Chavez once again porves he's a tin pot dictator in the making.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Flubber
and we once thought man would never fly and we did etc etc

Well, one is a comparison of social systems and how people organize themselves. The other was a technical problem. People have an amazing capacity for organizing societies. Some work. Some don't. Some work well. Some not so much.

On the one hand we can look at the communist states as complete failures. They never reached the level of development of advanced capitalist society, with the exception of the one that started out as an advanced capitalist society (East Germany). Their lack of political freedoms was appalling, and in some cases, the death toll was among the most horrible things in all human history. That's definitely not looking good.

On the other hand, all but one of these countries was war ravaged by the most devastating war in human history. They started out from nothing and pulled themselves up from their boot straps, going from agrarian societies still using the wooden plow to societies capable of putting satellites in orbit, ending famine, abolishing illiteracy in a generation, of fighting off invasions by advanced capitalist states, etc. With the exception of Germany, they were all colonial or neo-colonial states (even Russia, which had an empire, was someone else's *****). None of them were societies with an real democratic experience.

We compare the socialist states with advanced capitalism, but they weren't advanced societies to being with. They should be compared like with like, other colonies to each other, other backwards nations to one another.

Even today, tens of millions of people in the former colonial world die of starvation, from easily cured diseases, from preventable disease. They are illiterate, lack potable water, decent health care, electricity, etc. By 1996, one half the people on planet Earth hadn't even made their first phone call yet. The bottom two billion people on Earth, 1/3rd of humanity, have a combined income matched by the top 200 billionaires. Does that not strike you as among the grossest of obscenities? (Which isn't to say individual capitalists are evil people. Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet are incredibly generous people.)

Capitalist welfare states can't go far enough to ameliorate the effects of capitalism. States that try generally suffer from higher rates of unemployment and lower growth. This causes its own unrest. There's always a tug of war between liberals and conservatives on how much the rest of society will kick in, leaving the beneficiaries in an uncertain state. Your country has a better health care system than ours, and yet many of your people hate it because it can't deliver to everyone on demand.

. . .

okay, I'm starting to ramble and I'm in an emotionally fragile state at the moment for reasons completely unconnected with Poly, so I'm just going to end this abruptly.

[Saras]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
The bottom two billion people on Earth, 1/3rd of humanity, have a combined income matched by the top 200 billionaires. Does that not strike you as among the grossest of obscenities?

What's obscene is that that two billion poorest people do almost nothing to help themselves. Obscene are agricultural policies of the west (basically the poor of the world are hostages of a small but very vocal and influential minority of the West, the anti-free market agricultural interests. Obscene are useless tribal wars. Obscene are religious fanatics choking creativity, liberty and contraception.

Making a lot of money legally is not obscene.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


You do realize the Bolsheviks had a gun to their head when they signed Brest-Litovsk? If the SRs wanted to fight on they weren't living in reality. The Russian army was non-existent.

Yes, the whole thing was a complete mess.

They could have fought a partisan war, presumably. In any case, what right did the Bolsheviks have to make that decision? Again, they were a minority in the Const Assembly. Their only claim to democratic legitimacy was based on the assertion that most voters for the PSR were actually supporters of the Left SR's.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

Originally posted by Flubber
Can you point to one instance where a communist revolution has been what you would deem as successful.

Nope, but the first few hundred years of capitalist revolutions weren't so hot either. The Americans were the first ones to get it right, only 250 years after the Protestant Revolts in Germany.

We'll get it right one of these times. We're getting closer and closer. Sandinista Nicaragua is hardly an example of mass murder and political repression.

Had Sandinista Nicaragua been such an example, it would have been obliterated in a few days by the US military. Reagan would have been delighted to have the excuse to invade. And the Sandinistas were smart enough to know that.

Anyway there does seem to be learning going on. Mr. Ortega seems to accept free trade and debt repayment, AFAIK. Hes even a CAFTA supporter. Of course hes also working with some of the more corrupt right wingers, so maybe its not only seeing the reformist light.

[lord of the mark]

I guess the problem im having is that Guev sees Chavez as basically in the line from Lenin to Castro to Ortega, and that he is refining socialist revolution. Its just as easy to see him in the line of Latin American Presidential dictatorship populism, someone using class discontent to achieve personal goals. Thats the real context for the abolition of term limits. Term limits are very important in the Lat Am context, where they exist to prevent the Presidency for life, easily achieved without proclamation by manipulation of elections, quiet imprisonment of opponents, etc.

[chequita guevara]

Actually, I don't know how to see Chavez yet. I'm hoping for one and not the other, but I won't be surprised if he's just another caudillo. Still, I want to give the situation a chance before I copy Oerdin's jerking knee and proclaim Chavez the anti-Christ.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
Had Sandinista Nicaragua been such an example, it would have been obliterated in a few days by the US military. Reagan would have been delighted to have the excuse to invade. And the Sandinistas were smart enough to know that.

It wasn't that they were smart enough to know that. It was that it wasn't in their character; that wasn't the kind of revolution they were making.

As for what Reagan. would or wouldn't do about genocidal commies, he didn't seem to have any qualms funding the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese drove them from power. I won't bother with all the genocidal right-wingers he supported. Though I suspect that if the Sandanistas had provided him with an excuse, he would certainly have invaded.

[Dinner]

Che, remember the debate we were having about Venezuela's oil output? Pick up the latest copy of the Economist because they quote OPEC as saying Venezuela's daily output is just 2.5 mbpd not the claimed 3.4 mbpd. The also point out that Chavez gives away 200,000 per day at below market rates to buy allies and gives away free of charge an additional 100,000 bpd. Chavez basically needs to make all of his money selling just 2.2 mbpd which is a whopping 1.2 million bpd less then what he's claiming he makes.

Of course even with high oil prices Chavez doesn't have the money to do everything he says he'll do so one of the first things he did with his power of decree was place the entire central bank under his personal directive and then started to spend and give away the national reserve. That's an extra $30 billion but once it is gone then it is gone and the country is broke.

[Dinner]

http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8633167

Venezuela
Glimpsing the bottom of the barrel

Feb 1st 2007 | CARACAS
From The Economist print edition
Lower oil prices threaten Hugo Chávez's expensive revolution. But he is not about to run out of cash soon

HE LOOKS unstoppable. Since his sweeping victory in an election in December, Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez, has stepped on the revolutionary accelerator. Parliament this week gave him the power to legislate by decree for 18 months. A committee of his supporters is drafting a constitutional reform to turn Venezuela into an avowedly socialist country, and to allow the president to stand for re-election indefinitely. “Nothing can stop the revolution!” proclaim full-page advertisements in the newspapers, adorned with the newly-minted red star of Mr Chávez's “Bolivarian socialism”. Nothing, that is, except perhaps a decline in the price of oil, on which the government depends for nearly half its revenue.

It has been Mr Chávez's extraordinary good fortune that the price of oil increased more than sixfold since he took office in 1999 to its peak last year. That has allowed him to ramp up public spending. With private investors scared off by controls and Mr Chávez's socialist talk, it is this spending binge that helped the economy recover after an opposition-led two-month general strike in 2002-03 and has since fuelled rapid economic growth (see chart).

So a lower oil price threatens economic growth, and with it Mr Chávez's popularity. Already, official projections and independent forecasts suggest the rate of growth may halve this year (but to a still-healthy 5%). Venezuelan crude, much of which is heavy and sulphurous, sells for about $10 less than lighter benchmark crudes such as Brent and West Texas Intermediate. Last year the average price for the Venezuelan “basket” of crudes was $56 a barrel. Last month, that figure was about $46. Any further fall might start to constrain Mr Chávez's ability to spend freely at home and abroad.

The 2007 budget is conservatively based on an average price for the Venezuelan basket of $29. But it is also based on average oil production of around 3.4m barrels a day (b/d). Neither of these figures bears much relation to reality and nor does the budget itself. Independent analysts, including OPEC and the International Energy Agency, believe the true production figure to be around 2.5m b/d. To complicate matters further, some of the oil is sold at a discount as part of Mr Chávez's strategy to win influence abroad, and 100,000 b/d is more or less donated to Cuba.

In contrast, total government spending last year was a third higher than originally budgeted. That pattern is likely to be repeated this year. “Quasi-fiscal” or off-budget spending, involving the diversion of oil revenues and the central bank's reserves into funds directly controlled by the president, is large and increasing.

Mr Chávez has a large piggy-bank he can draw on. The forthcoming constitutional reform is likely to strip the central bank of its last vestiges of autonomy. Between them, the bank's reserves and the resources of the National Development Fund total around $50 billion—a similar amount to this year's official budget.

So even if oil prices remain below their 2006 levels, nobody expects the bottom to fall out of the economy this year. But Mr Chávez needs not just to maintain public spending but to increase it if he is to satisfy the popular expectations he has whipped up at home, and to fulfil the pledges of aid he has made to friends abroad. In the past few weeks alone, he has promised to build 200,000 houses in Nicaragua and loan $1 billion to Ecuador, for example.

The economy is showing some signs of strain. The inflation rate, at 17% last year, was the highest in Latin America—even though Venezuela's currency is overvalued. Despite the oil bonanza, the government has run a fiscal deficit in most of Mr Chávez's time in power: this year that deficit may reach 3% of GDP.

The president seems to be aware of the problems. He has urged OPEC to cut oil output further, to set a floor for benchmark prices of $50. On January 21st he announced his intention to increase petrol prices for the first time since he came to power. Petrol costs less than 5 cents a litre in Venezuela at the official exchange rate, but raising the price is politically sensitive. The government also plans tax increases. Officials insist that plans to nationalise the telecommunications and electricity industries, announced last month, will not trigger a fall in tax revenues, though opponents doubt that.

The oil price has crept back up over the past fortnight after a sharp fall. It may well rise further. Even if it does not, few expect the benchmark price to fall to its levels of 2003, let alone 1999. But if prices stay at their levels of the past month, some economists believe that Venezuela's economy will struggle. “There's a sustainability problem,” says Luis Zambrano, an economist at the Catholic University in Caracas. “More and more spending is needed to produce a [percentage] point of economic growth.” What will lubricate the revolution when the oil bonanza ends?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Che, remember the debate we were having about Venezuela's oil output? Pick up the latest copy of the Economist because they quote OPEC as saying Venezuela's daily output is just 2.5 mbpd not the claimed 3.4 mbpd. The also point out that Chavez gives away 200,000 per day at below market rates to buy allies and gives away free of charge an additional 100,000 bpd. Chavez basically needs to make all of his money selling just 2.2 mbpd which is a whopping 1.2 million bpd less then what he's claiming he makes.

Of course even with high oil prices Chavez doesn't have the money to do everything he says he'll do so one of the first things he did with his power of decree was place the entire central bank under his personal directive and then started to spend and give away the national reserve. That's an extra $30 billion but once it is gone then it is gone and the country is broke.

Chavez has given the poor a good portion of the oil revenue. If the price of oil drops he wont be able to do that as much. It's no big deal. Get over it Oerdin.

[Dinner]

I'm not concerned about if he gives to the poor, in fact I rather like that. What I am concerned about is his dictatorial tendencies, Che's refusal to admit them, and that Che called me a liar because I said Venezuela only produced 2.5 mbpd. The facts are in and the amount is 2.5 mbpd not the 3.4 mbpd that Chavez is claiming. I want Che to admit he was wrong and say he's sorry.

[pchang]

I also

want the Lakers to win the NBA championship this year.

[Caligastia]

I would like a 500lbs brewkettle.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Oerdin
I'm not concerned about if he gives to the poor, in fact I rather like that. What I am concerned about is his dictatorial tendencies,

He's only taken power from the people who were keeping the poor from getting their share.

[Dinner]