Years of Poems and Spirits

“A judge in the United States has ruled that Luis Posada Carriles, wanted for allegedly blowing up a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing 73 people, cannot be deported to either Cuba or Venezuela.”

—Did not see this in the headlines among all major news source. Only found this in the Economist weekly summary. This is, if not the mother of, got to be a close elder of all hypocrisies.

—Also read on the New Yorker about another Cuban suspected terrorist: Orlando Bosch . A co-conspiritor of Carriles. Jeb Bush used his cause to build his arch conservative credentials. Older Bush pardonned him. Has close tie to Otto Reich, the GWB’s point man of Latin America in the State Department.

Foreign Affairs article(c). Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs

Quotes
“Economic growth, rather than being a force for democratic change in tyrannical states, can sometimes be used to strengthen oppressive regimes.”

Idea: “World Bank should reconsider the kinds of conditions they attch to their loans”
—Only if the loans are so desperately needed as the regime would rather put their own lives on the line?

Rationale: “Economic growth … raises the stakes of the political game by increasing the spoils available to the winner, and it leads to an increase in the number of individuals … get involved in politics.”

Term from political science “strategic coordination”—the set of activities that people must engage in to win political power.

“If authoritarian incumbents can limit s.c. by the opposition … To remain secure, autocrats must raise the cost of political coordination among the opposition without also raising the cost of economic coordination too dramatically.”

Example: Chinese restrictions on Internet-related activities (see blog). Russian government total control of TV stations.

“Coodination goods are distinct from more general public goods—public transportation, health care, primary education, etc.”

The authors “examined the provision of public goods in about 150 countries between 1970 and 1999″, found 4 points:
1. The suppression of coordination goods is an effective survival strategy. Allowing freedom of the press and ensure civil liberties, … reduce the chances that an autocratic government will survive for another year by about 15-20%
2. Today’s autocrats tend to suppress coordination goods much more consistently than they do other public goods.
3. The greater the suppression of the coordination goods … the greater the lag between economic growth and the emergence of liberal democracy.
4. Except at the highest levels of per-capita income, significant economic growth can be attained and sustained even while the government suppresses coordination goods.
—Is this corelated to per-capita income or something else? e.g. type of economy (resource intensive vs. information intensive? or productivity related)

“China … is best viewed not as the exception to the rule that growth prodcues liberalization, but the emblematic of the fact that it usually does not.”

Foreign Affairs article. F. Gregory Gause III

One of the rare piece of article that challenges the tenents of the neo-conservative foreign policies.

“Is it true that the more democratic a country becomes, the less likely it is to produce terrorists and terrorist groups? ”

Among the “free” (i.e. non-autocratic or theocratic) countries, “India accounted for fully 75% of the total … A significant number of terrorist events in India took place far from Kashmir”
Related articles: the New Yorker article on a Gujarat, India demogague (Thuckway?)

“A list of terrorist incidents between 1976 and 2004 … shows more than 400 in India and only 18 in China”

“Arabs in general do not have a problem with democracy … Strong majorities of those surveyed in Kuwait (83%) … and the Palestinian (53%) said democracy would work.”
However, “Washington probably would not like the governments [such] democracy would produce.”

Author’s view is “engineering democracy” by supporting “secular forces”. (Ha! got you)