(Miami Hurled) Honduras' business leaders hope elections restore investors' faith

[Mika]

Honduras' business leaders hope elections restore investors' faith
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/1398668.html

Honduras' business leaders are hoping the recent presidential elections will
help restore faith among international investors and local consumers.

BY LAURA FIGUEROA
[e-mail]

TEGUCIGALPA -- Just days after Honduras' recent presidential elections, Tegucigalpa Chamber of Commerce members gathered for their monthly meeting and breathed a collective sigh of relief.

``Finally, we can get back to business,'' said Luisa Maria Willingham, the chamber's director.

For five months, talks of networking and sales projections were put on hold as business owners tried to navigate through the civil unrest caused by the forced removal of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in June.

Getting back to business now means facing the harsh economic landscape of a country that has essentially been on standby for half of the year.

Almost 180,000 jobs have been lost since Zelaya's ouster, according to studies by Honduran business groups. A study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., found that nearly $50 million was lost each day during a series of curfews imposed by the de facto government.

While the Nov. 29 elections won by conservative Porfirio Lobo are seen by many as the country's way out of political turmoil, business leaders are hoping that international acceptance of the election will also restore faith among foreign investors and local consumers.

``Foreign businesses often have a fear of investing in Latin America because of the problems that have resulted from someone like Hugo Chávez nationalizing businesses,'' said Adolfo Facusse, president of the National Association of Honduran Industry.

``What Honduras has demonstrated is that we're not going to follow in the political path of Chávez,'' Facusse said. ``Many business owners will look at what happened here, will note our elections and see Honduras as a more stable place where the government will not try to take over your business.''

Already the third-poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, the country's weak economy suffered even more setbacks in the months following Zelaya's removal.

Tourism dried up as leery travelers kept away and the U.S. State Department issued warnings against traveling to the beleaguered nation.

Infrastructure projects, which employ thousands of Hondurans, remain on hold after the United States and the European Union withdrew millions in financial aid. Nearly $37 million in U.S. aid has been suspended, a substantial amount for a country where foreign aid accounts for nearly 20 percent of its budget. Throughout the capital city, shop owners try to lure in customers, despite running their shops behind windows boarded up to keep vandalizing protesters at bay.

``As soon as people feel safe by the new government, which promises to be a reconciliation government, then we're going to be ok,'' said chamber director Willingham. ``The clarity of the political map in our country, and the overwhelming amount of people who showed up to vote, will demonstrate the faith that our people have that our country is moving forward in the right direction.''

INDEPENDENT HOPES

Moving forward, business leaders say they have gleaned several economic lessons in the five months of political and economic isolation -- namely that they must try to reduce dependence on foreign assistance and trade.

``We learned the hard way that governments have interests, not friends,'' Willingham said. ``We have depended too much on the good will and donations of other countries. We really need to start moving in the direction of becoming self-sufficient.''

Willingham said her chamber is doing its part to revitalize small businesses -- by training folks accustomed to selling goods from their home on ways to formalize their business practices and expand their ventures.

Business leaders are pegging their hopes that Lobo, a wealthy cattle rancher, will use his business prowess to boost economic development. Lobo is a graduate of the University of Miami's business school.

``The first thing that needs to be done is to create a plan for the next four years that should be a long-term plan to create the conditions for investment in our country,'' said Amilcar Builnes, director of the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise.

`RESTORING FAITH'

Builnes was among a dozen high-profile Hondurans whom Lobo called upon just days after his victory for the first of many ``national dialogues,'' which the new president hopes will fuse rifts created by the political crisis.

The council will be launching an outreach campaign to help assure foreign investors that it is safe to resume business with Honduras. Builnes said Honduras must now work on establishing better trade relations with its Central American neighbors.

``We're the No. 1 business purchaser of other Central American countries, but we're not sending enough of our products to them,'' Builnes said.

He added: ``The nature of the elections was a great starting point, but now we have to get back on course to working on restoring faith in our economy.''

[Downwinder]

1. I'm not buying it.

Facusse is trying to cast them as victims.

I will maintain my boycott of all product categories associated with Honduras.

[EFerrari]

2. Fuck them.

[Judi Lynn]

3. "Now we can get back to business?" Business interests control the government.

They use the poor in near slave conditions, keep their country deep in poverty, and now they have seized the physical means to kill everyone who doesn't go along with them, and they've left TONS of examples around to imtimidate people well enough they will choose to live in terror, and in silence, and in hopelessness.

Completely broken, suffering, compliant workers without any possible hope.

Great for business, bad for human beings.

Business has HAD its way in Honduras so very long. That's why so many of them have sought to work outside the country and send as much money as they can afford to help their families. The very fact they struggle to help their families when they could simply cut their connections and live for themselves shows you there IS a river of real love, concern, self-sacrifice within real human beings who, even driven nearly mad in their lack of security STILL work to make sure their loved ones have food, clothing, shelter, no matter how meager it is.

Let's weigh the value of a Honduran BUSINESS man/woman against someone who literally spends his/her life for others.

The Honduran business community refuses to allow the poor to suffer less. They fear somewhere in the future they might be denied total satiation every day, or miss an opportunity to upgrade their luxurious self-indulgence.

Absolutely FUCK them all, and the US Americans they rode in on.

[Judi Lynn]

4. What could we want more than a remark from Adolfo Facussé?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/_Qk7oZ6Emppk/Sq3TmEISPAI/AAAAAAAA1g0/LgXBGGMlJg8/s320/AdolfoFacusse.jpg http://narcosphere.narconews.com.nyud.net:8090/userfiles/adolfofacusse1.jpeg


http://photography.nationalgeographic.com.nyud.net:8090/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/Photography/Images/POD/v/victoria-coast-sunset-525071-ga.jpg

The Facussé Moment of Reflection ........
ANALYSIS-Honduras coup leaders hunker down for isolation

~snip~
"We don't care about what the world thinks and eventually the world will understand," Adolfo Facusse, head of Honduras' private industry association and one of the most influential businessmen in the country, told Reuters.

Facusse said the de facto government could lift a ban on open-pit mining to attract investment, and issue debt to ease the strain on state coffers.

"If the government needs money, we say: 'Issue bonds, we'll buy them right away,'" he said in an interview in the garden of his sprawling private compound in the capital.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN03525204

[Peace Patriot]

5. The business leaders' view. When do the workers get quoted? Oh, yeah, a lot of them are dead,

or in prison, or fired from their jobs, or suffering injuries (beatings, rape, torture), or mourning loved ones slaughtered by the military, the police and their death squads.

They don't get a viewpoint in "business." They get shot, beheaded, SILENCED.

---------------------

This Facusse bastard sure has Chavez on the brain...

"'Foreign businesses often have a fear of investing in Latin America because of the problems that have resulted from someone like Hugo Chávez nationalizing businesses,'' said Adolfo Facusse, president of the National Association of Honduran Industry.

"'What Honduras has demonstrated is that we're not going to follow in the political path of Chávez,'' Facusse said. 'Many business owners will look at what happened here, will note our elections and see Honduras as a more stable place where the government will not try to take over your business.''"

----

Reminds me of the Honduran coup general who said that, by their coup, they were "preventing communism from Venezuela reaching the United States" (quoted in a report by the Zelaya government-in-exile).

Communism = doubling the minimum wage (Zelaya policy)

Communism = joining a regional trade group (ALBA) by which Honduras can get cheap oil from Venezuela and thus lower the price of bus tickets for poor workers (Zelaya policy)

Communism = lunches for poor school children (Zelaya policy)

Communism = listening to labor unions and grass roots groups all over Honduras, on the need for fundamental reform of Honduras' putrid political system (Zelaya policy).

And in Venezuela, communism = universal health care, universal free education through college, wiping out illiteracy, maximum citizen participation in government and politics, local community power on the use of government development funds, and many other DEMOCRATIC policies, as well as spectacular economic growth over the previous five years, 2003 to 2008, averaging 10%, with the most growth in the private sector (not including oil)!

If that's "communism," we could use some here--so I am not at all happy with this Honduran coup general and his cronies who took it upon themselves to "prevent communism from Venezuela reaching the United States." And you gotta wonder who's feeding him, Facusse and their ilk these lines.

[Braulio]

6. A little reality check

As I said last summer, Zelaya would accomplish nothing...other than get people killed.

Meanwhile, let's set a reality check regarding Venezuela: the President himself declared a national emergency in health care a few weeks ago, because the system is breaking down, and the government is increasingly autocratic and ignores election results (otherwise, explain why the Caracas Metropolitan Mayoralty was eviscerated by Chavez and his puppet Congress after city hall was won by a Chavez opponent).

The spectacular growth you discuss is the result of the terrible economic performance during the oil strike in 2003, and the oil prices hitting record levels in 2008. Now, GDP is falling at about 3 % per anum, is projected to fall in 2010 at a similar rate. Inflation is raging at 25 to 30 % per anum, oil and gas production forecasts continue to be revised downwards, there's an electric power shortage, water shortage, and Venezuelan bonds are reaching junk status. Crime is at a record high, and your worker's paradise is being abandoned by the middle class in growing numbers. Add it all up, your darling Chavistas are ruining the country.

[Peace Patriot]

7. You are way exaggerating these problems, and inventing some, and you can't give

the Chavez government ANY credit for ANYTHING. They are just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad! They are "ruining the country"!

Criminy, WHO needs "a reality check"?

"GDP is falling at about 3 % per anum, is projected to fall in 2010 at a similar rate."

"...is falling...". Yup, this year, like everybody else. "...is projected to fall..." is a conveniently passive word construction. WHO is "predicting" this? The government itself--with a VERY conservative budget based on only $40 a barrel for oil (revenues from which make up only one third of Venezuela's budget) predicts 0.05% growth for the next year, while FULLY funding social programs and after a SIZZLING growth of 10% for the five previous years (most of it in the private sector, not including oil). Numerous countries are hurting after the Bushwhack Financial 9/11. Venezuela, and the other Bolivarian countries, are in fact doing very well in these circumstances.

There is an electric power shortage because there is a DROUGHT. It has nothing to do with Chavez government management. They are in fact far better managers of the Venezuelan government and economy than the looting and plundering "neo-liberal" assholes who ran the country into the goddamn ground in every way imaginable, before Chavez.

As for health care, the Chavez government has been trying to provide health care for EVERYBODY--for that vast poor majority that the previous assholes didn't give a frig about! Instead of praising that very difficult and essential project, and all the new community health centers that have been built, staffed and are up and running, in numerous areas that were never before served by government, and never before had health care of any kind, you dwell on the problems in big hospitals, where doctors complain of not making enough money!

"...my workers' paradise." "...my darling Chavez." Did I say those things? Did I say that Venezuela is a "workers' paradise"? Did I say that Chavez is a "darling" or express any such sentiment? These gross mischaracterizations of what I said are exemplars of what you are doing to the Chavez government--gross exaggeration.

Every country has problems of one kind or another. If you ONLY mention the problems--and if you invent problems--you are like one party to a marital divorce hating the other party for leaving the toothpaste uncapped, not closing the toilet seat, failing to pay a bill and incurring late fees, having relatives who fart at the Thanksgiving dinner table, and leaving scratches on your CDs, in addition to marital infidelity. You are PILING ON. And you are as ridiculous as divorcees sometimes are. Years later they can maybe laugh at themselves. In the high heat of the moment, the other party is evil personified. Nothing they ever did is good. We see this in the parties to a contested will, as well--siblings conceiving insane hatred for each other, such that nothing good that the other person ever did can be remembered. It's emotional blindness.

Chavez is not all bad, and not all good. But the Chavez government is a lot better for most Venezuelans than any prior government, and it inherited vast malfeasance from the previous one--the kind of malfeasance that cannot be remedied in a decade, the kind of malfeasance that Bush/Cheney just inflicted on us here in the U.S. We may never recover. Even if we were able to elect a new FDR--whom Chavez resembles more than any other politician--we may never get out of the vast hole that Bush/Cheney plunged us into.

The Chavez government has done extremely well in these circumstances--with unremitting hostility from the U.S., from Venezuela's own, selfish, unproductive, whiny rich elite who want the U.S. to come in and install them in power again, and from global corporate predators like Exxon Mobil and the corpo-fascist press. The Chavistas are NOT "ruining the country"--far from it; they have brought the benefits of Venezuela's oil to the vast majority, and have led the country and the continent in a new thought: That resources, and economies, should benefit everyone, not just the rich and the corporate. And even if they make mistakes, they are, by and large, doing what they were ELECTED to do--in elections that are far, far more transparent than our own. They have the approval of their people, in big numbers, in most respects.

Try a little love and charity, Braulio. Try thinking about that crippled, arthritic old lady with heart problems, who worked as a maid all her life in some rich Venezuelan's house, to be able to feed her children--worked for pittance wages, had no other skills because she was displaced from her little farm by big rich landowners, and could never afford school--and now has a pension, provided from the oil revenues via the Chavez government, and now has a medical clinic down the street that she can walk to, and can now READ, because of the Chavez government literacy programs, and maybe even has a part-time job, and a sense of usefulness, cooking her favorite recipes with other old ladies in the neighborhood, in the Chavez program for providing homemade lunches to local laborers on government construction projects.

It's Christmas, Braulio--a time for reflections on kindness and generosity, a time for forgiveness and renewal. A time for new thoughts. You are stuck on this thought that Chavez is bad, bad, bad. He is not. Nor are those who support him--the vast majority of Venezuelans.

[Mika]

8. WHO needs "a reality check"?

Some people say that ALL despots and tin pot dicktaters drive stick shift cars.

Here, PP, is indisputable proof and all the evidence needed that Chavez is bad bad bad bad.......