Venezuela just went full dictatorship

[Loren Pechtel]

As always when you eat the rich people benefit for a while. It's a one-shot benefit, though, and in the long run society pays the price. That's what we are seeing now.

The rich are unnecessary and violent parasites.

The only hope for the planet is to rid ourselves of this infection.

You'll rid the Earth of the human race in the process. You don't even attempt to address the catastrophe of what happens when you run out of rich to eat.

 

[untermensche]

The rich are unnecessary and violent parasites.

The only hope for the planet is to rid ourselves of this infection.

You'll rid the Earth of the human race in the process. You don't even attempt to address the catastrophe of what happens when you run out of rich to eat.

Your slavish adoration does not equate to necessity.

And you rid the world of them by creating mechanisms that allow the fruits of labor to go to the laborer. Like worker owned and managed economic institutions.

 

[Axulus]

At least under Chavez some of the Venezuelan citizens that had been abused for centuries had improvement in their lives.

As opposed to the wishes of his opponents with their glorious dream that the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.

Chavez was not the reason for that. The high price of oil was the reason. I've posted this before but you are too blind to see it - as written by a high ranking Chavista economist who was a full supporter of the revolution but was tossed out when he became critical of their policy:

An Empty Revolution - The Unfulfilled Promises of Hugo Chávez

Although opinions differ on whether Chávez's rule should be characterized as authoritarian or democratic, just about everyone appears to agree that, in contrast to his predecessors, Chávez has made the welfare of the Venezuelan poor his top priority. His government, the thinking goes, has provided subsidized food to low-income families, redistributed land and wealth, and poured money from Venezuela's booming oil industry into health and education programs. It should not be surprising, then, that in a country where politics was long dominated by rich elites, he has earned the lasting support of the Venezuelan poor.

That story line may be compelling to many who are rightly outraged by Latin America's deep social and economic inequalities. Unfortunately, it is wrong. Neither official statistics nor independent estimates show any evidence that Chávez has reoriented state priorities to benefit the poor. Most health and human development indicators have shown no significant improvement beyond that which is normal in the midst of an oil boom. Indeed, some have deteriorated worryingly, and official estimates indicate that income inequality has increased. The "Chávez is good for the poor" hypothesis is inconsistent with the facts.

My skepticism of this notion began during my tenure as chief economist of the Venezuelan National Assembly. In September 2000, I left American academia to take over a research team with functions broadly similar to those of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. I had high expectations for Chávez's government and was excited at the possibility of working in an administration that promised to focus on fighting poverty and inequality. But I quickly discovered how large the gap was between the government's rhetoric and the reality of its political priorities.

Soon after joining the National Assembly, I clashed with the administration over underfunding of the Consolidated Social Fund (known by its Spanish acronym FUS), which had been created by Chávez to coordinate the distribution of resources to antipoverty programs. The law establishing the fund included a special provision to ensure that it would benefit from rising oil revenues. But when oil revenues started to go up, the Finance Ministry ignored the provision, allocating to the fund in the 2001 budget only $295 million -- 15 percent less than the previous year and less than a third of the legally mandated $1.1 billion. When my office pointed out this inconsistency, the Finance Ministry came up with the creative accounting gimmick of rearranging the law so that programs not coordinated by the FUS would nevertheless appear to be receiving resources from it. The effect was to direct resources away from the poor even as oil profits were surging. (Hard-liners in the government, incensed by my office's criticisms, immediately called for my ouster. When the last moderates, who understood the need for an independent research team to evaluate policies, left the Chávez camp in 2004, the government finally disbanded our office.)

Chávez's political success does not stem from the achievements of his social programs or from his effectiveness at redistributing wealth. Rather, through a combination of luck and manipulation of the political system, Chávez has faced elections at times of strong economic growth, currently driven by an oil boom bigger than any since the 1970s. Like voters everywhere, Venezuelans tend to vote their pocketbooks, and until recently, this has meant voting for Chávez. But now, his mismanagement of the economy and failure to live up to his pro-poor rhetoric have finally started to catch up with him. With inflation accelerating, basic foodstuffs increasingly scarce, and pervasive chronic failures in the provision of basic public services, Venezuelans are starting to glimpse the consequences of Chávez's economic policies -- and they do not like what they see.

...

Views differ on how desirable the consequences of many of these reforms are, but a broad consensus appears to have emerged around the idea that they have at least brought about a significant redistribution of the country's wealth to its poor majority. The claim that Chávez has brought tangible benefits to the Venezuelan poor has indeed by now become commonplace, even among his critics. In a letter addressed to President George W. Bush on the eve of the 2006 Venezuelan presidential elections, Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Dolores Huerta, and Tom Hayden wrote, "Since 1999, the citizens of Venezuela have repeatedly voted for a government that -- unlike others in the past -- would share their country's oil wealth with millions of poor Venezuelans." The Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has noted, "Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez seems to have succeeded in bringing education and health services to the barrios of Caracas, which previously had seen little of the benefits of that country's rich endowment of oil." Even The Economist has written that "Chávez's brand of revolution has delivered some social gains."

One would expect such a consensus to be backed up by an impressive array of evidence. But in fact, there is remarkably little data supporting the claim that the Chávez administration has acted any differently from previous Venezuelan governments -- or, for that matter, from those of other developing and Latin American nations -- in redistributing the gains from economic growth to the poor.

One oft-cited statistic is the decline in poverty from a peak of 54 percent at the height of the national strike in 2003 to 27.5 percent in the first half of 2007. Although this decline may appear impressive, it is also known that poverty reduction is strongly associated with economic growth and that Venezuela's per capita GDP grew by nearly 50 percent during the same time period -- thanks in great part to a tripling of oil prices. The real question is thus not whether poverty has fallen but whether the Chávez government has been particularly effective at converting this period of economic growth into poverty reduction. One way to evaluate this is by calculating the reduction in poverty for every percentage point increase in per capita income -- in economists' lingo, the income elasticity of poverty reduction. This calculation shows an average reduction of one percentage point in poverty for every percentage point in per capita GDP growth during this recovery, a ratio that compares unfavorably with those of many other developing countries, for which studies tend to put the figure at around two percentage points. Similarly, one would expect pro-poor growth to be accompanied by a marked decrease in income inequality. But according to the Venezuelan Central Bank, inequality has actually increased during the Chávez administration, with the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality, with zero indicating perfect equality and one indicating perfect inequality) increasing from 0.44 to 0.48 between 2000 and 2005.

Poverty and inequality statistics, of course, tell only part of the story. There are many aspects of the well-being of the poor not captured by measures of money income, and this is where Chávez's supporters claim that the government has made the most progress -- through its misiones, which have concentrated on the direct provision of health, education, and other basic public services to poor communities. But again, official statistics show no signs of a substantial improvement in the well-being of ordinary Venezuelans, and in many cases there have been worrying deteriorations. The percentage of underweight babies, for example, increased from 8.4 percent to 9.1 percent between 1999 and 2006. During the same period, the percentage of households without access to running water rose from 7.2 percent to 9.4 percent, and the percentage of families living in dwellings with earthen ?oors multiplied almost threefold, from 2.5 percent to 6.8 percent. In Venezuela, one can see the misiones everywhere: in government posters lining the streets of Caracas, in the ubiquitous red shirts issued to program participants and worn by government supporters at Chávez rallies, in the bloated government budget allocations. The only place where one will be hard-pressed to find them is in the human development statistics.

Remarkably, given Chávez's rhetoric and reputation, official figures show no significant change in the priority given to social spending during his administration. The average share of the budget devoted to health, education, and housing under Chávez in his first eight years in office was 25.12 percent, essentially identical to the average share (25.08 percent) in the previous eight years. And it is lower today than it was in 1992, the last year in office of the "neoliberal" administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez -- the leader whom Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, tried to overthrow in a coup, purportedly on behalf of Venezuela's neglected poor majority.

In a number of recent studies, I have worked with colleagues to look more systematically at the results of Chávez's health and education misiones. Our findings confirm that Chávez has in fact done little for the poor. For example, his government often claims that the influx of Cuban doctors under the Barrio Adentro health program is responsible for a decline in infant mortality in Venezuela. In fact, a careful analysis of trends in infant and neonatal mortality shows that the rate of decline is not significantly different from that of the pre-Chávez period, nor from the rate of decline in other Latin American countries. Since 1999, the infant mortality rate in Venezuela has declined at an annual rate of 3.4 percent, essentially identical to the 3.3 percent rate at which it had declined during the previous nine-year period and lower than the rates of decline for the same period in Argentina (5.5 percent), Chile (5.3 percent), and Mexico (5.2 percent).

Even more disappointing are the results of the government's Robinson literacy program. On October 28, 2005, Chávez declared Venezuela "illiteracy-free territory." His national literacy campaign, he announced, had taught 1.5 million people how to read and write, and the education minister stated that residual illiteracy stood at less than 0.1 percent of the population. The achievement received considerable international recognition and was taken at face value by many specialists as well as by casual observers. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported that "illiteracy, formerly at 10 percent of the population, has been completely eliminated." Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and UNESCO's general director, Koïchiro Matsuura, sent the Venezuelan government public letters of congratulation for the achievement. (After Matsuura's statement, the Chávez's administration claimed that its eradication of illiteracy had been "UNESCO-verified.")

But along with Daniel Ortega of Venezuela's IESA business school, I looked at trends in illiteracy rates based on responses to the Venezuelan National Institute of Statistics' household surveys. (A full presentation of our study will appear in the October 2008 issue of the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change.) In contrast to the government's claim, we found that there were more than one million illiterate Venezuelans by the end of 2005, barely down from the 1.1 million illiterate persons recorded in the first half of 2003, before the start of the Robinson program. Even this small reduction, moreover, is accounted for by demographic trends rather than the program itself. In a battery of statistical tests, we found little evidence that the program had had any statistically distinguishable effect on Venezuelan illiteracy. We also found numerous inconsistencies in the government's story. For example, it claims to have employed 210,410 trainers in the anti-illiteracy effort (approximately two percent of the Venezuelan labor force), but there is no evidence in the public employment data that these people were ever hired or evidence in the government budget statistics that they were ever paid.

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MR. Chávez

In fact, even as the conventional wisdom has taken hold outside of Venezuela, most Venezuelans, according to opinion surveys, have long been aware that Chávez's social policies are inadequate and ineffective. To be sure, Venezuelans would like the government's programs -- particularly the sale of subsidized food -- to remain in place, but that is a far cry from believing that they have reasonably addressed the nation's poverty problem. A survey taken by the Venezuelan polling firm Alfredo Keller y Asociados in September 2007 showed that only 22 percent of Venezuelans think poverty has improved under Chávez, while 50 percent think it has worsened and 27 percent think it has stayed the same.

At the same time, however, Venezuelan voters have given Chávez credit for the nation's strong economic growth. In polls, an overwhelming majority have expressed support for Chávez's stewardship of the economy and reported that their personal situation was improving. This is, of course, not surprising: with its economy buoyed by surging oil profits, Venezuela had enjoyed three consecutive years of double-digit growth by 2006.

But by late 2007, Chávez's economic model had begun to unravel. For the first time since early 2004, a majority of voters claimed that both their personal situation and the country's situation had worsened during the preceding year. Scarcities in basic foodstuffs, such as milk, black beans, and sardines, were chronic, and the difference between the official and the black-market exchange rate reached 215 percent. When the Central Bank board received its November price report indicating that monthly inflation had risen to 4.4 percent (equivalent to an annual rate of 67.7 percent), it decided to delay publication of the report until after the vote on the constitutional reform was held.

This growing economic crisis is the predictable result of the gross mismanagement of the economy by Chávez's economic team. During the past five years, the Venezuelan government has pursued strongly expansionary fiscal and economic policies, increasing real spending by 137 percent and real liquidity by 218 percent. This splurge has outstripped even the expansion in oil revenues: the Chávez administration has managed the admirable feat of running a budget deficit in the midst of an oil boom.

Read the whole thing to give you a factual perspective rather than the propaganda that Chavez has fed you which you've eagerly lapped up:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/venezuela/2008-03-02/empty-revolution

 

[arkirk]

The rich are unnecessary and violent parasites.

The only hope for the planet is to rid ourselves of this infection.

You'll rid the Earth of the human race in the process. You don't even attempt to address the catastrophe of what happens when you run out of rich to eat.

You just say this because you have a low regard for the human race and only have sympathy for domineering rich people. You cannot seem to conceptualize people living in peace with each other and the environment. You regard CRIME as completely okay as long as it produces profit. You really have nothing to say that would be helpful to the Venezuelans or anybody else for that matter. You represent an attitude that does not allow for human cooperation. Now I have not called you ANY NAMES, but I have made it clear how I regard you and all the derogatory remarks you have posted all these years. Your theory is that human beings mostly are beyond redemption and actually deserve no consideration at all except if they can somehow represent a profit to you and those like yourself.

 

[whichphilosophy]

Chavez was not the reason for that. The high price of oil was the reason. I've posted this before but you are too blind to see it - as written by a high ranking Chavista economist who was a full supporter of the revolution but was tossed out when he became critical of their policy:

An Empty Revolution - The Unfulfilled Promises of Hugo Chávez

Although opinions differ on whether Chávez's rule should be characterized as authoritarian or democratic, just about everyone appears to agree that, in contrast to his predecessors, Chávez has made the welfare of the Venezuelan poor his top priority. His government, the thinking goes, has provided subsidized food to low-income families, redistributed land and wealth, and poured money from Venezuela's booming oil industry into health and education programs. It should not be surprising, then, that in a country where politics was long dominated by rich elites, he has earned the lasting support of the Venezuelan poor.

That story line may be compelling to many who are rightly outraged by Latin America's deep social and economic inequalities. Unfortunately, it is wrong. Neither official statistics nor independent estimates show any evidence that Chávez has reoriented state priorities to benefit the poor. Most health and human development indicators have shown no significant improvement beyond that which is normal in the midst of an oil boom. Indeed, some have deteriorated worryingly, and official estimates indicate that income inequality has increased. The "Chávez is good for the poor" hypothesis is inconsistent with the facts.

My skepticism of this notion began during my tenure as chief economist of the Venezuelan National Assembly. In September 2000, I left American academia to take over a research team with functions broadly similar to those of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. I had high expectations for Chávez's government and was excited at the possibility of working in an administration that promised to focus on fighting poverty and inequality. But I quickly discovered how large the gap was between the government's rhetoric and the reality of its political priorities.

Soon after joining the National Assembly, I clashed with the administration over underfunding of the Consolidated Social Fund (known by its Spanish acronym FUS), which had been created by Chávez to coordinate the distribution of resources to antipoverty programs. The law establishing the fund included a special provision to ensure that it would benefit from rising oil revenues. But when oil revenues started to go up, the Finance Ministry ignored the provision, allocating to the fund in the 2001 budget only $295 million -- 15 percent less than the previous year and less than a third of the legally mandated $1.1 billion. When my office pointed out this inconsistency, the Finance Ministry came up with the creative accounting gimmick of rearranging the law so that programs not coordinated by the FUS would nevertheless appear to be receiving resources from it. The effect was to direct resources away from the poor even as oil profits were surging. (Hard-liners in the government, incensed by my office's criticisms, immediately called for my ouster. When the last moderates, who understood the need for an independent research team to evaluate policies, left the Chávez camp in 2004, the government finally disbanded our office.)

Chávez's political success does not stem from the achievements of his social programs or from his effectiveness at redistributing wealth. Rather, through a combination of luck and manipulation of the political system, Chávez has faced elections at times of strong economic growth, currently driven by an oil boom bigger than any since the 1970s. Like voters everywhere, Venezuelans tend to vote their pocketbooks, and until recently, this has meant voting for Chávez. But now, his mismanagement of the economy and failure to live up to his pro-poor rhetoric have finally started to catch up with him. With inflation accelerating, basic foodstuffs increasingly scarce, and pervasive chronic failures in the provision of basic public services, Venezuelans are starting to glimpse the consequences of Chávez's economic policies -- and they do not like what they see.

...

Views differ on how desirable the consequences of many of these reforms are, but a broad consensus appears to have emerged around the idea that they have at least brought about a significant redistribution of the country's wealth to its poor majority. The claim that Chávez has brought tangible benefits to the Venezuelan poor has indeed by now become commonplace, even among his critics. In a letter addressed to President George W. Bush on the eve of the 2006 Venezuelan presidential elections, Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Dolores Huerta, and Tom Hayden wrote, "Since 1999, the citizens of Venezuela have repeatedly voted for a government that -- unlike others in the past -- would share their country's oil wealth with millions of poor Venezuelans." The Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has noted, "Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez seems to have succeeded in bringing education and health services to the barrios of Caracas, which previously had seen little of the benefits of that country's rich endowment of oil." Even The Economist has written that "Chávez's brand of revolution has delivered some social gains."

One would expect such a consensus to be backed up by an impressive array of evidence. But in fact, there is remarkably little data supporting the claim that the Chávez administration has acted any differently from previous Venezuelan governments -- or, for that matter, from those of other developing and Latin American nations -- in redistributing the gains from economic growth to the poor.

One oft-cited statistic is the decline in poverty from a peak of 54 percent at the height of the national strike in 2003 to 27.5 percent in the first half of 2007. Although this decline may appear impressive, it is also known that poverty reduction is strongly associated with economic growth and that Venezuela's per capita GDP grew by nearly 50 percent during the same time period -- thanks in great part to a tripling of oil prices. The real question is thus not whether poverty has fallen but whether the Chávez government has been particularly effective at converting this period of economic growth into poverty reduction. One way to evaluate this is by calculating the reduction in poverty for every percentage point increase in per capita income -- in economists' lingo, the income elasticity of poverty reduction. This calculation shows an average reduction of one percentage point in poverty for every percentage point in per capita GDP growth during this recovery, a ratio that compares unfavorably with those of many other developing countries, for which studies tend to put the figure at around two percentage points. Similarly, one would expect pro-poor growth to be accompanied by a marked decrease in income inequality. But according to the Venezuelan Central Bank, inequality has actually increased during the Chávez administration, with the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality, with zero indicating perfect equality and one indicating perfect inequality) increasing from 0.44 to 0.48 between 2000 and 2005.

Poverty and inequality statistics, of course, tell only part of the story. There are many aspects of the well-being of the poor not captured by measures of money income, and this is where Chávez's supporters claim that the government has made the most progress -- through its misiones, which have concentrated on the direct provision of health, education, and other basic public services to poor communities. But again, official statistics show no signs of a substantial improvement in the well-being of ordinary Venezuelans, and in many cases there have been worrying deteriorations. The percentage of underweight babies, for example, increased from 8.4 percent to 9.1 percent between 1999 and 2006. During the same period, the percentage of households without access to running water rose from 7.2 percent to 9.4 percent, and the percentage of families living in dwellings with earthen ?oors multiplied almost threefold, from 2.5 percent to 6.8 percent. In Venezuela, one can see the misiones everywhere: in government posters lining the streets of Caracas, in the ubiquitous red shirts issued to program participants and worn by government supporters at Chávez rallies, in the bloated government budget allocations. The only place where one will be hard-pressed to find them is in the human development statistics.

Remarkably, given Chávez's rhetoric and reputation, official figures show no significant change in the priority given to social spending during his administration. The average share of the budget devoted to health, education, and housing under Chávez in his first eight years in office was 25.12 percent, essentially identical to the average share (25.08 percent) in the previous eight years. And it is lower today than it was in 1992, the last year in office of the "neoliberal" administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez -- the leader whom Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, tried to overthrow in a coup, purportedly on behalf of Venezuela's neglected poor majority.

In a number of recent studies, I have worked with colleagues to look more systematically at the results of Chávez's health and education misiones. Our findings confirm that Chávez has in fact done little for the poor. For example, his government often claims that the influx of Cuban doctors under the Barrio Adentro health program is responsible for a decline in infant mortality in Venezuela. In fact, a careful analysis of trends in infant and neonatal mortality shows that the rate of decline is not significantly different from that of the pre-Chávez period, nor from the rate of decline in other Latin American countries. Since 1999, the infant mortality rate in Venezuela has declined at an annual rate of 3.4 percent, essentially identical to the 3.3 percent rate at which it had declined during the previous nine-year period and lower than the rates of decline for the same period in Argentina (5.5 percent), Chile (5.3 percent), and Mexico (5.2 percent).

Even more disappointing are the results of the government's Robinson literacy program. On October 28, 2005, Chávez declared Venezuela "illiteracy-free territory." His national literacy campaign, he announced, had taught 1.5 million people how to read and write, and the education minister stated that residual illiteracy stood at less than 0.1 percent of the population. The achievement received considerable international recognition and was taken at face value by many specialists as well as by casual observers. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported that "illiteracy, formerly at 10 percent of the population, has been completely eliminated." Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and UNESCO's general director, Koïchiro Matsuura, sent the Venezuelan government public letters of congratulation for the achievement. (After Matsuura's statement, the Chávez's administration claimed that its eradication of illiteracy had been "UNESCO-verified.")

But along with Daniel Ortega of Venezuela's IESA business school, I looked at trends in illiteracy rates based on responses to the Venezuelan National Institute of Statistics' household surveys. (A full presentation of our study will appear in the October 2008 issue of the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change.) In contrast to the government's claim, we found that there were more than one million illiterate Venezuelans by the end of 2005, barely down from the 1.1 million illiterate persons recorded in the first half of 2003, before the start of the Robinson program. Even this small reduction, moreover, is accounted for by demographic trends rather than the program itself. In a battery of statistical tests, we found little evidence that the program had had any statistically distinguishable effect on Venezuelan illiteracy. We also found numerous inconsistencies in the government's story. For example, it claims to have employed 210,410 trainers in the anti-illiteracy effort (approximately two percent of the Venezuelan labor force), but there is no evidence in the public employment data that these people were ever hired or evidence in the government budget statistics that they were ever paid.

THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF MR. Chávez

In fact, even as the conventional wisdom has taken hold outside of Venezuela, most Venezuelans, according to opinion surveys, have long been aware that Chávez's social policies are inadequate and ineffective. To be sure, Venezuelans would like the government's programs -- particularly the sale of subsidized food -- to remain in place, but that is a far cry from believing that they have reasonably addressed the nation's poverty problem. A survey taken by the Venezuelan polling firm Alfredo Keller y Asociados in September 2007 showed that only 22 percent of Venezuelans think poverty has improved under Chávez, while 50 percent think it has worsened and 27 percent think it has stayed the same.

At the same time, however, Venezuelan voters have given Chávez credit for the nation's strong economic growth. In polls, an overwhelming majority have expressed support for Chávez's stewardship of the economy and reported that their personal situation was improving. This is, of course, not surprising: with its economy buoyed by surging oil profits, Venezuela had enjoyed three consecutive years of double-digit growth by 2006.

But by late 2007, Chávez's economic model had begun to unravel. For the first time since early 2004, a majority of voters claimed that both their personal situation and the country's situation had worsened during the preceding year. Scarcities in basic foodstuffs, such as milk, black beans, and sardines, were chronic, and the difference between the official and the black-market exchange rate reached 215 percent. When the Central Bank board received its November price report indicating that monthly inflation had risen to 4.4 percent (equivalent to an annual rate of 67.7 percent), it decided to delay publication of the report until after the vote on the constitutional reform was held.

This growing economic crisis is the predictable result of the gross mismanagement of the economy by Chávez's economic team. During the past five years, the Venezuelan government has pursued strongly expansionary fiscal and economic policies, increasing real spending by 137 percent and real liquidity by 218 percent. This splurge has outstripped even the expansion in oil revenues: the Chávez administration has managed the admirable feat of running a budget deficit in the midst of an oil boom.

Read the whole thing to give you a factual perspective rather than the propaganda that Chavez has fed you which you've eagerly lapped up:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/venezuela/2008-03-02/empty-revolution

Without a doubt there were problems in Venezuela but rather than quote an opinionated piece, it is best to look at some statistics and specific sources of information.

http://harvardpolitics.com/world/the-legacy-of-hugo-chavez/
Under Chávez, Venezuela expanded low-income housing, made healthcare and medicine accessible to much of the population, and subsidized food distribution for those in need. These programs, especially in rural areas, made social services and government jobs available to large swaths of the population, resulting in a drop in the poverty rate from 48.6 percent in 2002 to 29.5 percent in 2011. The infant mortality rate also declined while literacy rates and access to free public education increased, according to data aggregated by Index Mundi. As Harvard professor Steve Levitsky explained to the HPR, “Chávez took social policies seriously. Even with cronyism, corruption, and inefficiency, he implemented policies that truly helped the poor.
CIA FACTBOOK as quoted by
http://www.theodora.com/wfbcurrent/venezuela/venezuela_people.html
Literacy:
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 95.5%
male: 95.7%
female: 95.4% (2009 est.)

There are issues with cronyism and corruption but there have also been positive changes. By the way even in he business district of Caracas it can be dangerous due to high crime rates (at least when I was there in 2006).

 

[Axulus]

Chavez was not the reason for that. The high price of oil was the reason. I've posted this before but you are too blind to see it - as written by a high ranking Chavista economist who was a full supporter of the revolution but was tossed out when he became critical of their policy:



Read the whole thing to give you a factual perspective rather than the propaganda that Chavez has fed you which you've eagerly lapped up:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/venezuela/2008-03-02/empty-revolution

Without a doubt there were problems in Venezuela but rather than quote an opinionated piece, it is best to look at some statistics and specific sources of information.

http://harvardpolitics.com/world/the-legacy-of-hugo-chavez/
Under Chávez, Venezuela expanded low-income housing, made healthcare and medicine accessible to much of the population, and subsidized food distribution for those in need. These programs, especially in rural areas, made social services and government jobs available to large swaths of the population, resulting in a drop in the poverty rate from 48.6 percent in 2002 to 29.5 percent in 2011. The infant mortality rate also declined while literacy rates and access to free public education increased, according to data aggregated by Index Mundi. As Harvard professor Steve Levitsky explained to the HPR, “Chávez took social policies seriously. Even with cronyism, corruption, and inefficiency, he implemented policies that truly helped the poor.
CIA FACTBOOK as quoted by
http://www.theodora.com/wfbcurrent/venezuela/venezuela_people.html
Literacy:
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 95.5%
male: 95.7%
female: 95.4% (2009 est.)

There are issues with cronyism and corruption but there have also been positive changes. By the way even in he business district of Caracas it can be dangerous due to high crime rates (at least when I was there in 2006).

All that was addressed already in what I posted. Which part of it are you disputing exactly? The piece I posted was full of statisics and data from someone who clearly values empirical evidence over ideology, even though he initially supported the Bolivarian Revolution.

One oft-cited statistic is the decline in poverty from a peak of 54 percent at the height of the national strike in 2003 to 27.5 percent in the first half of 2007. Although this decline may appear impressive, it is also known that poverty reduction is strongly associated with economic growth and that Venezuela's per capita GDP grew by nearly 50 percent during the same time period -- thanks in great part to a tripling of oil prices. The real question is thus not whether poverty has fallen but whether the Chávez government has been particularly effective at converting this period of economic growth into poverty reduction. One way to evaluate this is by calculating the reduction in poverty for every percentage point increase in per capita income -- in economists' lingo, the income elasticity of poverty reduction. This calculation shows an average reduction of one percentage point in poverty for every percentage point in per capita GDP growth during this recovery, a ratio that compares unfavorably with those of many other developing countries, for which studies tend to put the figure at around two percentage points. Similarly, one would expect pro-poor growth to be accompanied by a marked decrease in income inequality. But according to the Venezuelan Central Bank, inequality has actually increased during the Chávez administration, with the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality, with zero indicating perfect equality and one indicating perfect inequality) increasing from 0.44 to 0.48 between 2000 and 2005.

And:

Remarkably, given Chávez's rhetoric and reputation, official figures show no significant change in the priority given to social spending during his administration. The average share of the budget devoted to health, education, and housing under Chávez in his first eight years in office was 25.12 percent, essentially identical to the average share (25.08 percent) in the previous eight years. And it is lower today than it was in 1992, the last year in office of the "neoliberal" administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez -- the leader whom Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, tried to overthrow in a coup, purportedly on behalf of Venezuela's neglected poor majority.

In a number of recent studies, I have worked with colleagues to look more systematically at the results of Chávez's health and education misiones. Our findings confirm that Chávez has in fact done little for the poor. For example, his government often claims that the influx of Cuban doctors under the Barrio Adentro health program is responsible for a decline in infant mortality in Venezuela. In fact, a careful analysis of trends in infant and neonatal mortality shows that the rate of decline is not significantly different from that of the pre-Chávez period, nor from the rate of decline in other Latin American countries. Since 1999, the infant mortality rate in Venezuela has declined at an annual rate of 3.4 percent, essentially identical to the 3.3 percent rate at which it had declined during the previous nine-year period and lower than the rates of decline for the same period in Argentina (5.5 percent), Chile (5.3 percent), and Mexico (5.2 percent).

Even more disappointing are the results of the government's Robinson literacy program. On October 28, 2005, Chávez declared Venezuela "illiteracy-free territory." His national literacy campaign, he announced, had taught 1.5 million people how to read and write, and the education minister stated that residual illiteracy stood at less than 0.1 percent of the population. The achievement received considerable international recognition and was taken at face value by many specialists as well as by casual observers. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported that "illiteracy, formerly at 10 percent of the population, has been completely eliminated." Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and UNESCO's general director, Koïchiro Matsuura, sent the Venezuelan government public letters of congratulation for the achievement. (After Matsuura's statement, the Chávez's administration claimed that its eradication of illiteracy had been "UNESCO-verified.")

But along with Daniel Ortega of Venezuela's IESA business school, I looked at trends in illiteracy rates based on responses to the Venezuelan National Institute of Statistics' household surveys. (A full presentation of our study will appear in the October 2008 issue of the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change.) In contrast to the government's claim, we found that there were more than one million illiterate Venezuelans by the end of 2005, barely down from the 1.1 million illiterate persons recorded in the first half of 2003, before the start of the Robinson program. Even this small reduction, moreover, is accounted for by demographic trends rather than the program itself. In a battery of statistical tests, we found little evidence that the program had had any statistically distinguishable effect on Venezuelan illiteracy. We also found numerous inconsistencies in the government's story. For example, it claims to have employed 210,410 trainers in the anti-illiteracy effort (approximately two percent of the Venezuelan labor force), but there is no evidence in the public employment data that these people were ever hired or evidence in the government budget statistics that they were ever paid.

 

[whichphilosophy]

Without a doubt there were problems in Venezuela but rather than quote an opinionated piece, it is best to look at some statistics and specific sources of information.

http://harvardpolitics.com/world/the-legacy-of-hugo-chavez/
Under Chávez, Venezuela expanded low-income housing, made healthcare and medicine accessible to much of the population, and subsidized food distribution for those in need. These programs, especially in rural areas, made social services and government jobs available to large swaths of the population, resulting in a drop in the poverty rate from 48.6 percent in 2002 to 29.5 percent in 2011. The infant mortality rate also declined while literacy rates and access to free public education increased, according to data aggregated by Index Mundi. As Harvard professor Steve Levitsky explained to the HPR, “Chávez took social policies seriously. Even with cronyism, corruption, and inefficiency, he implemented policies that truly helped the poor.
CIA FACTBOOK as quoted by
http://www.theodora.com/wfbcurrent/venezuela/venezuela_people.html
Literacy:
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 95.5%
male: 95.7%
female: 95.4% (2009 est.)

There are issues with cronyism and corruption but there have also been positive changes. By the way even in he business district of Caracas it can be dangerous due to high crime rates (at least when I was there in 2006).

All that was addressed already in what I posted. Which part of it are you disputing exactly? The piece I posted was full of statisics and data from someone who clearly values empirical evidence over ideology, even though he initially supported the Bolivarian Revolution.

One oft-cited statistic is the decline in poverty from a peak of 54 percent at the height of the national strike in 2003 to 27.5 percent in the first half of 2007. Although this decline may appear impressive, it is also known that poverty reduction is strongly associated with economic growth and that Venezuela's per capita GDP grew by nearly 50 percent during the same time period -- thanks in great part to a tripling of oil prices. The real question is thus not whether poverty has fallen but whether the Chávez government has been particularly effective at converting this period of economic growth into poverty reduction. One way to evaluate this is by calculating the reduction in poverty for every percentage point increase in per capita income -- in economists' lingo, the income elasticity of poverty reduction. This calculation shows an average reduction of one percentage point in poverty for every percentage point in per capita GDP growth during this recovery, a ratio that compares unfavorably with those of many other developing countries, for which studies tend to put the figure at around two percentage points. Similarly, one would expect pro-poor growth to be accompanied by a marked decrease in income inequality. But according to the Venezuelan Central Bank, inequality has actually increased during the Chávez administration, with the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality, with zero indicating perfect equality and one indicating perfect inequality) increasing from 0.44 to 0.48 between 2000 and 2005.

And:

Remarkably, given Chávez's rhetoric and reputation, official figures show no significant change in the priority given to social spending during his administration. The average share of the budget devoted to health, education, and housing under Chávez in his first eight years in office was 25.12 percent, essentially identical to the average share (25.08 percent) in the previous eight years. And it is lower today than it was in 1992, the last year in office of the "neoliberal" administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez -- the leader whom Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, tried to overthrow in a coup, purportedly on behalf of Venezuela's neglected poor majority.

In a number of recent studies, I have worked with colleagues to look more systematically at the results of Chávez's health and education misiones. Our findings confirm that Chávez has in fact done little for the poor. For example, his government often claims that the influx of Cuban doctors under the Barrio Adentro health program is responsible for a decline in infant mortality in Venezuela. In fact, a careful analysis of trends in infant and neonatal mortality shows that the rate of decline is not significantly different from that of the pre-Chávez period, nor from the rate of decline in other Latin American countries. Since 1999, the infant mortality rate in Venezuela has declined at an annual rate of 3.4 percent, essentially identical to the 3.3 percent rate at which it had declined during the previous nine-year period and lower than the rates of decline for the same period in Argentina (5.5 percent), Chile (5.3 percent), and Mexico (5.2 percent).

Even more disappointing are the results of the government's Robinson literacy program. On October 28, 2005, Chávez declared Venezuela "illiteracy-free territory." His national literacy campaign, he announced, had taught 1.5 million people how to read and write, and the education minister stated that residual illiteracy stood at less than 0.1 percent of the population. The achievement received considerable international recognition and was taken at face value by many specialists as well as by casual observers. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported that "illiteracy, formerly at 10 percent of the population, has been completely eliminated." Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and UNESCO's general director, Koïchiro Matsuura, sent the Venezuelan government public letters of congratulation for the achievement. (After Matsuura's statement, the Chávez's administration claimed that its eradication of illiteracy had been "UNESCO-verified.")

But along with Daniel Ortega of Venezuela's IESA business school, I looked at trends in illiteracy rates based on responses to the Venezuelan National Institute of Statistics' household surveys. (A full presentation of our study will appear in the October 2008 issue of the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change.) In contrast to the government's claim, we found that there were more than one million illiterate Venezuelans by the end of 2005, barely down from the 1.1 million illiterate persons recorded in the first half of 2003, before the start of the Robinson program. Even this small reduction, moreover, is accounted for by demographic trends rather than the program itself. In a battery of statistical tests, we found little evidence that the program had had any statistically distinguishable effect on Venezuelan illiteracy. We also found numerous inconsistencies in the government's story. For example, it claims to have employed 210,410 trainers in the anti-illiteracy effort (approximately two percent of the Venezuelan labor force), but there is no evidence in the public employment data that these people were ever hired or evidence in the government budget statistics that they were ever paid.

If any drop in illiteracy could be measured from 2003 to 2005 that in itself is an achievement given this such a short amount. Taking into account later figures produces a much better result

The 2003 estimate was

definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 93.4%
male: 93.8%
female: 93.1% (2003 est.)

Per
http://latinostories.com/Latin_America_Resources/Latin_American_Literacy_Rate.htm

Now compared with 2009 that rise was significant enough to show progress.

 

[Will Wiley]

I'd just like to be the first to point out that this is all the fault of white people from America.

How dare you criticise america in derec's thread

 

[untermensche]

Chavez was not the reason for that. The high price of oil was the reason. I've posted this before but you are too blind to see it - as written by a high ranking Chavista economist who was a full supporter of the revolution but was tossed out when he became critical of their policy:

Chavez was TOTALLY the reason.

Without Chavez those people would have remained second class citizens, as they had been for centuries, in the apartheid state of Venezuela that existed without comment from Americans.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You'll rid the Earth of the human race in the process. You don't even attempt to address the catastrophe of what happens when you run out of rich to eat.

Your slavish adoration does not equate to necessity.

And you rid the world of them by creating mechanisms that allow the fruits of labor to go to the laborer. Like worker owned and managed economic institutions.

Your slavish unwillingness to see the need of capital to build things doesn't make it go away. In many important cases the workers have no hope of affording the tools. (Consider chip fabrication plants--with billion-dollar price tags.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You'll rid the Earth of the human race in the process. You don't even attempt to address the catastrophe of what happens when you run out of rich to eat.

You just say this because you have a low regard for the human race and only have sympathy for domineering rich people. You cannot seem to conceptualize people living in peace with each other and the environment. You regard CRIME as completely okay as long as it produces profit. You really have nothing to say that would be helpful to the Venezuelans or anybody else for that matter. You represent an attitude that does not allow for human cooperation. Now I have not called you ANY NAMES, but I have made it clear how I regard you and all the derogatory remarks you have posted all these years. Your theory is that human beings mostly are beyond redemption and actually deserve no consideration at all except if they can somehow represent a profit to you and those like yourself.

You're not addressing the point, either.

No profit, no business, economic collapse. Most of the people die.

- - - Updated - - -

If any drop in illiteracy could be measured from 2003 to 2005 that in itself is an achievement given this such a short amount. Taking into account later figures produces a much better result

The 2003 estimate was

definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 93.4%
male: 93.8%
female: 93.1% (2003 est.)

Per
http://latinostories.com/Latin_America_Resources/Latin_American_Literacy_Rate.htm

Now compared with 2009 that rise was significant enough to show progress.

A change like this looks more like measuring error than anything of importance.

 

[Axulus]

Chavez was not the reason for that. The high price of oil was the reason. I've posted this before but you are too blind to see it - as written by a high ranking Chavista economist who was a full supporter of the revolution but was tossed out when he became critical of their policy:

Chavez was TOTALLY the reason.

Without Chavez those people would have remained second class citizens, as they had been for centuries, in the apartheid state of Venezuela that existed without comment from Americans.

You Low GDP = lots of poverty. That's nothing new. Yet, what happened under Chavez' tenure? Inequality got worse under Chavez as I already posted. Chavez devoted no more percent of the budget to education, housing and healthcare than under the last "neoliberal" president in 1992. Poverty declined at a slower rate than the typical developing country that had the kind of oil fuled GDP growth that Venezuela had during Chavez. And guess what? Poverty is going back up to pre-Chavez levels as the price of oil has crashed. Violence is worse than it ever has been. Healthcare is deteriorating rapidly into third world status.

These are the facts, and Chavez has fed you a whole lot of bullshit.

I've noticed you haven't even attempted to dispute these facts. Your fact free assertions convince no one.

 

[Axulus]

A change like this looks more like measuring error than anything of importance.

The article I posed addressed it, the change in literacy rates after the program implemented was not statistically significant when you take into account all the older illiterate people who passed away during that period. The rate declined from 1.1 million illiterate people to 1 million over the 2 year period.

 

[untermensche]

Chavez was TOTALLY the reason.

Without Chavez those people would have remained second class citizens, as they had been for centuries, in the apartheid state of Venezuela that existed without comment from Americans.

You Low GDP = lots of poverty. That's nothing new. Yet, what happened under Chavez' tenure? Inequality got worse under Chavez as I already posted. Chavez devoted no more percent of the budget to education, housing and healthcare than under the last "neoliberal" president in 1992. Poverty declined at a slower rate than the typical developing country that had the kind of oil fuled GDP growth that Venezuela had during Chavez. And guess what? Poverty is going back up to pre-Chavez levels as the price of oil has crashed. Violence is worse than it ever has been. Healthcare is deteriorating rapidly into third world status.

These are the facts, and Chavez has fed you a whole lot of bullshit.

I've noticed you haven't even attempted to dispute these facts. Your fact free assertions convince no one.

Those are cherry picked distortions.

Millions rose from the second class apartheid status they existed in prior to Chavez.

An apartheid status nobody in the US gave a damn about. In fact many Americans profited by exploiting the situation.

 

[maxparrish]

Chronicles in Socialism - Venezuela, Fat Parasites Threaten to Kill Emaciated Host.

What happens when millions of ticks cover a milk cow? The cow becomes emaciated and dies slowly.

What happens when some of the overseer ticks are larger than the cow? The cow abruptly falls over dead.

Reports are that Venezuela's Oil Company cow is on its last legs, likely to be sent to be butchered by October unless oil prices have a dramatic turnaround.

Before 2016 is out, PDVSA may be forced to file for bankruptcy. It’s hard for a Venezuelan to even read those words without flinching. The image of PDVSA as a bottomless barrel out of which you can always get more and more cash is so deeply burned onto the Venezuelan political psyche that the words “bankrupt PDVSA” seem oxymoronic – like “dry water” or “moderate chavista.”

PDVSA can’t go bankrupt. I mean, surely that’s just impossible…or is it?

What seems like plain lunacy to normal people has become a live debate inside the legal profession. Bond markets have just about concluded PDVSA will not make its October bond payments. With some PDVSA bonds now yielding north of 130% – the kind of interest rate that would make your neighborhood payday lender blush – for Wall St, it’s a foregone conclusion: barring a dramatic surge in oil prices, PDVSA will default.

As we’ve long discussed on this blog, PDVSA bonds have no Collective Action Clauses. There is no way to negotiate an “orderly” default of PDVSA’s debt: even a large majority of bondholders can’t compel a small minority to accept it....

http://caracaschronicles.com/2016/02/15/pdvsa/

Back to our scheduled denial...

 

[Axulus]

You Low GDP = lots of poverty. That's nothing new. Yet, what happened under Chavez' tenure? Inequality got worse under Chavez as I already posted. Chavez devoted no more percent of the budget to education, housing and healthcare than under the last "neoliberal" president in 1992. Poverty declined at a slower rate than the typical developing country that had the kind of oil fuled GDP growth that Venezuela had during Chavez. And guess what? Poverty is going back up to pre-Chavez levels as the price of oil has crashed. Violence is worse than it ever has been. Healthcare is deteriorating rapidly into third world status.

These are the facts, and Chavez has fed you a whole lot of bullshit.

I've noticed you haven't even attempted to dispute these facts. Your fact free assertions convince no one.

Those are cherry picked distortions.

No they are not. They are the kind of data that is the very essence of how poor people in Venezuela are doing. I noticed once again you don't even attempt to rebut the data. Why not provide data you think is relevant that has not already been rebutted in the article?

Millions rose from the second class apartheid status they existed in prior to Chavez.

You are a broken record. As has already been explained, the oil boom is the reason for that, not Chavez. Any monkey in office would've been at least as effective in reducing poverty, if not more so, with an oil boom like that. Once again comparable developing countries with an economic boom like that typically have _greater_ poverty reduction. In other words, Chavez gets poor ratings on effectively reducing poverty given the size of the economic boom. Why do you not even attempt to rebut this? Are you conceding the point?

Not only that, but the type of poverty reduction that occurred was unsustainable and only supported by the oil boom. Once the oil market inevitably crashed (like it always does), the economy would be killed and an extreme humanitarian crisis would be expected to result. This is a direct consequence of the mismanagement of the economy under Chavez and Maduro government. The blood of all the children dying in the short staffed and supply shortage hospitals is directly on their hands, among other things.

Why do you defend child killers like that? It is beneath you.

An apartheid status nobody in the US gave a damn about. In fact many Americans profited by exploiting the situation.

Your broken record assertions convince no one.

 

[untermensche]

Those are cherry picked distortions.

No they are not. They are the kind of data that is the very essence of how poor people in Venezuela are doing. I noticed once again you don't even attempt to rebut the data.

Because it means NOTHING.

It is a smoke screen. Some carefully cherry picked meaningless assertions.

The 1999 National Constitution declared the country as multi-ethnic and pluricultural, and created a progressive framework for the recognition of indigenous rights. Most notably, all indigenous languages are now official languages of Venezuela, and the constitution provides a legal framework for the protection of indigenous lands and resources and guaranteed representation in the National Assembly. Despite these enormous legal advances, indigenous communities have continued to struggle to make these symbolic changes translate into material realities.

These are the efforts that can't be put into dollars and cents.

One might ask why in 1999 Venezuela had to create laws to protect indigenous rights.

But the US right wing economists who put that list together for you don't give a damn about worthless crap like human rights.

Millions rose from the second class apartheid status they existed in prior to Chavez.

You are a broken record. As has already been explained, the oil boom is the reason for that, not Chavez. Any monkey in office would've been at least as effective in reducing poverty, if not more so, with an oil boom like that....

These resources were not getting to the indigenous people at any time prior to Chavez. Venezuela was an apartheid state where millions had few if any rights. It is delusion to think resources would have by magic been used in this manner without him.

 

[whichphilosophy]

Those are cherry picked distortions.

No they are not. They are the kind of data that is the very essence of how poor people in Venezuela are doing. I noticed once again you don't even attempt to rebut the data. Why not provide data you think is relevant that has not already been rebutted in the article?

Millions rose from the second class apartheid status they existed in prior to Chavez.

You are a broken record. As has already been explained, the oil boom is the reason for that, not Chavez. Any monkey in office would've been at least as effective in reducing poverty, if not more so, with an oil boom like that. Once again comparable developing countries with an economic boom like that typically have _greater_ poverty reduction. In other words, Chavez gets poor ratings on effectively reducing poverty given the size of the economic boom. Why do you not even attempt to rebut this? Are you conceding the point?

Not only that, but the type of poverty reduction that occurred was unsustainable and only supported by the oil boom. Once the oil market inevitably crashed (like it always does), the economy would be killed and an extreme humanitarian crisis would be expected to result. This is a direct consequence of the mismanagement of the economy under Chavez and Maduro government. The blood of all the children dying in the short staffed and supply shortage hospitals is directly on their hands, among other things.

Why do you defend child killers like that? It is beneath you.

An apartheid status nobody in the US gave a damn about. In fact many Americans profited by exploiting the situation.

Your broken record assertions convince no one.

Nigeria and Saudia Arabia (apart from its 5,000 princes and the rich) houses a lot of impoverished citizens who didn't benefit a penny from its oil revenues.

 

[whichphilosophy]

You just say this because you have a low regard for the human race and only have sympathy for domineering rich people. You cannot seem to conceptualize people living in peace with each other and the environment. You regard CRIME as completely okay as long as it produces profit. You really have nothing to say that would be helpful to the Venezuelans or anybody else for that matter. You represent an attitude that does not allow for human cooperation. Now I have not called you ANY NAMES, but I have made it clear how I regard you and all the derogatory remarks you have posted all these years. Your theory is that human beings mostly are beyond redemption and actually deserve no consideration at all except if they can somehow represent a profit to you and those like yourself.

You're not addressing the point, either.

No profit, no business, economic collapse. Most of the people die.

- - - Updated - - -

If any drop in illiteracy could be measured from 2003 to 2005 that in itself is an achievement given this such a short amount. Taking into account later figures produces a much better result

The 2003 estimate was

definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 93.4%
male: 93.8%
female: 93.1% (2003 est.)

Per
http://latinostories.com/Latin_America_Resources/Latin_American_Literacy_Rate.htm

Now compared with 2009 that rise was significant enough to show progress.

A change like this looks more like measuring error than anything of importance.

I would disagree as all people die not most of the people
To see how effective something is a few years would be needed to rate the progress. Of course some people die while others replace them so to speak in a population that is increasing.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You Low GDP = lots of poverty. That's nothing new. Yet, what happened under Chavez' tenure? Inequality got worse under Chavez as I already posted. Chavez devoted no more percent of the budget to education, housing and healthcare than under the last "neoliberal" president in 1992. Poverty declined at a slower rate than the typical developing country that had the kind of oil fuled GDP growth that Venezuela had during Chavez. And guess what? Poverty is going back up to pre-Chavez levels as the price of oil has crashed. Violence is worse than it ever has been. Healthcare is deteriorating rapidly into third world status.

These are the facts, and Chavez has fed you a whole lot of bullshit.

I've noticed you haven't even attempted to dispute these facts. Your fact free assertions convince no one.

Those are cherry picked distortions.

Millions rose from the second class apartheid status they existed in prior to Chavez.

An apartheid status nobody in the US gave a damn about. In fact many Americans profited by exploiting the situation.

What you are missing is that while they rose for a little while they have fallen back and taken the previous middle class with them.