A brief distraction

Holy doodle, I was wrong.

I guess Hugo won’t be unpacking anything just yet.

Perhaps they don’t teach you everything in the Political Science classroom.

(Which is where I’ll be for the next little while; you probably won’t be seeing any updates until my 40 pages of paper are handed in on the 12th)

Petrocrats of the world… Unite!

One of my roommates wasn’t sure if he was going to stay with us for the entire year, and being the pragmatic Irishman that he is, decided it would be unwise to unpack all of his things for such a brief period of time. Well Liam decided–just like Hugo Chávez–that he wasn’t going anywhere. I guess the question of the day is, what exactly is ol’ Hugo unpacking?

I find something captivating in Chávez; but–as I quipped the other day–probably in the same way as a firefighter to fires, or a police officer to criminals. It seems to me that the proposed constitutional amendments to be put before the general public on the 2nd of December are going to to pass (despite some opposition from Students and some Elites), establishing the political infrastructure necessary for more of Hugo’s Napoleonesque Latin American adventures.

But maybe Chávez breaks the mold. His blend of “a little Marx, a little Jesus, a little anti-imperialism and a lot of the whim of Hugo Chávez” seems genuinely directed at the poorest of the poor in Venezuela (and even some in the United States!). Even as gasoline subsidies are driving up the world price of oil (in China, too), the money extracted from Venezuela’s nationalized oil industry isn’t ending up in the president’s personal coffers, but rather in programs designed to maintain programs stemming from the government’s ‘zero misery’ attitude.

Pascal told us that kings had to be continually occupied, lest they turn to tyrants. Let’s hope (for the sake of both Venezuela and my bragging rights) that fighting misery is enough to occupy a Chávez unfettered by term limits or a limit on his discretionary power.

Old hat, new hat

It seems like there’s a new game in town in Afghanistan. Poppies are out, marijuana is in. I guess the question this brings to mind is: what exactly was ‘won’ in the ‘war on poppies’? I think there was a widespread belief that there were only two options for farmers to grow prior to this war’s ‘resolution’: food or opiate inputs. (I would argue that much of this misconception would stem from the media, who often used a simple ‘poppy vs. food crops’ comparison to show the relative prices of the commodities.) From this standpoint, once the ‘poppy problem’ was solved, farmers would be drawn into the formal (and legal) economy of subsistence crop production.

Obviously, this didn’t happen. I would suggest a consideration of international crop prices. If recent activity at the WTO has told us anything, it is that there is a greater global recognition of the severe problems stemming from the subsidization of basic crops in the west; cotton in particular. Even if the subsidies were removed–which I sincerely doubt they will be– can these subsistence farmers hope to compete with western economies of scale and technologically superior production methods?

I doubt it. If instead of kicking flowerpots over internationally (or spraying toxic goo in farmer’s fields, or whatever they do to eradicate poppy crops), the United States spent as much money paying domestic producers not to produce cotton, would this problem sort itself out?

China: Caveat Emptor?

Not so long ago, there was an article over at The Onion making light of the Chinese political reaction to its dangerous exports discovered abroad.  It gave me a laugh, and I sent it to the back of my mind (somewhere next to all those old Star Trek episodes).

It remained there until yesterday, when I read this New York Times piece.  Clearly there exists regulatory failure when chemical companies–firms producing a central link in pharmaceutical commodity chains–can sidestep the state drug administration.  What the Onion article shows (albeit hyperbolically) is the type of reaction we can anticipate from the Chinese Government.  Cheap imports from China are probably one of the only things that are allowing (the few) American households that can still pay their mortgages to continue to do so.  The Chinese technocrats clearly know this.  Until there is a significant economic cost associated with this failure of government (sorry about the Eurocentricism), I don’t think we can expect anything more than a couple of show trials and promises to ‘do better next time’.

Then again, it might also be a pretty good idea to look at who is buying these inferior inputs.  I’ll bet my B.A. that all this transpacific finger-pointing is running interference for a lot of North American companies that are just as shady as these Chinese scapegoats.

Holy Smokes!

The good people at the Globe and Mail have allowed me to stumble across another gem from the Canadian Press.

Isn’t this ‘alarming’ discovery completely obvious? You mean to tell me that high-school-age rapscallions, who are not deterred by the illegality of underage cigarette acquisition, have no qualms about smoking contraband cigarettes?

Stop the presses. Please.