The Devil's Excrement

Today is the fifth anniversary of this blog. I must confess that during the past month I have considered whether to shut it down on this date.Why? Because I get the feeling that everything I say is simply repetitive. That I am not saying anything new. What was a suspicion a few years ago, has become a certainty. Everything bad thing about Chavez and his Government has become institutionalized. The Government no longer even attempts to hide its abuses in the gray area of the law. Even Chavez challenges the CNE and the Courts to stop him from violating the law and defends the fact that the President of PDVSA blatantly violated it during last year’s election.

But I will leave the blog open, not so much out of duty or need to do so, it is almost irrelevant given the hold on power of the autocrat/dictator on all institutions, but because things are going to get much worse and as long as I am allowed to, I might as well leave it alive and continue recording what Chavze is doing to the Venezuelan people and the country.

Everything has become absurd. A Minister suspends a concession just because…she felt like it. A foreigner is invited to the National Assembly to say that any reporter ever invited to her country by the local Embassy is a traitor to Venezuela and the National Assembly not only takes it seriously, but calls the reporters to testify. Corruption is so rampant that on Thursday “some” banks, those friendly to the Government and willing to pay a “fee” , were sold US$ 400 million in structured notes at an equivalent prices of Bs. 3,100 to 3,200 and they quickly turned around and sold it in the parallel market at Bs. 4,200 for a tidy one day US$ 95 million in profits (minus “fees”) to those lucky enough to be selected. A Congressional Committee shows a decision from the PDVSA Board “forgiving” some companies from fulfilling contracts for a few hundred million dollars, because they backed the Government during the strike. a billion dollars in drilling rig contracts is given to 12 companies, 7 of which only exist on paper. Two years later only the five that were real delivered. A pro-Chavez reporter/priest says that he knows things going on at PDVSA that are so bad they will make the Government “fall”, thus, he says, he can’t reveal what he knows, but the Prosecutor does not call him to ask what it is he knows. The Minister of Communications says Venezuelans have a right to “control” media produced by Venezuelans in Venezuela and aimed mostly at Venezuelans, which implies this blog can be “controlled”. A CNE Director agrees with Chavez that what happens at PDVSA is a “private” matter. Public telephones become free. Dozens of jets belonging to the friends of the revolution land daily in Caracas’s military airport where private planes are banned from landing. The Government buys a company on sale a year ago for US$ 15 million, for US$ 103 million. Venezuela will import US$45 billion in 2007, up from US$ 12 billion in 1998. Structural inflation was over 24% annualized in July, but the Government pays for ads saying the Government anti-inflation plan is working. RCTV was closed and rules were invented to shut down RCTV International, just because…A new Constitution has been rewritten and the Government of “participation” has yet to tell its people what it says.

Then, how can I be worried if everything is so rosy?

Because the country is a basket case and only oil prices going higher all the time will be able to sustain the madness.

For example…It went unnoticed that in the last three weeks, bolivar denominated Government bonds, mostly in the hands of the banking system, dropped 20-30% in value.

Or that Venezuela’s Global 27 bond fell 30% since March and gyrated 8% on a single day last Friday.

And that Fonden’s indiscriminate sale of its Venezuelan and Argentinean bonds, destroyed the market for some of them and increased spreads by 300% due to the amateurish way in which this was done.

And this all spells trouble in the economic front at a time when oil prices are at an all time high…imagine if they happened to go down

And that is precisely why I will keep writing, because all sorts of external reasons will be blamed when the whole thing collapses, but I plan to record how it all happened and how this is the result of ignorance, arrogance and the belief that the laws of economics can be manipulated at will.

And I will also report for as long as I am allowed to how this Government is not democratic, it has fascist tendencies and is run by a bunch of of people who simply suck up to the autocrat/dictator while they enrich themselves.

Not that I think I will have any effect by writing about it. I am very pessimistic about the future of this country under the current administration, which I think is here to stay, whether the “people” want it or not. And I believe the damage is so severe, that I don’t think changing administrations will help much anyway, except that maybe, just maybe, we could get someone who has respect for human rights and the rule of law.But there will only be change when the mess becomes chaos and by then it will be that much more difficult to fix things.

So, you can count me in for a while. I will be here. Off and on. Pessimistic. But I will be chronicling the destruction and will try not to be too repetitive. But sometimes, it is just impossible. Like in this post.

Gustavo Coronel has his own blog, check it out!

In another arbitrary act by the Chavez administration, the Ministry of Tourism today took over the concession of the Avila Magica cable car system, operated under concession by a local consortium. That consortium had a 30 year contract with the Government which was unilaterally rescinded by the Government in violation of the contract itself. There was no due process, no right to defense, the autocratic Government of Hugo Chavez did what it wanted without regards for the rule of law. There was no decision by a judge, no audience, no chance for the operators to defend themselves.

The cable car concession was given out nine years ago. At the time the system did not work and was completely replaced and rebuilt thanks to a credit of US$ 90 million by the company that rebuilt the system. The cable car was built in the 50’s but by the late 60’s it began having difficulties because of the lack of maintenance. One of the companies in the consortium trades in the Caracas Stock Exchange. The Minister said that the Government will not compensate the operator of the concession and that the operators actually owed money to the Government.

Another step by the robolution to guarantee no investment in the country by the private sector.

On his Sunday program Alo Presidente, attempted to manipulate the truth using his customary convoluted logic he uses for everything to try to show that Venezuela’s terrible performance at the Panamerican games in Brazil was actually a victory. His Chavezian argument suggested that Venezuela did better than arch-enemy the US because the number of medals per inhabitant was higher for Venezuelan than for the gringoes. Today Simon Bocanegra in Tal Cual takes Chavez to task with this fake news item on the issue:

International Olympic Committee adopts Chaz method by Simon Bocanegra in Tal Cual

Geneva.-The International Olympic Committe, following the recommendation made by the President of Venezuela, decided to adopt the novel method proposed by hos excellency for the calculation of sports medals. It immediately recalculated the medals from the Panamerican Games. The new standings changed radically the overall view of the games. The small islands
in the Caribbean of Antigua and Barbuda took the top place for the first time with 12.08 medals per one million inhabitants, defeating other continental sports powerhouses like Bahamas (6.19) and the Netherland Antilles (5.47). Cuba occupied the fourth place (5.24). The biggest disappointment was Venezuela which from the eight place it occupied under the old calculation method, fell to tenth place with the one proposed by its President with 0.37 medals per million inhabitants. Countries considered up to now as sports powerhouses in the Continent, such as Brazil. Mexico and Argentina, to which one should add Colombia, came in the last places overall.

The United States, that had been usurping first place in 13 out of the 15 Panamerican Games that have taken place, occupied the 12th. place, showing its mediocre standing in sports, masked up to now by an imperialistic calculation, which originates in the Greek empire and perfected later by the Roman Empire.

I was hoping last night’s silly post would be my only mention of Sean Penn’s irrelevant visit to Venezuela. But I could not pass up the opportunity to note that maybe Penn’s visit has something to do with the fact that Chavez and Penn were forever linked and joined last January when Hannity inducted Penn into his enemy of the state’s list, joining Chavez, Castro and Kim Il Sung and other practitioners or sympathizers of fascism. (Thanks D.!)

Let’s see: Sean Penn, Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte…

Are men stupid or what?

Venezuela
may be the only country where the underlying inflation goes up the highest in
one month and the Minister of Finance holds a press conference to tell the world
that economic policies are working and this can be seen in the inflation rate

As the June inflation rate dropped
to 0.5%, Minister Cabezas claimed
today that this showed that the policies implemented by his Ministry in
combination with the Central bank were having an effect. But in fact the drop in
the CPI for July is an artificial effect of the combination of one-time events:
the cut in the value added tax (VAT) rate from 11% to 9% and the drop in the
rates of telecom company CANTV, which led to a drop of 5.5% in communications
prices for the month of July. Remove these two factors and the true structural
inflation would be between 2.3% and 2.4%, the highest of any month so far this
year when these adjustments are taken into account.

Thus, it is not clear whether the
Minister is trying to lie or is simply ignorant or a combination of both.

What’s next?

Destroying the country’s yield curve?

Wait! He already did that!

Dictator by Michael Rowan in El Universal

Dear President Chavez, with all respect, you can’t dictate
that people can’t call you a dictator. The old saying goes:
if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and looks like
a duck, it’s probably a duck. This is why people call you
a dictator. You have taken absolute control over Venezuela’s
institutions, which is the chief characteristic of a dictator.
You admit proudly to indoctrinating Venezuelans in the ideology
of your revolution, which is a dictionary definition of a
dictator. You have made media criticism that you deem to be
disrespectful of your authority a crime, which is exactly
what dictators do. So in all fairness to those who are free
to form their opinions of you from what they perceive in everyday
life, you should admit that it is not specious for a person
to call you a dictator.

While whether you are a dictator or not is a matter of opinion,
whether a person can say you are a dictator in Venezuela or
anywhere else is their fundamental human right. You do not
have the power nor should you seek it to prevent anyone who
believes you are a dictator from saying it. You say you are
going to expel people who call you a dictator from the country.
Sir, you have no right from God or man to do any such thing
and in your heart of hearts you know it. But if you do expel
a person for calling you a dictator, recognize that everyone
you face from that point thereafter may be thinking you are
a dictator and knowing you are a dictator but not saying it
to your face for fear of being punished.

Last week the Democratic candidates for US president were
asked in debate if they would meet with the world’s worst
dictators – you and four others were named. Barack Obama said
maybe he would. Hillary Clinton said maybe she would not.
But none of those candidates said: “Hugo Chavez is not a dictator
and does not belong in that group of dictators from Iran,
North Korea, Cuba, Syria and Venezuela.” Now if that debate
had been held in Venezuela, would you expel the YouTube person
who asked the question and all the candidates who answered
it? Venezuela will become the country with the smallest population
in the world if you continue with the fantasy that people
cannot say the truth — you are a dictator.

I actually thought that it was last night that RCTV International was supposed to shutdown its cable and TV signal, but it was tonight. Then this afternoon the Venezuelan Supreme Court admitted an injunction from the Chamber of cable TV services. The arguments are very simple:

i) The Chamber of Cable TV operators does not know which are the networks to be excluded or not.
ii) It does not know why RCTV International was given 5 days to comply why the others were given ten days.
iii) There is no definition of who is or not a “national operator”.
iv) It does not know the existence of any regulations on this matter and asks that the regulator be ordered to issue them.

The Court had to admit the case since it was so obvious that the whole thing was built to get RCTV International off the air, going as far as requiring it to go off the air earlier than the others. Funny that on the same day Chavez authorized the creation of a new Telesur Venezuela, that would register as a local network, something the “other” Telesur had never done or had never been required to do in the past.

Mision Ribas is th Chavez Government’s attempt to graduate as many people form high school as possible, without any regards for quality. The problem, much like Venezuela’s secondary school education, is the level of quality and the improvisation. It is the number of graduates that matter, not if they actually learned anything. The same way health “achievements” are measured by number of patients seeingand not by improvements in health indices.

Today Tal Cual had this picture which proves my point: If the teachers who educate in Mision Ribas, can’t even write a simple word like “inscripciones” correctly, calling for the students to register, not only replacing the “p” with a “c” in the banner, but hanging it outside, what can you even ask from the students? Didn’t anyone  notice?

What happens when they teach high school Physics or Chemistry?

What a mess!!