May 31, 2008     ECrisis offers several news snapshots today for your review- none of it any good.

EL UNIVERSAL reported May 30 that we are all Chavistas now:
   
“Venezuelan citizens bound to cooperate with intelligence works

Following the entry into force of the National Intelligence and Counterintelligence System Law enacted on Wednesday by President Hugo Chávez, any Venezuelan or foreign individual, corporation or non-governmental organization is bound to "cooperate" with covert agencies as needed.

Anyone refusing to meet the request for help will be "causing damage to security, defense and comprehensive development of the nation." Therefore, under the Organic Law on Security of the Nation, ordinary people are subject to 2-4 years of prison and public servants could be held from four to six years.

The recently enacted legal instrument, composed of 29 articles and two transitory provisions, considers that "national or foreign individuals and corporations, as well as bodies and entities of the national, state and municipal public administration; social networks; grassroots and community organizations, are entities set to back intelligence and counterintelligence activities, where their cooperation to obtain information or for technical support, is requested by the bodies of special competence jurisdiction.”
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Time for the OAS to boot out this "democracy" which is not a democracy and is an effrontery to human beings. Here is a snapshot of the USA's current political situation: a leading presidential contender with the glib gloss and sheen of the well educated but the common sense and applicable command of facts and figures bereft of anything but the most selfish manipulative ends. Barack Obama is the perfect ally for Rafael Correa: a credentialed man whose own integrity goes begging like a dog riddled with fleas. The WALL STREET JOURNAL of 5-20-08 reports:
 
“For months, Barack Obama has had the image of an incandescent, golden-tongued Wundercandidate. That image may be fraying now. As smart and credentialed as he is, Sen. Obama is often an indifferent speaker without a teleprompter. He has large gaps in his knowledge base, and is just as likely to dig in and embrace a policy misstatement as abandon it...Mr. Obama told a Portland, Ore., crowd this month that Iran doesn't "pose a serious threat to us," saying that "tiny countries" with small defense budgets aren't much to worry about. But Iran has almost one-fourth the population of the U.S. and is well on its way to developing nuclear weapons. The next day Mr. Obama had to reverse himself and declare he had "made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave."

Last week in Orlando, Fla., he said he would meet with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez to discuss, among other issues, Chávez's support of the Marxist FARC guerrillas in Colombia. The next day, in Miami, he insisted any country supporting the FARC should suffer "regional isolation." Obama advisers were left explaining how this circle could be squared. In a debate last July, Mr. Obama pledged to meet, without precondition, the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Syria and Cuba. He called President Bush's refusal to meet with them "ridiculous" and a "disgrace."
Heavily criticized, Mr. Obama dug in rather than backtrack. He's claimed, in defense of his position, that John F. Kennedy's 1961 summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna was a crucial meeting that led to the end of the Cold War.

Not quite. Kennedy himself admitted he was unprepared for Khrushchev's bullying. "He beat the hell out of me," Kennedy confided to advisers. The Soviet leader reported to his Politburo that the American president was weak. Two months later, the Berlin Wall was erected and stood for 28 years.”
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We will continue to insist that Barack Hussein Obama detail what he means precisely by his "regional isolationism" for Chavez and Correa because he and his paid supporters adore these cartel masters and have no intention whatsoever of "isolating" these criminals. And should U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy's nephew Joe beat out his current bride "Vicky" for Teddy's Senate seat, Chavez and Correa will have a ready made alliance more noticeable than the current noticeable alliance from the Dodd-Richardson-Delahunt team of Soros do drugs and do cartel boosters already  warming the U.S. Congress.

Unfortunately, there are some yet in the global media who report senseless things such as the excessively misleading and dishonest claim by rather vapid Jose de Cordoba in The WALL STREET JOURNAL, "In any case, the uproar over the [Raul Reyes FARC] files would likely discourage major gestures of aid from Venezuela in the future." This soft on Chavez journalist ignores the facts on the ground about Chavez and his on going spending spree to prop up the FARC and any other criminal cartel leader whom he and Rafael Correa  calls "friends."  We have asked before: which NGOs source Mr. de Cordoba's reports because he clearly is not using the facts to support his spin that all is well in the Andes when...it is not. Meanwhile, the Shining Path is on the rise again, co funded as it is by Hugo Chavez with Cuban and Venezuelan money and actors.  And contrary to the cheery propaganda supported by the National Endowment for Democracy {NED} and Soros's own Fenton Communications, heroin poppies are indeed now growing inside Ecuador in the high  plateaus where these new bio engineered hybrids can thrive on unwanted lands. Correa's Ecuador is a major drugs trans shipment center and a "new" heroin plantation today, while pretending that cocaine is not their problem even though huge cocaine processing labs and centers exist inside Correa's narcostate. Heroin is not and has never been an indigenouscrop in any of the Americas: it is raised today for death and greed.

Ecuador is not only a failed state today but is a known narcozone and a state sponsor of terror. Ecuador is getting a free ride not only in the global media but also domestically because we are all lazy and afraid to say what are the facts. The AP writes today that, "The United States has many blacklists for people, groups and countries it deems unsavory. But the state sponsors of terrorism list has perhaps the highest profile, though only five countries are on it: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. Those countries designated by the U.S. face restrictions on foreign aid, a ban on defense sales and other sanctions that can hinder their acquiring U.S. technology or doing business with U.S. financial institutions. The penalties can extend beyond U.S. borders. The United States will use its weight at the United Nations and world financial organizations to try to block assistance to designated countries. The designation could also discourage U.S. allies and multinational corporations from dealing with the designated nations."

But Ivonne Baki and U.S. Senator Dodd want to tell us all that the facts about Ecuadorean criminality must be hidden away and their reality negotiated. This is a false application of law and order and is a chimera. Both need to resign their posts.

What is at stake for Ecuador are only two matters- two groups which stand to lose should the USA deem Ecuador correctly as a state sponsor of terror: Ecuador will lose its thousands of US AID operatives propping up Correa and Chavez's plan to craft a sheltered narco zone in Ecuador plus the money launderers using Ecuador's banks to wash FARC funds from Pesos and Bolivars in to U.S. dollars to assist their good friends currently running about 1/3 of all PetroEcuador and PdVSA oil through black market spot oil trades for extra allegiance to the Chavez-Correa cartels. Both the US AID operative and the oil derivatives manipulators are utterly living and breathing and having their being in large part from the Soros manipulative machine which has found the perfect port in Ecuador where one and all are completely committed to living manipulatively and pretending that all is legitimate when it is not. The Soros juggernaut is the only money maker that stands to lose with Ecuador on the USA's State Sponsor of Terror List and is the massive effort trying to lie a lot to block Ecuador from being correctly placed on this List. A quick review of those denizens of the Soros actor list reveals the correctness of this evaluation and anyone who says differently is a liar.

Ecuadoreans who grasp the concept that much is evil in Correa's Ecuador like to detail that this is the antiChrist come to life in Ecuador. This too is an unsatisfying explanation however much evil is apace. This too carries an "It is not Our Fault- the Devil Made Us Do It" and we are victims/powerless before Satan theory which is not only childish but lazy and aberrant as well, rejecting each person’s freedom of will to refuse evil in any format. This is a dishonest dismissal of our own complicity with the manipulative right of passage in Ecuador while still looking for some new sucker to steal from or live off their money. Continuing the passive-aggressive theory that all this is Satan's fault or Soros the antiChrist's fault is dishonest and childish. Evil is the face of Soros but evil only succeeds because we let it by our own passive aggressive laziness and irresponsibility while we go right on living off of someone else's money.

Venezuela knows a lot about living off other people's money, called PdVSA. This past week, Chavez's goons ordered that all TV stations had to pay $200,000 an hour to broadcast Chavez talking, a state forced event in any case. For now, so the story goes, this embarrassing scam has been cancelled. Cubans and Ecuadoreans know a lot about living off of someone else's money. In Castro's Cuba today, over 1/5 of Havana does not work at all because the Cuban regime- that is the Venezuelan oil monies- hand over more per month for the unemployed than the paltry less than $100 a month [often around $10 per month is earnings] earned by actually working. A janitor in a Cuban hospital sees about $7 a month in earnings. Socialism often crafts dependencia and more corruption.

While the USA is focused on its elections this Fall, Ecuador faces a YES-NO vote in legalize Chavez as their supreme allied commander for their new narcobloc. And Venezuela votes for provincial representatives even as Chavez's backers still claim that only the White House in Washington is backing the drive for freedom in Venezuela. This is of course a bald lie. While President Bush no doubt would like to expand functional freedoms in South America, his own team backs the Soros plan for lessened freedom and more socialism to assist the Soros drive for ratified narcostates. Bush's own team refuses to do or say anything about the failed NED-US AID plans, pouring even more monies in to support for Chavez and Correa's deceptions by aiding and abetting the Chavez-Correa insurgency of dishonesty.

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Me Generation: Perpetual Adolescents
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON | Posted Friday, May 30, 2008 INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY

Here is how our baby-boom generation solves problems:
• Recently, George Bush went to Saudi Arabia to ask the ruling House of Saud to pump more oil. That request had about as much chance of success as the Democratic-led congressional effort to "sue" the Saudis in American courts for their selfish "price-gouging."

The current debate about energy in the United States has devolved into doing the same old thing — consume, don't produce and complain — while somehow expecting different results.

Congress talks endlessly about the bright future of wind, solar and new fuels, while it stops us from getting through the messy present by utilizing abundant coal, shale and tar sands; nuclear power; and oil still untapped in Alaska and off our coasts.

• For the past five years, we fretted over a "housing boom" that had priced an entire generation out of the market. In response, government and lending agencies got "creative" by relaxing standards to allow shaky "first-time" buyers into the red-hot market of high-priced homes. Home-improvement TV shows proliferated on how to "flip" houses and buy "no-down-payment" properties.

When the bubble inevitably burst, cries of outrage followed about how "they" (never "we") caused a "depression" in housing. Our leaders shrieked about greedy lenders and incompetent regulators who foreclosed on us — never that the American people themselves caused much of the speculation problem, or that housing prices are finally becoming affordable again for new couples.

• Over 70% of the American people, and a majority of Democratic senators, wanted to remove Saddam Hussein — overwhelming support for the administration's war that rose even higher as a brilliant campaign finished off the Baathists in three weeks.

But when a messy insurgency erupted, suddenly we heard that our victory was ruined by "their stupid occupation."

• The current Social Security system is unsustainable. But the baby boomers who gave us Botox aren't about to up the retirement age and freeze their own cost-of-living hikes to allow the cash-strapped next generation a little help in paying for our out-of-control benefits.

There is a pattern in all these dilemmas. And it is not conservative-vs.-liberal politics, but generational chaos. Those who came of age in the 1960s now hold the reins of power and influence — and we are starting to see why their values have worried almost everyone for nearly a half-century.

History has seen something like them before in the "blame them" years of Demosthenes' Athens, the self-indulgence of Julio-Claudian Rome, the "after me, the deluge" generation of late 18th-century France, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties.

What are the baby boomers' collective traits? Like all perpetual adolescents who suffer arrested development, we always want things both ways: Don't drill or explore for more energy, but nevertheless demand ever more fuel from other suppliers.

There are never bad and worse choices, but only a Never Never Land of good and even-better alternatives. Housing not only has to stay affordable for buyers, but also must appreciate in value to give instant equity to those who have just become owners.

When things don't go well, we always blame someone else. Why drill off Santa Barbara or Alaska when we can sue those terrible Saudis for not putting more oil platforms in their Persian Gulf?

And why accept that the conduct of all wars is flawed and victory goes usually to those who persevere in making the needed adjustments when we can just keep pointing fingers at the official who disbanded the Iraqi army or sent too few troops after the invasion?

The sense of self-importance is never far away. We "earned" our generous unsustainable Social Security benefits, so why should we have to suffer by cutting them?

Sociologists have correctly diagnosed the perfect storm that created the "me" generation — sudden postwar affluence, sacrificing parents who did not wish us to suffer as they had in the Great Depression and World War II, and the rise of therapeutic education that encouraged self-indulgence.

Perhaps the greatest trademark of the 1960s cohort was self-congratulation. Baby boomers alone claimed to have brought about changes in civil rights, women's liberation and environmental awareness — as if these were not prior concerns of earlier generations.

We apparently created all of our wealth rather than having inherited our roads, schools and bountiful infrastructure from someone else. And in our self-absorption, no one accepted that our notorious appetites created more problems than our supposed "caring" solved.

Our present problems were not really caused by an unpopular president, a spendthrift Congress, neocon bogeymen, greedy Saudis, shifty bankers or corporate oilmen in black hats and handlebar moustaches — much less the anonymous "they."

The fault of this age, dear baby boomers, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
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This brilliant summary reminds us that when we are lazy and self absorbed, we do nothing and expect others to do something because we will not and we demand that the fault lies with others even as we spend other people's money. We pretend that we are pious because we kneel in church and explain that "we care" about poverty or "others" while we increase our self indulgences and our self important demands which replace all others. So not tell us that this is not the perfect picture of Rafael Correa for it sis. And it is also the reflection of most of us today- in this place and in this time while we pretend that we are not for we are.

Here we have the manipulative adolescents running Montecristi, with the morals of dead dogs and the collective IQ of 14...hitting below the belt as it were:
                               
Golpes bajos en la Asamblea de Montecristi

El presidente de la Asamblea suspendió ayer, la sesión ante los reclamos de Sociedad -HOY 5-31-08

This is exactly how Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez run their bloc and if this does not make all mankind uncomfortable, you really do need to quit reading this column and enroll in Uribe's rehab center in Colombia and get your own "assets" straightened out. Meanwhile, Correa's team sponsored another pro FARC conference this last week in Loja. Once again- Media not permitted. How many young people is Correa recruiting for the FARC in Ecuador and why do you enable this to go on? Every day is one more cause to know that Ecuador is a state sponsor of narcoterror.
 
-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis