Chavez: 'Galbraithiano'

[ProudDad]

Source: The Nation

Last year, the New York Times reported that Hugo Chávez, 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 Chávez 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 Chávez, 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.

Chávez 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 support 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."

Read more: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071015/grandin

---

I just got this issue in the mail today -- so it's late breaking news to me...

[ProudDad]

1. More from the article

"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 partnership 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."

[1932]

2. I'm a Galbraithiano too.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. Just another stalinist like FDR.

A great issue of the Nation, by the way. Right next to the article of Chavez, Eric Alterman is on fire. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071015/alterman

"Having exposed their country to the ignominy of certain defeat in Iraq, the Bush Administration and its neoconservative allies

are seeking to salvage their crumbling reputations by blaming their critics for the catastrophe their policies have wrought. We are witnessing the foundation for a post-Iraq "stab in the back" campaign. "

[TheProf]

4. Phew, that's a relief (Chavez reading Galbraith)

Now only if he would stop calling Fidel his mentor and quit mentioning he is a Maoist maybe people who normally criticize him will be a little more understanding.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Please provide a link to any statement by Hugo Chavez claiming he is a "Maoist."

It's only right you provide actual references to your claims, as the rest of us do.

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[TheProf]

10. Chavez Praises One Of World's Longest Living Dictators

"Long live Cuba! Long live Fidel!" Chavez shouted on arrival at the Havana airport, Cuban state television showed.

"I think it's time to put on the uniform. We want to see you back in uniform, that's an order," Chavez said in Caracas.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN1230032120070612

Not your typical state visit.

[bvar22]

6. K&R for wider distribution

to help counter balance the steaming heap of propaganda being "catapulted" by the US CorpoMedia and BOTH Political Parties.


The Democratic Party is a BIG TENT, but there is NO ROOM for those
who advance the agenda of THE RICH (Corporate Owners) at the EXPENSE of LABOR and the POOR.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Isn't the admission in the 2nd paragraph stunning? My god. They couldn't wait

to get to their steaming keyboards to start gibbering away about what a colossal blunder had been made.

Look at how many, many publications tore right into that:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2004-37%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=Chavez++Chomsky++not+dead&btnG=Search

Absolutely pathetic. This is the state of U.S. journalism after being seized by the right-wing.

Very glad to see your article, ProudDad. This is just ONE example of shoddy translation work which benefits the right-wing administration in its filthy war against the people of Latin America.

On edit, more from the Nation's article:

~snip~
Galbraith is celebrated not just by Chávez 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 corporate monopolies. His belief that corporations 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 corporate 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 Washington threw its support 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.
(snip)

The countervailing power of left civil society organizations--many existed before Chávez'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.
(snip/)

[johan helge]

9. I'm definitely a Galbraithiano

His autobiography "A Life in Our Times" is my favourite book.