Before the coronavirus pandemic and the plague of locusts came the protesters.

From the affluent locales—Chile, France, Britain, Hong King, Catalonia—to the impoverished ones—Algeria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guinea, Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon and more; the world was on fire (to borrow from Amy Chua’s brilliant book).

The reasons cited for a world-wide conflagration ranged from the evils of free-market capitalism (says the Left) to the “socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela” (says the Right), to “economics, demography, a sense of powerlessness…and social media.”

Some experts spoke of a “youth bulge” of over-educated young people chasing too few jobs. In truth, this was more like ill-educated youngsters with useless degrees, who thought it chic to don a balaclava and lob hard objects at the police and the property it was protecting.

Chile is the jewel of Latin America. In 2014, it even surpassed the United States on the Index of Economic Freedom, ranking seventh to America’s 12th. Since 1990, economic growth in Chile has been as steady as the stability of its institutions. Poverty rates had plummeted and social services had been extended to the needy.

On the right, Pat Buchanan has described Chile as “the country with the highest per capita income and least inequality in all of Latin America.”

On the Left—yet still on the side of a competitive market economy—the Economist agrees. Chile “is the second-richest country in Latin America, thanks in part to its healthy public finances and robust private sector.”

In no-man’s land are the protestors on the streets of Santiago and other cities. What the demonstrators want is unclear. To the extent their inchoate signs and signals can be divined, it would appear that the path the well-to-do Chile will be forced to take is that of less capitalism and more socialism; less of the private sector and more of the state.

Indeed, Chile is beset with protesters determined to bring the elected government to its knees. Many parts of Santiago, the capital, have been boarded up or burned down. The country’s “malcontents” want more state-provided stuff; more health care and more free education and pensions.

It increasingly looks like Sebastián Piñera, Chile’s president, may just be forced “to scrap a system” that appears to have served Chile well.

One of the Chilean system’s signal features was “developed by free-market economists during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990.”

Whereas, “in many other countries,” including the American social democracy, “public pensions are financed by taxing current workers and giving the money to current pensioners”; in Chile, explains the Economist, “citizens are expected to save for their own retirement.”

In the United States, the pension promises made by government and underwritten with taxpayer support, have resulted in pension debt to the tune of $5.2 trillion, for states and local governments.

Conversely, Chile’s private scheme has helped the country “manage its public finances and encouraged the development of long-term capital markets, which in turn has boosted economic growth.”

But that’s not how the rioters and looters see solvency and individual responsibility. Theirs is the story of democracy and the quest for government-mediated distribution.

Ditto, the Venezuelan mobs fighting against the forces of Nicolás Maduro. They were not fighting for “freedom,” as classical liberals and conservatives think of it, and certainly not against socialism.

Rather, in opposition leader Juan Guaidó, the anti-Maduro malcontents in Caracas and elsewhere were simply looking for a better, more malleable socialist.

Lech Walesa, an iconic polish political leader, captured the impetus propelling demonstrations across the world. Working-class people are turning on the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, he forewarned. Their motto: “Give us your assets.”

Lower-case, doctrinaire democrats in America doggedly conflate the will of the people across the world with liberty. This Disneyfied view of democracy ignores that, in a democracy, the right to vote gives one man control over another’s life and livelihood.

You see, people with higher incomes constitute a minority, an economically dominant minority. People with low incomes are in the majority, a politically dominant majority.

In democracy, the rich dominate the economy, the poor dominate the polity. Come election time, the politically powerful exact their revenge against the economically powerful.

Or, as H. L, Mencken put it, “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

* Image is courtesy the Economist

©2020 ILANA MERCER
WND March 26
American Greatness March 29
Unz Review  March 26
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The Egyptian Justice Ministry, under the authority of the military council, has detained and indicted 19 American democracy activists. To listen to the malfunctioning media stateside, however, the Egyptians are being petty, picking a fight with their American benefactors for “operating in Egypt without a license.” Or, if you want “expert” opinion, courtesy of Politico.com, the Egyptian plan to prosecute these “Americans and two dozen others” “is more over the future of U.S. aid to Egypt and who controls it.”

Among the Americans detained in Egypt is Sam LaHood—son of Ray LaHood, the Obama administration’s secretary of transportation and a former Republican congressman from Illinois. Try as it did to obfuscate Egypt’s allegations against LaHood, the New York Times was forced to mention the military-led government’s suspicion that LaHood’s organization had been funneling funds through Washington “to stir unrest in the streets” of Cairo. The Gray Lady nevertheless attributed this preposterous figment of the Arab imagination to an “escalating drumbeat of anti-American statements” in Egypt.

LaHood fell under suspicion in his capacity as head of the International Republican Institute (IRI). And, wouldn’t you know it, he was working alongside the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and Freedom House—described by the Times as “a Washington-based group that promotes democracy and open elections.” Also arraigned were the director of the NDI and one “Patrick Butler, vice president of programs at the DC-based International Center for Journalists.”

The IRI and the NDI are excrescences of the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively. Yes, on the foreign-policy front, not much distinguishes America’s duopoly. Republicans and Democrats work in tandem, Saul-Alinsky style, to bring about volcanic transformation in societies that desperately need stability.

As far as America is concerned, Egypt’s road to majoritarian politics is stalled at the military dictatorship stage. While some may contend, uncontroversially, that this is preferable to a people’s republic governed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and the Salafist al-Nour Party, which won the ballot in the newly installed democracy—America is the ultimate arbiter.

Dr. Ron Paul excepted, conjuring up new missions abroad is a project shared by the incumbent president and his Republican rivals. According to the New York Times, both the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute “are chartered to promote democracy abroad with [ostensibly] nonpartisan training and election monitoring.” “Loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties,” these institutes “were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations.”

“In the last twenty years democratization has been a central, massively funded pillar of American foreign policy,” writes Amy Chua in “World On Fire: How exporting Free market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.”

“In the 1990s the U.S. government spent approximately 1$billion on democracy initiatives for post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. At the same time, America aggressively promoted democracy throughout Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. … There is almost no developing or transitional country in the world where the United States has not actively championed political liberalization, majoritarian elections, and the empowerment of civil society” (page 124).

To cap it all, the troublesome meddling is paid for by the unsuspecting, overburdened American taxpayer. The hypocrisy in all this is that we Americans do not live under the Athenian democracy seemingly promoted abroad. On the contrary, we the people labor under a highly evolved technocratic, militarized Managerial State, which is far more efficient in encroaching on its citizens than are the tin-pot dictators, who’ve been built-up into mega-monsters in infantile, Disneyfied minds.

Given the US’s record-breaking incarceration rates, your average Egyptian under Mubarak or Libyan under Gadhafi was probably less likely than his American counterpart to be jailed, harassed or have a threatening encounter with the state’s emissaries. Were Americans to run riot, as the spirited Egyptians have done pursuant to the Port Said stampede, they’d probably come face-to-face with the Military. In contravention of The Posse Comitatus Act—and in furtherance of freedom, of course—the 2006 version of The National Defense Authorization Act allowed the Armed Forces to “restore public order” during “major public emergencies.”

The LaHood international incident The Times has framed as an expedient attempt by an Egyptian government that “faces public doubts,” “to rally support by stoking feuds with Washington.” But only the other day did “Pravda on the Hudson” concede “that several groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt,” received training from the three aforementioned outfits.

It is a fact—and three of the Republican presidential candidates will applaud it—that Washington fields community agitators, whose brief it is to unleash marauders for mobocracy all over the world. DC does so through NGOs, surrogates and other unwitting participants, confirms former State Department official Col. Lawrence Wilkerson.

“Purple” in Iraq, Blue in Kuwait, Cotton in Uzbekistan, Grape in Moldova, “Orange” in the Ukraine, “Rose” in Georgia, “Tulip” in Kyrgizstan, “Cedar” in Lebanon, Jasmine in Tunisia, Green in Iran, still un-christened in Russia and Syria: Dig around and you’ll find LaHood à la Alinsky activists behind these “color-coded,” plant-based revolutions, blessed and backed by baby Bush and his non-identical, evil ideological twin, Barack Obama.

Egypt’s Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi is hip to the role of American community organizers in the Lotus Revolution, which is how the West has dubbed the mess in Egypt.

©2012 By ILANA MERCER
WND & RT
February 10

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