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Venezuela Falling Behind
Christopher Frank writes "Seems Venezuela's lack of power has finally caught up with them! MSNBC has the story: 'If you thought Venezuela's political crisis seemed to be dragging for an impossibly long time -- you were right. In a bizarre mass-malfunction, Venezuela's clocks are ticking too slowly due to a power shortage weakening the electric current nationwide. By the end of each day, the sluggish time pieces still have another 150 seconds to tick before they catch up to midnight.'"
The town of Highland Illinois had a company that made motors that shipped all over the world. At night the local power company would slow down the frequency from 60HZ to 50 HZ for testing of the motors and then catch up all the clocks in town by running at 62HZ for 5 times as long as the elapsed test sequence. This whole process had to be completed before people had to get up for work in the morning.
This was about 20 yesrs ago so things have probably changed by now.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
there was an attempted coup, in which the US was allegedly involved.
whether involved or not, Bush was pretty delighted at the replacement of the elected president with a dictator. and there were at least talks between the white house and the coup plotters in which the white house obviously didn't do a very good job in discouraging the coup plotters.
for a collection of references to articles giving a good background on this issue, see my website (comments, additional info much appreciated).
also provided on the same page is a history of similar coups over the past 50 years in Latin America which occurred to governments in response to actions similar to what Chavez has been doing (land reform, nationalisation of oil/industries). basically anything to alleviate the poor majority. it is this historical pattern which gives the biggest indication that the CIA may be behind it. however, the difference in venezuela is that the CIA supposedly stopped performing these coups.
perhaps the failure of the coup indicates how much harder it is for them to pull them off today (they have to be much more careful to leave no fingerprints, as the public is much less likely to support them without the cold war excuse).