Ah, Socialism!

Bolivia head starts land handout
By James Read
BBC News

Bolivia's president has given more than 30,000 square km (18,600 sq miles) of land to indigenous peasant communities under a programme of agrarian reform.

Evo Morales launched the programme after landowners walked out of talks with the government, warning they would take action to defend their estates.

Thousands of peasants gathered in the centre of Santa Cruz to see Mr Morales launch his agrarian revolution.

They cheered and waved rainbow flags symbolising indigenous resistance.

The venue for the ceremony was carefully chosen: Santa Cruz is the home base of Bolivia's main landowners' federation, which is deeply opposed to the land reform.

When its leaders walked out of talks with the government, they warned that their members would form self-defence groups to protect their estates.

But President Morales is clearly in no mood for compromise.

Bolivia's big landowners, he said, had to accept that the lands their ancestors stole during the Spanish conquest five centuries ago would now be returned to their original owners.

The land handed out on Saturday was already owned by the state.

But Evo Morales has said his government will also seize private holdings that are judged not to be in productive use to meet his target of redistributing around a fifth of Bolivia's total land area over the next five years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/5045424.stm

Remember, if you're an American, this is what Kendra and Ulrika have in mind for you.

-Kiamat Dusk

What are you talking about? We did this already in the US, a century ago. We just had a different rationale, and called it things like Manifest Destiny and the Homestead Act.

Actually, unlike Bolivia, we were taking land AWAY from the true owners, rather then giving it back.

The original owners are dead. This land is being taken from the current owners and redistributed to people the government thinks will make better use of it. That is exactly what we did in the 19th century.

It worked so well in Zimbabwe

Government Policies Lead to Collapse of Zimbabwe Economy

What an appalling act of unjust, unmitigated populist oppression, guaranteed to drag Bolivia into a new dark age.









Nah, only kidding. Viva Morales!

Sure, those pesky socialists like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, et.al., who redistributed the property of wealthy American Tories to peasants who fought and voted for the Revolution.

And some of those Tories made a "noble last stand" in defense of their estates and privileges, too. Damn that socialistic United States!

Wow, and in the past some of our luminaries owned slaves, too. Does that mean if Bolivia started a slave trade that'd be a good thing?


-Kiamat Dusk

Come on, surely somebody will fall for that one.

The next thing you know there'll be people in the US demanding compensation for property they once owned in Cuba.

No. It means you missed my point.

Hey, i rent my home. I could use some free land. My husband is black, does that qualify us for the 40 acre & mule program?

Briana Dawson

According to the Supremes, the government can take your private land and give it to Wal-Mart anyway. I don't see the difference.

I guess making fun of peasants qualifies as amusement for some.

But oh, come on, that's different.







*snorts*

What does Diana Ross and her posse know about it?

Bolivia gas under state control
Bolivia's President Evo Morales has signed a decree placing his country's energy industry under state control.

In a May Day speech, he said foreign energy firms must agree to channel all their sales through the Bolivian state, or else leave the country.

He set the firms a six-month deadline, but the military and state energy officials have already started taking control of the oil fields.

Brazil and Spain have both expressed concern at the move.

The main foreign oil firms operating in Bolivia are Brazil's Petrobras, the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF, British companies British Gas and British Petroleum, France's Total, and the US Exxon Mobil Corporation.

The Brazilian government called the moves unfriendly and said their operations in Bolivia were under review.

The Spanish Foreign Ministry expressed its deep concern and said it hoped there would be authentic negotiations and dialogue, while Exxon Mobil said it was monitoring the situation very closely.

Bolivia has South America's second largest natural gas reserves.

But the country has suffered years of political crises over how to develop and profit from the industry.

High energy prices

Speaking at an oilfield in the south of the country, Bolivia's left-wing president called it an "historic day".

"The pillage of our natural resources by foreign companies is over," he declared.

The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources
Evo Morales
Bolivian President

He said the companies had six months to re-negotiate their contracts and urged them to "respect the dignity of Bolivians".

Foreign companies would receive 18% of oil and gas revenues during the transition period, reports said.

Vice President Alvaro Garcia said the military and officials from the state energy firm YPFB moved to take control of 53 energy installations - including gas fields, pipelines and refineries - immediately after the decree was signed.

There was no immediate word from the foreign energy companies themselves.

The firms will get less favourable terms but current high global energy prices may be an incentive to see if they can work with Mr Morales, the BBC's Americas editor Simon Watts says.

Friendly meetings

Mr Morales swept to victory as Bolivia's first indigenous president in January elections after vowing to "recover" the country's natural resources by renationalising them.

However, he has shown signs of pragmatism since coming to office, and has held friendly meetings with several oil bosses.

On a visit to Brazil in January he said renationalising the industry would not mean expelling foreign companies or expropriating foreign property.

"Foreign companies have every right to recover investments and make profits, but profits should be balanced," he told a press conference at the time.

Petrobras is one of Bolivia's largest foreign investors, controlling 14% of the country's gas reserves.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4963348.stm

My husband thought it was funny as well.

"peasants"? LOL ! what peasants? Or did you mean "pea's" and "ants". Because making fun of pea's and ants is hella-funny.

Briana Dawson

Take a look at the Zimbabwe situation and tell me how funny land reform is.

Which part to you find most humorous? The part where people starve to death or the part where they get shot?

The problem with communism isn't the ideas its the ability to implement them in a decent way. What we are dealing with in a large part of the world is the fallout of post-colonial rule. In many countries (including the middle-east) what happened when the the western powers pulled out is that instead of returning to their original ways of ruling a group of elitists stepped in and in essece became "home grown" colonial rulers. Land reform sounds good on paper and the idea is to return lands to native people by taking it away from those who stole it under colonial rule. The problem is that people are human and they want more for themselves. In the end all that happens in land reform is that the land is redistributed to those doing the redistrubtion. The people who should get something out of it end up worse and those who developed and tended the land loose out completely.

There are ways redistrubute wealth more fairly, but they don't have the sexy appeal of land reform and they don't make good slogans when you have mobs marching in the streets.

The problem with communism is that it's a purely theoretical belief that totally ignores reality, not that it hasn't been implemented properly. A small, self-chosen group may well be able to implement "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" (Karl Marx) and a "social ownership" (from the Communist Party USA site's main FAQ page) of the means of production with a not-unreasonable chance of success, but it simply doesn't scale up to any noteworthy level of government.

But, then again, by blaming the delivery of the idea, one needn't worry about considering the possibility that maybe the idea itself is flawed.

I don't see how you're saying anything different than what you did, except that the idea itself is flawed.

Communism doesn't work because:
1. whoever does the planning needs to be omniscient
2. whoever does the planning needs to be completely selfless
neither of those conditions could ever be met

In any practical sense communism could never work, not in its ideal form. But how is the idea itself flawed?

My point was that if you (generic "you" are looking to address an issue with an idea, but without the idea taking into account significant parts of that issue, the idea is inherently flawed.

As a Highland Scot, can I get the English thrown off of our ancestoral clan holdings?


I guess you'd have to throw the sheep off too, since the land was taken at the time of the Highland Clearances.

That's like saying "Sure, perpetual motion can never work, but what's wrong with the idea?"

It's circular. The problem is that it can never work. You can't take that part out of the equation.

I would argue that both capitalism and communism fail when too much power is concentrated in too few hands. It does little good for the average person when a monopolistic power industry is handed from a couple of large corporations over to a single governmental authority, or vice versa. It isn't addressing the needs of the people very well in either case. This is a tricky situation in any country with a large portion of its economy dominated by a natural resource. To keep things running with any kind of decency, the profits from this resource need to be distributed around, thus socialism.

Drift all the way over to communism, though, and you're back playing the game of a small, powerful elite owning everything and the people not owning anything. We need to get beyond the capitalism vs. socialism dichotomy and realize that the most successful economies rely on something else: power diffusion.

Economist Jack Powelson describes this in his book, A History of Wealth and Poverty: Why a Few Nations are Rich and Many Poor:



In other words, the game is better when you have more players, and it's not an all-or-nothing situation.