Las mentiras de la guerra fría y la política

Navengando en el Wall Street Journal me encontré esta curiosa e inquietante noticia:

"The past can never be predicted, and perhaps never more so than when it comes to the German left. Two years ago, we learned that Nobel Laureate Günter Grass -- the literary scourge of all things fascist, especially America -- had himself been a member of the Waffen SS. Now comes another zinger that casts the radical political and social upheavals of the late 1960s in new and revealing light.

The historical surprise concerns a turning point whose ripple effects were felt in Europe and beyond. On June 2, 1967, a West German policeman fatally shot an unarmed, 26-year-old literature student in the back of his head during a demonstration in West Berlin against the visiting Shah of Iran. Benno Ohnesorg became "the left wing's first martyr" (per the weekly Der Spiegel). His dying moments captured in a famous news photograph, Ohnesorg galvanized a generation of left-wing students and activists who rose up in the iconic year of 1968. What was a fringe soon turned to terrorism.

To them his killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was the "fascist cop" at the service of a capitalist, pro-American "latent fascist state." "The post-fascist system has become a pre-fascist one," the German Socialist Student Union declared in their indictment hours after the killing. The ensuing movement drew its legitimacy and fervor from the Ohnesorg killing. Further enraging righteous passions, Mr. Kurras was acquitted by a court and returned to the police force.

Now all that's being turned on its head. Last week, a pair of German historians unearthed the truth about Mr. Kurras. Since 1955, he had worked for the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police. According to voluminous Stasi archives, his code name was Otto Bohl. The files don't say whether the Stasi ordered him to do what he did in 1967. But that only fuels speculation about a Stasi hand behind one of postwar Germany's transformative events.
Mr. Kurras, who is 81 and lives in Berlin, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he belonged to the East German Communist Party. "Should I be ashamed of that or something?" He denied he was paid to spy for the Stasi, but asked, "What if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn't change anything." Mr. Kurras may be the monster of the leftist imagination -- albeit now it turns out he is one of their own."

No conocía sobre ese personaje ni sobre ese asesinato ni su aparente relación con las protestas y la "radicalización" de los años 60s.

No es nada nuevo en realidad, para cualquiera con medianos conocimientos de historia, la perversidad y maquiavelismo de los regímenes comunistas en la guerra fría (y de los regímenes capitalistas tambien).

Pero la noticia me produjo o mejor, volvió a producirme una reflexión: ¿Cuántos hechos políticos y sociales aparentemente espontaneos o no planeados de la guerra fría en realidad erán obra de alguno de los bandos siguiendo una maquiavelica estrategia y agenda política?

Cuanto de la historia política y social "oficial" es una farsa, un tinglado montado por gobiernos y movimientos políticos?

Y peor aún, cuantos de los hechos que suceden hoy en día son así, diseñados para manipular a las masas en favor de una u otra ideología?

Los reyes filosofos de la FED

Brad Delong comenta la causa de la crisis:

"The current financial crisis has its roots in Greenspan's decision to keep interest rates very low in 2002 and 2003 to head off the danger of a deflation-induced double-dip recession, and his subsequent decision that the costs of cleaning up after a housing bubble were likely to be less than the costs of the high unemployment that would be generated by a preemptive attempt to pop a housing-speculation bubble. Two years ago, I would have said that Greenspan's judgment here was correct. Six months ago, I would have said that his judgment was probably correct. Today -- in the middle of the largest nationalizations in history -- I can no longer state that Greenspan made the right calls with respect to the level of interest rates and the housing bubble in the 2000s."


El articulo tambien resume la historia de la banca central y la economía política de la FED vs congreso vs ejecutivo en Estados Unidos.Lo extraño es que no veo llamados a cuestionar los poderes de la banca central. Solo piden mas regulación para los bancos, mientras reconocen que la causa estuvo en las acciones de la FED!

Que la banca central debe tener mucho poder se ha convertido en un tabú incuestionable. Y esta crisis parece que no va a cambiar eso.

Esta es la introducción al articulo:

"Ben Bernanke is the closest thing to a central economic planner the United States has ever had. He bestrides our narrow economic world like a colossus. Unelected (he was appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed by an overwhelming majority in the Senate) and unaccountable (unless the Congress decides that it wishes to amend the Federal Reserve Act and take the blame for whatever else goes wrong with the economy), he is responsible only to his conscience -- and his open-market committee of himself, the other six governors of the Federal Reserve Board, and the 12 presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks. The fate of the economy in the next administration depends far less on the president than on this moral-philosopher-prince to whose judgment we have entrusted a remarkable share of control over our destiny.

How did an ivory-tower academic whose specialty is the details of the Great Depression get to this position? What does he do all day? How did so much power come to rest in a single institution, a single individual? The current system is the product of a century and a half of evolution in the role of a central bank, on both sides of the Atlantic, through a series of accidents and crises. For a generation, the idea of social democracy -- with government ownership, control, and regulation of at least the "commanding heights" of the economy -- has been in retreat. But in the middle of this market economy is an immense island of central planning: the Federal Reserve.

In normal times, the Fed -- not the market -- decides what the short-term interest rate is. The interest rate is perhaps the key price in the economy. It is the price at which we trade wealth in the present for wealth in the future. When the interest rate is low, our focus is on the future: Businesses and consumers borrow and invest. When the interest rate is high, our focus is on the present because distant-future promises of cash are not worth very much in today's dollars. You might think that if there were ever a decision we would leave to the market and the aggregated preferences of millions of individuals, it would be the terms on which we trade present comfort off for future wealth. But we don't. We leave that decision to the discretion of the philosopher-prince Bernanke and his committee. And in extraordinary moments like the September Wall Street crisis, when the flow of funds through financial markets dries up, we leave the decisions of which banks to nationalize, which to close down, which to forcibly merge, and which to rescue and on what terms to our financial overlords in the Eccles Building on the National Mall."

Vale la pena mencionar que Delong es democrata, trabajo en la administración Clinton y se considera de centro o centro-izquierda. Su articulo no corresponde a la típica visión libertaria, pero estada carga del realismo político que le falta, diría yo, a la mayoría de economistas.

Termina con este parrafo:"Cicero said that the problem with his political ally Cato was that he thought they lived in the Republic of Plato while they really lived in the Sewer of Romulus. It is either our curse or our blessing that we live in the Republic of the Central Banker."

Creo que los modelos de algunos economistas seguro tambien funcionarían bien en la republica de Platón, el sistema de los filosofos reyes que planifican la sociedad.

Lucha de clases en elecciones de Estados Unidos

"Voters who make $60,000 a year or less favor the Democratic party while those who make more are fairly evenly divided between both parties. Investors favor the GOP, 43% to 42%, while those who do not invest favor the Democrats, 53% to 31%.
"

y tambien de genero:

"Men now favor the GOP by a 43% to 41% margin, while women continue to show big support for the Democrats, 49% to 36%."

El dato mas interesante es este:

"Voters who work for the government favor the Democrats, while entrepreneurs support the Republicans."

Aquí esta el enlace.

Como funciona el gobierno....

Paul Krugman ganó el premio nobel de economía ayer. Así que se me dió por leer su autobiografía. Dado que krugman es un economista keynesiano y entusiasta del Estado de Bienestar, los programas sociales y la regulación, nunca me imaginé encontrar esta perla:

"After a little while, however, I began to notice how policy decisions are really made. The fact is that most senior officials have no idea what they are talking about: discussion at high-level meetings is startlingly primitive. (For example, the distinction between nominal and real interest rates tends to be regarded as a complex and useless bit of academic nitpicking). Furthermore, many powerful people prefer to take advice from those who make them feel comfortable rather than from those who will force them to think hard. That is, those who really manage to influence policy are usually the best courtiers, not the best analysts. I like to think that I am a good analyst, but I am certainly a very bad courtier. And so I was not tempted to stay on in Washington."

Dada estas experiencia por qué insisten en darle mas poder y funciones al gobierno? Por qué insisten en que el gobierno es la solución a todos los problemas de la sociedad?

Los importadores del castrismo

Muy interesante este articulo de Plinio Apuleyo sobre la vida de Luis Villar Borda.

Entiende uno que el origen de varios reconocidos lideres izquierdistas son señoritos bogotanos de colegios "de bien", tal vez envidiosos de los nuevos ricos("Muy pronto descubrimos que fuera de los 10 centavos del tranvía, no teníamos nunca plata para comprar una coca-cola porque pertenecíamos a esa particular categoría (a la cual se sumarían más tarde Camilo Torres y Alberto Dangond) de muchachos pobres y de buena familia. Vivíamos en viejas casas del centro de un solo piso con patios y matas de geranios y no teníamos estilógrafos Parker como los demás condiscípulos sino tinteros y plumas de poco precio, y algo me decía que él heredaba los trajes de Carlos, su hermano mayor: unos nickers café que muy pronto desaparecerían del todo.") .

Estos comentarios donde Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza se compara con sus otros compañeros de colegio que si eran ricos, me recordó este texto del economista Tyler Cowen sobre el papel del miedo a perder status en las ideologías políticas:

Take the so-called "left wing." Some of these people favor a kind of meritocracy. They feel it is unfair that money so determines access in capitalist society and they do not want the monied class to rise in relative status, certainly not above the status of the smart people and the virtuous people. It is important to fight for the principle that the desires of this monied class have a relatively low priority in the social ranking. Egalitarianism is the rhetoric of the day, and readjusting the status of other Americans to the status of this monied class often receives more attention than elevating the very poorest in the world to a higher absolute level.

Tal vez el resentimiento hacia los verdaderos ricos, causo que estos señoritos bien se volvieran izquierdistas?

Finalmente el hecho es que algunos de estos señoritos, incluyendo el mismo Plinio Apuleyo, lideraron la introducción del castrismo en Colombia:

"Ramiro Andrade, Luis y yo fundamos las Juventudes del MRL, grupo ultra castrista que veíamos como una vanguardia revolucionaria, cuyo lema era Ni un paso atrás y su distintivo unos chacos colorados con los cuales aparecíamos en lugares tan candentes como Puerto Boyacá. Enviado por nosotros, Luis se entrevistó con Fidel Castro en La Habana y obtuvo de él la oferta de entrenar política y militarmente muchachos nuestros en Cuba. De esa experiencia, quién iba a creerlo, surgió el Eln, pues muchos de los jóvenes entrenados solo creían en la guerra de guerrillas y no confiaban en la vía electoral. Se metieron al monte. Varios de ellos, hasta entonces muy cercanos a nosotros, murieron en la primera etapa de esa lucha armada. Y también, dentro del Eln, Camilo Torres."

Y despues siguen insistiendo que las guerrillas colombianas son ejercitos populares, cuando en ultimas no son mas que el resultado de las acciones de señoritos bogotanos, miembros excelsos del establecimiento que en su afan de poder importaron el comunismo y el castrismo.

Por qué nadie le ha pedido cuentas a estos tipos por la barbarie que desencadenaron al obtener de Fidel Castro entrenamiento política y militar?

Otro cientifico se aparta......

de la histeria del calentamiento global (cuyo propagandista mas celebre Al Gore):

"I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.
FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Pareciera que muchos ambientalistas y políticos de izquierda quieren hacernos creer que la idea de que el calentamiento global es causado por las emisión de CO2 es un hecho ya aceptado por la cientificos y los que se oponen son solo los lacayos del "gran capital" y las transnacionales contaminadoras.

Dado que es un "hecho" se justifica usar todo el poder del estado para detener las emisiones, sin importar las consecuencias que esto tenga sobre la economía y sobre nuestras libertades.

Por supuesto que esa no es la realidad. No esta probado que el calentamiento global es causado por la emisión de CO2. Y no existe consenso entre la comunidad cientifica sobre el tema, como lo demuestras las opiniones de este cientifico.

Pero es que se debe tener en cuenta que este no es un debate cientifico, es un debate politizado:

"The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary."

La maldición de los recusos naturales

Estra gráfica muestra la relación entre dos variables: el indice general de libertad en paises petroleros(medido de acuerdo a cierta metodología) y el precio del petroleo.

Muestra lo que se conoce como la maldición de los recursos naturales.

El tema se ha vuelto a poner de moda gracias a los increíbles aumentos de los precios de bienes básicos (petroleo,minerales,metales ) que se conocen como "recursos naturales".

Thoma Friedman define una primera ley de la petropolitica y en el Cato Institute discuten el tema.

Me pregunto si en Colombia tambien esta sucediendo el mismo fenomeno. Despues de todo, el auge de exportaciones recientes se debe a la minería(Carbon especialmente) y el petroleo, mientras que los industriales sufren con la reevaluación (la clásica "enfermedad holandesa")

La tactica preferida

Esta es una de las tácticas preferidas de los políticos como Piedad Cordoba (y tambien Chavez y sus secuaces como Correa,Evo,etc) es

Siempre a cada rato avisan de una gran conspiración en su contra, de un complot. Siempre buscan mostrarse como victimas. A cada rato Piedad Cordoba hace eso.Y a cada rato hay mas de un crédulo listo para caer en la trampa

Sobre el poder de las corporaciones

"Yo creo que el poder de las grandes corporaciones de controlar las preferencias de los consumidores es altamente sobrestimado. Miren todos los nuevos productos de las grandes corporaciones que fallan. Esto no es para decir que las grandes corporaciones no crean problemas, pero en mi opinión, la manera mas problemáica en que explotan su poder es a través de la manipulación directa del proceso político mas que la manipulación de las preferencias de los consumidores"

Hal Varian, economista en jefe de Google

Pensamiento Liberal del Dia

"La política es el arte de conseguir que tus intereses egoístas parezcan intereses nacionales"
Thomas Sowell