Hugo Chavez is dying. Dr. Jose Marquina, who correctly told the public based on his own private sources that Chavez was in respiratory failure (before the Venezuelan government announced it), denies the rumors that a special team of Russian doctors has flown into Cuba to save the Venezuelan president. But even without the Russians, things are dramatic enough, Marquina adds. Chavez is unrecognizably bloated with edema; he is in a medically induced coma to keep him quiet enough to tolerate the tubes snaking into his body and to limit his need for oxygen. Marquina was pretty certain: barring a miracle, Chavez ain’t gonna make it back to Venezuela to take his oath.

Even though the Venezuelan Constitution requires a new election within 30 days if the president is incapacitated, Chavez’s supporters have learned, maybe even from reading this blog, that constitutional provisions are made to be elastic. His supporters say Chavez should be given “time to recover”. They’ve even suggested that Venezuelan justices be flown to Havana to administer the oath to the unconscious man.

The New York Times, in its own low key journalistic manner, has already declared Chavez dead. They’re run his political obituary in a special called The Future of Venezuela.

“What future?”, Moses Naim of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace asks. He writes that Chavez has managed to bankrupt oil-rich Venezuela. It was hard, but he did it. The Commandante Presidente gave away oil to nearly anyone who backed his anti-American agenda. Cuba, even China got theirs compliments of Hugo. The only source of hard cash he had coming in was the oil he sold to America at market prices. Naim writes:

President Chávez has bequeathed the nation an economic crisis of historic proportions.

The crisis includes a fiscal deficit approaching 20 percent of the economy (in the cliff-panicking United States it is 7 percent), a black market where a U.S. dollar costs four times more than the government-determined exchange rate, one of the world’s highest inflation rates, a swollen number of public sector jobs, debt 10 times larger than it was in 2003, a fragile banking system and the free fall of the state-controlled oil industry, the country’s main source of revenue.

Oil-exporting countries rarely face hard currency shortages, but the Chávez regime may be the exception. Mismanagement and lack of investment have decreased oil production. Meanwhile oil revenue is compromised partly because of Chávez’s decision to supply Venezuelans with the country’s most valuable resource at heavily subsidized prices. Thus a large and growing share of locally produced oil is sold domestically at the lowest prices in the world (in Venezuela it costs 25 cents to fill the tank of a mid-sized car).

Chavez was the progressive dream on steroids. He spent on entitlements, lived off capitalism. But even this couldn’t halt the process of economic collapse. But by dying, Chavez can now escape blame for an economy set to implode on his low-information electoral base. Poverty may be around the corner for most Venezuelans, but when it comes they’ll blame Bush, probably literally. Francisco Toro of the Caracas Chronicles explains how it works:

Chávez has spent all of the windfall from Venezuela’s enormous oil exports, and then some: the country’s debt has quintupled in 14 years. Time and again spending has been hiked just ahead of elections to give Chavistas an edge. This last one was no exception.

It’s been a wildly popular and successful strategy, but this kind of spending-led “socialism” can’t last. For years, Venezuela has been borrowing at credit-card level interest rates. As the country runs out of money and out of people willing to lend it more, the real question is who’s going to be left holding the checkbook when the spending must screech to a halt?

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Two recent news items featured a routine business activities that by rights would never have been noteworthy. The first involved a man selling his company on the best tax terms he could get. The second involved a company hiring some security guards. Why should anyone care about these unremarkable transactions?

Maybe because the businessman selling the company in the first case was former vice-president Al Gore. The buyer as also named Al. Al Jazeera. The New York Times explains:

Al Jazeera did not disclose the purchase price, but people with direct knowledge of the deal pegged it at around $500 million, indicating a $100 million payout for Mr. Gore, who owned 20 percent of Current. Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1, according to several people who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. But the deal was not signed until Wednesday. …

Going forward, the challenge will be persuading Americans to watch — an extremely tough proposition given the crowded television marketplace and the stereotypes about the channel that persist to this day.

“There are still people who will not watch it, who will say that it’s a ‘terrorist network,’ ” said Philip Seib, the author of “The Al Jazeera Effect.” “Al Jazeera has to override that by providing quality news.”

With a handful of exceptions (including New York City and Washington), American cable and satellite distributors have mostly refused to carry Al Jazeera English since its inception in 2006. While the television sets of White House officials and lawmakers were tuned to the channel during the Arab Spring in 2011, ordinary Americans who wanted to watch had to find a live stream on the Internet.

Gore will now be part of the new outlet’s advisory board. The second otherwise dull item was that the Journal News was hiring security guards. Don’t thousands of businesses do that? Well yes, but the Journal News was the anti-gun newspaper that published the names of registered gun owners in its area in order to shame them. Now they’re defending themselves with guns.

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Louis Michael Seidman of Georgetown University, writing in an New York Times op-ed says, “let’s give up on the constitution.” It’s an old document that prevents government from doing business by interposing silly rules.

Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate? …

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse.

Trashing the Constitution is survivable, Seidman argues. FDR “professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation. In 1954, when the court decided Brown v. Board of Education, Justice Robert H. Jackson said he was voting for it as a moral and political necessity although he thought it had no basis in the Constitution. The list goes on and on.”

America survived FDR didn’t it? Well it also survived World War 2. Still he says, some conventions should be respected in the vague sort of way that we ‘respect’ our elders and keep holy the Sabbath day.  “This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.”

Above all don’t worry. You can live without your imagined freedoms.

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Paul Bracken in his book, The Second Nuclear Age, argues that rather than tending to a Nuclear Zero, the world has in fact already gone straight from the First to the Second Nuclear Age in the years since the Fall of the Wall. Bracken, a professor at Yale School of Management who spent years in the classic think Cold War think tank notes that not only have the original nuclear powers (the US, Russia and the UK) kept their weapons, but so have the subsequent entrants (France, China and Israel).  Now with with India, Pakistan and North Korea new entrants and Iran and Saudi Arabia probably in the pipe the Second Nuclear age is fairly and truly begun.

One may not like it, but there it is.

But as when the bipolar nuclear world was still new in the 1940s,  there are as yet no established maps for navigating the new one.  And as the Cold War’s first years were so dangerous because policymakers had yet to figure out how to operate within a nuclearized context, so too are the coming decades likely to be fraught with peril.  We don’t know how the new nuclear world works yet.  The international system took 50 years to learn the rules of the old one the hard way — via the Berlin Crisis, Korea, Cuba and Vietnam — it will likely require the same type of hard knocks to figure out the new.

The strategic problems of the First Age were only addressed when the debate widened to include the public, where it drew the attention of the best minds of the day (Kissinger, Kahn, Schelling).  During the 1948 Berlin crisis the only strategies available were the ones left over from World War 2.  Then, just as now, nuclear weapons were attractive to policymakers because they were cheap.  Truman wanted to cash in on the Peace Dividend after VJ day and the only alternative to keeping 165 conventional divisions in Europe to hold back the Red Army was the Bomb. The problem was he had no guidelines on how to use it. Still he may be better off than we are now, when many think we don’t need to think about those issues.

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“Why Is It That So Many Good Causes Get Hijacked By Bad People?” asked R.F. Wilson. “Take human rights. I’ve got nothing against human rights. In fact, I’m all for them. But why is it that so many disgusting people hijack the good cause of promoting and safeguarding human rights and start milking it for all it’s worth? And eventually it results in lowlifes and scumbags jumping on the human rights bandwagon and pushing out decent people whose liberties and freedoms are trampled and abused. It’s just ain’t right.”

The danger of corruption doesn’t stop with the human rights crowd. The anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-pollution, anti-racism and even animal welfare organizations are all vulnerable. They sometimes mutate into horrible parodies of their original intent. Why does it happen?

That’s easy. It is because, as Willie Sutton once said, that is where the money is. And money attracts snake oil salesmen. Nowhere was that more dramatically illustrated than the recent American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals agreement to pay the Ringling Brothers $9.3 million to settle a fraudulent lawsuit they lodged against the circus using a paid witness. That’s not the half of it. It’s only the tip of a RICO case brought against the animal rights advocates and its lawyers.

The settlement covers only Feld Entertainment’s claims against ASPCA for attorneys’ fees and damages in the initial Endangered Species Act (ESA) case filed in 2000 by the animal rights activists and the resultant racketeering (RICO) case brought by Feld Entertainment in 2007. Discovery in the initial lawsuit uncovered over $190,000 that these animal activist groups and their lawyers paid to Tom Rider who lived off of the money while serving as the “injured plaintiff” in the lawsuit against the circus.

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Lord Mandelson, a pro-EU British politician, warned the European project could unravel if the poverty caused by the economic crisis spreads throughout the zone. “Now this goes to the heart of the EU’s political legitimacy because whether you are from an austerity member state or a bailout country, you are likely to be dissatisfied for a long time to come with the economic state of Europe and the price you are paying for Europe’s indebtedness and its relative failure to generate the wealth it needs to pay for its high standard of living.”

What unites the disparate classes and nationalities of the continent is money. The deal was ‘sign on to the EU and win a prize’.  But the prizes have been running short lately. That means the class struggle is back. And this time the divide can no longer be portrayed as exclusively running between the capitalists and the workers. Super-sized bureaucracies have created a new division: between the the guys who spend the budget and the great unwashed whose taxes pay the budget.

The new divide is contaminating everything even in America. After the massacre of school children in Connecticut was being used to illustrate the dangers of the Second Amendment, a curious thing happened. It began to morph, unbidden, into a class struggle issue.

It may have started when Piers Morgan mocked a guest on his talk show as “an unbelievably stupid man” for disagreeing with him on the subject of gun control.  However, his British accent worked its subliminally upper-class magic in American minds. Through this filter, Morgan didn’t come across as just another dude disagreeing on the subject of the Second Amendment on CNN but the high and mighty Lord Banastre Tarleton riding roughshod over some homesteaders in the New World. The thing about the Voice of Command is that you have to know when to use it. Morgan didn’t.

It led to a petition for his deportation which evoked a hilarious counterpetition from Britain saying that after spending so much effort getting rid of him they didn’t want him back.  Then David Gregory pulled his now infamous high capacity magazine stunt on national TV. He brandished a 30-round capacity magazine on his show to illustrate how illegal it was — after the DC cops told his producers he couldn’t do it. When asked how the cops could tolerate a direct challenge the sheepish answer was: it’s David Gregory and besides, he wasn’t actually going to shoot anybody.  He succeeded in reminding everyone, as Mark Steyn put it that “laws are for little people — and not for David Gregory”.

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Nathan Harden writing in the American Interest argues that higher education as we know it is doomed. The short video clip below may provide an inkling why. “I want an education,” implores this lady student at a Chicago school in what passes for a class. Evidently, she doesn’t think she is getting it. Why is that?

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

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When H. Norman Schwarzkopf drove Saddam Hussein’s force out of Kuwait, he not only won the Mother of All Battles, he also recaptured the standard from Giap’s trophy room. From 1975 until that February, 1991 the accepted narrative forged by the press in Vietnam was that America was bound to lose any clash of arms in the Third World. Schwarzkopf’s performance shattered that narrative so thoroughly that some regarded its effects as dangerously destabilizing.

And they all came home

He died today at 78.

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Let’s see what pundits see in their 2013 Seeing-Stones.

Nouriel Roubini ‏@Nouriel tweets a really upbeat message.  “Main 2013 global tails risks: US cliff, EZ crisis, China hard landing, war between Israel & Iran, Asia islands disputes causing conflict”.

What did he miss? Well Syria for one. But the New York Times has that covered.  “U.N. Seeks New Aid for Syria Crisis and Predicts 1 Million Refugees by Mid-2013″.

He missed Africa for another. “France sees military intervention in Mali in six months.” But they don’t see France doing it.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian on Monday expected a possible military intervention to quash Islamist terrorists in northern Mali during the first six months of 2013…. Le Drian reiterated Paris’ refusal to send French combat forces to the conflict-torn African country but it will provide technical support to African troops to retake northern Malian region from Islamist insurgents.

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The dinosaurs are on short rations. But even the little mammals  are finding it hard to get enough food. This is the landscape of 2013 and while nobody knows yet how it will turn out the prospects are not encouraging.

First let’s examine the condition of the giant saurians. Real Clear Markets tracks Europe’s continued economic decline. The days when it expected to conquer the world from Brussels are over. “One has to hope that the markets are right in betting that Mrs. Merkel will be able to hold Europe together in 2013. However, policymakers in the United States would be ill-advised to base their policies on the assumption that all is going to be well in Europe next year. Since all the signs are pointing to a deepening economic recession and a further deterioration in Europe’s political environment that could lead to another intensification of the Euro crisis.”

In other words Europe may survive, but don’t bet on it. Nor on the flashy and glitzy world of the media which is already writing its own obituary. Everything is failing, according to Matt Haughey. Not only are the papers going bust, so are the blogs, Twitter and Facebook. “The disruptors are getting disrupted” he exults.

What I’m noticing now is the feeling that the disruptors are beginning to be disrupted themselves. Many of the companies labeled Web 2.0 in the mid-2000s are either no longer with us (Friendster, Bloglines, etc.) or were long ago sold off and subsumed into larger companies. The rise of blogs in the early 2000s seems to be following an opposite trajectory in the early 2010s. Social media/software is taking over not just blogging, but search, and events, and existing location-based startups. Even the giants of the social space aren’t showing signs of blockbuster success beyond their registered user numbers (Facebook is struggling with revenue and its stock price, Twitter is slapping ads on everything and hoping for the best).

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