Month: December 2010

I don’t know that Shimon Peres can do much about it one way or the other, but I think there is a good chance that something is going to give in 2011. I can’t see us going another year with the status quo on the peace process and on Iran. President Obama isn’t going to be able to do a whole lot with Congress so he should have a lot more spare time for globetrotting and diplomacy.

At his advanced age and with his vast experience and way of thinking, [President Shimon] Peres identifies himself with the state. And he sees all his enterprises drowning in the sea. In 2011, will Shimon Peres surprise us all – and surprise himself, too – by shedding the suffocating uniform of the figurehead and saying what he thinks publicly, in a clear voice and with a great outcry? Many people are pressing him to take that course, some of them opposition figures with whom he meets frequently…

…If there is a national figure today who is esteemed and to whom the nation will listen, it is Peres. Maybe the way to induce the prime minister to act is through the public. If Peres truly believes, as he says in private conversations, that in 2011 Israel will face the genuine possibility of economic sanctions by the European Union, joining the ranks of countries like North Korea and Iran, will he be able to look in the mirror at the end of the year and tell himself that he did everything he could to avert the disaster?

“What do you want from me, I’m not the prime minister,” he tells people who urge him to burst the boundaries of the presidency. “I prefer to do things quietly, by persuasion and with agreement. I have learned a few things in my life. Sometimes it’s better to work in this way in order not to generate anger and destroy friendships.”

It looks like Netanyahu has failed.

The accepted view across the political spectrum today is that Labor will leave the government in February or March of the new year. The Netanyahu coalition will survive for a few months with the help of the National Union, and then the Knesset will dissolve.

It looks like Peres thinks more than Netanyahu has failed:

People who have spoken with Peres of late are hearing grim and apocalyptic prophecies unlike anything he has ever voiced before. Not only about the peace process but also about the image of the country, which is becoming ever uglier, about the revulsion he feels at the phenomena of xenophobia and persecution of foreigners, and about the damage being done to Israel by the dark letters recently issued by rabbis and their wives.

In any case, I think we should keep our eye on Israel. The next year there could be historic, or apocalyptic. The people who have been running the country are out of ideas. They’ve got nothing left. Maybe they’ll realize that there is no one to turn to anymore and face reality. I hope so, for their sake.

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UK discussed plans to help mujahideen weeks after Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

Cabinet documents released after 30 years …  

(The Guardian) – Within three weeks of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, was negotiating how to channel covert military aid towards the “Islamic resistance” that was fighting the Russians.

Details of how swiftly clandestine weapons routes were opened up to aid the mujahideen emerge from secret cabinet documents released to the National Archives today under the 30-year rule.

The files show how extensive military and diplomatic efforts – co-ordinated with western allies – were made to defeat the USSR and the lengths to which Thatcher went to discourage participation in the 1980 Olympics.

Shortly after KGB special forces seized control of Kabul on 27 December 1979, the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, expressed the view: “The Russians are resorting to the big lie by saying that they intervened at the invitation of Afghan authorities … we should take every opportunity to make them uncomfortable and bring home to them the consequences of their actions.”

In mid-January Armstrong sent a “secret, personal” note to the prime minister on a meeting in Paris between senior US, French, German and British officials.

“There was some discussion of support for Afghan resistance to the invading Soviet troops,” he explained. “For obvious reasons, I am circulating it separately from the record for the rest of the discussion.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US national security adviser, recommended providing Afghan fighters in “forward positions” just inside the Pakistan border with “surface to air missiles to defend themselves against air attack”.

The French proposed channelling military aid via the Iraqis. The aim of the west, they said, should be to keep the Islamic world “aroused about the Soviet invasion that would be served by encouraging a continuing guerrilla resistance”.

Armstrong said intervention “would make more difficult the process of Soviet pacification of Afghanistan and [ensure] that process takes much longer than it would otherwise do; and the existence of a guerrilla movement in Afghanistan would be a focus of Islamic resistance which we should be wanting to continue to stimulate”.

There were further “secret four powers talks” in London. On 1 February Carrington informed Thatcher that one of the main ideas being pursued was “support for patriots inside Afghanistan through the covert supply of arms and training. French officials favour this. The Chinese are also interested; and the US are active in this respect. Muslim money is already flowing and may be sufficient.”

The West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, described the US position as “thoroughly dangerous” and a “clear and present danger of a third world war”.

The west’s arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan has been seen as one of the contributing factors in the rise of al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden was a prominent Saudi financier of the mujahideen.

On July 3, 1979, U.S. President Carter signed a presidential order authorizing funding for anticommunist guerrillas in Afghanistan. Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency program to arm, train, and finance the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989.  

The program relied heavily on using the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as an intermediary for funds distribution, passing of weapons, military training and financial support to Afghan resistance groups. Along with funding from similar programs from Britain’s MI6 and SAS, Saudi Arabia, and the People’s Republic of China, the ISI armed and trained over 100,000 insurgents between 1978 and 1992. They encouraged the volunteers from the Arab states to join the Afghan resistance in its struggle against the Soviet troops based in Afghanistan.

How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen  

Iran hostage crisis from November 4, 1979

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

See, I don’t like to see Christine O’Donnell called a maniac. For me, ‘maniac’ has a menacing connotation, as if there is at least a small chance that Ms. O’Donnell will lose her temper and snap my neck. I prefer to stick with milder descriptors like ‘delusional’ or ‘fruitcakey.’ Another bone I have to pick is the idea that just because the Republicans lost otherwise winnable senate races in Delaware, Nevada, and Colorado that it means that we didn’t just elect a bunch of people who are more crazy than Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Ken Buck.

I think we’ll find out that the Senate rules and Rand Paul are completely incompatible. The new senator from Utah, Mike Lee, appears dangerously unhinged. But the real gems will be found in the House. We don’t even know who they are yet, but there are dozens of would-be felons, scoundrels, thieves, and tax-cheats to choose from. The prototype for these politicians is Joe Miller, the Alaskan candidate for Senate. But Joe Miller got a lot more scrutiny than the used-car salesmen, exterminators, and war criminals that are coming to office next week.

We’re still suffering from the fallout of the 1994 elections: witness Sam Brownback becoming the governor of Kansas. We will likewise be suffering the consequences of the 2010 elections when 2026 rolls around. Count on it. The midterms are not a story of a tragedy narrowly averted.

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US teen birth rate still far higher than W. Europe

ATLANTA – The rate of teen births in the U.S. is at its lowest level in almost 70 years. Yet, the sobering context is that the teen pregnancy rate is far lower in many other countries. The most convincing explanation is that contraceptive use is much higher among teens in most Western European countries.

Last week, U.S. health officials released new government figures for 2009 showing 39 births per 1,000 girls, ages 15 through 19 — the lowest rate since records have been kept on this issue.  CDC press release and report.

 « click

However the headline and story in the Washington Post:
Birthrate among teens hits record low

Adjusted graphic in headline of the Washington Times:
Teen birth rate hits 70-year low Original story in Times was the content of the CDC press release. Article content has changed in last hour.

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

I like some of his books but I think it is fair to say that Gore Vidal is the prototypical self-loathing liberal American. Republicans sometimes call this the “Blame America First” phenomenon, but that was never really accurate. For example, Hunter S. Thompson didn’t blame America first. He worshipped and respected our freedoms. He even abused them. But he also understood our violent nature. Vidal is no different. Not really. Michele Bachmann is right. Vidal is snotty.

And consider that Thompson came from nothing but never would have considered exile. Vidal’s father was an All-American quarterback at West Point and his grandfather was a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma. He went to St. Albans and Sidwell Friends. He had every advantage and he turned up his nose at the whole spectacle. I understand why someone like Michele Bachmann would want to puke after being exposed to Vidal’s sanctimonious condescension.

But Messiah is fun. It’s worth a read.

The Christmas to New Year period is traditionally when I draw breath and take time out to think about the year ahead. For Ireland, 2010 has been about as traumatic a year as we have faced in the last century, ranking with the insurrection of 1916; the Civil War in 1922; the economic war with Britain in the I930’s; the “Emergency” as the Second World War was called in Ireland; the Mother and child scheme debacle which marked the high point of Rome Rule in Ireland in 1950/51; and the cataclysmic events of Bloody Sunday in 1972 which undermined the constitutional civil rights movement, radicalised nationalism, and led to a 30 years urban guerilla war between the Provisional IRA and Britain.

The political fall-out from the Irish banking crisis, where the Irish Government effectively took 50% of Irish GDP’s worth of public money and gave it to the mostly foreign banks who were private investors in private Irish banks, is still working its way through the Irish political system.  A General election is expected to take place sometime in or around March 2011 and all polls predict a humiliating defeat for Fianna Fail, the dominant ruling party in Ireland since 1932.  Some commentators caution that such polls often don’t pan out that way in practice, and that, in any case, dramatic falls from grace by ruling parties are often subsequently reversed, as in Denmark in 1973 and Canada in 1993.

My great fear is that the election could result in not very much change at all, with an equally conservative Fine Gael Party largely taking over from Fianna Fail as the dominant government party pursuing policies only cosmetically different from the austerity drive now agreed between the Government, the ECB and the IMF.  For the moment, the TINA narrative is taking hold, and those few economists and others arguing for a default or radical renegotiation of the ECB/IMF deal remain very much voices from outside the establishment.  National confidence has taken a huge beating, and many people simply do not see taking on the EU and the international “financial community” as a viable option, particularly as it is claimed the government will now have to start drawing down those ECB/IMF loans to further bail-out the banks and to fund current government expenditure from mid 2011 onwards.
Fine Gael has taken the opportunity to have a go at what they see as a hugely inefficient and bloated public sector, as if that was the cause of all our woes. Expenditure abuses and inefficiencies certainly did, and to a lesser extent, still do, exist.  But they are minuscule compared to to the abuses in the private banking sector and the property speculation business it funded.  To some extent it is a case of old money (Fine Gael) getting its own back at the slightly less old (Fianna Fail) which only discovered its “entrepreneurial” instincts since the 1960’s, and which came unstuck rather dramatically with the financial abuses of the naughties.  It certainly isn’t about a radical overhaul of the Irish class society, or a radical rethink about how the Irish Nation should be led in the years ahead.

Too often Labour has just been the rather smug make-weight between the two, making up whatever numerical deficit stood between either Fianna Fail or Fianna Gael and a governing majority.  There was a time when “the Seventies will be Socialist” Labour genuinely tried to provide an alternative.  But too often its appeal is based on marginally more redistributive policies or claims to managerial probity and competence.  Now it is becoming the party of refuge for those public sector workers who feel betrayed by both Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael, but that liaison could prove very short-lived indeed if Labour, as is their norm, end up becoming the junior partner in an austerity driven Fine Gael led administration.

Perhaps the most damaging legacy of the “Celtic Tiger” era is the degree of greed and cynicism it spawned.  Almost gone is the youthful idealism often seen during my youth and few seem to engage in politics for anything other than personal career advancement.  The very notion that you might embark of a career in public service in order to further to the common good seems more likely to be greeted by yawns, guffaws, cynicism or just plain ridicule. The calibre of public representatives is thus very low: good local constituency workers, assiduous funeral attenders, a few popular publicans, solicitors, auctioneers, teachers and former sportsmen – but almost none who are outstandingly articulate, major intellects, consummate legislators or experienced in leading large organisations.

None of which would matter two much if the calibre of the Civil Service leadership teams had remained high.  But here too a culture of time serving, place holding, mutual back-scratching, and fawning incompetence seems to have taken hold.  There is little evidence of intellectual capability – no Keynes, or no Dr. T.K. Whitaker, who is often given much of the credit for the 1960’s turnaround in the Irish economy.  Now many of our brightest and best are emigrating and the country risks becoming again the stagnant cesspool of maudlin self pity and scapegoat seeking so reminiscent of my early youth.

Except I don’t think that this is what is going to happen.

Firstly, at a political level, Sinn Féin will pose a significant threat to Labour and force a more assertive leftward stance. Labour in Government, even as the junior partner, will have to insist on a substantial renegotiation of the ECB/IMF deal or face its own obliteration at the polls in due course when that deal results in unsustainable interest payments and a spiralling descent into sustained depression as the debt/GDP ratio rises ever further.  With Morgan Kelly, David McWilliams and others shouting ever louder from the newspaper rooftops, it will no longer be possible to claim TINA or that they had no choice.

People are looking for a choice, and if Labour does not provide it, they will look elsewhere.  Enter, stage left, Sinn Féin and a variety of independents, many of them with a distinctly redder hue than the mildly pink “smoked salmon” socialist tinge so often associated with the Labour party in Ireland. As yet Labour is making no sustained alternative argument to the ECB/IMF austerity plan – preferring to look backwards and continue blaming Fianna Fail for the misguided banking guarantee and bail-out. That point is generally accepted but what people really want to know is what different policies are Labour going to pursue in the future?

It is hardly a coincidence that Labour is now well behind Fine Gael having briefly been the most popular party in Ireland in previous polls in June and September. Recent gains have been by Fine Gael and Sinn Féin – at the expense of Fianna Fail and Labour – so it is high time that Labour abandon the shallow populist policies more commonly associated with Fianna Fail. Fianna Fail is now at rock bottom (13-17% in recent polls) and so there are no more votes to be had from that quarter. If Labour is to recover first position it is going to have to win the economic argument with Fine Gael and compete with Sinn Féin.

So my wish list for the new year is an election as soon as possible fought on actual policy proposals and arguments rather than personalities and with the electorate given a real choice.  We’ve had enough of Civil War politics and the parties arising from that conflict.  It’s time for a new political dispensation in Ireland.  So far a variety of small groups have sprung up to try and meet that need, but the most fundamental change required is a re-polarisation of Irish politics away from civil war to civil consent.  

The days of governments playing fast and loose with public money must be over. Scape-goating the poor and the public service will not wash. In today’s integrated, globalised financial world, the “Irish” banks are no more Irish than Microsoft’s Irish operations.  If the international financial community want to invest in Ireland, they must bear the risks as well as the profits. And if Merkel wants to punish the profligate, she had better start with the banks closer to her home which made some very bad investment decisions and which had no call on Irish taxpayer’s resources – or the public infrastructural investment, health care, social welfare and educational services for which they should have been deployed.

Okay. No reparations. Never have to say you’re sorry. I think I’ve got this American thing down.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is continuing to blast the government’s recent discrimination settlement with African-American farmers as “reparations” — and even predicting that the new Republican-led House will investigate it.

In an interview with local western Iowa radio station KCIM, King discussed the oversight efforts that the new GOP House would undertake. First and foremost, he said, would be his pet cause of investigating ACORN — which no longer exists as a national organization, but whose activists at the state level could be targeted.

“And there’ll be other investigations looking into the Pigford farms issue,” King added, “which I think is full of fraud, that’s — what it amounts to is paying reparations to black farmers in America. We don’t do reparations in America.”

King has previously attacked the settlement for discrimination in past decades by the Department of Agriculture as “slavery reparations”.

Of course, nothing King says even makes any sense. He doesn’t like black people. And he wants to investigate people like me who have worked for ACORN registering voters.

The title to this story paraphrases comments made in an interview of defeated Democratic Representative John Hall. He blames the Supreme Court decision in Citizen’s United case, which permits corporations to anonymously fund organizations for the purpose of running political attack ads under the theory that corporations are people too, for what he perceives as a corporate takeover of the Federal Government:

“I learned when I was in social studies class in school that corporate ownership or corporate control of government is called Fascism. So that’s really the question— is that the destination if this court decision goes unchecked?”

Hall said that the flow of corporate dollars is why he and the Democrats lost control of Congress.

“The country was bought,” he said. “The extremist, most recent two appointees to the Supreme Court, who claimed in their confirmation hearings before the Senate that they would not be activist judges, made a very activist decision in that it overturned more than a century of precedent. And as a result there were millions of extra dollars thrown into this race.”

It’s hard to argue with his assessment. Indeed, corporations funded groups affiliated with business and right wing causes to the tune of millions (possible hundreds of millions of dollars) this campaign season. As a result, we have a slew of Republicans elected to office who even fellow members of that party admit are the most extreme in the history of the Republican Party since the days of the Radical Abolitionists, on issues ranging from the Environment and Climate Change …

Outgoing Republican Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.) broke with his party today and publicly vented his frustration about the apparent turn toward climate skepticism in the next Congress, when Republicans will take control of the House. […]

“To my free enterprise colleagues, whether you think it’s all a bunch of hooey, what we talk about in this committee — the Chinese don’t, and they plan on eating our lunch in the next century, working on these problems,” Inglis said. “We may press the pause button for a few years, but China is pressing the fast-forward button.”

Inglis, ranking member of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, also took aim at “people who make a lot of money on talk radio and talk TV saying a lot of things. They slept at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and they’re experts on climate change. They substitute their judgment for people who have Ph.D.s and work tirelessly” on climate change.

… to Republican hypocrisy about the deficit and the economy.

The human capacity for self-delusion never ceases to amaze me, so it shouldn’t surprise me that so many Republicans seem to genuinely believe that they are the party of fiscal responsibility. Perhaps at one time they were, but those days are long gone.

This fact became blindingly obvious to me six years ago this month when a Republican president and a Republican Congress enacted the Medicare drug benefit, which former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker has called “the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s.” […]

Maybe [Trent Franks (Rep-AZ)] isn’t the worst hypocrite I’ve ever come across in Washington, but he’s got to be in the top 10 because he apparently thinks the unfunded [Medicaire] drug benefit, which added $15.5 trillion (in present value terms) to our nation’s indebtedness, according to Medicare’s trustees, was worth sacrificing his integrity to enact into law. But legislation expanding health coverage to the uninsured–which is deficit-neutral–somehow or other adds an unacceptable debt burden to future generations. We truly live in a world only George Orwell could comprehend when our elected representatives so easily conflate one with the other.

Of course, there are good reasons conservatives oppose expanding the government, as the pending health legislation would do, even if it adds nothing to the deficit. But anyone who voted for the drug benefit, especially someone who switched his vote to make its enactment possible, has zero credibility. People like Franks ought to have the decency to keep their mouths shut forever when it comes to blaming anyone else for increasing the national debt.

It took millions of dollars spent on ads blaming the deficit on Democrats rather than the Bush era Tax cuts, wasteful spending, corruption, two unnecessary wars, and an unfunded Medicare drug mandate, to elect candidates who will vote the way their corporate masters tell them to vote. Millions of dollars to spread lies about who was really responsible for the policies that created our massive deficits and allowed Wall Street to run the world’s economy off a cliff. Citizens United allowed Big Business to promote falsehood, mislead the public and use outright propaganda to purchase the House of Representatives lock, stock and barrel. Of course, with the “60 vote” rule they already effectively owned the Senate.

The lesson of Citizens United wasn’t lost on Blue Dog Democrats with lesser principles than Representative Hall who sought desperately to water down or obstruct major health care reform, financial reforms and climate change legislation along with their more conservative brethren in the Republican party. Apparently they believed the corporations would lay off them in the mid-term elections if they played ball. Guess they now know that given a choice, Big Business will always choose a Republican, no matter how unqualified or extreme, over a “business friendly” Democrat any day of the week.

I thank Representative Hall for speaking the truth. I wonder how much longer anyone but corporate approved spokespeople and Republicans in Congress will be permitted access to major media outlets to protest the lies by Conservatives, Republicans and Big Business that we see go unchallenged on the “News shows” and talk Radio on a daily basis.

Oh right, I forgot. Refutations by liberal Democrats and progressives of the untruths and zombie lies are already ignored by most major mainstream media outlets. We already live in a country where the “truth” is manufactured by one side and one side only, and whatever progressives say or do to combat that “truth” as grossly in error is dismissed or marginalized. For that we can thank the conservative activist judges of the Supreme Court who preference the speech of corporations over that of ordinary individuals.

And without a reversal of that radical and unheralded decision by five conservative justices, we are headed for a one party state, one which serves the interest of business and cares nothing about the rising rates of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, lack of decent health care and the destruction of our nation’s once thriving middle class.

Whether you call it fascism or not, it is a grim future to behold. Unless you are the CEO, senior executive or hold a large percentage of shares of major corporations. Their world, aside from having to pay for the extra security to enjoy the fruits of their ill-gotten gains behind the walls of their increasingly fortress-like enclaves, will be peaches and cream.

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Brazil’s Silva sees record approval rating

SAO PAULO — Brazil’s president is seeing record approval ratings with just over two weeks left before he leaves office. The Ibope polling institute says Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s personal approval ratings are now at 87 percent. That’s up from 83 percent at the same time last year.

Silva leaves office Jan. 1 after eight years. Brazil’s presidents are limited to two consecutive terms. He will be handing over power to his hand-chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, who won election in October.

The Legacy of Brazil’s Lula da Silva

BUENOS AIRES — He couldn’t do it in 1989, in 1994, or in 1998. But on Oct. 27, 2002, the man who everyone in Brazil knew by the nickname “Lula” conquered the highest public office in the country.

Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva took office on Jan. 1, 2003, having won 46.4 percent of the popular vote — twice as many as the second-place candidate, José Serra, of the conservative Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB).

“I, who so many times was accused of not having a university diploma, won my first diploma as President of the Republic of Brazil,” said the teary-eyed founder and historic leader of the Workers Party (PT).

Lula is of the people

Brazilian society identifies with the president, according to William Gonçalves, a professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

“Lula is a man of the people. He understands their necessities and speaks like them,” Gonçalves said. “The president made mistakes, whether they were factual or because of his lack of traditional education, the cultivated, upper-middle class would criticize him. But those objections didn’t hurt Lula’s image in the minds of people in general.”

It was not just his simple and direct style that earned him popular admiration, but also his social programs designed to bridge the gap between the weathy and the poor. One of the best known of these programs is Bolsa Família, which he implemented shortly after taking office and which, according to government figures, reaches 12 million homes.

The program gives poor families a monthly subsidy of between 22 and 200 reais per child (approximately U.S.$12 to $117).

Thanks to this and other measures, 30 million people entered the ranks of the middle cass and 19 million people managed to make it out of extreme poverty during Lula’s eight years in office, according to a study conducted by the Center of Social Policy at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (CPS-FGV) and published by the Argentine daily Clarín.

What’s more, there was a noticeable impact on wealth distribution: 40 percent of the poorest Brazilians increased their wealth 3.15 percent, while the richest 10 percent saw their wealth increase at a more modest 1.09 percent, according to the CPS-FGV.

Brazilian President, Weeps During Farewell Speech (VIDEO)

Lula da Silva has his own oil field according to Petrobras

Brazil’s state-run Petrobras confirmed that oil fields recently discovered offshore contained 8.3 billion barrels of recoverable crude and gas — and said the biggest field was being renamed “Lula.” That nomenclature happens to be the nickname of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who steps down after overseeing eight years of prosperity in Brazil capped by the oil discoveries.

Petrobras explained, though, that the decision to change the name of the field from Tupi to Lula came from its tradition of naming such deepwater zones after marine animals. Lula in Portuguese means squid. The president formally added the nickname to his full name, and he is universally known as Lula in the country.

“It’s not my name — it’s the name of a crustacean,” Lula protested when asked whether the move was to honor him, after he bolstered Petrobras’s control over the oil.

Brazil hopes the fields will propel it into the top league of oil exporting nations, securing its drive to become the world’s fifth-biggest economy in a few years’ time.  

Education in Brazil no longer bottom of the class

(The Economist) – In 2000 the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries, decided to find out how much children were learning at school. At the time, only half of Brazilian children finished primary education. Three out of four adults were functionally illiterate and more than one in ten totally so. And yet few Brazilians seemed to care. Rich parents used private schools; poor ones knew too little to understand how badly their children were being taught at the public ones. The president at the time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, saw a chance to break their complacency. Though Brazil is not a member of the OECD he entered it in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Brazil came last.

A decade on, it is clear that the shock was salutary. On December 7th the fourth PISA study was published, and Brazil showed solid gains in all three subjects tested: reading, mathematics and science (see chart 1). The test now involves 65 countries or parts of them. Brazil came 53rd in reading and science. The OECD is sufficiently impressed that it has selected Brazil as a case study of “Encouraging lessons from a large federal system”.

America’s Ranking – Education Matters  

Brazil: No Mideast peace with US mediation

After recognizing Palestinian state within 1967 borders, Brazilian President Lula da Silva calls for end to American ‘guardianship’ in region.

Former US President Jimmy Carter said: “I am very happy to see that Brazil recognized the Palestinian state with the 1967 borders. We cannot count on the United States alone to bring peace, since it agrees with almost everything that Israel does. Brazil can help because it has a lot of influence among developing countries. Brazil can be one of the leaders of this process.”

The Obama administration has been disappointing and inadequate for Latin America.

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."