Chavez expropriates Oil Contractors in Lake Maracaibo

In his personal efforts to control Venezuela´s economy, the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, has enacted a new law to expropriate the provision of goods and services related to the Oil Industry. The law is termed, Organic Law that Reserves to the State Goods and Services related to the primary activity of the Oil Industry.

The law was quickly prepared by the National Assembly and last night was enacted by Hugo Chavez himself. What is really important about the law is that all activities involving goods and services related to the Oil Industry will now be owned by the State in what Chavez calls "social property" or in spanish "propiedad social". The law provides that the expropriated shareholders will be paid book value for their shares and permits the avenue of public bonds.

And what is social property, is it the same treatment as public goods destined for public utility, like say public parks, benches and plazas, or is Chavez reffering to public goods destined for private utility, such as the huge network of private companies owned by the State, such as PDVSA (Oil), Pequiven (Petrochemicals), CVG (Steel, Aluminum), the Venezuela Cement Corporation? Chavez has a very confused and troubled head...

Chavez wants to totally control Venezuela´s economy and his advisers have come up now with the idea that all the Oil contractors in Venezuela should be expropriated and its assets and employees transferred to state owned PDVSA. Lets consider that the Oil contractors in Venezuela and even more in the State of Zulia significantly contribute to the local economy. What we are seeing is just a revenge against privately own contractors, most of them owned by European families with highly technical and ethical corporate histories, to wipe them out of the oil economic scene.

I personally think that Hugo Chavez has a personal and hidden agenda against the State of Zulia and the city of Maracaibo.

Murdoch bites back / Internet in market failure

The net is in market failure. Could you believe that?

The efforts of the status-quo in Wall Street are trying to turn the internet into a (more efficient) cash machine. They have plans to eliminate or signficantly reduce free online content in a move that will definitely change internet. Or at least thats what they will try to do...

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch expects News Corporation-owned newspaper Web sites to start charging users for access within a year in a move he says could radically shake-up the culture of freely available content.

Murdoch said the existing Internet business model was "malfunctioning."

Speaking on a conference call as News Corporation announced a 47 percent slide in quarterly profits to $755 million, Murdoch said the current free access business model favored by most content providers was flawed.

"We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning," the News Corp. Chairman and CEO said.

"We have been at the forefront of that debate and you can confidently presume that we are leading the way in finding a model that maximises revenues in return for our shareholders... The current days of the Internet will soon be over."

Murdoch said the experience of the News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal had proved that charging for content could be made to work. Would you pay to use news Web sites? Sound Off below

He said 360,000 people had downloaded an iPhone WSJ application in three weeks and said users would soon be made to pay "handsomely" for accessing WSJ content.

Murdoch said he envisaged News Corporation titles introducing charges within 12 months.

Now the real issue will be if Rupert Murdoch will go after Google and Youtube and charge them for the free online content. This will obviously create a hurricane of legal fees in major IP law firms in London and New York. Covington & Burling, White and Case and the likes...

Venezuelan anomie

Anomie, is a sociological term that signifies in individuals an erosion, diminution, or absence of personal norms, standards, or values, and increased states of psychological normlessness. It also translates into a social condition in which norms are weak, conflicting, or absent. When applied to a government or society, anomie implies a social unrest.

Émile Durkheim described anomie as a state of relative normlessness or a state in which norms have been eroded. A norm is an expectation of how people will behave, and it takes the form of a rule that is socially rather than formally enforced. Thus, in structural functionalist theory, whether at a personal or societal level, the effect of normlessness is to introduce alienation, isolation, and desocialisation as norms become less binding for individuals.

In my opinion, what we are living in Venezuela is a sense of chronic anomie. With the high levels of crimes commited, it also makes no sense to report them to the police. Yesterday, Tuesday May 5, 2009 my brother got mugged at gun point at around 7pm while going in a pizza joint in front of a major hospital in Maracaibo. The burglar took his cellphone and his wallet.

It is true here in Venezuela theres always a sense of normlessness, everything from the guy that watches your car and demands his tip to the bank officer who expects his bottle of whisky if he approves your credit. The worst part is that we Venezuelans often take advantage of the chaos around us, or anomie, and often use to our own convenience.

While I remain in agreement with Ralph Dahrendorf that a legal system that prosecutes all the crimes renders it ineffective, at the same time, a system where no or little crimes are prosecuted gives a sense of unrest, where people tend to take the law into their own hands, into a violating-the-law-down-whirl-spiral, wheres theres nothing in the end. There are loads of examples in Venezuela, from local lynch mobs killing local barrio thugs to blunt fragrant violation of exchange laws by thousands of people selling their Cadivi rights to obtain foreing currency, buying pirate hollywood dvds or software in the street in broad daylight or just paying to get your legally free passport.

The sense of law is absent in Venezuela...

Social-who?

Social-me, social-forever, social-comics....what is socialism?

Edmund Burke on (the Venezuelan) Revolution

Do not be fooled, it is virtually impossible that Edmund Burke wrote something about Venezuela, let alone about the Chavista so-called socialist Revolution...

Edmund Burke was a famous Irish born political thinker back in the 18th century and served for many years in the British House of Commons as a member of the Whig party. He is mainly remembered for his opposition to the French Revolution.

In 1789, soon after the Fall of the Bastille, the French aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont asked his impressions of the Revolution; Burke replied with two letters. The longer, second letter became Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790.

As per his Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously, because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the huge complexities of human nature and society. Further, he focused on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing:

'What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor."

Founded upon St. Augustine, Cicero, and Plato, he believed in "human heart"-based government. Nevertheless, he was contemptuous and afraid of the Enlightenment, led by intellectuals such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Turgot, who disbelieved in Divine Moral Order and Original Sin, saying that society should be handled like a living organism, that people and society are limitlessly complicated, thus, leading him to conflict with Thomas Hobbes's assertion that politics might be reducible to a deductive system akin to mathematics.

Burke has been termed as a cornerstone of the conservative intellectual in Britain, eventhough that he was a member of the Whig party which in turn became the Liberals. So it is also natural to see classic liberal thinkers supporting Burkes view on government and society.