Blogging the democratic revolution
Dictator Hugo Chavez of Venezuela breaks everything he touches. He’s destroyed Venezuela’s democratic institutions, wrecked its judiciary, laid waste to its oilfields, subverted its elections, desecrated its ecology, devalued its money, trashed its free press, busted its banks, stomped its property rights, tore apart its relations with the U.S., gutted its civil service, split its military, wrecked its treasury, bankrupted its companies, shot its demonstrators dead, neglected its tallest skyscraper to burn, turned its hillsides into mudslides and made a smoking ruin of Venezuela’s good name in the world. That’s not all. The story of how he’s desecrated art is…
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!
The words of Mexican communist novelist Carlos Fuentes. Coming from him, it’s pretty damning. Obviously, he can’t stand the guy, and among other leftists, he’s influential. Hugo Chavez, beware. Not even the communists are sticking up for you now. Read it here.
Counting oil sands, Venezuela has more petroleum reserves than any country on earth. Even Russia. Even Canada. Even Iran. Even … Saudi Arabia. It’s unbelievable what the Texas-and-Oklahoma-sized country only 1350 miles away from us really has. Venezuela could probably supply the entire world with oil if it wanted. That road you are driving on, if it’s nice, is probably made of Venezuelan-oil-derived asphalt, the world’s finest. Which is why Venezuela’s declining oil production is such a scandal. Only Iran and Indonesia have comparable production declines in their state-dominated oil industries, but not nearly as intense. Globally, it forces the…
Have you ever wanted to read the past six years’ of history in Venezuela? What really happened? What the role of people power is? And why it failed? (Hint: Jimmah Cotta). Have you ever wanted to read it in ace writing form? Then click here, it’s the best summary of Venezuela’s revolution I’ve ever read. A truly superb read you’ll zip right through without any tripping over vagueness or irrelevant detail. It cuts to the quick of what’s really at stake.
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…
The Venezuelan dictator has a way of finding it…based on who he is, a creature of chaos. It’s not the other way around, says Pedro Burelli, a razor-sharp analyst of Venezuelan affairs. He is an oil man, and one of those people who knows the deal. Every word he writes is worth pondering closely. Take a look at this lead: Ever since he beat off efforts to recall him, many have predicted that Hugo Chavez will get into trouble only if, and when, oil prices fall from their lofty levels. My response has always been: ???????Hugo Chavez will get into…
Is that a great headline or what? I wish I had thought of it myself. Read the whole thing here.
Alek Boyd has some shocking information about the extent of Hugo Chavez’s international networks. Not only is the Venezuelan dictator suspected of being fully engaged in meddling in the internal affairs of Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Grenada, Argentina, Chile and Mexico – he’s meddling in France! That’s right, the thug is buying up the mainstream media there in France and manipulating it like Telesur. It’s really shocking. Not only that, he’s got maybe some contact with some communist union there about schoolbooks and he’s manipulated history taught in French schools to tell the story of the glorious him. Yes,…
Venezuela’s vindictive dictator, Hugo Chavez, was revealed in all his glory to be the author of the infamous ‘Tascon List’ – a blacklist of all the people in Venezuela who legally and openly signed the referendum petition to recall Hugo Chavez last year. The price they paid for that was high. The Thug of Caracas vowed to exact revenge on them if they defied him and he made good on his threats. Chavez got people fired from jobs, denied them passports, denied them services, and otherwise made 3 million people second-class citizens. It was a relentless vindictiveness not seen since…
Miguel has some new developments on the Posada Carriles case that illustrates just how weird this case is getting. There’s all kinds of information the mainstream media hasn’t touched on yet, and should. Why does the government of Venezuela really want this guy back? That it does doesn’t make sense, so it’s going from bad to bizarre. Read the whole weird thing here.
Miguel Octavio explains in a good piece the dynamics of oil production in Venezuela, all of which proves that Venezuela’s oil production is severely lower than anyone thought, and its earnings are crippled. That’s bad news for dictator Hugo Chavez who depends on oil earnings to buy the loyalty of his shantytown voters. It’s worth reading. Read the whole thing here. Blogger Daniel Duquenal also has a good essay on the oil company’s fake figures. Fine work. Read it here.
Right on the heels of the U.N.’s oil for food scandal, where much of the U.S. is appalled at the chutzpah of British MP George Galloway and his defensive tantrum in U.S. Congress today over his oil for food take, who should come along but some bureaucrat from Mayor Ken Livingston’s office – that’s ‘Red Ken’ to the London locals – caught red-handed by intrepid Aleksander Boyd setting up a Web site on behalf of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Have you ever heard of anything sleazier? He was so bold and shameless about it that he used the full name…
Word is out that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez was ranting and raving about this El Universal piece we linked this morning here. Chavez angrily cited it by name, calling it all lies. The piece itself was built around the first-rate research and writing of Gustavo Coronel, whose essay this morning we linked here. Coronel clearly is getting under the dictator’s skin. This is what blogging is all about.
Profoundly good analysis by Gustavo Coronel. A must read. Read it here. UPDATE: My own take here. UPDATE: Another good take from El Universal. (Man that must have been a beach to translate!)
Luis Tascon, the Venezuelan congressman who put signers of a recall referendum against dictator Hugo Chavez on a special Internet-accessible blacklist, has met a miserable demise. In this way, he would seem to parallel Joseph McCarthy, who died an isolated drunk. That said, the signers of the petition cannot be compared to McCarthy’s targets – they were not interested in operating in secrecy, for one, they were not interested in subverting the U.S. system in the name of Joseph Stalin, and they were not doing anything illegal. No, Venezuelans just woke up one morning and realized that signing a legal…
On Val’s Babalu blog, I wrote a long essay on the Posada Carriles case. It is a foreign policy issue, but now that Fidel Castro has made the claim that it’s a U.S. ‘credibility’ issue, there is a people-power dimension to it. People with access to mass communication would think so, and that is who Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez seek to appeal to with this extradition demand directed at the U.S. Those elites among them hate us as intensely as they hate the purple fingers of our friends the Iraqi voters. They know we support revolution. Hence, their hollow…
Tomas Sancio has a superb piece noting the strong and growing presence of Latin American popular culture into mainstream American culture. He takes a screenshot from a Web site to show his point. I am always fond of telling my Latin American friends that when they come to big cities here in the states, they can happily get away with not a word of English and listen to all the same music here that they might listen to there. It’s new. It’s the reality. It’s beautiful. It’s perfectly dynamic. And it’s a revolution. Which is why Hugo Chavez’s weird, insular…
“Fidel Castro asserted terrorist should be judged in Venezuela” goes one headline from one of those impartial and objective Cuban propaganda sources; another one reads “New York Times Urges US Government to Deny Asylum to Terrorist Posada Carriles”… The majority of the 176 Posada Carriles-related articles, indexed by Google News, originate from Cuban or Venezuelan funded sources. Fidel Castro’s and his toyboy’s ‘assertions and demands’ aside -as if words uttered by them had any relevance or weight- the US administration is faced with a dilemma; that of returning a long time collaborator to Venezuela in the know that revolutionary justice…
Miguel has an item out from a Mexican newspaper reporting that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez may have shipped weapons to Mexican Marxist guerrillas, bought with funds from Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s office, who is now running for president of Mexico. Via Havana. AMLO denies he knew anything about it, but that’s not impressive because he is not famous for accountability. If the news is true, it’s an extremely dangerous development. Read it here. UPDATE: Here is my own analysis on American Thinker here.
Leftist ecology outfits are basically money-making operations. The more of a stink they can raise on an issue, the more the cash rolls into their coffers. It has nothing to do with merit, only buzz. And the causes they champion are not based on principle but on how leftwing. Ask anyone who’s ever been involved with an NGO racket. Not one of them is normal. They are all sharks. That’s why their biggest causes aren’t necessarily the most objectively serious ones. Greenpeace or an eco-outfit like them will happily harass a Midwestern farmer over a ‘wetland’ (read: swamp) or sandalista…
I’m tempted to pontificate on the cult of personality and the nature of totalitarian regimes. Never mind that. Just click here.
Some newspapers have dismissed Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s moving of his oil company’s headquarters to a Havana, Cuba, as just a small detail. Well, it is not a small detail, according to one respected Venezuelan journalist, it is a sign of a spreading shadow of tyranny over a huge region of many flags. Daniel Duquenal has a careful translation of the entire essay here. UPDATE: Venezuelan oilman Gustavo Coronel’s essay on the same topic is a must-read here.
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has created another useless union this week, positively thrilling the Canadian press, but in Latin America, there is nothing new about it. So here is the deal: In Argentina during the 1990s, people used to joke about the extent of something known as ‘the corporate republic’ or ‘corporate state.’ The corporate state is not about companies but the expansion of medieval-guild-like organizations designed to keep individual people out of the system in the name of some exclusive collective. That’s what this new Chavez union is. But despite what Chavez claims, he’s hardly first to the party. In…
I didn’t watch the UK elections very closely because I was pretty sure that one way or another, the excellent Prime Minister, Tony Blair, would win. But it was a wonderful experience to see how people abroad and from other lands marvelled at this English spectacle, in all its civilized execution. I’ve always liked the UK system, but it’s instructive to see how others who live in non-democratic societies experience England’s authentic democracy. There are two very good essays out on it now, one by blogger Daniel Duquenal and the other by Aleksander Boyd, both of which are fresh in…