In his memoirs, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” The Russian variant would be just a bit different: ???????If you are lucky enough to have survived living in Moscow as a young woman, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Moscow is a moveable famine.???????

In Russia, at least two dozen women are murdered by their husbands every single day. Women don????????t give birth to enough children to sustain the population even if it had a normal mortality rate, but Russia????????s rate far exceeds the norm due to a seemingly endless litany of social maladies from AIDS to nuclear contamination (by the middle of this century, the island nation of Japan will have a larger population than Russia, and by the end of the century Russia will be a Muslim state). If we then drop a name like Anna Politkovskaya or Galina Starovoitova, the plight of women in Russia begins to seem quite hopeless indeed, and as Publius Pundit has previously reported, the list of future female martyrs is long indeed.

But we can go further: Many people have at least heard those two famous women????????s names, but how about the name Malika Umazheva? Four years ago this Wednesday Ms. Umazheva, then head of administration of Alkhan-Kala, was abducted from her home in the middle of the night by armed gunmen, taken out into the night and shot. The government blamed the killing on ???????bandits??????? (just the way Russians blamed the World War II murder of Polish officers in the forest of Katyn on the Germans), but Ms. Umazheva was a persistent critic of human rights abuses by Russian forces in her village and the cause of her demise was obvious to all who knew her.

Anna Politikovskaya wrote of her:

Malika was a true heroine, a unique and marvelous one. She became the head of administration of one of the most complex Chechen villages–Alkhan-Kala (a ‘Baraev’ village, the subject of endless ‘cleansing operations,’ executions and disfigured corpses) after the former head had been murdered. Reason would have told her: ‘Sit quietly. Be careful.’ But she did the exact opposite–she became the boldest and most committed village head in that murderous zone of military anarchy which today is Chechnya. By herself, unarmed, she went out to meet the ÄRussianÅ tanks that were crawling into the village. Alone, she shouted to the generals who had deceived her and, on the sly, were murdering the residents of the village: ‘You scoundrels!’ She relentlessly fought for a better fate for Alkhan-Kala. No one else permitted himself to do that in present-day Chechnya. Not a single male.

If you want to gain a true appreciation for the darkness of the malignant shadow that is closing all about Russia these days, and the failure of the West to seek to illuminate its recesses, try to search out a simple photograph of Ms. Umazheva on the Mighty Internet. Then, on Wednesday, see how much effort the West takes to remember her and try to find out what it has done to continue her work.

Given the wretched position of Russian women despite their heroic struggles, it????????s somber beyond words to realize that Russian men actually have it even worse. Unlike the average Russian woman, the average Russian man can????????t expect to reach the age of 60, and then there????????s Alexander Litvinenko, who only made it to age 44, succumbing on November 23 (last Thursday) to a fatal poisoning undoubtedly instigated by the Russian secret police.

Litvinenko, a KGB defector in 2000 who revealed the Kremlin????????s plans to assassinate dissident oligarch Boris Berezovksy and who was just beginning an investigation into the killing of famed journalist Anna Politkovskaya, becomes only the most recent in string of attacks on those who dare to challenge the Kremlin????????s worldview and dates back perhaps to 1837 and the duel which killed the poet Alexander Pushkin, likely rigged by his enemies in the Tsar????????s court as he became ever more sympathetic to the cause of freedom and equality.

Saddest of all, perhaps those killed outright, even the ones who perish slowly like Litvinenko, are the lucky ones, as those sent to concentration camps such as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn can attest — even moreso those consigned to the torture halls of Lubianka under Stalin (it????????s one of the most poorly understood facts in the modern history of our planet that Stalin????????s concentration camps killed more people than Hitler????????s).

Through it all, a woeful, a cowardly silence has echoed across the great Russian land. The Russian people have never stood one single time to protect their great patriots from the malignant machinations of the state, and hence Russia has degenerated into what Atlantic magazine aptly labled ???????Zaire with permafrost.???????

On Saturday, the Litvinenko killing turned into a national nightmare in Britain. As the Globe & Mail reported:

The mysterious death of a former Russian spy living in exile in London turned into an unprecedented public health scare on Friday when it emerged that he had been deliberately poisoned by a major dose of radioactive material. Further traces of the substance were found at a sushi restaurant and at a central London hotel where Alexander Litvinenko had met a number of people before falling ill, and at his home in the city. He was killed by polonium 210, a rare radioactive isotope that is so toxic that there may never be a post-mortem examination of Litvinenko’s body, for fear of causing further deaths. Police and security sources said they had never encountered such an extraordinary death. “Nothing like this has ever happened before,” said one Whitehall source. “It is unprecedented; we are in uncharted territory.” One priority on Friday night was to establish who has access to polonium 210 anywhere in the world.

Government ministers, meanwhile, are said to be “dreading” the possible repercussions of a public inquest into Litvinenko’s death, at which they expect his associates to make damning accusations against the Russian government.

Traces in the restaurant this time. How much collateral damage next time? Britons are justifiably concerned about the potential side effects even on this occasion. The New York Times reported:

???????If substantial amounts of polonium 210 were used to poison Alexander V. Litvinenko, whoever did it presumably had access to a high-level nuclear laboratory and put himself at some risk carrying out the assassination, experts said yesterday.???????

It continued:

Polonium 210 is highly radioactive and very toxic. By weight, it is about 250 million times as toxic as cyanide, so a particle smaller than a dust mote could be fatal. It would also, presumably, be too small to taste. There is no antidote, and handling it in a laboratory requires special equipment. But to be fatal it must be swallowed, breathed in or injected; the alpha particles it produces cannot penetrate the skin. So it could theoretically be carried safely in a glass vial or paper envelope and sprinkled into food or drink by a killer willing to take the chance that he did not accidentally breathe it in or swallow it.

???????This is wild,??????? said Dr. F. Lee Cantrell, a toxicologist and director of the San Diego division of the California Poison Control System. ???????To my knowledge, it????????s never been employed as a poison before. And it????????s such an obscure thing. It????????s not easy to get. That????????s going to be something like the K.G.B. would have in some secret facility or something.???????

In other words, it is as if the Kremlin is formally announcing the onset of the second Cold War, proudly and defiantly, even though Russia has less than half the population of the USSR that failed to carry the day in the first confronation. It is as if the Kremlin has literally become intoxicated on the fumes of its oil revenues, or perhaps simply become insane.

On the other hand, did we really think that Russians would simply abandon their ideology of contempt for the West simply because they lost the Cold War? Would we have rejected democracy if the shoe had been on the other foot? Perhaps we too were sniffing glue. Time to sober up.

Given that it was Winston Churchill who warned the West about the first ???????Iron Curtain descending across the continent,??????? there????????s some poetry to be found in the Litvinenko attack falling in London and the clarion call being sounded there.

Britain????????s crack squad of anti-terrorism police are the same ones who recently foiled an attack on an American airliner by Muslim extremists. Indeed, in our panic over Osama bin Laden, we seem to have forgotten the horror of a giant state like Russia, armed with nuclear weapons, being bent on our destruction. Litvinenko is our wakeup call. Because of his capacity and his level of resources, Vladimir Putin is a far greater threat to Western democracy than bin Laden can ever dream of being.

At midweek the nightmare got worse, as it was reported that Yegor Gaidar had fallen ill in Moscow with a “mysterious illness” that doctors cannot diagnose after a vist to Ireland. Gaidar was the driving force behind the “shock therapy” move towards democracy under Boris Yeltsin, believing that Russia was fully capable of backsliding into a neo-Soviet state and therefore needed to rapidly disperse assets away from the center. As such, Gaidar is obviously a major target of Kremlin ire, and his sickness, coming in such close proximity to the demise of Litvinenko, is horrifying indeed, and even more so in close proximity to the actions of his daughter, previously documented on La Russophobe, in hanging a public banner calling the Kremlin thugs “bastards” for altering the elections law. Even if the illness is purely natural, it’s a reminder of the nature of the problem we face.

Gaidar’s colleague Anatoli Chubais was quoted as saying on NTV:

“Yegor Gaidar on 24 November was in the balance between life and death. Could this be simply some sort of natural illness? According to what the most professional doctors, who have first-hand knowledge of the situation, say — no. A poisoning, an attempted murder: this is precisely the version that needs to be examined. For me there is no doubt that the deathly Politkovskaya-Litvinenko-Gaidar chain, which by a miracle was not completed, would have been extremely attractive for the supporters of an unconstitutional, forceful change of power in Russia.”

He told RIA Novosti:

“This deadly design would have been extremely attractive for those supporting unconstitutional, violent means of changing power in Russia.”

Gaidar’s daughter told Kommersant:

“The doctors are leaning towards the conclusion that all the symptoms … point specifically to poisoning.” The doctors will make their final diagnosis on Friday, with ???????a poison unknown to civilian medicine??????? deemed the most likely cause of his illness, she said.

The Novye Izvestia daily quoted Maria Gaidar saying that her father had eaten a

???????simple breakfast of fruit salad and a cup of tea.??????? Shortly after, Gaidar fainted. ???????I went up to him. He was lying on the floor unconscious. There was blood coming from his nose, he was vomiting blood. This went on for more than half an hour,??????? Maria Gaidar said.

According to Novye Izvestia, Gaidar then remained unconscious for three hours in hospital and for a full day his life was considered in danger.

If nothing else, the events involving Gaidar are an urgent wakeup call. Publius Pundit has been sounding the warning call for months now, as a troll through our extensive Russia archives will make clear, and we have not been alone. But just as in Churchill????????s day, the West has been slow to answer this call, both because of our typical democratic inefficiency and our psycholgical tendency to resist accepting the presence of additional horror in our midst, one that will need all our resources (and all our luck) to remedy.

It was so much more comforting to think that the ???????Russia problem??????? had been solved, wasn????????t it?

Putin responded to fears of Kremlin complicity in Litvinenko????????s killing by saying: ???????There is no ground for speculation of this kind. A death of a man is always a tragedy and I deplore this and send my condolences to the family.??????? No grounds? Is this man joking? Does he take us for fools? Russia has been condemned by every human rights organization under the sun for its barbaric record of torture and murder in Chechnya and the pandemic of racism and corruption that is sweeping Russia proper. More than a dozen journalists have been murdered while Putin has held the reins of power, and not one killing has been solved. The government has seized control of the television airwaves, which did not report a single word about Litvinenko????????s fall. Yet Putin still has the temerity, the hubris, to accuse us of paranoia?

As the Globe & Mail reported:

???????Some of Putin’s aides went further, hinting at an expatriate plot to discredit the Russian government. ???????I am far from being a champion of conspiracy theory,???????? said Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Putin’s chief envoy to the European Union. ???????But it looks like we are facing a well-orchestrated campaign or a plan to consistently discredit Russia and its leader.???????????????

One is hard-pressed to decide whether it is more ominous to think Yastrzhembsky is serious or just propagandizing. Either way, we are looking at a fully realized neo-Soviet Union.

Indeed, looking at these events through the eyes of Putin, Litvinenko is simply an irresistible target no matter how much ire any act against him produces in the West. By killing him, not only is a major thorn removed from the Kremlin????????s side, but Putin can blame the West????????s reaction on ???????russophobia,??????? thus stoking the fires of xenophobia that help him retain his grip on power despite limited financial resources and undercutting those who sound the warning call in the West by playing on their own liberalism. He can send an unmistakable message of the depths to which his government is prepared to sink in order to get what it wants, terrifying many, and this is necessary for a Russia that cannot get what it wants by simply using geopolitical influence with a GDP rivaled by the tiny Netherlands. And by blaming the killing on Russia????????s ???????enemies abroad,??????? he can even justify further assaults on those ???????enemies??????? including further killings.

Who would be the orchestrator of such a ???????well-orchestrated campaign??????? in the Kremlin????????s eyes? Two names top the list, the exiled ???????oligarch??????? Boris Berezovsky (who resides on London after Britain refused to extradite him) and the jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is cooling his heels in a Siberian prison. The Kremlin can????????t simply kill either one of them outright, they are too wealthy and powerful and too well-connected in the West. In the end, a shadow of the USSR????????s former imposing power, Russia simply can????????t win that kind of confrontation, and it knows it. Yet, they remain the leading potential rivals to the Kremlin????????s control over the country.

Now, suppose Russia were to manufacture some evidence that one of both of these oligarchs was responsible for killing Litvinenko just so they could make the Kremlin look bad? Wouldn????????t that justify taking them out, at least enough to blunt any Western response? If so, then by killing Litvinenko the Kremlin could neatly kill two (or even three!) birds with one stone.

So the West must begin to send its own messages. As Lincoln said, these dead must not have died in vain. We must clearly say we will do all we can to protect Russia????????s remaining Litvinenkos and Politkovskayas, and we must make it clear that we will remember and be motivated by them when the were gone. We know how to do this, we did it with Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, and it made them powerful. We must create a climate that will encourage as many Russian patriots as possible to step forward as soon as possible and in a united front, making it harder for the Kremlin to pick them off one at a time, a climate that will provide them with the resources they need to maximize the value of their struggle. In America, resisting the rise of dictatorship in Russia is something that should meet with bipartisan approval, a perfect opportunity for a united country to show the world what it can do.

We must pursue the investigation of the Litvinenko killing no matter where it leads. We must stand behind the courageous Britons as they do so. Meanwhile, we must not forget what we are dealing with. A recent report by Amnesty International reveals that torture is being routinely practiced by the Russian police against ordinary Russian citizens, and not merely in the wilds of Chechnya. Given this, we must no longer view a charge of ???????russophobia??????? as anything other than a badge of honor, an epithet launched by those who would struggle destroy Russia at those who would struggle to save it.

Perhaps Martin Luther King was ???????KKK-phobic.??????? So be it. Russia now finds itself locked in a final battle with itself for its own survival. Russia, with $300-per-month salaries and a plummeting population, emerged from the first Cold War. What would emerge from the second? Nothing that would be recognizable or that could endure. It is as vital for those who love Russia as for those who fear its encroachment upon Western security to stop the process now so clearly underway at the earliest possible moment, to show we have learned something from our past mistakes.

Of course, we will make it difficult for ourselves. The killing of Litvinenko was originally blamed on Thalium, which seemed the most likely cause. When this was discounted, the russophile propagandists pounced, aided by the latent ant-Americanism that pervades many corridors of our academia. History student Sean Guillory of Sean????????s Russia Blog, for instance, proclaimed with haughty contempt:

???????Evidence doesn????????t matter when it comes to Stalin, Russia, and now, even Putin. They are all given magical powers to direct events and history at will. This line of thinking only shows how difficult it is to break the Cold War????????s cultural and ideological structures that still inform how we in the West think about Russia.???????

He referred to ???????language tricks that conjure ghosts of the Soviet past??????? and condemned seeing Russia as an ???????abnormal society??????? as if he were King lecturing to the Grand Wizard. It????????s rather easy to use the force of our liberal values against us, and Putin is a sophisticated student of judo. Guillory vilified a statement from Britain????????s Guardian newspaper that ???????poisoning dissidents cannot be part of a modern, democratic agenda??????? saying that the West is in no postion to judge Russian democracy ???????? implying we are no better. He even went so far as to repeat the KGB propaganda that Litvinenko was a small fish that they wouldn????????t trouble themselves with. Then, suddenly, it turned out things were even worse than the ???????russophobes??????? first imagined.

Is this what the study of history in America has come to? Have we forgotten that if we had been more confrontational and more suspicious about Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, not less, we could have taken more resolute action to interrupt a sequence of events that lead to the GULag Archipelago where tens of millions of Russians lost their lives (while the West lost trillions of dollars)? Have we forgotten how our failure to be more suspicous when Vladimir Putin came to power has led us to this awful day? We laughed when Boris Yeltsin told us this unknown spymaster would succeed him, laughed when we should have been weeping.

Political correctness of this kind costs lives. It is a price we ought not be prepared to pay. Josef Stalin created concentration camps that killed more people than Hitler????????s and he continued his reign over Russia unimpaired until he died of natural causes.

If that isn????????t ???????magical power,??????? what is?

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.

Scenes from Mexico’s Congress
Source: El Universal, via StJacques at Free Republic

Mexican Congress has opened, and supporters of failed presidential candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the ridiculous little man who could not take defeat like and man, and instead inaugurated himself president last week, are determined to not allow real electoral winner, Felipe Calderon, take office. It’s actually a constitutional requirement that he take office physically and these clowns and bozos - who are defying the will of 44 million Mexican voters - are determined to physically prevent that from happening. They want the second-place finisher to take office instead. It just goes to show their contempt for democracy and their utter unfitness to be seated in Mexico’s congress. They are not democrats, they are, rather, in the same league as the Sadr-ites who have infiltrated Iraq’s parliament via legitimate elections, even as they wage civil war on the side. At least they are having the good sense to threaten to resign these days, or so I heard on the radio this morning, going the Subommandante Marcos route to oblivion. But not these Mexican congress guys. They are determined to halt democracy and elections by force. From inside! And to turn congress into the most undignified, un-Mexican brawling match Mexico has ever seen. Aside from that, they are uniting with the troublemakers linked to gangs in Oaxaca state, as is so beautifully chronicled by Mark in Mexico. He’s got a good take on this aspect in his most recent posting of developments, here

Who cannot be reminded of this?

Unfortunately, such specters should be confined to the ring of sport, not the enclaves of democracy. But that just goes to show where the sour-grapes losers of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are at right now, a bunch of fourth-rate Mexican wrestlers turning the Congress into a Mexican wrestling match.

UPDATE: Mark in Mexico has video of the mess and an expert baseball analysis of the best throw techniques from the babe’s gallery up top. It’s a must-read here.

Amid the recrudescence of Cold War murder from Russia, the specter of strife in Lebanon, and the shadow of tyranny darkening over the defiantly hope-filled streets of Venezuela, there also is great suffering among the people in Iraq, where the recent attacks have been the war’s most violent.

Of course it is a civil war. There have been news reports that both sides can sustain their battle and both Sunni and Shia have old grudges to settle. This item here really explains the dynamic from the strategic perspective.

But amid all this, the people of Baghdad, day after day, are suffering greatly. Our dear Mohammed at Iraq The Model has some moving descriptions of strings of bad news - evacuations, losing one’s furniture, kidnappings, threats, menace, isolation, the wearing down of the war. Amid all this, neighbors in the little neighborhoods of the vast city still manage to get together to drink tea and be together, even though there is little they can do to stop the violence. Their only consolation? It is better than being alone.

Remember them too, in Iraq, for theirs is one of the world’s great struggles for democracy. Read the whole thing here.

With the victory of leftists Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua just in the past month, it would seem as if a year-long string of defeats for the Bolivarian Revolution — most exemplified by Mexico and Peru — has been broken. With Fidel Castro regrettably still alive, Evo Morales looking to impose his will on Bolivia’s productive regions, and Hugo Chavez ready and willing to steal the up-and-coming election in Venezuela, things are looking less optimistic than ever.

However, I think that the image of such waves and counter-waves (like the “leftist wave” sweeping Latin America, and the anti-Chavez wave in Peru and Mexico) is just a matter of electoral timing. Elections in certain countries in which Chavez’s message is well or ill-received come at different times, but if a group of such labeled countries go to the polls around the same time, it affords the misconceptions that perhaps election results in one country spill over to the others. The fact that Ortega and Correa have won around the same time has nothing to do with the other, but everything to do simply with each countries’ demographics, history, and economy.

1) Chavez’s message is of the populist-socialist variety, so it will appeal to the poor people of Latin America who feel especially disenfranchised by an overbearing and corrupt oligarchy.

Nicaragua and Ecuador? Definitely! A small and corrupt minority of people have grabbed the reins of government for hundreds of years, using it to fatten their wallets, while leaving the rest of their countries to live like animals. In some countries it is particularly bad, and it is there that this message will most resonate.

2) Chavez plays the race card, appealing broadly to the Latin American indigenous population.

Countries that have especially large indigenous populations would definitely succumb to this. For centuries the white, Spanish-descended elite has oppressed the “backward” Indian populations of Latin America, ruling the continent despite being in the vast minority. Chavez says that the Indian majority should overthrow this white ruling class and take majority power. This is where Bolivia and Ecuador come in. So the populist-socialist message combines with the racial message.

3) Chavez plays the anti-imperialism card, singling out the United States, which for Latin America is the perfect scapegoat.

The United States’ history in Latin America is long and complicated. From the Monroe Doctrine to funding the Sandinistas to paramilitary death squads in Guatamala to the War on Drugs, the United States is seen in many quarters of Latin America as imposing its view on the entire hemisphere. Especially in Central America, where the United States has repeatedly intervened in countries’ internal affairs, is the anti-imperialism card most likely to play out. Others just jump on the bandwagon.

Chavez also has the added benefit that some of his ideological opponents have played themselves out and been discredited through scandal and dysfunctionality, thus discrediting the ideology altogether. Free trade and markets are seen as ideologically fused with the leader, so if the leader goes down in flames, so does the idea. That’s why Chavez and all his redistributionalist policies are on top right now — he’s charismatic, and people perceive that its working. That’s why in some countries, like Nicaragua and Ecuador just now, the results of the elections may have been a foregone conclusion whether held this month or a year ago.

Yet for every message there is a counter-message.

However, many countries that are economically more developed and stable, providing ample opportunities for individual prosperity, will not be affected. While Mexico and Chile still have their respected oligarchies, the middle class is growing and loving it. One only has to look at how Mexico’s northern regions voted for conservative Calderon earlier this year to see that. At some point the opportunity beats out the poverty. If the beast is to be humbled, the oligarchs — so afraid of competition for their money — must realize that they will likely be rich as hell no matter what and open up the economy for growth so that those at the bottom can feel it too.

Pan-Indian racial solidarity is also not the only identity in Latin America that is powerful. There is also the nationalist identity. This is how Alan Garcia in Peru put a halt on Chavez’s interference and decisively won the presidential election there — despite a large Indian population! Countries that do not have large Indian but rather mestizo populations will not succumb to this message anyway, but if the message can be made for being loyal to the country rather than Chavez, then it is possible to overcome him.

Lastly, the anti-imperialism message can easily be overcome. Northern Mexico voted for Calderon because NAFTA has brought wonderful opportunities to Mexico that are simply trickling down from the border. Economic growth and prosperity are expanding there; I’ve seen it for myself. The United States and current governments who are willing to do business with it can easily defeat the anti-imperialism types by bringing about the wonders of free trade and foreign investment. If this brings prosperity, rather than greater wealth for the oligarchs, then the United States if anything will be more of a friend than an invader. The message can also be turned on Chavez who, in these recent years, can be seen as interfering in the internal affairs of other Latin American nations much moreso than the United States. There is the possibility, like in Peru, where he can be seen as the imperialist.

The trend in Latin America is going two ways, and the anti-Chavez message is becoming stronger as the movement learns how to push back. The elections in Nicaragua and Ecuador surely add to his count, but it cannot be dismissed that in the last year there has been formidable pushback that will only continue. In Venezuela itself Chavez is facing the greatest threat to his power ever — a democratic candidate with immeasurable support.

It is possible that in a week and a half that Chavez will no longer be with us anymore. If he does not conduct free and fair elections, we may see Latin America’s own democratic colored revolution against his socialist tyranny. And since he is at the top of this personality cult called the Bolivarian Revolution, cutting the head off the snake may itself cause the whole movement to shatter.

Rafael Correa, 43, an avowed leftist “economist” educated at the University of Illinois, has won the presidential election in Ecuador.

He’s a good friend of Hugo Chavez and has campaigned on promises to de-dollarize Ecuador, default on the sovereign debt, and nationalize private oil companies, chasing out every last penny of foreign investment. He’s one of the biggest Idiots in the hemisphere.

Some economist. The guy doesn’t even know arithmetic, let alone human nature.

The only consolation is that he’s likely to be thrown out before his term is up, and he does not have a congress whose parties he can work with.

Of course I am disgusted. But I could also see this coming. Correa’s program, after the primary, was substantially modified in the direction of the right. He toned down his Chavez worship, changed his mind on dollarization and softened his lunatic tone on defaulting on the sovereign debt.

Not that I believe him.

But moving right, just as his rival, banana tycoon Alvaro Noboa moved a little to the left, seemed to be more palatable to Ecuador’s voters. And maybe it’s understandable - Correa was a fresh face. Noboa was an oligarch. Correa must have seemed more like an outsider, more willing to be worth the gamble to focus on the poor, via handouts. Noboa, being an oligarch, is one good reason why Ecuador is so full of poor people. It’s not his wealth that is evil but the fact that he has privileges to operate his businesses at the expense of potential entrepreneurs who cannot get business licenses. They are shut out while Noboa is fully operational and happy to see no rivals flourish. It’s the privilege, not the money, that makes Noboa’s wealth so odious and his candidacy so suspect. It’s a very tough situation but it goes back to much further in time than the advance of Hugo Chavez. Ecuador’s problems begin with oligarchic privilege and the crushing of the private sector. That may be one reason why Correa came out on top.

The sentiment of voters seemed to be the same as Bolivia, too - despair. Voters were thinking - they all suck and they all lie so let’s give this one a chance. Throw the dice! It was the same thing Bolivia’s voters repeatedly said ahead of their vote cast for Evo Morales. Now, Ecuador joins Bolivia in the contest to be the most unstable country of the Americas, going against the current set by its two majestic neighbors, Peru and Colombia. What a sad pity.

ECrisis has further coverage well worth reading here.

UPDATE: Boz at Bloggings by Boz has an absolutely excellent analysis of this new situation in his new ‘Five Points On Correa’ that’s a must-read here.

UPDATE: FT says Correa’s going into the presidency with his hands tied.

Now I know what you are thinking. This being Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, getting stoned means he was caught smoking the holy leaf. Particularly since this was Santa Cruz, home of granola, Angela Davis, Surf City, leftists up the wazoo and the banana slugs volleyball team. Who could be surprised if Evo was stoned in Santa Cruz? Isn’t that what one does when one finds oneself in Santa Cruz? Particularly if it’s him?

But it’s all wrong. No holy leaf, no sun and surf, south of the equator, all of these words mean something far more primal.

Evo Morales was showered with a hail of stones, as in r-o-c-k-s by young people in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, bitter and enraged at the Marxist leader’s obsession with land confiscation to the state. It was a fierce response to the advance of collectivism and these young people know they have no one but themselves to rely on. Nobody is going to take up their cause if Morales steals their freedoms. That’s why they are fighting in the streets right now.

Meanwhile, the Babes of Santa Cruz were back in action, more beautiful than ever, and Jim Hoft at GatewayPundit’s got the scoop and some dazzling new photos.

See what’s unfolding in the serious Santa Cruz that is resisting communism in this superb post from Jim here.

The Manuel Rosales presidential election rally in Caracas Saturday
Source: Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis

The size and depth of the crowd at the Rosales rally in Caracas Saturday
Source: Daniel Duquenal at Venezuela News & Views

Venezuelan flags at the Rosales presidential rally in Caracas Saturday
Source: Anonymous, via Venezuela Today

The babe count was high in Caracas on Saturday
Source: Miguel Oser at 11 Abril (whose album shows many babes)

Note the ‘duh’ look on Chavez’s face, probably his real expression over this
Source: Martha Colmenares, citing Globovision

More Venezuelan babes at the rally in Caracas Saturday
Source: AP, Retuers, via Yahoo! News

Words don’t begin to describe this. At least a million people marched across Caracas to final campaign rally by Manuel Rosales, who is challenging Hugo Chavez for the Venezuelan presidency, and as Alek Boyd notes, the entries to the city were blocked off so that outsiders could not be ‘bused in’ or otherwise travel to Caracas. This pure local sentiment in Venezuela on display, something that puts the lie to certain polls that claim Chavez has a high lead. Even some of the mainstream media are questioning this.

See the rest of Alek’s photo show, which he took from climbing a billboard here.

Miguel at The Devil’s Excrement has a video of the sizzling energy of the rally in this post here. And he has some breathless eyewitness analysis describing what is going on and what it was like at that rally in these posts here and here.

Martha Colmenares, a journalist at Martha sin Mordaza has more photos from Globovision and excellent coverage and analysis in Spanish in this post here.

Daniel at Venezuela News & Views has excellent analysis explaining the historic significance of this, along with tons more photos he took himself, in this must-read post here.

UPDATE: And don’t miss Jim at GatewayPundit’s excellent roundup and analyses of several orbiting issues in this excellent post here.

Poisoned Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko on his deathbead
Source: Kim Zigfeld, at La Russophobe

In his defiant last statement, poisoned Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko said, “The bastards got me. But they won’t get everybody.”

Incredibly brave words for a man going down in lingering pain from a now-unknown poison. Less than a week ago, Alexander Litvinenko was in perfect health, doggedly trying to find out the truth behind the murder of another Russian journalist in London. In a scene reminiscent of Daniel Pearl’s kidnap, he apparently got too close to people too dirty, and then hit on some nerve too close to something dear to the Russian government. Then he was poisoned, fulfilling Kim Zigfeld’s eerily asked question of ‘who’s next?‘ The Russian government dismissed allegations of their being behind the act but the Kremlin’s never been truthful about its poisoning practices. This goes back to the Bulgarian umbrella incident of 1982 to the use of poison gas on the Moscow theatre to the poisoning of Yushchenko around 2004. They poison. This what they do, there is no sense in arguing with them, through their repeated actions the truth gets louder and more strident the more Putin & Co. deny it.

It’s nothing but the FSB KGB continuation of an age-old Russian tradition, reaching back to the assassination of Alexander II and Nicolas Stolypin, of killing off the bright lights of reforms and truth seeking. In both those instances, history’s course was changed as democracy was suborned through murder - and changed for the way worse. Murder as an instrument of governance changes the entire basis for what a society can and cannot put up with, can or cannot fear, and will or will not do. It creates a climate of fear and a senseless pall of brutality. But there is one critical difference - in the 19th century cases, Stolypin and Alexander II were legitimate leaders felled by illegitimate thugs. In these new cases, the truth-tellers and reformers were little democracy revolutionaries on the bottom, felled by illegitimate thugs from the top. That’s why Litvinenko’s statement that ‘they won’t get everybody,’ is so significant. It’s the boys at the top striking out at the many democrats on the bottom, not the stray groups of anarchists at the bottom striking out at the few reforming leaders. Hence, Litvinenko’s quest for truth will go on. And everything about his last moments suggests that he did die a hero.

There is one implication from this poisoning that Putin ought to concentrate very hard on: Now that he’s set the terms for how democracy and transparency will be made or unmade, through assassination, he should know that two can play that game. And that he and his are not particularly immortal. God knows what will happen with this murder - along with the other assassination in Beirut. I feel an ominous cold chill in the air already.

Keep a eye on Kim’s La Russophobe blog for more updates if she doesn’t get any up right away here. She will be making a post here in a day or two

UPDATE: Kim’s summary of the case on Publius is here, and her latest reading at La Russophobe is here. Be sure to read all the way to the bottom for the implications of the case for us in the West, she outlines what is really at stake here.

UPDATE: Speaking from the grave, Litvinenko left a message and testimony directed at Putin, accusing him of the crime.

UPDATE: Radiation from Polonium-210 was found in the spy’s body.

UPDATE: A London sushi bar where Litvinenko had one of his suspect meals has been found oozing with radiation by London cops.

UPDATE: Putin warned the EU not to lecture him about Russia’s treatment of political dissidents and said they ought to focus on their own problems, being a mafiya-infested confederation and all.

Relatives of assasinated Lebanon minister Pierre Gemayel mourn
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News

Following the assassination of Lebanon’s Pierre Gemayel in a hail of gunfire by Syrian agents this week, the funeral in Beirut has rapidly turned into a gigantic anti-Syria demonstration. Lebanon’s leaders have lashed out at the Syrian tyrants who are attempting to suborn democracy through murder.

Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out that this assasination could be the spark that sets off a world war. Hugh Hewitt describes why it is an anschluss.

It’s begun with a huge funeral that is rapidly building toward another Cedar Revolution, as Rafik Hariri’s murder in 2005 did. It is hoped that the people will win a peaceful victory, but given what Lebanese are up against in the vile lunacy and evil shamelessness of the Syrian regime, this is an open question.

Here are some photos from Beirut:

Source: All photos, AFP and Reuters, via Yahoo! News

Jim Hoft at GatewayPundit has a superb roundup and more photos here.

Lawhawk at A Blog For All has more key material and an excellent longer analysis with background, along with more photos in a highly recommended post here.

Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard has more here.

Ed at Captain’s Quarters has some excellent recommendations of who to watch here.

Lizards at Charles’ Little Green Footballs has a good discussion thread here.

This time, avalancha in Barquisimeto, Venezuela
Source: Aleksander Boyd, VCrisis

How does one explain this?

The huge ‘avalancha’ crowds of Venezuelans from end to end of the vast South American nation the size of three Texases, all seeking an end to Chavismo is the rainbow swirling edge of pure democratic revolution. The photos - and there are a ton of them in Alek’s new photo album from several cities here signal that people are tired of tyranny, they are tired perpetual warfare, they are tired of hostility to free trade, they are tired of economic horror shows. They want peace, prosperity and friendship. They want to be proud of their proud nation once again. This is a color revolution in a million colors.

The only way to achieve this revolution of democracy is to boot Chavez, a would-be dictator who is holed up in his gold-plated palace, repeating to himself that he is indispensible, that he is the people, that he is loved. He is none of those things, he is detested. He can exit peacefully now, by holding clean elections, by accepting the verdict of democracy.

But in reality, he doesn’t want that. So he will in the end feel the people’s force. As these crowds of democracy revolutionaries are right now flaring for the future.

Hugo Chavez, this is your signal to go.

To see a really spectacular additional photo, click on to Venezuela Today.

And see this terrific Miami Herald slide show here.

After putting Mexico through a summer of turmoil and protests over a presidential electoral defeat he could not bring himself to accept, all I can say is:

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
Source: AP, via VOA

Look …. at that …. ridiculous … little … man.

He’s like the little man on the wedding cake!

Yesterday, failed Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador inaugurated himself “president” in a bid to be seen as Mexico’s legitimate elected president. He lost, of course, and this grandiose gesture is nothing more than his own personal fantasy. He looks like Gilligan up there, in one of the dream sequences, declaring himself dictator. But Gilligan was a television comedy of course. AMLO really believes it.

Most Mexicans have long moved on from that July 2 election and abandoned AMLO. Mark in Mexico notes that AMLO had to raise his own funds for this self-fete. And EEEEEUWWW!!!! Check out Mark’s photo gallery of this ridiculous little self-coronation up close here!

Not that he is good for Mexico. Greg Flakus at Voice of America interviews experts who warn of the continuing potential for instability based on this man’s inability to take a loss like a man. It’s worth reading here.

Cuba’s immensely wealthy Castro family, which Forbes magazine pegs for just under a billion provable dollars, is beginning to look outward for asylum with their money. That’s why the Chilean press yesterday reported that Mrs. Castro, the second or third wife of the Cuban dictator, has just bought a parcel of land straddling the Chile-Argentina border. That way, if something goes wrong on an extradition or truth commission subpoena, she can step over the boundary and remain on the estancia. It’s an amazingly shameless effort to launder out the ill-gotten Castro fortune into potential palaces of exile. In Cuba, the word is sinverg????enza.

But it does tell us one powerful thing: The Castroites are no longer confident that tyranny will remain in Cuba after Castro’s trip to the ash heap of history. They see democracy on the rise and slyly recognize that all of their ill gotten gains will not be strong enough to halt its inevitable advance as millions of people at long last seek freedom. They see it coming. And like rats on a sinking ship, they are bailing out with the loot, now.

George and Henry at Babalu have the whole story, including translations from the Chilean press and a lovely photo of Mrs. Castro in this first-rate post here.

Inflation, as Milton Friedman said, is a monetary phenomenon. The only way you get inflation is to print out money like there’s no tomorrow. Because when you do that, there IS no tomorrow, money-printing destroys savings and with it, future investment. Which would have great implications for a nation’s stability and passage to or from democracy. Slobo of Yugoslavia, for instance, achieved his greatest repression, after he triggered the worst money-printing orgy in history, printing literally at the speed of inflation for a 313,000,000% rate. A dark curtain of tyranny descended over the country after that. You can read about it in Steve Hanke’s essays on it here and here.

Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez, has been spending money if not like Slobo, at least like Imelda Marcos. Not that he might not try to catch up with Slobo. He’s printed and printed and hasn’t invested a penny. He’s the ultimate singing summer grasshopper in the surrounding world of industrious ants. Chavez is burning money like a souped-up roadster engine burns fuel.

And as economist John Maynard Keynes once drily said: Anything that can’t go on, won’t.

That’s why a chart put out on by Miguel Octavio on The Devil’s Excrement Web site is so instructive. Hugo Chavez is printing money like crazy. He’s printing far faster than he’s taking oil money in. He thinks capital controls will preserve the value of the money but it won’t. There are too many holes through the black market. Now the central bank is running scared. Inflation and the end of savings are coming soon, based on the vivid lines on that chart, showing a freefall. Venezuela probably only has a few months left before a great big crash happens.

The fall is going to be hard. See Miguel’s proof in the chart here, the interim ripoffs by grabby rats on the sinking ship here, and the critical backgrounder here.

UPDATE: Miguel has much more, under a hilarious new headline, in this post here.

On Sunday, the British press exploded with reports about the poisoning in London of KGB defector Colonel Alexander Litvinenko (pictured above, circa 2002), who had been in the process of investigating the murder of Anna Politkovskaya to see whether the KGB (now called the FSB) was involved. The Associated Press reported that ???????Toxicologist Dr. John Henry, who has been treating Litvinenko, told the BBC that the former agent had been poisoned by thallium — a toxic metal commonly found in rat poison. ???????It points to that in his blood stream,???????? he said.??????? The Times of London reported that the symptoms appeared just after a meal at a restaurant with a former friend who ate nothing and had promised leads on the investigation. The New York Times explains:

The Sunday Times of London said the former agent had met Nov. 1 with an Italian contact identified only as Mario in a central London sushi bar. Last week, Mr. Litvinenko told reporters he began to feel sick within hours of the meeting with Mario. ???????I ordered lunch, but he ate nothing,??????? Mr. Litvinenko said, according to The Sunday Times, which apparently interviewed him after he began to feel ill but before his condition deteriorated. ???????He appeared to be very nervous. He handed me a four-page document which he said he wanted me to read right away.??????? ???????It contained a list of people, including an F.S.B. officer, who were purported to be connected with the journalist????????s murder,??????? he said. The F.S.B., or Federal Security Service, is the successor to the K.G.B. ???????I do feel very bad,??????? Mr. Litvinenko told The Sunday Times. ???????I????????ve never felt like this before ???????? like my life is hanging on the ropes.???????

The Times continued:

Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned on the direct orders of the Kremlin because of his biting mockery of President Putin, according to a former Soviet spy now living in Britain. Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior KGB agent to defect to Britain, said that the attempt to kill Mr Litvinenko had been state-sponsored. It was carried out by a Russian friend and former colleague who had been recruited secretly in prison by the FSB, the successor to the KGB. The Italian who allegedly put poison in Mr Litvinenko????????s sushi ???????had nothing to do with it???????.
???????Of course it is state-sponsored. He was such an obvious enemy. Only the KGB is able to do this. The poison was very sophisticated. They have done this before ???????? they poisoned Anna Politkovskaya (the campaigning journalist murdered on October 7) on a plane last year. Who else would know where she was sitting and could poison her food? Probably also it was the KGB that shot her.??????? Mr Litvinenko, who fled to Britain in 2001, was a target because of the Kremlin fury at his sarcastic attacks on President Putin, Mr Gordievsky said. ???????There are three people they hate: Boris Berezovsky, Akhmad Zakayev and Sasha (Alexander) Litvinenko, who was writing article after article for the Chechen press, laughing at Putin.??????? Mr Gordievsky, a former KGB station head in London, who still refers to the FSB by its former name, insisted that he did not know the identity of the Russian would-be killer. But he assumed that the man was a former associate of Boris Berezovsky, the former oligarch and Yeltsin confidant, who has been granted political asylum in Britain. ???????He used to be in Mr Berezovsky????????s entourage and was imprisoned in Moscow. Then suddenly he was released, and soon after that he became a businessman and a millionaire. It is all very suspicious. But the KGB has recruited agents in prisons and camps since the 1930s. That is how they work.???????

Russia has a way of humiliating American presidents. From FDR????????s foolhardy hobnobbing with Stalin at Yalta to Jimmy Carter kissing Leonid Brezhnev full on the mouth, any president that tries to befriend Russia always pays a heavy price for it. And so it has occurred that the Kremlin has sought to liquidate yet another foe (remember the similar attack on pro-West Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko which left his face permanently scarred) at the very moment when George W. Bush was inking a deal for Russian entry into the World Trade Organization, merrily thumbing his nose at the recent Democratic electoral victory, to say nothing of the counsel of conservatives like Charles Grassley and John McCain.

On the BBC flagship radio news program ???????Today??????? Monday morning, Mary Dejevsky, columnist for the British newspaper The Independent, was put up against Alex Goldfarb, a friend and supporter of Litvinenko. Dejevsky was obviously invited on to give balance to the program in spite of the fact that she seems to the only British journalist holding out against the obvious conclusion, which was even being suggested by other writers in her own newspaper, that the Kremlin had struck again. ???????Today??????? is the most influential news program in the UK, compulsory listening for all those within the political world or the establishment. Dejevsky cautioned against presuming that the Russian security services had a hand in the poisoning by remarking that these allegations were being touted by known anti-Putin factions in the UK (implying they are functionaries of exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, and other possible target for a Kremlin it). In other words, she as much as invited the Kremlin to strike again, giving them plenty of helpful cover for doing so. One must remember that exactly these same sorts of cautions were given out by the KGB regarding dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov during Soviet times ???????? were they to be discredited simply because they opposed the totalitarian regime?

How could Dejevsky seem so blind to the obvious, or be so keen to rubbish the FSB????????s accusers? Well, for one thing she????????s an avid participant in the infamous Valdai discussion club previously exposed on Publius Pundit. Yevegania Albats (Publius Pundit has reported last week on her heroic work for democracy in Russia) warned at the time that the participants were compromising their integrity (to the group????????s credit, it at least published her article on their website at the time, although it????????s been buried since then.

So it looks like the Kremlin????????s investment is paying off, big time.

The New York Times quoted Goldfarb as follows:

Alex Goldfarb, a friend who had visited Mr. Litvinenko in the hospital, told the BBC that doctors had told him that he had only a 50-50 chance of surviving. ???????He looks like a ghost,??????? Mr. Goldfarb said. Speaking later to reporters outside London????????s University College Hospital, to which Mr. Litvinenko had been transferred, Mr. Goldfarb said the British police interviewed Mr. Litvinenko on Sunday. ???????He is in a fighting mood,??????? Mr. Goldfarb said. Asked why Mr. Litvinenko might have been the target of an attack, Mr. Goldfarb said, ???????He is one of the top public enemies of the Russian F.S.B. and of Putin, particularly because of his book.??????? He added that Mr. Litvinenko belonged to ???????the so-called London ????migr???? circle, which was branded by Russia as a terrorist cell on British soil.???????Mr. Goldfarb called the poisoning ???????very scary ???????? it means there????????s no limit.???????

The net result is that we have a cadre of Kremlin sycophants in the West who are literally helping to place the lives of true Russian patriots at risk, thereby destroying the last vestige of hope for a democratic resurgence there and undermining the security of the West. First Politkvoskaya was cut down amid rumors and indicia of Kremlin complicity (President Putin called her an enemy of the nation only days after her killing), and then when a KGB defector seeks to investigate he too falls. Right now, Russia is a feeble state with a male adult lifespan below 60, an average salary of $300 per month and an economy wholly dependent for subsistence on world energy prices. In other words, the situation is little different from the state Russia was in immediately after the Bolshevik revolution in the early part of the last century. But, then as now, if the world stands idly by watching people die, allowing the Kremlin to consolidate its anti-democratic grip on the nation????????s throat, there will come a time when Russia will once again present the world with a nasty and expensive long-term threat that could have been avoided. That????????s to say nothing, of course, of the simple morality of standing up for those who risk their lives for democracy. The very idea, much less the practice, of erring on the side of allowing the Kremlin to continue its brazen series of attacks, rather than on the side of protecting the victims, is maddening, sure and certain proof that we have not yet learned all we should have from our past relations with Russia.

Litvinenko’s condition has deterioriated and he’s been moved to intensive care. Click here to see a photo of him in his hospital bed, his hair fallen out due to the poison.

EURONEWS has a closeup before/after picture and a video.

The BBC reports that state-controlled Russian TV is ignoring the events (quoting Yulia Latynina). Click here to read its story.

The website for Britain’s Frontline Club, a journalist organization, has footage of Litvinenko at one of its functions speaking out about the killing of Anna Politkovskaya and the complicity of the Kremlin therein. Watch the video here:

The British paper The Telegraph has a strong op-ed piece also connecting the two events and laying the blame for deteriorating democracy in Russia directly at the Kremlin’s doorstep. Read it here:

FOX News has a story about the Italian who ate with Litvinenko just before his symptoms appeared to provide him information about a “hit list” that included Litvinenko. (And an account from a friend named Goldfarb, along with a denial from the Russians.

SkyNews reports that Litvinenko had a heart attack overnight and is hours from death now -Mora)

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.

Vietnamese wave as the motorcade of U.S. President George W. Bush makes its way through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Monday, Nov. 20, 2006. (AP Photo/Nghat Le)

Vietnamese onlookers react to the arrival of U.S. President George W. Bush at Ho Chi Minh Museum in Ho Chi Monh City, Vietnam, Monday, Nov. 20, 2006. (AP Photo/David Longstreath)

Vietnamese cheer U.S. President George W. Bush as he arrives the Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange Monday, Nov. 20, 2006, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. (AP Photo/David Longstreath)

A volunteer waits to get a glimpse from leaders dressed in their traditional costumes for the family group photo after attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) retreat in the national convention center in Hanoi. To delighted squeals of “Bush!”, “Putin!” and “Arroyo!”, star-struck volunteers at the gathering of key Asia-Pacific nations in Vietnam turned snapping photos of world leaders into a summit craze.(AFP)

U.S. first lady Laura Bush, left, and Janette Howard, second left, thank restaurant staff members after having dinner in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Sunday, Nov. 19, 2006. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Source: AP and AFP, via Yahoo! News

I must say, I’ve never quite seen anything like it.

See you all on Monday! I have a very special anniversary to celebrate this weekend, so Publius goes on hold until then… :)

Milton Friedman, Democratic Revolutionary
Source: John Petrie’s Milton Friedman Quotation Page

The great Milton Friedman died yesterday in San Francisco. His ideas changed the world the most in our era. When we say ‘free markets,’ we think of him. I can think of no one whose ideas made more revolution and genuinely changed the world more for the better. He was the biggest democratic revolutionary of our age.

Friedman won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976. He brought forward free market ideas that were grounded in an Aristotelian understanding of human nature. Among his great ideas are that profit is not evil. People are naturally competitive. Low taxes mean bigger private sectors. Government must be small - and strong. If someone offers you a gift, you take it.

And one of my favorites: Inflation is a monetary and only a monetary) phenomenon. (In plain English: you only get inflation when government jackasses work overtime at the money-printing presses, stamping out too much cash which floods the economic system with toilet paper money). Not one other thing causes inflation - not jobs, not savings, not velocity of money, not business, not labor costs. Just the printing press.

Friedman was the original Chicago Boy, leading the economic revolution at the University of Chicago through the mid-20th century. It took awhile to get his ideas out, but they were very radical indeed. They finally reached the mainstream with the election of the great Ronald Reagan.

A New Yorker, whose was born in Austria, (same place the other great economists come from), Friedman nevertheless infused his ideas with the American experience. I have always seen himn as uniquely American and loved his wonderful biography he wrote with his lovely wife, Rose, called “Two Lucky People.” Friedman also had a few government roles, advising the great Ronald Reagan, whose political rise came from his understanding of Friedman. It was Friedman’s advice that cured our economy from the stagflation nightmare of Jimmy Carter in 1980. He’s the one who told Paul Volcker to go raise interest rates to burn excess money out of the system. It was painful and horrible but that’s what you have to do to get rid of money-printing excesses. And nobody liked money-printing as much as Jimmy Carter’s Fed did. Except maybe the Confederacy.

Friedman also was the little bureaucrat responsible for the decision to take the cash that is taken out of our paychecks each payday for taxes. It was his idea that he cooked up while working for the government in the 1940s, and something he later rued as a tax cutter, but I am not so sure it was a bad thing. One of the great strengths of the government system here in the states is that taxes are collected and not many people cheat. Most places don’t have that - they have vast informal sectors, capital flight, money stuffed under beds or accounts in the Canaries or Caymans or Miami or Luxembourg. It’s the normal state of affairs. Not so in the states and the taxes automatically taken out are one reason why.

That wasn’t all he did on the fiscal front. He understood the power of fiscal action for creating democratic revolution. Sounds farfetched but it is perfectly true. When Augusto Pinochet, a tinpot tyrant of Chile with blood dripping from his hands, asked for some help in creating a social security system where each Chilean would have his own account and a stake in the system, and huge socialistic state-run enterprises would be taken right out of his own state hands and put in the hands of the people instead, Friedman gladly took the opportunity. Unlike Pinochet, Friedman knew that giving people personal cash power was a proven tyrant-slayer. He wasn’t surprised to see Chile blossom into a full-blown democracy shortly after that and Pinochet permanently out of power. That was one real people-power democratic revolution that to this day has staying power.

He also did something else - he popularized economics. It was no longer the dismal science after he got done with it, it was the magic of possibility, the transformation of poverty into wealth and choices. He was really good on TV. When I was young, I was wildly inspired by his TV show, ‘Free To Choose.’ It talked a lot about Hong Kong, where 80-something year-old Friedman was considered a ‘rock star.’ He actually attracted screaming teenagers! He explained to people like me that Asia was an economic miracle. Poor people from the 1960s were suddenly living normally. It came about from wealth creation and wealth creation came about because governments lowered taxes to practically nothing. That was why Hong Kong was such a dynamic, wonderful place. Begging bowls were things of the past, water buffalo were pets in a zoo, and nobody ate cats in the glittering, prosperous free-market Hong Kong of today.

To appreciate Friedman, you have to understand what the world was like before him. It was an economic wasteland. Everyone thought John Maynard Keynes was the ‘It’ Boy and that governments could spend indefinitely, creating one vast entitlement program after another. Jimmy Carter was the ultimate culmination. But he wasn’t the only one. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were also believers in this garbage and they all worked together to set the stage for Jimmy Carter’s economic morass, his most memorable contribution to leaving America a worse place than he found it.

For me, I grew up with the horror of Carterism and remember it well. I had no knowledge of World War II or the Fifties or much of the Sixties. All I knew was that government had no idea what it was doing and my public-school teachers liked to tell us kids there was no solution. It made me a rebel.

As a kid, I used to sneak off to the community college a couple miles away to read a magazine that excited me called National Review. I would go there specifically to read Friedman essays. I loved his take on the free market - smaller government, smaller taxes, no more regulation. The rebel in me became a believer. Once, I even got into a fight with my parents as a kid because I read in a Parade magazine essay that Friedman said kids should always get allowances to teach them to manage money. My parents weren’t keen on that and said he had no idea what he was talking about. (They probably figured I wouldn’t manage it!)

In college, I can’t say I had a big picture on economics as I do now. It was all fragmented. I had one fabulous high-school teacher named Mister Janc who taught us “Rich-Dad” personal finance techniques, a brilliant thing to impart to kids, and much better than economic theory.

Then there was Friedman and his tax-cut small-government ideas.

Then in college, all we got was Keynes. There were those creepy graphs I had trouble understanding as well as the ridiculous idea that governments can spend indefinitely and the more they spend the bigger and better the economy gets. It made no sense at all. How could I reconcile that nuttiness with the wonderfulness of Friedman? Were they the same ideas? I didn’t get it. How could these two insanely different concepts even be called the same ideas? I was horrified and if Keynes was what economics was, then I wanted no part of this field.

Later on, when I became a financial journalist, I learned to reconcile them all. Of course, I learned that Keynes wasn’t all bad, but his understanding was limited by the zeitgeist of his era.

I had the honor of meeting Mr. Friedman two times. In 1998, I called him at his house in San Francisco from Singapore. I needed his help to save Indonesia. He gave help. I asked him if Indonesia could benefit from a currency board. He said unequivocally yes. “But you have to get rid of the central bank,” he added, cautioning that it could not be a phony currency board. I put that quote on the wire and moved world currency markets toward support for Indonesia as word spread that momentum was building in the direction of monetary sanity for the poor battered Indonesians who’d just lost all their savings in a catastrophic IMF-induced currency devaluation. Still, he scared me a little, he had a steel-trap mind and a taste for precision that I have never seen to such an extent as anyone else. Was I just too awed of him? No, there really was something there, he was icily precise in everything he said and thought through.

The second time I met him was 2004 in San Francisco, at a big Cato Institute conference named in Friedman’s honor. What a glorious evening that was! I got to sit next to John Fund at the dinner. I got a long (two-hour) interview with the great Hernando de Soto. I got to sit down after dinner with Thomas Sowell, who was really nice. I met all these totally cool people.

But I also got to go to the front table and meet Mr. Friedman, who greeted me warmly when I recalled our Indonesia conversation. His lovely wife Rose was also there, and they made a sunny couple and looked so happy. Everyone was awed and honored to be in his company one brief evening. He had, after all, really changed the world and we all knew it.

Here’s one heck of a good roundup from Atlas Foundation that’s a must-see here.

Just over one month ago, at 5:10 pm Moscow Time on Saturday October 7, 2006, the heroic and valiant Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was found shot dead at her home. As Publius Pundit reported soon afterwards, Politkovskaya was far and away Russia????????s most internationally recognized and lauded journalist, and a harsh critic of the Kremlin????????s brutal policies in Chechnya, which have been roundly condemned by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International. Universally, analysts have seen Kremlin complicity in the killing. As if to confirm it, commenting on the killing days later, Russian President Vladimir Putin called her an enemy of Russia, and expressed regret only for the fact that the killing would be used by Russia????????s enemies as fodder for a negative PR blitz.

Given the Kremlin????????s barbaric, neo-Soviet attitude towards the Politkovskaya assassination, the logical question to ask now is: Who????????s next? Five targets are readily apparent: Lidia Yusupova, Marina Litvinovich, Svetlana Gannushkina, Yulia Latynina and Yevgenia Albats. Ironically, all are female. There????????s no doubt but that the leading voices in favor of democracy in Russia today are women (Russian women are dramatically healthier of body than Russian men, whose abuse of cigarettes and alcohol is notorious and whose average lifespan is shockingly brief, and perhaps this leaves them better equipped in terms of fortitude as well). Outrageously Lidia, widely touted as a contender for this year????????s Nobel Peace Prize, has only a stub entry in Wikipedia, and the same is true of Yulia (Wiki has requests for assistance with these entries posted) while Yevegenia, Svetlana, and Marina have no entry at all. Publius Pundit readers are asked to consider providing/supplementing these entries to Wikipedia as a first step towards creating the kind of international recognition that these three women deserve, recognition which would not only give them due respect for risking their lives in the cause of democracy but also help facilitate financing their heroic efforts and give them so protection against retaliation. Obviously, more could have been done to recognize and protect Politkovskaya while she was alive, and her killing should serve as a wakeup call for all concerned with the development of democracy.

1. Lidia Yusupova

The awarding of this year????????s Nobel Peace prize to a pair of economists responsible for inventing the ???????microcredit??????? that facilitates the development of small businesses in the third world was nearly as great an affront to the worldwide battle for democracy as the prior award to terrorist Yasir Arafat. The prize should have gone to Yusupova, winner of the prestigious Rafto Human Rights award from Norway, who puts more on the line in any given day for the cause of democracy and peace than all the economists who ever lived combined. Here????????s what Reuters reported about her in the run-up to this year????????s Nobel announcement:

The cramped apartment on the outskirts of Moscow overlooking rows of Soviet-era tower blocks is the temporary home of human rights lawyer Lydia Yusupova, a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s temporary because next year she plans to return to her native Grozny and continue — despite the threat of murder and kidnap — to document human rights abuses in a war between Russia and Chechen separatists which has killed thousands. “It’s very important (to win),” she said in the kitchen of her two-room apartment where she has lived since last year while she completes a study programme funded by the U.S. non-governmental organisation Ford Foundation. “The Chechnya theme is still critical. Things are not as good there as European experts may think.” Whether Yusupova wins or not, she says she will return to live and work in Grozny, Chechnya’s ruined capital. “Now there is another wave (of kidnappings and arrests) in Chechnya,” she said comparing it to disappearances during Stalin’s Soviet Union. “There are currently many people who are illegally imprisoned.” Thousands died and Yusupova and Memorial, the human rights group she works for, estimate that as many as 5,000 people have disappeared — mainly Chechens targeted by federal and pro-Russian law enforcement. Yusupova, an ethnic Russian born in Grozny, also faced the threat of kidnapping. “We went to bed every night waiting,” she said, faint highlights streaked through her short, dark hair. “I didn’t want to be caught totally off my guard if they came for me in the middle of the night.” The dangers for people who highlight the disappearances persist away from Chechnya. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, one of President Vladimir Putin’s strongest critics, was killed by a gunman in central Moscow on Saturday. “It’s absolutely terrible,” Yusupova said by telephone after the murder. “It was done to make others shut their mouths. To say ‘See what can happen to you’.”

Will it happen to Lidia too? To a large extent, that????????s up to us to decide. Will we publicize her work? Make financial contributions to facilitate it? Or will we wake up tomorrow and read another horror story, just like Politkovskaya????????s?

2. Marina Litvinovich

That????????s Marina in the sunglasses, standing in front of an apartment building in downtown Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. The building, like many others, remains a burned-out shell because, despite its claims to the contrary, the Kremlin has done virtually nothing to support a rebuilding effort. It has instead engaged in a rather pathetic, Soviet-like effort to create a Potemkin Village that will fool the unwitting eye of the few foreigners who dare to visit while leaving the population to stagnate in a condition of utter despair. But Marina Litvinovich will not be fooled. She operates a blog (in Russian) called Abstract2001 at Live Journal and has a played a number of significant roles in the modern Russian political debate. She has served as chief of staff to Irina Khakamada, liberal legislator. She is a key advisor to liberal presidential challenger Garry Kasparov. She publishes a website called The Truth About Beslan (also in Russian) in which she investigates the Kremlin coverup of its outrageous conduct during the Beslan hostage crisis. Like Politkovskaya, she has defiantly probed the truth about Beslan by interviewing key figures involved in the events and publishing their accounts. She’s been arrested by the Kremlin for taking part in public protests over its conduct regarding Beslan and she’s participated in wide variety of other protests, including those to oppose the cruelty of hazing in Russia’s military. Finally, she heads the Aid to Victims of Terror Foundation, whose work has been praised by Freedom House. In other words, she does more in any given day (indeed, any hour) to serve the interests of Russia than Vladimir Putin will do in his entire lifetime. Maria????????s work regarding Beslan is essentially that of a shadow government, as the official government group charged with investigating the catastrophe, known as the Torshin Commission, might in the words of commentator Jeremy Putley ???????be thought to stand as a symbol for much that is wrong with Russia today ???????? too cowardly to tell the truth, too dishonest even to lie, knowing that lies will be transparently obvious, and so saying nothing, even though the commission has had an inordinate amount of time already to complete its investigation. It is like the failure to mount an investigation into the 1999 bombings in apartment buildings, that were declared to be a state secret. It is like holding trials in secret, so that the truth cannot be seen. It is cowardice compounded with criminality and abuse of authority.

For her service to her country, Marina has been repaid in the classic Russian manner: Brutal physical assault by cowards in the darkness. On Monday, March 20, 2006, for instance Marina was attacked from behind as she headed her car just after 9 pm. She had valuables on her person which were left untouched. Here’s how Moscow Times columnist Masha Gessen described the incident:

Monday night, Kasparov’s right-hand person, the political consultant Marina Litvinovich, left the United Civil Front office just after 9. About an hour later, she opened her eyes to discover that she was lying on a cellar awning and someone was trying to ascertain if she was all right. She was not: She had apparently been knocked unconscious by a blow or several blows to the head. She had been badly beaten, was bruised all over, and was missing two of her front teeth. Nothing had been taken from her: not her notebook computer or cell phone or money. She spent three or four hours in the emergency room that night, and she spent another three or four at the police station the following day. She found the police to be extraordinarily polite and considerate — and, as the organizer of many of Kasparov’s public speaking events and any number of protests, Litvinovich is something of an expert on police behavior. Some higher-up had apparently been sent down to the station to handle her case. At the same time, she told me, “I am not stupid and I could see what they were getting at: that I was just walking down the street and passed out. That I must be in poor health.” Litvinovich is 31 years old and healthy. “And that I fell in such an unfortunate manner that I got bruised all over.” Litvinovich has a bruise on her leg that, the doctors told her, was probably caused by a blow with a rubber baton. The police suggested it may have been a car bumper. Litvinovich pointed out that her clothes were so clean that she was wearing the same trousers and coat the following day. She clearly was not hit by a Moscow car. Moreover, this is one of several signs that she was attacked by professionals: She must have been held while she was beaten, then laid carefully on the awning on which she found herself. In other words, the attack was a message. The pristine execution and the fact that Litvinovich’s valuables were not touched serve to underscore this. So what’s the content of this message? Another young political consultant, an up-and-coming member of the Kremlin’s Public Chamber, Alexei Chadayev, put the message forward in his blog: “Women should not be in this line of work. … Marina is on the warpath, and no one ever said this war would be conducted according to rules.” This is this country’s ruling regime speaking. Its message is crude: as simple as a rubber baton, as brutal as a blow to a young woman’s face. If you are going to oppose the Kremlin, it is saying, this will happen to you.

That wasn’t the first time Marina has been physically attacked, proving the power of her work and the utter cowardice and impotence of those who oppose her, who cannot face her on any remotely civilized terms and can only resort to the crude violence of an animal. Next time, maybe a bullet rather than a blunt instrument will be relied upon, since the latter had no effect on this valiant heroine. That is, unless the West sends a clear message that the price of harming her is not one Russia can afford to pay.

3. Svetlana Gannushkina

As the Washington Post recently reported: ???????Svetlana Gannushkina, a refugee rights activist, tops a list of 89 people published by a radical nationalist group, the Russian Will, which has urged ???????patriots???????? to take up arms and execute her and other friends of ???????alien???????? peoples.??????? The Post reported further: ??????????????I am horrified at what happened with Anya,???????? said Gannushkina, using Politkovskaya’s nickname. ???????Of course, I understand that considering what happened, we are all under the same threat.???????? Gannushkina said she first learned in August of the Web site calling for her to be killed as an ???????advocate of alien migrants.??????????????? The Post revealed that ???????information on the targeted activists and journalists, including their phone numbers and addresses, has spread to numerous other nationalist sites and blogs and Gannushkina has received phone threats.

Gannushkina said she asked prosecutors to investigate the group’s activities in August, but prosecutors have failed to launch a probe. A spokesman for the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office declined comment.??????? Gannushkina????????s response? The Post states: ???????Gannushkina said she would continue her advocacy work despite the intimidation, rejecting her colleagues’ advice to hire a bodyguard, because she did not want to put anyone in danger. ???????If I intend to live here, I intend to live and not hide in a burrow,???????? she said.???????

Gannushkina is the director of an organization called the ???????Migration Rights Network??????? which is operated under the aegis of the major Russian human rights group Memorial. She is also a member of the Human Rights Council and the leader of her own organization, the Civil Assistance Committee. Here is an example of the types of issues she confronts on a daily basis:

In 2005, in 10 areas of the Russian Federation (Central Russia, the Volga Region, and Siberia) 39 people were held on charges in of so-called Islamic extremism, according to Vitaly Ponomarev, Director of the Central-Asian Program of the Human Rights Center Memorial, at an October 31 press conference, “Anti-Muslim Repressions in Central Russia” at the Independent Press Center. Scores of people are under investigation. No less than 40 percent of those under investigation undergo torture, noted Ponomarev. Recently in central Russia, terrorist accusations have been manufactured. The most scandalous of them is the Tatarstan matter, where 20 people were accused of preparing terrorist acts for the 1000th anniversary of Kazan. The kidnapping of former inhabitants of Uzbekistan continues. Vitaly Ponomarev reports that, according to Muslims of the Volga Region, each year 3 - 4 descendants from Uzbekistan disappear. The Director of the Civil Assistance Committee, Svetlana Gannushkina, discussed the fate of the 14 ethnic Uzbeks detained in Ivanov. One of them, Xatam Xadzhimatov, was freed as a citizen of Russia. The rest - 12 citizens of Uzbekistan and a citizen of Kyrgyzstan are located under guard in expectation of obtaining refugee status. The period for examining their petitions elapses on November 8th, and if the detained are not recognized as refugees, they are threatened with deportation. Gannushkina is certain that the leaders of Russia and Uzbekistan have an understanding about deporting Uzbek citizens to their native land, even though their extraditions are illegal. Gannushkina spoke about the recent deportation to Uzbekistan of Marcel Isayev and about the assistance of Russian authorities in the kidnapping, by Uzbek special services, of Russian citizen Alisher Usmanov.

Gannushkina is, then, one of the people who are actually doing the things that Politkovskaya was reporting about, and hence a natural target of Kremlin ire, perhaps concealed behind the veil of neo-Nazis or other nationalist groups.

4. Yevgenia Albats

Yevgenia Albats, host of a controversial radio talk show on the Ekho Moskvy station, one of the last bastions of independent journalism in Russia, is the heir apparent to Politkovskaya. As identified by the International Consortium of Journalists:

She was the first Soviet journalist to investigate the Soviet political police, the KGB, when the communist regime was still in control. She is the author of KGB: The State within the State. In 1989, she received the Golden Pen Award, the highest journalism honor in the then-Soviet Union. She was an Alfred Friendly fellow in 1990 and a fellow of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in 1993. Albats also free-lanced for several publications, including the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and the CNN bureau in Moscow. She has a graduate degree from Harvard and has testified before the U.S. Congress on human rights abuses during the war in Chechnya, which she covered.

Albats???????? book, a vigorous attack on the secret police organization of which President Putin was the former spymaster, makes her an automatic target of Kremlin ire, and her brilliant Moscow Times columns only escalated the level of confrontation. But the Moscow Times is published in English and reaches a very narrow audience; Albats move to Russian-language radio brings her to the forefront of Kremlin opposition. Recently, she launched a staunch defense of Politkovskaya on her radio program, one which caused Russophile Moscow Times columnist Alexei Pankin to label her as espousing ???????democratic sympathies that verge on Bolshevik intransigence.???????

Reviewing her book, the New York Times wrote: ???????That Ms. Albats could conduct her courageous research at all suggests at least a glimmer of change in the ancient Russian apparatus of secrecy. Still, for Americans rushing to feel good about the ???????new???????? Russia, ???????The State Within a State” is a sobering reminder that whatever you believe about the influence of the secret police now, the world in which the Hydra-headed K.G.B. flourished is just three short years behind us.??????? Albats cagily said nothing to condemn Putin when he first rose to power, giving him all the rope he needed to hang himself. She told PBS????????s Frontline just after he came to power: ???????Obviously, I don’t think that’s a good idea to judge Putin just by his KGB past. It’s not right, because that’s the way KGB used to judge us Soviet citizens–just because we are not party members or had the wrong last name or belonged to the wrong nationality or confessed to religion. I do believe that people are capable to change, and that ten years in the democratic circles did make a certain impact on Putin, as well.??????? But she also fretted: ???????The mentality of the KGB officer is that they were taught to be an extreme statist. . . . those who believe in the Russian imperialistic notion of being a great empire. That kind of mentality was taught and developed inside the KGB. And we clearly can see that Putin is that sort of extreme statist. For him, as for many of those who worked in the KGB, the state always comes first.??????? Thus, she now has a solid base from which to launch her assault on the Kremlin, which may see silencing her as its only alternative given that she cannot be discredited.

5. Yulia Latynina

If Yevgenia Albats is not Politkovskaya????????s successor, then the mantle surely falls to her firebrand colleague at Novaya Gazeta, Yulia Latynina (also a columnist for the Moscow Times and an Ekho Moskvy radio commentator like Albats). No description of this amazing woman can suffice, one must let her words speak for themselves. Here????????s a transcript from one of her broadcasts:

Good day, this is Yulia Latynina and ???????Access code??????? is on the air. First, as always, some questions from the internet. I have a bunch of questions I????????m going to try to answer here about Abkhazia, about Yuganskneftegaz, about the terrorist act in Taba, even about the Russian national soccer team????????s loss. But first I would like to briefly mention one interesting item which went practically unnoticed by the Russian press but was very much of interest to Western newspapers. That is the report of the governing council of Iraq, which found that Russian politicians and officials received fairly large amounts of money from Saddam Hussein. Companies linked to the KPRF received about 142 million barrels under the oil-for-food program, that works out to about $16 million of profit for them. Zhirinovsky received more than $8 million, Mirkom, the MChS????????s trading company, that is, I should remind you that at that time that trading company and the MChS were headed up by the then-leader of ???????Unity??????? ÄSergeiÅ Shoigu, and all of this was going on while the question of whether Russia would support Iraq or America was being decided. Shoigu received $7.6 million, and the most modest recipient was Aleksandr Voloshin, the then-head of the presidential administration, a mere $638,000, according to the Iraqi governing council.

As I already said, none of this aroused very much curiosity in Russia. First, because all of this has long been rumored, and there wasn????????t really anything that seemed too disturbing for Russia. Yes, we know more or less what our Russian officials are like, but in the West everyone was terribly alarmed. The reason I????????m talking about this is that it????????s a very important matter, this story about Iraqi money, Iraqi bribes to be more precise, which explains the mechanism by which our foreign policy decisions are made. To be honest, it was always incomprehensible to me why Russia took Europe????????s side on the issue of Iraq rather than America????????s. Let me repeat that I don????????t want to discuss the Iraq war here, I don????????t think it was justified, and I don????????t think President Bush was a smart man for starting it, that was all falsehoods, stupidity, and lies. Just like all lies, this one has ended badly; Bush wanted to use the Iraq war to help defeat terrorism, but he????????s only made it stronger. He wanted to lower the cost of gasoline for his voters, but he????????s raised it. And most importantly, the war in Iraq has changed the USA from a power which controlled the world through certain mechanisms, certain economic, financial, and, as funny as it may sound in relation to the US, cultural mechanisms, to the extent that Hollywood and McDonald????????s can be considered culture. So anyway, this war has transformed the USA from America into an empire. To be what America was and become an empire, that????????s sort of like what happened to Spain in the 16th century, what a fall.

But we????????re not talking about that, we????????re talking about the fact that the war in Iraq could have become a fortunate gift for Russia, because we could have become America????????s natural allies in the war against Islam. That is, we are fighting Islam in Chechnya, after all, and the US is doing so in Iraq. Second, because the USA was prepared to compensate us for our support in this war. They were ready to repay us not only with trade concessions and not only with the repeal of Jackson-Vanik; they were willing to repay us by changing Russia????????s geopolitical status. Specifically, they were willing to make Russian oil instead of Arab oil one of the main sources of US oil reserves. Forgive me for such a pro-Russian statement, but a chance like this comes along to a country that has left the ranks of the superpowers once in a century. And we supported not the US, as it happened, we supported Iraq, we supported the EU, which, let me remind you, is a half-Islamic state. It????????s enough to say that the most popular name for newborn boys this year in Holland was Mohammed. And now it????????s become clear, from the report of the Iraqi governing council, why this happened: because the US was offering trade benefits for all of Russia, geopolitical status, Jackson-Vanik, etc. Saddam Hussein was offering big bucks to the big-shots. That is, Saddam Hussein understood better than the Americans how Russia works, because as it turned out, to get our support, the Americans shouldn????????t have enticed us with Jackson-Vanik or whatever. It would have been enough to pay our officials more than Hussein did. That is a frightening decisionmaking process. We have 50 seconds to commercial, so speak up, you????????re on the air.

Listener Alexei (Moscow) ???????? Yulia, you find lots of interesting stories in the surrounding environment and comment on them in very interesting ways. But how would you comment on this story, it seems pretty interesting that some liberals are shouting on every street corner about how democracy and freedom of speech are being suppressed. But other liberals, including the leaders of SPS, Gaidar and Chubais, are implementing this very same suppression of democracy and free speech. How can that be?

Yu. Latynina ???????? thanks for the question, I????????m of course quite surprised that it turns out we????????re ruled by Gaidar and Chubais here in Russia, that they are the ones suppressing free speech and democracy. I????????m speechless, so I can end my commentary there and break for commercial. But, actually, that????????s a brilliant text, I advise you to send it in to the Financial Times, that certain liberals, as you said, certain individual liberals, that????????s a classic way of putting it, certain individual liberals are suppressing democracy. Turns out Gaidar????????s in charge of the country.

How much longer Latynina will be allowed to go on like that is anybody????????s guess. It????????s actually quite mild compared to some of her commentary, such as this from the pages of the 2004 Moscow Times:

In the next decade, Russia may break up into six to eight different states. That, at least, is the view of CIA analysts to be found in a report available on the intelligence agency’s web site. In world history, countries that suffer from systemic internal disorder inevitably become the victims of conquest. And not even nuclear weapons can guarantee the territorial integrity of a country, just as a car alarms don’t always protect against theft. A country without an army is in trouble, and Russia’s army showed its true colors in Chechnya: It’s adept at plundering but no good at fighting. In this high-tech age, only professional armies can get the job done; mass conscript armies are as obsolete as cavalry armies were in World War II. However, our generals reject any reform of the army because a professional army would not perform, in their view, its most important function: building generals’ dachas. The Kremlin also abandoned reform of the army, though for a different reason: A professional army is a threat to the authorities. All the preconditions for a military dictatorship in Russia are in place, except for the military itself. The authorities would clearly prefer that the army disgrace itself in Chechnya. The state of the army also means that the preconditions are in place for the conquest of Russia from without. The strategic foes are the Islamic world and China; but we don’t hear much about Islam or China, we only hear about NATO. The fact that NATO is at our borders is a slap in the face but not a threat. disintegrating empire, which has a war on its hands but no army, tends to delegate the fighting to local princelings and to surround itself with a network of feudal principalities. One such principality is Chechnya, where President Akhmad Kadyrov will remain true to the Kremlin for as long as it serves his interests.

This is the courage of a Solzhenitsyn, willing to be packed off to a gulag in order to stand up for the future of her country. But it appears that only men, like oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, merit prison sentences from the Kremlin. Women like Politkovskaya get a bullet in the back I the night. Will we stand up for Yulia before it????????s too late? We shall see.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.

From a post at my Free and Secular Iran Yahoo Group: The bitter reality under the Islamist Regime of Iran, where Love is a crime.

A young couple in a park in Tehran.

The Islamist regime????????s Police on a daily basis scrutinizing and eavesdropping on citizens???????? private lives

The park police approaches the young couple asking for their ID cards as proof that religiously he is not committing a ‘crime’ for sitting next to her or putting his arm around her

The couple is taken away by the police and their ???????crime???????? is love

And the authorities think they can end or eradicate love among the Iranian youth

My original post here

A much talked about concept (and concern) over the summer and autumn in EU foreign policy circles has been the birth of what is being called the “Kosovo double-standard,” by which the EU and United States support Kosovo’s independence from Serbia while declining to recognize the supposed self-determination of Georgian breakaway provinces Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The idea came about this year as talks began in February over Kosovo’s status, as well a vote this summer which allowed Montenegro to declare independence from Serbia. If last year was the year of democratic revolutions, then this is certainly the one of independence movements. Only, the EU fears that Kosovo and Montenegro will set a precedent for resolution to future conflicts, in a way that is not in line with their current foreign policy.

EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, interviewed with Radio Free Europe, explains:

BRUSSELS, October 4, 2006 (RFE/RL) — EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana today acknowledged that Kosovo’s campaign for independence could set a precedent for Georgia’s breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Solana also said the European Union could not meet a request made by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili for peacekeepers, but that Brussels is actively trying to “build confidence” between Moscow and Tbilisi.

Solana told the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee in Brussels today that during a recent phone conversation, Saakashvili had confessed to “tremendous worry” about the possible consequences that ongoing UN-sponsored Kosovo status talks could have for Georgia.

‘We Are All Trapped’

The Serbian province is seeking independence for its 2 million citizens, over 90 percent of whom are ethnic Albanians. Belgrade is staunchly opposed, but international negotiations — begun earlier this year — seem destined to end in eventual independence.

Solana indicated that he, too, considers it possible that independence for Kosovo could have a negative effect on Georgia’s territorial integrity, acknowledging it would set a “precedent.”

“We are trapped here,” he said. “President Saakashvili is trapped, all of us are trapped in a double mechanism that may have good consequences for one, but not for the other. It may not be a win-win situation — although we should be able to look ÄforÅ and find a win-win solution. But it will not be easy.”

The United States and the European Union both expect that Kosovo will achieve independence. Russia has warned that if Kosovo becomes independent, it will push for the secession of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Tensions between Russia and Georgia are running high. Moscow has blocked all transportation and postal links between the two countries in a continuing dispute over Tbilisi’s arrest on September 27 of four Russian military officers on spying charges.

Solana also said today he himself is worried about “the manner in which Saakashvili is concerned about” the issue, but did not elaborate.

Solana said the EU will continue to stand up for Georgia’s territorial integrity.

Unsurprisingly, Russia has latched on to the notion more than anyone else, accusing the European Union of fostering these double-standards in its own self-interest. Indeed, Serbia was a key ally of Russia in Europe and its disintegration has been a blow to Russia’s over-inflated ego / sphere of influence. With Kosovo prepared to declare independence unilaterally without any say from Serbia, Russia sees no reason why the same framework cannot be applied to South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

This is exactly what happened on Sunday, when South Ossetia held a referendum of independence from Georgia, in which no one except for Russia recognized the results. Russia says that it is simply supporting the self-determination and democracy of the South Ossetian people, though the believe such a thing would naive in the least.

MOSCOW, November 14 (RIA Novosti) - Russia supports the results of a referendum held in South Ossetia on Sunday, at which the breakaway region’s residents voted overwhelmingly for independence from Georgia, despite Western powers’ refusal to recognize the vote.

The Foreign Ministry said the referendum was held in line with democratic principles.

According to the official results of the referendum, held in conjunction with the self-declared republic’s presidential election, 99% of voters backed independence, while 96% voted for incumbent leader Eduard Kokoity.

The ministry said in a statement released late Monday evening, “Whether people like it or not, we are dealing here with an expression of free will by the people of South Ossetia, expressed through democratic procedures.”

“No matter how Georgia or several other Western countries try to dismiss the importance of this event, it is nevertheless significant. To ignore this is, to say the least, short-sighted.”

Given a that respect for democracy by Russia’s current leadership falls a few feet too short, I am lead to believe that Russia is playing the double-standard card. Is it not reasonable to think that Russia considers its own self-interest as well, irrespective of the will of others? Of course not. So when the head of South Ossetia said that the province now intends to join Russia, bells of hypocrisy could be heard ringing in the distance as far away as America.

MOSCOW, November 14 (Itar-Tass) - Head of South Ossetia Eduard Kokoity, in his remarks in a live broadcast of the Centre television network, has reaffirmed the republic’s striving to unite with North Ossetia and accede to the Russian Federation.

What Russia is doing is exactly what it accuses the EU of doing. It is playing to a double-standard. The only reason that South Ossetia and Abkhazia were able to split off from Georgia was because of support from thousands of Russian so-called peacekeepers. The Kremlin is therefore pushing for independence in these territories in order to both 1) weaken the Western-oriented Georgian government just as Serbia is weakened, and 2) strengthen Russia by incorporating South Ossetia into its territory.

This is just the beginning of Russia’s double-standard, though. One must also look at how the past and present leaderships of Russia have dealt with the separatist movement in Chechnya. When most Chechens wanted to legitimately secede from Russia and create their own independent republic, Russia immediately vowed to protect it sovereign territory, launching an all out war in which hundreds of thousands have died.

In Russia’s eyes, it can actively break the sovereignty of other nations so long as it serves Russia’s own national interest, but if similar separatist activity occurs in the Motherland — watch out! A city might get flattened. If anything, Russia is pursuing a double-standard. The EU must confront Russia over its expansionist policy and stop feeling as if it cannot act due to some perceived foreign relations hypocrisy. The fact is, the EU is not looking for Georgia to become a vassal state, but a partner. Yet Russia would prefer to see it as the former.

You’ve heard of VCrisis for Venezuela, no?

Now, there’s ECrisis, for Ecuador.

A couple of Ecuador hands who believe in democratic revolution and free markets, have gotten together and come up with a beautiful new Web site for all developments regarding turbulent little Ecuador. It’s full of richly sourced stories and the most up to date developments. This new blog is a sorely needed addition to all the good Latin American blogs out there and I will link it here often.

It’s a must-see here.

The mind of Hugo Chavez is like a compost heap. It’s full of layer upon layer of muck, and when he gets to spreading it out through what comes out of his mouth, you never know what will come up to the top.

Greg Wilpert, a Chavista agent who edits a prominent Chavista Web site, wrote an amazing piece about Chavez’s relations with the West and his own view of himself for Political Affairs, the official magazine of the Communist Party USA. He had a long rambling chat with Chavez, who proves he’s congenitally unable to keep his mouth shut. So he blathered and blathered, speaking of his pleasure at the Democrats’ election to Congress, while discussing every liaison he’s had with them. It’s interesting because he said too much - all of the material in it can be used to politically damage U.S. Democrats. He said way too much and Wilpert printed it all. It also shows Chavez’s modus operandi, his capacity for horsetrading and subterfuge and his conspiratorial mindset.

Wilpert’s got information about Chavez’s peculiar relationship with John Kerry, and all the strange encounters Chavez had had with Clinton. Chavez also discusses how he handles these leaders, who often were in the shadow of Bush themselves, showing a willingness to make backdoor deals. To Kerry, for example, he said:

Recalling the 2004 presidential campaign, Chavez told of how the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, made overtures to contact him, via Citgo, and that Kerry sent warm greetings at the time. This gave him some hope that if Kerry were to win, a relationship of mutual respect with the U.S. could be started. However, a few days after the Citgo meeting, Kerry????????s campaign came out with a strong anti-Chavez statement, which Chavez attributed to an error within the Kerry campaign, to ???????infiltrators??????? and thus decided not to respond publicly to the statement. Instead, he sent a private message to Kerry, saying that he doesn????????t ask Kerry to put on Chavez????????s trademark red beret. Instead, ???????If Kerry has to say that Chavez is a tyrant, fine, but then, once elected, we talk.???????

He also described his own view of his favorite topic, himself, claiming he is a “revolutionary,” and not a populist, which underscores the fact that he’s a tyrant, not a mere pork-barreler as he is often portrayed in the press. He speaks of his brand of communism as no longer ’21st Century Socialism’ but now “indo-American socialism.” I guess the 21st Century Socialism thing didn’t work out. Now he claims he’s just following Indians now.

This is a must-read for a look at the untidy and conspiratoral mind of Chavez here.

Monday the trade Neanderthals in Congress rejected endorsement of Vietnam’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

It was slopped through a lame-duck committee and Congressional Republicans and Democrats voted against bringing Vietnam into the world trading system. They wanted to shut Vietnam out. And keep all the trade to themselves. Problem is, it takes two to trade, so we all are dimished by keeping a good trading partner out. Vietnam went from zero trade ten years ago to our 16th largest trading partner. What a lousy way to treat a country we’ve made money off of and they’ve done the same from through the miracle of capitalism!

This is a communist country whose leadership saw the error of its communist ways in 1989, as the rest of the Asian Tiger states in its region grew and prospered - Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand and others. And above all, as China grew. That prompted the Viets to reform, to open up to the rest of the world and allow capitalism instead of collectivism. That is completely to its credit, heaven forbid North Korea do such a thing and get a clue from Japan, China and South Korea. The Vietnamese were a lot smarter and knew what was good for them and their people. That’s why they took up trade.

When I visited Hanoi in 1998, I saw a booming economy with most everyone poor but busy. It was just like the rest of Asia but there were no shantytowns. In addition to the humble everyday aspects of Vietnamese culture (such as the world’s best food from even the humblest stalls), I saw many pretty things expanding. Pretty cafes, indigenous designer shops, art galleries. It sounds very yuppie but it wasn’t, the place didn’t look like other places in a cookie cutter way, it was just gorgeous due to capitalism all in its own unique and Franco-indigenous way.

Now this idiot congressional trade vote has happened, sending a message to the world that the U.S. is closed for business. And wants only crummy substandard Ohio factory consumer goods done by overpaid union labor, $30 a hour for turning gears, no education necessary, from the kind of factories that have not been upgraded or invested due to vast union pensions for Americans to have to buy. And as for lower prices, fuhgeddaboutit. It wants inflated prices, shoddy goods and lack of choice. Anything to hit back at China and Walmart. Vietnam, though it isn’t China, looks close enough.

This bodes ill for the more desperately needed trade pacts in our hemisphere, like CAFTA, Colombia and Peru. Today, President Uribe of Colombia is flying up to Washington to plead his case. I don’t have high hopes for him, based on this kind of disgraceful performance on Vietnam, begrudging it trade and telling it to go back to communism.

Congress should be ashamed of itself.

Alek Boyd has taken some photos of Puerto Cabello’s refineries, showing all how Hugo Chavez is painting the entire industrial complex a bright communist red. Rather than the ethereal white of the Long Beach refineries, it’s this rage-inducing comrade red, Chavez’s own color. The only othe place I’ve seen this done is Tijuana, Mexico, where the ruling PRI party has begun painting the flimsy corrugated metal border fence their own vulgar PRI red. No wonder everyone hates the border fences. No wonder everyone hates Chavez’s ugly paint job on refineries. It’s really gross.

This may surprise you, but taking those pictures was dangerous for him. He doesn’t say that, but I will. I was at the same refinery less than a year ago and took two pre-red-paint photos of it here:

and

Admittedly, it did need a coat of paint, but mainly because Chavistas graffitied it up with their ugly subliterate radical-left slogans. Now, since Alek has seen it, and you can match it up exactly with my two photos, it looks like this:

All communist red, just waiting for a little gold hammer and sickle decal in the corner and a thick heavy steel-teethed comrade tractor driver lady on the road below. It also represents a change in the nature of Chavismo. Early Chavismo had shantytown dwellers go paint things up any way they wanted, no matter how meritlessly. After all, they were “the people.” Now things are different: they are corporate, they are uniform, they are the result of central planning, not worker soviets, as the early Soviet Union and the early days of Chavista Venezuela once had. Through these aesthetics, we can see that the Stalin era for Venezuela is dawning. Call it Red Dawn.

Alek no doubt means to show how politicized the Venezuelan oil company is getting - oil workers have to vote Chavista or as Chavez put it, “go to Miami.” But I note that taking the photos was dangerous. When I took those top two photos, two Chavista army men patrolling the area stopped, pointed their rifles at me, called me a spy, and ordered me to stop. Cripes, I thought it was just scenery. I waved back to them and barreled back into my friend’s car as we took off at highway speed. I comforted him that maybe they could not know that I was a gringo. Close call, those refineries are paranoid places, and by now they are even more paranoid.

Go see Alek’s whole photo album, taken at great risk to show us exactly how bad it’s getting in Venezuela, in this post here.

What’s gotten into Brazil’s supposedly decent president, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva?

He flew up to Venezuela and openly endorsed Hugo Chavez for president, hugging and kissing him, and openly meddling in an election for a country that’s not his own. Oddly enough, Chavez did not do the same for him, which is to say meddle, as he openly and shamelessly did in Peru and Mexico.

Meanwhile, the lovefest between the Brazilian and Venezuelan leaders comes a day after Peru’s leader, Alan Garcia, paid a visit to Lula and then openly declared verbal war on Chavez, calling him the scum of the earth to a Venezuelan newspaper. It was a war cry.

What’s happening.

Our Brazilian friends, like Luis Afonso, might well point out that it just goes to show that Lula is no damn good, never was, has always maintained the leadership of the far-leftist Sao Paulo Forum as paramount to any national concerns. And it’s one good theory.

Then there’s my theory, that Lula is basically a good guy, and Chavez, with all his petrodollars and corruption, has Lula over a barrel somehow. Meddling in another nation’s politics is very much against Brazil’s culture, and Lula has never interfered in any other nation’s elections - surely it must mean that Chavez has some damning home movies of Lula, maybe taking briquets of cash from Chavez or something. It’s a theory I first heard in Caracas. Still, corruption never seems to touch Lula, so even if home movies of Lula accepting Chavista bribes surfaced, it might not topple Lula.

Then there’s Daniel at Venezuela News & Views, who has an interesting third theory: Lula enjoys being leader of the continent, and Chavez serves well as his own personal pit bull. Lula coming to Venezuela and saying kind words about Chavez is nothing more than patting a colony child on the head, and keeping him in the Brazil orbit. Because Venezuela is not in Brazil’s natural orbit, it is in the U.S.’s sphere of influence. Daniel says to look at a map and see for yourself. Venezuela is the natural ally of the U.S., not Brazil, due to geography. A trip to the U.S. is an easy couple hours by plane or a two-day oil tanker voyage. Meanwhile the mighty and impentrable Amazon separates Brazil and Venezuela, making an arduous sea journey more practical. That’s why Lula sees it as important to keep Chavez president, he will keep Venezuela in Brazil’s impractical orbit. If Manuel Rosales is elected, he will take Venezuela back to its natural and most efficient area of influence - the U.S. Lula, who’s trying to amass regional leadership, does not want to see that. What an intriguing and original analysis. Which of the three do you agree with? Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Alek Boyd at VCrisis has weighed in, he thinks Lula is just being Lula and has a long history of supporting Chavez at critical moments - note his very union-unfriendly act of breaking the PDVSA strike on behalf of Chavez in 2003. Lula shipped Venezuela lots of non-union-produced oil to keep Chavez in business. In addition, Lula has signed lots of cash deals with Chavez and must pay tribute for his largesse. Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Miguel Octavio observes that Lula is really interfering in his country’s internal affairs and that a shakeout in these current conditions is going to leave Lula looking bad. Here he is, supporting a tyrant who’s about to be booted, and not imagining there will be any consequences. Miguel is not so sure that Lula is calculating right, he is just showing that he doesn’t know the country he’s purporting to interfere with. It’s a great read here.