How U.S. and U.K. Media Are Trying Their Best To Push Nicolas Maduro and Venezuela Over the Edge
May 31, 2016
How U.S. and U.K. Media Are Trying Their Best To Push Nicolas Maduro and Venezuela Over the Edge
American political and media elites would love to see the leftist Venezuelan government go down just as Brazil’s Workers’ Party has.
BY Max Ajl
Failed state. Economic and social collapse. Battlefield clinics. Humanitarian crisis. Descent into chaos. These are the apocalyptic buzzwords being used to describe modern Venezuela and the Nicolas Maduro government in the U.S.-U.K. press, shortly after a constitutional coup d’état dumped Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff of the social democratic Workers’ Party from office. U.S. political elites are happy with this turn of events. As historian Greg Grandin writes, the U.S. now “has compliant compradores in power in Argentina and Brazil, and perhaps soon in Venezuela.”
Some words you will rarely read in media coverage of Venezuela include “capital strike,” “economic sabotage,” “destabilization plan,” “coup d’état” or others which provide a far more complete and accurate account of what is going on in the country. For while the crisis is real, it is also the result of an ongoing attempt by the country’s elite and international forces like the U.S. government to subvert the Maduro presidency. In so doing, the role of the media is to wage psychological warfare against the Venezuelan government, doing its best to erode public support and sympathy for the struggling government.
Many of the articles lead with stories of babies dying amidst power shortages, antibiotics in short supply and deaths from easily treatable hemorrhages in Venezuela’s public hospital system. The crisis of medicine and medical equipment shortages is real. But for the right-wing press, it is simply a story about a socialist government mismanaging the economy, not providing enough dollars for pharmacies or medical suppliers to import the needed goods or otherwise seriously screwing up that basic mechanism of modern societies, the international supply chain—a cautionary tale about what happens when you hand the keys to a country over to leftists. But some numbers help explain what is actually going on. In 1998, Venezuela imported $222 million of medicine. In 2013, according to official numbers, that figure supposedly soared to $3.2 billion. But, as the economist Manuel Sutherland points out, the physical quantity of medicines which actually came into Venezuela decreased from 2003-2013, by 75 percent. 2003 was when the government imposed currency controls in reaction to ruinous capital flight.
Sutherland argues that the privately-owned pharmaceutical sector takes advantage of the country’s preferential exchange rate for medical supplies. It obtains dollars cheaply, then sells them dear, whether on the parallel market or to transnational corporations, which then repatriate the capital. The sector inflates its costs by falsifying import bills in order to make up the difference. The Venezuelan pharmaceutical crisis, then, is not the making of the Venezuelan government; it is largely the making of the private sector, with the government often turning a blind eye, Sutherland suggests, due to fear of further supply shortages, more intense political pressure from those transnationals parent governments and concern for officials’ reputations.
More:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/19158/nicolas-maduro-venezuela-dilma-rousseff-american-media-coverage
Good Reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016159362
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