Blogging the democratic revolution
The mighty Panama Canal route links trade between 2 huge oceans Source: The Financial Times Tiny little Panama, a jungly nation with a population only as big as Singapore’s, is about to do something spectacularly great for the entire world on Sunday. This itty bitty state has a masterplan to shower friendship and prosperity to huge swathes of the world, north and south and east and west, doing more for the cause of peace and unity than just about any other nation on earth. The world is going to be different after Sunday. On Sunday, Panama’s voters among its 4…
Louis Goodman over the the Foreign Policy blog takes a look at this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize, and discovers that the prizes for less science-centric, more socio-culture specific areas are going to people from the developing world. At first glance, this year’s crop of Nobel prizes came out quite nicely for the United States. Americans, after all, swept the prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry and economics. But a closer look suggests room for improvement. Americans dominate in the “easy” sciences????????fields where it is comparatively less difficult to establish consensus????????but lag in the arguably more complex realms of advancing…
I thought that headline might grab your attention. Francis Fukuyama, in an interview with Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, said something that reminded me of an idea that I was pondering about a year ago but never followed up on. RFE/RL: Professor Fukuyama, some of your critics say that your ideas about the primacy of liberal democracy created a climate suitable for the self-assured behavior of the U.S. government in world affairs. Do you feel responsible to any extent for this? Fukuyama: Well, no. I think that the Bush administration, to the extent that they thought they were using…
Between them, Russia and China account for 17% of the world????????s territory (roughly 26 million square miles out of about 150 million total) and nearly 25% of its population (almost 1.5 billion people out of over 6 billion total). Yet, the two countries only account for 7% of the world????????s nominal economy ($3 trillion out of $44.5 trillion). True, they account for 17% of the world????????s economy adjusted for ???????purchasing power parity??????? ($10.5 trillion out of $60.7 trillion), but even here their share of wealth lags far behind their share of the population, and the idea of ???????purchasing power parity???????…
All the oil money in the world can’t help him now! Chavez pulled out all the stops to get a rotating seat on the United Nation Security Council, all in the name of challenging U.S. imperialism. Oil contracts with China, bond buyouts from Argentina, subsidized energy all over the world. Billions of dollars in political influence flushed down the toilet, being lost to U.S.-backed Guatamala, who never raised a peep during the whole affair. This is what a real vote looks like — something Chavez hates — so imagine how much he can’t stand democracy now! So far it looks…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is losing his UN Security Council bid badly. Now Chile has come out and said it won’t vote for him, but will abstain through the first round. Socialist Chile was one Chavez insisted he had in the bag. Well, he no longer does. The UN goes to the vote tomorrow and will have the results around 12:00 p.m. Eastern, so this contest for the fate of the free world’s democracies versus the world’s worst tyrannies won’t be long. Venezuela Today is up again and has the whole roundup here. UPDATE: As the vote goes on, Fox…
An Andean woman casts a ballot outside Quito today Source: Associated Press, via Houston Chronicle Ecuador’s beautiful women wait in line to vote Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News I am in shock. I was so depressed about the electoral prospects of Ecuador, where a Chavista prettyboy, Rafael Correa, was leading all polls, that I had trouble blogging. The guy was total Chavista and not only that, he was gross in a way only Ecuadorean politicians can be. You know, like El Loco. He actually went walking around taking his belt off, and cracking it against anything he could find, saying…
Is there any greater freedom than to be a bozo? That’s the way it seems with Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister of Spain. He really, really, really hates the U.S. He hates it with a loathing that would challenge Hugo Chavez. He kicked the U.S. out of the Columbus Day parade in Spain a few years ago and invited in Cuba instead. Columbus Day – which in Spain is National Day – is a big deal there. Then in another incident, Zapatero pointedly refused to stand for the passage of the U.S. flag at a parade. “Why should…
David Sasaki has an interesting post on “The Freedom of Familiarity” — or alternatively, the slavery of choice. He discusses the boundaries of freedom of choice, such that there is some point that so many alternative choices are available that either a person cannot simply settle on one thing or he may simply never be able to decide. The context in which he writes this is a very familiar scene: going to the cafe to read the newspaper and drink a cup of coffee. There are three cafes here in Caracas where I have my morning coffee, palmera or cachito…
Ecuador goes to the polls this weekend and Nicaragua and Brazil are white-hot races. Boz has all the latest polls – including updates on Bolivia and Peru – plus links to many good analyses, it’s content-filled on key issues and one of his best. Well worth reading here. Not sure what he’s talking about with his first Nicaragua item, though!!!
Protesting Hugo Chavez in Washington on Friday Source: Gustavo Coronel, at Venezuela Today Today, hundreds of angry Brazilians, angry Bolivians, angry Chileans, angry Cubans, angry Ecuadoreans, angry Mexicans, angry Nicaraguans, angry Peruvians, angry Salvadorans, angry Colombians, angry Argentines and others gathered at the Organization of American States to protest the international political meddling of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez against their countries. Chavez seems to think he has a sayso in the affairs of every single country in the region. Turnout for the short notice rally was very good. Here is the original flyer and I’m gonna get photos… El Universal…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez calls it just spreadin’ revolution. The rest of the hemisphere has a plainer word for what he’s up to: Meddling. And ohhh, he’s been out meddling! Nobody in the history of the Americas, including the U.S., has been ever accused of meddling so often from so many places as he has. In so short a period of time! Just look at today’s morning edition of El Universal, the main newspaper in Caracas, which has a string of meddlings described. Baduel: Military bases are for Bolivian troops Salvadorian Gov’t to investigate Venezuela’s meddling into internal affairs Ch????vez…
Apparently, an anarchic landmass with a nuclear weapon. I feel like this post should have been written back in 2002 when it was revealed that North Korea was working on a nuclear weapons system. The end result seemed inevitable even then. With thousands of pounds of artillery armed just miles from Seoul and the prospect of mushroom-cloud catastrophe just about anywhere, Kim Jong-Il had everyone blackmailed. He was going to get what he wanted no matter what and nobody had the balls to stop him. But really, there is only so much the United States can do short of invasion…
Now this is gross! Feel the love! Smell the sulphur! UPDATE: Miguel has some barf-alert Chavista poetry to complement some additional repulsive Chavista images here and here UPDATE: Daniel has some excellent thinking analysis of the barf-alert Chavista ‘love’ campaign and a great roundup of the other blogs that are disgussing this in this must-read post here.
Over the weekend, the anti-democratic crisis brewing in Russia took a horrifying turn for the worse. On Friday, the Associated Press reported that the Moscow police were circulating requests to primary schools requesting that they be provided with lists of all students with Georgian-sounding last names; the orders came in the wake of the forcible deporation of more than 100 Georgians from Russia as the start of a massive campaign. The AP gave an example: ???????Nina Zubareva, an official from school No. 1289 in northern Moscow, told the AP that on Thursday, the local police station telephoned and demanded a…
An Avalancha. You don’t even need to speak Spanish to know what it means. Source: The Devil’s Excrement, which has tons more, keep scrolling. Too busy to write anything but the Avalancha presidential election rally in Venezuela over the weekend has yielded some unbelievable photos. Manuel Rosales of Venezuela is mounting a ferocious challenge to brutal leftist dictator Hugo Chavez in the December elections and this past weekend, hundreds of thousands of battered Venezuelans rallied in a dramatic show of force. They covered Caracas. I’ve never seen so many people in once place at once! These honorable democratic revolutionaries are…
It is traditional thought to immediately consider a military coup bad because they usually are. Take the many horrors of Africa and Latin America, for example. There have certainly been ambiguous exceptions, such as Pinochet’s coup in Chile which still inspires much debate. But nowadays things are a bit different. Military coups are occurring for the explicit purpose of creating national harmony and moving forward with democracy. Look at Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania, where coups have led directly to increases in civil and political liberties with a progression toward elections. The most recent coup that inspired international condemnation was in Thailand,…
Courtesy of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Sandalistas can now select five-star accomodations if they find themselves tiring of all the gunfire, fireworks and 6:00 a.m. blasted regatton that so livens up shantytown life. After all, there’s something for everyone in the world of Chavistadom! This new news item, which I have only a fragment of from EFE, only goes to show that Chavez is not even trying to pretend anymore that’s he’s down there with the people. He and his sandalista pals on tour from Chicago and New York and Los Angeles and Paris and London have gone upscale. They’re…
At VCrisis, Alek Boyd has firsthand info about how Hugo Chavez’s shiny new Russian weapons purchases are being used – to massacre Venezuelan and Brazilian peasants from helicopters in the deep jungle. There was a great big massacre of miners in the Amazon rainforest this week and Boyd is on the scene with tons of photos and interviews with locals. These are Hugo Chavez’s death squads up close. Death squads from the air, with the willing collaboration of Vladimir Putin. Read the whole thing here.
As Publius Pundit readers know, a crisis is brewing in Georgia. After discovering a spy ring seeking to subvert the current pro-West presidential administration on Russia????????s behalf, just as Georgia entered the final round of talks on NATO membership, the Georgian government took action to arrest the conspirators, who included several Russian military officers. In response, Russia has recalled its ambassador and imposed a trade and travel blockade on tiny Georgia, seeking to destabilize its economy. More recently, it has loosed a pogrom-like assault on Georgian-owned businesses and assets in Russia, as well as a series of crude attacks on…
Geraldo Alckmin drove Brazil’s popular incumbent President Lula into a runoff Oct. 29 with a powerful showing in Sunday’s election. The guy rocks. Source: AP, via BBC photo gallery A massive political earthquake is shaking Brazil right now and practically no one in the mainstream media (BBC a notable exception!) is really covering it. This ought to be a much bigger story than it is being made out to be. I am sort of amazed at the lack of attention. The pillar of the responsible left, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, faces a growing prospect of being toppled as momentum…
Not that he ever really had it, but President Bachelet was considering supporting Venezuela’s candidacy for a rotating seat on the United Nations security council that’s coming up. Possibly no more. A.M. Mora y Leon already posted up an article showing Bachelet’s absolute fury over remarks made by the Venezuelan government that the Christian Democrat Party had betrayed Salvador Allende as well as the revolution. The fallout was absolutely astronomical. Relations between the two countries have never been so low. If Chavez ever thought he had a chance of gaining Chile’s support — probably one of the most important countries…
Panic has set in at Venezuela’s state oil company with the spectacular exit of 7-Eleven from the Citgo gasoline-station label. The PR damage is so bad that the entire brand may be a total loss. Indy gas station after indy gas station are yanking ties to the Venezuelan dictator-controlled oil company. This follows 7-Eleven’s verbally spectacular pullout, a U.S. consumer boycott, as well as Citgo’s own of pulling of the Citgo label from about 1800 stations that the Venezuelan energy company could no longer supply due to crumbling productive capacity. Which is a shame, because it was a good company…
If chills did not run down your spine when you heard the tune for the Soviet national anthem, written to glorify the mass-murdering dictator Joseph Stalin, playing for Russia at the Winter Olympics this year in Italy, if you do not shiver every time you hear about Russian people favoring Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, with 70%-plus approval in opinion polls, then perhaps you are ready for this: Russia is re-weaponizing psychiatry as a method of dealing with anti-Kremlin dissent, just as in Soviet times. Two major articles from leading newspapers have documented the early stages of the phenomenon.…
The Assembly to Promote the Civil Society, an umbrella organization gathering over 300 Cuban opposition movements that fight peacefully for democratic and regime change in the island, is planning a meeting of the independent libraries. They will inform the population about the goals of the civil desobedience and non-cooperation campaign named “Yo no coopero, yo si quiero el cambio” (I don’t cooperate with the repressive authorities, I want the change). The official motto will be “We are gathering for democracy”. Banned books, reviews, leaflets will be distribuited to the neighbors of the libraries where the meetings will take place and…