Blogging the democratic revolution
It is traditional thought to immediately consider a military coup bad because they usually are. Take the many horrors of Africa and Latin America, for example. There have certainly been ambiguous exceptions, such as Pinochet’s coup in Chile which still inspires much debate. But nowadays things are a bit different. Military coups are occurring for the explicit purpose of creating national harmony and moving forward with democracy. Look at Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania, where coups have led directly to increases in civil and political liberties with a progression toward elections. The most recent coup that inspired international condemnation was in Thailand,…
Courtesy of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, Sandalistas can now select five-star accomodations if they find themselves tiring of all the gunfire, fireworks and 6:00 a.m. blasted regatton that so livens up shantytown life. After all, there’s something for everyone in the world of Chavistadom! This new news item, which I have only a fragment of from EFE, only goes to show that Chavez is not even trying to pretend anymore that’s he’s down there with the people. He and his sandalista pals on tour from Chicago and New York and Los Angeles and Paris and London have gone upscale. They’re…
At VCrisis, Alek Boyd has firsthand info about how Hugo Chavez’s shiny new Russian weapons purchases are being used – to massacre Venezuelan and Brazilian peasants from helicopters in the deep jungle. There was a great big massacre of miners in the Amazon rainforest this week and Boyd is on the scene with tons of photos and interviews with locals. These are Hugo Chavez’s death squads up close. Death squads from the air, with the willing collaboration of Vladimir Putin. Read the whole thing here.
As Publius Pundit readers know, a crisis is brewing in Georgia. After discovering a spy ring seeking to subvert the current pro-West presidential administration on Russia????????s behalf, just as Georgia entered the final round of talks on NATO membership, the Georgian government took action to arrest the conspirators, who included several Russian military officers. In response, Russia has recalled its ambassador and imposed a trade and travel blockade on tiny Georgia, seeking to destabilize its economy. More recently, it has loosed a pogrom-like assault on Georgian-owned businesses and assets in Russia, as well as a series of crude attacks on…
Geraldo Alckmin drove Brazil’s popular incumbent President Lula into a runoff Oct. 29 with a powerful showing in Sunday’s election. The guy rocks. Source: AP, via BBC photo gallery A massive political earthquake is shaking Brazil right now and practically no one in the mainstream media (BBC a notable exception!) is really covering it. This ought to be a much bigger story than it is being made out to be. I am sort of amazed at the lack of attention. The pillar of the responsible left, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, faces a growing prospect of being toppled as momentum…
Not that he ever really had it, but President Bachelet was considering supporting Venezuela’s candidacy for a rotating seat on the United Nations security council that’s coming up. Possibly no more. A.M. Mora y Leon already posted up an article showing Bachelet’s absolute fury over remarks made by the Venezuelan government that the Christian Democrat Party had betrayed Salvador Allende as well as the revolution. The fallout was absolutely astronomical. Relations between the two countries have never been so low. If Chavez ever thought he had a chance of gaining Chile’s support — probably one of the most important countries…
Panic has set in at Venezuela’s state oil company with the spectacular exit of 7-Eleven from the Citgo gasoline-station label. The PR damage is so bad that the entire brand may be a total loss. Indy gas station after indy gas station are yanking ties to the Venezuelan dictator-controlled oil company. This follows 7-Eleven’s verbally spectacular pullout, a U.S. consumer boycott, as well as Citgo’s own of pulling of the Citgo label from about 1800 stations that the Venezuelan energy company could no longer supply due to crumbling productive capacity. Which is a shame, because it was a good company…
If chills did not run down your spine when you heard the tune for the Soviet national anthem, written to glorify the mass-murdering dictator Joseph Stalin, playing for Russia at the Winter Olympics this year in Italy, if you do not shiver every time you hear about Russian people favoring Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, with 70%-plus approval in opinion polls, then perhaps you are ready for this: Russia is re-weaponizing psychiatry as a method of dealing with anti-Kremlin dissent, just as in Soviet times. Two major articles from leading newspapers have documented the early stages of the phenomenon.…
The Assembly to Promote the Civil Society, an umbrella organization gathering over 300 Cuban opposition movements that fight peacefully for democratic and regime change in the island, is planning a meeting of the independent libraries. They will inform the population about the goals of the civil desobedience and non-cooperation campaign named “Yo no coopero, yo si quiero el cambio” (I don’t cooperate with the repressive authorities, I want the change). The official motto will be “We are gathering for democracy”. Banned books, reviews, leaflets will be distribuited to the neighbors of the libraries where the meetings will take place and…
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his challenger, Geraldo Alckmin Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! Singapore Today is election day in Brazil, and for 126 million Brazilians, time to decide who their next president and congressional representatives will be. Via the Washington Post, AP has a good primer on the nuts and bolts of how Brazil’s elections work in this post here. According to Arthur Ituassu, of Brazzil magazine: They will be choosing their president and vice-president, twenty-seven governors, senators and state assemblies, as well as 513 federal deputies. What should be a party for one of the biggest democracies in…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis writes that he’s still shaken after being attacked by a horde of 80 Chavista thugs at a campaign rally in the obscure town of Valera in the high Andean mountain state of Trujillo, over in Venezuela’s mostly rightwing west. Trujillo’s a tiny state, with a population only at 608,000, and sort of Juan Valdez territory, where some people wear ponchos and ride llamas and donkeys. Its biggest city, Valera, looks like this: Valera, in the Andean state of Trujillo, Venezuela Source: Municipal Government of Valera But Alek said thousands of Valera citizens attended a Manuel Rosales…
Europe. Treasure box of civilization that every other civilization on earth, grand and small, old and new, owns a few pearls and diamonds from. Reason, individualism, liberty, fairness and linear progress from the Judeo-Christian European heritage have affected human aspirations all over the earth – everything from Pakistani kids longing for Nikes and Iranian women demanding their human rights, to India demanding its place at the UN Security Council. All of these are derived from the heritage of reason which began in Europe. But the LAST people who seem to be aware of this are Europeans themselves. They don’t even…
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 prices on the street, making a tidy profit. Never occurred to him that capitalism could be practiced by poor people, too. So over in Venezuela, market economics have taken rein from Chavez’s much-touted cheap food, whether Chavez likes it or not, as poor Chiclet-sellers, known…
Alek Boyd has more continuing coverage of the Manuel Rosales presidential campaign that is challenging the presidency of Hugo Chavez. Alek reports that Rosales is attracting huge, growing crowds out in the Venezuelan burgs and boondocks. He has some choice quotes from locals and some descriptive writing on what it all looks and feels like. See his latest here.
The world is loaded with well-wishers who have visited communist Cuba as tourists, and marvelled at beauty of the island, the sultry enticing laid-back culture of the people, the music, the ease of life, the apparent lack of materialism, the supposed universal health care, and other illusions. Over at Killcastro, a fine blog by Cuban exiles who have actual experience of Cuban life beyond the tourist spots at Varadero and central Havana, and who currently have some of the deepest contacts and connections inside the real Cuba, they printed a smuggled-out letter from a Cuban inside Cuba, that tells the…
What is the impact of the world democracy revolution? In Arab states, there’s been a significant change toward democratic revolution in the past two years, according to this absolutely fascinating report from a writer who visited Dubai and talked to James Zogby, a respected pollster of the Arab world. He found that young Arabs, both men and women, in their 30s and 40s, are beginning to lose interest in a Pan-Arab identity, a dead end that has brought nothing but anguish and poverty since the post-colonial tinpot-dictator era of the 1960s. Instead, they are starting to see themselves as citizens…
The Moscow Times newspaper maintains an impressive stable of pundits analyzing Russian political developments, and their weekly columns are often required reading for those who wish to understand and properly respond the rise of the Neo-Soviet Union. Two recent examples deal with the disturbing and self-destructive rise of official anti-Americanism in Russia: Georgy Bovt documents its rise in the Russian Duma, while Alexander Golts explains its new significance in the Russian military. Bovt writes: Last week, a remarkable document titled “On a Likely Scenario of Action of the United States toward Russia in 2006-2008” was circulated in the State Duma.…
Hot on the heels of the surprise power-packed U.S. consumer boycott of Venezuelan oil, a huge refinery explosion of Venezuelan oil occurred this morning in Havana, Cuba, where considerable Venezuelan oil is being refined. Gigantic. Val has a photo of the inferno, the latest oil blow to Hugo Chavez. The Real Cuba has more photos and details. Along with this, this, this, and this, just this past week, Venezuelan oil production under a communist regime is profoundly strained – beset with accidents, safety violations, waste and destruction. Even if oil prices rise as a result of all this, if Hugo…
Jonathan Scheele, head of the European Commission’s Delegation to Romania said about the upcoming accession of Romania to EU that, “There will be no more reports by the European Commission and it will therefore be very important for the Romanian political class, civil society and Romanians in general to take responsibilities.” Easier said than done. Jos???? Manuel Durao Barosso emphasized: “Yesterday we decided, today we are celebrating and tomorrow we must go back to work.” The Romanian Premier, Calin Popescu Tariceanu promised the reform process would continue, especially in Justice, agriculture and the sanitary-veterinary field. He said that, ???????Romania is…
On the left above, you see the face of pro-U.S. Ukrainian Viktor Yushchenko before he sought the presidency of his country. On the right, you see his face shortly after he made that decision. What happened? Well, he ingested a large amount of highly toxic chemicals, and it wasn????????t a suicide attempt. Many people believe it was an effort by the Russian secret police to keep Yushchenko from ousting pro-Russian prime minister Viktor Yanukovich from power in the upcoming election. Yushchenko had promised to move Ukraine away from Russia and towards the European Union, NATO and the United States. The…
Cripes, what’s got into these guys? I used to live in Singapore and I used to write for the Far Eastern Economic Review, mostly slapping around China’s oppression in those palmy expat days. Today, the once-ominiscent FEER, now a news-turned-essay magazine, and down on its heels due to the Internet and global forces, is nevertheless back on the Singapore sheet list. In fact, this time the Singaporean government has downright banned it. And for SUCH a Singapore reason! They said the FEER failed to provide the name of someone they could serve papers to, in the (inevitable) event they sued…
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 Hugo Chavez repeatedly disparages and discounts even as he claims to represent the aspirations of the people. Today, it wasn’t George Bush who spoke but the People of the United States who issued a majestic market verdict on him. That was evident in action taken…
Venezuela tonight held its first presidential debate. But it wasn’t quite like any other debate I’ve ever heard of. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez refused to participate of course, due to a congenital inability to share the television screen with any other human being. The Caracas megalomaniac just can’t make himself do it. But that was no problem for Venezuela’s enterprising private sector. Globovision took his long windy speech off state TV, ran half the screen with the dictator’s bloviating, and then had Venezuelan opposition candidate Manuel Rosales reply to each and every Chavez lie and idiocy. Can you imagine? They…
Bolivian government coca-leaf graffiti targeted at dissidents in Santa Cruz Source: AP, via Yahoo! News Argentina’s Cronista Comercial newspaper last week released an Argentine foreign ministry study, whose authors used various corporate-risk business models to forecast a 56% chance of civil war breaking out in Bolivia in the next few months. It’s faster than anyone thinks. Bolivia’s President Evo Morales Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News At issue is the growing tyranny of Bolivia’s leftwing populist president, Evo Morales. His popularity numbers have dropped, and in Bolivia’s industrious, entrepreneurial, job-creating and mixed-race east, discontent with his Marxist remedies is growing. Morales…
The European Commission has announced that Romania and Bulgaria are set to join the European Union at the beginning of 2007. It truly is an historic achievement; something that bodes well for the future of the two countries and the continent as a whole. The European Commission has announced that Romania and Bulgaria will be admitted to the EU in January 2007, but under strict conditions. Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said both countries had made enough progress to join the union. But they will be checked for progress in curbing organised crime and corruption, and ensuring food safety and…