The Power and the Money

Reposted from a parallel universe

  A casino, a liquor store, a Bureau of Indian Affairs office, a corrupt judge, a BATF operation gone way wrong, and a bewildered FBI investigator trying to understand how the high price of Coca-Cola fits into the other strange goings-on in San Cristobal County ...

“In syncretistic religions, Scully, the attributes of one religious figure,” Mulder taps a case containing a weeping St. Catherine, “are given to another. In this case, John the Baptist’s connections with water: rivers, dunking ...”

“Baptism?”

“... made him the prime candidate to represent Chac, the Mayan water god.”

“I see. Like a mid-season replacement.”

Mulder glowers. “Now, traditionally, fermented corn mash was used as the sacrament in Mayan ritual, mixed with some magic herbs. A little binge, a little purge, and soon you're seeing visions.”

Scully looks around at the vaguely Catholic ornamentation encrusting the church. “I can’t imagine why.”

“The Spanish must have stopped the magic mushroom part of the ceremony, but you still had the folk belief that to receive the numinous, you had to expel the profane. Hence the burping contest we saw at Mass.”

“And that’s where the Coca-Cola comes in.”

“Yeah. What a racket. No wonder El Jefe owns the bottling plant.”  Mulder looks up at a garish mural, Salome being presented with the martyred St. John’s head. Not too many redheads in Spanish colonial religious art.

Observatorio Argentino 7: Argentina’s inexplicable pension nationalization

 I’ve been asked to discuss what's going on in Argentina.  So what’s going on in Argentina?  The short answer seems to be simple:  President Fernández just made a huge political mistake.  She’s nationalized the pension accounts funded by mandatory contributions in a most unwise fashion for a rather unnecessary reason, and probably sealed her political doom in the process. 

Hat tip:  Leticia Arroyo Abad. 

There are two ironies.  The bigger one I’ve already mentioned:  AFAICT, it’s bad politics, rather than just bad economics.  The smaller personal irony is that I am not a fan in general of “privatized” pension schemes in general (although they can, if designed right, increase savings) and I am certainly not a fan of the Argentine scheme in particular, yet I find myself thinking that ending the scheme the way the government wants to do it is simply insane.

And the weirdest thing is that it seems politically insane.  Weren’t the Kirchners supposed to be excellent politicos? 

As often, though, it gets a little complicated.  And so, more below the fold.

A ditch not dug

In 1911, U.S.-Latin American relations almost took a dramatic turn for the different.

In October of that year, the head of the Panama Canal Zone's civil administration, Maurice Thatcher, told a U.S. Senate committee, “We must have courts ...  I would like to see an American civil population here ... These Americans would come here to live, make their homes here, and they would prefer to live under the dominion of the American government, under American laws.” 

George Goethals, the rather un-Brooklyn-like Brooklynite in charge of construction thought differently.  “Introduce the franchise, and we’d go to pieces.”  The Taft administration agreed with Goethals.  The Canal Zone was not to receive elected government, civil courts, or even private property.  The Zonians remained a population of transients.  (Vocal, obnoxious, and slightly-crazy transients, but transients.)

But what if Thatcher had won the argument?  The Zonians would have owned farms and businesses.  They would set their own tax rates.  They would elect their governor.  The strange monopoly that the federal government held over ancilliary businesses would not last.  The Zonians would not all work for the federal government.  They would be a settled population, certainly larger than the actual Canal Zone population, which bounced around 50,000 in the 1950s and '60s.  And it is hard to imagine them lacking a non-voting representative in Congress.

Under such circumstances, could Congress have agreed to give the Canal Zone back to Panama?   

What? Already???

  This is not a political post.

As some of you know, I like zombie movies.  One of my favorite genres.  Don't ask me to explain it.  Dawn of the Dead got into my head when I was a kid, scared me to death, and I suppose I never got it out. 

I also have no problem with remakes.  Some, like Cape Fear, beat cold the original. 

But a remake of a movie that only came out last year?  What??  And a Spanish movie at that.  It doesn't even qualify as a foreign-language film.

So go rent Rec.  Don't see Quarantine. 

That's filmmaking.

Word up

  Two videos from the recent presidential debate.  Number one, because it moves me, and I agree with it.  My incentive to work harder will not go down (because my payments will not go up) if we prevent this from happening:

And number two, because it sends my wife into hysterics every time she sees it, and I like making her laugh:

Imperialism can really pay

So there's Panama.  Well, what about Suez?

The Suez Canal started under very different political conditions, inasmuch as the Egyptian government was on-board with the project.  So on board, in fact, that it not only put in 45 percent of the initial capital (£1.5 million), it promised the Compagnie de Suez the free use of forced labor to build the thing. 

That wasn't nada.  In 2007 pound sterling, the Egyptians put in £149 million.  But as I've mentioned elsewhere, the world was poorer then:  relative to the growth of the British economy since then, that would be equivalent of plonking in £4.3 billion today.  That would be a lot of scratch for the current Egyptian government; it was an amazing amount of scratch for 1854's. 

So far, so non-imperialistic.  Awful for the poor people who had to live under Cairo's despotism, but that'd be like blaming Russia for the shortcomings of the Kazakh government.  (Wait ... no, I'll leave that to those who know more.)

The story gets better, though.  It's an amazing bit of imperial skullduggery ... and perhaps the coolest thing about it is that it could easily happen today.  I mean, it's not like world powers scarf off strategic parts of nearby states for strategic gain these days.

So, with the caveat that what I'm about to tell you is pieced together from primary sources and could well be wrong, the story is below.

Imperialism can pay

There's a debate out there about imperialism.  Did it pay?  The consensus answer is:  no, it did not.  The British spent far more in defense than they earned from imperial investments; in fact, by the 1880s, the profitability of imperial investments had fallen below domestic and non-imperial ones.  The French believed that their empire after WW2 helped them maintain their balance-of-payments; the numbers don't support that idea either.  The big counterexamples involve the Nazi conquest of France, and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after 1945 ... but after 1970 or so the balance on the Soviet empire hinges on how much you believe control of the Warsaw Pact armies was worth to Moscow. 

But there is a case of imperialism paying, and paying quite well:  Panama in 1903. 

Canals and Costa Rica

Peter asks about past Nicaragua canal plans; Randy asks about the environment and Costa Rica.

Nicaragua was in fact considered for a trans-Isthmian canal.  Only one project got past vaporware:  between 1887 and 1893, the Maritime Canal Company excavated 1½ miles of canal and built 11½ miles of railroad in pursuit of the project.  Their planned route to the Atlantic followed the dashed line above.  Meanwhile, their plan to avoid the rapids and shallows of the San Juan River east of its junction with the San Carlos River was brilliant in its simplicity, if not in its feasibility:  build a giant dam at Ochoa and flood everything all the way to Lake Nicaragua.