Category Archive 'Venezuela'
16 Dec 2008

Peter Zeihan, at Stratfor, discussing the impact of the ongoing collapse of oil prices from to a current $40 a barrel from $147 last July.
Happily, the list of losers is headed by the worst outlaws.
Venezuela and Iran top this list by far. Both are led by politicians who have lavished vast amounts of oil income on their populations to secure their respective political positions. But that public approval has come at its own price in terms of economic dislocation (why diversify the economy if strong oil prices bring in loads of cash?), low employment (the energy sector may be capital-intensive, but it certainly is not labor-intensive), and high inflation (high government spending has led to massive consumption and spurred rampant import of foreign goods to satiate that demand).
Of the two states, Venezuela is certainly in the worse position. By some estimates, Venezuela requires oil prices in the vicinity of US$120 a barrel to maintain the social spending to which its population has become accustomed. Iran’s number may be only somewhat lower, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in the process of at least beginning to bow to economic reality. On Dec. 5, he announced massive cuts in subsidy outlays with the intent of reforging the budget based on a price of only US$30 a barrel.
Read the whole thing.
14 Dec 2007
Reuters reports on the International epidemic of laughter resulting from the embarrassment of one of the Chavez regime’s revolutionaries observed to be a luxury consumer while in the midst of a rant against Capitalism.
Venezuelan Interior Minister Pedro Carreño was momentarily at a loss for words when a journalist interrupted his speech and asked if it was not contradictory to criticize capitalism while wearing Gucci shoes and a tie made by Parisian luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton.
“I don’t, uh … I … of course,” stammered Carreño on Tuesday before regaining his composure. “It’s not contradictory because I would like Venezuela to produce all this so I could buy stuff produced here instead of 95 percent of what we consume being imported.”
0:30 video
03 Dec 2007
And, David Goldstein, at the Huffington Post, responds to the bad news, thusly:
The Bushies have called Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez a dictator and a tyrant… but since when do dictators lose elections? …
Now if only Bush had accepted the will of the people as graciously as Chávez.
19 Oct 2007

A glass monument to a villain like Che? Not the wisest choice.
AP:
A glass monument to revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara was shot up and destroyed less than two weeks after it was unveiled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government.
Images of the 8-foot-tall glass plate bearing Guevara’s image, now toppled and shattered, were shown Friday on state television, which said the entire country “repudiated” the vandalism.
If any of the shooters should ever find themselves in the United States, they should be sure to contact the author of this blog who will be glad to buy them a drink.
20 Jan 2007

It was just occurring to me: presidents of the United States are a lot like cats, and adversaries of the United States are a lot like mice.
George W. Bush is like some cats I’ve had. The mice made a mess on 9/11, and Bush responded by desultorily playing with Afghanistan and Iraq in much the fashion some cats will enthusiastically start tackling a given mouse, but simply bat him around a bit, and then lose interest and go to sleep, while the mouse recovers and scuttles off to violate one’s domestic order another day.
In the case of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Venezuela and a growing list of leftwing dictatorships in Latin America, Bush is worse, more like an old, lazy, and utterly indifferent spoiled housecat, who does no mousing at all.
When one thinks about it, one realizes that in the last 50 years we’ve had good looking presidents and ugly presidents, presidents who had a lot of charm and presidents who made Americans go out and throw up in the street. We’ve had presidents who talked a good game, presidents who screwed up everything, and Ronald Reagan who had a special grace. Besides Reagan, though, we’ve hardly had a president, since the time of FDR, who was any kind of mouser at all. And by my standards, even including Reagan, we have not had a really serious mouser.
I used to have a small grey cat who’d nail one foreign enemy, at least, every night. Our cellar was full of corpses of mice, and voles, and shrews. She didn’t just play with them. After a short session of batting her victim around, she’d administer a lethal, leopard-like bite to the back of the neck, and that was that.
How can a US administration just sit there, and let some idiot like Chavez take over a nearby country, nationalize property (including the property of US corporations), denounce the United States and embark on a campaign of Hemispheric subversion in alliance with our enemies? One really wants to take one’s slipper, and whack that sleeping president a good one, and say: “Over there! Mouse. Go get him! Hunt him up. Kill, kill, kill.”
20 Jan 2007

The BBC reports that Hugo Chavez, the tin-horn dictator of Venezuela, has followed Adolph Hitler’s example, and gotten his rubber-stamp parliament to start passing legislation permitting him to rule by decree, and remain in power forever.
Venezuela’s National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill granting the president the power to bypass congress and rule by decree for 18 months. President Hugo Chavez says he wants “revolutionary laws” to enact sweeping political, economic and social changes.
He has said he wants to nationalise key sectors of the economy and scrap limits on the terms a president can serve.
Mr Chavez began his third term in office last week after a landslide election victory in December.
The bill allowing him to enact laws by decree is expected to win final approval easily in the assembly on its second reading on Tuesday.
Venezuela’s political opposition has no representation in the National Assembly since it boycotted elections in 2005.
Chavez has been hosting Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and is doubtless plotting ways and means to extend the reach of our enemies into this hemisphere. The Bush Administration will be guilty of criminal negligence every bit as bad as Clinton’s, if it fails to remove this revolting communist thug from power before he does further violence to the rights of his own people, and before he creates a functioning base for terrorism in the Western Hemisphere.
03 Dec 2006

TCS Daily reports:
In a forthcoming study for the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, senior researcher Ely Karmon raises the alarming prospect of Hezbollah affiliated groups bringing the Lebanese terrorists’ brand of violence to the Americas. While acknowledging that it is too soon to draw clear conclusions about the nature and objectives of these Hezbollah “franchisees,” Karmon nonetheless notes that “successful campaigns of proselytism in the heart of poor indigene Indian tribes and populations by both Shi’a and Sunni preachers and activists” have contributed to the growing attraction of Islamist terrorist groups in Latin America. Karmon also observes that “there is a growing trend of solidarity between leftist, Marxist, anti-global and even rightist elements with the Islamists,” citing inter alia the September 2004 “strategy conference” of anti-globalization groups hosted by Hezbollah in Beirut.
Evidence of this was already available in the Washington Post’s front page coverage of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s September 22 mass rally, which mentioned that among those in attendance was a Lebanese expatriate who had flown in from Venezuela for the event and that “[a]t the mention of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a critic of America, cheers went up.”
As it happens, one month after the demonstration in Beirut, on October 23, Venezuelan police discovered two explosive devices near the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. According to a statement in El Universal from the acting police commissioner of the Baruta district, law enforcement officials arrested a man carrying a “backpack containing one hundred black powder bases, pliers, adhesive tape, glue, and electric conductors” who “admitted that the explosives had been set to detonate within fifteen minutes.” The man arrested was José Miguel Rojas Espinoza, a 26-year-old student at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, a Chávez-founded institution whose website proclaims that it offers a free “practical and on the ground education” contributing to “a more just, united, and sustainable society, world peace, and a new progressive and pluralist civilization.”
Two days after the failed bombing, a web posting by a group calling itself Venezuelan Hezbollah claimed — “in the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful” — responsibility for the attack. The bombing was meant to publicize Venezuelan Hezbollah’s existence and its mission to “build an Islamic nation in Venezuela and all the countries of America,” under the guidance of “the ideology of the revolutionary Islam of the Imam Khomeini.”
29 Sep 2006

Anchorage Daily News:
Leaders from four Western Alaska villages have rejected an offer of free heating oil from a Venezuelan- owned company because that nation’s president this month called President Bush “a devil” and made other inflammatory comments about the United States.
“Despite the critical need for fuel in our region, the Unangan (Aleut) people are Americans first, and we cannot support the political agenda attached to this donation,” read a statement from Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association released late Thursday.
Under a program from Texas-based refiner Citgo, which is owned by the Venezuelan government, that is giving cheap and free heating fuel to poor people across the country, more than 12,000 rural Alaska homes in about 150 villages are scheduled to receive 100 free gallons this winter.
Valued at about $5 million, the gift to Alaska is welcome by people in many poor, remote villages. Heating fuel exceeds $7 a gallon in the remotest villages.
Last year, 50,000 spongers in Massachusetts accepted more than 4 million gallons of discounted heating oil from the Venezuelan dictator’s program devised to score a public relations victory over the United States.
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