That's never a completely true statement. It is much nearer false for Venezuela, where the last free elections filled their Congress with the opposition, and where people are literally fighting their government on the streets.
Notice I said "the last free election". It is prone to a no true Scotchmen fallacy, but when the police start to violently stop people from voting you can be sure an election wasn't free anymore.
I’m just wondering... in which governing scheme is corruption not the default? I can’t think of any in use today by a country or large organization where it’s not there in one way or another.
The only solution, I think, is to have an extremely low tolerance for corruption (and incompetence because that’s often what corruption is disguised as) such that anybody in power would be too scared to do corrupt shit because they know they’ll get put in to jail and get the hole bill put into their name, but such a thing wouldn’t work because none of the types of people that want to be in power would ever let something like that take place because, well, they want to stay in power.
The answer is not in policing corruption, since everyone is subject to corruption (no population is free of bad apples), but in preventing corruption. If there is not much power to be had by those seeking election, then the people "in power" are not worth influencing. Note: not anarchy and not anti-regulation; just a little slightly anti-lots of government power. EDIT: But this is the right idea.
A government is a monopoly by definition. And in a monopoly, competence is useless - being replaced by corruption (just a different skill). But the more areas the government is involved, the more corruption it spreads. And in socialism the government does it all: production, jobs, education, health care, etc.
As two notable countries of significant interest to HN readers recently proved, frustrated voters are easily led astray by populist demagogues with big promises and low tolerances for truth-telling.
I'm mainly annoyed by the association of Venezuela's disaster with socialism. What the voters "bought" was a populist system; the political underpinnings are almost entirely irrelevant.
Scandinavia is fraught with the socialist devil too, yet manages to get by just fine.
Nobody wants BSF. Plus the government does shenanigans with the exchange rate, with the official exchange rate having no relationship to reality.
If you refloat debt in a different valueless currency that you control the exchange rate on, you're de facto defaulting - nobody wants your currency. They want hard currency.
Re: currency you don't control, do you consider Ecuador a colony? They have debt in the sucre, which is pegged to the dollar. Is most of Europe a colony of Brussels? Except for the British and the Swiss, everybody else runs debt in Euros, which they don't control.
You should ask some Greeks if they feel they are in a colony like position with respect to Brussels/Germany. Controlling your own money is a key factor to maintaining sovereignty. Goldbugs take this to a level where they desire personal sovereignty and thus a money not controlled by the government (gold or silver).
It's seldom for a debtor in need to choose the currency. If Greece kept drachma, they'd still need to borrow in euro or dollar as few would have drachmas to loan.
US can take loan in dollars because everyone has dollars to park, which is because everyone else has dollars too.
In any country with a free exchange of currency there is no problem for investors to get any amount of currency they want. They buy it on the open market. Forex is the biggest and most liquid market in the world. Before the Euro every country in Europe had bonds in their own currency. Interest rates were higher in some due to inflation and default risk, but there was no problem borrowing large sums of money.
Well, the Greeks had a grand old time borrowing against the Euro when people were still willing to lend to them.
When the piper came due, they couldn't raise interest rates or devalue their own currency to deal with the situation.
Point is, it's not a colony situation. For a while, Greeks loved the fact they could borrow against the EU with low interest rates, much lower than their own financial situation would indicate. Once people started wanting their money back, yes, this limited their options. They probably shouldn't have put their own economy into that situation though, that's why the drachma used to fluctuate up and down so much and the interest rate was high, because they weren't really good for the money they borrowed.
"currency you don't control, do you consider Ecuador a colony? They have debt in the sucre, which is pegged to the dollar. Is most of Europe a colony of Brussels?"
You can make a powerful case that they are.
A country that doesn't control its money doesn't control its economic policy. Is there anything more important than the economy for a country?
A fair economic area need, first, a monetary and fiscal common policy, and, second, a policy choose in the interest of all the citizens in the area.
The Euroarea only have a monetary common policy and I'm not the only one that think that is not run in the interest of all the Europeans.
I can't talk about Ecuador, but historically, fixed exchange rates, as any fixed structure don't survive even small "earthquakes". It's even worse if it's not an fixed exchange rate, but a foreign currency. In the case of Ecuador, you can be sure that, at some point in the future, the economic policy run from Washington will be the opposite of what the country needs.
The point of the article is that the economy of Ecuador was so bad dollarization caused capital flight to stop, stabilizing the economy.
I'm not an economist, but maybe the short term benefits outweighed the long term restrictions. But it did impose some amount of financial discipline on them that they never exhibited before, and would probably boost the confidence of foreign investors that they could invest and still get money out.
As a counterpoint, Venezuela is not a colony, but their economy is in a shambles, they can't feed their own citizens, but they have ultimate monetary control and can do whatever they want to their economy. That's what got them in this mess in the first place. Some thing as PRK and Cuba.
What have private firms got to do with this? The debts are owed by the government and the government owned state oil company.
The domestic economy of Venezuela has collapsed due to extreme economic mismanagement, so switching to a local currency won’t help because the economy doesn’t have the local resources to rebuild. That means to rebuild it will need to import modern equipment and engage foreign expertise to rebuild and update infrastructure the country doesn’t have the capability to build itself anymore. Good luck getting the foreign currency needed to do that in a default.
Take the oil industry for example. Venezuela itself doesn’t have the capability to build significant new oil infrastructure or update it. In order to do that they need foreign currency to pay suppliers and contractors. So the only way to keep their oil industry going, on which the whole economy now depends, is using hard currency. They’re not going to socialist paradise their way out of this.
The paradox of Venezuela is a populist government that beasts its chest about foreign imperialism starving its citizens to make bond payments to foreigners. We're beyond the point where a sane democracy would have defaulted. The only conclusion I can come to involves cronies of the administration holding substantial amounts of the debt. The payments aren't on interest and principal, but for patronage.
It's difficult to figure out what's really going on there. I followed Abby Martin's reporting on the ground recently, and it's quite eye opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYWrPiUeWY
I've only seen a few pieces by Martin, but everyone was a gross distortion of the situation covered. She's a propagandist pushing anti-Western narratives, not a journalist summarizing the facts. I suspect her coverage here may be influenced by her anti-Western feelings.
Really? Do you have some examples of those gross distortions? So far it seems like she has an anti-capitalism slant, but that's hardly something unique or a dis-qualifier nowadays.
The bond markets have pretty much been expecting a default for several years but they have continued making payments even though they can't buy food and medicine. It's a very strange policy.
On August 25, 2017, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order limiting the government of Venezuela's ability to access certain types of international financing. This would certainly curtail the governments ability to ease the pressure of bond payments.
when you cant sell assets, you cant repay a bond. PDVSA, the nationalized oil asset of the state of Venezuela, is now legally prohibited from dealing with US markets.
While this all seems to be a reasonable response to the Maduro leadership issues in the country, one becomes immediately suspicious of the US intent in latin america when Vice President Pence cites the motivation as 'ensuring democracy.' the sentiment has about a 40 year grim history in the region as it applies to US foreign policy.
> one becomes immediately suspicious of the US intent in latin america
These restrictions are forcing an inevitable outcome sooner. Venezuela's debt load is unsustainable for reasons entirely of Chavez and Maduro's doing (as well as the people who elected them in elections that were, until fairly recently, fair and free [1]).
Suspicion is good. Using baseless suspicion to deflect attention from a well-based problem is not.
I've read and enjoyed it. Knowing good people who work and have worked for Bechtel, et cetera, I can assure you that the riveting read it makes contains some truths and many exaggerations.
The laws the U.S. is deploying here are designed to prevent a despot from pilfering a population's wealth to pay cronies. Letting Maduro liquidate PDVSA to pay debts which should be defaulted on is precisely the intent of the law, an intent which aligns the United States with Venezuela.
Again, suspicion is healthy. But using the possibility of an international conspiracy to detract from a well-established national one (in Venezuela) is disingenuous.
In this case, though, the point is that it doesn't actually matter.
Maybe the Washington Consensus really is a racket designed to turn underdeveloped nations into 1%-favoring client states. (Frankly, the least convincing part of Perkins is the claim that this is a formal conspiracy instead of a convenient result of non-conspiracy functioning.)
Even if that's true, refusing to deal with PDVSA is far from unreasonable on a practical and moral level. Maduro is running an unsustainable, patronage-based con, to the detriment of his country. Freezing his ability to do that via international finance is a pretty reasonable move, so it doesn't actually tell us anything about the presence or absence of a conspiracy.
> You've decided the only way Venezuela can emerge through this is by collapse and rebirth
No, I have not. There are three ways a sovereign can deal with its debt: taxation, inflation and default. Chavez nationalized everything he could. Maduro inflated away the locally-denominated debt [1]. Dollar-denominated debt is immune to Bolivar inflation, so what's left is further taxation or default.
Maduro is choosing further taxation. ("Taxation" refers to the government's take rate of economic activity. Democracies publish tax rates. Dictatorships seize.) I'm arguing they should default. This would be good for Venezuela but bad for Maduro's regime, which appears to use dollar debt for patronage.
You probably mean well, but you are basically arguing against progress. The US might have ill intent, but even assuming ill intent, that intent is still better for the people of Venezuela than the current government which has left them starving and represses them.
The president of the U.S. undermining the results of a free and fair Latin American election is not "progress". That's par for course since at least 1904.[1]
Getting a non authoritarian regine in place would be progress in almost every way. The Monroe Doctrine precedes 1904. It's interesting that the Venezuelans have been in favor of it at times:
It is clear what Venezuelans are in favor of; they just had an election. If you support undermining the election for their own good... who is the authoritarian here?
Either you believe the election was unfair or you believe it was fair but we, the U.S., have the right to undermine it. The latter is trivially an authoritarian, anti-democratic stance, although unfortunately par for course in U.S. - Latin American affairs.
If you think it was unfair, you're going to have to cite some evidence. I've cited independent observers who noted the very high transparency of Venezuelan elections, to which you really had no response.[1]
regardless of what you think of Trump, this is the correct action. The maduro govt is not just full of issues, they are murdering and starving their own population and any funds are used to prop up the privileged few elite in the aristocracy. El mercosur is about to expulse venezuela so this is not just some yankee only EEUU foreign agression bs. If you support the Maduro government, you're against humanity at this point.
54% of the population supported the Maduro government in the election.[1] If you think Trump is taking the "correct action," you're against democracy at this point.
No, there is good reason to believe the election was fair. The mainstream U.S. reporting on this is extremely biased; the U.S. has a long history of deeply anti-democractic attitudes towards Latin America (since at least the Monroe Doctrine). Excellent and detailed reporting here:[1]
"...key opposition candidates in the governor's races in Venezuela are gradually accepting the results as legitimate, except for one controversial close race that is being challenged in the State of Bolivar where opposition has some serious allegations due to the discrepancy in the results that the CNE announced, that's the election commission in Venezuela, the results that they announce and the printout of the report that was given to each party by the voting machines."
"ALEXANDER MAIN: First of all, it's really nothing new... Already in 2002, much of the corporate media internationally was suggesting that the presidency of Chávez had become something of a dictatorship and completely ignoring some of the anti-democratic activities of the opposition parties in Venezuela, and namely a coup d'etat was supported by most of Venezuela's opposition parties in April of 2002. This was initially represented as some sort of a popular uprising against the dictatorship, and it was really, I think, thanks to the reaction of other governments in the region that clearly saw that there was a coup d'etat that the narrative began to change around that.
"Soon afterwards, we got back into this tradition of suggesting that there was creeping authoritarianism going on in Venezuela. Very little was said about the fact that nearly every year, sometimes twice a year in Venezuela, you had elections being held at different institutional levels. These elections would typically have very big turnouts, they'd be very transparent, very free and fair... In fact, it can be argued that the electoral system in Venezuela has gotten more and more refined in terms of the degree of transparency, to the extent that in fact, it [speaks] in part to that transparency and the internal checks and balances that today you do have this controversy in the state of Bolivar... They can do this, in fact, because they have records from electronic voting machines, which everyone believes... the fact is that you have a system that's in place that can very easily allow for verification... It really is sort of a direct contradiction of this constant claim that the country is slipping into dictatorship. You don't have that when you have constant elections in which people, the majority of voters participate and where you can have confidence in the results."
Chavez was a military man who established a dictatorship, and his successor continues. You are kidding yourself if you really think this has anything to do with big bad guy US. Not all problems derive from the US.
If you consider Chavez's presidency as dictatorship, you are very mistaken. He was a populist, but never a dictator. I know Vox is not always the best source of news, but this article is spot on:
This is technically true, but while in office, Chavez eliminated most of the institutions necessary for a healthy democracy (eg independent judiciary). If he was not technically a dictator, he acted like one, and his successor is filling the role he made possible.
My go-to source on this has actually been Jacobin - first because socialist regimes abroad are their wheelhouse, and second because they're particularly incentivized to give a positive view of Venezuela. They gave Chavez consistent support well past 2002, which makes me think they're not subject to the criticism you've offered here.
And yet... Well, these days their reporting looks like:
There is nothing in your sources that disputes the legitimacy of the election results. Your second citation actually criticizes the first:
In a recent article, Mike Gonzalez pronounced the Bolivarian Revolution dead: “This project has failed.” Needless to say, this cavalier suggestion would come as a surprise to those on the ground... Gonzalez begins with a strange conspiracy theory: that a helicopter attack against government targets was really a false flag operation carried out by the government itself. Unfortunately for him, this unsubstantiated innuendo — which echoed right-wing talking points — didn’t age well: less than a week later, Oscar Pérez made an appearance at an opposition rally.
It continues,
By portraying a chaotic constellation of facts without explaining their causes, by heaping blame onto the government while letting the opposition and imperialism off the hook, Gonzalez’s account shares much with its professed adversaries... left almost entirely out of this picture are the hundreds of thousands struggling for socialism on the grassroots level and having to make difficult decisions — with real consequences — amid the crisis of the present.
And your third source explicitly calls "to reject any and all calls for imperialist interventions aimed at 'saving' Venezuela." In conclusion it calls for us
to stand in solidarity with the majority of Venezuelans who are suffering at the hands of a vengeful, reckless opposition, and an incompetent, unaccountable government. There is little doubt popular-class support for the government has declined in recent years... It is equally clear popular-class support for the opposition remains limited, likely due to the popular classes’ well-founded distrust of and disgust towards the opposition, and particularly its violent, leading edge.
In short, they had an election where the people had to make some hard choices, like many democracies. Your sources do not dispute the validity of the election. A foreign country undermining an election in support of the violent opposition, which was explicitly rejected by the popular vote, is objectively not "in the interests of the people."
As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I recommend watching Abby Martin's on the ground reporting in Venezuela to get a full picture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYWrPiUeWY (this particular episode is one of many examples)
When this is the outcome, I am definitely against democracy. The Nazis were elected into power through democratic processes, does that make anything they did somehow ligitimate? Do the venezuelan people deserve to die of starvation and lack of basic medical necesities b/c they elected a criminal into power (assuming your stats are true)?
The Nazis were elected into power through democratic processes
This is not true. The high-water mark for the Nazis was 43.9% in the 1933 election, far short of a majority. Hitler was appointed chancellor in a shady backroom deal and shortly afterwards banned all other political parties.
It seems you're assuming democratic systems/processes are only two party and rule by majority i.e. votes of > 50% means power. Thats not what I said, but if thats your definition then though a valid point, it still doesn't apply to the nazi situation. Most social democratic systems in Europe now and then dont work this way. You can easily become a controlling party by getting 20-30% of the vote even today in Germany for instance. At the time it was much worse, you could become a represented political party with a very low % of votes (under 5%)
The ability of external powers is a point I bring up when people go on about Venezuela being a failed socialist state.
With the stroke of their pens, other nations have limited what Venezuela can achieve on its own, and are forced to play the game as usual.
How anyone can say it a symbol of failed socialism states when you're being squeezed by international super powers into a corner with no real access, I have no idea.
Blind zealotry of their home land, IMO. I have zero faith or respect for humanity at this stage.
"Almost every hedge fund" is a bit of an exaggeration but outside of the hedge fund universe, PDVSA bonds are definitely held by a lot of mutual funds I guarantee that some people here own.
I think this actually misstates the problem in an important way, because many people believe that we can simply print more, ignoring the entire other side of the equation.
There has to be something to buy with that money or it's worthless paper and metal. There have to be people working to provide goods and services. If that's not the case for whatever reason--because of a lack of resources, because enough of society has broken down that people can't, won't or don't work, or whatever else--you see failures.
So it's not just a currency problem. It's a problem of whether things that are actually useful to people are being produced and money is just a way of measuring the exchanges. Pretty much any naive maximization of money results in issues, whether that involves ignoring externalities for profit, or broken incentives caused by distributing piles of money that cannot, on average, be exchanged for useful goods or services.
I've always heard in the past how socialism had terrible economic outcomes for the poor folks that fell into it with self inflicted famines and all sorts of abuses. It's interesting to see a live one play out during my adulthood and it makes me wonder how much overlap there is among the historical set.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadThe only solution, I think, is to have an extremely low tolerance for corruption (and incompetence because that’s often what corruption is disguised as) such that anybody in power would be too scared to do corrupt shit because they know they’ll get put in to jail and get the hole bill put into their name, but such a thing wouldn’t work because none of the types of people that want to be in power would ever let something like that take place because, well, they want to stay in power.
Scandinavia is fraught with the socialist devil too, yet manages to get by just fine.
Venezuela private firms should all be run through administration to wipe out the creditors and re-floated with Bolivar investment.
If you refloat debt in a different valueless currency that you control the exchange rate on, you're de facto defaulting - nobody wants your currency. They want hard currency.
Re: currency you don't control, do you consider Ecuador a colony? They have debt in the sucre, which is pegged to the dollar. Is most of Europe a colony of Brussels? Except for the British and the Swiss, everybody else runs debt in Euros, which they don't control.
US can take loan in dollars because everyone has dollars to park, which is because everyone else has dollars too.
When the piper came due, they couldn't raise interest rates or devalue their own currency to deal with the situation.
Point is, it's not a colony situation. For a while, Greeks loved the fact they could borrow against the EU with low interest rates, much lower than their own financial situation would indicate. Once people started wanting their money back, yes, this limited their options. They probably shouldn't have put their own economy into that situation though, that's why the drachma used to fluctuate up and down so much and the interest rate was high, because they weren't really good for the money they borrowed.
You can make a powerful case that they are.
A country that doesn't control its money doesn't control its economic policy. Is there anything more important than the economy for a country?
A fair economic area need, first, a monetary and fiscal common policy, and, second, a policy choose in the interest of all the citizens in the area.
The Euroarea only have a monetary common policy and I'm not the only one that think that is not run in the interest of all the Europeans.
I can't talk about Ecuador, but historically, fixed exchange rates, as any fixed structure don't survive even small "earthquakes". It's even worse if it's not an fixed exchange rate, but a foreign currency. In the case of Ecuador, you can be sure that, at some point in the future, the economic policy run from Washington will be the opposite of what the country needs.
> A country that doesn't control its money doesn't control its economic policy. Is there anything more important than the economy for a country?
http://www.coha.org/examining-the-effects-of-dollarization-o...
The point of the article is that the economy of Ecuador was so bad dollarization caused capital flight to stop, stabilizing the economy.
I'm not an economist, but maybe the short term benefits outweighed the long term restrictions. But it did impose some amount of financial discipline on them that they never exhibited before, and would probably boost the confidence of foreign investors that they could invest and still get money out.
As a counterpoint, Venezuela is not a colony, but their economy is in a shambles, they can't feed their own citizens, but they have ultimate monetary control and can do whatever they want to their economy. That's what got them in this mess in the first place. Some thing as PRK and Cuba.
They are already too oil export heavy. Without proper inputs the outputs will be inferior, unexportable and inefficient.
The domestic economy of Venezuela has collapsed due to extreme economic mismanagement, so switching to a local currency won’t help because the economy doesn’t have the local resources to rebuild. That means to rebuild it will need to import modern equipment and engage foreign expertise to rebuild and update infrastructure the country doesn’t have the capability to build itself anymore. Good luck getting the foreign currency needed to do that in a default.
Take the oil industry for example. Venezuela itself doesn’t have the capability to build significant new oil infrastructure or update it. In order to do that they need foreign currency to pay suppliers and contractors. So the only way to keep their oil industry going, on which the whole economy now depends, is using hard currency. They’re not going to socialist paradise their way out of this.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/08/25/exec...
when you cant sell assets, you cant repay a bond. PDVSA, the nationalized oil asset of the state of Venezuela, is now legally prohibited from dealing with US markets.
While this all seems to be a reasonable response to the Maduro leadership issues in the country, one becomes immediately suspicious of the US intent in latin america when Vice President Pence cites the motivation as 'ensuring democracy.' the sentiment has about a 40 year grim history in the region as it applies to US foreign policy.
These restrictions are forcing an inevitable outcome sooner. Venezuela's debt load is unsustainable for reasons entirely of Chavez and Maduro's doing (as well as the people who elected them in elections that were, until fairly recently, fair and free [1]).
Suspicion is good. Using baseless suspicion to deflect attention from a well-based problem is not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Venezuela#Voting_...
I suggest your read or watch this and you'll be immediately less suspicious [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
The laws the U.S. is deploying here are designed to prevent a despot from pilfering a population's wealth to pay cronies. Letting Maduro liquidate PDVSA to pay debts which should be defaulted on is precisely the intent of the law, an intent which aligns the United States with Venezuela.
Again, suspicion is healthy. But using the possibility of an international conspiracy to detract from a well-established national one (in Venezuela) is disingenuous.
Maybe the Washington Consensus really is a racket designed to turn underdeveloped nations into 1%-favoring client states. (Frankly, the least convincing part of Perkins is the claim that this is a formal conspiracy instead of a convenient result of non-conspiracy functioning.)
Even if that's true, refusing to deal with PDVSA is far from unreasonable on a practical and moral level. Maduro is running an unsustainable, patronage-based con, to the detriment of his country. Freezing his ability to do that via international finance is a pretty reasonable move, so it doesn't actually tell us anything about the presence or absence of a conspiracy.
That's the problem here. You've decided the only way Venezuela can emerge through this is by collapse and rebirth.
Pushing 31 million people right to the brink and hoping they fall your way is far from inevitable.
It doesn't have to be that dramatic and painful.
No, I have not. There are three ways a sovereign can deal with its debt: taxation, inflation and default. Chavez nationalized everything he could. Maduro inflated away the locally-denominated debt [1]. Dollar-denominated debt is immune to Bolivar inflation, so what's left is further taxation or default.
Maduro is choosing further taxation. ("Taxation" refers to the government's take rate of economic activity. Democracies publish tax rates. Dictatorships seize.) I'm arguing they should default. This would be good for Venezuela but bad for Maduro's regime, which appears to use dollar debt for patronage.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Venezuel...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_crisis_of_1895
If you think it was unfair, you're going to have to cite some evidence. I've cited independent observers who noted the very high transparency of Venezuelan elections, to which you really had no response.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15536102
https://elhem.co/2017/07/27/nicolas-maduro-accused-of-crimes...
[1] https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/venezuela-election-resu...
"...key opposition candidates in the governor's races in Venezuela are gradually accepting the results as legitimate, except for one controversial close race that is being challenged in the State of Bolivar where opposition has some serious allegations due to the discrepancy in the results that the CNE announced, that's the election commission in Venezuela, the results that they announce and the printout of the report that was given to each party by the voting machines."
"ALEXANDER MAIN: First of all, it's really nothing new... Already in 2002, much of the corporate media internationally was suggesting that the presidency of Chávez had become something of a dictatorship and completely ignoring some of the anti-democratic activities of the opposition parties in Venezuela, and namely a coup d'etat was supported by most of Venezuela's opposition parties in April of 2002. This was initially represented as some sort of a popular uprising against the dictatorship, and it was really, I think, thanks to the reaction of other governments in the region that clearly saw that there was a coup d'etat that the narrative began to change around that.
"Soon afterwards, we got back into this tradition of suggesting that there was creeping authoritarianism going on in Venezuela. Very little was said about the fact that nearly every year, sometimes twice a year in Venezuela, you had elections being held at different institutional levels. These elections would typically have very big turnouts, they'd be very transparent, very free and fair... In fact, it can be argued that the electoral system in Venezuela has gotten more and more refined in terms of the degree of transparency, to the extent that in fact, it [speaks] in part to that transparency and the internal checks and balances that today you do have this controversy in the state of Bolivar... They can do this, in fact, because they have records from electronic voting machines, which everyone believes... the fact is that you have a system that's in place that can very easily allow for verification... It really is sort of a direct contradiction of this constant claim that the country is slipping into dictatorship. You don't have that when you have constant elections in which people, the majority of voters participate and where you can have confidence in the results."
[1] http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=...
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/world/2017/9/19/16189742/ve...
And yet... Well, these days their reporting looks like:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/venezuela-maduro-helicopt...
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/venezuela-elections-chave...
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/venezuela-crisis-maduro-o...
You don't have to be a capitalist imperialist to recognize that this particular government has abandoned legitimacy and the interests of the people.
In a recent article, Mike Gonzalez pronounced the Bolivarian Revolution dead: “This project has failed.” Needless to say, this cavalier suggestion would come as a surprise to those on the ground... Gonzalez begins with a strange conspiracy theory: that a helicopter attack against government targets was really a false flag operation carried out by the government itself. Unfortunately for him, this unsubstantiated innuendo — which echoed right-wing talking points — didn’t age well: less than a week later, Oscar Pérez made an appearance at an opposition rally.
It continues,
By portraying a chaotic constellation of facts without explaining their causes, by heaping blame onto the government while letting the opposition and imperialism off the hook, Gonzalez’s account shares much with its professed adversaries... left almost entirely out of this picture are the hundreds of thousands struggling for socialism on the grassroots level and having to make difficult decisions — with real consequences — amid the crisis of the present.
And your third source explicitly calls "to reject any and all calls for imperialist interventions aimed at 'saving' Venezuela." In conclusion it calls for us
to stand in solidarity with the majority of Venezuelans who are suffering at the hands of a vengeful, reckless opposition, and an incompetent, unaccountable government. There is little doubt popular-class support for the government has declined in recent years... It is equally clear popular-class support for the opposition remains limited, likely due to the popular classes’ well-founded distrust of and disgust towards the opposition, and particularly its violent, leading edge.
In short, they had an election where the people had to make some hard choices, like many democracies. Your sources do not dispute the validity of the election. A foreign country undermining an election in support of the violent opposition, which was explicitly rejected by the popular vote, is objectively not "in the interests of the people."
This is not true. The high-water mark for the Nazis was 43.9% in the 1933 election, far short of a majority. Hitler was appointed chancellor in a shady backroom deal and shortly afterwards banned all other political parties.
With the stroke of their pens, other nations have limited what Venezuela can achieve on its own, and are forced to play the game as usual.
How anyone can say it a symbol of failed socialism states when you're being squeezed by international super powers into a corner with no real access, I have no idea.
Blind zealotry of their home land, IMO. I have zero faith or respect for humanity at this stage.
The US and other governments have been meddling in SA for decades.
Something that CANNOT be tolerated when it comes to the US and its most recent election, right?
There has to be something to buy with that money or it's worthless paper and metal. There have to be people working to provide goods and services. If that's not the case for whatever reason--because of a lack of resources, because enough of society has broken down that people can't, won't or don't work, or whatever else--you see failures.
So it's not just a currency problem. It's a problem of whether things that are actually useful to people are being produced and money is just a way of measuring the exchanges. Pretty much any naive maximization of money results in issues, whether that involves ignoring externalities for profit, or broken incentives caused by distributing piles of money that cannot, on average, be exchanged for useful goods or services.