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Comment by omegaworks | Hacker News Reader

Curious: are you aware of how much misery is actually caused by the US' economic sanctions?

"Make the economy scream" was a statement actually uttered by a US president in response to a democratically elected socialist in Chile[1].

According to Jorge Arreaza, Venezuelan foreign minister[2]:

> We cannot repatriate the profit from our company in the United States to invest it in food and medicine in Venezuela.

Economic sanctions ensure that the pain of imperialism is felt by the most vulnerable[3].

We need to wake up to the misery that we impose on the world.

1. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm

2. https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14239

3. https://www.thenation.com/article/trumps-sanctions-make-econ...

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You can't just pick and choose a bad economic sanction from the past and claim all economic sanctions are bad and cause misery.

The lack of food and medicine in Venezuela is purely the Venezuelan government's fault, and Jorge Arreaza (an in general, the entire Venezuelan government) has used the US as a scapegoat for the past 20 years.

venezuela placed gold in the bank of england as a guarantee for a loan from germany to buy food from turkey. london is currently refusing to return it despite venezuela paying back germany. the gold has doubled in value and could be used to buy food. just another piece of evidence of economic pressure actively hurting people in venezuela.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-gold/venezuela-g...

>The lack of food and medicine in Venezuela is purely the Venezuelan government's fault

We live in a highly interdependent and interconnected globalized world. Lack of access to the global market hurts Venezuelan farmers, leaving them unable to export their excess and cushion local market fluctuations. It has also hurt Venezuelan consumers unable to purchase imported goods with their Bolivars, rendering them worth less.

Medicine is a patent-encumbered, capital-intensive industry that is protected at the WTO level[1]. When your economy is highly specialized (due to globalization, the post-colonial resource curse, political pressures and/or brain-drain emigration) it becomes dependent on foreign imports of medicine. When those suppliers become malicious, a shortage is what emerges.

No one is blameless, but we must examine the situation with a clear understanding of the actors with power and the actors without.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Why do you claim the shortages are due to suppliers becoming malicious?

Why do you claim the US sanctions are to blame, when said sanctions have only been applied to individuals? (Unless there are new ones I'm not aware of).

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