Venezuelan Apocalypse:

[iWriteStuff]

Certainly repenting and living the gospel does not exclude or preclude these actions. It includes them. I seems to me that many Mormons fail to understand that.

Alrighty, I guess I can be rebuked on here too... Guys, really, I've read the books. Lots of them. I don't deny there are conspiring men, that communism is evil, that our own government is becoming an impediment to freedom, that the financial system is rigged, etc. I read a lot of books, almost exclusively non-fiction, and on a large variety of topics. I love to learn, especially about the world around me. I know the awfulness of our situation.

My points was/is that knowledge of those things brings me no happiness. It's like a drink of bitter water - I need to follow it up with the sweetness of the gospel. And I need something more like a 2-to-1 ratio of gospel vs world in my life.

I'm no ostrich. Balance for me is focusing more on the gospel of Christ, the Good News, than allowing myself to be swallowed up in the bitterness of the world.

That's all!

[lundbaek]

It's the good news that keeps me fighting within the bounds of the laws of God to expose and oppose the bad news.

[Separatist]

[Separatist]

https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/so ... l-society/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Thomas DiLorenzo writes:

The socialist “paradise” of Venezuela, of course, which ranks 186 out of 189 in the World Bank’s index of business friendliness and is labeled as a “debt and hyperinflation hell.” Everyone there is “equally poor” except for the bloodsucking political elite, something that is true of all socialist countries everywhere.

One wonders why the pope, who is always quick to use gutter language to describe peaceful voluntary exchange in a free market, has never uttered a single word of criticism of the socialist political thugs who have ruined the economies of Argentina (his home country), Brazil, Venezuela, and many Latin American countries.

[ajax]

Bernie won't talk about Venezuela:

[roycelerwick]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251752410" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.investors.com/politics/comme ... socialist/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[gclayjr]

ajax,

Since this crisis, is so horrible, and is so related to the Socialist doctrine Bernie is peddling, I am amazed, both that he hasn't been asked before, and that he had no answer. Venezuela is not the first Socialist disaster in history (they all are disasters... no successes), so socialists have 3 standard answers

1) the problems are a result of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy (in Venezuela's case they say an American conspiracy... Imagine Obama gunning to destroy a Socialist state)


2) Socialism is great, this implementation was flawed by flawed people and I would do it right, and the people would be so happy and well off.

3) It worked in Scandinavia, where they never completely implemented socialism, and are now running away from it as fast as they can.

Which one do you think Bernie will use after having some time to think about it?

Regards,

George Clay

[ajax]

Both 1) and 2)

[Rose Garden]

A friend of mine who lived in Tonga says dog is pretty good.

It tastes like turkey except gamey. I don't like gamey meat so don't care for it. Cat is greasy and tough, according to my first husband. Go for the dogs first and resort to cats when you are really hungry.

[Jason]

Experts report that PDVSA contributions to Central Bank accounts are now below US$ 100 per month, after costs and debt service. This is in contrast to US$ 2-3 billion the company used to contribute two years ago. Russ Dallen, managing partner at Caracas Capital Markets, explains that “the numbers do not work”, leading the Maduro regime to sell off its few remaining foreign assets and spend reserves on importing around US$ 1 billion in food each month.

http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/m ... rylink=cpy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Venezuela shipped 11,948 kilograms of gold to Switzerland in April for a total value of US$ 466.3 million, after shipping 12 metric tons of gold in March, 12 metric tons in February and 36 metric tons in January. According to the Swiss government, in the last four months, Venezuela has shipped 72 metric tons of gold worth US$ 2.63 billion to Switzerland so far in 2016. According to our best estimates, April’s gold sales mean that Venezuela is now down to US$ 7.3 billion in gold, now just half of the US$ 14.5 billion it had at the start of 2015.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... les-crisis" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

...roughly 7-8 months left before complete meltdown???

LatAm Debt Dynamics: Venezuela Not That Bad
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3978932 ... ezuela-bad" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

...debt stays where it is while GDP (oil income) plummets...

Airlines Suspend Flights to Venezuela as Economic Crisis Worsens
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... next-month" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The cargo of 2 million barrels of U.S. light sweet crude sold by BP cannot be discharged at the PDVSA terminal in Curacao until it’s paid for, according to the news agency, which is relying on unnamed sources and Thomson Reuters vessel tracking data. China Oil and BP reportedly have a tender from PDVSA for the shipment of 8 million barrels of WTI crude for the second quarter of 2016.
http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/ ... Bills.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Harrowing scenes of Venezuela on the brink of collapse
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in- ... ge%2Fstory" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

By most measures, Venezuela is already a failed state: Amid crippling shortages of food, medicine, power and water, every societal ailment is soaring. Inflation is headed toward 700%, and the murder rate is probably the world’s second-highest, after El Salvador’s. According to the New York Times, deaths of infants under a month old in public hospitals are 100 times more common than three years ago, while a coalition of nongovernmental organizations says at least 200,000 people with chronic illnesses lack the medications for them. An April poll, reported by the Miami Herald, showed that 86% of Venezuelans said they bought “less” or “much less” food than they used to, while only 54% said they ate three times a day. No wonder there have been numerous reports of mobs sacking food warehouses, as well as dozens of instances of vigilante lynching of suspected thieves.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

According to World City trade between Venezuela and the United States dropped almost 50% during the first quarter this year. World City President Ken Roberts says “Venezuela had US$ 23.880 billion in trade with the US in 2015 and the total for the first quarter this year was US$ 3.250 billion.
http://www.el-nacional.com/economia/Com ... 14913.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory. In recent weeks, the government has taken what may be one of the most desperate measures ever by a country to save electricity: A shutdown of many of its offices for all but two half-days each week. But that is only the start of the country’s woes. Electricity and water are being rationed, and huge areas of the country have spent months with little of either. Many people cannot make international calls from their phones because of a dispute between the government and phone companies over currency regulations and rates. COCA-COLA FEMSA, the Mexican company that bottles COKE in the country, has even said it was halting production of sugary soft drinks because it was running out of sugar. There is often little traffic in Caracas simply because so few people, either for lack of money or work, are going out. Last week, protests turned violent in parts of the country where demonstrators demanded empty supermarkets be resupplied. And on Friday, the government said it would continue its truncated workweek for an additional 15 days.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/world ... ricas&_r=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Spain will closely monitor the situation of the nearly 200,000 Spanish nationals living in Venezuela in view of the deteriorating conditions in the Andean nation, Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria said Friday. She cited the “very significant deterioration” of public safety in Caracas and other cities and said Spaniards living in Venezuela are suffering from the same shortages of basic necessities affecting the rest of the population.
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?Article ... ryId=10717" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Sirocco]

Sounds like Germany after WW1, jeez...

[Jason]

The debt situation is quite similar....

[Sirocco]

The debt situation is quite similar....

Germany did bounce back for a time borrowing money but the great depression then Nazi's happened...
In times of hardship people often turn to more radical ideas or people they might never have considered earlier (eg Donald Trump)

[Jason]

The debt situation is quite similar....

Germany did bounce back for a time borrowing money but the great depression then Nazi's happened...
In times of hardship people often turn to more radical ideas or people they might never have considered earlier (eg Donald Trump)

Germany had a largely productive people (certainly war torn) that did not have the same level of thievery and thuggery as Venezuela...and the rest of the world at this point in time.

Venezuela is canary in the coal mine. I anticipate seeing similar changes around the world over the next couple of years as the debt train comes to a halt.

There will be major differences though in terms of inflation vs. deflation depending upon banking control over respective governments. End result is similar though.

[ajax]

My Venezuela Nightmare: A 30-Day Hunt for Food in a Starving Land

The diary of a desperate mother trying to put food on the kitchen table

Editor’s note: The looting, the blackouts, the mob lynchings, the hospitals with no supplies. Venezuela’s collapse into disarray is of a scale unseen in the Western Hemisphere in decades. In an effort to illustrate what day-to-day life is like on the ground, Bloomberg reporter Fabiola Zerpa documented her efforts to secure food for her middle-class family. This is a selection of entries from her month-long chronicle.

Thursday. My one chance in the week to buy staples—cooking oil, rice, laundry detergent—at state-set prices. All Venezuelan adults are assigned days of the week to shop for regulated goods based on the numbers on our national ID cards. My days are Sundays and Thursdays. Sundays are useless, though. Stores stopped selling regulated goods over the weekend a long time ago. Thursdays are only marginally more useful. For the past several months, the lines at the two supermarkets near my house in eastern Caracas have been so long, stretching out for two blocks, that it’d take hours to get a chance to shop. And then there’s no guarantee I’ll find anything once inside.

Still, I drive by the supermarkets in the morning to give them a quick look. No chance. They’re so jam-packed, there isn’t even a spot to park. I keep going. My reporting assignment on this day will take me to several parts of the city, so, of course, I’ll be on the prowl for something, anything I can take back to my two kids—an eight-year-old boy and ten-year-old girl—and husband Isaac.

I step into a pharmacy. Isaac is running low on his cholesterol medication. His doctor has prescribed him Vytorin or Hiperlipen. The store has neither. But wait, the pharmacist says: there’s a lab in India that just cut a deal with the government to supply medicine here; they produce an anti-cholesterol pill. I don’t like the idea at all—who knows what this stuff is?—but it’s better, I figure, than taking the risk that he’ll run out of medicine. I grab four boxes.

Around midday, I swing by a bakery in search of bread. I’m greeted, impatiently, by a young woman. “We only sell bread at 5 p.m., señora.” On my way out, I notice a sign on the front door that I somehow missed on my way in: “NO BREAD.” As I get back in my car, I realize I’m low on cash. I head to a nearby ATM. It’s out of money.

But later, as my day’s winding down, I stumble upon a little treasure. At a local kiosk, I spot a generic, lactose-based product. It isn’t quite milk—that’s almost impossible to find—but it’s worth a try. Maybe the kids will like it. I walk away with two bottles in my hand and a huge smile on my face.

Click link above to read more.

[ajax]

Perhaps a helpful corrective would be this just released book:

The Problem with Socialism
Thomas DiLorenzo
https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Socialis ... +socialism" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

socialism.jpg (58.14 KiB) Viewed 1165 times

[Separatist]

FINALLY Venezuela is Ending Price Controls

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/20 ... price.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

President Nicolás Maduro’s government has begun dismantling price controls, a major policy shift that aims to ease widespread unrest by letting shops sell food at market prices, reports The Wall Street Journal.

What began as a limited experiment in March in western Zulia state, which borders Colombia, has since been rolled out to six other border states, according to ruling-party governors and interviews with supermarket owners and shoppers across the country. One of the governors says plans are afoot to extend the program to the capital, Caracas, where food riots recently broke out just outside the presidential palace.


“Before there was nothing; now there’s everything,” said Jesús Barrios, 36, as he shopped in Maracaibo, the state capital of Zulia, according to WSJ.

“At least I can come in and buy, even if at high cost,” said Ana Atencio, a nurse who came in after her shift to get some sugar for her baby’s milk. “Before, I wouldn’t even dream of it because of the line and people fighting.”

In cities where the controls have been lifted, including Maracaibo and Puerto Ordaz, the long lines of shoppers that snaked outside every store have shortened. Looting of markets and food trucks—a daily occurrence just a few months ago—were down one-third nationwide in August from a May high, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict, a nonprofit group---another free market miracle.

[ajax]

VIDEO This is What Healthcare Looks Like in Venezuela