It is a mistake for the US to try to overthrow the democratic government in Venezuela.

LOL...bump

 

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John Oliver never mentioned socialism, or how Glynch loves this guy

 

It's sad what has happened to that country.

 

Yup, very tragic.

https://joelhirst.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/the-suicide-of-venezuela/

The Suicide of Venezuela

Posted on April 23, 2016 by Joel D. Hirst

I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing epic about it. We who have the privilege of travel often look down in satisfaction at the ruins of ancient Greece; the Parthenon lit up in blues and greens. The acropolis. The Colosseum in Rome. We walk through the dusty streets of Timbuktu and gaze in wonder at the old mud mosques as we reflect on when these places had energy and purpose. They are not sad musings, for those of us who are tourists. Time has polished over the disaster. Now all that is left are great old buildings that tell a story of when things were remarkable – not of how they quietly fell away. “There was no reason, not really,” we tell each other as we disembark our air-conditioned buses. “These things just happen. Nothing is forever; and nobody is at fault. It’s just the way of the world,” our plastic wine glass in hand. Time ebbs and flows, slowly wearing away the foundations of a civilization until it collapses in upon itself – at least that’s what we say to comfort ourselves. There’s nothing to do about it. These things can’t be stopped. They just are.

This is what people will say in a hundred years, a thousand years about Caracas, Venezuela. Or Maracay, or Valencia, or Maracaibo. Those great sweltering South American cities with their malls and super-highways and skyscrapers and colossal stadiums. When the archeologists of the future dredge the waters of the Caribbean and find the remains of sunken boats; putting them on display in futuristic museums to tell of the time when this place had hosted a civilization. Ruins of great malls filled with water and crocodiles – maybe the ancient anaconda will have retaken their valleys; maybe the giant rats that wander the plains will have made their abodes in the once-opulent homes of the oligarchs – covering the tiles and marble with their excrement. “There was nothing that could have been done,” the futuristic tourists will also say. “The country declined – and vanished – it’s the way things go.”

We tourists are wrong.

I know, because I have watched the suicide of a nation; and I know now how it happens. Venezuela is slowly, and very publically, dying; an act that has spanned more than fifteen years. To watch a country kill itself is not something that happens often. In ignorance, one presumes it would be fast and brutal and striking – like the Rwandan genocide or Vesuvius covering Pompeii. You expect to see bodies of mothers clutching protectively their young; carbonized by the force or preserved on the glossy side of pictures. But those aren’t the occasions that promote national suicide. After those events countries recover – people recover. They rebuild, they reconcile. They forgive.

No, national suicide is a much longer process – not product of any one moment. But instead one bad idea, upon another, upon another and another and another and another and the wheels that move the country began to grind slower and slower; rust covering their once shiny facades. Revolution – cold and angry. Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again. This is what is remarkable for me about Venezuela. In my defense – weak though it may be – I tried to fight the suicide the whole time; in one way or another. I suppose I still do, my writing as a last line of resistance. But like Dagny Taggert I found there was nothing to push against – it was all a gooey mess of resentment and excuses. “You shouldn’t do that.” I have said. And again, “That law will not work,” and “this election will bring no freedom,” while also, “what you plan will not bring prosperity – and the only equality you will find will be in the bread line.” And I was not alone; an army of people smarter than me pointed out publically in journals and discussion forums and on the televisions screens and community meetings and in political campaigns that the result would only be collective national suicide. Nobody was listening.

So I wandered off. I helped Uganda recover after a 25 year civil war – emptying out the camps and getting people back living again. I helped return democracy to Mali, and cemented a national peace process. I wrote three novels. I moved, and moved, and moved again. I loved my wife; we took vacations. We visited Marrakesh, and Cairo, and Zanzibar and Portugal and the Grand Canyon. We had surgeries. I had a son. We taught our son to sit up, to crawl, to walk and to run; to sing and scream and say words like “chlorophyll” and “photosynthesis”. To name the planets one by one, to write his name.

All the while the agonizingly slow suicide continued.

And always, in the early morning over coffee I open my computer to document, if only for myself, the next cut in Venezuela’s long, tragic suicide. I chat with my friends, who continue to try and explain to the mindless why their misery is a direct result of one bad idea built upon the last in a great edifice of stupidity. Good men and women who are stuck in a two-decade old debate from which there is no escape. I say silent prayers for the next in the long line of political prisoners. I look at photographs of places that I knew – beaches where I went and restaurants that I frequented; covered in garbage or boarded up and stinking. I watch the videos of the nightly sacking of supermarkets that are fortuitous enough to have had a supply of something.

Tonight there are no lights. Like the New York City of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, the eyes of the country were plucked out to feed the starving beggars in abandoned occupied buildings which were once luxury apartments. They blame the weather – the government does – like the tribal shamans of old who made sacrifices to the gods in the hopes of an intervention. There is no food either; they tell the people to hold on, to raise chickens on the terraces of their once-glamorous apartments. There is no water – and they give lessons on state TV of how to wash with a cup of water. The money is worthless; people now pay with potatoes, if they can find them. Doctors operate using the light of their smart phones; when there is power enough to charge them. Without anesthesia, of course – or antibiotics, like the days before the advent of modern medicine. The phone service has been cut – soon the internet will go and an all-pervading darkness will fall over a feral land.

Torre de David

The marathon of destruction is almost finished; the lifeblood of the nation is almost gone. No, there is nothing heroic or epic here; ruins in the making are sad affairs – bereft of the comforting mantle of time which lends intrigue and inevitability. And watching it has, for me, been one of life’s great tragedies.

 

To glynch, the government there is great, and it's all the USA's and Israel's fault. Long live bureaucracy and communism!

 

I'd assume the story of Venezuela is a much more complex mix of opposing economic extremes competing for control of apparent massive wealth and all being crushed by an oil crash no one for saw or prepared for. Most revolutions are in a response to powerlessness and lack of equitable treatment.

To simplify the story to the current situation denies the history that lead up to it.

 

It's not. Lots of countries rely on oil wealth

 

This is a really ****ty situation because Maduro has been really ****ty in general and Venezuelans need a better servant to manage their country.

The problem, as always of course, the tactically forced options are to keep going with Maduro or accept a corrupt, bribed US-backed government which will proceed to shovel out their assets and then chain Venezuelans to a slave debt deal they can not pay off.

That's why I can't bring myself to say I want Maduro to stay on, I can't bring myself to say a single decent thing about him anymore, but certainly you would have to hate Venezuelans in order to imply that a US backed right wing government would be anything other than better and more supportive for big American businesses. That's all it is, it's all it's ever been. And let me remind you again, you won't see a dime of it. You and me and Venezuelans are not in this game, we're not part of this deal. You will get the splatter of big banks and oil companies trickling on you. YOU won't and will never be rich or powerful enough to get any of it. You, me, Venezuelans are a nuissance, a road block. You as an American are not a part of this thing.

There are better options than both Maduro and his opponent, they are available, in every country in the world no matter what CNN has told you. It's just difficult to grow those options when the most weaponized and aggressive country in history and the armed local mafia boss are fighting over stealing someone else's money and rights, and spilling unlimited blood is an option.

So if you're in it to rape Venezuelan assets, subvert their human and civil rights in order to get a leg up economically, just say so. Don't act like you care about Venezuela. If you give a damn about Venezuela, then you can't possibly be happy with the current state of affairs and what's clearly going to be imposed on Venezuela as a government after Maduro. It's a joke at this point.

 

Maduro, such a victim, lol.

Get real, stop trying to make it about us banks or whatever.

Far left socialist policies have completely destroyed a nation.

 

It is 100% about banks making humongous sums of money and any American business tapping a credit-chained country.

How can you in 2016 not see the direct, legal, practical, clear role that banks and other big businesses play in influencing foreign policy through the open political process? This is how it is, how it's been, and it's not just Obama. It's all you favorite guys and all the guys you dislike. This is the game plan. It's no secret, it's not up for debate because it's not 1960 right now. We have real data, we have old records, we have leaked new records, we have current behavior to form an opinion.

We just now have the benefit of 20/20 vision with literally dozens of countries who all happen to come to the same place. That place where by some miraculous theory, there is a non-capitalist friendly government who did something wrong and things would be improved by allowing American government to force the hand. There are TONS of case studies of entire countries in South America, Asia, Middle East, and now we're beginning to see it a lot more in Africa.

Maduro screwed up the country FURTHER as a criminal. He is not a victim and no one said he is, that's just the inner convo narratives you guys are hearing I suppose. Agreed that he's a criminal though. Why is the US involved at any level at all with this thing? Why do you even know about this story? Why is US involvement a default position for a country whose citizens have a 30 year flat standard of living even after going through this with easily 5-10 other countries in that time period?

Stop being a fanboy for people who consider you a bangable cheerleader or a nuissance. That's all we are in this thing, you can choose to be one or the other. You will not gain anything, neither monetarily or morally. Nothing in that country or yours will be fixed. Almost no one in your country or theirs will be happy with the outcome. Maduro will be detained. A corrupt government will be installed. Public assets will be sold off from poor venezuelans to rich foreigners. Debt will be piled on. A year or two later, Venezuela will once again be on the verge of economic demise and they will have to face increased the foreign assault on their country. They can either default at that point and have the EU and US declare economic war on them, strangling them. Alternatively they can renegotiate it to an even worse deal which will have to be renegotiated again shortly after. This is all guaranteed. It's like watching a Hollywood movie, once you've watched them carefully, you can predict the outcome of 99.99% of them.

 

Shut up Mathloom, you are an idiot.

 

Seriously... can we actually have a debate where people debate with nuance instead of personal attacks for once ATW? Mathloom actually attempted to debate with nuance. Give him credit for that. Instead of attacking him personally, can you at least attempt to debate without personal hatred?

 

Mathloom, the countries that have grown the most have opened up markets and allowed banks to do their thing in providing loans to grow the economy.

Compare Venezuelan economic growth to Mexico or Peru which have been implementing market friendly policy. They are growing nicely.

Is everything perfect? No. But they aren't starving on the streets thanks to socialism.

 

And then you have the opposite end of the spectrum such as India with free markets galore and a wealth gap that is out of control.

 

Mexico is next to US which helps its economy, but a large chunks of it are essentially a failed state as the cartels run the country.

Venezuela's economy is collapsing because oil is down.

China is the biggest growth story of the last 20 years. Their is massive government control in their economy. Foreign companies are forced to partner with Chinese companies.

Please explain to me how opening up their economy is suddenly going to fix anything. Oil prices are low, what company is going to rush it develop the Venezuelan oil fields. Their oil needs to be refined heavily which is unprofitable in the current environment. Market based economies work when you have something to market. I don't see anything of usefulness in Venezuela. You must have some sort of competitive advantage as a economy for a market based system to work. Its not socialism or communism or capitalism that is killing Venezuela right now.

 

That's a pretty silly statement. People don't starve in the street because of socialism. Its one of the upsides of socialism. OTOH, does opening up the market serve the common folk or the elites? I guess somebody still believes in trickle down.

 

Kinda like America.