Speaker For The Diodes - March 14th, 2011

05:24 am - QotD

"That Hugo Chavez sure is an evil authoritarian for getting the parliament to give him emergency decree powers.

"He's a terrible enemy of democracy, and the US needs to keep funneling money to fund the opposition to make sure this awful authoritarianism doesn't spread to other countries in the hemisphere.

"He was given this power by his lockstep ruling bloc of the national assembly, who act simply as his toadies so that Chavez can carry out his radical goals unfettered. And now he will have 18 months to lock in whatever laws he and his preferred legislature want so as to keep the next legislature from undoing these fait accompli.

"Chavez used the pathetic excuse of massive floods displacing almost 150,000 people to ram through acts such as providing housing to flood victims. As a dangerous precedent, before even getting his new powers, he used the excuse of the most severe drought in a century to forcibly regulate hydro-electric power generation and use.

"Critics say that next will come measures designed to disempower and gut the opposition in the legislature, whose numbers don't make a majority but are a rivaling minority. After all, Chavez cynically pushed this through before the next assembly session, when the minority opposition will have up to 40% of seats.

"The assembly passed sections allowing the Supreme Court to review the decrees and the citizens to revoke any decree via referendum if 5% of voters petition it.

"In this country we would simply never accept such authoritarian measures used to push through executive acts in a rushed manner so as to disempower the minority opposition to oppose them.

"Here, in a country which appreciates the principles of democracy, our leaders would never use the mere majority of the legislature to ram through laws giving the executive vast powers or to weaken opposition forces throughout a state or nation. No one would even think it possible for one of our leaders to completely ignore the objections of a minority holding up to 4 out of every 10 seats.

"Our politicians would wisely reserve the use of emergency powers for responses to minor budget deficit issues, and would apply them to such common-sense purposes as removing rights to collective bargaining, or to remove elected officials by executive order, or to immediately award profitable taxpayer-funded contracts to hand-chosen private interests without a fair and open bidding process.

"America needs to act, and act quickly, before Chavez' manipulative authoritarianism can spread to any other nation with leaders hungry to grab such concentrated power."

-- El Cid, 2011-03-10, regarding recent events in Wisconsin and Michigan [thanks to realinterrobang for quoting it earlier]