Really? Venezuela should be a much richer country but was controlled by a cabal of wealthy families that siphoned the wealth off.
Since Chavez, the poverty rates are down and literacy is way up.
The gold move is a smart one. Control of actual gold bullion will be important as we go into these next tumultuous months.
I have heard that argument before...many times. Is a very poor argument.
Chavez has been in power for 13 years with the highest oil prices in Venezuelan history. Most of that money went to their personal pockets. How do I know this you might ask?
It happens that it is LAW. You see, the Chavez government created a LAW that would allow them to set the national budget price, at the time was at 70$ I think (don't quote me on that) and any amount above that would go to a PERSONAL presidential account that Chavez controls and has no OBLIGATION to tell anyone what he is doing with that money.
Let me remain you that we spent several years with the prices above 100$ per barrel and that Venezuela produces about 2.5 million barrels of oil PER DAY. I'm not going to pretend the need to do the math here for the HN folks, but just in case, for illustration purposes that personal account would receive somewhere on the lines of...
75 million dollars a day.
Try to grasp how MASSIVE that amount is.
You see, when you talk about poverty and literacy I simply know that you have not been nowhere near Venezuela.
Venezuela is falling to pieces, structurally, morally, economically, etc. We wasted a decade that could have turn our country in to a super power.
This sounds like propaganda. Got a link to this law?
So it's a fund controlled by the president in a government where he does not have to respond to anyone. Would you mind explaining how is that not his personal bank account?
This is so true, based on my experience having stayed in Caracas, Venezuela on my way to Bogota, Colombia just a few months ago. I was shocked at the difference between those two neighbouring countries, Colombia is rapidly improving whilst Chavez is destroying Venezuela.
The demand for oil is in every sense an economic addiction and the governments of the industrialised world will suspend all principle to keep the pipelines flowing. They empower ruthless sociopaths with billions of dollars and feign outrage when these despots hold their people hostage and slaughter thousands to maintain their hold on power. Why are the world's most dangerous men invariably from major oil producing countries?
I think the capitalist ideal of money as the only measure of success is a very irresponsible way to run a planet. In the past at least, the system seemed to work in favour of a few countries that were first at the controls. Now that there is just so much momentum that this ship has started to fly itself, I find it amusing to watch the US and Europe scrambling to come to grips with just a small part of the helplessness of the other 5 billion.
Natural resources have a way of bringing corrupt people to take those resources from you.
Whenever you have something of value bad people will try to take it with force. The capitalist ideal of money is that markets allocate resources better than force. Saying that capitalism creates brutal dictatorships, is like saying banks generate robberies.
Canada was a highly developed economy before the era of big oil. It has the third largest proven oil reserves after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Despite high production, primary industries constitute less than 6.2% of GDP. Contrast this with embryonic economies that were just emerging from colonial control, where a few million dollars was disproportionately above average income and you could buy yourself a government by creating a ruling oligarchy.
"We only negotiate with terrorists when they're selling oil."
The capitalist deception is that money bought weapons for the ruling class to do the dirty work of taking these resources by force when necessary. Doing big business with a thug empowers him; when he's several orders of magnitude wealthier than everyone in his community, you get a polarized society of highly successful armed gangs and oppressed people. When he's also a religious extremist you get the Taliban. Can a free market exist without a free society?
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS/countries...
South America is full of resources and natural wealth, and should be a very wealthy economy. The only thing holding parts of the continent back is the class warfare and old marxist/socialist governments.
Look at how well Chile (a benchmark for modern western markets via Milton Friedman et al) and Argentina (for a time) recovered. That is what Venezuela should also look like. I have never heard anybody argue for the South American style of socialist dictatorships and against the reforms that have been demonstrated in the other, successful, nations of the region.
See 'The Miracle of Chile':
I don't particularly like him, but I think it was inevitable that someone like him would show up given the history of economic inequality in the country. You have to realise that you can only tell people it's their fault for being poor for so long before they react.
Current problems in Venezuela are the responsibility of this government.
I specially like when they says things like the fact that there are teenagers girls aged say 17, getting pregnant because of the lack of education in our school system. And yet nobody seems to realize that a 17 year old girl was 4 when Chavez got to power.
I tell you, the things us Venezuelans need to hear everyday... it makes you want to cry.
Incompetence at its finest.
Having just lived in 5 different countries in South America over the last year and a half, I disagree. If I had to pick "The Only Thing" holding parts of the continent back, I have to say the severe meddling of the west. It's disgraceful.
Venezuela is not a dictatorship; it's been a democracy since 1958. It's true that it's socialist, just like Canada and France, but it's struggling with much bigger problems of corruption, illiteracy, poverty, and crime than those countries are. I don't think Chávez has improved the situation much. Chávez's government may not be a very good democratic government, but it is at least a democracy. The opposition is even worse, which is why they don't get elected.
I live in Argentina. The country has immense potential, but it's been in intermittent decline since the 1930s. It has never had a Marxist government. The periods of rapid decline have largely coincided with right-wing military dictatorships, although there have been a few major disasters under democratic governments as well, notably the 2001 economic collapse produced by the unsustainable 1990s economic policies you are commending.
It's useless to blame "class warfare" for the problems. Even if it's true that the rich are in a state of war with the rest of society (and I think it's a substantial exaggeration; expatriating your ill-gotten gains, making racist remarks about Paraguayan immigrants, and hiring employees under the table does not rise to the level of warfare) the path to reconciliation is through building a society they feel proud to be included in and confident in investing in, not blaming them for the social problems we all have a hand in creating.
Chile has barely surpassed Argentina economically after 80 years of Argentine decline. It's true that it has a more functioning economy, but I'm not sure that the society as a whole is functioning better.
Chile also never had a socialist dictatorship, nor has Uruguay, Venezuela, or Brazil, so I think that when you talk about "the South American style of socialist dictatorships" you are lying about history in hopes that your readers will be ignorant. Maybe there's something that actually happened in the real world that that phrase is intended to refer to?