Chavez shuffles deck chairs

An apparently innocuous story appears in the Financial Times this morning announcing that Chavez is appointing new cabinet ministers;

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced a major cabinet reshuffle on Thursday after a poll defeat last month wrecked his hopes of winning new powers to push ahead with his declared socialist revolution.

Chavez named a soft-spoken replacement for his combative vice-president, Jorge Rodriguez, and said he was making 12 other cabinet changes.

Mr Rodriguez was blamed by many government supporters for the referendum defeat in December, when voters rejected Mr Chavez’s bid for new powers and the right to run for reelection indefinitely

In recent days, an apparently humbled Mr Chavez has dropped his grandiose revolutionary speeches and has instead promised to tackle issues like crime and garbage collection that more directly affect his grass roots supporters

But there’s a little more to the story than FT lets on. Daniel at Venezuela News and Views expounds;

There is so much to post on such as the way higher murder rate in Venezuela than in Iraq or how Cabezas fiscal policies failed miserably as Venezuelan inflation reached 23%, almost the double of the set goal, the highest of the continent, about 4 times as high as the average. And let’s not even mention the very partial, very selective, very meaningless “amnesty”….

Gateway Pundit wrote on Wednesday that the murder rate in Venezuela is higher than the murder rate in Iraq. El Universo reports more than 12,000 murders last year in Venezuela. Earlier this week, Las Armas de Coronel posted pictures of Chavez’ garbage issues;

At The Devil’s Excrement, Miguel guesses that inflation is probably higher than what the government publishes and agrees that Chavez is just shuffling deck chairs while the Titanic sinks;

Clearly, Chavez is still shuffling people around, rather than looking for experts. He wants loyalty more than effectiveness and management capability. This bodes badly for him (and us!) in the near future, as there are significant problems that need to be resolved and tackled with true expertise. The most important positions that needed to be filled were the Vice Presidency and the Ministry of Finance, we shall see what the latter brings.

Tomas Sancio at Venezuelan Politics says it’s because Chavez is too rigid;

In the end, Chávez’s binary way of thinking is hurting him more than he would expect. The highlights of 2007 were that he closed RCTV for criticizing his government and pushed a Constitutional Reform that few people had any input in. In spite of record oil prices and largesse, his popularity suffered and will continue doing so in 2008 if he doesn’t become more flexible. Again, we wouldn’t bet on this.

But I think it’s because he’s a moron pretending to be one of the literati. He doesn’t understand economics, he doesn’t understand politics – I’m surprised that while he was a paratrooper, he could find the ground. Chavez thinks that things happen just because he says it happens. Look at the other members of his “gran revolucion” – nose picking mouth breathers all.

He’s assembled the biggest group of idiots across the globe with no other goal than to stick his finger in the eye of the United States, and George Bush in particular. What kind of vision is that? And how does that help the Venezuelan people?

Funny that it took the Spanish King to point out that Chavez has no clothes. And FARC.

Category: Foreign Policy, Hugo Chavez, Politics