Blogging the democratic revolution
Venezuela’s oil, however you think it should be allocated, belongs to Venezuela. But that’s not how Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez sees it. He’s now on the verge of appointing a hardcore German Marxist who had and maybe still has ties to the Baaden Meinhof terrorrists to lead Venezuela’s oil company. Not unreasonably, Alek, who is…
Today the Marxist FARC guerrillas of Colombia attempted to murder a close senatorial ally of President Alvaro Uribe with a car bomb. They have tried for years to kill Uribe, probably hundreds of times, but the popular president’s security is too tight. So this time, the detested Marxists went after his allies. It was the…
Harry Hutton lived through it here. The revolutionary courage of Colombians still blazes like an emerald.
For all those who imagine that ‘land reform’ based on the confiscation of private property yields anything but Zimbabwe, Miguel Octavio has a sad news item describing how confiscated land in Venezuela’s western Zulia state a couple years ago has since gone from productive to fallow, the inevitable end-product of socialist redistribution. It’s something nations…
To read some of the news, one might think the U.S. is the only place affected by the rise in world energy prices. After all, we are the world’s largest energy consumer (no value judgment, I add) and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez often makes anti-U.S. statements expressly for the purpose of driving up prices, something…
The news announced over the weekend that Venezuela was seeking to acquire nuclear technology from Argentina, just happened to coincide with Pat Robertson’s claims (which were in the news months ago) that Venezuela is cozying up to Iran for nuclear purposes. (We know, Pat.) Francisco Toro has some very interesting thoughts about this baffling trend…
I’ve been re-reading a few passages from Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Carlos Alberto Montaner and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza’s excellent book about the debilitating myths frequently found in Latin America that harm its development. The book is called ‘The Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.’ It has whole chapters on entitlement, Castro worship, liberation theology, nationalism,…
I think property rights is rapidly emerging as a central revolution of our time in many areas. It touches even the United States, as the Kelo case demonstrates. Private property is the one thing communist regimes oppose. It’s also the key to freedom and the only basis for rule of law. And what a coincidence,…
Singapore threw into jail a couple of ethnic Chinese Internet posters who wrote derogatory remarks about their Malay countrymen. As I wrote here, this kind of thing goes on all the time, and I’ve seen it myself. But this time, the Singaporean government cracked down, swiftly and surely laying down its brand of justice, something…
Via Real Clear Politics, the Washington Post has an astounding article about a young rock band in Indonesia that is defying the vicious local Islamofascists by singing innovative songs against Jihad terrorism. Every time the terrorists threaten to blow them up, the youthful band comes up with a new song, calling it their next new…
I knew of the hunger strike of two Cuban ’75’ dissidents in Fidel Castro’s prisons but had very little information about Castro’s actual GULag at Guantanamo, and the conditions of which that led to the drastic hunger strike. Today, Wall Street Journal‘s Mary Anastasia O’Grady has done a great public service by publicizing this terrifying…
Miguel Buitrago of the excellent MABB blog has a fascinating post on the different political party programs of the candidates for Bolivia’s elections. He lines them all up side by side, helpfully laid out in bullet points. Read the whole thing here. My own analysis on one detail: Take a good look at the hard-left…
Why does Chavez remain popular? Here’s a frank and intelligent discussion of the matter in terms even I can relate to here.
So much for George Bush being intimidated by the bitter union- and leftist-bankrolled struggle this past summer to ratify CAFTA. In less than four weeks, negotiators say a free trade pact with Panama could be signed. Negotiators are rushing to polish up the accord in the last weeks before President George Bush visits the wonderful…
Besides the end of property rights, Venezuela also is turning into a financial madhouse. Almost every blogger I can find on Venezuela is commenting about it how Venezuela’s central bank, the guardian of its very currency, is under attack by the Chavista dictatorship. The Financial Times reported here that Venezuela’s central bank shifted up to…
I was going nuts, there was no Boli-Nica for weeks, and the whole world seemed … gray. At long last he is BACK and he’s got a funny new post up on Hugo Chavez’s latest scheme to build a ‘national computer.’ Boli, we want more! Boli describes Hugo Chavez’s latest schemes with state-financed computers, how…
Via our friend Harry Hutton, we learn that Colombia has a young policewoman who singlehandedly has destroyed vast money-counterfeiting networks in Colombia, knocking Colombia down from the rank of number one in U.S.-dollar counterfeiting to number three. Just one person’s individual work and initiative in a country long believed to have insurmountable problems. Not any…
Tuesday’s essay on property rights by the great Carlos Alberto Montaner, has awesome intellectual firepower. He is the best writer I know of anywhere in the world, and this is his most luminous essay. Montaner writes about how the destruction of property rights, as is happening in Venezuela, makes democratic revolution nearly impossible. He carefully…
Both Venezuela and Bolivia will hold watershed elections this December 4. Political pictures, and the outlook for democracy, could change as a result. Venezuela will elect National Assembly members ahead of dictator Hugo Chavez’s planned “changes” to the constitution. Bolivia will hold long-anticipated presidential elections after the leftist street-mob toppling of their second president in…
France is desperately in need of a democratic revolution. Socialism has failed, as it has failed everywhere else, and the French people face a bleak future. Instead, they’re getting a non-democratic revolt. Unions desperate to preserve their privileges are protesting in the streets, trying to shut the country down. Incubating revolution is complicated. The French…
Francisco Toro, after a (too-)long hiatus, is back to blogging thoughtfully about Venezuela. His new blog has a beautiful new design (although truthfully, the last two were extraordinary, too) and a new format of short posts with pithy original ideas. I don’t always agree with him on everything but I would say I do like…
This past Sunday, 60 Minutes ran an “interview” with Elian Gonzalez, who is now 11 years old. Elian, you recall, was the 6-year old boy who was picked up at sea by two fisherman and taken ashore, where an international custody battle between Fidel Castro and the Miami exile community ensued, leaving bitter and unforgotten…
The weekend’s terror attack on the Indonesian island of Bali was a monstrous atrocity. Does it have revolutionary implications? I think it does, because it’s closely aligned with Indonesia’s brave self-transformation into an authentic democracy in 1999. The terrorists who struck Bali were trying to destroy Indonesia’s fragile democracy – at a sensitive time. With…
One of the biggest triggers to revolution in any country is the concept of ‘rent-seeking.’ It’s a concept that’s largely foreign to us Americans, but perfectly understood by many people in other cultures. It’s the concept of someone exacting unfair payments over others because of some fundamental and resented privilege. If you were in the…
Confirming strongly our theory that the babes go where the heart of the action is. At the Iraq war counterrallies this weekend to defend Iraqi freedom and stand up for U.S. troops, there are some spectacular examples. Go see it here.