SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the this-is-why-they-can't-have-anything-nice dept.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/20/news/gm-venezuela-plant-seized/index.html
General Motors says it will immediately halt operations in Venezuela after its plant in the country was unexpectedly seized by authorities.
GM described the takeover as an "illegal judicial seizure of its assets."
The automaker said the seizure showed a "total disregard" of its legal rights. It said that authorities had removed assets including cars from company facilities.
"[GM] strongly rejects the arbitrary measures taken by the authorities and will vigorously take all legal actions, within and outside of Venezuela, to defend its rights," it said in a statement.
Authorities in Venezuela, which is mired in a severe economic crisis, did not respond to requests for comment.
It was not immediately clear why authorities seized the GM plant. Huge swaths of Venezuela's economy have been nationalized in the years since former President Hugo Chavez rose to power. Under Chavez, who took office in 1999, the state took control of private oil, telecommunications, energy and cement businesses.
President Nicolas Maduro has continued the tradition, while blaming the United States and its companies for Venezuela's economic and political problems.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Friday April 21 2017, @04:10PM (7 children)
"In 1950, Venezuela had the 4th highest GDP in the entire world. Then, the socialists took over, and it's all been downhill since."
Nice story, but unfortunately it's as true as anything else on Fox News. Venezuela has never been in the top 10 of GDP. Ever.
And the socialists are a relatively recent phenomenon.
1948-1958 Right-wing military dictatorship
1958-1998 Mostly corrupt populist democratic governments
1999-now Socialists
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday April 21 2017, @05:21PM (5 children)
Some other important aspects of Venezuela post-1999 that I think are worth mentioning here:
1. The socialists were elected into power. Chavez was extremely popular, and Maduro (who took over after Chavez died based on the constitutional succession) had close votes but won his re-election. That makes them approximately as legitimate representatives of their people as the governments you described as "populist democratic".
2. It's about as well documented as these things ever are that the US backed a coup against the socialists back in 2002, trying to replace him with a group of completely unelected businessmen upset about Chavez's tax rates. That group of businessmen included Venezuela's media moguls, which makes Venezuelan-based reporting on Venezuela suspect. And the way the US media reported it, more-or-less exactly in line with how the Venezuelan and US coup organizers reported it, makes that reporting suspect as well.
3. Since 2002, and especially since Chavez' death in 2013, there has been evidence of ongoing efforts by the US to remove the socialists from power. That effort includes working hard to convince Americans that Chavez and now Maduro were dictators rather than an elected heads of state (the simplest way to demonstrate that wasn't and isn't the case: If they were dictators, then Julio Borges, the opposition party leader, would be dead).
Are either Chavez or Maduro saints? Almost definitely not. I do think Chavez was fairly sincere about what he was trying to do (in a nutshell: put oil revenue into improving the lives of Venezuela's poorest citizens, and damn what the multinational corps have to say about that), but I consider it entirely possible that corruption and the rough-and-tumble of politics made that less of a success than he hoped. As for Maduro, he seems to me to be a fairly typical politician doing what typical politicians do in order to stay in power. And yes, in countries without a strongly independent judiciary and electoral authorities, that includes dirty tricks.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday April 21 2017, @06:05PM (2 children)
Thanks for saving me the typing.
I would have added that Chavez spent the oil money without anticipating that the Bush depression would crash the record-high prices (driven by the Bush bubble propping China, and the Bush wars) dramatically. It takes a lot of education to distribute oil profits to people, while having them understand that you need to take that away during bad times.
Most of that money came from the US, which was always very happy to deal with the Big Bad Evil Socialists for cheap oil, while trying to undermine them to reduce the oil cost, fail the idea that money can be shared with the poor, and prevent Chavez's oil diplomacy (with Cuba and others).
So now, as is usual (Iran...), the US media is happy to portray Venezuela as having failed and Maduro as a dictator, and conveniently forgetting to mention that this was not a black-and-white situation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21 2017, @06:15PM (1 child)
Right the man who stole public property through use of force, banned opposition from politics, dissolved constitutional law-making body, took away people's rights to own guns and now is proclaiming he will distribute guns to supporters is not a dictator in a romantic sense, only a text-book definition of one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21 2017, @06:47PM
More reading comprehension failure
conveniently forgetting to mention that this was not a black-and-white situation.
Cause that part kind of matters.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21 2017, @09:47PM (1 child)
Chavez would properly be branded a Bolivarian (Anti-Imperialist).
He was NOT especially active in empowering The Workers, so "Socialist" wouldn't be accurate.
His redistribution of the commonwealth (for about the billionth time this week) would come under the heading of Liberal Democracy.
(The Alaska Permanent Fund[1] has already been mentioned in this (meta)thread.)
[1] ...at one time happily overseen by that Pinko, Commie, Anti-Capitalist Sarah Palin.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday April 22 2017, @03:54AM
Maduro was a union leader prior to becoming a politician, so by that standard he's more of a socialist than Chavez was.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 21 2017, @05:44PM
"anything else on Fox News"
You're claiming that Fox News owns that NationMaster page? Evidence? I don't know who owns it, haven't bothered to look. I'm wondering if you maybe clicked the link, saw some data, and assumed that it must belong to Fox?
http://www.nationmaster.com/about [nationmaster.com]
We are a global team of passionate stat geeks, dedicated to the mission of bringing facts to the world of geopolitics, economics, geography, defence and culture.
We believe that statistical literacy should be a core part of education. In the information age, everyone needs to be able to interpret data. If you leave it to someone else, you’re risking your future.
NationMaster was founded by Luke Metcalfe back in 2003. He was a fan of the CIA World Factbook but wanted to give it context, comparing countries side by side and calculating everything per capita. From there, NationMaster turned into the internet’s one stop shop for international statistics - a place where you can compare anything at all.
Now in 2014, NationMaster is growing into a community of statistics creators and users.