The conventional long-form name of Saudi Arabia is "Kingdom of Saudi Arabia". This isn't some thing that Clinton made up, and I'm not sure why it's relevant to mention her. The country is referred to as "The Kingdom" by many. Of course, that doesn't preclude it being a dictatorship, as the two are not mutually exclusive.
In light of that, every dictator around the world should declare their kin to be the next in line. (Well not really, since that implies ideological consistency. You'd actually have to be a fool to expect that.)
Isn't that sort of a no true Scotsman argument, though? You've eliminated a whole bunch of countries with constitutional monarchies where the king, though not an absolute dictator, has significant political power. Kuwait, for instance.
The headline conceals the subtext of the piece, which is that the author feels the courts did Venezuelans a favor by acknowledging what he says residents have suspected for over a decade: Venezuela has been a dictatorship for some time now.
Venezuela'a foreign exchange reserves stand at less than $12 billion [1]. They pay over 15% of that this month to bond holders [2].
This makes no sense until one considers that the bond holders might be regime insiders. Venezuela is a state structured to maximise the transfer of wealth from the many to the few.
Shockingly, as recently as 2004 Venezuela boasted fair elections [3]. The degree to which Venezuelans are to blame for their predicament (and the related probability that they will recreate it in spite of aid) is a difficult moral question.
When a democracy transitions to a dictatorship in a decade how do you not hood the electorate responsible? They made the choices continually to allow this.
Probably the difference between something like Brexit, which no one doubts was a free and fair election, and, say, Assad, who is not really the 'fault' of the Syrian people.
I don't see anyone offering Theresa May amnesty if she'll retire quietly to Saudi Arabia or Iran or something in order to aid in the forming of a lasting peace in the British Isles.
I suppose outsiders feel more or less justified in meddling depending on how much "it's their own damned fault" ?
Plus Brexit was achieved by the most democratic of processes, Syria's government was overthrown from a foreign country, because someone else had all good contracts - how are the two comparable eludes me.
Are you actually refering to referundum as the "most democratic process" when they are (mostly) always accompanied by massive propaganda ? The Brexit one being no exception (on both sides).
Thats a frequent opinion that sounds sensible. But when you put some thought into it, you realize that a lot of the electorate are poor uneducated people who did not know better.
and in the regions most people vote for whichever party drove them to the polling booth in a bus then gave them a sack of food and a gas canister afterwards.
Venezuelan elections have never been fair - there is a lot of vote rigging from all sides
If by unbiased you mean in terms of the bias variance trade-off, and not in terms of "tends to align with beliefs of neither side of the political spectrum," then I'm inclined to agree.
How long did it take Germany to transition into a dictatorship? How long will it take the US to transition into one? For us, the laws are already in place. We're just watching and waiting for the right guy, or the wrong guy, depending on your perspective.
It's all just one poorly elected candidate away I guess. Look at what's happening in the Philippines with Duterte for a taste of why people are so concerned about Trump(regardless of whether the concern would end up founded or not).
You can't talk negatively about Clinton in Silicon Valley or on any sites run by such people. If you do here for instance you will get downvoted. I think that's a recent HN rule. You have to vote for Clinton or your not one of us.
You can't be for that clown ass or those independents whatever their names are... remember it's Clinton or gtfo!
You have be schooled in Silicon Valley democracy. Now go forth and follow the sheep in which the majority are all white men!
Everyone and their dog knows that Podesta's emails were dumped. What of it? What was in those emails that indicates Clinton is a Duterte category threat?
For the last 60 years or so, few of the world's worst dictatorships have. In fact, the worst instance of the USA invading another country was sparked by the rare instance in which a terrible dictatorship did attempt to invade another country.
Few would praise the Union of Myanmar, for instance, despite its hermetic demeanor towards the rest of the world.
Trying to work out which invasion you are thinking of. Neither Iraq nor Afganistan were triggered by dictators invading other countries. Vietnam was triggered by a dictatorial invasion but the US were essentially invited in. There have been lots of minor invasions in between but I'm struggling to place which one you mean.
Gulf War 2 was a continuation of Gulf War 1, which was prompted by Hussein's invasion of Kuwait --- in which Iraq annexed the entire country of Kuwait.
I'm choosing my words carefully when I say this was the worst instance of the USA invading another country. Gulf War 1 was justified, if any war can be justified --- you don't get a much clearer casus belli than invading and annexing an ally. Gulf War 2 was a disaster of world-historical proportions.
A country with one of the greatest oil reserves in the world, fertile land, good climate, access to the sea (world trade) and no military conflicts for a century was turned into a population of homeless people hunting dogs and cats on the streets in order to not starve to death - only possible with Socialism.
I remember how ten years ago people on my university (in a Western country) were trying to convince me that Chavez's version of Socialism is the future for humanity. And when he came to give a speech he was celebrated like a pop star.
Now you guys get to see what Chile would have turned into if it hadn't been for a certain general. Maybe after 50 years of poverty, famine and secret police your country will get back to where it started.
You're being vague here, so I can't be sure what you're implying, but if you're suggesting that Pinochet was a positive thing for Chile, that's a nightmarish thing for anyone to sign their name to. What am I missing?
I've met some reasonable, leftist-leaning people who lived through the coup, and who told me that "Something had to be done" because the country was in a state of crisis. Of course, the crisis was manufactured, Pinochet committed crimes against humanity, etc. etc.
Pinochet won a referendum in 1980 to stay in power. It may have been manipulated, but judging by the number of people I've met longing for the days of Pinochet, I wouldn't be surprised if he had a true majority supporting him. People told me variants of "He kept the trains running on time".
You're missing the alternative, which is what Allende was implementing in Chile: expropriation of private property (both farm and industry), hyperinflation, severe devaluation of currency, release of convicted guerrilla terrorists... the list goes on. In other words, what happened in Venezuela.
Is there anything that the Maduro government could do that would make you say, "I wish a right wing coup like the one that happened in Chile had happened instead"?
There are, after all, a lot of communist revolutions that turned into complete bloodbaths once the ruling party consolidated its power.
The United States was an extremely wealthy country with exceptional freedom up until the Great Depression. And this was only a short episode in US history.
Sure. The US had been rich since about 1850, and was broke like everyone else for a short time in the 1930s. But the grandparent said this kind of disaster is 'only possible with socialism', which the Great Depression proves is not true by counterexample.
The big difference here is that in Capitalism you have boom and bust cycles where on average people still get more wealthy over time while in Socialism you'll always and without exception end up in abject poverty - and what's even worse than poverty - an authoritarian government that will attempt to control and regulate every aspect of its citizens lives including persecution of wrong thoughts.
> an authoritarian government that will attempt to control and regulate every aspect of its citizens lives including persecution of wrong thoughts.
I think this is a perfect description of capitalist countries, including the US. Of course, they try to give people thousands of perceived options, like what color of car to buy, but in the end everyone needs to abide by rules that are increasingly more coercive.
And that was because of severe economic privations. Venezuela doesn't have anything to blame. Sure the price of oil has dropped, but as the previous poster said, they have fertile land and a long coast.
Last time I checked, Norway, one of the richest and happiest countries in the world, is run as a Social Democracy. Hence, Socialism is not the problem. The problem is, was, and will always be: corrupted humans running it.
In the case of Venezuela, the late Chávez and his friends stole every petro-dollar they could laid their hands on. Obviously, they also made huge public spendings, something that will naturally give a sense of prosperity and economic development, and make them very popular; yet, that public spending was not investment per-se that could later generate wealth. The Bible puts it quite clear: don't give them fish, teach them how to fish.
Now the oil money is gone so is the fake bonanza. Maduro has to stay in power in order to keep himself and his buddies out of jail.
More like "Dude and the whole leftist intellectual elite are wrong on the Internet, will never acknowledge being wrong and will be wrong again the next time the same thing happens. News at 11."
I think you did. It's hard to imagine why you'd have cited Michael Moore in the same breath as "leftist intellectual elite" otherwise.
How credible would I sound talking about a right-wing intellectual elite after referencing something Ann Coulter had said? Because that's who Michael Moore is: the Ann Coulter of the left.
Because 1) the GP referred to a Michael Moore twit and 2) the leftist intellectual elite did support Chavez. I have never claimed Michael Moore belongs to the intellectual elite, much less that he somehow leads it.
Both have supported Chavez and therefore I have mentioned both "in the same breath".
In 2005, Time magazine named Moore one of the world's 100 most influential people.
So, not exactly just a dude. Michael Moore represents a growing anti-capitalist ideology in America, and when their socialist experiments fail it should be noted.
Again not clear on why I'm meant to care what the Ann Coulter of the left thinks about Venezuela. He has lots of nice things to say about Fidel Castro era Cuba as well.
One reason is that Bernie Sanders, who was not that far off from winning the presidency, takes him very seriously.
From Michael Moore's website: "I first endorsed Bernie Sanders for public office in 1990 when he, as mayor of Burlington, VT, asked me to come up there and hold a rally for him in his run to become Vermont’s congressman."
I call 100% absolute total bullshit on the idea that Bernie Sanders takes any of his cues from Michael Moore, and I happily voted against Sanders in the Illinois primary because I thought he'd make a terrible President.
This is an extremely silly attempt to salvage a hopeless argument that Michael Moore is a meaningful data point.
Unrestrained equality leads to dictatorship. Unrestrained liberty leads to dictatorship. Democracy requires a balance between equality and liberty, and the political pluralism that is inherent in the vying for power.
Partisan fanatics who breathlessly wait for the total victory of their side would do well to remember this.
I strongly doubt that liberty & equality (before law) lead to dictatorship. Unless you mean liberty that goes as far as harming others. But that would infringe on other people's liberty.
In many "classless", free-market capitalistic societies (and a bunch of similar ones), society ends up approximating social class by the logarithm of the wealth of the person. In these cases "liberty and equality" really mean "lack of government interference in use of wealth", which ultimately translates to government restraint on social status to influence society for your own benefit.
In cases where there's no special laws targeting the wealthy, you essentially have a feudalistic society without any formalized duty of or decorum from the higher classes to the lower classes, which ultimately leads to an exploitative and abusive relationship.
As with many cases in politics, the lack of an explicit structure merely means a more abusive invisible structure.
The further argument is that this is why we should have laws which target the wealthy to provide civic funding/service, eg, higher taxes above say, $250k/yr. That allowing the dynamic class assignment of free-market economies, but formalizing the duty of the higher classes to provide for those under them, provides for the strongest and most resilient societies. Which is generally speaking what the data shows.
Similar arguments can be made about why you should have laws which provide damages if you buy a newspaper and lie about your business rivals molesting kids.
Liberty and equality are at loggerheads. Liberty is the animating principle of the modern right, and equality is the animating principle of the modern left.
I'd probably phrase it as the US leftwing and rightwing have different importances placed on different kinds of libterties a person can have and different notions of equality.
Gun rights, for the left, are an issue of liberty; while abortion, for the right, is a matter of equality.
Too often in American politics, we pretend that what are orthogonal axes are different choices in a dilemma. Here I think we have an instance of that: liberty and equality are related but mostly orthogonal groupings of several related concepts, the preference of which can lead to radically different notions of "equality" or "liberty".
That's what makes politics hard: the other guy wants liberty too, but he understands that in a fundamentally different way than you.
You've probably seen this, but for those who haven't George Lakoff give's this a fairly good treatment in this[1] on 'Moral Politics'.
By 'this' I mean the idea that the Left and the Right have different experiences of what is moral.
My issue with politics is that I think we need to extricate it from morality. Like we have separation of Church and State a la Secular Society, we need amoral politics.
If you're filipino, and ethnic filipino, it's easy for a populist government to incite economic confiscation and persecution of the ethnic group that tends to hold all the money, which happens to be the Chinese in the Phillipines.
Same thing happened in Venezuela. "All the rich people have the money! Let's go take it back! They must have cheated us somehow! Nationalize the factories."
There's also an even clearer historical tension between property rights and right-wing authoritarian dictatorships, so I'm not sure how much we can learn from your observation.
> There's also an even clearer historical tension between property rights and right-wing authoritarian dictatorships
This is true. However right-wing authoritarian dictatorships aren't usually ideologically driven, and don't pretend that what they're doing is just "for the good of the people".
Most left wing ideological governments usually go down the bitter road to the end, and do things for political rather than financial purposes. They usually end in either a referendum or revolt when all the money goes away and there are no other exits. That's what Venezuela is doing right now.
And it's also quite interesting that your response is "Oh yeah? Well the right wing does it too." What's your point?
Maybe it does, and they should be strung up by the thumbs as well. We're talking about left-wing governments who believe in central control of methods of production.
> However right-wing authoritarian dictatorships aren't usually ideologically driven, don't pretend that what they're doing is just "for the good of the people".
I'm curious. Do you have a specimen in mind?
[p.s.]
> right-wing authoritarian dictatorships aren't usually ideologically driven
And I question this as well. The ideological basis of right-wing is precisely that the natural order of things is a rigid & hierarchical and that such hierarchies are by nature more stable.
And anywho, minus the superficial comrade this and people's soviet that, what was the difference between Stalinist Soviet Union and some right wing system with a generalisimo on top?
The power went fairly smoothly from a military dictatorship to a democratically elected government.
Sure the parallel isn't perfect - Taiwan and South Korea were on a war footing against communist rump states. However, the generals never claimed any particular moral high ground or rights.
Surely they both justified their military dictatorship as a bulwark from the menace of communism and for liberation/unification of homeland, which sounds to me like "good of the Chinese/Korean people."
I patiently await for you to point me to a cite that documents that the South Korean/Taiwanese military justified their rule because they asserted the right to dress up in military uniforms and lord it over the rest of the population.
That last bit isn't true at all for South Korea. Park Chung-hee, the general who ruled for nearly 20 years, was president under 3 constitutions, each further consolidating his power, importantly with the appearance of a democratic mandate. Despite the appearance of a democracy and the Reagan-like legacy he holds, Park was definitely a dictator: under the Yusin constitution, the president (only Park was eligible to run for president per carefully designed requirements) appointed the parliament, could suspend any freedom, and even legislate without his parliament's rubber stamp in emergencies.
Most enterprise was limited to Park's inner circle (which became the chaebol), allowing him to have a planned economy that finally surpassed North Korea's. Labor rights were nonexistent, journalists and other writers frequently became political prisoners, and travel outside the country was not allowed. The only thing that can be convincingly said to be better (holding Western liberal democracy as best) than in North Korea is the GDP, whether that meant much to the average citizen is up for debate since North Korea remains opaque. And it surely would have carried on if not for Park's assassination, which left no obvious successor. The new constitution (remember, Yusin made sure that only Park Chung-hee could be president) had a term limit on the new president, Chun Doo-hwan, to appease democratization activists who had been incensed by the Gwangju (5/18) massacre, the murder of hundreds or thousands of people for the crime of living in a restive province. When Chun's term ended, violent protests, this time in Seoul, forced his successor to make the 6/29 Declaration, a complete capitulation to the democratization activists.
That was long...point is, South Korea's military dictators did claim a democratic mandate, justifying oppression as the only way to economic prosperity (sound familiar?). After Park Chung-hee, they sought to appease democratization activists. Despite that effort, the transition was quite messy, not "fairly smooth": between 200 and 2000 protestors were killed in one week in 1980, and democracy was finally won through violent protests in the streets of Seoul in 1987.
Basically authoritarian governments want something, and don't really care what else happens as long as they get what they want. Fanatics want to run everything.
That is also not an accurate statement. Authoritarians can be motivated by greed (Manuel Noriega), or by a desired outcome (Queen Elizabeth), or by ideology (Pol Pot).
There isn't a meaningful spectrum that has "authoritarian" on one side and "communitarian" on the other. One is a "how" and the other a "why".
I would express it other way. Right wing dictatorships get support in middle class, while left wing dictatorships get support in working class. Middle class is better educated and more loving of order, so it's easier to structure society and even transitioning to a democracy. We did it in Spain forty years ago. Working class dictatorships need more propaganda, distrust elites (except the very people in politic power) and change, so the paranoia is much bigger.
> right-wing authoritarian dictatorships aren't usually ideologically driven, don't pretend that what they're doing is just "for the good of the people
WTF? Hitler definitely said he did what he did for the good of the German people (okay. not the Jewish people or handicapped people, but the people that mattered)
It was certainly devoid of meaning when it came to its use in the name "National Socialist Worker's Party". In other contexts, it's oftsn used with substantial meaning, and even often with a consistent enough meaning that uses are comparable. But that doesn't suddenly render the atypical uses examples of the usual meaning.
The name of his party was the German National Socialist Workers Party, but other than, maybe, "German" and "National", those words had about as much connection with their common meanings as the "Democratic" in "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".
This simply is not true. Plenty of connections with socialism if you read the 25 principles of the NSDAP as translated at the Nuremberg Trials.
For instance: "All citizens must have equal rights and obligations", "Abolition of unearned (work & labor)income. Breaking of rent slavery", "Nationalization of all associated industries","Profit sharing of heavy industries","Expansion on a large scale of old age welfare","Provision of a law for free expropriation of land for the purpose of public utility". "Enabling of every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education", "State to support all outstanding intellectually gifted children".
Means nothing when he purged all the people who wanted the socialism part.
Fascism does not mean much when it comes to spectrum and can be compared to anything as long as the dictator's mood was right. It essence it believed in the strength of one man to take the nation forward.
For Nazism, you will see a mishmash of economic policy that slants a little towards the right economically as compared to Mussolini's fascism that leaned a little towards the left - he was part of the socialism movement before obvious disgruntlement.
It's not useful to compare against something defined by the whims of one man.
As is too often the case, the "it's official" in the headline really means "it's not actually official, but this makes the headline more provocative". The article goes on to describe the remaining fig leaf of a supposedly independent judiciary.
Aren't most dictatorships usually called "The Peoples Democratic Something or Other". I mean, does any dictatorship say "Constitutional Dictatorship" on their official letter-head.
Like, North Korea even calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".
Where is the worldwide leftist intelligentsia that supported this totalitarian regime from the beginning with wet dreams of "21st century socialism"?
They are all quiet now and will surely soon claim that things went wrong there and misrepresent the original intents of the "revolution".
It's time to recognize that, once again, socialism resulted in the same results that it has always achieved: hunger, death, lost freedom. And this is not because "things went wrong". It's by design.
Hopefully in the same place as the worldwide right-wing intelligentsia that so actively supported death squads in central America just a few years prior to Chavismo.
Difference is, right wing governments seem to recover much more easily than left wing ones.
Chile, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, they all had people who got "disappeared" but all their citizens are currently fed, which means it's fairly possible to switch out of that mindset somehow.
The only left wing country I can think of that led its economy to recovery is China. Other than that, Venezuela, DPRK, Argentina, and Brazil don't seem to be doing so well.
This is just sophistry. The true problem with the parent comment is not that it's unaware of the right wing's role in political violence, but that it's seizing on a word ("socialism") that it doesn't bother to define --- and the word means different things in practically every place it's used.
"and the word means different things in practically every place it's used"
It was once used enthusiastically by the Great and the Good to describe Venezuela. Venezuelan leaders still use it freely to describe their policy.
Recently though, the intelligentsia has become reluctant to attribute Venezuela as Socialist, leaving the matter conspicuously ambiguous with much discussion of oil prices mumble mumble. Thankfully our thought leaders have come to the rescue and solved this problem by declaring Venezuela a Dictatorship, so we no longer need to step around the precious S word.
It's like when a fast food joint gets so undeniably filthy, their franchise is revoked. Protect the brand by denying association when something goes wrong.
Forgetting all the European left wing governments, depending on what time frame you want to cherry pick from most of them didn't need recovering. Iceland maybe?
Thing is, other factors, foreign support/interference, wars, corruption have more of an impact than left/right posturing of governments.
I wonder how a world without main stream media would look like... Would it be a better place? So much negativity, hidden agenda, pay for play, etc. is present, that one would probably be better off staying uninformed, than reading articles with God knows what agenda.
I'm struggling to understand how a world without professional journalists (because that's what "mainstream media" means) would be better.
Given the choice of getting my reporting from either pseudonymous posters writing on random blogs, or professional journalists who write under their own name, abide by an ethics code, and are supported by a publishing organization that includes editors and fact checkers -- well, I'll rather pay for the latter in any world.
Someone(s) down-voted you, but I think you have a point.
In 10 years we'll probably find out that the CIA orchestrated this whole fiasco. I mean, that's pretty much the story of, like, every thing that ever goes wrong in every country. Or near enough. I don't mean to sound hyperbolic, but yeah c'mon.
No, you're not off the mark. What's happening in Venezuela is a direct result of economic sabotage. We wanted Hugo Chavez out so bad but invasion was not an option, so we started on the other front.
All those demonstrations by the so-called opposition were not by accident. On the contrary, they were well orchestrated. The same stunt we tried to pull off in Cuba just late last year.
Fortunately for Cubans, they arrested the lead front man, who was operating under the guide of a member of a Jewish religious group.
... which, based on all the actual evidence, the US had nothing to do with beyond having an official position that Chavez shouldn't be removed by extra-constitutional means.
If the CIA had staged a coup Chavez would have been killed when he was captured. They're not amateurs.
And Eva Golinger makes a lot of accusations in her book that are literally crazy, particularly surrounding Chavez's death.
Well, a bunch of people will blame the CIA, but you can draw a pretty heavy dark line from the average Venezuelan voter to the problems they're having today.
And why would an authorian regime in one country justify American destabilization in their territory?
Jesus, I'm tired of american military acting world police pretty much everywhere. I do not like dictatorships, but bombing people into democracy rarely works, as northern Iraq is an excellent example of.
Cuba: Have a look into the economic sanctions cuba was under for the last ~60 years. Without substantial help from other nations, notably Venezuela, I don't doubt the government would've fallen long ago.
N.Korea: Nations that have had "second-in-command" officials "eaten alive by... hungry dogs" for "attempting to overthrow the state" in the last 3 years won't be listed on my top ten stable countries.
I lived in Venezuela as the son of a diplomat in the late 80s. It was a wonderful country. As a middle schooler (grades 6-8) I rode my BMX bike all over Caracas with my buddy with no fear in the world.
The funny thing is, at that time, Venezuela was known to have suffered quite a decline from it's heights in the late 70s and early 80s when it was on the cusp of being a 1st world country thanks to the oil boom and (relatively) smart investment in infrastructure.
Even back then they had price controls, where the prices of things were printed on the packaging of all products.
It's always a shame when a country suffers, and it's particularly sad to me because I know the country well, and there are a lot of great things to celebrate about the country.
LOL. I, too, sometimes forget HN is an American majority community and get enraged by the occasional foolishly bold comment like parent's. But then the reality sets in... I am on American soil here on HN! What was I expecting?
Maduro was elected president. There's no vote upcoming, just yet another recall referendum, this one which failed to get going in the courts.
Honduras on the other hand had an elected president. Obama bankrolled his generals, who overthrew him in a coup in 2009, and then he continued bankrolling them. Where are the US newspaper headlines about the Honduran dictatorship? The Organization of American States, with the exception of the US, is who was condemning this.
Insofar as Venezuela's oil business doing badly...what country is the the energy business doing well in? Fracking and North Dakotan energy businesses are going bankrupt left and right, which is said to be the fault of Arabian oil flows, but when Venezuela's economy suffers from the same thing it's said to be due to mismanagement or whatever nonsense.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos has his newspaper spin things in the interests of American billionaires, what a shock. The majority of Venezuelans don't give a damn what the yanquis think, they can just look to what they did to Honduras, a real dictatorship, seven years ago, and what they're still doing.
Americans loooove to get up and pontificate in some kind of imperial self-satisfaction. Like how the Osama bin Laden and the mujahideen would overthrow Afghanistan's secular government in the 1980s with America's arms, money and blessing. Kind of hit Americans in the ass when they strung Arabia with military bases, causing a response of a plane flying through the Pentagon from those guys they bankrolled in the 1980s like bin Laden. Blowback from America's imperial pretensions.
Correct. Venezuela is suffering as a result of being an oil-producing country, and the same has happened to similar economies. And saying that Maduro is a dictator is nonsense. First because he is an elected representative, and second because America never cares about supporting dictators, as long as they play nicely according to their interests. For example, right now we had a soft-coup in Brazil and the president-in-office is extremely unpopular, but I hardly hear any complains from the mainstream media.
The other thing that needs to be understood is that Venezuela has decided to become a socialist country. When that happens, it is normal that the GDP decreases as the economy reorganizes itself. But as income is shifted from the rich to the rest of society, most of the population will benefit, even if there is no real GDP growth.
Do you actually believe that an orderly transition to socialism is what's happening in Venezuela, or are you just presenting that as a theoretical framework for some kind of ideal case?
From his handle (and comment) he/she seems to be Brazilian, a kind of people that see the world with red-coloured lenses and believe the next populist is always the best one.
This is just an observation of what is going on in Venezuela. They have opted for a socialist economy and this necessarily requires a reordering of the economic forces. If people like it or not is another issue - most certainly the rich people in Venezuela hate it.
Anyone who has a medical condition in Venezuela probably dislikes this "reordering of economic forces" too. There are nearly no pharmaceuticals. Operating rooms can't function. One in three patients in hospitals end up dead according to the government's own statistics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Venezuela#2010s
This isn't what socialism is supposed to look like.
As for the rich: the old rich certainly are poorer, and the old middle class seems to be sinking below poverty line by international metrics... But don't forget that there is a new class of rich people in Venezuela, as the leading party's inner circle has accumulated wealth. Even North Korea has its rich people despite its extreme Stalinist interpretation of socialism.
Most people in Venezuela never had access to pharmaceuticals. And, while any difficulties in health care are deplorable, lack of medical resources is the norm on third world countries. So it is difficult to assess how much of this was due to the regime policies or to the bad shape of the economy. The problem in doing this assessment is that all coverage of Venezuela is ideologically tainted. Any perceived problem in Venezuela is taken as the direct result of socialist policies, when in fact the country was poor longer before Chavez came to power. But for example, few newspapers will talk about the fact that the GDP of Venezuela has almost tripled since socialists came to power.
Venezuela's closest ideological match Cuba does a much better job of providing healthcare for its citizens, and Cuba doesn't have any oil wealth. Wouldn't that indicate that the problem is with Venezuela's regime specifically?
The GDP has tripled, yet the average citizen's health and purchasing power are worse in the same time period. Where is the money? What kind of socialism are they building when even poor stagnating Cuba manages to look like a positive example?
But as income is shifted from the rich to the rest of society, most of the population will benefit
The Socialist Fairy Tale Ending.
Now, I've never been to Venezuela, but weren't they running out of toilet paper, bread, and butter, earlier this year? Or is that just how the Western Media is spinning it so we all fear Socialism, while on the ground forced asset seizure by the state is paradise realised?
If the income is really shifting from the rich to the rest of society, it's kind of hard to explain how Chavez's daughter is worth four billion dollars while ordinary people can't get toilet paper or antibiotics. Seems to me like the cash is actually flowing in the other direction.
There's a pretty hard limit on the benefit that can be achieved that way with no real growth in output, even in the car where redistribution actually proceeds and does so flawlessly. OTOH, I think there's plenty of evidence that Venezuela had largely been governed by a kleptocracy with socialist rhetoric rather than some ideal socialist redistributionist regime.
Honduras on the other hand had an elected president. Obama bankrolled his generals, who overthrew him in a coup in 2009, and then he continued bankrolling them. Where are the US newspaper headlines about the Honduran dictatorship? The Organization of American States, with the exception of the US, is who was condemning this.
The OAS vote suspending Honduras from the organization was unanimous.. including the US.
The US and Costa Rica also negotiated with Honduras to have Zelaya reinstated (san jose accord).
If the supreme court of Honduras issues an arrest warrant for the president.. in what way is that the fault of the US? Surely you're not suggesting some kind of grand conspiracy involving the US, the Honduras supreme court, Honduras military, multiple OAS members and Costa Rica... all working together to remove the president of Honduras just so that 6 months later they could hold an new election and continue their democracy? That would be a bit crazy.
Man, I really wish US intelligence agencies were as competent and powerful in real life as they are in conspiracy theories. We would be running the world.
Can't wait until an election to declare the end of democracy? A recall referendum was thrown out by the courts, and the opposition haven't won an election in nearly 20 years.
It's official: Washington Post declares Venezuela a dictatorship on a monthly basis for past 17 years, is now openly encouraging a(nother) coup.
At least the editorial isn't written by Donald Rumsfeld, like it was in 2007[1].
"[..]a relatively large, relatively sophisticated major oil producer just three hours’ flying time from the United States has just become the second all-out, no-more-elections dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere."
Seems like a bit of a hysterical speculation based on the judicial rejection of a recall referendum between elections.
I realize that the opposition placed a lot of their hopes of turning over the results of the last election on this, but just because their plan failed doesn't mean democracy has ended. And anyway, they've clearly fallen to plan B, the same plan for if the referendum was defeated, to get the US to help with another coup. Clinton has probably indicated that she's into it. She loves that sort of thing.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadMore interesting questions include whether Turkey or Saudi are dictatorships.
Did I just miss an attempt at sarcasm, here?
That was her response to a dig about why we're not pushing for democracy in Saudi Arabia. It was her way of saying they don't need democracy.
This makes no sense until one considers that the bond holders might be regime insiders. Venezuela is a state structured to maximise the transfer of wealth from the many to the few.
Shockingly, as recently as 2004 Venezuela boasted fair elections [3]. The degree to which Venezuelans are to blame for their predicament (and the related probability that they will recreate it in spite of aid) is a difficult moral question.
[1] https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/venezuela-new-roadblock-re...
[2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-venezuela-602c...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_recall_referendum...
I suppose outsiders feel more or less justified in meddling depending on how much "it's their own damned fault" ?
Venezuelan elections have never been fair - there is a lot of vote rigging from all sides
You can't be for that clown ass or those independents whatever their names are... remember it's Clinton or gtfo!
You have be schooled in Silicon Valley democracy. Now go forth and follow the sheep in which the majority are all white men!
Few would praise the Union of Myanmar, for instance, despite its hermetic demeanor towards the rest of the world.
I'm choosing my words carefully when I say this was the worst instance of the USA invading another country. Gulf War 1 was justified, if any war can be justified --- you don't get a much clearer casus belli than invading and annexing an ally. Gulf War 2 was a disaster of world-historical proportions.
I remember how ten years ago people on my university (in a Western country) were trying to convince me that Chavez's version of Socialism is the future for humanity. And when he came to give a speech he was celebrated like a pop star.
Pinochet won a referendum in 1980 to stay in power. It may have been manipulated, but judging by the number of people I've met longing for the days of Pinochet, I wouldn't be surprised if he had a true majority supporting him. People told me variants of "He kept the trains running on time".
There are, after all, a lot of communist revolutions that turned into complete bloodbaths once the ruling party consolidated its power.
Or the United States in the early 20th Century. Grapes of Wrath and all that.
I think this is a perfect description of capitalist countries, including the US. Of course, they try to give people thousands of perceived options, like what color of car to buy, but in the end everyone needs to abide by rules that are increasingly more coercive.
US citizens, esp those under so called middle class, rank worse than most other western countries. Ya know all those Eurpean socialist ones.
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2016/08/us-is-doing-be...
In the case of Venezuela, the late Chávez and his friends stole every petro-dollar they could laid their hands on. Obviously, they also made huge public spendings, something that will naturally give a sense of prosperity and economic development, and make them very popular; yet, that public spending was not investment per-se that could later generate wealth. The Bible puts it quite clear: don't give them fish, teach them how to fish.
Now the oil money is gone so is the fake bonanza. Maduro has to stay in power in order to keep himself and his buddies out of jail.
How credible would I sound talking about a right-wing intellectual elite after referencing something Ann Coulter had said? Because that's who Michael Moore is: the Ann Coulter of the left.
Both have supported Chavez and therefore I have mentioned both "in the same breath".
There is a raise of leftists (at least in speech because in substance from Sanders to Corbyn there so much "left", rather a mild "right")
So, not exactly just a dude. Michael Moore represents a growing anti-capitalist ideology in America, and when their socialist experiments fail it should be noted.
From Michael Moore's website: "I first endorsed Bernie Sanders for public office in 1990 when he, as mayor of Burlington, VT, asked me to come up there and hold a rally for him in his run to become Vermont’s congressman."
This is an extremely silly attempt to salvage a hopeless argument that Michael Moore is a meaningful data point.
Partisan fanatics who breathlessly wait for the total victory of their side would do well to remember this.
Put more power into the hands of the common people and you end up with someone like Trump as a nominee.
Don't you think in a weaker country with more classism like Venezuela, that if a Trump were elected, that you'd end up with something like this?
The majority can turn a democracy into a dictatorship.
In many "classless", free-market capitalistic societies (and a bunch of similar ones), society ends up approximating social class by the logarithm of the wealth of the person. In these cases "liberty and equality" really mean "lack of government interference in use of wealth", which ultimately translates to government restraint on social status to influence society for your own benefit.
In cases where there's no special laws targeting the wealthy, you essentially have a feudalistic society without any formalized duty of or decorum from the higher classes to the lower classes, which ultimately leads to an exploitative and abusive relationship.
As with many cases in politics, the lack of an explicit structure merely means a more abusive invisible structure.
The further argument is that this is why we should have laws which target the wealthy to provide civic funding/service, eg, higher taxes above say, $250k/yr. That allowing the dynamic class assignment of free-market economies, but formalizing the duty of the higher classes to provide for those under them, provides for the strongest and most resilient societies. Which is generally speaking what the data shows.
Similar arguments can be made about why you should have laws which provide damages if you buy a newspaper and lie about your business rivals molesting kids.
I'd probably phrase it as the US leftwing and rightwing have different importances placed on different kinds of libterties a person can have and different notions of equality.
Gun rights, for the left, are an issue of liberty; while abortion, for the right, is a matter of equality.
Too often in American politics, we pretend that what are orthogonal axes are different choices in a dilemma. Here I think we have an instance of that: liberty and equality are related but mostly orthogonal groupings of several related concepts, the preference of which can lead to radically different notions of "equality" or "liberty".
That's what makes politics hard: the other guy wants liberty too, but he understands that in a fundamentally different way than you.
By 'this' I mean the idea that the Left and the Right have different experiences of what is moral.
My issue with politics is that I think we need to extricate it from morality. Like we have separation of Church and State a la Secular Society, we need amoral politics.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM
See https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC0ZB2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?.... It speaks a lot about market dominant ethnic minorities. The Chinese and the Jews are the target of a lot of these attacks.
If you're filipino, and ethnic filipino, it's easy for a populist government to incite economic confiscation and persecution of the ethnic group that tends to hold all the money, which happens to be the Chinese in the Phillipines.
Same thing happened in Venezuela. "All the rich people have the money! Let's go take it back! They must have cheated us somehow! Nationalize the factories."
This is true. However right-wing authoritarian dictatorships aren't usually ideologically driven, and don't pretend that what they're doing is just "for the good of the people".
Most left wing ideological governments usually go down the bitter road to the end, and do things for political rather than financial purposes. They usually end in either a referendum or revolt when all the money goes away and there are no other exits. That's what Venezuela is doing right now.
And it's also quite interesting that your response is "Oh yeah? Well the right wing does it too." What's your point?
Maybe it does, and they should be strung up by the thumbs as well. We're talking about left-wing governments who believe in central control of methods of production.
I'm curious. Do you have a specimen in mind?
[p.s.]
> right-wing authoritarian dictatorships aren't usually ideologically driven
And I question this as well. The ideological basis of right-wing is precisely that the natural order of things is a rigid & hierarchical and that such hierarchies are by nature more stable.
And anywho, minus the superficial comrade this and people's soviet that, what was the difference between Stalinist Soviet Union and some right wing system with a generalisimo on top?
The power went fairly smoothly from a military dictatorship to a democratically elected government.
Sure the parallel isn't perfect - Taiwan and South Korea were on a war footing against communist rump states. However, the generals never claimed any particular moral high ground or rights.
I patiently await for you to point me to a cite that documents that the South Korean/Taiwanese military justified their rule because they asserted the right to dress up in military uniforms and lord it over the rest of the population.
Most enterprise was limited to Park's inner circle (which became the chaebol), allowing him to have a planned economy that finally surpassed North Korea's. Labor rights were nonexistent, journalists and other writers frequently became political prisoners, and travel outside the country was not allowed. The only thing that can be convincingly said to be better (holding Western liberal democracy as best) than in North Korea is the GDP, whether that meant much to the average citizen is up for debate since North Korea remains opaque. And it surely would have carried on if not for Park's assassination, which left no obvious successor. The new constitution (remember, Yusin made sure that only Park Chung-hee could be president) had a term limit on the new president, Chun Doo-hwan, to appease democratization activists who had been incensed by the Gwangju (5/18) massacre, the murder of hundreds or thousands of people for the crime of living in a restive province. When Chun's term ended, violent protests, this time in Seoul, forced his successor to make the 6/29 Declaration, a complete capitulation to the democratization activists.
That was long...point is, South Korea's military dictators did claim a democratic mandate, justifying oppression as the only way to economic prosperity (sound familiar?). After Park Chung-hee, they sought to appease democratization activists. Despite that effort, the transition was quite messy, not "fairly smooth": between 200 and 2000 protestors were killed in one week in 1980, and democracy was finally won through violent protests in the streets of Seoul in 1987.
How is that even a logically coherent sentence...
Basically authoritarian governments want something, and don't really care what else happens as long as they get what they want. Fanatics want to run everything.
There isn't a meaningful spectrum that has "authoritarian" on one side and "communitarian" on the other. One is a "how" and the other a "why".
WTF? Hitler definitely said he did what he did for the good of the German people (okay. not the Jewish people or handicapped people, but the people that mattered)
https://www.quora.com/Was-Hitlers-Nazi-party-left-wing-or-ri...
Of course this probably just shows that left vs right is really one dimensional, and politics is bigger then one dimension.
Again with "trying to use the word socialist without a clear definition is not making your argument any more credible."
For instance: "All citizens must have equal rights and obligations", "Abolition of unearned (work & labor)income. Breaking of rent slavery", "Nationalization of all associated industries","Profit sharing of heavy industries","Expansion on a large scale of old age welfare","Provision of a law for free expropriation of land for the purpose of public utility". "Enabling of every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education", "State to support all outstanding intellectually gifted children".
Fascism does not mean much when it comes to spectrum and can be compared to anything as long as the dictator's mood was right. It essence it believed in the strength of one man to take the nation forward.
For Nazism, you will see a mishmash of economic policy that slants a little towards the right economically as compared to Mussolini's fascism that leaned a little towards the left - he was part of the socialism movement before obvious disgruntlement.
It's not useful to compare against something defined by the whims of one man.
Like, North Korea even calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".
They are all quiet now and will surely soon claim that things went wrong there and misrepresent the original intents of the "revolution".
It's time to recognize that, once again, socialism resulted in the same results that it has always achieved: hunger, death, lost freedom. And this is not because "things went wrong". It's by design.
Chile, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, they all had people who got "disappeared" but all their citizens are currently fed, which means it's fairly possible to switch out of that mindset somehow.
The only left wing country I can think of that led its economy to recovery is China. Other than that, Venezuela, DPRK, Argentina, and Brazil don't seem to be doing so well.
It was once used enthusiastically by the Great and the Good to describe Venezuela. Venezuelan leaders still use it freely to describe their policy.
Recently though, the intelligentsia has become reluctant to attribute Venezuela as Socialist, leaving the matter conspicuously ambiguous with much discussion of oil prices mumble mumble. Thankfully our thought leaders have come to the rescue and solved this problem by declaring Venezuela a Dictatorship, so we no longer need to step around the precious S word.
Whew.
Thing is, other factors, foreign support/interference, wars, corruption have more of an impact than left/right posturing of governments.
I wonder how a world without main stream media would look like... Would it be a better place? So much negativity, hidden agenda, pay for play, etc. is present, that one would probably be better off staying uninformed, than reading articles with God knows what agenda.
Given the choice of getting my reporting from either pseudonymous posters writing on random blogs, or professional journalists who write under their own name, abide by an ethics code, and are supported by a publishing organization that includes editors and fact checkers -- well, I'll rather pay for the latter in any world.
1 formOfGovernmentX - ie democracy, socialism, dictatorship, etc 2 On america's shit list
?
In 10 years we'll probably find out that the CIA orchestrated this whole fiasco. I mean, that's pretty much the story of, like, every thing that ever goes wrong in every country. Or near enough. I don't mean to sound hyperbolic, but yeah c'mon.
All those demonstrations by the so-called opposition were not by accident. On the contrary, they were well orchestrated. The same stunt we tried to pull off in Cuba just late last year.
Fortunately for Cubans, they arrested the lead front man, who was operating under the guide of a member of a Jewish religious group.
If the CIA had staged a coup Chavez would have been killed when he was captured. They're not amateurs.
And Eva Golinger makes a lot of accusations in her book that are literally crazy, particularly surrounding Chavez's death.
Jesus, I'm tired of american military acting world police pretty much everywhere. I do not like dictatorships, but bombing people into democracy rarely works, as northern Iraq is an excellent example of.
Something like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12766554
N.Korea: Nations that have had "second-in-command" officials "eaten alive by... hungry dogs" for "attempting to overthrow the state" in the last 3 years won't be listed on my top ten stable countries.
The funny thing is, at that time, Venezuela was known to have suffered quite a decline from it's heights in the late 70s and early 80s when it was on the cusp of being a 1st world country thanks to the oil boom and (relatively) smart investment in infrastructure.
Even back then they had price controls, where the prices of things were printed on the packaging of all products.
It's always a shame when a country suffers, and it's particularly sad to me because I know the country well, and there are a lot of great things to celebrate about the country.
Well, nice knowing ya
Honduras on the other hand had an elected president. Obama bankrolled his generals, who overthrew him in a coup in 2009, and then he continued bankrolling them. Where are the US newspaper headlines about the Honduran dictatorship? The Organization of American States, with the exception of the US, is who was condemning this.
Insofar as Venezuela's oil business doing badly...what country is the the energy business doing well in? Fracking and North Dakotan energy businesses are going bankrupt left and right, which is said to be the fault of Arabian oil flows, but when Venezuela's economy suffers from the same thing it's said to be due to mismanagement or whatever nonsense.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos has his newspaper spin things in the interests of American billionaires, what a shock. The majority of Venezuelans don't give a damn what the yanquis think, they can just look to what they did to Honduras, a real dictatorship, seven years ago, and what they're still doing.
Americans loooove to get up and pontificate in some kind of imperial self-satisfaction. Like how the Osama bin Laden and the mujahideen would overthrow Afghanistan's secular government in the 1980s with America's arms, money and blessing. Kind of hit Americans in the ass when they strung Arabia with military bases, causing a response of a plane flying through the Pentagon from those guys they bankrolled in the 1980s like bin Laden. Blowback from America's imperial pretensions.
This isn't what socialism is supposed to look like.
As for the rich: the old rich certainly are poorer, and the old middle class seems to be sinking below poverty line by international metrics... But don't forget that there is a new class of rich people in Venezuela, as the leading party's inner circle has accumulated wealth. Even North Korea has its rich people despite its extreme Stalinist interpretation of socialism.
The GDP has tripled, yet the average citizen's health and purchasing power are worse in the same time period. Where is the money? What kind of socialism are they building when even poor stagnating Cuba manages to look like a positive example?
The Socialist Fairy Tale Ending.
Now, I've never been to Venezuela, but weren't they running out of toilet paper, bread, and butter, earlier this year? Or is that just how the Western Media is spinning it so we all fear Socialism, while on the ground forced asset seizure by the state is paradise realised?
Where did you read this? Wikipedia tells a very different story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Honduran_coup_d%27%C3%A9t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Honduran_constitutional_c...
The OAS vote suspending Honduras from the organization was unanimous.. including the US.
The US and Costa Rica also negotiated with Honduras to have Zelaya reinstated (san jose accord).
If the supreme court of Honduras issues an arrest warrant for the president.. in what way is that the fault of the US? Surely you're not suggesting some kind of grand conspiracy involving the US, the Honduras supreme court, Honduras military, multiple OAS members and Costa Rica... all working together to remove the president of Honduras just so that 6 months later they could hold an new election and continue their democracy? That would be a bit crazy.
It's official: Washington Post declares Venezuela a dictatorship on a monthly basis for past 17 years, is now openly encouraging a(nother) coup.
At least the editorial isn't written by Donald Rumsfeld, like it was in 2007[1].
"[..]a relatively large, relatively sophisticated major oil producer just three hours’ flying time from the United States has just become the second all-out, no-more-elections dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere."
Seems like a bit of a hysterical speculation based on the judicial rejection of a recall referendum between elections.
I realize that the opposition placed a lot of their hopes of turning over the results of the last election on this, but just because their plan failed doesn't mean democracy has ended. And anyway, they've clearly fallen to plan B, the same plan for if the referendum was defeated, to get the US to help with another coup. Clinton has probably indicated that she's into it. She loves that sort of thing.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11...