Venezuela - socialism case study

drypowder

drypowder

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I had started a thread on the old forum that chronicled some of the steps along the way as Venezuela's socialist experiment yielded the very predictable consequences of collectivism - very predictable, but somehow overlooked by every socialist/communist movement in every other country.

Old thread here if anyone wants to catch up on events over the last couple of years in this South American socialist paradise: http://www.carolinashootersclub.com...n-socialism-to-improve-economy-maduro.187806/

Venezuela is starting to circle the drain now, so I figured we ought to keep an eye on it, and absorb the warnings that come from the collapse. Note the American MSM has taken great pains to avoid covering this slow motion train wreck - people might get the wrong idea about socialism, so let's not cover it! Instead, they'll focus our attention on every tweet from Trump and whether Ivanka is smiling enough or not.

Venezuela On The Verge Of Revolution As Hyperinflated Currency Crashes To New Record Low

Note: the black market rate is the real rate - i.e., the illegal market's rate is the only one that isn't severely restricted in terms of who can convert at this rate and in what amount. And of course, black markets are an inevitable consequence of price fixing.
20170423_VENZ.jpg


Socialism is good for losing weight though!
On April 6, The Economist reported that over the past year, 74 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 20 pounds.
 
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Why We Have A 2nd Amendment: Venezuela Plans To Give Firearms To Loyalists To Purge Growing Resistance

After enduring shortages of food and medicine for years, as well as a total collapse of their currency, the people of Venezuela have had enough. Last week it was estimated that 2.5 million people marched against the Maduro regime, which had previously tried to strip away the powers of the opposition-led parliament. It’s estimated that as many as 6 million people may have taken to the streets to protest throughout the country.

In the lead-up to the protest, which had been planned for weeks by opposition political parties, President Maduro issued an alarming proclamation that didn’t receive nearly enough press. He promised to expand the nation’s armed militia, and hand out firearms to as many as 400,000 loyalists.

If you know your history of communist regimes, you understand what comes next. Maduro’s response to millions of hungry pissed off people, is to arm his die-hard supporters, who will be able to purge the starving masses that dared to cross him. They may not face much resistance, because in 2012 Venezuela banned private firearm ownership.
 
drypowder said:
Note the American MSM has taken great pains to avoid covering this slow motion train wreck - people might get the wrong idea about socialism, so let's not cover it!
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And here's a study that makes this point for me.

Media Yawn at Venezuela’s Spiraling, Socialist Nightmare

Out of approximately 50,000 total evening news stories on ABC, CBS and NBC combined in the last four years, just 25 have covered the ongoing crisis in socialist Venezuela, according to a Media Research Center study published Tuesday.

After Venezuela’s former socialist president, Hugo Chávez, passed away in March 2013, the country has spiraled into economic disaster and civil chaos. So far in 2017, more than 50 Venezuelans have been killed during protests against current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his socialist policies. Many Venezuelans are starving due to shortages of food and other essentials. The country’s inflation rate is set to surpass 700 percent and 25 percent of Venezuelans will be unemployed.

“Yet the Big Three evening newscasts have tried to pretend this crisis does not exist, offering virtually no coverage as the situation has deteriorated over the past four years,” MRC Research Analyst Mike Ciandella wrote.
 
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They just aren't socialist enough, and haven't been from the start. That's why we need to get rid of the half measures like Obama care and just go full on with the free healthcare, free food, 16 weeks vacation, and $25 min wage; and to be sure we should just relocate all Syrians to the US, their country is a war zone so just move them all here and they'll be happier. Unless we take these steps right away we're doomed I tell you, doomed because we aren't fully socialistic.

Yeah, purple.
 
JimB said:
and to be sure we should just relocate all Syrians to the US, their country is a war zone so just move them all here and they'll be happier.
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As an aside, the media has done a great job of perpetuating the myth that most of the refugees coming to Europe are from Syria. Only a tiny fraction, less than 5% are actually from Syria. Many are from Africa, but the media will never talk about that. Lots of Syrians went to Lebanon. And all these economic refugees know to say that they are fleeing warzones (Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen) and lots are carrying forged documents (easier to pull off when the records of a country like Syria have been scattered to the winds in the war torn areas).
 
The Media and the Bernie Sanders Socialist are part of the media. They believe that "thier Socialism brand" will work and Venezuela is just bad for thier cause.
 
Venezuelan Women Turn To Prostitution To Afford Food

All twelve women who work at the “Show Malilo Night Club” brothel in Arauca, Colombia are from Venezuela. As Venezuela’s socialist economic crisis continues, many Venezuelan women have turned to the sex trade in neighboring Colombia to eat and provide for their families.

“We’ve got lots of teachers, some doctors, many professional women and one petroleum engineer,” brothel owner Gabriel Sánchez said of the women who sell their bodies for $25 an hour. “All of them showed up with their degrees in hand.” Sanchez who is 60 years-old, started the brothel in Arauca, Colombia after he lost his job in a car repair shop in Venezuela thanks to the government’s socialist policies.

Sánchez and others in the sex industry say Venezuelans dominate the trade now because they’re willing to work for less pay. “I would say 99 percent of the prostitutes in this town are Venezuelan,” he said. Amid food shortages, hyperinflation, rampant poverty driven by socialism, and U.S. sanctions, waves of economic refugees have fled the country. Those with the means to do so have gone to places like Miami, Santiago, and Panama. But those who are less fortunate, have had to sink low to simply eat.

Where is our MSM, who rejoiced when Chavez ushered in the glorious socialist revolution? Where are the ******* sophist snakes who sell this poison only to slither back to their comfortable lives and complain that the most recent collectivist disaster is a result of people not properly implementing collectivism?
 
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In January 2017, according to estimates by the Finance and Economic Development Commission of the National Assembly (AN), it was predicted that inflation will close this year at 679.73 percent.

Wow.
 
Venezuela: Teenage Girls Turn to Prostitution to Fight Starvation

Once again, I'll draw attention to the paucity of MSM coverage of the reality of the glorious socialist revolution in Venezuela.

Collectivism doesn't create equality by bringing the poor up; instead, it brings everyone else down into poverty, apart from the ruling elite, their henchmen and those lucky enough to be close to this circle.

An annual survey on Venezuelan living conditions released in May found that nearly 75 percent of people lost an average of 19 pounds as a result of malnutrition in the past year. 82 percent of households live in poverty.

82% in poverty! In a country blessed with enormous energy resources. If Venezuela embraced capitalism, they could be one of the richest countries in the world. Instead, they have to hunt stray dogs and dumpster dive for food. Women have to sell their bodies for a meal. People waiting in line for hours for toilet paper. This is the reality of collectivism, once you strip away its oh-so-appealing promises.
 
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JimB said:
They just aren't socialist enough, and haven't been from the start. That's why we need to get rid of the half measures like Obama care and just go full on with the free healthcare, free food, 16 weeks vacation, and $25 min wage; and to be sure we should just relocate all Syrians to the US, their country is a war zone so just move them all here and they'll be happier. Unless we take these steps right away we're doomed I tell you, doomed because we aren't fully socialistic.
Yeah, purple.
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You left out one year of paid maternity leave for both parents.:)
 
Button Pusher said:
You left out one year of paid maternity leave for both parents.:)
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Sorry, of course, but for all parents rather than both. It would be wrong to impose or presume a traditional family structure.
 
'It feels like we're all dying slowly': Venezuela's doctors losing hope

Shortages of medicines are well-documented in Venezuela, with patients often having to buy prescriptions and basic medical supplies using contacts abroad and risk having them sent over, or purchasing at highly-inflated prices on the black market. But many are going without.

“Every day we see people dying for diseases that we know exactly how to cure but when you don’t even have gloves, masks, gauzes, medicines or some big but necessary equipment, it’s too hard.

“And at the same time it’s scary, because some families have ended up hitting us, frustrated and feeling that we don’t want to do anything to save their loved ones and that we are guilty for this dramatic situation,” he says.
 
drypowder said:
'It feels like we're all dying slowly': Venezuela's doctors losing hope

Shortages of medicines are well-documented in Venezuela, with patients often having to buy prescriptions and basic medical supplies using contacts abroad and risk having them sent over, or purchasing at highly-inflated prices on the black market. But many are going without.

“Every day we see people dying for diseases that we know exactly how to cure but when you don’t even have gloves, masks, gauzes, medicines or some big but necessary equipment, it’s too hard.

“And at the same time it’s scary, because some families have ended up hitting us, frustrated and feeling that we don’t want to do anything to save their loved ones and that we are guilty for this dramatic situation,” he says.
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So is no one trying to take down the government? Are they all just taking what is dealt them?
 
Mike Overlay said:
True. But unarmed and starving makes it extremely hard to fight the heavily armed and well feed
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True, but it’s better than lying down and accepting your fate. I was mainly asking because months ago there were reports of clashes in the streets where people were using Molotov and poop bombs. I haven’t really heard anything on that since.
 
ChickenHawk said:
So is no one trying to take down the government? Are they all just taking what is dealt them?
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You could ask the same of North Koreans.

Mike Overlay said:
True. But unarmed and starving makes it extremely hard to fight the heavily armed and well feed
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Indeed. I would guess that rallying people at this point is more difficult than it was, say, a year ago. A lot of the people who would've participated a year ago have either already left, or are too damn busy trying to find food and medicine.
 
drypowder said:
You could ask the same of North Koreans.

Indeed. I would guess that rallying people at this point is more difficult than it was, say, a year ago. A lot of the people who would've participated a year ago have either already left, or are too damn busy trying to find food and medicine.
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Oh I would ask that of them. It just makes one wonder if culturally people are more of a lie down and die type mindset, or fight the man kind of attitude. Americans have always seemed a bit more rebellious, but is that a culture thing or a people thing? It is obviously changing.
 
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ChickenHawk said:
Oh I would ask that if them. It just makes one wonder if culturally people are more of a lie down and die type mindset, or fight the man kind of attitude. Americans have always seemed a bit more rebellious, but is that a culture thing or a people thing? It is obviously changing.
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Culture and people are not separable. They are inextricably intertwined because culture is downstream of genes. In other words, different population groups will form different cultures. The politically correct equalists will deny, deny, deny, but we see evidence of this everywhere on the planet.

In the case of America, the initial culture was created not by average Anglo-Saxons, but by those who were adventurous enough to undertake a long and arduous sea voyage for a new and untamed land. So we would expect early American culture to be different from English culture of the same time period even though the people come from the same genetic pool because the early Americans were a self-selected group from within that gene pool. You had further self-selection around the time of the American Revolution, as many loyalists left the thirteen colonies for Canada. And so even within the context of the Anglo-Saxon gene pool, you can generate different cultures. So it's no surprise (for anyone not heavily indoctrinated in Marxist equalism) that different population groups will form very different cultures.

So to get back to your point, yes, Americans do seem to have a more rebellious culture, because it is literally ingrained in the DNA of the early Americans, and has been somewhat transmitted both down the genetic line and the cultural line (for those later arriving people who assimilated - and of course some of the people who came later were escaping hostile governments in their own countries, so again these are non-random populations from their original countries).

But once we started taking in immigrants in such large numbers that assimilation is no longer working (there are lots of factors that incentivize/disincentivize assimilation, and sheer numbers is one of those factors), this cultural transmission gets weaker. Also, when you have chain migration, visa lottery, freebies for immigrants, etc., you are getting different subsets of people, and opposition to government may not be a factor at all for many.
 
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drypowder said:
Culture and people are not separable. They are inextricably intertwined because culture is downstream of genes. In other words, different population groups will form different cultures. The politically correct equalists will deny, deny, deny, but we see evidence of this everywhere on the planet.

In the case of America, the initial culture was created not by average Anglo-Saxons, but by those who were adventurous enough to undertake a long and arduous sea voyage for a new and untamed land. So we would expect early American culture to be different from English culture of the same time period even though the people come from the same genetic pool because the early Americans were a self-selected group from within that gene pool. You had further self-selection around the time of the American Revolution, as many loyalists left the thirteen colonies for Canada. And so even within the context of the Anglo-Saxon gene pool, you can generate different cultures. So it's no surprise (for anyone not heavily indoctrinated in Marxist equalism) that different population groups will form very different cultures.

So to get back to your point, yes, Americans do seem to have a more rebellious culture, because it is literally ingrained in the DNA of the early Americans, and has been somewhat transmitted both down the genetic line and the cultural line (for those later arriving people who assimilated - and of course some of the people who came later were escaping hostile governments in their own countries, so again these are non-random populations from their original countries).

But once we started taking in immigrants in such large numbers that assimilation is no longer working (there are lots of factors that incentivize/disincentivize assimilation, and sheer numbers is one of those factors), this cultural transmission gets weaker. Also, when you have chain migration, visa lottery, freebies for immigrants, etc., you are getting different subsets of people, and opposition to government may not be a factor at all for many.
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I think we are saying the same thing in different ways. Between church and grocery shopping I think you had a bit more time to be more eloquent.

P.S. People need to assimilate to the culture of getting out of other people’s friggin way and beinf courteous.
 
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