The unexpected death of Nestor Kirchner provides us with a moment to look back on the trials and successes of one of Argentina’s most remarkable and controversial leaders. Kirchner was one of the few global south leaders to successfully challenge international financial institutions, and get away with it.
At the onset of the Third World debt crisis in the 1980s, many economic justice activists were afraid to engage on the issue because they felt it was just too complicated. Then, in the 1990s, the hot issue was trade. And again, many people thought, “I’ll never understand the World Trade Organization.” But eventually, in both of these cases, large numbers of people bit the bullet and learned enough to have a voice in these debates. And they built strong movements for debt and trade justice that continue today.
As the United States continues to isolate Iran over its nuclear program, the Islamic regime is engaging in a foreign policy counter-attack with profound strategic consequences. The theater of strategic warfare between the United States and Iran has expanded well beyond the Middle East.From sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America, Iran is selling arms, offering aid and investments, and otherwise establishing a new pattern in south-to-south relations as it battles what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls “Western arrogance.”
Just about everything you hear about Cuba in the U.S. media is a lie.
I learned that from the moment my TACA Airlines charter jet landed in
Havana last Sunday. It was filled with Cuban-Americans returning to
their homeland carrying clothing, DVDs, microwave ovens, electronic
games, and other consumer goods missing from the Cuban market. I’d
always read that the “Miami Cubans” hated the very thought of
socialist Cuba. So I was surprised and even a little shocked when the
entire plane burst out in loud applause when we touched down.
The U.S. and India should not sign a treaty that will only serve the short-term interests of large corporations, and undermine the authority of governments to protect their people from financial crisis.
The unexpected death a few days ago of Nestor Kirchner deprived not only Argentina of a remarkable, albeit controversial leader. It also took away an exemplary figure in the Global South when it came to dealing with international financial institutions.
Kirchner defied the creditors. More importantly, he got away with it.
Dilma Rousseff came very close to winning in the first round of voting in Brazil, she ended up on the threshold of the government currently led by Lula de Silva. Lula, the most popular president Brazil has ever had, is stepping down after eight years that changed the face of the country and transformed its place in the world.
What were NBC executives thinking? The unemployment rate remains near double digits, and many Americans have simply stopped looking for work. And what does the network premier this fall but a sitcom called Outsourced about an American manager sent to run a call center in India. The jokes revolve around funny names, unappetizing food, Sikh turbans, arranged marriages. “It’s hard to know what a normal smell is here and what isn’t,” says Todd Dempsy, the culturally insensitive manager played by Ben Rappaport, in last week’s “Touched by an Anglo” episode. And there’s indeed something fishy about a show that capitalizes on U.S. jobs going overseas during an economic downturn.
President Barack Obama’s upcoming visit to India will come just after the mid-term elections in the United States. Whether this timing is coincidental or deliberate, it will decide where Obama stands on several contentious issues between the two countries.
One of these issues is the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to India.
On a frigid Wisconsin day in February 2008, the rapier-like rhetoric of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama slashed away at “free trade” deals that have cost thousands of Wisconsin jobs. He bemoaned the overseas flight of U.S. jobs and connected viscerally with thousands of mostly blue-collar workers at a rally at an imperiled General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin that would ultimately close 10 months later.