Fausta's Blog

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Archives for August 2014

August 9, 2014 By Fausta

Venezuela: Derwick in the news

In the WSJ:
American Agencies Probe Venezuelan Energy Company
Federal and New York City law-enforcement authorities are investigating Derwick Associates, which became one of Venezuela’s leading builders of electricity plants during the Chávez administration.

Manhattan prosecutors are investigating Derwick and ProEnergy for possible violations of New York banking law, people familiar with the matter said.

Meanwhile, people familiar with the matter said prosecutors in the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section are reviewing the actions of Derwick and ProEnergy for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits offering foreign government officials improper payments in exchange for a business advantage.

Federal prosecutors are scrutinizing the difference between the prices ProEnergy charged Derwick for its equipment and the prices Derwick ultimately charged the Venezuelan government, one person familiar with the matter said. The person said that in some past FCPA cases, excessive margins have been used to conceal bribes to foreign officials.

Casto Ocando, in his book Chavistas en el Imperio: Secretos, Tácticas y Escándalos de la Revolución Bolivariana en Estados Unidos (page 224), estimates that the Chavez government awarded Derwick contracts of nearly a billion dollars (plus $400 million overruns) between 2009-2010.

Alek Boyd has been writing about Derwick since 2012; in today’s post he explains that

Derwick Associates never won “competitive bids”. In the multiple occasions that Batiz and Ultimas Noticias asked Derwick Associates to reveal details of the contracts it had gotten from the Venezuelan State -bold added with the purpose of highlighting the fact that this is public money we are talking about- the company refused, repeatedly, to come clean. Derwick Associates has never been a “transparent company”. Quite the opposite in fact.

Read Alek’s post here.


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Filed Under: Communism, crime, Venezuela Tagged With: Alek Boyd, Casto Ocando, Derwick Associates, Fausta's blog

August 8, 2014 By Fausta

Today’s illegal invasion headlines

From Drudge:

Rwandan man accused of war crimes arrested crossing into USA…

Immigration Official Arrested for Bringing Man from Ghana…

Border Patrol: Feds Releasing Murderers Into USA…

Email Tirade…

Mother of slain agent: ‘I will not rest’…

WIRE: Americans worry illegals threaten way of life, economy…

UNIVISION POLL: Immigration Low Priority for Latino Voters…

DREAMers vow confrontations…

REPORT: New migrants entering public school system to cost Texas taxpayers $45M…

Feds Bend CDC Rules, Allow Sick Illegals to Stay…

Embattled Dem: I voted with John McCain…

Americans Renouncing Citizenship Hits New Record…

Neoneocon answers Dana Milbank:

Dana Milbank wants all you old white men to know that he understands your concerns, although he doesn’t share them. Big of him, isn’t it?

Actually, he doesn’t even understand them, as his essay proves. He thinks the concerns of those other white men have to do with race itself, and that they’re upset because, increasingly, “Whiteness has less and less to do with being American.”

No, Dana dear, they’re upset because traditional and historical Americanvalues increasingly have less and less to do with being American. You’re the one obsessed with race and ethnicity. For most people opposing increased illegal (or greatly increased legal) immigration, the problems are the following ones, and they have nothing to do with the color of the new arrivals:

(1) Letting people come here who break the law means that you’re bringing in a lot of people with no respect for law. That bodes ill for their future as law-abiding citizens.

(2) Way too many of the new arrivals are economically dependent on the welfare state, and in fact by their own admission that’s one of the main reasons they come here. That was never true in the past (especially back when there was no welfare state) and will constitute a drain on our already-stressed economy no matter whether such arrivals are white, black, green, or purple.

(3) Years ago we stopped stressing assimilation in all its important manifestations. American values have suffered as a result. Assimilation was (and still is) the key to this country’s encouraging immigration and yet continuing to be America, with its American exceptionalism intact. It’s not the race of the new arrivals that’s the problem, the problem is that their failure to assimilate is making this country more like the places from whence they came, and that’s not a good thing.

I don’t see white Dana spending years living in China, Latin America, or any other such places.

The Squeegee men and broken windows are back in NYC

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Filed Under: illegal immigration, immigration, politics Tagged With: Fausta's blog

August 8, 2014 By Fausta

Pope Francis reinstates Marxist to the priesthood

My latest, Pope Francis reinstates Marxist to the priesthood, is up at Da Tech Guy Blog.

Yes, the guy who accused Israel of genocide is now back saying Mass; that Miguel D’Escoto.

Related:
Nicaragua: A reminder on the sandinistas

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Filed Under: Catholic Church, Communism, Nicaragua, Pope Francis I Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Miguel D'Escoto

August 8, 2014 By Fausta

Nicaragua: A reminder on the sandinistas

I have an article coming up later today on a related topic, so please keep the following in mind:
The Black Book of the Sandinistas

In emulating Castro and their other communist heroes such as Stalin and Mao, the Sandinistas took control of everything in the country: mass organizations, the army, police, labor unions, and the media. They censored all freedom of speech, suspended the right of association and ruthlessly crushed the freedom of trade unions. Faithful to their Marxist ideology, the new tyrants seized the means of production. State controls and nationalization spread, aid to the private sector and incentives for foreign investment disappeared. To put it plainly, another 20th-century experiment with socialism annihilated a nation’s economy along with a peoples’ prospects for a better life.

Thousands of Nicaraguans who attempted to protect their property — or who simply committed the crime of owning private property — were imprisoned, tortured, or executed by the new despots.

Unlike the previous regime of Anastasio Somoza, the Sandinistas did not leave the native populations on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua in peace. In Khmer Rouge style, they inflicted a ruthless, forcible relocation of thousands of Indians from their land. Like Stalin and Mao, the new regime used state-created famine as a weapon against these “enemies of the people.” [2] The Sandinista army committed myriad atrocities against the Indian population, killing and imprisoning approximately 15,000 innocent people. The Sandinista crimes included not only mass murders of innocent natives themselves, but a calculated liquidation of their entire leadership — as the Soviets had perpetrated against the Poles in the Katyn Forest Massacre, when the Soviet secret police executed approximately 15,000 Polish officers in the spring of 1940.

The Sandinistas quickly distinguished themselves as one of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America, carrying out approximately 8,000 political executions within three years of the revolution. The number of “anti-revolutionary” Nicaraguans who disappeared while in Sandinista hands numbered in the thousands. By 1983, the number of political prisoners inside the new Marxist regime’s jails was estimated at 20,000. [3] This was the highest number of political prisoners in any nation in the hemisphere — except, of course, in Castro’s Cuba. By 1986, a vicious and violent Sandinista “resettlement program” forced some 200,000 Nicaraguans into 145 “settlements” throughout the country. This monstrous social engineering program entailed the designation of “free-fire” zones in which Sandinista government troops shot and killed any peasant of their choosing. [4]

The Sandinista Gulag also institutionalized torture. Political prisoners in Sandinista jails, such as Las Tejas,were consistently beaten, deprived of sleep and given electric shocks. They were routinely denied food and water and kept in dark cubicles known as chiquitas (little ones), that had a surface area of less than one square meter. These cubicles were too small to sit up in, were completely dark, and had no sanitation and almost no ventilation. Prisoners were also forced to stand for long periods without bending their arms or legs; they were locked into steel hot boxes exposed to the full force of the tropical sun; their daughters or wives were sexually assaulted in front of them; and some prisoners were mutilated and skinned alive before being executed. One sadistic Sandinista practice was known as corte de cruz; this was a drawing-and-quartering technique in which the prisoner’s limbs were severed from the body, leaving him to bleed to death. [5]

The result of all of these horrifying cruelties and barbarisms was yet another mass exodus from a country enslaved by communism with tens of thousands of Nicaraguans escaping and settling in Honduras, Costa Rica and the United States. [6]

As most Marxist regimes, the Sandinista despotism accompanied its internal repression with external aggression. With Soviet and Cuban aid

Read the whole thing here.

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Filed Under: Communism, Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua, politics Tagged With: Fausta's blog

August 7, 2014 By Fausta

Venezuela: What a show trial looks like

Venezuelan Court Bars Defense for Opposition Leader
As Leopoldo López’s trial got under way Wednesday for allegedly inciting violence in a bid to topple the government, his defense faced a problem: They were banned from calling witnesses and evidence on his behalf.

In addition to not being able to call 63 witnesses the defense had proposed, the court barred Mr. López’s defense team from presenting 18 videos taken by journalists at the protest. Hearing from those witnesses would provide clarity over what happened, said Mr. Gutiérrez, because the prosecution is accusing protesters of throwing Molotov cocktails at the Attorney General’s Office. He said no images have emerged depicting that kind of violence.

Meanwhile, the court ruled that the prosecution is permitted to call more than 100 witnesses, mostly government employees.

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Filed Under: Venezuela Tagged With: #LaSalida, Fausta's blog, human rights, Leopoldo López

August 7, 2014 By Fausta

“once every 5 years”

IRS Abolishes Mandatory Expiration Dates For Illegal Immigrants’ Taxpayer Status

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) quietly changed regulations to allow more undocumented immigrants to keep their taxpayer status through a program that is rife with fraud and abuse, and to delay deactivation of immigrant taxpayer status until 2016.

The IRS now prevents peoples’ Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) from automatically expiring after five years as previously mandated. Now immigrants can keep their ITIN so long as they pay taxes at least once in a five-year period. (RELATED: IRS Loophole For Illegals’ Children Costs Taxpayers Billions)

Absolutely remarkable. The IRS apparently doesn’t mind paying out fraudulent refunds to illegal aliens, and balks at using one of the tools the agency needs to prevent that fraud.

Do I get to pay my taxes every 5 yrs? http://t.co/Ib4du5dwcj

— Fausta (@Fausta) August 7, 2014

UPDATE:
Linked to by Peach Pundit. Thank you!

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Filed Under: illegal immigration, immigration, income taxes Tagged With: Fausta's blog, IRS

August 6, 2014 By Fausta

And now, for a “train deal” with Mexico

My latest, And now, for a “train deal” with Mexico, is up at Da Tech Guy Blog.

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Filed Under: illegal immigration, immigration, Mexico Tagged With: Da Tech Guy Blog, Fausta's blog

August 6, 2014 By Fausta

Ecuador: Like bitcoin, but not as solid

Anyone investing in Ecuador?

Bitcoin-Like Money Is Ecuador’s Latest Dollar-Saving Plan (emphasis added):

After mortgaging most of Ecuador’s oil and gold to finance spending, President Rafael Correa is planning to create virtual money to pay the nation’s bills.

Congress last month approved legislation to start a digital currency for use alongside the U.S. dollar, the official tender in Ecuador. Once signed into law, the country will begin using the as-yet-unnamed currency as soon as October. A monetary authority will be established to regulate the money, which will be backed by “liquid assets.”

What do they mean by “liquid assets”, if it can’t be swapped for government bonds?

How reliable is Ecuador?

Less than six years after repudiating $3.2 billion of its dollar-denominated debt

And don’t forget the 1999 default.

UPDATE:
Since the “currency” is yet unnamed, I suggest we name it bullcoin.


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Filed Under: business, economics, Ecuador Tagged With: Fausta's blog

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