Latin America
Related: About this forumWhat in the World: Venezuela on the verge of collapse?
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/03/07/exp-gps-0308-witw-venezuela.cnnVideo by Fareed Zakaria
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Warpy
(111,429 posts)Yes, Maduro is ham fisted and unable to achieve the cult of personality Chavez had. However, the fast fall in oil prices have more to do with the country coming apart at the seams than anything else, policies or not. In fact, the mess might have been partially alleviated by Chavez's land redistribution and attempt to get a Venezuelan agriculture started. Until his presidency, the country imported nearly all its food.
Yes, the far right will likely gain traction as hunger builds and we're likely to see Maduro toppled and replaced with some general for life. However, it has more to do with the oil bust than popular dissatisfaction with things like land reform.
Zakaria is correct that this will spread to other petro economies.
Marksman_91
(2,035 posts)The scarcity started to show up way before then, around when Maduro took presidency. And since then, he's only implemented worse policies, especially regarding the currency exchange controls, which has made it harder for companies to obtain the dollars they need to produce.
And as for why the country isn't really producing anything else besides oil now, you can blame the populist measures taken by Hugo when he started expropriating like mad all private businesses that were actually producing and then replacing them with untrained and corrupt military managers. In the end that's what you get when you value subordinates who are loyal more than their skill or competence.
hack89
(39,171 posts)VZ agriculture is inefficient due to a lack of investment.
Warpy
(111,429 posts)Getting an agricultural economy up and running will take many decades of land reform and support for new farmers.
One blunder he made was getting people onto land they could do nothing with because they didn't have the paperwork to say they now owned it. No paperwork, no loans for equipment and seeds.
Marksman_91
(2,035 posts)Venezuela used to produce so much more before until Chavez took away most people's businesses away, and without compensation. He used the ol' populist method of claiming he was "giving them back" to the people, when in reality it was all just for show. Most businesses and means of production run by the government now are barely producing anything, and certainly much less than when they were under the original owners' hands. Now the country's more dependent on oil exports than ever, and because the economy never truly diversified, most products are now being imported. And with really low oil prices, the overdependence on oil has become very apparent now.
This is coming from a Venezuelan who personally knows friends whose families used to own very productive lands, by the way.
Judi Lynn
(160,659 posts)Thursday, Aug 28, 2014 11:35 AM CDT
Fareed Zakaria’s real sins: Not plagiarism but neoliberal know-it-all-ism
As a new controversy swirls, a reminder that Zakaria's problems start with hunger to advise the rich and powerful
Jim Sleeper
One of many examples presented by the website Our Bad Media shows him reproducing, in his Time column, a couple of sentences — citing statistics on corporate tax avoidance, gathered by IQ Capital Research for the New York Times– from a column written and published there months earlier by David Leonhardt.
Zakaria’s column didn’t credit Leonhardt, the researchers, or the Times. A reader might have assumed that Zakaria had discovered the information himself or that it had long been publicly known. A reader wouldn’t have noticed that Zakaria was using Leonhardt’s own sentence structure and diction.
Leonhardt and his publisher would be well-justified in taking offense, but does this really matter to the quality of public discourse? Did Leonhardt work any harder at gathering these particular statistics, handed him by the Times‘ contractor, than Zakaria did in passing them on?
As far as I can tell, the Zakaria column at issue here is an otherwise wholly original, counterintuitive and illuminating essay on tax fairness. It takes off on a proposal by the then-Republican presidential-primary candidate Herman Cain, who championed a flat tax scheme that many — including Leonhardt and, for that matter, me — may not endorse, but that Zakaria found worthy of consideration, with some modifications of his own that he proposed in his column.
Fair enough, but, what would it have cost him to credit Leonhardt and the Times‘research contractor?
A lot, apparently, at least in his own busy mind. Zakaria’s own assiduously cultivated stock in trade relies on his being widely regarded as a one-man Davos, a “go-to” seer for the rich and powerful and for millions who follow their moves. His virtuosity and ubiquity as neo-liberal consciousness-shaper of the hour are driven not merely by his sometimes-illuminating intelligence but by his hunger to advise elites whose prerogatives and policies he smoothly defends.
More:
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/28/fareed_zakarias_real_sins_on_plagiarism_and_the_dishonesty_of_our_self_important_pundit_class/
Marksman_91
(2,035 posts)Despite whatever it says about Zakaria, he's really not alone in what he talks about in the video. Pretty much any economically literate person agrees that Maduro is leading Venezuela to collapse. But it's ok, I know you're too proud to admit you're not as economically well-versed as the people who actually studied economics, of which the majority agree that Venezuela is on the brink of defaulting.
COLGATE4
(14,732 posts)all you get in response is a cut and paste, usually out of date and almost always irrelevant.
