Bolivia Moves Left

The Globe and Mail, acting like the Voice of Amerika in Canada, is all a flutter over another Left victory in Latin America. In yesterdays editorial they attacked the overwhelming support for Evo Moralies in Bolivia.

Nearly complete official returns Wednesday showed coca activist Evo Morales winning Bolivia's presidency, getting 54.2 per cent of the vote with more than 92 per cent of polling places tallied.

Like we couldn't see that coming a mile away after this springs General Strikes and protests by the miners, the poor and the indigenous peoples movements. The country is another IMF basket case. As Brazil, Argentina and yes even Venezuala, have shown, left wing governments have been able to stablize the national economies and put them on a sure footing within the global market place. Brazil proved that this past weekend when they teamed up with China and India at the WTO and forced through their agenda on trade, much to the chagrin of the U.S. and E.U.

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Hello G&M you are begining to sound like the National Pest.Me thinks that the way it reads the unsigned editorial was penned by Marcus Gee their resident right whing apologist for all thinks Amerikan.

Dr. Dawg does them in with his reply to their editorial. Dawg published the editorial and responds to each accusation. Important note you can't find the editorial the day later, and if you do its 'locked' unless you are a subscriber. So publishing it online is important thanks Dawg. ( and a tip o the blog to Canadian Cynic for pointing this out).

On PBS News Hour they actually had a good overview of the Bolivian election. They had on Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. His analysis was cutting edge, pithy and to the point, so I will quote some of the key points he made.

Well I think you're seeing this across South America as you just showed on the map. What you have here is primarily the result of a 25-year economic failure. People here don't really understand or appreciate this. But you've had very little growth in all of Latin America over the last 25 years.

The total growth of income per person, which is the most basic measure that economists have to measure economic progress, has been only 10 percent.

Now if you look at the prior 20 years, 1960 to 1980, it grew by 82 percent. So you've had a 25-year period now; a whole generation-and-a-half of people in Latin America have really lost out on any chance to improve their living standards.

Well, Bolivia is an example of that. They've been under IMF agreements almost continuously for nearly 20 years. And their income -- and they've done what they were told to do. They privatized even the Social Security system there. And their income today per person is less than it was in 1980.

And I don't know what Roger considers to be a success but when your income per person is lower than it was 25 years ago, most economists would call that a failure, a terrible failure.

Unless you are an American State Department hack or an editorialist for the Globe and Mail.



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Bolivia
Latin America
Socialism
elections