This claim has been debunked after the OAS finally released their data set. The original report fucked up the time stamps, which means the "hard-to-explain change in the preliminary results" never actual occurred.
>Bolivia’s economy has undergone structural economic transformation during Evo Morales’s presidency. Real (inflation-adjusted) per capita GDP grew by more than 50 percent over these past 13 years. This was twice the rate of growth for the Latin American and Caribbean region. Even as the Latin American regional economy slowed over the past five years, Bolivia had the highest growth of per capita GDP in South America.
Bolivia's GDP per capita is still one of the lowest in Latin America. It's also one of the lowest in the world excluding African nations. It's easier to grow when you're very poor.
If a capitalist friendly guy had been in charge, you would not have made this point though. When socialists have success people are always eager to find excuses and when capitalism utterly fails like the Russian shock therapy, people line up to make excuses.
Can’t we just accept that the devil is in the details. Quality of government matters more than you political ideology, with respect to economic growth.
I lived in South America and the amount of Bolivian emigrants, and people in general who leave the country temporarily to use other countries' resources (collecting welfare from other countries and taking advantage of public healthcare in some other South American countries, particularly Argentina) is enough proof for me that Bolivia is not doing very well, whether it is a socialist state or not.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. It’s almost a tautology that it’s easier to double a two dollars than it is to double two trillion. Starting point makes a big difference, and growth alone is not an indication of comparative success.
It will depend on what will the new gov do about the military and police which betrayed the past administration and how many loyal forces as a % of the forces do they have
If they decide to purge it will take less time to "recover", if they make a national unity government, then it might take considerably longer
You think Musk was serious? You sure he wasn't just trolling a responder who came out with a red herring about US coup in Bolivia and accusing Musk of being complicit in it (and you get those guys all the time online. You could be talking about unicorns and they'll just jump in with "Remember that America is evil" bit).
But he wasn't. He was responding, in kind, to a tweet that came out with a red herring about America organizing coup to benefit Musk. And those guys are a dime a dozen online. Their one trick is to always post about how evil America is regardless of context. They are supremely annoying.
> Their one trick is to always post about how evil America is regardless of context. They are supremely annoying.
This is a bad faith interpretation of that tweet. They were responding to a tweet about unnecessary government expenditure with an example of another expenditure that (allegedly) Musk supported. You can call it a whataboutism or attack it for a number of other things, but this is an irrelevant strawman.
Oh.. so the only person who 'alleged' this, was this bad faith doofus who accused Musk of supporting (or staging) the coup in Bolivia. Gotcha ... though I still fail to see what is the a good faith interpretation of that tweet.
The good faith (perhaps better faith is more appropriate) way to interpret it would be as I mentioned, and calling it out for its actual issues instead of trying to soapbox by building a strawman.
I'm not sure what it is you expected. If you start with accusing someone of staging or supporting a coup you lost the right to a good faith interpretation of your motives from that individual. But this is par for course from online marxists.
Oh, so he wasn't joking. He was mocking the people who think he should be held accountable for his actions. As they're annoying.
The clear role lithium played on the coup, the known pressure placed by the US to force that coup, and the economic benefit to Tesla both immediately after the coup and long term. I'll admit it's hardly conclusive, but it's enough that his response was terrible.
>He was mocking the people who think he should be held accountable for his actions.
If you're an internet marxist and accuse someone (without evidence) of staging or supporting a coup .. you're not actually holding anyone for their actions... you're just acting like a douchebag marxist.
>and the economic benefit to Tesla both immediately after the coup and long term.
And to you as well, after all, lower lithium prices mean lower prices for any battery-operated electronics. Maybe you're behind this coup as well?
>I'll admit it's hardly conclusive
I think you can state it more strongly than that. It's a conspiracy theory in the mold of infowars.
Only Marxists oppose coups? If you don't want people to blame you for a coup, maybe don't make your first public statement about it be a douchebag admission of guilt.
>And to you as well, after all, lower lithium prices mean lower prices for any battery-operated electronics. Maybe you're behind this coup as well?
I would stand to gain a few dollars, Musk would gain billions. As I think the US helped with this coup, I would be behind it as well, but not to the same degree.
>I think you can state it more strongly than that. It's a conspiracy theory in the mold of infowars.
Both the foreign interests ties and the US ties have some evidence, you just can't conclusively show Musk's involvement. Given the events of the past century, suspecting US involvement in a South American coup is hardly crazy.
Let's just agree on this: responding with a troll response to a Marxist troll who accuses you of being complicit with a Bolivian coup, is not 'admitting' anything. It boggles my mind how you can possibly think otherwise.
I think otherwise as a mocking admission is still an admission. I'll agree that his words likely weren't meant to be taken literally, and that it's hardly proves his connection. Still, that response and his further attempts to draw it back don't make him look good.
The replies to this are amazing. A popular leader enacts policies which prevent multinationals from extracting the resources of Bolivia (including a lot of lithium, used in batteries), the leader is then pushed out in a coup which is supported by the US intelligence community and the western business interests (look up the OAS). And Musk tweets support for this coup and then deletes the tweet and people defend this like it’s a joke. Maybe he was high when he tweeted it but there is clearly some truth behind his “joke”.
The parent comment does not claim that it is "neutral", and a politician's opinions are not normally assumed to be "neutral", so I'm not sure why you even raise that as an issue.
Non-neutral sources don't tend to be well received around here. What makes this one deserving of a pass?
The issues that interview covers have been widely discussed. Surely there's someone with an agenda other than "give this guy batting practice pitches right over the plate" that has asked him his opinion. This guy is a politician, being in the media, answering questions and talking about his opinion is part of his job. He's certainly done more interviews than just this one.
Furthermore, a friendly interview is much less informative than a neutral or hostile interview. Anyone can hit batting practice pitches. Anyone can answer questions from a friendly interviewer. A politician's answer to tough questions or to having their answers questioned is far more informative. Jacobin interviewing a leftist/socialist is like Tucker Carlson interviewing some ardent "muh religion and family values" type right winger. It's just a forum for the interviewee to pontificate mostly unchallenged.
Maybe there isn’t but you can usually do better at neutrality than a magazine that names itself after a bunch of violent revolutionaries who helped usher in the Reign of Terror, and which since then has become a byword for hard left extremism.
You link to this article as if the French Revolution isn’t indicated as the inspiration of the movement and the source of the name, and no one involved is laying claim to the tradition.
Yes, and good for them. That’s a fine reason to start a movement. It’s still the name and the magazine is still explicitly about the tradition of socialism. It’s still about as neutral as interviewing Trump in Breitbart, and only a few steps away from the neutrality of interviewing Stalin in Pravda.
I link to this article as an antidote to your pithy and hostile response, which flamed without actually looking at the source material.
For what it's worth Jacobin is on the whole a social democratic ("democratic socialist") publication, basically a mouthpiece of the DSA, and not particularly radical.
But saying it's a step-away from Pravda is about par for the course for the absolutely ideologically distorted "centre" of American politics within which someone like Obama can be labelled as "socialist" and mistakenly uses "socialist" as slur to describe anything that the government is involved in.
In any case, there was a time in which mainstream US publications would deign to interview people like Morales even when they were ideologically miles apart from them. Even Castro got some interview space in US newspapers back in the 60s. That time has past -- a coup was executed in Bolivia, justifications printed for it, a brutal racist regime installed, and "democrats" in the US sat back and said nothing.
This is an oversimplified description of Jacobinism.
Between the dogma, the history/ (French revolution, England), the evolution through time and the use of it by different political groups it is difficult to summarize it by Jacobin = "hard left extremism".
In fact this reference can by use all over the political spectrum. For example, the idea of a strong centralized state power speak to communists (left) as well as nationalists (right). As well, the idea of equality of every citizen of jacobinism can be closer to centrist than extremist.
Fun remark : only the English Wikipedia article emphasis so much on a link Jacobin-left (for the languages i can read). On the other hand, the french article is much more careful and emphasis more on the difficulty and evolution of interpretation.
There's no solution to the halting problem, so you might as well stop writing garbage collectors. How does the argument "people are biased, therefore anything goes" appeal to anybody is beyond me.
> You can never be truly neutral, but that's not an excuse not to try.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe a magazine doesn't want to be neutral? Maybe that's their competitive edge, maybe that's what their customers are after.
You're just imposing your own values on a business entity.
Yes, I absolutely am. They are free to do as they please. I am free to criticize them because that doesn't align to my values. Freedom works both ways.
Wow. Seems like a super messy situation. Morales wins in the first election, but because of irregularities he resigns under pressure and his own party votes to annul the old election results and bans him from running again?
Of course. Although his run was upheld by the supreme court (which is biased towards his party), there was a referendum held the year before which basically asked 'should Evo be allowed to run again, although it's currently unconstitutional?' and the people decided against him. Him running again was literally unconstitutional and he running again puts his presidency's (and thus, his parties) legitimacy in question
Yep, right now CC ( @carlosdmesag ) is ahead by a significant margin. It's weird, people are congratulating Arce but in the official recount he's nowhere near winning.
Yeah, you are right, these people really need to be put in their place for electing a party which gave them ~5%annum gdp growth for the last decade, maybe strong economic sanctions might do the trick..... /s
Chile ranks first in Latin America — and 44th among 189 countries — in the United Nations Human Development Index. "The U.N. ranking counts not only economic growth, but also health and education standards."
Human rights abuses are great! Since you seem to think the ends justify the means, I suppose you'll start to sing praise of China as well, since they've done a very good job of developing the nation despite some unscrupulous actions against some people.
I don't recommend you to use that example again, because it would only make you look bad to anyone who knows what he's/she's arguing about
When Pinochet was forced to step down from power, Chile had a ~39% poverty rate, which if we were to use today's new poverty metric it would be around 70% poverty. [pg17]
X axis is GDP, rightmost is better, Y axis is GINI, highest GINI means stronger inequality
As you can easily see, all the advancements on Chile's development have come since Pinochet stepped down from power and his reforms removed one by one, the source of that data was from the Chilean Central Bank
Also, there was an interview around 8 years ago, where historians outlined that basically the only reason why Pinochet stepped down was because the CIA informed him that the US would not continue to prop up his regime, as Pinochet wanted to renege on the vote to step down from power, but the at the time General in charge of the Navy and the General in charge of the Airforce both of them disagreed with Pinochet, so had the CIA not done so, it could have ended on civil war.
And what's interesting of it all, is that the CIA had documents/assessments which stated that if Pinochet were to continue in power, the already rampant poverty and growing slums in Santiago would work as perfect spots for a hard Communist uprising along the MIR and FPMR, both groups communist guerrillas which had already tried to assassinate Pinochet. So the US stopping support of Pinochet was again, intended to advance their own interests in the country
But yeah, slowly things which were done while Pinochet was in power are being corrected
> ...We show that the sale of state-owned firms in dictatorships can help political corporations to emerge and persist over time. Using new data, we characterize Pinochet’s privatizations in Chile and find that some firms were sold underpriced to politically connected buyers. These newly private firms benefited financially from the Pinochet regime. Once democracy arrived, they formed connections with the new government, financed political campaigns, and were more likely to appear in the Panama Papers. These findings reveal how dictatorships can influence young democracies using privatization reforms.
Thanks to social democrats who took over after Pinochet. So whatever Chile is today, a lot of it is thanks to democratic socialism. Still Chile has not gotten rid entirely of its troubled Milton Friedman and the Chicago boys legacy.
"Social democrats" are capitalists. They didn't abandoned capitalism. The current president is an independent who is backed by center-right organizations.
"In Villa Grimaldi detainees would be electrocuted, water boarded, had their heads forced into buckets of urine and excrement, suffocated with bags, hanged by their feet or hands and beaten. Many women were raped and for some detainees, punishment was death."
I think this is good, since the presented candidate is not Evo then there is no breaking of constitutional laws, and therefore his legitimacy as president won't be questioned.
Personally it didn't sit right with me that he ran (and won) for president unconstitutionally the last time, because I feel like that just gives the coup-ers some legitimacy, and a president ruling a country for that amount of time is a little bit too Putin-y for me.
That is fully legal and normal in a parliamentary system. In presidential systems, the president is given a lot of power which is why he/she is often term limited.
Sure, in a coalition with various parties including mostly her biggest rivals, in a federal country where states have a lot of power, with a lot of checks and balances and a very strong constitutional Court which restricts a lot of what governments can do. Let's not compare the state of Germany's democracy and its civil society with Bolivia.
Angela Merkel is not president of Germany. It's funny you mention this since I lived in South America for most of my life and only recently moved to Germany, so I can see the differences in the way things are done over there and over here.
Germany's equivalent to US' or Bolivias president is Merkels position, the chancellor. Germany's president is more like the role of the Queen in the UK.
I was being cheeky, but it's hardly a valid equivalent. It's only equivalent in the sense that she's the head of the executive power, but in reality by design the system gives a chancellor way less power than a president has.
95 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadThis claim has been debunked after the OAS finally released their data set. The original report fucked up the time stamps, which means the "hard-to-explain change in the preliminary results" never actual occurred.
https://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/bolivia-macro-2019-1...
Can’t we just accept that the devil is in the details. Quality of government matters more than you political ideology, with respect to economic growth.
If they decide to purge it will take less time to "recover", if they make a national unity government, then it might take considerably longer
But he wasn't. He was responding, in kind, to a tweet that came out with a red herring about America organizing coup to benefit Musk. And those guys are a dime a dozen online. Their one trick is to always post about how evil America is regardless of context. They are supremely annoying.
>probably did help cause
Where are you getting that from?
This is a bad faith interpretation of that tweet. They were responding to a tweet about unnecessary government expenditure with an example of another expenditure that (allegedly) Musk supported. You can call it a whataboutism or attack it for a number of other things, but this is an irrelevant strawman.
What are you talking about? The tweet Musk trolled is in bad faith. That doofus accused Musk of staging a coup. And yes, it is 'whataboutism'.
>another expenditure that (allegedly) Musk supported
Allegedly? Who alleged this? Where are you getting that from?
> Allegedly? Who alleged this?
Literally the tweet you are attacking. I'm not sure if you are playing dumb on purpose or what.
The clear role lithium played on the coup, the known pressure placed by the US to force that coup, and the economic benefit to Tesla both immediately after the coup and long term. I'll admit it's hardly conclusive, but it's enough that his response was terrible.
If you're an internet marxist and accuse someone (without evidence) of staging or supporting a coup .. you're not actually holding anyone for their actions... you're just acting like a douchebag marxist.
>and the economic benefit to Tesla both immediately after the coup and long term.
And to you as well, after all, lower lithium prices mean lower prices for any battery-operated electronics. Maybe you're behind this coup as well?
>I'll admit it's hardly conclusive
I think you can state it more strongly than that. It's a conspiracy theory in the mold of infowars.
Only Marxists oppose coups? If you don't want people to blame you for a coup, maybe don't make your first public statement about it be a douchebag admission of guilt.
>And to you as well, after all, lower lithium prices mean lower prices for any battery-operated electronics. Maybe you're behind this coup as well?
I would stand to gain a few dollars, Musk would gain billions. As I think the US helped with this coup, I would be behind it as well, but not to the same degree.
>I think you can state it more strongly than that. It's a conspiracy theory in the mold of infowars.
Both the foreign interests ties and the US ties have some evidence, you just can't conclusively show Musk's involvement. Given the events of the past century, suspecting US involvement in a South American coup is hardly crazy.
No. But I looked up the twitter account and a hammer/sickle is a tell-tale sign of Marxists.
>you just can't conclusively show Musk's involvement.
Let's be clear, you can't show ANY involvement by Musk. So all you're left with is FUD.
Except the bit where he admitted it. I don't have any further evidence that he played a role in an incredibly beneficial event for him, that is true.
Let's just agree on this: responding with a troll response to a Marxist troll who accuses you of being complicit with a Bolivian coup, is not 'admitting' anything. It boggles my mind how you can possibly think otherwise.
The issues that interview covers have been widely discussed. Surely there's someone with an agenda other than "give this guy batting practice pitches right over the plate" that has asked him his opinion. This guy is a politician, being in the media, answering questions and talking about his opinion is part of his job. He's certainly done more interviews than just this one.
Furthermore, a friendly interview is much less informative than a neutral or hostile interview. Anyone can hit batting practice pitches. Anyone can answer questions from a friendly interviewer. A politician's answer to tough questions or to having their answers questioned is far more informative. Jacobin interviewing a leftist/socialist is like Tucker Carlson interviewing some ardent "muh religion and family values" type right winger. It's just a forum for the interviewee to pontificate mostly unchallenged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Jacobins
But you'd have to read to figure that out.
Downvote harder, Bolsheviks.
No matter what way you cut it, the absolutely brutal chattel slavery was the inspiration of the movement, not Robespierre.
For what it's worth Jacobin is on the whole a social democratic ("democratic socialist") publication, basically a mouthpiece of the DSA, and not particularly radical.
But saying it's a step-away from Pravda is about par for the course for the absolutely ideologically distorted "centre" of American politics within which someone like Obama can be labelled as "socialist" and mistakenly uses "socialist" as slur to describe anything that the government is involved in.
In any case, there was a time in which mainstream US publications would deign to interview people like Morales even when they were ideologically miles apart from them. Even Castro got some interview space in US newspapers back in the 60s. That time has past -- a coup was executed in Bolivia, justifications printed for it, a brutal racist regime installed, and "democrats" in the US sat back and said nothing.
Fun remark : only the English Wikipedia article emphasis so much on a link Jacobin-left (for the languages i can read). On the other hand, the french article is much more careful and emphasis more on the difficulty and evolution of interpretation.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe a magazine doesn't want to be neutral? Maybe that's their competitive edge, maybe that's what their customers are after.
You're just imposing your own values on a business entity.
https://computo.oep.org.bo/?fbclid=IwAR1ZEacVZhmfMUUoFPklcIz...
he might win outright
https://as.com/diarioas/2020/10/20/actualidad/1603185745_540...
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/an...
Not sure how you got that from my comment, which implicitly mentioned China's own abuses.
I don't recommend you to use that example again, because it would only make you look bad to anyone who knows what he's/she's arguing about
When Pinochet was forced to step down from power, Chile had a ~39% poverty rate, which if we were to use today's new poverty metric it would be around 70% poverty. [pg17]
https://www.undp.org/content/dam/chile/docs/pobreza/undp_cl_...
If you'd like it in graph form, here's a GINI/GDP graph of Chilean presidential administrations
https://imgur.com/k0s8tKe
X axis is GDP, rightmost is better, Y axis is GINI, highest GINI means stronger inequality
As you can easily see, all the advancements on Chile's development have come since Pinochet stepped down from power and his reforms removed one by one, the source of that data was from the Chilean Central Bank
Also, there was an interview around 8 years ago, where historians outlined that basically the only reason why Pinochet stepped down was because the CIA informed him that the US would not continue to prop up his regime, as Pinochet wanted to renege on the vote to step down from power, but the at the time General in charge of the Navy and the General in charge of the Airforce both of them disagreed with Pinochet, so had the CIA not done so, it could have ended on civil war.
And what's interesting of it all, is that the CIA had documents/assessments which stated that if Pinochet were to continue in power, the already rampant poverty and growing slums in Santiago would work as perfect spots for a hard Communist uprising along the MIR and FPMR, both groups communist guerrillas which had already tried to assassinate Pinochet. So the US stopping support of Pinochet was again, intended to advance their own interests in the country
But yeah, slowly things which were done while Pinochet was in power are being corrected
> https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-...
> ...We show that the sale of state-owned firms in dictatorships can help political corporations to emerge and persist over time. Using new data, we characterize Pinochet’s privatizations in Chile and find that some firms were sold underpriced to politically connected buyers. These newly private firms benefited financially from the Pinochet regime. Once democracy arrived, they formed connections with the new government, financed political campaigns, and were more likely to appear in the Panama Papers. These findings reveal how dictatorships can influence young democracies using privatization reforms.
On the other: Volkswagens!
There are clearly two sides to the debate here. /s
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/09/life-under-pi...
Personally it didn't sit right with me that he ran (and won) for president unconstitutionally the last time, because I feel like that just gives the coup-ers some legitimacy, and a president ruling a country for that amount of time is a little bit too Putin-y for me.