Posted on 04/03/2007 1:17:34 PM PDT by Graybeard58
Give morons or fanatics enough rope and eventually they'll hang themselves. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez apparently wants to be the next dope on a rope. He announced last week plans to push his nation further toward communism by creating "collective property," to seize control of large ranches and redistribute "idle" land owned by someone he doesn't like. He would define collective property as state-owned assets managed by workers who share profits. In a word: collectivization. His proposal indicates that on his frequent junkets to Cuba, he has kept his eyes and mind firmly closed. Cuba has plenty of arable land and, except for the occasional hurricane, an ideal climate for agriculture.
And the result of Cuban collectivization of agriculture led to another report showing that in 2006, for the fourth straight year, Cuba's main food supplier was the United States. Under a loophole inserted into the U.S. trade embargo, American farmers and food processors annually sell Castro's communist paradise more than $300 million worth food, including chicken, wheat, corn, rice and soybeans, plus mayonnaise, hot sauce and candy bars. Even Cuba's national brand-name cola is bottled in America.
Chavez also apparently never talked to his friends in China about the benefits of private ownership. Eager to expand their economy, the Chinese adopted a law to protect the rights of private businesses, home buyers and farmers.
And, finally, there was last week's report from a group of analysts on the health of Venezuela's oil industry, the cash cow Chavez has been milking to finance his "reforms" and export terrorism and communism. The economic institute CIECA, based in Caracas, estimated Venezuela's state-owned and -operated oil company lost $3.7 billion in 2006, a year in which most major U.S. oil companies earned so much money that they were threatened with excess-profit taxes.
Analysts said the long-term capacity of Venezuela to keep pumping crude "is under threat because it is spending more on Chavez' ideological agenda than on badly needed investments." In short, his regional ambitions are likely to do severe and permanent damage to his country's economy. He has crippled the oil industry and is about to apply to agriculture the same disastrous communist practices that invariably have led to starvation ever since Josef Stalin first tried them in Ukraine in the 1930s.
What ideologues like Chavez fail to realize is the key to successful farming really is a capitalist plot.
Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
If you want on or off this ping list, let me know.
Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
If you want on or off this ping list, let me know.
Okay, I'dllike to know how they could possibly lose $3.7 billion last year. Something does not add up.
Chavez sending money to himself?
Actually, they put in a Constitutional provision to protect FOREIGN INVESTMENTS. So long as they surrendered half interest to their Chinese partners.
... home buyers and farmers.
Actually, it doesn't protect their real estate from confiscation in reality. Hence the vast amount of rural unrest stemming from the unabated practice of house and farm confiscations...with little or no compensation... which they are successfully stomping out. So much for their "eagernesss."
Conclusion: They are only "eager" to pull the wool over gullible Western eyes.
He was taking notes during those farm visits, but it wasn’t Cuba or China playing host, it was Zimbabwe.
Collective Property.. Sounds more like Chavez wants to move to the terror famine stage of Stalinization. The Stalinist method of destroying all the institutions in a country to turn it into a totalitarian regime is to make everyone starve to death by purposefully disrupting agricultural production and let the communist party decide who eats and who doesn’t.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Holocaust
Giving all that oil away to impoverished Americans in states that elect idiots to Congress.
Damn, let me start knitting.
Simple PDVSA (packed with and run by hand-picked Chavez cronies) handed over most of its income to the gov’t to pay for social programs
Quote” The CIECA analysis shows PDVSA handed over about 70 percent of its gross revenue to the state, including $28.7 billion in taxes, royalties and dividends, and $9.9 billion for other social spending”
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/AFX-0013-15534096.htm
So it is profitable, but the state is taking all the profits and then some. Now I can do the math.
Sneak preview of the Hillary era.
The very fact that CNN knows this is contradictory to what they report. They hide this on CNN Money and yet report on their cable news how Chavez is such an insightful guy for selling oil products to the poor in USA for a discounted price. Someday maybe news editors will be taken to jail for treasonous actions.
Latin America pinglist.
It doesn’t matter whether they give away product or confiscate earnings, the result is the same. The oil industry truly lost money that included greedy capitalist profits and essential modernization / maintenance funds. Without both profits and investment, your industry deteriorates producing ever less social welfare funds. In short, the communist / socialist ideals always lead to deterioration of its economy, in large measure because they kill the incentives to work and invest. Socialism can skate by only in small, highly motivated tribal situations but NEVER in a national economy.
They were our technological rivals in narrow sectors relating to space and to weaponry, but they never got close to us when it came to cars and other vehicles, TV, food production, communications, any kind of consumer item; they had a huge debate about how evolution supposedly works (look up Lysenko) that set back their agricultural sectors several decades. Collectivization doomed their system of medical care. As was the case with their politics, they rarely allowed reality to intervene in what the Soviet masters wanted to do.
Watching CNN for financial information is like watching Fox for left-wing bias.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.