November 18, 2008  Ecuador's leader Rafael Correa has been busy solidifying his passion for blaming everyone else for the crimes his government commits.

This is a standard operating procedure for every Ecuadorean today: blame everyone else and take no adult responsibility for anything in this ethically deadened zone, just ripe for the Russo-Iranian bloc of criminal adventurers. As recently written about Chavez's Venezuela in the WASHINGTON TIMES, "Caracas is on a seemingly unstoppable downward slide. The invading poor have endangered the city of 6 million as never before. The wealthy (those not seeking refuge in southern Florida, Colombia or Spain) lead a semi-surrealistic existence reflecting a sense of smiling through the ever-increasing gloom, plus a devout dream that somehow, someday Venezuela will be rid of Mr. Chavez, socialism and insecurity. “This is very true about Ecuador: the poor keep getting poorer because Correa refuses support for honest employment and the so called educated care nothing about anyone or anything except their false piety, also called living la vida manipulativa of country club Catholics and meaningless addiction to grabbing Something for Nothing.
 
It is this semi surreal abandonment of responsibility by the citizens of Ecuador that is repulsive and morally negated, even as each and every one today wants to tell you that they are willing- wanting- to negotiate everything in life, including essential ethics- if only- if only to their selfish advantage, including life's morals and even democracy, left meaningless to every coward in Ecuador today which is about the entire nation- a nation of cowards who have sold out freedom for the lure of the shopping mall.
 
Ecuador is not alone. The USA has seemingly forgotten the urgency of truthtelling for the seduction of half truths and lives lived by excuses:



Still this recent article on Venezuela [forgetting to mention the education by the state take over by the Chavez-Ayers-communist team] continues, "While patience can clearly be a virtue, the attitude seems to a visitor more like a misty, delusory political dream these days in Caracas. Consider: Overall inflation is running at 36 percent, heading for 50 percent. Inflation of consumables - the stuff on which people subsist - is 50 percent, heading for 100 percent. Insecurity is the greatest concern of caraquenos as their city sports the highest murder rate - 132 per 100,000 inhabitants - in the world, with the majority of killings affecting the poor.

Corruption is so rampant the average citizen must usually pay from 100 to 300 bolivares ($25 to $75) to renew the mandatory cedula identity card. Nonprivileged citizens express a weary, fear-ridden sense of what lies ahead. One man said, "The cost of food, when it is available, rises daily. We can't keep up. I fear for my family, and not just for their safety." The political opposition remains in dismal disarray. Aging politicians, remnants of Venezuela's nearly 50 years of democratic rule, stand for little else than a return to his/her share of the spoils that Mr. Chavez is hoarding to himself, his military, socialist and Cuban cohorts....Oscar Schemel, who heads strategic planning and polling firm Hinterlaces, is forming a representative group of opposition personalities to develop a common vision for Venezuela. The project, called Utopolis, is sorely needed to unify the opposition and also to provide average citizens with a common understanding of what their country can be. Hugo Chavez is a survivor. Despite megalomania, manic-depression requiring daily doses of lithium and a seemingly endless need to enrich himself and numberless cohorts, he has a powerful charisma, coupled with a sense of when to strike and when to stand down. "
 
Hugo Chavez succeeds as Rafael Correa succeeds [if this ruinous failed state status is success] by the seductive promise of Something for Nothing- the Faustian Bargain of one's soul, one's vote in return for state socialism/hand outs/give aways/ state welfare which always deadens the soul and ends liberty. The essential ingredient to the Andean dictators is the cowardice of the many that is gamed and manipulated and used by the evil of the few. The evil of the few depends on the cowardice of the many and this reliance on cowards has earned the public face of Correa and Chavez's support, which is of course as shallow as a political bribe.

Nonetheless, the Correa-Chavez bloc of nations seems to be co-manipulating a mutually reinforcing banking cabal, also called bond market manipulations for dirty derivatives traders. Here is a beginning review: Ecuador's Correa May Burn Biggest Ally, Chavez, in Bond Default
By Lester Pimentel and Daniel Cancel
 
 
Nov. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Ecuador President Rafael Correa's looming default on $510 million of bonds may hurt his biggest ally, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, more than anyone else.

Ecuador, hamstrung by a tumble in oil, its biggest export, said last week it will use a 30-day grace period to decide whether to make a $30 million interest payment that came due Nov. 15. Chavez's government owns structured notes tied to Ecuador's bonds that would force Venezuela to pay $800 million if Correa doesn't make the payment, according to estimates by Barclays Capital Inc.
Venezuela's potential losses may strain relations between two presidents who meet every three months and espouse the same socialist themes. During an Ecuador-Colombia border dispute in March, Chavez, 54, mobilized tank battalions in a show of support for Correa, 45.

``Chavez will have something to say'' about the debt payment, said Alejandro Grisanti, a fixed-income analyst at Barclays in New York. He ``will encourage Correa not to default.''

The price on Ecuador's 12 percent bonds maturing in 2012 plunged to 14 cents on the dollar on Nov. 14, sending yields over 100 percent, as investors braced for the first sovereign default since the global financial crisis deepened in September.
Standard & Poor's cut Ecuador's rating to CCC-, three levels above default, on Nov. 14, hours after Finance Minister Maria Elsa Viteri announced the government's plan to withhold the interest payment.

`Truly Horrifying'
Correa, an economist who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been threatening since the 2006 campaign to halt payments on debt he calls ``illegitimate.''

In his weekly radio address on Nov. 15, Correa called a debt auditing committee's preliminary report ``truly horrifying,'' echoing previous statements he's made that some of the obligations were fraudulent. He said he expects to receive a full report on the debt on Nov. 20.

``If there's a sufficient basis to say we can't pay this illegitimate debt, that's what we'll do,'' Correa said in his radio address, according to a statement posted on the government's Web site. ``That the bonds fall and the country risk rises doesn't hold the least interest for us. Here we'll act for the country and the common good.''

Ecuador's finances have come under strain as oil, which accounts for 60 percent of the country's exports, has plunged 61 percent from a record high in July to $57.60 a barrel.

Largest Creditor
Ecuador needs an oil price of $95 to cover all the spending in its budget and a price of $76 to avoid depleting its $6.3 billion of foreign reserves, according to Barclays. The South American country last defaulted less than a decade ago. It halted payments on $6.5 billion of bonds in 1999.

The structured notes, so-called first-to-default baskets that are also tied to Argentine and Venezuelan debt, work like credit-default swaps, Grisanti said. Swaps, contracts conceived to protect bondholders against default, pay the buyer face value in exchange for the underlying securities or the cash equivalent should an issuer fail to adhere to its debt agreements.

Venezuela would be forced to pay $800 million to investors who would hand over defaulted Ecuadorean bonds in return, according to Barclays.

``In the event of default, Chavez will be Correa's largest creditor,'' Grisanti wrote in a Nov. 14 report. Venezuela's position as a creditor would likely bolster the payout Ecuador would offer in a debt restructuring, he said.

Argentine Default Concerns
Barclays came up with the $800 million estimate from conversations with ``local sources,'' Grisanti said. Venezuela has pared its holdings of the notes over the past year, he said.

A spokesman at the Venezuelan Finance Ministry declined to comment on the government's holdings of the notes.

Investor concern has also mounted that Argentina will default for a second time this decade amid the global economic slump and rout in commodities. Argentina's benchmark 8.28 percent dollar bonds due in 2033 trade at 26 cents on the dollar, down from 67 cents two months earlier, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Correa won a landslide victory in November 2006 after promising to rewrite the constitution and boost spending on the poor. He said in September that he'd suspend debt payments before trimming spending on education and health care.

Ecuador's foreign debt totaled $10 billion as of September, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. That equals less than 25 percent of its $44 billion annual gross domestic product.

`Collapsing' Prices
While the drop in oil has crimped revenue, Viteri said at the news conference that the government has the cash to make the $30 million payment on time.

The price on the 2012 bonds, which were issued as part of a restructuring in 2000, sank 28 cents over two days from 42 cents on Nov. 12, according to JPMorgan. The bonds traded at 99.5 cents on Sept. 8, a week before the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. deepened the decline in oil.

``Bond prices are collapsing,'' said Igor Arsenin, an emerging-market strategist at Credit Suisse Group in New York. ``They are seriously considering defaulting.''
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The death of Lehmans helped ppb of oil to fall? How can that be? We have been told repeatedly that speculators have no role in oil pricing and that it is all a matter of supply and demand. So what does BLOOMBERGS mean by this? We are joking of course. Of course Lehmans and BARCLAYS run massive off the books oil derivatives speculations and jigger bond analysis to fit their mood. Moreover, why indeed should Argentina's dead beat credit picture afflict the Ecuadorean-Venezuelan bloc of hedge fund speculators and off the books oil traders? Why indeed.
 
And why we ask, does BARCLAYS base its so called bond analysis on unnamed local Venezuelans who...we sadly report....are not avid truth tellers at all, following the Ecuadorean mantra to manipulate at every chance. More likely, LEHMANS was shorted by Barclays in a place and in a time where the Arab states such as Qatar do now co own BARCLAYS.
 
As for the claim that Correa has just stiffed his backer Chavez in a dirty off the books bond derivatives deal, what we do know is that Correa has no clue as to where Ecuador's money is but he does have lots of advisors telling him how to lie, steal and cheat his way forward. Or what do they call it??? forcing Chavez to pay Correa a few hundred million dollars- $800 million they claim- for bond deals gone bad, thus sayeth Barclays.
 
What we do know is that Correa, Chavez and Barclays are knee deep in bizarre behaviors. And still we ask: who did the initial derivatives deal between Chavez and Correa? These shinning examples of transparency in action, democracy in full sail, will surely disclose the facts for it is, after all, their nation's finances involved in derivatives swaps. So- who did the deal? And how much money was made for Chavez and Correa [and Barclays]?
 
And why does this matter? It matters because it remains that just because Correa and Chavez have successfully seduced their own nations with the lure of Something for Nothing- also called socialism for he many and cartel hedge funds for the self enriching inner cartel cabal, there was never a FREE PASS CARD handed out to these criminals to avoid integrity and destroy freedom and abandon ethical living just because they promised falsely to "help the poor."
 
HOY reports today on the Correa team "studying" their law suit against the world's multilateral banks and "studying" suing those who believe in capitalism while the Correa team is busy "studying" paying their legal debt, here looking especially knowledgeable and well versed to tackle the truth...with all the fiscal credibility of the World Wrestling Federation:
 
       
Gobierno estudia una moratoria
Publicado el 18/Noviembre/2008 | 00:10


La ministra dice que la caja fiscal cuenta con un saldo aproximado de $1 200 millones

 Al Gobierno no le preocupa el incremento del Riesgo País. Según la ministra de Finanzas, María Elsa Viteri, este indicador "no refleja las acciones económicas que el Gobierno ha desarrollado". Según dijo, el Riesgo País se ha mantenido en alza, incluso antes de que el Régimen resolviera acogerse al período de gracia para decidir si paga o no la cuota anual de $30,6 millones correspondientes a los bonos Global 2012

Y, aunque el Banco Central del Ecuador no reportó ayer el estado de este indicador (el último registro corresponde al 4 de noviembre: 3 089 puntos), según Ramiro Crespo, de Analytica Securities, luego del anuncio, bordea los 4 000 puntos.

Here is another propaganda piece by the anti Colombia and pro FARC actors from the U.S. Congress, assisted fully by the Soros pro narcotics efforts concurrently aiding and abetting Rafael Correa in his specious claims against Chevron Texaco for money- lots of money- upwards of $50 billion in composite fake claims to bankrupt a once vibrant company currently suffering from its only sin which is to retain the region's worst lawyers in this war of attrition, co funded by Correa and assisted by the US Democrats and the Soros activists.

Ecuador keeps up oil cleanup fight against Chevron

 
Chris Kraul / Los Angeles Times

Abel Garrido stands near his oil-polluted pond in Coca, Ecuador. “I’ve lost 30 cows,” Garrido says. “I cut them open and their insides are black.”

The oil giant says it already cleaned up its share of the mess in the Amazon region, but peasant farmers continue to suffer.
By Chris Kraul

November 17, 2008 LATIMES
Reporting from Coca, Ecuador -- Abel Garrido has just struck oil and he's not happy about it.

Using a tree branch, the weathered farmer probed the edge of a pond that his cattle use for drinking water and soon turned up the smelly black sludge that he says has killed much of his livestock and sickened his family.
 
"I've lost 30 cows," Garrido said. "I cut them open and their insides are black."

Paying the medical bills to treat his three children for skin cancer has cost him his meager savings.

"Here's the cause," Garrido said, contemplating the dark slime gleaming on the end of the branch.

The contamination at Garrido's farm and hundreds of others in a Rhode Island-sized area here in the Ecuadorean Amazon is the basis of a controversial, long-running civil lawsuit in which a verdict is expected early next year.

On one side are 30,000 mostly peasant farmers like Garrido who say they are living a health and ecological nightmare caused by careless oil drilling and production methods that contaminated their drinking water and spoiled their lush jungle environment.

On the other side is defendant Chevron, the San Ramon, Calif.-based parent company which in 2001 acquired Texaco, which produced oil here from 1972 to 1990, and which the lawsuit claims polluted a vast swath of the Amazon. Chevron says Texaco cleaned up its share of the spills with three years of remediation work and that the Ecuadorean government absolved it of all future responsibility in 1998.

The oil giant blames Petroecuador for any ongoing spills and for not following through on its share of the cleanup. Texaco was 37.5% partner in the oil field venture, and Petroecuador owned the rest.

The Ecuadorean plaintiffs claim that Chevron never adequately cleaned up hundreds of oil catch basins and spills of drilling muds that continue to contaminate the groundwater. They claim the settlement with the government doesn't preclude individuals successfully suing the oil giant.

If Garrido and other residents win, the case could set a worldwide precedent: Foreign plaintiffs have never collected for alleged offshore environmental damage caused by a U.S. company, said Ohio State University environmental economist Douglas Southgate.

Last week, U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) toured the area and, shocked by the pollution he saw, wrote a letter he said he plans to send today to President-elect Barack Obama asking that the U.S. help Ecuador with cleaning up and direct "relevant departments and agencies . . . to design a plan to help fix this awful situation."

In an interview here, McGovern said that "legal wrangling aside, what I saw demands immediate attention. This is a humanitarian and environmental crisis."

Transferred from a New York court in 2003, the case may be decided by a superior court judge in Lago Agrio, near Coca, within a few months, attorneys say. The verdict may not be to Chevron's liking. In a report filed in March, a court-appointed investigator estimated that Chevron was liable for up to $8 billion in health and cleanup costs.

"Texaco used the pristine Amazon rain forest as a garbage can," said Steven Donziger, a New York-based environmental attorney who represents the Ecuadoreans.

Chevron fired back, challenging the scientific methods of the analysis, including the connection it made between oil spills and cancer cases. Economist Southgate, who is a Chevron consultant, said the report also didn't factor in Petroecuador's share of responsibility for the pollution, or evidence that it has continued to contaminate since it took over all ownership and operation responsibilities from Texaco in 1992.

In April, Chevron took a public relations blow when local attorney Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and community organizer Luis Yanza won the international Goldman Environmental Prize for leading the legal battle against Chevron, a prize the oil company bitterly criticized.

In September, the Ecuadorean government indicted two of Chevron's Ecuadorean lawyers, accusing them of falsifying scientific evidence used to show that Texaco's remediation measures in the 1990s were effective. Chevron denied the charges.

Chevron attorneys have petitioned U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab to cancel the trade breaks Ecuador receives from the United States for its role in helping fight drug trafficking, claiming that President Rafael Correa had prejudiced the oil contamination case in public statements, limiting Chevron's chances of getting a fair trial.

Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson said that if the company lost in Ecuador, it would appeal the verdict, possibly before a World Bank tribunal or at The Hague.

Chevron has left the door open for a negotiated settlement, but previous overtures to the Ecuadoreans have been rebuffed, he said.

Garrido, who has owned the 80-acre farm since 1981, said he didn't know or care who is to blame; he only wants to be given money to buy a new farm somewhere else, where he can escape the sight, smell and health effects of the oil.

"When I bought the farm in 1981, the oil was here, but they told us it was good for us, that it had a lot of vitamins," Garrido said. "That was just to fool us."

Kraul is a Times staff writer.
 
_________________
 
Go ahead- ask the "journalist" about those cows whose stomachs were chock full of oil. Go ahead. And while you are at it, ask for a full forensic audit of PetroEcuador because the Correa cartel should not proceed one step further in their fraudulent claims against Chevron Texaco without it, no matter that their corporate decision making is so shallow that they forgot to put the full facts of this bankrupting case on the table. #0 cows by a farmer who tells us that he was tricked in to believing that oil sludge was good fertilizer and good for free vitamins.
 
Cartels exist because they lie a lot and make end runs around democracy. Following their hedge fund mentality governance plans to never be honest about what they do, here is a superb piece on the vain glories of manipulating democracy under the shallow GUISE OF DEMOCRACY, which is Caracas and Quito today which is also to say is NOT democracy at all but a fake democracy:

The Wall Street Journal
THE AMERICAS 
NOVEMBER 17, 2008
Dodd's 'Democrat' Tightens His Grip 
 By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Hugo Chávez's threat last week to bring tanks to the streets if his side does not win key states in Sunday's gubernatorial elections is chilling. But it is not surprising. It is only the next logical step in what is the Venezuelan president's drive to seize all power and silence all dissent.
 
Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.
Despite numerous setbacks for Venezuelan democracy, many still believe that they can rid themselves of Mr. Chávez democratically. Their expectations were raised last year when voters defeated a referendum in which Mr. Chávez attempted to rewrite the constitution to strengthen his authoritarian powers. Now they hope to deliver another setback by voting in anti-Chávez governors in at least three and maybe more than 10 of the country's 23 states. The top post in the capital district of Caracas is also up for grabs.

There are currently at least 18 states with pro-Chávez governors, and despite deteriorating living standards, Mr. Chávez's United Socialist Party of Venezuela is expected to be returned to power in a good number of them.

One reason is that the cards are stacked against the opposition. The government is using state funds for pro-Chávez candidates and has dramatically outspent the competition. The National Electoral Council is dominated by pro-Chávez representatives. Scores of individuals who are popular were declared "ineligible" to run. The government has refused to release the voter rolls so that the opposition can ensure that they are clean. On election day, lines are expected to be long and the widespread assumption that the government will use tricks to win could dampen opposition turnout.

Yet even these odds are not enough for Mr. Chávez. In recent weeks he has begun threatening to use the military against his own population in states where his municipal and gubernatorial candidates are defeated. On a trip to the state of Carabobo last week, for example, he told voters, "If you let the oligarchy return to government then maybe I'll end up sending the tanks of the armored brigade out to defend the revolutionary government." Just as troubling are the president's declarations that in states where his candidates are not elected, he will withhold federal funding.
 
Venezuelans saw this coming. From his earliest days as president in 1999, Mr. Chávez began working to destroy any checks on his power. On April 11, 2002, after weeks of street protests against this effort, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans marched again in Caracas. Nineteen people were shot dead in the streets by government supporters. When Mr. Chávez asked the military to use force against the crowd, the generals refused and instead told him he had to step aside.

One might think that all Americans would have supported the demand to stop the bloodshed. But Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd threw a fit over Mr. Chávez's removal. The self-styled Latin America expert insisted that since Mr. Chávez had been initially "democratically elected" in a fair vote, he should have been immune from challenges to his power, no matter the abuses. To this day the senator calls the event a U.S.-backed coup, even though a State Department Inspector General's report found that the charge was false. Even the Organization of American States accepted the change in power.

Of course it wasn't a coup, U.S. backed or otherwise, as witnessed by the fact that while Mr. Chávez was removed from power, he was allowed to keep his cell phone, chat with Havana and negotiate his future. With the inadvertent help of the opposition, which acted incompetently, Mr. Chávez was back in office days later.

The circumstances of Mr. Chávez's political resurrection are still debated, but what is not in question is the reason Venezuelans had massed in the streets that day: They opposed the strongman's consolidation of power, which they warned would lead to dictatorship.
Fast forward six and a half years, and it turns out that the protestors were right.

Nearly all economic, judicial, electoral and congressional power in Venezuela is now in the hands of Mr. Dodd's "democratically elected" Chávez. Cuban doctors and teachers blanket the country, indoctrinating the poor. Cuban intelligence personnel are always on hand to support the Bolivarian Revolution while neighborhood gangs do the grass-roots work of enforcement. Political prisoners are rotting in Venezuelan jails without trials.

Being identified as a political opponent of the revolution is a ticket to the end of the unemployment line. Private property has zero protection under the law and the economy's private sector has been all but destroyed.

Mr. Chávez appears surprised that after a decade of repression, Venezuelans are still struggling to regain their liberty. But he is just as determined to retain control, and has made it clear he will not accept defeat at the polls. This is your "democratically elected" president, Sen. Dodd.
___
 
For our part, we hope you reread this fact based analysis often. And finally banish the Correa and Chavez lies that the USA assisted in the so called Chavez coup when it did not. We are way past being aggravated by liars and manipulators selling more lies based on non facts. A decade of repression is Venezuela's lot- a road map out of there will not be had nor held under the fake selling of fake elections in Venezuela or Ecuador. Miracles do happen but we remind that honest people- persons of conscience neither abandon their commitments and retreat and hide nor do they forget that if miracles are what are truly needed - and Ecuador and Venezuela need miracles now badly for theirs are failed states with little quality of life- then first the miracle must be defined, put on the table and all hands co ordinate to help use their God given gifts[ free speech, data backed governance and fact based education, application of integrity, contract law-rule of law and freedom to worship among others- also called applying faith in motion to not abandon hope as is currently the passion of abandoning hope in the Andes, itself a sin] to help make the miracle happen.
That is all you need to know today. Or you can choose to pretend that all ethics replicate the World Wrestling Foundation.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis