Venezuela suspends sale of Stanford Bank

[G_j]

Source: AP

Venezuela suspends sale of Stanford Bank

By FABIOLA SANCHEZ Associated Press Writer
Posted: 03/20/2009 04:00:39 PM PDT

CARACAS, Venezuela—Venezuela's finance ministry suspended the sale of a local bank controlled by Texas financier R. Allen Stanford on Friday, saying the only bidder's offer was too low.

Italcambio Casa de Cambio, a local brokerage firm, offered the equivalent of $55.8 million for Stanford Bank SA—31 percent of the $180 million sought by a board of government officials overseeing the open auction, said Rodolfo Porro, a legal consultant at Venezuela's Finance Ministry.

Porro, who announced the suspension Friday, did not take questions from reporters. Finance Ministry spokespeople also declined to answer calls seeking information on when a new auction would be held or if the asking price would be reduced.

The government will keep proceeds from the sale to cover the cost of backing the banks' deposits and coordinating the auction. Finance Ministry and banking regulators have declined to say how much that could be.

Two other local banks, Baninvest Banca de Inversion and Mi Casa Entidad de Ahorro y Prestamo, had expressed interest in the auction but ultimately declined to participate, state media reported.

..more..

Read more: http://www.insidebayarea.com/business/ci_11961133

[msongs]

1. maybe the dear leader wasn't get a big enough slice for himself lol nt

[Dreamer Tatum]

2. Some spicy mustard on that one! nt

[Peace Patriot]

3. Why do you slander Chavez with the phrase "dear leader"?

That phrase suggests a "dictator." I have found, through extensive research, that that charge against Chavez is wholly false. In addition to the transparent elections held in Venezuela (unlike our own, I should point out), and strong evidence of, a) extraordinarily high citizen participation in government and politics in Venezuela, including strong government encouragement of maximum citizen participation, and b) extraordinarily high citizen approval of their democracy (highest in South America), and Chavez's consistent 60% to 70% approval ratings, we have statements like those of Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, who said, recently, of Chavez, "They can invent all sort of things to criticize Chavez, but not on democracy!," and Chavez's strong friendships and alliances with other other democratic leaders of South America, including, in addition to Lulu, Nestor Kirchner (former president) and Christina Fernandez (current president) of Argentina, Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, Tabare Vasquez, president of Uruguay, and Fernando Lugo, president of Paraguay.

So please, defend your suggestion that Chavez is a "dictator." What facts do you have to counter my conviction that he is not a "dictator"?

[nvme]

4. Chavez

I don't know about dictator BUT, iF Prosecuting opposition,(Maracaibo Mayor), Packing the legislature with cronies, and the courts, changing the constitution to allow for permanent re-elections. Creating fast-track authority to rule by decree. Nationalizing oil, food production and farmlands, seizing opposition media outlets by refusing to reissue licenses. seems fairly benign to me. Just Imagine that happening in the good ole USofA While the Repubs were in charge wouldnt that seem a bit one sided?

[EFerrari]

5. Do you want one of us to run down why that list is b#llshit?

In fact, that did happen here and it has not happened in Venezuela, with the exception of the nationalizations. Bush only nationalized the DEBT while he stuffed his cronies pockets.

[arikara]

6. I believe it is usual for most elected leaders

to appoint their own people into positions that is hardly considered "packing the legislature with cronies". As for changing the constitution that was passed by a transparent referendum. A bit of nationalizing would do some good around here too perhaps some benefit of resources would go to the people instead of to greedy corporations; and as for the media, if ours had willingly and actively participated in a attempted coup hopefully more would happen to them than refusing to reissue licenses. The rich hate Chavez, the poor love him. That should illustrate the difference between the repubs and him. What we are fed here with our fair and balanced media is the rich folk's point of view and still so many buy into it.

[EFerrari]

9. "Packing the legislature" = majority party won the elections.

That's the kind of spin we're dealing with.

[dixiegrrrrl]

11. Uh....most of that DID happen here, "while the Republicans were in charge"

Prosecuting opposition....check ( Siegleman, et al)

Packing the Legislature with cronies...double check

Creating authority to rule by decree....check.. ( you DO remember that issue, don't you?)

Nationalizing oil..no, but monopolizing it via Cheney.

Food productions and farmlands...oh yeah....Monsanto, ADA, FDA, letting cronies run the Agri-biz and putting lots of farmers out of competition.

Seizing media outlets....don't need to seize them if your buddies can own most of them.
Fairness Doctrine was gutted.

[EFerrari]

12. They privatized our social systems and nationalized their debts!

LOL! Gotta love the BFEE. They do that, nobody notices and they smear Chavez and everybody gets on board. Gotta love American news consumers!

[hack89]

19. I know - the similarities are alarming, aren't they? nt

[EFerrari]

21. That's because it's straight projection. n/t

[Idealism]

14. My god that is a lot of disinformation for one post.

I don't know about dictator BUT, iF Prosecuting opposition,(Maracaibo Mayor)

The Maracaibo mayor- Manuel Rosales? The disgraced official who took part in the 2002 coup, but instead of being thrown in jail or worse (like he would be in the US), he is allowed to run for President? That guy? If someone tried to depose Bush, they would disappear- no questions asked.

Packing the legislature with cronies

You mean to free and fairly democratically elected officials? Chavez "packed" them into the legislature? I have dozens of international observers who will disagree.

changing the constitution to allow for permanent re-elections

You do realize that Venezuelan's voted on both creating the new constitution and then doing away with term limits, right? You do also realize that each of the 13 votes held since Chavez was in officer or on the ballot were deemed free and fair by such organizations as the United Nations and the Carter Center, not to mention EU, AU, and other envoys?

Here is another question for you: what is so bad about doing away with term limits? Is Canada under dictatorship as well then? Canadians didn't even get to vote their term limits away- are they less democratic than the US in your eyes?

Creating fast-track authority to rule by decree

That was approved by a democratically elected legislature. You can argue the necessity for such a thing, but not the legality nor democratic nature of the process. I personally think it was needed to make the land reform laws and better access to public health care possible. You may disagree with that opinion, but not if you have a problem with individual missions do tell which ones.

Nationalizing oil, food production and farmlands,

Since when is believing that your country's citizens should benefit from their states resources a crime? Is nationalizing a country's resources so bad when you cut poverty in half in 5 years after doing so, and extreme poverty by 72% in that same time span?

seizing opposition media outlets by refusing to reissue licenses

You do realize there are 6 major stations broadcasting publicly in Venezuela and the right-wing oligarchs own 5 of them. Chavez has to deal with 5 FOX news stations to his 1 MSNBC (poor analogy in reality). He refused to renew the public broadcasting license of ONE station that actively participated in the 2002 coup, airing hours of the Carmona and military generals and their press conferences. They showed tapes of these thugs abolishing the national constitution, the legal system, the legislature, and the justice department continuously and tried to incite violence against government officials. They would be put to death in America, but all that happens to the station in Venezuela is they lose their right to broadcast publicly. They still can broadcast privately and be picked up by satellite- it isn't like it's shut down.

Imagine, indeed, if a coup supported by MSNBC happened under the Bush regime. Everyone at MSNBC would be either in jail or permanently disappeared, not to mention whoever assumed the provisional government would have been put to death for treason, and then whoever funded such a thing would also cease to be. Yet Chavez is the dictator...

[Judi Lynn]

20. Excellent, direct answers to a wad of pure winger fiction.

You might want to see this article by F.A.I.R., if you haven't already. Great comments here, as well:

Coup Co-Conspirators as Free-Speech Martyrs
Distorting the Venezuelan media story

5/25/07

~snip~
RCTV and other commercial TV stations were key players in the April 2002 coup that briefly ousted Chávez's democratically elected government. During the short-lived insurrection, coup leaders took to commercial TV airwaves to thank the networks. "I must thank Venevisión and RCTV," one grateful leader remarked in an appearance captured in the Irish film The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The film documents the networks’ participation in the short-lived coup, in which stations put themselves to service as bulletin boards for the coup—hosting coup leaders, silencing government voices and rallying the opposition to a march on the Presidential Palace that was part of the coup plotters strategy.

On April 11, 2002, the day of the coup, when military and civilian opposition leaders held press conferences calling for Chávez's ouster, RCTV hosted top coup plotter Carlos Ortega, who rallied demonstrators to the march on the presidential palace. On the same day, after the anti-democratic overthrow appeared to have succeeded, another coup leader, Vice-Admiral Victor Ramírez Pérez, told a Venevisión reporter (4/11/02): "We had a deadly weapon: the media. And now that I have the opportunity, let me congratulate you."

That commercial TV outlets including RCTV participated in the coup is not at question; even mainstream outlets have acknowledged as much. As reporter Juan Forero, Jackson Diehl's colleague at the Washington Post, explained (1/18/07), "RCTV, like three other major private television stations, encouraged the protests," resulting in the coup, "and, once Chávez was ousted, cheered his removal." The conservative British newspaper the Financial Times reported (5/21/07), " officials argue with some justification that RCTV actively supported the 2002 coup attempt against Mr. Chávez."

As FAIR's magazine Extra! argued last November, "Were a similar event to happen in the U.S., and TV journalists and executives were caught conspiring with coup plotters, it’s doubtful they would stay out of jail, let alone be allowed to continue to run television stations, as they have in Venezuela."

When Chávez returned to power the commercial stations refused to cover the news, airing instead entertainment programs—in RCTV's case, the American film Pretty Woman. By refusing to cover such a newsworthy story, the stations abandoned the public interest and violated the public trust that is seen in Venezuela (and in the U.S.) as a requirement for operating on the public airwaves. Regarding RCTV's refusal to cover the return of Chávez to power, Columbia University professor and former NPR editor John Dinges told Marketplace (5/8/07):

What RCTV did simply can't be justified under any stretch of journalistic principles…. When a television channel simply fails to report, simply goes off the air during a period of national crisis, not because they're forced to, but simply because they don't agree with what's happening, you've lost your ability to defend what you do on journalistic principles.

~snip~
The RCTV case is not about censorship of political opinion. It is about the government, through a flawed process, declining to renew a broadcast license to a company that would not get a license in other democracies, including the United States. In fact, it is frankly amazing that this company has been allowed to broadcast for 5 years after the coup, and that the Chávez government waited until its license expired to end its use of the public airwaves.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3107

[Idealism]

22. Thanks for the article!

I have not seen this website before, do they focus on international reporting or domestic more often?

[Judi Lynn]

24. Probably more often on domestic, it would seem.

Their founder is Jeff Cohen whom you may remember.

http://www.historycommons.org.nyud.net:8090/events-images/a999jeffcohen_2050081722-22208.jpg

Here's one short review of the F.A.I.R.:

Media watch nonprofit organization

Founded by former journalist and civil rights lawyer Jeff Cohen, media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has set the standard for media criticism based on democratic values rather than on partisan positions. Tracking media practices that marginalize women, people of color, and voices of dissent, FAIR critiques media bias, inaccuracies, and omissions—and mobilizes a community of activists to hold media outlets accountable. The group’s teaching tools include its widely-distributed action alerts, its magazine Extra!, and the syndicated radio program Counterspin, hosted by Janine Jackson, Steve Rendall, and Peter Hart. FAIR has taught a generation of progressive activists to become media critics, to respond to misleading reporting with reasoned critiques, and to work for public interest media policies. Prominent activists who have worked at FAIR include broadcaster Laura Flanders, media critic Norman Solomon, and feminist media activist Jennifer Pozner.

http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/mediaheroes/fair

The founder of F.A.I.R., as I just discovered looking for more on him, was the producer of the Phil Donohue Show which got axed as _{George W. Bush} fired up his murder machine against Iraq:

Fall 2002: MSNBC Restricts Anti-War Voices on ‘Countdown: Iraq’ Program

eff Cohen, the founder of the media watchdog organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and a former producer for MSNBC talk show host Phil Donahue, loses almost all of his airtime on the network as the Iraq invasion approaches. Cohen, once a frequent guest on MSNBC’s various opinion and commentary shows, will reflect in his 2006 book Cable News Confidential that he argued passionately against invading Iraq, using “every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers—no real threat, cost, instability.” However, as the run-up to war progresses, he is no longer allowed on the air. He will write: “There was no room for me after MSNBC launched ‘Countdown: Iraq’—a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. ‘Countdown: Iraq’ featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.” In 2008, Cohen will write: “It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals—many working for military corporations—were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor.” Cohen’s recollections will be bolstered by a 2008 New York Times investigation that documents a systematic, well-organized media manipulation program by the Pentagon that successfully sells the war to the media and the American public by using so-called “independent military analysts” (see April 20, 2008 and Early 2002 and Beyond). While the Times article focuses primarily on the analysts and their Pentagon handlers, Cohen says that an equal portion of blame belongs to the media outlets themselves. “The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld nor the Pentagon,” Cohen writes. “It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism. No government agency forced MSNBC to repeatedly feature the hawkish generals unopposed. Or fire Phil Donahue. Or smear weapons expert Scott Ritter. Or blacklist former attorney general Ramsey Clark. It was top NBC/MSNBC execs, not the Feds, who imposed a quota system on the Donahue staff requiring two pro-war guests if we booked one anti-war advocate—affirmative action for hawks.… (T)he major TV networks… were not hoodwinked by a Pentagon propaganda scheme. They were willingly complicit, and have been for decades.” (Truthout (.org), 4/28/2008)

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=phil_donahue_1

[ima_sinnic]

17. you need to educate yourself instead of just mindlessly buying into foxnews spin (nt)

[EFerrari]

7. Zero evidence of corruption on the man. The opposition has been searching

for it and they come up empty.

[bitchkitty]

8. What a card. I'm dyin' here.

Keep on dreaming - dream that we really live in a Democracy, while criticizing and demonizing a true Democratic leader and nation.

God, please let democracy come to this country soon, and let the opposition to freedom choke on their own vile lies!

[IndianaGreen]

16. I think we could use our own American brand of the Bolivarian Revolution

and put people ahead of profits, the bankers, and the financiers.

[MasonJar]

10. Chavez is a great democratic leader, who is also proud to be a socialist

who speaks and acts for all the people, with special emphasis on the poor. The MSM of the USA follows its regular Bushian course in its depiction of Chavez, who is IMHO a truly great leader, who has been up against almost insurmountable odds against the rich in Venezuela and the government and media of the USA, especially the Bushista. America has subverted and murdered for too long in Central and South America; I hope that the new South American leaders succeed in extricating themselves from our vicious and self-aggrandizing grasp. The murders we perpetrated under Reagan et al are forever a brand on our national soul.

[G_j]

15. empowering the poor is the surest way to bring down

their wrath. They will then work full time to generate hatred against, and cast this person as the enemy.
same ol, same ol..

[Joanne98]

13. Give them Hell Hugo!

[Peace Patriot]

18. They're trying to get a good price for the bank they put on the OPEN MARKET! Such capitalists,

there Chavistas.

When Bush bailed out the banks, Chavez said, "Hello, Comrade Bush!"

--------

As for Msongs and the "dear leader" remark, what followed upthread is why I asked the question. Let me reiterate: "So please, defend your suggestion that Chavez is a 'dictator.' What facts do you have to counter my conviction that he is not a 'dictator'?"

What followed is an example of an educated populace--people here at DU who know the facts, and know what bullshit the demonization of Chavez has been. Oh, first there was one little burp of disinformation, the howler being that Chavez packed the legislature with "his cronies." Chavez has no control over who the people vote for in the legislature, any more than any other political leader might have, as to his own party (--in this case, a brand new socialist party formed only last year, in which Chavez is trying to pull the fractious left together on focused goals).

But soon, other DUers spoke up. It is we who have had "dictators" for leaders, not Venezuelans. It is we who had a president who wrote his own laws, and whose cronies like Karl Rove used Justice Department hiring and firing to promote wrongful lawsuits against opposition politicians. It is we who had leaders who tortured prisoners and spied on us all, and slaughtered a million innocent people to get their oil. Not Venezuelans. They have a leader who has defended Venezuela's oil, and used its profits to bootstrap the poor.

I asked the question because those who mindlessly repeat Bushwhack and corpo/fascist press "talking points" about Chavez cannot defend them. They are lies. There is no defense. They cannot support the statement that "Chavez is a dictator" nor the insinuation that they intend by using a phrase like "dear leader." Chavez is a democratic leader, subject to the will of his people, and has proven this time and again. He is neither a dictator nor a wannabee dictator. He has been president of Venezuela for ten years, and has yet to break any law or violate the Constitution in any way. I've yet to hear of a dictator who puts everything to vote--even his own term limits--in free and fair elections. Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly to remove all term limits, so that Chavez--and also a number of rightwing governors and mayors--can run for re-election again.

But anyway, others filled in the facts that give this Bushwhacky "talking point" the lie.

[Judi Lynn]

23. The election in which the opposition lost seats happened after their unsuccessful violent coup.

They knew they were going to take a beating at the polls, and started spreading the word early on to their party members to "boycott" the next election.

We had a hearty laugh about it at D.U. (those of us who are Democrats) because it was painfully clear they knew they were going to get thumped and were trying desperately to conceal the circumstances. Only the most devious, deceitful, dishonest people in the world would have EVER considered after that painfully crude tactic, complaining that Chavez had stacked the legislature.

They lost. From boycotting, they made the leap to insist the Chavistas seized control of the legislature. There's more to it than that: had they participated as civilized, respectable, mature human beings (a task beyond their ability) they would have been trounced thoroughly, taking a total BEATING. By boycotting, they attempted to conceal the massive disapproval the Venezuelan people have for what they did. They would have lost with, without the boycott. They attempted to seize control of their situation by claiming Chavistas took the election away from them. Poor, poor, racist, tyrannical, greedy ruling class oligarchs. Mean old vast Venezuelan majority. What rank offensive deceit.

Clearly they think we're all watching tv 24/7, and have no idea we're being flim-flammed by our own corporate media working constantly in their service.

[classysassy]

25. Keep

your eyes on the problems in America,I know why some of you hate Chavez.