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Venezuela "sucks right now" due to geopolitical egotism. We've turned them into a pariah on the global market, penalizing nations that dare trade with them with our own sanctions.

Of course the Bolivar tanked. You can use a dollar to buy anything in the world. You can't use the bolivar to buy diddly squat.



Oh, and it had nothing to do with Chavez nationalizing industrious sectors and covering for his failures with the unsustainable crude oil prices?


Was it the act of nationalizing the sectors that made them unproductive or the refusal of the US to trade with said sectors post-nationalization?

We have a long, colorful history of punishing latin american nations for embracing redistributive social policies and decolonisation.

Never forget: https://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/10/40_years_after_chiles...


Refusal to trade? Since when did we have a broad trade embargo on Venezuela? We floated the idea of specifically an oil embargo only this year, with damn good reason given their human rights issues. You're reading too much Noah Chomsky.


Human rights issues? We trade freely and openly with Saudi Arabia. "Human rights issues" is trumpeted ad nauseum to cover for our self-serving international vendettas.

Like many former colonies, they suffer from a resource curse. Nationalizing their primary, non-renewable, extractive industry is the only way to ensure that their economy didn't centralize and stagnate, to ensure they didn't remain a vassal state[1]. Norway did it and they're a thriving, economically diversified, socialist state with an enormous sovereign wealth fund[2]. Libya did it to pursue the same societal goals and we exterminated their ruler and destroyed their state to such an extent that slavery reemerged[3].

I wonder what the difference was.

1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/resource-curse.asp

2. https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...

3. http://time.com/5042560/libya-slave-trade/


So let me get this straight: you're shifting from arguing that the US bears responsibility for the Venezuelan crisis by a supposed embargo that did not exist to implying that were at fault because we don't impose enough embargoes? Look, the world is complicated and no one ever claimed the US was a shining beacon of morality. The issue is a distortion of the obvious and we'll understood proximate causes of misery in that otherwise oil rich country, which should be as prosperous as Norway.


> the refusal of the US to trade

Venezuela is refusing international aid. There are sanctions on their government bonds, but the lack of private sector trade is basically caused by

- the lack of private sector industry,

- a lack of hard cash now, and

- trade barriers implemented by the Venezuelan government

not punitive American trade barriers or them somehow being turned into a "pairah".


>Venezuela is refusing international aid.

All aid from the IMF comes with punitive strings attached. Enforced austerity from abroad. A painful, unwarranted contraction of the economy primarily felt by the people most at risk.

>There are sanctions on their government bonds

You sanction a government bond and guess what happens? Debt becomes expensive, development becomes impossible. You are unable to cushion economic shocks like the threat of sanctions by a major economic superpower. The threats become liable to throw the entire economy into chaos, sending investors, domestic and international, fleeing for less risk.

We're keeping their oil cheap for a reason.




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