BOLD like a Leopard

It's convenient to blame the Gringos, but who do you blame if you're main creditors have nothing to do with them?  While external factors do affect a nation's economic output, projecting the responsibility for a massive economic collapse on other nations is an indicator of incompetent leadership. Those thinking that you can explain away internal economic collapse by blaming sanctions, the IMF, or "neoliberalism" should at least try to explain why some of the following trends have occurred.  And by the same token, the act of commenting on and highlighting the failures of the "Bolivarian Revolution" of Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro should not be construed as an endorsement of military intervention in Venezuela, nor indeed supporting the economic sanctions against the country. Criticism and observation of any nation's behaviour is essential to keeping it accountable to its own citizens as well as to its neighbours and trading pa...

Resisting knowledge for the sake of righteousness is ignorance. Recently one of my critics sent me a clip from The Real News Network in an effort to debunk what he calls my “bias” about Nicaragua. This is a person who believes that it is improper for citizens of the USA to criticize Venezuela and Nicaragua because of our past Cold War intervention in Latin America as well as what he classifies as our neo-liberal agenda that causes poverty in the region. I will address this criticism today, as well as discuss the video that this critic sent me point by point. First let me show the text of this person's criticism: The Real News had an interesting piece on Nicaragua.   I'll just state again that I understand Razor [Me]  wants so bad for me to play his dumb "my side vs your side" game w/ Nicaragua.  That's not my perspective, I try to gather information and understand the situation better.   I fundamentally think differently....

The Nobel Prize winning economist is correct in saying that millions of Europeans immigrated in the 1800s, he just forgets to mention the flaws in that process. Famous American illustrator Thomas Nast depicted Irish immigration for what it was in the 19th century, including the violence towards police and street crime. (Getty Images) In the previous installment of this analysis of Paul Krugman's article calling Donald Trump, the Republicans, and their voters " Know Nothings ", we dealt with his deflection of the topic to attacking conservatives and like minded voters as uneducated dolts that cannot handle the intellectual rigours of a college education. The real issue of how a modern western state should modulate its incoming immigrant population was obfuscated by his obsession with attacking the opponents of unfettered influxes of the Third World poor. So in what way did Krugman compare the immigrant waves of today and the 19th century? He cited the major w...