I mean...American exceptionalism but from the leftWorld can only be understood through America’s policy preferences. If you align with them you must be bad, and if you don’t you must be good.
Venezuela Crisis: Failed coup attempt by Juan Guaido; Military remains supporting Nicholas Maduro
- Thread starter 88m3
- Start date
DrBanneker
Space is the Place
I was no Gaddafi fan but unless you are a rabid neocon, being a "tyrant" isn't enough excuse to overthrow countries and execute leaders.
Everyone knows what he did in the 80s and before Arab spring everyone was becoming his buddy again. I worked in oil and gas and you had hardcore Republican businessmen and politicians bringing Libya in from the cold after Muammar and Said Gadaffi said some nice words and gave up their "WMD" program that hadn't been shyt since the Soviets were around. Oil was flowing and everyone ignored the eccentric old man hoping Said, educated at LSE etc, would be cool when he took over. Then came some issues with his Pan-Africanism (phony or not) and challenging parts of the world order. When the whole revolution broke, they took him down but hat was purely Sarkozy etc. not the US getting revenge for Reagan error terrorism.
Libya is now a shythole with Islamist militias and they nearly destroyed Mali as well as Nigeria (Boko Haram got most of their level up training and equipment from jihaddis who occupied Timbuktu and Gao).
DrBanneker
Space is the Place
Because we have to deal with heavily armed migrant caravans from Central America. DUH!
Real thing though, Venezuela's crisis helped elect Bolsonaro in Brazil. Part of the reason is probably Venezuela is state collapse, not a war with cool coverage and blowing stuff up.
DrBanneker
Space is the Place
When I worked in O&G a decade ago, I had to buy equipment from US based companies for the Venezuela ops because the damn central bank made it take 6+ months to convert bolivares to dollars so they couldn't meet any supplier terms. Capital controls were a shytshow then but with $120/barrel oil you could paper over the problems. Not now.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
American exceptionalism but from the left
Yup! Same bullshyt responses when Assad uses chemical weapons on women and children. Pathetic.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Idk how I forgot! It was just this week our resident sycophants were arguing that we need a wall like Israel to stop the marauding horde.
I think the entire region is wary of "leftist" governments after twenty years of rule and meager gains for the lower classes.
Most of the governments are "leftist/socialist/marxist" only in name idk why any reasonable person in the west would support the majority of them.
DrBanneker
Space is the Place
Why Is Venezuela in Crisis?
Second, while Venezuela has moved away from free-market capitalism, its economy is hardly socialist. The private sector, not the state (and still less the social economy), controls the overwhelming majority of economic activity. Between 1999 and 2011, the private sector’s share of economic activity increased, from 65 percent to 71 percent.
Part of the tragedy of Venezuela is nobody really wants to try to understand the full scope of what's going on. People want to cry "socialism" or make excuses for Chavez/Maduro when shyt is very complicated.
There is a socialism component to the story as Chavez and his programs used oil revenues in very good times to fund social programs. However, the problem with Venezuela (and Brazil) was not that they tried to do social programs but they believed the commodity supercycle would last forever. Brazil would never have had a trade surplus if not for inflated commodities and their economy crashed hard. But Venezuela wasn't just the case of some super-Marxists trying to implement socialism like Cuba in the 60s. A lot of it was due to economic mismanagement of the exchange controls and outright theft.
Venezuela exacerbated its problems by trying to hold it all together with insane capital controls (which I had to deal with in business as stated above). That was the start of the crisis: small and other politically unconnected businesses could not convert money to buy imports and then came the sanctions. The Venezuelan government began to run dry on foreign exchange when oil collapsed so they couldn't pump dollars into the economy to maintain the bolivar. So everything went to shyt.
They also isolated most of their neighbors which is never smart either. Did Chavez's socialist revolution play a part with this? Sure. But Veneuzuela is more in the dump now than Cuba or even E. Europe in the Warsaw Pact. It's a bit like Zim under Mugabe. A bunch of enriched and grizzled generals supporting a political leader hanging on at all cost.
DrBanneker
Space is the Place
I don't know I think this stuff is going in a cycle of a generation or so. Not a fan of the Marxists but Latin America's problem is the entrenched and massive disparity of their elites. I mean when you look at land ownership, wealth distributions, etc. it makes it really hard to run a middle of the road pro-market mixed economy like the US or Europe. Elites there don't even try to hide their entitlement either. I have a feeling that the hard right turn in Brazil and Colombia will create its own issues and once people forget what just happened the left will come back. Whatever you say about Chavez, Maduro, or Lula I don't have much sympathy for the alternative.
Json
Superstar
The military angle hasn’t been introduced. That’s would send more people fleeing the country and destabilize it further.
Json
Superstar
Bolivia on a smaller scale did the same thing except they saved their oil surplus money and haven’t fallen into economic ruin.
They still got political corruption of course though.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
This is pearl clutching. There's already food shortages, diseases that are killing people that had been previously eradicated, an authoritarian regime killing political opponents and tore up their constitution, and millions of refugees destabilizing their poor neighbors(something the US is partly picking the tab up on already). You're fine with that going on indefinitely?
How dare you!
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
seems like both political extremes turn into authoritarian scum there, idk how you deal with decades/centuries of wealth inequality in Latin America, the US and Western Europe have by far done a greater job not that we don't have our own uneven and broken systems.
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Json
Superstar
What are you talking about? I wasn’t taking a position on anything going on now.
All I said was without the military angle, the situation is people fleeing to nearby countries. A prolonged military engagement with countries like Russia backing Maduro, as proxy for attacking America, will send people further out and probably to America which starts the Republicans complaining about border issues.
