At a speech celebrating May Day in Bolivia today, President Evo Morales announced the expulsion of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from the country. According to the AP, Morales stated:

"The United States does not lack institutions that continue to conspire, and that's why I am using this gathering to announce that we have decided to expel USAID from Bolivia.”

The role of USAID in Bolivia has been a primary point of contention between the U.S. and Bolivia dating back to at least 2006. State Department spokesperson Patrick Ventrell characterized Morales’ statement as “baseless allegations.” While State Department spokespeople and many commentators will characterize USAID's work with oppositional groups as appropriate, a look at the agency's work over the past decade paints a very different picture.

Documents obtained by investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood show that as early as 2002, USAID funded a “Political Party Reform Project,” which sought to “serve as a counterweight to the radical MAS [Morales’ political party] or its successors.” Later USAID began a program “to provide support to fledgling regional governments,” some of which were pushing for regional autonomy and were involved in the September 2008 destabilization campaign that left some 20 indigenous Bolivians dead. Meanwhile, the U.S. has continually refused to disclose the recipients of aid funds. As a recent CEPR report on USAID activities in Haiti concluded, U.S. aid often goes into a “black box” where it becomes impossible to determine who the ultimate recipients actually are.

Thomas Friedman is probably best ignored, but there are people who take him seriously. Today his NYT column touts the "401(k) world" where Friedman says:

"But this huge expansion in an individual’s ability to do all these things comes with one big difference: more now rests on you."

The gist of the argument is that people are more exposed to risk so that means that they can fall farther or, in principle, rise higher than before all the wonderful new technologies that leave Friedman breathless.

Naturally, just about everything Friedman has to say is wrong or misleading. First and foremost, wonderful new technologies are not new. We have been seeing breakthroughs in technology for the last two hundred years. Have the last decade's been more wonderful and awesome than the breakthroughs of prior decades?

How does the Internet compare to development of the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television?  I have a job, so I'll let the Thomas Friedmans of the world worry about that one.

Reuters reported Sunday that the president of Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) Tibisay Lucena has criticized opposition candidate Henrique Capriles for not presenting proof to back up his claims of fraud (also the focus of our post earlier today):

"We have always insisted that Capriles had the right to challenge the process," Tibisay Lucena, president of the electoral council, said in a televised national broadcast.

"But it is also his obligation to present proof."

She dismissed various opposition submissions alleging voting irregularities as lacking key details, and said Capriles had subsequently tried to present the audit in very different terms than the electoral council had agreed to.

"It has been manipulated to generate false expectations about the process, including making it look like the consequence of the wider audit could affect the election results," she said.

Lucena's statements that the election audit of the remaining voting machines, as initially called for by Capriles, will not change the results are correct, although perhaps not for the reasons she meant. As noted on Friday, we did a statistical analysis of the probability of the results of the audit of the first 53 percent of voting machines finding the results it did if the remaining 46 percent of voting machines in Venezuela had enough discrepancies to change the results of the election. The probability, according to our calculations, is less than 1 in 25,000 trillion.

The math is pretty straightforward. Considering how many votes by which Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner, and that the initial audit of 54 percent of machines didn't find anything, and considering how many votes there are per machine, it is almost impossible for the remaining 46 percent of machines to have enough discrepancies to change the election results.

Dean Baker
Truthout, April 30, 2013

Dean Baker
The Guardian Unlimited, April 29, 2013

“Venezuela to audit votes without opposition conditions” reads the headline of a BBC article published over the weekend.  According to the piece, Venezuela’s electoral authority “will not carry out the full recount demanded by opposition candidate Henriqu

April 30, 2013

April 30, 2013 (Housing Market Monitor)

It's a bit scary what passes for good news in the economy today. Steve Rattner had a NYT blogpost this morning that began by telling readers:

"On its face, Friday’s announcement that the nation’s gross domestic product expanded at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first quarter was good news, following as it did an only marginally positive result for the previous three-month period."

Well, positive growth is better than recession, but we have to remember that we are operating at a level of output that is 6 percentage points below potential, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The potential growth rate is in the range of 2.2-2.4 percent. Even if we take the bottom end of that range, a 2.5 percent growth rate would still only close this gap at a rate of 0.3 percentage points a year. [Added note: potential GDP growth refers to the rate that the economy could grow if it were fully employed as a result of the growth of the labor force and increases in productivity. The economy has to grow faster than potential in order to make up the sort of gap in output it is now seeing.]

That means that with a 2.5 percent growth rate it would take us twenty years to get back to potential GDP. We can mark 2033 on our calendar for the celebration, just after the end of Chelsea Clinton's second term.

Apart from the new low for good news Rattner is also annoying for his persistent ability to highlight Social Security and Medicare as problems in determined defiance of the data. Social Security's costs are projected to rise by roughly 1.0 percentage point of GDP over the next 15 years as the baby boomers retire. That's roughly the same increase in costs that we saw over the last 15 years. It is a bit more than half of the size of the increase in military spending associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What's the big deal?

Over the last decade the fight for accountability in Latin America for crimes committed by past dictatorships has seen a tremendous number of successes. In Peru, Alberto Fujimori is in jail. In Argentina dozens of defendants have been convicted in just the last year. But two ongoing cases continue to drag on, Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala and Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti. Both Ríos Montt and Duvalier enjoyed support of all kinds from the U.S. government, but the U.S.’s response to the cases illustrates the ongoing hypocrisy of the U.S. in the region.

In Guatemala, as numerous media outlets have described it, Ríos Montt is “the first former head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide in a national court.” While the case was recently suspended, after a week of legal maneuvers, it appears that it may be set to resume this week.  After the trial was suspended on April 18, investigative journalist Allan Nairn reported that “Guatemalan army associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and that the case had been annulled after intervention by Guatemala’s president, General Otto Pérez Molina.” Nairn, who investigated atrocities in Guatemala in the ‘80s – including Pérez Molina’s involvement in them -- was supposed to testify at the trial.

But less than a week later, the U.S. sent Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues Stephen J. Rapp to Guatemala to “meet with U.S. Government and Embassy officials, local victims groups, and other international officials.” Last Friday, as the trial continued to be suspended, State Department Acting Deputy Spokesperson  Patrick Ventrell stated:

So we urge the Government of Guatemala to ensure that this legal case is conducted in accordance with Guatemala’s domestic and international legal obligations, and we expect the process and outcome will advance the rule of law.

The statement from the State Department came the same day that Rapp concluded his trip to Guatemala. Over the weekend, president Pérez Molina also seemed to partially walk back his previous statements criticizing the trial, calling the trial “historic” and pledging to not personally intervene.

In Haiti, on the other hand, the U.S. has been entirely absent.

Dean Baker
Al Jazeera English, April 29, 2013