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http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/6066721/ Venezuela still has yet to pay what it owes to a number of foreign airlines, unsurprisingly. I thought this comment was interesting, though: quote:During [American Airlines] last Q1 earnings' call, it was mentioned that they have $750 million in cash trapped in Venezuela and that revenues from Venezuelan ops are 90% in Bolivares. This basically means that 10% of the revenue comes from customers paying in USD. That 10% is the only hard currency that's partly funding the ops into CCS [Caracas Airport] and MAR [Maracaibo Airport]. Some predictably stupid responses later on, unfortunately.
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May 1, 2014 00:34
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The opposition can't do what Maduro can't do unless they are willing to gently caress the poor. They need to start nationalized farming or some poo poo so that produce doesn't just get exported into the back market. They also need to raise those gas prices because it's just throwing money away. Raising it a penny a week for a year would buffer a lot of outrage and people would get used to the higher prices gradually. They really need to invest in tractors or tractor production and other farming stuff. It isn't enough to redistribute land when the people given land don't have the tools or knowledge to farm.
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May 1, 2014 07:25
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Heavy industry plus food imports is probably a better path than 
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May 1, 2014 07:57
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I woulda thought that land redistribution would be a good thing but everyone wants to live in the big cities instead of developing the land. Maybe they could start a prison farm program or something. Or perhaps spend money on co-op farming. Hell they could give illegal immigrants from Colombuia work visas or something and hire them to farm nationalized or privatized mega farms. Because, obviously, there doesn't seem to be a lot of natives who want to become farmers.
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May 1, 2014 09:08
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BabyChoom posted:The opposition can't do what Maduro can't do unless they are willing to gently caress the poor. The opposition's current policy proposal is for a substantial minimum wage increase to outpace inflation, but I guess we won't be hearing anything about this from people who insist that this is some battle between Heroic Socialist Leader and the Laissez-Faire Gang because that's their preconceived notion of how the world works. quote:They need to start nationalized farming or some poo poo so that produce doesn't just get exported into the back market. oh my god
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May 1, 2014 11:08
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One Tuesday, CNN en Español reporter Ismael Cala interviewed Luisa Ortega Diaz, the Venezuelan Attorney General. The interview can be found here. The interview was fairly cordial up until the very end, when Luisa Ortega suggested - perhaps with no ill intention - that the Cala "was not following events in Venezuela closely" because he had asked her a question she argued had already been answered through a press conference earlier. Ismael snapped on her, told her that saying those things were an attempt to discredit journalists, and asked her to not do it again. Here is the transcript: quote:Ismael Cala: With all due respect, I have to make use of the voice of social media, which has changed and pluralized communications and even the way in which we conduct journalism through traditional channels. There are some comments that say, for example – Judith Romero says, “The Venezuelan Attorney General lives in a another country. My god…” There are many comments like this. And really, I’m surprised, because all of the suspected and alleged violations or accusations of [violations] of human rights, and you’ve told me that none of what I’ve told you is true. When it’s been reported, and CNN has reported, that there are dozens of accusations of torture, women who had – apparently – electricity applied to their breasts, others were threatened with rape, a young man was stripped naked in the middle of the street, the incident of the young man and the rifle. And you’re telling me that none of this is true? Or, I want to understand, if there is the possibility that some of this might be true once it is investigated? For those not familiar with the case, Nairobi Pinto is a Globovision journalist who was kidnapped earlier this month from the steps outside her house. She was held somewhere for a week, and then released in the middle of the night with no conditions. No one ever contacted her family asking for a ransom. Nairobi gave a press conference where she essentially said "I can't say anything. They didn't mistreat me and I didn't see their faces. Thank you for your time". At the time of her kidnapping, some people questioned whether or not it had something to do with the fact that she was a journalist. The lack of details regarding the case still causes lingering questions. I found the attorney general's comments regarding human rights violations to be really shallow. Her argument that "We don't violate human rights because that's illegal" is laughable. It's great that there are investigations taking place into the alleged violations, but her attitude towards human rights violations allegations seems willfully blind. On the issue of political prisoners, her answer was equally sneaky: "There are no political prisoners here because no one here in jail is a political prisoner". But when pressed for what evidence they had on Leopoldo Lopez, she went off on how the building was burned, how 800+ people almost died, how the library burned to the ground, etc. "We have witnesses and recording of Leopoldo Lopez planning and ordering an arson attack on the Public Ministry building" is evidence. What she provided was just a retelling of events they are blaming on Leopoldo Lopez.
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May 1, 2014 15:21
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The current Venezuelan government is some tame poo poo. Taking such abuse from shills and hatchet men. If this was any other country and the same poo poo was happening, a lot of the upper middle class/high class and their lackies would be in jail or dead. One guy got stripped naked in the middle of the street in Venezuela? Is that the types of scandals over there? Because, believe it or not, tons of people get beatings in the USA and get their clothes stolen. Instead of these boarderline traitors trying to tear down the government, they could participate in it and fix problems. But the right wing monied elite and their brainwashed compatriots don't want to fix problems. They want to pass off twitter as some authority on the reality on the ground in Venezuela. Usually by passing off pictures of real crack downs in real totalitarian countries such as Egypt as evidence of brutality in Venezuela. These clowns which compromise the opposition give the racist teaparty in the USA a run for their money and use the same tactics. One of them being the racist birth certificate tactic. meat sweats posted:The opposition's current policy proposal is for a substantial minimum wage increase to outpace inflation, but I guess we won't be hearing anything about this from people who insist that this is some battle between Heroic Socialist Leader and the Laissez-Faire Gang because that's their preconceived notion of how the world works. You say I have a preconceived notion of how the world works. That isn't true. Whats true is that in the multifaceted society of Venezuela, you can only see through one.
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May 1, 2014 18:04
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Keep chubbing yourself over your fantasies of killing fields -- you're almost there!
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May 1, 2014 20:36
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Sometimes I wish it was possible to embed music in people's avatars so Babychoom's could play "Holiday in Cambodia". There's been a lot of protests, but very little violence from the opposition, yet your reaction is that they should be grateful that they're not being shot in the streets? As for participating in the process, that's sort of hard when the government is more interested in using them as a scapegoat.
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May 1, 2014 20:57
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BabyChoom posted:The current Venezuelan government is some tame poo poo. Taking such abuse from shills and hatchet men. If this was any other country and the same poo poo was happening, a lot of the upper middle class/high class and their lackies would be in jail or dead. One guy got stripped naked in the middle of the street in Venezuela? Is that the types of scandals over there? Because, believe it or not, tons of people get beatings in the USA and get their clothes stolen. The amount of videos showing abuse of power and violence by the GNB and colectivos, is overwhelming!!! The worst blind is the one who doesn't want to see...
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May 1, 2014 23:59
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It's OK that the Venezuelan police torture people for saying they don't like the government because "sometimes people get their clothes stolen" in the U.S., whatever that means. The cutting edge of leftist intellectual thought, right there.
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May 2, 2014 00:15
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meat sweats posted:It's OK that the Venezuelan police torture people for saying they don't like the government because "sometimes people get their clothes stolen" in the U.S., whatever that means. The cutting edge of leftist intellectual thought, right there. You never provided evidence that Maduro has ordered murders. When I called you out on it all you did was whine and cry. You are the cutting edge of right wing "intellectualism". What's your position again? Overthrow the government and reinstate the good old times?
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May 2, 2014 01:44
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meat sweats posted:It's OK that the Venezuelan police torture people for saying they don't like the government It's ok for the rest of the first world so /shrug
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May 2, 2014 02:32
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meat sweats posted:oh my god It's kind of interesting to see how the most idiotic ideas get started, like Juche and whatever the Khmer Rouge called their thing. Idiots like BabyChoom get into power and are like "just have everybody farm guys!" *millions perish*
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May 2, 2014 02:37
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Hey now, Juche was an effort by Kim Il-Sung and his pals to prove they too were capable of "refining" local variants of marxism, because all the other socialist countries were doing it. It's got several layers of reason more than BabyChoomin'. I mean, it's ultimately kinda empty and little more than sloganeering for "just listen to your dear leader", but still.
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May 2, 2014 02:41
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Yeah I guess I should say that the blind obedience comes first and the moronic sweeping changes unchecked by cowed underlings come later. Fortunately I don't think BabyChoom has a lot going on in the charisma department.
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May 2, 2014 02:44
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SedanChair posted:It's kind of interesting to see how the most idiotic ideas get started, like Juche and whatever the Khmer Rouge called their thing. Idiots like BabyChoom get into power and are like "just have everybody farm guys!" *millions perish* I was thinking the same earlier. That post was the perfect primer in how you go from "lets just help the poor!" communism to "gulags for all, suffering for obsolete". Like, "Man, Venezuela needs to nationalize agriculture to make up for imports. Not enough farmers? Lets have prisoners farm. Not enough prisoners? Well, if these "protestors" hate food prices so much let's arrest them and put them to work in the fields. What, now we have gulags? ...but you hang negroes.  "
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May 2, 2014 02:45
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I especially like the part about foreign migrant workers on privatized mega-farms. Because consolidating farmland, handing it over to corporate interests, and then exploiting migrants to work it has never gone wrong.
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May 2, 2014 02:48
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There have been a couple of developments regarding Eliecer Otaiza's murder. Today, El Nacional reported that the man arrested in connection to Otaiza's death is a member of a gang called Los Menores that operates in Baruta and El Hatillo in Caracas. Apparently, according to the man, they saw Otaiza driving in their barrio in an SUV and thought that he was a cop, so they killed Otaiza and stole his SUV. It's believed that Otaiza took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a bad part of town. Anyway, Maduro collected all the tin foil he had lying around in Miraflores and fashioned it into a shiny hat and said this today: quote:Otaiza’s murder was planned. Otaiza’s murder was executed so that it would appear as a false positive before public opinion as just another act of violence, just like false positives are planned in Colombia. Otaiza’s murder was encouraged from Miami by sectors that had media and economic control before in Venezuela. Maduro did not offer any evidence for these claims. My favourite part of is when he says that "a group of journalists started to spread a version of Otaiza's murder that fits perfectly with that which his murderers put forward". Yeah, there's a name for when journalists repeat what someone has said: it's called "reporting the news". SedanChair posted:It's kind of interesting to see how the most idiotic ideas get started, like Juche and whatever the Khmer Rouge called their thing. Idiots like BabyChoom get into power and are like "just have everybody farm guys!" *millions perish* Berke Negri posted:I was thinking the same earlier. That post was the perfect primer in how you go from "lets just help the poor!" communism to "gulags for all, suffering for obsolete". Like, "Man, Venezuela needs to nationalize agriculture to make up for imports. Not enough farmers? Lets have prisoners farm. Not enough prisoners? Well, if these "protestors" hate food prices so much let's arrest them and put them to work in the fields. What, now we have gulags? ...but you hang negroes. That's what happens when you put ideology above all else. The more I dig into Venezuelan politics and news, the more I feel like the PSUV is some kind of weird cargo cult. They know what socialism is kind of supposed to sound and look like, and they're trying really hard to emulate the optics of it, but it just isn't working for some reason. Like, how many more red flags and Venezuelan flag tracksuits do we need to order before domestic production makes up for import disruptions?
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May 2, 2014 03:32
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Rent-A-Cop posted:I especially like the part about foreign migrant workers on privatized mega-farms. Because consolidating farmland, handing it over to corporate interests, and then exploiting migrants to work it has never gone wrong. You left out the prison farms. Angola is the model of BabyChoom's Venezuela.
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May 2, 2014 06:48
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I want to say that BabyChoom is really funny, but I can't since he's advocating things that literally led to the deaths of millions of people when they were actually tried out.Rent-A-Cop posted:I especially like the part about foreign migrant workers on privatized mega-farms. Because consolidating farmland, handing it over to corporate interests, and then exploiting migrants to work it has never gone wrong. And just imagine what his reaction would be if someone from America suggested this 
Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 13:26 on May 2, 2014 |
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May 2, 2014 13:21
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Venezuela does have a domestic food production problem, most likely because prices are far under market value so there is little incentive for the private producers to continue production. Also, I do believe Venezuela has experiment with co-ops but it isn't clear how their production will hold up. As for prison farms, no that is a terrible idea and abusive. I do think large parts of PSUV's program don't make any sense, or have been half-assed even if they are well meaning. Heavily subsidized food is a good thing... as long as you can pay for it, but when you can't you need to figure out a way to keep prices low for those that are the most vulnerable. In addition, Venezuela doesn't have wage controls, so while food and other consumer items are subsidized, wages are all over the place which makes the utility of price controls more moot. In addition, there is the issue of fuel subsidies which are a complete drag on the system and the fact that while CADIVI is very restrictive about currency exchange, when the exchange happens, people are able to obtain hard currency far under black market rates....which means the government has to keep most of that cost. In addition, while taking a greater portion of oil revenues probably is defensible, much of the nationalization the PSUV has done seems to have been haphazard such as random shopping malls. Of course, the PSUV had done good as well, government stores and cafes, the co-ops and the Missions are probably all things that should be retained or expanded. Anyway proposed higher minimum wages are fine, but the details are important, is that with a floating currency and the reduce of price controls or not? Those details are pretty important. Ultimately, there very likely will be a further crisis though when the government simply runs out of money, and I guess we will see what happens. A better idea would be to radically reconfigure their price control/currency system while minimizing its impact on the poor and still try to retain what positive improvements they have made. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 13:59 on May 2, 2014 |
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May 2, 2014 13:47
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I feel that BabyChoom is experiencing some of the more religious aspects of socialism. Any level of mortal anguish is to not only to be stoically endured, like Job, it's to be rapturously welcomed as a trial of the Faithful and Saved - the Correct, even - and proof that Social Revolution is underway. Suffering can be dismissed because it will only be a pinprick in comparison to the bliss of Heaven - er, I mean Full Communism.
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May 2, 2014 13:48
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I don't think he ever had the realization that most sensible leftists had which is that any government that declares a large portion of its populace to be enemies in order to sustain itself is probably a really bad one, regardless of what it calls itself on the political spectrum.
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May 2, 2014 17:03
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Adventure Pigeon posted:I don't think he ever had the realization that most sensible leftists had which is that any government that declares a large portion of its populace to be enemies in order to sustain itself is probably a really bad one, regardless of what it calls itself on the political spectrum. This is interesting to me because I don't think I've ever had such a realization either. To me, it seems like it may be sort of inevitable that any government that really wants to transform society in a revolutionary manner (whether that revolution be Bolivarian or something else) is going to have significant numbers of opponents among the general population. And doesn't it make sense that a revolutionary government would declare those opponents to be enemies of the revolution? How those enemies are to be dealt with and to what extent they are to be tolerated are other matters, but it seems to me that it would be out of touch with reality for the Venezuelan government not to acknowledge that it has enemies among the Venezuelan people.
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May 2, 2014 21:20
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Math Debater posted:This is interesting to me because I don't think I've ever had such a realization either. To me, it seems like it may be sort of inevitable that any government that really wants to transform society in a revolutionary manner (whether that revolution be Bolivarian or something else) is going to have significant numbers of opponents among the general population. And doesn't it make sense that a revolutionary government would declare those opponents to be enemies of the revolution? I would think that claiming to speak for the people and then declaring a non-insignificant part of the population as enemies of the people is sort of...hypocritical?
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May 2, 2014 21:23
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computer parts posted:I would think that claiming to speak for the people and then declaring a non-insignificant part of the population as enemies of the people is sort of...hypocritical? Yeah, I suppose a revolutionary movement shouldn't go around claiming that it intends to serve the interests of all of the people and should instead be clear as to exactly which segments of the population the revolution is meant to empower and improve the lives of. In any case, it seems pretty plausible to me that there may be some powerful actors in the Venezuelan business community who have perhaps been trying to undermine the Venezuelan government by sabotaging the Venezuelan economy. But I'm just speculating here. Thanks for reading my post!
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May 2, 2014 21:36
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Remember that people can have all sorts of reasons for opposing a government, and not all resistance is to government is unhealthy to the government or a country. More so, peoples' stances towards a government can change back and forth depending on the actions. Declaring segments of the population to be enemies of the state kills any chance for healthy change to be instigated by opposition. Second, the enemies of a government or political party are not necessarily the enemies of a country; often the goal when political parties declare enemies is to falsely equivocate the two. Third, time and time again we've seen that institutions which deal with "enemies" tend to be self-sustaining. When they might otherwise become unnecessary, they find new enemies to sustain themselves. Finally, a proper government should be for everyone in a country, not just those that agree with its ideology. Also, the vast majority of the time, when a government goes on a witch hunt they're trying to distract from their own fuckups.
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May 2, 2014 22:07
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Yeah, I think I'm very much not inclined to be a liberal democratic kinda guy, so perhaps I should stay out of politics if liberal democracy is really as good of a thing as so many people seem to think it is. But I'm totally rooting for the PSUV in Venezuela and the lefty governments throughout Latin America! I wish we had a leftier sociopolitical atmosphere here in the Yankee empire!
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May 2, 2014 22:42
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I consider myself left wing, but I've never had fantasies about dragging reactionaries off to Kublinka's basement to be shot in the back of the head, so maybe I'm a bad one.
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May 2, 2014 22:59
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The problem is that Maduro isn't really doing anything to change the fundamental nature of the economy and build socialism, he's just selling oil and implementing (very poorly) reforms like price controls. I'd held on to the hope that the protests might make Maduro come to his senses but his response has been anything but encouraging. MUD will very likely be as bad or worse but Maduro just isn't worth defending now, no matter your ideological orientation. Even Heinz Dietrich, one of Chavez's mentors, is convinced that Maduro is simply incompetent.
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May 3, 2014 01:19
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There was discussion during the last election in Venezuela (and elsewhere) about the ridiculousness of Maduro the bus driver being elevated to the presidency, which was written off as "elitism" rather than concern over how PSUV completely values loyalty & ideological purity over anything else including competence and human decency. I would like to see what the people who were most concerned about the "elitism" of asking if the person running a command economy had the slightest idea how wages and prices work think now.
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May 3, 2014 03:45
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meat sweats posted:There was discussion during the last election in Venezuela (and elsewhere) about the ridiculousness of Maduro the bus driver being elevated to the presidency, which was written off as "elitism" rather than concern over how PSUV completely values loyalty & ideological purity over anything else including competence and human decency. I would like to see what the people who were most concerned about the "elitism" of asking if the person running a command economy had the slightest idea how wages and prices work think now. Isn't the issue not his class or former occupation, but his competence? It's the classism that's gross.
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May 3, 2014 03:47
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Many normal working class people have gone on to become great leaders, and many rich men with executive experience who spent their entire lives being groomed to rule have been Miserable Failures. Maduro's actions, not his past as a bus driver, make him incompetent.
OwlBot 2000 fucked around with this message at 03:56 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 03:54
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Of all the things to criticize Maduro for, the fact that he was a bus driver 30 years ago seems really petty and bizarre. Plus he became an unofficial union rep for the bus drivers of the Caracas Metro, which I'd argue is a pretty good place to get experience being a political leader. He is clearly not good at it, so I would say that either he did not learn much from it or what he learned is not applicable to the problems facing Venezuela today, but I don't see any reason why his job history would indicate he would have been any worse of a leader than Henrique Capriles. E: Mistakenly refereed to Henrique Capriles as Henrique Radonski burnishedfume fucked around with this message at 05:39 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 04:08
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DrProsek posted:I don't see any reason why his job history would indicate he would have been any worse of a leader than Henrique Radonski. As I am saying, the events since his election have made it clear that the criticisms of his competence were correct. Also, are you unfamiliar with how Spanish-language names work or how Henrique Capriles is always referred to in Venezuela, or are you intentionally using his matronymic to try to highlight his Jewish heritage as a negative, like Maduro did during the campaign?
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May 3, 2014 05:02
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meat sweats posted:As I am saying, the events since his election have made it clear that the criticisms of his competence were correct. Your post was about the accusations of incompetence based on his past career, and counter accusations of elitism. It is definitely elitism to say that his career as a bus driver was a warning sign of his incompetence, however it is clear that regardless of his past career Maduro today is incompetent at his position. As for the name, googled the name to make sure I spelled it right, copied his full name from the Wikipedia link, brain went on autopilot and deleted the middle word assuming it was a middle name (and if you really want to dig deep into the psychology of my typo, I've been spending more time than usual reading Eastern European news and seeing a Slavic-looking name made me forget what thread I'm posting in).
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May 3, 2014 05:38
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All week, Maduro had been hinting about releasing evidence on Friday that the events of the past months were part of a coup against the government. Yesterday, the Minister of the Interior and Justice, Miguel Rodriguez Torres, went on T.V. to talk about the conspiracy against Venezuela. This is a partial list of the people the government is implicating in the coup against the country:
Torres presented this information during a press release yesterday, a video of which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFXTBOZnJq8. I will translate the video probably today or tomorrow. DrProsek posted:As for the name, googled the name to make sure I spelled it right, copied his full name from the Wikipedia link, brain went on autopilot and deleted the middle word assuming it was a middle name (and if you really want to dig deep into the psychology of my typo, I've been spending more time than usual reading Eastern European news and seeing a Slavic-looking name made me forget what thread I'm posting in). Ha! Don't worry about this, I get mixed up with the naming customs too and I'm Venezuelan! When I first moved to Canada, I went around signing my name "First Name - Father's Last Name - Mother's Last Name". It was a little while before I realized that this wasn't the naming custom people were used to up here. Some of the earliest government documents I got when I came up here still show my full name as I used to write it, while the rest just show my "First Name - Last Name". I gotta get around to fixing that 
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May 3, 2014 13:51
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Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day. The National College of Journalists released a lengthy statement on the situation of the press in Venezuela. The short version of it is that they believe the conditions the press is suffering from are the worst in Venezuela's history. An interesting point they bring up is that while state-owned print media - or independent media that is aligned with PSUV ideology - has not complained about a lack of paper to print on, virtually all papers critical of the government have. They argue that this can mean two things: 1) They are not suffering from a lack of paper, which means the government is favouring them, or 2) They are not voicing their grievances for fear of government reprisal. It also came out yesterday that in all of April, Maduro spoke in cadena nacional (when every television and radio station is mandated to broadcast his speech for as long as he talks) for a total of 22 hours and 23 minutes. According to the Regional Alliance for the Freedom of Expression, Maduro's cadenas are the longest in Latin America. Maduro spoke during 192 cadenas in all of 2013. And some murder statistics, which I always find absolutely mind blowing. According to the CICPC (Venezuelan CSI), so far this year, there have been 4,680 murders in Venezuela. This is pretty good news though, because that number is actually 30% lower than it was last year. That's good, right?  In Caracas alone, there were 36 murders during the first 3 days of May. Over the course of a single night - this past Friday - 9 people were murdered.
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May 4, 2014 15:47
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IIRC didn't you and other Venezuelans state that all types of print media (proPSUV and proMUD) were suffering from shortages? Also expect the homicide and crime rate to continue to decline. As I said before lead is likely a huge reason for the massive crime uptick?
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May 6, 2014 04:45
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