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 Venezuelan, views this as an unusually brazen sort of treason. In Hugo Chavez’s revolution, ideology is much more important than citizenship. It’s essentially an Sandalista idea and part of a vast phony revolution that he’s been promoting with the ultimate aim of making Venezuela a…
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 first car-bomb attack in Colombia in a couple of years, and only for one reason: President Uribe has rounded up vast numbers of the terrrorists and put them in jail where they belong. But he’s not done yet and there are still a few lurking…
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 that have experienced communism already know. Read it here.
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 he can benefit from. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Zarkawi, bin Laden, and other terrorists expressly target U.S. economic interests in a bid to wage economic warfare on us. Usually that means attacks on critical energy supply. Sometimes they gain small victories. Europe has diversified…
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 that seems to kind of skim over our US-American eyes, given that Hugo Chavez here is largely viewed as a clown (and therefore ineffective) – along with some pointed observations about where this all is headed. Read the whole thing here and here. Aleksander Boyd…
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, poverty, blaming the gringos, consorting with Sandalistas, and other useless, unconstructive things. Today I found something in the Cuban state press about Argentina that so haunted me I thought I would share it here. Argentina is blaming its shopkeepers for inflation, the mighty bete noire…
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, in the countries where there are the biggest fault lines on property rights, a communist regime is somewhere in the background, be it China or Venezuela. Via Fiscal Study (a great blog), linking Global Voices, and also via Simon World, a very important Chinese blog…
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 that may have a chilling effect on Internet freedom. The Internet is one of the few places where one can feel free in taut neat Singapore. For a country so obsessed with its international ‘competitiveness’ it doesn’t look auspicious. But a look at the government’s…
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 ‘smart bomb’ aimed at the Islamists. They are literally defying death by singing songs condemning terrorism. And they just keep doing it. There are signs that this group is changing Indonesia, a nation that is full of intelligent, interesting young people who have no interest…
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 communist dungeon that stands alongside what she calls, in comparison, the ‘tropical resort’ of the U.S. Guantanamo terrorist prison that has been subject to such international reproach. On the human rights violations that are occurring at Castro’s Guantanamo, the media and international left are utterly…
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 plan of action for the Evo Morales MAS program – and then notice the packaging – it bears all the earmarks of U.S.-based Sandalista organizations for its otherwise communistic program. Twenty years ago, did leftists package their collective farms and forced indoctrinations as ‘microenterprise’? Try…
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 country in early November. If they can get it done, it send a spectacular message to the rest of the Americas that free trade is alive and well and nobody, but nobody, will be shut out of the growing potential for U.S.-style prosperity up and…
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 $20 billion of its $30 billion in reserves from U.S.-Treasury assets to the Bank of International Settlements over in Switzerland, something that may be a move to annoy the U.S. but which could cause Venezuela to lose its own money, too. Any central bank can…
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 it’s likely to be done and why it won’t work. By coincidence, a day or two ago, I put up a post on ‘rent-seeking,’ citing the estimable Tyler Cowen, describing the same dynamic. But in hilarity, Boli was matched by Boz, who wrote an even…
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 more. I read the story in Semana and my jaw dropped. Who says one person can’t make a difference? This revolutionary has truly made a difference, not only in the preservation of the value of the U.S. currency, which is marvellous, but in enabling poor…
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 cites examples from Eastern Europe and Cuba, showing how stripping people of these property rights leaves not only no freedom, but no possibility of freedom. His original ideas are so powerful you will never quite look at the world in the same way again. It’s…
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 two years, the work of activists linked to Castro ally Evo Morales. Both elections are showing signs of crisis ahead of the vote. Here is a brief roundup: In Venezuela: Francisco Toro at Caracas Chronicles writes that the opposition, which has now united, must deal…
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 cannot make themselves repudiate socialism. They’re not like Eastern Europeans. So, there’s all kinds of strife, blaming the wrong things, fighting productivity gains, screaming at the reality of capitalism, and refusing to change and grow – the same mirror of confusion that characterized the May…
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 Francisco best when he has genuinely original ideas, and fortunately, that is often. It’s a real treat to see him back, so go read the whole thing (yeah) here.
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 feelings among the freedom-loving Cubans now in the U.S. The 60-Minutes interview had a staged appearance, with CBS itself admitting it got “help” from Fidel Castro’s own camera-man, making the film communist-approved propaganda to shed the most favorable possible light on the Castro regime. The…
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 fuel costs soaring and the rupiah battered, these evil people were going after an economic power center, and they intended their attack as economic warfare. It’s something they are betting can topple democracy. Do I think they can do it? No. Indonesians treasure their democracy…
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 mafia, you would call it ‘skimming.’ Tommy Soeharto and all the Soeharto kids were perfect living embodiments of rent-seeking – what those guys did during Indonesia’s longest-running dictatorship was to either own or exact “protection money” from the airplane you flew in to Jakarta on,…
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.