Posted on 05/30/2016 5:14:40 AM PDT by HomerBohn
We are witnessing someting unprecedented in our life time: An entire country, Venezuela, is shutting down before our eyes.
Here’s the latest on the increasingly desperate situation in Venezuela, from The New York Times, May 28, 2016:
(1) Electric blackouts: Electricity is being rationed. To save electricity: ◾Courts and other government offices operate for only two half-days a week, the equivalence of one full day. ◾Public schools are closed on Fridays.
(2) Water shortage: Water is also being rationed. As an example, water arrives just once a week, on Thursdays, to the neighborhood of San Antonio de los Altos. But the water is a brownish color and is making people sick. Many Venezuelans say they have gotten skin irritations from showering or from the inability to bathe and wash their sheets and towels.
(3) Food shortages: ◾Last week, protests turned violent in parts of the country where demonstrators demanded empty supermarkets be resupplied. ◾Coca-Cola Femsa, the Mexican company that bottles Coke in Venezuela, said it’s halting production of sugary soft drinks because it ran out of sugar.
(4) Many people cannot make international calls from their phones because of a dispute between the government and phone companies over currency regulations and rates.
(5) There is little traffic in the capital, Caracas, because so few people, either for lack of money or work, are going out. Buildings downtown, including government buildings, are empty.
6) Public health crisis: People are dying in hospitals, from electric blackouts, broken medical machines (X-ray, dialysis, scanning, incubators), and chronic shortages of medicine (antibiotics, intravenous solutions), bandages, soap, gloves, beds, water (doctors preparing for surgery at the University of the Andes Hospital in Mérida clean their hands with bottles of seltzer water), and even food. Whatever supplies there are are stolen by hospital staff to sell on the black market. The government can no longer afford to buy imported medicine. Patients are asked to bring their own blankets, sheets, pillows and toilet paper. The result: the rate of death among babies under a month old increased more than a hundredfold in public hospitals run by the Health Ministry, from 0.02% in 2012 to to over 2% in 2015; the rate of death among new mothers in those hospitals increased by almost five times in the same period.(Source)
Venezuela’s socialist government blames the problems on an “economic war” being waged by elites who are hoarding supplies, as well as the U.S. government’s efforts to destabilize the country.
President Nicolás Maduro, who succeeded Hugo Chávez, rejected the political opposition’s call for accepting international aid and described the move as a bid to undermine him and privatize the hospital system. Instead, Maduro insisted that “I doubt that anywhere in the world, except in Cuba, there exists a better health system than this one.”
But most economists agree that Venezuela is suffering from years of economic mismanagement, including over-dependence on oil and price controls that led many businesses to stop making products. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet when oil prices were high, the government saved little money for hard times. Now, oil prices have collapsed — they are around a third what they were in 2014.
Meanwhile, Sean Penn, buddy of the late Hugo Chavez, is still no where to be seen in Venezuela. He’s in France, screening his new movie, The Last Face, at the Cannes Film Festival. The movie, directed by Penn, has been booed by audiences and savaged by critics.
Its not about the Socialism and its economic results its about the POWER it gives the elite rulers over the plebeian masses. Its always been about POWER!
Like all Soviet style socialist countries, Venezuela’s problems have nothing to do with the government or socialism. It is DROUGHT! This time a drought brought on by, hell I don’t know. let me think about it a minute.
Globull Warming! That’s it. Globull Warming.
See, simply by channeling Walter Duranty, I was able to find in just a couple of sentences the source of Venezuela’s awful problems.
Now all that has to be done is for the UN and especially the US to send aid. Especially money aid for their leaders.
We should take the relief pitchers and the shortstops. The rest of them can stay home.
Once Venezuela goes full Somalia the only question remaining is whether ISIS or Al Qaeda will run the mess.
Simple math would easily prove how unrealistic Bernie’s free stuff would be. Maybe that’s why the schools keep creating crazy math techniques.
What’s a Venice whale?
Shutting down electric power service by de-energizing their grid is a stupid way to save money.
Yet another socialist paradise ruined by capitalist running dogs.
I’ve been unable to find it, but I saw an excerpt from an interview Bernie did on a Spanish channel (Univision?) where the interviewer asked Bernie about the economy in Venezuela, and Bernie flat out refused to answer the question, since he’s running for the president of the USA. It was very telling.
Even more telling is the fact that I’ve been unable to find anything about it.
Mark
My reply is this: if the Germans couldn't make socialism work (see the former German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany) it won't work anywhere.
Homer, they just think the fools in Venezuela did it wrong. This will not deter them, or their voters. They are too stupid to see reality because it doesn’t match up with their fantasies. It won’t even give them cause for pause.
I have many close Venezuelan friends. Most have fled the country with whatever they could get out under the radar. Some are still there, afraid to leave their families. One thing is common: they all acknowledge that the only way for this situation to change is with a lot of bloodshed.
Cuba. That's been the plan, IMO.
so they have run out of cats and dogs
Yup. Next stop.... the USA. More “refugees.”
Might suggest "Bumbling Bernie" as his nickname.
The Swedes have a more homogeneous society than we do and all are expected to honor their social contract. Absent the Somalis, they did pretty well.
Electric blackouts - People were able to keep the courts open long before electricity so this is a cop out and more criminals are out on the streets. Schools were teaching kids 5 days a week in the days before electricity. Again, another cop out keeping the upcoming voting generation stupid.
Water shortage - Who’s bottling all the seltzer water the hospitals are using?
Food shortages - A starving nation but Coke is producing diet Coke. Again, they seem to have access to water same as the seltzer water company. It pays to live in the country with your own water well.
People cannot make international calls - that should be the least of their worries.
Few people, either for lack of money or work, are [not] going out - That’s the ticket. Sit home on your backside and do nothing. Wait for the government to save you. No, you morons, you get up and go out to do what you can for your family and your community and you encourage others to help rebuild.
Public health crisis - Any staff who steals and sales on the blackmarket gets a firing squad at dawn. If you can’t afford another child or don’t want to die in the maternity ward, keep your knees together.
Send the military in to rid your country of its moronic leaders. But you won’t because you’re getting what you voted for and are too ignorant to know any better.
A sterling example of what happens when so-called Communism takes over is the nation of Venezuela AND the Castro brothers Cuba.
Smaller examples exist here in the United States. Every large city is becoming a landfill with Democrat mayors and city government having been in charge for eons.
You’re right.
I believe that at some stage in their lives people like Obama, Hillary, Bernie and millions of others have sold their souls to Satan.
They are Satan’s disciples.
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