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Chavez: 'Galbraithiano'
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[Readers who followed the fireworks of last year's appearance by
Hugo Chavez at the UN General Assembly will probably remember this
whole incident well indeed. Actually, the Times did not issue any
corrections "quickly" at all. In fact, they made more mistakes in
the correction they finally did issue and had to issue more. The fubar
seems mostly to have been the error of a woefully ignorant re****ter
that got blamed on an anonymous translator. And then there was the
sloppy editing. See the items below. -NY Transfer]
NY Times Re****t of Chavez Literary Goof Greatly Exaggerated 9/30/06
http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20060925/047333.html
NY Times FINALLY Corrects Its FUBAR on Chavez/Chomsky 10/6/06
http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20061002/047840.html
Editing 101 for The New York Times (Galbraith, Chavez, Chomsky) 10/21/06
http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20061016/049051.html
The Nation - Sep 27, 2007 (Oct 15, 2007 issue)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071015/grandin
Ch!vez: 'Galbraithiano'
By Greg Grandin
Last year, the New York Times re****ted that Hugo Ch!vez, in his speech
before the United Nations--the one in which he called George W. Bush
the Devil and urged Americans to read Noam Chomsky--expressed regret
that he hadn't had a chance to meet the linguist before he died. A call
to Mr. Chomsky's house, the Times writer quipped, found him very much
alive. The Times, though, had to issue a quick correction when, upon
review of the original Spanish, it became clear that Ch!vez was
referring not to Chomsky but rather to John Kenneth Galbraith, who had
indeed passed away a few months before.
There is something more than a little ironic about this incident, where
the press, in a rush to ridicule the controversial Hugo Ch!vez, lost
John Kenneth Galbraith in translation, for it is exactly the Harvard
economist's brand of New Deal social democracy, itself long expunged
from public discussion, that would allow for a more honest
consideration not just of Chavismo but the broader Latin American left
of which it is a vital part.
Ch!vez has described himself as a "Galbraithiano" and says he started
reading the economist, whose books have been available in Spanish in
Latin America since the 1950s, as a teenager. Long before he began
referring to Chomsky and other currently better-known political
thinkers, he cited Galbraith to explain his economic policies; at the
beginning of his presidency, in 1999, for example, he urged a gathering
of Venezuelan industrialists to sup****t his mild reform program,
quoting Galbraith to warn that if they didn't, the "toxins" generated
by "extreme economic liberalism" could "turn against the system and
destroy it."
Galbraith is celebrated not just by Ch!vez but by a wide range of
reformers, including Ecuador's new president, Rafael Correa, himself an
economist. This popularity reflects a growing enthusiasm for the state
regulation of the economy that Galbraith prescribed. As Latin America
struggles to remedy the damage caused by two decades of failed
free-market orthodoxy--which has produced dismal growth rates and
widespread social turmoil and misery--politicians are rehabilitating
key macroeconomic principles unthinkable a decade ago. Argentina, for
example, has generated the region's most impressive growth by lowering
interest rates, maintaining a competitive currency exchange rate,
enacting price controls to stem inflation and driving a hard bargain
with international creditors, thus wiping out two-thirds of the
country's external debt and freeing up state revenue for social
spending and investment.
Galbraith has attracted admirers in Latin America not just for his
macroeconomics but for his critique of cor****ate monopolies. His belief
that cor****ations are political instruments with the incentive and
ability to corrupt democracy resonates today in a region where much of
the economy is controlled by foreign firms and where cor****ate TV
(which Galbraith believed had little to do with free speech and
everything to do with manufacturing consumer demand) has become a
bulwark of elite privilege. Galbraith's solution was to use the state
to set up a system of what he called "countervailing power," enacting
aggressive union protection, unemployment insurance, subsidies, welfare
and minimum wage guarantees to counter monopolies and force a more just
distribution of national wealth.
In Latin America, a similar version of democratic developmentalism held
sway in the early 1940s. Reformers from across the political spectrum
believed the region's oligarchy to be an obstacle to modernization and
thought the best way to weaken its deadening grip was to empower those
in its thrall. But the cold war cut short this democratic experiment,
as Wa****ngton threw its sup****t behind reactionary allies in order to
insure continental stability.
Developmentalism continued into the 1970s but under the auspices of
either authoritarian or military regimes, which responded to demands
for a more equitable share of power and wealth with increasing
repression, culminating in the wave of terror that swept the region,
from Chile to Guatemala, in the 1970s and '80s. This violence, which in
many countries decimated the left, made possible the radical
free-market economics that reigned throughout Latin America during the
last two decades of the twentieth century.
The re-emergence of the Latin American left signals a revival of
democratic developmentalism, but with a key difference. While in the
1940s reformers sought to extend political power through unions and
peasant associations vertically linked to parties or leaders, today
they rely on a diverse, horizontal array of "new social movements" to
counter their countries' extreme concentration of wealth and political
power--Brazil's Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, for
example, or Bolivia's Movimiento al Socialismo, less a political party
than a coalition of social movements, or Ecuador's powerful indigenous
groups.
But it is Venezuela that has the most advanced partner****p between a
state reclaiming the right to regulate the economy and a diverse array
of antineoliberal social movements. What sets Chavismo apart from past
populist experiments in Latin America is its heterogeneity. It is
impossible to spend any time in urban barrios, among co-op members,
community media and other cultural activists, or in the countryside
with peasant organizers and not be impressed with their diversity of
interests, civic investment and commitment to building a more humane
society.
The countervailing power of left civil society organizations--many
existed before Ch!vez's ascendance; some were founded afterward--has
turned Venezuela into a vibrant democracy and is key to understanding
not just the government's survival in the face of a series of
formidable antidemocratic assaults but its evolving program, as many of
its initiatives come not top-down but from the grassroots. Last
December a respected Chilean polling firm found that in Latin America
only Uruguayans held a more favorable view of their democracy than
Venezuelans.
The question Venezuela faces is how to institutionalize this
relation****p between a fortified executive and an empowered citizenry
while protecting individual rights and limiting corruption. Debates are
under way over a series of constitutional reforms, to be voted on in a
national referendum in December, that attempt to do just that. While
the international media have focused on a proposal to remove
presidential term limits, other initiatives would greatly strengthen
community councils, created two years ago as the building blocks of
Venezuela's "participatory democracy," in charge of a range of local
issues, from education and healthcare to sanitation and road repair.
While critics see the councils as another mechanism for Ch!vez to
strengthen his power, the Wa****ngton Post writes that in "the
neighborhoods, it's hard to find anything but bubbling enthusiasm."
Could Chavismo devolve into old-style authoritarianism? Of course. But
the record so far indicates otherwise. For all his rhetorical excess,
Ch!vez has presided over an unprecedented peaceful social revolution,
doubling his electoral sup****t in the process. Save for Chile's Popular
Unity government--which never received nearly as much approval at the
polls as Ch!vez's Bolivarian experiment has--it is hard to think of
another instance where such a profound reordering of political and
economic relations has been ratified so many times at the ballot box.
This is a remarkable accomplishment, for revolutions, by their nature,
tend to generate crises that drain away much of their initial sup****t,
producing cycles of violence and repression.
This achievement is rarely re****ted on in the US media. Ch!vez often
repeats an observation by one of his favorite economists to bring home
the point. "Never before," the Venezuelan president quotes Galbraith as
saying, "has the distance between reality and 'conventional wisdom'
been as great as it is today."
*
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