You have absolutely no idea what's going on there, do you Moi? There are no sanctions preventing the production of food in Venezuela. There are no sanctions preventing the delivery of food aid to Venezuela. Perhaps, you'd care to explain away this with your phony sanctions scapegoat: and it's no just food aid: Venezuelans Die as Maduro Government Refuses Medical Aid https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelans-die-as-maduro-government-refuses-medical-aid-1523025805 The Stalinist dictatorship in Venezuela and its idiotic and negligent policies are solely and wholly responsible for the humanitarian crisis in that country. That bogus "sanctions" propaganda you're spouting is merely a canard used to shield those socialist scumbags from responsibility and accountability.
Even Maduro has finally admitted the obvious truth. "Under-fire Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro admitted his economic model has "failed" in the wake of food and medicine shortages and public service paralysis, such as Tuesday's power failure that affected 80 percent of Caracas. "The production models we've tried so far have failed and the responsibility is ours, mine and yours," Maduro told his ruling PSUV party congress, as Venezuela looks to tackle chronic inflation the International Monetary Fund predicted would reach one million percent this year." FRANCE 24 INTERNATIONAL, Venezuela's president admits economy has failed, 31 July 2018. http://www.france24.com/en/20180731-venezuelas-president-admits-economy-has-failed
The government took back control of the national petroleum company PDVSA, and has used the abundant oil revenues, not for benefit of a small class of renters as previous governments had done, but to build needed infrastructure and invest in the social services that Venezuelans so sorely needed. During the last ten years, the government has increased social spending by 60.6%, a total of $772 billion . Poverty is not defined solely by lack of income nor is health defined as the lack of illness. Both are correlated and both are multi-factorial, that is, determined by a series of social processes. To make a more objective assessment of the real progress achieved by the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela during the last 13 years it is essential to review some of the key available data on the social determinants of health and poverty: education, inequality, jobs and income, health care, food security and social support and services. With regard to these social determinants of health indicators, Venezuela is now the country in the region with the lowest inequality level (measured by the Gini Coefficient) having reduced inequality by 54%, poverty by 44%. Poverty has been reduced from 70.8% (1996) to 21% (2010). And extreme poverty reduced from 40% (1996) to a very low level of 7.3% (2010). About 20 million people have benefited from anti-poverty programs, called “Misiones” (Up to now, 2.1 million elderly people have received old-age pensions – that is 66% of the population while only 387,000 received pensions before the current government. Education is a key determinant of both health and poverty and the Bolivarian government has placed a particular emphasis on education allotting it more than 6% of GDP. UNESCO has recognized that illiteracy been eliminated furthermore, Venezuela is the 3rd county in the region whose population reads the most. There is tuition free education from daycare to university; 72% of children attend public daycares and 85% of school age children attend school. There are thousands of new or refurbished schools, including 10 new universities. The country places 2nd in Latin America and 5th in the world with the greatest proportions of university students. In fact, 1 out of every 3 Venezuelans are enrolled in some educational program.[ii] . It is also a great achievement that Venezuela is now tied with Finland as the 5th country with the happiest population in the world. . Before the Chavez government in 1998, 21% of the population was malnourished. Venezuela now has established a network of subsidized food distribution including grocery stores and supermarkets. While 90% of the food was imported in 1980, today this is less than 30%. Misión Agro-Venezuela has given out 454,238 credits to rural producers and 39,000 rural producers have received credit in 2012 alone. Five million Venezuelan receive free food, four million of them are children in schools and 6,000 food kitchens feed 900,000 people. The agrarian reform and policies to help agricultural producers have increased domestic food supply. The results of all these food security measures is that today malnourishment is only 5%, and child malnutrition which was 7.7% in 1990 today is at 2.9%. This is an impressive health achievement by any standards. Some of the most important available data on health care and public health are as following: continued Chávez is a legendary figure in Venezuela who transformed the country’s political and economic landscape by nationalizing industries and funneling enormous amounts of government money into social programs. Under his rule, Venezuela’s unemployment rate halved, income per capita more than doubled, the poverty rate fell by more than half, education improved, and infant mortality rates declined. While he sparked ferocious opposition among the country’s elites and conservatives — who at one point attempted a coup against him — he was loved by the country’s poor and working classes. continued https://www.vox.com/world/2017/9/19/16189742/venezuela-maduro-dictator-chavez-collapse
Yes he did.FYI Maduro, Chávez’s vice president and handpicked successor, temporarily assumed the office of the presidency, and was narrowly elected president in the elections that took place shortly after. He has been in power ever since. Maduro has tried to replicate his predecessor’s political playbook. But he has largely failed. And a great deal of that can be traced back to two key assets that Chávez had that he likely never will. First, Chávez was famously charismatic — a once-in-a-generation kind of political charmer with an extraordinary ability to persuade people from all different backgrounds to join his cause. Having grown up as a poor child in the Venezuelan countryside, Chávez had an organic and intuitive connection with the poor and working-class citizens he came to champion. A savvy politician, he cobbled together a coalition of leftists, military officers, broad swaths of the middle class, and Venezuela’s long-neglected poor. “Chávez was an almost unclassifiable and unprecedentedly good politician,” George Ciccariello-Maher, a scholar of Venezuela at Drexel University, told me. “He had these incredible abilities and capacities that no one could be expected to reproduce.” Chávez’s second special asset was an unprecedented oil boom, which poured about a trillion dollars into the country’s treasury during his tenure. High global oil prices have always been a boon for Venezuela, since it possesses enormous oil reserves. It’s a quintessential petrostate whose entire economic fate relies on the price at which the country can export oil to global markets. But Chávez expanded the state’s control over the oil industry and was ambitious in his efforts to redistribute the money it brought into government coffers. continued https://www.vox.com/world/2017/9/19/16189742/venezuela-maduro-dictator-chavez-collapse
You want me to repeat myself? Otay - the failed collectivization schemes and mismanagement of the economy that socialist idiots from Stalin to Mao to Menghistu and now Maduro are famous for. Those mistakes. The mistakes socialist idiots keep repeating over and over again... Right - Venezuela is an Austrian School libertarian utopia! The socialist imbeciles who have been running that country aren't nationalizing industries and collectivizing farms... Say, what's up with all the red flags, comrades? Pushin' for some laissez-faire capitalism?
I agree with that, but it is also possible that a majority of Venezuelans voted for the current tyrant over the alternative candidates. Would that legitimize the Venezuelan dictatorship? I think not.
"No more whining, I want solutions comrades!" Freakin' hopeless. The good news is maybe those socialist jackasses will finally allow humanitarian aid into the country...
Socialism is an economic theory of social organization that believes that the means of making, moving, and trading wealth should be owned or controlled by the community as a whole. In Marxist theory, it is a transitional (temporary, in between) social state between capitalism and communism. Communism is an ideology of economic equality through the elimination of private property. Strict govt. planning and equality for all. These countries are not socialist or communist they are dictatorships which are closer to fascism.
It's funny you posted that propaganda after Dydad shared Maduro's confession that the socialist program in Venezuela has failed. I wonder what the progs at Vox are bleating and babbling about that today. From the article cited in Post #128: "Under-fire Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro admitted his economic model has "failed" in the wake of food and medicine shortages and public service paralysis, such as Tuesday's power failure that affected 80 percent of Caracas. "The production models we've tried so far have failed and the responsibility is ours, mine and yours," Maduro told his ruling PSUV party congress, as Venezuela looks to tackle chronic inflation the International Monetary Fund predicted would reach one million percent this year." IT'S OVER, apologists...
Let's have a listing for forum Republicans who are marching off to Venezuela to fight their war against its government ...
The socialism/communism you see in Venezuela is what you get when socialists and communists try to apply their unviable utopian fantasies and theories in practice - a crappy real world (or practical) version of theoretical socialism/communism. I do agree with you that in some respects Bolivarian Venezuela does resemble another incremental or transitional system that exists between capitalism and socialism & communism - fascism - where the government exercises de facto instead of direct control over private enterprises and property. However, this exists alongside the property and enterprises that are directly controlled by the state, so what you have is a crappy real world version of fascism/socialism/communism - or just plain crap. We can quibble over semantics, but in the long run the crappy real world/practical version of socialism/communism that Maduro & Co. are practicing speaks to why it is folly to even attempt to apply theoretical socialism and communism in the real world. Neither theory is viable in the real world, and socialists and communists have the track record of consistent failure to prove it. The question then is why bother attempting to implement a theoretical system that can't be implemented in the real world? In the real world, the idea and good intentions aren't enough - people expect results, and they expect positive results, not tyranny and destitution.
LOL - I love this thread. We're hearing the same old time-honored litany of excuses that Leftists always make for the failure of socialism/communism in any given country, most notably "It wasn't pure socialism/communism!" "The wrong people were implementing it!" along with the usual "It wasn't the socialists' fault - it was (insert scapegoat here)'s fault! Rinse and repeat...
Thank you. Shutting down speech that disagrees with yours is certainly the liberal way. Best of luck.
It doesn't matter how the Venezuelans voted. The outcome was predertermined. People think all democracies work the same.
You provided incredible numbers and facts. In order for facts to be effective, they have to be believed. I realize you won't read this since I'm on your ignore list but I post it for the interests of others.
You've provided propaganda to me. Maduro has confessed that the Bolivarian socialist program the Hugo Chavez began has failed. How is it that you can't acknowledge that hard fact? I saw the same thing happen after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and now I'm seeing the same negation and denial from the votaries of the "progressive" faith as another country and its people fall before our very eyes. As if watching the Venezuelan people suffer wasn't painful enough, it is intensified by the knowledge that the negation and denial surrounding it virtually assures that somewhere, sometime it is bound to happen again... As it was with the Soviet Union so it is with Venezuela and so it will be for the next country that falls prey to the lies...
I'm against invading (and saving) Venezuela. Let them marinate in their socialism. Let them resort to cannibalism. They deserve it.
