Blogging the democratic revolution
…the knives come out. On Saturday, the small city-state, and economic hub, of Singapore went to the polls to elect a new parliament. For the first time in years the ruling People’s Action Party faced a real challenge to its 47-year grip on power – with the opposition gaining a large chunk of the vote, including in the Prime Minister’s own constituency. In spite of electoral rallies that saw tens of thousands attend for the opposition, and barely hundreds for the ruling party – the PAP secured victory. By no means was their win as a result of ballot-stuffing. The…
Amid all the smoke and dust of urbanized Jakarta – motorcycles, white Islamic veils, clove cigarettes, blue jeans, smoking satay on the street grill – in a megalopolis of something like 21 million people – there is a real Java, Indonesia, too. This one isn’t revolutionary, but eternal. By eternal, I mean it seems to resist EVERY change in favor of itself, its OWN identity. Java is the same as it always was. Not that it is always easy to live this way, of course, it’s just that it’s frequently done. You might ask why such a post belongs on…
Blogger Boli-Nica, a Bolivian national who knows a load of baloney when he sees it, whales hell out of the newest development coming out of that Chavisticating country: The army of 400 auditors from Venezuela’s flamingly corrupt, incompetent, thieving oil company rolling in to inspect the books at Bolivia’s national energy company. Boli points out that there’s something distinctly unsavory about the auditors of ONE country, coming down to audit the books of COMPETITOR! When has that ever happened except in a hostile takeover? It’s scary indeed. Aside from that, Boli points out that Venezuela’s auditors have an Augean Stable…
No poverty in ‘revolutionary’ Cuba? No people living in the streets? This is what Castro and its supporters on the extreme left keep on saying. The reality is quite the opposite. Contacto Cuba has a must-see video showing street people in Havana. The video, made in cladestinity, includes street people telling their daily life. Not surprisingly, for those who never believed in Castroite propaganda, when asked about how they think their future would look like, everyone said “my future? it’s the street” . Others even affirmed: “If I could, I would move to the United States” and another said :…
It’s finally out. We knew he was a megalomaniac. We knew he was like Hitler in Paris when he strutted through to “congratulate” his newest colony of Bolivia. The signs are everywhere, and starting to come together: Hugo Chavez’s ultimate masterplan is to rule the world. Literally. He’s got it all mapped out in various regions and on five fronts. His three-pronged strategy is “anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism and advancement of The Project.” Sound nutsy enough to you? Sound Hitlerian enough? If you don’t think so, you haven’t read this longer piece detailing Hugo Chavez’s very own goal for global domination at…
Political temperature time for the Americas and Boz has a new collection of polls for the hemisphere this week. The lowdown on Mexico, and rightwing PAN party candidate Felipe Calderon’s growing presidential election lead is one thing, as well as the fascinating political lineup going on in Peru – which makes me think the worst things that can happen probably won’t. In all, a good week, and lots of stuff I haven’t mentioned. Go see what he’s got here.
This week, Evo Morales nationalized Bolivia’s natural gas industry. He didn’t do it as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez did, by a hundred kisses of law, order, and win-win “people’s” baloney, but in the old 1960S style: with guns and goons. Like a pirate, he confiscated the assets of others and called them his own. Then he demanded that the rest of the world like it. This thug creates no value, produces no product. All he does is take from others. Brazil, Argentina, Spain and indirectly, Chile, were most affected. In that, he struck out at his best potential allies in order…
As I have written before, dinner table talk in Venezuela is ‘who got shot, who got kidnapped, who got murdered, when do we emigrate.’ That’s normal everyday conversation, every single day at every single dinner table in Venezuela. It’s that bad. You can imagine what the barbershop talk is like! One Venezuelan barber in the Petare slum of Caracas, having heard enough stories from his customers, decided to write them down, act them out, and film them. He didn’t have any actors, all he had was ketchup for blood, flour for cocaine and his buddies for actors. His big Hollywood…
Happy May to everyone – it’s been flurrying all day in Ulaanbaatar! My family lives about 12km NNW of the city in the hills at the very edge of the city (great hiking!). We live in a one-room house, but most of our neighbors live in gers. The front window looks out over UB, which is always cloaked in smog, and I rejoice each time I recall that I am no longer living in that cloud. Last month we did a homestay with herders in the Kharkhorin valley. I got a lot of experience combing goats for cashmere, as the…
This is the question many would ask themselves after reading the news of a new terror attack against Italian troops. This time the fact occurred in Afghanistan. Just a few weeks after the attack on the Carabinieri in Iraq, that killed 3 of them, now it’s the turn of the Italian soldiers in Afghanistan. The new Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi announced that its weak government would withdraw the troops out of Iraq as soon as possible. Terrorists may have thought that by hitting Italy in Afghanistan as well, Prodi might be easily convinced to withdraw the troops from there…
That’s the question that Lee Harris asks in a column over at TCS Daily. He focuses on the unfolding situation in Latin America, where Axis of Subversion trio Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Evo Morales are undoing the democratic fiber of the entire continent. To explain the resurgence of state socialism in this wellspring, he looks to important thinkers of both Marxism and capitalism alike. The root? Populism. This much is already known, and its potential effects on the region dangerous. What is not delved into is the exact nature of this populism and how it is morphing into state…
Outside of following the politics of developing countries, I also like to follow the markets. Especially the markets in countries that are up-and-coming or not even on the radar. Markets where a lot of people don’t even know markets exist. Others they would. Places like Mexico have been booming. But so have many places in the Middle East; for example, Saudi Arabia, which introduced the Tadawul stock index in 2001, began at 8000 points and topped 20,000 in mid-February this year. Kuwait and Egypt have also been riding uphill at lightning speed, a lot of this due to rising oil…
In Cuba, people have two faces: the one they’re forced to show when they have to march and listen to the long Castro’s speeches, and the one they prefer to show when they are almost sure that the police don’t see them. Here is a young Cuban who derides Cuba’s daily life and so the regime. It’s a courtesy of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) , that didn’t publish the name of the guy in order to protect him from the ire of the State Security and its paramilitary mobs. “Havana is the city of the long lines. Just imagine…
Eduardo Avila at Global Voices has an extremely good Bolivian blog roundup covering all the angles on Bolivia’s energy nationalization, an event that has rocked at least three continents this week. It’s an excellent glimpse on what the different Bolivian blogs – of all ideologies – are saying on this week’s biggest event. Read it here.
Who could have a fortune like that but an absolute ruler, a totalitarian dictator like Fidel Castro himself? The bearded beast is today worth $900 million, thanks to high commodity prices and some help from his little Venezuelan friend. Cubans go hungry, making less than a dollar a day, and freeze ice for lunch so that the meal tastes more like “food.” The obesity epidemic is nonexistent in Cuba and it’s not because of any accomplishment of Castrodom, let alone too many rabbit salads. It’s due to starvation living conditions. Castro, meanwhile, traipses around billionaire-style, isolated, alone, Gatsby-like, in a…
Daniel in Venezuela has taken more photos on the road from Yaracuy state to Valencia, and he’s noted the rising tide of human misery along Venezuela’s barren, decrepit highways. Instructure is crumbling while scavengers grow around the dumps in the rural landscapes. I saw this myself in Venezuela on my way through the countryside. It was bleak and saddening. This is Chavismo in action. He also saw a lot of nighttime horror in Caracas, and did not close his eyes to it. Nobody is reporting this. He wrote about it here. His unique photos are here.
International Workers’ Day, known to most as May Day, was originally invented by the labor unions to celebrate the Haymarket Riot of 1886 in Chicago that resulted in the institution of an eight-hour workday. Since then, it has been hijacked by radical communist groups bent on overthrowing the “evil” of capitalism. After the Red Scare, May Day was no longer celebrated by the masses of the United States, but elsewhere in the world it is an officially sanctioned holiday. Many communist subversives use it to bring their numbers out into the light, as you can see in Russia and the…
The trial of 9/11 conspiracist Zacarias Moussaoui has come to a dramatic end, with the jury deciding that he will receive life in prison instead of the death sentence. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted for involvement in the September 11 terrorist attacks, will be sentenced to life in prison on Thursday after a jury on Wednesday decided that he should not receive the death penalty. The decision to sentence Mr Moussaoui to life in prison without parole was a big blow to the Bush administration, which had argued his involvement in the attacks on the World Trade Center and…
Need some good news? Click on Boz’s poll roundup for the first bright item on Mexico’s election, where the good guy seems to be squarely in the lead. He’s also got new polls from Guatemala, Peru, and Colombia, plus a suspect poll from Venezuela’s own Hugo Chavez himself. The Chavez poll is interesting, Chavez is claiming he has the support of 60% of the voters. That’s actually a pretty low number coming from a guy like him, I would have expected a good 90% or so. Chavez may be ever so obliquely admitting that he is detested because he knows…
Alvicho at Off Topic notices a creepy similarity here. I dare you to argue with it!
With the nationalization of Bolivia’s energy resources, the two biggest victims in this are socialist Brazil and socialist Spain. Franco, I am still waiting for you to give us word from Spain on this Bolivian travesty, so in the meantime, consider Brazil: Evo Morales is determined to play approximately the same tormenting role to Brazil that Hugo Chavez plays to the U.S. – that of underdeveloped big energy supplier that revels in politicizing the energy supply and seeking very high prices. Bolivia is actually better positioned than Venezuela for that nuisance role, because natural gas, which Bolivia exports to Brazil,…
There’s something kind of creepy I notice once in awhile when I look up which keywords are bringing in traffic at Publius Pundit. Whenever some group of indecent words comes up, like ‘nude, Ugandan, women’ or ‘naked, Iranian, babes’ or ‘Swedish, sex, slaves’ – more often than not, the person doing the search is flagged from some country like Iran, Saudi Arabia or one of the oppressed Gulf states. What a horrible distinction to be known for! But much as I like those countries and wish for the best for them, much as I wish democratic revolution on them, I…
After the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan over a year ago, the country has pretty much dropped off the radar. Beside working on reforms in the structural institutions of the country, and President Bakiyev wanting the U.S. to pay more for the Manas air base, not much is going on. Until lately. Bakiyev hasn’t proven himself to be anything like the democrat or reformer people hoped he might turn out to be. Organized crime rules the country, not the people. In place of last year’s opposition (now in power) and the clan regime of Askar Akayev (now out of power), there…
Uruguay has broken free from the Chavez orbit. It’s exiting Mercosur, the trade bloc that is a good idea in concept, but in reality not so good for a little state like Uruguay. It’s dominated by Brazil and Argentina, and while Brazil is never a problem, Argentina is. It’s also got Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in as a brand new associate member, something that makes the air pretty hard to breathe for civilized Uruguay. Chavez has stated that he intends to make Mercosur his vehicle for influencing events around the Americas. Well, not on Uruguay’s dime. Uruguay is a lovely little…
I got back from the La Brea evening protest. This was the second one that wasn’t the early morning’s coercive boycott, but instead a real show of presence for the immigrants who feel most strongly affected by coming Congressional efforts to deal with immigration. It was endorsed by Cardinal Mahony and Dolores Huerta, and reportedly drew about 400,000 people, versus the morning action, which only drew about 200,000. There was probably some overlap of protestors. But by and large, it goes to show that more immigrants want peaceful dialogue and change, not ‘revolucion’ and confrontation endorsed by ANSWER and its…