pocoloco

But I will say this, I think that your assumption in point 1 is wrong. I think that the mismanagement of the financial system worldwide has proven that there is no country currency invulnerable to manipulation.

Jeff Booth talks about this towards the end of this interview which is great in it's entirety IMO.

Using the military was normalized be previous governments from the left and the right. Nothing new in using them for security purposes. And lockdowns are being performed worldwide, so from a local perspective nothing abnormal in using the military for lockdown purposes.

> * Defect blame to all political opponents

Which blame? Keeping derelict infrastructure such as the potable water plant that didn't receive a repair for 30 years hoping that it will break down in order to pass laws to privatize access to water? A non-existing health care system for the most Salvadorans? On and on...

> * Threaten to shutdown the largest bank and mobile phone operator

The president used his power to keep these and other corporations in check since these were ignoring the orders of not seizing the stipend provided by the gov to the poorest. At least one bank was seizing this in "fees" and debt collection. As for the mobile company, there were people reporting that one company was cutting service to people for non-payment even though these have been prohibited by the gov to do so for a few months therefore illegal.

> * Bot networks that attack any dissenting view

This is a tired argument that has been shown to be false time and time again. The popularity of the president, Nayib Bukele, is such that 98% of the population have a positive image of the president and 97% approve his handling of the current virus crisis. There is enough people that approve his actions that anyone emotionally invested in the opposite cannot handle the reaction of others specially when any comments that they bring are at best uninformed, at worst lies. I know, these are high numbers; he's that good.

> * A government official publicly using the twitter api to identify tweets from the opposition

So, the gov is investigating public information about posts with unverifiable data aimed to discredit and possible incite violence against the president's family. What's wrong with that?

> * Order the military and police to use lethal force if someone does not comply.

Comply to what? To break lockdown? Nope. Use lethal force when engaged with violent life-threatening forces, which in El Salvador are gangs backed by drug cartels, corrupt business man, and prominent politicians from left and right protected by immunity because they are currently serving. Yes, that's right, current serving politicians from both left and right have been recorded providing funds to these gangs.

> We've had somewhat working separation of powers.

What? I guess you're talking about the president stating that he will use his constitutional powers to enforce any measure deemed necessary to protect lives. This is an argument used by his discredited opponents because they still control the judicial and legislative bodies. Before Bukele, the presidency danced to the same sick music that has kept this little country poor where both left and right were attached to the hip.

> It is terrible to see my country turning into an autocratic rule, and how the government is misusing Twitter to make that happen :/

It brings hope to see a small country that has been ruled by a primitive dishonest bi-partisan mafia to have at last a glimmer of hope for a better future in this time of incertitude.

[1] Survery result in Spanish PDF

The dual economy didn’t happen overnight, says Temin. The story started just a couple of years after the ’67 Summer of Love. Around 1970, the productivity of workers began to get divided from their wages. Corporate attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell galvanized the business community to lobby vigorously for its interests. Johnson’s War on Poverty was replaced by Nixon’s War on Drugs, which sectioned off many members of the low-wage sector, disproportionately black, into prisons. Politicians increasingly influenced by the FTE sector turned from public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism. As money-driven politics accelerated (a phenomenon explained by the Investment Theory of Politics, as Temin explains), leaders of the FTE sector became increasingly emboldened to ignore the needs of members of the low-wage sector, or even to actively work against them.

America’s underlying racism has a continuing distorting impact. A majority of the low-wage sector is white, with blacks and Latinos making up the other part, but politicians learned to talk as if the low-wage sector is mostly black because it allowed them to appeal to racial prejudice, which is useful in maintaining support for the structure of the dual economy — and hurting everyone in the low-wage sector. Temin notes that “the desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector.”

America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People

When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU.

And that the paper:

...co-authored by three economists from the Bank's Monetary Analysis Directorate, they stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong.

This, they explain, will have the effect of making oil cheap to the point that there won’t be enough money to invest in maintaining the current infrastructure and even less to invest in green tech. Once the bad debts are cleared and growth returns the true effects of peak oil will be felt everywhere.

In summary, they say, don’t get your hopes up with clean/green tech. It is too little too late and it simply cannot replace oil. And nuclear energy is no better once you take into account the energy required to build, operate and decommission reactors and also dispose of radioactive waste in a safe manner.

They have in my opinion one of the best analysis available in the intertubes.

In his biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes that Sony had “all of the assets,” including a record company, to create its own iPod. “Why did it fail?” he writes. “Partly because it was a company … organized into divisions (that word itself was ominous) with their own bottom lines; the goal of achieving synergy in such companies by prodding the divisions to work together was usually elusive.”

What Is Sony Now?

Cracking Down on Conflict Minerals