Venezuela, Hugo Chavez

Sand

You mean are you to believe. I asked people why they think it unfair as I could find no more information as to why. Any chance you know? Or you going to keep spouting fictional speculation.

Viva Chavez! The great leader of the Bolivarian revolution and his allies have won *all* the seats in the recent election. A full 25% of the electorate emerged to endorse this great man and his vision for Venezeula, including removing the 2 terms limit so he can rule for life! Hurrah for the savior of Venezeulan democracy! The other 75% are counter revolutionaries and CIA spies!

In the face of this dire threat Chavez has reluctantly introduced widescale reform of the military, including taking direct command of the reserve, all Chavez loyalists to a man, which he apparently plans to expand to 2 million strong, probably to be paid for by revoking the concept of private property, following in the footsteps of Chavez's good friend Robert Mugabe.

Different measures apply over different timeframes. Building up your local economy is a wise long term strategy but the IMF dogma is contrary to this, being in favour instead of a huge gamble on debt ringfenced for investor-friendly projects, privatisation, FDI, and austerity for natives.

Investors, local or otherwise, flee in panic when the rate of return is meaningless as is the case in hyperinflation. Building up your local econonmy is close to impossible under such circumstances - Ive heard of examples of functioning economies in high inflation, but 200% a month isnt high, its insane. Hyperinflation comes about from governments printing money they dont have to pay bills they cant meet. The only way to stop is to stop printing money and face facts that you cant afford those bills.

Slow steady growth with a sound indiginous economy would be far preferable.

It would have been preferable if there hadnt been hyperinflation to begin with. Buts thats the start point and the currency peg was absolutely correct. The only error the IMF made was to try and think it could beat the market forces. No human agency, government or otherwise, can dictate to market forces.

I'm not suggesting they would definitely have been prudent in the absence of the IMF, but they might have been.

With 200% inflation a month as their trackrecord, that is highly, highly unlikely.

I'm not arguing against international trade, just for fair trade and primary attention to your local economy.

So policies that discourage trade and favour export over import....wholl be importing if were all trying to export? Lets just be honest and call it self sufficiency.

Should Ireland have privatised Telecom Eireann? (Hint the government have had to get back into the market to catch up on broadband)

Depends on what you mean by privatise? They simply sold a monopoly - the primary seller of phone service, owned the network that all phone services had to be carried on. That is not an enviroment for private competition. Just a private monopoly. The sheer fact that the government made such a hamse of the privatisation is not an argument in their favour that they could actually deliver a decent service. The network is a natural monopoly, either the government should have retained it or sold it to a wholly independant private interest. Eircom have at least stopped lying that no one in Ireland wants broadband.

Semi-states here on the other hand have had huge successes

Theyve been screwing us for years! People should get down on their hands and knees and give thanks to almighty god for Ryanair. A national holiday should be dedicated to St Michael O Leary. Suddenly Aer Lingus discovered that maybe they neednt charged us hundreds of pounds to visit the UK and the continent. The concept of a day trip to London was born with the arrival of competition. Natural monopolies make sense, semi states for the sake of having a "national airline", or a "national phone company" make no sense.

That's not going so far as an argument to ban FDI, but don't court it to such an extent that you're over-exposed to it's whims as your domestic productive capacity is neglected.

Yep, FDI has been a disaster for Ireland. Currently Im typing this from Ireland. Without FDI Id be typing this from the UK, the US, or Europe most likely. Why are the whims of FDI so frightening? We know what motivates them, and we know generally how theyre going to react to events. Why do you want to place our economic well being at the mercy of a fool like Tom Parlon, whose wasting truckloads to move civil services down the country....because....well....he can shure. Less Tom Parlon, more FDI please!

As for successful entrepreneurs, my #2 heros, far better than people sitting on their butts with a hand out looking for something for nothing.

Unless theyre successful entrepreneurs from another country. Then they should shag off back home to wherever they came from?

Many of their crimes are ignored by mainstream western media, water, soil, air pollution etc.

Actually its not. It fills newspapers and books and TV documentaries and movies ( The Constant Gardner/ The remake of the Manchurian candidate/so on and so forth), music ( rage against the machine, and more lately greenday cashing in). Idiots like Michael Moore are deified for spouting random garbage. Its *anything* but ignored. The evil corporate executive has never been so prevalent in the public mind- even the oily coke snorting 80s executive had to share a lot of screentime with the oily coke smuggling 80s CIA agent back in the days when hollywood couldnt decide which represented contemporary ultimate evil now the dirty communists were gone.

Just recently Dell advised the government that if corporation tax were raised they'd have to reconsider their position.

I know - everyone knows that these companies are here for the tax regime/eu access. Our educated workforce is simply a bonus.

And why remain so exposed to their whims, let's build our local economy to stand on firm ground rather than the sand of fickle FDI and a non-infinite construction and consumer boom.

With what exactly? We have no natural resources of note. No oil to make socialism work like Norway does, or Feudalism like Saudia Arabia does. We can only build a service based economy, and for that we need customers and international trade....the FDI companies? We cant afford to be idealogical about our economy, we have to do what works. And trade and investment works.

But we'd be wise to build up our local economy given the growing risk of capital flight to competing nations.

Of course but a low corporate rate tax does not harm Irish companies. If anything it exposes them to the standards expected to thrive in a competive global market as well as providing a pool of labour that have experience of working in these companies.

Hobbes

Sand wrote:

Viva Chavez! The great leader of the Bolivarian revolution and his allies have won *all* the seats in the recent election. A full 25% of the electorate emerged to endorse this great man and his vision for Venezeula, including removing the 2 terms limit so he can rule for life! Hurrah for the savior of Venezeulan democracy! The other 75% are counter revolutionaries and CIA spies!

Actually the parties with similar policies to him won most if not all the seats and I really don't see how you can spin this as unfair as the majority of the opposition pulled out beforehand. What else did you expect? A landslide victory for the one remaining opposition party?

Also do you have any details on the removing the two term limit or are you just BS'ing again. The reason I ask is because it was Chavez who put the two term limit into law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez
also increased the presidential term of office from five to six years, introduced a presidential two-term limit, and introduced provisions for national presidential recall referenda — that is, Venezuelan voters gained the right to remove the president from office before the expiration of his presidential term. Such referenda can only be activated by a petition to do so with the required number of signatures.

So you see he actually put laws in place to allow the people to remove a president if they didn't all agree with that president. Something the opposition were quick to enact.

Edit: Have found US news stories (only or source back to the US stories) which hint at it may happen but tbh it doesn't make sense considering he put the law in the first place.

In the face of this dire threat Chavez has reluctantly introduced widescale reform of the military ... revoking the concept of private property

Sorry Sand but your BS'ing again. Both stories have been discussed already in the thread and he didn't just suddenly do them, even the stories you posted to are back in April and it was old news even then.

Investors, local or otherwise, flee in panic when the rate of return is meaningless as is the case in hyperinflation.

I stopped reading here. Your posting drivel. Unless you have something to actually back up what you are saying (and relevent to the time) don't bother posting crap.

democrates

Sand wrote:

Investors, local or otherwise, flee in panic when the rate of return is meaningless as is the case in hyperinflation. Building up your local econonmy is close to impossible under such circumstances - Ive heard of examples of functioning economies in high inflation, but 200% a month isnt high, its insane. Hyperinflation comes about from governments printing money they dont have to pay bills they cant meet. The only way to stop is to stop printing money and face facts that you cant afford those bills.

While Brazil had inflation averaging 400% (from 'lows' of 100% to highs of 1600%), Semco of Sao Paolo survived and boomed. How? Workers with democracy and profit-sharing voted to cut their own wages and innovated furiously to keep their business divisions afloat when needed.

Ricardo Semler wrote two top books about it, Maverick in '93 which trashed my belief that capitalism while not perfect was the best system we had, and The Seven-day Weekend in 2003.

Sand wrote:

It would have been preferable if there hadnt been hyperinflation to begin with. Buts thats the start point and the currency peg was absolutely correct. The only error the IMF made was to try and think it could beat the market forces. No human agency, government or otherwise, can dictate to market forces.

See! Market forces (the will of speculators and investors) renders democracy impotent, reason enough to reject such concentration of global power as the IMF extols.

Sand wrote:

So policies that discourage trade and favour export over import....wholl be importing if were all trying to export? Lets just be honest and call it self sufficiency.

There's too much trade, we already consume and pollute far more than the biosphere can supply or dissapate respectively, we need to cut back. One of the other myths of global capitalism is that all nations can simultaneously outcompete each other. It creates winners and losers, a bad system. Thrift. Sustainability. Co-operation. There are far happier options to explore.


And yes, neither Chavez (or Ireland) should go for total self-suffiency, it's impractical given non-uniformly distributed resources, and ecologically inefficient to over-replicate production.

Sand wrote:

Depends on what you mean by privatise? They simply sold a monopoly - the primary seller of phone service, owned the network that all phone services had to be carried on. That is not an enviroment for private competition. Just a private monopoly. The sheer fact that the government made such a hamse of the privatisation is not an argument in their favour that they could actually deliver a decent service. The network is a natural monopoly, either the government should have retained it or sold it to a wholly independant private interest. Eircom have at least stopped lying that no one in Ireland wants broadband.

A seperate thread would be apt for all I have to say on that debacle. Privatization esp. of key infrastructure is unnecessary, just run it well.

Sand wrote:

Theyve been screwing us for years! People should get down on their hands and knees and give thanks to almighty god for Ryanair. A national holiday should be dedicated to St Michael O Leary. Suddenly Aer Lingus discovered that maybe they neednt charged us hundreds of pounds to visit the UK and the continent. The concept of a day trip to London was born with the arrival of competition. Natural monopolies make sense, semi states for the sake of having a "national airline", or a "national phone company" make no sense.

The consumer price benefit of competition is a faustian deal. Yes some lower prices, but at the expense of higher stress and lower pay and conditions for staff and the vast costs externalised by corporations but borne by society both present and future. Is that what we want for our children?


In Ireland it's hard to see the downside (bar the 26% of our own people hovering over the poverty line due to our investor-friendly tax/services regime), we've avoided the worst ruination of global capitalism by being it's favourite b1tches. We're a tax haven with way more than a per-capita average share of global FDI. We think that proves 'investor friendly' = success, but all nations cannot do that, our national gains have been at the expense of others and being average humans on a small island we can't win at that indefinitely. But we've still a bright future as responsible global citizens once enough nations reject the capitalist cancer.

Sand wrote:

Yep, FDI has been a disaster for Ireland. Currently Im typing this from Ireland. Without FDI Id be typing this from the UK, the US, or Europe most likely. Why are the whims of FDI so frightening? We know what motivates them, and we know generally how theyre going to react to events. Why do you want to place our economic well being at the mercy of a fool like Tom Parlon, whose wasting truckloads to move civil services down the country....because....well....he can shure. Less Tom Parlon, more FDI please!

True, decentralization will waste millions, such ineptitude is not the answer. I am frightened of FDI, because already absentee global capitalists get what they want of Irish governance but without any responsibility to Irish citizens. Compare and contrast with the landed nobility of yore.

Financial speculators also frighten me. When I bought my house in '92 the Punt was attacked, my interest rate went over 15%. When leading capitalists Sir James Goldsmith in 'The Trap' and George Soros in 'The Crisis of Global Capitalism' warn that the global economy (and therefore peace) is horrendously unstable due to speculators I fret. When I read that currency trades of $2Trillion daily are nearly 98% speculative, I worry. The LTCM crisis of '98 when 25-1 leveraged Ruble speculation bombed and almost took the entire US banking system down but for a Fed brokered bailout is hardly convincing that global capitalism has any contribution to stability. It's dangerous and destructive.

Sand wrote:

Unless theyre successful entrepreneurs from another country. Then they should shag off back home to wherever they came from?

Think I see what you're getting at, so to clarify, I don't like selfishness regardless of nationality, excess and/or unfair FDI is undesireable, and the limited liability company that seperates owners from employees is an instrument of class division. Worker-owned co-operatives are my preference, but hey, let the people choose their own station in life.

Sand wrote:

Actually its not. It fills newspapers and books and TV documentaries and movies ( The Constant Gardner/ The remake of the Manchurian candidate/so on and so forth), music ( rage against the machine, and more lately greenday cashing in). Idiots like Michael Moore are deified for spouting random garbage. Its *anything* but ignored. The evil corporate executive has never been so prevalent in the public mind- even the oily coke snorting 80s executive had to share a lot of screentime with the oily coke smuggling 80s CIA agent back in the days when hollywood couldnt decide which represented contemporary ultimate evil now the dirty communists were gone.

But that's the unavoidable tip of the iceberg, you only get the propaganda of selectivity and newsworthiness when you search and see the horror is day in day out worldwide.

There'll always be scum, but not all investors or corporate managers are so, many quite the contrary where they can. But what choice do they have in competition? It's race to the bottom to enrich the owners or lose your job.

Sand wrote:

With what exactly? We have no natural resources of note. No oil to make socialism work like Norway does, or Feudalism like Saudia Arabia does. We can only build a service based economy, and for that we need customers and international trade....the FDI companies? We cant afford to be idealogical about our economy, we have to do what works. And trade and investment works.

Any country that defies global capital can expect to pay a price as Chavez has experienced. Trade and investment by the people and for the people are good, but not perverted by capitalism. Ireland could easily survive with a core economy providing the needs of society plus organic food and eco-energy exports and tourism for starters. But the greed, enough won't be enough any time soon.

Sand wrote:

Of course but a low corporate rate tax does not harm Irish companies. If anything it exposes them to the standards expected to thrive in a competive global market as well as providing a pool of labour that have experience of working in these companies.

Why compete? As an intelligent species, why? Because not enough of us are wise enough to organise global society based on co-operation. Knowledge is best shared, why don't we? Competition, again.

I used to think "most problems in the world occur where people fail to follow the proven capitalist formula for success, and quit b1tching about the imperfections unless you've a better alternative". Since then the unsustainability and injustice of capitalism dampened my enthusasm. Global employment levels are falling, real wages are falling in the US and elsewhere, we're all fighting against each other ever more fiercely to survive yet still restrain wage-claims to be competitive, our environment is raped and poisoned, the climate delivers ever faster more furious blows, and the only winners in this apalling vista of misery and madness are the pathalogical capitalists and a select few of their obedient minions. Even then I asked, but what's the alternative?


The nail in the capitalist coffin for me has been the discovery of better alternatives such as worker-cooperatives as Chavez has begun plus Keynes International Clearing Union as previously posted, and there are many many more around democracy, social networks, ecology etc.

DadaKopf

An interesting development. Venezuela formally joins Mercosur.

Mercosur is currently in negotiations with the EU on their Economic Partnership Agreement, essentially a free trade round run in parallel with the WTO which attempts to sneak through the 'Singapore Issues' rejected at Cancun.

For those who see Chavez as a mad left-wing loony, his entry into an organisation that is negotiating a common external tariff reduction and trade liberalisation with the EU certainly throws the cat among the pigeons.

It could be that Chavez is attempting to drive a wedge between the US and EU, clearly visible in the current WTO negotiations in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, it's another piece of evidence to show that Chavez is trying to further boost confidence in Venezuela's domestic economy and private sector growth.

MrJoeSoap

http://www.guardian.co.uk/venezuela/story/0,,1963577,00.html

Hugo Chávez today began a third six-year term as president of Venezuela after trouncing his rival, Manuel Rosales.

The national electoral council said Mr Chávez had won 61% of the vote while Mr Rosales, the governor of an oil-producing province, had won 38% after nearly 80% of the vote had been counted.

Wearing his trademark red shirt, Mr Chávez told cheering supporters at the presidential palace late yesterday his landslide victory was a blow to the Bush administration, the frequent target of tirades from the Venezuelan leader.

"It's another defeat for the devil who tries to dominate the world," Mr Chávez told a crowd of red-shirted supporters listening to him under pouring rain. "Down with imperialism. We need a new world."

Even before polls closed, Chávez supporters were celebrating in the streets, setting off fireworks and cruising Caracas, honking horns and shouting: "Chávez isn't going anywhere."

Since he first won office in 1998, Chávez has increasingly dominated all branches of government. His allies now control congress, state offices and the judiciary.

Current law prevents him from running again in 2012, but he has said he plans to seek constitutional reforms that would include an end to limits on presidential terms.

Mr Chávez is the fourth leftwing leader to win an election in Latin America in the past five weeks. Ecuador's Rafael Correa, an ally of the Venezuelan, won a runoff last week after promising sweeping political reforms; Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua also won recent presidential contests.

Mr Rosales acknowledged defeat but promised to keep fighting. He was greeted by cries of "coward" by some upset supporters as he left his campaign headquarters.

"We recognise they beat us today, but we will continue the fight," said Mr Rosales, 53, who drew his main support from the middle and upper classes.

Mr Rosales, a cattle rancher who is now expected to return to his post of governor of the western state of Zulia, called the election a choice between freedom and increasing state control of people's lives. He also decried rampant crime and corruption, widely seen as Mr Chávez's main vulnerabilities.

The country's opposition movement struggled to challenge Mr Chávez after he defeated a recall referendum in 2004. Many opposition supporters believe Mr Chávez has an unfair advantage by controlling key institutions such as the election council.

But his supporters applaud the man they fondly call El Comandante for spending the country's oil wealth on free health and education programmes for the poor majority, who have long felt abandoned under a succession of governments.

Venezuela is the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, and soaring oil prices have made it the continent's fastest growing economy.

A retired army paratrooper who led a failed military rebellion before his first election win, Mr Chávez has survived a brief coup, an oil strike and scores of demonstrations during his seven years in the Miraflores presidential palace.

No surprises there.

Odds on him still being in power after 2012?

mike65

It surely must be becoming clear (if slowly) to even the most dopey fan-boy that Chavez is just another Latin American demigod, take contol of all the essential arms of the state then announce after a landslide victory "hey - I'm so good you'll have me for life - you would'nt know what to do without me and I can protect you from the Great Satan".

You've got to hand it to him he's done it brilliantly, and only one more task remains. Not to get ousted/killed before he can change the law.

Mike.

toiletduck

He got the most votes, he won. But it is weird the way the left (here in Ireland anyways) give such support to a (democratically elected) President, who uses the threat of foriegn enemies to "scare" (I'm using that term loosely) his people, yet vilify for Bush for supposedly doing the same.

RedPlanet

toiletduck wrote:

He got the most votes, he won. But it is weird the way the left (here in Ireland anyways) give such support to a (democratically elected) President, who uses the threat of foriegn enemies to "scare" (I'm using that term loosely) his people, yet vilify for Bush for supposedly doing the same.

You are omitting that in Chavez's case, the foreign enemy is real, does sponsor coups against democratically elected governments, has a history of threatenting other countries militarily and economically. Whereas Bush's enemy is largely a fairytale, and we don't need to mention WMD's do we?

toiletduck

Wtf have wmd's got to with that?


America's enemies don't exist? C'mon. But that's not even the point, both are the same in using threats (real or imagined) to scare the populace. But for some reason, Chavaz is appauled for his efforts by the left but Bush is scaremongering.

Frederico

toiletduck wrote:

Wtf have wmd's got to with that?


America's enemies don't exist? C'mon. But that's not even the point, both are the same in using threats (real or imagined) to scare the populace. But for some reason, Chavaz is appauled for his efforts by the left but Bush is scaremongering.

I thought that Chavez himself was a target of an attempted coup in the 90's.. am I wrong?

America has always interfered with South and Central America for its own interests and profits, most often to the detriment of those countries. Chavez is making a stand and drawing attention to himself.. with a media spotlight down there and more world attention it makes it much harder for America to get up to its dirty tricks..

I think the US will just have to sit back this time and give Chavez enough rope..

oscarBravo

toiletduck wrote:

...both are the same in using threats (real or imagined) to scare the populace.

There's the flaw in your logic: you're assuming that there's no difference between real and imagined threats.

We know that the US is a real threat to countries where it doesn't like who's in charge. We also know that WMDs were an imaginary threat. So which of the presidents is scaremongering?

ISAW

In my interview with the president of Venezuela on March 28, he made Bush the following astonishing offer: Chávez would drop the price of oil to $50 a barrel, “not too high, a fair price,” he said—a third less than the $75 a barrel for oil recently posted on the spot market. That would bring down the price at the pump by about a buck, from $3 to $2 a gallon.
But our President has basically told Chávez to take his cheaper oil and stick it up his pipeline.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1818
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1557

http://www.consensuseconomics.com/venezuela.htm

http://www.cepr.net/publications/venezuela_2004_09.htm
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?sec=econ
http://www.mkeever.com/venezuela.html

http://www.alacrastore.com/country-snapshot/925

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1000

A Junta creating a Marxist state by squandering oil? It does not seem to be the case does it?

ISAW

From this thread:
http://santa.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=51366678&postcount=55

in the recent half century the Us supported many a dictator. Indeed many in America admired Hitler. But there is a long list of dictators they supported. One cant just single out someone who is NOT a dictator on the possibility that he MIGHT become one just because one does not like his politics and at the same time ignore the other ACTUAL dictators which the US supported.
...
It was claimed chaves is creating a dictatorship in Venezuala. No definition for such was given and no evidence for one was produced. at the same time the Us have supported many a dictator and the principle of laothing dictators is not applied. Do you detect double standards here?
...
Here is another handy link:
http://www.embavenez-us.org/constitution/intro.htm