Brother, can you spare $49,665,810,000?

Quico says: According to people idle enough to actually keep track of these things, in the first half of the year the Chávez government announced plans to spend at least $49.7 billion dollars on projects abroad.

I write "at least" because the figure doesn't include the many, many foreign spending promises made "loosely," without announcing a specific price tag.

49 billion verdes is about one and a half times the government's total (oil and non-oil) revenue over that same period: these guys are literally pledging the country's money away faster than it comes in.

It's hard to get a gut level feel for exactly how much money $49.7 billion dollars is.

To give you a sense, here's what $206 million (mostly in $100 bills) looks like.



[This fearsome stash was confiscated from a drug cartel in México just recently.]

Now, the government has, on average, been pledging to spend this amount of money abroad every 21 hours. Indeed, between January and June, the Chávez government pledged to spend this amount of money 240 times over on projects abroad.

So, actually, $49.7 billion would look more like:


















































































Nice, huh?

Actually, I propose the Mexican Drug Cash Pile (MDCP) as the standard unit of account for Bolivarian Foreign Spending.

The conversion rate would be 206,000,000 $ : 1 MDCP.

Bolivia got pledges for 6.4 MDCPs worth of new spending (mostly for energy exploration,) China 9.7 MDCPs (new refineries), Argentina - 15 MDCPs (for bonds), Cuba 21.9 MDCPs (for all kinds of stuff) , Russia 22.3 MDCPs (weapons), Nicaragua 23 MDCPs (refinery), and Iran gets a scrumptious 43 MDCPs (for super secret stuff).

But it's Ecuador that tops the bill with a whopping 46 Mexican Drug Cash Piles worth of new spending: some 9.5 billion of your and my dollars to build a shiny new refinery at Manabí.

Now, does anyone actually follow up on these pledges? Do they ever get audited? How many of these projects will actually get built?

And, erm, how many "commissions" can you pay with 49 billion bucks?

Chavez vs. The Grassroots

Quico says: Teodoro Petkoff has this little riff about how Venezuela's democratic roots just run too deep for an authoritarian model to really take hold. The relatively liberal habits of mind developed before Chávez came to power have "stuck", he says, and are now too deeply embedded in our collective psyche to just wither away and die.

I've often worried that that's just wishful thinking on Teo's part. But then you see things like this, and you see his point:

"Sr. Presidente, a Ud. lo están engañando"
Uploaded by lbracci

Beyond satire

Quico says: I wanted to make fun of this little rant, but on second thought, the thing satirizes itself:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has vowed to expel foreigners who publicly criticise him or his government.

"No foreigner can come here to attack us. Anyone who does must be removed from this country," he said during his weekly TV and radio programme.

Mr Chavez also ordered officials to monitor statements made by international figures in Venezuela.

"How long are we going to allow a person - from any country in the world - to come to our own house to say there's a dictatorship here, that the president is a tyrant, and nobody does anything about it?" Mr Chavez said.

"It cannot be allowed - it is a question of national dignity," he said.

Role confusion

Quico says: So within the last 48 hours, we've found out that

• Four years on, PDVSA still can't figure out a way to hire enough drills to keep oil output from falling,
  

and

• Chávez thinks this is a great time for PDVSA to start growing beans and making shoes and stuff

Watch this space for more announcements from the super secret Sixth Motor of the Revolution. Next week, they'll tell us the Agriculture Ministry gets to run monetary policy and the Central Bank is going to be in charge of the army, after that the Defense Ministry will take over the schools while the Education Ministry organizes elections and CNE runs TVES.

Oh, and who'll pump out the oil? Avepane, of course...hey, you gotta have some continuity.

Verily I marvel at their strategic vision, at this fiendishly clever plan to confuse the hell out of the Marines when they invade. When the gringos go to snatch PDVSA, all they'll find is people making sneakers. When they storm into the National Assembly, they'll find a massive Vertical Chicken Coop instead. And when they try to take over the Supreme Tribunal they'll find it turned into a sprawling whorehouse.

Think I'm kidding? Think again: those last two bits are already in place...