There is no
question that Venezuela is in very serious difficulties and has been
for the last couple of years. The problem is that it's almost
impossible to get a balanced, nuanced report on this, in any major
Anglophone media outlet, almost all of which, are ferociously hostile
to Venezuela's Left-Wing government.
The few
reason critics, are distributed in comparatively small publications.
Gabriel Hetland, for example, in a balanced piece for the Nation,
entitled 'How severe is Venezuela's crisis?', reports that,
while 'Venezuela is in the midst of a severe crisis ... mainstream
media have consistently misrepresented and significantly exaggerated
the severity of the crisis.'
Without
question, the biggest problem facing the Venezuelan government, is
the precipitous drop in global oil prices, due to OPEC decision to
dramatically increase production. A decision that was clearly not
driven by economic motives.
As Max Ajl
writes for 'In these times', 'plummeting oil revenues mean that
Venezuela received 70 million dollars in oil export revenues in
February 2016, as against 3 billion dollars in January 2014.' The
second major factor in the country's problems, is the exchange rate.
Since 2003, the government has used currency controls block capital
flight. As Bloomberg reports, it is imposed a variable exchange rate
system. This means that dollars are less expensive relative to the
bolivar, when purchasing priority goods, including food, medicine and
car parts, but far more costly when buying other goods, or when
purchasing dollars on the black market.
This has
created opportunities for corruption. You can buy dollars cheaply by
pretending to import billions of dollars worth of medicines and sell
them dearly on the non preferential exchange rate. Thus, private
sector arbitrage has contributed to medicine shortages, but it has
also allowed criminal operators in the black market to drive up the
cost of dollars and thus, helped drive up inflation. This, as Mark
Weisbrot writes for The Huffington Post, has 'fueled an
inflation-depreciation spiral since the fall of 2012'.
The problem
is not state Socialism then, but a policy intended to stop financial
panics that is simply enabled spivs to turn a quick buck. Maduro,
recognizing this, has, as the Financial Times reports, begun the
process of devaluing the currency and lifting some price controls.
Importantly, the government has also sought to protect people from
the effects of this, by raising the minimum wage and improving food
subsidies.
Other
factors that contributing to the crisis are contigent. At the worst
drought in 47 years, drying up the dams and causing an energy crisis
for example. And one of the claims of starvation, as the NGO Food
First explains in an in-depth report on Venezuela's crisis: '...
there's not an overall food shortage - food is in abundance, with
distribution serving a bottleneck.' What is missing is not food,
but certain, particular, essential goods, which have been kept off
the shelves. The handful of companies which make these goods have a
great deal of power and they say that the government's price controls
disincentivise them from distributing the needed goods. But many of
those goods are not even price-regulated, and all those that are,
price increases have not stimulated more availability. Polar, one of
the major firms producing these essential items, is owned by a member
of the Right-Wing opposition.
The problems
now unfolding, nonetheless take place against a significant backdrop
of progress. In 2015, the FAO noted that the government had met its
millennium development goal of halving hunger and driving down
undernourishment, by 'increasing its national interventions and
its level of international cooperation'. That is, unlike the old
regime, it used petroleum resources address popular needs.
The Obama
administration, picking up where Bush failed, decided that this was a
moment to push for regime change in Venezuela. As Mark Weisbrot wrote
for The Guardian, '... there's $5 m in the 2014 US federal budget
for funding opposition activities inside Venezuela, and this is
almost certainly the tip of the iceberg - adding to the hundreds of
millions of dollars of overt support over the past 15 years.'
In 2015, the
Obama administration issued an executive order, declaring Venezuela a
threat to US national security and imposing new sanctions. The basis
of US government rationales for intervention, is a rising violence in
last couple of years, particularly due to deaths occurring during
violent Right-Wing opposition protests in 2014. As George
Ciccariello-Maher wrote for Jacobin 'The pretext for these
sanctions is so-called human rights abuses that occurred more than a
year ago, during a wave of street protests against the government of
Nicolas Maduro ... the protests were hardly spontaneous ... The means
were far from peaceful ... while many of the police responsible for
violence were arrested, the same can't be said for the protesters
who, for example, decapitated motorcyclists with barbed wire and
sniped at police from rooftops.'
The nature
of the violence in Venezuela has been widely misreported according to
Roberto Lovato writing for Al Jazeera America, who points out the
long history of violent efforts by the Right-Wing opposition to
resist the social changes enacted by Chavez, culminating in a
violence of recent protests. This scene of opposition violence and
sabotage is barely alluded to in mainstream reporting.
The absence
of context, the white washing of the opposition, the unhinged
apocalyptic language used about Venezuela, and the open call for US
intervention, after it has been effectively intervening for years,
tend to undermine any criticisms coming from the major international
media.
Full
analysis:
Nah, they are hard left socialists. Though, from a distance, it is hard to differentiate the two. Just remember, a fuckin' retard will occasionally by pure accident do something non-destructive. That's how you tell the difference.
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