(Source: http://www.banned-books.com/bbauth.html)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
by Mark Twain
The word "nigger," which appears many times in the novel, was the cause for the removal of this classic from an eighth-grade reading list. In the 1950s, the NAACP objected to the book's perceived racist tone. In 1984, the book was removed from a public high school reading list in Waukegan, Illinois, because a black alderman found
the book's language offensive.
American Heritage Dictionary (1969)
In 1978, an Eldon, Missouri library banned the dictionary because it contained 39 "objectionable" words. And, in 1987, the Anchorage School Board banned the dictionary for similar reasons, i.e., having slang definitions for words such as "bed," "knocker," and "balls."
Andersonville (1955)
by MacKinlay Kantor
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1956, this story of a Confederate prison camp during the Civil War, was viciously attacked throughout the U.S. It was banned in Amarillo,
TX.
Annie on My Mind
The Olathe, Kansas school system ordered all copies of this book removed from high school library shelves. It is a story of two women who meet and fall in love and struggle with declaring their homosexuality to family and friends.
As I Lay Dying (1932)
by William Faulkner
In 1986, Graves County, Kentucky, the school board banned this book about a poor white family in the midst of crisis, from its high school English reading list because of 7 passages which made reference to God or abortion and used curse words such as "bastard," "goddam," and "son of a bitch." None of the board members had actually read the book.
Atkol Video Catalog
WIRED magazine (Feb. 1996) reported that AOL censored Atkol Video's catalog from its virtual shopping mall for carrying gay titles. AOL gave no censoring criteria when it "cut some titles and retained others."
Banned From Public Radio: Humor, Commentary and Smart Remarks Your Government DOESN'T
Want You To Hear (1991)
by Michael Graham
The title of this first book is literally true: he was banned from the South Carolina Educational Radio Network courtesy of those geniuses in our General Assembly for commentary which poked fun at their 1991 Ethics Act. Graham also has the distinction of being the only person officially fired from his job as communications director for SC Secretary of State Jim Miles by an act of those same courageous geniuses.
The Book Your Church Doesn't Want You To Read (1995)
by Tim C. Leedom, Editor
The book traces astrological and mythical origins of modern day western religions. A Barnes & Noble bookstore in San Diego refused to stock this book because of its content.
Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (1971)
by Mike Royko
A Ridgefield, CT school board in 1972 banned this book from the high school reading list, claiming it "dowgrades police departments."
Catch 22
by Joseph Heller
This book was banned and/or challenged more than once. It was banned in Srongsville, Ohio in 1972 and that decision was overturned in 1976. It was also challenged in Dallas, Texas (1974) and again in Snoqualmie, Washington (1979).
Catcher in the Rye (1951)
by J. D. Salinger
This is a perennial favorite of censors and has been banned in the U.S. and Australia. In 1960, a Tulsa, OK teacher was fired for putting the book on the 11th grade reading list. The teacher was reinstated, but the book was permanently removed from teaching programs. A Minnesota high school administration was attacked for allowing the book in the school library.
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974)
by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks
The CIA obtained a court injunction against this book's publication stating the author, a former CIA employee, violated his contract which states that he cannot write about the CIA without the agency's approval. First amendment activists opposed this ruling, "raising the question of whether a citizen can sign away his First Amendment rights." After prolonged litigation, the CIA succeeded in having 168 passages deleted.
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Beauty's Punishment
Beauty's Release
by Anne Rice (under the pseudonym, A.N. Roquelaure, written in the early 1980s)
April 28, 1996, the Columbus, Ohio Dispatch reported that following a complaint from a patron in the Columbus Metropolitan Library removed the trilogy of Rice's Sleeping Beauty books and their audio tapes after determining the books were pornographic. These same books were also removed from the Lake Lanier Regional Library system in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in 1992.
Daddy's Roommate
by Michael Willhoite
A favorite of censors, this children's book about gay parenting was the subject of a challenge in the public library. In an all-too-familiar request, a parent complained about references to homosexuality in material for children. The library board voted to uphold basic library principles by retaining the book on its appropriate shelf in the children's section.
Deadly Deceits (My 25 Years in the CIA) (1983)
by Ralph McGheehee
The CIA delayed the publication of this book for three years, objecting to 397 passages, even though much of what the author wrote about was already public knowledge.
Decamerone
by Giovanni Boccacio (1313-1375)
In Cincinnati, an "expurgated" version of Boccacio's Decamerone is confiscated in 1922. In 1926, there is an import ban of the book by the Treasury Department. In 1927, U.S. Customs removes parts of text from the "Ashendene edition" and ships the mutilated copy back to me British publisher in London. In 1932, import ban lifted in Minnesota. In 1934, the New England Watch and Ward Society still bans the book. In 1954, it is still on the black lis tof the "National Organization of Decent Literature."
Dictionary of American Slang
by T.Y. Crowell, publisher
Max Rafferty, California superintendent of public instruction in 1963, and his supporters found over 150 "dirty" passages in the book.
Don't Call Me Brother
by Austin Miles
In 1992, former Christian fundamentalist minister, Austin Miles, was sued; charges were that his book, Don't Call Me Brother, was "...a vitriolic attack upon organized Christianity." The $4 million lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court also screamed "libel" and "slander." After a lengthy and costly process, the court ruled that the book was not defamatory.
1-The Drowning of Stephan Jones
by Bette Greene
2-The Education of Harriet Hatfield
by May Sarton
3-Maurice
by E. M. Forster
All three of these books, which treat homosexuality in various ways, were removed from a regional high school. The novels' purchase was financed by a grant that teacher Penny Culliton received and was approved by the school superintendent and principal. However, shortly after a local newspaper reported that Culliton was involved with a lesbian and gay support group for young people, the books were found unsuitable and were banned. Maurice and The Education of Harriet Hatfield were seized from the students while they were reading the novels in class. Personal attacks on the teacher and demands for her dismissal have been so vehement that her job is now in jeopardy.
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
This book is about censorship and those who ban books for fear of creating too much individualism and independent thought. In late 1998, this book was removed from the required reading list of the West Marion High School in Foxworth, Mississippi. A parent complained of the use of the words "God damn" in the book. Subsequently, the superintendent instructed the the teacher to remove the book from the required reading list.
Families
by Meredith Tax
A young children's book that creatively describes different family structures, was finally removed by the Fairfax County school board. Meredith Tax's beloved book had been under attack for a long time, during which many individuals and organizations rose to its defense. What's more, Families was praised by the board's own review committees.
Flowers in the Attic
by V.C. Andrews
The county's board of education decided to remove all school curriculum materials and library books containing any and all "profanity" and "pornography," both concepts ill-defined. The tremendous public outcry made the board backtrack and resolve to review its selection policy. However, after this conciliatory decision, and while the review process still inches along, most of the books in Andrews's popular series Flowers in the Attic were removed from the high-school library for "pornographic" content.
Forever
by Judy Blume
Forever censored, this wildly popular teen novel was attacked once again for its frank treatment of adolescent sexuality and was removed from an eighth-grade optional reading list. In Rib Lake, Wisconsin, a school district principal had the book removed from the library after confiscating a copy from a student in the lunchroom, finding "graphic descriptions of sex acts."
Freedom and Order
by Henry Steele Commager
The U.S. Information Agency had this book banned from its overseas libraries because of its condemnation of American policies in Vietnam.
From Here to Eternity
by James Jones
This book was censored in 1951in Holyoke, Springfield, Massachusetts and in 1953 in Jersey City, New Jersey; blacklisted by National Organization of Decent Literature in 1954.
The Glass Teat (1970)
by Harlan Ellison
The Glass Teat is a collection of essays which appeared as columns in the Los Angeles Free Press and Rolling Stone during the 1960s. They were critical essay on the subject of television broadcasting; and essays critical of the president and vice-president. The publisher, Ace Pub. Corp. consequently recalled his book and had it removed from bookstores. Years later it was later re-released.
Grapes of Wrath (1939)
by John Steinbeck
Several months after the book's publication, a St. Louis, MO library ordered 3 copies to be burned for the vulgar words used by its characters. It was also banned in Kansas City and in Oklahoma.
Howl
by Allen Ginsberg
Officials of the Cold War era saw only willful destruction of American values in a poet's grief over suffocating 1950s convention.
The Joy of Sex (1972), More Joy of Sex (1975)
by Alex Comfort
Lexington police in 1978 confiscated these sex instruction books in accordance with a new county ordinance prohibiting the display of sexually-oriented publications in places frequented by minors.
The Last Mission (1979)
by Harry Mazer
Against the recommendation of school librarians, teachers, and administrators, the board of the Carroll Middle School removed this novel from the library for its scattered "bad words." The novel, which was named 1979's New York Times Best Book of the Year, is based on the author's experiences in the Air Force during World War II. Mazer said, "It's like a slap in the face of veterans. The book speaks about the sacrifices of the soldiers who fought in that war." Local residents and parents petitioned and protested as well. In a final decision, the board voted 6-1 to return the book.
The Last of the Wine
by Mary Renault
Fifth-century B.C. Athens is the setting of the historical novel that was challenged in a high school for references to homosexuality. Not only did the complainants and their supporters revile the book, which enlivened an honors history class, but they also attempted to humiliate the teacher by calling him a "sexual predator" and accusing him of trying to "recruit" children to homosexuality. The school board
supported the teacher and the novel.
Literature in Society
In an improbable complaint about this textbook, two eminent African-American authors were the main targets of censorship. An excerpt from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was deemed offensive for its use of the word "nigger," and the sexual slang in Nikki Giovanni's poetry was found unacceptable. School officials also found intolerable a reference to homosexuality elsewhere in the book and seized the ever-so-dangerous texts (that include Wordsworth and other immoralists) while 12th-grade students were reading them.
Lolita (1955)
by Vladimir Nabokov
Although it was published in Paris, it was soon (1956) to be banned there for being obscene. An Argentinian court banned the book in 1959 and again in 1962 ruling that the book "reflected moral disintegration and reviled humanity." In 1960, the New Zealand Supreme Court also banned the book. It was later freely published in France, England, and the U.S.
Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
The Toronto School Board banned this classic from all its schools, claiming it was racist for use of the word "niggers." Even Golding's Nobel Prize in literature did not protect this author's book.
Lysistrata
by Aristophanes
U.S. import ban on Lysistrata was lifted in 1930.This Greek tragedy was written somewhere around 400 B.C.
Nothing New on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
Banned in Chicago and Boston, in Austria, and Czechoslovakia in 1929; in Germany in 1930; and in Italy in 1933. There was a public burning in Germany in 1933.
Pentagon Papers (1971)
Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, this 3,000 page history of U.S. involvement in Indochina, was banned from publication by court order. The NY Times was printing portions of it when the order came down. Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the decision and Bantam proceeded to publish a paperback edition.
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
by Philip Roth
Several libraries and librarians throughout the U.S. were harassed and threatened for carrying this book on their shelves.
Search for Truth in History
by David Irving
This video tape has already been banned in three countries.
Satanic Verses
by Salman Rushdie
The Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran put a price on the head of this author for writing this book which allegedly is critical of the Islam religion. Rushdie, as a result, went into hiding for an indefinite period of time, fearing for his life.
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
by William Steig
In 1977, the Illinois Police Association urged librarians to remove the book, which portrays its characters as animals, and presents the police as pigs. The American Library Association reported similar complaints in 11 other states.
The Valachi Papers (1968)
by Peter Maas
Asked by the Justice Dept. to edit the papers of Mafia leader Joseph Valachi, Maas was later sued by the Justice Dept. for trying to publish the memoirs. The reason they said was that the book would hamper law enforcement. The suit was settled and Putname published the book in 1968.
Things Your Father Never Taught You
by Robert Masullo
Production of this lighthearted look at male grooming was delayed by a born-again Christian art director who objected to a description of Japanese furniture arranging as "occultist."
Waco: The Davidian Massacre
by Carol Moore
This controversial book challenges the government's version of events at Waco. A public library refused to carry the book stating the reason was that the book was privately published.
Who Built America?
Apple Computer has distributed Who Built America?, an acclaimed history series created for CD-ROM, as part of a free software package for schools buying its computers. When it received protests about material relating to the history of birth control, abortion, and homosexuality, Apple asked Voyager to delete the offending material. Voyager refused, and Apple suspended distribution. Following many protest letters, Apple reversed its decision and resumed distribution.
Worlds In Collison
by Immanuel Velikovsky
In the 1950s, the scientific community tried to ban this controversial version of the origins of our solar system because it didn't comport with the "official" version of events. The publisher, MacMillan, was forced to give up publication of the book even though it was on the New York Bestsellers list at the time. If your are interested in this Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision and The Saturn Myth, see David Talbot's video documentary, Remembering the End of the World.
Women on Top
by Nancy Friday
Would-be censors got their way in their demands to remove this book from the Chestatee Public Library in Gainesville ( Hall County ), Georgia. Before a final vote was taken by the library board on the fate of Women on Top, the book was borrowed and "accidentally" destroyed. The board voted not to replace it.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
U.S. Intervention in Venezuela and in Latin America
October 11th 2006, by Noam Chomsky
(source: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/print/2001)
A public event on the occasion of the 30th Anniversary of the bombing of Cubana airliner, flight 455, which cost the lives of 73 passengers, was held on October 6th, 2006, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Boston. Participating in this event were political activist and analyst Noam Chomsky, Cuban specialist and French scholar Salim Lamrani and the President of the National Lawyer’s Guild, Michael Avery, for a discussion of US foreign policy towards Cuba and Latin America, and the cases of Luis Posada Carriles and the Cuban Five.
The following is Noam Chomsky’s response to a question from the audience:
Audience Member: With the recent integration and cooperation between Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, obviously the US is paying more attention to these countries. What in your opinion could be the agenda of secret agents currently in action in Venezuela? and could you please analyze the possibility of military intervention in Venezuela and Bolivia on the part of the US government.
Noam Chomsky: I think your point is well taken. We know that the US did support a military coup, which briefly overthrew President Chavez and the US had to back down, when he was restored quickly and also had to back down in the face of a very angry reaction in Latin American. In almost all of Latin America, there was a very angry reaction. They take democracy there more seriously then we do here.
Right after trying to overthrow the government by force, the US immediately turned to subversion, supporting anti-Chavez groups. That’s described in the press, the way it’s described is, the US is supporting pro-democracy groups, which are opposed to President Chavez.
Notice it’s true by definition that if you oppose the president, you are pro-democracy. It’s completely irrelevant that according to the best polls (Latin America has very good polling agencies which take regular polls on these issues around the continent). Support for democracy has been declining—not for democracy but for the democratic governments—has been declining through Latin America, for a pretty good reason, the governments have been associated with neo-liberal programs which undermine democracy—IMF, treasury department programs—so your support for the governments are declining. There are exceptions, and the major exception by far is Venezuela.
Since 1998, when Chavez was elected, support for the elected government as be rising very fast, its now by far the highest in Latin America. He has won several elections that have been recognized to be free and fair, he has won numerous referendums, but he is a dictator, a tin-pot dictator, which is proven by the fact that our dear leader said so, and since we are voluntary North Koreans, when the dear leader says it, it’s true. So therefore, he’s a dictator, and if you carry out subversion to overthrow him, that’s pro-democracy by definition. You have to look hard to find an exception to this, or even a comment on it, just like the other examples I discussed.
We might ask ourselves how we would react if Iran, say, had just supported a military coup that overthrew the government in the United States and when they have to back off from that, immediately turned to supporting pro-democracy groups in the United States that are opposed to the government. Would we give them ice-cream and candy?
Well in dictatorial Venezuela, they let them keep functioning. In fact, even let the newspapers in support of the coup keep functioning. I could go on with this, but what’s likely to happen?
Well, the US has had two major weapons for controlling Latin America for a long time. One of them is economic controls, the other is military force. They have both been used continually. Both of them are weakening and it’s a very serious problem for U.S. planners.
The Economic, for the first time in its history since the Spanish colonization, Latin America is beginning to get its act together. It’s moving towards some degree of independence, even some degree of integration. The Latin American countries have been very separate from one another through their histories, they have a huge gap between the very rich and the huge massive poor, so when we are talking about the countries, we are talking about the rich elites. The rich elites have been oriented towards Europe and North America, not their own citizens, not each other. So that Capital flight goes to Zurich, or London, or New York, the second home is in the Riviera, the children study in Cambridge or something like that. That’s the way it’s been, with very little interaction, and it’s changing.
First of all there are major popular movements, like in Bolivia. They had a democratic election of the kind we can’t even dream of. I mean if there was any honest newspaper coverage in this country we would be ashamed at the comparison between their election and ours. I won’t go through it, but with a little thought you can quickly figure it out, because there is mass popular participation, and the people know what they are voting for, and they pick somebody from their own ranks and their major issues and so on. It’s unimaginable here where elections are about the level of marketing toothpaste on television, literally.
There are mass popular movements all over and they have begun to integrate to some extent for the first time.
The military weapon has been weakened. The last effort of the US had to back off very quickly, in 2002 in Venezuela. The kinds of governments the US is now supporting—forced to support—are the kinds it would have been trying to overthrow not very long ago, because of this shift.
The economic weapon is weakening enormously. They are throwing out the IMF. The IMF means the US Treasury Department. Argentina, it was the poster boy of the IMF, you know, following all the rules and so on. It went in to a hideous economic crash. They managed to get out of it, but only by radically violating IMF rules, and they are now, as the President put it, “ridding themselves of the IMF” and paying off their debt with the help of Venezuela. Venezuela bought up a lot of their debt. The same is happening in Brazil. The same is going to happen in Bolivia.
In general, the economic measures are weakening, the military measures are no longer what they were. The US is deeply concerned about it, undoubtedly. We shouldn’t think that the US has abandoned the military effort, on the contrary, the number of US personnel—military personnel—in Latin America is probably as high as its ever been. The number of the Latin American officers being trained by the US is going up very sharply. By now, for the first time (it never happened during the cold war) the US military aid is higher than the sum of economic and social aid from key federal agencies- that’s a shift. There are more air bases all over the place.
Keep your eyes on Ecuador, there’s an election coming up in about a week, the likely winner, [Rafael] Correa is an interesting person, he was recently asked what he would do with the big Manta US airbase in Ecuador and his answer was, well he’d allow it to stay if the United States agreed to have an Ecuadorian airbase in Miami.
But these are the things that are going on. There’s a call for an Indian Nation for the first time. The indigenous—in some states like Bolivia—majority is actually entering the political arena for the first time in 500 years, electing their own candidates. These are major changes, but the US is certainly not giving up on it.
The Military training has been shifted. Its official focus now is on what’s called radical populism and street gangs. Well, you know what radical populism means, like the Priests organizing peasants or anyone who gets out of line. So yeah, it’s serious. What will they do?
Governments have what are called security interests; they have to protect the national security. If any of you have ever spent any time reading declassified documents, you know what that the means. I’ve spent a lot of time reading them and it’s true, there is defense of the government against its enemy, that prime enemy. Its prime enemy is the domestic population. That’s true of every government I know. So if you read the declassified documents, you find that most of them are protecting the government from its own population. Not much has to do with anything you might call security interests, in another sense, and that’s true right now. So we don’t know what they are planning because we have to be protected from knowing what the government is planning. So we have to speculate.
If you want my speculation, based on no information except what I would be doing if I was sitting in the Pentagon planning office and told to figure out a way to overthrow the governments of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Iran, in fact. The idea that immediately comes to mind, so I assume they are working on it, is to support secessionist movements, which is conceivable if you look at the geography and the places where the oil is and so on.
In Venezuela, the oil is in Zulia province, which is where the opposition candidate is coming from, right on the boarder of Colombia (one of the only states [in Latin America] where the US has a firm military presence). It’s a rich province, pretty anti-Chavez, and it happens to be where most of the oil is, and in fact there is rumor of a Zulia independence movement, which, if they can carry it off, the US could then intervene to protect against the dictator. That’s Venezuela.
In Bolivia, the major gas resources are in the low-lands, the eastern low-lands, which is mostly European, not indigenous, opposed to the government, rich area, near Paraguay (one of the other countries where the US has military bases), so you can imagine the same project going on – also secessionist movements.
In Iran, which is the big one, if you look at it, the oil of the region (that’s where most of the hydrocarbons in the world are) they are right around the gulf, the Shiite sections of Iraq, the Shiite sections of Saudi Arabia and an Arab—not Persian—region of Iran, Khuzestan, right near the Gulf, it happens to be Arab. There is talk floating around Europe (you know it’s probably planted by the CIA) of an Ahwazi Liberation Movement for this region. A feasible, I don’t know if it’s feasible or not, but I think the kind of thought that would be occurring to the Pentagon planners is to sponsor a liberation movement, so-called, in the area near the Gulf then move in to defend it. They’ve got 150,000 troops in Iraq; presumably, you might try that, and then bomb the rest of the country back to the Stone Age. It’s conceivable, I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if those are the kinds of plans that are being toyed with.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
The Booming Venezuelan Economy, and how it affects Monte Carmelo
Thursday, March 20, 2008
source: http://www.venezuelanotes.blogspot.com/
A local mason is putting the finishing touches on a wall next door, where our neighbors are adding a large room to their house.The major media in the United States and Venezuela are overflowing with misinformation about Venezuela and its social and economic indicators, so it was relief to see a reliable appraisal of Venezuela’s economic growth appear recently: “The Venezuelan Economy in the Chávez Years,” by Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval at CEPR, the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, February 2008. ( For those of you who are not familiar with CEPR, you should visit their website at http://www.cepr.org/, since they are primarily engaged in producing reliable information, analysis, and prognostication concerning the U.S. economy – they predicted the dangers of the stock market bubble in the late 1990s, and the housing bubble of the 2000s, when most economists were ignoring the problems because they were giddy with the joys of short-term profit-taking; likewise, they are one of the best, non-hysterical guides to understanding the current state of the U.S. Social Security system.)
In their report, which reviews solid statistics gathered through 2007, they note that Venezuela’s economy has been one of the fastest growing in Latin America and the world over the past five years: “since the first quarter of 2003, Venezuela's real (after adjusting for inflation) GDP has grown by 87.3 percent.”
“…employment in the formal sector has increased to 6.17 million (2007 first half), from 4.40 million in the first half of 1998 and 4.53 million in the first half of 2003. As a percentage of the labor force, formal employment has increased significantly since 1998, from 45.4 to 50.6 percent (2007).”
The figures above indicate, according to my handy calculator, that total employment, including both the formal and informal sectors, was 12.19 million in the first half of 2007, versus 9.69 million in 1998. This is an increase of 26% in nine years, a remarkable achievement for any country.
Such numbers are enough to drive Bush, Cheney, and their gang wild with envy, and makes them determined to destroy Venezuela’s experiment in developing “21st century socialism.” Too bad they only read opposition newspapers and bogus CIA and State Department reports instead of real information from CEPR, where they could find out that one major effect of Chavez’s “dangerous,” “destabilizing,” and “dictatorial” tendencies (the U.S. government’s words) has been to bolster the private sector.
The United States, given its paltry economic growth over the past eight years and its current economic downturn, should be coming to Venezuela for lessons in how to create jobs. Republicans and Democrats alike could re-learn the strategies that were once implemented in the United States through Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal: government policies that redistribute income, democratize and support public education, and invest in broad systems of public works will also stimulate the private sector. Most job growth in Venezuela has taken place in the private, not the public sector. In fact, the private sector is growing faster than the public sector. “Private employment was a larger percentage of the labor force (75.0 percent) in the first half of 2007 as compared to the first half of 1999 (71.6 percent).”
Most U.S. Republicans, of course, would be adverse to the kind of income growth that has taken place. The bottom 80% of the population has seen its incomes increase by 60% to 100% over the past nine years (figures adjusted for inflation – see my previous November article on incomes and social classes). Middle-class income growth has been positive, but not as great as among the lower classes, and upper-class incomes have risen at the most modest rate. A recent article in the opposition newspaper, El Universal of Caracas, has a table of economic analysis indicating that the poorest sector of the population, level E, which represents almost half of the population, enjoyed income growth at more than twice the rate of the highest level AB, which amounts to 2% or less of the population.
Economic activity in the village of Monte Carmelo: a mini-boom in construction
One sure sign that economic growth is benefiting poor and working class people is the amount of construction activity that can be found all around the country. People in the lower-income barrios of the big city of Barquisimeto report that they have never seen so much activity undertaken by homeowners: they are replacing old make-shift construction of tin and boards with concrete and steel, adding on additional rooms or second stories, and re-plastering and repainting entire houses inside and out.
The campesinos of Monte Carmelo are also busy with building projects because they now have a little extra money to pay for materials, and because it’s summertime here. During the three dry months – January, February, and March, many campesinos don’t have enough water to cultivate vegetables for the market, so they take advantage of the dry weather and some free time to fix up their property in various ways. Some are also taking advantage of government loans and credits that are designed to help low-income homeowners and farmers.
The three bodegas (little stores) in town are doing a brisk business. One bodega is located in the front room of a family’s house, and they just decided to lift the roof and create a small, bamboo-walled garret for a couple of teenagers (it’s comfortable during the cool evening and nighttime hours, but baking hot between 10 and 3 in the daytime when the summer sun is blazing.)
Local residents eat pork, but campesinos here are not used to raising pigs (they do raise chickens and cows for meat) because they can be dirty and smelly. However, a new program promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture is demonstrating that it is possible to raise pigs in small numbers without damaging the environment or offending your neighbors. In fact, if the pigs are incorporated into a small-scale system that includes organic gardening, overall production of healthy foods can be increased while also enhancing the quality of the local environment.
Diluvin and family just received a government loan that has allowed his family to initiate such a project on their four or five acres of land. In addition to the water tank above, they are constructing a small concrete residence for the pigs and concrete bins where compost, pig manure, and worms (vermiculture) will be combined to produce very high quality organic soil and liquid fertilizers. The new organic material will be used to cultivate an acre of vegetables and fruits while also enriching the soil of two more acres which are already planted with mature and fledgling coffee trees. And the pigs, besides producing valuable manure, will be reproducing little piglets which will be sold to neighbors who can fatten them up for ham, pork roasts, and bacon.
Other kinds of economic activity in the state of Lara
(you will have to wait a couple of days for the photos in this section)
The little village of Monte Carmelo, population 800, has three shops, all little bodegas that sell food and household items. They are doing well.
Ten minutes away in the town of Sanare, population 25,000, there are hundreds of stores and shops, but no supermarkets or malls, so it’s much like a U.S. town circa 1955. Business is good.
The big city of Barquisimeto, with a million inhabitants, has all sorts of shopping centers that are booming: supermarkets, hypermarkets (similar to the big WalMarts in the U.S., only fancier), fast food outlets, big discount warehouse stores, and car dealers – consequently shoppers can buy most anything that we can buy in the United States. There is a huge new, ultra-spiffy mall called Sambil, part of a chain that began in Caracas, but we thought the Metropolis, also quite new, was prettier.
Although we have been living continuously in Venezuela since September, we didn’t venture into a shopping mall until a few weeks ago when we accompanied our friend Ruben to his university classes in Barquisimeto. After an hour or two in these pseudo-environments, where we purchased nothing except some really awful Italian lunches, we happily escaped. But we can report that the middle and upper classes of Venezuela (about 20% of the population, mostly anti-Chavez and continuously complaining about their endangered economic status) are doing well financially and spending their money with wild abandon.
The Metropolis, snazzier than PA malls
A medium-size, well-maintained mall very similar to the kind we have at home in central Pennsylvania
New construction in a middle-class area near the Barquisimeto Zoo
Venezuelan shopping centers have several things in common with U.S. malls: for instance, terrible meals are served at the food courts. Also, most goods are sold in the same multinational brand-name stores -- Levis, Skecher, and Adidas – that you would see in the States or many other parts of the world. While the biggest malls are spiffier than those we have in south central Pennsylvania, they are also much more expensive – you have to pay twice as much here for brand-name shoes and brand-name burgers like Burger King. We did not sample the food at Burger King because there were long lines, and later that night we ate giant hamburguesas and Vikingos (super “Viking size” burgers) for one quarter the price at a small roadside stand along the main road from Barquisimeto to Sanare.
We went to the second shopping center shown above, which looked like any well-kept, medium-sized mall in a middle-class area of the U.S., because our teacher friend, Ruben, wanted to buy his wife a pair of shoes. The mall was busy, although you can’t see the crowds in the picture because everyone was standing around the corner in another corridor waiting to get into one of three shoe stores. The stores were having sales for El Dia de Amor (“Love Day” or Valentine’s Day on February 14) because it seems that a sure-fire way to a woman’s heart in Venezuela is through her feet. There were guards holding back the waves of would-be shoppers and limiting the number of people who could enter a store at any one time. Most customers were women accompanied by their husbands or boyfriends, but a few men, like Ruben, were feeling bold enough to pick out the perfect shoe all by themselves. We were in a hurry to get to a meeting, however, so Ruben decided he had to pass up the shoes in favor of a purse in an empty leather goods store down the corridor.
A Ruined Economy?
There are some faults with the Venezuelan economy, such as high inflation and occasional shortages of food in some stores, but most people are still earning much more (after adjusting for inflation) and eating much more than they did ten or twenty years ago. For this reason, although commentators in the opposition press and the U.S. are constantly claiming that Chavez is ruining the economy, these anti-Chavistas are unable to produce any reliable data to back up their arguments. Besides, they are constantly disproving their contention by engaging in their favorite recreation: going shopping.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S., working people are losing: in the last quarter of 2007 there was 5.6% annual rate of inflation in CPI, and only a 2.3% annual rate of increase in wages – that is, a decrease in income after it’s adjusted for inflation. CEPR recently reported that manufacturing employment in the United States hit a low point, for less than 10% of the working population now labors in factories, the lowest figure ever recorded since statistics were first gathered a century ago:
The loss of manufacturing jobs continues the downward trend of the last decade. Manufacturing employment has fallen by 3,880,000 jobs, or 22.0 percent, since January of 1998. It lost 279,000 jobs in the last year. The newly revised data show that employment in manufacturing fell below 10.0 percent of total employment in October. The loss of jobs has hit every sector of manufacturing, although the auto sector has been especially hard hit, losing 57,400 jobs or 5.6 percent of
employment in the last year. The loss of 18,300 jobs in textile mills and 20,300 in apparel (10.1 and 9.1 percent of employment, respectively) also stand out.
And his recent column in The New York Times, economist Paul Krugman indicated that worse news is yet to come, a product of the insane U.S. government policies that deregulated banking, mortgage, and financial transactions over the past three decades. The American taxpayers, he says, will be forced to bail out some of the biggest U.S. banks, the ones that wasted a large proportion of U.S. savings on bad loans:
“The result of all that bad lending was an unholy financial mess that will cause trillions of dollars in losses.”
The little village of Monte Carmelo, population 800, has three shops, all little bodegas that sell food and household items. They are doing well.
Ten minutes away in the town of Sanare, population 25,000, there are hundreds of stores and shops, but no supermarkets or malls, so it’s much like a U.S. town circa 1955. Business is good.
The big city of Barquisimeto, with a million inhabitants, has all sorts of shopping centers that are booming: supermarkets, hypermarkets (similar to the big WalMarts in the U.S., only fancier), fast food outlets, big discount warehouse stores, and car dealers – consequently shoppers can buy most anything that we can buy in the United States. There is a huge new, ultra-spiffy mall called Sambil, part of a chain that began in Caracas, but we thought the Metropolis, also quite new, was prettier.
Although we have been living continuously in Venezuela since September, we didn’t venture into a shopping mall until a few weeks ago when we accompanied our friend Ruben to his university classes in Barquisimeto. After an hour or two in these pseudo-environments, where we purchased nothing except some really awful Italian lunches, we happily escaped. But we can report that the middle and upper classes of Venezuela (about 20% of the population, mostly anti-Chavez and continuously complaining about their endangered economic status) are doing well financially and spending their money with wild abandon.
The Metropolis, snazzier than PA malls
A medium-size, well-maintained mall very similar to the kind we have at home in central Pennsylvania
New construction in a middle-class area near the Barquisimeto Zoo
Venezuelan shopping centers have several things in common with U.S. malls: for instance, terrible meals are served at the food courts. Also, most goods are sold in the same multinational brand-name stores -- Levis, Skecher, and Adidas – that you would see in the States or many other parts of the world. While the biggest malls are spiffier than those we have in south central Pennsylvania, they are also much more expensive – you have to pay twice as much here for brand-name shoes and brand-name burgers like Burger King. We did not sample the food at Burger King because there were long lines, and later that night we ate giant hamburguesas and Vikingos (super “Viking size” burgers) for one quarter the price at a small roadside stand along the main road from Barquisimeto to Sanare.
We went to the second shopping center shown above, which looked like any well-kept, medium-sized mall in a middle-class area of the U.S., because our teacher friend, Ruben, wanted to buy his wife a pair of shoes. The mall was busy, although you can’t see the crowds in the picture because everyone was standing around the corner in another corridor waiting to get into one of three shoe stores. The stores were having sales for El Dia de Amor (“Love Day” or Valentine’s Day on February 14) because it seems that a sure-fire way to a woman’s heart in Venezuela is through her feet. There were guards holding back the waves of would-be shoppers and limiting the number of people who could enter a store at any one time. Most customers were women accompanied by their husbands or boyfriends, but a few men, like Ruben, were feeling bold enough to pick out the perfect shoe all by themselves. We were in a hurry to get to a meeting, however, so Ruben decided he had to pass up the shoes in favor of a purse in an empty leather goods store down the corridor.
A Ruined Economy?
There are some faults with the Venezuelan economy, such as high inflation and occasional shortages of food in some stores, but most people are still earning much more (after adjusting for inflation) and eating much more than they did ten or twenty years ago. For this reason, although commentators in the opposition press and the U.S. are constantly claiming that Chavez is ruining the economy, these anti-Chavistas are unable to produce any reliable data to back up their arguments. Besides, they are constantly disproving their contention by engaging in their favorite recreation: going shopping.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S., working people are losing: in the last quarter of 2007 there was 5.6% annual rate of inflation in CPI, and only a 2.3% annual rate of increase in wages – that is, a decrease in income after it’s adjusted for inflation. CEPR recently reported that manufacturing employment in the United States hit a low point, for less than 10% of the working population now labors in factories, the lowest figure ever recorded since statistics were first gathered a century ago:
The loss of manufacturing jobs continues the downward trend of the last decade. Manufacturing employment has fallen by 3,880,000 jobs, or 22.0 percent, since January of 1998. It lost 279,000 jobs in the last year. The newly revised data show that employment in manufacturing fell below 10.0 percent of total employment in October. The loss of jobs has hit every sector of manufacturing, although the auto sector has been especially hard hit, losing 57,400 jobs or 5.6 percent of
employment in the last year. The loss of 18,300 jobs in textile mills and 20,300 in apparel (10.1 and 9.1 percent of employment, respectively) also stand out.
And his recent column in The New York Times, economist Paul Krugman indicated that worse news is yet to come, a product of the insane U.S. government policies that deregulated banking, mortgage, and financial transactions over the past three decades. The American taxpayers, he says, will be forced to bail out some of the biggest U.S. banks, the ones that wasted a large proportion of U.S. savings on bad loans:
“The result of all that bad lending was an unholy financial mess that will cause trillions of dollars in losses.”
Posted by Steve Brouwer
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