End of maduro - hopefully. - Page 64 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15107354
Your boring life story has nothing to do with Venezuela. But now that you keep talking about your family, it's a shame they didn't starve to death by sanctions the likes of which people like you support, because then that'd mean you wouldn't exist and life would be slightly less boring. :D
#15107356
skinster wrote:Your boring life story has nothing to do with Venezuela. But now that you keep talking about your family, it's a shame they didn't starve to death by sanctions the likes of which people like you support, because then that'd mean you wouldn't exist and life would be slightly less boring. :D


We did starve at the end of the Soviet Union and after gaining independance. It was actually the aid from America that saved a lot of people. In the end we just got through it and fixed the economic problems not to starve again.
#15107363
skinster wrote:OK dude who starved and then not-starved, cool story. :D



Your trying to spin everything as if it is the fault of imperialism. Soviet Union tried the same by the way. The narrative is not exactly new. We didn't starve because of imperealism, we starved because the SU system couldn't produce enough food and distribute it. There is obviously enough fertile land in both ex-USSR and in Venezuela for that. The problem is the system itself. At some point you have to admit this. Also this begs a question, why support a system that can't feed its own people?
#15107592
JohnRawls wrote:At some point you have to admit this. Also this begs a question, why support a system that can't feed its own people?


My questions would be:
1. Why support a System that cannot defend itself from Imperialism?
2. Why support a System that is inferior to Western Imperialism?
3. Why support a race who refuse to maintain a good, open and fair system?
#15107612
Patrickov wrote:My questions would be:
1. Why support a System that cannot defend itself from Imperialism?
2. Why support a System that is inferior to Western Imperialism?
3. Why support a race who refuse to maintain a good, open and fair system?


I think that defending yourself from imperealism can be difficult because of sheer sizes of countries. It doesn't necessarily mean that the system itself is bad. It might be that you are just a small country so that is not a valid question.

Regarding 2: It depends on what you think as inferior. If you look at HK as an example, sure, British imperealism did a lot of good on top of some bad overall. But it doesn't mean that Western Imperealism can't be as bad or even worse than Venezuela today. There are pretty horrible examples from the 19th century about this. So it heavily depends on how this Western Imperealism manifests itself. If it manifests itself as a HK model of sorts then you are right but if it manifests as Belgian Congo than fuck it. Not that i consider Guiado a Western imperialist though. He can be described like that in a very loose sense because he is asking help from outside of the country to combat Maduro.

Regarding 3: On paper Venezuelan system is that. But just on paper. For example Russia also has a constitution, seperation of power, free speech, rule of law etc. But once again, just on paper. The implementation itself is as important as what you write on the paper. If Venezuela actually did live up to its values that are on paper there then I wouldn't see any problems with it. The problem is that it doesn't.
#15107701
JohnRawls wrote:It depends on what you think as inferior. If you look at HK as an example, sure, British imperealism did a lot of good on top of some bad overall. But it doesn't mean that Western Imperealism can't be as bad or even worse than Venezuela today. There are pretty horrible examples from the 19th century about this. So it heavily depends on how this Western Imperealism manifests itself. If it manifests itself as a HK model of sorts then you are right but if it manifests as Belgian Congo than fuck it.

Not that i consider Guiado a Western imperialist though. He can be described like that in a very loose sense because he is asking help from outside of the country to combat Maduro.


Congo Free State was an exception and was itself under immense pressure that Belgian government had to take it from their ignorant and negligent king. If what's reported in Wikipedia was true, Belgian Congo also had significant achievement during their last years.

As for Venezuela, IMHO anyone achieving a certain level in politics will have to compromise a lot, so I won't say Guiado is a purely positive figure. Conversely, it is absurd for us to expect politicians, and leaders in particular, to be dirt free. To me, it's how much of the end can be achieved that the means can be justified.

The biggest mistake of the West in both Syria and Venezuela was that they allowed the situation to drag on too long -- people lose confidence easily when they suffer failures. Conversely the anti-tyranny forces had greater success in North Africa (even Libya, yes)


JohnRawls wrote:On paper Venezuelan system is that. But just on paper. For example Russia also has a constitution, seperation of power, free speech, rule of law etc. But once again, just on paper. The implementation itself is as important as what you write on the paper. If Venezuela actually did live up to its values that are on paper there then I wouldn't see any problems with it. The problem is that it doesn't.


The implementation is exactly what I mean by "maintain". For various reasons, some ethnic groups seem stronger than the others in the implementation.
#15108629
To JohnRawls, a former member of the privileged class in the USSR, skinster wrote:This thread is about Venezuela, not your boring family.

Well, it IS sort of about all the boring families who only think about themselves, living in some kind of social bubble of nepotism and lack-of-empathy for anyone outside the four walls of the family compound.

This kind of exclusionary family mafia is modeled on the elite and their mafia structure, and became "the model" of society after WW2 because... it sold a lot of cars and suburban land. But is was and still is, a social disaster. Being confined with your plastic family who judge everyone else as "losers" is very similar to racism.

These kinds of isolated family cells, provide us with third world elite vassals, AND with North American working classes who identify with Dynasty and the monarchs of olde. Both of these "boring family" classes will work diligently to destroy any kind of community endeavor where their own boring family doesn't come out ahead of "the losers and bums" they see outside their shuttered windows.
#15110275
I found this paper to be quite interesting:

Absher, Grier & Grier (2020) wrote:Abstract

We study the economic effects of durable left-populist leaders in Latin America. Using synthetic control to create a credible counterfactual for four such regimes, we find that they have, on average, a negative, significant, and sizeable average effect on income. Specifically, these countries at the end of their treatment periods end up over 20% poorer on average than what the average of their synthetic counterfactuals predict. We find negative and significant single country effects on real per-capita GDP in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. Only in Ecuador does GDP keep up with its synthetic counterfactual. We investigate whether there is a trade-off, where national income was sacrificed to improve inequality or health. We find no significant average counter-veiling trade-off in decreased levels of income inequality or infant mortality relative to what the average synthetic predicts.


In a typical nerd fashion, I'm going to try to see if the result holds using a different dataset :)
#15112567
How the U.S. failed at its foreign policy toward Venezuela
On August 4, 2020, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Venezuela. Appearing before the committee was U.S. State Department Special Representative Elliott Abrams. Abrams, who has had a long—and controversial—career in the formation of U.S. foreign policy, was assaulted by almost all the members of the Senate committee. The senators, almost without exception, suggested that Abrams had been—since 2019—responsible for a failed U.S. attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro.

From Republican Senator Mitt Romney to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, Abrams received a severe tongue-lashing. There was no disagreement in the committee about the goals of U.S. policy, namely to overthrow—with force if necessary—the government of President Maduro. Murphy laid out the timeline of Trump’s policy, which began with the recognition of minor Venezuelan politician Juan Guaidó as president of Venezuela in January 2019 to the current moment, including how the United States—in Murphy’s words—“tried to sort of construct a kind of coup in April of last year.”

Abrams was unfazed. “Obviously we hope that [Maduro] will not survive the year and we are working hard to make that happen,” he said. The policy—including “a kind of coup”—remains intact. Abrams has now added another file to his post: he will be Trump’s special representative on Iran; the man who failed to conduct regime change in Venezuela is now going to deepen U.S. attempts to overthrow the government in Iran.

Venezuelan Reaction
A clip from Murphy’s comments—including the “kind of coup” sentence—circulated widely on social media inside Venezuela. Senior members of the Venezuelan government—including Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza—shared it. It was also shared by former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, who acidly noted that Senator Murphy “is surely a good person, but he doesn’t even understand what he is acknowledging.” What he is saying is that the U.S. government has tried to do a coup in Venezuela. This is what created outrage in the country.

We asked Foreign Minister Arreaza to comment about Murphy’s use of the term “coup” in his statement about U.S. policy vis-à-vis Venezuela. Arreaza told us the following: “U.S. spokespersons continue to openly admit to their crimes and illegal aggressions against the Venezuelan people.” It is not only Murphy—a liberal Democrat—who used the language of a “coup.” Trump’s former national security adviser—John Bolton—recounts in his book how Trump had said that, per John Kelly, “it would be ‘cool’ to invade Venezuela”; Trump also said that Venezuela is “really part of the United States.” Speaking of Murphy’s comment and Bolton’s book, Arreaza said, “these confessions are priceless evidence for the complaint we raised at the International Criminal Court.”

Even members of the Venezuelan opposition, such as Enrique Ochoa Antich, said that the open way in which Abrams and the U.S. senators spoke of armed action against Venezuela “is painful and unacceptable.” The entire Trump-Bolton-Abrams policy, he said, has failed to dent the government of Maduro.

Illegal
Ecuador’s Correa correctly said that Murphy did not know what he had acknowledged. It is rare for a U.S. politician to care when they say things that violate international law. Murphy’s casual statement about a “coup” is in clear violation of the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS), of which the United States is a member. Two articles from Chapter IV of the OAS charter explicitly outlaw a coup:

No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements. (Article 19)

No State may use or encourage the use of coercive measures of an economic or political character in order to force the sovereign will of another State and obtain from it advantages of any kind. (Article 20)


There is no need to interpret these articles, because they are written very plainly. They say that not only is “armed force” forbidden as a “form of interference,” but so is the “use of coercive measures of an economic or political character” to violate the sovereignty of a country. The tenor of the Senate hearing was in total violation of the spirit and letter of the OAS charter and the Charter of the United Nations. But this has been the behavior of the U.S. government since at least 1954, when the Central Intelligence Agency overthrew the government of Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala.

Failure
The U.S. senators certainly attacked Abrams for his failure. But what was the failure that bothered them? Not the failure to abide by the laws and conventions signed by the United States; that was not the problem.

Universally, the senators attacked Abrams for not being able to succeed with his coup plans. They gave him advice about how to better overthrow the government of Maduro. Thus far, the U.S. government has denied Venezuela access to IMF funds, charged the leadership in Venezuela of drug-trafficking (with a hallucinatory indictment), and sent a carrier group to tighten the embargo on the country; none of these policies have succeeded, despite the full weight of the U.S. government behind them. Rather than concede that the government of Maduro has popular support, the United States wants to pursue its policy with even more draconian methods.

The United States is currently conducting a hybrid war, which includes an economic war (sanctions and sabotage) and an information war (coloring the government as authoritarian). Some senators wanted the Trump administration to go beyond this highly destructive form of warfare. They wanted the U.S. government to run a full blockade of Venezuelan ports.

The Trump administration is unwilling to go that far. Such a policy, Abrams said, would be an “act of war.” Trump wants a war, but not an open war; the U.S. military knows that it might be able to flatten Caracas, but it would not be able to win a war against the Venezuelan people.
https://mronline.org/2020/08/09/how-the ... venezuela/
#15112574
Can you say "MEA CULPA?"

Chris Murphy spills the beans, explaining just how much the USA is responsible for the misery in Venezuela, one of its "backyard" countries.

#15116030
I start to think if the United States, United Kingdom, and all those Western countries should offer some kind of population exchange.

That is, deport the likes of Member skinster and Member QatzelOk to the so-called countries they support, while accepting the long-suffering victims of totalitarian regimes like the poor Venezuelans, Belorussians, etc.
#15116041
skinster wrote:https://twitter.com/Venezuelanalys2/status/1298717912283246601



Why does an exporter of oil needs fuel? Is it perhaps because the country uses state socialism type of economy which has destroyed the oil and fuel industries. Actually it pretty much destroyed almost all industries including agriculture.

As for US holding Iranian tankers. They are not Iranian tankers so US is not violating any laws here. Also no lethal force was used, US talked with the company and threatened sanctions for the individuals and the company. So the vessels themselves went to the US.

In the words of Iranian Embassador:

"Yet another lie and psychological warfare by the US propaganda machine. The tankers are neither Iranians, nor their owners or flags have anything to do with Iran. The terrorist Trump just wants to cover up the humiliation of his failure against the great nation of Iran by scattering false propaganda," the ambassador wrote." Here is the link: https://www.iranwatch.org/library/gover ... ankers-lie

So the official position of Iran is that those tankers do not belong to them. Since Maduro is not recognized by the US then US can do this but will have to give away everything to Guiado later on.
#15116047
JohnRawls wrote:Why does an exporter of oil needs fuel?

For the same reason that some food-producing countries have historically seen many of their citizens starve to death: mafia involvement in media and politics. Sanctionning foreigners to death.

Choking someone to death (George Floyd style) and then asking why a grown man with lungs doesn't simply breathe?

Really, is this the best that you got?
#15116056
QatzelOk wrote:For the same reason that some food-producing countries have historically seen many of their citizens starve to death: mafia involvement in media and politics. Sanctionning foreigners to death.

Choking someone to death (George Floyd style) and then asking why a grown man with lungs doesn't simply breathe?

Really, is this the best that you got?


Then you understand what socialist economic policies degrade to. I understand that it was your jab at liberal or capitalist economies which RARELY have this issue. On the other hand, almost all planned economies of the socialist model run in to this problem. Nobody would be putting sanctions on Maduro if he was at least semi-democratic. He doesn't even try.
#15116064
Venezuela BAD!!! but let me tell you about America, the GREAT very successful country in a recession where there are no uprisings against police brutality and the state perpetuates itself by destroying countries and lives on every continent, oh it is so good that country that is attempting to destroy the other one in this thread, so very great and I'm a complete fucking idiot, yes me, JR. :D
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