A lot has happened in the last 10 years. The first decade of the 21st century.Via Yes But No Yes
Want a recap? Newsweek has done a pretty good, snarky summary.
A World Divided
From 1961 to 1989, the Berlin Wall was the literal manifestation of a world divided by the Cold War—a concrete barrier, eventually 12-feet high at points, demarcating East and West Berlin, and by extension, the Soviet and Western worlds. Patrolled by armed guards, eerily clean and white on its Eastern side, covered with graffiti on its Western face, the Wall turned West Berlin into a veritable island of democracy in the middle of a Soviet client state, and served as a mute, and seemingly immutable, reminder of how tenuous peace between East and West really was.
Photo: KEENPRESS/Getty Images
Jan 01, 1981
"This law makes selling video games to anybody actually worse than giving real guns or cigarettes to a minor, or even forcing him or her to work, as you get less jail time and lower fines if you do any of those things. I have to be protected from them, so I don't go into a killing spree. (If I were so impressionable, I would not be writing this, I would have swallowed completely the huge amount of propaganda they feed to us). Our Parliament, instead of addressing our real needs, behaves like the bunch of escapist, authoritarian demagogues they are, imposing their decrees on us, because they are know they are right, and those of us who dissent, surely are rich elitist bastards who hate the poor, traitors who hate Venezuela and work for sinister, evil and shady foreign powers (If you follow American politics, this attitude should ring some alarms to you).
Surely a government that calls itself Socialist would have corrected a gross mistake by previous administrations: our marginal tax rate for the richest citizens is 34%, which is less than what the American marginal tax rate was when Bush gave tax cuts to Donald Trump and Warren Buffet. One would think that after ten years of Socialist government focused on the poor and against the evil rich, the fiercely egalitarian Venezuelan MPs would have found the time to increase the taxes of the hated rich to the same level of such boring, bland, flavorless, countries as Finland, New Zealand, Sweden or Canada. Instead, they have been too busy forbidding video games, porn (2 to 6 years in jail for filming porn, as it goes against "good customs" and family) and human genetic engineering (The law is written in such an imprecise language than creating Human Recombinant Insulin could lead me to jail), while our president befriends murderers, genocides, golpistas (coup makers, like Gambia's president Yahya Jammeh), and tyrants and replicas of the sword of Bolívar, The Liberator."
Venezuela: Accelerating the Bolivarian Revolution
Bogotá/Brussels, 5 November 2009: Against the spirit of the constitution, President Hugo Chávez is accelerating his “Bolivarian Revolution” by implementing radical laws that affect basic rights and liberties and thwart the political opposition’s fair chances in the December 2010 legislative elections.
Venezuela: Accelerating the Bolivarian Revolution,* the latest update briefing from the International Crisis Group, examines how in 2009 the Chávez government has progressively abandoned core liberal democracy principles guaranteed under the Inter-American Democratic Charter and the American Convention on Human Rights. The executive has increased its power and provoked unrest internally by further politicising the armed forces and the oil sector. It is exercising mounting influence over the electoral authorities, the legislative and judicial branches of power and other state entities.
“The December 2010 legislative elections promise to further polarise an already seriously divided country”, says Nicolás Letts, Crisis Group’s Colombia/Andes Analyst. “Unresolved social and mounting economic problems are generating tensions that exacerbate the risk of political violence”.
The government’s lack of capacity to correct serious deficiencies in the management of the state is provoking increasing social protest. The continued targeting of the political opposition and the mass media, coupled with growing economic, security and social problems, are deepening discontent. The opposition, which continues to be divided, is challenging Chávez through democratic means. However, it may in the future look to more violent alternatives for confronting him, if his government continues to shut off space for participation and restrict critics from expressing their views through democratic mechanisms.
Society at large is experiencing critical levels of insecurity and stark deficiencies in basic public services. Tense relations with Colombia may take a toll on the president’s popularity at home. While Chávez’s bellicose rhetoric towards Colombia is unlikely to elicit an armed reaction, it does stimulate the potential for mounting trouble along the border.
“Ten years of ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ have failed to produce significant and sustainable improvements in the living conditions of the poorer segments of society”, says Markus Schultze-Kraft, Crisis Group’s Latin America Program Director. “Chávez has proved to be a poor manager, with difficulties to administer the vast state apparatus he has created and cater for citizens’ legitimate demands”.
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