Yellow Water, Dirty Air, Power Outages: Venezuela Hits a New Low | Hacker News Reader

Yellow Water, Dirty Air, Power Outages: Venezuela Hits a New Low

bloomberg.com

40 pointsrandomname240 comments

If you think socialism is cool and awesome just poorly implemented, come to Venezuela and live here a year and hopefully you will hate Chavez/Maduro and his death legacy.

If want to read more about go to http://www.caracaschronicles.com/

The Scandinavian version seems to work a bit better. Maybe it is just an implementation problem.

Maybe Venezuela is the MySpace to Norway's Facebook :)

They still have a enormous amount of oil in the ground but not the government to use it wisely. Despite the disaster the country is with the resources in the ground it is still possible to turn the country around, but clearly not with the present leadership. Sadly South America doesn't have a good track record with coups actually improving things.

Is there somewhere where military coups do have a good track record?

Does the world war II counts?

I think a coup is necessarily internal. Wars aren't generally considered coups

All are contentious, but solid cases could be made for

- Turkey (it could use another one about now, if the military wasn't neutered)

- Thailand (providing stability currently)

- Egypt (removed Muslim Brotherhood)

Portugal had a peaceful military coup in 1974. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution

The only country where the possession of oil hasn't been more of a curse than a bless is arguably Norway.

Venezuela's economic situation is more of a product of having oil than it is a product of the so-called socialism of the previous government.

Free money from extractive industries has normally served to let whatever government keep power through handouts to the populace.

Saudi Arabia, as another example, may not be an economic disaster but the regime broadly is a disaster for the foreign workers it abusively employs and the nearby areas it exports its reactionary ideology to.

Saudi Arabia? UAE? As troubling as some of their policies, they are not failed states like Venezuela.

Did you even read what I wrote?

They're not failed states, they're disasters for the world as whole.

You're right. It's been widely observed that oil and many other valuable natural resources are actually bad for countries unless they already have good governance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

I thought this might be about Flint, Michigan when I began reading the title.

Yeah, Venezuela is the new target of the media that brown-noses with Washington...

How is Venezuela a new media target? They've been in the US news media rather frequently since at least 2005 or so (when I first noticed an uptick in Venezuela specific coverage, from primarily US-mainstream sources at that time like CNN).

Probably a bit before IIRC. Just after the CIA sponsored coup and kidnapping of the democratically elected leader.

Imagine the reversal. Venezuelan secret services kidnapped the US president to install a more friendly regime so they could profit more from the US natural resources.....

Latin-American left-wing are exactly like North-American right-wing: all inconvenient facts or reality are mainstream media fault.

Well, before you being wasting "paper" bashing other countries, look into your backyard first!

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