This Article over at Slashdot…

"In Paraguay we are at T-9 days to national elections. The ruling party has been in power for nearly 61 years (including more than 30 years of dictatorship). Now the state-run ADSL company is hijacking the DNS nationwide of a site that denounces the corruption in the party."

…provoked this comment…

Paraguay is a country ruled by a conservative coalition.

Which only goes to show what my old bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. "Kid," he’d say, "nobody believes in capitalism. Nobody believes in socialism. It’s socialism for me, and capitalism for you!" Ivan may have been a red, but he was a cynic first and foremost, and that keeps you honest.

In the end, there is only one thing that really matters in any system: transparency. At least if the system is supposed to be run for the benefit of the people who live under it. You can be all for the proletariat, or all for the free market, but if you’re pulling the wool of the peoples’ eyes, you aren’t any different from anybody else running a con behind high sounding priciples.

Well I believe in a free market because I don’t think that human beings can plan an economy any better then we can plan the weather.  But a free market needs a rule of law and a means of preventing the power of money from subverting that rule of law, or that free market won’t remain free for very long, it’ll degenerate into oligarchy. 

But that’s the republican ideal, isn’t it?   For decades now anyone with half a brain could see that republicans favored oligarchy over all other forms of government. They claim to believe in both free markets and the rule of law and I think seven years plus of George Bush has pretty well decisively proved otherwise.  Nothing disturbs the status-quo more then free market capitalism, when it isn’t turning it upside down.   Nothing.  And nothing locks the human potential in chains and thereby preserves the status-quo better then crony capitalism, which is to say, republican party economics.

The state religion of Oligarchy is God Loves The Rich.  Its economic theory is To The Victors Belong The Spoils.  Its theory of government is Might Makes Right. Vis:

A Tale of Three Lawyers

On Thursday in the National Press Club in Washington, a crowd gathered to witness the presentation of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling to Lieutenant Commander Matthew Diaz. The story of Matthew Diaz was chronicled in this space repeatedly (also here and here). It is a story of courage, fortitude, conviction and suffering. Joe Margulies introduced the honoree with clarity:

no one can think it is fun when you sit in a courtroom as an accused, and a United States prosecutor points an accusatory finger at your chest and calls you a criminal and tells you that you have betrayed your oath and you have betrayed your country, and you have endangered the safety of the men and women that you swore to share your burdens with. And no one can think it is fun when you have to sit with your heart pounding in your chest as the jury files back into the room with a piece of paper folded in its hands, and that piece of paper holds your fate. And no one can think it is fun when that jury, your peers, pronounces you guilty. And no one can think it is fun when you have to face that same jury that will sentence you for what may be many years; many years that you will be away from your family, your life in tatters, your career ruined.

Matthew Diaz served his country as a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. He watched a shameless assault on America’s Constitution and commitment to the rule of law carried out by the Bush Administration. He watched the introduction of a system of cruel torture and abuse. He watched the shaming of the nation’s uniformed services, with their proud traditions that formed the very basis of the standards of humanitarian law, now torn asunder through the lawless acts of the Executive. Matthew Diaz found himself in a precarious position—as a uniformed officer, he was bound to follow his command. As a licensed and qualified attorney, he was bound to uphold the law. And these things were indubitably at odds.

Diaz resolved to do something about it. He knew the Supreme Court twice ruled the Guantánamo regime, which he was under orders to uphold, was unlawful. In the Hamdan decision, the Court went a step further. In powerful and extraordinary words, Justice Kennedy reminded the Administration that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was binding upon them, and that a violation could constitute a criminal act. One senior member of the Bush legal team, informed of the decision over lunch, was reported to have turned “white as a sheet” and to have immediately excused himself. For the following months, Bush Administration lawyers entered into a frenzied discussion of how to protect themselves from criminal prosecution.

One of the crimes the Administration committed was withholding from the Red Cross a list of the detainees at Guantánamo, effectively making them into secret detainees. Before the arrival of the Bush Administration, the United States had taken the axiomatic position that holding persons in secret detention for prolonged periods outside the rule of law (a practice known as “disappearing”) was not merely unlawful, but in fact a rarified “crime against humanity.” Now the United States was engaged in the active practice of this crime.

The decision to withhold the information had been taken, in defiance of law, by senior political figures in the Bush Administration. Diaz was aware of it, and he knew it was unlawful. He printed out a copy of the names and sent them to a civil rights lawyer who had requested them in federal court proceedings.

Diaz was aware when he did this that he was violating regulations and that he could and would, if caught, be subjected to severe sanction. What he did was a violation of law, even as it was an effort to cure a more severe act of lawlessness by the Government. Diaz violated the law in precisely the same sense as Martin Luther King reminds us, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, that his arrest was based on a violation of law. That everything the Nazis did in Germany was lawful. And that every act of the Hungarian freedom fighters was a crime. In terms of the moral law, however, Diaz was on the side of right, and the Bush Administration and the Pentagon had, by engaging in the conduct that the Supreme Court condemned, placed themselves on the side of lawlessness, corruption and dishonor.

Diaz was charged, tried and convicted for disclosing “secrets.” For the Bush Administration, any information which would be politically embarrassing or harmful to it is routinely classified “secret.” In this fashion the Administration believes it can use criminal sanctions against those who disclose information it believes will be politically damaging. The list of detainees at Guantánamo, which by law was required to be disclosed, was classified as “secret.”

Diaz spent six months in prison and left it bankrupt and without a job. In addition to his sentence, the Pentagon is working aggressively to have Diaz stripped of his law license so he will not be able to practice his profession. The Bush Administration has sought to criminalize, humiliate and destroy Diaz. Its motivation could not be clearer: Diaz struck a blow for the rule of law. And nothing could be more threatening to the Bush Administration than this.

When republicans tell you that they love free markets and hate big government, look around:

No Randites in Financial Crises

Dean Baker has a nice rant about the disappearance of reliance on "market forces" now that the Princes of Wall Street are staring disaster in the face without government help:

What Happened to "Free-Market" Conservatives (or Neo-liberals)?: With the housing bubble in full meltdown, our political leaders are busily ignoring all the things they have said about the market over the last quarter century and looking to throw all the money that they can find to sustain the bubble. This would be comical, if it weren’t so painful.

Remember all the steel workers and autoworkers who lost their jobs due to trade agreements that were supposed to advance economic efficiency over the last quarter century? How about the workers in the airline, trucking, and telecommunications industry who lost jobs due to deregulation, which was also supposed to increase economic efficiency?

Well, it’s a new day. Nothing these people (or their economists) said matters anymore. It housing bubble support time!

For years, economic policy was supposed to be guided by market principles. If our autoworkers couldn’t compete with their counterparts in Mexico or China, who got paid $1 an hour, then it would be inefficient to have trade protection that would keep them employed here. The same applied to regulations that might keep high paying jobs in key sectors of the economy. Educated people all knew that interfering with the market was harmful to the economy, and if we ever forgot this basic truth, the Washington Post regularly ran sanctimonious editorials to remind us.

Well, it’s a new day. The housing bubble is melting down and Congress and the Fed are throwing money everywhere. After all, this isn’t about auto workers and truckers, it’s about Wall Street banks, and the politicians are pulling out all the stops to come to the rescue. In addition to the money that the Fed is throwing at the banks through subsidized loans at its discount window, it is also granting free insurance to the investment banks — a gift that is potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Now Congress is jumping into the act. Remember way back in the fall when they couldn’t find $7 billion to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program? Well, now Congress can finds hundreds of billions of dollars to support a housing bubble. It’s a worthy goal. After all, the Wall Street crew might lose their shirts if the housing bubble continues to meltdown.

Congress will not be able to support the housing bubble indefinitely, but they might be able to do it long enough to allow the big boys to cash out and pass more of their bad loans onto the taxpayers and other suckers.

The political support for this bailout package may make it unstoppable, but if it does go through, we should be clear that there are new rules. In the post bailout world, anyone who makes claims about forcing workers or the poor to take pay cuts or do without benefits in the name of economic efficiency is simply a fool or liar.

Anyone who cared about economic efficiency would be yelling at the top of their lungs against this bailout. Anyone who can throw untold hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars at the rich to save their hides, has no concerns about economic efficiency, they just want to help the rich. In such a world, the rest of us have the right to demand the same sort of handouts from the government. And those who stand in the way are simply lackeys of the rich and powerful, who pretend to care about principles of economics.