Blogging the democratic revolution
Today is the 300th anniversary of the birthday of Benjamin Franklin. He was anything but a Babe of Politics, but he was a magnificent revolutionary at a very old age – showing you don’t have to be! Franklin’s inspiring revolutionary history as well as his many revolutionary inventive and institutional accomplishments are recounted in this…
Gustavo Coronel has written powerful, readable, interesting essay about all the new problems besetting Hugo Chavez – against all expectations. Chavez should have the wind at his back now that he’s consolidated power, but precisely the opposite has happened. It’s all falling apart on him, the center is not holding, which is exactly what happens…
There’s some great thinking and analysis out there on Chile’s election. Here are some of the best items I’ve found so far: First stop, check out Boz at Bloggings by Boz‘s Five Points on Chile, describing the implications of the election. I in particular agree with Point One, and think his Point Five is excellent,…
Katy at Caracas Chronicles stayed up late to watch Chilean elections, because she’s got family in Chile but also because she sees Chile’s polar opposite, nightmarish Venezuela, up close. Her contrast of the two systems, and her good common sense on what next for Latin America’s brightest democracy is well worth reading here. Daniel in…
Via Daniel’s Venezuela News & Views I learned that all is not well in Guyana and its western neighbor, Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Like Jim Jones before him, Chavez has designs on the country and much grander than that Marxist Jesus Socialist before him, he intends to one day take over half the country. He is…
Do it! You can almost hear Gilbert and Whitey egging on The Beav to do something stupid. And so it seems with this new spectacle of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez announcing he intends to replace the IMF with his own self-financed IMF, to be called ‘Bank of the South.’ This bank wouldn’t really be a…
This Sunday, Chile will undertake a great expression of democracy in its relatively new republic through its presidential elections. Gone are the days of dictators and caudillos and tinpots. Having totally renounced them and their lack of democracy, what’s left are two good candidates, one leaning left and one leaning right, heading down to the…
Boz has all kinds of interesting and different kinds of political, social and economic polls from around the hemisphere this week, from norte to sur, check it out here.
Ten thousand angry middle class Thais rallied to demand Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s resignation. They are accusing him of corruption and abuse of power. They’ve had it up to here with Thaksin, a billionaire businessman and once-enormously popular prime minister who has amassed power in the wake of the 1997 Asia Crisis, which began in…
You have to have real guts to scrap your country’s currency and just start using the U.S. dollar. It’s hard. You might not be a gringo but every time you buy or sell something, you have to look at U.S. heroes on the face of the money you are using. But the benefits of doing…
The topic of the week is Bolivian president-elect’s understated style of dressing. Leftwing Evo Morales doesn’t actually own a suit, but only street clothes, something that’s creating a bit of a sensation around the world. On Morales’ first unofficial World Tour to meet assorted leaders in places like Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, South Africa and China,…
Brazil announced today that its state oil company, Petrobras, would spend $18 billion to develop its Santos Basin offshore natural gas reserves in a bid to reduce its dependence on imported natural gas, explicitly, from nationalization-minded leftwing Bolivia. Eighteen billion. That’s big money. A whole Iraq-War trove of cash. A massive, history-changing investment. Why the…
…and not just in Caracas. But what’s happening in Caracas is bad enough. Here is a Guardian account, straight out of the history of the Soviet Union with ‘Venezuela’ pasted over the ‘Russia’ part. It is a real escalation of the shortages that are engulfing Venezuela – and soon it will be made worse by…
Just the kind of revolutionary competition that really should be going on in the world – not of arms, not of plunder, but of which country can demonstrate it’s the most pro-free-trade? Ian Vazquez at the Cato Institute, who just got back from the Arab countries, launched this intriguing new yardstick that will be sure…
Leftwing Uruguay, supposedly fully in bed with Hugo Chavez, now seeking a free trade pact with the hated Colossus of the North, none other than the U.S. And you were told it was all going so bad down there. Uruguay is practically the vortex of supposedly anti-American sentiment, its president fully pals with the hemisphere’s…
Two weeks ago in Caracas, I was continuously monitoring Globovision TV and El Universal newspaper for information about Viaduct 1 leading to Maiquetia airport. There was a real concern that the damn thing would collapse. It was the listing bridge on the only highway leading to the airport. Rains came down, and shifted the mountains,…
What I reported here on the Caracas coffee shortage turns out to be a part of a much larger story many details of which I saw in different areas of the country. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has forced producers of coffee to sell their beans below cost, or face confiscation of assets. He’s also done…
That’s Strike Two for the Venezuelan dictator. Joining Mexico, Peru has pulled its ambasssador from Venezuela on the grounds that it’s now openly meddling in Peru’s presidential elections. Yesterday, far-leftist Presidential candidate Ollanta Humala, Evo Morales’ Peruvian ideological soulmate, decided to join the cavorting with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales in public photo opportunities to…
…in the context of Latin America’s failed economic reforms is a truly interesting comparison. After all, failed reforms in Latin America have left it at the mercy of increasingly hostile, unproductive, dead-end leftist leaders, while rule-of-law-loving Estonia has seen itself vault to nearly first-world status in just a few short revolutionary years. Mary Anastasia O’Grady…
Fausta’s come up with a fierce photoessay showing all the hugging with all the whos that Hugo Chavez has done this past year. It’s her inimitable contribution to the year’s many lists. Blech! You gotta see it right here! Hat tip: Val at Babalu.
It’s written all over the visa lines, stretching from Mexicali to Caracas, from Havana to San Salvador, from Buenos Aires to Guayaquil, from La Paz to La Paz – and like the Drug War, its most violent edge is at the 1400-mile-long U.S. Mexican border, from Matamoros and Brownsville to Tijuana and San Diego where…
I was trawling around on one of my favorite Web sites, The Real Cuba, and happened upon a whole section called ‘Cuba B.C.’ or ‘Before Castro.’ It’s a huge collection of photos of what Cuba looked like before Fidel Castro turned it into a communist wasteland, rife with poverty, corruption, absence of truth, and total…
Tens of thousands of Chilean copper-mining contractors have gone on strike for higher bonuses in a time of record-high copper prices. They’re contractors rather than employees, and don’t exactly have a contractual right to demand this money. But for the same reason that uninsured New Orleans homeowners still seek money from Uncle Sam, even though…
By calling them exactly what they are. It’s a thing of beauty. Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe had this to say about the charmers who have been waging a murderous narcoterrorist war against Colombia’s resistant people for the past 44 years: “In addition to being thieves, they are buffoons. In addition to being kidnappers, they are…
Via Global Voices, we learn that Boz has his own list of Top 10 Americas Stories Of 2005, in a different – but well-reasoned and interesting – take from my own 2005 list earlier this week. Check it out here.