Gionet Todesco is only one of the many talented artists we have here in Caracas
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Tatau in venezuela
Posted: Wednesday, March 26, 2003
By: Thais J. Gangoo
VHeadline.com lifestyle correspondent Thais J. Gangoo writes: More than 10 years ago, a new trend came to our Venezuelan society. People decorating their bodies with expressive and picturesque tattoos and body piercing started filling the streets putting others in shock and awe because of this new and particular tendency.
The word tattoo comes from the Tahitian word "tatau" which means, "to mark something."
Throughout history tattoos have been used to show a membership to a clan or society around the world. The earliest recorded tattoos were found on the bodies of Egyptian mummies during the time of the construction of the great pyramids (1200 BC).
Greeks used tattoos as a way of communication among spies. Romans, however, used tattoos to mark their slaves. Meanwhile, people from West Asia displayed their social status by tattooing their bodies.
Things have change a lot over the years, however we can't forget that some people are still impressed either in a positive or a negative way by these walking tapestries of art we can see walking in our streets.
Venezuelan talent
Gionet Todesco is a tattoo artist born 28 years ago in Caracas. He started tattooing 11 years ago and was lured into this particular world by well-known artistes such as Lucky (the first to bring the 'art' to Venezuelan culture more than 10 years ago) and some other friends too.
"I got my first tattoo when I was 14 years old ... I remember I began doing this with a machine a friend and I bought at the time ... then, I started searching for information! I asked so many people and read so many articles about it. That's where it all started," says Gi0net.
Drawing on the skin is not an easy job ... it requires practice. Gionet not only tattoos but he also designs and does body-piercing too. He says all kind of people came to the store to get tattoos and the majority come with no idea of the design they'd like, or even what part of their body they'd like to get it on. He says he refuses to copy a design from a magazine or a paper ... he'd rather create a design with his own touch and what the clients express through their personalities and taste.
"Sometimes I have people who know what they want, but they won't tell me what it means. However, I can feel it. I know the meaning of a tattoo just by looking at the person and the design. It's just a feeling. Although, sometimes, customers like a design and they don't know what it means. I know the meaning of some symbols and things like that."
Its understandable that, right now, with all the difficulties we have to get supplies from around the world, and the prices went up this year ... a tattoo in Venezuela now costs between Bs. 50.000(US$30) and Bs.500.000 (US$300), depending on the size and how detailed the tattoo design is. I was wondering how wild people get when it comes to tattooing their bodies and Gionet says the weirdest tattoo (although its pretty funny) was a 'Mafalda' and some on genitals, which are obviously the most painful of all, and the weirdest too, since not many people seem to be willing to stand the pain.
It's basically the same when it comes to body-piercing. The most common ones are on the belly-button, ears, tongue, eyebrow, and nose, genital piercing is very uncommon here in Venezuela ... not many people come to a store to say they want to get one. Besides which, the prices go from Bs.25.000 ($15) to Bs.50.000($30) although the piece of jewelry is not included.
"Saturday is the best day because usually people get paid that day and they go out to the malls and shop at the stores. A lot of young people come to the store and tell me they want to get a tattoo ... I ask their age and, if they are under 16, I don't do the job, even with their parents' consent. However, if the person is over 16, and comes with a parent, I'd do it!"
"The reason is simple. It's not a matter or maturity whatsoever ... its a matter of age. When we are 16 years old, our body still has to grow more until we are adults. If we get a tattoo when we are too young, we might have the risk of deformation and that will never look good. Besides, people must be identified with the piece and at that age sometimes we are not too sure about what we want," Gionet says.
- When they come to get a body piercing, that's a different story ... if they come with their parents, there's no problem even when they're under-age.
When the time comes and you decide what design you want and where you want it tattooed, a whole process is started:
First, needles are bought either already assembled or the parts; so, they can be put together by the artist. Then, everything is sterilized from 30 minutes to an hour or so. Solutions like soap and chlorine are used in some cases, however some other sterile substances are used too. Moreover, different methods are used to sterilize the needles, but its just a matter of what the artist prefers. After the instruments are sterilized, the needles are packed individually, so they are ready to be used. Gloves and needles are new when a tattoo is being done and, after that, they are thrown away. During a good month of work, over 1,000 needles may be used by Gionet.
When the tattoo is done we should not forget to follow the recommendations a tattoo artist gives. Its forbidden to go to the beach, the pool and even the gym. It's a must to use sun block at all times the tattoo is exposed to the sun and it must be washed at least twice a day with natural soap and be coated with medicinal cream such as Bacitracine (it may vary from one tattoo artist to another).
The type of ink is a very important aspect we can't forget. Depending on that we have a long-lasting tattoo or we'll have to retouch it after a few years. "The best inks," Gionet says, are French and American ... American ink is well-known because it has the best black and brown colors.
Although tattooing is not something we need in order to live, it seems that people still go to get tattoos done ... "it's just a matter of playing with the price," says Gionet.
The process to get a body-piercing done is very similar ... when we talk about the sterilizing process and the after care. However, we must say that people are advised of the advantages and consequences of certain body-piercings and the chance there is for the body to reject them. Gionet says that most of the time that happens when there's not enough tissue to hold the piercing ... such as on the hand, neck and back.
Gionets point of view is that when I'm getting a tattoo, it is just like expressing likes, love, pain, etc. We can't live alone, and expressing all these things is a need of tribalism in the union of which there is the strength.
"Throughout my life this job has given me a lot of satisfaction ... it pulls you away from the rest of the world ... this is my lifestyle, this is what I do for a living and I love it."
"I am very impressed by women, they are much stronger than man in so many ways, and even when it comes to getting a tattoo or a body-piercing, it seems they were born to endure pain."
After I left the store, I asked what makes people with tattoos and piercing different from others: "the difference is that we don't talk about people who don't have any ... but they do talk about us.
Will our minds ever change? I remember when I got my tattoos. Everyone in my family thought I'd lost my mind ... and I'm pretty sure they talked a lot about it. But, I think its silly. Nothing you do to your body changes your feelings or your personality. I will soon turn 24, and I believe I'm the same person I was before my tattoos. Up to now, I have four tattoos and one body-piercing, and I see how my family has changed their point of view ... now they accept it more, and see what the truth is about people who have this type of art on their bodies.
- Its art walking in our streets. Everywhere we go there we have it. A piece of art that will be in our bodies until the day we die and even after.
Venezuela has many good tattoo and piercing artists and Gionet Todesco is only one of the many talented artists we have here in Caracas. "We truly are very proud of our people and how they represent us around the world!"
AD strongman creates own political movement
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela Electronic NewsPosted: Wednesday, March 26, 2003
By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue
Ousted Accion Democratica (AD) general secretary, Rafael Marin has announced that he will lead a new political movement called Common Citizen's Democratic Center (CCCD). "This new association will avoid the traditional Leninist party structure that has characterized Accion Democratica (AD) and other parties ... it will be based on a horizontal type leadership."
Taking a potshot at his AD colleagues, Marin says the CCCD will promote and defend liberty, democracy, human rights, ethical values, tolerance, honesty and solidarity ... "the CCCD is a point of encounter fro pluralist ideas from the most liberal to social democrat."
Marin dismisses rumors that he will be expelled from AD but admits he does not how the current AD leadership will react to the CCCD.
Among the guests are the inauguration are: Miguel Rodriguez, Gonzalo Feijoo, Pedro Pablo Alcantara, Eugenio Mendoza, Levy Benshimol, Douglas Leon Natera, Julio Sosa Pietri, John Munoz and a written message from Economist Emeterio Gomez, currently in Haiti.
Practical Postwar Planning --What will happen to the oil?
Read Source
March 26, 2003, 12:55 p.m.
By Martin Hutchinson
Once Saddam Hussein is defeated, the U.S.-led coalition that has defeated him will have its most difficult economic decision: what to do with Iraq's oil revenues, to ensure that they benefit the Iraqi people as a whole, rather than simply fueling a destructive and greedy government machine.
It's a difficult problem. Of all large-scale revenue sources, oil has proved itself the most destructive to the quality of local governments and the welfare of local peoples.
Examples abound. Venezuela, in spite of being a democracy and relatively well-off, has been appallingly run since the 1950s, completely failing to develop a viable non-oil economy. Mexico, one of the world's wealthier countries in 1945, declined into an orgy of corruption owing to its oil wealth, with the worst corruption coming during the 1970-82 period, when oil was at its most valuable. Indonesia, while a dictatorship, was a beacon of Asian success until President Suharto's last years, but has descended into a mire of corruption since the middle 1990s. Since Suharto's departure in 1998, none of his three democratically elected successors has shown any ability to make the Indonesian economy work.
And then there's Nigeria.
There aren't a lot of favorable counterexamples. Tiny countries like Kuwait, Dubai, and Qatar do OK, proving that if you have enough oil wealth — say $100,000 per annum per head of population — you can manage to avoid dissipating it. Even Saudi Arabia, the world's oil-wealthiest country, saw its per capita gross domestic product decline from $25,000 to $7,000 from 1980 to 2000, proving that in spite of the Suharto example, autocracy is no cure for oil-financed corruption. Britain, Norway, and Russia have shown that oil wealth in modest quantities can be a boom, but all three countries had strong non-oil economies before the oil wealth appeared (in the case of Britain and Norway) or a huge non-oil sector that coexisted alongside it (Russia).
It is pretty clear therefore that simply removing Saddam and installing a democratic government will not ensure good government in Iraq. Since the country has the world's second-largest oil reserves and only a weak non-oil economy, there is no chance that it will follow the path of Britain, Norway, and Russia, and every likelihood that even a democratic Iraq will become a second Venezuela or Nigeria, failing to enrich its people and squandering the money in worthless government projects and unbounded corruption. And, of course there remains the possibility that such an Iraq will continue at some level to sponsor terrorist activity.
So what are the alternatives? Until last Monday, under the 1995 "oil-for-food" program, Iraq's oil revenues were handled by the United Nations. This rendered a large portion of the Iraqi population — some 14 million out of the country's population of 24 million — dependent on handouts from the U.N.'s relief administrators. As the citizens of the Berkshire village of Speenhamland found out in 1795, a pure handout program of this kind, in a society that has a high poverty level and considerable social dislocation, simply creates dependence and reduces economic activity. Naturally, the "oil for food" program has also done nothing for Iraq's agriculture. While possibly a necessary (if ineffectual) remedy at a time Iraq was subject to international sanctions, U.N. administration of Iraq's principal source of foreign exchange earnings is bound to cause huge political and economic trouble going forward.
Another possibility would be for the oil revenues to be administered by the World Bank or the IMF, which would use them to pursue a carefully thought out development strategy according to the governing policies of the international institution concerned. This has two problems. First, it would be perceived in Iraq as an exercise in U.S. imperialism, since the World Bank and IMF are perceived in the third world, rightly or wrongly, as instruments of U.S. policy. Second, it would provide no tangible benefits for the Iraqi population themselves (other than by U.N.-type handouts, which have the problems outlined above) but would simply provide a huge "gravy train" for the international institutions and their associated consultants, by which the money will be wasted on ineffectual projects, while the true needs of the population go unmet.
If you think I'm exaggerating, consider Bosnia, a relatively prosperous country with a good education system before 1991, into which tens of billions of dollars of international aid have been poured, without any sign of having created a viable economy. The reason for this is quite simple: The international aid agencies, bound by their own agendas, paid little attention to the needs of the Bosnians themselves. In every other country that broke away from the former Yugoslavia, one of the first orders of business was to provide a mechanism to restore to the populace their foreign currency savings, which had been expropriated by the Yugoslav National Bank in 1991, and used to fund the Serbian war machine. Once this had been done, new business formation and the restoration of a functioning economy were once again possible, since these savings were of course the main source of small-business financing. In Bosnia, the problem was ignored by the aid agencies, and by the government they controlled, and the small business sector is consequently notably absent from the current Bosnian economic scene.
The central problem in all the above schemes for spending Iraq's oil revenues is that they depend on a central Marxist fallacy: that the oil under a country, and the oil production issuing from the country, are rightfully the property of that country's government.
This is equivalent to nationalizing the U.S. semiconductor industry, on the grounds that the U.S. government had provided for the education of William Shockley and his successors who invested in the various devices involved. The principle makes no sense economically; still more does it make no sense morally.
In economic reality, there are two groups of people who have a right to the revenues from Iraq's oil industry: the oil companies that developed it, and the owners of the land under which the oil was discovered. In the event that private-property rights were undeveloped in the region when the oil was found, the latter ownership devolves, not on the Iraqi government, but on the Iraqi people themselves.
The majority of Iraq's oilfields were developed by the Iraq Petroleum Corp., a consortium founded in 1925, and owned by British Petroleum (23.75 percent), Shell (23.75 percent), Compagnie Francaise des Petroles (23.75 percent), ExxonMobil (23.7 percent, between the two constituent companies), and the late Nubar Gulbenkian, the famous "Mr. Five Percent" wheeler dealer, owner of that percentage of the company. IPC was partially expropriated in 1964 and fully nationalized in 1972, the latter by a government of which Saddam was already the guiding figure.
There would thus seem no reason to recognize the expropriation, and every reason to return the operation of the oilfields to the British, Anglo-Dutch, French, U.S., and Portuguese (the Gulbenkian Foundation, domiciled in Lisbon) entities whose rights were so brutally overruled by Saddam's thugs. The Iraq National Oil Company, a corrupt tool of the Saddam regime, can legitimately be cut out of the business.
It is also however clear, through examination of current operating agreements in the oil industry, that the great majority of the oil revenues, perhaps 75 percent to 80 percent, should accrue to the landholders, in this case (subject to any well-founded title claims by individuals on particular oil fields) to the Iraqi people as a whole — not to the government. By ensuring that oil revenues accrue to individual Iraqis, not to their government, the coalition can provide the Iraqi people with a huge tangible benefit from the invasion, and spread the money widely enough so that any funding for terrorism or a military machine is insignificant.
The requirement therefore is for a fund that holds the money, and that contains individual accounts in the name of the Iraqi people, who derive benefit from their holdings and have at least some degree of control over the way the money is invested. Fortunately, there is an excellent model for such an entity: Singapore's Central Provident Fund, with currently 2.9 million members and assets of $45 billion.
The CPF was set up initially in 1955, but its growth dates from 1968, when by a provision of Singapore law a percentage of every employee's salary (currently 20 percent paid by the employee plus 16 percent paid by the employer) up to SGD 6,000 ($3,000) per month is paid into the fund, to accrue in solid investments and pay for the employee's future retirement, health and later housing (by means of home mortgage withdrawal) needs. The fund's investments are managed by trustees, who provide "a fair market return at minimal risk" which is linked to bank deposit rates. However, fund members may also choose their own investment vehicles from an approved list for their accrued fund balances.
Iraq's short-term potential oil production is around 2.5 million barrels per day, with the possibility of an increase to 3.5 billion barrels per day within 3-5 years from investment in new fields. At an oil price of $25 per barrel, with 80 percent of oil revenues devoted to the fund, an Iraqi CPF would have initial revenues of $18.25 billion per annum, or $760.42 for every Iraqi man, woman and child. In addition, going forward, a portion of employed Iraqi's earnings, maybe 10 percent, could be added to his account in the fund.
Over a period of years, as the fund's revenues and assets grew, this should prove sufficient to provide the Iraqi people with basic retirement, health and unemployment benefit needs, as well as educational services for Iraq's children. It would best be managed by the staff of Singapore's CPF, who have 35 years experience in running this type of scheme, and are as far as humanly possible incorruptible (Singapore ranked fifth-lowest in the world, after three Scandinavian countries and New Zealand, in Transparency International's most recent annual corruption rankings.)
By instituting an Iraqi CPF, with individual accounts, funded by the oil revenues, and managed by staff of the Singapore CPF, the coalition would over a 2-3 year period allow the Iraqi people to develop an asset over which they had (if they wished) individual investment control, which would fund their basic social-program needs. The new Iraqi government, in turn, would have to depend on non-oil sources, such as sales and income taxes on the Iraqi people for its revenues. It would thus be relatively impoverished, but would also have no need to provide basic social security, health, or education services for its people. With at most 10 percent of Iraq's GDP under its control, it would be unable to afford expensive military adventures, would have very limited control over the Iraqi economy, and relatively few and minor avenues for serious corruption.
An Iraqi people who had their basic social security, health, and education needs taken care of by a Central Provident Fund managed by incorruptible and capable Singaporeans, and whose government was modest and not very corrupt, would be the happiest polity in the unhappy Middle East. That, at least, is something worth fighting for.
— Martin Hutchinson is business and economics editor at United Press International. This piece was originally written for UPI and is reprinted with permission.