Blogging the democratic revolution
The world economy runs on what happens in the U.S. economy. That has potential to affect the outlook for every revolutionary country on earth. At the center of this phenomenon is Alan Greenspan, who yesterday hiked interest rates yet again. He’s hiked and he’s hiked – ten times in the past ten quarters. It’s flattening and inverting the yield curve. And an inverted yield curve NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES THEY TELL YOU THIS TIME IT’S DIFFERENT – is always a harbinger of recession. It was last time, the time before, and the time before that. Despite what ‘experts’ claimed…
Meanwhile, down at the Crawford Ranch… Source: Associated Press …too bad I don’t have a good horsy picture with ten-gallon hats, but a pickup-truck picture will do. Venezuela’s dictator can only wonder what his next door neighbor is laughing about with President Bush right here – because it’s almost certain Chavez’s name got brought up at some point. Probably with a lot of ridicule too. Hey Hugo – they’re laughing at you!
The best part about CAFTA is upon us – Hugo Chavez has come out screaming on Venezuelan television about CAFTA’s passage. And why shouldn’t he scream about our CAFTA victory? A rich El Salvador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica are the last things Chavez wants to see. It’s bad enough that these democracies are friendly with the U.S. – now they have free trade rights, too, and as nations they have embarked on a great regional mission to become as rich as America. Why shouldn’t they be? They’re our friends. But for Chavez, it’s pain upon pain.…
Any time Danny Glover, Babs Streisand or Michael Moore open their big Hollywood mouths, the media come running, happy to feed these bawl-babies with free publicity. But let Puertoriqueno singer Ricky Martin, declare his intention of improving the U.S.’s image abroad, particularly among Arabs, using his experience as a Boricua, and these media suddenly go silent, desperately silent. To heck with that. Ricky Martin is out to spread democracy and I am going to say something! Check out GOPinion’s full story about this admirable young man here.
CAFTA is often compared to NAFTA, but the roots of the trade pact are very different. They began in 1983 when the great Ronald Reagan launched his Caribbean Basin Initiative. As he fought the march of communism with all his strength, the far-thinking President Reagan also knew that U.S. might is based not only on military power but on economic power and more particularly, the ability to share our hope with others. The American Dream is also the Honduran Dream, the Salvadoran Dream, the Costa Rican Dream, the Guatemalan Dream. Now, with CAFTA, we all share the same dream. CAFTA…
Alexis de Tocqueville, the extraordinary French observer who chronicled how democracy rose and developed in America, is 200 years old today. In the Age of Democratic Revolution & Civil Society, he gave us all a roadmap that is more important than anyone ever realized. Great economists like Hernando de Soto, who first underlined the importance of property rights, got much of his material from American history and much of that he took from de Tocqueville. Alexis de Tocqueville is a true polestar of authentic democratic revolution and a great capital-L Liberal. The Adam Smith Institute blog has a marvellous essay…
in the House. Victory for our hemisphere. The full list of how they voted. Our friend Will has analysis and a good roundup of what other bloggers are saying here. IBD has an editorial saying this trade treaty will benefit businesses across the board, citing the word of Central Americans who are in the middle of this. It is here or here. Sigh. I am too tired to comment. But I am overjoyed.
Tick tick tick – CAFTA’s victory is expected in three hours, according to my sources, and to the Washington Post, but cross your fingers, it’s not over until it’s over… This trade treaty is the most important measure of support we can give to the entire hemisphere. Central Americans don’t want our troops. They don’t want our money. They just want a chance. They want CAFTA. Political death to anyone who votes against it. No forgiveness and no forgetting. FREE TRADE THROUGH THE AMERICAS NOW!!!!
Earlier today A.M. Mora y Leon posted an entry on the necessity of passing CAFTA, and I wanted to add to that. Today the Wall Street Journal published an article which described the kind of negotiating going on in the House of Representatives over this trade pact, and in doing so illustrated the short-sightedness which seems to perpetually dominate that august institution (see “White House Barters for Trade Pact Votes;” A4, subscription required): As the House moves toward a vote this week on President Bush’s Central American trade pact, the White House is trying to cut deals to shore up…
Nicaragua’s Contras, the original freedom fighters in our lifetime, who during the Reagan Era, took on the name and tradition of the original Hungarian freedom fighters who resisted Soviet tanks in 1956, have turned their swords into plowshares and begun the extraordinary task of growing some of the world’s best coffee. Freedom-fighting Contra Cafe! Being Nicaraguan, it’s going to be good – it would be good even if sandalistas grew it – but so much the better that it’s a project of those who truly know what freedom is. Boli-Nica first discovered the phenomenon, and Instapundit has some good and…
Hugo Chavez and the communist thugs and barefoot Neanderthals one step removed from white sheets who oppose CAFTA are all about to be dealt a stinging defeat. The House leader reports that CAFTA is likely to be approved before the end of July. This is the scent of victory, because defeat is unthinkable. This is the most important legislation of the year because the fate of our entire region is at stake. I just hope we have reason to have hope. We need CAFTA.
Hillary Clinton would have you think she is a moderate Democrat, serious about free trade, reasonable on all issues. A look at her voting record, particularly her despicable ‘no’ vote on CAFTA, shutting Central America out of U.S. markets and U.S. prosperity, will tell a different story. Here is an item from American Thinker about Hillary and her extremist anti-CAFTA cohorts, freaks like CISPES and Witness for Peace. This is the fringe left, so happy togetherrrrrr. Read it here.
Police officers raise a British flag in front of the State Department in Washington, D.C., Thursday, July 7, 2005, in remembrance of those killed in the London bombings. (AP Photo/Yuri Gripas) It was the first time a foreign flag has been raised at the State Department. MORE: Pejman Yousefzadeh notes that after September 11, Queen Elizabeth ordered her personal guards to play The Star Spangled Banner instead of God Save The Queen. As he says, “class engenders class.” If you haven’t already, you may want to fly the Union Jack on your blog today.
July 4 is here, my favorite holiday! I was thinking all day what I would write here about our great country and the struggle for freedom all over the world. I couldn’t. There are too many words and too many ways to say them. So instead, I will implore you all to take the day off and spend the time with your friends and family. Celebrate and, most of all, appreciate the freedom that we as a nation are always fighting for. At the end of the day, remember that there are still many people facing the struggles that our…
Our good friend Stefania of the estimable Free Thoughts blog is not only more serious in thinking about what the G8 should be doing than Bob Geldof, she’s also more serious than the G8 itself. Her suggestions about what the G8 should really be thinking about and discussing are here. Don’t miss.
The Central American Free Trade Agreement, the treaty to bring our good and faithful friends from Central America into free trade with the U.S. has won – won! – a bruising battle in the Senate. We were terrified all was lost and it was not! This is the greatest victory of the year! Victory! The last step is to get CAFTA passed in the House. If it passes in the House, it will be a strike for freedom and a deadly blow to Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Communism won’t be the way out, but standing on one own two feet…
There is no issue, none, more critical today than whether the U.S. Congress passes CAFTA. So much is at stake in the treaty that will show whether the U.S. includes Latin America in to its hopes and opportunity or coldly shuts it out. And don’t think Osama Bin Laden, Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe aren’t watching – they are. If CAFTA loses, every single one of them will be emboldened. This prospect is unbelievably horrible, and Bush must pay any price, battle any battle, to get this treaty passed. It is that important. If there is a political cost to…
Colombia’s president Alvaro Uribe faces mounting opposition from what it seems to be a united front of the liberal party and other more preoccupying factors. A coalition of former presidents -Cesar Gaviria, Ernesto Samper and Andres Pastrana- seems to have found common ground, leaving behing past rivalries, to attack the policies and performance of former party member Alvaro Uribe. Recent appointments aside, that of Cesar Gaviria as party leader, it remains to be seen whether or not they will be able to agglutinate enough votes against the current president, whose prospects of getting re-elected look promising -should the Constitutional Court…
It’s jackass season in Washington and with it comes threats from Congress to harass China over its trade gap. Larry Kudlow outlines the incredible progress China has made since 1978 – 1978! – and warns that the U.S. has got to stop hectoring China for doing all the right things. China’s stable currency, its trade of goods with us, its lifting of its poor into the middle class are all things that need to be encouraged, not screamed at in U.S. Congress. Because trust me, China is capable of much worse than the ‘crime’ of trade. Larry Kudlow makes a…
City government machines are usually filthy even in the most ideal of first-world political conditions, which makes them an ideal operating environment for Venezuela’s dictator, Hugo Chavez. That may be why he’s growing active there. Alek Boyd recently questioned the brazen use of London municipal resources for Chavez’s government propaganda effort and got an amazing response from London officials, disingenuously wondering what the problem was. Read Alek’s account of Chavez’s London onslaught here.
The Liberator of East Central Europe and Central America, the leader who made the U.S. believe in itself again, the man who changed the world forever, we remember our great President Ronald Reagan. He was the father of the modern democratic revolution. Just consider what the world was like before Reagan became our leader. In the backwash of the 1960s and the moral mud of the Carter era, revolution was the province of violent charlatans like Che Guevara. After Reagan, they became something different, beginning with the Velvet Revolution. Reagan knew that freedom was a concept engraved on every human…
If you want to read something that’s a real treat and explains out well the nature of Hugo Chavez in light of his bizarre claims about becoming a nuclear power, you can’t do better than read Alek Boyd’s excellent – and highly entertaining – essay today debunking the dictator’s nuclear pretentions, which also giving a good skewering to those who take them too seriously. A good Chavez antidote, read it here!
As ‘The World’ —- otherwise known to us as self-centered eurotrash — solemnly intones about the depredations of the U.S. over the Saddam underwear photos and the importance of eradicating the US from the earth — by UN vote of course, or better still, EU bureaucratic fiat from Brussels —- Tim Blair advises us that there’s a very different reaction on the ‘Arab Street’ which ‘The World’ fully informs us it speaks for since it understands it so much better than us unsophisticated cowboys do. LMAO! Hat Tip: Instapundit.
The people of the Americas have the right to democracy and the governments have a duty to generate conditions for governance and also to carry out their mandate in a democratic fashion. The guarantee of respect for the fundamental rights of the citizens, the Rule of Law, civil liberties, the respect for minorities and the institutions of the democratic system are crucial. Only then can the social, political, economic and cultural development that our nations deserve be effectively promoted. It is imperative that the commitments adopted under the Inter-American Democratic Charter be wholly fulfilled. Verbattim of acceptance speech of new…
I admit that I ran across this item on accident, because as under-publicized as it is, that would be the only way to find it. While speaking to the International Republican Institute — one of the main organizations that allocates democracy building aid — President Bush proposed creating a special corp of federal workers that would help young democracies create a sustainable future. WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush, seeking to put muscle behind a promise to support young democracies, said Wednesday the administration is creating a special corps of federal workers that will deploy quickly to help foreign governments in…