[rwallace]

That was last year when the crisis could still be attributed to incompetence, mismanagement. The situation has changed considerably since then.

I'm going to call it now: the Venezuela crisis is not incompetence after all. It's the first steps of a highly competent plan to do what several other communist governments did last century: bring about the death of a large percentage of the country's population.

I don't lightly advocate military intervention. I think it's almost always the wrong thing to do. But I'm advocating it now. The communist government of Venezuela needs to be taken down hard and fast, before this turns into full-blown genocide.

[narrator]

I said that they were getting a terror famine ready last year and everyone thought I was a lunatic. The idea, pioneered in the Soviet Union in the 30s, is that the government has to control all distribution of food and goods produced by workers to earn hard currency abroad by exporting the food and goods instead of feeding people domestically so it can use the proceeds to "build socialism". That means they have to confiscate factories and force people onto collective farms who don't want to be there as they're doing now. Sure they could have a normal capitalist economy and just tax them like a normal country, but this is communism and they have to remove the "capitalist running-dog exploiter" class from power and give all economic power to the government.

If you want to read about Soviet forced collectivization and all that messy history for a preview of what's coming up, this is a pretty good source:

http://acienciala.faculty.ku.edu/communistnationssince1917/c...

Ctrl-F for "Collectivization" and start reading from there, or read the whole thing if you want the background.

Remember, the guys running Venezuela are communists. They've read up and talked with the Cubans about how the Soviet Union was set up and run, etc. They like that model and think it was a good idea. They are simply following the cookbook. This includes the propaganda that everything bad happening is due to foreign saboteurs, right-wing reactionaries or unfortunate, but soon to be remedied, mistakes.

They've got the forced collectivization already to go:

https://news.vice.com/article/venezuela-has-a-new-forced-lab...

[astronautjones]

They don't have a communist government.

[tim333]

Although they are probably heading that way if Maduro can get away with it. I still think the food shortages are incompetence rather than design though.