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| Lorenzo Mendoza promoting his competition? Harina PAN all alone in the middle.... |
Apparently Maduro has been making a total ass of himself. I mean, TOTAL, as in without possible redemption, total enough that we truly must wonder why in hell Chavez named him his heir. Heck! Even Ramirez starts looking good in comparison. However I must also say that the idiotic presentations of Maduro seem at least to come in big part from his totally inadequate staff. What we see this week is the result of what happens when dumb instructs idiot.
Let's start with the Polar case I left you with last week end. Maduro attempt at blaming the Polar group for all of the food scarcity problem backfired badly as early as Monday when Lorenzo Mendoza, spotting a cheap shirt and surprising long hair showed all the corn flour brands that are supposedly produced in Venezuela. This great picture, reproduced from many angles depending on the media reporting is clearly understandable for the Venezuelan on foot, in line, branded, for a couple of kilos of corn flour. They all know that when they find corn flour, it is most of the times from Polar, almost none from the other brands. Polar is the lone one working.... On Tuesday the regime had to back down and pretend that they were going to be all love and kisses and collaboration with Polar which may get, hold tight, a lease of some state plants that went under to refurbish them for the regime to pretend it produces corn flour again....
You would think that a chastised Maduro would know better, that by now he should have realized that the staff ad the food and agriculture ministries had no f*****g ideas of Polar realities and numbers and that he would stay quiet for a while. Think again..... On Thursday he attacked another big group, Protinal. This is the main poultry producer in Venezuela, at least a third of the country and possibly the best run business in that field. I know that as a fact. Apparently Maduro received a complaint from a local producer that Protinal refused to buy his corn, preferring instead to import it. So Maduro made a big show, accusing Protinal of sabotaging the local production of corn. and easy charge to do since Protinal is partly owned by Cargill, a world grain trader.
Unfortunately the guys around Maduro once again got it all wrong, pathetically wrong. To begin with, the local production is not enough anyway to cover all the corn needs for the country, be it white corn for Polar and its Harina PAN or yellow corn for livestock feed. Second, to be allowed to import corn you must prove that the bulk of Venezuela's crop has been bought and that there is a need to import. The regime would know that, Ivan Gil the minister for agriculture would know that if he were not such a political hack. His people signed whatever import license Protinal had. Third, indeed the regime forces my customers to buy corn but sometime the corn is of such low quality that they must refuse since the corn would kill their livestock because of its moldy content, its poor nutritional value, etc.... I also know that as a fact, I have seen many quality control results from many people in my consulting activities. Whoever complained to Maduro I am willing to bet had a dismal corn not fit for animal consumption. And finally, if Protinal in the end took its chance in not buying that corn it was because harassed enough elsewhere by the regime (CADIVI, supplies, labor laws, etc... see this entry of the blog) it could not afford the losses in dead animals that this toxic corn would have caused.
OK, that would be enough for yours truly who knows his stuff. But nooooo... there had to be two purely extra fascist moments lurking in the news.
The idiot one first Maduro has convoked (what is that new mania of convoking everyone now? Is this "I am not Chavez" attempt at renewing his image?) the owners of Venevision and Televen to his office next Monday. What for? To make a new type of TV, away from the anti values of capitalism, away from promoting violence and what not. No more tawdry soap operas, no more violence inducing shows, only wholesome shows from now on. I guess cable TV and Direct TV will be banned too...... Fundamentalists in the US would be so lucky to have Maduro as president.....
But if the more than lame excuse of Maduro is officially that high crime rates in Venezuela are linked to bad TV the real reason is elsewhere: Maduro has been smarting that Televen and even Venevision dared to show some of Capriles activities in the last campaign. Very little did they show, and even less of Capriles questioning Maduro's pseudo victory But that little was too much. So what Maduro is going to tell Cisneros and Camero next Monday is that he is going to prepare a Damocles sword of a law that will force them into passing bland ratings killing shows if they give the microphone to Capriles again. Besides that naked show of fascist power, I am not going to shred a single tear for Cisneros and Camero and hope they will be shut down at once: these creeps negotiated with Chavez in the hope that offering bland to non critical news whatsoever would shield them from abuse of power, protect them from fascism. Serves them right for abandoning RCTV or even helping to its demise as the case of Cisneros was, to his never ending shame.
And last but not least, the latest outrageously fascist attack of Maduro. He had the nerve to say on the video below that he knows the identity of the 900,000 chavista that did not vote for him last April and that he was going to do something about it. First, he admits publicly that indeed he lost that many votes, at the very least we should add if votes were truly counted as they should. Second he is lying because no matter what the electoral board did in matters of cheating it is very difficult to know who voted for whom unless hidden cameras were located in voting centers. This is just a brutal and cruel fascist ploy to scare people into voting for Maduro next time, as if, I suppose, elections were coming soon... Does Maduro knows something we do not know?
You can see it here, at second 28, he mentions the 900,000, ; at 34 seconds he says that we have their ID numbers; and there is a menacing pregnant pause that starts at second 36....... with the evil smile included.......
XXI century fascism at work......