This morning I ran the Charlotte Runway 5K, which I'd never done. It's a very cool race, as you actually run on a runway, while planes are taking off and landing not too far away (and Charlotte has an extremely busy airport). I've never seen so many people stopping in a race to take photos. An added and pretty obvious benefit is that it is the flattest race you could possibly do.
Here is the text of the bill Governor McCrory signed into law. Key points:
1. E-Verify will now apply to contractors who work for a government agency in NC.
2. The matricula consular (even named specifically) is no longer acceptable to be used with any government agency (including police). The NC General Assembly must approve any ID not currently specified.
3. Sanctuary cities are prohibited. For example, you cannot tell police not to collect information of someone's immigration status, even if they're not arrested.
The upshot:
1. People will be even more afraid of the police, even if they've been robbed, assaulted, etc.
2. The civil rights resolution passed by the Charlotte City Council in June will be superseded.
3. The effort to create a municipal ID in Charlotte will be quashed.
4. The General Assembly is saying it does not trust local government.
5. This will help seal the Republican Party's alienation of the growing Latino population.
The U.S. and Cuba played their annual game at the United Nations, as Cuba introduced a resolution condemning the embargo and got overwhelming support. The number of countries staying on the U.S. side has dwindled over time, and now includes only Israel. So the vote was 191-2. The first time I blogged about this, in 2006, the vote was 183-4.
Last month the Obama administration had indicated it might actually switch its own vote to abstention if some of the language of the resolution changed. But Cuba offered up the same language so the game was played the same way as always. Cuba's stance was that even with the diplomatic thaw, the embargo is still being enforced:
RodrÃguez described the U.S. vote as unfounded, and reiterated that, as long as the blockade continues to be strictly enforced, the General Assembly will continue condemning it.
He commented that he would not respond to the U.S. representative’s statements, but insisted that it is the blockade which must be substantially modified - not the Cuban resolution.
The New York Times just had an article lamenting the fact that Cubans were choosing to have fewer children, clearly seeing that as a problem. My dad responds:
But, wait a second. One of the reasons why the country has a growing older population is because the death rate is so low in Cuba. Life expectancy in Cuba is 78 years at birth, compared to 79 for the United States. Think about that. We complain in this country about how expensive health care is, but in poverty-stricken Cuba your chances of death at any given age are about the same as here. Why? Education is the key, as the article itself notes, quoting a former World Bank economist, Helen Denton.
Congressional testimony: Douglas Farah on Russia's role in Latin America:
Yet given its current positioning, one could argue that Russia now has more influence in Latin America than ever before, even including at the height of the Cold War. This will likely remain true despite the recent announcement of the normalization of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States and Russia’s ongoing economic turmoil.
The ALBA bloc embraces terrorism and terrorist groups such as the FARC in Colombia, Hezbollah and the Spanish ETA and its military doctrine includes the justification for the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States.
Russia’s rise underscores the significant loss of Washington’s ability to shape events in a region close to home and of significant strategic interest. This decline, due to waning policy attention amidst multiple global crises and severe budget constraints, is leaving a diminishing group of friends in the hemisphere. Since 2010, U.S. engagement efforts, both military and diplomatic, have been scaled back dramatically with overall aid decreasing both civilian and security assistance. And regional initiatives have been among the hardest hit by the ongoing budget austerity,33 which has left a vacuum that is being filled by extraregional actors and a growing group of political leaders who hope for the collapse of the United States.
Come tonight to the Levine Museum of the New South, where I'll be taking part in a program the Charlotte Teacher's Institute of UNC Charlotte has put together in conjunction with the new NUEVOlution exhibit.
The news about the Argentine presidential election is naturally focused on the surprising surge by Mauricio Macri, which shows more disenchantment with the Kirchner era than expected.
What gets less attention is what hasn't happened. There has been no inflammatory rhetoric from the Casa Rosada (though Cristina Kirchner hasn't tweeted since yesterday so let's see). Daniel Scioli's response has been measured, there is no crisis, there are no accusations of malfeasance, nobody is being thrown into jail. The outcome was a big deal but the process was...boring.
And that's what you want to see.
Increasingly, Venezuela is become more isolated in this regard. We've seen major yet boring elections elsewhere as well (I made the same point about the 2013 presidential election in Ecuador). For all the talk about the problems Argentina faces, it is important to note that the electoral aspect of its democracy seems to be working quite well.
For general posts on the election, see Otto and Steven Hyland.
I read David MacLean's The Answer to the Riddle is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia. Very good book. MacLean was in India and had a terrible reaction to the malaria drug Lariam. He suddenly became conscious in a train station, not knowing who he was or what he was doing. He spends the book describing how he tries to understand who he had been before.
The book made me think about how brain chemicals essentially construct reality. His descriptions of hallucinations conjured up images of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, who like other Beat writers (and many other artists of different eras) thought hallucinogens took them to a higher level. MacLean felt he was close to solving a riddle God had given him, and God looked like Jim Henson. Who's to say he's wrong?
But it also means that chemicals dictate how we feel about people. He couldn't remember his girlfriend, and so suddenly they had no past. It didn't matter if they had spent months together: his brain chemicals wiped out all the memories, so for him that time never occurred. It's scary to think about, and he was badly scared.
He spends much of the book using other chemicals, mostly nicotine and alcohol, to counteract the chemicals that are messing him up. As you might guess, they really only make things worse. In the end, he needed to forge a new romantic relationship to center himself. Past ones simply could not work because knowing that memories were missing created a chasm.
At Latin America Goes Global Andrés Cañizález asks the question about what happens the day after the December 6 Venezuelan elections. What he mentions but which deserves more attention is the role of the military. That it's still such a major factor in Latin American politics is sad, really. But this is where the rubber hits the road. If the government takes a major electoral hit, which is very likely, then the military leadership will need to decide whether it supports the government over the constitution.
We know the military is tightly bound to Chavismo. We know it is routinely used by the government to make political points about foreign policy. We know there is Cuban influence. We know that Maduro has needed the military to publicly pledge its loyalty.
But for the most part the focus on the military has been whether it would protect Maduro from a forced ouster, not a legislative defeat. The former is not in doubt but the latter is. So if the PSUV looks to be losing then we need to pay close attention to how the military reacts.
The Chinese state media has an article about how Chinese expertise can help diversify Latin American exports. The problem is that its suggested solution is to help Latin America produce more food for the Chinese to consume, which is in fact the opposite of diversifying exports.
With China likely to double its food imports by 2020, sharing its agricultural technology with Latin America may be a good idea.
The New York Times notes that because of Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio's Cuba obsession, we don't have an ambassador to Mexico. Roberta Jacobson is the nominee and she had the gall to help fix our failed Cuba policy.
Ms. Jacobson played a leading role in re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba. This has greatly annoyed two influential Cuban-American senators, Marco Rubio of Florida and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who want to keep America’s policy toward Cuba stuck in a Cold War mentality. And under the Senate’s opaque confirmation process, all it takes to sink the nomination of a qualified public servant is one or two people with a grievance.
A Helms aide said that the senator believes Pastor misled Congress during hearings on ratification of the Carter Administration treaty transferring the Panama Canal to Panamanian ownership at the end of this century. Helms opposed the treaty, which he said was a "giveaway" of American property and influence.
Indigenous protests in Ecuador have prompted some fascinating debate. Jeffrey Webber has an article describing how Minister of Culture Guillaume Long criticized him and his description of those protests.
In a paradigmatic expression of passive revolution in the country today, Long weaves a technocratic thread throughout his interview, of loyalty and submission to benevolent elected officials and anxiety in the face of undisciplined, independent, social organization of workers, peasants, and indigenous communities from below. The post-modern liberal left, in this view, “exalts non-state actors, NGOs, and a nebulously defined civil society, elected by no one, who are always seen as forces for good.” The Correa government’s electoralist calculus – in which politics is increasingly reduced to choosing who rules – extra-parliamentary politics lose all texture and particularity. This is evident in Long’s inability to differentiate between Jaime Nebot and trade union activists, between Guillermo Lasso and indigenous activists mobilizing to fight mining incursions into their territories. There is no room in such a calculus for a virtuous dialectic of a Left government operating inside the contradictory apparatuses of a dependent capitalist state, on the one hand, and self-organization and mobilization of popular sectors from below. You could argue, plausibly, that such a dialectic was visible during the Constituent Assembly process of 2006 to 2008, but that time has long since passed.
No one disputes Long’s basic points on economic growth and social improvements under Correa in the realms of health care, education, income inequality, and poverty. But he misrepresents the realities of the international economic environment and exaggerates some of this social improvement, while ignoring its most recent directionality. Improvements in income inequality and poverty outcomes in Ecuador have not been out of step with the general improvement across these areas throughout much of South America (governed by gradations of Left and Right parties) throughout the duration of the Chinese-driven commodities supercycle (2003-2011). Economic growth was rapid throughout this period in South America. Therefore Long gets the timing of the global recession’s impact on South America wrong. “Economic growth has averaged 4.3 percent,” he writes, “despite Rafael Correa’s coming to office on the eve of a global recession.” This was a general regional trend, not a particular achievement of Correa’s administration.
The global recession, however, is now reaching South America in a delayed reverberation, through China’s slowdown. South America has entered what is likely to be an extended period of low growth, and Left (and Right) governments in the region are facing class decisions, made sharper by the absence of high commodity prices to lubricate social programs. Who is paying for the fall in state revenues? The rich or the poor? Mining capitalists or indigenous communities? Early signals in Ecuador are not promising for those interested in genuinely shifting costs onto the elite.
I was quoted in this Guardian article on the Obama administration's decision to cut some aid to Mexico because of failure to address human rights issues. I assume we'll hear some "Obama punishes his allies" sort of criticism, but the human rights problems in Mexico are real and serious, so deserve to be noted in a real and serious manner.
Read more...To what degree do we credit a single unnamed "U.S. official," talking to Fox News about how he saw Cuban military officers in Syria, especially as it comes just as a Fox commentator falsely claimed he worked for the CIA? As you might guess, Cuba has denied it.
My take is that exactly none of these sources--anonymous official, Fox news, or the Cuban government--is trustworthy. So feel free to ignore the story until there is actual evidence. But rumors like this take on a life of their own, which of course is why they are sometimes intentionally put out there. Because senators will get indignant, which they like doing.
"Press reports now indicate that hundreds of Cuban military personnel are on the grounds in Syria, with the purpose of supporting Russia and Iran in bolstering the Assad regime," the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman wrote in a letter to Obama Friday.
Take someone who doesn't know much about Latin America, who wrote a book trying to rehabilitate Richard Nixon, and who refers to murders and torture in Chile as "infelicities," and then have him publish an article in National Review on U.S. policy toward Latin America. You'll get a mishmash of facts concluding that the U.S. is losing Latin America.
But Latin America, a region of vast potential right under America’s nose since James Monroe’s time, gets little apparent attention beyond the vagaries of immigration. It is a very important strategic area awaiting unconscionably delayed recognition from post–Cold War America.
I read Morris Morley and Chris McGillion's Reagan and Pinochet: The Struggle Over U.S. Policy Toward Chile (2015). I'm finishing up a review for Latin American Politics & Society. The upshot is that I enjoyed the book.
The book makes two main contributions. First, it explains why U.S. policy toward Chile evolved in ways that were not obvious when Reagan first took office, and how that was shaped by internal administration schisms. Second, it explores the difficulties and frustrations U.S. policy makers had influencing events in Chile.
I don’t believe I’ve ever had reason to criticize academic authors for being too modest, yet that’s what I felt as I read. Morley and McGillion don’t situate themselves in any particular scholarly context. It is a bit frustrating that the introduction begins immediately with a chronological account of U.S. policy toward Latin America but does not first lay out the book’s key arguments, contribution and structure. In fact their foreign policy analysis is more useful than they even try to claim.
I started reading Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Queen of the South, a novel about a Mexican woman who had been a narcotrafficker's girlfriend in Mexico and then escaped to Spain (Melilla, specifically, on the northern tip of Africa) when he was killed. I really like Pérez-Reverte, who has a beautiful style and originality, but this book bored the living daylights out of me. I decided to stop if I got to page 100 and it hadn't changed. And it didn't. I found it to be a pedestrian and uninteresting drug story, of which there are a million to choose from. The main character Teresa is flat and boring, and there is no plot to make up for that fact. Major disappointment from a fine author.
Read more...Cuba complains a lot about U.S. control over Guantánamo Bay. Raúl Castro did so again not long ago. If you remember, the United States took it during the Spanish-American War in 1898, wrote it into a 1903 treaty, then updated it in 1934 with the aid of, among others, Fulgencio Batista.
A few short years after the Spanish-American War,
Cuba emerged not as a colony of Spain but as an
independent and sovereign republic - a change in
status made possible only thanks to U.S. military
assistance.
Over time "IMF" has become a dirty word in Latin America, laden with images of externally-forced shock therapy programs. Governments, especially those on the left, searched for ways to avoid dealing with it. Now after meeting in Latin America, IMF officials say basically that rejecting the IMF worked pretty well.
Helped by strong growth, social transformation in Latin America over the past decade and a half has been impressive. The region sharply reduced its poverty rate, cut extreme poverty in half, and income inequality also fell. Going forward, the challenge is preserving and increasing gains in a more difficult environment for growth, especially for commodity exporting countries.
Watching the baseball playoffs, the issue of advanced metrics came up with regard to deciding the American League MVP, which unleashed a torrent of tweets. I thought for the umpteenth time how similar the "old school" vs. "advanced statistics" debate in baseball is so similar to the quantitative vs. qualitative debate in political science. Both sides dig in and puff up, too often asserting that the other side is just flat wrong. The tone gets really snotty, with both sides mocking the other. People routinely get genuinely angry, especially when they sense that their entire way of thinking is being challenged.
And in both baseball and political science, it's all so tiresome and unnecessary. There is (or at least should be) plenty of room for everyone to live together if every single one of us just decided to be even just slightly more tolerant.
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