This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.

Venezuela To Start Fingerprinting Supermarket Shoppers

Tyler Durden's picture




 

Back in August, when we wrote about the latest instance of trouble in Maduro's socialist paradise, we cautioned that as a result of the economic collapse in the Latin American nation (and this was even before the plunge in crude made the "paradise" into the 9th circle of hell), Venezuelans soon may need to have their fingerprints scanned before they can buy bread and other staples. This unprecedented step was proposed after Maduro had the brilliant idea of proposing mandatory grocery fingerprinting system to combat food shortages. He said then that "the program will stop people from buying too much of a single item", but did not say when it would take effect.

Privacy concerns aside (clearly Venezuelans have bigger, well, smaller fish to fry) there was hope that this plunge into insanity would be delayed indefinitely, as the last thing Venezuela's strained economy would be able to handle is smuggling of the most basic of necessities: something such a dramatic rationing step would surely lead to.

Unfortunately for the struggling Venezuelan population, the time has arrived and as AP reported over the weekend, Venezuela "will begin installing 20,000 fingerprint scanners at supermarkets nationwide in a bid to stamp out hoarding and panic buying" as of this moment.

The government has been selectively rolling out the rationing system for months at state-run supermarkets along the western border with Colombia where smuggling of price-controlled goods is a major problem.

 

On Saturday, President Nicolas Maduro said that seven large private retail chains had voluntarily agreed to install the scanners.

Last month the owners of several chains of supermarkets and drugstores were arrested for allegedly artificially creating long queues by not opening enough tills.

It gets better: Maduro also accused Colombian food smugglers of buying up price-controlled goods in state-run supermarkets along the border.

For the first time in recent history the economists who say the effort is bound to fail, are right. They blame Venezuela's rigid price controls that discourage local manufacturing and the recent slide in world oil prices that has further diminished the supply of dollars available to import everything from milk to cars.

As BBC further adds, in January the hashtag #AnaquelesVaciosEnVenezuela ("Empty shelves in Venezuela") became a worldwide Twitter trend, with over 200,000 tweets as Venezuelans tweeted pictures of empty supermarket shelves around the country.

'Empty shelves in Venezuela' became a worldwide Twitter phenomenon

Last week South American foreign ministers said the region would help Venezuela address the shortages.

The lack of staple foods and medicines has contributed to discontent and to frequent large, often violent anti-government demonstrations.

What assures that Venezuela is bound to become the next Greece is that the one saving grace the socialist nation had left, high oil prices, aren't coming back for a long time, which effectively makes the country's oil production industry a drain of cash, cash the country can't afford to spend, at current oil prices. As a reminder, crude oil amounts for 95% of the country's exports. Venezuela's plummeting currency rates and the falling price of oil by nearly half since November has diminished its supply of dollars to buy imported food.

The good news is that with the world having no lack of failed countries in the past year, for the IMF this should be a token state-rebuilding exercise for Christine Lagarde and her henchmen. One knows they have had more than enough "sovereign bail out" experience in the past year, the one in which the world was supposedly on the road to "recovery."

 

- advertisements -

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:17 | 5872019 Usurious
Usurious's picture

 

 

this is what they do when debt money dies..........take notes people.......

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:31 | 5872050 ZerOhead
ZerOhead's picture

Selling the nations gas for 8 cents a gallon is a crime. The people would be much happier if they just sold their money losing oil reserves to Soros or the Rothschilds and paid market rates at the pumps.

http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Venezuela/gasoline_prices/

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 09:15 | 5872818 COSMOS
COSMOS's picture

If we are not fingerprinting our welfare recepients we should be.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 13:33 | 5873963 PTR
PTR's picture

Problem with that is that we're then one step to everyone being fingerprinted.

 

Edit- oh wait- RFID bracelets or chips will probably be used insead of fingerprinting. 

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 21:12 | 5875995 mkkby
mkkby's picture

Fingerprint readers, good luck.  How the fuck does that stop the food from going out the back door at market prices, rather than gov mandated go-broke prices?

All this will do is shift more sales to the black market.  Everything dot gov does is either a cluster fuck or fraud.

+1 on fake plastic fingerprints, the new and only growth industry.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 00:42 | 5872214 Steaming_Wookie_Doo
Steaming_Wookie_Doo's picture

No money to buy imported food, but they had the dough for 20,000 fingerprint readers? And assumably a database/backend systems to ID repeat horders??

I'll add that I'm surprised a place with as good a climate as Venezuela has any trouble growing enough crops for their people...

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 01:05 | 5872250 Automatic Choke
Automatic Choke's picture

no, no, no..... they are going to buy everybody iPhones (or iWatches) and use the fingerprint scanners built into those.

 

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 01:33 | 5872283 RafterManFMJ
RafterManFMJ's picture

Quite a bit of badfeels about the fortunes of Venezuela.  Soon, maths will be applied to solve the Socialist's Problems, as it always has been.

Goods aren't being made, no hard currency to import; what do you do?

Time for maths!

If your nation has 10,000 people and say 1000 milk cows, you have an unsustainable ration of 10 people per cow. Not nearly enough!

If you reduce the population to 5,000 however, now you have a ration of 5 to 1!

So after the outright thefts have squeezed all they can, next come the wars or killing fields.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 08:13 | 5872640 Ayreos
Ayreos's picture

A single US cow produces on average over 20 liters of milk per day, which tend to be quite enough for 10 US citizens.

That said, aren't the most bellicose countries in the world capitalist? Despite a number of socialist policies they may or may not employ, i mean.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 03:55 | 5872406 Zero Point
Zero Point's picture

According to nobel prize winning economists, this is GREAT for the Venezualan economy, as it creates a boom in local fingerprint scanner producers.

Er... wait... what?

Wed, 03/11/2015 - 09:54 | 5877202 Martian Moon
Martian Moon's picture

Same for Honduras

Now fingerprinting all visitors

Where did they get the money?

http://roatanfans.com/honduras-will-apply-a-biometric-identification-system-in-its-4-airports/

Homeland security - that's where

It's a live test - they will work out any bugs - then bring it home

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:20 | 5872028 Harbanger
Harbanger's picture

Socialist Paradise always starts with hope and ends in Tyranny.

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:34 | 5872059 ZerOhead
ZerOhead's picture

Every political system eventually ends in tyranny... and then it just ends.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 00:20 | 5872180 Harbanger
Harbanger's picture

Socialism is an economic system more than a political system.

What your'e seeing in Venezuela and Greece is Socialism without the ability to borrow/print money.  They need to budget and live within their means (GDP) but rather than cut the size of goverment, the socialists cut the size of the private sector by taxation/regulation or by nationalizing production.   They than become economically less productive as a Nation because the Public sector is less productive and eventually have to plunder the plebs for their own survival.  The Socialist system is only doing what it takes to sustain itself economically.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 01:16 | 5872263 Ignatius
Ignatius's picture

The 'King of Dumbfuckery' strikes again.

Yeah, socialism has lots of problems, and I'm glad you mentioned it as, a) it's the only song you know and, b) nobody here has ever heard this before so we can thank God you were born to tell us again.

Now, genius, where and how does the CIA and the corporate oligarchic rule play into this (you know, the shit you never talk about).

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 02:40 | 5872315 gallistic
gallistic's picture

Amen!

Propaganda is tailor-made for idiots like him...

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 00:29 | 5872196 MrTouchdown
MrTouchdown's picture

Maduro socialist paradised some folks.

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:20 | 5872029 XqWretch
XqWretch's picture

Thats what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:36 | 5872060 ZerOhead
ZerOhead's picture

They don't have any eggs.

Come to think of it they probably don't even have baskets.

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:23 | 5872039 JLM
JLM's picture

It sounds almost like something out of the Book of Revelations.  No mark of the Beast no food.... . 

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 09:17 | 5872825 COSMOS
COSMOS's picture

Book of Made Up Shit, just like the self chosenites.

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:25 | 5872044 Salah
Salah's picture

What a socialist Sunday school object-lesson, and in a country, which by most measures should be one of the wealthiest & most advanced on that continent.  Like PJ O'Rourke said, "make-believe" has great power.

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:36 | 5872061 Northern Lights
Northern Lights's picture

I remember being 13 and travelling to the former communist Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1986.  I saw first hand what life was like behind the iron curtain as a foreigner from a Western country.  It was an eye openner.  First morning we were there, my grandmother (mother's mom) took us to the supermarket for grocery shopping.  Sufficite to say, your local 7-11 was stocked better than this place.  The meat counter was a joke.  Only meat in the display was a roll of salami and a slab of ham.  To the locals, it was expensive.  Milk was another story.  Here in the west, you buy your milk in a plastic jug.  Over there, they were still selling it in those glass bottles as if it was 1920 and it didn't look none to sanitary either.  Not sure it was pasturized.  For a month we were consuming only powdered milk.

When I hear someone praising the benefits of a marxist society, I just want to beat them to a pulp.

 

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:42 | 5872077 Divine Wind
Divine Wind's picture

 

 

+1000 and thanks for your comments.

Most have ZERO idea what such a society is like, or the true scale of the horrors of really tough financial times with no safety nets.

Soon enough, then will learn first hand.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 01:30 | 5872260 Automatic Choke
Automatic Choke's picture

I spent two months working in Moscow in 198X on a scientist swap.  A few of us Americans lived in a local apartment in the suburbs, across the street from the lab.  The grocery store was not quite what you would expect at Safeway.  You didn't go there to pick up anything specific...indeed, you counted yourself lucky if they had meat, and didn't ask what kind it was.  Vegetables were a bit lacking also (it was late spring)...lots of old and smelly cabbage, beets, carrots. 

There was always a hefty supply of grapefruit juice, though.  It was cuban, and very very good.  (And the labels were printed in .... not russian, not spanish...but english.  The only language that cubans and russians have in common, sort of.)  It was great stuff for hangovers.

Funniest (thinking of a few comments back about putting all your eggs in one basket....) was that the eggs weren't packaged.  An old lady counted them out for you, and you were supposed to bring your own bag.  I hadn't, and once asked for a dozen, but my russian was pretty poor and instead of asking for twelve (dvinatsits) i said dvatsits (twenty).  She counted out twenty, shaking her head, and I tried to juggle them the block long walk back to the apartment.  I had about a dozen when I got there....

 

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 04:27 | 5872418 XqWretch
XqWretch's picture

Haha, funny story. Did they always have plenty of vodka stocked?

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 09:19 | 5872834 COSMOS
COSMOS's picture

At least they were proud people and got their country back in line without selling out to IMF fucks and EUkrauts.  Life ain't easy but you can pull through if you dont sell yourself into slavery.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 13:00 | 5873758 Automatic Choke
Automatic Choke's picture

All countries are full of proud people.  Most anybody can rationalize pride.

At this time, it was very optimistic there....peristroika was taking hold, they were opening up to the west, and everybody had high hopes.  It has gotten much worse since.  It was sort of a golden time to be there.

(And no, vodka was not that easy to get, since they were clamping down on drinking....long lines at the liquor stores.  Of course, if you had hard currency and could shop at the diplomatic stores, there was plenty....)

 

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:37 | 5872064 RMolineaux
RMolineaux's picture

Quick......Set fire to the CIA toilet paper hoard !

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:38 | 5872065 Divine Wind
Divine Wind's picture

 

 

 

Get a can of spray-on bandage.

Spray fingertips and then allow it to dry to a TACKY state.

Then press fingertips onto toe tips.

You then transfer your toe prints onto your fingertips.

This is old school fieldcraft, but it works like a charm.

 

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 09:20 | 5872841 COSMOS
COSMOS's picture

LOL but for most people then your fingertips will smell like foul foot odor

Mon, 03/09/2015 - 23:46 | 5872086 DaveA
DaveA's picture

People who do a cost-benefit analysis of socialism always forget that the benefits are temporary but the costs are permanent.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 00:15 | 5872164 Nobodys Safe
Nobodys Safe's picture

I had to click on all the links in the article to find the the picture of the fat asses (Thank you BBC)

 

 

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 00:29 | 5872198 robnume
robnume's picture

Gas prices are already rising. Almost one dollar per gallon, here in So. Cal. Low gasoline prices were very temporary and politically motivated. Surely, no one here on ZH thought low pump prices were here to stay.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 00:54 | 5872231 joego1
joego1's picture

Yeah, wait till gas is $10/gal.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 01:22 | 5872275 Augustus
Augustus's picture

You live in a special case of government Hell.

Price here is $2.25 for regular 87 octane.

You might also check your egg prices.  Ours are $1.88 / doz for Grade A large.  Cheaper on larger packages.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 09:22 | 5872848 COSMOS
COSMOS's picture

And you must live in a special case of govt Heaven.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 00:56 | 5872233 joego1
joego1's picture

How about a fist print commie dog?

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 00:56 | 5872235 Spungo
Spungo's picture

Am I supposed to cry for these people? This is all self inflicted. You voted for this. This is what you wanted.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 00:57 | 5872237 pashley1411
pashley1411's picture

Let's see, socialist Venezula controls the producers, the sellers, and now is trying to control the buyers.   And ya think it will make any difference?

Recall Xerxes, flailing the Hellespont; because the water had the temerity of sinking his fleet.

What is of interest is what the Colombian buyers are doing with their profits; finding Venezulan assets now, waiting for the collapse, or joining the crowd in Miami real estate?

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 01:06 | 5872251 Which is worse ...
Which is worse - bankers or terrorists's picture

Peak Venezuela. 

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 01:32 | 5872282 Augustus
Augustus's picture

It really is amazing how the socialists are most able to destroy the agricultural sector.  Highly productive US style production is darned complex and efficient.  However Venezuela has ample land for growing crops.  Converting corn to chicken is not too difficult.  Producing milk should not be beyond their capability sor a relatively modern economy.

 

One of the projects in Haiti after the earthquake was to send in "instructors" to teach them how to raise goats.  How the heck is it possible that they could not have already known about raising goats?

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 02:39 | 5872327 gallistic
gallistic's picture

You clearly are not aware of Latin American history or the word latifundia.

Only very recently has there been any success in breaking up the latifundia, implementing some modest land reforms, and making a true attempt at developing an agricultural sector that might someday meet the needs of food self-sufficiency.

Believe it or not, there was never any serious "agricultural sector"; under neoliberal policies, and in true client-state fashion, it was all imported from the good ol' USA.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 02:09 | 5872321 damicol
damicol's picture

Socialism, the most evil vile creed on the fucking planet.

I could butcher any fucking socialist  shit for brains like stepping on fucking cockroaches.

They voted for the cunt, now they can fucking starve, I don't care if the population falls to less than a million, if they learn that any  stinking piece of low life shit starts spouting socialism they gut and burn the cunt where they stand.

And that goes for any other place where the dumb fucks vote for socialist scum.

Including the US and its fucking corrupt little mincing  promiscuous bath house trawling faggot Kenyan monkey cock jockey

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 04:53 | 5872439 juujuuuujj
juujuuuujj's picture

Scandinavia.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 06:47 | 5872519 Ace Ventura
Ace Ventura's picture

The perceived 'success' of socialist-style systems in Scandinavia is due to one overriding factor conveniently left out of the discussion:

DEMOGRAPHICS.

Flood those nordic countries with the fucktardial multi-culti bullshit the rest of the western world is being constantly pummeled with.....and watch how fast scandinavia turns into a quagmire of dilapidated shit like the former soviet bloc countries in eastern europe.....or just about any other socialist country not in scandinavia.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 08:02 | 5872615 Haus-Targaryen
Haus-Targaryen's picture

This is the truth. This Berkeley School of Sociology bullshit that all people and cultures are equal in all things is a fucking disaster when coupled with socialism.

This Slavic-Germanic-Anglo self-loathing that "black and brown people do everything right and we do everything wrong because multiculturalism" that western society is plagued with merely exacerbates the problem.

Fuck socialists and the contemporary left wing.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 08:15 | 5872642 juujuuuujj
juujuuuujj's picture

@Ace Ventura, through the eyes of a country bumpkin, yes, immigration and labor mobility are to blame for all the world's problems. But if you checked the facts, you'd see that Nordic countries have plenty of immigration, while Eastern Europe has close to zero. Nordic countries operate social welfare at a surplus, while Eastern Europe is neoliberal, privatized and broke.

The reason Socialism AND Capitalism work fine in certain places, and not in others, is quite simply THE LEVEL OF OLIGARCHY, and has nothing to do with immigration. 

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 08:18 | 5872654 Bill of Rights
Bill of Rights's picture

Top post...

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 02:10 | 5872326 Atomizer
Atomizer's picture

Submit a stool sample to receive government issued one ply toilet paper roll. One sheet is enough. 

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/apr/23/musicnews.music

Sherly Crow one tissue theory. 

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 03:11 | 5872353 gallistic
gallistic's picture

I bet no one here has heard the real news, so I will share just one nugget.

The President of the United States has declared a national emergency!

No, really, I am dead serious. You won't see this on CNN, but there is a National Emergency.

You see, the ongoing (14 years) political and economic war has not yielded the desired results. The US is taking a more muscular approach, since the opposition parties, although heavily and completely funded by Uncle Sam, have gotten trounced in 18 elections in a row. I guess the Venezuelan people simply do not support fascists, no matter how much money they spend.

All the (at least three) coup attempts that the US has orchestrated have failed, and its proxies have repeatedly, time and time again, failed to bring forth a color revolution, even with hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars and the full support of those benevolent NGOs like the NED, IRI, NDI, and Freedon House. Even worse, they are all getting pinched with the smoking guns in their hands and getting thrown in jail!

There are many leaked audios, videos, and e-mails of the coup plotters, er,.. freedom fighters plotting and discussing their schemes. There are also confessions by several of those involved. Unfortunately, monolingual, ethnocentric (US) "Americans" will not understand the clips, for they are in Spanish, but I am sure they will understand this:


Executive Order, 9 March 2015

"I, Barrack Obama, President of the United States of America"...blah, blah, blah...  Venezuela is bad and they "constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat"

This is a more direct approach. We got the ball rolling with "sanctions". We all know the next steps, as we have seen this script play out many times before.

 

Seriously, one of these days, I am going to unleash a massive post laying out the facts of this whole deal, because the general lack of knowledge is appalling.

 

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 06:14 | 5872493 ForTheWorld
ForTheWorld's picture

You should probably lay out that massive post full of facts, because that Executive Order doesn't exist, at least on the US Governments register of Executive Orders:

https://www.federalregister.gov/executive-orders/barack-obama/2015

The biggest tell was there was no EO number at the top of the document that you linked to. I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt, but after doing some research, I can't find the signed document for that EO. I can find ones for Ukraine and other nation states, but not Venezuela.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 08:31 | 5872688 gallistic
gallistic's picture

Oh it exists all right.

I do not know why, but the federal register is always behind the times.

 

Wed, 03/11/2015 - 04:34 | 5876734 ForTheWorld
ForTheWorld's picture

Welp... I've come back to eat crow. Here it is (no title for it at the moment):

https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/03/11/2015-05677/no-title-...

Thu, 03/12/2015 - 15:53 | 5882723 gallistic
gallistic's picture

Well at least you have the stones to fess up and rectify; I respect that.

Personally, I like my crow with a little garlic.  ;)

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 08:15 | 5872646 rsnoble
rsnoble's picture

Kinda disturbing.  I mean,watching your future unfold and all.

Also disturbing that they can't get food.....but we can sure's the fuck fingerprint the entire country.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 08:51 | 5872747 joak
joak's picture

Don't really get the bashing of Venezuela here. Oligarchic countries are bad, the ones who try to fix imbalances created during decades of the most unfair oligarchic regimes are bad too. ZH is keen on pointing american interventionism all around the world, but when Maduro accuses the US of involvment in what is happening there, this is tinfoil hat conspiration. From what I read, shortages are the result of the subsidied products sold in Venezuela, some mafia being specialized in smugglign those products in Columbia to be sold there or to hoard them to sell them much more. Now I don't know all the details of the situation there, there are most probably issues, but in general I have the feeling Venezuela is the topic on which ZH agrees with mainstream media just to show "see we are not systematically anti mainstream, just thirsty for the truth". I don't care if they are socialist or whatever, all i know is that every development indicator has dramatically increased since Chavez took the rein of the country. Actually, chavism is a typical national-socialist movement.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 09:07 | 5872792 gallistic
gallistic's picture

You are far closer to the truth on this than most posters here.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 09:52 | 5872976 dogismycopilot
dogismycopilot's picture

well, at least they have skinny good looking women now.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 10:34 | 5873150 gcjohns1971
gcjohns1971's picture

Don't laugh at crazy Maduro.

He believes in something for nothing, with the 'something' magically appearing because of Socialism.

It is the most widely shared madness in the world.

Maduro and Venuzuela are simply closer to the endgame than the rest of the lunatics.

Tue, 03/10/2015 - 10:50 | 5873226 roadhazard
roadhazard's picture

If true what a fucking waste of money.

Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site!