Venezuelan President Survives Drone Assassination Attempt (cnn.com)

The Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, has survived an apparent assassination attempt involving drones that exploded close to him while he was speaking at an event in Caracas. State television showed Maduro abruptly cutting short his speech during a celebration of the National Guard's 81st anniversary. From a report: In a tweet, the president of Venezuela's National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, called the incident at the military parade a "terrorist attack against the president and the high military command blaming the opposition for the violence." Venezuela's international government broadcaster, TeleSUR, said on Twitter that the Venezuelan government confirmed an attempted attack on Maduro. Venezuela's vice president for communications, Jorge Rodriguez, later addressed the nation on live TV at the request of Maduro. He said people heard explosions that corresponded to drones and heard drones detonate near a parade for the occasion.

Comments

Re: Assassination? Or Hoax?

[gtall]

I think it was actually worse than that. The Soviet Union managed to miss educating its people for the current world's economy. That's why it is still centered on exploitation of mineral wealth. They still produce world class academics, but have no real way to get them into the economic life of the country. The West and Orient have figured out how via startup companies...well, China is rather using a sledgehammer here with their state owned companies, but they are not very efficient nor resourceful.

However, the worst thing the Soviet Union did to their people was make them reliant on the State. Putin needs to keep this charade up or he leads nothing. Too many of their people are susceptible to Kremlin propaganda. With no initiative of their own, they are also prey to the few oligarchs who have transitioned from state ownership to "private" ownership.

Re: Assassination? Or Hoax?

[quenda]

Laughable. The Soviet Union ended up dirt poor ... What definition of "workable" is that?

Read some history. Or even just the Wikipedia page. While it ended up a mess, the Soviet had impressive economic success at first.

Beginning in 1928, the course of the Soviet Union's economy was guided by a series of five-year plans. By the 1950s, during the preceding few decades the Soviet Union had rapidly evolved from a mainly agrarian society into a major industrial power.[15] Its transformative capacity—what the White House National Security Council of the United States described as a "proven ability to carry backward countries speedily through the crisis of modernization and industrialization"—meant communism consistently appealed to the intellectuals of developing countries in Asia.[16] Impressive growth rates during the first three five-year plans (1928–1940) are particularly notable given that this period is nearly congruent with the Great Depression.[17] During this period, the Soviet Union encountered a rapid industrial growth while other regions were suffering from crisis.[18]

Assassination Attempt Or Accident?

[Humbubba]

Maduro says it was an assassination attempt by drones, BUT firefighters say a gas tank in an apartment exploded.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/04/venezuelan-president-nicolasmaduro-cuts-short-speech-panic-amid/

Re: Assassination? Or Hoax?

[Nidi62]

If she's so crooked then why hasn't the DoJ, headed by Sessions who was appointed by Trump, investigated her yet?

Re:Um... you do know the USSR

[thrich81]

Germany and Japan were both really destroyed by WWII (they lost, were occupied, and Japan had been nuked) and they recovered within a couple of decades to become world class, dominant economic powers; by 1990 Japan had surpassed the Soviet Union despite much less population and far fewer natural resources. Well, make that, West Germany recovered; East Germany under a Soviet style government/economy didn't do so well. After what Japan went through in that war and their subsequent recovery, no one else can complain about starting over from a devastated country.

We rebuilt those countries

[rsilvergun]

that was a large part of what made America successful. Rebuilding (West) Germany & Japan allowed us to pry money out of the hands of our ruling class and put it in the hands of the working class. It kept our post war economy going. In the absence of fear and war the ruling class will claim all the money and resources for themselves only seldom doling them out in exchange for power. When that happens you get a Dark Age. Progress stops in favor of right wing conservatism because the ruling class, who already have the best of everything civilization has to offer, work to prevent anything that threatens their cushy lives.

Eisenhower knew this was coming and oversaw the creation of the Military Industrial Complex to stop it. Go watch some youtube videos from Norm Chromsky or read Eisenhower's memoirs where he laments the creation of the MIC (having decided the damage caused by basing the most powerful country's economy on a war machine outweighed the benefits of prying money from the hands of the rich). This is all well verified history.

Um... sure you can

[rsilvergun]

now, you can't have _excessive_ wealth for all. Excessive wealth is when it ceases to be material wealth and becomes _power_. It's when you can control access to food, shelter, medicine, education and transportation such that you begin to decide who lives and who dies. We have that in America today. 45,000 people die of completely preventable diseases every year.

The fear that comes from knowing that could be you is a big part of how our ruling class keeps the working class divided among themselves. You fight against single payer healthcare because you're afraid if the other guy has healthcare you won't get it. Only fear can make that work because it's been demonstrated multiple times that single payer healthcare works (Canada, Germany, France, all of Scandinavia, I could go on...).

Money is not necessarily power. It only becomes power when you can force someone to do something they otherwise would never consider doing. That's not fixing your plumbing. That's going to Afghanistan to fight for an oil pipeline we didn't need.