The Venezuelan economy - did it fall, did it jump, or was it pushed?

POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Friday, November 28, 2025 16:52
VIEWED: 3096
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1KIKI

Friday, August 10, 2018 11:29 PM

When you have just one single export - in this case oil - it makes your economy insecure.

Venezuela: Oil Company Sanctions
May 24, 2011

Venezuela to face US sanctions over violence against protesters
Dec 12, 2014

President Obama slaps sanctions on Venezuela - CNN Money
Mar 9, 2015

US Congress Passes New Sanctions Against Venezuela
Jul 8, 2016

White House Raises Pressure on Venezuela With New Financial
Aug 25, 2017

U.S. Places New Sanctions on Venezuela Day After Election
May 21, 2018

You'll also see a HUGE drop in annual average crude oil prices, in 2015 they were less than half those in 2014. https://www.statista.com/statistics/262858/change-in-opec-crude-oil-pr
ices-since-1960/ But the annual average smooths out the true drama. In two months in 2015 the price of oil plummeted from 61/bbl to 38/bbl. That sure smells like an intervention. At the time it was seen as a US-instigated Saudi-facilitated strike against Iranian (and possibly Russian) oil exports. But it didn't help the Venezuelan economy.

There's plenty of evidence the Venezuelan economy was both deliberately and accidentally pushed.

SIGNYM

Saturday, August 11, 2018 2:30 AM

It was a combination of all of the above IMHO. Venezuela -with the WORLD's LARGEST KNOWN OIL RESERVES - was a ripe target for sanctions and destabilization. They were particularly hurt by falling oil prices, and there is unfortunately a significant amount of corruption and incompetence at home, leading to pilfering and spoilage of goods.

And not to forget there was a recent attempt on Maduro's life.

Chavez turned Venezuela's oil money to "help" the poor: Housing, education, healthcare. Venezuela to this day has an arrangement with Cuba for oil in exchange for teachers and doctors. All very noble goals. But unlike Russia, neither Chavez nor Maduro made any efforts ... not any successful efforts, anyway ... to diversify their internal production. It is a puzzle how a nation with a year-round climate for growing can be suffering from food shortages.

I realize that nations like Cuba and Venezuela don't have a wide variety of resources on which to build an economy. Venezuela, for example, lacks metal ores, and Cuba lacks everything except fertile land, fishing, and limestone (for cement manufacturing). But if Cuba could survive sanctions, so could Venezuela.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

SIGNYM

Saturday, August 11, 2018 2:38 AM

By the way, did you hear about the violent Nicaraguan demonstrations a few weeks ago?
Whatever happened to them?

One interpretation was that this was an attempted "regime change" operation which failed. EDITED TO ADD: Because it featured sniping by unknown parties.

*****

And now, suddenly, Trump has turned the "sanctions" guns on Turkey because ... why? The Turkish lira is imploding, many other "emerging market" currencies are following suit. Turkish lawyers want to arrest (some) American military officers based in Incirlik for "supporting terrorism". (And don't forget, Erdgogan survived what many feel is an American-inspired coup attempt two years ago.) And this is all about an American pastor being held in Turkey? He's been in jail since 2016 ... why NOW, all of a sudden?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

JAYNEZTOWN

Sunday, August 12, 2018 9:44 PM

This is the Banana Republic show and the Generalissmo Cult of personality in Latin America. There is no Middle Class in S.America no middle class politics no middle class economy and there is nobody really paying taxes, there is only the extreme rich and the extreme poor, one extreme of Leftism Commie militia or one extreme of Conservative Rightwing militia. La "República Bananera" or "República del Plátano" no matter how they try to change its usually a corrupt, smoke and mirrors People's Republic of Tyranny or a Puppet State guy wearing some military style hat an economy built on chocolate or oil or banana or cigars or some coca leaf but not built on all, heavily depending on one item, one leader and very suspect shakey foundations .

The Generalissmop Republic of Latin America, will probably contain all the usual runaway che guevara militia type Jailbirds of Colombia, Cuba, Panama etc. The United States and other nations may have problems with 'corruption' but it is nothing like Latin America. The USA and other nations have a longer cultural evolution and longer history than most of these 'new' Latin American countries, 500 yrs the United States has been evolving since the European explorers arrived and i guess there always was turmoil, there is a tragedy in history, wars, slavery and land taken from Natives but there is an evolution always a possible path to freedom. A long history of independence civil war revolution, the USA is very different these nations the US constitution, the mix of ideas from revolutionaries the guys had different churches Christians, Lutherans, Protestants, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Quakers, probably a lot of Masons and maybe Diesm or Diests, the ideas of Trade and of Free Speech. While nations wared with each other over religion or race or politics a new country was going to be born with freedom to exchange many good ideas.

The Spanish Empire or Latin American Empire died a long time ago, historically they lost out to the birth of the USA, they lost to British, French and the growing economic and military might of United States of America, in each remarkable event in world history each battle the Spanish or Latin typically lost every exchange they did not even receive the 'bronze' medal, the Latin American Empire was never to be it. The idea of a great Spanish century it never did happen it is like the old ruined temples you might find in Asia, India, Arabia, Europe or the runs of Rome and Egypt. Spain in Europe is not long out of its own dictatorship, and before this a civil War between Fascists and Communists. I am not sure Spain became a real country or true united country, imagine for a second a bizzaro timeline of the United States in the twlightzone where huge chunks of America were removed and still spoke Dutch, Native American langauges, English and French...Spain is it more a collection of people and was it ever 'born' the Basque, Galacian, Asturian, Catalan are they Spanish. However when you compare life with the poorer Western Nations of Europe the old nations Europeans are still far more comfortable and richer than their cousins of South America. When you contrast the greatest economic Latin American nations say Mexico or Brazil next say France, Germany, Italy the Latin American nations they have growth but do not have any stability, they have massive social issues Latin American nations are torn by drugs and gangs and murder and crimes on levels you might see in some part of the Middle East or Africa.

To economically and socially compare Even the richest Economy of Latin America with double the population of say their cousins in Europe is still many, many times poorer than Italy or France. The United States economy is a very different economy and many Western style Democratic economy are built on diverse economic ideas, for example Canada or USA or Australia will not just sell one item, they have ores, they build machine parts, they export farm produce and vegetable fats, they do software,

SIGNYM

Monday, August 13, 2018 9:32 PM

JSF ... eight years ago, I undertook a project to bring to the board ALL of the "interventions" that the USA visited upon other nations, starting (as I recall) around 1900. It's not that there weren't others before then, it's just that I had to limit the scope of the project SOMEhow. (And so of course I missed posting about the absolute genocide of Native Americans without which this nation would never have been expanded to its current scope.)

As I recall, there were somewhere on the order of 60 ... possibly more ... instances where the USA destabilized, overthrew, invaded, or in some fashion created "regime change" in other nations, just to gain cheap commodities or to enforce loan collections or, (more lately) to impose the petrodollar. I posted it over three threads. People were BEGGING me to stop because it was just too awful, but people deserve, and need, to know the truth, yanno? I can't find the first two threads, but I was able to locate the third and here it is http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=42912&p=3

Also, Obama's speech at West Point, re-casting our naked aggression against the entire world as some sort of democracy-loving peacekeeping effort. It was a speech that made me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit. We spent some posts referencing those three previous threads, and (since none of could find all of the originals) I posted ... AGAIN ... a compiled list of all of our "interventions" since roughly 1900 .. without the summaries of each "intervention" but the best I was willing to do. (Not about to re-create a multi-week effort.)

http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=58149

I bring this up in order to back up my point that S and C America are the cluster-fucks that they are because of REPEATED "intervention" by the United States, in which we overthrew whoever (quite often democratically-elected leaders) in order to prop up juntas and plantation-owners who would do what we* [*bankers and international cartels] wanted them to do: Suppress land reform, kill labor movements, open their banking systems, sell us cheap bananas/silver/copper//oil/canal passage etc etc.

If you want to know the extent of our depredations, we managed to "regime change" in EVERY NATION in S and Central America ... sometimes more than once! .... except Costa Rica, which apparently didn't have anything that we wanted very much. And we are STILL "intervening" all over the world, most notably in the mideast but we just attempted another regime change in Nicaragua and are STILL attempting to overthrow the government of Venezuela (after all, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the WORLD, and Chavez had the temerity to nationalize them!). Right at this very moment, we are waging economic war on Turkey through sanctions and a forex attack on their lira.

It is impossible at this point to know how these nations would have fared without our kindly "assistance", but it is also impossible to deny our hand in making these nations what they are today.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

1KIKI

Tuesday, August 14, 2018 4:27 AM

One day I had the insight as to why, for nearly a century, the US had typically overthrown democratically elected governments and backed puppets: it's because foreign democracies can't bring the US guaranteed economic results. Those darn people democratically running their own countries might have their own ideas for their own economies.

Now the new paradigm is to destroy functioning countries we can't control, and leave smoking cluster-fuck ruins in their place. I guess the US has learned if you can't control them, you can always ruin them - so they can't actively defy you.

But with the US running out of foreign countries to export poverty to at the point of a gun, it's taken to cannibalizing its own people for corporate profit.

But YAY AMERICA !!! Patriotism makes everything right.

THUGGER admits it's not about RUSSIA !!! and is, in fact, a witch hunt. "Trump better be innocent of any wrong doing, anywhere, anytime."

1KIKI

Tuesday, August 14, 2018 6:39 AM

I had a very long and detailed history on US 'intervention' in Venezuela, but a WSJ article from 2003 caused my connection to bonk. Suffice to say that the US has a long and dirty history of supporting brutal leaders, and actively fomenting coups against Chavez,, and perhaps Maduro. It was the WSJ article that laid the 2003 PDVSA strike at the feet of the US that bonked.

In the face of US meddling in such an inauspiciously single-resource economy, it would take someone more skilled than Maduro to overcome the situation.

THUGGER admits it's not about RUSSIA !!! and is, in fact, a witch hunt. "Trump better be innocent of any wrong doing, anywhere, anytime."

SIGNYM

Tuesday, August 14, 2018 9:33 PM

I'm not sure what that little project did to, or for, others but it had a profound impact on me.

As a teen during Vietnam, I knew that we had a habit of entering into feckless and destructive wars, and of course I checked off Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq as they were happening in our never-ending quest for global domination. I had heard about our interference in Iran (when we deposed the democratically-elected Mossadegh and installed the Shah) and knew in a general way about our continued interference in nations south of our border.

But looking into each and every instance, and looking up the nations involved, the people involved (Dulles brothers, Kissinger, North etc), the tyrants we installed and especially the number of people killed ... it was relentless. A parade of atrocities that just kept on and on and on. I hadn't realized that there were so many, that it went back so far, and that the reasons always stayed the same: to further the interests of our banks and international corporations, even as far back as 1900.

It made me heartsick, and I'm still heartsick. I love my country, I really do. I would love to see us do better and I know we can, but we need to learn, absorb and accept the painful lessons of history.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

SIGNYM

Tuesday, August 14, 2018 11:12 PM

Oh, and cue the spittle and the accusations of LIAR!!! and Russian troll! in 3... 2...1 ...

If you look back at my links, you'll see that Geezer wrongfully called me a "liar" back then too, while lying about his own posts.

But historical facts are historical facts.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876

JAYNEZTOWN

Wednesday, December 6, 2023 9:04 PM

Venezuela-Guyana dispute:

Maduro mobilizes the army and announces annexation of Essequibo

https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-12-06/venezuela-guyana-d
ispute-maduro-mobilizes-the-army-and-announces-annexation-of-essequibo.html

Venezuela, Guyana tensions rise over disputed oil-rich region
FRANCE 24

it was once known as British Guiana a British colony, since 1966 it has been known as an independent nation

British Guiana (1953)

British Guiana is famous among Stamp Collector philatelists for its early postage stamps

https://web.archive.org/web/20140618081926/http://www.bbc.com/news/wor
ld-us-canada-27890106

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