Luis Arce is in power after a victory too large to pretend it didn’t happen. Last year, when the coup happened, I wasn’t sure if it was real or not, a call I got wrong (it was a coup). This is very good news. The election results were so clear that the coup leaders could not pretend otherwise, and a campaign of violence and intimidation, plus exile of Morales, failed. (Note that this is only barely a case of “democracy worked”, since a lot of people died, were beaten and so on fighting the coup.)
I will suggest that Bolivia will be best served by prosecuting those involved in the coup, and systematically (though carefully) expunging right wing ideologues from the military and the police so they are not willing, in the future, to back coups. As long as military and paramilitary forces are right wing, the country will always be ripe for coups and outside interference.
It is, nonetheless, an excellent sign that no attempt to retain power thru further force was used after all the intimidation failed.
I note, also, that the coup leaders were essentially fascist Christians. A warning for other nations.
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Zachary Smith
By an interesting coincidence the MOA site also has a post up about the right-wing loss in Bolivia. Only the German blogger added a ‘twist’ to his story.
Bolivia Has Won. Will Trump Win Too?
I learned there how a certain obnoxious American billionaire may have been behind the Bolivian coup, but little else. Most of the post involved some “speculative” thinking about how our Orange Leader is going to surprise the hell out of everybody in a few weeks.
There is noting at all I can do to affect the upcoming US election, and since I detest both candidates, I’m just not going to obsess about it. That said, I suspect the MOA blogger has been smoking too much wacky tobacky.
Mallam
It was certainly a coup, and this was evident relatively immediately because election experts I follow/trust on twitter said at the time OAS was simply wrong in their interpretation of the data. However, while I opposed the coup, it should also be a warning to not try to overturn the will of your voters in the first place. Morales won, this is true. But he didn’t have democratic legitimacy in the first place given that he installed his own people on the court to overturn something that the people supported. He was term limited and should have accepted that fact. MAS overwhelming victory is only more evidence to this fact that a significant number of people supported MAS but didn’t vote for a fourth term.
The good news is that in the end the people’s will was respected: a MAS government with a mandate and without Morales. Good news all around.
S Brennan
Honestly, if the US would stop effing around with other nations and follow FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy the US economy [overall, for the 95%] would benifet more than any other.
Obama’s Libya/Syria/Ukraine “regime-change” wars legitimized Bush [the 2nd’s] illegal invasion of Iraq. And Clinton’s piece of work in the Balkans has radicalized Muslims who didn’t even know they were Muslim; imagine a woman wearing a burka during the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics? Now women wearing burkas in Sarajevo is a common thing…and yeah, sharia law is slowly being implemented. I can see Bill taking advantage of the underage girls being sold into prostitution. With Biden’s election we will return to the “normal”, regime-change neocolonialism without end. It’s good to see that Tulsi Gabbard is not out campaigning for Biden…the way Sanders is. Tulsi performed her required seppuku and exited the building bleeding her guts out.
Nothing like having that judas, in his cheap crumpled suit, extolling Biden’s virtues. Well, if Sanders shamelessly campaigned for Hillary in 2016, he might as well campaign for Biden in 2020. Regime-change neocolonialism without end is back on the menu, thank you Mr. Sanders I am looking forward to watching Biden make sure those Bolivians vote “correctly” the next time they are given a chance.
Thomas B Golladay
Good to hear. Now they like Erdogan must purge the military of coupists and install their own technocrats in the apparatus of government, such that any coups are quickly identified and crushed out of the gate.
Finally, let Morales come home to honorable retirement.
Willy
Quinoa is gaining in popularity in the states. Will there be an Eisenhower to lend support for yet another quinoa republic dictator? Probably not. Still… lets see what underhanded tactics the kleptocrats can come up with to try and ruin this popular election.
Ché Pasa
So are the Xristo-Fascists just going to stand back and stand by? Or will accommodations be made to keep them happy?
StewartM
Zachary Smith
Most of the post involved some “speculative” thinking about how our Orange Leader is going to surprise the hell out of everybody in a few weeks.
Yeah, those ‘leftists’ in the thread play the usual double standard. Blame the Ds (correctly) by noting how their actual actions fail to match their rhetoric and talking points, but then be completely f-king oblivious to Trump’s actual actions and just pay attention a few stray talking points here and there. Like this by Red Ryder:
“Trump will be most concerned with carving his name into history with Infrastructure, a new greener electrical grid, rebuilding urban centers, creating a health system that is better and cheaper and all can access, and getting left wing ideology out of the educational system….His economy before Covid-19 was pulling people out of poverty, improving wages, creating new jobs and small enterprises were thriving. All good for people of color and blue collar workers. ”
HUH? The guy who can’t/won’t get a CoVID-19 relief bill in place? (And yes, beat on Mitch McConnell hard enough–he’s up for re-election and vulnerable; campaign for his opponent if need be) and it can get done. The same Trump who promised everyone ‘great health care’ tried to get Paul Ryan crapcare passed, that would have had older not-yet-eligible for Medicare having to spend *the median American income* on just *premiums alone*? The same Trump who submitted plans to cut Medicare and SS and Medicaid *this very year*? As for the ‘great Trump economy’ statistically it’s but a dead heat with the Obama economy, post-recession, and that’s not giving it any compliments. Throttling those HB-1s really turned things around—NOT!
In fact, Trump’s policies are a net drag on the economy. Tax cuts for the rich and deregulation did mean higher profits, which were not spent on promoting innovation but sunk into stock buybacks and other paper ponzi schemes, the same as before. Oh yes and the CoVID-19 pandemic showed that Trump was just as eager to shovel trillions of free money to the stock market as was Bush and Obama.
And Trump’s supposed Green New Deal in the waiting? Has that been cleared by Koch Industries yet? And what? A ‘leftist’ is not supposed to be concerned by Trump embracing actual, real-life fascists who yearn for their own Day of the Rope and who turned out anonymous police forces to grab peaceful protestors off the street and whisk them away in vans?
I’m starting to wonder if some of these forums are populated by trolls, Russian or otherwise. A big reason *why* the Clinton/Obama DLC policies were bad is that they helped create the conditions for a Trump, or worse, to arise. That truth does NOT mean Trump is to be preferred. The fire is not preferable to the frying pan.
Hugh
Wish Bolivians the best. Sometimes the good guys do win. The cynic in me wonders how much and for how long. Usually when the people win, they get undermined by the military, the rich, and endemic corruption. Right now, much of Latin and South America is rightist, but with Bolivia maybe this will begin to change.
Meanwhile in other places like Thailand, the struggle between the monarchist/military regime and popular protests is ongoing. On the one hand, people are tired of the military, and the current monarch is a power hungry, money hungry louse, but neither the military nor the monarch will give up unless forced. Monarchy is one of those institutions with no redeeming characteristics and plenty of bad ones.
kråke
“Democracy” is never enough to preserve democracy, is it?
Not just trials. Or prosecutions. Or expulsions from the officer corps. Line ’em up, Che style, but with a modern caveat: bring them to the indigenous villages and coca towns that suffered the worst of the Falangist repression, and have them run a miles long gauntlet of armed locals.
Eric Anderson
You’d get the same result in Venezuela were Maduro to step away and allow a competent successor to run against the opposition.
Eric Anderson
You’d get the same result in Venezuela were Maduro to step away and allow a competent successor to run against the opposition.
Eric Anderson
Stewart M:
“I’m starting to wonder if some of these forums are populated by trolls, Russian or otherwise.”
Me: Knocks on mike. “Testing. Testing. Any you ol’ CIA spooks on here messing with our simple minds”?
Interwebs: Hummmmmmmmmmmm.
All clear Stewart. Proceed to runway No. 5.
TM
\”Obama’s Libya/Syria/Ukraine “regime-change” wars legitimized Bush [the 2nd’s] illegal invasion of Iraq. And Clinton’s piece of work in the Balkans has radicalized Muslims who didn’t even know they were Muslim; imagine a woman wearing a burka during the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics? Now women wearing burkas in Sarajevo is a common thing…and yeah, sharia law is slowly being implemented.\”
Speaking as a Bosnian, the Dayton accord has essentially encased us as a politically divided ethnostate, and colony of foreign powers. It also rewarded the genocidaires with their own little fiefdoms after they were done ethnically cleansing them. It\’s hard to blame the people for signing, the war was horrific, and they would accept any conditions to stop it.
In regards to the perceived proliferation of burkas and implementation of sharia, this is not really true at the moment, though I have noticed a resurgence in faith in the young generation. This is probably similar to the post-USSR Russians becoming relatively religious; a reaction to difficult conditions and massive upheaval. For many a source of comfort.
The gulf states are buying up land like gangbusters and will certainly be pushing their horrific religious beliefs in the more deprived and alienated regions, which I am certainly worried about. I\’m hoping that the younger generation\’s zeal for attacking corruption and unifying our political system beyond the ethnic and sectarian division used to rob us blind will help defend against this.
Zachary Smith
https://www.ianwelsh.net/bolivian-socialists-sweep-to-power/#comment-118601
StewartM, it’s a safe assumption that a high percentage of internet posters are either enthusiastic volunteers or paid workers. A number of times in years past some blogger would post an actual job listing for the State or Defense department for such people. Oddly enough, those “search results” seem to have disappeared.
Here are a couple of little articles about this subject.
(2015) Federal government routinely hires internet trolls, shills to monitor chat rooms, disrupt article comment sections
(2015) Professional trolls get paid to stir up trouble, and they are experts at covering their tracks. Here’s who’s paying them, and why.
The second link mentions the rise of Artificial Intelligence for this work. For many years computer software has existed which allows a single human to operate under many usernames, and probably with disguised location information. I can’t see why a trolling/propaganda facility couldn’t use a handful of real people to also operate the AI systems.
I’ve heard that in the Apartheid state troll work is considered a patriotic duty, and some high schools offer this for students. It might be a popular class if the best ones are able to avoid the military draft and spend a year or two in comfortable air conditioned facilities.
My three or four suspects here have adopted personas of obnoxious know-all jerks. tRump Kissers to the core despite occasional claims to the contrary, I’ve seen their equals at places like Daily Kos and some ‘feminist’ sites. These types KNOW the truth, and all the unwashed heathen ought to shut up and be in awe of the Revealed Truths they post. There is no point of trying to discuss anything with these “people”, so it’s my policy to ignore them and their scattershot insults.
Ten Bears
Surly, Stewart, you jest. Trolls in Ian’s basement? Lol, Ian’s got the best.
Trolls and stooges that don’t know they’re stooges, and pawns, oh my!
Been that way for years.
bruce weiers
The fire is not preferable to the frying pan.
\”Thinking\” of that quality is one of the reasons we alternate between the fire and the frying pan. If you put yourself out there, Stewart, with a sign on your ass that says, \”Manipulate me, I love it!\” this will be the politics you are served. You keep arguing, whether you realize it or not, that what you regard as \”the frying pan\” is somehow marginally \”better\” and therefore, we should like the frying pan.
I think we should not like the frying pan. We should stop pretending that Obama was better than Bush or that Bush was better than Trump. I am not saying that you cannot squint and see stylistic differences. I am saying on big issues, they have all been god-awful. Bush took this country into an aggressive war without any justification — he should have been hung as war criminal. I don\’t forget that. I do not see how any one can. Obama imitated Bush\’s infamous surge in Iraq with a surge in Afganistan — no reason, no sense. Obama gave banksters blanket immunity from prosecution in the biggest financial collapse in 70 years; Jamie Dimon is a friggin\’ billionaire today leading a bank with more felony convictions than most inmates at a Federal penitentiary.
Trump is horrible! The liberal Democrats keep harping on how horrible, but somehow the things that most upset them are either not real at all (collusion with Russia to steal the election) or things any sensible, reasonable person opposes (that Trump is not in every minute of every day one hundred percent committed to a \”free trade\” that sends jobs to China or a foreign policy at war with Russia, a nuclear power). I loathe Trump and his corrupt cronies, but I cannot get past the corruption of Biden\’s family. Harping on about \”fascism\” while putting a callous authoritarian like Kamala Harris in close proximity to power is not persuasive to me. I do not get how you can be so credulous.
Willy
Ye shall know them by their toots.
They claim to be FDR, yet it smells a whole lot worse.
js
The clue is if someone keeps going on and on about Obama etc., 4 some years into Trump, and soft peddles Trump. Yea Obama may be all that and the powerful players in the Dem party Obama influenced, but you don’t bother to note who actually has power right now, like at all?
If say some 3 years into a Biden-Harris administration people have legitimate critiques of Biden-Harris policy, and all anyone ever does is accuse them of “derangement” and says “but Trump ..” it will be equally irrelevant to actual power dynamics.
And yea I do think Trump is one of the worst presidents we’ve ever had looking at domestic issues. But if you add in foreign policy there are so many contenders for worst president. So those who say Trump is uniquely bad may not be as “deranged” as all that, they are just focusing exclusively on domestic policy, when I see it that way it all suddenly clicks. Now I don’t think there is a moral argument for entirely ignoring foreign policy but one has to live in this country so it’s a natural bias.
bruce wilder
I don’t forget, js. There are people who seem to think simpleton GWB passing candy to Michelle is all we need and all is forgiven. There are people who think an endorsement of Biden by neocons and neoliberals from the Bush years should persuade us to sing kumbaya as Biden is voted in. Biden is an evil pos. No one should think voting him in is a political achievement. It is a political failure of the second magnitude that he is the nominee alongside a woman who won ONLY the Hamptons primary. And, I note that Obama was instrumental in putting Biden-Harris into place. So the bastard is not quite done screwing this country; he still has enormous power to do the wrong thing.
And, by the bye, Obama giving blanket immunity to banksters in a financial crisis spawned by epic fraud is something the U.S. may never recover from. On the moral failure scale, it is a domestic disaster.
Because I do not forget, I am not interested in counterfactual “if” scenarios for three years into Biden-Harris (as if Biden will last much past inauguration).
Willy
I was talking about the proselytizers we see around here (besides myself who’s the only sane one).
They seem to embrace the “Bill O’Reilly Method”, which is pretending to be rational nonpartisans while spouting nonsense at the intellectual level of wars on Christmas and liberals hell bent on abolishing marriage. They present too many red flags and wingnut batshit for me to take them seriously.
Speaking of Obama, did he know what he was doing from the get-go, or was his mind hijacked by Men In Pinstripe, or was he like my in-law who rationalizes that it’s okay to corrupt good institutions as long as your own family benefits?
Hugh
Robert Rubin, Austan Goolsbee, and Paul Volcker were Obama economics advisers. Rubin was Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. He was a Goldman alum and made big bucks running the criminal organization known as Citigroup. And he helped found that neoliberal bastion the Hamilton Project. Austan Goolsbee was one of Obama’s Chicago Boys. While Obama was running for President promising to re-negotiate NAFTA, Goolsbee was rather famously caught telling the Canadians, not to worry, it was just campaign bafflegab. And Volcker who started the Fed’s war on American wages rounded out the group.
Then of course there was Timothy Geithner. He was president of the New York Fed and had a front row seat both promoting the funky financial instruments that blew up the financial system back in 2008 and as Obama’s Treasury Secretary foaming the runway of a totally corrupt and criminal financial system. Obama backed all of these financial pirates/terrorists. He was a true believer of them, their class’s right to loot, and that they should get away with it.
Ché Pasa
No bruce, I don’t know anyone who believes “all is forgiven” wrt the Cheney-Bush regime. Far from it.
Michelle’s smooch was probably too much information to share with the public, but it was essential for the confirmation that the Obamas, Clintons, and Bushs are all on essentially the same side, though — of course — mistakes were made. Too bad about the Iraqis, too bad about all the Americans who lost their homes, too bad that some people made out like bandits in the midst of catastrophe. But there were good things too. A Black man was elected president, twice, and that means something to many people — including apparently the Bushs — that transcends politics and the unpleasantness that went before. Obama performed admirably according to the tenets of the presidency as it’s been since neoliberalism became the dominant ideology.
According to those dominant precepts, Iraq was a titanic mistake — not a war crime, a mistake — made by well-meaning but misguided and misinformed men and women of good will. Best just to put it behind us, no? And yes, Syria, Libya, and some of those other misadventures didn’t turn out so well, but again, well-meaning efforts don’t always turn out the way we’d hoped, you know?
I’m wondering if, after Trump is finally removed, he’ll go through the same sort of rehabilitation, the excusing of mistakes, the ha ha laughter at his cravenness, corruption, and deadliness, if he’ll get a good wiping down and clean up of his grotesqueries. We’ll see.
I’m already hearing mainstream efforts to make it seem like the Trump years really haven’t been all that bad, the dead and impoverished notwithstanding. After all, there are those lovely tax cuts for the rich, and who can argue with a radically conservative federal court system? I mean, it’s all good, right?
Ché Pasa
Check out Ollie Vargas for some of what’s going on in Bolivia. The XristoFascists may be a tiny minority, but they are armed and ready for “whatever is necessary.” Ahem.
And let’s not forget who/what supports them.
Thomas B Golladay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Fb3uL7J_A&ab_channel=Dr.SteveTurley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBz6l720NO4&ab_channel=Dr.SteveTurley
Its over for Biden. The beatings will continue till morale improves.
Meanwhile Jimmy Dore and others say I told you so.
Willy
Meh. Michele Bachmann said the Bible predicts that black transexual marxists will try to overthrow the US government, challenging Qanon which says it’ll be Tom Hanks and his democratic party henchmen instead. She’s far more entertaining.
Ten Bears
She’s got Charlie Manson eyes, Willy, almost as much fun as Ian’s trolls.
S Brennan
“[The] claim that Trump is some sort of unique threat in office: “the lesser evil is evil, but in this case, the greater evil is simply off the charts.” This empty hyperbole is unaccompanied by any evidence that the evil perpetrated by Trump is “off the charts” in a way that that perpetrated by Bush or Reagan, or for that matter the Clintons, Obama, or….
Biden (architect of mass incarceration; ardent promoter of the Iraq War and the “weapons of mass destruction” lie; “good friend” not just of Bernie Sanders but of Wall Street, the credit card industry, and the fossil fuel industry; and sexual predator accused by multiple women of harassment, groping, or rape) is not. I can’t imagine why people like Rick Snyder, John Kasich, and virtually the entirety of prominent Bush Administration officials would so enthusiastically endorse Biden if they did not consider him sufficiently evil for their tastes. It certainly can’t be because of their concern for the environment, out of control spending on new nuclear weapons or the military more generally, democracy, or racism and sexism.
More likely, it is because, as Black Agenda Report’s Bruce Dixon once said of Obama, they consider him the “more effective evil.” Under Obama/Biden, the US increased its level of military interventions abroad compared to the latter part of the Bush administration, with troops in more countries and the US-backed overthrow of the governments of Honduras, Ukraine, and Libya. Bush signed a minimum wage increase into law; Obama did not.
Health care costs for most people continued to skyrocket despite the passage of the “Affordable” Care Act, and insurance companies laughed all the way to the bank as they pocketed new profits from a bill that they essentially wrote.
During Obama/Biden’s eight years in office, millions of homeowners lost their homes, police continued to murder large numbers of people and protests against such violence were violently repressed (as was Occupy Wall St.), mass incarceration and the drug war continued unabated, economic inequality reached levels unseen since the Gilded Age, the worst environmental disaster in US history (the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion) resulted in no meaningful change in regulatory oversight, and oil production and fracking skyrocketed.
How is that not “off the charts” evil? While most members of the ruling class have reasons of their own for preferring Biden to Trump, if they really thought that Trump was an existential threat to the prevailing neoliberal order that has brought them such handsome profits, why did they go out of their way to rig the Democratic primary to make sure that Biden defeated a considerably more popular and inspiring candidate who polled better against Trump, Bernie Sanders? Clearly, it was Sanders rather than Trump who the ruling class perceived as a threat to their interests.”
https://medium.com/@jeffmelton/the-central-importance-of-independent-politics-has-not-changed-fd5a0f6195be
Willy
You gotta be kidding me.
Ché Pasa
Posted 5 hours ago to Ollie Vargas’ Twitter:
Problemas
KT Chong
It’s not over yet:
when a US/CIA-orchestrated coup failed…. well, expect US sanctions on Bolivia and criminal charges against Evo Morales and Luis Acre in 3… 2… 1…
Roger Fox
Following the resignation of Morales, a political vacuum has emerged in the country: According to the Bolivian constitution, if the current president resigns, either the vice president or the chairman of the country’s Senate becomes acting head of state. However, Vice President lvaro García Linera said he was leaving his post after Morales. Senate head Adriana Salvatierra also announced her resignation. The chairman of the Chamber of Deputies Viktor Borda also left his post.
The next in line is one of the deputy heads of the Senate. The incumbent second vice-speaker, Jeanine Agnes, has already told local media that she is ready to act as president until new presidential elections are held.