The Poor are not the priority

Life is busy and no time to write deep insightful posts. Fortunately I can always find something somewhere to palliate, such as this great interview of Francisco Rodriguez published today in Tal Cual and lifted here for those who do not subscribe. In Spanish, sorry, I have no time to translate it. However it should be mandatory reading for all of these PSF that actually think that after ten years in power Chavez cares about the poor. If he does, at best he does not care much more than what previous governments cared for.....

Among other little juicy items there is a prediction of a significant decrease in economic growth because the current neo-liberal policies of the government to restrict liquidity in cash in the streets is not accompanied by a cut in spending. FR did not need to add that in an electoral year spending is actually going to grow if anything. We all get it except hard core faithful chavistas :) (PS added later. Reader hhbv points justly that I shoudl have also added the FR paper which made Tal Cual request the interview. Here it is, to spare you the need to go to my previous post)

There is also an article on oil policy where chavismo is giving concession to China in conditions perhaps more favorable than those given to Western companies a few years ago. After all of these nationalizations, we are back to square one due to the incredibly bad management of PDVSA...

PS: on unrelated stuff. Venezuelan bloggers in English are doing good. The latest incident is Quico now quoted in Newsweek. After the regular financial papers where Miguel appears or the censorship texts by yours truly, we can all be proud that we are contributing to better knowledge about the Venezuelan reality through the readers that keep prodding us. But no one is a prophet in one's country and we still are pretty much ignored inside Venezuela. But even there we see some change. Quico is being cited by Ibsen, Miguel speaks regularly with Marta and if lately I am discreet here I was still the first blogger interviewed by Milagros :)

Fortunately the Spanish blogosphere is increasing its exposure, though unfortunately it tends to be more interested in digital fist fighting, at least the political one. Counting now silent Alex who was the trailblazer in getting Venezuelan blogs known (we owe him a huge debt), other English language blogs are starting to get read and I hope that through us named above, they will have an easier time to get better known than we had to. As for the pro Chavez blogosphere, well, there is not much to say there: the creativity and originality battle has been won long ago by the anti Chavez side :)

-The end-