February 29, 2008   Although Rafael Correa ridiculously wants to insert a replica of Castro's Cuban disaster inside Ecuador- and is setting about to do this with alarming speed- we commend today Alvaro Vargas Llosa for standing on principle to evaluate correctly the disaster that is Cuba today. He notes, "Raul Castro has killed all hope that a transition to the rule of law and a market economy will start anytime soon in Cuba. The appointments he has made as well as his first speech as president and his televised conversation with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez indicate that self-preservation is Castro’s paramount objective even if he understands the need to shake up the moribund communist state."
 
In other words- communism is the opposite of rule of law by its very definition. Today's new crop of caudillo communists are so shallow and so adolescent that they seriously want to lie a lot about their childish governments to tell us all that we must abandon rule of law- the very cornerstone of democracy- to insert their preferred money making schemes called financial rackets and communism. While these teen agers on methane gas are busily cutting deals with each other, with Iran and with the FARC, Andean notables such as Evo Morales, Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez are essentially self enriching while insisting that the rest- outside their buyers' club- must be poor/be the proletariat and suffer all losses of freedoms to sustain the state-forced money making scams, also called populism or sovereign trusts.
 
What we do not understand is why anyone would surrender liberty just so that these ninnyhammers can craft massive profits for themselves as insiders while denouncing the very freedoms promised?
 
Cuba is for rent. Cuba is for sale. Cuba is for hire. Cuba has been hired by Hugo Chavez for all intents and purposes. In fact, it is easy to say that Chavez pays the rent for Cuba- feeding its political regime and feeding its military. For this, Cuba gets lots of Venezuelan oil to trade on the oil market and prop up the ridiculously overpriced oil markets. And Venezuela gets lots of STASI trained Cuban intelligence officers. These are also called Cuba's largest export industry, next to its own people who flee for asylum in other nations. Cubans flee under the gift of asylum. Asylum means that the home nation is so horrific that one abandons all for the safety of another nation, typically one with rule of law, unlike where they came from. Cuba, like Venezuela and Ecuador are net exporters of human beings because it is impossible to sustain quality of life in these dishonest places. Asylum awardees know that having asylum means that one can never go home again.

The point being that matters are so horrific that one fears losing life and limb and livelihood in such horrible places. And that is why tens of thousands of Venezuelans, Ecuadoreans and Cubans have deserted the tender mercies of their dictatorships under the Chavez-Castro-Correa plan and have fled.
 
But Ecuador has already shipped out over 1/3 of its own in a massive diaspora which is shameful. And Ecuador never had the years of Russian-backed spy manufacturing capacities which are of course everywhere now in Ecuador, thanks to Correa and Chavez. So one can also say easily that Cuba has an export product: communist-style intelligence services- which Ecuador does not have. And these communist style STASI trained spies are all over DISIP out of Caracas and now Quito. These agents of governmental control, also called military intelligence or spies, insure that the regime is having and holding its territories- that is thee and me- for perpetuity and for self enrichment. What they really do is expand their protection rackets for hire and sell us the very things that debase our lives. They call this "sovereign trusts" building. To DISIP, now essentially running the entire government of Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, sovereign means the active steps to avoid transparency, to sell protection rackets when necessary, force out any competition while remonopolizing the region of and by the corporatist Bolivarians, protect at all costs the money making scams of the ruling junta, to deceive, corrupt and above all- make profits while never paying taxes.
 
To Bolivarians, also called Correa, Morales and Chavez, democracy is perverted to a point where it means that one never has to say one is sorry for any crime against humanity or progress. To Bolivarians, protection rackets are paramount as anarchy settles across the region.
 
Alvaro Vargas Llosa correctly writes -read it here- of Cuba, "Raul Castro has spent the last few decades surrounded by generals politically attached to him. He has given them power—the Cuban military controls many of the state-run industries in areas such as agriculture and tourism that generate some revenue. They will be the backbone of Raul Castro’s government...If Cuba were to open its economy to an extent comparable to China’s, the Cuban government would risk losing control of the process very quickly. Raul Castro wants to guarantee the continuity of the revolution by making it more efficient, not to change its nature by turning capitalist. That is why, even though Raul is believed to be resentful of the Venezuelan president’s interference in Cuban affairs and jealous of Chavez’s role as Fidel’s Latin American heir, the two talked on the day of Castro’s `inauguration.' The message was clear: the alliance will continue."
 
Cuba sells its people as cheap labor and sells its propaganda services, also called "sovereign media" and sells its intelligence services to Hugo Chavez because Chavez gives Cuba money for this and props up its remarkably cruel and debauched regime. For this, Cuba's military regime survives and lives and breathes and has its being, thanks to Hugo Chavez's oil money and the generosity of the Venezuelan people who have never once complained about Chavez's purchased services from Cuba although they do suffer mightily inside Venezuela from the Cuban state intelligence officials who overpopulate the Venezuelan military-DISIP complex. Ecuadoreans are so irresponsibly lazy that they have yet to figure out the Correa-Chavez-Cuban over throw of their own democracy which has been subverted to the same Venezuelan model of non-liberties.
 
Cambio requires that Cuban intelligence officials cease their dirty work across Latin America. Cambio means that democracy stop lying about itself as the Cuban-Venezuelan propaganda machine spends billions to lie and cover up their crimes. Cambio means that justice is never measured by the point of a gun, as is the case in Ecuador, Cuba and Venezuela, but is measured by even handed law and order...which does not exist in these three nations although it should.
 
Cambio means that Venezuela and Ecuador cease and desist their current love affair with Russian mobsters, Iranian dirty money movers and the FARC.

We hold these truths to be self evident and anyone who tells you differently is lying or selling something, usually not helpful.
 
Hugo Chavez essentially owns Cuba and all that this means because he feeds their junta and houses them and provides cover for their expansion/growth of product sales. These product sales are cheap labor, propaganda services- also called lies and also called state owned media, plus intelligence operations to maim any who counter the state system, imprison any who would stand in their way, destroy all competition, and reign with the grey glove of deception. To date, Ecuadoreans want this. To date, Ecuadoreans look entirely stupid and depraved for abandoning their own principles to the tender mercies of criminal rackets, even as their Venezuelan brethren and Cuban friends have so done. What they express is surprise that food items are short, global affection has fled and sympathy for their own devils does not exist. Indeed, why would any Ecuadorean be welcome anywhere when they exhibit the same integrity/the same honesty of a Chavista DISIP agent? Why indeed. Only criminals enjoy being surrounded by criminals. Honest men and women do not want criminals inside their homes however much foolish Ecuadoreans keep inviting the manipulative and depraved in to their lives.
 
Today in the United States, the hottest ticket in town is not for the Oscars. It is not for the high-on steroids baseball teams. It is not to swear allegiance in the public square to Iran's Hezbollah or Chavez's Bolivarianism, also called criminal money making rackets. It is for the Pope's visit to Washington. Millions are trying to secure tickets to the Pope's Masses where he will be, as he always is, honest and forthcoming. Americans appear hungry for the truth. Ecuadoreans cannot handle the truth and have crafted a fake state religion under the Cuban-Chavez-Correa false face of spirituality, replete with shamans, fake feathers, fake sacrifices and fake symbols under their own special fake government run by Venezuelan-Cuban operatives now. While enjoying all these fake societal lies, it is worth noting that nothing stands in the way of truth tellers like the Pope from Rome, nothing that is except the criminal cartels who protect their own money making corruption and deceptive religiosity.
 
From the annals of fake feathers [no doubt imported from China], fake cults and politics as usual, with all trappings borrowed from supposed indigenous


Juan Karita / AP Photo

Supporters of Bolivia's President Evo Morales celebrate in front of Bolivia's National Congress in La Paz, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008. Bolivian lawmakers from Morales' party passed the referendum Thursday night in a raucous session, effectively closing two months of failed negotiations with opposition groups that refuse to recognize the new framework.
 
In the 1980s, Pope John Paul II came to Ecuador in a seminal event which is still remembered widely. Today, the Papacy is no longer welcome and none from Ecuador even try to bridge their own rejection of the Vatican, preferring instead to sell out the church and never hold their own accountable to anything except a whole hearted plan to revise Ecuador into a state of criminal wanderlust. Correa thinks this is the best way for adolescents, such as himself, to proceed. We disagree.
 
Just this week, the Chavez goons broke in to the Bishop's offices in Caracas. Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa neither condemned this criminal spree nor stood with Catholics to undo this crime. Correa calls these “sovereign” behaviors. We call it criminal.
 
Today U.S. presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama's reportedly paid policy guru on Russia, Michael McFaul, tells us in FOREIGN AFFAIRS here that Russia has been determinedly unfree and undemocratic for many years.
 
Regarding Putin's autocracy, the article's main author- himself a Soros-backed Carnegie man and a perpetrator of the Condoleezza Rice abandonment of Russian independence movement leadership cabal- correctly states, "The conventional explanation for Vladimir Putin's popularity is straightforward. In the 1990s, under post-Soviet Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, the state did not govern, the economy shrank, and the population suffered. Since 2000, under Putin, order has returned, the economy has flourished, and the average Russian is living better than ever before. As political freedom has decreased, economic growth has increased. Putin may have rolled back democratic gains, the story goes, but these were necessary sacrifices on the altar of stability and growth...

This narrative has a powerful simplicity, and most Russians seem to buy it. Putin's approval rating hovers near 80 percent, and nearly a third of Russians would like to see him become president for life. Putin, emboldened by such adoration, has signaled that he will stay actively involved in ruling Russia in some capacity after stepping down as president this year, perhaps as prime minister to a weak president or even as president once again later on. Authoritarians elsewhere, meanwhile, have held up Putin's popularity and accomplishments in Russia as proof that autocracy has a future -- that, contrary to the end-of-history claims about liberal democracy's inevitable triumph, Putin, like China's Deng Xiaoping did, has forged a model of successful market authoritarianism that can be imitated around the world...

This conventional narrative is wrong, based almost entirely on a spurious correlation between autocracy and growth. The emergence of Russian democracy in the 1990s did indeed coincide with state breakdown and economic decline, but it did not cause either. The reemergence of Russian autocracy under Putin, conversely, has coincided with economic growth but not caused it (high oil prices and recovery from the transition away from communism deserve most of the credit). There is also very little evidence to suggest that Putin's autocratic turn over the last several years has led to more effective governance than the fractious democracy of the 1990s. In fact, the reverse is much closer to the truth: to the extent that Putin's centralization of power has had an influence on governance and economic growth at all, the effects have been negative. Whatever the apparent gains of Russia under Putin, the gains would have been greater if democracy had survived...

Putin has also reduced the autonomy of regional governments. He established seven supraregional districts headed primarily by former generals and KGB officers. These seven new super governors were assigned the task of taking control of all the federal agencies in their jurisdictions, many of which had developed affinities with the regional governments during the Yeltsin era. They also began investigating regional leaders as a way of undermining their autonomy and threatening them into subjugation...

Putin emasculated the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia's parliament, by removing elected governors and heads of regional legislatures from the seats they would have automatically taken in this chamber and replacing them with appointed representatives. Regional elections were rigged to punish leaders who resisted Putin's authority. And in September 2004, in a fatal blow to Russian federalism, Putin announced that he would begin appointing governors -- with the rationale that this would make them more accountable and effective...
Yeltsin was far from a perfect democrat: he used force to crush the Russian parliament in 1993, bulldozed into place a new constitution that increased presidential power, and barred some parties or individuals from competing in a handful of national and regional elections. He also initiated two wars in Chechnya. The system that Yeltsin handed over to Putin lacked many key attributes of a liberal democracy. Still, whatever its warts, the Russian regime under Yeltsin was unquestionably more democratic than the Russian regime today. Although the formal institutional contours of the Russian political system have not changed markedly under Putin, the actual democratic content has eroded considerably.

Putin's rollback of democracy started with independent media outlets. When he came to power, three television networks had the national reach to really count in Russian politics -- RTR, ORT, and NTV. Putin tamed all three. RTR was already fully state-owned, so reining it in was easy. He acquired control of ORT, which had the biggest national audience, by running its owner, the billionaire Boris Berezovsky, out of the country. Vladimir Gusinsky, the owner of NTV, tried to fight Putin's effective takeover of his channel, but he ended up losing not only NTV but also the newspaper Segodnya and the magazine Itogi when prosecutors pressed spurious charges against him. In 2005, Anatoly Chubais, the CEO of RAO UES (Unified Energy Systems of Russia) and a leader in the liberal party SPS (Union of Right Forces), was compelled to hand over another, smaller private television company, REN-TV, to Kremlin-friendly oligarchs. Today, the Kremlin controls all the major national television networks...

While weakening checks on presidential power, Putin and his team have tabled reforms that might have strengthened other branches of the government. The judicial system remains weak, and when major political issues are at stake, the courts serve as yet another tool of presidential power."

McFaul is brilliant in his dissection of criminality, also called autocracy or populism or "sovereign democracy" run by "sovereign wealth" cartels. He beautifully notes the ill effects of failing to deliver free and fair governance. But our Soros man now working for Obama also laments the wise decision of Putin to kick out the always unaccountable Soros NGOs and the UN/Soros-laced NDI and Soros-laced AFL_CIO: "The Kremlin, accordingly, has tossed out the Peace Corps, closed OSCE missions in Chechnya and then in Moscow, declared persona non grata the AFL-CIO's field representative, raided the offices of the Soros Foundation and the National Democratic Institute..." Mr. McFaul completely fails to translate the horror of Putin's criminal regime in to a step by step reform plan. This is comparable to a cancer doctor telling a patient how and why he has cancer but walking out before saying anything meaningful about treating the disease, surgically ending the disease or what life will look like with the life and liberty ending disease. We consider this irresponsible and morally inappropriate.

More correctly, the article reports, " Even in good economic times, autocracy has done no better than democracy at promoting public safety, health, or a secure legal and property-owning environment...At the same time that Russian society has become less secure and less healthy under Putin, Russia's international rankings for economic competitiveness, business friendliness, and transparency and corruption all have fallen......Property rights have also been undermined. Putin and his Kremlin associates have used their unconstrained political powers to redistribute some of Russia's most valuable properties...Security, the most basic public good a state can provide for its population, is a central element in the myth of Putinism. In fact, the frequency of terrorist attacks in Russia has increased under Putin... increased energy revenues allowed for the return to autocracy. With so much money from oil windfalls in the Kremlin's coffers, Putin could crack down on or co-opt independent sources of political power; the Kremlin had less reason to fear the negative economic consequences of seizing a company like Yukos and had ample resources to buy off or repress opponents in the media and civil society. In short, the data simply do not support the popular notion that by erecting autocracy Putin has built an orderly and highly capable state that is addressing and overcoming Russia's rather formidable development problems."
 
As to oil and its wallet lining wads of cash for the communist inner circles, now controlled by the state cartels, "If there is any causal relationship between authoritarianism and economic growth in Russia, it is negative. Russia's more autocratic system in the last several years has produced more corruption and less secure property rights -- which, as studies by the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development demonstrate, tend to hinder growth in the long run. Asset transfers have transformed a thriving private energy sector into one that is effectively state-dominated (private firms accounted for 90 percent of Russian oil production in 2004; they account for around 60 percent today) and less efficient. Renationalization has caused declines in the performance of formerly private companies, destroyed value in Russia's most profitable companies, and slowed investment, both foreign and domestic...The strengthening of institutions of accountability -- a real opposition party, genuinely independent media, a court system not beholden to Kremlin control -- would have helped tame corruption and secure property rights and would thereby have encouraged more investment and growth. The Russian economy is doing well today, but it is doing well in spite of, not because of, autocracy. "
 
Moreover, our Obama cum Soros man on the job essentially tells us that the so called Washington Consensus- contrary to the foolishness spewed by Joseph Stiglitz and his US AID funded comrades in foolishness to aid and abet Putin and Chavez's wanderlust, was right all along, "Kremlin officials and their public-relations operatives frequently evoke China as a model: a seemingly modernizing autocracy that has delivered an annual growth rate over ten percent for three decades. China is also an undisputed global power, another attribute that Russian leaders admire and want to emulate. If China is supposed to be Exhibit A in the case for a new model of successful authoritarianism, the Kremlin wants to make Russia Exhibit B.

Identifying China as a model -- instead of the United States, Germany, or even Portugal -- already sets the development bar much lower than it was just a decade ago. China remains an agrarian-based economy with per capita GDP below $2,000 (about a third of Russia's and a 15th of Germany's). But the China analogy is also problematic because sustained high growth under autocracy is the exception, not the rule, around the world. For every China, there is an autocratic developmental disaster such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo; for every authoritarian success such as Singapore, there is a resounding failure such as Myanmar; for every South Korea, a North Korea. In the economic-growth race in the developing world, autocracies are both the hares and the snails, whereas democracies are the tortoises -- slower but steadier. On average, autocracies and democracies in the developing world have grown at the same rate for the last several decades...The Kremlin talks about creating the next China, but Russia's path is more likely to be something like that of Angola -- an oil-dependent state that is growing now because of high oil prices but has floundered in the past when oil prices were low and whose leaders seem more intent on maintaining themselves in office to control oil revenues and other rents than on providing public goods and services to a beleaguered population. Unfortunately, as Angola's president, José Eduardo dos Santos, has demonstrated by his three decades in power, even poorly performing autocracies can last a long, long time. "

Our Kremlinologist for Obama tells us that all this tragedy- all this corruption- will be with us for a very long time with no end in sight. We at ECrisis vehemently disagree with Obama, McFaul and their pater familias Soros that the status quo, commandeered as it is by offshore oil derivatives traders to destroy vibrant democratic economies, must not or cannot change. We refuse to abandon cambio for integrity to the stasis of corruption. We urge a step by step analysis of the Putin model and indeed it is correctly detailed/diagnosed to date by McFaul and his co author. But diagnosis is not enough and does leave the status quo unaltered by caveat. You have seen this already...in Caracas, in Havana and in Quito, sometimes called Ciudad de Alfaro. What are we to make of this apparently insightful analysis which refuses to deliver prescriptions for restoring functional rule of law and democracy's beacon? And what do we do now with such abandonment of data-backed reform plans?

What do you say when the supposed best and brightest abandon all hope while they are supposedly selling hope? Is cambio so demeaned/so manipulated so easily as to surrender to the rackets and cartels? And poignantly, if McFaul is indeed on the Obama payroll, what of the thousands of assorted other paid professionals on the Obama-Soros payroll whose very living means resistance to functional democracy in their unending struggle to insert flaccid socialism on a hardening globe of criminality? Flaccidity has never once helped the hardened and only replicates a weakening commitment to integrity's aims. But George Soros takes credit for crafting the Obama messianic cult to restore America's spirituality which he alone paid for as a campaign moniker. Soros would have you believe that America is broken and only one man, Barack Hussein Obama, can heal this land by his political plans, as yet unknown, to supplant America's fundamental spiritual core which Soros has been fighting against for over 40 years. To Soros, spirituality is anathema and an "evil." Soros has spoken often that he alone is the hand of god -deux y machina- and we agree that if one worships the state as replacement for the real church, then such religious anarchy- also called agnosticism replaced by political religiosity of the venal sort- will be your dream state.

This dream state is active now in Cuba, in Venezuela, in Ecuador and in Russia. It is called criminal rackets where the government is not anything else than a protection racket for its own self defined cartels to self enrich. And if you think this fake state religion of the rackets for the offshore cartels is fabulous, just look around. Ecuador is today the murder capitol of the globe. If you have no compassion for the dead and dying, you will be very happy with the new religion of instability, death and destruction. But maybe one fine day you will awaken from your manipulative haze, demand not just a diagnosis but a prescription for living, and grasp the concept that all men are created equal and that all men deserve the right to live free and die on their own terms, not by some state backed thug with an AK 47. Soros calls this "alternative democracy" or "sovereign democracy." Barack Hussein Obama thinks that Soros is wise and he agrees with him in all his myriad of chattering propagandists- also called NGOs or political hacks- and has never once given back one penny of his millions in campaign-buying combination persuasions. We call this criminal and we claim that democracy is not so cheap as to be so roundly demeaned and unhinged.

Our advice remains as it has always been: study hard and stay well informed. Remain flexible and stand your ground for reforming the Putin-Castro-Chavez-Correa autocracy plan which jiggers global oil prices to self enrich while criminally casting lies, unaccountability and controls over the most cherished of human endeavors.
It remains today that in Washington, D.C., were this Pope permitted to address the crowds on the National Mall in front of the U.S. Capitol, millions would attend. If this Pope spoke the same words in Cuba or in Venezuela or in Ecuador or in Russia today, what do you suppose would happen? We would like to know.

How would you receive this Pope and his sincere message of real hope?

Pope Benedict XVI blessing a child upon his arrival at Santa Maria Liberatrice a Monte Testaccio parish, in Rome, Sunday, Feb. 24, 2008 (AP Photo/Plinio Lepri)


In Washington, D.C. this Pope is attracting millions to his essential message. Not just the paid thousands who attend fake Million Men events and political rallies, well tuned up by labor unions and paid U.S. activists from the Democratic Party, but freely and happily moving reminders that religious freedoms and the freedom of speech must not perish from this earth. If this is too embarrassing for the paid provocateurs from the agents of sovereignty, also called flaccid socialism to enhance state funded rackets and terrorists, we say- let the treatment begin to reform commitments to life and liberty.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis