The Devil's Excrement

(Syrian President makes a face when Chavez tells him his refinery will be built after he finishes the other 16 promised)

Too much to digest at once, so here are just the headlines, with comments:

—Chavez offers the President of Syria that he will build a refinery in his country.

Does Al-Assad know that there is a huge line? Just off the top, he has to wait until Chavez builds one with Brazil, Panama, Uruguay, Jamaica, Nicaragua, China, and abut ten others, none of which have even been started, but were announced at least three or four years ago. The lone exception: The Cuban refinery, the only one that Venezuela has devoted the time and the money to work on it.

–To get a job in Government denounced Andres Velasquez, you have to get a “Patriotic Certification” saying that you are loyal to the revolution.

This is an improvement, no? This is the Chavez/Tascon list but backwards, you want a job, you register as being part of the faithful, don’t bother if you are not. You can even lie if you want to. In the old Chavez/Tascon list, it was taken from a recall referendum list if you signed against the Dictator.

–According to the Rector of Universidad Jose Maria Baralt, a Bolivarian that supports the process, they are “immersed in forming a new and different educational model in which the professional does not sell himself or buys his degree. Thus, they are thinking of doing away with undergraduate thesis, research and projects as part of degree requirements”. (Bolivarian students marched today rallying, among other things against university internal entrance exams)

I agree, what a bothersome bunch of useless stuff, thesis, research, projects, while they are at it, maybe they should do away with exams, courses and, hell, teachers…bring back the honor system, Bolivarian in this case.

—National Assembly refuses to discuss the spoiled food case.

Of course it should. Imagine if all the corruption surrounding the case came up in the discussion. We are talking about 122,000 tons of rotten food, but we know the corruption involved most of the imported food, the containers (you pay rent for them did you know that?), the storage time, the fees, the permits. The guys involved in this are millionaries. Ask Andorra. But it’s bad timing, no corruption fighting until October, at the least.

–Chavez’ PSUB party asks for an investigation into where the opposition is getting money.

You got to be kidding me! PSUV spends 100 times more than the opposition and everyone knows where the money is coming from: From the Government and you want to ask where the puny amount of money the oppo has is coming from? That’s like asking if the US is advising the opposition, when Chavez only does what Fidel suggests and Cuban advisers have invaded Venezuela. Why is this asymmetrical?

–Chavez has given Cuba a billion US$ for cooperaton in science and research between Cuba and Venezuela according to Jaime Requena in Tal Cual.

This has generated a total of 16 publications at an average cost of US$ 62.5 million per paper. I guess we should have quite a few Nobel Prizes coming our way. Or am I an optimist?

Bizarro indeed…

The ability of the robolution to amaze and awe is truly remarkable. Bizarre has now become a normal word in Venezuela as the Chavez Government does nothing that could be construed as being normal.

Take the term “informal” workers. They represent the more than half of the Venezuelan population who have casual jobs, selling stuff in the streets and trying to make a living. Nothing organized or regulated about them. Periodically, the Government tries to move them from one place to the other, they are banned from certain places, but somehow they survive, resurfacing somewhere else. Informal workers, called “buhoneros’ in Venezuela, used to be pro-Chavez, but they seem to support him less and less. I tried to depict some of their activities and smarts in the reappearance of Oligarco Burguesito, who met Nero Buho the street vendor to talk about the end of the swap market.

But Nero’s life, if he existed will become rougher starting today, as the Government issued a decree, essentially forbidding that street vendors sell foodstuffs at a price different than the regulated price and as long as they maintain the required hygiene and health standards necessary.

Moreover, these “informal” workers will have 30 days to comply with the decree and those found to be in violation of the decree will have their merchandise confiscated.

Where do I start on this? It has so many weird edges that it is actually quite hard to know the beginning. I have a thousand questions. For example, who the hell is going to supervise this? Will Chavez create the “Buhonero Police” to check it all out?

But even before that, where do you find the street vendors? I mean, these are street vendors, they are all over the place, do they have to register now? Doesn’t that turn them into some sort of “formal” workers? What if they move from one place to the other?

But what happens, for example, if one of these street vendors barters rather than sell one kilo of merchandise for another? Does this apply to fair pricing in barter too?  Didn’t the Government want to promote barter? How do you regulate barter in the end? Isn’t that an essential part of the communal law recently passed by the National Assembly? What differentiates a communal vendor or barterer form an informal worker? Is he regulated by this? Who has to register? Where? How does this all work?

And once you get beyond these nitpicking details, everyone is legit, everyone has registered, do they all become “formal” workers? Does the unemployment rate become negative then? Because if informal employment is more than 50% and unemployment is 7 or 8%, like INE says, then we would have -40% unemployment or something like that.

And in the end, when the poor now formalized, “informal” worker has his stuff confiscated by the buhonero police, can he appeal? Can he get his stuff back? Can the buhonero cops become street vendors too? How many buhonero cops do you need to supervise this? Who will train them? Is this an massive employment program in the end?

Does it apply to trucks that come from the interior to sell their goods in the cities too?

Will buhoneros have to have prices marked on all items? Do they need to get cash registers? Do they have to print official tax office receipts? Collect Value Added Tax? Pay it? Pay income taxes?

In the end, this sounds as bizarre and harebrained as so many other things the robolution has ever created or improvised.

But hey, eleven years running and they are still running things…

Well, we were told that the now banned swap market was mostly speculation and the President of the Central Bank said US$ 26 million a day should be sufficient. Well, the graph below shows volume so far:

Thus, with corporations limited to US$ 50,000 a day, individuals with US$ 5,000 a year, banks still putting the system together, volume is already up to US$ 44 million.

Not pretty.

(I think that food is not the only thing that is going bad in Venezuela)

With over 120,000 Tons of food found either in a putrid state or expired over the last month, you would think that the new head of PDVAL, locally called Putreval, Colonel Carlos Osorio, would spend at least his first month in office looking at the logistics of how the food is brought into the country and how is distributed, to understand why so much food was left in storage and allowed to go bad.

Instead, the Colonel spends the day visiting a Polar facility and meeting the press to denounce that, lo and behold, they found all of 79 Tons of margarine at a Polar storage building. Imagine that! 79 Tons of a product, when the company he presides has allowed four orders of magnitude more of food to go bad over a few months!

I guess they don’t teach orders of magnitude in military school in Venezuela or the Colonel was transferred just when the subject was going to be covered in class.

But this simple example shows why this Government is so incompetent and ineffective. A guy on his first day on a job which requires managerial experience, that he clearly does not have, (otherwise he would not be a Colonel) rather than attempting to tackle the overwhelming task in front of him, chooses to devote his time attacking the private sector, using a miniscule amount of food as an excuse to accuse them of hoarding.

Miniscule, because Polar provides a large fraction of the margarine in the country under a variety of names, in a country of 26 million people, where 160,000 tubs of margarine are probably sold every week of the year and as the Polar representative explained, since Thursday was holiday, there was more material in storage than usual.

But the problem is clear, the Government spends all the time on propaganda, avoiding responsibility and trying to distract attention from the myriad of problems it has created with its incompetence.

And this simply indicates that Colonel Osorio will be another failure in his new position, as he will not have the support either of funding or logistics that PDVSA used to have PDVAL. He probably thinks the military will do a better job than PDVSA, but this example clearly shows this is unlikely to be the case. He is as clueless as his predecessors and throwing money and soldiers at the problem will not solve anything. You just need organization, management and hard work!

But that is too much to ask from anyone in this Government, which always finds time to spend on the less important things.

Meanwhile the Legislative Council of Monagas State decides to investigate Polar for the firing of one worker, the same week that Chavez freezes all collective bargaining agreements in the country, forbids salary increases and bonuses for any worker in the Venezuelan civil service. But all these workers do not appear to have any labor rights, but the Polar worker needs to be protected.

It is all smoke and mirrors, trying to hide the reality of the failure of the robolution in all fields of Government.But after eleven years, people are no longer fooled as easily, no jobs, inflation and shortages have become the main concerns of the population which is tired of a robolution that has failed to deliver.

(They want to shut our mouths off, bit all they have managed is to shut our noses off)

Yes, not much stuff to blog about. The way things are going in Venezuela the word “news” requires something beyond imagination, because the “routine” just does not cut it here in Venezuela anymore. Chavez used to be a Teflon President, but we now seem to have a Teflon Government. Nothing sticks to it, nothing scandalizes, everything in the end is the opposition’s fault and/or absolutely irrelevant.

Take the by now 120,000 Tons of putrid food imported by the government. It turns out that the word “putrid” is just an exaggeration. It is just “expired” food, or some socialist concept like that. And by the way, it is mostly the private sectors fault, according to the Chief Mismanager, the President of PDVSA Rafael Ramirez According to this genius, who will go into history as the destroyer of PDVSA. the private sector is responsible for their putrid food, because they were in charge of the ships and the storage companies. Funny, the storage companies were nationalized long ago and in any case, if this were the problem, the Government would be finding lots of private sector spoiled food. Instead, every time they raid the private sector companies, they take the food away for hoarding, but somehow it is never spoiled, bad or whatever euphemism you want to find for a large fraction of what happens to the food brought in by the Government.

Oh, how come the Cubans who run the ports are exempt from fault? Oh, yes they are Cubans…

And then you wonder when the Comptroller surfaces and says that he started looking into the rotten food two years ago. Are you kidding me Clodosvaldo? That was 120,000 Tons ago! What have you done since then? Of course, Leopoldo Lopez used money for one purpose to pay a Chavez’ ordered salary increase, it only took you six months to ban him from running for office. I guess the PDVAL or PUTRIVAL guys can be elected for the next National Assembly, at least they will know where to look for the corruption.

Which brings me then to the “People’s Ombudswoman”, who always comes to the defense of the Teflon guys, but seems rather quiet on the subject of the possible poisoning of the population. She should be concerned, after all, the spoiled food was not meant for the oligarchs, but for those that vote for Hugo, or at least used to. What morals does this woman have? As Diego Arria told Chavez, I tell her: “See you in The Hague” and I include Clodosvaldo and his double pension in this too.

And speaking of those pensioned off, how about funny man Norman Puerta, the former and retired anti-drug czar of Venezuela, he was caught with a million dollars in that idyllic country, but it has nothing to do with drugs or anything illegal, it was just “a misunderstanding over the money he saved”, just  a million bucks of savings for a guy who made made maybe US$ 1,000-$2,000  a month. But you know, the people who work for the Chavez teflonic Government, particularly in the anti-drug sector, they lead spartan lives, after 11 years in power they can save a million bucks. I’s just discipline, even if you don’t believe the math. It would only take him 500 months to make that million, and that is only 41.6 years, Chavez should last that much if things keep rolling along the way they are.

And in the middle of all these irrelevant news, Chavez issues a decree saying that nobody, absolutely nobody, can negotiate a collective contract agreement without his authorization. Never mind that this has been the silent “rule of law” for the last five years. It is an intrinsic part of XXIst. Century Socialism, that unions are out and Chavez’s party PSUV is in. Thus, no negotiations, no salary increases, no unions. And some people still think this is a left wing revolution.Neither the workers, nor the people can revolt in Venezuela.

It is all about Hugo.

But thanks God these are quiet times, not much happening, not much to write. When something does happen, you can be sure I will report back to you beyond the banalities of the robolution like those described above.

In the meantime, I will do like the opposition leaders, work on my stuff, even if I don’t want to get elected.