NOVANEWS
Hugo Chávez
Venezuela’s chief strength is its oil reserves.
Venezuela’s chief weakness is also its oil reserves.
The problem is that those reserves allowed Venezuela to easily buy imported consumer goods. As a result, people converged on Venezuela’s cities, looking for jobs in the petroleum sector.
This caused Venezuela to stop being self-sufficient. Today Venezuela must import two-thirds of its consumer goods.
The people who sell to consumer goods to Venezuela do not want to be paid in Venezuela’s currency (the Bolívar fuerte) since Venezuela’s currency can only be spent in Venezuela. Instead, the sellers want to be paid in a widely used currency such as the US dollar.
Venezuela obtains those widely used currencies by selling oil. But now the US-Saudi collusion has driven down the price of oil as part of a concerted attack on Russia and Venezuela. This forces Venezuela to borrow foreign currency by selling sovereign bonds. However, as part of the US attack, the ultra-corrupt bond ratings agencies (Fitch, Moodys and Standard & Poor’s) have suddenly and radically downgraded Venezuela’s sovereign bonds, making it prohibitively expensive for Venezuela to borrow. (The agencies did the same thing to Russia.)
Therefore Venezuela cannot easily get foreign currency in order buy imported consumer goods. The result is shortages that cause the lines you see in the images above.
Simultaneously, Venezuela’s rich oligarchs intentionally make the shortages and the suffering even worse. They reduce their store hours. They reduce the amount of employees at cash registers. They hoard supermarket items, keeping them off the shelves. Meanwhile they blame the government for everything.
In addition to shortages in food and medicine, they also cause shortages in things you think are trivial until you can’t get them, like toilet paper, or body soap, or laundry detergent, or deodorant. Imagine not being able to bathe yourself or wash your clothes for weeks or months on end. It’s all part of a calculated attack on Venezuela’s government and masses.
Meanwhile all the economics journals blame everything on Venezuela’s government. They spout nonstop bullshit that is meaningless and intentionally confusing.
Unfortunately most people believe these lies, since it is easy and fun to blame “evil governments” like Venezuela’s, or like National Socialist Germany’s. Also, the more the masses suffer, the more they look for convenient targets, preferably among the weakest members of society. Thus, when the masses are crushed by the rich elitists, the masses don’t blame the elitists. They blame blacks, or immigrants, or Muslims, or homosexuals, or “homo-phobes,” or “terrorists” or whatever. Anything but the correct target, namely their rich overlords.
At the moment, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is traveling the world, desperately seeking help as the US-led war on his government continues. Back in Venezuela, his government briefly arrested the CEO and 20 top officers of Farmatodo, which is a nationwide pharmacy / drug store chain analogous to Walgreens or CVS pharmacy in the USA. Farmatodo, has 160 stores in Venezuela, plus some in Colombia. (The equivalent in Mexico is Farmacia Guadalajara, which has about 1,200 stores.) Farmatodo, used to be open 24 hours, until its owners joined the US-led war.
The rich owners of Farmatodo, coordinate their attacks via Fedecámaras (a financial terrorist group otherwise known as the Venezuelan “Chamber of Commerce”).
I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal whose author claimed that this is what always happens with socialism, because of universal laws of economics. The authir ignores the fact that all these problems (ALL of them) are caused by evil bastards such as himself.
When the USA attacks a nation in order to steal its resources and reduce its people to debt-slaves, the USA calls its victims “terrorists.” Likewise, when the USA attacks Venezuela’s government and people, the USA refers to Venezuela’s government as “dictators” who are “waging a war on private enterprise.”
The Financial Times is using a clever ruse to try and blame Venezuela’s government for all this. In 1998 Venezuela established the Investment Fund for Macroeconomic Stabilization (FIEM in its Spanish acronym). This was a savings fund to protect the economy from a drop in oil prices, and was needed because Venezuela’s economy depended on oil revenues, which are volatile. When oil prices started to rise, the Hugo Chávez government stopped contributing to this fund, and instead gave the money to literacy programs, plus housing projects for the poor, and so on. Thus, according to the Financial Times, Venezuela’s government has only itself to blame. It’s a cute attempt to camouflage the evil of the US-Saudi empire, which is depressing oil prices far more than would be normal. Hugo Chávez knew the US-Judeo Empire was evil, but even he underestimated just how evil the Empire is.
