The Republican Party Found its Best Candidate for the Presidential Election of 2008.

.

May 4, 2007

SouthAmerica: After watching part of the Republican Party presidential debate last night I realized that finally the Republican Party found their best candidate for them to nominate during the primaries as the representative of the Republican Party in the presidential election of 2008.

There is only one minor problem for the Republicans to solve in the meantime since Ronald Reagan has been dead since June 5, 2004. But after 8 years of a disastrous George W. Bush administration even electing a dead person will be an improvement for the Republican Party.

You know your political party is in trouble when your best candidate has been dead for almost 3 years and he is the only thing that your party talks about.

I am glad that the Republican Party finally found their best candidate for the presidential election of 2008 – Ronald Wilson Reagan.


.

 

.

May 5, 2007

SouthAmerica: Regarding their best presidential candidate for 2008 - Ronald Reagan - the Republican Party has a bigger problem than the fact that Ronald Reagan has been dead for almost 3 years – Ronald Reagan has served as US president for 2 terms in the 1980’s and the US Constitution does not allow him to serve a third term - even if he continues being dead.


.

 

And electing any of the Democritical wannabes would be a complete meltdown for all of America.

Even for the whole World...

 

SA before you worry about Republicans I strongly recommend to grab "Foreign Policy" mag and read THE RETURN OF AN IDIOT article.

 

The Return of the Idiot
By Alvaro Vargas Llosa, FP, May/June 2007

Throughout the 20th century, Latin America’s populist leaders waved Marxist banners, railed against foreign imperialists, and promised to deliver their people from poverty. One after another, their ideologically driven policies proved to be sluggish and shortsighted. Their failures led to a temporary retreat of the strongman. But now, a new generation of self-styled revolutionaries is trying to revive the misguided methods of their predecessors.

Ten years ago, Colombian writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner, and I wrote Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, a book criticizing opinion and political leaders who clung to ill-conceived political myths despite evidence to the contrary. The “Idiot” species, we suggested, bore responsibility for Latin America’s underdevelopment. Its beliefs—revolution, economic nationalism, hatred of the United States, faith in the government as an agent of social justice, a passion for strongman rule over the rule of law—derived, in our opinion, from an inferiority complex. In the late 1990s, it seemed as if the Idiot were finally retreating. But the retreat was short lived. Today, the species is back in force in the form of populist heads of state who are reenacting the failed policies of the past, opinion leaders from around the world who are lending new credence to them, and supporters who are giving new life to ideas that seemed extinct.
Because of the inexorable passing of time, today’s young Latin American Idiots prefer Shakira’s pop ballads to Pérez Prado’s mambos and no longer sing leftist anthems like “The Internationale” or “Until Always Comandante.” But they are still descendants of rural migrants, middle class, and deeply resentful of the frivolous lives of the wealthy displayed in the glossy magazines they discreetly leaf through on street corners. State-run universities provide them with a class-based view of society that argues that wealth is something that needs to be retaken from those who have stolen it. For these young Idiots, Latin America’s condition is the result of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, followed by U.S. imperialism. These basic beliefs provide a safety valve for their grievances against a society that offers scant opportunity for social mobility. Freud might say they have deficient egos that are unable to mediate between their instincts and their idea of morality. Instead, they suppress the notion that predation and vindictiveness are wrong and rationalize their aggressiveness with elementary notions of Marxism.

Latin American Idiots have traditionally identified themselves with caudillos, those larger-than-life authoritarian figures who have dominated the region’s politics, ranting against foreign influence and republican institutions. Two leaders in particular inspire today’s Idiot: President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Evo Morales of Bolivia. Chávez is seen as the perfect successor to Cuba’s Fidel Castro (whom the Idiot also admires): He came to power through the ballot box, which exonerates him from the need to justify armed struggle, and he has abundant oil, which means he can put his money where his mouth is when it comes to championing social causes. The Idiot also credits Chávez with the most progressive policy of all—putting the military, that paradigm of oligarchic rule, to work on social programs.

For his part, Bolivia’s Evo Morales has indigenista appeal. In the eyes of the Idiot, the former coca farmer is the reincarnation of Túpac Katari, an 18th-century Aymara rebel who, before his execution by Spanish colonial authorities, vowed, “I shall return and I shall be millions.” They believe Morales when he professes to speak for the indigenous masses, from southern Mexico to the Andes, who seek redress of the exploitation inflicted on them by 300 years of colonial rule and 200 more of oligarchic republican rule.

The Idiot’s worldview, in turn, finds an echo among distinguished intellectuals in Europe and the United States. These pontificators assuage their troubled consciences by espousing exotic causes in developing nations. Their opinions attract fans among First-World youngsters for whom globalization phobia provides the perfect opportunity to find spiritual satisfaction in the populist jeremiad of the Latin American Idiot against the wicked West.

There’s nothing original about First-World intellectuals’ projecting their utopias onto Latin America. Christopher Columbus stumbled on the shores of the Americas at a time when Renaissance utopian ideas were in vogue; from the very beginning, conquistadors described the lands as nothing short of paradisiacal. The myth of the Good Savage—the idea that the natives of the New World embodied a pristine goodness untarnished by the evils of civilization—impregnated the European mind. The tendency to use the Americas as an escape valve for frustration with the insufferable comfort and cornucopia of Western civilization continued for centuries. By the 1960s and 70s, when Latin America was riddled with Marxist terrorist organizations, these violent groups enjoyed massive support in Europe and the United States among people who never would have accepted Castro-style totalitarian rule at home.

The current revival of the Latin American Idiot has precipitated the return of his counterparts: the patronizing American and European Idiots. Once again, important academics and writers are projecting their idealism, guilty consciences, or grievances against their own societies onto the Latin American scene, lending their names to nefarious populist causes. Nobel Prizewinners, including British playwright Harold Pinter, Portuguese novelist José Saramago, and American economist Joseph Stiglitz; American linguists such as Noam Chomsky and sociologists like James Petras; European journalists like Ignacio Ramonet and some foreign correspondents for outlets such as Le Nouvel Observateur in France, Die Zeit in Germany, and the Washington Post in the United States, are once again propagating absurdities that shape the opinions of millions of readers and sanctify the Latin American Idiot. This intellectual lapse would be quite innocuous if it didn’t have consequences. But, to the extent that it legitimizes the type of government that is actually at the heart of Latin America’s political and economic underdevelopment, it constitutes a form of intellectual treason...
[3 additional pages to article]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3805

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3829

Want to Know More?
In Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot (Lanham: Madison Books, 2000), Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Alvaro Vargas Llosa describe the original misguided populists of Latin America. Vargas Llosa is also the author of Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

The seminal text on how intellectuals in Europe and the United States view Latin America is Carlos Rangel’s The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). Economist Javier Santiso argues that pragmatism outweighs ideology in the region today in his book Latin America’s Political Economy of the Possible: Beyond Good Revolutionaries and Free-Marketeers (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006).

FOREIGN POLICY’s recent coverage of Latin America includes a debate between Ignacio Ramonet and Carlos Alberto Montaner in “Was Fidel Good for Cuba?” (January/February 2007) and “Hugo Boss” (January/February 2006), by Javier Corrales, who takes a look at how Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez amassed power under the guise of democracy.

 

Thank you Biggerfish.

 

I think the article missed an important point.

The united states should have worked harder to keep our markets receptive to some of the goods made in Latin America. Instead of helping them Clinton and Gore let china china currency fix there way into wiping out the industrial infrastucture in Latin America was building.


I find it ironic that Latin America seems to like China and Clinton. If I were Venezuela the last country in the world I would work out oil accords with is China. Sure help them beat your domestic industries into the ground with a steady supply of your oil. good thinking.

 

.

May 6, 2007

SouthAmerica: Reply to Cesco

If you notice the article that you mentioned it is about the other countries of South America and about Cuba.

The article does not apply to Brazil – and all you have to do it is check what has been happening to the Brazilian economy in the last few years. The results speak for itself.

Anyway the future of the Brazilian economy is connected to China and not to the United States.

I wish you were at the “Sustainable Development Forum 2007” at the Hilton Hotel last Monday, April 30, 2007. The Forum was opened with a speech by former Brazilian president Jose Sarney – and he blasted the United States among other things because of its dependence on imported oil. Not only imported oil – imported oil from the most unstable places around the world such as the Middle East, Nigeria, Venezuela, Angola, and so on…It seems that the United States did not learn its lesson in the mid-1970’s when we had that major oil crisis. It is pathetic that the United States it is more dependent of imported foreign oil in 2007 than the United States was in the mid-1970’s.

I also could mention that the Brazilian government has been paying almost all its international debt – Brazil has paid all its debt to the IMF, and also to the Club of Paris. And the Brazilian Central Bank has over $ 120 billion dollars in foreign currency reserves as of April 2007. Basically Brazil can pay every single dime of Brazilian government outstanding foreign debt right now.

Total Brazilian government debt is the lowest that it has been for decades at 41 % of GDP. Besides Brazil has a much younger population than the United States and it will not have to come up in the coming years with trillions of US dollars to take care of the old folks – related to pensions and healthcare.

Brazil as a country it has a very clean balance sheet and looking better by the day. On the other hand we have the United States with $ 10 trillion dollars of current outstanding debt plus another estimated from $ 50 to $ 70 trillion dollars in liabilities coming due related to the costs of taking care of the baby boom generation.

By the way, the United States economy it will not be able to generate the cash flow necessary to pay all its bills. Besides Americans have better things to do with its borrowed money from China such as wage wars that have been lost and they have to keep these fiasco going as long as the American people let the people in Washington get away with this nonsense. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has cost the United States over $ 1 trillion dollars and this is only the down payment on this money pit.

For all practical purposes the United States government is insolvent and bankrupted.

When South American countries look into the future there is only one option - which it is China. Who on his right mind would look into the future and say let’s associate ourselves as close as possible to this country that is going broke and bankrupted such as the United States?

People are not stupid, and they understand what is going on. Only fools believe that the United States will continue borrowing every dime from the rest of the world’s savings for much longer. Unless you don’t mind losing your hard earned money and incur large currency loses on your US dollar investments.

By the way, when you mentioned a book about “Idiots” the first name that came to mind was the name of George W. Bush. I don’t think that there’s a bigger “Idiot” in the Americas than George W. Bush - and his administration is turning the United States into a "Banana Republic".



.