Morning Coffee - 1 July 2009

Cores e Sabores, originally uploaded by Dani Romanesi.

Hot off the French press, your Morning Coffee. Today's highlights include accusations by Amnesty International that Shell is blaming phantom "saboteurs" for massive accidental oil spills in the Niger Delta, the UN General Assembly's unanimous condemnation of the coup in Honduras, and explosive charges of state-sponsored antisemitism in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

Speaking of Honduras, I find it absurd that anyone would balk at calling the ouster of the democratically elected president a coup. The military claims it frogmarched the pajama-clad president to the airport and put him on a plane to Costa Rica because he wanted to hold a non-binding referendum on whether to investigate the possibility of modifying term limits.

Does anyone know enough about Honduran constitutional law to say whether the president was really acting improperly when he ordered the vote? The people who say he was defying the Supreme Court seem to be the architects of the coup, and I haven't seen any independent legal analysis of those claims.

A coup in response to a possibly illegal non-binding referendum is truly destroying the village to save it. Critics of the president point out that in many Latin American countries, strict term limits are an important check on the powers of a very strong executive branch.

The United States does the same thing Our presidents are limited to two four-year terms. Term limits are anti-democratic insofar as the people's most preferred candidate might be excluded simply because s/he has served before.

On the other hand, if compound interest is the most powerful force in the world, surely incumbency is a close second and presidential term limits may help democracy overall by preventing a single person from becoming to entrenched.

Mexican presidents are limited to one six-year term.

Honduran president is limited to a single four-year term, which strikes me as an unreasonably short in this day and age. Four years seems like scarcely enough time to enact any kind of agenda. Obviously, if the president wants to reform term limits he should be pursuing that change by constitutional means. However, if the military were entitled to intervene every time the Executive flouted the constitution, the U.S. would probably be under military rule by now.