Caracas 31 de mayo de 2003

Ante el desarme de la policía del Zulia -- para lo cual el régimen CASTRO-COMUNISTA de los señores Chávez y Castro se apoya en el recién firmado e histórico acuerdo entre el oficialismo y la “oposición” -- solamente me cabe recordarles a mis amigos que firmaron y apoyaron tal garabato, lo que aseguraba Don Pepín Rivero (editor y fundador del “Diario de La Marina”, en Cuba):

“Transigir con un comunista es mil veces peor que transigir con un ladrón, sin que con esto quiera yo ofender a los ladrones…”

Con profundo aprecio,

ROBERT ALONSO

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En mis años mozos había una dieta fabulosa – que llevó a la muerte cardiaca a más de uno – llamada “LA ATKINS”, diseñada por el médico norteamericano Robert Atkins, la cual consistía en ingerir grandes cantidades de proteínas y un mínimo de carbohidratos.  La razón que esgrimía este médico era muy sensata: al organismo se le hace más fácil consumir carbohidratos que proteínas, en consecuencia – si se le da la opción -- vive de los carbohidratos y almacena las proteínas, razón por la cual uno engorda como un sapo.  Por el contrario, si se obliga a nuestro organismo a consumir grasas (proteínas) y casi cero carbohidratos, no le queda otra opción que comenzar a tomar prestado de nuestras reservas lo requerido para poder subsistir “sanamente” y uno se pone flaco como una culebra… y termina muriéndose como un pendejo.

No es que “LA GUARIMBA” sea el último sacrificio antes de decirle adiós a la humanidad, pero requiere de un pequeño esfuerzo.  Entre sus bondades, sin embargo, está aquella de hacerla accesible a todos los grupos sociales, edades y estados físicos.  Es tan bondadosa y amplia que les ofrece la oportunidad a los ciudadanos de la tercera edad de luchar por todo lo que construyeron durante sus productivas vidas y a no ser para sus hijos y nietos una lastimosa carga en el destierro o morirse de tristeza mirando al piso en la patria que ellos – para bien o para mal -- nos dejaron de herencia.   Los minusválidos pueden hacerle un gran aporte a la sociedad y a la patria “guarimbeando”.  Sin embargo, no deja de requerir de un mediano esfuerzo.

Si a la sociedad civil organizada se le vende la “teoría colominiana” en la cual se asegura que Chávez está guindando de un gajo, cual mango casi podrido y – para rematar – se le mete el embuste que con el referendo revocatorio el Sr. Chávez saldrá de la presidencia como corcho de limonada, el común de la gente escoge la opción TOTALMENTE PASIVA antes de ponerse a “guarimbear”, algo así como sucede con el organismo cuando se le da la opción de quemar carbohidratos o proteína, pues el único esfuerzo – en todo caso – sería ponerse en cola para votar o, aún mejor, esperar que el gajo se reviente y “el mango” caiga solito de platanazo.  El problema está en que tal vez ni siquiera el hombre esté verde y este régimen no nos dé la oportunidad de llegar al referendo.

Todavía se pretende “achinchorrar” más a la sociedad civil desorganizada, haciéndole creer que ahora, con esto del “ACUERDAZO”, ya todos vamos a vivir felices cual lombrices y colorín, colorao… aunque el cuento no se ha acabao, pronto terminará el drama: el régimen nos respetará, no nos caerán más a tiro, los “círculos del terror” y los malandros serán desarmados, Carter velará por lo inmaculado del referendo revocatorio que sacará a Chávez como corcho de limonada, lo haremos preso, lo juzgaremos por delito de lesa humanidad y lo enviaremos – para siempre – a la celda de al lado del Sr. Milosevic; los “Tupamaros” y los “Carapaimas” guindarán sus pasamontañas y se meterán a boy scouts, se acabará la inseguridad ciudadana, el dólar bajará a Bs. 60, habrá harina pan como arroz partido – o “pa’tirar pa’rriba”, como diría Agatilla -- y al “presidente” Gaviria le darán el Premio Novel de la Paz, el cual – de motus propio – compartirá con el ciudadano Elías Santana.

Sin embargo, los expertos nacionales e internacionales, oficiales activos y retirados de nuestro Ejército forjador de libertades y de otros ejércitos del mundo con los cuales he hablado sobre “LAGUARIMBA”, me garantizan – TODOS – que una acción así (llevada a cabo adecuadamente) tumbaría al incipiente régimen CASTRO-COMUNISTA de los señores Chávez y Castro en una tarde -- ¡en una tarde! -- siempre que no sigamos “autoguaraleándonos” mucho en el tiempo.  De hecho, algo similar, fortuito y a mucha menor escala lo tumbó ya el 11 de abril de 2002 sin que nosotros nos diéramos cuenta.

Y ustedes entonces se preguntarán qué estamos esperando.  La respuesta es muy sencilla: estamos esperando un líder que la convoque.  No será fácil porque quien recoja la bandera de “LA GUARIMBA”, la convoque y el pueblo no le haga caso, se quemará políticamente.  Ese es el grave problema de los políticos de oficio.   Es más fácil montarse en el “autoguaraleo” e “ir tocando el piano de oído” que lanzarse a la tarea de liderizar a todo un pueblo para que en perfecta cohesión se lance a “LA GUARIMBA” cerrada y pareja.

Aquellos políticos que se montaron en el tren del “ACUERDAZO” se acordarán de sus respectivas fechas de nacimiento cuando el pueblo se dé cuenta de la soberana tomada de pelo que les han echado a todos ellos.  Hoy sus acciones pudieran estar en el pico de su valor, pero les garantizo que caerán estrepitosamente como una máquina de escribir desde el “pent house” de un rascacielos cuando ese acuerdo en pleno se convierta en sal y agua, dentro de unos diítas…

Claro que todavía no podemos ponernos a convocar “LA GUARIMBA” porque su tiempo no ha llegado aún.  Por una parte, esa sociedad civil engatusada se atiborra hoy con los “carbohidratos” del “ACUERDAZO”, pero no nos olvidemos que la constitución nos OBLIGA a defender la democracia ante un régimen forajido.  “LA GUARIMBA” se justificaría CONSTITUCIONALMENTE de llegar elmomento.  Digamos que si a este régimen le diera por regalarle petróleo a una tercera nación, o meterle mano al FIEM… o instaurar un control de cambio sin la aprobación de la Asamblea, desconocer los convenios internacionales como el ALADI, por ejemplo… se estaría poniendo al margen de la constitución.  Entonces, SOLO ENTONCES, tendríamos la fuerza moral, cívica, legal y CONSTITUCIONAL de convocarla… si tuviéramos un líder.

ROBERT ALONSO robertalonso2003@cantv.net

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<a href=slate.msn.com>slate.msn.com, Friday, May 23, 2003, at 9:12 AM PT

Not everyone at Notre-Dame embraces the concept of the Segway.Paris is a walker's city, built for sauntering, window-shopping, the sideways topple into the cafe chair. On our final day here, we finally realized that the best way to get around on Segways is to use the bike lane rather than the sidewalk. The ride is fast and uncluttered, and you aren't constantly giving pedestrians heart attacks. Technically, Segwaying in the street is illegal, but the policemen who stared us down at intersections and in front of President Chirac's house all seemed to be following the same penal-code decision tree ("Not a bicycle, yet has two wheels and moves in a leisurely manner: ALLOW TO PROCEED"). Our belated epiphany came courtesy of David Mebane, the owner of Mike's Bike Tours, which conducts bicycle tours of the city. (Yes, he knows it should be called David's Bike Tours; long story.) David, an easygoing 27-year-old Texan, led us around Paris for four hours on his Schwinn as we followed on our Segways, "Make Way for Ducklings"-style. Every once in a while he would stop, lean over the handlebars, and explain something: "Marie Antoinette's head was lopped off in the place there, totally decapitated by the guillotine"; "If you go over to the third window to the right of that arch of the Louvre, you can look in and see the Venus de Milo for free"; "Down there in the Hôtel des Invalides, my favorite building in Paris, so beautiful when it's all lit up at night, the French resistance built a false ceiling in the dome—just below that second level of windows. They hid U.S. airmen who'd been shot down, bomber crews and so on, between the two ceilings." He had the patient manner of someone who must explain to American visitors, several times a day, why the ATMs here don't dispense dollars. While an implacable enemy of French bureaucracy, he loves the French and their history. At Place Clemenceau, he wheeled up beside a dark green statue of Charles de Gaulle and said, "Little World War II story. Obviously, de Gaulle was leading the Gaullist resistance, but there was also a Communist resistance, and when the Allies took Paris back there was a void of power—who's going to take over? August, 1944, de Gaulle flies in from London to take command but gets extremely low on fuel, it's a near thing, is he going to make it?" I guessed that he would. "He lands with nothing in the tank," David continued, "then walks down the Champs Elysées in a big parade with all the soldiers and citizens, from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre-Dame, with German snipers on rooftops taking potshots at him, whatever, craziness, but nobody hits him and he takes the keys to the city. There's just this tremendous celebration of liberation." Amanda looked up at de Gaulle in his uniform and kepi. "He looks like he belongs in Singin' in the Rain," she said. The figure did look rather as if it were beginning to pirouette and break into song. "Or like the Morton Salt girl," David said. It was a sunny day at last, and all Paris seemed to be out and in a cheerful mood. It might well have just been coincidence, but cultural understanding of the Segway seemed to have seeped into the collective consciousness. On our first day here no one knew what the machine was, but today four different people seemed to know all about the Segway and its gyroscopes and began explaining it to other bystanders as we talked nearby. As we slalomed around I.M. Pei's glass pyramid in the Louvre's courtyard, a photographer who shoots Polaroid photos of tourists there at 6 euros a snap began asking rapid-fire questions. A short, intense man in a red windbreaker, he was curious about the Segway's range. When I said that it was 17 to 25 kilometers, he frowned and seemed to take against the whole idea. "But that's nothing," he said. "Paris is very large—what can you do with 20 kilometers? You can't get to the office and back!"

David took up the cudgels. After riding the Segway in the courtyard, he had decided that he wanted one for leading his tours. "You can always recharge. It takes no time." (Well, five or six hours.)

"Four hours of use before you need to recharge, it's nothing," the photographer said. "My cell phone has a five-hour charge! And whose boss will let them charge the machine at the office?"

"The Segway engineers are working on extending the battery life," David said, which is true, but he was winging it. "The newest technology, magnesium—" he looked at me.

"Cadmium," I said, not entirely sure if that was what you use for batteries or enemas.

"Cadmium," David repeated confidently. "All the problems will be solved. Now, if this machine were a little cheaper and had a larger range, would you be interested?"

The photographer lowered his sunglasses and looked at it again, up and down, then broke into a charming smile. "It is very interesting," he said. "Very."

After we wound through the crooked streets of the Marais and had some superb sandwiches at Lina's, just off the rue de Rivoli, I noticed that my battery indicator was getting low. Halfway up the Champs Elysées, it indicated that I had no reserve at all, and as we were entering the home stretch on rue de Bassano, the user interface screen begin flashing red: nothing in the tank! My Segway was slowing, creeping, humming just a little: Would I make it?

I guessed that I would. And indeed I coasted up to the front door of the hotel with nothing in the tank. There was no tremendous celebration of liberation, just a chance to get off and recharge and think happy thoughts about the imminent possibility of dinner. The French helped liberate us in 1776, we returned the favor later, and now both countries are free to be provoked and intrigued by each other and to disparage each other's wine.

Amanda had been following right behind me to give me a push if necessary. "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—and Segway," she said.

By Rupert Goodwins <a href=msn.com.com>MSN.com-ZDNet (UK) May 20, 2003, 8:27 AM PT

COMMENTARY: London--Referendums are everywhere. We'll soon find out whether Tony Blair will be asking us to vote on the euro; meanwhile, it's a full-time job these days watching television and deciding which celebrity to eject, which poem is finest or whether surfing horses make a better advert than potato-eating Martians.

We can e-mail, text or phone our choices in from the sofa, while the government is dead keen on introducing similar electronic voting for less important decisions such as national and local elections. Truly, the voice of the people is loud across the land.

Yet we've never felt more detached from the mechanisms of state. Everyone knows that the euro vote will only happen when Tony's sure of the outcome, and the biggest demonstrations the country has ever seen made not a scrap of difference to the Iraq adventure. It's a commonplace that democracy doesn't work without an informed electorate, so perhaps some of this cynicism is reflected in the slow demise of the newspaper industry--felt most keenly by those parts of the press that take themselves most seriously as organs of truth. People don't trust journalists, and it's hard to escape the feeling that a lot of the media repays the compliment.

Our new technologies were supposed to remove these sorts of barriers, but attitudes harden instead: online media discussion groups turn into cliques, suspicious of outsiders and proud of their prejudices. In the US, the world's poster child for the glorious Internet revolution, it's even worse: patriotism and sectarianism are the order of the day, while the old leaders of the traditional high-tone press are in spasms of self-doubt. The New York Times' recent public self-flagellation over its rogue reporter has been met with raucous laughter, while huge stories go unreported. For anyone who believes in the necessity of a healthy, diverse and skeptical press as a guard against abuses of power, these are worrying times.

But where to look?

Try South Korea. A phenomenally successful experiment in new media--it actually makes money--called OhmyNews has been blossoming for four years. As an exclusively Korean-language publication, it's remained beneath the radar in the Western media (Thanks to Dan Gillmore of the Mercury News for pointing it out). But it's making the agenda in its home country, where it is widely held to have helped the election of a reformist presidential candidate.

Like all good news sources, it comes as both a weekly paper and constantly updated Web site, with the weekly publication using the best parts of the site. But unlike any other news source, it's largely written by its readers or 'citizen-reporters' as they're known. Anyone can submit contributions to the Web site; the articles the people write are scrutinized by the permanent staff and rated before publication. Of the 200 or so submitted daily, around 140 make it onto the site.

The more the editors like a story, the higher its position on the site, the better its chances of making the paper and the more money the contributor gets--although since the top payment is around £15, nobody's retiring early yet. That's good enough for the 15,000 people who've got their bylines into OhMyNews, a pool of contributors hundreds of times bigger than any paper you'll read.

And while the paper version is mostly written by the staff journalists, the leads they get from their contributors are invaluable. With hit rates as high as 20 million--in a country of 40 million--the readers who don't write seem just as keen as those who do.

Some of the credit for the publication's success goes to the South Korean policy of aggressively introducing broadband across the nation. It's also been helped by the lack of diversity in newspapers prior to its launch. But it's also earned its spurs by running with serious stories the other outlets didn't cover, as well as creating that bond with its readers that all newspapers need by the simple method of printing things that matter to them on a personal level.

OhMyNews doesn't abdicate the important editorial principle of filtering and ranking the news--somewhere that other online quasi-journalistic phenomena such as blogs fall down--rather, it underlines the unfashionable idea that the best quality news comes from the widest possible input. People trust it, and use that trust to take part in the national debate that has to be at the heart of democracy. Not bad for an organization with a staff of 50.

We desperately need to repeat the experiment, here and in the United States. Pure grass-roots activism is too easy to ignore, while the mainstream media still sees its readers as circulation fodder--demographics to be placated or inflamed. Whoever takes on the task can take pride in their role in reinvigorating democracy at an important time, in helping to recreate a vibrant national community and in demonstrating the strengths of new technology--and did I mention that it makes money? I'd vote for that.

<a href=slate.msn.com>slate.msn.com By Daniel Gross Posted Friday, May 23, 2003, at 3:15 PM PT

Last week, Kristin J. Forbes, a young Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, was named to President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. Professor Forbes has an impressive résumé, but one can't help but think that one article in particular helped put her over the top.

In her most prominent journal article, which appeared in the American Economic Review in 2000, Forbes concluded that "in the short and medium term, an increase in a country's level of income inequality has a significant positive relationship with subsequent economic growth." In other words, after employing various forms of regression analysis and crunching scads of data, Forbes presciently affirmed what President Bush and the Republicans who control Congress have long implied but never said: If you want to put a jolt into the economy, fix fiscal policy so that it widens the gap between rich and poor. By reducing marginal rates and cutting taxes on dividends, that's precisely what the most recent gimmick-laden tax bill will likely do.

But Forbes—who appears to be no relation to the better-known Forbes family of income inequality advocates—is an academic economist, not a think-tank jockey. Her argument, although easily caricatured, has less to do with partisan politics and more to do with an ongoing academic debate about the relationship between economic inequality and growth.

In the middle part of the 20th century, the prevailing presumption was that income inequality was good for growth. Putting more money in the hands of the rich, who saved more, would provide economies with the means to finance investment. Under the schemas of influential economists such as Keynes contemporary Nicholas Kaldor and Nobel Memorial Prize-winner Simon Kuznets, governments faced a tough choice in devising fiscal policy. They could either spread income out more evenly, which would harm growth, or stimulate greater growth by fostering greater inequality.

In recent decades, the accumulated knowledge about how economies performed in the post-World War II era started to undermine this view. Countries in East Asia—Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc.—charted impressive growth over long periods, even as the distribution of wealth remained relatively equal. And regions in which income inequality was both massive and stubbornly persistent—i.e., Africa and Latin America—were perennial laggards. Indeed, the very structures that calcified income inequality—dynastic landholding, corrupt governments, lack of investment in public education—seemed to militate against growth.

In the 1990s, a wave of empirical research found that, in fact, countries with high inequality over a long period of time have low growth. This paper by Harvard professors Alberto Alesina and Dani Rodrik is a good example of such work. When there's a lot of inequality, the median voter will be poor. As a result, populist backlash will pressure the government to enact redistributionist policies and tax capital, thus hurting investment and stunting growth. (See under: Venezuela.)

Forbes' article uses new data and different methodology to poke (tentatively) at this conventional wisdom. Alesina and Rodrik—and many other researchers in the 1990s—took a "cross-country" approach, examining the relative economic performances of high- and low-inequality countries over time. But Forbes chose instead to look at the performances of individual countries over time and investigate whether there was a correlation between periods of higher or lower inequality on the one hand and periods of higher or lower growth on the other. Of course, it's possible that the relationship she detects between growth and higher inequality is more coincidental than causal. As New York University economist Bill Easterly put it: "It's more likely that what she was finding was that there are long waves or business cycle waves—maybe during booms, inequality rises, and during recessions, inequality falls."

Forbes—whose dissertation committee included the avowedly anti-Bush economist Paul Krugman—says she isn't certain about the meaning of her results. She notes that "the relationship is far from resolved" and that it is "too soon" to reach "any definitive policy conclusions." Unfortunately, the Bush administration and its Republican allies suffer no such compunctions.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com

Bush's new economist has a curious prescription.

What did you think of this article? Join the Fray, our reader discussion forum

Remarks from the Fray: …In Dr. Forbes' article, she writes that "it is possible that the strong positive relationship between inequality and growth could diminish (or even reverse) over significantly longer periods [than 10 years]." It's worth noting that income inequality in the U.S. has been increasing (as I recall) for significantly longer than the 10 year threshold that Dr. Forbes identified. As a noneconomist, might I ask if it would be consistent with Dr. Forbes' article for the U.S. economy to be presently slumping because we have had a prolonged correlation between inequality and growth, leading to the diminution or reversal of the relationship between growth and inequality that she could not rule out? At the very least, looking at the conclusion of her article, it seems that Dr. Forbes recognizes that absolute income inequality is not an absolute good. If only there were some sign that the Bush people are aware of that as well. --Dameffy

…Kuznets did NOT describe inequality as a cause of growth but as a temporary consequence of economic growth. As rapid growth begins, lead sectors take off, and the income of capitalists (and even some workers) in those sectors grows faster than other incomes; hence inequality grows. As growth balances (lots of reasons and possibilities), the income distribution becomes more equal. So the "Kuznets Curve" describes an inverted-U relationship between growth (cause) and inequality (effect). After an economy reaches some threshold income--low enough that the advanced industrial countries had passed it by the early part of the 20th century--rising tide raises all boats. Kuznets did not think that inequality causes growth, he did not assert a policy trade-off between equality and growth trade-off, nor did he advocate inequality. In summary, Kuznets held that growth at first increases inequality and then decreases it… --M-westernmass

…This is a particularly tricky debate because it crystallizes what I think of as the four main groups in American Politics: Liberals, conservatives, libertarians and authoritarians. Liberals and authoritarians form one group for financial matters with conservatives and libertarians on the other side….Ultimately, freedom demands of us that we go out and provide goods and services for others which they value in order to survive. We all go out, work and are rewarded according to how well we judge and satisfy the desires and appetites of others. A person is only as valuable as he or she is difficult to replace. I spend my resources (time, money and attention) attempting to secure for myself the best living I can. Doing so involves providing goods and services to others. My employer values one hour of my time more than a certain wage and I value that wage more than the hour of my time….With a system of redistribution in place, the transfer beneficiaries do not have to work as hard as before to attain their previous material status. Additionally, the precedent has been set that one may simply vote for a better standard of living instead of having to go out and take the thousands of tedious actions necessary to achieve that standard on their own. Further, dependency breeds resentment. Class warfare flourishes, bogeymen are continually set up and knocked down, profit goes from being the best beacon of doing something right for others to being a dirty word, victimhood loses its stigma and becomes a profession, and children are raised with few of the skills necessary to fend for themselves without increasingly massive handouts. Every direct transfer program, environmental standard, OSHA regulation and labor law that we have exists only because certain people (rich or poor) were uncomfortable with the strength of their positions in relationships with others and decided to diminish the power of parties they perceived to be adverse by limiting their freedom. The rich have now poked out the eye of the poor and vice versa and none of us is better for it. Redistribution in either direction retards individuality, kills dignity, discourages productive behavior, encourages further theft and kills freedom. --NickPasse

I am no fan of the policies of the Bush administration, nor a believer in its good motives in general (sample my other posts if you don't believe me). But I have to disagree with Daniel Gross's theory that Dubya is stuffing his Council of Economic Advisors with intellectual defenders of his policies. Kristin Forbes does look like an odd appointment at first glance. She is only five years out of graduate school, and has a single publication in a blue-ribbon economics journal. However, she already has good policy experience, including a stint as assistant Deputy Secretary at Treasury last year (and earlier experience at the World Bank). It seems more like an internal promotion than a fresh appointment to me. More importantly, look at some of the other appointments. The nominee as Chairman is Greg Mankiw, an adherent of the New Keynesian school of macroeconomics, which is a rival of the Chicago school in its advocacy of pro-active macro-management and government interventions in the economy. The same can be said of another appointee, Harvey Rosen of Princeton. If Bush wanted well-credentialed conservative economists, there are much better choices: Bob Lucas (Chicago), Tom Sargent (NYU), Robert Barro (Harvard), to name a few. (Here [post.economics.harvard.edu] is a sample of Mankiw's views on monetary policy. But wait, in this [post.economics.harvard.edu] one, he argues that social security funds should be invested in the stock market; read the abstract. Hmmm...!!) So I think Gross is a little off the mark. Isn't the Council of Economic Advisors a somewhat ceremonial body, anyway? The real policy making power lies with the Treasury. And, surprise surprise, you will find only ex-CEOs there. --Sissyfuss1

…Bush has just moved his CEA team two blocks further away from the White House, a detail that in Washington terms means a serious reduction in rank. Our of sight, out of mind, Bush may now proceed with screwing up the biggest economy in the world without pesky details rubbing up against his shoddy work. In the mean time, the mainstream economic community has spoken: In a recent joint statement, 10 Nobel laureates in economics and 450 other economists said there is wide agreement that the purpose of President Bush's tax plan is permanent change in the tax structure and not the creation of jobs and growth in the near-term. The permanent dividend tax cut, in particular, is not credible as "short-term stimulus." Job losses are currently occurring at a 1.5 million per year clip, showing that the long neglected economy now needs a direct and immediate stimulus. Bush claims that GDP growth will be highest in the first two years (it has to, because GDP is now an unsustainable negative). This implies that they will decline in 2005, 2006 and 2007 relative to what we would expect if no plan were implemented. Other forecasters have reached similar conclusions. An analysis by Mark Zandi, president of Economy.com and definitely not a liberal, shows a positive impact over the first two years (a dismal 0.8 percent higher GDP over two years) but an annual GDP decline of 0.25 percent thereafter. Consequently, GDP is lower by 1.0 percent in 2013 than it would be with no Bush package. The result is a loss of 750,000 jobs by 2013. We pay for that by bankrupting the Treasury, billing our children, delivering decidedly less public services, and increasing tax unfairness, radically increasing poverty in America. --GaryWmoderate