Venezuela is toast

[Lenno]

More Socialist Folly: Venezuela Changing Time Zone To Address Energy Crisis
Let’s vote Bernie and Hillary in so we can have this kind of fun too!
Via TLR:

Venezuela’s president announced Thursday that he plans to solve the country’s energy crisis by changing time zones.
“I’m going to modify the time zone in Venezuela starting on May 1 to help save electricity,” Nicholas Maduro, Venezuela’s socialist president,said in a national address Thursday, according to Bloomberg. “I’ll explain this measure in the coming days but it’s part of the same objective: to overcome this situation.”
The government has been rationing energy across the country for months, as the hydroelectric-reliant country goes through a drought. The ruling socialist government blames the lack of water on global warming and “sabotage” by political foes, while the government’s critics cite a lack of maintenance and poor planning.
Maudro has yet to explain the details of the changes or how altering time zones would save power. Scientific studies have shown that changing the clocks doesn’t limit power use, according to Scientific American.
This isn’t the first time Maduro has resorted to bizarre schemes to deal with the country’s energy crisis. He previously gave the entire country a week off andhas extended weekends to reduce stress on the power grid. Maduro even asked women to stop blow-drying their hair to save power

[Lenno]

<img alt="The Venezuelan government owes local telecoms companies around 700 million dollars, which these firms need to honor obligations with foreign providers" class="StretchedBox W(100%) H(100%) ie-7_H(a)" src="https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/MeutR9SdztHF7cDFyHkPZA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9ODAwO2lsPXBsYW5l/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/afp.com/Part-MVD-Mvd6709620-1-1-0.jpg"/>

































The Venezuelan government owes local telecoms companies around 700 million dollars, which these firms need to honor obligations with foreign providers (AFP Photo/Luis Acosta)

More
Caracas (AFP) - Things in Venezuela keep finding ways to get worse. Because of acute shortages, people can't find basics like toilet paper. Now, it will be harder to make overseas calls or watch pay TV.
The problem is this: the global drop in oil prices has made dollars much more scarce in Venezuela -- which is dependent almost totally on petroleum for hard currency. So local telecoms companies don't have greenbacks to pay international suppliers.
President Nicolas Maduro's leftist government controls the currency market, and distributes dollars to private companies as it sees fit.
The government owes local companies around 700 million dollars, which these firms need to honor obligations with foreign providers, according to the Chamber of Telecommunications Services Companies.
So as a result, for instance, the Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica will temporarily suspend this week long distance phone service for calls to countries such as the United States, Spain, Mexico, Italy, Brazil, Colombia and Panama.
Mobile phone company Digitel, which is privately owned, has halted long distance calling services and international roaming since April 9 because it cannot reach agreement with providers on new payment timetables.
But it is not just telephone service that is affected. State-run television company Cantv, which provides cable service says it is reviewing contracts with providers of local and international content. That means there is less to watch on TV in Venezuelan living rooms.
- Raising rates -
"For two weeks now, I have lost six of my favorite channels," complained Isael Gonzalez, a 46-year-old motorcycle taxi driver and Cantv subscriber. "They were the ones showing movies and cartoons -- so I decided to unplug the whole thing. What use is it if the channels I like are off air?"
Drisley Petaquero, 36, also said several channels had been cut from her father's Directv pay-TV service.
"Especially the ones showing comics -- there used to be five and now there are just two," she said. "He complained to the company and they told him they were performing maintenance work."
The state regulator, the National Telecommunications Commission, admits there is a problem and blames the lack of dollars.
The government says Venezuela's oil revenue went from 37.2 billion dollars in 2014 to 12.6 billion dollars last year. And the country is saddled with commercial debts of 12.5 billion dollars.
Companies are desperate to raise rates.
Industry sources say that Telefonica's mobile branch Movistar was given permission in 2014 to raise its rates by 35 percent, while inflation was running at 68 percent; in 2015 it won a 35 percent rise, with inflation at 181 percent.
A basic home bundle -- cable TV, a land line and wireless Internet is cheap in Venezuela: around 1,100 Bolivares, which is equivalent to 3.54 dollars or even less than a dollar, depending on which of several exchange rates you use.
- 'Explosive demand' -
Still, regulators denied local operators permission to rate their rates in February and March.
The operators say they need a rate hike badly because foreign providers' costs are rising in the wake of a 37 percent devaluation of the Bolivar in February and because of rampant inflation.
All the debt and the delays in gaining rate hikes also mean the sector cannot make the investments it needs -- an estimated billion dollars a year. So coverage and service quality are suffering.
With prices so low, Venezuelans are tripping over each other to sign up for cell phone and mobile Internet packages. But the industry cannot keep up because of the lack of investment, the chamber of commerce said.
So networks will become saturated and service will decline, the chamber said in a recent report.
Venezuela is one of Latin America's biggest consumers of mobile data.
The country has 65 percent penetration in cable and satellite TV, and 99 percent cell phone penetration, regulators say.
All this comes on top of the day to day problems Venezuelans face just trying to buy basic necessities like food and medicine. This also stems from the shortage of dollars. The economy contracted 5.7 percent in 2015.

[ByGraceAlone]

Links? The first one isn't working.

[keyseygirl]

Watch and Share - Very Short Outstanding Video

Published on Mar 1, 2016
Just a few years ago, the government of Venezuela came for the people's guns, telling them that they'd be safer without them. Now the country is still plagued with crime, while law-abiding citizens are disarmed—and would do anything for the Second Amendment freedom that we enjoy as Americans. The National Rifle Association fights for the protection of these liberties. The NRA is Freedom's Safest Place.

• Category
  
  • News & Politics
  
  
• License
  
  • Standard YouTube License

[Lenno]

it works fine for me
https://youtu.be/p9lo0OxrXLo

[Lenno]

The Suicide of Venezuela

Posted on April 23, 2016 by Joel D. Hirst
I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does.
Let me tell you, there’s nothing epic about it. We who have the privilege of travel often look down in satisfaction at the ruins of ancient Greece; the Parthenon lit up in blues and greens. The acropolis. The Colosseum in Rome. We walk through the dusty streets of Timbuktu and gaze in wonder at the old mud mosques as we reflect on when these places had energy and purpose. They are not sad musings, for those of us who are tourists. Time has polished over the disaster. Now all that is left are great old buildings that tell a story of when things were remarkable – not of how they quietly fell away. “There was no reason, not really,” we tell each other as we disembark our The Suicide of Venezuela

Posted on April 23, 2016 by Joel D. Hirst
I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does.
Let me tell you, there’s nothing epic about it. We who have the privilege of travel often look down in satisfaction at the ruins of ancient Greece; the Parthenon lit up in blues and greens. The acropolis. The Colosseum in Rome. We walk through the dusty streets of Timbuktu and gaze in wonder at the old mud mosques as we reflect on when these places had energy and purpose. They are not sad musings, for those of us who are tourists. Time has polished over the disaster. Now all that is left are great old buildings that tell a story of when things were remarkable – not of how they quietly fell away. “There was no reason, not really,” we tell each other as we disembark our air-conditioned buses. “These things just happen. Nothing is forever; and nobody is at fault. It’s just the way of the world,” our plastic wine glass in hand. Time ebbs and flows, slowly wearing away the foundations of a civilization until it collapses in upon itself – at least that’s what we say to comfort ourselves. There’s nothing to do about it. These things can’t be stopped. They just are.
This is what people will say in a hundred years, a thousand years about Caracas, Venezuela. Or Maracay, or Valencia, or Maracaibo. Those great sweltering South American cities with their malls and super-highways and skyscrapers and colossal stadiums. When the archeologists of the future dredge the waters of the Caribbean and find the remains of sunken boats; putting them on display in futuristic museums to tell of the time when this place had hosted a civilization. Ruins of great malls filled with water and crocodiles – maybe the ancient anaconda will have retaken their valleys; maybe the giant rats that wander the plains will have made their abodes in the once-opulent homes of the oligarchs – covering the tiles and marble with their excrement. “There was nothing that could have been done,” the futuristic tourists will also say. “The country declined – and vanished – it’s the way things go.”
We tourists are wrong.
I know, because I have watched the suicide of a nation; and I know now how it happens. Venezuela is slowly, and very publically, dying; an act that has spanned more than fifteen years. To watch a country kill itself is not something that happens often. In ignorance, one presumes it would be fast and brutal and striking – like the Rwandan genocide or Vesuvius covering Pompeii. You expect to see bodies of mothers clutching protectively their young; carbonized by the force or preserved on the glossy side of pictures. But those aren’t the occasions that promote national suicide. After those events countries recover – people recover. They rebuild, they reconcile. They forgive.
No, national suicide is a much longer process – not product of any one moment. But instead one bad idea, upon another, upon another and another and another and another and the wheels that move the country began to grind slower and slower; rust covering their once shiny facades. Revolution – cold and angry. Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again. This is what is remarkable for me about Venezuela. In my defense – weak though it may be – I tried to fight the suicide the whole time; in one way or another. I suppose I still do, my writing as a last line of resistance. But like Dagny Taggert I found there was nothing to push against – it was all a gooey mess of resentment and excuses. “You shouldn’t do that.” I have said. And again, “That law will not work,” and “this election will bring no freedom,” while also, “what you plan will not bring prosperity – and the only equality you will find will be in the bread line.” And I was not alone; an army of people smarter than me pointed out publically in journals and discussion forums and on the televisions screens and community meetings and in political campaigns that the result would only be collective national suicide. Nobody was listening.
So I wandered off. I helped Uganda recover after a 25 year civil war – emptying out the camps and getting people back living again. I helped return democracy to Mali, and cemented a national peace process. I wrote three novels. I moved, and moved, and moved again. I loved my wife; we took vacations. We visited Marrakesh, and Cairo, and Zanzibar and Portugal and the Grand Canyon. We had surgeries. I had a son. We taught our son to sit up, to crawl, to walk and to run; to sing and scream and say words like “chlorophyll” and “photosynthesis”. To name the planets one by one, to write his name.
All the while the agonizingly slow suicide continued.
And always, in the early morning over coffee I open my computer to document, if only for myself, the next cut in Venezuela’s long, tragic suicide. I chat with my friends, who continue to try and explain to the mindless why their misery is a direct result of one bad idea built upon the last in a great edifice of stupidity. Good men and women who are stuck in a two-decade old debate from which there is no escape. I say silent prayers for the next in the long line of political prisoners. I look at photographs of places that I knew – beaches where I went and restaurants that I frequented; covered in garbage or boarded up and stinking. I watch the videos of the nightly sacking of supermarkets that are fortuitous enough to have had a supply of something.
Tonight there are no lights. Like the New York City of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, the eyes of the country were plucked out to feed the starving beggars in abandoned occupied buildings which were once luxury apartments. They blame the weather – the government does – like the tribal shamans of old who made sacrifices to the gods in the hopes of an intervention. There is no food either; they tell the people to hold on, to raise chickens on the terraces of their once-glamorous apartments. There is no water – and they give lessons on state TV of how to wash with a cup of water. The money is worthless; people now pay with potatoes, if they can find them. Doctors operate using the light of their smart phones; when there is power enough to charge them. Without anesthesia, of course – or antibiotics, like the days before the advent of modern medicine. The phone service has been cut – soon the internet will go and an all-pervading darkness will fall over a feral land.

The marathon of destruction is almost finished; the lifeblood of the nation is almost gone. No, there is nothing heroic or epic here; ruins in the making are sad affairs – bereft of the comforting mantle of time which lends intrigue and inevitability. And watching it has, for me, been one of life’s great tragedies.air-conditioned buses. “These things just happen. Nothing is forever; and nobody is at fault. It’s just the way of the world,” our plastic wine glass in hand. Time ebbs and flows, slowly wearing away the foundations of a civilization until it collapses in upon itself – at least that’s what we say to comfort ourselves. There’s nothing to do about it. These things can’t be stopped. They just are.
This is what people will say in a hundred years, a thousand years about Caracas, Venezuela. Or Maracay, or Valencia, or Maracaibo. Those great sweltering South American cities with their malls and super-highways and skyscrapers and colossal stadiums. When the archeologists of the future dredge the waters of the Caribbean and find the remains of sunken boats; putting them on display in futuristic museums to tell of the time when this place had hosted a civilization. Ruins of great malls filled with water and crocodiles – maybe the ancient anaconda will have retaken their valleys; maybe the giant rats that wander the plains will have made their abodes in the once-opulent homes of the oligarchs – covering the tiles and marble with their excrement. “There was nothing that could have been done,” the futuristic tourists will also say. “The country declined – and vanished – it’s the way things go.”
We tourists are wrong.
I know, because I have watched the suicide of a nation; and I know now how it happens. Venezuela is slowly, and very publically, dying; an act that has spanned more than fifteen years. To watch a country kill itself is not something that happens often. In ignorance, one presumes it would be fast and brutal and striking – like the Rwandan genocide or Vesuvius covering Pompeii. You expect to see bodies of mothers clutching protectively their young; carbonized by the force or preserved on the glossy side of pictures. But those aren’t the occasions that promote national suicide. After those events countries recover – people recover. They rebuild, they reconcile. They forgive.
No, national suicide is a much longer process – not product of any one moment. But instead one bad idea, upon another, upon another and another and another and another and the wheels that move the country began to grind slower and slower; rust covering their once shiny facades. Revolution – cold and angry. Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again. This is what is remarkable for me about Venezuela. In my defense – weak though it may be – I tried to fight the suicide the whole time; in one way or another. I suppose I still do, my writing as a last line of resistance. But like Dagny Taggert I found there was nothing to push against – it was all a gooey mess of resentment and excuses. “You shouldn’t do that.” I have said. And again, “That law will not work,” and “this election will bring no freedom,” while also, “what you plan will not bring prosperity – and the only equality you will find will be in the bread line.” And I was not alone; an army of people smarter than me pointed out publically in journals and discussion forums and on the televisions screens and community meetings and in political campaigns that the result would only be collective national suicide. Nobody was listening.
So I wandered off. I helped Uganda recover after a 25 year civil war – emptying out the camps and getting people back living again. I helped return democracy to Mali, and cemented a national peace process. I wrote three novels. I moved, and moved, and moved again. I loved my wife; we took vacations. We visited Marrakesh, and Cairo, and Zanzibar and Portugal and the Grand Canyon. We had surgeries. I had a son. We taught our son to sit up, to crawl, to walk and to run; to sing and scream and say words like “chlorophyll” and “photosynthesis”. To name the planets one by one, to write his name.
All the while the agonizingly slow suicide continued.
And always, in the early morning over coffee I open my computer to document, if only for myself, the next cut in Venezuela’s long, tragic suicide. I chat with my friends, who continue to try and explain to the mindless why their misery is a direct result of one bad idea built upon the last in a great edifice of stupidity. Good men and women who are stuck in a two-decade old debate from which there is no escape. I say silent prayers for the next in the long line of political prisoners. I look at photographs of places that I knew – beaches where I went and restaurants that I frequented; covered in garbage or boarded up and stinking. I watch the videos of the nightly sacking of supermarkets that are fortuitous enough to have had a supply of something.
Tonight there are no lights. Like the New York City of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, the eyes of the country were plucked out to feed the starving beggars in abandoned occupied buildings which were once luxury apartments. They blame the weather – the government does – like the tribal shamans of old who made sacrifices to the gods in the hopes of an intervention. There is no food either; they tell the people to hold on, to raise chickens on the terraces of their once-glamorous apartments. There is no water – and they give lessons on state TV of how to wash with a cup of water. The money is worthless; people now pay with potatoes, if they can find them. Doctors operate using the light of their smart phones; when there is power enough to charge them. Without anesthesia, of course – or antibiotics, like the days before the advent of modern medicine. The phone service has been cut – soon the internet will go and an all-pervading darkness will fall over a feral land.

The marathon of destruction is almost finished; the lifeblood of the nation is almost gone. No, there is nothing heroic or epic here; ruins in the making are sad affairs – bereft of the comforting mantle of time which lends intrigue and inevitability. And watching it has, for me, been one of life’s great tragedies.

[Lenno]

How Bad Is It In Venezuela? Soldiers Are Stealing Goats To Eat
#FeelTheBern!
Via CNBC:

The situation in Venezuela has become so bad that even soldiers are struggling to support themselves.
Over the weekend, six members of the Venezuelan military were detained by local authorities for stealing goats, the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional reported Sunday. It said the soldiers confessed to stealing the goats and said they did it to feed themselves, since they had no food left in their barracks.
“It’s not a good sign when your military doesn’t have enough food, and when the military has been relegated to guarding and protecting food lines,” said Jason Marczak, director of the Latin America Economic Growth Initiative at the Atlantic Council. “This is endemic of the problems going on across the country.”
Keep reading…

HT: Instapundit

[Lenno]

Venezuelan Opposition Leader Assassinated Days After 1.8 Million Sign Petition To Oust Maduro

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/08/2016 19:56 -0400

The situation in hyperinflating socialist paradise Venezuela just moved one step closer to chaotic totalitarianism. With President Maduro clinging to power (thanks to his military 'assistance') amid growing social unrest (1.8 million signatures gathered seeking a referendum to remove him), FoxNews Latino reports German Mavare, leader of the opposition UNT party, died Friday after being shot in the head, asassinated in the western state of Lara, according to his organisation. Maduro has appeared on State TV tying Mavare to "armed groups" and suggested that more right-wing politicians are potential targets.
The Venezuelan people are growing increasingly angry at the nightmare of economic squallor Nicolas Maduro appears to have laid at their door (thanks in large part to an overly-generous socialist agenda runnining out of other people's petrodollars)...

In less than a week, more than 1.8 million people in Venezuela signed petitions seeking a referendum to remove President Nicolas Maduro from office. That's nine times the required 200,000 signatures.

The opposition said in a statement they delivered the petitions in 80 sealed boxes early Monday morning without notifying the media to avoid potential clashes with Maduro’s supporters.

Ousting Maduro will not be an easy task despite his approval rating plummeting amid triple-digit inflation, widespread food shortages and near-daily power blackouts. Recent polls suggest two-thirds of Venezuelans want him out.

If the National Electoral Council verifies the signatures in the coming days, it would trigger a second petition drive during which 20 percent of the electorate, almost 4 million people, would have to sign before a referendum could be scheduled on removing Maduro before his term ends in 2019.

If a vote were held, the president would be removed only if the number of anti-Maduro votes exceeded the 7.6 million votes he received in the 2013 election. In December's parliamentary elections, opposition candidates mustered only 7.7 million even though they won control of the legislature by a landslide.

President Maduro has recently dug in against what he calls opposition attempts to destabilize Venezuela...

"If the oligarchy were to do something against me and take this palace by one means or another, I order you, men and women of the working class, to declare yourselves in rebellion and undertake an indefinite strike."

And now, it appears 'someone' has "rebelled"...Venezuelan politician German Mavare, leader of the opposition UNT party, died on Friday after being shot in the head, an assassination that occurred in the western state of Lara, his organization said.

"The board of the UNT expresses its deepest sorrow for the slaying of colleague German Mavare. We demand justice and an end to violence," was the message posted on the Twitter account of the UNT party, headed by jailed ex-presidential candidate and former governor of Zulia state, Manuel Rosales.


The mayor of Iribarren in Lara state, Alfredo Ramos, said on his Twitter account minutes after the incident occurred before dawn Friday: "German Mavare, of the popular urbanization of Carucieña, a tireless fighter for social causes, has just been hit by a bullet in the head."
For his part, Luis Florido, an opposition lawmaker of the Voluntad Popular party, said on Twitter: "German Mavare died. A red bullet ended his life. Politics today is high risk. We demand an investigation of the case #NoMoreViolence #Lara".

The authorities have not yet issued a statement about the matter. Bloomberg reports that Maduro, speaking on on state television, said:

“The people we captured are talking and more than one far right-wing politician is mentioned."

"Authorities this week killed leaders of armed groups with ties to paramilitaries."

"Government is pursuing armed groups."

In conclusion, things just went to 11 on the spinal tap amplifier of failed-state-ness, and we leave it to R. Evan Ellis to discuss what happens next,

The question for businessmen and governments with a stake in the deteriorating situation in Venezuela is no longer if the regime of Nicholas Maduro will come to a premature end, but under what circumstances.

This reality has little to do with the determination or sophistication of the Venezuelan opposition, nor of the resiliency of its almost completely compromised institutions. Rather, the Maduro regime has locked the country on a course of national self-destruction, responding to the deepening economic crisis with counterproductive, and simply bizarre measures, such as criminalizing the attempt of the market to respond to shortages, or reducing the federal work week, destroying the little productive capacity that remains in the country.

Similarly, in the face of the population’s demand for a change in course, evinced by the massive opposition victory in the December 2015 mid-term elections, Maduro’s intransigence increases the probability that the suffering and frustration of the Venezuelan people will eventually give rise to violence.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-0...etition-oust-

[Lenno]

Hungry Venezuelans Hunt Dogs, Cats, Pigeons as Food Runs Out

Economic Crisis and Food Shortages Lead to Looting and Hunting Stray Animals

Sabrina Martín May 4, 2016 at 8:41 am
Facebook18kTwitterTumblrStumbleUponRedditEmailShare

In addition to dogs and cats, people are also killing pigeons to stave off hunger (El Nacional)

EspañolRamón Muchacho, Mayor of Chacao in Caracas, said the streets of the capital of Venezuela are filled with people killing animals for food.
Through Twitter, Muchacho reported that in Venezuela, it is a “painful reality” that people “hunt cats, dogs and pigeons” to ease their hunger.


People are also reportedly gathering vegetables from the ground and trash to eat as well.

• Read More: US Senate Extends Sanctions Against Venezuela

The crisis in Venezuela is worsening everyday due in part to shortages reaching 70 percent. This to go along with the world’s highest level of inflation.
The population’s desperation has begun to show, with looting and robberies for food increasing all the time. This Sunday, May 1, six Venezuelan military officials were arrested for stealing goats to ease their hunger, as there was no food at the Fort Manaure military base.

• Read More: Venezuelan Army Vehicle Caught with 88 Pounds of Marijuana

The week before, various regions of the country saw widespread looting of shopping malls, pharmacies, supermarkets and food trucks, all while people chanted “we are hungry.”
The Venezuelan Chamber of Food (Cavidea) said many businesses only have 15 days worth of inventory. Production has been effected as a result of a shortage of raw materials, as well as exhausted national and international supply resources.



Supermarket employees confirmed food does not arrive at the same rate as it did before, and that people’s inability to get enough is a daily struggle.
Supermarkets are registered into a system in such a way that they are not permitted to sell Venezuelans food 15 days since their purchase of the same product. As a result, long food lines have formed all over the country, with many people reselling their share to earn an “extra income.”

[danielboon]

Caracas (AFP) - An opposition leader urged Venezuelans Tuesday to defy a state of emergency decreed by the government as it grapples with an acute political and economic crisis.
Henrique Capriles spoke as the opposition-controlled congress prepared to debate the sweeping measures decreed by President Nicolas Maduro.
He said lawmakers will probably reject the measures, and that if the government insists they remain in force "it is up to us... to ignore this decree." https://www.yahoo.com/news/oppositio...42.html?ref=gs