Randomly Noted

Hugo Chavez will be happy to know that for a price, the following url is available: www.totalitarian.com.

The Venezuelan president announced during his Sunday TV program that he plans to create his own blog so that he can communicate with the world. He plans to respond to questions from both supporters and critics. “I’m going to have my own battle trench on the Internet,” he declared.

So, is this akin to “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em?” Chavez recently suggested his government would look for ways to control the Internet after charging that anyone who criticized him by using Twitter, the Internet or even text messaging was engaging in “terrorism.”

No start date was announced for the blog.

There’s a different kind of Sun King who rules Venezuela (the other sunny fellow was a guy named Louis and he was the 14th in France).   When thinking about the way Hugo runs things south of the border, remember that song said to be inspired by a vamp Lola Montez: whatever Lola wants, Lola gets. Replace the name “Lola” with “Hugo.”

My fellow blogger Gabriella Stern wrote earlier about Hugo Chavez and his threat to take over a Toyota production plant in his country. (Click here to see Gabby’s blog.) We now see Hugo & Co. is asking the U.S. to extradite a banker that a Venezuelan judge earlier this month released because the banker had been held in jail too long. Lola, I mean Hugo, wasn’t happy by that decision. The judge was arrested and the Venezuelan president with the sunny disposition said she (the judge) ought to be jailed for 30 years for letting him go. This isn’t to say this banker did good things. He’s accused of defrauding the central bank in Venezuela. But then again, he deserves his day in court and it hasn’t happened.

With all the flaws we think we have with our political and legal systems, we don’t have presidents jailing judges because they don’t agree with a decision. Happy Holidays, Hugo. And let’s hope the U.S. just ignores that extradition request.

Here’s the story from Newswires reporter Dan Molinski:

Continue reading…

Venezuela boss Hugo Chavez has struck again: now he’s threatening to seize Toyota Motor’s Venezuelan vehicle assembly plant if the Japanese auto maker doesn’t make a “rustic” car poor people in the country can afford to buy. The “Chinese,” he said, can produce a people’s car if Toyota fails to comply. This Chavism comes as the country’s power supply is so woeful that earlier this week the president had to order factories and shopping malls to cut electricity usage by 20%. Chavez has tended to expropriate or threaten to grab foreign oil assets. His attacks on foreign non-oil assets have tended to target small potatoes – such as coffee production plants. By shifting his sites to giant Toyota, Chavez takes his particular brand of economically ruinous populism to a new level. So, here’s a question: If you’re a foreign firm, do you invest in Venezuela or shift your money elsewhere? When China does something despotic, overseas investors adjust but persevere, knowing they can’t afford not to bet their futures on China’s vast, increasingly affluent population as well as its still-cheap labor force. Venezuela’s much smaller and less crucial; the Toyota gambit will hurt foreign direct investment.

Venezuela’s economy shrank 4.5% in the third quarter, so the country’s boss is going to change how gross domestic product is measured: “We simply can’t permit that they continue calculating GDP with the old capitalist method,” he said in a televised speech to members of his socialist party. “Capitalist calculations,” the president said, don’t take into account socialist-style economic activity – such as visits to subsidized medical centers in which money doesn’t change hands.  Nor, he says, does capitalist methodology adjust for a government’s decision to cut oil production to support prices, as the Chavez regime has done. Those awful capitalists were likewise responsible for the 2.4% contraction in Venezuela’s economy in the second quarter. One would almost feel sorry for the President if his socialist calculations weren’t so utterly flawed and his government so unfriendly to investors and entrepreneurs.

President Hugo Chavez is vowing to take 154 FM radio stations off the air and threatening to shut down cable-TV providers, reports DJN colleague Darcy Crowe. We shouldn’t be surprised, of course. Chavez has been fighting the private media for many years. Among other things, he has pledged to take Venezuela’s only nationwide private 24-hour news channel off the air. Why? Because it’s critical of the president, Crowe writes. The president’s plan to clobber private radio and TV players comes wrapped in official-sounding rationales: All those radio stations haven’t turned in required broadcasting license renewals. Some of the cable systems have interfered with broadcasts by state-run news channels, including Chavez’s favorite, Telesur, the president alleges. As Crowe writes, “Telesur has become a key public and foreign relations tool for Chavez: the state-run news channel broadcasts throughout the region with a decisive leftist tilt.” Readers of this blog will recall that Chavez has also been cracking down on certain non-media companies and industries for purportedly undermining state-run interests. He’s nothing if not consistent.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is threatening to seize a Parmalat dairy plant because it’s producing below capacity. DJN’s Darcy Crowe reports the factory is equipped to produce 285,000 liters of dairy products (presumably milk) each day but is generating 60% of that. Not a crime in most economies, but in Chavez’s Venezuela, milk is political. The country’s consumer-protection overseers are irate about Parmalat’s behavior and – tellingly – so are the bosses of a government-run dairy company. It seems pasteurized milk is subject to price controls whereas skim milk and other unregulated products aren’t. Parmalat’s government-run competitors have a vested interest in ensuring their private rival produces as much low-margin pasteurized milk as possible.  Continue reading…