Hugo Chavez has overseen a massive escalation of state-sponsored criminality and drug running in the last few years.

George Soros continues to fund the globe's largest pro-drug legalization network while arguably running major opaque, offshore, tax sheltering (some call this hiding) and investment sheltering (some call this hiding) currency and market speculations operations.

Chavez today is arguably running a major opaque financial scheme, using state PDVSA oil funds, for offshore, tax hiding and investment hiding, currency and market speculations and consolidation operations.

Both Soros and Chavez fund vast "ngo" networks of propagandists and operatives, also called lobbyists and political allies, in what is a strong KGB-style disinformation campaign underway. Both Chavez and Soros hate U.S. President George Bush and have committed unreported millions to elevating their hate-Bush campaigns.

Both Soros and Chavez have recently engaged in anti- Israel campaigns, again spending untold sums of funds, which of course garner encouragement for Iranian fascists and Hezbollah networks.

Both Soros and Chavez are reported to be thrilled with the new Democratically-controlled Congress of the United States.

Both Chavez and Soros have strong Washington alliances through Congressmen Payne and Delahunt, Senators Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and others. Both Soros and Chavez repeatedly denounce the U.S. led war on terror and the U.S. security building presence in Iraq. Neither Soros nor Chavez denounced the recent Iranian conference to rewrite history regarding the mid-Twentieth Century holocaust.

Hugo Chavez calls the U.S. an "evil empire" and derides the U.S. government. Soros has similarly called the Bush administration numerous pet monikers and has funded various propaganda efforts often called the `politics of hatred.'

In fact, there is no valid basis for any anti-U.S. hatred by Chavez toward the USA which has done nothing substantive to cast any harm to Hugo Chavez's corrupt regime.

Similarly there is no valid basis for any anti-U.S president Bush. hatred by Soros as the U.S. government has done nothing substantive to cast harm against Soros and his anti-Israel, anti-Bush campaigns even as the U.S. government spends untold millions in joint support for Sorros’s pet activist "one globe/alternative democracy" projects.

The political rhetoric of hatred by Chavez is a cover for his growing Russo-Iranian-Latin American government-backed opaque hedge fund style governmental operations and determined global market manipulations of oil and currencies. Chavez, like Soros, witness good examples of others who enjoy a hate-U.S. political campaign while determinedly profiteering from currency and oil market manipulations. Increasingly the parallels are obvious.

Both Soros and Chavez, strengthened now with two badly educated leaders- Evo Morales of Bolivia and the pro-FARC Rafael Correa of Ecuador, actively support what they call "alternative democracy" which carries an eerie symbiosis to Russia's "sovereign democracy" which is soon to be enshrined in the recent spate of "full power" constitutions. The "alternate democracy" oil monopolizing nations of Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador are currently enshrining "full power constitutions."

These power-consolidating, market-consolidating actors dangerously appear to behave like power hungry, unaudited, murky, offshore currency speculators who encourage drug legalization in its variants and turn a blind eye to crime and terrorists while insisting that legal oversight of their own behaviors remains in a factual brown-out where scrutiny is unwelcome.

When these actors in combination are enjoined by caudillo, authoritarian state governments and state-owned oil monopolies, U.S. funded NGOs and anti-U.S. actors... the chance of financial independence and market freedoms shrink in these alternative democracies of alternative governance.

Some may call this.....global criminal racketeering. Others may call it a greedy, albeit politically justified [to `help the poor'], anti-U.S. financial security and currency raiding.  Others call this a global energy re-monopolization by the Russo-Iranian-Venezuelan hedge fund style governmental consolidation plan.

Some may call it treason.

- from the Editors, ECrisis and recent news clips

 -------------------

Wall Street  Journal   12-18-06

Le Figaro: French Defense Minister and potential presidential candidate Michele Alliot-Marie said France will withdraw the 200 special-forces troops that make up part of the NATO contingent trying to secure Afghanistan.

BBC: Cuban officials have told visiting U.S. lawmakers [ led by Congressman Delahunt D-MA] that Cuba's ailing leader, Fidel Castro, doesn't have cancer or any other terminal illness, and that he will return to office, though no details about his health were given.

Associated Press: Former Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad buried the hatchet with George Soros, saying he now accepts that the U.S. financier wasn't responsible for the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

____

Venezuela, Oil Producers Buy Euro as Dollar, Oil Fall (Update1)

By Agnes Lovasz and Daniel Kruger

Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is directing a growing share of the country's oil profits into euros as the dollar and crude prices fall.

The dollar, down 9.5 percent against the euro this year, may face more pressure in 2007 because Venezuela and oil producers from the United Arab Emirates to Indonesia plan to funnel more money into the single European currency.

``The U.S. dollar has suffered a long process of deterioration,'' Domingo Maza Zavala, one of seven board members at the central bank of Venezuela, said in a Dec. 14 interview. ``The diversification strategy started this year.''

Banco Central de Venezuela has slashed the percentage of its $35.9 billion worth of reserves invested in dollars and gold to 80 percent from 95 percent a year ago, said Maza Zavala. The country, the world's fifth-largest oil supplier, has boosted its euro holdings to 15 percent, from less than 5 percent in the same period.

The dollar has slumped against the European currency in 2006 as growth in the euro region outpaced the U.S. for the first time in five years. The dollar today fell against the euro to $1.3094 as of 6:55 a.m. in New York. The U.S. currency is little changed versus the yen this year, and currently trading at 117.81 yen.

Indonesia Buys Euros

Bank Indonesia is boosting euro holdings, said Senior Deputy Governor Miranda S Goeltom in a Dec. 13 interview in Jakarta. Indonesia has $39.9 billion in reserves. Sultan Bin Nasser al- Suwaidi, the governor of the Central Bank of the UAE, last month said he was considering when to shift as much as 8 percent of the nation's $24.9 billion in reserves into euros.

The central banks are changing policy ``because the oil price has come down a long way and the U.S. dollar has been declining,'' said Michael Derks, chief markets strategist at Arch Financial Products LLP, a London-based hedge fund. ``The euro stands to benefit.''

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which produces 40 percent of the world's crude oil, said at a Dec. 14 meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, that it would cut output by 500,000 barrels a day to boost prices. Crude oil for January delivery fell 36 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $63.07 a barrel in after-hours electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices have fallen from a high of $78.40 in mid-July.

Crude is priced in dollars and the U.S. is the biggest consumer, importing around $400 million worth of the fuel a day in 2005, according to data from BP Plc, Europe's second-biggest oil company.

Political Opposition

The share of foreign-exchange deposits held in dollars by OPEC members and Russia, the largest non-OPEC oil exporter, fell to a two-year low of 65 percent during the second quarter, from 67 percent during the previous three months, Bank for International Settlements figures released last week show.

Venezuela may also be motivated by animosity toward the U.S., said Rick Arney, chief currency strategist in San Francisco at Barclays Global Investors, which manages $1.7 trillion in assets.

``There is a political overlay to all of this,'' said Arney. ``Buying the dollar is not politically popular for some of these folks.''

Chavez, re-elected as President for six years on Dec. 3, told the UN General Assembly on Sept. 20 that the U.S. is ``the greatest threat'' to the planet, and has repeatedly described U.S. President George W. Bush as ``the devil.'' He also says Bush's administration is trying to have him killed.

Greenspan Comments

Chavez called on OPEC to sell oil denominated in euros rather than dollars at a meeting of the group in Caracas on June 1, supporting a proposal made by Iran.

Some analysts said the shift by oil-producing nations into euros is unlikely to weaken the dollar. OPEC nations reduced their dollar deposits by $5.3 billion in the second quarter, compared with holdings of $632 billion overall, according to data compiled by the BIS.

``It seems to be inconsequential in the large scheme of things,'' said Marc Chandler, global head of foreign-exchange strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. ``If anything, we should be surprised how small the outflow is.''

The euro climbed as much as 0.5 percent on Dec. 11, the most in a more than a week, when former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said there are signs OPEC nations are switching their reserves out of dollars.

`At the Start'

``A rising euro is a source of capital gain for central banks and a source for offsetting the capital loss created by the dollar'' decline, said Bankim Chadha, Deutsche Bank AG's head of macro foreign-exchange in New York and a former International Monetary Fund official. This gives ``an incentive to buy euros.''

OPEC members and Russia increased the percentage of their foreign-exchange deposits held in euros to 22 percent in the second quarter from 20 percent, the BIS said. By contrast, the global average is about a third, according to the Basel, Switzerland-based bank.

Oil states will probably buy the European currency at a faster rate to bring their reserves closer in line with other nations, according to David Durrant at Julius Baer Investment Management in New York.

``They've done very little diversification in the past,'' said Durrant, an investment strategist at Julius Baer, which oversees about $40 billion. ``We're at the start.''

To contact the reporters on this story: Agnes Lovasz in London at alovasz@bloomberg.net ; Daniel Kruger in New York at dkruger1@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: December 18, 2006 06:59 EST