Seeing the forest through the trees

Other than the Kermit Gosnell murder trial this past week, the big news was music mogul Jay-Z and his wife Beyonce' visiting the authoritarian island state of Cuba.

It was dubbed a "cultural" visit by the Treasury Department who grants permission for such requests, although, part of the dust-up is whether he received some assistance from the White House of which he is reported to be on very good terms.

No matter. We've never been big fans of trade embargos or trade restrictions as they never appear to work. Closed, insular, police states appear only to become that much more so when denied the liberalizing influences of western democracies.

We're reasonably confident that part of this cultural visit did not entail Jay-Z and his lovely bride visiting any of Cuba's political prisoners languishing in that country's gulag. And since Jay-Z and the President are supposedly boys and since also the Commander-in-Chief has asserted the absurd notion that he has the right to assassinate U.S. citizens overseas without due process, we will call this trip for what it was: a mutual stoke-off photo-op between two like-minded regimes.




Addendum #1: from the comment section of the linked HuffPo piece, we are informed that perhaps the criticism leveled at Jay-Z and Beyonce is due to skin hue. Let the record show and do a word search to prove it that these pages have been exemplars regarding color-blindedness when it comes to calling out toadies, stoolies, apologists and otherwise useful idiots for the likes of the Castro regime, Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Ahmedinejad's Iran.

Unreal headline of the day

U.N. Human Rights Council Takes Aim at New Target: United States


Alternate headline: "When You Lose Russia, Cuba and Iran"


Fantasy: to be the UN ambassador for one day and for that day to be also blessed with super-human powers so that the UN building in lower Manhattan would be leveled by the sheer fury and rage of our overturning-the-money-changers'-tables-in-the-temple righteous indignation.

Video clip of the day

Here's the Wall St. Journal's Mary Anastasia O'Grady talking about Cuba, Cuba's health care system and PBS's love affair with it.





So, Cuba actually has a doctor shortage because Castro is sending them overseas for cash?

Is there a burgeoning youth movement that could eventually overturn the Castro regime? Color us skeptical. Think its an ADD thing. The American media loves making a big deal about the "youth vote" of which we've also always been skeptical even when we were once "youths" ourselves.


"Why do Cuban policemen travel in threes? So that one can read, one can write and one can keep an eye on the other 2 dangerous intellectuals."



O'Grady's article can be found here (subscription to WSJ required).

In his memoir covering four years in Cuba as a correspondent for Spanish Television, Vicente Botín tells about a Havana woman who was frustrated by the doctor shortage in the country. She hung a sheet on her balcony with the words "trade me to Venezuela." When the police arrived she told them: "Look, compañeros, I'm as revolutionary as the next guy, but if you want to see a Cuban doctor, you have to go to Venezuela."

Does this mean the guy on the left is out, also?

For a good Hollywood leftist that, for half a century now, has been rationalizing Cuban human rights abuses because everyone gets free dental check-ups... now what?

Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba's communist economic model doesn't work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.

The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel's brother Raul, the country's president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba's 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.

He said Castro made the comment casually over lunch following a long talk about the Middle East, and did not elaborate. The Cuban government had no immediate comment on Goldberg's account.

No doubt a three-martini lunch, lefties, where perhaps Fidel was getting a little sloppy and might have misspoke. But as they say, In vino veritas.

But let not your heart be troubled, oh intrepid Hollywood gulag apologists. Fidel's brother and current president, Raul Castro is putting his own twist on a truism we've come to know and love around here and that is: The statist's solution to failed statist policies is simply the same statist policies.

President Raul Castro and others have instituted a series of limited economic reforms, and have warned Cubans that they need to start working harder and expecting less from the government. But the president has also made it clear he has no desire to depart from Cuba's socialist system or embrace capitalism.

"...start working harder and expecting less from the government." aka, pretty much the exact opposite of the Obama administration's governing philosophy.

Re-learning through the centuries

Has socialism finally jumped the shark in Cuba?

President Raul Castro expanded self-employment fields on Sunday, ahead of looming government plans to slash as many as one million jobs -- 20 percent of communist Cuba's work force -- from state payrolls.

The economy, 95 percent of which is currently in state hands, does not have the ability to absorb such vast numbers of jobless. Castro's move aims to try to reduce the socioeconomic fallout, but it will be an uphill battle.

The Council of Ministers "agreed to expand the range of self-employment jobs, and their use as another alternative for workers who lose their jobs," Castro said as he gave a closing address at one of two annual sessions of the National Assembly.

After the crash of the former Soviet bloc, Cuba's cash-strapped government in the 1990s approved a wide range of self-employment. Positions such as beauticians, dog groomers, small restaurant owners and even lighter refillers were legalized as long as workers got licenses and paid taxes.

But social resentment emerged as an issue when some workers, particularly in small private restaurants, achieved dramatic levels of success.

The government began increasing taxation and regulation, and decreasing license-granting, until the self-employed sector was largely rendered paralyzed, like the rest of the economy.

(italics, ours)

Or is it merely jumping it, again?

From the Pilgrims abandoning a collectivist impulse to the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it keeps dawning on us, over and over, that socialism is an unsustainable economic model... yet free market capitalism which generates the inevitable unequal outcomes is viewed as unseemly as the italicized paragraph indicates.

Not because of actual results or empirical data has collectivism survived through the centuries but rather has envy, one of the seven deadly sins, been the life blood of a model and philosophy that never seems to go gently into that good night.

What all this appears to indicate is that as fallible humans, we will probably never completely rid ourselves of collectivism, be it straight-up socialism that we see abroad or the crony capitalism as practiced here in America, currently.

What would be nice, however, is we reach a point where free-market capitalism becomes the coin of the realm, so to speak, rather than the reactionary oh crap, everything else has failed - let's give that capitalism thing a tryM.O..

Being resentful and envious is no way to go through life.

When you run out of "rights"...

From a paper titled, "Freedom and Exchange in Communist Cuba" by Yoani Sanchez for the Cato Institute (H/T: Carpe Diem):

"An increasing number of Cubans are disillusioned with socialism and are demanding change. One of the tools that Cubans are now using to recover their freedom of expression and association is the Internet, which has quickly given rise to a community of cyber-dissidents, despite the Cuban government’s efforts to make Internet use difficult. Now that the state is out of money and there are no more rights to exchange for benefits, the demand for freedom is on the rise.

(italics, ours)

That nails it. Not the internet part but the "rights" part. Cubans are finding out that simply declaring everything a "right" (employment, health care, education, etc.) has not resulted in an improvement in their quality of life and surely hasn't resulted in an increase in freedom.

When you run out of "rights" to bestow upon yourself, the "struggle" loses quite a bit of its sex appeal and your country is left figuring out just how it's going to pay for all those "rights". Will we have to descend to third-world status before we figure out what the Cubans are figuring out?

Pie chart image of the day

heh



H/T: The Corner

Honduras update (UPDATED)

(please scroll down for update. thanks)

With all this excitement going down stateside, we don't want to forget about a neighbor to the south. Previous posts on Honduras, here.

At what point do you think the State Department might have enough egg on its face to call it quits with respect to their embarrassingly political handling of Honduras? They’re calling for another carton.

Honduras will inaugurate president-elect Porfirio Lobo this week, two months after one of the world's most recently famous little countries held a successful democratic election. So we are left to wonder why the United States State Department is still trying to hammer anyone there who dared to participate last summer in the constitutional removal of President Manuel Zelaya from office.

What’s truly amazing is that this fiasco looks to have a happy ending even after the bullying and meddling of super-powers like the U.S. and regional bad actors like Cuba and Venezuela. In a move that for this part of the globe looks damn-near Washingtonian, the interim President and member of the disgraced Zelaya’s own party, Roberto Micheletti, will step down from power so that Lobo can assume the office of president just as Micheletti promised when this whole thing blew up last June.

A smooth transfer of power should be something to be celebrated yet a spiteful State Dept. has refused to re-instate the visas of Micheletti, his cabinet and advisors and the entirety of the Honduran Supreme Court and, last week, the State Dept. continued its spite-fest by yanking even more visas from members of the interim government.

The bullying doesn’t end there as Lobo, under pressure from our government, has agreed to let Zelaya, despite the legal charges against him, go to the Dominican Republic where he will no doubt consort with the likes of Chavez and Brothers Castro to foment discontent towards and within Honduras.

What a tremendous example we have set for burgeoning and struggling deomcracies in the hemishere who will now think twice before turning to the great United States for assistance.


(UPDATE #1):Don’t think for a moment the citizens of Honduras have forgotten about this country’s attempts to interfere with that country’s ouster of Zelaya and the subsequent elections that saw a peaceful transfer of power in the executive branch to a different political party.

Mr. Zelaya's ouster, widely condemned as a coup, plunged Latin America into a diplomatic crisis. No country recognized the new government, the Organization of American States suspended Honduras, and governments and international financial institutions canceled aid. But neither sanctions nor intense diplomatic negotiations were enough to return Mr. Zelaya, a close ally of Venezuela's populist President Hugo Chávez, to power.

The crowd attending Mr. Lobo's inaugural booed mentions of the OAS, U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens, and Costa Rican President Óscar Arias, all of whom tried to arrange for Mr. Zelaya's return to power.

The Honduran crisis also created tensions between the U.S. and Brazil, Latin America's emerging heavyweight. Brazil strongly criticized what it said was U.S. reluctance to apply tougher sanctions against Honduras, which depends on U.S. trade and remittances from Hondurans living in the U.S.

(italics, ours)

Terrific. At the end of the day we wind up pissing off everybody.

The more we think about this, the more we cannot believe that with the deck stacked against Honduras as it was, this potential meltdown is going to have a happy ending. Props to the interim president, Roberto Micheletti, who stayed the course by not giving into overwhelming and near-unanimous pressure from without to re-instate Zelaya and who kept his word by holding elections and stepping down when Lobo won the election. That Washingtonian moment of holding a nation together and graciously and lawfully stepping down when the time came will represent Honduras’ finest hour.

God bless the people and country of Honduras for showing courage and a commitment to the ideals of sovereignty and democracy.

Exit thought: Iran got all the ink with respect to the administration’s handling of the two international crisis but this was far worse as the response to Iran was a sin of omission rather than the sin of commission that was Honduras.

Exit question: For the lefties that write history and love to paint America as the meddling and imperialist bad guy, how will they write the Honduras chapter? Democratic president aligning with the hemisphere’s socialist goons in order to keep another socialist goon in power and ultimately losing out when Honduras elects a conservative to the office of president. That ought to be good read.

Great moments in the history of statism Pt. II

I search, without success, for a bottle of detergent to wash the glasses smeared with grease and fingerprints, which don't yield to water and the dishcloth. Looking for the soapy liquid, I have walked part of Havana today, as the television announcers call on us to strengthen our hygiene before the advance of H1N1. The alert occasioned by the epidemic, however, has not caused the shops to lower the price of cleaning products, not even the cost of simple soap which is the equivalent of the wages for a full day's work. Instead, the opposite has happened. The collapse in imports has been most notable in those that are used to bathe and disinfect.

The voice of the announcer calls on us to wash our hands often, use handkerchiefs when we sneeze and maintain good personal hygiene, but the reality forces us into filth. We lack face masks, running water in many houses, the simple possession of vitamin C to strengthen the organism, and cleanliness in public places. Thus, the so-called "swine flu" has fertile ground to reproduce. While it advances through our neighborhoods, the official media maintain their reserve and don't mention the closed schools, the quarantined sites and the full hospitals.

(italics, ours)

Ah, life in the socialist paradise of Cuba.

The real shocker here is that the Castro regime has resisted one of the first impulses of a statist when confronted with a crisis: price controls. Price controls that have the mysterious ability to make those controlled items vaporize like water on asphalt in the middle of August. This is a disturbing situation for which we do not have a ready explanation.

Read more here including HuffPo commenter apologist whining

"Hey, neighbor"

Lost in a lot of the hub-bub of this tea party non-sense this week was some more good news regarding freedom and liberty.

President Obama is lifting some restrictions on Cuban Americans' contact with Cuba and allowing U.S. telecom companies to operate there, opening up the communist island nation to more cellular and satellite service, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs announced at his regular news briefing today.

The decision does not lift the trade embargo on Cuba but eases the prohibitions that have restricted Cuban Americans from visiting their relatives and has limited what they can send back home.

It also allows companies to establish fiber-optic and satellite links between the United States and Cuba and will permit U.S. companies to be licensed for roaming agreements in Cuba.

We want to commend the President on this decision. We have posted previously on the dubious nature and effectiveness of trade embargos on countries as punishment for their collectivist economics and/or deplorable human rights conditions (it seems those two are always canoodling in the corner, doesn’t it?).

It never made any sense that we would be carrying the banner of freedom while denying many of the tools of democratization to people we were claiming to help.

Again, good on President Obama for beginning to tear down some of these antiquated Cold War policies.

"Freedom" is in the eye of the beholder

Having said that, I'm a proud American and infinitely aware that if I were a Cuban citizen and were to write an article such as this about the Cuban leadership, I could be jailed. Furthermore, I'm proud that the system set up by our founding fathers, while not exactly intact today, was never dependent on just one great leader per epoch. These things remain in question for the romantic heroes of Cuba and Venezuela. I consider mentioning this, and perhaps should have, but I've got something else on my mind.

So concludes the money paragraph towards the end of an article in The Nation from Sean Penn from this past November. An article for which we wasted 20 minutes of our life which we will never get back as after 4 days of kissing Hugo Chavez’s and Raul Castro’s asses he finally gets around to asking really the only question that matters with respect to free vs. authoritarian/totalitarian societies but doesn’t because …. he has something else on his mind?

Then again, what would one expect from a man who has fashioned himself as a spokesperson for gay rights but is either ignorant of history or willfully dismissive as it doesn’t quite fit the narrative of his current mission?

Here's the history Penn ignores, courtesy of journalist James Kirchick: “Not long after the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro ordered the internment of gay people in prison labor camps, where they were murdered or worked to death for their 'counterrevolutionary tendencies.' Over the gate of one of these camps were the words 'Work Will Make Men Out of You,' an eerie homage to the welcome sign at Auschwitz instructing Jews on their way to the gas chambers that 'Work Will Make You Free.' ...

“Raul Castro was notorious for ordering the summary execution of ... people whose only crime was their homosexuality.”

We suppose that for people like Sean Penn, “freedom” is just a matter of context.

Not a celebration but merely a recognition...and a hope.

We’re doing some double-duty over at The Liberator Today regarding an anniversary that should invoke disgust but all to often brings cheers from educated fools both here and abroad. Check it out, here.

Add another to the list of desirable Brazilian imports

A couple of weeks back, Petrobas, the Brazilian state-controlled oil company announced they had struck oil about 150 miles off the coast of Sao Paulo state. This find sits adjacent to the company’s massive Tupi field which was discovered two years ago and remains the world’s largest find since 2000 and the biggest in the Western Hemisphere since 1976.

Brazilians, though, say they are going to forego drilling and continue their pursuit of alternative forms of energy such as wind, solar and ethanol. Naw, just kidding – they’re gonna drill.

The Brazilians won’t say just how much of that black sticky stuff is setting down there so let’s put it this way: The Brazilians as a result of Tupi and this most recent find, have locked up 80% of the world’s fleet of vessels capable of drilling in deep water and have plans to lease 40 more drilling vessels and semisubmersible oil platforms starting in 2017.

Meanwhile, back in the states, as the price of 87 octane rose to $4.37/gallon here in San Diego, the price-gouging rolls on completely unabated. The gougers profit margin is 15 cents on the dollar as compared to the 4 cents on the dollar that the oil companies make and yet it’s the gougers who have been pitching a fit and have been the ones sounding aggrieved of late with all their grandstanding and worthless hearings.

But don’t fret. Just a couple years back an agreement was reached that allowed for off-shore drilling just 50-90 miles off the Florida Keys. Unfortunately, its gonna be these guys. And any bets, they won’t employ slant drilling techniques to tap into our own untouchable off-shore reserves which are part and parcel to the estimated 112 billion barrels of oil in nonpark federal lands in the West, Alaska and under water? Go right ahead. And lets not even get into the abyssmal environmental and pollution track record possessed by these people.

But back to the Brazilians for a moment: at least they get the ethanol thing a bit better than we do. (Story here)

“Corn is food. Turning it into fuel, which is costly and energy-intensive, removes nourishment from the global food supply. Subsidizing corn-ethanol production in Iowa also diverts land from soy, another important staple.
Sugarcane is not a staple. It's eight times more productive than corn. It grows year round. It must be processed fast, so CO2-spewing transport to distant ethanol plants is impossible (unlike for corn).
Its leftover biomass can be used to produce electricity, enough, by some estimates, to provide a third of Brazil's power needs by 2030. Ethanol already accounts for about 50 percent of car fuel in Brazil. The vast extent of unused arable land - only 16 percent is cultivated - offers enormous scope. At $40 per barrel-of-oil-equivalent in Brazil, sugarcane ethanol makes strategic and economic sense.
Yet, the new U.S. farm bill extends the current steep ethanol import tariff - 54 cents a gallon - until 2010, to keep what Brazil makes out. The Iowa boondoggle marches on.”

Could the U.S. Government, if they tried, come up with a more completely counterproductive, wasteful, expensive, up is down, black is white energy policy? Moot question – they already have.

Define Revolution

We’re kind of surprised it took this long but now after “The Motorcycle Diaries”, the Che’ floodgates have been opened. Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che’ biopic, “The Argentinian” and “Guerilla”, played at Cannes and “Chevolution”, a look at the mass marketing of the iconic Che’ image have been making the festival rounds… no word on when they are showing at your local suburban multiplex – check your local listings.

As “The Motorcycle Diaries” focused on the pre-Cuba Che’, Soderbergh’s movies will be the first to depict Che’ as what this article calls “the legendary Argentinian-doctor-cum-internationalist-revolutionary.” It is noted, they neglected, “Head of Cuban Prison System”, “Castro’s strong-man”, “murderer”, “common thug” and “most-likely rapist”… hey, if the Left can gloss over some inconvenient truths about their man then certainly we can take some dramatic license with his life and accomplishments, as well.

Anyway, so what are we to make of the marketing of Che’ and the supposed irony of Che’ being co-opted in total by capitalism? Are we to take some solace that his Maoist reputation has been permanently soiled by the taint of green (the other “green”) or should it trouble us further that his “brand” which ultimately represents the restriction of free trade and commerce and repressions of liberty, thought and speech, has gone Main Street?

Frankly, it’s a lot of both so we remain torn. We love the fact that “Che’” has become the ultimate sell-out and Madison Avenue shill but we remain discouraged that through the years and with increasing frequency and vigor his actions and motives have been entirely glossed-over and worse, hailed as virtuous.

So until such time when we can come up with an equally market-viable and intellectually and morally empty response to all that is Brand Che’ we offer only, “Revolution..? We got your Revolution right here, pal.”. Oi!

A Flip-Flop or mere Pandering?

Obama’s speech back on May 23 to the Cuban-American Founddation (CANF) in Miami contained a noticeable policy shift in his Cuba/Castro policy. We had noted previously, Obama’s skepticism of this country’s Cuban trade embargo, a skepticism which we share so it was a little surprising that no one in the media has yet to really pick up on Obama’s commitment to the status quo:

“I will maintain the embargo,” he said to cheers from CANF members. “It provides us with the leverage to present the regime with a clear choice: if you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations. That’s the way to bring about real change in Cuba—through strong, smart and principled diplomacy.”

In fact, his speech that took on other subjects specific to Latin American policy, including Columbia and Hugo Chavez and Venezuela, was about as hawkish as we’ve heard. Then again, this was the decidedly anti-Castro/anti-communist CANF he was speaking to so one never knows whether the inner-Reagan in him was awakened or he was just slingin’ around the red meat. We strongly suspect the latter.

H/T: Reason.tv