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 splendid American Thinker essay by Phil Gallagher here.
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 when you declare war on the laws of human nature and economics, as Chavez has done. This may well be why Washington is being so quiet now – they’re going to let him do himself in, without their involvement. As Venezuela’s people are quietly regrouping…
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, too. But go see all of them and see what you think. It’s a don’t miss here. Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons has some interesting – and rarely noted – facts about the issues Bachelet is likely to face regarding privatization, labor, and the social…
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 Yaracuy also has a excellent sober analysis of Chile’s election, and its contrast to Venezuela. He writes: It seems that the changes in Chile are deeper than one would have thought, perhaps the first country getting into a right/social-democrat European pattern for the good fortune…
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 even talking put putting an extra star on Venezuela’s flag, just to represent that coming intention. It turns out the Guyanese are not happy about this and one of Daniel’s posters has provided a fascinating link to a recent Guyana newspaper editorial addressing the growing…
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 bank however, but more like a candy store. Chavez says he’ll make loans on no terms whatsoever, and I suppose, not expect to be paid back, which is the Argentine way. In return, he’ll expect political loyalty, which, as the Caribbean states at the OAS…
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 wire on Sunday’s elections. This whole election will serve as a benchmark to the rest of Latin America of what a good election should be. All countries should try to measure up to this excellent Chilean standard. Agencia EFE has a great profile of one…
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 Thailand, and has since eroded civic freedoms. The Thais are rallying around around Songla Limthongkul, a former business partner and former political ally of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Songla is a media mogul who’s appalled at the his former partner’s business deals (a rumored $2…
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 it — to you — are absolutely amazing. Never again can your government confiscate your savings account by devaluing the money in it. You will never again wake up and find your life savings worth nothing because the government wanted to please some inefficient banana…
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, riding there on a Venezuelan PDVSA state oil company jet, he encountered baleful looks in ultra-formal Spain, and phony expressions of sympathetic support from the nominally communist Chinese for his dressed-down look. I don’t have a problem with him being who is he and in…
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 hell doesn’t the U.S. get a clue from Brazil! The U.S. is a veritable soup of regulations and special interests that prohibits development of its own abundant natural gas and oil reserves. That’s why U.S. upsteam energy companies can find almost nowhere to drill –…
…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 the closure of the bridge from the airport and port where 70% of Venezuela’s imported food comes: Venezuela’s coffee industry in chaos as price of beans doubles ???? Shortages in shops after producers hoard stocks National Guard (!) told to “find every last kilogram” Greg…
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 to incentivize free trade measures in the new emerging economies of the dynamic Middle East. It can be read here.
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 worst dictators. And yet! Seeking a free trade pact, same as Mexico’s Vicente Fox has got! I am flabbergasted. Talk about unexpected! Uruguay was one of the five nations that didn’t sign on to the free trade pact with the U.S. at the Mar Del…
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, twisting the steel and cement linking bridge over a steep ravine. Without that highway and without that bridge, there was no getting out of Caracas. I began to consider how I could get to Maracaibo or some other city with an international airport if it…
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 the same for meat, as we reported here. And when I was in Caracas, a full-page ad taken out by Polar Group in El Universal warned that it was the same dynamic with corn flour – and that the company was unlikely to survive on…
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 consolidate the Axis of Evil, as Daniel in Venezuela notes. Just coincidentally, Humala was in Caracas for the festivities with the other two. It’s no coincidence that political meddling was one of the reasons Mexico also pulled its ambassador from Caracas last November – and…
…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 has her new Index of Economic Freedom out, with a discussion of Estonia’s “revolutionary reforms” (you think she reads Publius???) and of Latin America’s increasingly braked reforms, something worth considering as we watch Latin America slide ever further into the leftist vortex of no return.…
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 thousands of immigrants from all over the hemisphere and elsewhere walk through scorched no-man’s-land deserts and dangerous smuggler routes full of human barbarians – all for the chance to come here illegally as something better than living in their hellish homelands. There’s an immigration crisis…
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 decay. How strange to look into the window of the past and see a society completely comparable to our own, completely similar in development and dynamism. Those days are gone, of course, in the name of Castro’s so-called ‘revolution.’ More and more, that looks like…
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 they didn’t buy any of the cheap, available, and pro-offered flood insurance from him, it’s nevertheless natural to ask. Times are unusual and politicians often respond to large numbers of people making the same request. It’s not unexpected that they might ask their owners for…
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 loudmouths,” Uribe said of the FARC leaders. The best part of this news story is the FARC’s reaction back to Uribe after he spoke the plain truth. May it be their epitaph. The whole story is here.
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.