Peter Binose: “No” I will wait for the next bus, go feed the babies
By Peter Binose
Are we led in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines by a Scrounging Monster?
Ralph Gonsalves is more than happy to take money from PetroCaribe whilst Venezuelans are in the throes of starvation and with little or no hospital or health care.
Gonsalves claims that Venezuela is our friend, but I am not sure that he actually knows what the word friend means. You certainly do not steal the babies’ bottle whilst the baby starves. Because we have been taking money from PetroCaribe whilst the whole system in Venezuela is in crisis and thousands of babies’ are starving. Can that be right? Should we be taking the food and medicines and the babies’ bottles from the mouths of Venezuelans, even if it is offered to us by some very nasty communist dictatorship system?
There are no pet foods or animal vaccines or animal medicines in Venezuela, animals just like their owners are dying of starvation and no medical care available.
http://venezuelatoday.net/as-shortages-run-rampant-in-venezuela-even-pet-food-is-scarce/
A person earning an average wage would take 166 years to save up to buy a house. According to a recent statement from Carlos Alberto Gonzalez, the President of Real Estate Camber of Venezuela (CIV), the country’s inflation rate has ballooned enough to impact both public and private sectors of the real estate market.
The most shocking part of his statement, as Blasting News and Descifrado reported, was that the average Venezuelan working full-time in a minimum wage job would have to save up for 166 years in order to purchase a house now.
Currently, the minimum wage in Venezuela is 7,421 bolivars per month (about $37 U.S.). The average cost of housing in Venezuela is 15 million bolivars.
http://venezuelatoday.net/a-new-house-in-venezuela-costs-166-years-worth-of-savings-on-a-minimum-wage-salary/
Venezuelan students are unable to fund themselves and some are actually starving and turning to street crime to fund their education. Like in Cuba girls have turned to prostitution to fund their education and to fund what they want to eat even.
One young entrepreneur Venezuelan student José Augusto Montiel has created an app called Abastéceme (“Supply Me”) in 2013 which allows residents to locate stores with extra supplies on a digital map, making it easier to find stores that have necessary items.
http://venezuelatoday.net/venezuelan-student-combats-food-shortages-with-mobile-app/
In an article published by The Guardian, a look into the prices of everyday items like toilet paper and milk make it clear that Venezuela’s economy can’t stay afloat for much longer. Venezuela’s former president, Hugo Chavez, enacted strict currency rules back in 2003 which, according to The Guardian, was meant “to reduce inflation and curb capital flight” by setting the Venezuelan bolivar to equal that of the U.S. dollar, although the government’s strict control over currency value made the bolivar start to drop in value rather quickly.
When Nicolas Maduro was elected into the Presidency in 2013, the country’s economy began weakening as the bolivar took a nose dive at an alarming rate. The bolivar now decreases in value by 70% each year, The Guardian states, and analysts estimate that it has fallen by 30%, compared to the U.S. dollar, since just the beginning of and during the year of 2015.
Those of you who love the occasional McDonalds burger and fries, will be in for a shock if they visit McDonalds in Caracas. Because there is a shortage bordering on non existence of potatoes, it’s no longer burger and fries [potatoes] it’s now burger and yam chips, and I am told they taste ghastly.
Venezuela has ordered more than 100 shopping malls to close to save electricity. According to Marco Bello of Reuters, shops in malls across Venezuela will be going dark, closing their doors to shoppers early to comply with a government electricity rationing order. Venezuela’s socialist government is asking more than 100 malls to close or generate their own power four hours each day, from 1pm to 3pm…
Crime is out of control and gang warfare is rife.
Over 100 police officers have been killed just in Caracas in 2015. However, in the last week of September 2015 violence against police officers in Venezuela took on new dimensions with five grenade attacks in three days.
Nicolas Maduro has announced a 6000% hike in petrol prices in a bid to keep the economy afloat, as food prices rise 315 per cent in a year.
Nicolas Maduro used a rambling five hour televised address to explain the first petrol price increase in 17 years, which came into effect on Friday. Mr Maduro had little choice, with the economy spiralling towards collapse – but knows that he is taking a risk. When the Venezuelan government increased petrol prices in 1989, the Caracazo riots broke out, killing up to 3,000 people.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/venezuela/12165456/Venezuelan-petrol-prices-rise-by-6000-per-cent.html
It’s not just Caracas where ordinary Venezuelans battle for survival as hospitals are left without supplies and shops without basic necessities, it’s even worse in other parts of Venezuela.
Venezuelan patients can expect their doctors to hand them a list of medical necessities, including catheters and antibiotics that they need to address their symptoms. The patients and their families will then be forced to visit a number of pharmacies and other health clinics to search for these items, which will likely be out of stock as well. They may perhaps eventually turn to the black market for the supplies, where there are no quality guarantees and no ways to tell if the supplies are right for the specific patient.
According to Human Rights Watch’s associate health and human rights director, Diederik Lohman, the organization Doctors for Health reported in March that Venezuelan public hospitals were shockingly unprepared to help their patients. A network of medical residents in public hospitals across the country, the group reported that 44% of operating rooms in 130 institutions were not operational, and 94% of labs lacked necessary materials. Additionally, 60% of routinely stocked medicines or medical supplies were entirely or partially unavailable in these hospitals, and most of the medicines on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines were not available in pharmacies.
Human Rights Watch corroborated these reports: in recent visits to Venezuela, the organization found shortages of medications to treat pain, asthma, hypertension, diabetes and heart diseases, among others. Similarly, syringes, gauze and needles were undersupplied, and basic lab tests could not be performed. This is to say nothing about common, relatively minor problems, like ear infections, which 75% of children will experience before the age of five. While this condition will usually pass on its own, some cases will require antibiotics and can cause hearing problems and other consequences if left untreated.
The government’s answer to the crisis is to redirect blame onto pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies and doctors. For example, in early February, Maduro accused a pharmacy chain of waging an economic war against the people after it closed several cash registers at one store, causing a line. The government later detained two of the chain’s directors for 45 days before releasing them to face charges of “boycott to destabilize the economy.” The police have also detained and interrogated a number of doctors who have publicly criticized the shortages or provided care to injured demonstrators. But everyone in Venezuela knows it is the government itself to blame.
In a shopping centre in the Sabana Grande district last week, women queued outside a pharmacy for nearly two hours to buy two four-roll packs of toilet paper. In what has become the ultimate indignity for the Venezuelan public – and a huge embarrassment for the regime – shortages of toilet paper mean it is now strictly rationed.
The former bus driver Nicolas Maduro, who Chavez designated as his successor and who won a disputed election in 2013, the response to the crisis, has been a mixture of denial, wishful thinking and angry denunciations of international capitalism waging an “economic war” on Venezuela. Perhaps its right to say you can take the driver out of the bus but he will never achieve the status of conductor, he will never know at which stop to get off, he can hear the bell ringing in his ears but will not know what it means.
Now my problem with all that is that we have Ralph Gonsalves taking money from Venezuela and PetroCaribe when not just the Venezuelan baby is starving in the barrio, but the whole nation is starving whilst he and the bus driver hug up at every opportunity when they meet. A true friend of the Venezuelan people would not be treating them so, he would be saying to Moduro, “no” “I will wait for the next bus, go feed the babies”.
My advice to Venezuela is to sell the PetroCaribe debt for 30cents on the dollar to a US banking group. Because the moneys owed by islands such as Saint Vincent will never be repaid, eventually they will either default or be looking for debt relief. So it’s by far better to unload the debts onto an organization that can sit on them, remember the first loss is the best loss. PetroCaribe has proved to be a scourge on the islands as their leaders spend money like men without arms, with perhaps no intention of ever repaying the debt.
See also
http://www.caribbeannewsnow.com/venezuela.php?news_id=25985&start=27&category_id=12
http://www.iwnsvg.com/2014/12/23/svg-owes-141m-under-petrocaribe/
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