The Best Axis of Evil That Oil Money Can Buy: Iran-Russia-Venezuela ....
 Cartoon taken from http://www.drsanity.blogspot.com |
The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report, paid as a contract through IFP/ US taxpayers for out of work former bureaucrats on the tax paid spree..., misses
Key Elements: the irrational albeit state backed Iranian commitment to suicidal death for all, especially those in their way and the growing Greek chorus of pure evil that wants Israel removed.
Following Israel's removal will be Western Europe and then the Western Hemisphere.Such items are not negotiable to Iran even as Russia and Venezuela backs up Iran's nihilistic zealotry. |
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Any sane human knows that one cannot negotiate with cults, however corrupt or uninformed or childish, even as Iran has one goal: death to all in their way.
The wheel of misfortune is spinning and death is on the line.
Front Page Magazine reports
"Coming to a Neighborhood Near You: The Axis of Evil. The unsurprising victory of Venezuelan song and dance artist Hugo Chavez in his re-election bid on Sunday was warmly welcomed around the world. Chavez friends in The Iranian Foreign ministry welcomed the Chavez victory, and didn’t even threaten to raise oil prices to $200 per barrel. That’s for next week...." Read the whole article here at Front Page Magazine The two outstanding articles below make a clear evaluation of Venezuelan elections. Nothing transparent and fair over there. - The ECrisis Editors |
 Cartoon taken from http://www.drsanity.blogspot.com |
Chavez Buys Himself An Election
INVESTOR'S BUINESS DAILY
Posted 12/4/2006
Latin America: Amazing how well totalitarians tend to fare in elections. Venezuela's was a big win for Hugo Chavez that, in the absence of fraud, the world is likely to approve. But that doesn't make it all free or fair.
Chavez won Sunday's election against challenger Manuel Rosales in a 61%-38% landslide, according to Venezuela's CNE election board. The victory margin was unusually high, but Rosales, to his credit, conceded gracefully, sparing Venezuela a Mexico-style electoral debacle. Uniting all the opposition for the first time, Rosales did well and lost honorably.
It is likely that observers from the Carter Center, the European Union and the Organization of American States, who have been watching this election for the past three weeks, will certify it for Chavez, giving him the veneer of democratic credibility he craves.
We see no signs of fraud, but there are troubling aspects to this race that suggest the outcome was not entirely free or fair.
How did Chavez win so easily? It begins from the electoral foundation. Chavez controlled the entire election apparatus, which raises questions about objectivity and confidence. All but one of Venezuela's CNE electoral board members are Chavista loyalists. In all their rulings, they've never shown anything but absolute allegiance.
The Chavista use of electronic voting machines cut confidence further. Credible computer scientists such as Johns Hopkins' Avi Rubin have noted that it's impossible to determine if a vote that is electronically transmitted to a distant totalization center actually reflects a voter's choice, even if a receipt is printed.
Worse yet, voting machines, combined with fingerprint machines, have been shown to have capacity to violate ballot secrecy. With Chavez officials threatening government workers to vote for their man or be fired, this amounts to intimidation that probably contributed to Chavez's wide margin. But it didn't make the election free.
Meanwhile, fairness tended to be compromised by money. With vast power, Chavez delved deeply into state funds to out-spend his opposition 18-to-1 on the campaign trail. His splattered cash was visible in vote-for-Chavez billboards, street signs, truck paint jobs and building murals. There was even a Chavez-brand toothpaste in state-run stores.
Chavez also had a 20-to-1 advantage in TV airtime and arbitrarily broke into TV programs for any absurd reason to get his face in front of voters. The cost of such campaigning almost certainly exceeded the nation's low $8 million campaign-spending limit.
This is all small potatoes compared with Chavez's ramped-up government spending. It exploded to 4.5% of GDP in 2006 to enhance Chavez's campaign, according to Santander Investments data. Last year, that figure was 3.2% of GDP, or $4.6 billion.
The handouts that Chavez shoveled out totaled nearly $8 billion and included everything from single-mother stipends and free Cuban doctors to subsidized groceries and roofing materials for the loyalists among Venezuela's poor.
His spending created a vast welfare class that has descended on Venezuela's malls with cash that's being thrown around "like there's no tomorrow," as a Caracas banker told us.
The 2006 budget for social programs was first set at $850 million. According to Banco Venezuela, Chavez stamped out $7.7 billion for his campaign year instead, essentially buying votes.
Chavez also hired bureaucrats, doubling government jobs for cronies in his eight years in office to 2 million, in a nation of 26 million.
Who can compete with that? Certainly not Rosales, who nevertheless rocketed from 3% name recognition to full national prominence in just four months on a comparative shoestring.
The pity of this election is that it comes at a high price for Venezuelans. Food inflation, as a result of Chavez's money-printing, is now 25%, and swap markets since September have signaled billions in capital flight. Foreign investment has slid to an abysmal $60 million, less than one day's worth of cash that Venezuela's capital control board permits to exit the country.
That doesn't mean much for the moment, as favorable U.S. media and gullible election observers get Chavez's election certified. What's dangerous is that Chavez intends to use his momentum to consolidate power, turning Venezuela into what he calls a "revolutionary democracy" like Cuba's, with no meaningful elections at all. At that point, he'll be able to expand his margins to 99%.
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Wall Street Journal
The Best Election Money Could Buy
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
December 8, 2006; Page A17
I gazed at the crucifix behind the altar and pondered the admonition. It was only 1 p.m., far too early to call a winner in the race between President Hugo Chávez and the challenger, Zulia Governor Manuel Rosales. But the Church was already signaling concern -- as it has been for the past eight years under the Chávez government -- about the end of tolerance in a nation that is supposed to be a democracy. There was good reason.
The words from the pulpit echoed in my mind that evening, when some 20 loudly rumbling motorcycles passed in front of the car in which I was riding near Plaza Altimira, where anti-Chávez Venezuelans have been known to gather. Each bike carried two helmeted men in military garb, armed with riot shields and long rifles.
It was nearly 6:30 p.m. and darkness had fallen. I remembered that Chávez supporters had more than once shot and killed unarmed civilians with impunity and I thought about heading back to my hotel. But I wanted to see whether the opposition would rally on its own turf. So I continued around the square. What I saw next was truly frightening.
The flowers growing in the plaza were drooping under a tropical shower as members of Mr. Chávez's feared National Guard poured out of a military vehicle on one side of the street and armies of informal government enforcers known as chavistas gathered on the other. A red truck was blaring revolutionary music. A bus carrying about 10 chavistas, their heads wrapped in the signature red of the Chávez campaign, drove menacingly up and down the street. It honked its horn and pulled wild U-turns as its passengers, at least one of whom was naked from the waist up, leaned out the door and windows pumping their fists and shouting angrily into the evening air.
I never believed that Fidel Castro's Venezuelan "mini-me" would be defeated on Sunday even though there is scant evidence that a majority of Venezuelans back his socialist revolution. Instead, I expected that a Chávez victory could be had "legally" through a combination of coercion, manipulation and the liberal use of state funds.
This seems to be what happened. The National Electoral Council (CNE) says that Mr. Chávez got about 61% of the vote versus 37% for Mr. Rosales; no one in the opposition is challenging his victory. Nevertheless, it is difficult to judge the race fair.
Among the irrefutable complaints from the independent electoral watchdog group known as Súmate (literally "Join Up") is the charge that the government would not allow an independent and reliable audit of the electoral registry; in the two years and three months since the recall referendum, voter rolls grew more than 30%. This left a lot of Venezuelans wondering who these new voters were but the government refused to release the full registry (including addresses) or post local lists at polling stations, as required by law.
Economic intimidation also played a role. It may be true that the poorest voted heavily Chávez. I don't know. But one economic step up from the most destitute, I have found palpable distrust of this president. In the struggling municipality called Caricuao, 30 tiny medical clinics and a number of larger ones have opened in the past year. I visited three clinics there on Monday, all of which are staffed by Cubans and decorated with anti-American propaganda. Yet this huge state effort to ideologically capture a barrio seems to have delivered only mediocre results.
A local woman I interviewed told me that her neighborhood was politically divided. Many dislike Mr. Chávez greatly, she said, but believed that the electronic voting machines and the fingerprint tracking machines at the polls would allow the government to know how they voted and that they would lose their government jobs if they went against him. Such fears are not irrational. It is well documented that the government has created enemies lists and fires dissidents.
Perhaps the working poor dismiss Mr. Chávez because they see so many apparatchiks getting fat off corruption while they get only crumbs. A new report by former Venezuelan oil company director Gustavo Coronel, published by the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, finds that during the past eight years government oil revenues and revenue from issuing new debt total at least $175 billion and that this windfall has been accompanied by a sharp drop in transparency. "For example," Mr. Coronel writes, "the state-owned oil company ceased publishing its consolidated annual financial statements in 2003, and Chávez has created new state-run financial institutions, whose operations are also opaque, that spend funds at the discretion of the executive."
Unaccounted for state funds could have been used to finance Mr. Chávez's re-election in more than one way. According to Goldman Sachs emerging-market analyst Alberto Ramos, "if you include imports, car sales are expected to almost double this year to about 300,000, many of them luxury models." If you have the right politics, you too might join the fun.
Yet trouble is looming as expectations rise and delivering on promises becomes more difficult. Mr. Ramos notes that "serious macro imbalances are emerging in the economy," including "accelerating inflation, sharply depreciated black market exchange rate. . . and the gradual atrophy of the non-oil sector." It is worth worrying about what Mr. Chávez will do to maintain power when the money runs out. The Church may have some reasonable fears.
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