Venezuela seeks mediation with US

[freshwest]

15. It's really sad. So many hopes dashed there. Now for a reality check and some relief - hopefully the

government of Venezuela will stop enabling the OIL oilgarchs to get away with what they've been doing. A lot like this thread:

Krugman on Putin: defending a kleptocracy, not the downtrodden masses

Putin’s thrashing, his evident decision to reject advice from economists who tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear, feel very familiar to me and I’m sure many others who’ve followed Latin America over the decades. Basically, it sounds a lot like good old-fashioned economic populism.

There is, however, one interesting difference. The stories Dornbusch and Edwards analyzed, the issues of Latin America today, involved governments that really were trying to help the poor and workers with low wages. That is, they really were populist regimes, even if they didn’t end up serving the interests of their constituency. But nobody would call the Putin regime populist; he’s rejecting economics as we know it to defend a kleptocracy, not the downtrodden masses.

Have there been comparable examples? I’m sure there must have been, but I can’t think of them. Malaysia’s imposition of capital controls in 1998 was in part about rescuing its version of oligarchs, but it was actually a reasonable policy given the circumstances, and worked OK. And otherwise I’m coming up blank.

So Putin seems to have brought something new, or at least formerly rare, into the world of economic policy: economic cronyism, an effort to suspend the laws on economics on behalf, not of the broad populace, but a tiny group of well connected malefactors of great wealth. Innovation!

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/macroeconomic-cronyism/?_r=0

to pampango:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026178084

Lot more at the blog linked. It's as if he read your post that day on what is going in Venezuela. The ideology has been for the masses, the wealth is still going to the top with government complicity. We've been naive about what these leaders are doing.

I'm sure you have read the link about how Putin's net worth is now $40B. Not bad, but being PM or President doesn't pay that well. It's from selling Russians out along with some blatant gangsterism.

Yet he's being sold to the left as one of them. You can't really separate the words from the deeds. The old myths and dreams die hard, this is a time when we are going to learn an awful lot about how the world is really run, not as we want.