A Visit with Andres Velasco, Economist and (now) Politician

It is a truism often alluded to that voters should be wary of politicians bearing big ideas.  When in 2006 Chile’s Andres Velasco left a professorship at Harvard’s Kennedy School to become Finance Minister in the administration of Michelle Bachelet he came with many ideas, principally that the cause of political instability in Latin America was due to poor administration of economic booms.

As Finance Minister, then, of a major copper-producing country during a boom in the price of that commodity, his first act was to institute a mechanism inspired by that observation.  A projected mean price was to be set, with excess revenues to be directed to a sovereign wealth fund.  In essence, he intentionally cooled the economy and became, in effect, the wet blanket at the party.

As a result, Chile became the first country to emerge from that world-wide recession, and Velasco, for his foresight, became in his country an enormously popular figure. 

I met Velasco in March not long after he announced his campaign for the presidency.  (Shortly our meeting, Michelle Bachelet stepped down from her position at the UN, returned to Santiago, announced her own candidacy.  She has since won the primary for leadership of the Concertacion Coalition and is contesting the presidency in the general election in the fall.)

But in the spring, when all seemed possible, Velasco kindly answered a few questions...


LINVILLE: How would you do things different? 

VELASCO: Chile is in the midst of a political legitimacy crisis.  Citizens do not trust congress, the judiciary, or the political parties. 

Much of this is related to the presence of a political class that has been in power for over a generation. People here often say: “For thirty years now I read the paper in the morning, I turn on the TV, it’s the same people, the same faces, on the right, on the left, and in the parties.”

One of the big issues that caused many citizens to be indignant is the allocation of government jobs to party friends. On a television programme last year I said that a very senior senator from the coalition I belonged to had pressured me to hire a dozen of his party associates and he had threatened to boycott our legislative agenda if I didn’t give in.  Well I didn’t give in. Dozens have since told me they had the same experience.

LINVILLE: Hugo Chavez died recently.  How will this change the political landscape of Latin America?

VELASCO: Over the last decade or so, two kinds of left governments, and left political parties, have coexisted in Latin America: first, modern, liberal, outward-orientated left-leaning governments, in countries like Chile and Brazil; and then populist governments with a tendency towards demagoguery in Venezuela and elsewhere. I would have hoped in recent years for a more energetic leadership on the part of the modernizers, particularly in Brazil.  Brazil missed an opportunity. At this moment the need is greater than ever to consolidate a modern kind of social democracy for those in Latin America who want their countries to be open, outward-orientated and to use economic development to improve the lot of the people in those nations.

en France...

To France last week to conduct an interview for British Airways HIGH LIFE magazine.  Look for my profile of a major entertainment figure in the September issue.  We did have a moment waterside on the Cote d'Azur, but stayed up in the hills with friends.  A picture from the spot then, somewhere between Grasse and St. Paul, just below which the Tour de France came through.

Nadim Shehadi on Dictators, Revolution and Civil War

The conflict in Syria is difficult even for the experts to grasp.  When I'm looking for guidance I often turn to commentary by Nadim Shehadi, a Lebanese-born expert at Chatham House.

Michael Totten recently interviewed him for World Affairs, where the man from Shehadi outlined a Machiavellian tactic of the Assad regime for maintaining control of Syria.  Shehadi playfully offered his explanation in terms of advice for an aspiring dictator:

“What you should do,” he said, “is establish the idea that you're indispensable, that you’re irreplaceable, that beyond you is the abyss of sectarian civil war, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and the breakup of the state. Create problems that only you can resolve. That's the mind game Bashar al-Assad is playing with you. As long as you can't see beyond him, he's safe.”

This has indeed been the essential psychological tactic for the Assad family for the last 43 years.

In practice, internal control is maintained via power over networks and civil groups.  Here from an essay by Shehadi himself:

The regime’s network cuts across sect, class, ethnicity, region and ideology; even the clerical establishment is split along these lines. The regime even has its own Islamists, its own tame opposition and a history of manipulating jihadi and salafi groups and infiltrating them in Iraq and Lebanon. Throughout over forty years of its rule, the regime and its security establishment has penetrated every organization and community and nurtured within them a number of individuals who gained power through their association with the Baath party and the intelligence services. These become the power brokers and act as intermediaries with the state apparatus.

They can get people in and out of jail as well as get them jobs or get them fired, facilitate businesses or close them down, and they maintain control through an atmosphere of fear and mafia-style extortion and blackmail. Very often such individuals rise at the expense of the more traditional leadership and can hold the whole community to ransom.  

In the same essay, he poses another essential question: Is the conflict in Syria a revolution or a civil war?

Read the whole essay by Nadim Shehadi HERE.

Read Michael Totten's discussion with Shehadi HERE.

Claire Berlinski from Istanbul on the Taksim Protests and Erodgan's Prospects

For the past two years, one of the most astute commentators on matters in Turkey has been Claire Berlinksi, and that is all the more so in the last week during the Taksim protests.  Early this week, she wrote:
 

Erdoğan may believe that he can outlast the protesters, and he may be right, particularly if the protesters succumb to the temptations of violence and vandalism. So far, they have been reasonably constrained. But the Robocops are exhausted—photos are circulating of them falling asleep on the street—and if there is one thing a prime minister best known for “taming the military” can’t do, it is to call in the army to settle things down. If the protests keep escalating and the crackdown intensifies, it’s hard to see how this can end well. Best case: the protests will spook the prime minister and give him a much-needed dose of humility. Worst case: The protests will spook the prime minister and leave him even more paranoid and vengeful.

Read the whole thing HERE, 

... and follow her excellent twitter feed HERE.

The Other Side of London... a Very Green One

A friend visited London last week on the occasion of his book publication, and he commented that the city seemed very expensive.  Indeed.

Yes, well, my friend was staying at the Savoy Hotel... and then he moved to Brown's Hotel (which is celebrating its 175th anniversary and looks fab).  He was dining at restaurants and private clubs in Mayfair (Mark Birley's new establishment he liked).  Against my advice to him, someone else was choosing the wine at meals.  High tea alone was eighty dollars.  Black cabs he found were astronomical, especially when compared to New York's yellow taxis.  Wifi in the hotels were a good thirty dollars a day.  And the phone bill there!

All true.  But London is a vast city, as spread out as Los Angeles, and there are other neighborhoods than gold-plated Mayfair.  All of London's museums are free.  The underground is not particularly enjoyable but it is moderately efficient, and almost affordable.  Simcards for mobile phones with data are much cheaper than in America, and would have solved his expensive hotel comms problem.  Tea?  Consider PG Tips, with a biscuit.

More importantly you will not get to know London, or Britain, from Mayfair, which is essentially one vast concierge service for the international wealthy.  My NY friend's trip was too short, so understandably he ignored my advice, but after saying goodbye to him I went walking with a London friend.  She has lived in North London near Hampstead Heath, an enormous wild park, for years and knows the trails, and the trees... and the birds.  Since I'm better on the poems than the birds I pointed out that Keats composed "Ode to a Nightingale" nearby in the garden of a pub on the fringe of the Heath. 

Here, below, the view from the start of our walk, at the entrance to an adjacent park.  Andrew Marvell, the poet and one-time secretary to John Milton and Oliver Cromwell, lived in a house fifty yards to the right.

But this walk was not about houses, or even poets.

Below is a broad meadow on Hampstead Heath.

continued after the jump...