Footage Contradicts U.S. Claim That Nicolás Maduro Burned Aid Convoy - Polidicks

Naw that's just a spin to make it sound nice and clean without any collateral. Sanctions are levied against financial and oil sectors, both aiming to reduce capital available to the Venezuelan state. Venezula unable to access it's own gold reserves (would be handy while a country faces economic crisis no?) The result is the state has less funds available to it. In a centrally planned economy this means everyone is hit. .This is not targeting individuals. This is targeting the entire economy (oil mostly being a large part of the economy) and the state. People are suffering from it. OHCHR | Venezuela sanctions harm human rights of innocent people.. GENEVA (31 January 2019) – Sanctions which can lead to starvation and medical shortages are not the answer to the crisis in Venezuela, says UN human rights expert Idriss Jazairy. His comments follow the imposition of sanctions on Venezuela’s national oil company by the United States. “I am especially concerned to hear reports that these sanctions are aimed at changing the government of Venezuela,” said Mr. Jazairy, the UN Special Rapporteur concerned with the negative impact of sanctions. “Coercion, whether military or economic, must never be used to seek a change in government in a sovereign state. The use of sanctions by outside powers to overthrow an elected government is in violation of all norms of international law. “I call upon the international community to engage in constructive dialogue with Venezuela to find solutions to the very real challenges being faced,” the expert urged. “Economic sanctions are effectively compounding the grave crisis affecting the Venezuelan economy, adding to the damage caused by hyperinflation and the fall in oil prices. This is a time when compassion should be expressed for the long-suffering people of Venezuela by promoting, not curtailing, access to food and medicine,” Mr. Jazairy said. Precipitating an economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is not a foundation for the peaceful settlement of disputes, Mr. Jazairy noted. “I call on States to engage in and facilitate constructive dialogues with all parties to find solutions which respect the human rights of Venezuelans,” he said. Sanctions (in this case) do not target the individual, do not buy that sanitised image that they're the perfect economic weapon, they are not!

i agree that the sanctions are extremely damaging. ever since the venezuelan economy collapsed, Maduros bank account represents about 80% of GDP. by sanctioning him, you are destroying whats left of the economy

Obviously haven't learned our lesson from Vietnam.

About a year ago I saw a post from you with some anti government shtick about the CIA funded Contras. You can pull a load of emotive language about Venezuela but you know full well what happens when the US intervenes in Latin America. You get fascism, you get war crimes. Maduro is shit but at least the US isn't responsible for the problem there (aside from US lead sanctions contributing to starvation). If the US leads an intervention and regime change then any blood from that (and there will be) is on their hands (and imo the people who called for them to do it). Intervening won't make the situation better but cutting sanctions will. Plain and simple. Also why don't you apply your emotive language to other crisises and dictators around the world? Why aren't you advocating for sending troops into Eritrea or Saudi? or Haiti where protesters have been killed in a crackdown recently? The ONLY reason the US gov/corporations want (and have wanted to for decades) to regime change Venezuela (and not other places in similar crisis) is they see some nationalised oil they can privatise for a big load of money.

maduros a pretty bad guy, i give you that. but let's be real here, just because you lost an election and decided to kill a few people doesn't necessarily mean you have to step down. once america backs off, maduro can use his swiss bank account to finallly redistribute the wealth to the people like chavez promised 20 years ago

For a breakdown of how sanctions are targetting the entire economy, affecting the people check this out. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article227416389.html Miami Herald Venezuela imports 80 to 90 percent of all its goods — including food and medicine — and asphyxiating PDVSA limits the country’s ability to bring in necessities. Venezuela’s imports in 2018 fell to an estimated $11.7 billion down from $66 billion in 2012, according to Torino Capital. And the firm expects imports to fall to about $7 billion this year. From $66 Billion in 2012 to $7 Billion in imports. Those imports include food and medicine,. Mark Weisbrot, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington-based think tank, argues that all unilateral sanctions are illegal and violate international conventions on collective punishment. He says that even sanctions on individuals have broader economic implications, as banks and institutions often steer clear of countries where officials are being targeted. And while he admits that Venezuela had “serious problems” before the U.S. measures took effect, he says the sanctions are now keeping Maduro from taming hyperinflation, increasing oil production or keeping his citizens fed and healthy. “The truth is, the U.S. government is preventing Venezuela from taking any step to fix the economy,” he said. When the U.S. imposed similar oil sanctions in Iraq from 1990 to 2003, infant mortality spiked. According to hotly debated research, the sanctions were responsible from anywhere from 40,000 to half a million additional deaths. And similar effects might be seen in Venezuela, Weisbrot said. IMO any deaths from those sanctions should be held against the Countries holding those sanctions. Sorry to repeat a point here but with figures I think it makes a stronger arguement, this is massive for the economy of Venezuela and will contribute massively to the suffering there.

you're acting like the US wants to help venezuela, which it doesn't

yeah it's pretty bad. it's cost the economy almost as much as corruption has https://transparencia.org.ve/an-ha-detectado-malversacion-superior-87-mil-millones-dolares-2/

So why make a situation worse? A thug breaks someone's arm, you then break the other and say the thug needs to be brought to justice. People there are suffering, you don't make it worse just for political capital. That's a vicious scummy move. And, back on original topic, you don't then go on to lie about who burnt the aid trucks!! You don't cite those lies in statements to the UN advocating for intervention.

i agree completely. the thing is that corruption of 90% of the wealth is already a given in venezuela, so taking the last 10% causes huge problems. people get all fired up about their government refusing to perform even the most basic services, and sometimes they get so angry they start flipping cars and even killing politicians, and i hate that shit.

You're acting like you ignored all other posts I've made in this thread so far. Like the posts where I specifically stated I do not believe the US has Venezuelan interests at heart.

the whole 'maybe this time it'll work out better than the last 20 times' attitude is pretty confusing. US intervention isn't a case of 'well let's just see how it turns out because it's pretty bad already'. that's literally how it's been every other time.

Where is that 90% figure from? If we're gonna talk maths we should show working. Also this report (literally published by the opposition) equates embezzelment with wastage and general inefficiency (see 'unfinished (and delayed (ie poorly planned work)) work'). Fair enough we'll go with that, though if corruption is firm grounds for regime change and intervention, and wastage is counted as embezzlement then we better get changing some regimes. It's unclear the period overwhich which the embezzelment occured, eg the PDVSA one was from 2004 to 2014, a 10 year period. The 'unfinished (and delayed) work' somehow managed to determine a cost of 222 billion over a 3 year period (possibly longer since it also discusses amounts from 2017) I'm wary about the figures and the way they are presented, there is a clear bias present here. Still corruption and exploitation are a problem but do you, honestly, believe that a US backed regime change would result in less exploitation? If so, why?

i think that the US regime change would result in more exploitation. venezuela is a socialist country, and a transition to a capitalist economy will result in worker exploitation

You mean when a "mass grave is found by an anonymous twitter user, they post a picture of it very similar to a mass grave picture from some other conflict"? Like what happened in OP. I don't think Maduro is any good, he's exploitative and authoritarian. But I think the sanctions make it worse unnecessarily, you can't inflict pain and starvation and blame the other guy, that's just wrong on every level - so in my mind that rules out sanctions. Going by the US track record for invervention and regime change in Latin America (and elsewhere more recently) I think it will end up worse (just less covered by our media) - so in my mind that rules out US (or any other) regime change. IMO best thing to do is try to improve things for the people there. It might not be an efficient system but people won't starve. All this stuff about wastage and corruption is cynical bullshit, the people who make those claims (eg US politicians) don't care about that stuff, they're using it to manipulate you for your support - and isn't a firm basis for regime change, if it were we'd be regime changing other places. No. The reason we're regime changing Venezuela is coz a buncha oligarchs in the US have wanted to for decades, they've spoke of it for decades and this is their shot. Sanctions are only making the situation worse and don't delude yourself into thinking the people running this (US politicians and already super rich corperate big money arseholes) are doing this for anything other than self gain. They want to replace Maduro as lead exploiter that's it.

It would probably be best just to source that claim instead of being purposefully obtuse, you know.

I think the vast majority of Venezuelans would welcome "worker exploitation" over the current situation

Oh boy Mark Weisbrot? Now I understand where you're coming from if you're quoting the guy who wrote this in 2013, https://i.imgur.com/b98nDGr.png Anyway, so, let's talk about those sanctions, shall we? Let's begin first by dissecting what the sanctions are. They are conveniently all listed here, and as you can see, the overwhelming majority of them are actually targeted towards specific individuals. The reasoning behind each one is described in the text, but it refers to either members of the upper echelon of the Venezuelan government or its military, and in each case, the intended effect of them is that sanctioned individuals will "have their property and interests in property in the United States blocked or frozen, and U.S. persons are prohibited from doing business with them". Now, why would any of these socialist paragons have any business to do with the pitiyankis, much less have assets in the United States is really beyond me. I'll leave you to figure that out. Point is, none of those actually affect anyone inside Venezuela, it doesn't explicitly forbid the government from doing business in the US, they are just really inconvenient for the families of those sanctioned, as they won't be able to travel to Disneyworld so easily. But alright, let's talk about the ones that aren't targeted towards individuals, let's talk about Executive Order 13808, put into place by Trump on the 24th of August, 2017. What it effectively does, as you can see in Section 1, is that it prohibits transactions in the United States related to the acquisition of new PDVSA debt, as well as Venezuelan government bonds, divident payments and securities qualifying as new debt. What does that mean? It effectively prevents Venezuela from using the US financial system. So, hey, there you go, that's the smoking gun right? Here's what Fulcrum isn't telling you. If you have a good memory, you can probably remember hearing about a Venezuelan crisis way before that date. I actually left the country on July 2016 as the situation quickly deteriorated. So, did this sanction serve as a way to accelerate the decay? Actually no, this actually probably helped slow it down, and to understand why, you need to observe that despite the historical price of oil in the last 10 years, plotted out, looks like this https://i.imgur.com/2Vh976p.png Venezuela's foreign reserves over the same period of time, look like this https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/107269/4d0d89bc-27b2-4953-b0b3-b528cd5e2d12/image.png So oil prices bounced back, yet foreign reserves steadily declined beginning with the Maduro presidency and preceding the 2014 crash, reaching a 20 year low today. Simply put, Venezuela was running out of money way before the sanctions were put in place, mainly because, the Maduro government seemed to prioritize making its debt obligations before buying food or medicine for its people. This is why, on April 2017, just 4 months before that sanction, PDVSA made a $90 million dollar interest payment on a bond bought for $2.8 billion by Goldman Sachs. This is during the time the crisis was underway. This is the same year where Venezuelans lost 11kg on average, people. Who else other than Wall Street was interested in buying Venezuelan debt? Well, none other than Russia, who morgaged CITGO, Venezuela's US subsidiary, in exchange for a 50,1% share. That's right, Maduro pawned off state assets to Russia, and they would've gotten them if a US court wasn't currently blocking that transaction. So what Fulcrum is ultimately saying is, Venezuela needs Wall Street to survive. That wasn't true before, as Chavez never actually needed loans like that at any point of his presidency. And Venezuela was tethering on default beginning in 2017, with basically every vulture lender making circles around PDVSA, including all of your favorites like JP Morgan. The country's credit rating was abysmal, and the fact they were looking for more debt was insanely reckless and irresponsible, as it would have obviously led to the seizure of state assets, because there is no way Venezuela could have sustained its debt payments in the long term. So, are there other sanctions like that? Specifically, ones preventing Venezuela from selling oil, or buying medicine, or food, or supplies of any sort? No. And according to Maduro, there isn't a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. Which is the reason why he has never accepted aid. The medicine could have arrived for free from countries other than the US, it could have come through the Red Cross, or the UN. The Venezuelan government has blocked all of that. Yeah, you wondered why there doesn't seem to be like a humanitarian mission in Venezuela if shit is so bad over there? It's because he doesn't allow it.

i just think its much more likely that a government which has misspent billions for decades and has driven the country into the ground might have more to do with the state venezuela is currently in than the sanctions remember this has been going on for the best part of twenty years. its been a gradual slide downwards for a long time and we are only just seeing the crisis boil over fully now

Got it, no source.

The current situation in Venezuela cannot be described with a single sentence, we have seen the international attention this event has got. From the United States to China, everyone seems to be involved on this event, or at least, showing a particular interest. People from the US to Chile have voiced their opinions, we have people that say "Maduro is bad and I support a US intervention" others say "Maduro is bad but I don't support a US intervention" or, paraphrasing a user here "I support Maduro because he is against the US" . We might not agree on what's the best course of action for Venezuela, but one thing is sure: Maduro doesn't want to leave power. We know what it means as a Latino Country to welcome the US in our affairs. There is a high risk of the United State goverment taking advantage because history has told us that. Oil. Minerals. Size. Venezuela is bountiful in natural resources but unable to extract those resources by himself. The US will gladly offer alternatives to it, but China and Russia will do the same too. No one here is a Hero. There are shades of gray, "lesser evils" as someone said. I believe that the lesser evil is the United States. Said country has a history of fucking Latinoamérica in the 20th century (a comprehensible fear) but as I said on a previous thread: things have changed. Today we have something unthinkable for the 70's or the 80's: The internet. People will record everything. In fact, people are recording everything. News outlets can share information instantly. Venezuelans can write their thoughts in social media or communicate with us through Discord, Facepunch of whatever service avaliable. If someone, let's say, dies due to the Military being dicks https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/207366/bef8ec94-1cc7-4c54-bada-ba8886f5ae37/Leonardo Henrichsen.jpg (Leonardo Henrichsen recorded his own execution during the Coup d'e Etat in Chile, 1973). Let's imagine an scenario in which the United States with South America joint efforts to send troops to Venezuela. Civilians and reporters alike will not stop recording the events. Taking their cellphones, smartphones, cameras, keyboards and register everything they can see. The picture above was taken on the heat of the moment but hasn't been remembered too well. Something like that happening with US/SA Soldiers would NOT be forgotten on the era of the internet. Sadly, this is what is left. We are mere spectators in an event that is killing a country, but unlike the coups of the 20th or the Middle East/Orient, information will flow. The consequences of the event will be recorded for eternity. For now we can all try to contribuite to the situation. Talk with venezuelans. Learn from them, offer a hand when they are in need. I know we cannot do much, but if we are able to at least help a single individual, believe me, they will be forever grateful. Don't be the classic type of cunt that discuss this stuff in social media/forums and never take action, I have been like that for far too long until a friend of mine, family even, suffered. Do something.