December 31, 2007   Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa want to have you tune in to their TV stations so that their narcodemocracy zone media monopolies, in partnership with Iranian News and AL JAZEERA will make money. Chavez and Correa are systematically either stealing or shutting down the competition, just as they have done with the oil and gas industries and exactly as they have done with competing political parties, banks, businesses, and lives. This is accomplished by either buying in or overt take over and theft/appropriations/caducidad by these unaccountable and seriously illegal statist operatives to enrich their inner group.
 
There is no question that the current made-for-TV-docudrama by Chavez is pure propaganda to try to convince the world that George Soros and the U.S. democrats are correct that the FARC are great folks and that drugs should be available to all as Soros's groups reach their behind the scenes goal of enabling more Andean contraband and drugs, also called easy money for hidden speculative accounts in the Caymans, Curacao or Miami's Brickell Avenue. The current so called news coverage from Chavez-land is also...a cheaply manufactured news reel to fill the news void in the Andes and provide local news, which Chavez's TV crews manufactured and which the vapid world of Chavez's TV viewers have yet to see one fact check or one substantive benefit for their tax dollar expenditure in the Chavez-Correa media monopolies, also called state propaganda.
 
The badly abused FARC hostages are unpaid actors in this cheesy propaganda scam by Chavez and the global fools who want us to actually believe that the FARC can be trusted, can be negotiated with and worse...should be enjoying economic freedom when none of what the FARC and Chavez demand are given to those whom they control. Where are the labor unions demanding union wages for these badly treated actors for Chavez and Correa's TV channels? Instead of spreading more lies before the American public- also called lying to the U.S. Congress- that Colombia's Uribe likes to kill union members, when nothing could be further from the truth, we notice that not one union member has whimpered one word in defense of these unpaid actors in this latest made for TV movie by Chavez-Correa and the seriously unprofessional Oliver Stone, whose name alone reminds us why no one trusts his work any more. Where are the omnipresent labor unions to demand fair union wages for these FARC hostages as background actors streaming across Chavez and Correa's fake TV media? We would like to know. In fact we would also like to know how much Oliver Stone is getting paid for his time in Colombia and Venezuela. We would also like to know what script writer will be employed for his planned movies to promote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his other gambit to tell us how wonderful the Colombian drug cartels were. Deifying Pablo Escobar and Mahmoud defy logic. Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez think this is a great idea even as Ecuador and Venezuela permit no functioning media in play.
 
VENEZUELA NEWS and VIEWS, read it here, has a good take on this exclusive, Chavez TV filler so called hostage rescue TV story. Correctly, instead of foolishly blaming the French and Sarkozy for enabling Hugo Chavez's propaganda efforts in Colombia's jungles, the article goes to the heart of the matter noting that even on vacation and miles from nowhere in Venezuela, Chavez's tawdry so called docudrama was streaming non stop across TV: "Thus, even in the middle of nowhere I was not spared the incredibly tacky show that Chavez has been setting up about the FARC hostages...indeed I have been watching a lot of stunning moments. For example the arrival of “dignitaries” in Venezuela waiting to have news from the FARC. They will fly together to pick up the hostages. Nestor Kirchner in the jungle picking up hostages?"
 
All residents should be grossly offended by the refusal of their own "nations" to restore open media and free speech. For a while, Venezuelans were offended by the multi-billion dollar asset theft of RC TV and the silence of decent news coverage that followed, only to be replaced by the Chavez-Correa-Iranian fake news today. With no meaningful coordinated regional effort to combat this rejection of free speech outside of a slight effort to rally which was doomed from the beginning for its failure to actually work the arenas which could have and would have helped to begin with....foolishly believing that Chavez and Correa's kangaroo courts would actually render justice when there is no justice in Ecuador and Venezuela- was a fools' errand and costly. What Ecuador's private media has done to defend itself is...nothing meaningful and this is shameful. Each and every time that so called paid advisors and so called diplomats wrung their hands and said that "nothing can be done," the surrender of democracy was at hand and none should have accepted this string of lies. Of course remedies exist- then as now but we must be prepared to actually work to apply the remedies. Venezuela learned the hard way. And now they have mush for brains from Chavez and Correa's Iranian news hours, littered by liars like Oliver Stone.
 
We are not afraid of Rafael Correa or Hugo Chavez. Our domestic advisors tell us to enable and be complicit with these criminal thugs. Our Mamas tell us to be silent and to make as much money off Rafael Correa's Chavez team as we can while our world closes in around us. We disagree with our domestic sell out of integrity. Every time local actors like El Cioppo tell us that he has, on close counsel of the U.S. embassy in Quito the advice that all Ecuadoreans must sell out their morals to the Correa-Chavez bloc state because this will "help the poor," we reject this dishonorable, illicit and nefarious nation ending plan. But it is to actors like EL CIOPPO, every day, when he is threatened by  the Correa-Chavez thugs to give up, to be as silent as a bought and paid for lamb about the criminal empire growing now in Ecuador  or else....or else his building supply contracts with the Chavez-Correa marketing team, sometimes called government, will hurt him. This is called extortion and political bribery. Chavez and Correa apply this daily. So too does TRAFIGURA, PdVSA and fake Iranian businesses popping up across the Andes to launder drug money and illicit Russo-Iranian monies. And still, shallow men like EL CIOPPO, who claims to coordinate with U.S. amb. Linda Jewell for his moral compass, fail to turn states evidence. They have sold out their principles on the core threat that their businesses will be harmed. This tawdry tale is repeated thousands of times a day across Ecuador and Venezuela now.
 
And still one hears....put up and shut up. This is crude corruption and exhibits a dead nation whose own values and manhood have been cheap held and cheaply purchased. El COMERCIO does however show a small glimpse from Guayaquil of some folks sporadically waking up:





El recorrido del jueves. Jaime Nebot, junto a Heinz Moeller, saluda a sus seguidores en la 9 de Octubre.   Foto:EL COMERCIO












We do not know where these moral compasses are pointing inside Ecuador today. But we do know that it is not due North, which is always a true direction fixed on the one sure thing that is always immovable and unable to be manipulated, try as they might.
 
More appalling are the non morals taught by any local church today. Inside the Catholic Church are two divisions in Ecuador, both of them as fake as Chavez and Correa's fake TV news. Inside schools today, not one speck of decent or useful educational content is underway. All is mostly propaganda with some math, science and language skills barely thrown in. You know this because no one from Ecuador is prepared to compete intellectually in the world today, abandoning even core education because...it is convenient to do so and of course feeds the self debasing cycle that all can complain and blame every one else for their non education and thus continue to do what is being done anyway...which is nothing at all.
 
We all know where moral compasses can point. We also know what needs to be done to restore credible quality of life which does not exist in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela any more. We do not even consider that "someone else" will repair this wasteland for us because we are long past the adolescent and selfish ideas that some "other" must build our lives for us. Refracted living in a mirror is not really living and we prefer to actually live life outside our own self imprisonment where values mean less that the fake TV which is now a constant.
 
We are not afraid and we know what to do.
 
No politician and no diplomat is responsible, not even Correa or Chavez, for this current ruinous state of living. Each of us is responsible and each of us can and will restore functional living if and only if we abandon the current craze for dysfunction and gay abandon to extortion.
 
You will not hear these words radiating from any homilies in Ecuador today....certainly not from the Liberation Theology neo Marxist excuse perpetrators and certainly not from the Opus Dei perpetrators of non Catholicism where none are urged to practice common charity and none are urged to self educate and non are urged to stand up for any moral relevancy at all. No indeed. The OPUS DEI is no agent of functional living, preferring instead to bless the entire Chavez-Correa mess as long as the for-show only show goes on and as long as the money keeps rolling in. Too harsh you say because Opus Dei, which has caused the schism in Ecuador by refusing to consider their own haves versus have nots theology, eschewing their insidious club for investors plan as they do while working their cult like charms of their internal claims to holding all keys to wisdom because....they alone know best...is simply one more lazy excuse for not experiencing a vibrant life. Not once has Opus Dei run a feeding station for the poor, supported drug treatment for the burgeoning addicts in the Andes, not once delivered a moral compass for the extortion rackets called governments under Chavez and Correa and not once- not ever- considered that without democracy, all religion is imperiled. This then are the two fools at play in Ecuador's unrealistic religiosity: the Chavez-Marxists complete with fake shaman feathers and the fake religiosity of the Opus Dei manipulators whose religion is for-show only, never in deed.
 
Instead, we consider this piece from today's WALL STREET JOURNAL as incredibly helpful, reprinted in full here:
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 The Wall Street Journal 
 December 31, 2007

 THE AMERICAS 

Liberty Theology

By ROBERT A. SIRICO

December 31, 2007; Page A12
Catholic Church bishops, priests and other Church leaders in Latin America were once a reliable ally of the left, owing to the influence of "liberation theology," which tries to link the Gospel to the socialist cause. Today the Church is coming to recognize the link between socialism and the loss of freedom, and a shift in thinking is taking place.

In a region that is more than 90% Catholic, this change might have enormous implications. A Church that emphasizes liberty could play a role in Latin America similar to that which it played in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, as a counterweight in defense of freedom during a time of rising despotism.

For proof of the change I refer to, consider a recent statement from the Catholic Bishops of Venezuela: It blasted the political agenda of President Hugo Chávez for its assault on liberty under the guise of helping the poor. It is morally unacceptable, the statement said, and will drive the country backward in terms of respect for human rights.

The Bishops' statement from Caracas was not the first challenge the Church issued to Mr. Chávez. The late Cardinal Rosalio Castillo once laid out the Church's view of Bolivarian socialism. The government, he explained, though elected democratically was morphing into dictatorship. He worried about the results of this process. "All powers are in the hands of one person who exercises them in an arbitrary and despotic way, not for the purposes of bringing about the greater common good of the nation, but rather for a twisted and archaic political project: that of implanting in Venezuela a disastrous regime like the one Fidel Castro has imposed on Cuba . . ."

In Mexico, the Church has also found itself at odds with the hard-line left. Last month a group of 150 people associated with the socialist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) rushed into the cathedral in the capital on a Sunday morning as Mass was beginning. The mob overturned pews, denounced priests and chanted anti-Church slogans. The PRD claimed that it was not directly responsible. But there was no mistaking the message: Anybody not lining up in favor of collectivist militancy is against it.

These are but two examples of the growing tension between the Catholic Church and the extreme left in Latin America. In Argentina and Cuba, the Church is also stepping into the role of opposition.

It is important to note that Church leaders who are challenging the likes of Mr. Chávez are not recommending Church involvement in politics. Their understanding, in line with the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, is that the relationship between the Church and the state in Latin America is complex and there should be a clean separation.

But they also know the importance of preserving freedom and pluralism.

The cases of political entanglement that we have read about most often have involved collaboration with what are called "right-wing dictatorships." But in what sense they differ from the total state control of "left-wing dictatorships" is unclear. Liberation theology may appeal to socially conscious clergy, yet it also politicizes the Church's role by blessing another form of wholesale control.

Liberation theology arose some three decades ago. The Bible teaches concern for the poor, liberation theologists said, and then went a step further: Jesus was a symbol and advocate of class warfare to expropriate from the rich on behalf of the poor.

Today liberation theology remains fashionable, and, because of intellectual confusion in Latin America, many still believe that the socialism of Mr. Chávez, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and even Fidel Castro, offers hope to the poor. When Mr. Chávez announces that he will "democratize" property in order to smash the rich, he can count on cheers from many religious admirers.

Sincere Church leaders, who are rightly convinced of their special mission to assist the poor, are sometimes drawn to a false hope that higher taxes, land redistribution, nationalization of industry and ever more big government programs offer a way out. This is tragic because it threatens to entangle the Church in politics, staking its reputation and the message of the Gospel on a political agenda.

At least 100 years of evidence stands contrary to the claim that a more powerful state (and that is all liberation theology really offers) is the proper means to material advance. Nothing is to be gained for anyone but the state by smashing the rich. What society needs is not expropriation but ever widening opportunities for all classes to improve their living standards.

There is only one way toward liberation, and that is a genuine liberalization of economic and political life, one that separates the state, not only from the Church, but also from the culture and the commercial life of the nation.

In my travels in the region, I detect an honest reassessment taking place. Leaders and future leaders seem to be recognizing that if the middle class is to grow, there needs to be more vibrant understanding of how the market, where people make their livelihood, actually functions. There is also a need for a deeper understanding of the moral hazards and opportunities that the political economy presents.

The Church, despite terrible blows to its credibility in recent years, is in as good a position as any institution to provide leadership and assume a teaching role in this. Pope Benedict's own writings provide a solid basis. He warns of the dangers of power and its morally corrupting effects, as well as the materially corrosive effects of socialist policies.

The Church can provide independent leadership in society. Above all else, there should be an independence from politics. Let us expand that model of independence to all sectors of society. Latin America would thereby become less vulnerable to despots, develop a thriving middle class, and secure a future of liberty and prosperity. In the role of the opposition, the Catholic Church can find its true voice as a defender of human rights and freedom.

Father Sirico is president of the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich.
 
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Again, we ask....what have you done to day to rebuild liberty? What has your church and your neighborhood and your family done?

Nothing is not an answer. A few good men doing nothing is what destroys healthy living.
 
-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis