Monday, April 18, 2005

The McCarthyst list exists by Teodoro Petkoff The McCarthyst list exists by Teodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual The President, from the Guayana region, ordered Governors, Mayors and Ministers to “file and bury Tascon's list”, that McCarthyist piece that makes these revolutionaries relatives of that North American Senator that unleashed a “witch hunt” in his country in the 50’s. Chavez says that “that moment is left behind” that “the famous list surely fulfilled an important role at a certain time, but that is past”. The President told us that he had received letters that “make me think that still in some spaces they have Tascòn’s list on the table to determine whether a person will or not work” “A confesión de partes, relevo de pruebas” (When people confess, you need no proof) Mr. Prosecutor, can you, with the diligence that is customary in you, begin to act? It is only a matter of guaranteeing the respect of the rights and constitutional guarantees, like the Constitution says. The shamelessness of the “process” has no parallel. The President of the country himself, the highest functionary in the nation, the number one public servant, admits-without blushing or shame- that in his “revolution” a list of political preferences is used to give or take jobs away. And that before-and this is perhaps worse- it had full justification: “It filled an important role”, to say it with his own words. What was that role, Mr. President? To scare, to threaten, to coerce those that were on the list so that, for example, they would not exercise their right to vote against you? What other role could it have been? You see, Mr. Prosecutor, there is material. And if you are lacking it, look again at the “bicha” (Constitution) You don’t even have to read it all In article 3, so that I don’t have to go far, it reads: “the State has as its essential end the defense, and the development of the person and the respect for his dignity, the democratic exercise of popular will, the building of a just society which is peace loving, the promotion of prosperity and well being of the people and the guarantee of fulfilling the principles rights and obligations recognized and consecrated in this Constitution”. But the height of cynicism is that of Deputy Adolfo Tascon, that outstanding student of Jose Vicente Rangel. “My intention was never to persecute anyone. That is not revolutionary behavior, that is fascist behavior”, says Little Adolph. And he adds that he withdrew his masterpiece-the list- from his webpage, once the recall vote was over. That is, once it “fulfilled an important role” What is clear is the existence of the list and its use-cowardly, lowly, illegitimate-it is a crime and the state is obligated to correct what happened during that period that began before August 2004 and it only admitted publicly recently via the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela himself and by Adolfo Tascon If the Prosecutor- and his buddies of the Citizens Power, that is Mundarain and Clodosvaldo- need something more to act, it should be sufficient that they jump to Article 21, paragraph 2: “Will adopt positive measures in favor of groups that may be discriminated, segregated or vulnerable, will specially protect those persons that for one of the reasons specified before, will find itself in manifest weakness and WILL SANCTION the abuses and mistreatment that is committed against them" You can Mr. Prosecutor, you only need the will. This story will continue. 4:26:38 PM    comment []

A true enemy by Ibsen Martinez (or The Devil's Excrement revisited) This is a somewhat long article in today’s El Nacional (page A-9), since it is quite interesting and goes right to the spirit and origin of the title of this blog and most people don’t have access to El Nacional, I thought it was worth translating. A true enemy by Ibsen Martinez (My subtitle: The Devil’s Excrement revisited) What the hell does oil have that it poisons? This is the question that many Venezuelans, Indonesians, Nigerians Algerians, Mexicans and Iranians born in the XXth. century have asked themselves at some point, without finding an answer. “No, don’t devote yourself to study OPEC” said Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo (The Venezuelan lawyer considered to be the “father” of the cartel of producers), to the US researcher that interviewed him one day in the seventies. “Opec is a boring matter-he added- You should study preferably what oil does to Venezuela; what it is doing with all of us” The fierce paradox of the petrostate-archetypical of the rich country, according to modern imagination-lies in its inability to deal with the turbulences that windfalls bring win time, and in their propensity to flog its citizens with all sorts of misfortunes. The most painful and ironic of all of them being extreme poverty. Judging from the fruits of her labor, Terry Lynn Karl, fruitfully followed the advice by the father of OPEC. In 1997, the University of California at Berkeley published her book “The paradox of plenty: Oil booms and petro-states”. (Not available yet in Spanish). This book can be read as a physiology of the petroleum state, understanding the latter, as a very special case of the mining states. In a little cited chapter of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith called attention for the first time, about the specific differences that make mineral wealth a class of wealth in itself. What Karl has found, throughout research carried out over a decade shows additionally, how petro-states not only do not share the characteristics of mining states, nor those of manufacturing or agricultural countries of the industrial or developed world, whose products are not limited, nor are as “intensive” in capital, nor are so dominated by external variables, as is the case with oil. Petrostates erected themselves, obviously, over what was there before the oil industry appeared in those nations. In the majority of cases, the oil industry encountered the same thing that, around 1911, was found in Venezuela, a legacy of institutional weakness and of extreme administrative laxity. It can be said, that at the beginning of the XXth. Century, after almost a century of cruel internal wars, when the first advanced parties of oil exploration arrived in our country, the modern Venezuelan state had not begun to take shape. The oil industry gave it, in great measure, its definite shape, whether good or bad. The way in which the states “earns its living-Karl tells us-is decisive in its patterns of industrialization”. But, it almost never fails, that the way in which the state collects its resources, creates incentives as well. Sometimes these can be unimaginable, as they impose preferences on the Governments when it comes time to “redistribute”. And with them, perverse restrictions are created to the available policies to fight poverty, for example, or insure education and free health care for the population. In the case of petrostates, everything that would be bad on its own, gets worse because the way in which they “earn their living” is exposed, on top of that, to a circumstance inherent to the nature of the oil business itself: the cycles, the alternation of booms and the dry spells. Since 1922, Venezuela has gone through various booms. Prof. Karl analyzes the two most recent ones, that of 1973, that followed the oil embargo decreed by OPEC (?) and the one that followed in 1983. Today, many Venezuelans accept that it was corruption, rampant in those years of the “Saudi Venezuela”, which was the overwhelming cause for Hugo Chavez’ ascent to power. Karl focused her analysis on the performance of Venezuela during the booms of 1973 and of 1983, to compare it with the other oil exporting countries subject to the same pressures and temperatures that a boom in the price of oil can introduce in the economic system of a petrostate. Some of the petrosates considered by Karl are members of OPEC, most of which arose from the decolonization process that followed World War II, such as Indonesia, Nigeria or Algeria. Others are Hispano-American, born at the beginning of the XIXth. century like Ecuador. Karl considers also the performance of a non Arab Islamic nation, as is the case of Iran. The result? Different countries, different social and economic structures, different cultures and the same ills. And the same inept answers with equally paradoxical effects of indebtness and growing poverty. Karl discerns two “conducts” that petrostates follow in periods of windfall. One pertains to the jurisdiction and authority of a petrostate, that all petrostates that go thorugh a boom tend to expand their jurisdiction, to find new areas of “competence” where they exert their action in deficient fashion. Or where they refuse to move aside, as long as they can neutralize economic agents. Their rulers fall with frequency in a manic phase and come ask their citizens to give them special powers to allow them to surround the historical inefficiencies of the petrostate, in order to better confront the happy contingency of a boom. Thanks to the windfall, we can now do everything; as a consequence, everything must be done. Thus, there appears, without order or coordination, new competences, new jurisdictions, new agencies. Inside those petrostates, those competences, jurisdictions and agencies fight bloody battles for the control of the huge resources, battles which weaken even more the institutional fabric and favor the concentration of powers, the legal vacuum and last, but not least, corruption. The announcement of the reactivation of the economy by President Chavez immediately after his victory in the recall referendum last August 15th, contemplated the creation of a new state airline, and of various new ministries in charge of “social programs”, one of which changed names and Minister in less than 48 hours. Car sales have grown in surprising fashion, so have the sale of private airplanes and the real state registry contains transactions for amounts unheard of in quite a long time. As to poverty, between 2000 and 2003, without strident populism, nor a belligerent nationalism, Chile reduced poverty in 1.8% to reach 18.8% (since 1990 it has gone down 50%), while Venezuela is the country in Latin America where poverty is growing the fastest and according to the Catholic University Andres Bello, there are today two million more people in poverty than when Chavez was elected President. In Venezuela, social policies limit themselves to spending money with a clientist propagandistic criteria and huge assistential inefficiency. All of this at the same time that PDVSA, the country’s state company announced revenues of US$ 30 billion in 2004 alone. Many foresee in the current increase of conspicuous consumption in Venezuela, the birth of a new caste of millionaire contractors associated with public expenditure and reminiscent of the Saudi Venezuela that followed the boom in prices in 1973. Is the so called “bolibourgeois”. The “diplomacy of crude” inaugurated by Venezuela in the English speaking Caribbean region during the times of all-powerful Carlos Andres Perez is experiencing a resurgence. Lately, the demential largesse of the Venezuelan Government is directed towards the Southern Cone and it has taken it to buy Argentinean debt or finance a sub regional TV channel. The other conduct that a petrostate undergoing an oil boom displays, is to appeal to international credit to avoid the conflicts that collecting taxes at a time of a windfall entails. These bond issues of the country are backed by oil revenues and are justified as operation with little risk “because we have oil for quite a while”. It happened in Venezuela in past booms and is happening again. The book by Prof. Karl ends with a comparative study between the performance of those countries mentioned and that of a relatively poor European country, but one which is institutionally mature, and that has been able to confront the discovery of a sudden oil richness, without being catastrophically affected by it, like we Indonesians, Nigerians, Algerians and Venezuelans have: Norway. The above seems relevant when one thinks that despite the political cataclysm that overcame Venezuela in 1998, and despite the official rhetoric, the populist petrostate, monstrously inept and monstrously corrupt that Chávez fought only to inherit it, is still alive. The Venezuelan petrostate, unscathed in the middle of the boom we are undergoing – the most sustained one of the last fifty years- with its sequel of wastefulness, of subsidized ineptitude and of corruption is, perhaps more than yanqui imperialism, the true threat and the true enemy of the Bolivarian “revolution”. 3:34:21 PM    comment []