is sucking hind titicaca! Just like the United States... 
after nObama is anointed!
Posted on 06/02/2008 1:34:45 PM PDT by thackney
LA PAZ, Bolivia - President Evo Morales signed a decree nationalizing all assets of gas pipeline company Transredes on Monday, saying the foreign companies that owned half of it had been too slow in negotiating.
Morales' decree gives the government full ownership of Transredes SA, which transports Bolivia's natural gas to clients in Brazil and Argentina. Terms of the nationalization were not announced.
The company had been half-owned by Royal Dutch Shell PLC (nyse: RDSA - news - people ) and Ashmore Energy International.
Morales said Ashmore executives had initially agreed to sell some of their 25 percent stake in Transredes to state energy company YPFB - as he ordered on May 1 - and jointly operate the pipelines with the state. But the talks failed to yield a deal.
"We waited patiently all month, but the actions they took were totally different," Morales said, donning a white hard hat for the signing ceremony in the eastern city of Santa Cruz. "They wanted to be bosses, and have us be the employees.
"We're a small country - sometimes they call us underdeveloped - but we have lots of dignity," he continued. "Partners are welcome, but we will not accept bosses."
Since his 2005 election as Bolivia's first indigenous president, Morales has repeatedly moved to exert greater state control over the country's natural gas fields - the second largest in South America, after Venezuela's.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
That will inspire confidence for private businesses to come to his country.
Screw them.
LOL! But the communists will come running and Morales will fully particiapate in the graft, corruption and poverty sure to follow.
Which explains the following:
Investment in exploration and production in Bolivia’s oil and gas industry fell to $149 million last year from $650 million in 2002, the lowest since 1996
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aRNH_MSzJmHI&refer=latin_america
is sucking hind titicaca! Just like the United States... after nObama is anointed!
The Marxists in this country are more subtle. The Marxists here want effective control, not formal ownership. The Marxists here use restrictions on development and confiscatory taxation as means of control. The rats may become even more emboldened if they take firm control in 2009. They may use price controls and imprisonment of executives to exert more control.
The Marxists in the country are talking cap and tax in the US Senate.
Seizing private business assets is what communists do. Chavez, Castro, democrats.
Technically, you are describing is Fascism. Hmmm...that would make the Marxist________ (fill in the blank.)
So Shell will move on and look for more fertile ground. And Bolivia will still be Bolivia.
If you rob your investors you won't get more investors. Anyone wonder why poor countries remain poor? The cure for poverty is the creation and accumulation of wealth. That requires a culture in which agreements are honored, and property is respected.
If you must forever watch your back, you have to have friends in high places. By definition this means oligarchy. Guys like Morales are the reason oligarchies exist. In a system like this, in which a single man like Morales can decide the fate of whole industries, you have to have protectors on the inside or you can be stripped of whatever you have. That means oligarchy.
And, since a guy like Morales could turn on you at any time, you had better invest your profits outside the country, in Chile or Miami or Los Angeles. Somewhere where property is respected and safe. That is why Latin America always exports its capital. Next election, next revolution, you could find yourself on the outside.
No corporation in its right mind should set up in such a place without a complex and subtle software control that would be impossible to operate without corporate permission. And if the software stops working—nothing else works.
I mean not just out of service, but worse than useless. Gas pipeline, for example, that would rupture without warning, even if repaired over and over again.
Everything would seem to be fine, easy to control, and doing what it was supposed to do. Yet everything would fall apart.
Think of it as a self-destruct switch, thrown when everybody has left the country.
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