The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. ECONOMICS
The exodus to the U.S. of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans accelerates as President Hugo Chavez continues his move to socialize the nation’s economy.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Editorial Director Ivan Osorio on Chavez’s anti-democratic precedent:
“Chavez’s contempt for the rule of law is astounding. In the general strike [of 2002], he sent out troops to seize private gasoline-delivery trucks and ordered military commanders to ignore court orders to return the trucks to their owners. He also seized control of the Caracas police department and defied a court order to return the department to the city’s mayor’s control. ‘A country where the judicial system is not autonomous and must submit to the executive is not democratic,’ said strike leader Carlos Ortega, president of the country’s largest labor federation. ‘Listen well, Venezuela and the world: There is no democracy here.’”
2. ENVIRONMENT
Former Vice President Al Gore faces charges of hypocrisy for the size of his “carbon footprint.”
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Adjunct Analyst Steven Milloy on Al Gore’s inconvenient electric bill:
“At the end of Gore’s movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ viewers are asked, ‘Are you ready to change the way you live’? Following this line of thinking, the movie’s web site suggests many ways that you can “reduce your impact at home,” including using less heating and air conditioning, buying expensive fluorescent light bulbs, using less hot water, using a clothesline rather than a dryer, carpooling, flying less and buying cost-inefficient hybrid cars. Given that Gore calls the fight against global warming a ‘moral imperative’ in the movie, you might reasonably think that he practices what his movie’s web site preaches. But you’d be wrong.”
3. BUSINESS
British Airways considers replacing its Boeing-made long-haul jets with purchases from the struggling European airline manufacturer Airbus.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Former Journalism Fellow Timothy Carney on how both Airbus and rival Boeing are dependent on massive government subsidies:
“The United States and the European Union may be on the brink of the largest transatlantic trade war ever. At issue are government subsidies for the makers of passenger jets—Boeing in the United States and Airbus in Europe. Each side claims the moral high ground, but in fact governments on both sides of the Atlantic heavily subsidize their jet-makers. Washington launched the dispute, even though Boeing may be the largest U.S. beneficiary of corporate welfare. Meanwhile, Airbus resembles more a government agency than a private business.”