Hari and Hugo
OK, OK, I know. I've been pretty tough on Venezuelan President and international lefty
heart-throb Hugo Chavez.
So, in a once-in-a-lifetime, albeit minor, concession to my critics, I'm posting this more sympathetic piece on Chavez from lefty Brit journo Johann Hari. Note, I say it is a minor gesture on my part as Hari also his own concerns about El Presidente.
After conducting a direct, sit-down talk with Chavez, and after doing his own reporting in Venezuela, Hari praises Chavez for putting the needs of poor people first. His concerns, however, derive from what is apparently the President's tone-deafness on democracy:
heart-throb Hugo Chavez.
So, in a once-in-a-lifetime, albeit minor, concession to my critics, I'm posting this more sympathetic piece on Chavez from lefty Brit journo Johann Hari. Note, I say it is a minor gesture on my part as Hari also his own concerns about El Presidente.
After conducting a direct, sit-down talk with Chavez, and after doing his own reporting in Venezuela, Hari praises Chavez for putting the needs of poor people first. His concerns, however, derive from what is apparently the President's tone-deafness on democracy:
His human rights-oriented critics point to his very close alliance with Fidel Castro and his decisions to meet with Saddam Hussein and even embrace Robert Mugabe. I put it to Chavez that under him, Venezuela has all the good things about Cuba – the great schools and hospitals – without the revolting things – dictatorship, censorship, repression. “I don’t think in Cuba there is a lack of freedom of speech,†he says with worrying speed. “If you approach Cuba from the perspective of the Western world, you might think so. But there, you have the people who express themselves on many matters. There is no repression in Cuba.†Really? What would he say to the Cubans jailed just for running private libraries, or to Vaclav Havel, who calls Cuba “the biggest prison on earth� “What you have in Cuba is a very specific model of revolution. We are very respectful of the revolutionary people of Cuba and its institutions. In the grassroots in Cuba, there are constant elections that take place. Is it true that by electing a President or Prime Minister every five years you have democracy? Is it because you have press and TV channels that you have freedom of speech? There’s a lot of cynicism behind that. So many lies behind that. Every country has its own model.†I grimace. What about Robert Mugabe? Does he regret calling him a “freedom fighter� “He is my friend. I think he has been demonised too much. Have you met him?†No, I say – but I have met many of his victims. “We all make mistakes. I think you should interview Mugabe yourself so you have a better idea who he is and what he’s about. You have to understand history of colonialism in Zimbabwe against the black people, he wants a world where people are equals without racism, that’s my opinion.†It is bizarre. The Venezuelan press is totally free. Most of the newspapers hate Chavez and even incite his murder, but he has never moved to censor them one inch. In 2002, Chavez himself was kidnapped in a US-backed semi-fascist coup, held hostage for 48 hours, and forced to watch while the parliament and supreme court were dismissed and a new pro-American President was installed. Only millions of people taking to the streets and a rebellion within the army prevented Venezuelan democracy from being destroyed. But even after all this, Chavez is so reluctant to be seen as a dictator that he has not launched a crack-down on the conspirators. The men responsible are still walking the streets... Yet here is Chavez defending some appalling dictators abroad. “No President will criticise his strategic allies to a journalist,†one of his press officers tells me afterwards. It’s true – I have tried to coax Tony Blair to condemn Vladimir Putin’s monstrous mass murder in Chechnya or the mass torture in the jails of Saudi Arabia, and he offers weasely excuses. But given Chavez’s willingness to wave aside a free press and elections in Cuba, could he one day do the same, travelling the old, worn dictator’s path from zero to hero to Nero? Will he become like the guerrillas he saw as a stunned young soldier in his own home-town, fighting massacres and torture with more massacres and torture?...By the way, as much as these posting on Chavez rankle some of our readers, I am not even remotely burned out on the subject. Sorry. There's always the inevitable objection: what business is it of ours to judge Chavez? Shouldn't we stick to worrying about our own government? In a word, no. Some of us old coots remain at least somewhat serious about searching for institutional alternatives to the injustices around us. We think it's very important to analyze, scrutinize, evaluate and criticize not only those who openly disdain freedom, but also those who act and govern in the name of social justice. Anyway, if you;re ticked off by this posting -- consider yourself lucky. I could have chosen instead to blog about this -----> Chomsky Hugging Hezbollah. But, frankly, that just left me speechless.
May 18th, 2006 at 7:03 am
As anyone familiar with Chomsky – and his trip to Lebanon (and coverage of it from Angry Arab) he was meeting with all sides, including those opposed to Hizballah. Replace “Lebanon” with Ireland and “Hizballah” with IRA, and it wouldn’t seem so controversial. Chomsky, like Said, believes in dialogue with all sides. Of course this was bad PR, but that is precisely the point – PR and image are less important than meeting and analysing the different players. Like in Ireland, some thought the IRA should disarm, others didn’t.
May 18th, 2006 at 7:33 am
I can’t believe Hari’s Hugo love fest fails to discuss the current, most worrying issue: “President” for life.
On the other hand, Hari paints a fantastic picture of benign dictatorship, with great emphasis on health and education. Too bad so few oil-rich countries have followed this so much.
I would like to advise Hugo to do two things, one that DC would hate, one it would love.
1) Socialize all digital information — allow all Venezualians to share all available digitized information with each other, w/o risk of any penalty. Music, movies, software; any and all information. (DC would hate this)
2) Begin funding new companies with guaranteed business creation loans: one $100 000 available to every adult for the starting and expansion of their own business. Of the new owner’s choice, restaurant, food processing, clothes making, building/ house construction, whatever. This would be in 4 tranches: $10 000 at first, with a year of grace and then payments; eligible for the second tranche of $20 000 after a year of repayments; eligible for a third tranche of $30 000 after another year of repayments; eligible for a final gov’t loan of $40 000.
(DC would prolly like such small-business mini-loan employment expansion).
Maybe double these loan amounts for any current gov’t employee who is willing to leave the gov’t for the private, peaceful sector — including military folk.
May 18th, 2006 at 7:34 am
Venezuelans, oops.
May 18th, 2006 at 9:18 am
A Venezuelan also inspired this dance! Maybe that’s worse than some of the other things coming out of that country. (This is as intellectual as I’m going to get today.)
May 18th, 2006 at 9:36 am
Chomsky didn’t “analyze the different players” — he endorsed Hezbollah’s position and gave the group his imprimatur. Is this unclear from the Al Manar quotation?
May 18th, 2006 at 10:13 am
Writing about Chávez doesn’t bother me and writing critically of him bothers me even less.
I just have no patience with conflating the occasional kook embracing him as to represent my entire side of the political spectrum.
For his part, Chávez is an attention junkie: imagine Camille Paglia if she were president of venezuela and you’d probably get about the same level of bombast and verbal windage.
Also much like Bush having the likes of Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan to meet with him, SoS Rice praising a tyrant like Obiang of Equatorial Guinea or Cheney meeting with Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and praising him. Kind of makes his righteous criticism of Yeltsin look hypocritical.
May 18th, 2006 at 10:44 am
Yes, Western leaders should be called on their weasely excuses and disgraceful compromises — but that means that Chavez should be called on them as well.
May 18th, 2006 at 11:30 am
No problems with that whatsoever.
May 18th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Good post. There’s a pretty good profile of HC in the new Atlantic Monthly by Franklin Foer. It talks a lot about how Chavez intentionally misspeaks so that his enemies think he’s crazy/stupid. Almost what you’d imagine with Bush if he actually cared what his opposition thinks.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
thanks for the link to that story, marc. myself, i have gone on a pendulm swing, back and forth, trying to figure chavez out. but am also at a disadvantage as i have never been to venezuela. i think johann hari did a good job. covered the good points to hugo, but did not let him slide on some of the concerns most of us have. but i think we can agree, if you agree with hari’s portrait, that chavez is not at all the boogie man that franklin foer paints him to be in the atlantic. as i keep on stating, but nobody has yet to challenge me on it, foer clearly is a good writer, but his portrait of chavez was overblown and exagerrates the chavez threat. if someone disagrees with that opinion of foer’s piece, or that idea that chavez is not a threat to the us or anyone else in the region, lets hear the reasons for it. i’d be interested in trying to understand the rationale for that point of view.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
If Chavez gave away his country’s natural resources instead of keeping them for his own people, nobody outside of Venezuela would care about democracy there at all.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
ok folks, back to the asylum. chavez is a moron–in a long line that springs from the bastard spanish colonial empire albeit private or military. an empire that has brought only pain and poverty where ever they planted their flag around the entire world. for five hundred years this “family criminal enterprise” model continues to infect every country it landed in. closer to home we have mexico to deal with as a consequence……..
May 18th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
Oh, Marc, why didn’t you blog about that Chomsky thing? I’m sure the responses would have been even funnier than the ones to your Chavez posts.
May 18th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
i don’t always agree with these guys, but thought the enclosed statement from the council on hemispheric affairs (coha) was interesting and could add to the hotly contested debate about my earlier comment that will most likely not ensue about the “chavez threat.”
here’s an excerpt:
One can only hope that somewhere in the Bush administration, a concentration of fast disappearing wisdom remains, and that it can bring to a halt to the State Department’s precarious – if not suicidal – descent into reckless arrogance and sprawling self-indulgence. As of now, the administration’s game plan is primitively simple and grossly offensive. Inspired by Nazi-era propaganda czar, Joseph Goebbels, the model is to keep on relentlessly denouncing Chávez as a “dictator†until the public begins to automatically accept the connections between the word and the man.
Of course, standing in the way of the administration’s success in convincingly making its case is the fact that Chávez’s political movement has won twice the number of highly attended elections than President Bush has, and by consistently far larger majorities—around 60 percent better. Furthermore, the TV networks are overwhelmingly dominated by the Chávez-hating middle-class opposition, and the same is true for the print media. To describe today’s Venezuela as a dictatorship is an unmitigated lie, and despite the adamant pleas of Rice and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, it is subscribed to only by a questionable sector of the U.S. media, led by Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl and the extraordinary science fiction editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
the rest of this coha statement can be found at:
http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/New_Press_Releases_2006/COHA%20Opinion/COHA_Opinion_06.11_Venezuela_Iran_F16s.html
May 18th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Vaclav Havel, the millionaire anti-Communist, seems as worked up over Cuba now as the Miami mafia. Maybe he should work on cleaning up his own backyard first.
The Prague Post – Jan 20, 2005
http://www.praguepost.com
LIVING STANDARDS WORSEN FOR ROMA(Czech Republic)
New report shows employment, housing still problematic
20/1/2005- Employment opportunities are no more numerous, housing is no better and living standards are getting worse for Roma, or Gypsies, according to the first major government study of Romany Czechs since 1997.
Released Jan. 12, the study, produced by the department for human rights, cited two positive developments for Roma: Education among Roma is improving, although slowly, and reported cases of discrimination are gradually declining. But the overarching message of the report is that the condition of Romany Czechs, on the whole, is worsening despite millions of crowns of
government spending and dozens of government projects.
“Health care, electricity, gas and water are getting more expensive,” said Ondrej Gina, head of the Roma Culture Union. “Which makes the situation for Roma harder.” “People have no money for rent, and they are evicted without
being provided with any substitute housing.” The government estimates some 250,000 Roma live in the Czech Republic, or 2.5 percent of the population.
About 70 percent of them are unemployed, the study says, and a majority live in ghettos on the edges of cities and towns. “Unemployment and bad housing are a syndrome of the times,” Gina said. “I’ve seen settlements where not a
single Roma has worked since [1989]. They are living on welfare checks. Many have gotten used to not working.”
Other Roma leaders criticize employers for refusing to hire Romany workers.
The government report, however, says that the country has improved on protecting Roma against discrimination. Last year, the government spent 93 million Kc ($4 million) on Roma programs, mainly through the Justice,
Health, and Interior ministries. The report criticized spending for being unsystematic as a whole — inadequate in some cases, overlapping in others.
However, one program that the government notes is working is one-year pre-kindergarten preparatory classes for Romany children that are aimed at reducing the numbers of Romany children who wind up in classrooms and schools for children with special needs, including disabled and mentally handicapped children. Sixty percent of the 51,000 adult Roma surveyed attended such classes, according to the report. Among Romany children who go to preparatory classes, 70 percent enter regular elementary school classes.
There are 137 such courses across the country.
The report says about 1,000 Roma study at high schools today, up from 30 in 1989.
The report comes ahead of the World Bank’s “Decade of Roma Inclusion” initiative, to be launched Feb. 2 in Sophia, Bulgaria. On Jan. 14, Slovakia announced 950 million Kc in spending this year on Roma programs. About 320,000 Roma live in Slovakia, about 6 percent of the population. The Czech government plans to spend 111 million Kc in 2005.
“These are only the most obvious funds that help Roma,” said Katerina Jacques of the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights. “More money is
spent to help Roma, but by various agencies and to various places. Because it’s not coordinated by one office, there’s no way to get a grand total.”
Ivan Vesely, head of Dzeno, a Czech Romany advocacy organization, said a serious analysis of Roma problems and corresponding plan were lacking. He advocates toughening welfare restrictions to pressure Roma to look for jobs.
“I would give enough to survive, maybe 7,000 [Czech crowns] a month, not 12,000,” he said.
The government report calls for programs to improve education, housing and employment opportunities for Roma to be directed by one agency.
May 18th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
What’s the big deal about Chomsky meeting with Hezbollah? Are you saying Marc that you agree with Bush et al that they are a major threat to the US? Was there anything unreasonable that Chomsky said where he’s quoted or is this just a chance to show you’re not one of those types of populists, you’re proud to accept Bush’s term of defining who is a bad guy and who isn’t? Ya’d think he met with OBL or someone who actually is a threat to American lives.
May 18th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
And Havel’s quote on Cuba is one of the stupidest laziest things I’ve heard in a while. I’m sure the women of Cuba wish they were in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or Haiti…and other ‘allies’ of Havel’s democratic world….
May 18th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
coha? sometimes the college kids make mistakes.
http://www.fejs.org/?q=node/5809
and this is one of those times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
chavez is a buffoon. whether it’s saying we are invading next week to steal his oil, or condi rice really wants to have sex with him to saying the taliban were just misunderstood, the guy is clinically unstable.
when crude prices have a cyclical downturn venezuela will circle the drain as usual and he’ll be overthrown in a bloody coup–the standard 300 year old docu-drama that is latin america. i just don’t know who is dumber, chavez or the folks that think he’s not.
May 18th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Neid: “we are invading next week to steal his oil”.
I think that the US can only invade one country at a time in order to steal its oil.
May 18th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Where have we put it?
May 18th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
got to admit thats pretty funny, patrick.
coha makes mistakes, but not as many as rumsfeld, cheney and co. whether justified or not, their prosecution of the war in iraq is a farce and our cia pursuit of osama is the biggest joke of all. if all these and other foreign policy mishaps ocurred under clinton, the right wing crew would not just have tried to impeach clinton but lynch.
the bush team is complete out of touch with reality when it comes to its latin america policies and hope that some of the more influential readers here will start pointing their critical guns at that before they really do something stupid in venezuela, bolivia and elsewhere.
May 18th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
worse happened under clinton. apparently you didn’t mind back then. while he was spraying his dna all over monica while talking on the phone, he was criminalizing bin laden, lobbing missiles into empty tents and laying the groundwork for the twin towers. yes, yes i know, i heard you, it was a bomb not a jet that hit the pentagon. then who can forget those seminal moments,
his marshmellow shake and bake with all those women and children down in waco. rwanda was another one our chocolate president apologized for, if my memory serves me. the list is too long.
as for south america–you mean the continued shithole of leftist depravity that the rest of the world tries to bail out every twenty years. see you in a few when the next batch of revoultions come, engineered and caused by lenin’s “useful idiots” like yourself. tell me, after 150 million dead, trying to force communism and socialism on the world, is there any point that the bodies pile up that you think it’s a stupid idea?
like i said chavez is a moron. as to the coca freak, the jury is still out.
and to my grassy knoller, yes tom, we invaded iraq to steal their oil and i have it stored in my backyard. those rovian voices are getting louder.
May 18th, 2006 at 6:58 pm
My pat your quite the capitalist fellow.
May 18th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
patty, bush is an embarrassing fool. lets see, the reputation and standing of the united states and americans in the world is currently at, what, an all-time low…sounds like a winning foreign policy we got, patty. mission accomplished in iraq? good luck. while bush is spending the u.s. back into economic ruin, sinking the value of the dollar around the world, there was a time not too long ago we had surpluses and peace. not to imply that i liked everything about clinton, i didn’t, but it does not take a rocket scientist to see that the days of peace, prosperity and clinton phone sex is better than what we got now.
as for south america and its “leftist depravity,” far from a shithole you ignorant swine, there is more fun and beauty here than you can imagine. and am not a follower of lenin and communism, but, fact is, patty, few else in latin america are either. what it is about here, patty, is not ideology. these countries are jettisoning the failing ideas of washington but they are not running to cuba or lenin to sign up either, they are mostly looking for another way, a pragmatic one that lifts them out of poverty and keeps all the good things they have from disappearing to the depravity of mcdonalds and the rest of the fortune 500 that you kiss, suck, up to.
May 18th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
“he was criminalizing bin laden, lobbing missiles into empty tents”
Yeah and your guy GOT bin Laden because, like, it’s sooo easy man. Child’s play really for the “adults.” Right.
May 19th, 2006 at 12:28 am
obviously you didn’t die in that swimming pool in what was it 67′. you have come back with water on your brain. the mess we are in is part of the smegma the clinton gang left for the next administration, in this case bush. as for our reputation in europe–who cares. let me see if i got this right, i’m supposed to be concerned about european opinion–these being the same enlightened losers that produced the 20th century ism’s that murdered 150 million. not only that, but my fathers generation had to go bail them out twice with nearly 500,000 dead and several million horribly wounded. yes, yes i’m really interested in what they have to say as they sanction genocide in africa and yugoslavia among other places. europe is getting the bitch slap they have long deserved. they have run their countries into the ground with their socialist claptrap while hiding behind our defence spending. they are so sick of their own countries they have negative birthrates. their best and brightest come here or in the case of france flee to the UK. i think it may have been you in drag giving the blowjobs.
as for the peace and prosperity we enjoyed that was a result of reagan and volker ending inflation and the cold war which allowed bush sr. and clinton to pare 2 trillion from the defence budget which they happily spent on more useless stuff. clinton to his credit passed two reagan pet projects–welfare reform and nafta. i know, not among your favorites……..
after spending ten years in latin america it is a shithole of depraved governments. costa rica and panama always offer hope. the only one down there with any thing on the ball is chile and that took pinochet ruthlessly killing about 3500 leftist to do it. i always smile when folks like you look like the blessed virgin with tears of blood discussing pinochet but then happily write poems celebrating fidel and the 10,000′s thousands he murdered while wearing your favorite che t-shirt. yes, but there’s free medical! as i said before they inherited a bastard spanish crime family structure, which they happily propagate, that has lasted 500 years. every time they start to make a little headway a stupid socialist shows up and tells them there’s an easy way. the poor campisinos don’t know what to believe. i forgive them for their stupidity–but you–you should know better.
jake, you left out the best part–he was getting blowjobs while he was doing it. now that’s talent. a true cracker right to the end. throw in a little bitch slapping and some date raping–quite the studly man he was.
and let’s not forget another hero of the left will be making his return shortly–the old pedophile himself–ortega of sandinista fame in nicaragua. ah, just think of the good talks on the veranda among the leading lights of the left from latin america, castro, chavez and ortega. jimmy carter will serve the drinks.
on a side not i still remember the opening of first mc donalds in guatemala city in 1975ish. while i have never had a hamburger i did wait three weeks to finally get in the place for some fries! you still couldn’t put the tp in the toilet though……….
jake, old bin’s been dead since dec 01. until i see him holding up the NYT like everybody else does, he’s dead. no matter, there’s more from where he came from.
May 19th, 2006 at 3:37 am
Get real Marc…pick on Chavez all you want, but you’re in serious denial if you dont think reporting on the genocide in Darfur isnt far more important and so much more worthwhile.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:10 am
lorie: “Was there anything unreasonable that Chomsky said where he’s quoted or is this just a chance to show you’re not one of those types of populists, you’re proud to accept Bush’s term of defining who is a bad guy and who isn’t?”
I love this line of reasoning: Bush says Hezbollah is a bad guy, therefore Hezbollah is not a bad guy. How lazy, how uninformed.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:24 am
“jake, old bin’s been dead since dec 01. until i see him holding up the NYT like everybody else does, he’s dead. no matter, there’s more from where he came from.”
Evidently the anoxia from the pool has left some damage.
May 19th, 2006 at 9:13 am
Say what you want about Chavez, but you have to respect his keen perception in the way he sizes up the major political actors on the world stage. His term for Bush? ‘El Pendejo’. Translation: ‘The Asshole’. Pretty accurate if you ask me.
May 19th, 2006 at 9:32 am
” Bush says Hezbollah is a bad guy, therefore Hezbollah is not a bad guy. How lazy, how uninformed.”
No, Cooper’s the lazy one. Bush says Hezbollah bad, US military say Hez bad…Chomsky bad for visiting Hez.
May 19th, 2006 at 9:36 am
well, at least you admit we are in a mess right now, patty. the present economic dire straits, though, patty, are only going to get worse before they get better. why? for one, because your genius boy bush unnecessarily cut taxes for his rich buddies while government spending at the same time went through the roof. bush is the first president to actually have a net loss of jobs on his watch. a record trade deficit, mmm, yeah, those free trade policies are working good. yeah, i know, i know, its all clinton’s fault.
as for the u.s. reputation in the world, its not just in europe. i live in south america, was also here before bush, and believe you me all over this continent the standing of the united states has sunk to rock bottom. the u.s., unfortunately, is despised all over the world, patty. thats the cold hard fact. this is not about europe, its about for example bush ignoring international laws, like rushing into war in iraq and essentially telling the united nations fuck you, its his inability to accept things like global warming despite hurricanes smacking the gulf coast and florida at increasing rates. hurricane katrina is the tip of a long chain of natural disasters to come because knuckleheads like bush don’t want to invest in cutting back on pollution.
yeah, its fun for you right wing freaks with your heads up your assholes to stereotype everyone on the left as lenin’s “useful idiots” etc. but we know the picture is not so neat. therefore, i won’t bother to try to set you straight on my views on cuba, et. al, because your brain is up your ass. but as for chile, where i currently live, yeah its had economic growth the last sixteen years after pinochet, but it also has one of the world’s largest gaps between rich and poor and believe me despite the impressive macro-economic numbers chile presents around the world i know very few chileans who really have money. most everyone is hurting. and the chilean youth, there are loads and loads of chileans graduating from college who can’t find a decent job here nowadays and wind up working in low wage, mindless crappy jobs. and, yeah, the minimum monthly wage in economic poster boy chile is around $250 a month. that does not get you far in chile, either, where the cost of living is not that much lower than many u.s. cities.
anyhow, i guess what the current south american generation is thinking, patty, is that the neoliberal thinking you guys have pushed on them did not do them any favors ( see argentina, bolivia, etc) and they want to try something new, like mixing up their economy with a combination of state and market. which, gee whiz, the kind of stuff the hypocritical united states had been doing all along. you see, patty, socialism as applied nowadays in latin america is not communism, soviet-style, but more like social democracy. chavez, morales, kirchner, lula, they all have a combination of market and state in their thinking, planning. thats why i say its more pragmatic then ideology here nowadays. yeah, even chile, the free market king, has had two socialist presidents since 2000 and under the first one, the economy rebounded stronger than ever.
the cold war is over, patty. the enemy is not the soviet union and communism anymore, that died long ago. yet, the enemy, unfortunately, as much as i don’t like to say it, but for most around the world nowadays the enemy is us. the us might want to re-consider its economic globalization policies, its environmental policies, its united nations policies, across the board, the us needs to re-think how it relates to the world.
i know, i know, this is all over your head..oops, where is your head?
May 19th, 2006 at 9:56 am
as for south america–you mean the continued shithole of leftist depravity that the rest of the world tries to bail out every twenty years.
I’m sure that he’ll be the first person screaming about “anti-Americanism” in Latin America, while remaining oblivious to the hate in that comment.
One wonders if his mother’s ob/gyn threw out the baby and gave his mother the placenta to raise . . .
May 19th, 2006 at 11:18 am
“as for south america–you mean the continued shithole of leftist depravity that the rest of the world tries to bail out every twenty years.”
that’s not hate. that’s a statement of fact in regards to the governments in latin america. it’s been true since colonial times. and as long as stupid people hold up chavez, ortega, castro et al as beacons of hope the slavery of the people will continue. economic morons like our friend from chile will never get it. they have all their solutions wrapped up in blaming someone else–in this case the US.
the cold war never ended. it’s been going on for a 1000 years. capitalism vs socialism/marxism/communism/perontistas/maoism etc it just mutates. one creates, the other is a parasite wanting everything for free disguised as entitlements. the governments in central and south america are parasites who could give two shits about their people. jones and his type are enablers……….as such they have to hate the US in general and bush in particular.
and i quote.
” why? for one, because your genius boy bush unnecessarily cut taxes for his rich buddies while government spending at the same time went through the roof. bush is the first president to actually have a net loss of jobs on his watch. a record trade deficit, mmm, yeah, those free trade policies are working good. yeah, i know, i know, its all clinton’s fault.
as for the u.s. reputation in the world, its not just in europe. i live in south america, was also here before bush, and believe you me all over this continent the standing of the united states has sunk to rock bottom. the u.s., unfortunately, is despised all over the world, patty. thats the cold hard fact. this is not about europe, its about for example bush ignoring international laws, like rushing into war in iraq and essentially telling the united nations fuck you, its his inability to accept things like global warming despite hurricanes smacking the gulf coast and florida at increasing rates. hurricane katrina is the tip of a long chain of natural disasters to come because knuckleheads like bush don’t want to invest in cutting back on pollution.”
stupidity like this is not accidental. you must have personally chosen to be this dumb. why? i have no idea. study up on tax cuts, free trade, job creation, the iraq war, trade deficits and for the love of god read the koyoto treaty. god invented google so you could do these things. you have no excuse. meanwhile get out there and narrow the gap between the rich and poor in chile! and please, stop being one of “Lenin’s useful idiots”.
May 19th, 2006 at 11:23 am
To show the witlessness of neid’s comment, consider this:
Brazil suffered from horrific inflation in the early 1980′s and 90′s brought on by a right-wing dictatorship that accumulated horrific levels of debt from North American banks that were eager to loan to them for their expensive, Pharaonic projects. The inflation was tamed (and remains tamed) by a center-left government.
Argentina’s center-right government followed IMF policies that resulted in a collapse of the currency and 21.5% unemployment throwing 60% of the population below the poverty line.
The two largest economies in South America needed to be rescued from rightist depravity.
May 19th, 2006 at 11:26 am
Neid, Marshall some facts to support your claims. Left-wingers in power in South America have been few and far between. You do not know what you are talking about,
May 19th, 2006 at 11:54 am
hey patty, i already know how to use google! look at this piece of work enclosed below i just found from an ex- reagan treasury secretary no less. could he be right, is life in the bush economy “fat, drunk and broke.” i guess you are the one who needs to learn how to use google. the sad fact is, patty, bush is the first president in history who can not create jobs. my guess is history will categorize his economic management as the worst since herbert hoover. lets hope the aftermath is not as grim as it was after hoover.
May 8, 2006
Life in the Bush Economy: Fat, Drunk and Broke
A Nation of Waitresses and Bartenders
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll jobs report released May 5 says the economy created 131,000 private sector jobs in April. Construction added 10,000 jobs, natural resources, mining and logging added 8,000 jobs, and manufacturing added 19,000. Despite this unusual gain, the economy has 10,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than a year ago.
Most of the April job gain –72%–is in domestic services, with education and health services (primarily health care and social assistance) and waitresses and bartenders accounting for 55,000 jobs or 42% of the total job gain. Financial activities added 26,000 jobs and professional and business services added 28,000. Retail trade lost 36,000 jobs.
During 2001 and 2002 the US economy lost 2,298,000 jobs. These lost jobs were not regained until early in February 2005. From February 2005 through April 2006, the economy has gained 2,584 jobs (mainly in domestic services).
The total job gain for the 64 month period from January 2001 through April 2006 is 7,000,000 jobs less than the 9,600,000 jobs necessary to stay even with population growth during that period. The unemployment rate is low because millions of discouraged workers have dropped out of the work force and are not counted as unemployed.
In 2005 the US had a current account deficit in excess of $800 billion. That means Americans consumed $800 billion more goods and services than they produced. A significant percentage of this figure is offshore production by US companies for American markets.
The US current account deficit as a percent of Gross Domestic Product is unprecedented. As more jobs and manufacturing are moved offshore, Americans become more dependent on foreign made goods. This year the deficit could reach $1 trillion.
The US pays its current account deficit by giving up ownership of its existing assets or wealth. Foreigners don’t simply hold the $800 billion in cash. They use it to acquire US equities, real estate, bonds, and entire companies.
The federal budget is also in the red to the tune of about $400 billion. As Americans have ceased to save, the federal government is dependent on foreigners to lend it the money to operate and to wage war in the Middle East.
American consumers are heavily indebted. The growth of consumer debt is what has been fueling the economy. Social Security and Medicare are in financial trouble, as are many company pension plans. Decide for yourself–is this the economic picture of a superpower that can dictate to the world, or is it the picture of a second-rate country dependent on foreigners to finance its consumption and the operation of its government?
No-think economists make rhetorical arguments that the decline of US manufacturing employment reflects higher productivity from technological improvements and not a decline in US manufacturing per se. George Mason University economist Walter Williams recently ridiculed the claim that US manufacturing jobs are moving to China. Williams asks how the US could be losing manufacturing jobs to China when the Chinese are losing jobs faster than the US: “Since, 2000, China has lost 4.5 million manufacturing jobs, compared with the loss of 3.1 million in the U.S.”
The 4.5 million figure comes from a Conference Board report that is misleading. The report that counts was written by Judith Banister under contract to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and published in November 2005 (www.bls.gov/fls/chinareport.pdf). Banister’s report was peer reviewed both within the BLS and externally by persons with expert knowledge of China.
Chinese manufacturing employment has been growing strongly since the 1980s except for a short period in the late 1990s when layoffs resulted from the restructuring and privatization of inefficient state owned and collective owned factories. To equate temporary layoffs from a massive restructuring within manufacturing with US long-term manufacturing job loss indicates extreme carelessness or incompetence.
Banister concludes: “In recent decades, China has become a manufacturing powerhouse. The country’s official data showed 83 million manufacturing employees in 2002, but that figure is likely to be understated; the actual number was probably closer to 109 million. By contrast, in 2002, the Group of Seven (G7) major industrialized countries had a total of 53 million manufacturing workers.”
The G7 is the US and Europe. In contrast to China’s 109,000,000 manufacturing workers, the US has 14,000,000.
When I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, the US did not have a trade deficit in manufactured goods. Today the US has a $500 billion annual deficit in manufactured goods. If the US is doing as well in manufacturing as no-think economists claim, where did an annual trade deficit in manufactured goods of one-half trillion dollars come from?
If the US is the high-tech leader of the world, why does the US have a trade deficit in advanced technology products with China?
There was a time when American economists were empirical and paid attention to facts. Today American economists are merely the handmaidens of offshore producers. Apparently, they follow President Bush’s lead and do not read newspapers–thus, their ignorance of countless stories of US manufacturers moving entire plants and many thousands of US engineering jobs to China.
Chinese firms, including state owned firms, have numerous reasons, tax and otherwise, to understate their employment. Banister’s report gives the details.
Banister points out that the excess supply of labor in China is about five to six times the size of the total US work force. As a result, there is no shortage of workers in China, nor will there be in the foreseeable future.
The huge excess supply of labor means extremely low Chinese wages. The average Chinese wage is $0.57 per hour, a mere 3% of the average US manufacturing worker’s wage. With first world technology, capital, and business knowhow crowding into China, virtually free Chinese labor is as productive as US labor. This should make it obvious to anyone who claims to be an economist that offshore production of goods and services is an example of capital seeking absolute advantage in lowest factor cost, not a case of free trade based on comparative advantage.
American economists have failed their country as badly as have the Republican and Democratic parties. The sad fact is that there is no leader in sight capable of reversing the rapid decline of the United States of America.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
May 19th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
patty, here’s where you can get more of that reality medicine about bush. check this site out:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/
May 19th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
What a dumbass.
Venezuela stages mock foreign invasion
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has for years predicted that a foreign army would attack the South American nation to snatch its vast oil reserves. A simulation conducted this week showed how it might happen.
A naval landing craft made landfall on the shores of Western Falcon state carrying troops and over a dozen camouflaged tanks. The “invading” army then took over the massive Paraguana Refining Complex, a key asset of the world’s No. 5 crude exporter.
The “occupation” is part of a military exercise to train troops and communities to repel a foreign invader.
The Chavez government said it is preparing citizens to fight a guerrilla war to repel a possible Iraq-style invasion by U.S. troops. The Bush administration insists the invasion paranoia is nothing more than leftist saber-rattling, but for Chavez supporters the threat is real.
And, so is anyone else who thinks that we’re going to invade Venezuela.
May 19th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
From brian jones’ link to the Smirking Chimp: I find it bitterly ironic that such folks (Bush worshippers) hear the march of freedom where I hear the strident goose-stepping of a fascism that has already caused untold destruction and threatens to be a great deal more destructive than Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
…we are tied together with patrick neid’s reference to Godwin’s Law above: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
When liberals regularly compare Bush and his supporters to Hitler, the better that Hitler looks–or, more accurately, the dumber they sound.
May 19th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Good news for Chavez and other dictators in our hemisphere: Cuban President Fidel Castro, who turns 80 this year, enjoys vibrant health and will live to 140, his chief doctor said.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/05/19/060519204148.jda4r8qu.html
Maybe future President Jenna Bush will see the end of Castro.
May 19th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
jones,
you need to keep googling. you’ll get it. just keep on going.
randy paul, i know exactly what i’m talking about. read all my posts on this thread top to bottom. here i’ll help you out
“ok folks, back to the asylum. chavez is a moron–in a long line that springs from the bastard spanish colonial empire albeit private or military. an empire that has brought only pain and poverty where ever they planted their flag around the entire world. for five hundred years this “family criminal enterprise†model continues to infect every country it landed in. closer to home we have mexico to deal with as a consequence…….. ”
chavez is a buffoon. whether it’s saying we are invading next week to steal his oil, or condi rice really wants to have sex with him to saying the taliban were just misunderstood, the guy is clinically unstable.
“when crude prices have a cyclical downturn venezuela will circle the drain as usual and he’ll be overthrown in a bloody coup–the standard 300 year old docu-drama that is latin america. i just don’t know who is dumber, chavez or the folks that think he’s not.”
“as for south america–you mean the continued shithole of leftist depravity that the rest of the world tries to bail out every twenty years. see you in a few when the next batch of revoultions come, engineered and caused by lenin’s “useful idiots†like yourself. tell me, after 150 million dead, trying to force communism and socialism on the world, is there any point that the bodies pile up that you think it’s a stupid idea?
like i said chavez is a moron. as to the coca freak, the jury is still out.”
“after spending ten years in latin america it is a shithole of depraved governments. costa rica and panama always offer hope. the only one down there with any thing on the ball is chile and that took pinochet ruthlessly killing about 3500 leftist to do it. i always smile when folks like you look like the blessed virgin with tears of blood discussing pinochet but then happily write poems celebrating fidel and the 10,000’s thousands he murdered while wearing your favorite che t-shirt. yes, but there’s free medical! as i said before, they inherited a bastard spanish crime family structure, which they happily propagate, that has lasted 500 years. every time they start to make a little headway a stupid socialist shows up and tells them there’s an easy way. the poor campisinos don’t know what to believe. i forgive them for their stupidity–but you–you should know better.”
“as for south america–you mean the continued shithole of leftist depravity that the rest of the world tries to bail out every twenty years.â€
that’s not hate. that’s a statement of fact in regards to the governments in latin america. it’s been true since colonial times. and as long as stupid people hold up chavez, ortega, castro et al as beacons of hope the slavery of the people will continue. economic morons like our friend from chile will never get it. they have all their solutions wrapped up in blaming someone else–in this case the US.”
those are my statements about latin america. even the supposed right wing dictatorships were “fascists”–mussolini’s third way between socialism and communism–none were ever capitalistic. they have all been criminal enterprises with different verbal handles to win favor with either the US or Russia in modern times. they have been the same for 500 years. the left desperately pins its hopes to any degenerate that comes along in the wild eyed hope that finally, somewhere, the carnage of all those dead bodies will have been worth it. today’s flavor of the day–chavez.
“and let’s not forget another hero of the left will be making his return shortly–the old pedophile himself–ortega of sandinista fame in nicaragua. ah, just think of the good talks on the veranda among the leading lights of the left from latin america, castro, chavez and ortega. jimmy carter will serve the drinks.”
i think that about sums it up. and we didn’t even mention those bright lights all through the caribbean from haiti to grenada………evita crys as i type.
oh before i forget brian, you had mentioned iraq. the war in afghanistan and iraq is the best thing that has happened in the middle east. hamas winning was also a big plus. the coming conflict with iran and syria will finally resolve most of the problems connected to radical islam. then and only then can the middle east move into the 17th century. of course you disagree, i would not expect any different. in fact your thinking is part of the reason the dems will only have had the white house for 12 of the last 40 years when bush retires in two years and seven months. just think, two years and seven more months of hearing george et al speak to you every night while they change your world.
your pain has just started. think of the reagan haters. everyday they get up they have to watch a new statue go up honoring him for the freedoms he brought to people with his message. the entire iron curtain worships his memory. “tear down this wall” will forever be enshrined in world history. oh, the pain of it all for you. counter balance that, with perhaps one of your heroes, our first chocolate president will be enshrined wth “i did not have sex with that woman” or for the prudent “it depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is”. yes, quite the achievemnet.
May 19th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
patty, i heard this big giant sucking sound, i thought it might be people thinking about all the jobs the conservative reaganite economist said we are losing due to free trade. paul craig roberts is so eloquent isn’t he, lets revisit the following from my prior posting, shall we:
“Today American economists are merely the handmaidens of offshore producers. Apparently, they follow President Bush’s lead and do not read newspapers–thus, their ignorance of countless stories of US manufacturers moving entire plants and many thousands of US engineering jobs to China.”
and
“This should make it obvious to anyone who claims to be an economist that offshore production of goods and services is an example of capital seeking absolute advantage in lowest factor cost, not a case of free trade based on comparative advantage.”
Ohh, and the real punchline, how many jobs have been created in the past 12 months? 2,584
but, then i turn on my computer, connect, and it turns out the real sucking sound is coming from you. i thought you were crying after i burst your little bushite bubble. i am not a registered democrat, i am an independent, but knowing you like political parties and that you were losing faith in george walker i was even thinking of trying to help you find out how you can switch to the democrats. the dems could use a reformed bigot with a sense of humor. but i guess this latest post from you means you want to keep on being a bigot. you want to keep on being stubborn even when the truth smacks you down and around and around and around. i’d say that is the definition of “ignorant swine,” wouldn’t you?
in any case, we all know you evaded my points about the second coming of hoover, etc. but on to your latest bizarre screed.
personally, i was in favor of the war in afghanistan. as for iraq, i understood the need to liberate the country from hussein, and might have even supported a un-sanctioned war for that purpose, but the fact is, the bush government went to war not liberate iraqis from hussein but, they said, to make the world safe from hussein getting a hold of weapons of mass destruction. so, it would seem to me, patty, if we went to war to rescue our future from wmd in the hands of iraqis and afterwards no wmd was found, it would seem to me that this is pretty much grounds to impeach bush. i mean, we just screwed our economy for the next 5-10 years, killed and maimed thousands of americans, killed and maimed tens of thousands of iraqis, and for what? where is the wmd? is it in your backyard? as for your little snide comment about the hamas winning, as cooper said in regards to chomsky, i am speechless. we all know what you mean by that. yeah, you were right, when you are involved it must always end up getting to godwin’s law.
as for reagan, thank god we had gorbachev back then. otherwise, patty, we might have all turned into nuclear dust some day.
May 19th, 2006 at 11:24 pm
bj wrote: as for reagan, thank god we had gorbachev back then. otherwise, patty, we might have all turned into nuclear dust some day.
Bull. The left hates to give Reagan the credit that he earned. Reagan played his cards knowing his opponent and what each held. You can’t say “what if there had been a different person negotiating with him,” because there wasn’t. But, President Lincoln was sure lucky that the South hadn’t developed the atomic bomb. Makes as much sense.
Oh, bj, your employment statistics are low for even the State of Alabama–not just the entire country. The economy is doing great.
Grounds to impeach Bush? Yeah. Bush lied, people died. Bush did not lie and anyone who says that is ignorant or dishonest. The intelligence from our CIA and G.B. indicated that there were WMD, and Hussein used them. Democrat Joe Wilson issued a fraudulent political report in saying that Iraq had not approached Nigeria about nuclear materials.
What does this have to do with Hugo Chavez? I don’t know except that Chavez is lucky that Reagan isn’t still President.
May 20th, 2006 at 4:04 am
The world hates the US — wrong. The Leftist envy filled neo-socialists hate the US, for showing France and Germany and Canada and Italy and Japan and even the UK how to create jobs in an advanced economy. Too bad so many Leftists are such good writers, talented singers, great actors … but such lousy economists.
If the illegals hate the US so much, why are they coming? And why don’t more Leftists leave? Didn’t they promise to if Bush won — guess they were just lying, like so many Leftist gasbags.
“This should make it obvious to anyone who claims to be an economist that offshore production of goods and services is an example of capital seeking absolute advantage in lowest factor cost, not a case of free trade based on comparative advantage.”
If a country has educated, low cost, hard working labor — that IS their free trade comparitive advantage. Saying America is not losing $20/hr jobs to companies making the same stuff with $1/hr jobs seems silly — that’s exactly what the free market says.
[The Roma problem is worse in Slovakia -- but they are NOT educated, and do NOT have a good work ethic. ]
Even $5/hr illegal immigrant laborers will replace $20/hr folk — such $20/hr folk are OVERPAID.
But of course the RACISTS, er, nativists, will say it’s better to use some kind of gov’t program to keep a $20/hr job rather than let 30 $1/hr jobs be created in China, or India, or someplace where the people are REALLY POOR. Bah.
The Dem desire to hurt the US rich, so as to benefit relatively rich workers in America is a little immoral. To help rich American workers by deliberately keeping dirt-poor Chinese in both absolute and comparitive poverty should be considered immoral — but nationalist racists keep making excuses for it.
It’s also stupid to compare China to America — the better comparison is the USA with the EU. And high unemployment, unsustainable gov’t benefits to the “workers” is already causing problems here in “EUtopia” (NOT!)
Paul Roberts chooses his starting point as Jan. 2001 — without mentioning the dot.com bubble pop, where Clinton’s overemployment economy burst. A more intellectually honest look would be looking at multiple 5 year and 10 year periods, and would show the Bush tax-cuts as doing great for the economy.
Bush and Reps in Congress have been doing terrible at spending (although the spending has also made the unemployment too low). Yet look at the corporate welfare of $700 million to Northrup, and Hillary, etc. voted to keep it rather than cut it as some Reps wanted. More evidence that the Dems talk “defictis bad” but virtually never “cut spending”. (And big spending Reps kept the pork, too.)
Latin America is sick because the power of the gov’t is used to hurt the poor and help the rich and powerful; and anti-rich folk become popular, give their gov’ts power, and then the rich take that power back.
How many times will the promise of easy help for the poor be shown false, before poor folk stop believing the false promises?
Get less gov’t — gov’t should be protecting private property, and enforcing honest, voluntary contracts. Too often it enforces dishonest, anti-poor contracts; too often instead of protecting poor private property, it takes that property, and gives it to the current gov’t friends; the rich and powerful.
Chavez seems, now, to be giving good benefits to the poor. If he can allow, primarily by NOT making it ILLEGAL (as too many in Latin Am. do), the poor to form their own small and medium companies, they can even get out of poverty. But he’ll prolly create BIG gov’t programs, so it will seem to work for awhile, and then break down.
May 20th, 2006 at 7:06 am
In fact Chavez is doing what Tom Grey advises, through micro-loans, etc. His racism about the Roma not wanting to adapt to bourgeois norms, esp when even under communism their wayt of life was protected – is uncalled for.
May 20th, 2006 at 9:22 am
woody: first, want to say, i am one of those people who get sick every time you try to act “cute.” you really are not very funny. believe it.
as for the new jobs figure, that refers to job growth over the past 12 months, the difference between jobs lost and jobs gained. if you can come up with a figure from alabama or elsewhere that proves this number is incorrect, be my guest.
liberty dad: your logic is confused and twisted but will say that its pretty laughable to hear you call paul craig roberts racist for wanting to save jobs in the united states. the free trade system as proposed in washington is perverse, in the end it will create more losers than winners – not just in the united states but in poor countries.
nuff said, no more debating right wing loonies this weekend. arrivederci
May 20th, 2006 at 9:45 am
just one more thing, about the racist statement, liberty. do you think you are doing the chinese or indians or mexicanos a big favor by giving them $1-a-day or $2-a-day jobs in sweatshops?
May 20th, 2006 at 11:02 am
b.j., thanks for thinking that I’m cute. I’m sure that you can find a long list of guys who would find you equally sweet–especially with your initials.
It’s off-topic, but here is something related to your request:
01/26/2006 Governor Riley, Business Leaders and Local Economic Developers Celebrate Alabama’s Economic Growth
Since the beginning of 2003, more than 1,200 new and expanding industries have located in Alabama. These industries are generating more than 50,000 jobs. The state’s unemployment rate has dropped from 5.7 percent in January 2003 to 3.5 percent in December 2005 – its lowest recorded level in Alabama’s history.
According to figures released at the conference from the University of Alabama’s Center for Business and Economic Research: Alabama added a net gain of 24,800 jobs during the 12 months between September 2004 and September 2005.
Figures from the Alabama Department of Industrial Relations report that: Employment in Alabama has increased by more than 85,000 between January 2003 and December 2005. The number of unemployed Alabamians during that same time period declined by 41,270.
04/26/2006 Alabama Economic Trends and Outlook (Washovia)
The Alabama economy has created 100,000 net new jobs since mid-2003….
See.
Do you know how stupid you appear when you say how many jobs have been created (in the U.S.) in the past 12 months? 2,584? 2,584!!! Why, we’ve added hundreds of thousands more jobs just for Mexicans.
Please share your source for your number. (If you’re relying on EPI’s “Job Watch” and can’t see through their dishonest presentations, then you are double stupid.)
The U.S. economy under Bush is doing quite well, and that success is being, naturally, ignored by the left and the press.
Please return to discussions on topic.
May 20th, 2006 at 11:07 am
Here is the correct working link (and spelling) for the Wachovia economic outlook referenced above: Alabama Economic Trends and Outlook (Wachovia)
May 20th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Game theory dicates without Gorbachov Reagan would have been spouting empty lines the the room.
May 20th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
“Even $5/hr illegal immigrant laborers will replace $20/hr folk — such $20/hr folk are OVERPAID.”
Wrong. Your understanding of economics is lamentably poor. The only reason illegal immigrants are earning $5/hour is because A) they are illlegal, and B) they can sent money back to their home countries, where it is worth significantly more (otherwise they wouldn’t work for that pay). In a properly functioning economy (i.e., one not breaking the law), legally employed workers will be paid what the market dictates. If a particular trade or service is in high demand relative to other trades/ services, then their respective values rise (same for products as for wages).
Capitalist economies have rules for a reason: they work. Sovereign countries have secured borders and structured employment regulations for a reason: they work. We need to make a decision: annex Mexico, or secure our borders and enforce employment laws. In the latter case, companies who break the laws and game the system through the black market, as people like Tom Grey support, will pay. This much is obviously rational.
May 20th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Completely OT, and purely stylistic remark: Tom, when does the “prolly” habit get broken? Nothing personal, but I liken it to hearing a grown man suddenly interject “baby talk” in the middle of a normal discussion. Is this common among libertarians, or some kind of Slovak-inspired slang?
I’ll take my answer off the air (i.e., rhetorically). Back to our regularly-scheduled program.
May 20th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
I’ve had a few of these emails forwarded to me:
The Venezuela government, run by dictator Chavez, is the sole owner of Citgo gas company. Sales of products at Citgo stations send money back to Chavez to help him in his vow to bring down our government.
Take Action – Please decide that you will not be shopping at a Citgo station. Why should U.S. citizens who love freedom be financing a dictator who has vowed to take down our government?
About CITGO
The company is owned by PDV America, Inc., an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the national oil company of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
I’m not real big on boycotts, but if there is a QuikTrip of RaceTrac next to the CITCO, I’ll go to one of them. (They’re cheaper, anyway.)
I have a friend who is involved in a gas station operation that previously sold BP gasoline. Because of new and higher deposit fees, etc. demanded by BP, they switched to CITCO. It’s a neighborhood station, but they told me that their regular customers still come in for service but are not buying nearly as much gas there. Gas sales are off something like 60%. I told them that I suspect that the ownership of CITCO might be an issue.
Maybe I shouldn’t have posted this comment. Now, all the lefties are going to start buying gas exclusively at CITCO stations just to kick sand at the U.S.
May 20th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
b.j., thanks for thinking that I’m cute. I’m sure that you can find a long list of guys who would find you equally sweet–especially with your initials.
Coming from a guy who deliberately uses a slang term that means blood-engorged tumescent pike for his name, that is really funny.
May 20th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
I’ve been on the board of directors, though fairly inactive, for ETP Slovensko for many years — we work with Roma, and are actively helping them help themselves.
As a group, they have less education.
As a group, they have lousy work habits.
One of the reasons “political correctness” is getting such a bad name is that those who believe it, believe in untrue facts (all are equal, blah blah blah). As long as the PC thought Nazis keep trying to suppress the truth, and implement policies based on their false wishes, their policies will fail.
Right now I’m not offering anybody any $1/hr job — but I’m working with HIV folk in Kenya, and seriously looking for a way to start businesses there offering $1/hr. I know it would be a help for most who would get such jobs, relative to having no job.
Brian, it’s easy to call somebody’s logic confused; it takes a little thought to show it. Your comment doesn’t rise above ad hominem. On “American racism”, which is actually less than other countries but real, the desire to use gov’t to save “our group’s” job is essentially racist. Free traders say that that instead of a gov’t making cheap cars illegal to save the jobs of highly skilled blacksmiths (in 1910-1930), the customers should be able to buy whatever they want and the producers should adjust.
Please show me a way to save overpaid jobs that doesn’t hurt others, and maybe you can convince me.
Naturally you make no attempt to relate to my own example, it’s not clear if you fail to understand it or just want to bloviate.
On the “rapid decline of the United States of America,” it would be nice if there were some macro facts. Key facts: growth rates; unemployment rates; asset value amounts.
NOT absolutely important: GNP of US relative to the whole world. With less than 300 mil people, if all 6 bil on earth averaged the US GNP/person, the US would be some 5% of the world’s product. From memory, the USA was something over 40% after WW II, and is still over 30%. As Chinese workers make more, prolly* starting with 600 000 000 (six hundred million) $1/hr jobs or somesuch, China’s econ should become twice as big as the US, or more. It’ll be bigger than the EUs before that.
OF COURSE the US REALATIVE economic position will get worse, as dirt-poor poverty of LESS than $1/ DAY gets replaced. That’s a good thing, but having a Clinton Leftist bozo complain about it shouldn’t surprise me.
He implies China can’t have both absolute cost advantage AND comparative advantage; which is a false idea. Every absolute cost advantage IS a comparative advantage. And the best thing in the world is for the lowest cost producer to produce, so the poor get jobs first, if they can do them.
Unions, like “Buy American” racists, don’t want to allow customers the choice to buy from “them.”
(*I like ‘prolly’ better than ‘probably’, hope it takes over linguistically, so people use it more often, and thus become more accurate.)
May 20th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Randy seems to be the expert and fixated on blood-engorged tumescent pikes.
—–
Prolly??
May 20th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
Woody,
Just my own.
You’re the one that seems obsessed with homosexuality, Woody. Smells of latency to me – not there’s anything wrong with it . . .
May 20th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
(*I like ‘prolly’ better than ‘probably’, hope it takes over linguistically, so people use it more often, and thus become more accurate.)
I think it makes look more like an idiot than otherwise, so that’s just a personal opinion in a land of public opinion. Don’t notify Webster’s or Oxford just yet.
May 21st, 2006 at 5:20 am
If you want to admit that you know what it smells like….
May 21st, 2006 at 6:51 am
“all are equal, blah blah blah” is not PC, it is self-evident human relations. As a thought experiment, think of how well you’d do living the Roma lifestyle, as oposed to the Roma learning capitalism.
People with this attitude help no one.
May 21st, 2006 at 9:55 am
woody: i commend you for having the courage to publicly come out of the closet and declare your gay. and am flattered that you feel attracted to me, and that you have gay friends you want to introduce me to, but i am sorry to say i don’t share your sexual preference. actually, bj is also not my full initials. i also have a middle name, and a middle initial, too. but i won’t tempt you with that. anyhow, stay strong.
as for the stat issue, moron, obviously stats on alabama’s jobs situaiton will tell us nothing about the situation for the entire united states. the stat i cite is a national one. it comes from one of your republican leading lights, paul craig roberts, a phd economist from stanford, berkeley, etc, who was a former reagan treasury secretary. i had posted the article it came from above. but i guess that you are also either senile, or maybe just slow. in any case, i assume someone with robert’s credentials can marshall up a solid source for his statement. here is a link to the article, which again was pasted in full above in an earlier posting from me, its called “Life in the Bush Economy: Fat, Drunk and Broke.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12977.htm
Paul Craig Roberts’s bio there says:
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
Roberts also has a lot of other good stuff on the Bush-whacked economy. Here are a few more of his greatest hits:
Liberty, you should check this one, about comparative advantage, its called “Second Thoughts about Free Trade.”
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/globecon/schumer.htm
But there is also:
Nuking the Economy
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02112006.html
Bush’s Jobless Economy
http://www.thinkingpeace.com/pages/arts2/arts377.html
Bush’s Con Job
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/48/16867
Lots more, he is quite the prolific writer on the Bush economic disaster. Check him out in google for more.
May 21st, 2006 at 10:02 am
well, i never thought i’d see this, marc cooper is censoring me. marc, i can recall many a comment from you that has veered off into foul and abusive language. and then we have the uncensored personal attacks on me from the right wing crew on your blog in recent days. what is up, ehh? i have no problem taking my time elsewhere, but at least let people know when you decide to be a hypocrite, shall we?
May 21st, 2006 at 12:46 pm
If that was Chomsky “hugging” Hezbollah, I guess Condi has been been at least giving Hezbollah surreptitious shoulder-pats. (Perhaps even Michael Totten pressed more literal flesh during his little southern Lebanon adventure than Chomsky did.)
All Chomsky said with regard to Hezbollah specifically was that the Hezbollah analysis of the security situation in Lebanon was correct — the Lebanese Army is not a significant deterrent. Is that true? I don’t know. Is it wrong just because Hezbollah flacks say it’s true? Hardly.
Chomksy then rants about how the U.S. is a terrorist country according to some of its own definitions of “terrorism”. This is inflammatory cant, of course, but given how hazy the definition tends to be, and how heinous some U.S. foreign policy has been, he’s probably right in some literal sense.
By the way, I wish people would stop praising Chomsky as the world’s greatest linguist, as the definer of modern linguistics, etc., whenever they have to reach for something good to say about him (“for balance”) before distorting his positions. (Or, on the other side, when they need to further burnish his intellectual credentials before going on to parrot his politics.)
Chomsky himself has correctly characterized his brand of linguistics as representing a minority opinion in the field. (A largish minority, but he’s right: most linguists are not Chomskians.) When I worked in the linguistics department at U.C. Berkeley, I think there might have been only ONE Chomskian on the faculty. (George Lakoff, as it happened.)
Chomksy is a mathematician who got interested in the grammar of human languages after studying the grammar of formal (mathematical) languages. Having studied both, I’d say this is kind of like declaring yourself a botanist after getting very good at making artificial flowers. It seems to me (and to linguists outside his fold) that he has been writing the same book about grammar for several decades — the covers and titles change, but they are little more than editions of the same book. He has never learned to speak another language, believing (in line with his own theories about the Critical Period Hypothesis) that he is incapable of learning a foreign language because he is now post-pubescent (though some may beg to differ on that point) That’s a position I find flatly bizarre, considering the number of people I know personally who learned to speak foreign languages fluently as adults. Considering that he is a major critic of the Cold War, it’s ironic that he vaulted to prominence in linguistics by using his mathematical grammar background to supply technical expertise to machine translation projects in the 50s for converting Russian intelligence into English (failed projects, of course.)
Chomsky is an interesting and influential linguist, but he is not the be-all and end-all of the field. The world’s greatest intellectual? Um, no, sorry. Very smart guy, certainly, and until he got monotonous on the subject of U.S. foreign policies (around the late 80s I think) a very perceptive critic of those policies. Sometimes I think he’d be taken more seriously even by his opponents if he weren’t such an icon for so many on the Left. Much of what he has written deserves to be taken seriously, after all.
May 21st, 2006 at 2:22 pm
Actually, it’s rather inarugable that Chomsky is, if not the “world’s greatest linguist”–kind of a silly term, ultimately–certainly the most influential one alive, and in since the second half of the 20th century. Chomsky’s approach to modelling grammar revolutionized linguistics, plain and simple: no other linguist since even approaches such an achievement. So I’d say that qualifies him as “world’s greatest linguist” (world’s best coffee! world’s greatest dad!), for whatever that’s worth. And I’m not even a Chomskyan linguist.
That said, even with the exciting developments coming out of collaborations between the fields of psychology, cognitive science, communicative disorders, neurology, and linguistics, nary a single theoretical model of linguistic grammar proposed today omits reference to some level of Chomskyan-inspired linguistics, be it the presupposition of universal grammar (still very much unfalsified), or the existence of a critical period. The support for the latter, by the way, is never seriously proposed as rendering impossible the learning of a second language after the critical period has passed–I suspect you’re taking Chomsky’s personal anecdote too seriously, since there’s ample evidence that later language learning is indeed more difficult (I think all of us can verify this through personal experience).
Yes, you’re right about Berkeley: not very Chomskyan at all (I would hardly label Lakoff a Chomskyan), but Berkeley linguistics have (at least in the past 20 years or so) generally marched to the beat of their own quirky drummers (which is no slight: they do great work).
In sum, I’d agree with you that Chomsky is neither be-all nor end-all in the field, but who the hell is? Again, this coming from a linguist who’s decidedly un-Chomskyan (color me connectionist, if anything). I recognize that his work, analogous to Kant’s awakening from his dogmatic slumber in slamming the empricists, roused modern linguistics out of its stagnancy in superfical descriptivism and behaviorism. Perhaps it would have been someone else eventually, but Chomsky’s transformational grammar made it happen not a moment too soon.
May 22nd, 2006 at 2:47 am
“all are equal, blah blah blah†is not PC, it is self-evident human relations
Yeah, that’s why there are as many women top physiscists. Right. It’s self-evident.
NOT.
You’re just lying…
Followed by incomprehensible; what attitude isn’t helpful? Mine, trying to be honest and support job creation? Yours, lying about equality and, um, snarking a lot?
People who really care about poverty are trying to help poor people get jobs.
Like 30 really poor $1/hr jobs instead of 1 overpaid $20/hr job — where clearly the guy losing his overpaid job is worse off if he has to take a $15/hr job; but the WORLD is better off if 30 people are better off. Whether Chinese or Roma or Kenyans or Mexicans (in the US or Mexico).
The anti-immigrant Dem position is exactly this: stop the really really poor Mexicans from coming to the US, so that the relatively poor (but on world scale absolutely rich) US workers can make more … than they deserve. Based on using gov’t force to stop peaceful, honest peaceful from offering to work for an agreeable price. Gov’t using violence to stop peaceful social advancement of the very poor.
Such a moral disgrace — yet every rich country does it. Germany and Austria aren’t yet even willing to let Slovaks work in their rich economies in unlimited numbers, despite being in an “EU”, for the same reasons. They certainly do NOT want Slovak Roma!
And remember, the “market” doesn’t really exist, only real people who make decisions exist. Decisions made in an environemnt which states: who uses what force against who under what circumstances. Decisions of peaceful, honest agreement — or decisions based on non-peaceful force.
The “free market” means minimum force (define property rights & protect them, enforce honest contracts). Everything else is less peaceful. Nothing with less force keeps working.
Oh, the use of big gov’t to “help the poor” is also so historically stupid — the rich and powerful will ALWAYS take control of any gov’t big enough to challenge them, and use the gov’t to help themselves. The one Dem argument against Bush that has merit is that Bush is now helping the US rich too much — by letting the pork bills the Reps and Dems push in Congress go thru.
It’s not the tax breaks which are problem, it’s the gov’t pork to friends of the electeds (Rep and Dem).
May 22nd, 2006 at 8:26 am
Tom Grey, my humble observation is that you’re very talented at talking (and talking, and talking), but not so good at responding to challenges. It’s called dialogue for a reason. On the other hand, you make my role easier in that all I need to do is re-state my point verbatim, through the efficient act of cut-and-paste:
“The only reason illegal immigrants are earning $5/hour is because A) they are illlegal, and B) they can sent money back to their home countries, where it is worth significantly more (otherwise they wouldn’t work for that pay).”
Feel free to repeat what you just said (again). I, however, believe one repetition is more than sufficient, and will provide further comments only when you actually attempt to move the dialogue forward.
May 22nd, 2006 at 9:58 am
MR. MODERATOR, STILL NO WORD ON WHY IS IT I WAS SINGLED OUT AND BECAME THE ONE AND ONLY PERSON IN YOUR BLOG WORLD IN NEED OF MODERATION.
AND WOODY, WHERE DID YOU GO YOU LYING PIECE OF SHEET?
May 22nd, 2006 at 1:14 pm
ok, i give up. sayonora, adios
June 22nd, 2006 at 6:27 pm
pat, you’re a real piece of shit. you are a moron with failed logic and have been brainwashed by ayn rand.
come to la and i’ll bury you fuckface.
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