Venezuela and Wishful Thinking

Here's an interesting little tidbit: The Venezuelan parliamentary elections of 2005 had an abstention rate of about 75%, whereas the presidential election of 2006 had an abstention rate of only 25%. I don't know what this means exactly, but it certainly does not bode well for parliamentary democracy in Venezuela, since it seems to indicate a general cynicism among the population with the Parliament and a great deal of trust in the executive.

In related news, the recent 2009 Venezuelan referendum that abolished term limits for elected officials passed with 54% of the vote and 70% of eligible voters responding. In other words, a small minority was able to ratify the abolition of a key democratic safeguard against tyranny (it's also worth noting that the current constitution was originally ratified under the auspices of Chavez as well). This is all part of what is called in official propaganda as the "Bolivarian Revolution."

Meanwhile, as the living standards of the average Venezuelans fail to rise significantly, new revelations of staggering levels of corruption within the Chavez government arise every day, and government workers are threatened into voting for Chavez, things are going swimmingly for Venezuela on one front: what some Venezuelan leftists refer to as (if I remember correctly) "celebrity tourism." I was extremely disappointed to see Noam Chomsky appear in Venezuela a few months ago at the behest of Hugo Chavez, and appear on national television in that country to essentially act as Chavez's spokesman (Noam Chomsky is a celebrity, albeit outside of the United States). Many other leftist celebrities have made the trip to pose for photo-ops with Mr. Chavez.

Leftists talking up Chavez's Venezuela is the equivalent of progressives during the 30s openly praising Huey Long's Louisiana. It should be seen as an apotheosis of corruption. Like China in the 1960s, Venezuela serves as a stand-in for the hopes and dreams of leftists in the real world. And this fatally undermines leftism. If Leftists are willing to support a corrupt government that has made millionaires out of a select few of Chavez's cronies, then they should be even more supportive of the nepotistic two-party system we have here in the United States.

Ironically, one of the main camps on the Left to escape this disease are the Trotskyists (ironic because Trotskyists idealize tyrants of their own). A recent article on the World Socialist Website, a Trotskyist publication, reports:

"Meanwhile, a wave of banking scandals has exposed the vast enrichment of a layer of businessmen close to the government, the so-called bolibuguesía, referring to the new layer of capitalists created by Chávez’s so-called Bolivarian Revolution. It has also called attention to the accumulation of wealth by a number of prominent political figures, who have become millionaires while promoting '21st century socialism.'”

Of course, the reason for this hostility is probably that Chavez has called for the convening of a fifth International, which would compete with the Trotskyist Fourth International.

The irony about all this is that there actually are much better vessels out there for leftists to put their hopes and dreams into. The socialist Ecuadorian government, for example, is far from perfect, but to my knowledge (which is admittedly scant), they have largely escaped the corruption and nepotism of the Venezuelan government. There is also the myriad of socialist and social-democratic governments in Europe. Then there's Bolivia, where the local "Movement Towards Socialism" is far more genuine than Venezuela's. The president, Evo Morales, is a former union organizer who rode a wave of grassroots organization into the presidential palace. The old Aristide government in Haiti, before he was kidnapped by US Marines and forced to resign, was also a real reason for hope. They built more schools in Haiti than all previous Haitian administrations combined, doubled the minimum wage, and slowly began to improve Haiti's crumbling, virtually non-existent infrastructure.

Random Crap

Here's a truly astounding article from the Wall Street Journal denouncing the Obama Administration's conduct in Haiti, astounding because most criticism of the occupation has been levied by the left, and the WSJ is of course anything but. And with 15,000 troops in Haiti by now, that it is an occupation is a fact that takes real talent to miss.

Speaking of which:

Here's another astounding article, but for different reasons. USA Today notes the history of Marine involvement in Haiti and manages not to recoil in horror. According to them, "The Corps governed Haiti from 1915 to 1934 after an invasion force was sent to prevent an anti-American dictator from assuming power. Young, non-commissioned officers governed Haiti with little supervision." Marines built "roads, bridges and schools," but "many" of the ungrateful Haitians viewed it as "imperialism." They also note the role the Marines played in the 2004 coup that overthrew the popular Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, except they describe their role with the Orwellian term "to prevent massacres." Of particular interest is this little nugget from one Lt. Col. Gary Keim: "We were required to reread [the 1915 Marine occupation] ... We've been here before. We've been successful before." It does not bode well for the "relief effort" if the US military is preparing for it by revisiting one of the more shameful chapters of American history.

Also:

Here's something that makes my blood boil. The Federal government has awarded the state of Louisiana 474 million dollars for damages to Charity Hospital during Hurricane Katrina. This means that the state now has enough money to renovate Charity and build a state-of-the-art facility within the old shell. Instead, they are going to sit on the money for years, trying to float hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds that nobody will go for, to finance the brand spanking new LSU/VA hospital, to be built for 300 million more than the cost of renovating Charity, be completed 4 and a half years later, and built upon land currently occupied by 200 mid-city houses to boot.

I know people who know people who think that the levees were deliberately dynamited to push the working poor of New Orleans off of their land. This is a grandiose, yet entirely understandable misconception, considering the net effect of the recovery has been to push thousands of lower and lower-middle class residents off their land and out of the city altogether. This is all done in the name of "cleaning up the city," and is received with much applause by the New Orleanian middle and upper classes. The irony is, of course, that one could make a far more convincing argument that it is the New Orleanian middle and upper classes that should be kicked out in the name of "cleaning up the city," seeing as the degeneration of New Orleans into an economic and cultural backwater is entirely their fault. It isn't as though the poor visit these problems upon themselves. The extensive, miserable poverty in New Orleans is due to centuries of mismanagement of the city's resources by the local elite. As late as the mid 19th century many New Orleans streets were still paved with wood.

The middle class would counter this argument by saying that everything was fine until them uppity niggers started voting in people like Nagin and Dutch Morial, but this is an absurd mischaracterization of the way that American elections work. Candidates for offices of any consequence must first be vetted by moneyed interests before they can run a successful campaign. Therefore, the ruling elites in America essentially hold veto power over candidates' campaigns. Besides, in the case of Nagin, it was the conservative white vote, which was encouraged to vote for Nagin by the Louisiana GOP, which proved the crucial swing factor in the election. The New Orleanian elites are deluded to the extreme if they think they have earned the hegemonic right to shape the future of the city.

State of the Union

Quick thought about last night's State of the Union speech:

Is anybody else creeped out by these things? I mean, what with the Glorious Leader descending from on high to tell the masses what a great job he's doing to thunderous applause? It's all a very bald-faced propaganda stunt, if you ask me.

Put in this light, one might say "I would expect such an affair from a country like the Soviet Union but not the United States," but that would imply a fundamental misunderstanding of the way our democracy works, specifically, how our democracy operates within very narrow boundaries. The parties themselves, of course, are highly centralized and operate undemocratically. Between elections, it is the party bureaucracy that engages in social decision-making, not the public. Democracy in America (and in most modern democracies) thus amounts to choosing between a government of one or the other tyrannies, similar in this one fundamental respect to Medieval European states that were ruled by elected monarchs. A truly democratic society implies rule by the people, not rule by parties.

A few suggestions come to mind that have their roots in colonial-era democracy. First, give the people the right to instruct their legislators. The people themselves should choose directly the platforms that their delegate to congress will push for. Second, give the people the right to recall their legislators if they find their performance unsatisfactory. Third and perhaps most importantly, invest local legislative power in town meetings. The rationale behind representative democracy is that direct democracy at a national level is too cumbersome; at a local level, this rationale does not hold (and even at a national level, this argument is severely weakened by advances in communications technology). At a local level, therefore, the best form of government is direct democracy. Furthermore, only by interacting with government directly through legislating rather than indirectly through voting do the people acquire a political sophistication necessary to the health of a democracy.

Jorge Castañeda is a Big Fat Cunt: A Well Thought Out and Soberly Editorial

Newspaper editorial pages are rarely worth bothering with, except to glean some schadendfreude from the intolerable levels of stupid that emanate from them.

So it was with great delight that I opened up the editorial page of the Dallas Morning News to read a lengthy editorial from The New Republic entitled "Adios, Monroe Doctrine" by one Jorge Castañeda. In a word, Jorge argues that Obama is actively abandoning the Monroe Doctrine because he is "no longer willing, or perhaps even able, to select who governs from Tegucigalpa, or anywhere else in the region for that matter." There is an element of truth to the latter claim, as the states of Latin America are finally beginning to determine their own destiny without foreign interference, but this is not due to a lack of trying on the part of the United States government. Noam Chomsky explains in a recent edition of In These Times:

"During the past decade, the United States has increased military aid and training of Latin American officers in light infantry tactics to combat 'radical populism'—a concept that, in the Latin American context, sends shivers up the spine...

The U.S. Fourth Fleet, disbanded in 1950, was reactivated in 2008, shortly after Colombia’s invasion of Ecuador, with responsibility for the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the surrounding waters.

Its 'various operations include counter-illicit trafficking, Theater Security Cooperation, military-to-military interaction and bilateral and multinational training,' the official announcement says."

Castañeda considers the fact that the United States did nothing to restore Manuel Zelaya to power in Honduras a "remarkable" and "transformative" moment in US history. In flat defiance of Occam's Razor, he argues that the non-action on behalf of the White House did not signal tacit support for the coup government, but rather a rejection of 200 years of American foreign policy in the region.

Untruths besides this one abound in his article. "Since George H.W. Bush's invasion of Panama, there have been no unilateral military interventions, no coup plots or new embargoes, not even the propping up of decaying regimes." The coups in Venezuela and Haiti over the past decade apparently do not count. Furthermore, only "the left, mainly" would like to see a "unilateral end to the Cuban embargo." This is true only if you consider the majority of the business world to be part of "the left." Hugo Chavez, Jorge tells us, "has already shown a penchant for mischief, particularly within Latin America. So far, he has meddled successfully in the electoral processes of smaller countries -- Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras -- and much less successfully in larger nations -- Mexico, Peru, and Columbia." I have no idea what half-truth, if any, this propaganda lie is based on. At any rate, even if it were true, it would be completely inconsequential when compared to the systematic campaign of mass murder that the United States government has visited upon the unlucky nations of Latin America for decades, and to imply, as Jorge does, that the United States has a responsibility to curb such "Venezuelan adventurism" is the height of hypocrisy.

I don't like Chavez. But for the mainstream media to hammer into people's heads, time and again, that he is a dictator rather than the duly elected leader of Venezuela, is disgusting. It is a terrible, malicious lie. For a "liberal" publication such as the New Republic to engage in this violence against the truth is a sign of how quickly and diligently contemporary media is working to erode any tangible sense of reality in the American public. In fact, I question whether or not the media itself has left any tangible sense of reality. For Jorge Castañeda to argue that the Monroe Doctrine is being abandoned while as we speak the US military is occupying Haiti is truly bewildering.

Jorge argues that "unfortunately, this new strategic environment is precarious." We could stand to isolate Chavez with out "benign neglect," but then Chavez might do something that the United States government could simply not tolerate. For example, he might crack down on dissent in Venezuela, and the US government has obviously always been a stalwart defender of free speech across the world. Or even worse, he could interfere in our attempts to starve the Iranian people into submission. This would be, in the eyes of Castañeda, "truly destabilizing." If our policy of "benign neglecty" impugns our ability to dish out benign cruelty, then, according to Castañeda, the United States should "abandon its deliberate passivity."

In closing, note that while Castañeda approves of the United States distancing itself from the Monroe doctrine, he has no moral reason for doing so. In the cost-benefit analysis, this is simply the most effective thing to do, in his estimation. This is how the imperial mentality works. The extreme left end of the spectrum argues that we ought not to crush indigenous peoples when it behooves us. As long as people like Castañeda serve as the far left voices of our public discourse, our democratic values are threatened.