When ration cards are an economic best option

I guess long time readers of this blog may blanch at the title, but bear with me a tad longer.


I have stopped living regularly in Yaracuy but I am in close touch. I still hold a home there. So checking things when I came back from my recent trip overseas I learned what is simply a staggering piece of news.

Now people need to register for a list of food items, namely the most wanted list of regulated basic staples: corn flour, corn oil, chicken and a half dozen more. The system will work as follow.

Somebody will come to your home and will register you and how many live there. Then, as items become available, someone will visit you in advance and you need to pay. You will get informed at what date delivery will come and you will need to have someone at home to receive the goods. These goods cannot be purchased anymore at any store in Yaracuy. You can only get them through registration at your local town hall and receive them either through home delivery or neighborhood distribution. Apparently local branches of PDVAL and MERCAL will simply close.

I could not get all the details as it seems they sort of vary according to the type of neighborhood you live in. One contact got a distribution of corn flour and chicken at the end of the street just because the consejo comunal knew she lived there (she had registered anyway). Another one has duly registered early in January. Once she received black beans after a two weeks delay after paying for them (200 Bs, 2 dimes!). Another time she got corn flour and mayo or something.

What is wrong with this picture?

First, the apparent commodity of having home delivery is an excuse: you can control better on an individual basis who gets what and remind them of that each and every time,

Second, the state can do significant "savings" on goods availability. Indeed, being absent from Yaracuy during this registration process I cannot purchase anything and I am sure that registering after the fact is not going to be easy. Never mind that if there is nobody home when you are visited at putting the order time, well, you get no delivery. And the better if delivery is when, say, you are at work.

Third, this is a monstrously complicated and expensive system to set in place. A ration card system with an assigned store would be much simpler and cheaper, if you must ration. Hence the title of this post.

Fourth, it is extremely sectarian and anti business. Of course. Not only stores are now forbidden to sell certain type of goods but you cannot buy certain type of goods out of your living areas. Soon enough we move on to conditions like soviet areas where people in certain cities had access to more varied type of goods than folks in small towns and country side where nobody could visit and thus could figure out what was going on. A little bit more and you will need a permit to travel between San Felipe and Caracas.

Why, oh why?

Julio Leon Heredia is Yaracuy governor and he is a fascist. I do not know as of this typing if other states are having such schemes set up, but I would not be surprised at all that Yaracuy is ahead of the pack.  This is quite along the lines of the autocratic mentality of Heredia, someone blocked to any dialogue and who in addition is still in shock at the loss of his own brother election in December 6 and who is probably delighted at punishing the Yaracuy people that did not vote for him at a 80% rate. It is just that simple, I know the character, I have already been a victim of his administration.

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A confusing but clarifying week

With the National Assembly swearing-in show and the collateral that came next Venezuela has experienced one of its most confusing weeks - but maybe one of its best ones-

Saddamization

The thread at the N.A. is simple. Chavismo could not find a way to stop its coming Götterdämmerung. So they came, saw and left. They could not avoid their first encounter with a free press in about a decade. Some of the questions were truly embarrassing like when a journalist was finally able to stand on the way of Cilia Flores and ask her about her narco-nephews. Not her nephews in jail in the US awaiting trial, but her NARCO-nephews, straight. This is what happens when you ignore and insult the press for so many years: they get so frustrated that they lose any sense of measure or respect. And poor Cilia, the "first fighter", the wife of president Maduro, had to pick up her pace to escape.

But this bringing down of Cilia was just the beginning of an iconoclastic binge. In the early morning next day the new chair of the N.A. Ramos Allup brought down all the portraits of Chavez that overwhelmed the decor. For good measure he also had brought down the computer created image of Bolivar out of his 200 year old remains. This necrophiliac endeavor from Chavez had become the new official portrait of Bolivar although there is a an existing portrait which was approved by Bolivar himself.

This carefully orchestrated act of Ramos Allup had the desired effect, an overreaction of chavismo which will cost it dearly. It included a lengthy military show in cadena (forced simultaneous broadcast on ALL networks and radios) to "desagravio"  redress/repair the insult made to Bolivar even though the bulk of the actions was in defense of Chavez who is, apparently, more insulted than Bolivar.

It is hard to imagine that the totalitarian mentality of these people could be exposed so well in such short notice. General Padrino wanted to impress on us that the computer Bolivar was now encrusted deep into the heart of all of us. How could it be otherwise, he implied. And this meant that Bolivar was insulted through insults to Chavez as the favorite "insigne" son of Bolivar (even if he never got 50% of the electorate to vote for him, even with his higher scores in votes cast). That there is no food or medicine after Chavez is not making a dent in these people who keep their idols up.  Hence the brilliant move of Ramos Allup, starting to tear down that mental construct that is blocking any progress for the country.

More details emerged to confirm that need. The mayor of Caracas announced that the whole city will be papered over with copies of the discarded portraits. Funds for that will apparently not be a problem. As to where will he find the paper and ink for that endeavour remains to be explained. Other chavistas suggested that all chavista households should have well displayed Bolivar and Chavez, a new version of the yellow star I suppose for those who do not harbor the "insigne" badge.

Meanwhile Ramos Allup forges ahead and went alone to Quinta Crespo market for his week's groceries, to the great wonderment of el pueblo not used to see chavista nomenklatura shop on their own (even if he had to leave in a hurry after red storm troopers arrived). Whatever criticism people throw at Ramos, and many are from the opposition itslef, we must thank him for breaking a taboo. The idolization of Chavez will never be the same.

The government thread is briefer: they have lost the capacity to set the political agenda and their race is to keep up with what the MUD and R.A. do. I am not going into the expected Greek chorus that want already to nullify the N.A. and jail R.A. I am just going to look at what happened at Miraflores. There Maduro named a new cabinet which kept military in the main positions, and the ones that move the most money. Some cryptic moderates under the guise of people with experience in the private sector were appointed. And to balance it all a social sciences major with nebulous ideas on economy and zero experience is the alleged new star.

But the new cabinet is more interesting through what is missing: some of Cabello heavy weights even though he still has his wife as tourism minister. Some see in that a real weakening of Cabello who, stripped of his power base at the N.A. and the refusal by the army to follow him in a coup on December 6, may be just on his way out. Perhaps even as a token offering to the DEA in a near future? All is possible but I also concur that Cabello's day are counted unless he finds new support that these days could only come from forgiveness of an opposition that he has brutalized for too long. In a way Cabello aura of invincibility is another icon that was brought down this week. After all since December 6 he was threatening and threatening and yet in the end he had to surrender the N.A. seat and could not stop its first measures, ridiculing himself by threatening the N.A. to leave it without funding.

As the first true week of the Assembly looms we may expect more surprises, the more so that it seems resolved in promoting first an amnesty law which could be the final showdown into forcing the regime to compromise,or to surrender. The final release of Leopoldo Lopez in the streets maybe too much for the regime to endure without breaking down. We will see.

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Capitalism as seen from chavismo

Chavistas have an odd way to look at capitalism. On one hand they are the most savage of capitalist, looting the national treasury in a way that would make blush the worst robber barons of the XIX century. Robber barons who would, by the way, leave at least a track of material achievements behind them, or at least will endowments; something yet to be seen by our home grown barons who limit themselves to subsidize equestrian joints where they can show off their own horses. Ain't it so Andrade?  But if on one hand they have no problem white washing 2 billions in Andorra or refuse to account on how the government "lawfully" spent 12 billion through HSBC, they have no problem telling us how bad capitalism is.

None will reach the summit of Chavez saying that capitalism destroyed life on Mars (yes, the planet) but gems of idiocy keep popping up. Maduro is a particularly well talented student for whom I have high hopes that he will come up with something even worse than the Mars idiocy. His latest account on how capitalism changed Venezuela in the last 100 years is for the annals. You will find out the following:


- 100 years of capitalism have estranged people from the countryside and thus there is a need for "urban agricultural revolution" which will be of course properly equipped with a very urban and capitalistic ministry  of urban agriculture. Wits like me think that a ministry of urbane culture may be useful in today's Venezuela but what do we know.

- I have to semi agree on something with him. He says that capitalism has imposed on us an "unproductive and parasitic lifestyle". If certainly his lifestyle and the one of most chavismo is unproductive and parasitic, I could not agree more, he should still tell us who built all the infrastructure they found when they arrived into office in 1999 and that they have left to rot since.

- Where he gets more offensive is in his misunderstanding of the whole system, or worse, his refusal to understand and learn. For example capitalism has turned all us into consumers, we are not producers anymore. So he stresses his ignorance as to what is produced must come out of thin air. He cannot even stick to a traditional commie way of enslavement through debt.

- And to finish with a flurry he takes Japan as an example of what can be done against that dependency culture of capitalism. Supposedly Japan has reached its agricultural "frontier", whatever that means. But in Maduro's mind it means that Japan has run out of places where to produce food so the huddled masses have taken to produce whatever they can to avoid starvation. From their balconies to their backyards they grow what it takes, including chickens in "vertical coops", the same ones that Chavez long ago promoted (maybe these pesky Japanese imitators stole the idea from Chavez?). Certainly Maduro ignores that the obsession for freshness in certain Asian cultures makes people want to buy they chicken live to kill and pluck at home, or that they will only trust their favorite fruit/herb only if grown under their watchful eyes. But it is not a matter of anyone explaining that to Maduro, I have the feeling that like Chavez he could not care less for veracity.

We did learn something through: Nicolas and Cilia have Wonderhen. They get all the eggs they need from a single hen they raise in a corner of Miraflores palace (I assume as the place was not specified). And they are delicious. The best!

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It is not truth or dare in Caracas, it is scream and dare

One has to wonder, and somehow admire, the chutzpah of Maduro promising to go all the way through his signature collection to bring them to Panama and humiliate Obama. That nearly magnificent obsession clogs everything else in the state news, even though the whole world already knows that most of those signatures in Venezuelan have been drawn under pressure, something that does not seem to register in chavismo. We are actually getting war reports: "we reached 6.2 millions signatures today", highlighting the exquisite love of chavismo for decimal points as if that detail made the numbers more trustworthy...

Beach, red, storms...........

The latest today is that Maduro found it to be a great idea to send squads of PSUV militants to the beaches of Venezuela, crowded for the Holy Week holidays, to ask scantily clad people to sign up...  I wonder whether there is any sense of ridicule left anywhere inside chavismo. Don't they realize that declaring the need to go to pester people at the beach is itself an admission that the signature drive has not been the success they hoped for?

For good measure Maduro also decided that March 9 (Obama's executive order date) should be declared from now on "anti imperialistic day" or something like that. I hope it is a paid holiday just in between Carnival and Easter week!  You know, those 5 weeks of lent can be long...


And for a final flourish we had the vice president, you know, that commie nerd that made it to the top by marrying one Chavez daughters, say that those who do not sign are "cowards" and "traitors/landless" (apatrida in Venezuela means both now). I suppose I should start packing a small bag for when I am sent to the Gulags, the only thing left for Arreaza to do. He even had the intellectual laziness to state that in 1987 the current left in office supported then president Lusinchi against Colombia. That is true except that there was actually a Colombian warship in Venezuelan waters whereas today the closest Marine to Venezuela is in US territory in Guantanamo. I think that there is a difference but then again I may be wrong.

I suspect that all of this hysteria today may not even be controlled anymore from Cuba, that it has taken a life of its own. It follows naturally the invectives sent to Felipe Gonzalez that I narrated yesterday (to which he refused to answer by saying "I would not know how to lower myself in such ways", mépris suprême).  But I certainly was right, Gonzalez is just the first salvo of a clear message to Maduro "pipe it down or even UNASUR is going to drop you".   Ex president of Chile, socialist Ricardo Lagos, said yesterday that UNASUR needs to work harder at figuring out a solution for Venezuela. I cannot stress enough he did not say that without tacit agreement from President Bachelet who for all her closeted leftist love has better things to do than dealing with Venezuela. He evens goes one step further by naming Samper to work harder when the creep said a couple of days ago that the whole of Latin America should reevaluate its relation with the US. Yeah, right, Chile is going to commit economical suicide to please Samper and his collection of spoiled brats.... One wonders whether Samper is really that stupid. or that bitter against the US for never restoring its visa.

The fact of the matter is that there is concerted effort by non official means (ex presidents, notables) to send a message to Venezuela, Cuba and even UNASUR: "enough is enough, don't you dare to screw up the OAS Panama summit and don't you dare put at risk our trade relations with the US. If you are flat broke, no credit, and no respect, it is not our fault". And if in the next days nothing improves do not be surprised if more "official" means begin to be employed. NOTE: that does not mean at all that these countries like the US, it simply means that they like their wallet better than they like Venezuela.

Now we are left to watch how far is Maduro decided to go. But he has been warned that there will be consequences.

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Note: written while listening to Tallis's Spem in Alium. Don't ask.

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Do not think it that far from chavista land to the Islamic State

Find the 7 differences:

You could not? You won! There are no differences!

They share the same mental construct, those that rewrite or destroy history because they do not like it, because it is not convenient, or because they are idiots. Be they the chavistas who tumbled down the statue of Columbus in Caracas on October 2004, or ISIS fighters trashing the archeological museum at Mosul, they are the same crap. Nor do they care whether the pieces are original: what matters is the iconoclastic gesture. And if truly worthy pieces like in Bamiyan must be blown up, so be it.

What separates for now chavista jack asses from ISIS murderers is just  a matter of crime intensity and the specifics. In the end they are both the product of fundamentalist alienation.

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De Colón al estado Islamico

Encontrar las 7 diferencias:

¿No pudo? ¡Ganó! No hay diferencias.

Es el mismo constructo mental, los que destruyen la historia porque no les gusta, no les conviene, o porque son brutos. Sean los chavistas idiotizados tumbando la estatua de Colón en Caracas o sean los Islamistas destruyendo el museo arqueológico de Mosul, es la misma mierda. Lo único que cambia es la magnitud y peculiaridad de los crímenes. El fondo es la misma alienación fundamentalista.

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