While Venezuela is raking in the big bucks for its oil, the socialist utopia is beginning to look like other socialist utopias: starvation, poverty, etc. From the Miami Herald:
Venezuela has adopted an unprecedented system of food rationing similar to the ration cards used in Cuba, after several months of food shortages that have caused popular discontent.
The Ministry of Nutrition announced last week that beneficiaries of the government’s food distribution program would only be allowed one purchase a day. The amount of food allocated to each family would be based on a ”social study” the government performed, it said.
Earlier this year, the government created a distribution network known as Pdval — financed by the state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA — to solve shortages of groceries like beef, eggs and milk that have sparked long lines in recent months.
According to Asdrubal Chávez, President Hugo Chávez’s cousin and the coordinator for Pdval, the distribution centers will now keep a registry of families shopping at each center to ensure that no home receives a ”surplus” of staple products.
Under the new rationing system, government distribution centers will open at 8 a.m. and each customer will be given a control number that will allow him to shop for food that day. The customer will also fill out a registry card with his name, ID number and the products and quantities to be purchased.
“Ministry of Nutrition”? Now that is what we like to call “polishing a turd”! Continuing:
Business groups and the government blame each other for the shortages. The Venezuelan economy is actually booming and the country is awash in money thanks to record-high oil prices — its main export. Chávez contends that businesses are boycotting his socialist revolution, while business groups blame the problems on the government’s price controls.
Yeah, businesses tend not to be very active where they can’t make any money. They’re funny that way. Continuing:
Luis Rodríguez, executive director of the Association of Supermarkets and Convenience Stores, said the shortages are not transitory but structural and they have been mounting for at least the past eight months.
According to Rodríguez, supermarkets throughout Venezuela are experiencing shortages of chicken, beef, pork, dairy products, eggs, flour and tomato derivatives, such as ketchup.
Rodríguez blames the shortages on price controls established by the government, which have left producers with little reason to increase production.
Hiram Gaviria, a former Minister of Agriculture and now director of an agricultural trade union known as Agro-Nutritional Alliance, said the new restrictions will make the situation worse and give even less motivation for internal production and normal food supply.
…
The shortages also have resulted in isolated and spontaneous episodes of looting during the past couple of weeks. In Maracaibo, the country’s second largest city, residents of the poor Cristo de Aranza neighborhood forced their way into a Mercal distribution center on Thursday, and took everything on a single night — including the coolers and air-conditioning system.
Hugo wanted to be like his mentor Fidel, and it looks like he is well on his way.
Economic ignorance is hazardous to your health.
February 25, 2008
Posted by crushliberalism |
economic ignorance, Hugo Chavez, socialism |
8 Comments
I suppose had she been accused of boinking a lobbyist, they may have cared. OK, let me reprhase that: had she been a Republican and accused of boinking a lobbyist, the NYT may have cared. From The American Thinker:
Since the 2006 Congressional victory by Democrats, The New York Times has ignored a highly questionable situation involving Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi among other leading Democrats, instead focusing on alleged Republican offenses.
On August 2nd, 2007 Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) submitted a bill to the U. S. House of Representatives which raised a potential conflict of interest involving the Speaker’s widely publicized family stock holdings, corporate sponsors, and former staffers turned lobbyists. The Speaker submitted the bill called the Early Treatment for HIV Act (ETHA) to the House with bipartisan support. It would allow states to decide whether or not to extend Medicare benefits for HIV treatment to some currently not covered.
Speaker Pelosi submitted ETHA one day after Medicare officials announced new rules to cut back on significant expenditures for the drugs PROCRIT® made by Johnson & Johnson and EPOGEN® made by Amgen. The new Medicare rules were primarily geared to reduce the use of the drugs for cancer patients. Those pharmaceuticals are used to treat anemia often seen as a side effect of HIV medications and for other conditions. Both companies enjoy massive revenues from the sales of those medicines, with Johnson & Johnson reporting $3.2 billion in earnings from PROCRIT® and a similar drug and Amgen showing $6.5 billion for EPOGEN® and a similar drug during 2006.
Last year Amgen started losing stock value as word of the cuts spread. A press release from Amgen at its’ corporate website stated “”Recent changes in coverage rules and adjustments to Amgen’s FDA approved labels for EPOGEN(R) and Aranesp have and will adversely affect Amgen’s revenue.” The company then announced layoffs.
The ETHA bill would increase the number of HIV infected persons able to receive government assistance. A PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis conducted in 2003 estimated that the act would increase eligibility for treatment by 30,000 people. In turn the government purchasing of the anemia medications associated with their treatment will certainly increase, making up some of the difference caused by the planned Medicaid purchasing reductions. In effect, this law could turn things around for Amgen and increase Johnson & Johnson stock values.
Considering that the bill was submitted only one day after the Medicare announcement, some viewed it as a reaction to the new guidelines and an attempt to improve the finances of those two drug makers. Unless Speaker Pelosi has divested herself of certain stocks that she held in 2006 by the time she sponsored ETHA, then she stood to profit from the bill. Inquiries to clarify her holdings have gone without response from her office. In addition she has strong connections to Amgen.
According to the ethics guidelines for the House of Representatives, an elected official must declare perosnal investments and holdings. Those declarations are available online and can be viewed at a website called opensecrets.org. The last declaration on record that covers the calendar year 2006 shows the Speaker owned over $500,000 dollars worth of Johnson & Johnson stock. Such a scenario creates the impression of a conflict of interest.
In addition, her close ties to biotech firm Amgen come into question. Two of her key staffers have left to become lobbyists working for Amgen directly or through lobbying firms. They include George Crawford, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as the Speaker’s former chief of staff and Howard Moon, described in a Washington Post article as a former senior policy adviser who was named the government affairs director for Amgen.
In addition, Amgen has supported her campaigns through PAC money and by sponsoring fund raising events. While she does not appear to own stock in Amgen, the timing of the bill raises questions about just how closely she is tied to the company.
Between 2002 and 2006 Amgen became a superstar stock amid soaring price hikes and massive profits. Nancy Pelosi attempted and failed to pass the Early Treatment of HIV Act during that run-up. In 2006 Amgen sponsored a fund raiser for Pelosi.
The Democrats won Congress in 2006 on a pledge to clean up the “culture of corruption” they ascribed to the majority Republicans. In one example, a Republican congressman in 2004 announced that he was considering taking a position with a pharmaceutical lobbying firm after he had negotiated pharmaceutical legislature. Congresswoman Pelosi charged at the time that the move was an “abuse of power”.
The pharmaceutical industry was expected to be hit hard as Democrats strove to lower prescription drug prices through government negotiations. Pharmaceutical stocks were expected to fall. Speaker Pelosi herself was viewed by many as a threat to ‘big pharma’. One common investment technique for drawing profit from the markets is to buy when prices fall and sell when they go high again. According to the Speaker’s 2006 disclosure she was invested in multiple pharmaceutical and biotech firms that make medications.
This new scandal recalls the early 2007 incident in which the Speaker promoted a minimum wage hike that would include all U.S. areas except American Samoa. Some large companies with canneries in Samoa are headquartered in the Speaker’s district. Amgen is a powerhouse in Northern California, with a significant presence in the Speaker’s district. That fact mirrors the Samoa controversy in which critics accused Pelosi of playing favorites with her district. And in 2007 it was revealed that the Speaker sponsored a massive earmark that would probably affect the value of property in which her husband was invested.
This summer, under extreme pressure from Congress, led by Pelosi, Medicare dropped its’ planned regulation changes. J&J and Amgen stock immediately soared as The New York Times reported:
Medicare has eased up on some of its proposed restrictions on the use of popular anemia drugs made by Amgen and Johnson & Johnson.
The decision, announced late yesterday, could provide some relief for the two companies, which have already experienced steep drops in sales of the drugs. [....]
The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services had proposed in May to sharply limit coverage for the drugs – Aranesp from Amgen and Procrit from Johnson & Johnson. Some analysts had predicted at that time that use of the drugs could be cut by as much as 50 percent. [....]
But investors reacted favorably, sending shares of Amgen by more than $2 in early after-hours trading, though it then began to drop back. Shares had closed at $56.19, up 57 cents.
Shares of the larger and more diversified Johnson & Johnson rose about 30 cents after hours, having closed at $60.07, up 30 cents.
How very interesting that The New York Times invests the efforts of a cadre of writers to investigate the wisp of a rumor concerning McCain while the Democrat Speaker of the House gets a free ride on such an apparently blatent abuse of power to enrich herself and friends.
And it doesn’t end there. Congress pressured Medicare to backdown from the regulations with votes in the House and the Senate. The Sense of the Senate nonbinding resolution was approved unanimously (with no votes recorded therefore). As a Senator, Hillary Clinton would have also voted on this measure that proved a financial boon for Amgen. Senator Clinton is also tied to Amgen.
Bloomberg recently reported that President Clinton’s former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steve Ricchetti, now a lobbyist, received a $1.7 million payment to his firm from Amgen. He serves as a bundler for Senator Clinton’s campaign. That means she is now receiving financial contributions assembled by a lobbyist at a firm that profited from the success of earning her vote.
One of those contributions was from Howard Moon, a former Pelosi advisor who donated $2,300 to the Clinton campaign a few weeks after Clinton voted to stay the hand of Medicare. In addition, in the days just before and after Pelosi submitted the ETHA bill on Aug. 2nd, 2007 a slew of Amgen executives made almost $30,000 dollars in private donations to the Pelosi campaign.
Barack Obama who claims not to take lobbyist money received over $12,000 in private donations from several Amgen corporate executives (listed as executives, directors, and vice presidents) as revealed by government watch dog group opensecrets.org. The donations listed occured just before the September 4th, 2007 Senate vote on the Sense of the Senate resolution and the day after.
This easily discovered appearance of unethical behavior on the part of Democratic leaders weighs far more heavily than the thin evidence provided against Senator McCain. Maybe the The New York Times has an ethics problem of its’ own.
Nope…no liberal media bias!
February 25, 2008
Posted by crushliberalism |
corruption, hypocrisy, media bias, Pelosi |
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Pass the popcorn…again. From Politico:
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton campaign Monday of “shameful offensive fear-mongering” by circulating a photo as an attempted smear.
Plouffe was reacting to a banner headline on the Drudge Report saying that aides to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) had e-mailed a photo calling attention to the African roots of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
“The photo, taken in 2006, shows the Democrat front-runner dressed as a Somali Elder, during his visit to Wajir, a rural area in northeastern Kenya,” the Drudge Report said.
The Clinton campaign did not deny the charge, but did not comment further.
My take: Hilldawg is just humiliating herself. This photo will cause no damage to Osamabamadingdong at all. But the blue-on-blue action is nice!
February 25, 2008
Posted by crushliberalism |
Hillary, Obama |
3 Comments
How do you know when you’ve “jumped the shark“? When Seattlestan’s hopelessly leftist fishwrap calls your story “thin beer” and says they wouldn’t have run it at all, and when your own stooge ombudsman says you shouldn’t have run it, then you have officially jumped it. From Seattlestan:
I chose not to run the New York Times story on John McCain in Thursday’s P-I, even though it was available to us on the New York Times News Service. I thought I’d take a shot at explaining why.
To me, the story had serious flaws. It did not convincingly make the case that McCain either had an affair with a lobbyist, or was improperly influenced by her. It used a raft of unnamed sources to assert that members of McCain’s campaign staff — not this campaign but his campaign eight years ago — were concerned about the amount of time McCain was spending with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman. They were worried about the appearance of a close bond between the two of them.
Then it went even further back, re-establishing the difficulties McCain had with his close association to savings-and-loan criminal Charles Keating. It didn’t get back to the thing that (of course) the rest of the media immediately pounced on — McCain, Iseman and the nature of their relationship — until very deep in the story. And when the story did get back there, it didn’t do so with anything approaching convincing material.
A very good editor I happen to work for, P-I Editor and Publisher Roger Oglesby, said today that the story read like a candidate profile to him, not an investigative story, and I think that’s true. A candidate profile based on a lot of old anecdotes…
…Admitting that Keller was in a better position to vet the sourcing and facts than I am as, basically, a reader, let’s assume that every source is solid and every fact attributed in the story to an anonymous source is true. You’re still dealing with a possible appearance of impropriety, eight years ago, that is certainly unproven and probably unprovable.
Where is the solid evidence of this lobbyist improperly influencing (or bedding) McCain? I didn’t see it in the half-dozen times I read the story. In paragraphs fifty-eight through sixty-one of the sixty-five-paragraph story, the Times points out two matters in which McCain took actions favorable to the lobbyist’s clients — that were also clearly consistent with his previously stated positions.
That’s pretty thin beer.
Nope…no liberal media bias!
February 25, 2008
Posted by crushliberalism |
McCain, media bias, Seattle |
2 Comments
How does this evil b#stard get away with killing police officers? For those of you on the left, the prior sentence was sarcasm. From Brutally Honest:
Verum Serum brings us the MSM Bias Moment of the Day:
Back on August 27th, Time magazine reported on the death of an officer who had hit an obstruction while escorting President Bush as part of a motorcade. I wrote about their outrageous headline here. The story itself is expired over at Time, but you can still see the headline here. Plus, I screencaped it for posterity. Here it is:
Today, Time reports on the death of an officer in Hillary Clinton’s motorcade. Here’s the headline from that story.
Nice eh… so damned typical.
God rest all cops killed in the line of duty and be with their families. God curse those who’d use their deaths to make political statements.
Nope…no liberal media bias!
February 25, 2008
Posted by crushliberalism |
media bias |
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Whenever Her Highness takes to the stage to tout her commitment to “the children” and her work on behalf of “the children”, I’m going to go ahead and assume she doesn’t mean stuff like this:
Hillary Rodham Clinton often invokes her “35 years of experience making change” on the campaign trail, recounting her work in the 1970s on behalf of battered and neglected children and impoverished legal-aid clients.
But there is a little-known episode Clinton doesn’t mention in her standard campaign speech in which those two principles collided. In 1975, a 27-year-old Hillary Rodham, acting as a court-appointed attorney, attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old girl in mounting an aggressive defense for an indigent client accused of rape in Arkansas – using her child development background to help the defendant.
Look, she was a defense attorney, and as such, she is legally obligated to zealously represent her client. Fine. Just doing her job. Cool. But you can’t go around telling the world what a child advocate you are when you did everything you could to keep a child rapist out of prison.
It also doesn’t help when you gloss over that sordid chapter in your life thusly (from ):
In her 2003 autobiography “Living History,” Clinton writes that she initially balked at the assignment, but eventually secured a lenient plea deal for Taylor after a New York-based forensics expert she hired “cast doubt on the evidentiary value of semen and blood samples collected by the sheriff’s office.”
However, that account leaves out a significant aspect of her defense strategy – attempting to impugn the credibility of the victim, according to a Newsday examination of court and investigative files and interviews with witnesses, law enforcement officials and the victim.
Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader’s honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out “older men” like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed “Hillary D. Rodham” in compact cursive.
Oh, I see. She “wanted it”, in other words. Interesting, considering that this is the line that mosts rapists use to justify their evil deed. So how does the victim describe the Hildeb#tch’s characterization of her?
The victim, now 46, told Newsday that she was raped by Taylor, denied that she wanted any relationship with him and blamed him for contributing to three decades of severe depression and other personal problems.
“It’s not true, I never sought out older men – I was raped,” the woman said in an interview in the fall. Newsday is withholding her name as the victim of a sex crime.
With all the anguish she’d felt over the case in the years since, there was one thing she never realized – that the lawyer for the man she reviles was none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Her Highness has a track record of enabling rapists, doesn’t she?
This is a heinous, despicable human being. It’s a shame she won’t be getting her party’s nomination, because something like this could have been used to bludgeon her over the head in the general election.
February 25, 2008
Posted by crushliberalism |
ambulance chasers, Hillary, shameful |
3 Comments
