The new Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff may once have been a Marxist guerilla but her administration is no more a friend to the left than President Obama’s is.
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.
The United States can’t compensate for the ineffectiveness of sanctions against Iran by bombing it instead.
The U.S. State Department’s claim that the “international community” is behind the U.S. is increasingly sounding like whistling past the graveyard.
Like the good Count of Transylvania, the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round of negotiations has died more than once. It first collapsed during the WTO ministerial meeting held in Cancun in September 2003. After apparently coming back from the dead, many observers thought it passed away a second time during the so-called Group of Four meeting in Potsdam in June 2007 — only to come back yet again from the dead. Now the question is whether the unraveling of the most recent “mini-ministerial” gathering in Geneva was the silver stake that pierced the trade round’s heart, rendering Doha dead forever.
Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. On January 15, Michael Shank interviewed him on the latest developments in U.S. policy toward regional challenges to U.S. power. In the second part of this two-part interview, Chomsky also discussed the Bank of the South, nationalization of resources, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Michael Shank: In December 2007, seven South American countries officially launched the Bank of the South in response to growing opposition to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other International Financial Institutions. How important is this shift and will it spur other responses in the developing world? Will it at some point completely undermine the reach of the World Bank and the IMF?
Coming from small towns throughout the country-side, with stars overhead and veiled by the cover of darkness, Tania and 149 other families made their way in pick-up trucks and small vehicles, to a fazenda (farm) on the outskirts of Chatuba, a small town two hour’s drive from downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “Everyone was both […]
The problem with the World Bank is much bigger than its president, Paul Wolfowitz.
The World Social Forum’s greatest achievement in Nairobi was creating this space where over 70,000 people representing social movements from all over the world could gather and reflect on successes and strategize for the future. One key thing that came out was the formation of the Africa Water Network. It was just an idea at the beginning of the week in Nairobi. But over the week, leadership evolved, ideas evolved, and a network was born. That’s the WSF at its best. Many people from many different countries can come together to create synergy and in this case a concrete network fighting the privatization of this critical resource, water. The network includes not only activists but engineers and people linked to governments as well.
As International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank officials engage in their joint semi-annual meetings in Washington, the Fund has a nettlesome new task: convincing its shareholders (most of the world’s governments, represented at the meeting by Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors) that the institution should continue to exist.