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CIA Columbia and Mexico working against Venezuela (Original Post) rainy Jul 2017 OP
Why is the CIA doing this? My mother in law is from Venezuela. Her sister lived there most of her wasupaloopa Jul 2017 #1
It seems to always circle back to global rainy Jul 2017 #2
That makes sence. But I don't see why our CIA is envolved. Unless you are saying the CIA wasupaloopa Jul 2017 #3
This might help: rainy Jul 2017 #4
Read the actual quotes. Igel Jul 2017 #5
Or not. Igel Jul 2017 #6
 

wasupaloopa

(4,516 posts)
1. Why is the CIA doing this? My mother in law is from Venezuela. Her sister lived there most of her
Thu Jul 27, 2017, 07:37 AM
Jul 2017

90 years.

I get different stories from different people as to what is going on there. I don't know who to believe.

I remember the 70's 80's fighting in South America over land reform. I don't think this is the thing going on in Venezuela.

 

wasupaloopa

(4,516 posts)
3. That makes sence. But I don't see why our CIA is envolved. Unless you are saying the CIA
Thu Jul 27, 2017, 07:44 AM
Jul 2017

is working for global capitalists.

I have a new friend who worked in intelligence in Washington for 30 years and her husband worked for the CIA. Due to our relationship I can discuss anything with her concerning her work or his.

Igel

(35,337 posts)
5. Read the actual quotes.
Thu Jul 27, 2017, 11:54 AM
Jul 2017

Not Maduro's "quotes". The CIA isn't involved, according to the facts, just according to the fantasy that the center of US attention is Venezuela.

And we think Trump is narcissistic.

Igel

(35,337 posts)
6. Or not.
Thu Jul 27, 2017, 12:22 PM
Jul 2017

Depends on how you read the quotes that are relevant.

Read them in the light of the quote that's not relevant--that would be Maduro's--and adopt his rather strained perspective, you get one meaning. Use any other of the several billion perspectives available, and you realize Maduro's trying to use xenophobia and class-hatred to prop up a regime that is collapsing under its own weight.

Venezuela is the USSR as far as finances and politics, but Chavez and Maduro started with less and were far less adept in all the ways that helped Stalin and Khrushchev. They're run through their capital, they relied on social divisions and distrust to maintain power, they trusted on having the "global capitalists" buy their single commodity at high prices. They flubbed it. Oil prices declined, and their reliance on the global market couldn't be fixed by their reliance on those remarkable democratic allies China and Russia.

When gas prices were really high because oil prices were high, Chavez/Maduro wanted them even higher. Because those high prices gave them money. They, of course, blamed capitalist corporations, and a lot of other people agreed. But all the while they undermined their economy and ran through resources. They demanded manufacturers buy high and sell low. They took away the means of production and used them less efficiently in the name of the people. They embezzled.

They did the same with PDVSA. They staffed it by political competence not business or petroleum competence. Money didn't go into reinvestment. It went into helping people. After a couple of years, PDVSA revenues declined because infrastructure eroded and exploiting new resources declined. This is on *top* of oil price decline. PDVSA ran into the same problems PEMEX had identified a few decades ago and had finally starting fixing. PDVSA still hasn't admitted it has problems.

They did a Mugabe. Let's confiscate all this territory held by large land owners. We'll divide it up and Pol-Pot-like push poor people into the countryside. Without fertilizer. Without equipment. Without training. Oh, and the really good land we'll give in huge lots to Chavez' friends and buddies because they're such great guys. Mugabe, that martyr for empathy and truth. Agricultural production predictably went down *after* their "collectivization." As it usually does. But Chavez made life-long supporters, so it was all good.

Playing to current pathological paranoid fears, note that Maduro last winter took out a big loan with Russia using Citgo as collateral. They needed $5 billion to keep things so peachy in Venezuela. Of course, they can't pay it back, meaning that Russia would get just under 50% of a large oil company based in the US. (This was the oil company that Chavez for PR purposes used to "help" poor people in the US in order to make the then-president look bad for political purposes. Another country meddling in US politics? What a great idea! Ahem.)

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/07/venezuelas-new-5-billion-bond-deal-involves-citgo-russia-and-is-raising-eyebrows.html
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/20/russia-venezuela-discuss-citgo-collateral-deal-to-avoid-us-sanctions-sources.html

Of course, in this Maduro has hurt his ally Russia more than the US sanctions have: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-venezuela-debt-idUSKBN18Y007

Yes, Putin is, or at least was, Maduro's BFF. You like guilt by association, there ya go. Excuses will, of course, be made for Maduro. The devil, or at least the Great Satan, made him do it.

However, if Citgo or other Venezuela assets are taken *as Maduro agreed to*, Venezuela will lose *those* revenue-producing assets and it'll be worse off than it was. Sadly, this is how Maduro's run the economy straight along, following in Chavez' footsteps. Maduro just got control when the coffers were pretty much empty and there wasn't much more to be wrung from that turnip. When the overall body weight of your population declines (even if https://www.upi.com/Venezuela-75-of-population-lost-19-pounds-amid-crisis/2441487523377/ probably is built on a series of methodological flaws), you start heading towards being like North Korea (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17774210).

Maduro is repeating Putin's line. Putin has blamed a lot of people for the Soviet Union's collapse, that "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the last century, but the CIA has figured prominently. How that worked, exactly, he can't really say; the best he can come up with is that somehow when the decision-makers were faced with the choice of using force to sustain the USSR or let it fall to bits, they were traitors and CIA stooges and let it fall to bits rather than using the Russian military to invade the Baltic states, squash dissent in Yakutia--in effect, do a Chechnya in a dozen places. For Putin, it had to be a a conspiracy, because he can't blame his own group but can separate out a group of disloyals that aren't part of his identity. Let's face it: The USSR collapsed internally, and a dozen Russian analyses point to this: It failed to modernize and innovate, agriculturally it was a backwater, its environmental and resource-extraction policies were a disaster, it was inefficient economically and misallocated resources routinely on a grand scale, and a few sectors had crucially relied on a productivity bump due to slave labor; it was corrupt and not only lacked social trust, it depended on a lack of social trust and civil society; it was an empire and relied on its immediate empire as well as it's extended economic empire in a quasi-mercantilist manner, using Comecon as a captive market for shoddy goods; finally, it relied too much on natural resource extraction instead of value added by its population. The only difference between it and Maduro's relatively soft collectivization was the bit about empire, since Maduro lacked an empire even for all his sabre-rattling.

Maduro was no Stalin. Stalin had no problem letting the children of the former middle class starve in the streets, with people afraid to help them. In a dictatorship of the proletariat (albeit with Stalin as the entirety of the proletariat), you don't want to be anything other than a prole.

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