Maybe 800 or more have died in Puerto Rico thanks to the complete collapse of American authority and resources.
Trump is America’s Chavez. It’s only a matter of time before he launches his own presidential TV show.
This is totally true, and our response to Puerto Rico has been appalling, but this has little to nothing to do with Venezuela.
I feel like folks have some knee hey reaction to try and defend Venezuela in this thread, just because Malathor defends Trump in other threads.
That is unnecessary. Venezuela’s current government does not deserve your defense, any more than Trump deserves Malathor’s.
Venezuela’s current situation is a tragic failure of authoritarian statism on a national scale. It’s a lesson of what not to do.
There is no reason to employ whataboutism in defense of what Venezuela’s leaders have done to it’s people. We should all agree that it’s terrible, just as we should all agree that Trump’s actions are terrible.
Not sure what the analogy is here. One is a natural disaster hitting a woefully unprepared territory that has been mismanaged forever, that managed to borrow and default on a debt bigger than Venezuela’s despite a tenth of the population. The other is going into famine without any natural disaster and while sitting on the largest oil reserves on earth.
Nah, it’s the reverse. There’s a kind of head-in-the-hole-ism when it comes to Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, as the banana-republic disaster that it has become, can get trotted out at any time as a pantomime villain at which we all agree to jeer. My point isn’t to excuse Venezuela but condemn by analogy America, since the same damn thing is happening here, literally.
Yeah Venezuela is a disaster because of well recognized corruption and mismanagement. That the US would allow the same thing to occur on it’s own soil and turn its back on an unfolding humanitarian disaster is shameful…
But then as Enidigm points out, tracts of the American mainland are essentially living in 3rd world condition. If only the rich had more tax cuts, I’m sure that would fix it.
Again, there are threads for Puerto Rico. It doesn’t have anything to do with Venezuela.
There’s zero reason to defend anything about venezuela.
Yeah, the New York Times had an interactive piece on Venezuela yesterday: “How to survive when money is worthless.”
“On the streets of Caracas, homeless children play with this bag of Bolvar bills as if it is Monopoly money”.
It made me think of this famous image:
Hey remember that coffee?
A million percent inflation is good right?
Must be nice having a mortgage less than a cup of coffee!
Those poor people.
What the crap is with Andorra?
For folks who aren’t aware of what’s going on:
Yeah, Maduro lost and then said he was kicking out US ambassadors or whatever.
Trump already said he wanted to invade before this happened, hopefully they sort it out and don’t give him his excuse.
Canada’s Conservative opposition also supports Guaido. Foreign affairs critic Erin O’Toole and ethics critic Peter Kent issued a statement on Tuesday saying the party “stands with them in opposing the extreme socialist policies that have led to the starvation and suffering of millions of citizens in a country that holds tremendous promise.”
Conservatives everywhere just can’t help themselves it seems. I know the rabid right love to use Venezuela as the latest example of “socialism fails!111!!”, but Venezuela is an authoritarian dictatorship. See below. It’s well known socialists hate labor and environmental laws, right?
“These miners have no labor rights at all,” says Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based senior analyst for the International Crisis Group. “They’re not protected from any of the dangerous elements — for example, the mercury that’s used in the mining.”
He adds that miners are “also severely at risk of being shot dead: Mining communities have phenomenally high homicide rates, even by the extraordinary high levels that we see in the rest of Venezuela.”
Getting reliable information is difficult because the area is highly dangerous for outsiders and locals are often too frightened to talk. Yet media and human rights activists portray a chaotic scenario in which armed gangs, fighters from Colombia’s National Liberation Army rebel group and elements of Venezuela’s military vie with one another for the control of mines, and use extortion and violence to co-opt independent miners.