Down South, Turning Left

So what’s up with Latin America?

In recent years, a host of left-wing governments have swept to power south of the border, and while Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is the most famous and most radical, also on the ‘watch list’ is Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva of Brazil, and (most recently) Alfredo Palacio of Ecuador.

Who are these people, anyway?

They come from a fairly diverse set of backgrounds:

Chavez is a former colonel in the paratrooper division who led an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992, for which he spent two years in prison. As it became clear the coup wasn’t going to work he told his supporters to stand down and went on TV, declaring that their goals hadn’t been achieved, ‘for now’. Upon his release, he built up his political base and won the presidency in 1999.

da Silva is the former head of a major Brazilian steel worker’s union During his rise to political prominence, many supporters of the former military dictatorship (including the US government) dubbed him ‘the son of Moscow’, but da Silva has been careful to move both his language and his policies toward the center. His nickname, ‘Lula’ is short for ‘Luiz’. It’s also the Portuguese word for ‘squid’. Whether that has any significance is up for debate.

Nestor Kirchner is the kind of person neither left-wingers nor right-wingers can really get excited about. Argentina’s current crisis is tied to the massive unpaid loans from the IMF, and while Kirchner decries the international banking establishment in harshest terms while at home, he’s mild and amiable when dealing with the financiers themselves, and has so far enacted no serious reforms.

Palacio is a trained cardiologist who was elected vice president of Ecuador in 2002. He has no official political party, though many of his ministers are from the Izquierda Democratica (Democratic Left).

How did they come to power? And, for that matter, why?

Well, they were all democratically elected, so far as anyone can tell. Chavez has survived numerous well-funded recall attempts by landslide margins, despite the fact that his opposition is rich, well-organized, and controls the media. Palacio only came into office very recently following his predecessor Lucio ‘Sucio’ Gutierrez fleeing to Brazil to escape from an angry mob.

All the men mentioned above got their jobs for the same reason any elected official should get his job: the old way wasn’t working. After decades of promises by politicians to use their nation’s enormous natural resources to enrich their people, after loan after loan from the World Bank was wasted to no effect and South America still maintained incredibly high poverty rates; (up to 80%, in the case of Venezuela) the voters had had enough.

Now, what are they doing that bothers people so much?

Their policies and rhetoric tend to be against international banking organizations (IMF, World Bank, etc.) and their domestic policies center on social spending and reducing foreign control of their internal affairs. Seeing as the US is the main benefactor of such groups. This is coupled with America’s long history of overthrowing leftist democracies has made regional leaders somewhat jumpy.

Venezuela and Ecuador are especially high priorities because of their large stores of oil, and in these days of high fuel prices and Middle Eastern chaos, one can’t be too careful about where your oil is coming from.

I don’t think these developments are anything terribly surprising or anything an honest citizen needs to worry about. Thus far, there have been (despite a host of completely unproven allegations to the contrary) no death squads, mass jailings of political opponents, clampdowns on free speech, or suspension of democratic institutions – unlike what happened under numerous Latin American governments installed by the CIA. In fact, if US businesses were really smart, instead of incredibly idiotic and short-sighted, they’d support these left-wing movements in Latin America with all they had.

The reason is simple; they’re trying to turn Latin America into a collection of first-world countries. Should they succeed, that means a great deal more money and opportunity for everyone – including us.* If we work with them, they’ll work with us. That’s what the Bolivarian revolution is all about, so far as the US is concerned.

Palacio himself has said (In reference to the World Bank) "If we pay that amount of debt, we're dead. We have to survive. If we die, who is going to pay them?"


*Call that bourgeois justification if you want. I know who my audience is.

Losing the Base

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently announced the closing or reduction of more than 800 military installations.

The ostensible reason is to reduce costs, yet of course military budgets keep going up and up and up - but none of that gets to the soldiers, the medics, the engineers, or any of the other personnel on the ground; it all goes to defense contractors, to buy $50 million dollar jets and $3,000 screwdrivers. As of now, a US army private gets about $14,000 a year. I wonder how much they could raise pay for the price of one F-16?

But this is also a bit of electoral payback. Whiles bases are closing in Conneticut, Maine, and Washington DC, they'll be opening in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama - not to mention Texas. Though there is some bipartisanship in who suffers from this:

Job Losses:
CT: Liberman (D) -6496
ME: Snowe (R) -6938 (many actually in NH)
MO: Talent (R) -3679
MS: Lott (R) -1678
ND Conrad (D) -2645
NM Bingaman (D) -2849
PA Santorum (R) -1878
VA Allen (R) -1574

Let the games begin.

An Open Question for the Visionairies

Instead of finding some contentious issue or event and posting my thoguhts about it, this time I'll leave it to my readers, however many there may be. I'm curious: What end are you working for? If you had your way, what's your vision of a better world, and in what way do you believe your chosen ideology (be it neo-conservativism, liberalism, socialism, etc.) is the best way to achieve this?

I don't want some vague answer such as 'more democracy' or 'more freedom' or 'more equality'. I want to know why you think those goals are worth achieving, what they would look like in the real world, and how your ideals lead to those things. Be as detailed as possible.

I'll leave off on my own Utopia for now; at least until I can articulate it in less than 10 pages.

Welcome to Stal-Mart

Some months ago in Econ class, the discussion turned to various kinds of ownership (private, State, collective etc.). I generally argued for as cooperative a system of management as possible, but I did speak out against “a mass-collectivization program like Stalin did with the farms.” At this point, a guy previously unknown to me spoke up and said ”Hey, you shouldn’t criticize Stalin. That’s just way out of line.” My professor smiled amiably and changed the subject. To the minimum wage, and how big companies like Wal-Mart pay their employees very little even though they can afford much more. This elicited another cry of protest from Party Comrade, who vehemently defended Wal-Mart and their low wages.

Later, I asked around to see if that guy was kidding. No, apparently he really does like both old Joe Stalin and Wal-Mart.

I asked myself; how could this be? How could someone idealize Soviet Russia in its worst years and a huge multinational corporation? Then I realized: they’re not so different.

Stalin (independent of his sheer brutality) had a definite economic system. It entailed the entire economy of the USSR geared towards a set of well-defined and pre-set goals set one or even five years in advance. They would produce a certain number of cars, a certain tonnage of steel, a certain amount of grain etc. All industry was concentrated together, and all orders came from the ‘Supreme Soviet’ – that is, the Kremlin. There would be no local control and no deviation from the script.

This ‘central planning’ or ‘scientific socialism’ was, in fact, instrumental in helping Russia become an industrial power, but it proved clumsy and unworkable, considering (among other things) the size of the Soviet empire and the logistical impossibilities that entailed. America, for its part, prided itself on its culture of independent businesses and entrepreneurship.

Now, however, things have changed. At the time of Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘trust-busting’, five companies controlled 55% of the US meat industry. Now, three companies control 80% of it. Microsoft has a stranglehold on the software industry and laughs in the face of the DOJ. Chain stores, ‘big-box’ outlets, and all-purpose megastores are taking up a larger and larger part of the American economy and driving small businesses to extinction. Wal-Mart, with annual revenues of $218 billion, or about 2.5% of total GDP, is simply the biggest.

So… a small collection of incredibly huge, unelected, all-powerful cartels with top-down management controlling our economy and reacting with total indifference to the needs of their workers? Sounds like Stalinism to me.

Enough of Talking

Today is General Election Day in Britain. I really don’t know much about modern British politics; I’m dimly aware that Tony Blair and the Labour Party will probably stay in power, though either the Tories or the Liberal Democrats might make significant gains.

In any case, the Brits have much better campaign ads than us.

I can see through your smile…