Venezuela calls for mandatory labor in farm sector
Source: CNBC
The government of Venezuela has issued a decree that "effectively amounts to forced labor" in an attempt to fix a spiraling food crisis, according to a new report from Amnesty International.
A Venezuelan ministry last week announced Resolution No. 9855, which calls for the establishment of a "transitory labor regime" in order to relaunch the agricultural and food sector. The decree says that the government must do what is "necessary to achieve strategic levels of self-sufficiency," and states that workers can be forcefully moved from their jobs to work in farm fields or elsewhere in the agricultural sector for periods of 60 days.
"Trying to tackle Venezuela's severe food shortages by forcing people to work the fields is like trying to fix a broken leg with a band aid," said Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, in a statement.
The law is vague in laying out exactly which workers can be forced to work in the farm sector, though it indicates that both public- and private-sector workers may be included. While working in food production, workers will be suspended from their regular jobs. They'll be allowed to return to their original jobs upon the completion of service.
Read more: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/29/venezuela-calls-for-mandatory-labor-in-farm-sector.html
LuckyLib
(6,814 posts)mahatmakanejeeves
(56,896 posts)Chairman Mao's Grandson-in-Law Buys 13.5% Stake in Sotheby's
So what am I supposed to do with all these copies of the Little Red Book?
Print headline this morning: "Mao's Kin Buys 13.5% Stake in Sotheby's"
Taikang expresses interests in possibly nominating directors to Sothebys board
By Kelly Crow
Kelly.Crow@wsj.com
@KellyCrowWSJ
Updated July 28, 2016 12:02 a.m. ET
A Chinese life insurance company run by the grandson-in-law of Chairman Mao Zedong has bought a 13.5% stake in Sothebys, citing a positive view of the auction house as well as potential interest in a board seat.
Taikang Life Insurance Co., one of Chinas biggest insurance companies, disclosed its stake Wednesday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory requirement for active investors who press for corporate change.
The move makes Taikang the largest shareholder of Sothebys, eclipsing stakes held by hedge-fund managers such as Third Points Dan Loeb, who owns 11.38%, and Point72 Asset Managements Steven Cohen, who owns 5.5%.
Taikang is run by Chen Dongsheng, a businessman best known in art circles as an art collector who helped found China Guardian Auctions Co. Ltd., the countrys first government-run auction house specializing in Chinese antiques and calligraphy. Mr. Chen, who is in his late 50s, is married to Maos granddaughter, Kong Dongmei.
Response to Little Tich (Original post)
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brooklynite
(93,853 posts)christx30
(6,241 posts)going on vacation?
brooklynite
(93,853 posts)PersonNumber503602
(1,134 posts)GulfCoast66
(11,949 posts)Archae
(46,261 posts)Why am I not surprised in the least?
Elmergantry
(884 posts)is a form of slavery afterall....
ChairmanAgnostic
(28,017 posts)Elmergantry
(884 posts)Capitalism built this great country. Socialism destroyed what capitalism built in Venezuela
ChairmanAgnostic
(28,017 posts)We've had a mixed economy during the times of biggest and most widespread growth. Pure capitalism necessarily leads to economic slavery for 90% of the people. Always.
Read Capital, a pretty thorough and well written book that came out last year. Then you would not be saying things like you just did.
Elmergantry
(884 posts)Can lead to abuses, no doubt. Regulated capitalism runs circles around socialism.
ChairmanAgnostic
(28,017 posts)MyNameGoesHere
(7,638 posts)Things are worse than when Americas exported capitalism and had poverty at 70% and the rich enjoying the benefits, but it didn't build shit. The poor were fucked under capitalism just like they are fucked now. Maduro has been a disaster and dropping oil prices didn't help cover his stupidity. But to imply Venezuela was a capitalist utopia before Chavez is just lying.
Bacchus4.0
(6,837 posts)crime was lower, no forced labor. The rich still enjoy the benefits of the government system rigged for them. Of course, many of the rich now are in the chavista government.
Igel
(35,196 posts)for the weekend as a condition of your employment to work for free on a state-owned farm to harvest potatoes?
Hey, last year an old fart from the current Russian communist party in the Duma said that they should revive the practice, sending city kids out to sovkhozes to dig potatoes. (There aren't really any more sovkhozes, but I think he just wanted the kids to muck in the dirt.)
Or when's the last time you sent your kids off to a summer camp for a month, at state expense, for the real purpose of providing free agricultural workers on state-run enterprises? (Even if that practice did produce an oddly good movie because of its campiness, Starci na chmelu, with it's great partially subversive song "Hops are our gold"
ChairmanAgnostic
(28,017 posts)I saw it live and in color. Posters of Lenin is with us on building walls, military vehicles coming out every other lunch hour just to parade their strength, being followed everywhere I went.
But, one ignores the perils of PURE and i stress P U R E , unbridled, unregulated, capitalism - the kind some of our billionaires inflicted on the USSR when it first became Mommy Russia. (Boy, did it do severe harm there, too. I saw that as well in the 1990s when I taught there)
Pure capitalism, without regulations, progressive taxes, worker's rights, product safety, food and drug regulation, safety and testing, investment in the arts and crafts, investments in public education, roads and bridges, sewers, energy, clean water -
YOU GET NONE OF THIS WITH PURE CAPITALISM. To think it appears magically, just because "capitalism" is to willfully take a position that is foolish, ignorant, and untenable.
Bacchus4.0
(6,837 posts)Nation you were thinking of? Venezuela is a disaster.
ChairmanAgnostic
(28,017 posts)be it pure socialism (Venezuela at the moment) or pure capitalism (Russia in the 1990s) does not work.
The only working robust, rewarding and protective system is a mixed system. Like ours, assuming the tea baggers don't shut down the government again.
Scruffy1
(3,239 posts)holding up Venezuela as an example of anything is absurd. Venezuela had great economic disparity for a very long time and still had it under Chavez. the small moneyed elite is still there. They have had all their eggs in the oil basket for a long time and will suffer the results of not diversifying their economy. Price controls are unworkable in Venezuela and simply lead to a shortage of goods. but that does not mean that they are always unworkable. The United States instituted price controls during WWII and it was fairly successful. but they had John Kenneth Galbraith to run it and did not have a porous border problem. The problem is when ideology trumps reason rather it be free markets or state capitalism.
Bacchus4.0
(6,837 posts)Its failure has been a work in progress.
Igel
(35,196 posts)Instead of devolving everything downward, it centralized to state capitalism.
The people were the party, but the party was the leaders. If the people disagreed with the leaders, they disagreed with themselves.
It's worth remembering that the USSR oficially wanted to remake the citizenry according to an ideological template.
Lockean capitalism has a bunch of implicit assumptions as to public morality and how social relations were structured. Remove that morality and things fall to pieces. Even democracy as envisioned by the founders was like this--it assumed a certain amount of social capital and civic morality.
7962
(11,841 posts)Just like many people like to point at Nordic countries and say "See, Socialism works!". But those countries arent PURE Socialist either; they have many capitalist ideals at work.
sufrommich
(22,871 posts)Odin2005
(53,521 posts)Chavez was a populist nationalist strongman who used socialist and anti-colonialist rhetoric to maintain support.
Calling socialism "slavery" is the sort of nonsense appropriate for Freeperland, not here.
Codeine
(25,586 posts)Throd
(7,208 posts)molova
(543 posts)No freedom there.
christx30
(6,241 posts)of countries like this. Well, this is what the people voted for every time they voted for Maduro.
SomethingNew
(279 posts)I thought all their problems were caused by the US? At least that's what I've been told here. I guess even the defenders of horrible dictators can't defend slavery.
7962
(11,841 posts)workinclasszero
(28,270 posts)And the deportation of millions of farm workers and others.