Posted on 08/10/2016 10:03:22 AM PDT by OddLane
In Venezuela the food lines are only the most visible evidence of a nation in free fall. Known as las colas, the lines form before dawn and last until nightfall, several bodies thick and zigzagging for miles in leafy middle-class neighborhoods and ragged slums alike. In a country that sits atop the world’s largest known petroleum reserves, hungry citizens wait on their assigned day for whatever the stores might stock: with luck, corn flour to make arepas, and on a really good day, shampoo.
“I never dreamed it would come to this,” says Yajaira Gutierrez, a 41-year-old accountant, waiting her turn in downtown Caracas. “That in Venezuela, with all our petroleum, we would be struggling to get corn cakes.”
In the capital’s Dr. José María Vargas hospital, a doctor watched a 73-year-old woman die of kidney failure because the hospital lacked the medicine to perform a routine dialysis...
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
- Robert Heinlein
Final proof of the evil of capitalism - Capitalism works and the fantasy of socialism always fails.
I’ve run into a few Venezuelans who ran away from Comrad Hugo the Horrible.
Engineers & Doctors now serving food at restaurants here in America.
Socialism is a cancer.
It kills everything it touches.
Socialism truly is death by a thousand cuts...
It is like there had been a natural disaster
And for a starving populace, there still looks to be enough obesity to go around.
After reading the article, have to say it us surprising that TIME isn’t making excuses for the Chavista government,
Sort of like Zimbabwe
What changed? The oil didn't run out. It's still profitable to produce, despite the current glut.
There is demand for consumer goods and resources (oil) to trade for them. Why doesn't supply come in to meet the demand?
I suspect this is a pogram perpetrated against the Venezuelan people - they're being purposely starved and driven out by their own gov't. It's a common thing in totalitarian states - Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, they all did it. And while it went on, while the common people were dying, the ruling classes got along just fine.
This latest communist purge will end eventually, and the politburo will have fewer enemies and fewer "useless mouths to feed".
A lesson to the masses: when you have no rights, no power, and no weapons, this will happen to you sooner or later.
Let me guess, few people in Venezuela will be blaming SOCIALISM for the problems, and in the USA, noone in the MSM will be blaming socialism at all. There will be excuses all round, just excuses, excuses, excuses.
Great post, ZOOKER. Thanks. BTTT!
The vote is not protection. Venezuela has open and free elections, and viable opposition parties.
The left hijacked the nice word social. There's nothing social about it. It should be called envyism because the economic destruction is driven by envy. The word capitalism is a leftist derogatory term for the free market. It has never required a large amount capital to succeed in a free market.
Too much dinero for social programs and graft, not enough to upgrade oil production:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2014/11/02/venezuela/18243787/
The degree to which "redistribution" turns out to be naked plunder isn't usually quite this visible quite this soon. The difficulty isn't that the poor don't have medicine and electricity, the difficulty is that the thieves have stolen the country's ability to make it for them. The stores are empty because the storerooms are empty because the factories are idle because the wherewithal to run them ended up in some party member's pockets. The smart ones are already operating an exit strategy.
Chavezofonos.
He wrote a great book about the Mexican drug cartels, El Narco, which I reviewed a few years ago.
And .. did Bernie use “political donations” to buy his house ..??
Bernie has never held a job .. so has he been putting that kind of money into a personal account somewhere ..??
Curious ..??
Another great example that socialsm works.
At destroying every country it touches.
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