Venezuela’s Socialist Hyperinflation Turned People Back To Barter System

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com
July 12, 2018

In the wake of socialist Venezuela’s massive hyperinflation, citizens have returned to the original monetary system in order to survive.  The barter system is now prevalent in the collapsed economy of the authoritarian dictator, Nicolas Maduro.

Barter is one of the best ways to trade goods, considering its almost impossible to tax those transactions and since money in Venezuela is as difficult to come by as food and medicine, that’s now the preferred method of trading goods and services. Women in Venezuela have been turning to prostitution and asking for payment in food instead of cash for a while now, and as the regime tightens its grip on the private sector, more will have to turn to trade to survive.

Once the richest country of Latin America, Venezuela, which sits on world’s largest oil reserves, now has a bleak future. People in this oil-rich country are scrambling for money, food and basic necessities. They have taken to swapping different items and even doing chores in exchange for packages of flour, rice, and cooking oil.

“There is no cash here, only barter,” said Mileidy Lovera, who is a 30-year-old mother of four. Lovera spoke with Economic Times while hoping to trade a cooler of fish that her husband had caught for food to feed her children or medicine for her son who has epilepsy.

Venezuela has experienced the death of cash. Payment for even the cheapest of goods and services would require unwieldy piles of banknotes or fiat currency, and there simply are not enough of those in circulation.  While wealthy formal businesses in cities can get by on bank transfers and debit cards, such operations are largely out of the question in rural areas.

The economic collapse, which began under socialist President Nicolas Maduro’s government, has driven nearly one million people to migrate to other places in search of food, medicine, or other basic life necessities. Others have stayed and fight each other with machetes for some “quality garbage” that is thrown out.

Economists have even begun placing the blame on the current government – a socialist regime which actually leans more towards communism (and the two are almost the same thing anyway). Many economists say the central bank has not printed bills fast enough to keep up with inflation, which according to the opposition-run congress, reached an annual rate of almost 25,000 percent in May.  “It’s a very primitive payment system but it’s also very primitive for a country not to have enough cash available,” said Luis Vicente Leon, an economist.

Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling

AFP
July 12, 2018

For months, a major recycling facility for the greater Baltimore-Washington area has been facing a big problem: it has to pay to get rid of huge amounts of paper and plastic it would normally sell to China.

Beijing is no longer buying, claiming the recycled materials are "contaminated."

For sure, the 900 tons of trash dumped at all hours of the day and night, five days a week, on the conveyor belts at the plant in Elkridge, Maryland -- an hour's drive from the US capital -- are not clean.

Amid the nerve-shattering din and clouds of brown dust, dozens of workers in gloves and masks -- most of them women -- nimbly pluck a diverse array of objects from the piles that could count as "contaminants."

That could be anything from clothes to cables to tree branches to the bane of all recyclers: plastic bags, which are not supposed to go in recycling bins because they snarl up the machinery.

"We've had to slow our machinery, and hire more people" to clean up the waste, says Michael Taylor, the head of recycling operations for Waste Management, the company that runs the plant.

At the end of the sorting line is the end product -- huge bales of compacted waste containing paper, cardboard or plastics.

These have been bought up for decades by businesses, most of them based in China, which clean them up, crush them and transform them into raw materials for industrial plants.

Last year, China bought up more than half of the scrap materials exported by the United States.

Globally, since 1992, 72 percent of plastic waste has ended up in China and Hong Kong, according to a study in the journal Science Advances.

But since January, China has closed its borders to most paper and plastic waste in line with a new environmental policy pushed by Beijing, which no longer wants to be the world's trash can, or even its recycle bin.

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Trump at NATO: ‘Immigration Is Taking Over Europe’

Breitbart
July 12, 2018

U.S. President Donald J. Trump has told press at the NATO summit on Thursday that he warned the defence union that “immigration is taking over Europe”.

“I told them today that the EU better be careful because immigration is taking over Europe and I said that loud and clear,” President Trump told a press conference in Brussels, Belgium.

“You see what’s going on throughout the world with immigration. I probably — if not partially — won an election because of immigration,” President Trump said, observing that the issue of mass, uncontrolled migration is inspiring voters in Europe — and the United States — to elect leaders who are tough on border control.

Remarking on the formation of the anti-mass migration Five-Star Movement (M5S) and the League (Lega) coalition in Italy, President Trump said: “If you look at Italy, [Prime Minister] Giuseppe [Conte] won his election on his strong immigration policies.”

The President also observed that Britain voted to leave the European Union (EU) because of uncontrolled immigration.

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