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In Venezuela, 'Cutting-Edge' Cryptocurrency is Nowhere To Be Found (reuters.com)
Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has made ambitious claims that the nation's petro cryptocurrency is backed by 5 billion barrels of petroleum reserves. But when reporters of Reuters conducted a months-long investigation, they found that petro is getting little to no traction in the nation or elsewhere. Reuters: Located in an isolated savanna in the center of the country, Atapirire is the only town in an area the government says is brimming with 5 billion barrels of petroleum. Venezuela has pledged those reserves as backing for a digital currency dubbed the "petro," which Maduro launched in February. This month he vowed it would be the cornerstone of a recovery plan for the crisis-stricken nation. But Atapirire residents say they have seen no efforts by the government to tap those reserves. And they have little confidence that their struggling village has a front-row seat to a revolution in finance. "There is no sign of that petro here," said homemaker Igdalia Diaz. She launched into a diatribe about her town's crumbling school, pitted roads, frequent blackouts and perpetually hungry citizens.
It turns out that Venezuela's petro is hard to spot almost anywhere. Over a period of four months, Reuters spoke with a dozen experts on cryptocurrencies and oil-field valuation, traveled to the site of the pledged oil reserves and scoured the coin's digital transaction records in an effort to learn more. The hunt turned up little evidence of a thriving petro trade. The coin is not sold on any major cryptocurrency exchange. No shops are known to accept it.
It turns out that Venezuela's petro is hard to spot almost anywhere. Over a period of four months, Reuters spoke with a dozen experts on cryptocurrencies and oil-field valuation, traveled to the site of the pledged oil reserves and scoured the coin's digital transaction records in an effort to learn more. The hunt turned up little evidence of a thriving petro trade. The coin is not sold on any major cryptocurrency exchange. No shops are known to accept it.
Venezuela has run out of other people's money.
Scandinavia is doing just fine.
full communism sure is great
Sweden == capitalism
Sweden didn't nationalize companies/ other peoples equipment, try to force farmers to produce under the cost of production, heavily regulate internal prices outside of market value, centrally govern production/distribution.
nationalization is not a requirement of socialism
Oil in the ground ultimately isn't really worth that much when you can't extract, process, and ship it. And Venezuela's aging oil infrastructure has been struggling for years now. Case in point this article from Routers that reports that Venezuela's tankers have been banned from some ports because they're so poorly maintained that they leak unacceptable amounts of oil into the local area. https://www.reuters.com/articl...
At the end of the day this really does show one of the weakness of socialist monoculture economies. If the one good you can sell starts too loose value you'll quickly find yourself in a pretty dire situation. Even more so if you're government is both corrupt and too incompetent to modernize your industrial equipment.
nationalization is not a requirement of socialism
That's just one way to steal property.
Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and workers' self-management of the means of production[10] as well as the political theories and movements associated with them.[11] Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity.[12] There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them,[13] though social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms.
A prerequisite of socialism is the appropriation of private property from it's original owners - nationalization is just one way of doing that taking.
Of course, that means another prerequisite of socialism is authoritarianism - a socialist society has to force unwilling private owners to give up their property.
You mean to tell me that citizens of the country who can't trust their country's own currency aren't trusting their country's cryptocurrency either? That's crazy talk.
Venezuelan citizens using a cryptocurrency like bitcoin is probably the most legitimate use of it.
Norway basically nationalized its oil industry, but did so with some forethought and planning, creating a sovereign wealth fund with the intent of maximizing the benefit of oil revenues for Norwegians, rather than simply enriching oil companies and skimming royalties off the top. You can call that socialism if you like, but the fact is that Norway's sovereign wealth fund is now large enough to both pay for a fairly generous welfare state and sit there as a protection against what can be a fairly volatile international market.
What Venezuela did under the Chavistas is to use oil revenues to pay for its welfare state, but also to enrich the Chavistas and their generals, and try to buy influence with other Latin American countries (Venezuela basically underwrote the Cuban economy for years by selling oil to the country at what amounted to almost give-away prices). If Venezuela had duplicated the Norwegian model, it would actually have weathered the storm that came with the collapse of oil prices reasonably well. To be fair, it's not like previous right wing regimes were all that cautious, and certainly while Norway is a fairly advanced country firmly in the developed world, while Venezuela has much higher poverty rates, but still, looking at Venezuela is to see a socialist state that also basically functions as a kleptocracy, that managed to keep afloat when oil prices were very high, and the Chavistas gambled that that would always be the way.
To be even fairer, Venezuela was hardly the only petro-jurisdiction to squander the wealth. Up in my neck of the woods, Alberta had the Heritage Fund, with the idea that it would function like Norway's sovereign wealth fund, but has squandered much of it as well. North Dakota was similarly irresponsible.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... that a shitty meme cryptocurrency was a giant bust? That's never happened before!
Venezuela has no petroleum industry anymore. No oil company can pay (or even feed) workers. They cannot maintain equipment. They cannot ship oil.
Unitl Venezuela undergoes a complete reboot, they have nothing and people will just flee. If I had Jeff Bezos level money I'd take over a hundred square miles or so of fertile farmland and start running my own country, you'd get endless waves of people happy to join your new country that had food and water and security. Then just slowly grow outward until you own all of Venezuela, by the simple choice of the people moving there. Call it "True Venezuela", to preserve national identity which still has value even if the country itself does not currently.
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"...said homemaker Igdalia Diaz"
Great editorial work, Reuters! You probably just got Igdalia Diaz killed under mysterious circumstances.
In 1950, Venezuela had the 4th highest per-capita income on Earth.
Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves on the planet.
It takes a special kind of stupid to fuck that up.
I give you socialism.
And yet "failing late-stage capitalist" countries are absolutely booming.
We're drowning in prosperity, with our most poor dying from obesity more than any other cause, and with everyone employed who wants to be... Yet socialists spouting idiocy abound.
Bernie Sanders has three homes and made $3.6 million dollars last year, but whines about how awful everything is.
Leftists and socialists violently riot, demand our destruction, and claim that we're the worst hell hole on earth... Yet people are literally dying to get in, and we're supposed to ignore all that.
According to this article from 2 days ago, Dashcoin cryptocurrency entered Venezuela with such a bang that it may have saved Dash (which has been tanking) as much as Venezuela. But all articles on cryptocurrency have been hype for the past 5 years, so I can't say I red very far. https://www.cryptorecorder.com...
Gently reply
See here. Crypto-currency is perfect for this.
Also, I'm guessing Venezuela would be doing a lot better if the US would stop sanctioning them. There's no excuse for those sanctions. Especially when we back dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. I was trying to figure out why we bothered until I noticed our private corporations seized a bunch of oil fields owned by Venezuela when they defaulted on loans.
Always follow the money...
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Really? A communist state whose people can't even get TP doesn't really have petro-backed cryptocurrency??
Next you'll be telling me that my pen pal bride just wants a green card! (sniff :( )
Norway basically nationalized its oil industry ...
Norway did nothing of the sort.
In May 1963, the Norwegian Government proclaimed sovereignty over the Norwegian continental shelf. ...
... Norway also established the principle that the state was to have a 50 per cent ownership interest in every production licence. [in other words, if you want to drill Norway's oil and gas - which is already owned by the state - Norway gets half ownership in the license to do so - hardly nationalizing anything]
In spring 2001, the Storting decided that 21.5 % of the value of the SDFI portfolio could be sold; 15 % was sold to Equinor and 6.5 % to other licensees. The sale of part of the SDFI portfolio to Equinor was seen as an important element in the successful part-privatisation of the company. Equinor was listed on the stock exchange in June the same year, and now operates in the same way as any other commercial actor on the Norwegian continental shelf. The state-owned enterprise Petoro was established in May 2001 to manage the SDFI on behalf of the state. In 2007, Equinor merged with Norsk Hydro’s oil and gas division.
Heck, it seems like Norway even privatized at least parts of the state's ownership stake in the actual oil/gas in the ground.
There's nothing socialist about a sovereign nation deciding to manage its oil and gas assets that way. In fact, it's quite non-socialist in its lack of direct government control and apparent privatization of portions of that control.
nationalization is not a requirement of socialism
Yes it is. Socialism means government ownership of the means of production (capital). That is all it means.
Socialism does not mean "capitalism with healthcare". A better word for that is "progressive" or "social democracy".
All countries are a mix of capitalism and socialism. In America, the government runs a massive advertising business that delivers garbage to everyones mailbox. In Sweden, the post office is privatized, but healthcare is not. They are about equal on the capitalism/socialism scale with government controlling about 40-50% of GDP.
Norway has somewhat more socialism because the government owns Statoil, a big oil company, but it is still a mostly capitalist country.
Finally! A leftist regime with a tight monetary policy!
This definition means that all of the democratic socialist spouters are wrong and that no European country is actually socialist in any form.
No, it means that larger portions of their economy utilize socialism, but that portions remain capitalist. Many countries (including the United States) can be considered such a mix.
And communism isn't socialism. Communism believes in effectively abolishing the state and going to pure shared ownership. No country has achieved communism.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Yes, Norway created a sovereign wealth fund out of nationalizing their oil industry. Of course they could have done the same if they sold the extraction rights to private companies. Also, they didn't take the usual route of nationalizing an existing industry that had been privately established. Rather they just decided that the government would run the extraction for their newly discovered offshore oil. This was pretty easy to do since it's pretty hard for any individual to claim mineral rights on a patch of ocean.
However, for a large portion of its history, they weren't spending any of it, which was quite wise of them. Only more recently did they tap into it (and there are limits to how much they can spend) and in their newest budgets they're trying to cut what they're spending out of it. There was a lot of criticism of the Conservative government leadership spending a lot of that money out in order to get reelected, which I suspect is behind the efforts to curtail the spending. However, they'll claim that they only did this to ease revenue shortfalls as a result of the collapse in oil prices.
The other funny thing about Norway is that their top marginal tax rate is lower than the top rate in the U.S. Also the Scandinavian countries in general don't really have a "tax the rich" type of approach the social democrats (or democratic socialists) seem to spout on about. They tax everyone quite highly. You only need to earn about 1.5 times the national average income to fall into the top bracket in the Scandinavian countries, whereas it's over 8 times as much in the U.S. If you look specifically at Norway their top marginal tax rate is 38.52% (compared to the U.S. at 37%) and both Norway and Denmark have lower rates now than they did 10 years ago, whereas the U.S. actually has higher rates, even though they were recently lowered (from ~39%).
This notion that the Nordic model is some great socialist system is just nonsense. Up until the recent changes from Congress, every single one of those countries had lower corporate tax rates than the U.S., and by a wide margin as well. All of them had been in the low 20% for years now (the U.S. was at 35%, but now we're much closer to them) and every single one of those countries had been gradually lowering corporate tax rates over the last decade as well. These supposed socialist states, are anything but and if you look at how many of them have been adjusting their taxes, they're moving away from what the kind of people who think they're socialist countries would make them socialist countries. I think people just see the healthcare system and assume everything must be socialist.
The Alberta Heritage fund got raided because there weren't enough protections put in place to stop asshole politicians from putting their fingers in the pie and they eventually quit paying into it and spent the money instead. I don't think North Dakota has spent any of their oil fund (Legacy Fund) money yet. I think they're just having issues because they probably got used to having all of that oil money in their budget and the price collapse left them in a lurch. Random side note, but from a certain perspective North Dakota is the most socialist state in the U.S. in that they have the only state-owned bank. Maybe it's all the Norwegian farmers.
That's exactly what happens. It's so common there's a phrase for it ("People made a run on banks").
Austerity isn't the solution nor is government spending the problem. The United States had it's best years during heavy government spending. Hell, it was WWII and the Military Industrial Complex that got us out of our permanent recession. Government spending is essential to prevent kleptocrats from monopolizing everything.
Venezuela is in a temporary downturn due to the price of oil. They were never a 'healthy' economy, they were a third world country that took their oil money and instead of giving it to the 1% and foreign powers used it to transform themselves into a first world nation. We shut them out of the world bank system so that when the price of oil dipped they couldn't keep up with the loans they took out to develop their country. We did that so we could steal the property they held outside their country.
This is a frighteningly common this America does. We've been fucking with South America as long as I've been alive. Again, it's so common we have a name for it ("Banana Republic"). We had CIA backed death squads down there in the 80s (thanks to Reagan). When it comes to the national stage we are not nice people, and we continue to do awful things because we turn a blind eye to it and blame the victim. All the while complaining about their refugees coming up here and taking our jobs.
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....Bernie Sanders has three homes and made $3.6 million dollars last year....Leftists and socialists violently riot....
Bernie Sanders never said people shouldn't own their own homes or be able to make money. He's for "medicare for all" because he believes that health care is a human right and that the role of government is to guarantee some basic human rights. If you're politically opposed to the idea of health care as a basic human right, make an intelligent intellectual argument as to why healthcare is not a right and why the government shouldn't provide medical insurance, but don't just attack the man and try to paint him as a hypocrite for owning three homes or having a job. He's not against individual property ownership or private enterprise.
It wasn't leftists who rioted in Charlottesville last year and ran over a counter protestor. It wasn't a leftist President who regularly and openly encourages violence at his political rallies, then promises to pay the legal bills if his supporters beat someone. It wasn't a leftist who committed the most deadly domestic terrorist attack in our nations history. You're trying to frame the debate in your own terms.
Socialism ALWAYS fails. The citizens of Venezuela need to rise up and make Venezuela great again.
No true Scotsman then?
For the readers not familiar with Canadian politics, the comparison to Alberta's Heritage fund is a common one but incorrect. Since Alberta is a province and not it's own country, successive federal governments have taken a large amount of the excess revenues generated by Alberta's oil and straight up handed it to other provinces under the name of a program called "equalization". The thought being we can't have one very rich province and some very poor ones.
This is a constant source of hatred from Albertans towards the federation.. eg. if you compare Alberta's GDP per capita with that of Quebec, Alberta is basically forced to give all it's high performing economy's fruits away to severely underperforming economies (which are typically laden with additional social benefits not found in Alberta, hence part of their poorly performing economies).
> He's for "medicare for all"
Sanders is for medicare for all because he does not believe people should be able to choose the healthcare that they want and should be forced to use an inferior government run system.
Sanders believes that "If you like your healthcare you can keep your healthcare" is a terrible idea and should never be allowed and outlawed.
Not to knock western journalism, but articles in the foreign press are saying Maduro was saying that the Petro will be used as an internal token of accounting within the state oil company. So, plenty of articles if you look it up state it wasn't *intended* to be traded to the public. The new Bolivar is pegged against the petro. It's still a clusterfuck, but the level of fact checking on Venezuela stuff is actually really poor.
I think it's worth noting that, as a sitting United States Senator, Bernie himself doesn't use the system he's touting. His health care plan is to get an Obamacare Gold plan and, like all senators, he receives a 72% subsidy for that.
So, until and unless Medicare starts qualifying as a Obamacare Gold plan (good luck with that), we're not even talking apples to apples.
Bernie is as crooked a politician as the rest of them: says one thing, does another. He's no better than any of the rest of them but his hypocrisy is quite a bit bigger.
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You can have "social ownership" without appropriation of private property. You can have socialized medicine; sure, it's paid for by taxes but only a moron would call all taxes a form of socialism.
Private property, by the way, being a relatively new concept for those who aren't monarchs. If private property were sacred, we'd have given it all back to the native Americans we stole it from originally. So taking of private property by conquest is ok? Private property only exists in the US because it was granted by the government to someone in the past.
I feel there's been a huge push in recent years to redefine a lot of political terms. Socialism isn't just a system anymore it's become something evil, and furthermore anything evil is rebranded as socialism. Similarly Fascist governments in the past are now being redefined to being left wing because of some innate assumption that the right wing has never done anything evil in the entirety of history. These new definitions are just used to prop up political views and would not hold water in any political science discussion.
But communism as defined by Marx has never occured in any country. You can't just change the definitions of words to make your point.
Not mostly everyone who wants to be employed. We have a high unemployment rate in the US but the official numbers say otherwise because the government artificially ignores certain classes of people and implicitly implies that they aren't looking for jobs. We also have a huge rate of underemployment. We have too many homeless people living on the streets or in their cars who have no regular or reliable source of income and who are not counted as "looking for work". These are people who used to have jobs, but whose bills have overwhelmed them after they were fired.
This country does have a fraction of people for whom the economy is booming. But it also has quite a lot of people where the economy is failing them. For most people, it's staying about the same, as wages haven't risen much relative to inflation.
And there are so few protesters demanding the destruction of the US. There may be some nutjobs who engage in violence in an attempt to shake up the system.
And this is an example of how conversations devolve when we absolutely insist on forcing everything into one label or another, even if it means redefining the thing.
There are middle grounds. In fact, there are only middle grounds in the real world. Take the extremist ideas back to philosophy class.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
marx defined communism as a single monopoly on all things economic and political. The USSR achieved that.
Bernie Sanders never said people shouldn't own their own homes or be able to make money.
But he has hammered the issue of wealth inequality. He's a hypocrite; he is the 1%. He can sell two of his homes so he only has one, and give the proceeds to those "in need". He doesn't need the government to relieve himself of his wealth to reduce "income inequality". Why doesn't he lead by example?
Are you seriously making the argument that Bernie is being a hypocrite because he doesn't use Medicare--a system he does not qualify for? This has been a dumb thread, but that post takes the cake.
I read the internet for the articles.
Wouldn't that be the wrong example? Unless his amazing display of charity causes billionaires around the country to suddenly become far far more charitable it is an empty gesture. Working to fix the systemic problems is a lot more effectual.
I read the internet for the articles.
Scandinavia is doing just fine.
Progressives come out of the woodwork to use this Scandinavian Socialism fallacy. Lets give Prime Minister of Denmark Lars Løkke Rasmussen the podium:
I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security for its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.
Unless his amazing display of charity causes billionaires around the country to suddenly become far far more charitable it is an empty gesture.
How is it an "empty gesture" when the people receiving his wealth will actually benefit?
Working to fix the systemic problems is a lot more effectual.
Who says you can't do both? Bernie is a hypocrite who would rather keep his wealth.
In Venezuela, being "politically reliable" was the only factor that mattered in being handed control of the expropriated companies. Actually having anything approaching a clue about running the business in question, or any business whatsoever, wasn't remotely a consideration.
This worked as well as it always does. Despots never learn.
Up until the recent changes from Congress, every single one of those countries had lower corporate tax rates than the U.S., and by a wide margin as well.
Up until the recent changes, the U.S. had the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. Our corporate tax rate was higher than Cuba's.
Left vs right is a false dichotomy. So all arguments based thereupon are bound to be at least a little incoherent.
The economy in most large areas of America has been in a deep economic depression for decades.
Isn't that just the headline tax rate, before loopholes. It's a jobs program for tax attorneys. Once they get properly lawyered up, most big American companies pay a very low effective tax rate.
It's an empty gesture because he's not Bill Gates. His contribution wouldn't amount to more than a few weeks of relief on the problem.
I read the internet for the articles.
It's an empty gesture because he's not Bill Gates. His contribution wouldn't amount to more than a few weeks of relief on the problem.
Oh, really? His most recent house he bought for $600,000. What do you think his other two houses are worth? He personally makes over $170,000 a year, and is never going to want .
So what would happen if he gave away that wealth and spread it around? The median income for a full-time worker is around $30,000 per year. He could easily make a significant difference in the lives of a dozen of people if he chose to. He's a hypocrite that is unwilling to lead by example.
I'm making the argument that the system he's touting won't be used by him and his congressional buddies. For someone who seems to think he's smarter than everyone else to the point of suggesting someone who disagrees with his hero is dumb, you're either redefining dumb or being intentionally obtuse.
As soon as socialist Bernie's master plan applies to EVERYONE then he's a hypocrite (like I said).
But it doesn't, never has and so he is.
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