Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Reelya]

But TempAcc, the wheat was past it's use-by date:

Two more bakers were taken into custody for making brownies with out-of-date wheat.

Do you want health inspectors to not arrest people trying to feed you expired goods? Or do you only cry that it's politically motivated if it happens in Venezuela? Sounds like a beat up.

[smjjames]

But TempAcc, the wheat was past it's use-by date:

Two more bakers were taken into custody for making brownies with out-of-date wheat.

Do you want health inspectors to not arrest people trying to feed you expired goods? Or do you only cry that it's politically motivated if it happens in Venezuela? Sounds like a beat up.

I see, TempAccs post missed that essential bit of information.

[Reelya]

There's also the give-away that the "wheat shortage" article completely omits any mention of the drought, which you can easily check out by googling.

There's a drought on btw, for the last 4 years. Makes it hard to grow wheat or beef btw.

And what happens then? Prices increase, imports increase. All the stuff listed in that article.

~~~

Also the bullshit in the article started with the headline:

Venezuelan bakers arrested for making brownies instead of bread

You have to read on a bit to find out they were arrested for using expired wheat. The headline is deliberately bullshit. BBC are not trustworthy. I could only find one BBC article even mentioning the drought, and somehow they managed to blame the problems caused by the drought on those damn commies in Venezuela.

BBC really don't have credibility on this issue since they have biased clickbait headlines and omit important details.

In that wheat-shortage article they also tell you about electricity cuts, but don't mention that it's because the capital runs on hydro-power and the dams are empty. They imply that it's because of Maduro's policies. But they're lying, because it's easily checked. And if they're lying about the reason behind the electricity shortages are you going to trust them about the wheat shortages? Both are because of the drought, which BBC won't tell you about. This is "Fake News" if anything was.

[Teneb]

Also, wasn't overtaxation of bread one of the underlying causes behind the French Revolution?

No. The monarchy, instead of spending money on things like food or even their army, kept throwing party after party. "The people have no bread" is a way to say that they have no food period. Because bread is a staple.

[smjjames]

Also, wasn't overtaxation of bread one of the underlying causes behind the French Revolution?

No. The monarchy, instead of spending money on things like food or even their army, kept throwing party after party. "The people have no bread" is a way to say that they have no food period. Because bread is a staple.

Yeah, like "let them eat cake" Marie Antoniette, although it's debatable whether she ever actually said that.

[Reelya]

It's also a different issue. There is no special bread tax in Venezuela that is a big source of revenue.

Basic bread is subject to the price controls. Brownies are not. So the guys want to make brownies because you can charge whatever you want for them. i.e. the bakers are arguing that they should be able to push prices of wheat-related good higher.

But note that the story only details people arrested for trying to use expired wheat to make these high-profit brownies. There is no actual mention of well-intentioned brownie makers also being targeted. So the people arrested were in fact profiteering by trying to turn expired food waste into higher-cost goods. If the price controls on bread didn't exist, they would have used the expired wheat to make bread instead of brownies and still have been arrested.

This is a common pattern in anti-Venezuela stories. They insinuate something nefarious is happening in general, then provide one or two concrete examples, but they have details that contradict the headline. It's not a good sign of credible journalism.

The article seems confused about which one it wants. It mentions unsold bread from high prices, but then mentions the baker's industry body arguing that prices are too low, and that people are working around the system to make higher-priced goods with the wheat. Which one is it? The price can't be both too low and too high at the same time, but this article is somehow argung for both outcomes and blaming the government for both. The article has details which directly contradict other details in the same article.

That, along with the clickbait headline with is contradicted by the details, and mentioning the electricity shortages without mentioning the hydro-dam water shortages, and all of these things being related to the drought ... basically it adds up to a "Legendary +15 Bullshit" article.

[TempAcc]

Indeed, I make a mistake in calling price control as taxation.
Regardless, in artificially keeping the price of bread low, the government disregards the economic fact of wheat becoming specially scarce since imports have plummeted and so has the internal production (in no small part because of the very drought you mentioned), but at the same time prevents bakers from increasing said price, essentialy driving the baker's revenue way down. In short, the government is forcing bakers to use almost all wheat of the lower amount of wheat they can acquire to make bread which they're forced to sell for low prices, essentialy driving the baker's revenue way down.

Basic bread is subject to the price controls. Brownies are not. So the guys want to make brownies because you can charge whatever you want for them. i.e. the bakers are arguing that they should be able to push prices of wheat-related good higher.

The bakers then opted to make brownies, which aren't a staple and thus have no government set price control, so they can actualy hope to have enough profit to buy things other than the wheat they use to make their own goods, like, say, feed and clothe their families. The fact two of them were arrested for using expired wheat only further confirms this fact, unless you're willing to believe the bakers are part of some evil cartel that wants to starve everyone so they can live in infinite luxury provided by the sale of a few dozen brownies.

Imagine that your boss tells you to work but forbids you from being paid more than a few cents for it.
Wait a minute.

[Reelya]

Every nation has cases where people try to offload expired food on customers. The fact is there's no specific reason to link this directly to politics, other than the clickbait headline. It smacks of them fishing around for a story then retro-fitting the headline to it.

The drop in imports recently is most likely related to this:



That graph predicted a rebound in oil prices, but that rebound never happened, there was a huge drop in world oil prices in 2014, and prices never actually recovered from that.

[smjjames]

Wasn't the drop in oil prices in large part due to Saudi Arabia glutting the oil supply in an attempt to force shale oil and fracking companies out of business?

Their attempt wasn't very successful though as those companies are bouncing back.

[Reelya]

There are also contradictory statements about Venezuelan oil production that miss the point. It's argued that Venezuela is too oil-dependent. They need to reduce that oil dependence. Bad Chavez! But Chavez also cut oil production and was elected on a platform of reducing oil dependence. The corporate articles are saying Veneuzela should have invested more in oil production capacity rather than civil society and "pump, baby, pump" their way out of economic problems, but at the same time they're slamming the nation for "not reducing oil dependency".

These two things are in fact contradictory positions. It doesn't make any sense to say that Chavez didn't do enough to reduce oil dependency, but he should have invested a higher percentage of GDP in oil investments. Both at the same time. One contradicts the other. A higher percentage of GDP was invested in the non-oil sector under Chavez (which is why they say he under-invested in oil), which clearly needs to be true if you want to reduce oil dependency in any reasonable measure.

In fact, the reduced investments in the oil industry were part of a socialist plan to gradually reduce the oil dependency of the nation, precisely because it causes these wild fluctuations in the economy in connection with global oil prices. Maybe they could have weathered more immediate storms by pumping more oil, but in that case oil dependency would actually increase.

[Sergarr]

You know, it's interesting that there are people who're still trying to defend Venezuela government's actions, even while they dissolve the legislative branch while accusing the opposition of treason. Thankfully, the majority of the free world citizens, both common and in the leadership, can see them for what they are - just another bunch of socialists, destroying yet another country with their failed policies.

[smjjames]

Well, obviously Saudi Arabia showed that you can't 'pump, baby, pump' their way out of the problem as it simply glutted the supply and caused prices to drop. Simple laws of supply and demand.

Not sure why you'd call it a socialist position to reduce oil dependency, after all, the US wants to reduce dependency on foriegn oil and don't see it as socialist. Though I guess it's not the same thing. Seems more like a survival position than socialist.

You know, it's interesting that there are people who're still trying to defend Venezuela government's actions, even while they dissolve the legislative branch while accusing the opposition of treason. Thankfully, the majority of the free world citizens, both common and in the leadership, can see them for what they are - just another bunch of socialists, destroying yet another country with their failed policies.

Universial single-payer healthcare doesn't seem like a failed policy, though the countries using it do have to find a way of making it sustainable.

[Sergarr]

Universial single-payer healthcare doesn't seem like a failed policy, though the countries using it do have to find a way of making it sustainable.

That's because it's not socialist, it's the capitalist way. Alternatives to single-payer healthcare are, objectively, less economically efficient, ergo they're not capitalist. Capitalism is the way of financial efficiency, maximized through informed and rational choice. The shit USA oligarchs try to pull is the opposite of that.

[Teneb]

Yeah, how dare governments try to give basic rights such as healthcare for free.

[Sergarr]

Yeah, how dare governments try to give basic rights such as healthcare for free.

Stuff like that never comes for free. There is no such thing as a free lunch - someone has to pay for it. Healthcare is, ideally, paid for by the whole society in a distributed manner, roughly proportional to their available wealth - which is to say, it's ideally paid through taxes - but it's never actually free.

You know, it's interesting that there are people who're still trying to defend Venezuela government's actions, even while they dissolve the legislative branch while accusing the opposition of treason. Thankfully, the majority of the free world citizens, both common and in the leadership, can see them for what they are - just another bunch of socialists, destroying yet another country with their failed policies.

Already brought up earlier in the thread, as a different article.

Well the claims are specifically that Congress has been ignoring court rulings for some time now. The courts do in fact have the authority to interpret the constitution, which is standard separation of powers.

Since the current constitution was written in 1999 during the Chavez years (it was written by elected national delegates then ratified by a referedum), and the opposition have always claimed to hate that constitution and tried to have it overturned more than once, I'd be interested to know what the actual legal details are here. They're suddenly defending Chavez's constitution now?

Dissolving a branch of government is a move towards tyranny. No matter their legal justifications, this is a move towards communist authoritarianism, typical of all states ruled by socialists, and thus should be condemned by the people of the free world as a fundamentally anti-democratic move.