Has Hugo Chavez thrown a lifeline to Ken Livingstone?

10.04.08 | There are so many reasons why Londoners should boot Livingstone out of City Hall that is hard to enumerate all of them. In my opinion, near the top of relevance list, is Livingstone's cuddling of Venezuela's petro-caudillo Hugo Chavez, a failed coupster soon to be declared supporter of a terrorist organization by INTERPOL. Mind you, one key element in Livingstone's bid to win London's mayoral race is meant to be the environment. It does not bother him in the slightest, nor does it alert his daft opponents, that his militaristic chummy has pledged to build a 8,047 kilometers oil pipeline, through South American wilderness, from Caracas to Buenos Aires, which will destroy thousands of acres of rain forest. Neither does it trouble the communist mayor that Hugo Chavez heads one of the world's biggest, most polluting oil companies.

In February last year PDVSA and GLA officials signed an oil deal. Livingstone's propaganda arm reported "The historic deal means London's bus fleet will use subsidized oil from Venezuela - leading to a massive 20 per cent reduction in the price of fuel." This is a blatant and demonstrable lie, for Venezuela is not providing subsidized oil to London's bus fleet (TfL), but rather it pays TfL, in cash, a 20% 'subsidy' of oil expenditure incurred by its contractors. Alas Chavez's charity gets Venezuela absolutely nothing; GLA and TfL officials can't even explain coherently what it is expected of them in return, though they praise Chavez's fake achievements with total conviction. Livingstone's publication also lies about the total number of beneficiaries of the programme. The pdf linked is worth a read, for it shows how those in charge of implementing the programme have, in the words of Tony Arbour, discriminated against poor Londoners: "the Mayor is distinguishing, as they did in Victorian times, between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. You have made it quite clear in the way that this money is being allocated that people who are on Jobseeker's Allowances are undeserving but people who are not looking for work are deserving."

Livingstone however, in his desperate bid to cling to power at any cost, has pledged today that "he will seek to use £14m of funding provided by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to subsidize public transport for failed asylum seekers." Does this new announcement means that a consultation process has been held with either Hugo Chavez or his cronies? If so, how come British and Venezuelan media have failed to report it? Who gave Livingstone the right to use Venezuelan money for political gains?

Londoners should note that despite the political capital that could be obtained, Livingstone failed to register his directorship of the Venezuela Information Centre, a propaganda outlet operated by GLA staff in City Hall, which is, presumably, oil deal's quid pro quo.

Guardian's Comment is Free censors Vcrisis

A phone call from ITV News desk yesterday morning brought me back to the Venezuelan reality. Frankly I was completely unaware that bus driver cum Venezuela's Foreign Secretary Nicolas Maduro was to sign the disgraceful oil deal with London's Mayor Ken Livingstone in City Hall. So I did a swift research on the web and found out about the whole sham. Some clauses of the oil for propaganda 'agreement' left me wondering, for dictator Chavez is to provide up to $32 million/year in oil subsidies to comrade Red Ken but the latter and the Greater London Authority are under no legal obligation to provide any services in return to Venezuela. What a fantastic deal, surely Red Ken must be one of the most expensive advocates Hugo has ever hired. Predictably The Guardian had something in the pipeline; almost simultaneously to the inking of the agreement that isn't an article by erstwhile KGB Richard Gott was posted in Comment is Free (CIF). In a matter of minutes the brigade of leftist racist idiots -vaya redundancia...- started posting comments on how great the deal was, how the poor in Venezuela are going to benefit from it, how traffic and waste management will improve, etc.

Not to leave that sort of bullshit go unscathed I posted, as the only Venezuelan in the comment section, that the deal was nothing but a sham. A tirade of attacks against me ensued by the usual English pundits that pretend to know better than me what's in Venezuela's best interest, the sort of folks that are so detached from reality that they dare argue that I am not representative of Venezuela; they are, despite the fact that they have probably never set foot in the country, do not speak the language, do not know the culture, do not have Venezuelan relatives and family and most probably were not aware of the existence of the country before 2002. However not all was bad about the tit for tat. Case in point an exchange with one CIF user that posts as Zambini. This Zambini fellow falsely claimed that comments that I have made in the past with regards to removing Chavez from power by violent means had been deleted from this site. To be frank the episode brought back memories of Dan Burnett, the Chavez apologist behind the blog oilwars, who once said that should I discover his real identity he would buy me a ticket to Caracas from London. It took me half an hour to determine who this cocky idiot was, needless to say that I'm still waiting on his ticket promise... Stupidity seems to be a characteristic of public employees in either side of the Atlantic though. By 'blowing the whistle' Zambini must have thought that he/she was 'exposing' me before Guardian readers, as if I needed any exposing in front of such radical bunch. The funny thing is that I was able to determine that he/she is a civil servant from the GLA and spends endless hours on the internet defending Red Ken's actions and attacking anyone that opposes his policies, in this case yours truly. Zambini attempts to visit this site from a GLA server such as gate.london.gov.uk were unsuccessful, which prompted his/her commentary and I know that he/she was trying to access Vcrisis for some time ago I blocked GLA servers from accessing this site.

But the most interesting aspect about this affair is that CIF has deleted comments of mine with regards to Zambini's civil servant persona and possible connections to Red Ken and by extension the propaganda joint he runs with GLA staff at City Hall. So there you have it dear readers, censorship is not the exclusive province of third rate dictators such as Hugo Chavez for his European comrades at The Guardian are just as quick at dispensing with uncomfortable truths.