TWO FREEBIES

Got some more good stuff for you young pups. Read carefully--I know you can read,but can you read carefully?

If you can not come up with an intelligent rebuttal get the hell back to school.

Hugo's All-Too-Predictable Shortages
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, May 01, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Economics: The blackout that engulfed most of Venezuela Monday was dismissed as just a technical glitch. But amid the state's takeover of the country's industries, it's not an aberration. It's a signature shortage of socialism.
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It happened suddenly in Caracas, and across the country at 3:59 p.m. A hydroelectric station somewhere blew out, and along with a failure of a backup system and a jungle fire, the entire electrical grid in the capital and other cities went down. It knocked out the Caracas subway, made cell phones unusable, cut traffic lights, forced hospitals to turn on emergency generators, trapped people for hours in high-rise elevators and left thousands stranded.
In Caracas, thousands waited in cars for hours. Thousands more had to trudge for hours to distant shantytowns up steep hillsides to make it home. In several cities, crime had a field day.
Such a blackout might not mean much in a place like Cuba, whose capital has been a trash heap since Castro's dictatorship began in 1959. It also might not mean much in Colombia, where a war against Marxist terrorists since 1966 has meant frequent power sabotage.
But it does mean something in Venezuela, not only because it's been a richer and better-developed country than the other two, but because it's rarely suffered outages until now. No one thinks it'll be the last.
What gives? Unlike Cuba or Colombia, Venezuela is nationalizing its industries now. Cuba has nothing left to nationalize; Colombia is privatizing.
Venezuela's strongman, Hugo Chavez, nationalized the power company, Electricidad de Caracas, in early 2007, then owned by Arlington, Va.-based AES. Chavez dictated that AES would be paid just 50 cents on every dollar it sank into the company since 2000. AES had no choice. It took the $800 million and an earnings hit.
"We're moving toward a socialist republic of Venezuela," Chavez said. "Now electricity is for all, the thing that had been out of reach."
But far from electricity for all, there are now shortages — the same kind hitting other industries Chavez has meddled in.
Businesses have been confiscated across the board in Venezuela, amounting to a nationalization of much of the economy. Chavez has taken cattle ranches, sugar farms, steel companies, cement companies, oil companies, ketchup and soda factories, apartment buildings, phone companies, and TV stations, handing many over to the control of his cronies. His government's excuses for the theft have ranged from lack of title deed, idleness, hoarding, strategic value, ownership by the wrong race (read: white) and, in the case of RCTV, the station Chavez shut down last year, "coup-plotting."
Price controls have eliminated all incentive for farms to produce more. As a result, there's little meat, milk, coffee, eggs, or salt in Venezuelan shops. Import and currency controls have kept needed goods like capital machinery and spare parts out of reach for many businesses, which are now going fallow.
That hits the entire economy. Tires, toothpaste, batteries and other necessities of modern life are getting hard to come by in Chavez's Venezuela. Don't even think about job creation.
It all amounts to state intervention in an economy, and its result is to turn once-productive private enterprises into inefficient state-run ones, answerable to no market, wasting capital, and run by state employees whose loyalties are strictly political.
Chavez blames the U.S., his state TV stations citing "yanqui sabotage" for the power outage that hit Caracas this week.
He's tried to blame food shortages in Venezuela on the U.S., saying they're due to U.S. production of ethanol. But with Venezuela taking $100 billion in oil earnings, and the shortages going well beyond food but to other things as well, it's obvious the excuses don't wash.
In reality, investment has fled and it's getting obvious. Once-sparkling Caracas now looks rundown. Farmers in central Yaracuy state tell us they've let their farms get dilapidated and their business offices get encircled with weeds to make them less attractive to the confiscating hand of the state.
In 2007, Venezuelan foreign investment fell to less than half a billion dollars. That's the impact of confiscations. Meanwhile, neighboring Colombia's foreign investment, by contrast, soared to $9 billion. The lesson in this is the more an economy opens itself to the private sector and the outside world, the more investment it gains.
Chavez's nationalizations have been a failure. They haven't spread the wealth, as promised, but instead have served up the same across-the-board shortages known in every socialist regime.


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An Absolut Outrage
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, April 08, 2008 4:20 PM PT
The Border: A vodka maker's ad campaign in Mexico is more than a marketing faux pas that offends many Americans. There's a real movement out there that feels our Southwest is really occupied Mexico.
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The first rule of marketing is know your customer base. So when the makers of Absolut vodka began an ad campaign in Mexico featuring what a map of North America might look like "In An Absolut World," it was well aware it might appeal to many Mexicans there and here.
The ad by the Swedish Absolut Spirits Co. features an 1830s era map where Mexico includes California, Texas, Arizona and other southwest states. The U.S. border lies where it was before the Mexican-American war of 1848 and before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw the Mexican territories of Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico ceded to the U.S.
The campaign taps into the national pride of Mexicans, according to Favio Ucedo, creative director of the leading Latino advertising agency in the U.S., Grupo Gallegos.
"Mexicans talk about how the Americans stole their land," the Argentine native said of the Absolut campaign, "so this is their way of reclaiming it. It's very relevant and the Mexicans will love the idea."
This isn't the first ad campaign targeted at what some Mexican activists call the "Reconquista" movement of those who dream and work toward the day when the American Southwest will be reconquered. To them, illegal aliens crossing the U.S. border are merely returning home.
In 2005, a Los Angeles billboard advertising a Spanish-language newscast showed the Angel of Independence, a well-known monument in Mexico City, in the center of the L.A. skyline, with "CA" crossed out after "Los Angeles" and the word "Mexico" in bold red letters put in its place.
The activists working for this cause actually see themselves as "America's Palestinians" and view the Southwest as their Palestine and Los Angeles as their lost Jerusalem.
An editorial in the newspaper La Voz de Aztlan in Los Angeles stated: "There are great similarities between the political and economic condition of the Palestinians in occupied Palestine and that of La Raza in the southwest United States."
The editorial went on to say: "The similarities are many. The primary one, of course, is the fact that both La Raza and the Palestinians have been displaced by invaders that have used military means to conquer and occupy our territories."
A key player in the "Reconquista" movement is the National Council of La Raza. Its motto: "For the Race, everything. For those outside the Race, nothing."
Few caught the significance of the warmly received words of then-Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo before the Council in Chicago on July 27, 1997:
"I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders." During a 2001 visit to the U.S., President Vincente Fox repeated this line, calling for open borders and endorsing Mexico's new dual-citizenship law.
A secondary group in the "Reconquista" movement is an Hispanic student activist group known as MEChA, for Movimento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan).
It has spent the last three decades indoctrinating Latino students on American campuses, claiming that the American Southwest was stolen and should be returned to its rightful owners, the people of Mexico, under the name "Nation of Aztlan."
Aztlan is the mythical place where the Aztecs are said to have originated.
Former MEChA members include Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was officially endorsed by La Raza for mayor and awarded La Raza's Graciela Olivarez award. Another MEChA member is former California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, who delivered the keynote address at La Raza's 2002 annual convention.
We have an idea: Let's build the border fence and pay for it by selling ad space, even to an ideologically driven company such as the makers of Absolut vodka. We'll drink to that.