There was a man who had worked all his life and had saved all his money and was a real miser.

He loved money more than anything, and just before he died, he said to his wife, "Now listen. When I die, I want you to take all my money and put it in the casket with me. I want to take my money to the afterlife with me."

And so he got his wife to promise him with all of her heart that when he died, she would put all of the money in the casket with him.

Well, he died.

He was stretched out in the casket, his wife was sitting there in black,and her friend was sitting next to her. When they finished the ceremony, just before the undertakers got ready to close the casket, the wife said, Wait just a minute! She had a box with her, she came over with the box and put it in the casket. Then the undertakers locked the casket down,and they rolled it away.

So her friend said, "Girl, I know you weren't fool enough to put all that money in there with your husband."

She said, "Listen, I'm a God-fearing woman and can't go back on my word. I promised him that I was gonna put that money in that casket with him."

"You mean to tell me you put that money in the casket with him!"

"I sure did," said the wife. "I wrote him a check."

Never underestimate the intelligence of a woman.

daily.stanford.edu By Eric Eldon News Editor Tuesday, February 4, 2003 last updated February 4, 2003 2:47 AM

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth in a weekly series of interviews with international students at Stanford meant to heighten awareness of issues of social and political importance around the world.

This past weekend, The Daily sat down to discuss Venezuelan politics with second-year chemistry doctoral student Eileen Jackson, president of the Venezuelan Association at Stanford, and fifth-year geophysics doctoral student Sandra Vega, a member of the association.

Venezuela emerged with Colombia and Ecuador from the collapse of Simón Bolívar’s post-Spanish colonial Gran Columbia in 1830. Venezuela has overcome a long line of military strongmen and economic instability, largely with money earned through its vast oil fields. It has successfully implemented many political reforms and attained, until recently, a remarkable level of economic stability.

Democratically elected governments have been in power since 1959. Today, the populist, leftist President Hugo Chavez is losing his once-solid support among Venezuelans — having survived one coup on his government, Chavez and his supporters are now confronting a popular two-month-old national strike led by the state oil company and, until yesterday, other business leaders.

The oil strike goes on even as the Chavez government continues to increase oil production without company involvement.

Yesterday, opposition leaders called off the general strike in response to the worsening economy and mediation efforts by a group of countries including the United States.

The Daily: The United States buys a lot of its oil from Venezuela, a member of OPEC, and it affects the oil prices and industries there. Many U.S. oil companies are invested in Venezuela, or at least used to be. How do U.S. and other foreign interests affect Venezuela?

Sandra Vega: Everything related to oil is [run by] the state. It’s managed by the state. Sometimes they have deals with other international oil companies. These companies go to Venezuela, they work there, and they have to pay taxes, and, depending on how much they produce, they have to give some [oil] to the government. You can say it’s an investment, but everything is controlled by the state.

TD: What do you think about President Hugo Chavez as a leader, as a person and about his economic plans?

Eileen Jackson: I don’t like him at all. I think he’s a very resentful person. He’s very aggressive, he has very violent speech. His economic plan is a mystery to me. He’s always talking about his revolution, he’s always talking about feeding the poor and making their lives better. What I see in Venezuela is more poverty since he’s been in government. Every year I go home and I can see it deteriorating. Unemployment is terrible. Chavez sets himself up there like he’s some new world leader, like he’s Jesus Christ, like he’s Simón Bolívar, like he’s going to change the world. But then it’s mostly rhetoric, there’s no real plan. Some of the things he’s done, some of the social programs have been more of a corruption case. He’s bankrupted the national bank. [Chavez’s government] has built houses [for the poor], but the houses are falling apart. He talks about public education, but there’s not enough money going into it. He says he’s building more schools, but I don’t see them. It’s turned into more of an indoctrination system, where they’re re-writing history. I think it’s dangerous because people actually believe in him, because he doesn’t have a plan — nothing different than communism, nothing new.

TD: So do you hold him responsible for the problems that Venezuela currently has?

EJ: I don’t think Chavez is responsible for all the problems. I think the problems are from the past and they’ve been growing. We’ve had a lot of corruption and a lot of inefficient governments, but instead of solving these problems, he’s making them worse. He’s created a lot of hate among classes that hadn’t been there before . . . in his speeches, he tells the poor people that they’re poor because [the rich] exploited them. There’s still a belief that the country is rich and it hasn’t been divided well. But it’s not only distribution of wealth, it’s also that you have to work, that you have to create wealth, and he doesn’t really have a plan for creating more wealth, or creating sources of employment, there’s something that’s long-term or long-standing. He hasn’t given any security, and no one invests in Venezuela nowadays. He talks about nationalizing businesses and that doesn’t help, either.

SV: Chavez took advantage of a very important historical moment in Venezuela. The people were tired of the corrupt political parties that had been governing the country for the last 40 years, and he promised to help the situation. Many people from the middle classes, especially who leaned towards the left, voted for him. He had a lot of support from people in different political parties. He tried to put everything in his favor to stay in power for a very long time — he changed the constitution — but in the years that he’s been in government, he hasn’t done a lot. He does a lot of talking, like every day on the television, but not about important things, and he has been very insulting to people who don’t support him. Now the private media doesn’t support him, and he does not want to tolerate this.

EJ: As time progressed, it became more and more obvious that he was becoming more and more authoritarian. At the beginning, it wasn’t so obvious, but anyone in the government who would criticize or say something against him would be removed from office, and that’s been happening more and more lately.

SV: He was elected democratically, but now he’s acting like a dictator.

TD: Could you talk about how you as individuals — your family backgrounds and work experience, such as experience in the national oil company — relate to how you perceive Chavez.

SV: I worked for PDVSA, the national oil company, I don’t work there anymore, but I have a lot of friends in the oil company, which gives me a different perspective on what’s going on. It is a very polarized situation now, and even though I don’t agree with Chavez’s behavior, the way he has done things, at the same time I also don’t agree with those who call themselves the opposition and the things they have also done.

TD: Are there noticeable shifts taking place in public opinion?

SV: Venezuela is in a process right now where the people are learning, where the people who used to be apathetic about these sorts of issues are out on the streets protesting. They realize that they have to participate to improve the situation. But the problems that we’re facing will take years to fix.

SV: There are many students, especially [studying] geophysics from Venezuela, especially from PDVSA. They have scholarships.

EJ: The company is paying for them. Scholarships from PDVSA and their affiliated consortiums

SV: No one knows what is going to happen now with the scholarships because Chavez has taken control of PDVSA and is firing a lot of people. I know at least three people who went to Stanford, who got their master’s degree here, who are fired. They are some of the thousands of people who are fired. No one knows what the strategy is that Chavez and his supporters are using, except that those who stay in the street protesting him are fired. He says he’s only firing managers, but that’s not true, he’s firing people who don’t manage anything. They’re managing PDVSA right now in a way that nobody understands. People are being fired who have been in charge of paying the scholarships for the people at Stanford.

EJ: The people that are at Stanford right now don’t know what is going to happen.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 - 1:59:41 AM By: Paul Volgyesi

Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:04:29 +0200 From: Paul Volgyesi sanbasan@operamail.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Re: A gringa's experience

Dear Editor: When Priscilla arrived in Caracas to begin work the state-run oil company PDVSA, "Hugo Chavez was a newly-elected President riding high on the wave of popularity."

A year after she left, the wave has become a tide.

Chavez supporters "were a minority at her office..."

You bet they'd be!

But "the debate among (her) co-workers was a healthy one. Non-supporters gave him the benefit of the doubt..."

That is, nobody ever dreamt "el negrito" would really dare touch their privileges.

Priscilla doesn't like "...his maniacal cling to power..."

Which is well within an electoral mandate that Priscilla would never dare to question in her own country. Did anyone hear Priscilla complain about how Dubya was not-elected?

• Or is she suggesting early elections or a referendum on the War on Iraq or any other Bushery she may not like?

When she says "It is no secret that Chavez is a recovering communist," she seems to ignore that "recovering communists" happen to rule half of the world ... one of them, Putin, making out quite well with Bush. As a matter of fact, better a recovering communist than a reborn fascist.

As for "The division between supporters and non-supporters shifted toward the class/income lines," Priscilla forgets colors (how many token niggers in Vassar?), on which a friend from Trinidad commented recently: "In our region, 'negro y pobre' are synonyms."

Which is exactly where said division was long before Chavez was even born, except that there was a huge "silent majority" kept that way by means of state-class terrorism.

And ... while Priscilla believes opposition slogans like "The people of Venezuela vehemently reject his rule." zillions of rotten 'lumpen' have had the gall of showing her she's dreaming on January 23.

All the rest of Priscilla's diatribe can be found in Gustavo Coronel's "Complete Works" and other opposition sources ... that huge mistakes will be made by a class taking over the public life and management of a country they've been forcibly kept away from for untold generations should surprise no one.

• What is much more surprising is the vehemence of US citizens in the support of criminal behavior (not the protests which are OK, but the sabotage and other niceties) that would land them in jail at home.

Or are the rules different for the "negritos" of the outer world?

Given that it took your politicians some two weeks of 24/7 study of the opinion polls to figure out they should distance themselves from Trent Lott...

Paul Volgyesi sanbasan@operamail.com Budapest, Hungary

www.vheadline.com Posted: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 - 3:46:23 AM By: Robert Rudnicki

Executive Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel has restated the government's position on an electoral solution to Venezuela's political crisis, urging the opposition to wait for a revocatory referendum after August 19, the half way point in President Hugo Chavez Frias' term in office and the earliest possible date permitted by the current Constitution.

Government negotiators in the Organization of American States (OAS) led peace talks at the Hotel Melia Caracas have presented this proposal to opposition negotiators, and Confederation of Trade Unions (CTV) secretary general Manuel Cova saying the opposition will respond to the proposal during Wednesday's session, however pointing out that the government has so far failed to respond to the opposition's proposal for a constitutional amendment that would shorten the President's term in office and allow an earlier referendum. 

The government's and the opposition's proposals are the two possible solutions that were put forward by former US President Jimmy Carter, but its seems unlikely at this stage that either side will agree to the other's choice. The government has previously indicated that should the opposition want an amendment then it would have to jump through the constitutionally required hoops to get one, without counting on the government's assistance.

www.upi.com By Owain Johnson UPI Business Correspondent From the Business & Economics Desk Published 2/3/2003 6:19 PM

CARACAS, Venezuela, Feb. 3 (UPI) -- Venezuela's state-owned oil producer Petroleos de Venezuela SA, hard hit by the country's general strike, hopes to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Its president, former OPEC Secretary-General Ali Rodriguez, will take advantage of a walkout by top managers and administrative staff to restructure.

The general strike, which failed to force leftist President Hugo Chavez to resign, has begun to crumble But the 64-day protest is continuing in the oil sector, where most top PDVSA managers and administrative staff are observing the stoppage.

PDVSA is a major supplier of crude oil to the United States, where the company also operates 13,000 gas stations under its CITGO brand. Before the general strike began on Dec. 2, Venezuela was the world's fifth-largest oil producer.

The impact of the strike prompted PDVSA to declare force majeure in early December. The company has taken a tough line with strikers, dismissing about 5,300 of its 33,000 staff for failing to report to work.

Speaking at a breakfast for the international press on Friday, Rodriguez said further dismissals were likely and ruled out a blanket amnesty for strikers.

He said would carry out a major restructuring program over the next six months to reduce staff levels and simplify its complex organizational structure. PDVSA has 189 companies, many of which exist only on paper, and he said the company would evaluate these companies and identify its key assets.

The president did not rule out selling some assets to improve the company's financial position, which has been badly affected by the strike. He said announcements could be expected later in the year, after the review.

The company has already scaled down its planned investments and spending for 2003 from $8 billion to $6 billion. The cuts include a 40 percent reduction in spending and a 30 percent reduction in investment. Rodriguez was emphatic, however, that PDVSA's cash flow problems wouldn't affect its ability to make foreign debt repayments.

PDVSA hopes to be able to ease the force majeure declaration by the end of February, although Rodriguez said it would take a long time to recover from the strike completely. He said, however, that he was very pleased with the progress to date. "We have demonstrated a great capacity for recovery," he told reporters.

Rodriguez said PDVSA produced 1.5 million barrels per day of oil last week and would regularly produce 2 million bpd by mid-February. He estimated that production would reach 2.5 million within the first half of March, close to Venezuela's OPEC quota of 2.8 million bpd.

Joint ventures in the Faja del Orinoco with international oil producers such as France's TotalFinaElf and Norway's Statoil are expected to restart production this week, adding a further 330,000 barrels to Venezuela's total daily production levels.

The speed with which PDVSA restarted production is impressive, given the absence of most top managers and the shutdown of the company's information and communications systems.

Rodriguez has retained the loyalty of most ordinary workers, and PDVSA estimates that most contract workers have returned to work. The company might take on a small group of U.S. experts on short-term contracts to replace sacked managers and help restart operations.

The PDVSA president was a left-wing guerrilla in his youth and remains loyal to the ideals of Chavez's "social revolution." That philosophy is intended to address the enormous disparities of wealth in Venezuela, but opponents say it masks an authoritarian project to convert Venezuela into a socialist state.

Rodriguez believes that by slimming down the energy producer and reducing costs, he will be able to deliver greater value to PDVSA's only shareholder, the government. Income from oil exports generates about half of all government revenue.

"In cultural terms, we are beginning to see the real nationalization of PDVSA," Rodriguez said. "Venezuelans are going to realize they are the real owners of this company. PDVSA is just an instrument for maximizing the benefit of our natural resources."

Striking oil workers allege, however, that Rodriguez has filled PDVSA with government loyalists and under-qualified staff to replace strikers and keep the company running. They claim that laxer supervision has already led to more accidents and the new reorganization will mean a drastic cull in operations that will reduce its production capacity and potential for growth.

"We are seeing the destruction of PDVSA's very base, the exploration and production businesses that are now at only a third of their capacity," a recent statement by the strikers read. "They want to put an end to refining, supply and trading businesses, gas operations, the businesses of (petrochemical company) Pequiven and more importantly, the company's human and management capital."