tschuckman@aol.com
But the stupid, lazy Liberals in America... the USA, still don't think it can happen HERE ! Duh....I have a big stick to help me teach stubborn people.... lol. Not really, I don't even BOTHER with oinks like that, who choose to be lazy, stupid and ignorant...Ha! Sorry, I am just too old and beat up to preach or teach the goofy, senseless ones. A few years ago, I tried to organize what I thought were some "good people" in the neighborhood near me, but they too turned out to be false friends, so I hope they are happy now because they won't have my help, assistance, or generosity anymore. I don't live there anymore. If I could just find someone who likes, loves, needs me, I could really make a great 'team of horses' thrive and survive. But.... the more think about that, I now believe that the Lord wants me to DEPEND ON HIM, all the way, and for everything ! ! When humans have failed me --- God will show me the way, and SAVE me. I pray to Him many times a day and also study His Word, the KJV Bible. I think that my main problem is that I trust people 'too soon' before I can figure out what they are really after.... duh.
Friends, please take the time to read about a large South American country where they are starving to death every single day! With the coming collapse of our own economy and financial crisis, the same thing will [not could--- but will] happen in the good old USA ! So, are you still going to take that great, loaded, expensive vacation, or buy a new car that you don't need ?? Just think about it, please, and share this blog post with others that you care for.
Ha! maybe the is the answer to my weight problem, and I will be nice and skinny again, as I was in high school. But I had big shoulders back then and muscles. If I just have good, pure, drinking water, I will be fine and dandy. I plan to have some Mexican food tomorrow and lots of hot peppers. Yum, Yum. I will order about 20 hot peppers for sure !
Tom
See! I was a lot more thin, and only weighed about 160 pounds in Vietnam: 68-70, and I had a very healthy appetite. And I had a full head of dark brown hair and shinny lovable eyes, too. God was surely protecting me back then, and even now. But I am so ready for the Rapture, dear Lord. YOU are all I have.
Americas
Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation
A Hungry Nation
CreditMeridith Kohut for The New York Times
CUMANÁ, Venezuela — With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.
Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.
Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.
And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.
In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.
This is precisely the Venezuela its leaders vowed to prevent.
In one of the nation’s worst moments, riots spread from Caracas, the capital, in 1989, leaving hundreds dead at the hands of security forces. Known as the “Caracazo,” or the “Caracas clash,” they were set off by low oil prices, cuts in subsidies and a population that was suddenly impoverished.
The event seared the memory of a future president, Hugo Chávez, who said the country’s inability to provide for its people, and the state’s repression of the uprising, were the reasons Venezuela needed a socialist revolution.
Now his successors find themselves in a similar bind — or maybe even worse.
The nation is anxiously searching for ways to feed itself.
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The economic collapse of recent years has left it unable to produce enough food on its own or import what it needs from abroad. Cities have been militarized under an emergency decree from President Nicolás Maduro, the man Mr. Chávez picked to carry on with his revolution before he died three years ago.
“If there is no food, there will be more riots,” said Raibelis Henriquez, 19, who waited all day for bread in Cumaná, where at least 22 businesses were attacked in a single day last week.
But while the riots and clashes punctuate the country with alarm, it is the hunger that remains the constant source of unease.
A staggering 87 percent of Venezuelans say they do not have money to buy enough food, the most recent assessment of living standards by Simón Bolívar University found.
About 72 percent of monthly wages are being spent just to buy food, according to the Center for Documentation and Social Analysis, a research group associated with the Venezuelan Teachers Federation.
Caribbean Sea
Boca
de Uchire
Cumaná
Caracas
Barcelona
VENEZUELA
COLOMBIA
BRAZIL
200 miles
In April, it found that a family would need the equivalent of 16 minimum-wage salaries to properly feed itself.
Ask people in this city when they last ate a meal, and many will respond that it was not today.
Among them are Leidy Cordova, 37, and her five children — Abran, Deliannys, Eliannys, Milianny and Javier Luis — ages 1 to 11. On Thursday evening, the entire family had not eaten since lunchtime the day before, when Ms. Cordova made a soup by boiling chicken skin and fat that she had found for a cheap price at the butcher.
“My kids tell me they’re hungry,” Ms. Cordova said as her family looked on. “And all I can say to them is to grin and bear it.”
Other families have to choose who eats. Lucila Fonseca, 69, has lymphatic cancer, and her 45-year-old daughter, Vanessa Furtado, has a brain tumor. Despite also being ill, Ms. Furtado gives up the little food she has on many days so her mother does not skip meals.
“I used to be very fat, but no longer,” the daughter said. “We are dying as we live.”
Her mother added, “We are now living on Maduro’s diet: no food, no nothing.”
Economists say years of economic mismanagement — worsened by low prices for oil, the nation’s main source of revenue — have shattered the food supply.
Sugar fields in the country’s agricultural center lie fallow for lack of fertilizers. Unused machinery rots in shuttered state-owned factories. Staples like corn and rice, once exported, now must be imported and arrive in amounts that do not meet the need.
In response, Mr. Maduro has tightened his grip over the food supply. Using emergency decrees he signed this year, the president put most food distribution in the hands of a group of citizen brigades loyal to leftists, a measure critics say is reminiscent of food rationing in Cuba.
“They’re saying, in other words, you get food if you’re my friend, if you’re my sympathizer,” said Roberto Briceño-León, the director of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a human rights group.
It was all a new reality for Gabriel Márquez, 24, who grew up in the boom years when Venezuela was rich and empty shelves were unimaginable. He stood in front of the destroyed supermarket where the mob had arrived at Cumaná, an endless expanse of smashed bottles, boxes and scattered shelves. A few people, including a policeman, were searching the wreckage for leftovers to take.
“During Carnival, we used to throw eggs at each other just to have some fun,” he said. “Now an egg is like gold.”
Down the coastal road in a small fishing town called Boca de Uchire, hundreds gathered on a bridge this month to protest because the food deliveries were not arriving. Residents demanded to meet the mayor, but when he did not come they sacked a Chinese bodega.
Residents hacked open the door with pickaxes and pillaged the shop, venting their anger at a global power that has lent billions of dollars to prop up Venezuela in recent years.
“We are now living
on Maduro’s diet:
no food, no nothing.”
Lucila Fonseca, 69on Maduro’s diet:
no food, no nothing.”
“The Chinese won’t sell to us,” said a taxi driver who watched the crowd haul away all that was inside. “So we burn their stores instead.”
Mr. Maduro, who is fighting a push for a referendum to recall him this year over the country’s declines, said it was the political opposition that was behind the attacks on the stores.
“They paid a group of criminals, brought them in trucks,” he said on Saturday on television, promising compensation to those who lost property.
At the same time, the government also blames an “economic war” for the shortages. It accuses wealthy business owners of hoarding food and charging exorbitant prices, creating artificial shortages to profit from the country’s misery.
It has left shop owners feeling under siege, particularly those who do not have Spanish names.
“Look how we are working today,” said Maria Basmagi, whose family immigrated from Syria a generation ago, pointing to the metal grate pulled over the window of her shoe store.
Her shop was on the commercial boulevard in Barcelona, another coastal town racked by unrest last week. At 11 a.m. the day before, someone screamed that there was an attack on a government-run kitchen nearby. Every shop on Ms. Basmagi’s street closed down in fear.
Other shops stay open, like the bakery in Cumaná where a line of 100 people snaked around a corner. Each person was allowed to buy about a pound of bread.
Robert Astudillo, a 23-year-old father of two, was not sure there would be any left once his turn came. He said he still had corn flour to make arepas, a Venezuelan staple, for his children. They had not eaten meat in months.
“We make the arepas small,” he said.
In the refrigerator of Araselis Rodriguez and Nestor Daniel Reina, the parents of four small children, there was not even corn flour — just a few limes and some bottles of water.
The family had eaten bread for breakfast and soup for lunch made from fish that Mr. Reina had managed to catch. The family had nothing for dinner.
It has not always been clear what provokes the riots. Is it hunger alone? Or is it some larger anger that has built up in a country that has crumbled?
Inés Rodríguez was not sure. She remembered calling out to the crowd of people who had come to sack her restaurant on Tuesday night, offering them all the chicken and rice the restaurant had if they would only leave the furniture and cash register behind. They balked at the offer and simply pushed her aside, Ms. Rodríguez said.
“It is the meeting of hunger and crime now,” she said.
As she spoke, three trucks with armed patrols drove by, each emblazoned with photos of Mr. Chávez and Mr. Maduro.
The trucks were carrying food.
“Finally they come here,” Ms. Rodríguez said. “And look what it took to get them. It took this riot to get us something to eat.”
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726 Comments
su
ny 16 hours agoIn oil spoiled economy, Neither Capitalism nor socialism is the friend of public.
Today we certainly understand that Venezuela's long history of American satellite capitalist economy and after Hugo Chavez bravado socialism feed only one thing, oil money.
Look ate the pictures and life, you can see only one thing, Venezuela's political elites ( Capitalist and Socialists) are here for only one thing, sucking blood out of poor people.
If we are going to talk today , Mr. Maduro , I believe you should admit even Saddam Hussain govern a nation better than you which is ended the Iraq as nation as we know it. How can you be so incompetent. But this is my naiveté, 20th century history full of Maduro's how they destroy their country.
Look every body can understand why Somalia is poor, or Chad is poor, but If people are in Venezuela are poor and suffering , there is only one thing to blame, politicians.
Apparently god never show mercy in Venezuela's history when it comes to Politicians.
It is simply heartbreaking.
Karl
NYC 15 hours agoIn the meanwhile, as usual, the poorest members of our global society will suffer the most because our score card doesn't take them into account. But we need to be careful about turning our backs on them. Think for a moment what a gap in energy services could do to our urban living even here in the US. Think Katrina or Super Storm Sandy minus the wind and waves. We'll be at each others throats yet if our leaders can't see a way forward.
Mike
Chile 15 hours agoTJJ
Albuquerque 15 hours agoIt has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism. Capitalism suffers from the excesses of shortsightedness, greed and poverty just as much as socialism. Just look at Appalachia today, where cheap natural gas has destroyed the coal-based economies of West Virginia and Kentucky, leaving people in debt and poverty. Likewise, cheap foreign labor, and cheap robots, have destroyed Detroit and other manufacturing hubs.
It has happened here. And It can happen here again. Maybe what we all need to learn, yet again is that, during the booms, plan for the busts.
Rudolf
New York 15 hours agoVMG
NJ 15 hours agoVenezuela needs food and we need oil, sounds like a mutually beneficial relationship is there to be made.
Wolfgang Schanner
Sao Jose do Rio Claro - Brazil 14 hours agoRQueen18
Washington, DC 14 hours agoVenezuela's oil is heavy and there is only one refinery that can take it in the Caribbean. Oil is not the answer. Investment in agriculture and mining is the answer, and that requires a new government.
Bob Aceti
Oakville Ontario 14 hours agoThe end game will likely be a revolution gunned-down by military junta that will seize power. I think we may have seen this movie before: Chile under Augusto Pinochet (1973-90) and Argentina under a Military Junta (1955-83) briefly interrupted by Peronist populist or provincial communist leaders.
This sad story is about the children and their parents; elderly; sick and dying. It reflects upon our own good fortune living in more risk diversified 'advanced' nations. The best way to avoid a Venezuela is to respect and support democractic process and eschew those that offer simple remedies to complex issues that also scapegoat segments of the population for personal political gain.
When you think about Venezuela and other resource rich countries, consider it wasn't too long ago that this country offered one of the highest standards of living in Latin America based on its vast oil resources. Now it has become a cauldron of social decay and despair. How many nations are in similar circumstances?
Gregory
New York 13 hours agoVenezuela's socialist experiment came after two centuries of the same pattern throughout Latin America: landowning and business elites controlling the economy for the benefit of the very few, and grossly underinvesting in the public infrastructure essential to lift the population out of poverty: education, sanitation, healthcare, transportation and housing. It was Vz's elites who ran the country for 200 years who left the country wholly dependent on oil revenues. Socialists inherited this.
Successive American governments supported those same elites throughout Latin America, even arming and training militaries whose main purpose was to enforce a plainly unjust socioeconomic order. All the better to extract resources and labor at cut rate prices, eg, the "banana republic" phenomenon.
That is why Latin America has the world's most extreme wealth disparities. And that's why Venezuela elected a socialist government that promised to address Vz's grotesque economic stratification.
Vz under Chavez was no dictatorship. It was a democratically elected & re-elected government. Its policies worked when oil prices were high, but failed when prices collapsed. It succeeded, and made mistakes. But Vz's government was persistently undermined by the Bush and Obama administrations, and by Vz elites who want to regain their unearned privilege.
ACW
New Jersey 13 hours agoI think, ultimately, the problem is (yet again) adoption of an ideology and the assumption that when ideology clashes with reality, the latter is what should give way. Both left and right have manifested that blindness in the past; Venezuela happens to be an example of the left. But right-wing capitalist governments have had their disasters as well.
I suggest the solution is a flexible middle course, a mixed economy and openness to adaptation - if A isn't working, try B or C or X or Q. FDR's New Deal is a reasonably good example of a mixed approach that mostly, though not perfectly, worked - some free enterprise, some command, some government supervision and regulation but not 'God is the State'.
Why are we so trapped in either/or?
Inner face
Los Angeles 11 hours agoUsha Srinivasan
Martyand 11 hours agokaw7
Manchester 9 hours agoAeon555
Northport, New York 9 hours agoNed
San Francisco 9 hours agonaturegirl
New York 9 hours agoAnd what of the Venezuelans? Should we not be asking how we can assist these starving families? Is it solely the job of our respective governments, or cna individuals make a difference? It is heartbreaking to see how much these families are suffering.
726 Comments