Monthly Archives: December 2011

Dec
8
2011
Posted by
admin
Comments

Chávez’s Campaign Dirty Tricks Reveal a More Sinister Side

JDSC 0754 150x150 Chávez’s Campaign Dirty Tricks Reveal a More Sinister Sideosé R. Cárdenas served in several foreign policy positions during the George W. Bush administration (2004-2009), including on the National Security Council staff. He is a consultant with Vision Americas in Washington, DC.

Even as the world marvels at the ways in which social media can work to undermine undemocratic regimes, the flip side is that the same new communications technologies can be exploited by those regimes to further repress and control their populations.

As U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Michael Posner recently noted, “We are seeing a growing number of repressive regimes get hold of the latest, greatest Western technologies and use them to spy on their own citizens for the purpose of quashing peaceful political dissent or even information that would allow citizens to know what is happening in their communities.”

Indeed, the opportunities have not been lost on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.  Ahead of the 2012 Venezuelan presidential election, his loyalists have begun employing such technologies to hack into the websites and Twitter accounts of his political opponents and other critics.

Already, the website and Twitter accounts of candidates Henrique Capriles Radonski and Diego Arria have been hacked, as well as those of prominent pollster Luis Vicente León, journalists, opposition news sites like LaPatilla.com, and numerous other sites and Twitter accounts of Chávez critics.

The hackings range from posting vitriolic comments against the opposition to more subtle faux posts meant to foment internal discord and division among the opposition. One hacker group calling itself N33 even uses a chavista red beret as its calling card.

One could be tempted to dismiss such hacking as typical chavista political dirty tricks that should surprise no one. From his first re-election, Chávez and his supporters have employed every measure legal or illegal to tilt the political playing field in his favor.

Yet, there are ominous signs that this is just the tip of the technological iceberg when it comes to the government invading citizens’ privacy and monitoring their actions, movements, and political orientation.

According to Anthony Daquin, a Venezuelan computer engineer who formerly advised the Venezuelan Ministry of Interior and Justice, the Chávez government is working with Cuba to implement a new electronic national identity system that would allow the government to instantly monitor private and sensitive personal information on each Venezuelan citizen, including how much they earn, where they live, what property they own, and what their political leanings are.

Daquin, who is seeking political asylum in the United States, told Miami’s El Nuevo Herald that he had a falling out with the government and its Cuban advisors when he objected to the new technology because of how it could be abused by gathering sensitive data about a person without their consent.

Chávez long ago outsourced the management of Venezuelan national identity cards and passports to the Cubans, who have developed an enormous data base of information about Venezuelans that will now be transferred to their identity cards using an embedded microchip that can be monitored – a technology, known as RFID, that has generated protests from privacy advocates around the world.

Clearly, the Cuban hand betrays a nefarious purpose in the introduction of such technologies to Venezuela. The Castro regime has succeeded in only one thing in its 50 years in power: controlling its citizens. Whether it is hacking the websites and Twitter accounts of the Venezuelan opposition and other Chávez critics or managing the national identity card system, there is no other purpose but to help maintain Chávez and his successors in perpetual power.

Systematic violations of privacy remind us of the significant obstacles that confront Venezuela’s democratic opposition in trying to unseat Hugo Chávez at the ballot box. They also are a stark reminder of the long-term dangers to individual freedoms in Venezuela. It also demonstrates the lengths to which those with vested interests in chavismo will go to ensure that it continues, in the event Chávez succumbs to cancer. Unless the true champions of democracy in the region demand some level of fealty to the democratic process, Venezuela will continue to spiral into a full-fledged police state.

 
Dec
7
2011
Posted by
admin
Comments

ICYMI – Israel: Chávez backs incoming terrorism in the South Cone

Israel: Chávez backs incoming terrorism in the South Cone
El Universal

Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon declared on Monday in an interview that Iran is framing, with the little help of Venezuela, a “terrorist infrastructure” in Latin America against the United States, Israel and their allies.

“The idea is framing a terrorist infrastructure to be underlying for a while and in due time be able to attack the interests of the United States or in the United States,” as well as “Israeli or Jewish interests or of any other country opposed to their political stance,” he uttered, as quoted by Efe.

Ya’alon, who completed in Montevideo a visit to Uruguay where he met with Uruguayan Vice-President Danilo Astori, among other authorities, put as an example of such theoretical strategy an alleged plot against the Saudi ambassador to the United States, recently replaced.

That case, where the United States fingered Iran and which was condemned last November 18 by the UN General Assembly, is not the only one, as proven by other episodes in the past, he remarked.

“Such a terrorist infrastructure worked already in 1992 against the Embassy of Israel in Buenos Aires and in 1994, against the AMIA Jewish community center,” also in the Argentinean capital city, he specified.

According to Ya’alon, the strategy forms part of Tehran plans to “export the Iranian revolution, firstly to surrounding countries,” such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon or the Palestinian territory, “and later to the West.”

The Vice Prime Minister, who in the nineties was the chief of military intelligence, explained that data available in his country reveal that in Latin America “such an infrastructure includes Muslim elements existent in the area and it also relies on drug kingpins.”

“It is also based on the impunity enjoyed by Iranian diplomats in the area” and “takes advantage very especially of the hospitality of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and in this way enters the whole continent,” he denounced.

Click here to read more.

 
Dec
5
2011
Posted by
admin
Comments

ICYMI: Chávez’s 40-Year Plan to Conquer Vice ‘Socialism, socialism and more socialism.’

The Wall Street Journal
December 5, 2011
By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez says his Bolivarian Revolution needs more time to produce its utopian fruits. “We barely have 10 years here,” he told a crowd of supporters in Caracas last week. “We will take it to 10 more and 10 more and 10 more to construct the new social virtues.”

In that time, Mr. Chávez pledged, “we will deepen the socialist revolution: socialism, socialism and more socialism. We have to deepen the struggle and defeat the vices of the past that still persists among us: violence, insecurity, corruption, selfishness, individualism.”

Considering that the human condition hasn’t changed much since we got kicked out of the garden, a 40-year plan to conquer vice seems pretty ambitious. But Mr. Chávez has never suffered a lack of self-confidence. Of course being an individual is hardly a vice. On the other hand, notably absent from his list was another perennial transgression that has yet to be defeated in Venezuela: the central bank’s sinful practice of printing money to finance the government.

Double-digit inflation has been the Venezuelan norm for decades. An annual rate below 20% since 1987 has been the exception; this year the International Monetary Fund expects a 25% increase in the price level.

Of course Mr. Chávez does not blame the central bank for inflation. In his school of economics rising prices are caused by producers, suppliers and merchants, who control the availability of goods and continually charge more for their products so that they can have a fatter profit. The solution to this injustice against the consumer, according to chavismo, is price controls. When they don’t work, the answer is more of the same.

It was 2003 when the Chávez government introduced its first big wave of price controls. That year inflation exceeded 31%. Since then prices have been frozen on a wide variety of food items—meat, corn flour, rice, bread, sugar, coffee, powdered milk, cooking oil—and a host of other products and services, including cement and building materials, domestic air travel, private education and medical clinics. The main effect is that many items that used to be readily available are now scarce. Yet inflation stubbornly persists.

The inflation tax hits the poor the hardest and they are Mr. Chávez’s most important constituents. Thus, in August he officially redoubled his efforts to control inflation by decreeing the “law of costs and fair prices.” This sweeping new legislation creates a regulator charged with monitoring what consumers are charged, analyzing those charges by researching the cost of production and setting “just” prices. An army of 4,000 apparatchiks will make up “committees” that will fan out around the country to report and denounce noncompliance. Hoarders, speculators or anyone found guilty of price gouging will be prosecuted. Offenders can be fined, lose their property, be banned from commerce, and even go to jail.

Among Mr. Chávez’s more amusing traits—providing you don’t live in Venezuela—is his unshakable belief that he can dictate what the Austrian classical-economist Ludwig Von Mises called “human action.” Thousands of years of experience suggest otherwise, most recently in the Soviet Union. But never mind. It is Venezuela’s destiny to suffer central-planning hubris all over again.

Mr. Chávez recognizes at least some limitations. He knows he cannot decide, from the commanding heights, every price in the Venezuelan economy on day one. So his latest effort will start small. On Nov. 22 his government added 19 new products, mostly in the area of personal hygiene and home-cleaning, to the list of items with frozen prices. By Dec. 15 regulators will have analyzed the cost to make these products—advertising and marketing costs not included—and will decide what they should be sold for. Once those prices are set, the bean counters will move on to other goods.

Mr. Chávez has asked the regulators to keep a close eye on foreign-based companies like Colgate-Palmolive, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Nestle, GlaxoSmithKline, and Johnson and Johnson. The Italian milk company Parmalat, now controlled by the French Lactalis Group, has already been accused of hoarding. But the large Venezuelan food producer Polar is also in Mr. Chávez’s cross-hairs.

Putting aside the absurdity of government bureaucrats overruling the laws of supply and demand, there is also the problem that many producers require dollars—which are not available at the official exchange rate—to pay for imported inputs. If the state insists on using the artificially strong Bolivar exchange rate to calculate costs, the vast majority of producers will either be judged guilty of overcharging or go out of business.

Consumers are anticipating what will ensue. In recent weeks the local press has reported that shops have been cleaned out of many price-controlled items. Sources say that products that are hard to find in stores can usually be purchased from street vendors at market prices.

In the meantime the government is feeding inflation by ramping up spending ahead of the election. Maybe Mr. Chávez will need more than 40 years to cure original sin.

To view the article on The Wall Street Journal, please click here.