| | Nick Miroff of the Washington Post revisited a Venezuelan dream: the Ciudad Guyana. It was a modernist planned city in the wilderness. “President Rómulo Betancourt, a key partner in John F. Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress,” founded the city in 1961, inviting his countrymen to turn Ciudad Guayana into a tropical Pittsburgh.” It was a monument to the kind of progress that was in vogue in the 1960s. Instead it became a kind of tropical Detroit. The Washington Post writes:
When it was founded, Ciudad Guayana and its state-run heavy industries were Venezuela’s best hope for breaking the country’s overwhelming dependence on crude oil exports. It had all the right ingredients: iron ore, bauxite and gold; timber and farmland; and huge rivers to supply cheap hydropower for smelters and factories.
Planners from MIT and Harvard came to lay out the streets. Loans from the World Bank helped finance the dams. The city grew to more than a million residents.
The steelmaking company at the core of the Ciudad Guayana project, Sidor, produced a record 4.3 million tons before it was nationalized by Chávez in 2008.
Today, most of its furnaces sit cold, deprived of raw materials, new technology and reliable labor. The last contract for its 14,000 steelworkers expired four years ago.
Today steelworkers who once earned enough to buy a new car on 3 month’s wages can hardly feed themselves. They have a guaranteed income, though. “Despite repeated strikes and work stoppages, the government has continued to pay salaries at the aging plant, including for more than 2,000 union officials who draw wages but don’t produce an ounce of steel.” But there’s nothing you can buy with it and nowhere to go.
Avenidas de Ciudad Guayana en decadencia –’the crumbling streets of the Ciudad Guyana’ says one headline. The city may no longer be making steel, but it now produces garbage. “Of the 1,200 tons of trash the city produces per day, only 200 are collected”, says another news article.
Progressive dreams are sometimes socialist nightmares wearing a mask.
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http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/09/05/the-reciprocal/#more-39079
[ Never heard of this. But not surprised. Leftists still think socialism will work the next time. ]
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John Work
Detroit. Ciudad Guyana. Starnesville. From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. All will be brought to the same level in our new Utopia. Except that some pigs will be more equal than others.
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[ Cuidad Guyana reminded readers of California's Crazy Train. ]
itellu3times
Regarding the California "Crazy Train", there's not a human being in the state who believes it will do a bit of good as transportation, it is entirely a make-work project on "free federal money" and a payoff to state unions, secondarily lawyers and construction companies. A textbook example of government capture and exploitation. AKA "corruption".
I have a junior version of it going on right now on Wilshire Blvd right around the San Diego Freeway, probably the busiest and most congested surface street in the world, being constricted for the next six months to build a "busway" that will exclude cars during rush hour, already an idiotic idea which I won't detail except that again, nobody wants it but it's free money for the local construction companies and unions. Ironically it runs right under the new $100,000,000 boulevard and freeway ramps just rebuilt - that also do no good at all to actual traffic.
It used to be I had to go to Massachusetts to see boondoggles like this not to mention incompetent engineering. Well, maybe not so much, some humongous money has been spent around Los Angeles for "carpool lanes" that nobody really believes work anymore either, meant as social engineering to coerce ride sharing and has NOT WORKED in the twenty-plus years involved, but has given Prius drivers an unexpected perq, now the social engineering is to buy hybrids.
BTW we also have a "Purple Line" trolley coming to the west side (if a mile south of the max congestion points), I actually drove under it for the first time a couple of miles east just the other day where it's already in operation in Culver City, and OMG is it ugly, like giant ropes of cancer across the city. The trolley lines being rebuilt around LA have actually pulled more riders and had somewhat less trouble than anticipated, but have they actually helped traffic? Doubt it. Are they actually running in the black, fully accounted? Doubt it. Does it even matter any more? Doubt it.
Will be totally obsolete within twenty years, replaced by self-driven rapid transit and taxis on surface streets that reduce traffic 50% and more, so won't have a chance to pay off. Classic bad timing. Classic corruption.
But this is the future: the fed prints, Washington DC distributes, the fascist corporations profit, and the actual population is burried under tons of concrete.
Future, hell, it's the present, I just said so.
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RWE3
A few years ago a Florida version of the Calif train was proposed, serving Miami, Orlando and Tampa.
The mayor of Tampa said of the effort, "I hope the government will pay for the entire cost of the project so the taxpayers don't have to." Now, that is really not quite as dumb as it sounds. He meant HIS taxpayers.
Gov Scott cancelled the whole thing after figuring out that however much Federal money was received, the State would still be stuck with an unacceptable bill to complete and operate the system. By the time California figures that same thing out, Gov Brown will be out of office and the biggest supporters will have their pockets lined.
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Subotai Bahadur
Politics is addressing those issues squarely. It is doing it by deliberately pretending reality does not exist. Even excluding the drought; California is a basket case and non-functional. And yet, no matter what reality is they are fixated on; a) the high speed rail between two places where nobody wants to go, b) inviting more and more illegals to the state and to the welfare system, and c) destroying any actual productivity in the state. Today Democrat Governor Jerry "Chiroptera Lunarii latraus" Brown publicly debated the Institutional Republican challenger Neil Kashkari. Brown got his butt kicked so hard that he has to loosen his collar to pass gas. His record as governor and his "initiatives" were discredited so badly that Brown has refused to do any more debates.
Yet, in California, there is no doubt that Jerry Brown will be overwhelmingly re-elected. And the Legislature will remain overwhelmingly Democrat. Even without the usual Democrat margin of fraud. California politics is addressing reality by denying it.
Add in the drought. While I find it ironic that the only place in the world where global warming seems to have struck is California, the politics there is not to react sanely. Water storage projects are anathema, the current water infrastructure is collapsing unrepaired, and there was legal action filed a couple of weeks ago to place Hetchy-Hetchy Reservoir under the same Endangered Species Act strictures as the Central Valley Project.
Agriculture died in the Central Valley when the water was taken from the farms sent downstream to promote the Delta Smelt under EPA mandates. They want Hetchy-Hetchy water to be used the same way, instead of being used to supply 85% of the drinking water of San Francisco and 124 megawatts of electricity.
Californians are sure that reality does not hold sway in California, or at least they vote that way. Their politics reflect that view.
Since they are inviting as much of the population of Mexico to their state as they can, we might as well cede the Mexican state of Alta California back to Mexico. That way, we will not have to deal with the sudden onset reality syndrome that will trump their politics.
Subotai Bahadur
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Old Doug
Brown vs Kashkari:
"He's raising your gas prices to fund his vanity project, the high-speed train. What I call the crazy train."
In the first debate between Governor Jerry Brown and GOP challenger Neil Kashkari, Californians saw exactly why the 76-year-old Brown refuses to submit to a second debate. Kashkari, a business man and political neophyte, relentlessly hammered his career politician opponent on jobs and education leaving Brown appearing old, slow and unresponsive.
The performance was so one-sided even political analysts and the Left-wing San Jose Mercury News called it for Kashkari, easily:
"He was more coherent than the governor," Whalen said. "More times than not, the governor went off into Jerry Brown mode where he was not answering the questions."
Kaskari pointed out the dismal four-year record of the Governor regarding jobs, education and poverty and mocked Brown for pitiful legislation like plastic bag bans and a recent law allowing restaurant patrons to bring their dogs to establishments. "The time for incrementalism has long since passed, governor," Kashkari said. "We actually need bold reforms to rebuild the middle class. Plastic bags isn't going to do it."
When asked after the debate if he will agree to participate in another exchange of issues and ideas with his challenger before election day, Brown said, "I think we've exposed the differences."
http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/gop-challenger-hammers-brown-california-governors-debate
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