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| My name is Jake Lloyd, and this is InfoWars.com. | |
| Let's take a couple minutes to break down the Venezuela problem. | |
| Let's talk about where Venezuela was and how it got to be where it is now. | |
| So, the country's had a pretty turbulent history. | |
| If you look at it overall, it was colonized by Spain in 1522. It didn't gain full independence until 1830. There were several forms and variations of the Venezuelan government in between the original break from Spain and what is now recognized as Venezuela. | |
| Simón Bolívar played a big part in that. | |
| He helped in the liberation wars for most of the northern South American states, and he played a big part in Venezuela's fight for independence. | |
| And it was a pretty turbulent period for the Venezuelan people up until about the 18th and 19th century when they discovered oil. | |
| Now, oil became the biggest export in Venezuela because, naturally, I mean, they have the biggest oil reserves that we know of in the world. | |
| So they're a very oil-rich country. | |
| Oil is obviously a very good way to make money as a state. | |
| So you'd think that they'd be pretty set. | |
| However, that kind of changes with things coming down the line in the future. | |
| So take it forward to about 1998. There was a collapse in support for both parties, mostly because, I mean, there was a coup attempt in 1992. Hugo Chavez was involved in the coup attempt. | |
| He was a military man. | |
| He grew up Poor, but he worked his way up to be an officer in the military, engaged in a coup, which failed, and he eventually ran in 1998 for the presidency in Venezuela. | |
| Well, he won, and he studied Marx and Mao and Castro, but he also studied Bolivar, but I don't think that he really did that much, because if you look at it, when he got into power, he tried to He renamed it the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. | |
| He had this idea of a Bolivarian revolution. | |
| Bolivarianism was an idea. | |
| It even had a motto. | |
| I don't remember exactly what it was. | |
| It was socialism, motherland, or death, which he eventually renamed to something along the lines of socialism, motherland, and victory because we cannot fail. | |
| Something along those lines. | |
| I'm paraphrasing slightly. | |
| So he had this idea of Bolivarianism, which was really just a form of socialism. | |
| It was this fight for social and economic equity in South America that was supposed to spread to other nations. | |
| It's what was credited for the Venezuelan success throughout the 2000s. | |
| Hugo Chavez, he was wildly supported. | |
| There was a coup attempt in the 2000s. | |
| I don't remember exactly what year it was. | |
| It was 2002, I believe. | |
| But he was only held for two days. | |
| He was held for two days because there was such support for him that people were streaming down from the mountains to come and protest and riot to get their beloved leader out of prison. | |
| And it worked because he was back in power two days later. | |
| So what was the craze about? | |
| Bolivarianism had a couple different plans. | |
| One of them was called Plan Bolivar 2000, which was the use of military for public works, mass vaccination, anti-poverty efforts, all those different kinds of things. | |
| There was Mission Habitat, which had the goal of building houses as well as providing social services like healthcare, education, etc. | |
| in the favelas and the surrounding areas of Caracas and the other major cities. | |
| So these are the things that Hugo Chavez did when he first got into power. | |
| And that was the essence of Bolivarianism, which was a Pan-American socialist movement. | |
| It was opposed to injustice and colonialism, which explains Chavez's hate for... | |
| He had a hatred for America. | |
| He had a hatred primarily, though, for Bush, which is... | |
| Bush obviously wasn't very well-elected around the world, but he called him the devil in front of the United Nations. | |
| So... | |
| Chavez continually appealed to the authority and the icon, the mythos around Bolivar. | |
| I mean, they call him El Libertador. | |
| I'm probably not pronouncing that perfectly correct, but the Liberator is essentially what he was called. | |
| So he was appealing to that, but he was also combining it with Marx and Mao. | |
| Now this doesn't exactly make sense because Bolivar studied in Europe. | |
| He studied in France. | |
| He studied Enlightenment thinkers. | |
| He was influenced by a lot of the same people that influenced the founders of America, the United States. | |
| So he wouldn't have been pro-socialist. | |
| I suppose we can't say that he wouldn't have been completely pro-socialism because Marxism, Maoism, Stalinism didn't exist at that time. | |
| But he was an Enlightenment thinker, or he at least bought into the Enlightenment thinking system. | |
| So he was very individualist, very... | |
| Liberty-minded. | |
| Bolivar was a complicated guy because he was very much into the idea of republicanism, like the government for him, but he was also, near the end of his life, he became, he was kind of a benevolent dictator, I guess you could call, because he bought into this idea that you could... | |
| He was the only one that could govern the country. | |
| I believe it was Ecuador before he died. | |
| So that's how it is. | |
| But that's kind of, in a nutshell, Chavez's ethos. | |
| Bolivar mixed with Marx. | |
| It doesn't really make any sense. | |
| So into Chavez's presidency, now I mentioned the Mission Habitat and Plan Bolivar 2000, which a lot of it had to do with public works and building houses, which didn't exactly go over very well because he constantly, consistently even, failed to deliver on the promises that he made about the housing crisis. | |
| Because by 2011, Venezuela had a shortage of two million homes. | |
| Chavez promised to fill that void, but he only built 500,000 roughly. | |
| And two-thirds of the new houses built in Venezuela at the time were built by private industry. | |
| Now, private business stopped constructing these houses because they were out of fear that the government was going to come and expropriate the houses and give them to people. | |
| Well, they're not going to spend all this money just to have houses taken for free and given to people, so they stopped building the houses. | |
| So we no longer have private industry building the houses, and we don't have the government building houses because they're so inefficient. | |
| So now you just have a massive housing crisis. | |
| So by 2013, when Chavez died of cancer, 3 million Venezuelans lived in inadequate housing. | |
| So that was coupled with other material shortages, which led to another crisis because Maduro was Chavez's replacement, the heir to the throne. | |
| It was held as an election. | |
| It's hard to tell what level of integrity the elections had. | |
| Maduro won. | |
| At that point, because Chavez gave him his blessing, the people supported him, and so they ran into material shortage shortly before and shortly after Chavez died. | |
| They didn't have steel to build the houses with, so Maduro ordered that all abandoned cars and vehicles would be seized. | |
| Melted down to make rebar for houses, which is resourceful. | |
| That's fine. | |
| I don't see a problem with that if they're abandoned. | |
| But then Maduro ordered that anyone with more than one property, so if you had your property that you lived in, that was fine. | |
| But if you had more properties that you rented out to people, you were ordered to, by the law, to sell them at a fixed rate, or you'd have them seized and you'd face fines and potentially jail time. | |
| So this is again where socialist communist countries always end up. | |
| The government provides until they can't provide anymore because they run out of their own resources so they start having to steal them, seize them from other people to redistribute them among the rest of the populace. | |
| So that is Chavez to Maduro as far as the housing and the material shortages go. | |
| Being that Venezuela is such an oil-rich country, you'd think that they'd be able to supplement their shortages in other areas with oil sales. | |
| But the issue was that they suffered from a thing called Dutch disease. | |
| And it's said that they suffered from the worst version of this in history because essentially what it is... | |
| They have the largest known oil reserves, so they start selling it. | |
| That becomes their primary export. | |
| Most of the industry is focusing on oil, getting oil processed, produced, and shipped to other places. | |
| Shipped within the country, without the country, etc. | |
| So that means that all of the resources are going towards that, which means that they're not going towards other things like agriculture, manufacturing, and other industries. | |
| So what that does is it increases the price of other domestic goods that aren't oil because you have less people producing them, so they're more expensive. | |
| It's naturally supply and demand. | |
| The price goes up. | |
| It's harder to produce them because you have less labor to do so. | |
| And So these prices are going up, but there's also price caps that prevent goods like milk, eggs, beef from being priced above a certain point. | |
| So that means that you need to sell a carton of milk for $3 because it costs $2.50 to produce it, so you're making a 50% profit, but the government is demanding that you sell it for $1.50. | |
| So every carton of milk that you make, you lose 50 cents. | |
| Well, they can't do that. | |
| That's not sustainable, obviously. | |
| I mean, they can do it for a time, but eventually they're just going to run out of stuff. | |
| They're going to run out of money to keep producing the milk and the eggs and the beef. | |
| So it led to extreme shortages of the things that people actually need to survive. | |
| You don't need oil to survive, you know. | |
| But they had plenty of oil, but nothing else. | |
| Well, this led to another sort of collapse because they had shortages plus rampant inflation because they did the exact same thing Geroen did after World War I, which is decrease the value of the money so that they could just continue to print more. which is decrease the value of the money so that And as we know, inflating the currency doesn't increase the value, doesn't increase people's standard of living. | |
| It just destroys the economy even further. | |
| So in 2015, inflation, I don't know why I keep saying inflammation, inflation exceeded 100%. | |
| By 2015, inflation was above 100% of the currency's original value. | |
| So that's what caused the housing crisis, what caused the shortages in materials and food and manufacturing, and that's what caused the inflation. | |
| So 2014, 69% inflation. | |
| 2016, 800%. | |
| In two years, the inflation went from the money's value to 800% of the money's value. | |
| It got so bad that rather than go out and work a job, people were playing online games like RuneScape or World of Warcraft to make money in the game, like online currency, the gold in the games, and then sell them online on eBay and stuff for cash. | |
| And they were making more than people could make at a salaried position at a more prestigious job in the capital city, Caracas. | |
| And they were only making a couple dollars a day. | |
| And they were still making more than salaried positions. | |
| I think that really says something about the state of the economy. | |
| So in 2017, there was a constitutional crisis. | |
| So we have the economy going down. | |
| There's no houses. | |
| There's no food. | |
| Well, all of a sudden in 2017, we have a crisis in the government with the Constitution. | |
| There's an entity, because they are a Republican government, as created by Simone Bolivar, they have a Supreme Tribunal of Justice, which is essentially their version of the Supreme Court that we have. | |
| So they have the executive branch where the president is. | |
| They have the Supreme Tribunal of Justice. | |
| And then they have the National Assembly, which is similar to our Congress, but I don't believe it's bicameral. | |
| There's only one house, I believe. | |
| The National Assembly was primarily controlled by the opposition, the opposition party. | |
| And this obviously wasn't going well because since 2014, things have been bad since 2011, at least. | |
| Now, I think it's important you should know before we go further, in 2011, people, even to 2013, people like Jeremy Corbyn, I have a tweet here, are tweeting, Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. | |
| He made a massive contribution to Venezuela and a very wide world. | |
| So Venezuela was praised by Jeremy Corbyn, who's the Labor Party leader in the UK. Bernie Sanders wrote something about Venezuela, saying that it was a model for democratic socialism. | |
| That's what Hugo Chavez called himself, a democratic socialist, very similar to Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders do in the American and British political landscape. | |
| Bernie Sanders praised Nicaragua, all these different places. | |
| So American and British leftists were praising Hugo Chavez for being the success story for democratic socialism. | |
| Wait a year after this. | |
| This was 5th of March, 2013. Wait one year and all of a sudden it's rampant inflation. | |
| People are starving in the streets. | |
| It got to the point where people were eating zoo animals because of that. | |
| So back to the constitutional crisis of 2017. Because of the terrible situation, the terrible living conditions in Venezuela, even the capital city of Caracas, we have growing opposition to the Maduro presidency. | |
| Which is why you had in their version of the Congress, the National Assembly, why you had primarily opposition leaders. | |
| Or it was at least a majority. | |
| I don't know if I'd say primarily. | |
| But they had a majority of the opposition leading the National Assembly. | |
| So, Maduro... | |
| The tribunal was primarily friendly to Maduro, so the Maduro-friendly tribunal restricted the immunity given to the assembly members, which primarily belonged to the opposition. | |
| So he took away immunity from his political opponents, because typically, I suppose, in Venezuela they have immunity so that they can't be prosecuted by a coup government or what have you, who might want to prosecute them and put them in jail for unpopular legislative decisions. | |
| So he removed that, and then they seized the National Assembly, excuse me, they seized the powers, the legislative powers of the National Assembly. | |
| So they essentially neutered the National Assembly, which is the people's voice in the government, and Maduro and the Maduro-friendly Supreme Court of the nation They have all the power. | |
| They have the executive power, they have the judicial power, and now they have the legislative power. | |
| Well, I mentioned that they removed immunity from these people. | |
| One of the main opposition leaders was arrested. | |
| He was pulled out by the secret police in the middle of the night. | |
| This was very unpopular, and it led to people like Oscar Perez, who was a cop. | |
| He was a helicopter pilot. | |
| He was killed in a raid after he fought against the Venezuelan government. | |
| There were no shots fired originally, but he commandeered an army helicopter. | |
| He flew over the Capitol in front of the Supreme Tribunal, and he dropped out flash grenades to get attention, and then he unfurled a banner that urged Venezuelans to take back their country, to take back the democratic reigns of their country. | |
| And eventually the government found him out, obviously, and he died in a shootout. | |
| So that's what we have now. | |
| People actually didn't rise up whenever Perez urged them to. | |
| But there's protests these days on the daily. | |
| People are starving. | |
| There's constantly protests. | |
| CNN Money says Venezuela oil production is plummeting. | |
| This is from February 12th. | |
| Peru has retracted the Maduro invitation as the crisis deepens. | |
| So at the Summit of the Americas, the Peruvian president says that Nicolas Maduro is not welcome. | |
| Amid growing international outcry over the decision to hold snap presidential elections amid a deepening economic and social crisis. | |
| So he held a snap spur-of-the-moment election, the legitimacy of which is questionable at best, because they've been deemed the Chavez and Maduro administrations have been called dictatorships at this point. | |
| Originally they were just elected presidents, But at this point, they've seized so much power that they're classified as dictators. | |
| Colombia is calling for international aid to cope with the Venezuelan crisis. | |
| Because Colombia, now with the crisis going on in Venezuela, we have millions of people flooding across the borders of Brazil, across the borders of Colombia. | |
| Colombia actually sent an emissary to Turkey to see how they've been dealing with the Syrian refugee crisis because they're anticipating that there's going to be something huge going on. | |
| They don't know how to deal with all these bodies coming across the border. | |
| Now, mind you, the border between Venezuela and Colombia was at one point closed off by Maduro because they didn't want people fleeing. | |
| But then it got so bad that they actually allowed it to be opened back up so that people could go across and get supplies and stuff. | |
| Currently, there's people who have left their children back in Venezuela, and they're working in Colombia to send back money. | |
| Now, they're not even making a lot in Colombia either. | |
| It's not that Colombia's that bad. | |
| It's actually a lot better than its reputation gives you at this point, or than its reputation would tell you from the past. | |
| But they have to sell, like, I read one story. | |
| A woman has to sell 54 mangoes a day just to make enough to live and just to have a little bit to send back. | |
| They're not doing well there either. | |
| Just because they don't have the ability to... | |
| They can't just go into a new society and just jump into the higher echelons of the economy. | |
| So Venezuela, this is Wall Street Journal, Venezuela's misery fuels migration on an epic scale. | |
| Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans are fleeing their country's misery and pouring across borders, particularly Colombia, creating a sharpening challenge for the entire region. | |
| And we have on Zero Hedge, mass exodus begins. | |
| Thousands flee Venezuela's socialist starvation across the bridge to Colombia. | |
| So, due to the effects of socialism, we have people starving. | |
| Crime is rampant in a way that it's never been before, and that says a lot for South America because things get pretty brutal down there with the cartels. | |
| So there's starvation, there's inflation, there's shortages of food and building materials, there's no housing, and now there's a dictatorship with secret police that make the opposition party disappear in the middle of the night when they oppose them. | |
| And then we have people like Jeremy Corbyn, people like Bernie Sanders, who want to praise Chavez and Maduro and Venezuela as the ideal, pinnacle example of democratic socialism, what we should all strive for. | |
| But, like President Trump said, Venezuela is not an example of socialism being implemented poorly, it's an example of socialism being implemented faithfully. | |
| My name is Jake Lloyd. | |
| This is InfoWars.com. | |
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