They nationalise a lot if not all the foreign E&P investments a few years ago - so don't be surprised that no one in their right mind would invest again. Ditto Argentina - both hydro carbon rich, formerly very properous, ravaged by corruption for years.

And yet they can still throw £30m of the state oil company's money at sponsoring Pastor Maldonado every year.

Optimistic as ever

Venezuela is now run by Cuba.
Maduro is an even bigger nut job that Chavez, but at least Chavez was intelligent, this guy has no clue, or care.

Up until a month ago, my wife was HR Manager for Brinks Latin America in Miami. She dealt alot with Venezuela as that is where Brinks make their money in South America.

Every visitor from Venezuela would bring almost no clothes, to leave space in their suitcase for washing powder, diapers etc.

They would fly their broken planes up to Miami to get repaired as they could not repair them in Venezuela.
Unfortunately this resulted in one plane going down with the loss of 4 lives about 2 miles from my house! On board was the pilot and co-pilot, and 2 people who had just made the journey to shop for basics.

Edited by twist (03 Nov 2015 2.21pm)

My reading of the situation in Venezuela is this. Since the fall of the Berlin wall and the expansion of global capitalism in to virtually every corner of the globe, state Socialism has faced a two-fold problem in terms of maintaining itself. Either it attempts to fight against the tide, building nationalist movements like you saw in France in the 80s or Corbyn at the moment, which push for socialist policies within a framework of global capitalism. This almost inevitably leads to compromise and disappointment, especially if the grassroots movement that propel them fade away.

The other option is the Venezuelan model of becoming a pretty insular society, relying on funding via a high level export. You see it in Scandanavia to an extent as well. Problem is, once that export evaporates or demand goes down, you're pretty f*cked. I actually think in the past few decades Venezuela has done some brilliant things for its people, and been relatively democratic and open in the process. But ultimately without a concerted global move away from capitalism, it is hard to see a way of making it stick.

If punk ever happened I'd be preaching the law, instead of listenin to Lydon lecture BBC4

The problem is that the politics and the system doesn't work. Everyone knows that this 'mumbo jumbo' is simply an expensive social engineering project which is doomed to failure from the start.

Also, I guess its which country you compare the country with when calling it 'relatively democratic'. Are you using the DPRK as the comparison model?

[Link]

"That was fun and to round off the day, I am off to steal a charity collection box and then desecrate a place of worship.” - Smokey, The Selhurst Arms, 26/02/02

Why didn't the politics and system of socialism work when half the world was communist before the collapse of the USSR?

Edited by stevegood (03 Nov 2015 8.56pm)