ecrisis

Unfree Russia Is Mirrored in Unfree Ecuador: Both Adore Iran’s Evil

2012-05-11T12:09:13Z

May 8, 2012 For a while, nations that ban rule of law feel oh, so clever. Their structural corruption seemingly delivers the cash for political bribes, pay offs and control of the people. All seems well. But all is never well. The system is not fair with a corrupt caudillo at the helm.

Russia, as the facts bear out, on a much larger scale, is like Ecuador under Correa. The more than 70% of gross national exports from oil and oil products reveals a nation which fails to incubate creativity and productivity while depending on spot oil trades and creepy derivatives speculators to keep the price of oil synthetically high, which never lasts and always falls. Ah, the Faustian Bargains with corruption. But wait you say: it will never afflict Ecuador. Ecuador avoids its vast corruption because Ecuadoreans are better han the rest of mankind and can lie, steal and cheat its way to fame and glory. Ecuadoreans, like Minister Patino can always

out - fox and out - manipulate the dummies still pretending that laws and due process have a meaning when every clever Ecuadorean from birth today is taught that rules have no meaning and bonds of fellowship have no place in this world. Like ambassador Cely sent to the USA, her portfolio is based on nothing more than a demand that she lie, steal and cheat.

And that is how Ecuador mirrors Russia today: lawless, corrupt and with absolutely no moral fiber. It is the moral thing….so easily discarded in Ecuador, that actually destroys nations. And Ecuador is killing itself.

- Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

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The Wall Street Journal
OPINION
May 10, 2012, 7:46 p.m. ET
David Satter: Awaiting the Next Revolution
Russia is a country in which the population has no respect for the political system, their rulers, or the distribution of property.

The violence that accompanied the inauguration of Vladimir Putin as Russian president this week is an ominous sign that Mr. Putin's apparent desire to rule for life is leading his country toward a dangerous political confrontation.

Initial demonstrations following last December's fraudulent Russian parliamentary elections were cheerful. Crowds of more than 100,000 kept to agreed meeting places and routes and even thanked the police for showing restraint. On the eve of this Monday's inauguration, however, police made 450 arrests and attacked demonstrators with batons, sending at least 17 people to the hospital. More than 20 police were injured by debris and beer bottles thrown by protesters.

Dmitry Peskov, Mr. Putin's spokesman, said he regretted that the police had not behaved more harshly. But harsh treatment may do little to shore up Mr. Putin's dwindling support. Rising prosperity had until recently obscured the fact that Mr. Putin and a small group of cronies control an estimated 10%-15% of Russia's gross national product.

Officially, Mr. Putin was elected president on March 4 with 63.8% of the vote. But a count carried out by the Golos Association, a Russian nonprofit founded in 2000 to protect the electoral rights of citizens, showed that the real figure was 50.75%. Even this could not have been achieved without banning many opposition candidates and putting the entire government at the service of Mr. Putin's campaign. In the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections, the pro-Putin United Russia party, which claimed to win a majority of seats, only received 30%-35% of the vote, according to Golos.

Under these circumstances, neither Mr. Putin's supporters nor his opponents can take the political process seriously. In an effort to defuse the protests, then-President Dmitry Medvedev agreed to a number of political reforms after the December parliamentary elections. The most important was the direct election of governors. But in each region, candidates must collect signatures from 5%-10% of the municipal legislators or mayors, a serious problem outside of Moscow for opposition candidates. Before leaving office, Mr. Medvedev also replaced 13 governors in politically independent regions, removing those seats from political competition for the next four of five years.

One new law regarding political parties gives legal status to opposition parties but prohibits coalitions, making it impossible to form a unified opposition. Mr. Medvedev signed a decree on April 17 establishing a supposedly independent television station, but the director will be appointed by the president.

Some democratic activists are working to achieve political power at the local level. Others may decide the best way to fight a pseudo-democracy is in the streets.

Another problem bred by Mr. Putin's rule is a deteriorating economy. Crude oil and gas account for 75% of Russia's exports. In order for him to win the presidency, Mr. Putin's government authorized $161 billion in additional spending through 2018, increasing pensions and freezing gas prices. As a result, the government needs an oil price of $150 a barrel over the next few years to break even, while a sharp fall in price (for example to $80 a barrel) could lead to an immediate crisis.

Corruption, especially of this magnitude, has its consequences. Investors do not invest in a country with no rule of law. In September 2010, Russia's capital account went into deficit, the result of lagging investment and capital flight. How much capital flight? According to Sergei Guriev, dean of Moscow's New Economic School, in net terms Russia is losing between $7 billion and $8 billion of capital every month, equivalent to 5% of its monthly GDP.

Finally, Mr. Putin's rule has led to rising nationalist extremism. During the election campaign, Mr. Putin accused the West of meddling in Russian affairs, saying "The battle for Russia continues and we will win!" It was not clear who he was battling or what he expects to win, but such rhetoric provides emotional support for the nationalist movement in Russia.

Under Mr. Putin, radical nationalists have attacked dark-skinned foreigners on the streets of Russian cities with impunity. In 2006, 13 people were killed in a bombing of Moscow's Cherkizovsky market, where the traders were mostly from the Caucasus and Central Asia. With the violence threatening to slip out of control, the authorities began to arrest neo-Nazis and skinheads, but there's been no attempt to combat their xenophobic worldview. Some fascist groups are now saying on their websites that it's not enough to attack "Tajiks"—the time has come to attack the system.

In the face of all this, Mr. Putin has made attempts to endow himself with new legitimacy. In recent years, he's been filmed riding a Harley-Davidson, singing the 1950s hit "Blueberry Hill," and photographed riding a horse bare-chested. One of his aides said he believed that Mr. Putin was sent to Russia by God, and the Russian media reported that a small female sect believes that Mr. Putin is the reincarnation of the Apostle Paul.

None of this, however, is likely to protect the Putin regime from the challenge it now faces. Russia is a country in which the population has no respect for the political system, their rulers, or the distribution of property. It is also a society assaulted with tendentious information not only by the rulers but by some of those in opposition.

In the best of all worlds Mr. Putin would resign, and free and fair elections, with nonpartisan monitors, would be held. But even that would not be enough. Russia needs a commission similar to the South African Commission on Truth and Reconciliation to review publicly not only the crimes of the Putin era but also crimes committed during the eight-year rule of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Only this can provide a basis for democracy.

Sadly, no such accounting is likely in the short run, which is why the stage is now set for a struggle over Russia's future in which neither side can be confident of success. What's at stake is not just the country's prosperity but its existence as a civilized society.

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Cristina Kirchner’s Leni Riefenstahl Moment

2012-05-06T17:01:02Z

May 4, 2012 President Cristina Kirchner of Argentina just spent tens of millions of Argentinean pesos at Young + Rubican in New York to advertise a nasty, cynical and dishonest political scam. Kirchner wants you to believe an untruth. Kirchner wants to persuade you that Argentina owns the Falkland Islands when it does not and never did. Certainly the Falklands for almost 200 years always flew the flag of England. Today- for over thirty years, the Falklanders loud and clear state that they choose to stay with the British Commonwealth and want Argentina to leave them alone. Over 90% of the very rugged islanders are full British citizens and want to stay that way. Kirchner does not care.

Here is Cristina’s very expensive and very dishonest ad. She features an Argentinean hockey player. We assume this is ice hockey. The ad shows him training for the summer Olympics

in England. The winter Olympics are not held in England- just the summer Olympics. We do not know if this wanna be Olympian althlete will succumb to field hockey, but we do not believe that field hockey is an officially designated Olympic summer game. We are not sure what he is training for but it is not, as the ad says, training for the Olympics in England this summer.

Nonetheless, the ad shows this Argentinean athlete, this hockey player, running up and down the streets of the Falklands primary town. The tiny pub is their largest and most prestigious.

The Falklands is almost a truck stop on some lost highway: few people, no urban development, certainly no hideous cement high rises and sacred condos so dearly beloved by tasteless Quitenos….but the Falklands do have a lot of sheep. Lost of sheep. The British came with sheep almost two hundred years ago when there was not much else on the Falklands and certainly no Argentineans nor Spaniards nor French nor any indigenous. Now they have sheep.

And Ms. Kirchner tells us that to train for the summer Olympics in England, the Argentinean hockey player must train on Argentinean soil….on the Falklands. Now we do not know if this is a video actually shot on the Falklands- camera crew and all or if this was a photo shop job.

What we do know is that under Cristina’s stupidity, no British camera crew could shoot such an ad on Argentinean soil, let alone the capital Buenos Aires. Cristina would send her paid Chavista bully boys…and now her Cuban spies and Cuban thugs after the British. That’s our Cristina….that is when she is not busy celebrating her theft of Repsol.

Somehow we liked Cristina a bit more when she was publicly stating that her now dead, but then supposedly alive husband Nestor enjoyed better sexual performance by eating Argentinean pork. She told us- and that they were proof- that this was more effective than Viagra.

And if you think that Rafael Correa is not teamed up with dirty Iranians moving businesses through and across Argentina as a shelter/ a cover with Iranian banks and terror criminals, you would be wrong. Thus far, these global criminals have hidden their crimes….their will has triumphed, a la Leni Refenstahl, even as the US president Obama continues, for reasons unknown to deem both Correa and Kirchner as dear allies, leaving Obama and every Latin president to look as dishonest and corrupt as the father of you-know-who, then ambassador Joe Kennedy did in the 1930s declaring that Hitler’s Nazis were also our allies. Then again, Peronista Argentineans were Hitler’s allies. The triumph of transnational criminal will. ….but not for long. Riefenstahl’s propaganda was funded by fascists to sell their political persuasions also. Both the Peronistas and the Nazis had a pretty bad record of protecting humanity while eschewing the overarching great central state and the great laborer, not unlike communists in that sense.

Watch Cristina’s ad here.

Recall too that in 1938, Adolf Hitler went in to propaganda overdrive using and abusing the Summer Olympics too.

Here is a Nazi bit of propaganda, which is appallingly still in usage today: support the Hard Left/ the communists, the Nazis/ the ALBA/ Montaneros, Peronistas/ Shining Path/Chavistas ….for they alone help the poor of the state and by the state.

The propaganda archives to mislead citizens is in fact a hall of shame. Be a Nazi- help the poor, they say. Be a socialist- help the poor. In fact, like all socialists, they helped their citizens to a very very early grave. You can see more here.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

Ecuador has no Justice …and we do Not Know why There are so Many Lawyers

2012-05-01T13:29:52Z

April 29, 2012 ECrisis has long maintained what Ecuadoreans and other assorted fools across the globe have NOT maintained: Ecuador’s 9-08 Cuban ALBA constitution is based on Cuban communism. So…please quit already with the false narrative that this text sprung forth, fully formed from the hearts and minds of legal giants, US AID liars, and EU communists from Spain and Caracas. In fact, the Ecuadorean constitution did come from the above listed liars who did a horrifying cut and paste job…removing any vestige of liberty from Ecuador. The Ecuadorean constitution is a disgrace and is the instrument of your own self imprisonment.

We remind that the Cuban constitution is a horror tool also. Complete state primacy over your work and private life. Like idiotic Venezuelans who pretend that this is great as long as Hugo Chavez’s bribes just keep rolling in, Ecuadoreans have sold out their morals for a few hand outs while doing nothing whatsoever to deserve anything from the global high prices of oil. Seen any debt reductions by Correa? Any “sovereign” savings? Are you any better off today that five years ago? No….you are not no matter that Correa reminds often of his new schools, new roads and no clinics. We state that these are badly done and the overall picture is that Ecuadoreans are poorer in a land that is rich because criminals and government burglars steal Ecuador’s assets. There is no justice in Ecuador: only the state. And that which Correa has not yet stolen, he lies about….because you let him.

Study the piece on the Castro 'legal system' here. If you do not see the similarities, please move to Havana.

Otherwise, demand that justice be the law of the land.

Once again….do what no one does: Review your constitution. The whole thing. Understand that it gifts total powers to one person- the president. Stop lying about it and stop telling us that you love your life lived inside a garbage can.

And what future does this little girl have…sacrificed for Correa’s communism?

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

Chavez and Correa are Drug King Pins: Stop Lying About It

2012-04-27T19:06:38Z

April 27, 2012 Colombia’s Uribe is one men who is a truthteller. He is not a wind bag and he does not lie. That puts him in an extremely unusual category in the Andes, surrounded as he is by liars, ninnyhammers, dimwits and dunces, most of whom should go to jail at once.

Uribe is completely correct that Venezuela [ and Ecuador] are drug havens.

"Venezuela is a haven for drug traffickers and terrorists and needs a new government to restore democratic values, former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said."

WOLA’s Adam Isaacson has been a Soros and pro Chavez tool for far too long. Who do you believe ?

For its part, Bloomberg carries on with he lie that Colombia bombed inside Ecuador to keill, as they were legally entitled to do so, Raul Reyes of the FARC. Seen any bomb craters in Lago Agrio from the raid? No- you have not. When bombs fall from the sky, there are bomb craters.

Jose Miguel Insulza toured the Reyes FARC camp. He saw first hand.

Seen any bomb craters yet? More to the point: seen any head counts for Ecuador of the numbers of FARC, ETA, Hezbollah, Iranian QUDS and Hamas? Why is that?

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

Correa’s Cuban Communism is Killing You

2012-04-11T13:33:07Z

April 11. 2012 ECrisis presses our readers to study the following analysis for its inherent lessons for all Cuban communists now destroying Ecuador, along with the heavy immorality of Iran’s totally dishonest Mullahs of Morass.

So far, many Ecuadoreans report how happy they are to surrender any and all liberty to the uber-Correa communist ploy. Pathetic indeed are these idiots who fail to ponder what happens when Correa runs out of someone else’s money and stops bribing the locals. And none have tallied up Correa’s incoherent economics….his failure to report even basic governmental budgets. But Correa is a liar and reports nothing honestly, like his sainted Cuba and Iran. No honesty equals no honor. Correa calls this his sovereign right. We suppose it is as long as Ecuadoreans confer to Correa his task of lying, stealing and cheating as much as he can…sovereign rights to be a criminal cartel conferred on leadership by the people for more extortion and bribes. Sounds like a plan! A plan that is until you finally figure out that you too are a Correa criminal: your role in this crime spree is obvious. You dance with the devil at your own demise.

Each time you applaud Correa stealing from innocent persons, you yourself are accessory to crime, salivating no doubt that this is necessary for your own wallet. It is necessary for your own moral rap sheet…that is all. Stop enabling Correa’s crime.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis
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The Poverty of Equality
By Stephen Moore & Peter Ferrara April 2012 AMERICAN SPECTATOR

Fairness requires that President Obama read up on his Kurt Vonnegut.

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

So began Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 short story "Harrison Bergeron." In that brave new world, the government forced each individual to wear "handicaps" to offset any advantage he had, so everyone could be truly and fully equal. Beautiful people had to wear ugly masks to hide their good looks. The strong had to wear compensating weights to slow them down. Graceful dancers were burdened with bags of bird shot. Those with above-average intelligence had to wear government transmitters in their ears that would emit sharp noises every 20 seconds, shattering their thoughts "to keep them…from taking unfair advantage of their brains."

But Harrison Bergeron, who was far above average in everything, was a special problem. Vonnegut explained, "Nobody had ever borne heavier handicaps.… Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses." To offset his strength, "Scrap metal was hung all over him," to the point that the seven-foot-tall Harrison "looked like a walking junkyard."

The youthful Harrison did not accept these burdens easily, so he had been jailed. But with his myriad advantages and talents, he had broken out. An announcement on TV explained the threat: "He is a genius and an athlete…and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."

Harrison broke into a TV studio, which was broadcasting the performance of a troupe of dancing ballerinas. On national television, he illegally cast off each one of his handicaps. Then he did the same for one of the ballerinas, and then the orchestra, which he commanded to play. To shockingly beautiful chords, Harrison and the ballerina began to dance.

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the laws of gravity and the laws of motion as well.…The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it. And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

SOCIAL SAFETY NETS that provide basic help for the needy to prevent human suffering are easily justifiable on moral grounds. Nearly everyone supports them to prevent severe hardship among those disabled, widowed, orphaned, or even just temporarily down on their luck. In modern and wealthy societies like ours, there is broad voter consent to such policies, which ensure people do not suffer deprivation of the necessities of life: food, shelter, and clothing. This recognizes we have a moral obligation to help our fellow man. It's always an open question how much of that should fall to private charity and how much should be done through government taxation. That said, the truth is, such safety nets, if focused on the truly needy and designed to rely on modern markets and incentives, would not be costly compared to the immense wealth of our society.

But once such policies are established, going further—taking from some by force of law what they have produced and consequently earned, and giving to others merely to make incomes and wealth more equal—is not justifiable. Vonnegut's story helps explain why.

First, achieving true and comprehensive equality would require violating personal liberty, as the talented and capable must be prevented from using their advantages to get ahead. Under this philosophy, the most productive must be treated punitively through high tax rates simply because they used their abilities to produce more than others. What we have just described is a progressive tax system. Work and produce a little bit, and we take 10 percent. Work and produce more, and we take 20 percent, and so on. Some societies take as much as 90 percent of the marginal output, as the U.S. did after World War II.

In a society where men and women are angels who always put the welfare of others ahead of their own, this system—from each according to his ability, to each according to his need—might even work. High tax rates wouldn't have any negative consequences because everyone would work for everyone else's benefit. Society would be like one, large commune, with everyone working for the common good. The ambitious, hard worker would get the same pay as the one who sleeps in and lives a lazy lifestyle. Output would be high, and we would have almost complete equality of outcome.

The problem, of course, is that men are not angels. We are driven by self-interest-not entirely, of course, but enough that giving everyone an equal share despite unequal contributions would severely deter work incentives. This is why in all those societies that have tried to enforce the more extreme vision of mandatory equality, totalitarian governments and poverty have emerged. And, by the way, in practice these societies are not very equal either. Richer and freer countries tend to have smaller income disparities than poorer and less free nations.

Moreover, as Vonnegut's story illustrates, inequalities of wealth and income are not the only important differences in society. If equality is truly a moral obligation, then inequalities of beauty, intelligence, strength, grace, talent, etc. logically all should be leveled as well. That would require some rather heavy-handed government intervention. It is not fair that LeBron James has a 40-inch vertical leap, and we have a 4-inch vertical leap (combined). It is not fair that some have high IQs, and others are below average. It is not fair that Christie Brinkley is beautiful, that some people are born with photographic memories, that one person gets cancer and the next one doesn't. We Americans were born in a land of opportunity and wealth, while billions around the world are born into poverty and squalor. We won the ultimate lottery of life just by being born in this great and rich country. Where is the justice in that?

THE GOAL OF A SOCIETY should not and cannot be to make people equal in outcomes, an impossibility given the individual attributes with which we were each endowed by our creator. It is the opposite of justice and fairness to try to equalize outcomes based on those attributes. It is not fair to the beautiful to force them to wear ugly masks. It is not fair to the strong to punish them by holding them down with excess weights. It is not fair to the graceful and athletic to deprive them of their talents. In the same way, it is not fair to the productive, the risk taking, or the hard working, to deprive them of what they have produced, merely to make them equal to others who have worked less, taken less risk, and produced less.

As Vonnegut's story shows, putting social limits on the success people are allowed to achieve with their own talents and abilities makes everyone worse off, because it deprives society of the benefits of their brilliance and beauty and skill and talent. The fact that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made billions of dollars in income—more than some whole societies make—has on paper made America more unequal. But is the middle class better or worse off for Microsoft and Apple products? Should we curse the invention of the personal computer, which is now in nearly every home in America, simply because it made these men unthinkably wealthy? Since hundreds of millions of people buy their products willingly, it would seem self-evident that Mr. Gates and Mr. Jobs generated a better world for everyone, not just for themselves.

Finally, this vision of equality as a social goal, with equal incomes and wealth for all, is severely counterproductive economically, and so makes for a poor society as well. Pursuing such a vision would require very high marginal tax rates on anyone with above-average production, income, and wealth, which theory and experience show leads to decreased production. As we saw in our discussion of tax policy above, the less people are allowed to keep of what they produce, the less they will produce.

A good and just tax system should be designed to make the poor rich, not the rich poor. The preoccupation with equality reverses these two objectives, such as when Barack Obama says we should raise the capital gains rate even if it doesn't increase government revenue, for "the purpose of fairness." How is an outcome that hurts everyone fair?

IT'S EASY TO THINK of other unfavorable results of this fairness fetish. Under the social justice of equal income and wealth for all, investment would make no sense. People invest only to earn returns, which means more income. Anyone who invests more would have a higher income, which would be expropriated to the extent it was above the average. But anyone who invests less and thus has a below-average income would be rewarded with a grant from the government to ensure equality. So, again, the only rational strategy would be to avoid all investment.

China is one good recent example. During the era of communism in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, when all land was cultivated for the "common good" and food was evenly distributed to all, regardless of how much one worked, China produced way too little food, and many millions of people, including children, starved to death. But then, starting in the 1980s, agricultural reforms began to emerge that allowed farmers to take a small plot of land and keep the food they grew. An amazing thing happened. Production of food on these very small tracts surged multiples higher than the output on the communal lands. The Chinese farmers saw output double and even triple from the previous arrangement where all food was put in a communal pot. Private ownership of the farms led to a green revolution, and China quickly became a food exporter.

Was this because the Chinese people are selfish and don't care about their fellow man? No, Chinese culture is no more selfish than any other. It's just that we as human beings are hardwired to put our own well-being and that of our kids above that of the fellow we don't even know. The human pursuit of happiness begins for most by taking care of themselves and their families. That is deeply ingrained into our cores.

We would add that the alternative course of demanding equality of opportunity can (and almost always does in practice) lead to the subordination of other values, such as personal liberty. As one example, the talented almost always want to leave societies where their talents are suppressed. Think of North Korea, or Cuba, or East Germany after World War II. These regimes quickly discovered that to keep their nations from economic collapse, they had to enforce tight restrictions on emigration and international travel to avoid losing their most productive citizens. And it wasn't just the best and brightest who wanted to leave. Many average citizens wanted to flee from economically stagnant, poor societies. So the governments had to restrict everyone from leaving and impose on the liberty of all. This is where the Berlin Wall came from. It was not a wall to keep invaders out. It was to keep citizens captive.

BUT DOESN'T THE DECLARATION of Independence itself say "All men are created equal," and isn't equality a fundamental American ideal? Yes, but these expressions invoke a concept of equality different from the social justice concept of equal incomes and wealth for all.

The original and traditionally American concept of equality is "equality under the law." That means the same rules apply to all, not the same results. Baseball is a fair game because the same rules apply to all players.

Equality of rules protects the property of all, which encourages saving, investment, and work, because all are assured protection for the fruits of their labor. Equality of rules ensures that all enjoy the same freedom of contract, which empowers them to maximize value and production, and plan investment knowing they can rely on their agreed contractual rights. Equality of rules provides a framework in which all are free to pursue their individual visions of happiness to the maximum extent.

Within this framework of equal rules for all, the outcome of the market in terms of income and wealth is fair, for two fundamental reasons. The first is that people basically earn in the market the value of what they produce. Economists say more formally that wages equal the marginal productivity of labor. That encompasses both the quantity and rarity of each worker's output. If the worker's output is unique, that output will be worth more, to the extent that people value it, because only he can produce it. James Patterson has gotten rich writing mystery novels that readers buy because they derive happiness from his thrillers and are captivated by his plots. Every one of us can sing, but Katy Perry has a string of number-one hits that young people all over the world want to listen to over and over.

Alex Rodriguez and LeBron James each make a lot more money than any teacher, or any doctor. In a broad social sense, what teachers and doctors do is worth much more than what professional athletes do. Sure, not everyone can teach, and fewer still can practice medicine. But only Alex Rodriguez and LeBron James can do what they do, which entertains millions at the stadium, on the radio, on television, and in the paper the next morning. Each fan is willing to pay a little in return for their unique performances. What they get is not unfair. They earn it, through talent and hard work.

THIS IS WHY it is wrong to even speak of the "distribution" of income and wealth. Income and wealth are not distributed. Income and wealth are created, and in a fair society they come into the world attached to the rightful owner that produced them. As the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick wrote, "Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process…is entitled to it. The situation is not one of something's getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it." If income and wealth are not attached to the owner that produced them, they tend not to be created at all.

Moreover, what is produced is not taken from anyone else. It is created by the worker, the earner, and does not come at the expense of others. The economy is not a fixed pie with slices handed out by Barack Obama. Each worker expands the pie and creates his own slices.

A society that puts equality ahead of freedom and prosperity will be in the end an unhappy one. As we have seen throughout history, high tax rates, high welfare benefits, and collectivist outcomes lead to deprivation and poverty. We want a fair society where everyone can realize his fullest human potential. And yes, that means some—Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, Albert Pujols, Lady Gaga, and Sergey Brin—will get a lot richer than others. There is no injustice in that.

We left until now the thrilling ending of Mr. Vonnegut's story. Just at the moment when Harrison Bergeron and the ballet dancer were wowing the audience with their expertise and breathtaking talent, as the orchestra was breaking into shockingly beautiful chords, and as the crowd's cheering reached a crescendo of joy and admiration, at that very moment, in barged the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers. With a double-barreled shotgun, she shot the two lawbreakers dead to the floor, and equality was restored.

Anti-Christian Cuban Communist Correa Lies About Christ’s Passion

2012-04-11T00:21:32Z

April 3, 2012 Can we get some relief yet? El presidente Correa just keeps on lying and lying and lying. Are there no Ecuadoreans willing to stand up to this uneducated, dishonest sociopath? Seriously….where does he get his stuff? And which priest instructed the Correa to announce the things he does about Christ, deftly forming it all in to some disgusting justification and manipulation of the New Testament?

No wait….Correa lies about everything and manipulates everything. While his view of Christ is so wrong, why are we surprised that he tackles Christ’s Passion for his own disgusting re- election efforts? What is next? The Liberation Theologists still hovering around the Vatican, soothing that Marxism will solve all problems, to declare that Correa’s dishonesty is next to Godliness?

No one should be swayed by Correa’s dishonest view of Christianity. The Jews, all on their own, handed Jesus up to death. The Romans drove the get away car and pounded in the nails. It is as clear as that. Much of mankind is likely to have joined in the evil…to their unending shame. The Jews were not manipulated by the Romans to condemn Christ. Indeed the point is: this is a tale of all mankind for every time we lie, steal and cheat….we go against Christ’s teachings. Correa is trying to remove the guilt of the sinning…as if to say the Romans made us do it. This is classic Correa: always blame someone or something else. The sins remain.

It remains that Correa is a criminal. He lies, He distorts, He steals. He extorts. He commits fraud and he needs to be gone. There is no excuse for his rampant, total criminality.

No one has made Correa do the evil things he has done and there is no excuse.

Correa has no right to decipher Christ for he and his 9-08 constitution chucked Christ under his Cuban Marxist ALBA constitutional bus….in favor of fat fake polytheistic Pachamama, now the state religion of liars and created for liars. There is no excusing Correa and his merry band of sociopaths. The Romans did not make any enact Correa and his sins.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

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President Correa Sends Holy Week Message via Twitter

April 02, 2012 Rafael Correa

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa promised not to wash his hands of injustice, via his Twitter account, today.

Through several tweets, Correa told the story of the Passion of Jesus as a representation of the collective thinking of our society. He condemned Pontius Pilatus and the high priests for washing their hands of Jesus’ crucifixion, after manipulating the Jews into condemning him to the cross.

The overtones of this message unleashed comments from both Correa’s critics and supporters. Mateo Martinez, a political analyst and doctoral candidate for the National Autonomous University of Mexico, shared his opinion of Correa’s strong religious message. “Correa is playing with the vagueness of symbolism, by sharing implicit and explicit allegories between the Holy Scripture and his presidency,” said the expert.

Correa’s Ecuadorean Franken-state

2012-04-02T18:56:48Z

April 2, 2012 “Franken-states” – abnormal, ungodly, inhuman, discredited, dishonest, creations by corrupt men [and woman] to be as humane things but are always created for criminality are on the menu in Latin America. No Cuban-communist ALBA nation is not a Franken-state. Each of these woe-begone horrors walks among us, undetected, unreported and fully inhuman…creations of their corrupt owners.

The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady delivers a tremendously helpful overview of monsters among us, in this instance Argentina. What defies logic is why, in the annals of fact based reporting and inter-governmental reviews of the Western Hemisphere, do we not see any substantive facts regarding real time data on these Franken-states, which always are ruinous, always dishonest and always lead to bad ends?

Ecuador is far worse than Argentina for actual crimes against mankind. Correa’s dishonest regime has married its own Central Bank with the Central Bank of Iran, dishonestly calling this as nice little trade deals to ward off any fact based analysis, still missing and still in dire need of completion. In fact, Ecuador’s marriage with Iran is so horrifying that any and all who refuse to so review the facts are themselves guilty of conspiring to aid and abet Iranian terrorists. Ecuadoreans want to pretend that destroying its own Central Bank, its national credibility, merging as it does with Iran and global vermin is of no consequence as long as one and all self-delude that they are helping the poor, which of course are not helped by this fraud scheme.

Mary Shelley, the authoress of the original book on FRANKENSTEIN told of the doctor seeking to help mankind, to better this world by making the dead walk. The dead do not walk but criminals do. All Ecuadoreans are lying to themselves and to the world at large today. Theirs is a ruinous nation, depleted of any honor for the greater lie that dead policies of communism and state crime can walk among them. It always ends badly.

ECrisis has been exasperated at the failure of all nations in South America to demand integrity of the whole. We consider these enablers and lying sycophants to self enrich. Worse yet is out sheer and utter revulsion at the U.S. Department of State for continuously refusing to report the facts on these man-made demons, instruments of horror. Then again, the Obama White House and its minions of synthetic Marxism, which demands that each sell the globe a dishonest world view is at the creator’s bench and what they have wrought and enabled strides among us all as a New Age cretinous Leviathan.

You might observe that Rafael Correa has become his own monster….his own Frankenstein, operating on false facts, false promises, false government and certainly not one whiff of the highly vaulted democracy, so arduously detailed by Correa’s enablers in crime. Democracy is not within ten million miles of Quito.

The JOURNAL article notes that the Economist has banned any printing of what Kirchner’s dishonest, dishonored kleptocracy state called Argentina puts forward. Have you not noticed that no one credible runs or entertains Correa’s fake financial data either? The void is yawning and the rejection of everything that Correa says and does is huge. Huge that is, except to cartels, Iranians, Cubanoids, Sorosites and the U.S. government of Obama and his “progressive” Democrats who demand lies, insist on failed nations and support ruinous acts to pretend that Cuban communism gives mankind relief. Relief is not on the menu for Correa.

Ruining the lands called Ecuador is what he does. Frankenstein’s monster is among us all. Ecuador is a primary Franken-state. Just stop it. Now.

Demand that liberty-in-law be yours. Insist that all stolen lands and companies be returned. Demand accountable government. Insist on independent central banking….not the Sanctions Demanding Central Bank of Ecuador ruining your future under Correa’s massively dishonest cousin Pedro Delgado with Iran’s tender mercies. Correa, Delgado and Iran have installed your own defilement and worst nightmare of state sponsored crime and horror: Frankenstein is yours now.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

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The Wall Street Journal
Kirchner Grabs the Central Bank
Argentina's monetary policy is now subject to the fiscal demands of the government. Citizens can look forward to more inflation.
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY 4-1-12

Argentina's Franken-state stormed the central bank last month, destroying the last vestiges of independence. Given the hyperinflationary history of that nation, it is worth asking why Argentines have allowed this to happen.

The pathology of a government power grab is not hard to discern. The state creates the conditions for crisis. Crisis strikes. Politicians seize extraordinary powers. Crisis passes. Left behind is a popular perception that complete annihilation was averted due to government genius. Politicians are permitted to expand their power.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (left) with her hand-picked head of the central bank, Mercedes Marcó del Pont.

Americans have a real-time example of this phenomenon in the subprime meltdown brought on by federal housing policy. We are now told that government intervention saved civilization: Last week Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke lectured students at George Washington University about the arbitrary rescue of Bear Stearns and AIG creditors in 2008 that he said stopped what otherwise "would've been basically the end." For whom, it is still not clear.

Having thus altered destiny, Mr. Bernanke next directed an unprecedented expansion of the Fed's balance sheet in order to rescue others in need. And last week he told a conference of the National Association for Business Economics that he is concerned that improvements in the unemployment rate may be unsustainable. He pledged to continue his free-credit policies, savers be damned.

The dangers of using easy monetary policy to push on a string are well documented. But when government is making up for previous mistakes, it rarely employs moderation.

Take unrestrained central banking to the extreme and you get Argentina. In 2002 it also had an epic crisis and the government intervened heavily in the economy, including orchestrating a mega-devaluation of the peso.

Under Kirchner presidencies—first Néstor and now his wife Cristina—since 2003, the state has confiscated bank accounts and retirement savings, hyper-regulated many entrepreneurs out of business, abrogated contracts, imposed price controls, and raised import tariffs and export taxes. Vast entitlements, notably in subsidized utilities and transportation, have been used to consolidate power.

Advocates of this broad intervention argued it was justified on the grounds that an economic contraction of minus 10.9% in 2002 required extreme measures. But since 2003, the economy has been growing. A country serious about building wealth in the 21st century would logically restore economic liberalization.

Instead, Argentina keeps reducing freedom and expanding the reach of the state. The latest concern is what appears to be an attempt to nationalize the Spanish oil company Repsol's Argentine holdings by getting governors who are sympathetic to the president to cancel key provincial concessions in recent weeks and making it difficult for the company to operate in the country.

Last month the Kirchner-controlled Congress delivered what could be the coup de grace for the Argentine economy: a reform of the central bank charter that eliminates a 1991 monetary rule requiring that base money be backed up by international reserves and placed beyond the control of the government. The central bank board now will come up with some formula for the amount of reserves to be kept on hand. Reserves above that amount will be available for Mrs. Kirchner's government to borrow. The formula can be adjusted at any time.

The Kirchner government has been dipping into the central bank's "excess" reserves—the surplus over the monetary base—since 2010. A showdown about that policy provoked the resignation of former bank president Martin Redrado in January 2010 and the naming of the more compliant Mercedes Marcó del Pont.

The government has argued that it is wasteful to sit on dollars that pay next to nothing when they could be used to pay down debt. That makes some sense. But paying down debt is not all Mrs. Kirchner has in mind. She maintains her popularity with generous government spending, and with international reserves fleeing, excesses are shrinking. She needed a charter change if she wants to tap more central bank funds. According to the reform, she can now borrow from the bank about twice what she could borrow before.

The bank's singular mandate of price stability has also been removed. In its place is a three-pronged mandate that includes the goals of providing for growth with social fairness and financial stability along with price stability.

Given Argentina's track record, it is hard to imagine that these new rules won't lead to more inflation. And none of this will boost the bank's credibility, which is already on the rocks. Government claims that inflation is running around 10% have been challenged by independent economists who say it is more like 20%.

In February, the Economist echoed those doubts with a seething commentary announcing that it would no longer publish official statistics. "We are tired of being an unwilling party to what appears to be a deliberate attempt to deceive voters and swindle investors," the magazine wrote.

A crisis is brewing. When it hits, will Mrs. Kirchner get even more power or will Argentines finally come to their senses?

Correa + Chavez Furthering Argentinean Crimes

2012-04-02T18:47:19Z

April 1, 2012 Argentina is following Cuban-communist ALBA play books, especially mimicking Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez: lie a lot, cheat, steal and pretend that you are honorable due to your self proclaimed “sovereignty” born by your own narcissism and fraud.

Suing innocent parties, stealing their belongings and dishonestly claiming that you have the obligation to do so is….still horrifyingly wrong. The Telegraph reports that Argentina threatens to sue banks helping Falklands oil explorers as trade war with Britain escalates.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

Liberty in Black and White

2012-03-30T11:06:02Z

March 28, 2012 The old church hymn reminds us, “and the government shall be upon his shoulders.” For Ecuador, that means the Cuban communist government, now in a threesome with Iran. You will recall that the first thing on the first day when new president Correa, who refused to be sworn in to uphold extant Ecuadorean law…or treaties or concordances, opened himself for business, he publicly declared full merger with Castro’s criminal, communist Cuba. He swore allegiance to Cuba. And the Obama team, waiting as they had during the Bush years, declared this holy.

One hopes that the stark visual of Correa’s pledged leader, Fidel Castro is before your pea brain. This is the Castro which Ecuador has promised to defend and serve….not the Pope nor anything remotely resembling honorable governance. Note the black jump suit. Note that the two men are about the same age. One was conscribed by force to the Nazi youth and willingly walked out. Later he was almost subjected to the horrors of communism. The other took communism’s dirty money and has caused mayhem and slaughters untold around the globe.

And Correa calls this blessed.

For our part, we stand against Correa’s dishonesty and his perversion of decency.

It is time you do also.

A poignant review by the great Carlos Eire on those who game mankind’s higher sensibilities to protect the statist prerogatives follows.

Weep afresh . How are your Holy Week preparations coming? Feeling any better yet?

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

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The Wall Street Journal· EUROPE NEWS March 28, 2012

Pope Seeks Greater Freedom for Church in Cuba
By NICHOLAS CASEY

Pope Benedict XVI, celebrating a morning Mass in the heart of revolutionary Cuba, called for a greater role for the Roman Catholic Church on the island nation and urged both Cuba and its enemies to change. Nicholas Casey has details on The News Hub from Havana. Photo: AP.

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Let Peter weep

Babalublog.com By Carlos Eire March 28, 2012

Immediately the rooster crowed the second time. Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken to him: “Before the rooster crows twice you will disown me three times.” And he broke down and wept. Mark 14:72

When Jesus chose Peter as his chief apostle, he knew he was delegating his authority to a very weak, and very flawed man. Peter was impulsive, inconstant, given to cowardice, and – by his own description – quite a sinner. Yet Jesus, the all-knowing Son of God, chose him over all the others.

And Peter's denial of Jesus just before the crucifixion was not the end of his constant screw-ups. He tried to lie to the apostle Paul, in regard to his opinion on keeping Kosher, and even tried to cover his tracks about having lied (Galatians 2:11). Up until the end he kept screwing up, and those around him kept recording his faults. Legend has it that when Nero began his persecution of the Christians in Rome, Peter headed straight out of town, and would have kept going if the risen Jesus had not bumped into him and asked “quo vadis?”, hey, where are you going? But legend also has it that he came to his senses, returned to Rome, and was crucified upside down on the Vatican hill.

Every pope after him screwed up in various ways. Three examples should be enough.

Pope Honorius I (625 -638) agreed with the monophysite heretics in a private letter, and his remains were later dug up and thrown into the Tiber River.

Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) had several mistresses and fathered a brood of ruthless illegitimate children, one of whom – Cesare Borgia -- was not only made bishop at the age of 15 and cardinal at the age of 18, but actually went on to become a formidable back-stabbing warrior, and the inspiration for Machiavelli’s book The Prince, the ultimate how-to manual for unprincipled tyrants. As if this were not enough, he also inspired the lurid and dreadful Showtime television series, "The Borgias."

In 1517, when Pope Leo X first heard of an Augustinian monk in Saxony named Martin Luther who had angered a Dominican preacher by challenging the legitimacy of indulgences, he dismissed all the fuss as nothing more than another “monkish squabble” between religious orders. Of course, we all know what happened next: the Protestant Reformation.

What are we to make of this, those of us who are Catholics? And those who are not?

The First Vatican Council proclaimed in 1871 that the successors of Peter are infallible in questions of faith and doctrine, that is, they are incapable of leading the faithful astray when it comes to their salvation. But it said nothing about the pope’s private life and his behavior concerning earthly matters.

Up until today, all of this had been a very abstract issue for me. Yes, I knew all this, and have studied it and taught my students about it ad nauseam, but I had never been affected by a papal failure of character until today.

Today reminded me of Good Friday. It felt like it, more than any Good Friday in recent memory. There was an abject despondency in the air, an oppressive grief beyond words. A crucifixion, multiplied eleven million times.

Today His Holiness Benedict XVI disowned Christ in Cuba. Today, he averted his eyes from the eleven million crucified Cubans in his midst, as he celebrated the holy sacrifice of the Eucharist. Today, he chose not to speak for the crucified, or to chasten their tormentors. Instead, he spent his time criticizing the so-called embargo, blessing the tyrants, and preaching a platitudinous sermon written for the theological faculty at the University of Regensburg rather than for the Cuban people.

And his subaltern, Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino, archbishop of Havana, beamed with satisfaction at the abject submission of Church to state.

I am saddened, yes, as are many other Cubans. I wept today. I am beyond sad: today has been one of the blackest days for me in a long time. The clouds hung low. At one point the sun was blotted out. I could not help but see eleven million crosses, with bodies writhing on them, stretched from one end of Cuba to the other. But I am not broken. Nor is my faith shaken. God works in mysterious ways. The Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth, Pope Benedict XVI has betrayed Cuba. So what? Aside from questions of faith and doctrine, he is as fallible as all of us are, and as prone to moral failure. And as a Catholic, it is my duty to pray for him.

I am angry too, yes. Mad as hell. I am angry at the old man, Joseph Ratzinger, and at the subalterns who advised him and made excuses for him. But popes have screwed up before, and will continue screwing up. And it isn’t up to any pope, or cardinal, or any foreign power to free Cuba from its tyrants. It is up to us, and to us alone, whether there or in exile.

His Holiness Benedict XVI did all Cubans a great favor today, when you look at his behavior from a certain perspective. He showed us that we cannot depend on anyone to help us.

Forget the pope. Let Peter weep, when he comes to his senses. Weeping is not for us, nor is whining. Forget any power on earth. Forget the differences between Catholics and non-Catholics. Forget heaven above, forget hell below . Cuba is hell on earth, our hell. Our task is to fight the tyrants and those who set up the eleven million crosses. Our role is to stand up to the tyrants and the henchmen who set up the crosses, wherever we are, and to remind the world constantly of their crimes against humanity.

Eventually, we shall overcome. Yes, we will.

But first, we have to realize where we are, and what the hour demands of us. Right now, for every Cuban, everywhere, there is but one question to answer: “quo vadis?”

Rafael Correa is Flat Wrong….Hayek is Correct

2012-03-25T14:03:04Z

March 25, 2012 Pope Benedict XVI is right: Cuban communism-Marxism is so over. It never works. It destroys liberty, not that the busy rent-seekers living off other people’s money running Ecuador today care one bit. But they might.

Rafael Correa’s beloved Belgium is bankrupt. Without the tens of thousands of overpaid, lazy sycophants chocked up by no vote whatsoever from the European Union member nations, Brussels would have collapsed.

President Correa runs a fully dictatorial, totally corrupt regime in Ecuador. He vowed from Day One to mirror Castro’s Cuba and he has so done, thanks to an influx of paid criminals from Venezuela, Cuba, the European Left and of course US AID who have been lying about their work for years….calling it democracy and justice when there is no democracy and no justice within ten million miles of their dishonesty.

But that is all right, you say. We cannot handle real democracy in Ecuador. We do not seek real liberty. We want communism, corruption and an end to democracy. Understand this: you are about to run out of someone else’s money.

Ecuador has stolen hundreds of legitimate, tax paying businesses. ..for Correa’s self enrichment. You care not because you dream that Correa will hand you bribes too.

And while the Indigenous, all a whopping 6% of the total population, march inexorably onward seeking more and more communism…wealth redistribution and land distribution…you are of course in agreement that, like the impossibly stupid Venezuelans, all oil money makes you the unlikely inheritor of corrupt Cuban communism. Look around…you can self educate. But know this: mass murderer Che Guevara is not going to rise from his grave with all his syphilis-riddled brain to save you. Fidel Castro is not going to save you. And president Correa is definitely not going to save you. By looking for false messiahs to rise from the dead, as Chavez tells Venezuelans to do with Bolivar, your feral secular stupidities are on parade.

Study what has become of the failed European Union. Know what choices you make and what you will stand for. Every time you support Correa, you show yourself as a person who should relocate to Cuba. Go ahead….move there. Enjoy the very thing you promote…on $20 a month.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

The Wall Street Journal
OPINION
March 23, 2012,
The European Union According to Hayek
Centralized welfare systems are necessarily run by a bureaucratic leadership that cannot master the knowledge needed to manage a complex society.
By ALBERTO MINGARDI
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi told The Wall Street Journal last month that the "European social model has already gone." If his fellow Europeans have read Friedrich Hayek, they would also understand why.

Friedrich August Hayek, who passed away 20 years ago this week, was one of the foremost social scientists of the last century. A Nobel laureate in economics, Hayek is often associated with his critique of socialist systems. There is, in society, a "knowledge problem": Economic life requires the coordination of individual planning. The relevant knowledge for economic planning is dispersed rather than concentrated in society. If this makes coordination challenging enough in a market system, it also makes coordination a virtual impossibility under central planning: The planner can never secure and process all the necessary information to provide detailed guidance to any given development in society.

Even though this argument was originally deployed against hard-core socialism, it works pretty well against the soft-core version widely adopted by European democracies. Centralized welfare systems are necessarily run by a bureaucratic leadership. The supposed technical superiority of such an organization is simply not enough to master the nuances of a complex society.

Centralized government allocates resources badly—regardless of its intentions. The very nature of centralization makes it impossible to collect and compute all the information that is needed. This is as true for any grand scheme of industrial planning as it is for the government-led welfare systems that characterize Europe's "social model."

Hayek was not deaf to the needs of the poor or the sick, and he even advocated some form of safety net. But he was well aware that Western democracies were at risk of developing, as he wrote in 1960, a "household state in which a paternalistic power controls most of the income of the community and allocates it to individuals in the forms and quantities which it thinks they need or deserve." Regardless of the intentions of its makers, such a system was bound to produce inefficiency and waste.

These inefficiencies and this waste, of course, become rents for those that live off them and return the favor with their political support.

States that control most of the income of the community and allocate it according to the wishes of their bureaucracy are now on the brink of bankruptcy. However, Hayek's solution—a limited-government state that allowed the free-market economy to flourish—is not getting more popular, at least not in Europe. One of the reasons for this is that many people believe a market system is inherently unjust, whereas the European social model attempts to combine wealth-generation with extensive redistribution to the ostensible benefit of the needy, to guarantee a measure of "social justice."

Hayek himself didn't argue that free-market competition would always reward the deserving. We do not cooperate, he wrote, because we sense the need to properly reward the merits of others. Rather, "so long as we think in terms of our relations to particular people, we are generally quite aware that the mark of the free man is to be dependent for his livelihood not on other people's views of his merit but solely on what he has to offer to them." Rewards in society depend on the game of supply and demand and, ultimately, on consumers' wants and needs.

Hayek pointed out that theories centered on the notion of "social justice" try to resemble, at the level of the "great society," the nature of smaller groups. In the smaller groups in which human beings lived for most of our history, people were compensated and advanced in society due to some shared vision of merit and worthiness. This also happens within larger societies: There are organizations—think of a corporation or an army or the church—in which people are rewarded because they score well in a particular metric.

It is thus not the case that the market system justly rewards the better and the wiser. Hayek's point is different. Small, self-organized, voluntary aggregates of human beings should be free to pursue their idea of "merit" as they wish provided that they take full responsibility for their efforts. However, a big society—one based on cooperation with strangers on a large scale, such as a state—should not attempt to play the game of the "just" distribution because it is not fit to it.

The European social model that trade unions and political parties still defend with such passion was ill-conceived from the start. A market system cannot work properly if a society aims to dole out rewards and punishments like a teacher in a classroom. Market institutions are anonymous and blind. Imposing upon them any preordained scheme of merit and reward will just make coordination between individuals—and, thus, wealth creation—more difficult.

The European social model has now reached its inevitable breaking point. Friedrich Hayek still offers the most compelling explanation of why it was bound to do so.

—Mr. Mingardi is director general of the Istituto Bruno Leoni, a Milan-based free-market think tank.

Islamists: Lessons of the Fall

2012-03-22T14:21:14Z

March 22, 2012 No one wants a with hunt. No one likes searches for problems that do not exist. No one likes Fidel Castro any more for he is a stubborn liar with a 60 year track record of continuously lying to the public, such as his latest whopper that the incredibly unhappy Cubans are never chucked in jail and are, according to Castro, paid US CIA operatives stirring up trouble for the island prisoners. No- no one liked Fidel because he is a liar.

And no one thinks the French are doing a great job either. The French, in their unending denial of their own internal problems, continue to blame actual radical Muslims and jihadists on the Neo-Nazi effort. While both do share practicing hatred as a commonality, the two efforts are different in many ways.

Denial of facts helps nothing. Denial of Ecuador’s home grown export product: dishonesty and viral hatred….now sent to the USA and Europe is beyond tragic. It is a cancer that has eaten the souls of Ecuadoreans just so criminal Rafael Correa can feel better about his own disgusting life, a life lived lying about everything and stealing from other people. No wait- that is what his KGB agent and Shining Path padre did. And the point is? The point is that Correa has been practicing this high art of lie, steal and cheat for a very long time.

The French like to tell us all that they too have a great society. France is morally bankrupt.

The French have Sharia Law courts. Sharia Law orders Muslims to destroy Catholic churches, among all others save the mosques. If you think this is a good idea to burn down Catholic churches, then you will love your own support for Rafael Correa who has brought you even more hatred in his marriage with the murderous, lying criminal Iran. And if you think Correa’s state mandated reverence of a fake, fat goddess called Pachamama is great, you will love with the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has in store for you and your fat, fake cult goddess of secular lies.

The Iranians have special ways for dealing with infidels such as Rafael Correa and the entire voting public of Ecuador who support this marriage of convenience of two utterly depraved sets of actors.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

Non Possumus

2012-03-22T14:14:46Z

March 15, 2012 The denizens of Ecuador have readily handed to their over-arching president Rafael Correa all that he has demanded to date: the end of rule of law, an alignment with Iran and Cuba, an end to free speech and open media, thefts of private businesses leaving protection of private property bleeding on the floor of the Assembly plus the end of judicial independence. To this, we are about to witness the next steps in totalitarianism of and by this narco-state of Ecuador: the end of sensible education, the end of free and fair elections plus the full control of religion by the secular state of Correa.

All of these destructive and disgusting acts are daily approved by Ecuadoreans who dishonestly pretend that some crime is great as long as the state keeps handing out its paltry bribes for more socialism. In fact, matters are so disgusting under Correa’s crime spree, that there is no pride left for Ecuador, honor is banished and stability under freedom denounced.

For its part, the U.S. government has blessed this incredible failed state. In fact, US AID assisted in creating and sustaining this cess pool of semi-literate communists. The people of Ecuador were so easily seduced. Not one Latin American nation cares enough about its own state to even honestly comment on the failed nation of Ecuador.

It is time to rise up and stand for functioning liberty… yes it is possible. It starts with you. The marching Indigenous seek more Cuban communism. They have it all backwards. But march they do. It is what they do best. Serious freedom lovers have a very different march to make.

But you… you need to stand for the light of liberty.

Tell Correa: “ Non Possumus. ” Ni un paso más. No more thefts of man’s liberties and functions. No more Cuban-Iranian communism in Ecuador.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

Correa’s “False Economy” and Worse- His Perception of Largesse

2012-03-22T13:53:32Z

March 5, 2012 Here you have a relatively decent description of Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, who has long surpassed some of history’s worst caudillos and is fully in the realm of utterly corrupt sociopathic liar, seizing and stealing all he can get away with while making the show for benign dictatorship. You elected this monster and helped install his One Man- One Corrupt Government. You own him….now stop it.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

As Usual, Reuters Lies About Correa’s Ecuador and Still Yet None Ask: Who Killed Rule of Law in Ecuador?

2012-03-02T14:22:33Z

March 2, 2012 We are weary of North American-based media refusing to relay the facts and encourage the everlasting glories of lying about el presidente Correa of Ecuador who is in fact a ruthless criminal, stealing from far too many with gay abandon. And when he is not stealing physically the assets of innocent Ecuadoreans, he has stolen their liberty. It is all of a piece.

Here is a statement from the USA’s Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen about all this. She is always helpful. Nonetheless, her own words give away the facts that the U.S. and Ecuadorean governments lie like dogs about Ecuador and its Iranian-ALBA mergers. None should pretend any longer that anyone in the U.S. government, outside team Obama’s control, has once been handed the facts about Iran in Latin America for they have not. Had any held the facts, the Hon. Ros-Lehtinen at this very very late juncture would not have to request the facts again from Mrs. Clinton just this week. So please….stop telling us the lie that the U.S. Congress has been marvelously briefed on Iran in Latin America for your canard is showing.

There is only one thing to do: stop covering up for the diplomatic foolishness and Nancy-girl cover ups of the failed Ecuadorean and USA governmental responses to communist-Iranian cartel actors in the Andes. In short, these fraudsters use U.S. money to paint false pictures of Correa’s Ecuador to sustain their own U.S. taxpayer funding prerogatives. Fraud and its kissing cousin corruption with intent to deceive is, last we looked, still a crime in the USA.

We are thrilled to see Chairwoman Ros-Lehtinen call for rule of law in Latin America. We hope she calls in her own staff, past and present, and reviews the facts of what they themselves have done or not done regarding the fundamental of democracy which is rule of law, while some have been denouncing its validity for over a decade, currently giving a vapid, pretty show of rule of law support which is backed up by nothing…nothing but duplicity. No no no- we cannot support rule of law issues in the Andes they cried. We at ECrisis hold these failures for who and what they are and were. No amount of waltzing around their new found affection for rule of law will ever undo the harm and evil to whole nations they created in their vast arrogance born of the essential which goes like this….rule of law, like honor, is just too much to ask. Remind us to never rely on their sets of honor for it does not exist. These same liars took U.S. money to help sell the utterly depraved 9-08 Ecuadorean constitution which hands total powers to the central presidency…and still they lie about their triumph today. …telling us that it matters not. Try telling that to freedom ended Ecuadoreans who now know, because they were too busy taking Correa’s extortionary bribes for too many years, that all liberty is denied them, thanks to Correa’s evil. …co-funded by Euro Reds, US AID and Hugo Chavez.

It is appalling that Chairwoman Ros-Lehtinen should have to demand facts from the U.S. Department of State….facts which have been blacked out for the last four years about Correa. Ms. Ros-Lehtinen has remedies for this and she should use them. Indeed she should have been using these remedies for the last three years to demand the facts, facts which have for three years still not been before the USA. Whining is not going to get the job done….nor is it an appealing tactic however much Andean mothers of deception hold this as a primary high art. Whining is disgusting. Only the hard cold facts regarding Iran and Ecuador will satisfy.

We say: let the sunshine in….the sunlight of transparency and accountability, long snuffed out in regard to any and all matters Ecuador. And still yet…..liars like REUTERS tell us that Correa is popular because he helps the poor. And you let that slide? We remind: Ecuador is a rich nation. Its poor exist because of Cuban-style state failures and cartel corruption, self enriching the evil Correa. And he is evil.

Are Ecuadoreans better off today than they were four years ago? Ten years ago? The answer is no. And when you pretend that Ecuador has not melded with Iran, ask yourself just what exactly you base your denials upon? What do you think Iran is busy signing treaties, deals and terms with Ecuador about? It is not about trade….that is a smokescreen. It is about their proxy state which is a marriage of evil.

You can wait on your blessings to magically appear. You can wait for some savior to rise from the streets. You can wait for Mrs. Clinton to lie some more and promise facts about Ecuador to Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen. Or you can do something about it. You can terminate your adoration for passive-aggressive dysfunction and sell honor. Honor comes from practicing honor. Honor loves the truth and acts on it.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis

Ecuador's Correa: Atahualpa's Revenge

2012-03-02T14:13:15Z

March 1, 2012 Make no mistake about it: the last of the short lived Incan dynasty was run by Atahualpa who was first and foremost his utterly depraved father’s son and a Mama’s boy.

Atahualpa, by no act of his own, inherited what his father and his grandfather before that, had set out to create: a totalitarian regime based on nothing less than the total control of the state and the rest be dammed. They were Nazis long before Adolf Hitler. The Incas were not happy savages living in Paradise Valley. They were total, severely brutal empire sustainers.

To be sure, the Incans had no truck with fake fat goddesses of the drug doing hippie sort, still pathetically idolizing the fake fat Ecuadorean constitutionally mandated state religion of Pachamama and their worship of the murdering psychopath Che Guevara. No indeed. The Incans demanded total obedience to them. Forced tribal migrations, blood drinking events and complete slavery of all was their reign.

Ecuador’s current regime maestro de capilla is a psychopath who controls everything he has not already stolen, and that is saying a lot. He learned well from his KGB-backed, Shining Path sociopathic criminal father and his overwhelming MaMa who is still manipulating everything she can for she is, like far too many Ecuadorean women of a certain age, addicted to a life lived on the cheap…the cheapened side of any honor, born by controlling every detail of their dishonest control freak venues. No child is left unscathed by such family pathologies.

Atahualpa existed at the cross roads of history when that which was handed him….all the brutal carnage of his family, all the blood drinking and all the sheer enslavement of a continent went smack dab up against an import that he could not comprehend and could not fathom: freedom. It cannot be underestimated that the Spaniards originally brought with them not the chains of slavery but promise of liberty. To be sure, within one hundred years the Spanish being Spanish lost their way and pathetically ruined any liberty in law they initially proferred. But the Incans knew a good deal when they first saw one: a chance to get away from the Mayan-style blood lust and total control of the state. It worked for about one century until lesser souls overwhelmed what might have been, post Inca.

We are intrigued by the one century of Incan rule. We should demand full research of the vast civilizations that preceded the Inca. We should have the facts on the Inca. Functioning archeological experts should be partnered with the Correa team of idiots who do supposedly unearth Atahualpa’s remains. These facts and independent experts do not in any way exist. Mirroring the utter stupidity of the Rafael Correa lies about Mariscal Sucre, should any trust anything Correa ever does, including the handling of Atahualpa? Of course not. Correa only lies about everything he ever does. Rafael Correa is the son of perverted, narcissistic criminals. He has spent his days hiding this and he will continue his perverted mission in life: to lie, steal and cheat as if to atone for all that his vain glorious MaMa has bred in his bones with no way out, just as there was no way out for Atahualpa from his real captors: his own father’s installed Incan minders and criminals. There is no conversion afoot for Correa: only disaster. Correa’s madre is no role model and her son, bred in stubborn deceit and systemic crime, should never head a nation. Unlike Atahualpa, who converted to Christianity [no doubt initially under great Franciscan duress a la Phillip II of Spain’s heavy fist and soon enough joined his old family minders to reject his nascent deals with the Spaniards which finally led to his bad end], Correa has abandoned every tenant of the Ten Commandments, let alone Christianity, even as he has melded his own nation with Iran in a marriage every bit as false and ruinous as his own happy, fake marriage for dishonest but greedy reasons. Marriages of convenience, so highly revered by Ecuadorean Madres for reasons unfathomable except their own incompetence and inertia, like fake religions, of and by the total state, always fail.

Do you not wonder why it is that there are no Las Damas in Quito reverentially beseeching the restoration of liberty? Where are women [ and men] of virtue in Quito? Who are they and what great moral instructions do they hold? The answer is found at your local Super Maxi: deceptive compromise, support for state theft and the perversion of finance with Iran.

We bear some sympathy for the last Incan. Atahualpa was stuck at the vortex of new moralities from a world he could not possibly comprehend. Atahualpa belatedly did comprehend that his own empire- his enslaved people- had chosen to abandon his totalitarianism, brutal and bloody. Correa chose to abandon morality. Correa is a totalitarian. He is brutal. Just how bloody his war against his own, playing out his own psycho-social perversions will get….remains to be soon. But that this criminal flourishes with gay abandon is more the condemnation of those who benefit from his criminality: his mother, his family, his circle of hardened criminals and lackeys who have chucked all sensibility over the high ridges of Cotopaxie. Atahualpa avenges his loss almost 500 years later with the worst totalitarian, also a criminal named Correa. Who do you deify?

And while you are busy stupidly revering poor old Atahualpa, know this: the Mayans by the time of Cortez had figured out that blood drinking rotted the brain. Cannibalism always kills off the cannibal sooner or later. Atahualpa had access to this Mayan knowledge. His own courtiers chose to ignore the lessons of history, readily available. Correa, like past cannibals, chooses to drink the blood of his victims symbolically while deifying Che Guevara and the fake fat Pachamama…his state religion of lies, greed and narcissism. What becomes of this state of lies may yet find a bed of thorns with the modern world or….the Mullahs.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis
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Ecuador 'locates final resting place of last Inca emperor's tomb'
It has been sought for centuries but remained a mystery, still out of reach. Now an expert has pinpointed a site that could be Atahualpa's resting place: the last Inca emperor's tomb.

Atawallpa 1497-1533 Last sovereign emperor of the Tahuantinsuyu or the Inca Empire Photo: Alamy

London Telegraph 29 Feb 2012

"This is an absolutely important find for the history of Ecuador's archeology and for the (Andean) region," said Patrimony Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa, speaking of the ruins found by Ecuadoran historian Tamara Estupinan.

The Inca empire, in the 1400s and early 1500s, spanned much of South America's Andean region, over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers), from modern-day Bolivia and Peru to Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia. It included dozens of ethnic groups with different languages, cities, temples, farming terraces and fortresses.

Atahualpa was the last of his dynasty. During the Spanish conquest he was taken captive in what is now Cajamarca, Peru.

He had been pressed to convert to Christianity and then the Spanish executed him by strangulation, then after his death in 1533, the empire began to fall apart.

This year Ecuador's state Cultural Patrimony Institute will start work on a promising archeological site, and Estupinan will be front and center to raise the curtain on a massive complex sprawling over a ridge at 1,020 meters.

It was back in June 2010 that Estupinan, now a researcher with the French Institute for Andean Studies (IFEA), found what she describes as an "Inca archeological site" high on the Andes' eastern flank amid plunging canyons. Nearby are a small local farm and a facility for raising fighting cocks.

But in the area called Sigchos, about 45 miles south of Quito, up on a hill dotted with brush, there is more - much more: she found a complex of walls, aqueducts and stonework that lie inside the Machay rural retreat. Machay means burial in the Quechua language.

"This is a late imperial design Inca monument that leads to several rectangular rooms that were built with cut polished stone set around a trapezoidal plaza," Estupinan explained to AFP.

Archeologist Tamara Bray, of Wayne State University in Michigan, and a colleague of Estupinan, confirmed that the site boasts "an Inca edifice that is phenomenally well preserved and quite important scientifically."

Inside the facility, a walled walkway starts at the Machay River and one can see the shape of an "ushno", essentially stairs that form a pyramid believed to be the (capac's) emperor's throne. Meanwhile a tiny cut channel of water would spout out a small waterfall nicknamed "the Inca's bath".

The director at the Lima-based IFEA, Georges Lomne, said the find appears to confirm that the Incas were active and present in a lowland area well outside what their best-known area of operations were: Andean highlands.

"Malqui-Machay is part of a broader complex that also would have included the Quilotoa lagoon and the area called Pujili (Cotopaxi)," he explained.

"All of this belonged to Atahualpa. It was his personal fiefdom in the way that French (and other) kings had royal domains," Lomne added.

Bray also stressed that "very few such Inca sites have been found in this type of tropical lowland. I think that the Incas used it as a sort of getaway."

Estupinan has some more specific ideas.

She believes Malqui-Machay is Atahualpa's final resting place. The tomb of the last capac (emperor) of Tahuantinsuyo, the trans-Andean empire.

While many experts have other theories, Estupinan believes that when Atahualpa was killed his remains could have been brought by his most loyal man, Ruminahui, to Sigchos for burial, to a place where Ruminahui based his fight for survival against the European intruders.

Root Cause of Chavez’s Demise: Selling Hatred

2012-03-02T14:07:34Z

February 21, 2012 For all of the Venezuelan denial of their own disastrous Marxist-communism, today it must be said that Venezuelans who adopt the hateful loathing of Jews can only face their own end game. Nothing identifies a failed state faster than their anti-Semitism.

It is impossibly dishonest to merely blame this on Castro or the ALBA leaders’ great love affair with Iran. No one forced Andeans to romance Iran. And nothing reveals their dark lunacy more.

Along with refusing state bribes and hand outs, all Andeans must deliver a stunning blow to the spread of hatred. It is a cancer that will eat each soul alive. Too many idiots at Quito Tennis and all across Correa’s doomed government actually despise Jews. These are ruinous behaviors and their hatred will, like a cancer, consume them soon enough leaving the entire world to wonder what it was that these liars did to benefit this globe. The answer is: zero.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis
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Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez faces an uprising at the ballot box

By Jackson Diehl, Published: February 19 2012 WASHINGTON POST

On Feb. 12, Henrique Capriles Radonski, a 39-year-old Venezuelan state governor, won a primary election to become the opposition’s candidate against Hugo Chavez in October’s presidential election. He won 1.8 million of an astonishing 3 million votes — double the turnout predicted by most analysts.

The next day, Capriles, a devout Catholic, was greeted by a commentary on the government-run Web site of Venezuelan National Radio titled “The Enemy Is Zionism.” Capriles, it explained, is the descendant of Jews. (In fact, his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor who emigrated from Poland to Venezuela.)

“In order to understand the interests embodied” by Capriles, the commentary declared, “it’s important to know what is Zionism, the Israeli ideology that he sneakily represents. . . . It is, without doubt, an ideology of terror, of the most putrefied sentiments of humanity; its supposedly patriotic impetus is based in greed.” And so on.

“Zionism,” it concludes, “is owner of the majority of the financial institutions of the planet, controls almost 80 percent of the world economy and virtually all of the communications industry, in addition to maintaining decision-making positions within the U.S. Department of State and European powers.”

Thus began the latest — and what will surely be the ugliest — political campaign by Chavez, a ruler who has served as a friend in need to Moammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — and who now is facing his own homegrown democratic uprising. But Venezuela’s spring differs from those of Libya, Syria or Iran: Instead of pouring into the streets, Venezuelans — fed up with the chaos and violence of Chavez’s 13 years in power — are marching to the polls and trying to restore the country’s crippled and compromised institutions.

The opposition Capriles now heads has learned lessons that might benefit some of the revolutionaries of the Middle East. It tried and failed to oust Chavez with mass demonstrations and strikes; it foolishly boycotted elections it believed would be unfair; it indulged in endless internal quarrels. The result was the entrenchment of a strongman who has thoroughly wrecked what was once Latin America’s richest country and who now presides over the highest inflation and murder rates in the Western Hemisphere, shortages of basic goods and power, and a drug-trafficking industry whose kingpins include the defense minister.

The opposition could have turned savage; instead it grew civil. Capriles, lanky and somewhat wonky, has insisted on pursuing power peacefully and by electoral means, even when the playing field is tilted. In 2004 Chavez jailed him on bogus charges; he won acquittal and in 2008 stunned Chavez’s hand-picked candidate for governor in Miranda, the populous state that surrounds Caracas. Now some pollsters are giving him even-money odds of beating Chavez himself, if the votes are counted fairly. His campaign has focused not on the caudillo but on the country — how he would begin to piece the economy and democratic institutions back together, while preserving social programs for the poor. His model, he says, is Brazil’s social democratic hero, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Chavez has responded by importing the rhetoric of the Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad, whom he recently welcomed to Caracas. He has tried to seize the ballot papers from the opposition primary, probably in order to identify and punish those who participated; such an operation targeted signers of a 2004 recall petition.

Meanwhile he is pouring borrowed money into the economy in a frantic effort to buy back support. The government budget calls for a 46 percent increase in spending this year. The state oil company borrowed $17.5 billion last year and is expected to sell another $12 billion to $15 billion in bonds. There is also a $30 billion credit line from China, to be paid back with discounted oil sometime in the future.

For Chavez, the future beyond October may not matter much. Operated on for cancer in Cuba last June, he has never disclosed the details of his illness; more than one foreign report suggests that he suffers from an incurable malignancy. Photos of his puffy face are in keeping with reports from opposition sources that he is relying on massive steroid injections to keep himself upright between now and October.

A lot of Venezuelans worry that one way or another, the country is headed for an implosion. A Capriles win could be contested by pro-Chavez generals; if Chavez wins and dies, a vacuum will open. Either way the economy will likely crash, once the pre-election spending binge ends.

That’s why the very orderliness and moderation of Capriles and the opposition coalition are so striking. Theirs is not so much an ideological or partisan crusade as a desperate effort to restore a semblance of political and social order to a country that is unraveling — a grasp at the modernity they glimpse in Brazil and Chile. Are they too late? The next seven months will tell.

diehlj@washpost.com