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VENEZUELA’S ECONOMY IS a basket case.
This week, a state of emergency was decreed in the south American country as President Nicolas Maduro brought in sweeping new powers.
The measures give his government and security forces broad authorisation to ignore most constitutional safeguards in a bid to keep order and supply basic food and services, and to counter a crippling energy shortage.
But the opposition, which controls the national assembly, tested Maduro’s resolve with nationwide marches on Wednesday.
Police and soldiers used tear gas to break up similar protests last week.
Crisis
The developments threaten to deepen the crisis in the oil-rich South American country, whose oil-dependent economy is teetering dangerously.
Hyperinflation, three years of recession, shrinking oil revenues, electricity rationing, and now rising political confrontation in the nation have sent alarm bells ringing across the Americas.
“The conditions for the Venezuelan population are terrible,” said a spokesman for the White House in Washington, Josh Earnest.
The country has already moved its time-zone forward a half an hour, allowed rolling blackouts and reduced public sector work weeks to two days a week, as well as ordered schools to close on Fridays.
The socialist Maduro government says the El Nino weather phenomenon has dried up the nation’s hydroelectric dams.
How did we get here?
So, how does a country with the 50th largest GDP in the world get to this point?
While it is a complex web of problems, it comes down to a lack of investment, a lack of trust and a floundering oil market.
Maduro is the hand-picked successor to Venezuela’s former leader Hugo Chavez. While Chavez was popular with the country’s poor and working-classes, many middle-earners and particularly the rich resented his sweeping reforms.
Maduro has carried that legacy, as well as a faltering economy, since his predecessor’s death in 2013. Now, seven in 10 Venezuelans say they want a new government.
Maduro has responded by attempting to use the army to stabilise the country.
Soldiers are to help police keep order, backed by the local civilian committees, and are to be deployed to distribute and sell food.
Individuals, companies or non-governmental organisations in Venezuela with links to foreign entities are to be put under scrutiny and their finances frozen if deemed to be political or destabilising.
The text also opens the way to expropriations of businesses not seen to be doing enough to supply staple foodstuffs, and other steps as needed as long as they don’t violate constitutional protections on human rights.
The measures are to last for 60 days with the option of being renewed for further periods of 60 days.
What’s next?
Maduro has said the state of emergency could be renewed to extend through 2017.
The company seizures could notably affect the Polar group, Venezuela’s biggest food and beverage company, which halted beer production on 30 April, saying it had run out of barley.
Venezuelan businesses say they are currently operating at less than 45% capacity because the government will not allow them to buy increasingly scarce dollars to pay foreign suppliers.
The opposition won legislative elections in December, but its agenda in the National Assembly has been stymied by the Supreme Court, which it condemns as beholden to Maduro.
It is now seeking to organise a recall referendum, and says it has collected 1.8 million signatures to launch the process.
But the vote must be held by the end of the year to trigger new elections, and the opposition accuses the authorities of stalling.
After 10 January – four years into Maduro’s six-year term – a successful recall vote would simply transfer power to his hand-picked vice president, Aristobulo Isturiz.
Isturiz said last Sunday there would not even be a vote, alleging irregularities in collecting signatures.
With AFP reporting
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Fine analysis. Putin is already beaten but because he’s staked everything on winning, he has no way out. Not just his political future but his life is on the line if he capitulates…
This article by Tom Clonan is a classic example of Western media propaganda. Tom lays put exactly why he thinks Russia can’t win, where “winning” means making the entire territory of Ukraine a vassal of the Kremlin, as it was during the USSR period. But the propaganda is in what Tom *doesnt* say, which is that it is now clear that Western sanctions will not topple the Putin regime, the West will not make Russia a vassal in the unipolar US-led world order and even the lesser goal of Ukraine recovering all five annexed Oblasts seems almost impossible to achieve at this point, with 300,000 Russian reservists entering the war in the coming weeks. Tom is correct, Russia can’t win this war completely. Tom won’t say that the West cannot win either.
@Rob Dowling:
Of all the comments and considering the blatant bias continuously spewed out by the ‘expert’ Tom Clonan, your comment is the nearest to a rational, objective analysis of all the comments so far. And, before you all start, stating a rational, objective position is the exact opposite of taking sides.
@Rob Dowling: the collective West could beat the russians in a week. the Ukranian army can expel the russians if given the proper heavy weaponry to hit targets in russia
@Rian Lynch: “Could” is just chit chat talk in the comments section of the Journal. I could say the Russians “could” turn every major city in Europe into a red hot molten lake of radioactive sludge using nuclear-tippes hypersonic missiles but of course I don’t, because it’d be auld talk based on “could” hypothetical this and that. The actual *fact* is Putin wont be toppled at this stage. So the West can’t *win* and many people remain in denial about that fact, clearly.
@Rob Dowling: the West isnt fighting thats a fact for you. Putin is grinding Russia into oblivion and is reigniting the cold war.
@Rob Dowling: a win for Ukraine just requires them to push the Russians back to the border, and whether they are able to do that depends on who runs out of munitions first. Also, those 300K Russian reservists are likely to be low quality trops with little training or combat experience and most of them support staff rather than front line soldiers. Many of them will have been pulled from other parts of the border, leaving the motherland dangerously exposed.
@Rob Dowling: All you can know is that Western sanctions have not toppled Putin’s regime YET. Any number of factors could bring about regime change in Russia.
@Rob Dowling: 300,000 untrained and underequipped people fighting against an army with better weapons, better training, more experienced and more motivation to fight.
Soes not sound like a fair fight to me.
@Declan McKenna: Tom Clonan is an expert a well known and respected one.
@Gary Kearney:
Time will reveal the accuracy of your statement and of his ‘expert’ opinions.
Excellent article. Unfortunately the only way this war will end is when putin no longer exists. Putin will eventually end up hiding out in a bunker waiting for the end.victory to the Ukraine and its warrior people.
@Paddy Ryan: depends on who replaces him.
@Paddy Ryan: Unfortunately they are hawks in the Kremlin that are far more extreme than Putin. I don’t see a happy ending for the Ukraine or the world to this conflict.
Three things have been truly astounding to me: 1) the obscene level of corruption in Russia from the top all the way to the bottom: materiel not being fit for purpose because maintenance funds were being funnelled into various pockets along the way; recruits sent into the meat grinder with barely any training and having to kit themselves out because their officers stole their original kit. 2) the sheer bloodthirstiness of the mainstream Russian media, calling on the army to hit Ukraine even harder, kill any Ukrainian who isn’t pro-Russian, level more of their their cities, up to and including nuclear strikes on Ukraine – and even the UK. 3) A sizeable chunk of the Russian population is ok with this ‘SMO’ against their so-called brothers.
Russia couldn’t beat Ireland if all males were called up and armed with billions worth of weapons from NATO. It’s interesting that Russia have said they are increasing their army by 40%, to 1.5 million. No side will be ‘winning’ anytime soon.
I read a Guardian analyst claim that Crimea is Zelensky’s greatest bargaining chip, the implication being that in the end it would be ceded to Russia as part of a peace deal, and that Zelensky knows this but cannot say anything other than that there will be no compromise.
I wonder like everyone else how and when this will end. I’ve noticed that even the suggestion of compromise is highly controversial. I’ve also noticed how the Kremlin has changed the narrative from fighting Ukrainian nazis to satanists and finally to NATO, with the latter enemy apparently quite succesful in garnering national support for the war. The idea is that Ukraine is forced to fight on behalf of NATO and US world domination, and seemingly this idea is popular among Russians who feel the collapse of the USSR was a humiliation that is worth resisting against.
Given all that, I wonder what the real options are. In the face of continuing Russian defeats popular support may actually increase, enticing Putin to keep escalating, by drafting more and more people into the army and eventually using nuclear weapons (the ultimate scorched earth).
There seems to be a reliance in the west that the Kremlin regime may fall, but whether that solves anything depends on what replaces it. So without compromise (the Crimea theory) there is either continuing escalation (with this or a similar/worse new Kremlin regime), or the war ends (under a new pragmatic Kremlin regime). That means two out of three options imply a length and bad, and possibly very bad war.
I hope as Tom says next year will bring common sense and humanity, but realistically I think we’re in this for the long haul. Very long.
@Mick Tobin: sorry mick but your analysis is flawed because Russia simply doesn’t have the economic strength for a long war plus the hardcore western sanctions are destroying its economy as well
Ukraine has already lost. for Russia winning is preventing Russian in Donbas from being attacked and preventing Ukraine from becoming a NATO member and EU state have proven they are not sovereign.
Germany industry is in melt down the US blew up Germany pipeline and Germans said nothing while it gas dependent industries close.
Russia used a tiny army in Ukraine that is about to change
@Joeohah: utter claptrap ,Russian bot
Unfortunately Ukraine cannot win this war either. What exactly is NATO’s end game? The longer this war goes on, the greater the risk of a full scale nuclear conflict.
Only the naive believe that the US narrative that this war is Putin war this war was 30 years in the making no matter the leadership in Russia this war was provoked that is evident from the US matra Putin’s unprovoked war.
Russian in Ukraine were left stateless by the West hero the naive Gorbachev and Reagan.
Think Putin will be toppled from within, soon enough too, t.g.
@Caoimhghin Whyte: Be careful what you wish for. There are hawks in the Kremlin far more extreme than Putin that will more than likely resort to even more extreme measures.
RETIRED COLONEL DOUGLAS MACGREGOR AS A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEWhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NohouAK1deg
If I had been Putin, I would have mounted an attack solely on the Donetsk front. It would have been much easier to justify in terms of aiding the Russian-speaking minority in the area, and Western opinion would have been more divided. As it is, Putin has done incalculable damage to Russia’s own interests and, most worryingly, to the movement for peace and neutrality in Europe.
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