Tag: Oil

Chavez is dead

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann

 

Overcoming the goods and bads of Mr. Chavez will not be any easy.  Eliminating redistribution of wealth programs will be almost impossible and the surrender of greater virtues like rationality, honesty, integrity, productivity and justice will be most surely sacrificed by the ruling leader for the sake of his reelection.  Even now that Mr. Chavez died, the Venezuelan Welfare State supports millions of its voters.  Just last year,  Venezuela added more than 800,000 people to the rolls of the state welfare system and  the number of pensioners reaches nearly 2.5 million, an increase of over 600 percent since 1999 in total pensions paid by the state, all of which are indexed to the national minimum wage (via venezuelanalysis.com).  Though he died, his party continues living and his ideas will continue been fostered in the form of more programs in the Venezuelan welfare state.  For this and many more reasons I say: Chavez is dead.

In a global scale the death of former President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías, will be very limited but noticeable for countries like China and Russia who benefited after Mr. Chavez expelled Western oil companies operating in the country and replaced them with Chinese and Russian state owned companies.  This oil companies were the most important strongholds of this two powerful countries in Latin America.

In a regional perspective the disappearance of this controversial figure will have important effects in Latin America as well.  Specially, around the league of the group ALBA (Spanish Acronyms for the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) in which he played an important role as its founder and main speaker against the North American interventionist policy.  Without Mr. Chavez the possibility of a halt of the oil donations to the member countries of this alliance could have an important significance as well. Venezuela donated millions of barrels of oil to needy Caribbean states, particularly Cuba, but also countries like Trinidad and Tobago and this countries in exchange commissioned their doctors to help in the most needed areas of Venezuela.  This symbolic gesture has been a constant diplomatic activity of the poor Caribbean states.

Also, Nicaragua benefited from Mr. Chavez anti-American policy.  The government of the former guerrilla leader Daniel Ortega and his party’s politburo have been recipient of more than $2.2 billion in Venezuelan petrodollars since 2007.  To them, the election of a member of the Chavez regime is fundamental to continue holding control of elections in the next term.  Further, the Pulitzer Center reports that “Since Ortega returned to power democratically in 2007, the wellspring of aid from ALBA — a bloc of eight left-leaning Latin American countries underwritten by Chavez — has provided the Sandinista government with an average of $500 million a year in loans, donations and oil credit. In 2011, Ortega’s ALBA allowance jumped to $609 million during his own re-election campaign.”  Showing how Venezuelan interventionism in the region was in occasions more powerful than the interventions of the United States of America that are historically hated and protested by leftists demagogues.

Venezuela has been officially (though in contravention to its Constitution) under the rule of the Vicepresident Nicolás Maduro since the death of Mr. Chavez.  He is now the interim President of Venezuelafollowing the death of Hugo Chávez.  Mr. Maduro will most probably run for the elections with very high chances of winning.  Before dying, Hugo Chavez ran for reelection in 2012 and got the vote of 55% of the voters.  His approval ratings among the poorest of the voters is very high and his main opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski, will have it very difficult to win.  More important to note is the fact that Mr. Capriles is mentioned as being part of the Centre-Right of the country.  However, if elected his main policies may end up been very similar to the ones that gave popularity to Mr. Chavez.  He may thus be a centre-right from hand-to-mouth and a centre-left activist in practice.

Mr. Chavez ruled the country since February 2 1999 until 5 March 2013.  During his 14 years in power he reformed to his convenience the Venezuelan Constitution several times, created dozens of agencies formed by members of his party, formed hundreds of thousands of state-owned cooperatives, fuelled billions of dollars in his stated goal to lower inequality in the access to basic nutrition, and to achieve food sovereignty for Venezuela.  Further, he placed Venezuela at the centre of the regional foreign policy with states in Africa, Asia and Europe.

A Satellite’s View of Ship Pollution and globalization

Cargo-Ship650The geographical hotspots of the world are all related to economic trade and global exchange of political interests. Places such as the Panama and Suez Canals have always been in the Western media. However, from an economic and strategic perspective, the Strait of Malacca is one of the most important shipping lanes in the world in the 21st Century. The history of this Strait’s geopolitical relevance goes as back as 400 years of history.

For centuries the strait has been the main shipping channel between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. It has been controlled by the major regional powers and also by the mayor global power during different historical periods. In 2011 hundreds of thousands of containers in more than 60,000 vessels crossed its waters carrying about one-quarter of the world’s traded goods including oil, Chinese manufactures, and Indonesian coffee.

In order to understand which is the geopolitical importance of the Strait of Malacca for the Chinese government we need to overview the current geopolitical dynamics and economic investments in the region.

The following image from NASA clearly depicts what are some of the IMPRESSIVE negative externalities caused by the transport of global goods in the region and opens the door for discussing

  • How can we fix this?
  • Who should fix it?
  • Can it be fixed?
  • Can we reduce the future impacts in the area?
  • What solutions are available?
A Satellite’s View of Ship Pollution

Color bar for A Satellite’s View of Ship Pollution
acquired 2005 – 2012 download large image (2 MB, JPEG, 1800×1800)

Elevated levels of nitrogen dioxide pop out over certain shipping lanes in observations made by the Aura satellite between 2005-2012. The signal was the strongest over the northeastern Indian Ocean.

Data from the Dutch and Finnish-built Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite show long tracks of elevated nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels along certain shipping routes. NO2, is among a group of highly-reactive oxides of nitrogen, known as NOx, that can lead to the production of fine particles and ozone that damage the human cardiovascular and respiratory systems. Combustion engines, such as those that propel ships and motor vehicles, are a major source of NO2 pollution.

To learn some more on the importance of the Strait of Malacca and the value of this shipping lane you can read the essay I wrote titled “The Strait of Malacca as one of the most important geopolitical regions for the People’s Republic of China. Download (.pdf)

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A Plan to Collapse Iran’s Central Bank and its Origins

The foreign policy of the richest countries has always depended in controlling the world’s monetary systems. As a continuation of the postcolonial systems, they continue holding the power to grant credits to poorer countries, to rescue their economies in periods of crisis and in pushing for an increase in world “reserves” and international “liquidity.” The end result of this policies resulted in creating world inflation and enriching those central banks that controlled the dice of this international game (just as it had been done in the previous colonial period).

Colonialism may seem to many an ‘old history’ that was overcome with the modernization of the world and the decolonization processes after World War II.  Nonetheless, in the following postcolonial period many already institutionalized strategies continued working and are still present today.  The IMF, for example, was one of the institutions born as a result of the decolonization process. Its results (far distant from their founding vision) were to keep the postcolonial countries in monetary and economic dependency.

For long the world’s centralized banking and monetary authorities, headed primarily by the International Monetary Fund, collaborated to initiate a period of surveillance, aid, and guarantees for the world’s financial markets as  and  explained in the post “The IMF and Moral Hazard“. However, the long-term results of theses policies fostered the dependency of postcolonial economies and, as such, empowered the populist leaderships in the former colonies that pursued expansive social programs that couldn’t be supported without their foreign aid and long-term indebtment.

Video: The Plan To Collapse Iran’s Central Bank

Today, I saw a video titled “The Plan To Collapse Iran’s Central Bank” in which analysts in the U.S.A. are evaluating the possibilities of collapsing Iran’s economy and disenabling them to continue researching their nuclear programs. Strategies as these may seem as “bogus” to many; however, the long history of international monetary intervention of the economies in postcolonial countries is long and influential (see: Pastor, Manuel (1989). Latin America, the Debt Crisis, and the International Monetary Fund. Latin American Perspectives).  The results of any of these strategies always end up creating inflation and as  mentioned in his essay “End the IMF” in the year 1963 the only solution for and end to inflation (an as such for peace and economic recovery) is to eliminate the IMF and the interventionist international monetary system that has proved, in practice, a gigantic machine for world inflation.

File:50000 IRR obverse.jpg
50,000 Iranian rial

Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi Falls

Free Libya - Saturday Is Always A Day Of Prote...
Image by infomatique via Flickr

“Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent “rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.

This right, however, is conditional. Just as the suppression of crimes does not give a policeman the right to engage in criminal activities, so the invasion and destruction of a dictratorship does not give the invader the right to establish another variant of a slave society in the conquered country.” Ayn Rand. The Virtue of Selfishness, 104

Gaddafi came into power as an assassin and terrorist. He started out murdering, continued murdering and had been going out murdering until today.  His death is no panacea but it is surely a victory for the Libyan people and their 2011 Revolution.

Starting in February 15th, 2011 a series of peaceful protests asked for change in the country and they were met with military force by the Gaddafi regime.  Thousands were hurt and killed. Gaddafi proclaimed his despotic discourse that same night and said that the only way he was going to leave Libya was going to be in a cuffing.  Indeed, that’s how he will leave the history of the country.

The fight for Libyans has not finished; loyalists around the Algerian and Nigerian borders are still present and the opposition continues.

I celebrate the capture of this dictator and our attention needs to be focused now in the continues shipping of supplies of medicine, fuel and food were for Libya’s urban centres.  As the philosopher Ayn Rand mentioned in the quote with which I begun this post; it is necessary as well, that we keep a close attention to the outcome of this Libyan revolution in order to avoid that another variant of a slave society in the conquered country with national or international control.