UPDATE FROM THE SOCIALIST PARADISE OF VENEZUELA. How are things coming along in Venezuela, that paradise of democratic socialism? How did the policies of nationalisation of strategic industries - putting peoples needs and environmental sustainability before corporate profit - the introduction of free health care and free education - how did it all work out ? Following report from The Economist ........ THE queue is perhaps a thousand people long. It snakes around the dusty, rubbish-strewn back lot of a giant supermarket in the heart of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. The store is the flagship of the government-run Bicentenario chain, part of a project started by President Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, and continued by his successor, Nicolás Maduro, to seize control of the production, import and distribution of food. (Government centrally planned control over the production, importation and distribution of food - what could possibly go wrong ?) But the regime’s hare-brained policies that are plucking food from citizens’ mouths. “I came here for milk,” says a young mother from El Valle, a working-class district a few kilometres to the south-west. “In El Valle, there’s nothing.” She is carrying a tiny baby, while her four-year-old daughter helps with the modest purchases she has managed to make. Today the Bicentenario has sugar, maize flour, chicken and toilet paper at giveaway, government-controlled prices—but no milk. It is 9.30am and customers who began queuing at six o’clock are just emerging. Hundreds more wait outside a narrow gate in the 3-metre-high railings around the lot. Uniformed police keep order; most customers seem resigned rather than belligerent. But the shortages are undermining support for the autocratic regime’s “21st-century socialist” experiment, especially among the poor, its intended beneficiaries. As queues lengthen across the country, there have been protests and some looting and violence. Fights break out, the strong snatch shopping from the weak and shots have reportedly been fired on occasion. Supermarkets have banned customers from photographing empty shelves, presumably under government pressure. Police have arrested journalists and charged them with disturbing the peace as they tried to report on food shortages. Several state governors have forbidden queuing overnight, perhaps sensing that it looks more shameful than when it happens during daylight. Government stores limit customers to shopping one day a week, assigning the day according to the last number of their identity cards. The government insists it is the victim of “economic warfare” waged by the opposition. According to one official, the children of the rich are “infiltrating people into the queues” to cause trouble. The real source of trouble, private-sector economists agree, is price and exchange controls imposed by the government, along with nationalisations of food processing and farmland. The diving price of oil, virtually Venezuela’s only export, means that the government can no longer import its way out of trouble. And for the second year in a row Venezuela has topped the “Misery Index,” an annual list compiled by The Cato Institute which combines data about a country’s inflation rate, interest rates, and unemployment - making Venezuela is the most miserable country in the world. The hardships of daily life are fraying Venezuelans’ patience. Catholic bishops, never friendly to the regime, published an unusually hard-hitting pastoral letter this month that laid the blame for the crisis squarely on the “totalitarian and centralist system”. It shouldnt be this way. Venezuela, after all, has the largest oil reserves in the world. It should be rich. But its been destroyed by socialist policies which are still advocated by the left in Australia. (And it worth remembering that a few years ago several Labor and Greens MPs invited Chavez to visit Australia and lecture us on the wonders of the Venezuelan Socialist Paradise - and how these policies could be implemented in Australia) Its a shame he didnt come, because Venezuela, comrades, is how every experiment in Socialism ends. economist/news/americas/21640395-government-offers-no-solutions-mounting-economic-crisis-empty-shelves-and-rhetoric
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 13:55:58 +0000
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