Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

Archives for February 2009

February 2, 2009 By Fausta

The Groundhog Day Carnival of Latin America & the Caribbean

Welcome to the Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean. If you would like your post included in next Monday’s Carnival, please email me: faustaw2 “at” gmail “dot” com.

The big news of the week is the alarming increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the region, including Venezuela where the country’s oldest synagogue was vandalized last Friday. Jews in Venezuela, who have for over two hundred years enjoyed tolerance and peace, over the past few weeks have suddenly found themselves in fear of attack and discrimination. Andres Oppenheimer, writing at Miami Herald points to other incidents in Argentina and Brazil. Meanwhile, Telesur broadcasts

a story entitled ”Gaza’s Ruins,” which accuses Israel ”and the world’s Jews” of failing to denounce alleged atrocities by Israeli troops and ”Jewish planes” in Gaza

and Fidel Castro (or his amanuensis) writes in Granma, the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party that Obama supports Israeli ‘genocide’.

I’ll be talking about this disturbing trend in today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern. Chat’s open at 10:45AM and the call-in number is 646 652-2639.

UPDATE
BBC video

LATIN AMERICA & CARIBBEAN
The Caribbean economies
Lonely beaches: A fall in tourism, and other body blows

Aiming To Shoot Across America’s Bow

Populism: The Illusion that Won’t Go Away

Rainforest Resurgence, and New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests

Commentary: Is there disunity in CARICOM?

Don’t miss also Market Memorandum‘s news roundup.

ARGENTINA
Fuga de capitales se triplico en el 2008

Women keep disappearing

Argentina Stalling Buenos Aires Bond Plan, Mayor Says

BOLIVIA
DEA presence ends in Bolivia
The last of the U.S. drug agents leaves on President Evo Morales’ orders. The U.S. and Bolivia are in a bitter dispute over the South American country’s anti-drug efforts.

Facebook will let anybody in these days

Bolivian Christian Group’s Ad Against New Constitution

BRAZIL
Dig like Brazil

Lula Raises Brazil’s Minimum Wage 12% as of February

COLOMBIA
Bomb goes off in Bogotá, FARC suspected

Colombia FARC Frees Four Hostages to Opposition Senator Cordoba, three policemen and a member of the Colombian army; The Red Cross verified that the hostages were released; however, Colombia FARC Have Killed Many of Their Captives, Caracol Says

As many as 300 captives taken by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia are dead, Caracol Television reported.

The FARC, as the drug funded group is known, were thought to hold as many as 700 Colombians kidnapped for ransom, the TV channel said. Herbin Hoyos, founder and host of “Voices of Kidnapping,” a radio program that relays messages from family members to rebel hostages, said in an interview with Caracol he has the names of many of the victims and their burial sites.

The details were provided to Hoyos by demobilized members of the FARC.

During his state visit to Germany after his trip to Davos, Uribe insists he’s not asking to stay in power in perpetuity, but that he wants his long-term policies to take hold (article in Spanish).

CUBA
Castro Betrayed Che With Moscow’s Help, Says Former Guerrilla

The finer points of credit

The star that illuminates and goes missing*

Houston we have no problem

Manifestación en Barcelona

Orestes Paino Viera, Cuban Political Prisoner of the Week, 2/1/09

Raúl Castro se reunió con Vladímir Putin en la sede del Gobierno ruso

GUYANA
British sunken ship discovered off Guyana

Hundreds of Guyanese waiting to be deported from Canada

MEXICO
Calderon Says Mexico May Need More Measures to Spark Economy

Killing the lawyers of Juarez

NICARAGUA
Nicaragua Strongmen’s Pact Under Strain

PUERTO RICO
1st Puerto Rican astronaut, Ralph Acaba, carries pride in heritage

Puerto Rico’s Democratic Party presents measure for tax relief

PERU
Mining in Peru
If a city’s the pits, Then move the city

VENEZUELA
Chávez Grabs Again for Life Tenure
Intimidation is on the rise as a referendum approaches.

Synagogue in Venezuela Vandalized in Break-In Israel acusa a Chavez del ataque a sinagoga

Barbarians at the gate: the Caracas Synagogue is profaned

“The Threat closer to Home”: a book on Hugo Chavez’s fake revolution

A long term view of monetary liquidity and international reserves in Venezuela

Former PDVSA President Giusti Denies Report of Madoff Losses

PDVSA maula

Here, There and Everywhere: Venezuela Trip Notes from Cartagena, Colombia
Here, there and everywhere

Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Ortega, Honduras’s Manuel Zelaya, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, plus Cuba’s vicepresident, Carlos Lage asisten a la cumbre extraordinaria del ALBA.

AMERICAN POLITICS
What Obama Can(Not) Do for Latin America

The Latino Republican Forum

The week’s posts and podcasts
Meanwhile at at the World Social Forum in Brazil: 15 Minutes on Latin America
Maradona does Caracas
Brave Benicio ran away. Bravely ran away, away.
Today at 11AM Eastern: Iran’s “Subversive” Role in Latin America
Wonder why no countries like to do business in Cuba?
The Battisti asylum in Brazil: 15 Minutes on Latin America

At Real Clear World:
Venezuela: More Anti-Semitism
Gates: Iran’s “Subversive” Role in Latin America

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Filed Under: Alvaro Uribe, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Caribbean, Carnival of Latin America, Colombia, Cuba, FARC, Fausta's blog, Guyana, Latin America, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Venezuela

February 2, 2009 By Fausta

How Government Prolonged the Depression

The Carnival of Latin America & the Caribbean will be up later this morning, but don’t miss this at the Wall Street Journal: It is completely pertinent now that we’re about to have the catastrophic “stimulus bill, of which Less Than 25 Percent is Actually Stimulus

How Government Prolonged the Depression
Policies that decreased competition in product and labor markets were especially destructive.

So what stopped a blockbuster recovery from ever starting? The New Deal. Some New Deal policies certainly benefited the economy by establishing a basic social safety net through Social Security and unemployment benefits, and by stabilizing the financial system through deposit insurance and the Securities Exchange Commission. But others violated the most basic economic principles by suppressing competition, and setting prices and wages in many sectors well above their normal levels. All told, these antimarket policies choked off powerful recovery forces that would have plausibly returned the economy back to trend by the mid-1930s.

The most damaging policies were those at the heart of the recovery plan, including The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which tossed aside the nation’s antitrust acts and permitted industries to collusively raise prices provided that they shared their newfound monopoly rents with workers by substantially raising wages well above underlying productivity growth. The NIRA covered over 500 industries, ranging from autos and steel, to ladies hosiery and poultry production. Each industry created a code of “fair competition” which spelled out what producers could and could not do, and which were designed to eliminate “excessive competition” that FDR believed to be the source of the Depression.

These codes distorted the economy by artificially raising wages and prices, restricting output, and reducing productive capacity by placing quotas on industry investment in new plants and equipment. Following government approval of each industry code, industry prices and wages increased substantially, while prices and wages in sectors that weren’t covered by the NIRA, such as agriculture, did not. We have calculated that manufacturing wages were as much as 25% above the level that would have prevailed without the New Deal. And while the artificially high wages created by the NIRA benefited the few that were fortunate to have a job in those industries, they significantly depressed production and employment, as the growth in wage costs far exceeded productivity growth.

These policies continued even after the NIRA was declared unconstitutional in 1935. There was no antitrust activity after the NIRA, despite overwhelming FTC evidence of price-fixing and production limits in many industries, and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave unions substantial collective-bargaining power. While not permitted under federal law, the sit-down strike, in which workers were occupied factories and shut down production, was tolerated by governors in a number of states and was used with great success against major employers, including General Motors in 1937.

The downturn of 1937-38 was preceded by large wage hikes that pushed wages well above their NIRA levels, following the Supreme Court’s 1937 decision that upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act. These wage hikes led to further job loss, particularly in manufacturing. The “recession in a depression” thus was not the result of a reversal of New Deal policies, as argued by some, but rather a deepening of New Deal polices that raised wages even further above their competitive levels, and which further prevented the normal forces of supply and demand from restoring full employment. Our research indicates that New Deal labor and industrial policies prolonged the Depression by seven years.

By the late 1930s, New Deal policies did begin to reverse, which coincided with the beginning of the recovery. In a 1938 speech, FDR acknowledged that the American economy had become a “concealed cartel system like Europe,” which led the Justice Department to reinitiate antitrust prosecution. And union bargaining power was significantly reduced, first by the Supreme Court’s ruling that the sit-down strike was illegal, and further reduced during World War II by the National War Labor Board (NWLB), in which large union wage settlements were limited by the NWLB to cost-of-living increases. The wartime economic boom reflected not only the enormous resource drain of military spending, but also the erosion of New Deal labor and industrial policies.

Go read the whole article.

James Pethokoukis links to Robert Brusca

The CBO has scored the HOUSE plan and has found that of the House plan’s $819 bln of spending and tax cuts only 21% will have impact in 2009 and by the end of 2010 only 64% of the plan will have had its impact on the deficit.

“Stimulus”? Not for the economy.

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Filed Under: business, Democrats, economics, economy Tagged With: bailout, Fausta's blog, New Deal

February 2, 2009 By Fausta

Martha’s shoes

Via Larwyn,

marthashoes

Fresh Look at Martha Washington: Less First Frump, More Foxy Lady

Contrary to popular opinion, even among some historians who should know better, Martha was not fat when she married George. Yes, she liked to read the Bible, but she devoured gothic romance novels, too. She capably ran the five plantations left to her when her first husband died, bargaining with London merchants for the best tobacco prices. And unknown to most, while George was courting her she had another suitor, a Virginia planter with much greater wealth and stature. In a little-known letter, Charles Carter wrote to his brother about what a beauty she was and how he hoped to “arouse a flame in her breast.”

Prairie Pundit,

See the description of those shoes Fausta. Hubba hubba. Sound like some that Sarah Palin would wear. I hope she was pretty, and that Washington was not marrying her for her money. I would hate to think that he was the first John Kerry.

I’ve always felt that George & Martha deeply loved each other.

And those are great shoes!

UPDATE
Martha was beautiful!

Gorgeous!

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Filed Under: fashion, marriage, shoes Tagged With: Fausta's blog, George Washington, Martha Washington

February 1, 2009 By Fausta

The Superbowl ad NBC won’t show

NBC Rejects Pro-Life Super Bowl Ad Educating Viewers on Obama and Abortion

Special thanks to Ada.

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Filed Under: abortion Tagged With: Fausta's blog, NBC, Superbowl

February 1, 2009 By Fausta

STDs and the “stimulus” package

Mark Steyn: Stimulated right into being another Europe
Plan also could trigger protectionist backlash, just like during the Depression.

The more interviews Speaker Pelosi gives explaining how vital the STD industry is to restarting the U.S. economy, the more I find myself hearing “syphilis” every time she says “stimulus.” In late September, America was showing the first signs of “primary stimulus” – a few billion lesions popping up on the rarely glimpsed naughty bits of the economy: the subprime mortgage racket, the leverage kings. Now, the condition has metastasized in a mere four months into the advanced stages of “tertiary stimulus,” with trillions of hideous, ever more inflamed pustules sprouting in every nook and cranny as the central nervous system of the body politic crumbles into total insanity – until it seems entirely normal for the second in line of presidential succession to be on TV gibbering away about how vital the federalization of condom distribution is to economic recovery.

The rules in this new “post-partisan” era are pretty simple: If the Democratic Party wants it, it’s “stimulus.” If the Republican Party opposes it, it’s “politics” – as in headlines like this: “Obama Urges GOP To Keep Politics To A Minimum On Stimulus.”

Particularly when blaming Rush Limbaugh, thus creating a distraction instead of debating the merits of the “stimulus”.

Which “stimulus” will mean protectionism:

And they’ve managed to goad the rest of the world into ending the Obama honeymoon in nothing flat. Headline from the London Daily Telegraph:

“U.S.-EU Trade War Looms As Barack Obama Bill Urges ‘Buy American.'”

That would be the provision in the Senate bill prohibiting any foreign-made goods from being used in “stimulus” projects. So, if you own a rubber plantation in Malaysia, and you’re hoping for a piece of Nancy Pelosi’s condom action, forget it. The EU Trade Commissioner is outraged at the swaggering cowboy Obama shooting from the hip and unilaterally banning European goods from American soil. But so are American companies such as General Electric. Bill Lane, an executive honcho with Caterpillar (the 10th-biggest U.S. investor in the United Kingdom), says, “We are students of history. A major reason a very deep recession turned into the Great Depression was the fact that countries turned inward.” Ah, yes. The Buy American Act of 1933. How’d that work out?

This, by the way, is particularly poor timing, as our allies most need free trade to be able to get through the world economic downturn – Colombia comes to mind.

Undoubtedly, the Dems in the Senate will pass this disastrous and insidious piece of legislature which they most likely haven’t read in its entirety. Let’s hope all the Senate Republicans grow a pair and vote against it.

The Dems wrote this “stimulus”, Obama’s endorsing it, they own it: let them alone approve it.

Bonus reading
The Obama Democrats: by the numbers

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Filed Under: Barack Obama, business, Democrats, economics, economy, Nancy Pelosi, politics, Republicans Tagged With: bailout, Fausta's blog

February 1, 2009 By Fausta

Venezuela: More Anti-Semitism

My post, Venezuela: More Anti-Semitism is up at Real Clear World. Please read it, and leave a comment.

And for Sunday carnival, Shiny happy dhimmi – #11 is up!

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Filed Under: anti-Semitism, Latin America, Venezuela Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Real Clear World Blog

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