November 30, 2009   ECrisis is aware of the growing number of refugees from Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador streaming in to the United States of America seeking a better, more just life for themselves and their families because there are no true rights and no future for any in these ALBA nations. Some- well now about 30% of all of Ecuador, have flooded in to Spain in a massive diaspora, seeking work only to be treated less than cockroaches because....the Spanish can and do treat Ecuadoreans like sub humans. And they are good at this and get away with it, because....they can. This is a true saying: "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt, they have more need of masters"… -Benjamin Franklin.  Why do you think Ecuadoreans are running away from the corrupt Correa? Because he has ruined the nation and mows over all that look at him cross-eyed. A full list of president Correa's Hate List is incomplete as of yet but grows each week, now topping close to 50 souls illegally charged and falsely accused of treason, a severe crime they never committed and a tremendous burden to defend because....there is no justice in Ecuador now: only Correa's Purple Curtain of lawless pervs, sycophants and apparatchiks. This matter will get worse before it gets better because Ecuadoreans let this go too long and get too out of hand.

The U.S. Democrats are quite welcoming to these unlawful immigrants who care nothing about the USA and its values. They just want their votes to insure that the U.S. party of Democrats is re-elected by these currently counted as about 50 million illegal persons inside the USA, currently bankrupting many state treasuries for their care and feeding. Others come to the USA either having married off their children to secure what are called "anchor babies" and thus gain "Green Cards" or buy their way through investor VISAS, also called buying condos and/or turn key businesses. The worst part about this is when these happy purchasers of USA freedom brag to their friends and bray and gloat that they alone are so wonderful that they have been gifted with legal US standing, called Green Cards, because they bought their way in to the USA or had the children marry and proffer progeny, these narcissists act as if this is the ultimate status symbol. While we grasp that the U.S. immigration laws are skewed for the rich, the vapid, the manipulative and arrogant arrivistes, we remain repulsed by the bragging, gloating "riche" who tell their clattering Ecuadorean chums that they are so fabulous that they "got" a U.S. Green card, never mind that they have no regard nor respect for anything but their shallow narcissistic selves and certainly no regard nor interest in building a better Ecuador nor a better USA- just the easy life of doing nothing and representing even less. In fact, they mock and actually hate freedom builders because these are considered "silly" and foolish.  Here is a novel approach: only persons who actually like the USA should become U.S. citizens:

Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907..
 'In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.'
Theodore Roosevelt 1907

Here is another approach to what Ecuadoreans and Venezuelans call democracy, which is not democracy at all because it avoids/ignores the mandate hat functional democracy must also definitionally include morality [currently vacated in all ALBA constitutions] as seen from those who lived under the Kremlin's cruel and murderous regimes where religion was a secret and the statist cult was all:

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November 30, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

The Ties That Bind
Democracy is moral or not at all.

By Michael Novak

On October 11, 2009, at the invitation of Václav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, Michael Novak delivered the following keynote address at Forum 2000, an annual conference held in Prague to map the globalization process and to note its positive results as well as the perils encountered by an increasingly interconnected world.

This year’s theme of Forum 2000 is “Democracy and Freedom in a Multipolar World” — in short, “Democracy after 1989.”

That theme is too rich for a brief introduction. Surely, though, one of the dramatic differences between 1989 and 2009 is the new salience of nearly all world religions in matters of democracy. As Jürgen Habermas wrote after September 11, 2001, the notion that the world is secular, and becoming more so, is no longer tenable. In fact, after September 11, secularism seemed to Habermas like a small island, surrounded by a sea of turbulent religion.

Accordingly, I will make four points this evening on the bonds between religion and democracy. First, the great French social thinker Alexis de Tocqueville taught us that religion gives democracy two important tasks: to put in place foundational principles on which human rights are secure against every raging storm; and to teach “the habits of the heart” that allow democracy to work in practice — habits of honesty, self-examination, self-mastery, and free association with others, and a sense of universal fraternity with all other women and men on earth. If men do not learn the habits of self-government in their private lives, how will they practice self-government in their public lives? To live democratically is to live a high moral art.

By itself, secularism tends toward individual, not general, moral standards. It begins with “tolerance,” and steadily slides toward relativism. Cultural decadence — first among entertainment elites, and then among the multitudes of the uninformed young — grows like fungus on the face of democracy. The silent artillery of time wears down the habits of the past. For this reason, democracy needs regular awakenings of conscience, often religious awakenings, just to survive as a morally beautiful and worthy enterprise — a moral enterprise. Democracy is moral or not at all.

Religion teaches humble people that they are valuable and noble, beloved by their Creator, equal to every other man. It also teaches us that the personal lives of plumbers and carpenters — and professors and playwrights — and all women and men, are meaningful, morally dramatic, and made in the image of God — as co-creators.

These are the first bonds between religion and democracy.

* * *

The second bond is the anti-totalitarian principle. Humans must not give to Caesar the things that are God’s, nor to God the things that are Caesar’s. Caesar is not God. Every state is limited. Many parts of human life do not belong to the state — not conscience, not inquiry, not the creative arts, and not the sacred and inalienable duty of each individual to his Creator: to say yes or to say no.

In the same way, no religion dares to coerce from above all the decisions of Caesar. No religion can coerce the consciences of individuals to respond yes or no. Before God, all individuals are free to respond in conscience. In this, the state cannot interfere. Man’s inalienable responsibility before God is the foundation of his inalienable rights before the state.

* * *

Third, there is a worldwide misconception that there is only one kind of secular state — the kind found in the European continent. The kind rooted in the ruthless irreligion of the French Revolution of 1789. The European continental secular state is virtually closed to public religion. It tries to imprison religion in the recesses of private life, outside of public sight.

Yet there is, in fact, another type of secular state. The other type may be called the Anglo-American type. Here citizens are recognized as both religious beings and political beings. The one cannot be surgically separated from the other.

Similarly, the institutions of man’s religious nature, and the institutions of his political nature — the church and the state — must be distinguished as Caesar and God are distinguished. Nonetheless, religion necessarily flows into political consciences, and political consciences generally root themselves in pre-political beliefs about human nature and destiny. The two interpenetrate each other. Communism was overthrown not by secular morality alone, but also by religious conscience from above.

Therefore, the state must not coerce religious consciences from above, and institutional religion must not coerce the work of Caesar from above. Fruitful accommodations must be worked out by trial and error.

* * *

Finally, the Western world has yet to hear all the new reflections on liberty, human rights, democracy, and the best relations between Caesar and God from the other great religions of the world: Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism (to name those with more than 500 million adherents each).

The careening adventures of freedom and religion in their long journey through history are not at an end. Much is yet to be learned.

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The Attempted Marxist Power Grab in Honduras

Posted: 29 Nov 2009    Jim Simpson the  AMERICANO

As Yogi Berra might have put it, it’s déjà vu all over again. Just as fellow-traveling liberals in this country looked the other way during Joseph Stalin’s ruthless consolidation of power, just as they worked the State and Treasury Departments to sell Mao Tse-tung as a friend of democracy, just as they glamorized Che Guevera and Fidel Castro as populist heroes and portray Hugo Chavez as standing up to American imperialism, they now seek to legitimize the attempted Marxist power grab in Honduras.

In the days after the expulsion of former president Manuel Zelaya, the Obama administration worked overtime to try to return him to power, and it continued to do so until it became evident that intimidation would not work. Now it is pursuing subtler but no less insidious methods of support for Marxism in Honduras.

These methods include the administration’s devious position in regard to Sunday’s presidential election, in which the clear frontrunner is conservative candidate Porfirio Lobo. While the American embassy in Tegucigalpa has issued a statement that the election is a “step forward,” it also continues to insist that the interim government of Roberto Micheletti resulted from a “coup” rather than a constitutional process, and it continues to insist that the December 2 vote of the Honduran Congress holds out the possibility of restoring Zelaya to power—the option that Ambassador Hugo Llorens continues to indicate as  “our preference.”

In following the advice of leftist advisors within his administration, including recently ousted White House Counsel Gregory Craig (well known, if not infamous, as the Clinton-era attorney who argued for the return of Elian Gonzalez to Cuba), the president has set the United States on a perilous course. The leftward drift of much of Latin America, and especially of Central America, not only denies liberty to millions of human beings who are sorely in need of human rights and free market opportunities, it also endangers the liberty of all Americans. This fact is apparent to all except those who might wish to see the establishment of a socialist regime within our own borders. Given the public statements of sympathy with Mao, Che, and Chavez by a number of the president’s senior advisers, those exceptions would most certainly include many within the Obama administration.

On more than one occasion Obama himself has spoken of “common goals” with the Marxist members of the Organization of American States including Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, as well as the left-wing Kirschner regime in Argentina. At the April OAS meeting in Trinidad, Obama was famously seen toasting with Chávez, Morales, Ortega, and other hard-core Marxists, with whom he appeared far more at ease than with the pro-American leader of Columbia, Alvaro Uribe. The president’s winking and nodding on the issue of Marxist rule has done all it can to encourage behavior such as Zelaya’s attempt to grab control of Honduras. At the ministerial meeting of the same organization Hillary Clinton, at Obama’s direction, cast a vote on behalf of the United States that would facilitate the eventual admission of communist Cuba into the OAS. The admission would be a direct violation of the Inter-American Democratic Charter signed in 2001, but who cares about a little rule prohibiting Marxist dictators?  The OAS has already has four or five of them.

Astoundingly, in Clinton’s statement justifying America’s vote on behalf of communist Cuba at the OAS ministerial meeting, a meeting ironically held in Honduras, she let slip the revealing statement that United States shares “common goals” with the Marxist regimes of our hemisphere. She did not have to spell out what these common goals are. Obama’s domestic policy of nationalizing and regulating private enterprise is a foretaste of Chavez-style seizure of private property, control of media, and distortion of the electoral process through such mechanisms as manipulation of census results. It is the beginning of the transformation of the United States from a free-market democracy into an authoritarian Marxist state. Apparently the “common goals” that we share with Chavez include the seizure of private property, the redistribution of wealth, the imposition of confiscatory tax rates, and the centralized regulation of banking, education, health care, energy, housing, and every other aspect of life. No wonder Obama can so warmly hug Hugo and embrace Ortega.

Now, when the heroic population of a small Central American country rise up and dare to object to a president who wishes to extend his rule indefinitely in violation of the nation’s constitution, the immediate reaction of the Obama administration is to condemn this democratic opposition and to cut off aid. Obama brazenly declared that the defense of the Honduran constitution by its Congress, Supreme Court, and military, as well as by a majority of its people, is somehow “illegal” and that it sets a “terrible precedent.” In fact, Obama had the nerve to suggest that the constitutional actions of the Honduran people in standing up to the threat of a Chavez-style dictator was in violation of the Inter-American Charter. In an incredibly misguided statement the president suggested that it would be more democratic to allow a Marxist dictator to seize control of Honduras and rule indefinitely than to enforce the term limits specified in the Honduran constitution.

Hillary Clinton, who seems to be acting as the president’s leftist enforcer on foreign affairs, averred that “we’re working with others on behalf of our ultimate objectives.” These ultimate objectives, like the common goals we seem to share with Marxists in Latin America, don’t need to be spelled out. They would appear to center on the global expansion of a Marxist agenda of income redistribution, nationalization of private business, and state control of media in the service of permanent revolution.

The administration’s response to Honduras should raise serious questions about what Obama has in mind for the United States itself. Will it suddenly become undemocratic to oppose a third or fourth Obama term in contravention to the United States Constitution? Is it undemocratic for conservatives to speak out when Marxist tyrants enforce their will by seizing control of radio and television stations, as the Honduran Marxist leader Manuel Zelaya did by demanding two hours per day of air-time propaganda?  Will it set a “terrible precedent” to criticize Obama’s seizure of and control of the banking industry, auto industry, energy industry, and health care industry?  Is it now defined as unacceptable to criticize Marxist leaders such as Fidel and Raul Castro?  It seems to me that Mary O’Grady, writing in the Wall Street Journal, was right in suggesting that the administration’s true colors were apparent in its siding with Latin American Marxists against the democratic removal of ex-President Zelaya.

All this raises an interesting question. Given the fact that he was able to react immediately to the events, how long in advance did Obama know about Zelaya’s attempt to seize power in direct contradiction to the Honduran Constitution? Did Obama know in advance that Hugo Chávez was shipping ballots to Honduras with the intention of facilitating an illegal referendum and a presumably rigged election? When those ballots were shipped, why then did Obama fail to condemn that action as a violation of democracy, and why did he not bring his objections before the OAS?  Why does he not bring an objection now? Is it possible, as might well be suspected, that the Marxist power grab in Honduras was tacitly approved in advance by the White House?

If it is true that Obama had advance knowledge that Manuel Zelaya would attempt to seize an illegal second term—as one would expect any informed American president would have had—why did he not act to defend democracy in Honduras? The United States is a signatory of the Inter-American Charter on Democracy which pledges every member to support the democratic process throughout the hemisphere, but Obama’s actions with regard to Honduras have not advanced the cause of democracy. They have attempted to reduce Honduras to yet another totalitarian state ruled by yet another Chavez look-alike.

What can we conclude from Obama’s actions with regard to Honduras? We can conclude that shortly after voting alongside every Marxist regime in Latin America to support the cause of admission of communist Cuba to the OAS, Obama threatened to use every means possible to restore a potential Marxist dictator to power in Honduras. In these actions Obama reveals his true motive, which is to support Marxist rule throughout the Americas. It is time to be clear as to what Obama means when he talks about “common goals” and when he labels the constitutional actions of the Honduran people as “illegal.”

One would hope that following Sunday’s elections the Obama would desist in its attempt to undermine democracy in Honduras. The prospects remain uncertain, however, because the fact is that Obama has never condemned or even criticized any Marxist leader in Latin America. His cordial relations with Hugo Chavez at the April meeting of the OAS in Trinidad perfectly reflect his feelings toward the most radical and anti-American of communists in Latin America. He was cordial with Chavez because he and Chavez share common goals. It should be obvious that like Castro (Fidel and Raul), Chavez, Ortega, and the rest, Obama is a Marxist who wishes to institute a command and control socialist economy in the United States. If he is stopped, it will only be because a majority of Americans, like the courageous majority of patriots in Honduras, are willing to stand up and make their views known.
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In Elections, Honduras Defeats Chávez
The tiny country beats back the colonial aspirations of its neighbors.
•         By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
Unless something monumental happens in the Western Hemisphere in the next 31 days, the big regional story for 2009 will be how tiny Honduras managed to beat back the colonial aspirations of its most powerful neighbors and preserve its constitution.

Yesterday's elections for president and Congress, held as scheduled and without incident, were the crowning achievement of that struggle.

National Party candidate Porfirio Lobo was the favorite to win in pre-election polls. Yet the name of the victor is almost beside the point. The completion of these elections is a national triumph in itself and a win for all people who yearn for liberty. 
The fact that the U.S. has said it will recognize their legitimacy shows that this reality eventually made its way to the White House. If not Hugo Chávez's Waterloo, Honduras's stand at least marks a major setback for the Venezuelan strongman's expansionist agenda.

The losers in this drama also include Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Spain, which all did their level best to block the election. Egged on by their zeal, militants inside Honduras took to exploding small bombs around the country in the weeks leading to the vote. They hoped that terror might damp turnout and delegitimize the process. They failed. Yesterday's civic participation appeared to be at least as good as it was in the last presidential election. Some polling stations reportedly even ran short, for a time, of the indelible ink used to mark voter pinkies.

Latin socialists tried to discredit Honduran democracy as part of their effort to force the reinstatement of deposed President Manuel Zelaya. Both sides knew that if that happened the electoral process would be in jeopardy.

Mr. Zelaya had already showed his hand when he organized a mob to try to carry out a June 28 popular referendum so that he could cancel the elections and remain in office. That was unlawful, and he was arrested by order of the Supreme Court and later removed from power by Congress for violating the constitution.

It is less well-known that as president, according to an electoral-council official I interviewed in Tegucigalpa two weeks ago, Mr. Zelaya had refused to transfer the budgeted funds—as required by law—to the council for its preparatory work. In other words, he didn't want a free election.

Mr. Chávez didn't want one either. During the Zelaya government the country had become a member of Mr. Chávez's Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), which includes Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. If power changed hands, Honduran membership would be at risk.

Last week a government official told me that Honduran intelligence has learned that Mr. Zelaya had made preparations to welcome all the ALBA presidents to the country the night of his planned June referendum. Food for a 10,000-strong blowout celebration, the official added, was on order.

ALBA has quite a bit of clout at the Organization of American States (OAS) these days, and it hasn't been hard for Mr. Chávez to control Secretary General José Miguel Insulza. The Chilean socialist desperately wants to be re-elected to his OAS post in 2010. Only a month before Mr. Zelaya was deposed, Mr. Insulza led the effort to lift the OAS membership ban on Cuba. When Mr. Zelaya was deposed, Mr. Insulza dutifully took up his instructions sent from Caracas to quash Honduran sovereignty.

Unfortunately for him, the leftist claims that Honduras could not hold fair elections flew in the face of the facts. First, the candidates were chosen in November 2008 primaries with observers from the OAS, which judged the process to be "transparent and participative." Second, all the presidential candidates—save one from a small party on the extreme left—wanted the elections to go forward. Third, though Mr. Insulza insisted on calling the removal of Mr. Zelaya a "military coup," the military had never taken charge of the government. And finally, the independent electoral tribunal, chosen by congress before Mr. Zelaya was removed, was continuing with the steps required to fulfill its constitutional mandate to conduct the vote. In the aftermath of the elections Mr. Insulza, who insisted that the group would not recognize the results, presides over a discredited OAS.
 
At least the Obama administration figured out, after four months, that it had blundered. It deserves credit for realizing that elections were the best way forward, and for promising to recognize the outcome despite enormous pressure from Brazil and Venezuela. President Obama came to office intent on a foreign policy of multilateralism. Perhaps this experience will teach him that freedom does indeed have enemies.

Almost 400 foreign observers from Japan, Europe, Latin America and the U.S. traveled to Honduras for yesterday's elections. Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, the German parliament and Japan will also recognize the vote. The outpouring of international support demonstrates that Hondurans were never as alone these past five months as they thought. A good part of the world backs their desire to save their democracy from chavismo and to live in liberty.
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Dictators are still flourishing in South AmericaPosted: Saturday, Nov 28th, 2009
BY: DR. LAINA FARHAT-HOLZMAN       

It has always been a mystery to most of us why Latin America has developed so differently from the United States and Canada. For a while it appeared that our southern neighbors were beginning to catch up to the notion of participatory government (plenty of elections) and the economies of some were really starting to look healthy.

The public dislike of the dictator model brought strong term limits for politicians for a while — but that is in meltdown. A whole new wave of populist presidents in Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and most notoriously, Venezuela are pushing for what will be life terms because they, and their populist supporters, think they are indispensable.

What is apparent to those of us who are not populists is that power corrupts, and absolute and unending power corrupts absolutely. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has been establishing a creeping autocracy, intimidating the press, providing “bread and circuses” to the masses, and now insisting that he must be reelected in order to “continue his great work.”

Even more ironic is that all of the above wannabe dictators came to power by removing an elite authoritarian government before them. But this is what you get when you have a democracy that depends upon votes from a largely illiterate and poor electorate. The poor don’t want democracy; they want food, want to feel good, and want revenge against their former oppressors.

Five centuries ago, Shakespeare described a populist revolutionary, Jack Cade (Henry VI, Part III), who for a period got a following in London by promising endless high-class virgins to rape and that the sewer pipes would run with French wine. Apparently that promise is still appealing to many in our world today (72 virgins for each suicide bomber and wine, forbidden on earth, but abundant in Paradise). It is a sad, small vision of a “brave new world,” but the ignorant buy it.

The countries courting dictators for life have something in common: a large, poor, illiterate underclass and a small autocratic elite. It is certainly true that the autocrats have not produced a just society, but the underclass will not do so either. These countries have never known good governance, and they share in a history that differs greatly from that of the Anglo-Saxon model.

When Spain conquered its vast empire in the New World, it had just come out of centuries of occupation by Muslims. The Spaniards brought with them that autocratic experience of governance, never having had the confrontation of educated Englishmen who limited the power of their monarchs. England, which settled North America, was already on a very different trajectory than Spain, as was apparent even in the 16th century. The differences have been enormous ever since.

In the 19th century, South Americans rebelled against their colonial masters and won independence. Unlike the American Revolution, however, they did not unite, nor did they encourage universal education. The poor just exchanged one master for another, and that pattern has continued until recently.

South American countries such as Argentina, Uruguay and Chile that do not have a native underclass have put their dictators aside and appear to be doing much better in democracy. Mexico, influenced by its North American neighbor, is starting to do better too —although its underclass is still abused economically and socially — but term limits are in place, as they are in Brazil. These countries may eventually catch up.

Why we should care about these other increasingly dictatorial countries is that they no longer live in isolation. Chavez, for example, is making common cause with the Islamic Revolutionary Government of Iran — not a happy thought, and he appears willing to give sanctuary to militant Muslims in their international jihad. All the good that Chavez has done in using his country’s oil wealth on education, health care and food subsidies will disappear as he ruins his country’s oil economy, but with all the force on his side, who will be able to complain?

“Presidents for Life” do not remain “presidents” for long, but turn into Gaddaffi, Saddam Hussein and Mugabe. Bad models indeed.
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We repeat from Novak's piece, "Religion teaches humble people that they are valuable and noble, beloved by their Creator, equal to every other man. It also teaches us that the personal lives of plumbers and carpenters — and professors and playwrights — and all women and men, are meaningful, morally dramatic, and made in the image of God — as co-creators. These are the first bonds between religion and democracy."  Powerful words. How many times did you laugh at those less fortunate than you and pretend that they are de-classe? Did you ever once show compassion or respect? No- not yet. Unless and until this transformative merging of good hearts- functionally active- with democracy's finest goals is underway, you will have cretins and thugs like Correa's special brand of democracy- his alternative democracy of ALBA with all the morals of a Gay Man's Bath House. And it will only get worse because....you just do not care.

Actually, you do care. We know you care or you would not be reading this web site. Think about it- why meld your moral free life in to a moral free dictatorship?

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis