THE BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION TURNS OUT TO BE AN OLD FASHIONED TYRANTS TOTALITARIAN STATE RULING THROUGH FEAR AND TERROR.

* Mac Margolis, writer.
THE MIDDLE CLASS CONTINUE TO FLEE VENEZUELA, BOLIVIA AND ECUADOR AS THE COLD WAR IRON CURTAIN DROPS OVER SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA
The Bolivarian Revolution was supposed to be about helping the poor, but what is happening is loss of FREEDOM of the MEDIA in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Both Ecuador and Venezuela are now without opposition viewpoints of opinions. Bolivia is getting there. The TOTALITARIAN POLICE STATE is tightening controls over all facets of life in these countries. Any idea of democracy is crushed. Like Cuba where teenagers who express a curiousity, or independent mind and can be jailed for not being socialist enough. You get three years in jail for what the state thinks you are thinking. Like all DICTATORS and Presidents For Life, Tyranny claims to be to help the poor. In Russia, they killed over a 100 million Russians for so-called helping the poor. It was the poor who suffered. Under MAO in China, they killed more than 500 million, POL POT murdered and enslaved first 4 1/2 million. In China it wasn't until the Communist Party turned to capitalism they started to succeed and turned the state into a ONE PARTY government. Still it is all about POWER, ABSOLUTE POWER. EGO of course, you need the EGO of a tyrant. Helping the poor what a cruel joke the BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION turned out to be.
The following article was recently in Newsweek Magazine by Mac Margolis. Even if you take the democratic attitude out of the articles, the repeating cycles of Latin American rule through FEAR and TERROR can be felt for us older generations.
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QUOTE FROM NEWSWEEK ON THE WEB COMMENTARY PAGES, AND WRITTEN BY MAC MARGOLIS ( at least that is what it says where I read it on the internet.)

For just a moment, in the early days of his presidency, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez looked almost like a healer. "Let's ask for God's help to accept our differences and come together in dialogue," he implored his conflicted compatriots in 2002. Instead, what Venezuelans got was an avenger. The government is seizing privately owned companies and farms. Labor unions have been crushed. Political opponents are routinely harassed or else prosecuted by Chavista-controlled courts. And now, after a decade of the so-called Bolivarian revolution, tens of thousands of disillusioned Venezuelan professionals have had enough. Artists, lawyers, physicians, managers, and engineers are leaving the country in droves, while those already abroad are scrapping plans to return. The wealthiest among them are buying condos in Miami and Panama City. Cashiered oil engineers are working rigs in the North Sea and sifting the tar sands of western Canada. Those of European descent have applied for passports from their native lands. Academic scholarships are lifeboats. An estimated 1 million Venezuelans have moved abroad in the decade since Chávez took power.

This exodus is splitting families and interrupting careers, but also sabotaging the country's future. Just as nations across the developing world are managing to lure their scattered expatriates back home to fuel recovering economies and join vibrant democracies, the outrush of Venezuelan brainpower is gutting universities and think tanks, crippling industries, and hastening the economic disarray that threatens to destroy one of the richest countries in the hemisphere. Forget minerals, oil, and natural gas; the biggest export of the Bolivarian revolution is talent.

The Bolivarian diaspora is a reversal of fortune on a massive scale. Through most of the last century, Venezuela was a haven for immigrants fleeing Old World repression. Refugees from totalitarianism and religious intolerance in Spain, Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe flocked to this country nestled between the Caribbean and the Andean cordillera and helped forge one of the most vibrant societies in the New World. Like most developing nations, the country was split between the burgeoning poor and an encastled elite. But in the 1970s and 1980s, Venezuelans were the envy of Latin America. Oil-rich, educated, with a solid democratic tradition, they lived a tier above the chronically unstable societies in the region. "We had a relatively rich country that offered opportunities, with no insecurity. No one thought about leaving," says Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations who lives in New York. "Now we have rampant crime, a repressive political system that borders on apartheid, and reverse migration. Venezuela is now a country of emigrants."
Click here to find out more!

It's much the same all over the Axis of Hugo, the constellation of nine states in the Andes, Central America, and the Caribbean that have followed Chávez in lockstep in the march toward what he calls 21st-century socialism. In the name of power, justice, and plenty for the downtrodden, the leaders of the "Bolivarian alternative" in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua are rewriting their constitutions, intimidating the media, and stoking class and ethnic conflicts that occasionally explode in hate and violence. The overthrow on June 28 of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, a key Chávez ally, is the latest example of the blowback from the Bolivarian revolution.

The middle classes and the young are taking the brunt. A study just released by the Latin American Economic System, an intergovernmental economic-research institute, reports that the outflow of highly skilled workers, ages 25 and older, from Venezuela to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries rose 216 percent between 1990 and 2007. A recent study by Vanderbilt University in Nashville showed that more than one in three Bolivians under 30 had plans to emigrate, up from 12 percent a decade ago, while 47 percent of 18-year-olds said they planned to leave. Many established professionals have already made up their minds. "I ask myself if I'm not patriotic enough," says Giovanna Rivero, an acclaimed Bolivian novelist who is leaving for a teaching job at the University of Florida and has no plans to come back. But "Bolivia is coming apart. There are people who've known each other all their lives who don't talk to one another anymore."

In Venezuela, Chávez has pushed hard against anyone who refuses to accept his party line. Daniel Benaim was one of Venezuela's top independent television producers, turning out prime-time entertainment and game shows for national channels with Canal Uno, a leading production house. "We had 160 employees and a 24/7 operation," he says. But after the failed coup against Chávez in 2002, the government cracked down on independent media, and programming budgets dried up. In a month, Canal Uno was down to four employees and heading for bankruptcy. Benaim redirected his business to serve the international advertising market and raked in prestigious international awards, including multiple Latin Emmys. But opportunities for non-Chávistas in Venezuela had withered. One by one, he watched the people he trained over the years leave the country. "I used to give angry speeches about the brain drain. Now I have to bite my tongue," says Benaim, who is also moving to the U.S. "We had the best minds in the business, and now there's nothing for them here."

One of Benaim's associates was Gonzalo Bernal Ibarra. He, too, had soared up the career ladder in broadcast television and until recently ran a campus network that reached 100,000 students. Everything changed in late 2007, when Chávez lost a referendum to rewrite the Constitution and began to crack down on his media critics, including Bernal. Strangers in jackets with weighted pockets—dress code for Chávez's military-intelligence police—began to follow him day and night. Then Congress was set to pass a bill obliging schools to teach 21st-century socialism. "I didn't want my kid learning that crap," says Bernal. Even shopping became a trial as spiking inflation and government price controls emptied the supermarkets of basic goods like milk, eggs, and meat. One day in late 2008, Bernal opened a bottle of whisky and held a yard sale. "I got drunk and watched my life get carted away," he says. He now lives in the Washington, D.C., area, with his wife and 6-year-old daughter, and is trying to adapt. "I was living in the most beautiful, wonderful, funny country in the world. Now a third of my friends are gone. In another 10 years, Venezuela is going to be a crippled country."

No industry has been harder hit by the flight of talent than Venezuela's oil sector. A decade ago, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) ranked as one of the top five energy companies in the world. Everything changed under Chávez, who named a Marxist university professor with no experience in the industry to head the company. PDVSA's top staff immediately went on strike and paralyzed the country. Chávez responded by firing 22,000 people practically overnight, including the country's leading oil experts. As many as 4,000 of PDVSA's elite staff are now working overseas. "The company is a shambles," says Gustavo Coronel, a former member of the PDVSA board who now works in Washington, D.C., as an oil consultant. Until 2003, researchers at the company's Center for Technological Research and Development generated 20 to 30 patents a year. Last year it produced none, even though its staff had doubled. PDVSA produced 3.2 million barrels of crude oil a day when Chávez took control. Now it pumps 2.4 million, according to independent estimates.

The decline has spread across Venezuelan society, heightened by cronyism, corruption, and censorship. In May, on the pretext that scientists were pursuing "obscure" research projects such as "whether there is life on Venus," Chávez began to slash budgets at the university science centers, where the country's cutting-edge public-health research was carried out. Instead he poured petrodollars into official misiones científicas (scientific missions), where the purse strings are controlled by Chávez allies. Now the country's most respected research institutes are falling behind. Earlier this year Jaime Requena, a Cambridge University–trained biologist at the Institute of Advanced Studies, was forced into retirement and stripped of his pension after publishing a paper charging that scientific research in Venezuela was "at a 30-year low." The number of papers published by Venezuelans in international scientific journals has fallen from 958 to 831, a nearly 15 percent drop, in just the past three years. At 62, with an aging mother, Requena has few options: "It's not easy to get another job at my age. I would leave Venezuela if I could. My friends and colleagues all have."

BELIZE VENTURE CAPITAL BANK CONTEMPLATED.

* J. P. Morgan a USA INVESTMENT BANK EXAMPLE


BELIZE VENTURE CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT BANK CONTEMPLATED !


Belize is sort of the wild frontier, but not so much in the old fashioned sense, but rather with the potentialities of getting rich in a wonderful climate of easy living and softer temperatures than the more Northern colder latitudes of the world.
There is a sort of gold rush sense of feel, to all the business opportunities that can be developed in a country that is small, but can develop small niche industries, to feed the appetites of the world in specialty gourmet select requirements. We are not going to compete with China, India or any place like that in mass production. But certainly exporting unique brand name products, we have a gold rush feel to it here in Belize. The Caribbean Diaspora is a big market internationally for Belizean entrepreneurs. Some fortunes of course will be made and most ventures will fail. Of course I don’t really understand economics any better than economists do, but feel certainly confident my gut feeling is far better than the understandings of politicians and bureaucrats. The world markets always alternate between cycles of growth and recession. Some things like food, never alternate much at all. Tourism alternates unfortunately, as the Eastern Caribbean now knows, but we in Belize because of our diversified tourist product, have taken hits, but not as bad as the undiversified Eastern Caribbean islands.
In the news this week, was the GRAND RE-JUVENATION of the Development Finance Corporation of Belize, looted and plundered by the PUP party of the past administration. We are going to be paying for that past PUP administration for probably the next three or four decades. With $20 million in new financing loan money aimed at some kind of niche market, which the politicians and bureaucrats tout will help development, I sometimes wonder? Experience shows me now, that this is not true. Good entrepreneurs that went the DFC borrowing route in the past in Belize, and failed, either through electricity blackouts, brownouts, or the inability for government to fulfill the grandiose infra-structural promises falsely made by bureaucrats seeking to create rapid economic growth under any circumstances, saw their loans called in. What we lost in the process was not so much loan monies, but rather our NATIONAL PATRIMONY of HUMAN ENTREPRENEURIAL CAPITAL. A person suckered by bureaucrats with false promises into starting a venture that eventually failed, was usually ruined for life and lost their home besides, putting them into the poverty bracket, with the inability to recover, because they started too big, and with BORROWED LOANS. Yet for those of us who have gone through life more successfully, starting and failing entrepreneurial ventures, we know from experience before hand, that 9 out of 10 new ventures will fail. Yet the number of persons willing to try the risks of entrepreneurial venture business are very limited. Usually only 2% of the available pool of semi educated, or even educated people.
We have for example a media touted 5000 graduates of higher education this year of one level or another. Of that number holding to the age old proven 2% rule, then only 100 of these 5000 will be of successful entrepreneurial business material, as our DEVELOPMENT HUMAN CAPITAL IN BELIZE. Yet the remainder 4,900 of these graduates must seek salaried jobs from those 100 ENTREPRENEURS, our NATIONAL CAPITAL, or go abroad to seek jobs. You must understand that 9 out of 10 new ventures fail. It takes time to establish lessons of success. Mentoring helps, but a lot of the lessons are only learned by each new generation by osmosis and experience and practical doing. We as humans learn by mistakes. Starting businesses and failing is part and parcel of the LEARNING CURVE. You cannot do this on any new pioneering type of venture if you borrow loans and sell your future ahead of time. So the fact that an entrepreneurial type personality and character in those 100 of the 5000 graduates this year will fail, is no reason at all to throw them on the scrap heap because their loans went bad. You need to chalk it up to EDUCATION in the real world, finding out what works and what does not work, why individuals that are of an entrepreneurial bent keep re-learning practically how to succeed. They need to be encouraged to TRY and TRY AGAIN. Unfortunately, unless you copy cat an existing type business and go into competition with others of the same mind, mostly learning to be a successful business person takes a couple of decades of trial and error. In Belize, the 2% of entrepreneurs are our DEVELOPMENT PIONEERING GOLD. They need help and they need to be continuously re-cycled through a decade or so, nursed along until they develop the experience and knowledge that only comes from practice.
That said, the idea that RISK CAPITAL, feasibility studies, PILOT BUSINESS PROJECTS and the all important elements of personal sacrifice and SWEAT EQUITY are needed for any successful entrepreneur to eventually succeed, build our commercial economic environment are more the realm of an INVESTMENT BANK. There are NONE in the Caribbean. We found that out last year and this year, when we tried to start an internal airline transportation route for CARICOM. There are certainly none in Belize, though Ashcroft has done his share with Channel 5 TV, SMART telephone, Belize Bank and Novelo’s Bus line. Such an event is more haphazard than any planned way to encourage our 100 entrepreneur HUMAN CAPITAL of this year into going into business ventures. When they fail, we need to let them do it in a way, that they can start again. This is usually in their psychological character and make up. They are naturally inclined this way to experiment and try new business ventures. You cannot do this through the DFC loan system. You can expand a pilot project that has succeeded into the next phase through DFC loans, but you cannot start them. You need RISK CAPITAL for new ventures in the beginning stages. These people are our BELIZE HUMAN CAPITAL for the future. They are on a learning curve and depending on their business venture choices, they will fail at different rates while learning the practicalities. Most pioneering ideas usually fail, without some sort of successful model to follow. This is the role of RISK CAPITAL, or VENTURE CAPITAL, given out to entrepreneurs for shares of any future business. if they succeed. The government of Belize needs to establish an INVESTMENT BANK in which they swap start up risk capital for SHARES in such new ventures, instead of LOANS. Chalk the losses up to EDUCATION of a different kind than a school system.
Part and parcel of the DEVELOPMENT GROWTH aspects of the Belize economy are wound up with the idea that Belize is a pioneer, wild west frontier type of society and country. This attracts immigrants with capital and entrepreneurial ability as well. Which we need if we are to feed our government infra-structure with taxes. The idea that Belize is wild and untamed and basically UNREGULATED is a PLUS to the entrepreneurial pioneer types. It does take a while for the nit picking bureaucrats to get around to regulating people with licenses and permits, but the longer you can stave them off, the more successful Belize will develop and more rapidly, than if you go the over-regulation route. This is something to lock in as an attitude by any future governments of Belize. Let new entrepreneurs run free as long as possible, ignore as long as possible the taxes and the permits and licenses ( currently used to steal businesses mostly by politicians in the CABINET for themselves or relatives ). Think about it you bureaucrats and policy makers in Cabinet.

TORRENTIAL RAINS HERALD START OF RAINY SEASON

* Tropical torrential rains open RAINY SEASON in Belize last night.


TORRENTIAL RAINS START NIGHT OF JULY 16-17TH, , 2009, IN WESTERN BELIZE

One month out of cycle, the RAINY SEASON has started in Western Belize. We expected the rainy season to start in June, the traditional month. We have had some showers, but nothing like last night. Really TORRENTIAL rains coming down, going to saturate the soils around here for agriculture. The plants are loving all this, but the soft dirt used by the government has washed out of all those years of holes in the roads and driving has gotten really bad again and expected to last through until November and maybe even into February. Nearly ALL our roads are dirt and gravel sometimes.

CARICOM LEADERS ARE COPY CATS, NOT LEADERS.

* CARICOM LEADERS SWEAT LIKE PIGS IN CONFERENCE IN THEIR TROPICAL PARADISE. They have no culture, no pride in their countries or environment.



DEVELOPMENT PHILOSPHY, COLONIAL EUROPEAN EDUCATION MODELS, AND ORGAN GRINDER MONKEYS AS CARICOM LEADERS

This article is going to be a bit more philosophical in nature, more of a soap box diatribe against an evening session of CARIBBEAN NEWS on our local Channel 5 TV station here in Western Belize, the industrial and agricultural heartland of our country, on the Western Caribbean rim. What gets my back up and annoyed, is the seriousness of pompous braggarts and important sounding leaders of Eastern Caribbean countries, including Jamaica in the middle of the Caribbean. All of them when sitting for television interviews were dressed in cold country, European suits, white shirts and ties. Now I know they are being interviewed in places like Trinidad, Jamaica, St. Kitts, Antigua and such places. I have also a couple of decades ago, even built me a 40 foot wooden sailboat on the beach in Portsmouth, Dominica and sailed many of those Eastern islands.
So I know, that our climate in Belize is pretty much the same as they have out on that side of the Caribbean basin. Which is hot and muggy, unless the trade wind is blowing and with temperatures over 80 degrees farenheight most days and nights. In Belize we do get colder NORTHERS during some winter months, but those Caribbean, Organ Grinder, dressed up pompous leaders of their tiny island countries, professing INDEPENDENCE do not ever get those colder temperatures They look like the old European ORGAN GRINDER MONKEYS entertaining the QUEEN at Buckingham Palace, or something. It is hot and humid out there in those Caribbean countries.
So pray tell me why they are dressed for television interviews during normal working hours, like Europeans? They look like they live in Norway, the UK, or Iceland or someplace. Don’t they have some typical cultural DRESS CODE that identifies them as Caribbean peoples? In Belize it is the loose shirt for politicians, or the GUYABERA. In Hawaii it is the Hawaiian shirt for example. A tie for instance is the Europeans answer to cold weather and replaces a neck scarf, to keep the body warm. An understandable dress code that has developed for climate reasons.
Which makes me feel, less than proud of joining CARICOM, with people that lack pride, patriotism, culture, and question their ability to lead either their countries, or any of us in CARICOM.
Thankfully, though myself was educated in the Belize Teachers College and got brainwashed back then, in the European examples and styles of education, after some decades of a constant barrage of UK and West Indies style educations, copy catting the European education systems. I am thankful to see in my life time a conversion in Belize, of our education system, to something, more home grown, taking the best from around the world, which mostly is the USA community college system, of business led demand courses, rather than the European style, square peg in a round hole type of education to serve monarchies with state control and limited career movement throughout ones life time. Keeping the working class, as in class divisions of society in their place. Of course colonial empires have collapsed and indeed the internet chatter news says, even things are so bad in the UK these days ( worse than Belize, with a bigger DEBT to GDP ratio ) that the UK parliament are discussing SLASHING the MILITARY budget might of the former EMPIRE by two thirds, to make ends meet in that poor second world, country.
How can anybody in CARICOM respect ORGAN GRINDER MONKEYS dressed to please Englishmen and other cold country Europeans in their cultural dress code styles in a climate that is totally unsuitable. These men are our leaders in CARICOM? Please forgive me if I laugh at the idea! Pompous organ grinder monkeys they are, without a shred of cultural self identity, pride and patriotism. Until you get some, how you can profess to lead, a bunch of broken, debt ridden, badly managed countries and then expect us in BELIZE to give you the reins of control of our future of Belize in our side of the CARIBBEAN SEA through an entity called CARICOM, I don’t know.
Basically the CARICOM COMMON MARKET cannot go anywhere, until we get internal transportation by plane and ship. If all these ORGAN GRINDER dressed MONKEYS professing to be LEADERS keep blathering about a FEDERATION, the least they can do is dress like CARIBBEAN peoples with our own dress codes, to make our peoples proud and unique. All they blather about is their troubles and bureaucratic regulations and organization and NEVER do anything constructive for economic development. So long as I see them copying the cold country dress codes of Europe, I will never believe a darned thing they say.
Every time I see a Caribbean leader being interviewed in one of those Eastern Caribbean islands, dressed like a European pet monkey, in a European suit and tie, I immediately judge that person as a liar and thief, a con man extraordinaire, ripping off his local population. The DEBT to GDP ratios of their countries confirm this opinion.

CARICOM LEADERS CANNOT BREAK THE CHAIN OF COLONIALISM

* The organ grinder represents the old Colonial masters in their cold country clothing styles, while the chained monkey in a costume imitating human beings, represents the lack of culture, costume and pride of vision of hot climate Caricom ( hic! ) leaders.


DEVELOPMENT PHILOSPHY, COLONIAL EUROPEAN EDUCATION MODELS, AND ORGAN GRINDER MONKEYS AS CARICOM LEADERS

This article is going to be a bit more philosophical in nature, more of a soap box diatribe against an evening session of CARIBBEAN NEWS on our local Channel 5 TV station here in Western Belize, the industrial and agricultural heartland of our country, on the Western Caribbean rim. What gets my back up and annoyed, is the seriousness of pompous braggarts and important sounding leaders of Eastern Caribbean countries, including Jamaica in the middle of the Caribbean. All of them when sitting for television interviews were dressed in cold country, European suits, white shirts and ties. Now I know they are being interviewed in places like Trinidad, Jamaica, St. Kitts, Antigua and such places. I have also a couple of decades ago, even built me a 40 foot wooden sailboat on the beach in Portsmouth, Dominica and sailed many of those Eastern islands.
So I know, that our climate in Belize is pretty much the same as they have out on that side of the Caribbean basin. Which is hot and muggy, unless the trade wind is blowing and with temperatures over 80 degrees farenheight most days and nights. In Belize we do get colder NORTHERS during some winter months, but those Caribbean, Organ Grinder, dressed up pompous leaders of their tiny island countries, professing INDEPENDENCE do not ever get those colder temperatures They look like the old European ORGAN GRINDER MONKEYS entertaining the QUEEN at Buckingham Palace, or something. It is hot and humid out there in those Caribbean countries.
So pray tell me why they are dressed for television interviews during normal working hours, like Europeans? They look like they live in Norway, the UK, or Iceland or someplace. Don’t they have some typical cultural DRESS CODE that identifies them as Caribbean peoples? In Belize it is the loose shirt for politicians, or the GUYABERA. In Hawaii it is the Hawaiian shirt for example. A tie for instance is the Europeans answer to cold weather and replaces a neck scarf, to keep the body warm. An understandable dress code that has developed for climate reasons.
Which makes me feel, less than proud of joining CARICOM, with people that lack pride, patriotism, culture, and question their ability to lead either their countries, or any of us in CARICOM.
Thankfully, though myself was educated in the Belize Teachers College and got brainwashed back then, in the European examples and styles of education, after some decades of a constant barrage of UK and West Indies style educations, copy catting the European education systems. I am thankful to see in my life time a conversion in Belize, of our education system, to something, more home grown, taking the best from around the world, which mostly is the USA community college system, of business led demand courses, rather than the European style, square peg in a round hole type of education to serve monarchies with state control and limited career movement throughout ones life time. Keeping the working class, as in class divisions of society in their place. Of course colonial empires have collapsed and indeed the internet chatter news says, even things are so bad in the UK these days ( worse than Belize, with a bigger DEBT to GDP ratio ) that the UK parliament are discussing SLASHING the MILITARY budget might of the former EMPIRE by two thirds, to make ends meet in that poor second world, country.
How can anybody in CARICOM respect ORGAN GRINDER MONKEYS dressed to please Englishmen and other cold country Europeans in their cultural dress code styles in a climate that is totally unsuitable. These men are our leaders in CARICOM? Please forgive me if I laugh at the idea! Pompous organ grinder monkeys they are, without a shred of cultural self identity, pride and patriotism. Until you get some, how you can profess to lead, a bunch of broken, debt ridden, badly managed countries and then expect us in BELIZE to give you the reins of control of our future of Belize in our side of the CARIBBEAN SEA through an entity called CARICOM, I don’t know.
Basically the CARICOM COMMON MARKET cannot go anywhere, until we get internal transportation by plane and ship. If all these ORGAN GRINDER dressed MONKEYS professing to be LEADERS keep blathering about a FEDERATION, the least they can do is dress like CARIBBEAN peoples with our own dress codes, to make our peoples proud and unique. All they blather about is their troubles and bureaucratic regulations and organization and NEVER do anything constructive for economic development. So long as I see them copying the cold country dress codes of Europe, I will never believe a darned thing they say.
Every time I see a Caribbean leader being interviewed in one of those Eastern Caribbean islands, dressed like a European pet monkey, in a European suit and tie, I immediately judge that person as a liar and thief, a con man extraordinaire, ripping off his local population. The DEBT to GDP ratios of their countries confirm this opinion.

BELIZE WESTERN AREA TELECOMMUNICATIONS WORSENS OVER 16 YEARS

* Belize Telecommunications woes!


INFRA STRUCTURE AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS DEVELOPMENT IN TWIN TOWNS, 16 YEARS LATER HAS GOT WORSE, NOT IMPROVED.

In any pioneering country like Belize, building up the economy relies on new businesses. Business in turn relies on the government to encourage and make infra-structure. The last time we tried the FINANCIAL CENTER business was 15 or 16 years ago and it failed, due to lack of reliable telephone communications. We moved to Miami for some years to be able to do it.
Right now we are doing the feasibility stage of a 90 day trial period and dealing with the logistics of attempting to establish another try at a FINANCIAL CENTER. Like all new ventures, there are restrictions of capital, many sorts of different problems, like trading systems to use, trial and error experiments paper trading, to weed out losses due to whip saws and DRAWDOWNS. Perfecting a system takes some time of real time endeavors. We are going through that right now, by driving into the TWIN TOWNS twice a day and using a paid internet café. For the financial center we are going to need a telephone service from the desk. Not a cell phone from SMART ( you cannot get any signal from BTL ) Currently we telephone by going out on the street and climbing the hill a bit and hope we don’t lose the signal. We get cut off regularly and lose the SMART cell phone signal, so this is not workable. We are struggling to figure out if we could maybe use the internet to telephone for each trade? We need about 3 calls to Chicago Exchange floor, for each trade made. At the moment, even internet is not available, but we have been having BTL promises for those 16 years and haven’t got it yet. So we decided finally we must go SATELLITE. Now we start researching those with HUGHES SATELLITE and we are wondering if it will work at all?
What we find is that the older 6000 and 7000 satellite Hughes series are obsolete and the bandwidth is oversold and so the reception speeds are slower than a DIAL UP in the USA. We need DSL speeds and bandwidth. HUGHES have a new 9000 modem, so I don’t know if that will improve things, if the same satellites are being used? There is a new system on the internet, forget the name, BLUE something or other for $100 usa. Dish and modem receiver, broadband. Supposed to be superior, so we are investigating that, through my daughter in Florida.
We need download DSL really, as the data feeds are changing by seconds, and monitor screens are being refreshed several times a minute. If we spend an extra $200 usa a month for REAL TIME data instead of DELAYED 15 minute data which is FREE, can the satellite systems keep up with it, is the question? The satellite forums are full of complaints of HUGHES satellite, but locally Belizeans are swearing by the satellite system. Of course for email, or text, or slow browsing, that may be adequate. Don’t know enough to judge just yet.
Anyway, equipment and telecommunications and electricity reliability are key components of our new business venture, a repeat of one we did 15 or 16 years ago, which failed due to lack of infra structure, mostly telecommunications service. We can if we go ahead buy a generator to run the place in an emergency, if BEL the electricity supplier cuts us off. Nothing worse than being cut off when you have contracts outstanding, changing $500 a minute in value and you are flying blind. We can get around some of this by going to longer trading time frames, though there are lots of trade opportunities that are only one day in scope for a quick score.
Tried that a couple of times this week, but the internet cafes are not opening in the TWIN TOWNS until after 9 a.m. and the markets are open on the exchanges at 8 a.m. local time. I need to be on the internet at 7:30 a.m. getting orders prepared for ACTION. Can’t do it, unless I have my own place. Which means I need reliable and fast internet and telephone. On the phone calls from the time of decision, to time of implementation, you should be able to phone the floor in Chicago and get the guy there, to fill out your order and fill it, ( MARKET ORDER ) inside 3 minutes total. By that time, prices can have changed a few hundred dollars anyway. Exits are easier, as one can use pre-set limit sell orders. This is not true of Spread Trading, but that is another story.
Anyway, these are the problems we are wrestling with here in Santa Elena Town of Western Belize, of which we have CABLE TV, but no DSL internet service and no telephone service, except a sort of spotty questionable SMART cell phone thingy, that you can never rely on. Before you ask it, the CABLE company says no, they have the wrong sized cable to run internet, or telephone service. We are a quarter mile from the BTL trunk line along the Western Highway, which they tell me is overloaded anyway for years now.
LOGISTICS in any new venture are always a problem, which is what separates the entrepreneur business person from the salaried mind set person. I’m going to have to locate somebody with a satellite system soon, and try a day, getting data feeds ad making hypothetical trades with what speed is available to see if it will work and otherwise devise different strategies to deal with the problem. Lot of fun, but I’m getting more gloomy about the long term prospects by the minute.