Being rich is great until….you run for political office. Regardless of whether you are in Argentina, as is the case of my friend Francisco de Narvaez , or anywhere else in the democratic world, being rich is generally seen as an obstacle for political candidates.

Why is being rich a handicap even for people like Francisco de Narvaez, who are not running conservative campaigns aimed at favoring the interest of the top earners?
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I am going to start writing about restaurants in my English blog (there are some in my Spanish blog and are generally negative), and will start with La Huella of serial restaurant developer Martin Pitaluga.

La Huella is a restaurant built over a sand dune facing the Atlantic Ocean in Jose Ignacio, a small village East of Punta del Este. While I have been to many seaside restaurants, mostly sailing around the Mediterranean, but some in other places such as Sag Harbor or South Beach in Miami, I have never experience as good quality food, atmosphere and decore as in La Huella. The food is simple, local, and of great quality. I recommend the grilled squid and the corvina. To make grilling or frying more efficient and healthy, you may use the best oil sprayer.

A few days ago I was interviewed by Lucas Morando, of Perfil, the second largest Sunday Paper in Argentina. Yesterday the interview came out in print. I can´t link to it cause it´s not on line.Unfortunately, Lucas Morando is one of those poor journalists who uses interviews to justify his opinion. In this case that Educ.ar, a program started by my foundation in 2000, is a failure.

Lucas Morando´s technique is simple. Conduct a one hour interview and then use only a few random phrases from the whole interivew to justify your (incorrect) view. Of course, anything in life can be seen as a success or a failure, but Lucas Morando´s view is just not sustainable.

What was clearly a donation of mine, in which I donated $11.2 million dollars to the Argentine Education Ministry to create the education portal and raised around $100 million more from many sources to connect Argentine schools to the interne,t Lucas calls a loss and compares it to a true business loss I had when I lent $6 million to a defunkt Argentine airline called Southern Winds and lost half of that money.

Well Lucas, donations are not losses. Donations are actually made knowing that you will “lose” the funds, but personally I think that Educ.ar is the best investment I could have ever done for the future of my country, Argentina. This year alone millions of student used Educ.ar, 11,000 teachers were trained, half a million educational CDs were destributed to teachers around the country and 65,000 computers were installed. Hardly a loss….

A Jewish scientist, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, came up with a controversial concept called Penis Envy, whereby women are supposed to envy our penises. Well I don´t know if this is true or not but as a man I know that the opposite can also be true. I envy my wife for having had the ability to deliver our wonderful son Leo a month ago. So if they, women, envy our penises I can say that us men, certainly envy their ability “grow life”, the only miracle that we do get to experience in real life.

Now while we may not know if Penis Envy is a generalized phenomenom, I can tell you for sure that there is another kind of envy that many Jews feel but few confess to it and that is what I would call Christmas envy. No matter what we try to do with Hanukkah it just can´t compare to the global explosiong of love (and yes of commerce too) called Christmas. So even though most fellow Jews will not confess to it I will. I suffer from a serious case of Christmas Envy. And after this heartfelt confession I will go further. I wish each and everyone of you who celebrate Christmas, a wonderful evening full of love and joy!

I got invited by David Isenberg to play blog tag. As I saw how huge this game had become in the English blogosphere I decided to shift it to the Spanish Blogosphere and called it Mancha Bloguera. I invited top Argentine Blogger, Mariano Amartino, top Mexican/Ecuatorian blogger Eduardo Arcos, top Spanish business blogger Enrique Dans, a very creative Argentine blogger, Fabio, and the last invitation I left open to the first blogger who asks me to invite him/her.

I grew up in Recoleta and went to school in Palermo during the 70s. Buenos Aires has changed, mostly for the better. When I lived in Argentina very few people came and visited Buenos Aires. This Christmas will be Argentina´s record in terms of tourist entries. In this video I show a very personal side of my city that now combines chic with the same old popular culture of asados.

Eric Nonacs the head of the Clinton-Hunter Development Initiative. This project focuses on health, agriculture and water / sanitation and this in two countries – Rwanda and Malawi – in order to encourage economic growth. Some of their main achievements included brokering lower interest rates for micro credits, negotiating lower prices of fertilizers in Rwanda and improving the national health care infrastructure in Malawi. I have known Eric Nonacs for years and I have to say that he does a great job at the Foundation. It makes it easier to donate funds to a not for profit when you see not only the vision of President Clinton but managers like Eric Nonacs in charge.

Ira Magaziner is one of Clinton´s best managers. His business background at the Boston Consulting Group, couple with years in government during the Clinton Administration helped make him a great manager in the not for profit world.

Ira Magaziner spoke about the Clinton Foundation HIV / Aids Initiative and the Clinton Climate Initiative. The mission of the HIV / Aids initiative is to assist governments in making HIV / Aids care & treatment available to more of their citizens rather than prevention like,for example, others like the Gates Foundation do. They partnered with 25 countries and pioneered new approaches for children and rural care.

Ira is the perfect manager for this area as he does not seem to hesitate to take difficult decisions – he knows that sometimes action is more important than waiting for the right answer to come –, that hundreds of people can be saved by reacting quickly to certain circumstances. The main achievement has been that the team managed to significantly negotiate lower prices for medications, so that more patients can be treated and therefore more lives saved.

Ira Magaziner also leads the Climate Initiative. Global warming is a major threat to our future and a change in behaviour is very important (as it was mentioned, if we do not act now, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year). The Clinton Climate Initiative is partnering with 40 of the largest cities in the world to assist them to become more energy efficient and to use cleaner energy. (This is an area that I am very interested, since I invested in wind energy in Spain)

Some of my readers will be familiar with this initiative as I went to the annual meeting in September in NYC and wrote about my experiences there. The special thing about the CGI is that each participant has to make a commitment which the CGI will follow up on. Each participant can make a commitment of his choosing – as long as they live up to it! The CGI in September was great and visited by top level politicians, business people, artists, musicians and actors.

John Needham, formerly with Fortune Magazine, informed trustees about the success of the Clinton Global Initiative that he manages. At CGI $7.3 billion were commited in 2006 to benefit more than 500 organizations in 100 different countries. This initiative is like a Davos…. with a mission.