Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Right-wing 'libertarians' experimenting in Honduras

If someone thought that the right-wing 'libertarianism'* that is flourishing in some socio-political sectors in the USA has anything to do with liberty, i.e. freedom, he/she is very wrong.

We have known today (LINYM[es], The Economist) that the main "development" project of the US-sponsored dictatorship in Honduras is the construction of chartered cities (free trade zones by other name), business that are sponsored by two US-based companies: Future Cities (previously The Seasteading Institute) and Grupo Ciudades Libres (very hard to find online, except that they owe $150).

Honduras for sale

The owner of the first one is Patri Friedman, grandson of ultra-liberal (i.e. anti-regulation) economist Milton Friedman, with a mere two-year career in some backwater college, occasional programmer, poker player and investor of Pay-Pal. He and his mentor and associate Peter Thiel (founder of Pay-Pal) are clearly fascist as they argue in the far right magazine Cato Unbound, one rejecting democracy altogether and the other arguing that freedom (meaning Capitalism) and democracy are incompatible.

These are the kind of investors (plunderers) for whom the totalitarian regime of Porfirio Lobo is  selling off the country with the chartered cities scheme.

Like adventurer William Walker or his late follower Sam Zemurray "the Banana Man" (who controlled much of Central America and the Caribbean with his all-powerful United Fruit Company, now Chiquita), these filibuster-adventurers of today aim to plunder once again the country of Honduras... and use their alleged "libertarian" (neo-fascist) ideology as a pretext with a varnish of ideological legitimacy.

Honduras, which has taken in these two years of tyranny the dubious honor of being the most dangerous state on Earth (used to be Colombia), according to The Washington Post, selected last month, almost in total secrecy, the elders' committee (Junta de Notables) that will manage the chartered cities' scheme. None of them is Honduran, not even a token figure or a political commissary. Their names:  
  • George Akerlof (US citizen, economist) 
  • Ong Boon Hwee (Singaporean, managing director of Beyond Horizon Consulting Pte Ltd) 
  • Harry Strachan (US citizen, professor of INCAE business school)
  • Nancy Birdsall (US citizen, president of the imperialist think-tank Center for Global Development, has participated of other Empire-management activities in the past)
  • Paul Romer (godfather of the neocolonial project, US citizen and economist).

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* Do not confuse with the more traditional left-wing libertarianism o libertarian communism, best known as Anarchism. Because in the USA any kind of class-centered political organization was taboo for long, they ended up using an euphemism, liberal, for those people who had social-democratic or even strong socialist tendencies. Hence the word liberal was handicapped for normal use as in Europe, where it means center-right pro-market and rather anti-state or in favor of small state and Social-Darwinism.

So while in Europe neofascist groups use names like "free democrats" or "national liberals", in the USA they have hijacked another word that also has that feel of "freedom": libertarian(-ism). True that in the age of classic fascism, the discourse was much less anti-state and pro-market, and more nominally socialist (pro state intervention), but nobody believes that Hitler was a working class socialist just because his party was named Workers' National Socialist blah, blah. Similarly US libertarians are conspiring against Liberty in all aspects.

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