Venezuelan Electoral System

“¡A Toda Vida Venezuela!”– La Gran Misión

Venezuela is launching a new Mission – perhaps the most relevant in recent years. In the world top 10 most violent countries, 8 are Latino Americans, and Venezuela is fifth, but is Venezuela holding the number one spot where the gap between the perception of violence and the real violence is the biggest? This has a media element in the middle of the political polarisation. Nevertheless, the death toll by violent crime is not a small number by civilised standards.



The Grand Mission ¡A Toda Vida Venezuela! was launched yesterday by president Hugo Chavez, to tackle this issue in its core with six strategic areas of action, each of them with several measures. Here what I could take note of:

'There are fewer and fewer things that money can't buy'

When Michael Sandel presented his book ‘What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets’, by using the assertion that 'There are fewer and fewer things that money can't buy', implied in itself that there are lots of things that the money already buy. And if the trend is growing or sloping down is debatable, I hope is the later. However, why we have toxic debts in the derivative market? why there is no a single banker in jail for the consequence of their mismanagement. They excuse themselves saying it was not crime nor fraud nor wrong doing done by them, and politicians agreed on that fallacy, it was just a systemic failure. I think money bought a lot of bails out to avoid the embarrassment of a judicial trial.

Greenspan said ‘the market model have an imperfection’. What exactly is the imperfection? Can be more invasion of markets the solution? more privatization of public spheres be the golden solution for what is an uninterrupted expansion of "monetization" of almost anything, by means of wrapping it up in magic marketing words. Can we stop them? shall we do that? In my opinion the answer is: that depends on where, when and how.

The spectre of a deadly obsession

Dear Lanre Bakare,

I do really like your expression of the spectre of a deadly obsession when you describe the absurd killing of youngsters for a pair of shoes, and you said well, it’s an obsession, but obsession with what? about what? If we accept the fact that we are still behaving like primitives tribes with new and fancy toys that modernity has given to us, them I can say that a pair of shoes is a trophy that contain certain socialized codes, a status symbol as you said. You had brought one example that an .... aggressive advertising that sells ‘brashness, competitiveness, obsessiveness and insatiability but I think is beyond that. I remember being in Caracas (one of the world's deadliest cities, as you put it) and seen the enormous tension among youngsters that, as any big metropolis subject to a miserly bombardment of advertisements about how is the “must being” with a resulting induced market by constructed necessities, and I have to say is brutal. bringing down civilization into barbarity again, of course assuming we have been lifted.

But is sad that is nothing else to say about your last sentence ... Trainers are a status symbol for young people all over the world, one that some are willing to kill for. That is the way is suppose to be? that’s it? This only fuel the core bully values of this phenomenon. Here is a question for this forum: how to recodify the gangs culture into a political and natural force able to construct themselves a channel that neutralize this vicious bombardment of adds and embrace exercise of power without ending up killing for a pair of shoes. Caracas is finding a dignified way out of this mortifying top list.

Read: The scramble for Kanye West trainers raises the spectre of a deadly obsession, by Lanre Bakare