Cracked.com has an article about Venezuela...

[Archae]

And it is very good.

My Wealthy Country Became A Dystopia Overnight: 6 Realities

http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2128-my-wealthy-country-became-dystopia-6-realities.html

[COLGATE4]

1. Best explanation of what the situation in Venezuela is like today.

Read about the howling successes of Chavismo in first person accounts from those on the ground.

[1939]

2. Vietnam is a good example

When the NVA and VC took over in 1975, they tried to establish the most puritanical forms of Marxism. Unfortunately for them, the evil, capitalist Americans left behind a capitalist cadre of dedicated black marketeers trained to divert PX supplies to their own profit. For almost twenty years, you needed to take toilet paper, toothpaste, and shampoo to visit Vietnam and the stores contained absolutely nothing.

Finally, the commissars realized the folly of their ways and said that capitalism was allowed in retail and the government would only control large businesses and banks. In three years, you could buy anything you wanted in the stores.

[HuckleB]

3. Recommended.

[Archae]

4. I can't help but notice...

None of the Maduro Can Do No Wrong phanbois have appeared in this thread, much less criticized it.

[HuckleB]

5. It seems that many at DU work to see if they can just bury information by ignoring it.

[hunter]

6. From the BBC:

Venezuela's farmers: 'Planting for the revolution'

Jose Braulio Diaz has his own plot of land where he tends 120 coffee plants.

He is one of thousands of landless labourers who have received land titles from the Venezuelan government.

"We used to be treated like slaves by the big landowners," he says.

-more-

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35642365

(my emphasis)

Free markets are nice, but big money is driving us straight to hell.

Fuck slavery and wage slavery, fuck big banks, fuck it all. What we describe as "economic productivity" is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the planet earth and our own human spirit.

The koch brother toilet paper barons can go to hell.

The best sort of economy seems to be a democratic socialist model where over half the economic resources are owned or strictly controlled by democratic means.

The U.S.A. is not an example of that. We are a perpetually "developing" nation with unconscionable numbers of people living in miserable situations of wage slavery, disintegrating housing, poor education, and lack of access to appropriate medical care.

I suspect the U.S. dollar is frightfully brittle at this point. We will actually go out of our way to destroy any nation that threatens the sacred linkage of the U.S. dollar to oil. (Russia, Iran... we're watching you!) We'll support godawful regimes like Saudi Arabia because they support the strong linkage of the U.S. dollar to oil. Hell, Saudi terrorists can knock down our "World Trade Center" and we'll respond by kicking the hell out of Iraq.



It probably won't take much to empty the shelves in our supermarkets.

The election of Benito Mussolini Trump could get us to that state pretty quick, but I'm a little afraid to ask, who will be his Hitler?

Authoritarianism, Big Money, and fossil fuels will be the death of this civilization.