The Latest Nullity Named to Run Venezuela's Collapsing Economy

The whole concept of Ramón Lobo running the Venezuelan economy in 2017 would be hilarious if it wasn't for the sheer scale of the tragedy it implies.

Venezuela is facing what is now probably its deepest economic crisis since the Federal Wars of the 1860s: an economic cataclysm of hard-to-overstate proportions. 78% of Venezuelans now say they themselves or someone close to them has lost weight due to being unable to source enough food. Now more than ever, the country needs — and I mean needs — a superstar economics team: the kind of far-sighted leadership up to the daunting task of stabilizing the nation’s badly beaten economy.

Instead, we’re getting Ramón Lobo.

Ramón who?! Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of him. Nobody had. A bush leagues chavista apparatchik whose most demanding previous post was as mayor of La Azulita — a town of 15,000 in Mérida State — the closest he’d come to the limelight until now was the time Henry Ramos Allup put him on the receiving end of one of his famous zingers (“¡de inteligencia no te vas a morir!”)

But that’s by the by. What concerns us here tonight is that Ramón Lobo has no discernable ideas on economic matters of any sort. He did study economics at ULA (an eternity ago), and he does now sit in the National Assembly’s Finance Committee (where he has failed to make any sort of impact at all). But his writings betray no trace of economic reasoning, much less a semi-reasonable approximation to an understanding of the scale of the economic berenjenal the nation is in. Instead, we get the kind of slogan-strewn, contentless propaganda pablum that’s at the heart of rhetorical chavismo. Crap like:

Complementándose al Sucre y con el objetivo de apalancar el desarrollo económico y social de la región, impulsar proyectos de carácter estructural para avanzar en la superación de la pobreza y promover una distribución equitativa y estratégica de las inversiones, que potencien sectores clave en la economía de nuestros países, se propone la creación del Banco del Sur, Banco del Alba y el Banco de Petrocaribe. El primero parte de la iniciativa de Unasur con su acta fundacional, suscrita el 9 de diciembre de 2007 por Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay y Venezuela. El segundo, fundado en noviembre del 2008 es impulsado por el ALBA-TCP y en aras de concretarse encontramos el Banco de Petrocaribe, el cual se plantea desde la Celac sobre las bases y principios cimentados en los convenios energéticos.

Dichas instituciones se conciben como bancos de desarrollo y entes de financiamiento regional independientes de organismos multilaterales como el FMI y el Banco Mundial , que prestaban dinero bajo el recetario neoliberal donde se excluye la implementación de políticas sociales que pudieran corregir las distorsiones del libre mercado.

Lo que hemos descrito en las líneas precedentes, marca el rumbo de la nueva Arquitectura Financiera de la Región, que tiene como eje transversal apuntalar la integración de los países latinoamericanos y la creación de proyectos conjuntos basados en la complementariedad, cooperación, solidaridad y combate a las asimetrías, pasando por el delicado proceso de la supervisión y verificación del comercio justo, a fin de alcanzar los niveles de desarrollo deseado con respeto de la soberanía y total independencia de los centros financieros del imperialismo.

I could’ve copy-pasted just about any passage from Lobo’s Aporrea oeuvre and it would’ve been much the same: a torrent of bureaucratic gobbledygood, inflated in style, hollow as the guy’s head, with no trace of reasoning anywhere. Par for the course, given the guy’s trajectory…and yet, this is the guy who’s going to be negotiating extensions of our line of credit with the Chinese from now on! This fucking guy is going to be on the receiving end of the conference calls with Wall Street investors! This is the guy meant to get our ducks in a row so we can avoid default, maintain some form of access with international goods markets, and forestall an even worse collapse than we’ve already seen. This guy!

It’s impossible to be surprised by this kind of thing anymore, but it’s necessary to remain appalled. And fucking angry. People are going hungry, nojoda, Venezuela can’t afford the luxury of a Finance Minister (and Economics VP) who has no fucking clue what he’s doing.