January 31, 2010  ECrisis will say it again: Cuban Marxist communism- aka ALBA-Bolivarian socialism of el jefe Correa y Chavez of a certainty have crafted ruin in Ecuador. And by this we mean ruin in every way conceivable- not just economic ruin which surely by now you have figured out is the case for Ecuador....economic ruin as Correa's cartel drains every known account it can and plans to steal even more....or extort more through its unrelenting rackets.

Do read the article below. It states the facts: "There's a lot of ruin in Venezuela.

To the short and brutal list of life's certainties, let us add that socialism invariably leads nations to economic ruin. Latest case in point: Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian" Republic of Venezuela."

There is a lot of ruin in Ecuador. Correa's socialist-Cuban communism- or whatever phony name he calls his cartel- is bankrupt and has ruined Ecuador just as that buffoon named Chavez has ruined Venezuela....because citizens let them. And where is Correa now? He did his perfunctory Man of Compassion tour of Haiti- on the run and hurried to a luxe spot in the Marxist Dominican Republic to enjoy another complete loser, Mel Zelaya who is a profound drug runner, too.

We add again a clip on Venezuela here which is poignant...not just for the facts but also as a reminder that truth tellers have existed for quite some time...ready and willing to state the facts about Correa and Chavez. Listen to Otto Reich's words of grace...reminding that there is always hope if we act of it. And recall too how the always-helpful U.S. Embassy of Soros Democrats in Quito refused en masse -barred- their attendance to Otto's last talk in Quito, as if he were a liar, as if he were the evil one. They were "too busy" they said to listen to Bush's former Envoy. They were too upset to cross the street to even say hello to their former boss from State Department because as the current US ambassador to Colombia, Brownfield's wife Kinney  said....in her high dungeon- no American in Ecuador could be seen to encourage truth tellers. And Linda Jewell and Heather Hodges continue the tradition of welcoming to Ecuador some of this globe's most remarkable avatars of socialism such as Noam Chomsky and Joe Stigletz, banning as they do any real advocates of free speech. And so it comes to pass that Ecuador and Venezuela have no free speech in any healthy fashion. And they do not have a democracy either but they do have fake democracy, fake freedoms, fake religion in fat Pachamama and fake constitutions of over 500 pages- chock full of nuts.

Watch this stirring video on Chavez. There is not one lie in this film- not one. And even so, it needs updating. Were you invited to a screening of this film in Quito? Did American truth tellers step up and share this story? Of course not. Like the American-Ecuadorean Chamber of Commerce, they are too busy pretending that Chavez and Correa are doing a great job and that we must all shut up and be happy with what little manipulated hand outs befall us and forget that Correa has ruined Ecuador so that he can continue to ruin Ecuador some more....because you are tepid, stupid and so easily seduced in to being like a mouse. Moreover, one must ask- why did not one Venezuelan lift one lazy finger and make this documentary? There are plenty of American trained scions of wealthy Venezuelans who are film makers, they say, trained in the USA and trained to work but never ever quite seem to do anything. Ecuador deserves a film like this. We can only wonder why no Americans have ever so done. Or any American trained Ecuadorean film specialists. Why is that? Tradition mostly? We think that this would be very easy to do. If one does not tell the story, it does not get told.
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REVIEW & OUTLOOK
JANUARY 30, 2010               Wall Street Journal
The Chávez Meltdown
There's a lot of ruin in Venezuela.
To the short and brutal list of life's certainties, let us add that socialism invariably leads nations to economic ruin. Latest case in point: Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian" Republic of Venezuela.

Earlier this month, the Venezuelan strongman moved the official U.S. dollar exchange rate to 4.3 bolivars to the greenback from 2.15. At a stroke, he wiped out the savings and purchasing power of the very working-class people he purports to represent, most of whom have barely been getting by. News of the devaluation instantly sent the country—where consumer prices had already risen by 25% in 2009, according to official figures—into a panic, with consumers standing in line to stock up on goods before prices rose.

Mr. Chávez next decreed that he would fine and even arrest any merchant caught adjusting prices, eliding the fact that Venezuela imports nearly everything and exports only oil. Now Venezuelans have the Hobson's choice of either complying with the diktat, which means shortages, or disobeying it, which means inflation.

Yet no sooner was one catastrophe of "21st-century socialism" inflicted on Venezuelans than Mr. Chávez unveiled another. On January 12, the government instituted a series of rolling blackouts due to an electricity shortage that had been building for months. Ostensibly, the reason for the shortage was a drought that had left water levels at the country's huge Guri Dam—the source of more than 70% of its electricity—at critically low levels. But that is a function of the government's failure to maintain the dam and build additional capacity.

The instant result of the blackouts was chaos, particularly in Caracas, where people were left "stuck in elevators or in dangerous parts of town without street lighting," according to Reuters. The capital city already has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, and Mr. Chávez was forced to suspend blackouts there two days later. The rest of the country, however, remains subject to sporadic power outages.

Behind the crack-up of Mr. Chávez's utopia is the fact that he's running out of money because Venezuela's oil production is plunging. In 1998, the year Mr. Chávez was first elected, the country pumped 3.3 million barrels a day. Today, the figure is 2.4 million barrels, and that's an optimistic estimate.

Venezuela isn't running out of crude. The problem is that Mr. Chávez has expelled or seized the assets of foreign companies capable of properly maintaining the country's fields, including ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. It didn't help, either, that in 2002 Mr. Chávez fired thousands of skilled employees of state oil company PdVSA because he didn't like their politics and replaced them with his political cronies.

On Monday, Mr. Chávez made a grudging concession to reality when he agreed to a joint venture with Italian oil major ENI, which itself had been run out of Venezuela in 2006. We'll leave it to the Italians to place their own bets about the limits of Mr. Chávez's caprice. They've already had fair warning that Bolivarians, like other predators, rarely change their spots.

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Does his sound familiar? It should. Chavez's ruin is your ruin and worse. Stand up. And when we say that Chavez and Correa’s ALBA communism equates financial ruin we so say with the facts. We are not afraid to say the facts….why are you afraid? Look around and state the obvious.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis