The Venezuela edition of “imports will kill’ya”

Gold? I’ll need you to explain that. When has gold not been valued/valuable?
Other than that quibble, I agree with what you wrote.
Fortunately I landed lucky; S.E. Asia is predominately agricultural and still feeding itself 100%.
Any food imports are usually luxury goods, such as western food products. But outside of large cities, the availability of those goods is very limited.
A decent meal (traditional) for lunch is $1 USD or less; dinner can be the same or slightly more at $3.00 for two.
America is failing badly here, thank the gods.
Because Venezuela has oil its been targeted by the U.S. for control and domination. It will take a very savvy and determined leader to continue to counter the U.S. assault on its sovereignty.

You’d think it was all as simple as “Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket”. Before the crash, gold was $800 an ounce and it shot up to $1600 in about a year. Silver has been crazy volatile for years by contrast. Its always “valued”, its just a question of how much. Same for a barrel of oil. Venezuela’s cost of production was only letting it make money on oil while the price was high.

A short anecdote (re; Asian culture):
When I bought my wife an engagement ring, I wanted a platinum ring (I was working as an engineer at the time). Initially my wife objected because it looked like silver.
But when I explained it exceeded gold in value, she was okay with it.
Funny how perceptions work, no?

@ Ian

Yes, but, non-reactivity? Hmm.
Yes, I see that as value, true.
This leads me to Jade, a gem the Chinese value highly, and where, it needs to be in contact with their bodies.
Have you ever seen imperial jade? It defies description in its beauty. Native Americans have a word that defies definition when describing the beheld beauty of an object: Zot.
Imperial Jade is Zot.
And beyond my mortal ability to describe…

Wow, that was some concern trolling in the NYT piece, eh?

Of course you’re right about growing, manufacturing what your country needs. But do remember that there are many deep state organizations, as well as the local opposition party, trying to make sure that socialism fails in Venezuela. I suppose it’s down to whose tales one believes, but there have been ample reports of the opposition hiring Colombians to steal whole warehouses full of commodities and taking them over the border; the opposition burning down schools, libraries, and other beneficial commons.

The plan to kill Chaismo has been underway since before 2006, but you might be interested in reading some of the WikiCables about the planned plays, plus Eve Golinger and/or Mark Weisbrot on current events in VA. I’ve written about events there different times; this is the first one I dug out of the cache.

http://my.firedoglake.com/wendydavis/2014/02/17/whats-afoot-in-venezuela-and-where-will-it-lead-an-open-thread/

But no, no matter what: making Maduro into a laughing stock is one of the best and easiest ways to discredit Bolivarian socialism. It’s begun already in Greece; Syriza won’t catch many breaks from the world press, either.

” That’s not a way of saying I disapprove of his goals, I very much agree with what he was doing in general terms.”

You lost me there Mr. Ian, if you don’t mind allow me to correct you on your perception of the economic model Chávez’s government crafted, and which is currently collapsing on its own weight.

The whole point of Chávez’s economic model was political control of the population by having the government destroy or confiscate local industries and replace them with imports, so the people would have to become subservient to the government, at first it could be maintained by burning the extra income from the oil prices into imports and social programs that would dissimulate the unemployment rates, now that oil prices dropped, those can no longer be maintened, and unsurprisingly enough there are not enough local industries to produce goods needed by the people, and the few that still exist can’t get access to dollars they need to buy equipments and raw materials.

Did you know that since January 2003 Chávez enacted a currency exchange control, which completely takes away the people’s right of using their own earnings and exchange them in another currencies, leaving Venezuelans completely isulated from the entire banking network save by yearly “allowances” the government authorizes only to those who do have credit cards and may be able to pay an airplane ticket?

The excuse Chávez gave to implement that currency exchange control was that allegedly powerful economic groups were trying to suck dry the Central Bank’s reserves (the Venezuelan bolivar is, at least in theory, representative money, whose value is backed up by the gold, dollars and euros on the International reserves) and knock down the bolivar’s value, yet over the years, after initially reaching a peak caused by oil prices higher than previewed in every year’s national budget, while the goverment had full control through an absurdly complicated bureaucracy of every dollar that made it in and out of the country, the Central Bank’s reserves have been progressively diminishing, and as of now there are not enough dollars in them for the government to maintain the massive import politics Chávez built when he was still alive, causing massive shortages in basic goods such as milk, chicken, cooking oil, sugar, toilet paper, and others, mostof which used to be produced here and are now goods mostly imported by the government itself ever since corrupt and incompetent officers took control of once-productive plants and farms and turned them into fiscal holes PDVSA had to cover for.

This without even mentioning the tragedy of how gasoline is becoming scarce due to the deterioration of PDVSA’s refineries and PDVSA finding itself unable to keep its oil extraction levels and resorting to import oil from Algeria and Russia.

To give you an idea of how the currency exchange control affects the “Juan Bimba” (Venezuelan equivalent to “John Doe”) in situations such as wanting to travel to the neighboring country either to visit family or leisure, Imagine that you wanted to take a trip to Seattle for a week. Perhaps you might consider driving or taking a bus to do the route, to cover your expenses you may think you can use your credit or debit card in any point of sale terminal the stores, restaurants and hotel you may use have, as long as your credit line can cover for it; and if you want some cash you can either put your debit card in an ATM to substract in USD any amount you may need as long as it is within what you have in your bank account, or simply exchange some pocket CAD for USD in a currency exchange house.

Well, under the conditions Venezuelans live at, such basic conditions of economic freedom are denied, Venezuelan debit cards are rejected by ATMs (due to the government’s restrictions, not by some right-wing conspiracy), and if you want to be able to use your credit card, you have to file a permit to the government through the bank that emitted it, a permit in which (among other things) you have to show the airplane ticket to the bank manager and leave a copy in it so the government can be sure of knowing you’re really travelling (there go the options of driving and taking a bus, hope you can afford the airplane ticket regardless of the short distance), and in case you get approved, the cap of how much you can spend will not be limited by your credit line, it will be by a cap the government sets on everyone (yearly cap of USD3000, having smaller caps determined by destiny and travel duration), since the destination is a neighboring country with tight relationships and you want to spend a week there, your credit card cap is set at USD700 (if you’re not convinced, you can google “tabla cencoex”/”tabla cadivi” and ask someone fluent in Spanish translate the table’s contents for you), so even if you have a decent credit history and your card has a limit equivalent of USD2000, you’re only allowed to spend 700 just because the government says so.

But what about cash? That’s another separate permit you must ask for, again requiring the same papers as with the credit card permit (airplane ticket included), yearly the amount of cash you can get from your bank (and which you can only retire after the Central Bank says you’re okay and within the week before you leave) is of USD500, unless you’re planning to go to a nearby country, a case in which you can only request USD200 to carry in your pocket once you get on the plane. It doesn’t matter if your own savings could allow you more, you have to plan all your expenses within the limits imposed on you (and unless you are lucky enough to have family living in your destination, most of it will be gone in the hotel).

And it doesn’t end there, once you finished travelling and get back, you have to submit a sworn declaration, in which you must tell how much you spent during your travel and even specify how many receipts you got from those, if after a checkup you pass, you might be allowed to submit for another petition to travel again 45 days after you made the declaration, and if you are unlucky, be ready to make a line and take with you all your receipts so you can convince a bureaucrat that you didn’t “steal” from the nation, if you fail to convince said bureaucrat, you can get as much as 15 years in jail (so you better keep all your receipts and papers in line to avoid the crime of… spending too much money?).

This situation I just described sums up how many obstacles are set on people for something as basic as travelling, it goes without saying that people who don’t own credit cards are by default trapped within this country’s borders and isulated from the rest ofthe world, and new cardholders have to wait a minimum of 6 months after activating their cards to be able to travel. And I haven’t even gone into the details of the USD300 cap for all electronic operations in foreign currency (again, credit card holders only), or how currency exchange houses have disappeared in Venezuela, and outside of Venezuela the only ones that still accept bolivars are located in Colombia, charging at a rate 30 times higher than the lowest official rate set by the government.

As for the bolivar’s value? When the currency exchange control began it was set at Bs1600 per USD, 12 years after, which included succesive devaluations, a reconversion that substracted 3 zeros from the currency and making a system with 3 official exchange rates, thevalue can either be BsF6.30(Bs.6,300 with the old currency), BsF12.00(Bs.12,000 with the old currency) or BsF52.00(Bs.52,000 with the old currency), so neither the value of people’s earnings and savings nor the Central Bank reserves protected, what happened to the alleged point of starting the currency exchange control in the first place? The only purpose it served effectively was to get industrials to suck up to the government so they would get dollars they needed for International operations, and force into bankrupcy those who didn’t.

If you want to see how damaging expropriations/confiscations were for the local economy, you might want to look up what happened to Agroisleña when it got turned into Agropatria, or more recently, when Zuli Milk got overtaken this very month and now its installations are disassembled and the stock they had was moved from the Zulia state to Caracas city, just to keep the ilussion over there that people can still find milk (as long as you make the line on the day that matches your national ID’s last number and take no more than one package of powdered milk) all while in the rest of the country people are desperate doing long lines to find something they can buy to feed their families.

So, what do you find defensible about this economic model? It was all about securing population subservience and limiting what goods they could access to, this model actually made every Venezuelan poorer while misleading everyone through propaganda and the seemingly infinite fountain of oil income to keep appearances, now that oil prices dropped and other OPEC countries refuse to cut their production so they can preserve their market shares, there’s no way to keep the programs that existed solely on the basis of high oil prices nor hide how we no longer produce basic goods that are (or were) part of our diet and some of which we used to export (most pathetic example, we’ve been coffee exporters from as early as the colonial age, and in 2010 the government started to import coffee from Nicaragua and Brazil after is massive failure at expropriating[i.e. taking by force with no compensation to the original owners] and managing coffee companies like Fama de América and Café Madrid).

Is that you, Antonio Herrera-Vaillant, posing as Juan Bimba?

wendy davis,

Absolutely concern trolling from the NY Times. There are indeed tough times underway but there were reports of shortages long before the recent oil price drop and, as you indicated, it seems a good portion of that was created by the corrupt Caracas/Miami oligarch opposition as part of their never ending campaign (like the street riots last year) to return to rule. Unfortunately, Maduro is nowhere near as skilled a politician nor impactful a cultural figure as Chavez.