Christmas is
creeping on us and the barrage of parties began in earnest this week,
tonight was my companies so I will not have time to post very long.
If there is one document everyone should read
is this one
by German born Heinz Dieterich who lives in Mexico, one of the
“theorist” of the revolution, who is extremely lucid in his analysis
from the political aspects to the economic aspects. Perhaps it helps to
be removed from it all to view things so lucidly. For those that don’t
speak Spanish, some highlights:
On the reasons for the defeat:
¨The National Assembly
The
main cause of the defeat in Venezuela is the vertical system for the
conduction of the Bolivarian process. This is evident in its three
formal instances, in which the president has no counterweight
whatsoever: the Parliament, the Cabinet and the party. The Parliament
is essentially a resonance box of the presidential will where the
Deputies, controlled by the three “foremen” say yes to everything that
is proposed even if it is unworkable. The responsibility of this lies
in considerable part on the oficialists deputies who don’t want to lose
their perks.¨
"The warning signs: The ides of March
The
product that they pretended to sell to the people, the constitutional
reform was deficient. In fact, so deficient that it only managed to
convince one fourth of the electorate. It had absurd tactical clauses
such as increasing the presidential term from six to seven years,
unviable economic elements like the six hour workday and structural
proposals, like refounding the State on communal councils whose
implementation presupposed the existence of a revolutionary
dictatorship in Venezuela which the conditions are not given for.
Finally,
Ditereich writes the most lucid description of the country’s economic
conditions that I Have seen coming from of the pro-Chavez side:
¨Officialdom
has turned into taboo macroeconomic debate. Nevertheless, any economist
(note the any!) can infer from the functional equilibria necessary for
a market economy, that a problem s going to blow up. Inflation, already
around 18%, will receive a new surge of additional injection for the
purchasing power (liquidity) by the end of the year and will require
afterwards a considerable cool down period, which the opposition will
take advantage of. Administrative prices (defined by the State) and
price regulations for basic foodstuffs, foreign currency and the
internal consumption of energy, increasingly distort more everyday the
relationships between supply and demand and make the economy
uncontrollable, causing black markets, corruption, bureaucracy and
scarcity.
Unfortunately, Dieterich´s conclusions call for doing things that go against Chavez´personality, a bad omen for the future of the autocrat
