>From: Charlie Stross <charlie@antipope.org>
>
>On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 12:31:22PM -0400, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>>
>> What Chavez is doing is trying to leverage Venezuela's oil wealth into
>> constructing a latin only trade bloc to compete against the FTAA. He is
>> smart in wishing to be the big fish in a small pond rather than a small
>> fish in a big one.
>
>Point of note: the US government is apparently trying to use the FTAA
>to ram through legislation similar to the DMCA throughout the Americans.
>
>Maybe you should be rooting for Chavez, Ortega, et al; they may be half-
>assed and they may espouse an ideology you don't like, but they haven't
>been coopted by the machine that's trying to strip you of your basic
>civil rights as fast as it can.
Um... Ortega may be digestible if one would be willing to go through a lot
of old Latinamerican left-wing fossil ideology. At least he seems basically
decent, if of dubious use for the kind of problems we have in the region.
Now, Chavez... *shudder* The guy is a goon, an opportunist, and a sly
version of what is worst about traditional authoritarian nationalism in
LA. Asking one to choose between the globalization oligarchy and this
kind of localist creep is like giving one the option of choosing between
being hanged or shot. In the end, we are equally "dead to the future".
(A brief Argentine digression: we have around our country the same kind
of character as this Chavez fellow. They have dabbled into politics, with
relative success on local elections. To be honest, they scare the living
daylights out of me, and if such people would get to power in Argentina
(a not too far possibility, considering the mess we are in and how
gullible scared people can be there) I would very much give my country
for lost for any practical purposes and several decades to come.)
Carlos
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:26 MDT