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

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

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



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

Fri, 12/28/2018 - 20:25
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Authored by Daniel Greenfield via Sultan Khish blog,

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



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

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

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

Give them nothing and do not let them come here.

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

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

"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:


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:



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


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:



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

Turning Point USA

#SocialismSucks

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



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

Mon, 01/07/2019 - 22:15
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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?


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.



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.”


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