Blogging the democratic revolution
Yesterday, Estonia held its national parliamentary election. Prime Minister Andrus Ansip’s Reform Party increased its position from 19 to 31 seats in the 101-seat parliament, while their coalition partner in the previous government, the Centre Party, gained one seat to move to 29. The Union of Pro Patria and Res Publica holds 19 seats, the…
Venezuela: Where products are generic – and customers are branded Source: Anibal Barreto, Correo de Caroni, via Feathers In the slums of Caracas, Chavista grocery patrons are now being branded on their bellies (food goes into your belly, right?) with indelible ink by store personnel to ensure that they do not buy more chicken than…
After years of braying about ‘food security’ – Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has accomplished the opposite of that: widespread empty shelves for basic food stocks like meat and sugar, throughout Venezuelan grocery stores, duplicating Soviet-style food shortages. The next step will be rationing. As of now, only chicken feet can be bought, according to this…
You can kind of hear it in the distance, the tolling bell for Chavez as his regime spirals into ever louder lunacy. But there is a real tolling bell that will get him, the bell of plunging oil prices. That bell is starting to ring so you can hear it. This week, oil prices fell…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has signalled his true intentions with more clarity than ever today, announcing that he would expropriate: 1. All the phone lines 2. All the electricity As this happened, a provincial governor from Bolivar state down south let it all hang out, simply saying he wanted to confiscate the entire media, forcing…
In 1938, when President Lazaro Cardenas nationalized the oil industry in Mexico, everyone said it was the right move. After all, there were some pretty gamy capitalists from the U.S., Britain, France and Spain operating in the country, and getting them out and creating a national oil company, even if it meant expropriations, seemed like…
RIA Novosti recently reported that from January through September of this year Russia received about $17.4 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI) and slightly more, about $17.9 billion, in the form of international financial organizations’ loans and trade credits. At about $2 billion per month, we can project that Russia will have no more than…
Peter Mork at Economics with a Face has some intelligent observations about ongoing efforts in certain European cities to eliminate all – repeat ALL – traffic rules in the name of fewer traffic accidents, an idea that scares the heck out anyone who first hears about it. But it turns out, it’s not that crazy…
OK, it was a ratbag of a bill. It lumped in everything that possibly could be lumped in, good with bad. Excellent, friendly deserving nations, like Vietnam, Colombia and Peru, (in short, our equals), got much of what they needed. Nations ruled by disgusting, undeserving, ungrateful governments, like Ecuador and Bolivia got plenty too. Messes…
In the wake of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s thundrous electoral victory on Sunday, he’s back in action, legislating new taxes on Venezuela’s battered middle class. For his first move, he’s decided to tax toilet seats as an “inessential item.” I guess the Venezuelans, some of whom elected him, are now supposed to just go without….
Congress has just wrapped up a huge free trade package! They actually are allowing it to go to the floor for a vote around 4 p.m. Eastern! They darn well better pass it! Not only will Peru, Colombia and Vietnam get some kind of trade relief for the next year (it’s temporary for the first…
Inflation, as Milton Friedman said, is a monetary phenomenon. The only way you get inflation is to print out money like there’s no tomorrow. Because when you do that, there IS no tomorrow, money-printing destroys savings and with it, future investment. Which would have great implications for a nation’s stability and passage to or from…
Milton Friedman, Democratic Revolutionary Source: John Petrie’s Milton Friedman Quotation Page The great Milton Friedman died yesterday in San Francisco. His ideas changed the world the most in our era. When we say ‘free markets,’ we think of him. I can think of no one whose ideas made more revolution and genuinely changed the world…
Monday the trade Neanderthals in Congress rejected endorsement of Vietnam’s entry into the World Trade Organization. It was slopped through a lame-duck committee and Congressional Republicans and Democrats voted against bringing Vietnam into the world trading system. They wanted to shut Vietnam out. And keep all the trade to themselves. Problem is, it takes two…
Can you imagine what it’s like to collect a bill from Castro? The guy defaults all the time, he owes about $6 billion in defaulted loans to banks all over the world, if I recall correctly. For some reason, though, Swiss banks have continued to do business with the Cuban government, perhaps because that’s where…
Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald, in a public service, has done us all a favor by identifying the Dirty Dozen of the new congress, the creeps who would keep free trade from enriching and helping the nations of the Americas. These are the poverty-enforcers, the anti-Latin Americans, the rust-belt oppressors, hobbled by their own…
I have had long running arguments with naivos even close to the oil industry that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela intended to turn not just Venezuela’s state oil company into a worker-ant collective but Western oil majors’ Venezuelan operations into them as well. Today, I stand vindicated. Today, workers from Chevron, Repsol, Shell, Exxon, Total and…
The U.S. has a new congress and boy is it hostile to the concept of free trade. Sadly, the Republicans in power were just barely there on this issue and the Democrats to a lesser extent, but not exactly absent. Now, with a Democrat-dominated House and Senate, it’s going to be very tough to get…
Alek Boyd has been doing some fantastic reporting on the state of poor society in Venezuela, actually talking to people and seeing what it’s like in their often ignored world. Are you aware that Venezuela’s poor are poorer than any other western hemispheric nation’s poor? I mean places like Haiti, Nicaragua, Brazil and Bolivia? I…
Doctor Zin at Regime Change Iran has found a megatrend piece that’s so arresting it can’t help but make you stop and think. World oil prices right now are dropping like a stone. If they go below $50 a barrel and stay there, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are in…
The Culebra Cut stretch of the 50-mile Panama Canal Source: AFP Getty, via Houston Chronicle Panama’s great referendum on expanding the mighty Panama Canal, to accomodate two times’ as much ship traffic, is taking place today. 1.7 million Panamanians are registered to vote on the $5.3 billion upgrade, essentially a bond project to be financed…
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…
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…
Defying the laws of economics, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez started state-run groceries for poor people to buy food at cut-rate prices. He never imagined that the little darlings he claims to champion over Big Bad Corporations might take the cheap food, buy a ton of it, and then turn around and sell it at higher…
There is something majestic about the power of the markets. No dictator, anywhere can control them. They do what they do, based on thousands of decisions by thousands of individuals, acting on a collective wisdom. No central planning can match this people’s verdict in reflecting the here and now, or the future. That’s a people-power…