April 7, 2010 Continuing our updates on the world around, reminding that the world does not begin and end inside Ecuador, our on going education includes the important news which follows. We think you should know that Brazil today is a speculator's dream come true- before its bubble breaks open because Brazil really, like Ecuador, has no sustained accountability and lots of folks are hawking their wares like a Mark Stanford investor scam in the making. Then again, you actually believed Ivonne a Baki and Peter Romero when they sold you Stanford’s criminally fraudulent money taking scams. You did no due diligence on these operatives of greed because they are friends of Correa and friends to the Clinton-Soros losers and you lost a lot. And with no transparency, you will and have lost a lot of Ecuador’s governmental money- between $6 to 12 billion in bankruptcy right now- and that is what Correa lets you know. The government has stolen your money and has no clue where it remains. Correa, who is no economist, has no concept how to grow this nation but he does know how to instruct his DC ambassador Gallegos to spend millions of your tax dollars to sell a fake propaganda of the fantastic Pink Curtain that is Correa’s corrupt regime.

We have been truly disgusted at how many Ecuadoreans tell us that the world's best and most honest media cannot be active inside Ecuador because president Correa hates the truth and denies the facts and so, they say, we must also hate the Wall Street Journal. Following this line of thinking to despise the good if one cannot manipulate it comes the realization that one should also reject the Bible as well. this is self defeating, manipulative behavior too.

Why are Ecuadoreans now afraid to align with truth tellers? What is it that brings them to their knees, barring their acts to do even the fundamentals known to free men everywhere? We remind: it is time to Man UP and be manly or else copy the un-manly ways of your regime’s Pink Curtain. Is your manhood so cheap that you would sell for a few of Correa’s extortion rackets? Obviously your work place and family values mavens think your manhood is worthless, good only to manipulate. We advise: there is a better way and to your own self you must be true.

If you do not stand for truth-telling, you stand for nothing. It is unbearable to say that it is all right to tell some small truths but break the rest of it.

The Wall Street Journal
OPINION: THE AMERICAS
APRIL 5, 2010
Curb Your Enthusiasm for Brazil
The best thing the new government has done is leave its predecessor's reforms alone.
•         By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista rocketed to eighth place this year on the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest individuals, from 61st last year. Now speculation is rampant that he is on his way to the top.

Powering Mr. Batista's soaring fortunes is black gold. His oil and gas company, OGX, won auctioned drilling rights in the shallow-water basin off the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro, and it estimates its reserves at 6.7 billion barrels.

A self-made Rio billionaire is supposed to be daring, charismatic and visionary, and Mr. Batista does not disappoint. I caught up with him when he was in New York last week for The Wall Street Journal's "Invest in Rio" conference. At a lunch on Wednesday he mesmerized the crowd with his enthusiasm, not only for his own projects in oil development, ports and ship building but also for his country. Despite many mistakes in the past, he said, Brazil has changed and is ready to claim its rightful place among industrialized nations.

That Mr. Batista is a disciplined, risk-taking sensation with plenty of political savvy there is no doubt. But do his new opportunities in oil and gas in Brazil imply a rising tide for the rest of the nation? Count me as a skeptic. Indeed, the more the country's elite talks about its public-private partnerships to reinvent Brazil with its newfound wealth, the more it sounds like the same old Latin corporatism.

It is true that life for Brazilians is worlds better than it was in the early 1990s, when hyperinflation fed national chaos. Credit for taming prices goes to two-term former President Henrique Cardoso, whose government implemented the Real Plan pegging the national currency to the dollar. Even though the peg was abandoned in 1999 Mr. Cardoso held fast to the anti-inflation dream, hiring Arminio Fraga, a successful hedge fund manager, to take over the central bank. Mr. Fraga made bank transparency a priority, and the market now disciplines Brazil in monetary matters. Mr. Cardoso also led the effort to make states fiscally accountable.

President Lula da Silva wins accolades from entrepreneurs like Mr. Batista, but a review of his tenure finds that the best thing he has done as the country's chief executive is nothing. That is to say, he did not undo Mr. Cardoso's monetary and fiscal achievements. Instead he continued to support an anti-inflationary bias by hiring Henrique Meirelles, a former president of Bank of Boston, to replace Mr. Fraga. Yet beyond a bankruptcy-code reform and improvements to insurance legislation, he has done little else.

The school of gradualism argues that Brazil can't be turned around overnight, and thus incremental progress is all that could be expected. The trouble is that ever since Brazil discovered abundant oil off its coast in 2007, it seems to have abandoned even modest reforms.

Consider the challenge of fixing the regulatory and tax structure, which is so stifling that small and medium-sized businesses have had to go underground to survive. Operating in the shadows, they can't take advantage of modern efficiencies that would help them raise productivity. As a result, they are sentenced to lives as the urban equivalent of subsistence farmers.

Mr. Batista argued to me that the size of the underground economy has been reduced in recent years in Brazil. That claim is hard to prove but even if it's true it would appear to be due more to a crackdown by state agents than on reform.

In the World Bank's 2010 "Ease of Doing Business," which measures the tax and regulatory burden imposed by the state, Brazil ranks 129 out of 183 countries, down from 127 in 2009. It is far behind Chile (49), Mexico (51) and China (89). The country gets especially bad grades in the categories of starting a business, paying taxes, employing workers and securing construction permits.

There are other worrying signs. In an interview with Journal reporters the day before last week's conference, Mr. Batista celebrated an increase in protectionism by praising a new "Brazilian content law" for the tankers he builds. "We used to have the second largest ship-building capacity in the world and it was totally scrapped under the liberal view, 'oh, let's buy where it is cheaper,'" he said. "We used to ship mountains of iron ore, mountains of food to the world. It's coming back now because of oil and because of this Brazilian content rule."

This may be good for Mr. Batista. But it's not so good for Brazilians who will pay the price for the capital misallocation.

With the large oil finds off-shore and the government revenues they imply, Brazilian politicians now expect to be rolling in dough. That does not bode well for the possibility of containing their power. Nor does it suggest that long-suffering Brazilian entrepreneurs—notwithstanding Mr. Batista's success as an oil baron—are about to be liberated.
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ECrisis commends Chevron Texaco for shining lights on the perversion of justice by the Correa- Donziger team of greed to try to extort money from a company that deserves none of these challenges. the Hague panel ruled on a small portion of the long ago essential crime, still defended and enlarged by the Correa-Donziger team, that Rodrigo Borja, himself a Cuban communist, was fabulous to steal from Texaco about 20 years ago. It is one thing to correctly blame Borja and another entirely to end the racket of greed that Borja started and Correa promotes today. Ecuador continues to expand the primary lie that statism and state theft is great when it is never great and should not be expanded in to the state-backed racket it is today: 

BUSINESS

APRIL 4, 2010, 8:18 P.M. ET

The Wall Street Journal
Chevron Suit Data Questioned
U.S. Scientist Says He Didn't Write Reports Attributed to Him on Pollution in the Rainforest
By BEN CASSELMAN And ANGEL GONZALEZ
An American scientist who provided key evidence against Chevron Corp. in a multibillion-dollar environmental lawsuit now says he didn't write reports attributed to him that found high levels of pollution in the Ecuadorean rainforest.

In fact, the scientist, Charles Calmbacher, said that although he found some contamination at the sites he examined, it was not as serious as the reports indicated.

The scientist's new claims, made in a deposition released by Chevron, are the latest twist in a long-running and complex legal battle.

Natives of Ecuador's oil-producing Amazon region have sued Chevron for environmental damage they say was caused by Texaco Inc. in the 1970s and 1980s. Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, denies the claims.

In 2004, the plaintiffs hired Mr. Calmbacher, a Georgia-based biologist and environmental scientist, to help oversee soil and water tests in Ecuador.

Reports signed by Mr. Calmbacher, which were submitted to an Ecuadorean court in 2005, showed high levels of toxins at two sites and estimated the contamination would cost more than $40 million to clean up at these sites alone.

His findings were among the evidence used by a court-appointed expert who in 2008 estimated Chevron's liability in the case at more than $27 billion.

But in a sworn deposition last week, Mr. Calmbacher said he didn't write the reports submitted over his signature, which said the sites were highly polluted and needed remediation.

While he did find some evidence of contamination, Mr. Calmbacher said, he didn't determine more remediation was necessary and didn't calculate clean-up costs.

"I concluded that I did not see significant contamination that posed immediate threat to the environment or to humans or wildlife around it," Mr. Calmbacher said, according to a transcript provided by Chevron.

Mr. Calmbacher didn't respond to messages left at his home and office Friday and Sunday.

Steven Donziger, a New York-based attorney for the plaintiffs, said Mr. Calmbacher's reports were only a small part of the overall case, and that other tests have shown contamination at dozens of sites.

"There's a substantial amount of evidence that shows these sites are highly contaminated," Mr. Donziger said. "I think the real focus of this trial is who's responsible."

Chevron's decision to release Mr. Calmbacher's testimony appears to be part of a strategy by the company to call into question the legitimacy of the trial in Ecuador, which Chevron has argued in court papers and public statements has been tainted by interference from the executive branch. Representatives of Ecuador's government have denied interference.

The company has said it expects to lose the case in Ecuador but plans to challenge enforcement of any ruling in the U.S., where it is the second-largest oil company by revenue.

In the deposition, Mr. Calmbacher said the plaintiffs stopped paying his bills in late 2004 and eventually dismissed him from the case.

Last month, lawyers for Chevron sought permission from a U.S. federal court judge in Atlanta to interview Mr. Calmbacher because they had doubts about the reports' authenticity.

Andrea Neuman, the Chevron lawyer who conducted the deposition, said Chevron became suspicious after Mr. Calmbacher apparently misspelled his own name in letters to the Ecuadorean court asking for an extension in filing his reports.

In his deposition, Mr. Calmbacher said he had flown back to the U.S. early due to illness, and had therefore sent pre-signed pages back to Ecuador with the understanding his findings would be printed over his signature. But he said the reports that were filed didn't reflect his conclusions.

He said he never saw the final version of the reports that were submitted to the court until he was shown them during the deposition.

"I did not reach these conclusions and I did not write this report," he said in the deposition, which does not address the underlying data.

Ms. Neuman, the Chevron lawyer, said Mr. Calmbacher's claim could be evidence of fraud by the plaintiffs.

"This is a completely fabricated report with completely fabricated conclusions," she said.

In a written statement on Sunday, Karen Hinton, a spokeswoman for the plaintiffs, called Mr. Calmbacher's claims "bewildering" and said he had never previously objected to the reports, which she said were based on tests conducted by independent laboratories.

Moreover, she said, Chevron's own tests at the sites showed contamination, even after Texaco cleaned up the sites in the 1990s. Chevron disputes this.

Chevron said it will file Mr. Calmbacher's testimony in the Ecuadorean court this week.

The company said it has already submitted the deposition to an international arbitration panel that is hearing a related suit filed by Chevron against the government of Ecuador over the government's handling of the environmental dispute.
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ECrisis includes this story that betting about climate change and trading air or carbon is not the last best hope for environmental protection. It is a good thing to protect and keep clean the environment. It is not a good thing to game those sentiments:

Senators form bipartisan climate bill
By Kevin Sieff in Washington

March 29 2010       FINANCIAL TIMES Three senior US lawmakers are piecing together a sweeping bipartisan energy and climate bill, which looks set to include sweeteners to galvanize support among Republicans and industry groups.

The proposed legislation, encouraged by President Barack Obama, dilutes a climate bill that stalled last year in the Senate. The senators have hosted meetings with industry groups over the past two weeks, revealing details about their plan that would cap carbon emissions while expanding offshore oil drilling and nuclear power generation.

Nearly six months have passed since the Senate’s last climate bill failed to win over conservatives and moderates, a political stalemate that cast a shadow on America’s presence at the Copenhagen climate summit. But some Democrats say the passage of healthcare reform has opened the door for climate change legislation, while acknowledging tradeoffs will be needed to secure 60 Senate votes. “They know that to pass a comprehensive bill they will have to ease concerns of some special interests and mid-western senators whose states have manufacturing-oriented economies,” said Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal think-tank.

Environmental groups are divided over the bill, with some decrying the push to pre-empt existing state and federal greenhouse gas regulations. But many moderate groups are withholding judgment until the bill is introduced, saying concessions to industry bodies will be necessary. According to people briefed by the senators, the bill aims to cut carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 17 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050, largely by implementing separate caps on utilities and manufacturers. The federal government would sell separate pollution permits to each sector, using a “hard price collar” to limit greenhouse gas allowances to between $10 (£6.70) and $30 per ton, and committing to flood the market with credits if the price ceiling is exceeded.

The bill’s sponsors – John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat,  Joseph Lieberman, the Independent from Connecticut, and Lindsay Graham, the South Carolina Republican – said the new sectoral approach would begin imposing carbon caps on utilities in 2012 and  manufacturers in 2016.

The bill includes a new petrol tax, which would be passed on to consumers, though this could be vulnerable in the efforts to reach a compromise. By mentioning investment in conventional energy, the senators have elicited favourable responses from industry leaders,   including BP executives and lobbyists from the US Chamber of Commerce, who opposed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House of Representatives last spring. After meeting the senators, Bruce Josten, the chamber’s top lobbyist, said their efforts were “largely in sync” with industry targets.

Mr. Graham, distinguishing his legislation from last year’s bill, told reporters this month “the cap-and-trade bills in the House and Senate are dead” and would be replaced.

He hopes his sector-by-sector approach to regulation, unlike Waxman-Markey’s economy-wide cap, will help him save face among conservatives. His role in the bill’s formulation was itself in doubt after he said the Democrats’ handling of healthcare reform “poisoned the well” for bipartisan co-operation.

The senators hope to send details of the bill to the Environmental Protection Agency this week. The bill is likely to be introduced by late April. Despite bipartisan sponsors, its passage is not guaranteed. Last week, 10 Democratic senators said they would not support unlimited offshore oil exploration. Meanwhile some environmentalists said the bill would curb the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases.
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And this from the CPJ, which is helpful. The CPJ is factually wrong however that Correa operates under old media gag laws. Correa's new ALBA constitution of 9-08 gifts him with full powers to end open media and free speech. This is criminal. Correa's latest two part new gag laws are what the state and all its unionized functionaries apply- however inchoate to date- these gagging denials of free speech remain:

Committee to Protect Journalists  [CPJ]                Ecuadoran courts should reverse editor’s libel conviction
 
New York, March 29, 2010—An Ecuadoran appellate court should overturn the libel conviction of editor Enrique Palacio, and the country’s legislators should reform archaic defamation laws that do not meet international standards for freedom of expression, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Palacio was sentenced Friday to three years in prison in connection with a commentary about a senior government finance official.

The case stems from a defamation complaint filed in October 2009 by Camilo Samán, chairman of Corporación Financiera Nacional, a government agency that grants loans to small businesses, according to local press reports. In a commentary published in the Guayaquil-based daily El Universo on August 27, 2009, Palacio criticized Samán for sending bodyguards to the newspaper to complain about a story concerning the finance corporation, local press reports said. Samán claimed the commentary damaged his reputation.

In rendering its verdict, a court in the province of Guayas also ordered Palacio, op-ed editor of El Universo, to pay $10,000 in legal costs, press reports said. Palacio said he will appeal the verdict.

Ecuador’s outdated criminal defamation provisions haven been systematically used to punish critical journalists, CPJ research shows. Milton Nelson Chacaguasay Flores, director of the weekly publication La Verdad in the city of Machala, served four months in prison last year on libel charges. The case stemmed from a 2007 story accusing Finance Minister Francisco Quevedo Madrid of having links to a man charged in a nationwide Ponzi scheme.

On Sunday, the Quito-based newspaper El Comercio outlined a series of six recent criminal defamation accusations against Ecuadoran journalists.

“We call on Ecuadoran judicial authorities to overturn the conviction of journalist Enrique Palacio”, said Carlos Lauría, CPJ's senior Americas program coordinator. “Ecuadoran lawmakers should reform defamation laws that are out of step with international standards on freedom of expression.”

Ecuadoran law also runs counter to the emerging consensus in Latin America that civil remedies provide adequate redress in cases of alleged defamation. In December 2009, the Costa Rican Supreme Court eliminated prison terms for criminal defamation. One month earlier, in November 2009, the Argentine Congress repealed criminal defamation provisions in the penal code. And in April 2009, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal annulled the 1967 Press Law, a measure that had imposed harsh penalties for libel and slander.

March 29, 2010

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As it remains, the CPJ urges civil- domestic- remedies to crimes. In Ecuador, Correa tells us that his fabulous justice system is fully based, like his educational curricula, on Cuban justice now under his Cuban-ALBA constitution, if you ever get around to growing up and reading it. Ecuador now has Cuban justice.

How is that working out for the souls locked inside Cuba's communist slave holding hell? Feeling good about your love affair with the Castros yet? Still manipulating yourself and your family to pretend that Cuba is fantastic when it is a pustule on the world today? An island of evil that sucks tax payer monies while selling so called doctors that are not trained to do much but apply salve and spy on one and all? You will not feel so good when Correa's tens of thousands of paid by you , communist Cubans are.....staring you down for amputations of your soul.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis