Bolivarian socialism apparently means financing things like lousy race-car drivers while the people lack medicine, food, and toilet paper.
Venezuela is on the verge of both economic and social collapse, and the Bolivarian socialist government headed by President NicolĂĄs Maduro is lashing out any everyone from âwhingeingâ factory owners (who lack the raw materials they need to produce anything of value) to the U.S. government, who he accused offormenting a coup when he extended the nationâs state of emergency last Friday.
The style of socialism introduced to the oil-rich country by Maduroâs predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, was credited bySalonâs David Sirota with creating an economic miracle as recently as 2013. But the disaster currently unfolding is more than just a failure of socialism.
Venezuela has been spending a fortune on unnecessary and ridiculous expenditures for years. That is, when government officials havenât been (allegedly) stealing billions in oil profits and pocketing the cash outright.
Despite sitting on the worldâs largest oil reserves and having nationalized oil production, Venezuela spends $45 million a year on Pastor Maldonado â an undistinguished Formula One race car driver with a predilection for crashing a lot â who essentially serves as a walking billboard for the countryâs oil company. Wasting taxpayer money on sponsoring a loser athlete is bad enough, but what could possibly be the justification for spending that kind of cash to advertise the national oil company, which by definition has no competition?
The waste and graft surrounding sports doesnât end with Maldonado. Formula Freak reports that following Chavezâs death in 2013, âAlejandra Benitez, the Venezuelan minister of sports, found that her falsified signature had moved over 65 million in sporting-fund dollars to places in which it did not belong.â
In 2007, as part of Chavezâs ambition to âcombat American cultural hegemony,â he forked over nearly $18 million for âscripts, production costs, wardrobe, lighting, transport, makeup and the creation of the whole creative and administrative platformâ of a prospective Danny Glover-helmed film project about a Haitian slave revolt. The film never went into production.
Pro-free market types enjoyed a good laugh when the countryâs largest beer company ceased production last month, as a direct result of a lack of access to foreign currency and a domestic currency now more useful as toilet paper than legal tender, but the situation in Venezuela grows more tragic by the day.
Though supermarket shelves are pretty much empty these days, for the past two years the government has been fingerprinting shoppers to prevent âhoarding,â which itself was also made illegal. As could be completely expected by such scarcity of basic items needed to live, much less live in any semblance of comfort, Bolivarian socialism has spawned a thriving black market.
âIn a system that mirrors the rationing implemented across communist countries last century,â Andrew Rosati writes in Bloomberg, âVenezuelans are allotted certain days of the week that they can purchase goods deemed most essential by the government.â The hole in the marketplace is now filled by entrepreneurs known as bachaqueros, who in turn âhave developed their own ecosystem, rules and regulations.â
Though Maduro would classify any unauthorized transaction as emblematic of the âeconomic warâ he imagines himself fighting, the economic realities his movement has created have led to âDoctors and accountants moonlight[ing] as cooks at restaurantsâ and everyday survival the only matter of concern to the populace.
Electricity has been rationed and the workweek has been cut to two days. The government, never known for its tolerance for dissent dating back to Chavezâs earliest days in office, recently tried to get a U.S. court to shut own a website advertising favorable exchange rates in towns along the Colombia-Venezuela border.
In The Wall Street Journal, Mary O'Grady wrote of how the hunger of the Venezuelan people can be directly pinned on the arrogance and incompetence of the government:
ChĂĄvez confiscated the countryâs most-productive farms and turned them over to chavistas who donât know how to farm. Even on farms that were not seized, planting is diminished. Most seeds used in Venezuela are imported and without dollars cannot be had. Farmers are reluctant to plant when the costs are high and the harvests are price-controlled. Dairy farms are also less productive now that daily power outages shut down electricity-powered milking machines. Trucks carrying food cargo are often hijacked.
Venezuela has had âfree health care for allâ since 1999, and has long relied on imported Cuban doctors to make good on that promise to the people, but these days basic medical items like gloves, soap, and intravenous fluids are nearly impossible to come by, to say nothing of medicine and equipment such as X-Ray and dialysis machines.
China will likely help Venezuela stay afloat during its self-created inflation crisis with a $5 billion loan, but with babies dyingfor lack of basic medical care, riots and looting born of sheer desperation, and the very real and growing risk of a military coup, stability may be a luxury Venezuela canât afford for a long time to come.
jimmyeatworldofficial
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
gamechangershow
yousharknotpass
theartofmadeline
