorial, claiming that the, “American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger.”
“Who's the banana republic now?” he asked.
It’s the socialist dictatorship with no food, no power, no water, no hope and true income equality.
Incomes are more equal in Venezuela. Everyone, except the regime and its loyalists, has nothing. Not even a grave in which to bury the dead. That’s not the American dream, that’s the socialist nightmare.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...-wont-bury-you

Give them nothing and do not let them come here.

They have oil. Make a deal to go in and get the oil production back up and running and WE take a percentage off the top to pay us back for the aid already given and a mandatory percentage to rebuild their country for their citizens with their oil money!

They also need to pay back the south American countries they all fled to and gave them aid there.

1 US dollar = 250,000 Bolivars



Convert US Dollars (USD) to Venezuelan Bolivars (VEF)

https://www.exchange-rates.org/Rate/USD/VEF

THIS is what happens when you elect a socialist to run a country...
Eventually the government runs out of other people's money and it becomes necessary for the people to take back power!!
https://amp.miamiherald.com/latest-ne…/article225129345.html



miamiherald.com

“Enough already!’ Venezuela’s highest ranking military diplomat breaks with Maduro

You Cant Fix Stupid; Stupid is FOREVER

Yes, Socialism caused inflation of 1 million percent over the last five years in Venezuela. Just ask the Washington Post:



Venezuela’s inflation will hit 1 million percent. Thanks, socialism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=.44892f62c7b1

Have Americans learned nothing? As Venezuelans are throwing off the chains of socialism tyranny, Americans keep voting more Left-wing authoritarians into power