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

Venezuela – An Economic Catastrophe In Images

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...?itok=LsxAU7nH As assorted socialists continually assure us, what they have in Venezuela is luckily not 'real socialism'...

Sat, 09/01/2018 - 14:30

Authored by Pater Tenebrarum via Acting-Man.com,

The Final Stage of a Crack-Up Boom

For economists the dire downward spiral of Venezuela’s economy holds the same fascination black holes hold for physicists. Both illustrate what happens amid the most extreme conditions imaginable. It is thought that this may potentially provide clues of a more general nature. The remnants of massive imploded stars are inanimate and many light years distant; regardless of how violent conditions in their vicinity are, they cannot touch us. Unfortunately, extreme economic conditions definitely involve a great deal of human suffering.
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...-ii-Copie4.jpg

“We are the humanist socialism that will save the world”, from Venezuelan cartoonist Weil (he always draws the dear leaders with big wads of dollars sticking out of their pockets, making them look like otherworldly birds – look for his work on the intertubes).
From the perspective of Austrian economic theory, a hyperinflation event essentially represents a highly compressed, extreme version of the boom-bust cycle referred to as a “crack-up boom” (note: the original German term coined by Ludwig von Mises was “Katastrophenhausse” – the literal translation would be “catastrophic boom”).
In a past article on forced saving we inter alia discussed the post WW I crack-up boom in the Weimar Republic, one of the most infamous hyperinflation events in history. The data available on this disaster are remarkably comprehensive and detailed and demonstrate that Austrian capital and business cycle theory indeed offers the by far most accurate explanation of the boom-bust cycle.
Recent developments in Venezuela are very similar. There is definitely a crack-up boom underway, but it differs of course in a number of details from the Weimar experience. Every slice of economic history is unique in some way after all, but the underlying economic laws driving economic history nevertheless remain universally and time-invariantly applicable.
Not too long ago our good friend Keith Weiner also mentioned Venezuela, mainly in the context of criticizing too simplistic views of the factors driving price inflation such as the quantity theory of money). Obviously the supply of money is just one of these drivers – the demand for money and the supply of and demand for goods and services are the others.
This is also why the purchasing power of money is not truly measurable, as no fixed yardstick to measure it with exists. There is no such thing as a “general level of prices” anyway – this is a logical fallacy. Keith correctly points out that in Venezuela – and this is something one can observe in almost all hyperinflation cases – it is not only money printing that has triggered the slump in purchasing power, but also a collapse in production, which has happened for more than one reason.

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...2-683x1024.jpg

As assorted socialists continually assure us, what they have in Venezuela is luckily not 'real socialism'. They were definitely full of praise for “Chavismo” though when high oil prices still helped mask the crumbling of the country’s economy. Some people such as Jeremy Corbyn no longer even mention Venezuela nowadays, after frequently informing us in the past how wonderful Chavez-style socialism was.
In Venezuela production collapsed very quickly after the socialist dictatorship of Chavez (and later Maduro) weakened property rights to such an extent that no sane person was prepared to take entrepreneurial risks with their capital any longer.
The entire gamut of interventions from the imposition of price controls to outright confiscation of businesses was implemented with the aim of transforming Venezuela into a full-scale command economy. Amid heavy money printing and a concomitant slump in production and imports, the demand for money eventually collapsed as well – triggering the hyperinflation phase.
It should be pointed out that capital consumption was already quite advanced before the advent of Venezuela’s socialist rulers, as their predecessors had gradually undermined the market economy for decades. Naturally, these previous interventions were also accompanied by a lot of money printing.
All interventionist governments consider the suppression of interest rates to be a cure-all – and it can of course mask structural economic problems for quite some time, as a rule up to the point when the bulk of previously accumulated capital has been consumed.

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...es-768x513.jpg
Empty shelves in supermarkets in Caracas have been the “new normal” for more than four years now. Not only has domestic production collapsed, but imports have declined precipitously as well. Holding on to cash balances denominated in the domestic currency makes no sense and a major “flight into real values” has been underway for quite some time.

Pictures of an Economic State of Emergency

We have quite a comprehensive collection of charts pertinent to the hyper-inflationary crack-up boom in Venezuela and decided to put the most interesting ones into a post (most of the charts are fairly up-to-date, but keep in mind that things are moving very fast in late stage hyperinflation).
Recently the government decided to shave off five zeros from its currency (on August 18 to be precise), which is reminiscent of the 1000 for one reverse split applied to the IBC stock market index in Caracas a few years ago (i.e., they took off just three zeros in this case).
One similarity is already ominously obvious: the collapse of the value of the Venezuelan bolivar (VEF) has immediately accelerated in the wake of the “currency reverse split”. The stock market rally also accelerated shortly after the index was robbed of three zeros.
Presumably this is mainly a psychological effect. Anyway, we have made charts of the exchange rate in which we simply ignored the removal of the five zeros. Eventually we will adjust all past numbers, but it won’t really make a difference – the charts will look exactly the same. For starters, here is a log chart of the black market rate of the VEF vs. the USD (“black market rate” in this case simply means “market price”).
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A log chart of the VEF-USD exchange rate. In 2010 VEF-USD traded just above 8 bolivares per dollar in the black market. As of today it stands at more than 8.7 million bolivares per dollar (or 87.22 using the post-split value, which compares to a VEF-USD rate of 0.0008 in 2010) – note the acceleration after the “reverse split” – on August 18, one day before the five zeros were shaved off, VEF-USD stood at around 5.9 million.
A linear chart from August 2014 to today shows how the move in the exchange rate accelerated as hyperinflation really took off and the bolivar essentially ceased to be a viable medium of exchange. Moves prior to 2017 are not really visible on this chart, but it is inter alia easier to show clearly at which point the “reverse split” was implemented. As noted above, the decline in the exchange rate accelerated even further in the wake of the decision.
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A linear chart of VEF-USD from 01 August 2014 to 31 August 2018. Within just 12 days after the introduction of the “new” bolivar, it moved from 59 to 87 (or from 5.9 million to 8.7 million in “old” bolivar terms).
Professor Steven Hanke of John Hopkins University runs the “Troubled Currencies Project” for the Cato Institute – he uses exchange rates to derive an implied inflation rate for the countries concerned. Although price inflation is not really measurable, this does provide us with a rough idea of how quickly the purchasing power of these currencies is vanishing.
The most recent chart of Venezuela’s implied inflation rate we have found is as of August 19, shortly after the government introduced the “new” bolivar. Since implied inflation stands at 61,670% as of August 30, it seems actually likely to us that a typo was made in the annotation and the chart refers to the situation as of August 29 rather than August 19. In any case, it is fairly current.
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Venezuela’s implied annual inflation rate via Professor Hanke – on August 30 it reached 61,760%.
The next chart shows Venezuela’s narrow money supply M1 since 2008 – unfortunately we could not find a log chart going back that far, so one can only discern the “parabolic printing phase” that began in 2016 – 2017.
We calculated that Venezuela’s money supply growth amounts to 46.68 billion percent since the early 1960s. On a log chart one would no doubt see that extremely generous money printing has been practiced for a very long time (it would probably look very similar to the log chart of the exchange rate above).
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...M1-768x358.png
Venezuela’s narrow money supply M1 – up 46.68 billion percent since the early 1960s. Its growth rate has accelerated markedly in the past several years.
This brings us to the miraculous Caracas stock market, which has soared amid a collapse in economic output – a symptom of the “flight into real values”, as stocks represent claims on real assets.
Despite the little joke we have pinched from Kyle Bass and added to the annotation, the stock market has actually preserved purchasing power quite well in recent years. There is only one problem: once the inflation phase ends, which it must one day, the subsequent “stabilization crisis” will result in a sharp fall in the prices of the stocks that have rallied the most, as the economy’s structure of production will have to be completely rearranged.
Many investors will find it very difficult to decide when to get out and move into different sectors or different types of investments – and the class of investors as a whole won’t be able to escape the coming losses anyway. In Weimar Germany several of the biggest and most prominent winners of the crack-up boom lost their entire fortunes after hyperinflation came to a sudden halt in late 1923.
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IBC Index, monthly – a gain of 4.11 billion percent since the low of 2002.
With respect to declining production, we have two more charts – one shows the slump in Venezuelan oil production compared to the surge in US oil production (note that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world) and the other shows official GDP growth numbers – which are only released intermittently these days.
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US vs. Venezuela crude oil production from early 2005 to April 2018
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Annualized GDP growth according to official statistics – since 2016 these data are only released sporadically, and we are not sure how accurate they are.
So there you have it – the symptoms of a crack-up boom.
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Nicolas Maduro, the remarkably well-fed current Dear Leader of Venezuela.

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An all too familiar sight in Caracas these days: somewhat less well-fed Venezuelan citizens are hunting for food in the garbage. We are sure they will be happy to learn that it isn’t the fault of “real” socialism.

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The situation is apparently not much better in rural areas – here a hungry mob is seen stoning a milk cow.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...strophe-images

Give them nothing!

No aid, no oatmeal, no money!

They have oil...take that to feed them!

AND DO NOT ALLOW THEM TO COME HERE! WE DO NOT WANT THEM!

THEY HAVE A WHOLE OCEAN FULL OF FISH...GO GET SOME!

Michael Moore Flashback: In Praise Of Venezuela

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...&itok=s4kk3mdb "Oil for the People": Michael Moore is in praise of Chavez ending poverty in Venezuela...

Mon, 09/03/2018 - 14:20
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

"Oil for the People": Michael Moore is in praise of Chavez ending poverty in Venezuela.
I captured that Tweet as an image in case Moore deletes it.
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...azonaws_18.jpg
It was retweeted 6,684 times. 1,862 fools liked it.
Michael Moore, please check this out.

Prof. Steve Hanke‏Verified account @steve_hanke

There is a scarcity of everything in #Venezuela; except suffering.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dl45eCQWsAAN05Y.jpg 6:07 AM - 31 Aug 2018





Oil for the People Question

Mike Mish Shedlock‏ @MishGEA
Michael Moore Flashback: In Praise of Venezuela @MMFlint https://moneymaven.io/mishtalk/economics/michael-moore-flashback-in-praise-of-venezuela-1uQbfKEzi0qpmfItuE76Sg/ …

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dl8ceFgUYAAL2ye.jpg

10:26 AM - 31 Aug 2018

Mike Mish Shedlock‏ @MishGEA

Michael Moore Praises Venezuela for "Giving oil to the people and ending poverty in Venezuela". 1. Moore now feels a bit stupid 2. Moore now feels very stupid 3. Moore is too stupid to feel stupid https://moneymaven.io/mishtalk/economics/michael-moore-flashback-in-praise-of-venezuela-1uQbfKEzi0qpmfItuE76Sg/ …

10:30 AM - 31 Aug 2018

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...aise-venezuela

Ken Rogoff Exposes The Regional Costs Of Venezuela's Collapse

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...?itok=aDx6Qzd-

As Venezuela’s great experiment with “Bolivarian” socialism implodes, it is creating a humanitarian and refugee crisis...

Venezuelans turn to breast milk donations as baby formula price soars...

Nation calls for massive march against USA...



As the price of baby formula in Venezuela soars, moms turn to each other for help

By Gustavo Ocando Alex
Special to the Miami Herald September 10, 2018 12:31 PM
video and photos at the page link

MARACAIBO, Venezuela Viviana Vargas was worried after her son Mathias was born in April last year. The 30-year-old Venezuelan mother wasn’t able to breastfeed him sufficiently due to stress and other problems, so the 6-pound baby was on the verge of malnutrition.
She and her husband began to look for infant formula, which is pricey and scarce in Venezuela. They found out that a 14-ounce can of powdered formula, good for a week at most, would cost about twice the monthly minimum wage at the time — about 6 million bolívares or $3 on foreign currency black markets.
“We started to go into crisis,” Vargas said. “We had to travel to Maicao [a Colombian town next to the Venezuelan border] to find the right baby formula for Mathias.”

They were lucky. They were able to scrape together the money to buy about $200 worth in several cans, enough to feed the baby at night for six months.

But Vargas wanted to give her baby the healthiest start possible without ruining the family budget. And she found it in an unexpected way. Her boss at an online food delivery company where she works as a sales executive had a sister, the mother of a 6-month-old baby, who volunteered to give Vargas breast milk.
She received frozen breast milk every 15 days, preserved in little plastic bags with the date marked in pen. “Mathias gained the proper weight in just weeks. It was incredible,” Vargas said, holding her baby, now 16 months old, in her arms.
In Venezuela, baby formula has become so expensive for families that some mothers have begun turning to other women for breast milk donations or even to nurse the babies directly.
President Nicolás Maduro’s government eliminated five zeros from the national currency in an attempt to combat wild inflation in Venezuela, but now a medium-size can of imported baby formula costs even more — 3,300 bolívares or about $33 at the black market exchange rate.
And finding formula to buy isn’t easy. It means going to a resale market because it is almost impossible to find in regular supermarkets or pharmacies.
When Luis Daniel Zavarse was a newborn, his mother in Venezuela obtained breast milk from a relative to feed him when he was hospitalized. With baby formula prices out of reach for many in Venezuela, women are turning to other women for help feeding their babies.
Photo courtesy of Zavarse family

Marianella Herrera Cuenca, a sociologist from Central University of Venezuela, heard during her visits to poor and middle-class homes about informal networks of women who were helping other mothers by supplying their children with breast milk when they couldn’t afford to purchase enough formula.
A study by Herrera Cuenca and others at the university into the lives of poor mothers in Venezuela — the results have not yet been released publicly — found that as many as three in 20 mothers are being helped to feed their babies by relatives or friends who supply breast milk.
Herrera Cuenca called it “an increasingly common practice. ... These are survival skills that have been practiced for a thousand years.”
Herrera Cuenca, who is in charge of the nutrition section of an annual life conditions survey, said many low-income families can’t afford baby formula. The latest survey found that 89 percent of Venezuelans don’t even have enough money to buy sufficient food for their families.
Venezuela is caught in a spiral of inflation so catastrophic that the International Monetary Fund predicts the rate will hit 1 million percent by the end of the year.
“We’re living in a hyperinflationary context where monthly incomes are worthless,” Herrera Cuenca said.
That translates into poor nutrition for many. She said 39 percent of Venezuelan kids in underprivileged neighborhoods are not breastfed all the way to the six-month mark — and many are then fed with the water used to cook rice or spaghetti, or with corn flour mixed with cow or goat milk, diets that could make them even more undernourished.
“Those kids have size deficiencies and develop chronic malnutrition. We’re talking about at least 500,000 children with a chronic deficit as soon as they start their lives,” she said.
Elainy Ávila, a 32-year-old architect, has donated her breast milk to six babies while being part of a support group for mothers called Lactaluz. She’s also part of an informal network in recent years that has stretched to cities like Caracas and Maracaibo, where dozens of women have been offering free-of-charge breast milk to mothers to help them feed their malnourished or sick children.
Along with helping the health of babies, the participants also know they are saving the family finances.
“To donate breast milk is to donate life by drops. In the case of Venezuela, it is a matter of life or death,” said Ávila.
Keily Quintini, 37, had fed her first daughter with formula but couldn’t pay today’s costs for the supplement when she had a second baby girl. Her neighbor helped her this time.
“Years ago, we fed Sarah, my oldest, with baby formula, but now to buy only one can is impossible. We can’t afford it,” she said.
Mervin Chávez, a pediatrician and head of the breastfeeding program at the University of Zulia, says that breast milk donors help an average of two to four infants per week at the Children’s Hospital in Maracaibo.
“Most of those kids come from poor families. They’re malnourished. All we need is just one call through our support group and we’ll have breast milk donations within the hour,” the doctor said.
Dr. Mervin Chávez, a pediatrician and head of the breastfeeding program at the University of Zulia, says that breast milk donors help an average of two to four infants per week at the Children’s Hospital in Maracaibo.
Gustavo Ocando Alex Special to the Miami Herald

Only healthy women, without diseases such as HIV and hepatitis, can donate, but there are generally at least 25 mothers willing to donate breast milk from Lactaluz alone, members of the group said.
Nelson Faría, a pediatrician who works with newborns at the Policlinica Maracaibo, said he has received recent calls from middle-class patients in despair because they can no longer afford baby formulas.
“Breast milk is necessary in Venezuela, especially in this severe crisis. It has all the greatest benefits for babies and the best thing is that it is free,” he said.
At 33, Ninette Noetzlin, a Venezuelan kindergarten teacher with a 1-year-old son, has nurtured dozens of babies she has never known.
“I have helped five babies near to my family and friends, but also every 15 days I give my pediatrician 5-pound sacks filled with little breast milk bags so he can choose the most needy of his patients so they can use it,” she said.
Mothers can be temporarily or permanently unable to breastfeed their children due to physical incapacity, health complications, diseases or drug use.
Patricia Zavarse, 38, got desperate last May when she could not breastfeed her baby, Luis Daniel, while he spent days at the Intensive Care Unit.
She couldn’t feed him because she was receiving daily doses of a drug to treat her high blood pressure. Doctors advised the parents to feed the baby with a specialized formula that was expensive and rarely on store shelves.
“We could not find it anywhere. The doctors even recommended that I and my husband say goodbye to our baby,” Zavarse said.
The solution came through a relative who was breastfeeding her 11-month-old baby. For two weeks, doctors fed the baby with milk from the relative, using a digestive tube.
“That milk helped save our baby’s life,” she said.
Luis Daniel is now a healthy 3-month-old, she said: “It was a miracle.”

When Luis Daniel Zavarse was a newborn, his mother in Venezuela obtained breast milk from a relative to feed him when he was hospitalized. With baby formula prices out of reach for many in Venezuela, women are turning to other women for help feeding their babies. Photo courtesy of Zavarse family


https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nat...217586870.html

Why do they continue to BREED while they live in poverty and have no money?

Get on birth control!

They better not even think of coming here.

"Socialism Works Beautifully?!" Tucker Tries to Reason with Socialist Professor

https://www.bing.com/th?id=OIP.eQv9q...=7&o=5&pid=1.7

Venezuela crisis so bad people abandoning beloved pets...

Maduro looks to China to bolster collapsing economy...

Mind OUR own business!

No money, no aid and NO oatmeal.

They CANNOT come here either!

Go home, fight your own Civil War and fix your own country!


USA IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO THE WORLD'S PROBLEMS, THEIR POVERY OR THEIR OVERBREEDING!

THEY HAVE LAND, THEY HAVE RESOURCES, THEY HAVE OIL...GO TAKE IT TO FEED YOUR OWN SELVES!

KEEP OUT!!!

Trump was right all along putting that military option on the table for Venezuela

Venezuela sues neighbors for ... not treating its flood of refugees well enough

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
https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/10421...g&name=600x314


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.

Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

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

Pompeo Vows "Series Of Actions" Against Venezuela's Maduro "In The Coming Days"

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...&itok=6yOgcjy1

"...you’ll see in the coming days a series of actions..."


Sun, 09/23/2018 - 09:15
95 SHARES

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued an incredible statement to Fox News on Friday, vowing to take "series of actions" in "the coming days" against Nicolas Maduro's government in Venezuela.
The threat was couched in terms of being in the "best interest" of Venezuelans, and though Pompeo didn't specify details, he said the US is “determined to ensure that the Venezuelan people get their say.”
“I think you’ll see in the coming days a series of actions that continue to increase the pressure level against the Venezuelan leadership folks who are working directly against the best interest of the Venezuelan people,” Pompeo told Fox.

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...s/Maduro_0.jpg
Image via ReutersIt is the broad nature of the threat that makes it unusual, but particularly the timing and context, as it follows the early August failed assassination attempt on Maduro which interrupted a live television broadcast from Caracas. Maduro had been speaking at a military parade when two explosive-laden drones said to be flying in the direct of the podium exploded in the area.

In the aftermath the Venezuelan socialist leader blamed the United States and allied right-wing groups for being behind the attack, in a speech describing, “They tried to assassinate me today," while blaming the attack on right-wing factions specifically connected to Columbia and Florida.
He claimed at the time that "several of those intellectually responsible and the financiers of this attack live in the United States, in the state of Florida," and called on U.S. President Donald Trump to "fight these terrorist groups".
The live broadcast on state television showing the assassination attempt:

https://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_t...jpg&name=small

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...PcX_normal.jpg AlbertoNews ✔ @AlbertoRodNews

Video at the tweet

ÚLTIMA HORA | VIDEO - Situación irregular en la avenida Bolívar de Caracas durante Cadena Nacional de Maduro en acto con la GNB.
VTV cortó de emergencia la transmisión oficial.
6:00 PM - Aug 4, 2018

• 7,125
• 11.5K people are talking about this

Washington has steadily increased sanctions on Venezuela over the past number of months after Trump administration officials have accused the Maduro government of stamping out democracy and jailing opposition leaders. Maduro for his part has blamed the country's ills, specifically the collapsed economy and now worthless currency, on Washington plotting and subversion.
Under Maduro the country is now beset by annual inflation running at 200,000 percent, resulting in basic stables and medicines disappearing from store shelves, resulting in a significant uptick in emigration for people with means.
But lately a series of statement and stories in the media have served to fuel and confirm his suspicions that the US is planning covert regime change. Certainly Pompeo's latest comments will add to Maduro's fears that more major "plotting" is afoot.
Early this month the The New York Times revealed in an explosive story that the Trump White House held covert meetings with Venezuelan military coup plotters seeking to topple the Maduro government. The US had set up a "clandestine channel" which involved contacts with what were described as "rebellious officers" bent on bringing about regime change with the help of Washington.
The NYT report detailed several secret meetings between the Trump administration and military officers to talk about potential coup plans, but according to Times sources "the coup plans stalled". The meetings were spearheaded by someone simply described as a "career diplomat".
Pompeo's Friday warning, which likely hints at more economic warfare and sanctions to be leveled against Venezuela, comes ahead of the annual U.N. General Assembly in New York next week. Maduro has not attended UN meetings since 2015 out of fear that he could be assassinated.



https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...ro-coming-days

Bernie Sanders Might Learn Something From Venezuela's Minimum Wage Experiment

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...?itok=fOeSmOaU

Socialism isn’t like the free market which progresses peacefully. Socialism requires a bureaucratic boot on the neck of business...

Wed, 09/26/2018 - 13:30
29 SHARES
Authored by Doug French via The Mises Institute,

There are labor shortages all over the country. There are not enough truck drivers, plumbers, food waitresses, construction workers, and so on. The official unemployment rate is below 4 percent. It was just reported private sector wages popped 2.9 percent.

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...ges/venez2.png

However, Bernie Sanders and other “progressive” candidates are endorsing the idea of a federal living wage. On his website, Bernie starts with,

Millions of Americans are working for totally inadequate wages. We must ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty. The current federal minimum wage is starvation pay and must become a living wage. We must increase it to $15 an hour over the next several years.

His latest big idea is to

tax companies with 500 or more employees an amount equal to federal benefits received by their low-wage workers. The bill is designed to discourage large companies from paying their workers so little that they end up relying on federal benefits, such as food stamps, to make ends meet.

If Bernie were paying attention, there is a minimum wage experiment going on in real time in Venezuela right now. Sure, there’s some serious money printing going on there and plenty of socialist schemes to keep the shelves empty. However, the fact there’s nothing to buy hasn’t kept Venezuelan president Maduro from hiking that country’s minimum wage 24 times since 2013 when he took office.
The latest hike went into effect on September 17, and it was huuuge — 3,000 percent. Fabiola Zerpa writes forBloomberg,

7 million employees are guaranteed 1,800 bolivars a month — worth about $20 at the black-market rate. President Nicolas Maduro intended the mandate as political boost, but it’s having the opposite effect as companies, already hit by Venezuela’s epic economic contraction, tell workers they can’t afford to keep them.

No one should be stunned if employees are told to go home if the government by way of brute force increases pay by 30 times.

“I already told my four employees to go find other jobs,” Caracas garage owner Marcos Vizcaino told Bloomberg. “I’ve decided to close. There’s no need for me to keep to losing money for a third year in a row.”

Zerpa writes,

The higher minimum wage, which Maduro announced last month, was among several bids to steady the rapidly failing state’s economy and stanch hyperinflation. The socialist autocrat also devalued the currency and lopped five zeroes off denominations of the bolivar bill, which has been rendered almost valueless.

Lopping zeros off a currency has never worked and how on earth would raising the minimum wage by 30 times “stanch hyperinflation?” By the way, the zero lopping just happened a few weeks ago and price inflation is 100 percent for the new money.
Maduro’s policies only serve to drive the Venezuelan economy further into a Marxian hellhole. Venezuelan business owners must keep quiet because if they decide to “simply dismiss people. Much of the action happens secretively as companies try to avoid punishment by the government, which has been jailing those it believes are flouting the rules.”
Socialism isn’t like the free market which progresses peacefully. Socialism requires a bureaucratic boot on the neck of business. “Apart from the astronomical rise in wages, companies have limited ability to adapt, thanks to restrictive controls.” Zerpa writes. “Food operations are closely monitored as the government provides them imported raw materials. More than 500 supermarkets and stores have been fined and 200 managers and workers detained since Maduro’s announcements, according to Cedice, a private-property watchdog group.”
Maduro seized a cardboard plant and a pharmaceutical company for not toeing the government’s line. Even businesses with steady payrolls like banks, education, and construction are expected to be hammered by the new edict, because “large firms have collective-bargaining agreements subject to government scrutiny.”
Aurelio Concheso, a labor expert at Fedecamaras told Bloomberg, “The impact can be devastating; it can consume a whole company’s capital.”
Murray Rothbard wrote in The Free Market in 1988,

It is conventional among economists to be polite, to assume that economic fallacy is solely the result of intellectual error. But there are times when decorousness is seriously misleading, or, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, "when speaking one's mind becomes more than a duty; it becomes a positive pleasure." For if proponents of the higher minimum wage were simply wrongheaded people of good will, they would not stop at $3 or $4 an hour, but indeed would pursue their dimwit logic into the stratosphere.

Maduro is indeed pursuing his “dimwit logic into the stratosphere.” His country has no food or necessities and soon it will have no jobs.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...age-experiment

Lady Liberty: Nikki Haley thrills Venezuela's battered democrats in the streets of New York

President Trump's United Nations ambassador picked up a megaphone and jumped down into the Venezuelan crowd protesting the odious Maduro regime to show them just whose side America stands on.

September 28, 2018
By Monica Showalter

Jumping down into the streets of New York with the crowds of protesters, U.S. United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley seized the moment with a megaphone, calling for democracy in Venezuela, just as Russia's Boris Yeltsin once did in the 1991 coup that overturned the Soviet Union.

https://youtu.be/Lj4zFksuclo

Youtube Video https://youtu.be/Lj4zFksuclo

Don't think Venezuelans weren't thrilled. These are Venezuela's beleaguered democrats, the ones who have been beaten, jailed, starved, and murdered as their elections were stolen from them in front of their faces. They were utterly, utterly thrilled, and not just in the streets of New York, but across the continent and deep inside Venezuela itself.

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...4dP_normal.jpg Pedro Mario Burelli @pburelli

Thanks Amb. @nikkihaley. Whether as a diplomat, as a politician, as a freedom loving and caring woman, you have proven to be a firm voice, a constant ally. Millions of Venezuelans, in and out of our beleaguered country, THANK YOU!
Nikki Haley ✔ @nikkihaley

RT @USUN: Socialism and corruption have taken freedom away from the people of Venezuela. Proud to join these great people protesting the Maduro dictatorship.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DoIlvpUV...jpg&name=small

10:35 PM - Sep 27, 2018

• 502
• 551 people are talking about this

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...1z_normal.jpeg Roberto Negretti Chalbaud @RNegrettiCh

We love you Nikky Haley, thanks fpr being a voice of freedom for Venezuela! God Bless you!
Nikki Haley ✔ @nikkihaley

RT @USUN: Socialism and corruption have taken freedom away from the people of Venezuela. Proud to join these great people protesting the Maduro dictatorship.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DoIlvpUV...jpg&name=small

2:05 AM - Sep 28, 2018

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• See Roberto Negretti Chalbaud's other Tweets

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...d-p_normal.jpg Betsy__VENZ @Betsy_VENZ

Replying to @nikkihaley and 3 others
Miss Haley, I take this opportunity to say “THANKS”! to you from my people from Venezuela ! For your bravery to defend us! For raising your voice to alleviate our pain, and hunger.. Justice for Vzla! for a FREE Venezuela! SOS https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f1fb-1f1ea.pnghttps://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f1fb-1f1ea.pnghttps://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f1fb-1f1ea.png!!!Thanks https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f1fa-1f1f8.pnghttps://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f1fa-1f1f8.png
11:27 PM - Sep 27, 2018

• 1
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https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...Zz_normal.jpeg Sonia Simmons @soniasimmons18

Replying to @nikkihaley and 2 others
Thank you Ms Nikki Haley for your words and support to my country Venezuela. Hope you and all the people assisting the United Nations keep on supporting us. May God bless you, your family and the United States.
9:53 PM - Sep 27, 2018

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https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...59B_normal.jpg Andres Cuellar @Sou_Andres

· 22h

Ver a esta mujer hablar tan comprometida con la causa Venezolana hizo que se ganara mi estima por siempre. Vídeo sin editar. @nikkihaley @leonline2000 @DonCorneliano2 @Neoadolfo pic.twitter.com/zIAN42Jote

https://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_t...jpg&name=small

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...1b_normal.jpeg Henry González @meteoro252002

Video at the tweet and page link

@nikkihaley Thank you for your commitmen with a just, urgent and necessary cause... Helping to bring freedom and justice upon Venezuela. God bless you Nikki Haley, God bless Donald Trump and his entire administration.
6:13 AM - Sep 28, 2018

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Thrilled is an understatement; hog-wild is more like it. Nicaraguans and Cuban-Americans were thrilled, too.
What an amazing irony this is. For decades, nitpickers, even on the Venezuelan side, have criticized American officials, such as then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who have spoke out on the Venezuelan hellhole, saying they were engaging in "megaphone" diplomacy, and sniffing that it was unhelpful.
Well, here's some megaphone diplomacy, and it's being received by Venezuelans in the same way the great Ronald Reagan's speech on the Evil Empire was received by the prisoners within the walls of the Gulag, as Natan Sharansky wrote of: With unrestrained joy.
Someone is finally listening to them. Someone is finally there on the ramparts with them, cheering them and giving them encouragement they're lapping up like a thirsty man in the desert. And she looks like Lady Liberty.
No wonder they are shedding tears of joy.

Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

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

Sorry If You’re Offended, but Socialism Leads to Misery and Destitution

No taxpayer money, no aid and NO oatmeal.

They can go home and fight their OWN civil war, take their oil and fix their own problems.

DO NOT LET THEM COME HERE AND DO NOT FORCE US TO GIVE THEM MONEY OUT OF OUR WALLETS!

OUR WALLETS...KEEP YOUR PAWS OFF OUR TAXPAYER MONEY FOR THIS!

https://scontent-mia3-2.xx.fbcdn.net...01&oe=5C5810B3

Their money worthless, Venezuela's desperate flee by foot...

Do not come here!

Do not dump yourselves on any other country!



GO HOME AND FIGHT!

WE ARE ALL PROTECTING OUR BORDERS!

NO VACANCY!

Socialism makes comeback in U.S. politics | devastating effects to national economy

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

But hey, lets try socialism here. It will work this time, we promise, says Bernie and the other democratic socialists.

Report: 80 Percent of Venezuelans Short of Food

14,954

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Roman Camacho/NurPhoto via Getty Images
20 Nov 20182,832

Around 80 percent of Venezuelans are now short of food, according to the new data compiled by NGO Human Rights Watch on Tuesday.

Following a trip to the Venezuelan border with Brazil by a team of health experts from John Hopkins University, researchers found that malnutrition continues to rise aggressively, with 80 percent of households unable to access enough food and rates of malnutrition among five years now over the World Health Organization’s crisis limit. In 2017, the average person lost around 11 kilos (24 pounds). In 2016, that number was 19 pounds; it is expected to have risen in 2018.
Combined with chronic malnutrition, the report also points to the scale of the collapse of the country’s health system, with practically every major health condition ranging from tuberculosis to malaria reaching crisis levels. For example, the number of malaria cases has risen from 36,000 in 2009 to 406,000 in 2017, while 87 percent of HIV patients now do not receive their necessary drugs.

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...aoL_normal.jpg

José Miguel Vivanco ✔ @JMVivancoHRW




El sistema de salud en Venezuela ha colapsado. Un equipo de @hrw_espanol y de especialistas en salud de @JohnsHopkinsSPH viajó a las fronteras en Colombia y Brasil para conocer la magnitud de la crisis. Esto es lo que encontramos:

Hilo https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f447.png

489
9:29 AM - Nov 19, 2018
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1,195 people are talking about this

Most of these conditions are going untreated, mainly due to a lack of necessary medical resources and trained specialists. Experts managed to collect such data by working with local authorities at the Venezuelan’s border with Brazil, where thousands of people are fleeing the country every day, many of whom are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. Around 2.3 million Venezuelans have left the country have left the country since 2015, mostly to neighboring Colombia and Brazil and other Latin American countries.
As well as the humanitarian disaster, the country is also seeing a complete collapse of most of its institutions, infrastructure, and public services. Nowadays, essential products and resources including water, electricity, transportation, gasoline, and toiletries are all in scarce supply, with regular blackouts across major towns and cities.
Such dire statistics add weight to the growing international concern at Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian crisis, caused in large part by the failed socialist revolution enacted under its late dictator Hugo Chávez and continued today under Nicolás Maduro. Many leading figures are calling for a humanitarian or military-based intervention to end the crisis, although all relevant powers have so far pulled back the idea.
The regime continues to deny the existence of a crisis. Maduro recently declared at the United Nations General Assembly that his country is “stronger than ever” and blamed any visible difficulties on the supposed “economic war” led by the United States.

Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.



https://www.breitbart.com/latin-amer...-Rb5P3mERUdJxU

No US taxpayer money, no aid and no oatmeal.

They have land, they have resources, they have oil, they have a whole ocean full of fish to eat.

DO NOT LET THEM COME HERE...GIVE THEM NOTHING!

WE ARE NOT THE ATM MACHINE OR DUMPING GROUND FOR THE WORLDS PROBLEMS!

Giving Thanks - A Collapse Update From Venezuela: Corruption, Hunger, & Crime

Thu, 11/22/2018 - 22:00
46 SHARES

Authored by JG Martinez D via Daisy Luther's Organic Prepper blog,

In this update, Jose talks about the worsening corruption, hunger, and crime in Venezuela. It’s hard to imagine, but things are still getting worse there. As we get together to feast with our families this week, please remember the people of Venezuela, where 80% of the population does not have enough food. ~ Daisy

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...a-collapse.jpg

I have been trying to solve a couple of issues this past week, mainly related to my parents’ health. Dad just had an event with his equilibrium (he is almost 80 so it is perfectly understandable), and he hardly could come back home in his old car. Amazingly, he did not crash or got injured in the way back. In the pictures, I have seen he is alarmingly thinner. I will send him some nutritional additions as soon as I can. I have been going through some personal and familial issues that demanded lots of attention and care and had to leave the city for some days up to work a few days in a place without any kind of coverage, not even landline, in the middle of nowhere. I survived though.
Let’s begin.
Why the collapse is still going on.

Well, it is a known fact that a slow, painful collapse is definitely the worst possible scenario. Its effects are long term, the suffering it inflicts has effects on too many people, and last too much time. It affects other countries’ economies and societies, on time.
In our example, this is exactly what is happening. I read the report of a Venezuelan journalist, much smarter than me, where he explains the exact reason with very clever words, of why the mafia is still in power. His analysis is that the regime is not a vertical structure. Otherwise, it would have been much easier to overcome with conventional methodologies. The reason is that the structure is not like, for example, the Iraq government where Saddam controlled everything.
In Venezuela, the power is exerted by small, powerful because they are armed and have support from traitors as internal sources) gangs that are scattered all over the country. These can be with or without uniforms. It is very likely there are foreigners with them too, not openly but in the torture/imprisonment facilities. This kind of division offers new perspectives to know where exactly the combat should start. I would dare to say that, once we understood how they operate, it should be much easier to remove them.
Local warlords should have local interests…and local thugs to “attend” such interests, too. With some basic surveillance and taking care of the local snitches, enough information could be collected for some groups to start cooking something decent.
Yes, I am a libertarian. This kind of love for freedom is beyond nationality. That is why the communist world fears it that much and wants to eliminate it so badly.
But I would not like to analyze too much the political aspects this time. It is effectively covered, at least in its main aspects, in other articles.
An update from my wife’s family

I hadn’t written some other articles because I was waiting for my wife’s family to arrive, so I could include personal information they collected from their conversations with other travelers.
They made the trip, and the information is outstanding. They confirmed the 18 dead by freezing story in the mountains of Colombia. Being a large family with small children, they received assistance in some of the parts of the trip, even being hosted without charge in a hotel room.
To summarize, this is the general situation: people have to get into a large truck (regular buses are out of the game, there are no tires or spare parts) just to buy some basic staples, at incredible prices that increase every single day. The power grid is working just 4/5 hours a day in most of the country. Sending money is now increasingly difficult. The price of food is such that, even in a foreign currency like dollars, the numbers just don´t match: a dozen eggs is 9$, and one kilo of meat about 13$ depending on the area. Corn flour for our arepas is just found by the 12 kilos package. Rice and pasta, the same. If someone can live with those prices…
Law “enforcement” is completely corrupt.

It is quite interesting to hear what they have to say about the role of the law “enforcement” corps. They kidnapped people, asking for ransoms in foreign currency. The situation in the imprisonment facilities was…apocalyptical. Once they have collected enough money from the ransoms and what not, almost the technical stuff LEOs all of that city flee the country for good, and they are now in some place in Latin America (Colombia, perhaps?)…or even planning how to sneak up to the USA.

Go figure.
One of the most interesting investigators of this kind of stuff I have read these last few days analyzed very thoroughly about how the atomization and redistribution of power schemes are what has allowed the mafia to be in relative control so much time. With many small bands of thugs operating at the same time all over the country, and the LEO corps obeying just their own rules (presidential convoy was stopped recently by an armed group of intelligence corps, with the consequent aggressive attitude of the bodyguards, and this impasse conducted to the removal of their director, Gustavo Gonzalez L. from the chair. (You can google it). There is a lot of stuff happening under the sheets.
It is quite likely that we will see lots of nasty things in the near future, as the power structures diminishes and more and more members are “purged”. Losing control for this structure means that the ruling party in the rest of the country will be those with the uniform, the badge, and the gun or the AK. And without a legal system working, that is bad. VERY bad. As it can be supposed, this will not be a happy ending for those involved. They know that the entire world is against them. They are considered (as it should be) delinquents for good people all over the world. They have stolen our gold and destroyed our capacity to generate wealth via oil production.
Stealth mode is essential to survive in Venezuela right now.

This said, I have suggested to my fellows to activate their stealth mode. Old clothing and shoes, avoid too clean cars, use the vehicles as little as possible…Jeez, even using dark bags in case they found some food is wise. There are plenty of stories about thugs grabbing grocery bags, sometimes even stabbing the holder, if some resistance was found. Parking the car ready to leave the place is a need. A lot of assaults are carried on when people are getting into the vehicle. In my case, with my SUV busted, I had a backpack and perhaps my wife or one of the kids with another smaller backpack, and we got to the bike quickly. (How I miss my old motorbike!).
I have a lot of stuff that I was going to move from our house to my parent´s place, mainly equipment like electrical tools and similar productive, useful devices that a prepper usually has in place. But nowadays, roads are so lonely and LEOs are so…predaceous, that it is not a good idea any longer. A truck loaded with stuff will be a gold mine for those thugs. That is, provided that the gangs roaming in the desert interstate roads can be avoided, which is highly unlikely.
Rules have changed, and the very weak empire of law that once existed (the middle 70s to 90s?) is no longer present. It is not a countrywide situation, though. But now the Southern states, Amazonas and Apure are the kingdoms of the Colombian guerrilla. Thanks, Uncle Hugo!. You f—ed us well.
There have been reports on the roads to the East of the country (Cumana city for example) where 20 or 25 people gangs stop the cars and take whatever they want. LEOs will take whatever food you happen to carry, without bothering in giving you something else than a warning that you are lucky to not be going to jail. This is something to be expected in such a situation, and it can´t be more dangerous. However, it will not develop itself from one day to another; once things start to get bad and dope starts to be scarce…the hunger will make the beast leave out. The predators will go after the easier preys first. Or whatever they believe these preys are.
It is a hard compromise, but you can´t look helpless and unable to defend. There are a lot of psychos here that will shoot innocent people in the head just because they can, and they know that no one is going to come after them. If you could see some of the videos that have been uploaded about what the gangs are able to do…you would understand why I am so freaked out. Hands chopped. Picks used to drill someone´s head while a woman laughs as she is recording the footage. Jeez.
If you carry, and the situation goes the wrong direction, people under such a dangerous situation, should not draw without being ready to use their piece. Once someone knows you are armed, you will become a target: a good piece is a survival tool for the thugs, a very coveted element, and finally, a prestige symbol.
And that is the update.

This is the updating, people. I will write some more articles, as I can interview and gather everything that my family that just arrived a couple of weeks ago is able to transmit everything while it is fresh in their memories.
Thanks for your much-needed assistance, and your moral support! I won’t disappear again.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...n-hunger-crime

Socialism is causing Venezuela – with the world’s largest oil reserves -- to run out of gasoline

Media favorite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who speaks Spanish, has never, so far as I can discover, commented on the ongoing tragedy socialism is foisting on Venezuelans.

November 24, 2018
By Thomas Lifson

The popularity of socialism on America’s campuses and among a substantial fraction of Democrats defies the evidence of a natural experiment taking place in Venezuela, just across the Gulf of Mexico from America. Venezuelans already are starving due to socialism’s perversion of incentives. Food producers can’t make money under the price controls, expropriations and regulation of the socialists of Chavez and his successor Maduro, so they don’t produce food, and people must flee by the millions in order to stay alive.

https://www.americanthinker.com/imag.../210534_5_.jpg
Venezuelan refugees in Colombia (photo credit: Daniel Cima)

Now, the same process of perverse incentives is shutting down the very resource that made Venezuela the richest country in Latin American before socialism ruined it. Fabiola Zerpa of Bloomberg reports:

Venezuela’s fuel shortages are worsening as mass resignations at the state oil company’s tanker fleet have delayed gasoline shipments.
Petroleos de Venezuela SA’s refineries are running at less than a quarter of their capacity, forcing the country to rely on imported gasoline.

Of course, foreign currency is in very short supply in Venezuela precisely because its oil production and refining output are collapsing, as incompetent political appointees screw up, and have no incentive to perform well. Because gasoline is regarded as so essential, Venezuela controls its price, further reducing incentive to produce:

Gas prices are still the among the cheapest in the world, with the black market rate earlier this month less than one cent per gallon. Maduro has yet to increase prices after vowing to do so at the end of September.

Price controls always produce shortages, as rent control regulations (also beloved by American socialists) demonstrate. Price may be affordable, but there are no goods available.
Now, not just oil production and refining, but also transportation is collapsing under cronyism and perverse incentives:

Resignations and requests for leave by personnel at PDV Marina, the oil company’s shipping affiliate, are reducing the tankers’ crews to a minimum, according to a document seen by Bloomberg. At least 11 tankers are affected, and minimal staffing is hindering PDVSA’s ability to deliver on time, the document shows. Venezuela’s Oil Ministry and PDVSA officials declined to comment.
“Tankers are now delayed all the time,” PDVSA union leader Gregorio Rodriguez said from Puerto La Cruz.“The situation is worse in cities far from distribution centers, where the truck fleet service is also shaky, as is eastern Venezuela.”

God forbid, a tanker disaster is possible with minimal crewing and inexperience.
Adam Smith wrote, “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation.” Venezuela is demonstrating the process by which the ruin of a nation unfolds, as vital systems gradually shut down, poisoned by socialism.
Media favorite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who speaks Spanish, has never, so far as I can discover, commented on the ongoing tragedy socialism is foisting on Venezuelans. The Babylon Bee has satirized her silence, but our media progressives are not going to press her on the issue.
It’s time for the American left to explain why the tragedy of Venezuela will not happen here if their policies are enacted.

Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

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

Socialism always ends in destruction

Monday, December 03, 2018 by: News Editors
Tags: big government, Collapse, current events, deception, economy, finance, government, Liberty, lies, Maduro, politics, propaganda, socialism, society, Tyranny, Venezuela

930 Views
https://www.naturalnews.com/wp-conte...m-collapse.png
(Natural News) Every attempt at socialism has failed miserably. Venezuela is only the latest country that has tried to implement a socialist paradise, only to inevitably crumble and crash before our eyes. Socialism, and its natural progression, communism, has caused the deaths of 100 million people since its inception 100 years ago.

(Article by Virginia Fidler republished from GoldTelegraph.com)
Just a few decades ago, Venezuela had massive oil reserves and an abundance of other resources. It enjoyed wealth and an excellent standard of living. Today, Venezuelans have no food, no medicine, and the country is driven by corruption and fear. While a starving population is in despair, many are desperately trying to flee paradise. The army, supported by President Madero, is in the street, ready to brutalize any dissenters. Madero and the military are not starving.
Socialism can only survive through corruption and intimidation. It’s a system tailor-made for corruption. And corruption may be Venezuela’s largest industry.
Despite that fact that every socialist paradise on earth has turned into hell, many American politicians, and their supporters are calling for socialism for America. Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris are self-declared proud socialist, loudly singing its praises. Younger newcomers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Andrew Gillum are joining the chorus.
With all the evidence to the contrary, why are so many Americans supporting the socialism their grandparents valiant fought against?
The very theory of socialism being a classless society is a sham. By necessity, socialism puts enormous despotic powers in the hands of only a few select people. It is clear why some politicians yearn to be among the chosen. However, it fails to explain why they are receiving a tremendous amount of support.
The U.S. Constitution is an irksome impediment to these politicians, with its checks and balances and annoying right to freedom. With freedom comes responsibility, and this is where socialist wannabes push the hardest. They, the politicians, will handle the responsibilities of daily life. They will feed you, clothed you, take care of your health, and help you think. Nothing is needed from you but absolute compliance. It’s all free, and to some, the promise can hold a great deal of appeal. By the time the promises remain unrealized, it’s too late. Power has been firmly grasped by the select few, and people’s lives are absolutely tied to the powers that be. It’s slavery by any other word. It was something the signers of the Constitution understood all too well.
Socialism rules every facet of a citizen’s life – as does slavery. It’s a relationship based on dependence and lies. Instead of equality, socialism shifts the wealth to a few loyal adherents at the top, while the masses at the bottom are left with increasingly less. It’s always been a house of cards, ready to tumble. Venezuela is simply the latest crash.
American schools are preparing the young for socialism. Political correctness reigns in classrooms, while free speech is gradually eroding. Millennials, wearing designer jeans, happily use their expensive, capitalist iPads to squash opposing opinions. All levels of American education have been deprived of any understanding of the Constitution and freedom. Students are encouraged not to think but to follow prevalent opinion. Unless real lessons return to the classroom, free speech will only be a memory. The designers of the Constitution knew that this document is the only thing standing between freedom and slavery. Get rid of the Constitution, and you eliminate the former with ease.
It is American parents that have delivered their children to this type of education. These parents, who should have known better but failed to speak out, opened the door to institutionalized group thinking. When parents fail to protect their young, the all-powerful state happily takes on the burden. Among today’s millennials, denouncing capitalism has become as chic as wearing flowers in their hair was to their parents. Schools are no longer teaching them about the 100 million who died under socialism.
The starving masses in Venezuela understand. Their prosperous oil industry is in ruins. Inflation is set to hit 1 million percent. President Maduro’s attempt at looping off zeros from the bolivar is considered a joke, except that no one is amused. Steve Hanke of the Cato Institute calls it “cosmetic surgery.” Maduro has implemented a new currency, the “petro,” which is linked to the country’s oil industry. The only problem is, Venezuela’s once-successful oil industry is rapidly failing. It has taken Maduro a mere five years to destroy Venezuela’s once-prosperous society.
Without a change in policy, Maduro’s efforts have been a band-aid on cancer. In Venezuela, life has been a matter of daily survival; starvation has become the norm. The government keeps printing worthless currency, but no one can afford to buy anything. Shops are closing every day. With their expensive iPhones in hand, this is what American millennials see a dream paradise. No one is asking what will happen once his or her dream turns into a nightmare.
Read more at: GoldTelegraph.com

https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-12-...struction.html

Gaunt, Filthy Kids Roam Streets of Caracas in Packs

Patricia Laya

December 10 2018, 6:00 AM December 10 2018, 10:11 AM

(Bloomberg) -- Editors Note: There are few places as chaotic or dangerous as Venezuela. “Life in Caracas” is a series of short stories that seeks to capture the surreal quality of living in a land in total disarray.
Most weekend mornings, you can find Andrea and her cousins juggling on a street corner. She’ll be throwing limes up in the air and catching them just in time to dash over to idling cars before the light turns green.
Early on this Saturday, only a handful of motorists rolled down their windows. Most shook their heads, mouthing, “No tengo, mi amor”—I can’t spare anything, honey. She kept her collections in a pink-plastic purse: 24 bolivars, less than a penny, and a packet of strawberry-flavored wafers. By 11 a.m., that was all she’d had to eat.

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Andrea is 9. Her father is dead. Her mother is pregnant, jobless and many miles away in a small town south of Caracas called Yare. Andrea and her cousins—Disbeth, 12, Jocelyn, 11, and Andres and Jose, both 8—come in by bus and subway on Fridays, sleeping for two or three nights on the streets of one of the world’s most treacherous cities. Their weekend jobs are to beg for food for themselves, abating the hunger that dogs them during the week, and for money to bring back to their struggling families. Sometimes Andrea manages to collect as much as 50 bolivars.
Street children have long been a cause for concern in Venezuela. Their numbers have ebbed and flowed with the economy, but it has never before been like this—never before with so many young kids, on their own, all over the city.
They are seemingly everywhere, weighing vegetables at market stands, carrying crates of sodas into diners, cleaning parked cars, begging outside grocery stores, waved away from bars and restaurants where security guards don’t want them bothering the clientele. Many toil as “cloreros,” hawking diluted bleach, or cloro, poured into water jugs.

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Sometimes barefoot, often emaciated, many roam in groups for protection, inviting sideways glances and purse clutching. Mostly, though, they’re treated with compassion, as nearly all Caraquenos can see themselves reflected in their misery.
That Saturday, their stomachs growling, the band from Yare cut the line outside a Catholic church serving a special holiday lunch to the needy. They each got a toy, Andrea carefully placing a doll in a checkered dress on her lap. Afterward they bathed at a square near a shopping mall, scooping up dirty water from a pool and pouring it over their heads, giggling as they chased each other around in their underwear.
While their clothes dried, they spent time underneath a bridge covered in graffiti, playing with knick-knacks they’d found: an old keyboard and a bag of tennis-shoe laces. They ignored the trash and feces. At one point, they fought over a plastic bag of the food they’d accumulated: a container of chocolate icing from a bakery and a couple of slices of stale bread. They dipped their hands into the icing and licked their fingers.

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Later on, they’ll walk to a residential neighborhood to find a quiet place to sleep. If she gets cold, she hugs herself “like this,” Andrea said as she demonstrated, crossing her arms over her bony shoulders. She favored her right wrist, which she injured a few months ago.
Unlike some of her cousins, Andrea goes to school when she’s home during the week. Her favorite class is Spanish, her least favorite is math. She has her future planned.
“I want to be a lawyer,” she said. “That way I can help my cousins when they’re taken to prison.”

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.
Bloomberg

https://www.bloombergquint.com/polit...racas-in-packs

Her mother is pregnant. No money to feed themselves but, hey, let's romp in the dirt and make more mouths to feed. How disgusting.

They have a whole ocean full of fish.

They have land, they have oil.

No US taxpayer money, no aid, no oatmeal.

Do not bring them here.

These countries need to be on birth control.

"I want to be a lawyer to help my cousins when they are taken to prison"...LOL...do not go to prison in the first place.

https://scontent-mia3-2.xx.fbcdn.net...66&oe=5CAE7A32

Venezuela EL NACIONAL stops printing: Govt pressures, paper shortages...




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

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...?itok=9iigBAqL

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.

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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.

"There's No Income Inequality When Everyone Has Nothing..." So, you think socialism

Venezuela’s Lessons for American Socialists

Noah Smith


January 03 2019, 6:30 AM
January 03 2019, 8:32 AM

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It’s hard to overstate how disastrous the reign of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro has been for Venezuela. A recent series of Bloomberg articles vividly depicts the hellish, never-ending struggle for survival in Caracas, the country’s capital. Hungry children roam the streets, people are fleeing the country, health care is almost nonexistent, violence is endemic, even water is scarce. Chavez’s so-called Bolivarian revolution took a peaceful, middle-income country and transformed it into a nightmare that puts the ruinous Soviet Union of the 1980s to shame.

It’s important for other countries — including wealthy ones like the U.S. — not to ignore Venezuela, but to use it as a cautionary tale. Politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have embraced socialism, as have many young Americans. But what are the lessons of Venezuela? Why did the country become such a basket case?

The Bolivarian revolution’s defenders often make excuses for the Chavez-Maduro regime by claiming that the country’s penury is the result of outside forces. For example, some argue that it was the fall in oil prices in late 2014 and 2015 that sunk the country. Venezuela is a petrostate — petroleum products constituted about 95 percent of the country’s exports in 2014, so the price decline was naturally a blow.

But although lower oil prices undoubtedly made things harder for Venezuela, they can’t be the primary culprit in the collapse. Venezuela stopped releasing many of its economic numbers in 2014. But other petrostates — Saudi Arabia, Russia, Nigeria, Angola and Kuwait — saw their incomes stagnate or even fall after 2014, but they didn’t experience anything remotely like the devastation that has hit Venezuela:

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Nor did the country come under attack by capitalist powers. Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. did impose sanctions against a few of the country’s officials in 2015, and President George W. Bush refused to sell arms to Venezuela, but these weren’t broad sanctions that had the power to seriously affect the country’s economy. No reactionary armies or bombers devastated Venezuela’s cities; the country’s impoverishment is all of its own making.

Venezuela’s critics can also be too sloppy. It’s easy to wave one’s hands and declare that socialism always fails. But Bolivia, another resource-dependent Latin American country, elected a socialist president, Evo Morales, in 2006. And Bolivia has been doing great. The country’s living standards, which had stagnated for 30 years, have grown rapidly and steadily since Morales took power:


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And at the same time, Bolivia has managed to reduce inequality dramatically:

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Despite ominous signs that Morales is becoming more authoritarian, Bolivia has not yet experienced anything like the devastation that has afflicted its ideological fellow-traveler to the north.

So if it wasn’t oil prices, external pressures, or the inevitable tendencies of socialism, what did sink Venezuela? It’s hard to identify the exact policy mistakes that Chavez and Maduro made, but three failures loom large — macroeconomic mismanagement, nationalization of industry and interference in the state-owned oil company.

The worst scourge of Venezuela’s economy has been hyperinflation:


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This level of price increases makes it impossible to save money. Even though incomes tend to go up along with prices, the sheer unpredictability when prices are rising by 20- or 40-fold a year makes it very difficult to plan consumption. You may think tomorrow’s meal will only cost 10 million bolivars, but instead it might cost 20 million, meaning you go might hungry if you don’t buy immediately. It’s also very hard for companies, even state-owned ones, to plan their investments when the price of those investments is highly uncertain.

Meanwhile, hyperinflation has led the government — predictably — to impose price controls. Those created shortages of basic necessities, and made people turn to the much less-efficient and corrupt black market.

It’s not clear how hyperinflation gets started — price controls, currency depreciation and fiscal deficits can help kick it off, but once it gets started it’s very difficult to stop. Venezuela should have seen this menace coming, as its inflation rate steadily crept up year after year, but its leaders just made the problem worse. Bolivia, meanwhile, has managed to keep inflation very low.

Another big mistake was large-scale nationalization of industry and expropriation of private property. Chavez was very fond of nationalizing both foreign- and domestically-owned businesses of all kinds. This is a sure way to wreck the private sector — if local business owners and foreign investors don’t think their property is secure, they won’t invest, and output will languish. This can cause a spiral, where the government is forced to nationalize ever more of the economy as the private sector pulls back.

Morales, in contrast, has been much more careful with nationalizations in Bolivia, mostly limiting them to the oil and gas industry and the electric grid — centralized, stable industries where government ownership is common around the world.

Finally, Venezuela’s leaders interfered with the smooth operation of an industry that was already government-run — Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, the state-owned oil company. The company once operated relatively independently, but Chavez meddled in its affairs, firing employees and replacing them with apparatchiks, starving the company of investment in order to extract money for his own purposes, and driving away or expropriating the holdings of foreign partners who helped PDVSA keep up production. The unsurprising result is that Venezuelan petroleum investment has collapsed, oil infrastructure is falling apart, and production is in free fall— all this in the country with the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves.

Socialists in the U.S. should take note — if there’s a right way to do socialism, this isn’t it. Instead of cautious policies like those of Bolivia, Venezuela’s leaders chose to ignore the menace of hyperinflation, nationalize private businesses across the economy, and muck up the smooth operations of PDVSA. The result was predictable — one of the worst self-inflicted economic catastrophes of the century so far.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
Bloomberg

https://www.bloombergquint.com/view/...a-s-socialists

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Turning Point USA

#SocialismSucks


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https://scontent-mia3-2.xx.fbcdn.net...50&oe=5C908CBE

Venezuela Supreme Court Judge Flees To US, Spills Secrets Of Maduro's Hold On Power

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...?itok=Biyy_lvO

“Only brought hunger, misery and destruction to the country” as a “failed state”...

Mon, 01/07/2019 - 22:15
264 SHARES

The Venezuelan government “has only brought hunger, misery and destruction to the country” as a “failed state” — admitted a Venezuelan Supreme Court justice and longtime government loyalist who is now making headlines by his shocking and unprecedented defection to the United States. “I’ve decided to leave Venezuela to disavow the government of Nicolas Maduro,” the former powerful judge, Christian Zerpa, told reporters. “I believe Maduro does not deserve a second chance because the election he supposedly won was not free and competitive.”
Considering such a powerful and high level former regime loyalist has just safely fled to Florida with his family, could gaping fissures now surface within the Caracas government and begin to grow, resulting in more defections to come?

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...0Venezuela.jpg
Now defected Venezuelan Supreme Court justice Christian Zerpa

Zerpa told reporters while speaking from Florida on Sunday that he could no longer stomach Venezuela's highest court being a mere appendage of Maduro's ruling inner circle, complaining that since 2015 only handpicked insider loyalists were appointed to the bench. As Maduro is set to enter his second, six-year term in an oath of office ceremony on Thursday, Zerpa cited that "he didn’t want to play a role legitimizing Maduro’s rule when the Supreme Court swears him in," according to the AP.
“We are in the presence of an autocracy that has condemned to death any opposition to this particular vision of power,” Zerpa told a Miami-based news broadcast. Western leaders and international rights organizations have condemned the latest presidential election, noting important opposition leaders and parties were banned, or in some cases boycotted the election knowing they would be pressured or forced out.
Zerpa's defection has been confirmed by Venezuelan officials and official media , which have started an apparent smear campaign claiming the supreme court justice was facing multiple sexual harassment charges by women he worked with. He now says he's ready to work with US investigators into corruption and human rights inquiries in Venezuela, even after being under sanction by Canada, but not yet by the United States.
In early media statements made after fleeing his home country, Zerpa described abuses ranging from receiving directives from first lady Cilia Flores on how to rule in cases that are politically connected, to finding legal means and creating loopholes in order to block opposition representatives from taking key swing vote seats in Congress.

https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defa...ages/Zerpa.jpg

One bombshell confession made by Zerpa related to his role on the court, involves his personally taking steps to ensure Maduro maintained total control of Venezuelan congress. The AP report describes this as follows:

As a newly installed justice, he recounted being summoned to the court and told to sign off on a key ruling without first reviewing its details. It disqualified three elected representatives of Amazonas state from taking their seats in congress following the opposition’s sweep of legislative elections in 2015.
The outcome prevented the opposition from amassing a two-third super majority that would have severely curtailed Maduro’s power.

He further related he had flee because he would be jailed for coming forward, and is now apologizing to the public for "propping up" the Maduro government.

He apologized for propping up Maduro’s government, saying that he feared being jailed as a dissident where his life would be put at risk.
Meanwhile, other dissenters have recently fled the country amidst a collapsed economy, runaway inflation, and an extreme food and medicine shortage after two decades of socialist rule. One such opposition lawmaker, Julio Borges, who previously fled the country fearing for his life, urged Latin American leaders on Monday to intensify pressure on Maduro, saying, “The inhuman arrogance of this dictatorship led by Nicolas Maduro personally challenges the heads of state of the region.”
He added further in a blistering critique of Maduro personally: “It’s not fair that a whole country should perish to satisfy one man’s lust for power.”

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Nicolas Maduro begins another 6-year term on Thursday, via Venezuelan Presidency/AFPIndeed the situation continues to be dire as the socialist country suffers from a perfect storm of starvation, disease, a lack of healthcare and extreme violence, with tragic reports of children dying from hepatitis and malaria.
"There is a human catastrophe in Venezuela. There is a resurgence of illnesses that were eradicated decades ago. Hundreds have died from measles and diphtheria. Last year, more than 400,000 Venezuelans presented malaria symptoms. Up to now, there are over 10,000 sick people from tuberculosis," said Caracas mayor and former political prisoner Antonio Ledezma, who founded the opposition party, Fearless People's Alliance. He added provocatively of the dire medicine and healthcare situation amidst a collapsed system: "People have been doomed to death. More than 55,000 cancer patients don’t have access to chemotherapy. Every three hours a woman dies due to breast cancer."
As the country continues its downward spiral, certainly to be exacerbated by at least another six years of Maduro's failed policies, Zerpa's high level defection is likely the start of more to come.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...uro-hold-power

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