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.
Yepper - the only reason Bernie hasn’t gone down the tubes yet is because Hillary has serious problems and Trump hasn’t deigned to set his sights on him——yet.
Maduro is doing a fine job all by himself destabilizing the country without the help of the CIA...
No, we WANT to encourage this speech! It's clear that Obama - the Savior of the Democrats, the Ideal of the Left - is destabilizing the socialist haven Venezuela. And it MUST have been done with Hillary!s full approval and awareness. Burnin' Bernie's as well since he's refused to condemn Obama for the destruction he's causing in Socialist Haven Venezuela!
We want the beauty queens, too. After all, who's gonna make you us a sammich and bring us a beer whilst watching the aforementioned pitchers and shortstops?
LATAM airline announces it is suspending flights to crisis-hit Venezuela - AFP
We should be bombing Venezuela...
...with food and water.
It should be brightly marked: Courtesy of the USA.
So, according to your graph, only 90 percent of Clinton supporters would support Clinton.
A civil war would be good for Venezuela. I'm surprised that it haven't happened already.
Eh. Not that immediate. Possibly slow decay like Ancient Rome. But it took hundreds of years for the Empire to collapse once the rot started to take place. I suspect the same for the Americans.
Obama, Hillary, Bernie are definitely Stan’s disciples, as for the others, some are and some are just useful idiots.
Stan’s, of course, should be Satan’s
One thing that I notice most people don’t consider is that people like clinton, sanders, and their associated ilk actually WANT this type of scenario to play out in the US.
This is a time worn recurring theme in world history. A few ruthless people ruling over the slaves and peasants , by making and keeping them poor, illiterate, and defenseless.
Notice this theme rearing its ugly head in the US? It makes sense when you stand back and look.
The eventual solution, or maybe not even a solution, just a change in the Who that rules, will involve bloodshed.
What about the Venezuelan beauty pageant contestants? Will they cope? Wonder how Sofia Vergera feels about her country? If it is so great why isn’t Sean Penn heading down there to help...he could take her to cheer up the masses.
The beauty queens are now street walkers.
Sean Penn? Lying in a gutter somewhere.
It will make an interesting study.
The electric blackouts manifest volumes regarding government corruption.
Venezuela not only sits atop much of the largest oil reserves available in the hemisphere, they also run hydroelectric dams for a significant percentage of their power.
Over the past decade, Venezuela has been well known for selling power at $.02/kWh or about 1/5 to 1/10 the cost of electricity in the US.
Of all the utilities which might keep the government intact, electric power is one of the few which would most likely be kept online, without interruption.
The least expensive method to reduce power costs would be by load shedding or de-energizing some circuits fed by the distribution systems. Substantially higher risks occur on the electrical protection systems when re-energizing these circuits. In some situations, HVAC systems consume far greater power when trying to catch up to lost cooling/heating after power is restored.
Policy-wise, electrical blackouts are far more expensive and damaging to electrical distribution systems then leaving them stable and energized.
FWIW, it would be interesting to observe how much of this is contrived by parties who might benefit from the demise of Venezuela.
Brilliant.
L
It is turning around, they are transitioning from a civilized country into a warlord society. From order comes chaos.
"Y'know, Nietzsche says, 'Out of chaos comes order.'"
Yeah, just like Kristol and Rove...he got a lot of things wrong.
This will all be over once Trump gets control of the CIA
Maduro won’t last 30 days.
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