In her latest Empire Files episode, acclaimed journalist Abby Martin exposes the media bias behind "distorted" depictions of Venezuela's food and political crisis.
As part of the episode "Abby Martin in Venezuela - Supermarkets to Black Markets," Martin enters local grocery stores, big and small, with hidden cameras to see if they are completely out of stock — as they are commonly depicted by mainstream media.
She notes, "We just went to five different supermarkets and the shelves were fully stocked. And this is all type of neighborhoods, all types of classes. From Nestle chocolates to coco cola products, fish, meat, vegetables and fruits."
Speaking with Venezuelan economist Pascualina Curzio, Martin discovers that while there are food shortages in Venezuela, these are a product of an "economic war."
"We cannot call it a generalized economic crisis, it's an economic war," Curzio tells Martin.Talking about some of the missing items from the stores' shelves, such as toilet paper, oil, flowers — products that have "high consumption and are under the control of huge monopolies" — Curzio explains:
"In the past four years, Venezuela's per capita has been 9 percent higher compared to the per capita in the last 30 years. The unemployment rate is 6.6 percent. So we can't call it a generalized economic crisis," Pascalina adds.
"What we see is that there are several aggressions, focused on affecting the entire population and it has to do with market manipulation and of the economy as a whole."
"There is a difference between the economic crisis and the economic warfare. These products are very particular, and they have very specific characteristics. These are responsible for food lines and even illegal markets due to the scarcity being caused."For instance, one of the main Bolivar exchange rate websites, called Dollar Today, that offers six times the legal exchange rate of the Venezuelan Bolivars per U.S. dollar, is run by a right-wing former Venezuelan colonel who moved to the U.S. after leading a failed coup to overthrow Chavez.
As Martin continues her investigation, she also discovers that there is still huge support for the Venezuelan government — despite what mainstream media reports.
She traverses through the Venezuelan crowds that are marching for President Maduro's government to continue working for the people and is told by one protester: "Oligarchs, listen to this! Always, Always, Hugo Rafael Frias will be in our hearts!" in reference to the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.
Walking through the sea of government supporters, Martin finds no evidence of the mainstream media narrative of government suppression.
"I found that the depiction of a widely hated government was a distortion, and in the process, millions of pro-government voices are being suppressed," says Martin.The mainstream media has been depicting that the press is under the government control and has no autonomy. Martin picked up some seven major newspapers from a local newsstand, out of which four were anti-government, a sign of the media bias against Venezuela.
Reader Comments
Ask a simple question, why? Why would anyone go to this black market? I mean there's so much food after all. Of course, it's all the corporations. They'd rather "hoard" their baby wipes. It's such a freaking joke, this puts all the early reports of the production of the soviet union and the tours of potemkin villages to shame.
One group says it's terrible, the other group says it's horrible. Who are we to believe? And her evidence? What evidence. A thirty second clip in what appears to be an upscale part of town and its supermarkets? Much proof good cross-sample.
This just doesn't add up. No culture/society/economy just experiencing a few hiccups would have it's people paying 6,000 bolivars for a single dollar unless they had too.
There's no economic explanation. Wow. You found the only economist in the world who is mystified.
Notice how it's mostly the older people who think it's shit, and the younger people who think it's keen. I mean, free college, who could disagree with that!
All of this crap presupposes two simple things:
1) There are two parts of society
2) Only the wishes of one part matter
The wealthy, the oligarchs, they are citizens too. Obviously they don't want to pay for all the free stuff. This is just mob-theft, justified by the sanctified poor.
Economics doesn't have an immediate feedback mechanism. You don't implement policies and the next day it all comes crashing down. The choices you make today will affect your economy 20, 30, 100 years in the future.
We have a better system in the usa, college costs go up faster than inflation, but that's fine, you can get a loan that will keep you in debt for years even if you manage to find a job.
We also have the best healthcare. It's so good, they give you a huge bill even if you have insurance because quality costs money. Don't pay attention across the border, those canucks are in the stone age.
Yeah the poor rich who can't afford their vacation home or second luxury car because taxes kills business. Never mind that taxes are calculated on profit, after reinvestment.
It's all about the free markets. Oil is cheap because of markets, cough, manipulation. Collusion to drop prices mainly to weaken Russia end up hurting Venezuela and others. With Libya they couldn't break the socialism, so the psychopathic cowards just bombed them.
Free markets work with the backing of the government corporate and military welfare. Isn't that ironic? Meanwhile I pay much more taxes as a percentage of my income than any corporation or investor would. Small businesses that the capitalists always claim to love also pay much more percentage of taxes and get less breaks than the corporations.
If you take away the subsidies, the pell grants, and the no-credit-no-problem ninja loan system put in place by the left, universities would have to lower their prices, like they did before the left got ahold of the system. In 1958 Thomas Sowell, a black man, worked and put himself through Harvard. Try doing that today.
It's people like you who made this mess, and then you blame it on the rich. Quit pretending like this is about helping the poor. This is about the middle class and a simple wealth transfer program of marxist proportions. We all know where the money is really going. You think some black kid in the ghetto is getting a pell grant to study feminist glaciology? Pahlease.
how about more than 120k for an engineering degree or multiples more to be a doctor or a lawyer? After all, to appease the market, many jobs expect a degree to get a crasptastic 60+hr a week job.
I'm not saying that the Venezuelan system is good, but socialism and regulations work.
What's with labeling me as a sjw and blaming me? I blame people as much as the markets, because they too thought they could get rich quick by flipping homes etc.
Just because I think education and health care is a crap capitalist system in the usa doesn't mean I follow the sjw craze. I didn't finish school and did some trade school and learned on the job.
post modernism applies as much to the sjw craze as it does to these artificially inflated markets, privatize the profits, socialize the losses
Socialism never works, and regulations that are reasonable can and do work. But what we have in the US is a crypto-fascist system that uses regulations to control the means of production and ensure monopolies to mega-corporations. The problem with socialism is that it's not really about the poor, it's about feeding from the public trough (the tax payers). It just turns out, corporations are better at it. One prominent strategy is to get rid of the trough and find a better way. That's the anti-socialist, free market idea. It has it's merits, and it has it's downsides, it's a trade off.
You have to see the downside of regulation, it makes economic competition about crooked politicians and entrenched bureaucrats. It's who you pay off to get the licenses, to get the grades. Smaller companies cannot compete, cannot jump through all the hoops, so they fall by the wayside. Pretty soon you have, guess what, a concentration of power. Which is exactly what socialism is, central planning. Socialism is not welfare. Socialism is not healthcare. You can have those systems in ANY economic environment. It all depends on how you develop and deploy them, and what the REASONS for them are. The reasons in socialism are "because I exist, I deserve."
Can't you see how the whole thing has been confuddled by the left, they've tried to rig the game so that the only logical outcome is conspicuously the system they recommend. They've destroyed cultural institutions, communities, and religions, which used to be the source of philanthropic endeavors, free hospitals, soup kitchens and poor housing. Now that they've destroyed that, the only thing that is left, so they claim, is the state. No. No thank you. I'd rather have my community, my church and my cultural institutions back please.
Then there's privatization, yeah, it's a lie. It's not free market capitalism when the government grants an exclusive monopoly to a company who has captive customers who have to pay. That's just fascism. Don't buy their BS when they say that's Capitalism. It's freaking not.
The big issue we're facing today is that we've had a hybrid system for so long, either direction will be very painful and very difficult. The responsible thing to do is to rip the bandaid off quickly. Knuckle down, and start repaying the debt. That's what Russia did. They paid it all back.
When it comes to these kids who wasted 4 years and 100,000 dollars on a shitty liberal arts degree, get a job and pay it back. There is no free lunch. If you think there is, you're it.
Get a job is easier said than done. But like you stated, we're in a crypto- fascist system. The annoying thing is how every year they cry for h1b visa guest workers in tech/it, while a lot of tech/comp sci grads can't find stable work.
Where I do see socialism working is in basic services. Water/sewage, police/fire, health care (basics, not cosmetic or frivolous diseases), and dare I say electricity...
privatizing those, like was done in other south american countries, was disastrous.
I just don't have faith in the market system. Locally, capitalism works. But on this huge scale it ends up dystopian just like communism.
But look at the long term outcomes of socialist countries? Look at how they maintain their systems, by raping the third world. By suckering in poorer countries. Look how they have to constantly find new ways to feed cheap labor into their systems. How it destroys their working class and bluecollar bases. For a short while, the system can ride high on the wealth created, or stolen from the previously capitalist system. But the debt builds up. The entrenched bureaucracy becomes more and more corrupt, siphons off more of the public funds. Eventually the system comes into crisis and collapses.
The longest running country, until a collapse, was the United Soviet Socialist Republic. It lasted about 74 years before total collapse. Socialism is no way to organize an economy.
The problem is, there is no IDEAL system, capitalism has all kinds of issues. But it is the best of all possible alternatives and it works very well, with very little interference, for very long. However it does tend to create bubbles. But those bubbles are not as catastrophic for the whole of society as the socialist collapses are.
When you build a system based on entitlement, you open the door for all kinds of pathologies. Look at the USSR, despite being about total democracy and freedom (the marxist ideals) it was built on massive amounts of actual, honest to god, slave labor. Of it's own citizens. It literally enslaved the very people who supported it.
I don't defend the American system, because I see it as more fascist than capitalist, at least since the 1930s. These hybrid economies tend to do better than pure socialism, but that's because capitalism conceals the flaws and generates some wealth. You see this in European Socialism. In reality the socialist state is being fed half by semi-capitalist economies and imperialistic resource rape in the third world.
The south american countries have been a constant shit-show since before Europeans landed there. Their problems are nothing new, and the current slew of problems is as much to do with their liberal-catholic mindset (on top of native victim culture) and entitlement as it does with American interference. They need to grow up and get their shit together and stop idealizing Bolivar and Che Guevara or the noble savage and realize they're gonna be low man on the totem pole for a couple of generations. The world has changed, change with it.
That's the SJW ideology though, everything is victims and perpetrators. International Politics doesn't work that way. It has never worked that way. It will never work that way. It's not black and white, good versus evil.
SJWs play on your pity, but remember: "Pity those who pity."
It's like a gold mine for psychopaths, because all they have to do is lie, misrepresent, control the image of something and people get riled up and protest or revolt. They rile you up and then get you to do their dirty work, and now everyone is calling for more power to the government, when THEY KNOW, THEY KNOW about PATHOCRATS!!! It's unbelievable. Pathocracy is the single greatest argument against socialism.
There's a reason that Political Ponerology was written in Communist Poland. Socialism is the most fertile ground in which a pathocracy can grow. It's their favorite kind of soil. That doesn't mean there isn't something in capitalism, that attracts different kinds of animals. And they can ruin that too. But the power in a socialist system is too centralized, it's much more dangerous.
It's alao like this laser focus on millennials being lazy, what better way to justify a crap economy that literally doesn't have enough jobs. Never mind that the baby boomers were the ones who were a big part of this mess, now blame them? I didn't hear people who went through the great depression looking down on the latter generations, just they were vocal about being logical so the same mistakes aren't repeated. Baby boomers instead don't look in the mirror and point the finger. Did you see the article on how they're the narcissistic generation?
Argh, all of this stuff just makes me feel annoyed that human nature itself is rigged to keep repeating the same drama. All is lessons they say, and for many it seems like they like repeating them over and over.
As you may know, the idea isn't new. In the early 1900s it was conceptualized as a world government "scientific society" promoted by Fabians Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley - to name a few ideologues. In the 1930s, it emerged in North America as Technocracy Inc, a huge political and economic movement that fizzled out due to lack of tracking technology and waning interest as the US economy began to improve. Technocracy Inc was the brainchild of Howard Scott and M King Hubbert (the geophysicist who developed the "peak oil" concept).
The concept continued with Brzezinski's plan for a Technotronic Era backed by David Rockefeller and the powerful group they created, the Trilateral Commission. Brzezinki was tasked with developing China into the New World Order's large scale Technocracy - which explains why last October Obama transferred US control over the internet to the UN via ICANN with China poised to take over much or most of the management.
Technocracy is entering the world right now primarily through the Trojan horse that is UN Agenda 2030. It's in every nation, except perhaps N. Korea. The Kremlin calls it Strategy 2030 and the wealthy gulf oil states use the euphemism Vision 2030. Iran is adopting 2030 in earnest as well, including many liberalizing social engineering reforms, as is Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc. BTW, a great website to get up to date progress on the Technocracy global takeover is technocracy.news.
Being Honest About Venezuela
MIKE GONZALEZ
As Nicolás Maduro’s increasingly antidemocratic government battles violent right-wing forces, ordinary Venezuelans are watching the gains of Chavismo slip away. [Link]
The government also control the foreign money exchange, so again let me laugh at the statement trying to pin out a right-wing colonel living in USA for running a web-page, when the reality is that the government forbiddes any access to dollars to businessmen who aren't chavistas. They only let exchange dollars to people close or loyal to PSUV, who prefere to use those dollars to enrich themselves in the black merket.
It's just ridiculous this so-called "economist". Everything's so mysterious. Why are there shortages? I don't know, must be a vast conspiracy by the IMF and the Corporations, who would rather stock pile toliet paper than sell it. Yeah, tell me another one comrade.
I can't put my finger on it exactly but this flip probably comes down to some kind of distortion field dividing the West from the Rest. It's what gets Macron detested for being 'a liberal', then liked for 'saying the truth about Africa' (its women have too many babies, apparently). He may be a 'dirty pinko liberal, but at least he's ultimately 'on our team'.
I think that, in this case, if you come down hard on supporting the opposition, then you're supporting what are effectively Venezuela's Bolsheviks/SJWs who want to 'tear it all down'. All the back-and-forth along the 2-dimensions of capitalism vs socialism misses the geopolitical axis that renders the picture in 3-dimensions. I'm not claiming to have or see that picture, but I'm pretty sure that whatever it is, it's far more accurate in 3-D, i.e. taking into account macrosocial forces and not just examining Venezuela in isolation. Venezuela is in the crosshairs of globalism vs nationalism, just as Trump is, just as Putin is. And what is globalism, really, but the Empire's doctrine of 'our way or the high way'?
Of course Venezuela's leaders will make mistakes along the way to finding sovereignty; it's a process. Nobody can - at the outset - have all the answers and foresee all the pitfalls and attacks/challenges it will face. Ideological principles like 'oligarchs are always bad because class warfare' are bent or dropped altogether as the reality of governing sets in. You hear that from the bearded fellow in the video report when he distinguishes 'patriotic oligarchs' from those sabotaging his country like the dirty fifth columnists they are. Shades of Putin's battles with certain oligarchs...
Finally, Americans railing against the Chavez regime in Cold War terms (capitalism vs socialism) ought to keep in mind that they're informed - sorry, but I don't know how else to say this! - by what, by now, amounts to a pronounced cultural bias in which Venezuela and the rest of the Americas have been 'our backyard' since the Monroe Doctrine was laid down in the early 19th century, so when one of the upstart kids tries to 'go independent', it upsets the status quo in their own culture, and may thus upset them.
Back in the 1980s, the US justified its creation of vicious proxy armies to overthrow and maintain client regimes in Latin America on the basis that 'the Soviets were in there messing in our backyard'. When it was pointed out to them, over and over, that they weren't, they said 'yeah well, ideologically, the Commies all over the place. How else to explain that Latin Americans are getting ideas about independence?'
Today we see a remarkably similar dynamic playing out vis a vis 'Russian interference', only this time, there's no ideological cloak of 'communism' to blame. The underlying reality is that 'the Rest' (like, 80%, and growing, of the planet's population) are presenting insurmountable challenges to US/Anglophone/Western hegemony, which is producing all kinds of hysterical conspiracy theories to justify its efforts to maintain and enforce 'Pax Americana'.
By the way, the video accompanying Martin's report has been added above.
From Base Nation , by David Vine: p.153, 'A Really Fair System' Labor, family, distribution of resources, central organization, social welfare, happiness... socialism . American troops may have believed they were fighting around the world to prevent the spread of socialism because 'our way is better', but they did so thanks to the application of textbook definitions of socialism, which their generals were forced to embrace (though, Clark aside, were generally loathe to admit) by the experience they gained from the reality of governing. When it comes down it, what else can we conclude but that they don't want anyone else to enjoy the benefits of socialism?
So basically join the army. The picture painted here of military life is wonderful and idyllic. Someone needs to watch Vet.tv.
The military, of any country, is a totalitarian regime of people armed and trained to kill without thought or question, it's a dangerous job and requires constant submission to authority and policy. Forced daily exercise, and putting up and shutting up when you're told to by commissioned officers who are all to often upwardly adjusted into their positions, while navigating the gauntlet of politically motivated stasi like Blue Falcons (just look what happened to Drip46). At the same time, militaries are crippling drains on a nations economy.
Socialists have a knack for painting the prettiest pictures, but anyone who does real research on the military will know that it's a cruel beast where it only pays to be a winner, and the slow and unfit are sectioned out, or die in battle. Even within the military, getting in, to enjoy all those juicy socialist benefits, requires a protracted recruitment process which screens out people with existing medical conditions (kind of easy to have single payer healthcare), weakness, and psychological unfitness. That's not to mention all the ways in which the military screws you out of pay, bonuses, and benefits on a regular basis. Plenty of horror stories abound.
On top of all this, it's universally accepted by most people that the budget of the US military is too big, and too much of a cause of debt, which only speaks to the economic unfitness of the system in any long term sense.
The people of the military pay for whatever benefit that system provides in sweat and blood. If we're willing to pay the same price, I say bring on the socialism. If every Bernie Sanders supporter survived Parris Island before wearing one of those stupid shirts, I'd at least respect them.
Read this list of socialist states. Which one are you in?
[Link]
Maybe is enough to say that even the least paid worker was provided with housing, his children could have university education on the expense of the state. He had a minimum of a month of annual vacation guaranteed by the constitution of the country, which he could spend at seaside or mountain at his own expense. There were no soup kitchens or the like because there were no hungry or homeless people. Almost all goods which was needed for everyday life was produced in the country.
Of course, the CEO's position had much higher salary and significant benefits. But this is a very small difference between the employee and the CEO, when compared with the difference between the employee and the CEO of a some "western capitalist" company.
It may be significant to say that the socialist Yugoslavia's debt was about $15 billion in nearly 50 years of its existence. And I think that Yugoslavian system just was needed some modification, NOT total destruction by "western capitalism". (Some modifications were attempted by Prime Minister Ante Markovic in late 1980's by introducing privatization in a way that the employees in a factory receive the shares of that factory, which would also stimulate their work. But he was stopped by "Western capitalism")
Today, the Yugoslav region is only a cheap labor force, where a regular worker can hardly pay for food, and he can only dream of his home and holiday at a seaside.
Observed from the perspective of a "Western capitalist", the Yugoslavs were already in mess, weak and incompetent, and only strong survive. But I guess it is not "capitalism", it is "fascism". It's just seems to me that that kind of "capitalism" last much much longer than from 1930's.
Maybe the difference between the economies of socialism and communism is that in socialism, at least in the Yugoslav, there was a private sector.
I'm just saying that capitalism as we have today has a lot of corporate welfare in tax breaks that small businesses could only dream of.
if that money went to the working class or social welfare programs, it would be a good thing. Imagine that you are a factory worker or some trade and you get hurt... According to laissez faire, you should find work, but you got hurt, like those soldiers: their risk gets social programs, like disability and medical care.
Also, what happens in Venezuela cannot be isolated from the rest of the South American context and I can assure you that something very diabolic is taking place in Brazil since at least 2013. The neoliberal right-wing is becoming very strong and the social rights determined by our Constitution are being destroyed one by one. We still have free education and universal healthcare (I mean of course tax funded), but not for long... the Brazilian people are being indoctrinated into a fake libertarian ideology (and I say fake because libertarian is a term that the right wing stole from French anarchists) which basically transforms them into oligarch boot licking zombies who worship capitalism and the rich and believe in fairy tales that "if you work hard enough, one day you too can be a millionaire" when we all know that if you work hard enough, it is the CEO of the company you work for who becomes a millionaire.
The Constitution determines a social-democracy, with humanized and regulated capitalism that provides opportunities for the poor and the needy, but that is being quickly replaced by an individualistic dog eat dog society that worships and obbeys the free market more submissively than God was worshipped in the Middle Age.
Just in 2014 a left-wing government was elected and it is GONE and we have now a right-wing government... all of that would be normal IF we had had an election in between, but there was not a single vote cast!
This "anarcho"capitalist and pseudolibertarian bullshit which basically translates to neoliberalism spreading like wildfire is the product of a well orchestrated campaign that is financed from abroad. People even acuse the PT government (which governed with the elite and did everything in their power to appease the banksters) of being somehow "communist" ?!. McCarthyism from the 1950's has been ressurrected in 2017 with no reason whatsoever (this has been a capitalist country since colonial times and remains) and the dumb middle class has bought into it and think it's cool.
All of this leads me to believe that it is not unlikely that Venezuela is being sabotaged, as we ourselves are. In fact, Brazil has been under attack since at least 1964 when a US LEAD military coup overthrowed democratically elected president João Goulart merely because he was left-leaning social-democrat - nothing close to a communist. The CIA operation that orchestrated this coup against Brazilian democracy and the Brazilian people was called Operation Brother Sam.
Sott.net should publish more about this country that is, after all, the largest and most populous in Latin America.
Sott.net editor, please consider my kind request to publish more about the situation in Brazil. I suggest you read Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept. This Pulitzer winning journalist lives in Rio and knows well what goes on here. His point of views are sharp and accurate.
Regards!
This fallacious line of arguing is based on mistaking statistical categories for the flesh and blood cohorts who move through them. 2/3 of all billionaires were not born rich, most started from scratch. Of the bottom 25% of wage earners in the 1970s, 95% of them were in the top 50% by the 2000s, and something like 75% of the bottom 25% moved into the top 25% by the 2000s, based purely on their income tax filings, and the amounts of income reported. So when you follow individuals throughout history, you find absolutely that people begin at the bottom, and work towards the stop.
It's only when we think of abstract categories like "The Poor" and "The Rich" that income inequality takes on a monsterous nature. But people don't stay forever in the category of "The Poor" and new people are being born every year who take their place in that category, as the previous members move into new categories.
Many arguments are used to support this idea, consider the statement, often made by left leaning analysts that household incomes have stagnated. Well that's fantastic actually, and rather conspicuous, because over the past 40 years or more, household size has SHRUNK. So essentially, the statement is that fewer people are making more, because they would have to make more in order for household income to stagnate in step with shrinking family sizes. Smaller household sizes should show smaller household incomes (with fewer earners in the household). Instead, we see that their earnings have more or less stayed the same, ipso facto, individual earners are earning more per capita.
Watch this for some additional reasoning, and consider reading economists with the opposing viewpoint. [Link]
Or this: [Link] and this [Link] for an exploration of the surrounding issues.
That is, actually the real problem is that there is not enough poverty in the united states, that it is maintaining its affluence in all stratas by pursuing silly economic policies that will bring about complete collapse. Since socialism is just silly economics taken to an extreme, it would not help the united states at all, and would only hasten the inevitable collapse.
The most important point of course, is that these problems are not trivial, and the idea that a single comment in an internet discussion could diagnose and design a treatment for ills that have infected modern polities since before the industrial revolution is absurd. The problems are more intractable than we assume. While it's true that earnings have risen, and this invalidates the leftist critique, in many spheres they have risen beyond what they should have, due to inflationary policies. The nature of the current system is a Frankenstein of half free-market capitalism, half socialism, which confuddles everything to no end. Thus the socialist critique is riddled with errors, AND the capitalist critique is riddled with errors. Neither one is going to get us out of this mess.
This is the simplest way to collapse an economy and the fact that it is still on its feet is very strong testimony to the weakness of the opposition, in spite of their many advantages economically.