1. "Portland, Oregon" - Loretta Lynn
2. "Cosmia" - Joanna Newsom
3. "Wayfaring Stranger" - Neko Case
4. "Big Green Country" - Neil Young
5. "Holiday in Cambodia" - Dead Kennedys
6. "Snowstorm" - Galaxie 500
7. "It's In Our Hands" - Bjork
8. "Danse Norvégienne" - Django Reinhardt
9. "Power of Love" - Jimi Hendrix
10. "You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar but I Feel Like a Millionaire" - Queens of the Stone Age
I have no intention of seeing Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. As an historian of Latin America who has studied a fair bit about indigenous peoples in Latin America (including the Maya), I'm sure I'd only be outraged at the inaccuracy. I'd hoped to completely ignore the film. However, I (unfortunately) have two comments.
First (and related to the historical-(in)accuracy issue), is it any surprise that Gibson maybe misrepresented the Mayas? According to the movie-industry "news" at IMDB.com, "some descendants of the Maya tribes depicted in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto have denounced the movie as racist and not representative of their ancient culture. In an interview with Reuters, Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation, said, "Gibson replays, in glorious big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, needed, rescue." Lucio Yaxon, described by Reuters as a 23-year-old Mayan human rights activist, added, "Basically, the director is saying the Mayans are savages."" Is this that surprising from a guy who not only made a movie about Jesus that was originally not-insignificantly anti-Semitic, but then went on an anti-Semitic tirade this summer?
Second (and more to the point)..."Braveheart;" "The Passion;" and now, "Apocalypto," which is apparently extremly violent and, according to the NY Times's A.O. Scott, "not much else in the way of bodily torment has been left to the imagination" in the film. Does Gibson know how to do anything but extreme gore? It's almost like a joke now - "what other time period in a different geographic location can I provide images of extreme gore?"
Whatever happened to the subtle use of violence unseen to increase suspense?
I haven't written about the aftermath of the Thai coup in awhile but a couple of good Asia Times articles reminds me that it is time. Shawn Crispin writes of the immense, if unofficial power of the Thai monarch. Although he is ailing, he is also riding high. The use of royal symbolism by the coup essentially assures us that the Thai monarchy supported it, although the military has tried to distance the palace from the coup.
More disturbing is the continued unrest in the Muslim southern edge of the country. One of the complaints about deposed Prime Minister Thaksin was his inability to control the Muslim insurgency. But Marwaan Macan-Markar writes that insurgents are now forcing schools to close and the Thai military is helpless to stop the violence. The Muslims look at Thai-run schools as particularly offensive, dating back a 1921 law forcing ethnic Malays to attend them. Things are not looking good on this front.
Yes, I'm a diehard Buckeyes fan, but no matter what sports or teams you root for, the Troy Smith story is still a great story. In an age where we all grow cynical with numerous drug scandals, selfish play, players flipping fans off, and the "me-me-me" culture of multimillion dollars (spurred on by mercenary agents), Smith's ability to get another chance and make the most of it, learning as he went along, provides a truly good story in the sports world, even to this jaded fan. Check it out.
And congratulations, Troy, on all you've accomplished and overcome in life.
I don't usually talk about such trivial issues, but why do people obsess over Lindsey Lohan? To the point, are there actually people out there who think she is that beautiful? I don't even think she is particularly attractive, and certainly doesn't deserve media obsession about her looks and behavior. Just curious.
You have to love that Mary Cheney is pregnant. Nothing pleases me more than seeing disheartened conservatives!
Redbeard has some awesome wingnut quotes on the matter, including this tasty one:
"We're not discussing economics. We're talking about rational people like Ms. Cheney who are not capable of having a family because of her sexual and relationship choice. She took a baby from a potential mom and dad. bottomline."
The Atlantic has listed their 100 most influential Americans. I'll just list them for ease of discussion:
1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Thomas Jefferson
4. Franklin Roosevelt
5. Alexander Hamilton
6. Benjamin Franklin
7. John Marshall
8. Martin Luther King
9. Thomas Edison
10. Woodrow Wilson
11. John D. Rockefeller
12. Ulysses Grant
13. James Madison
14. Henry Ford
15. Theodore Roosevelt
16. Mark Twain
17. Ronald Reagan
18. Andrew Jackson
19. Thomas Paine
20. Andrew Carnegie
21. Harry Truman
22. Walt Whitman
23. Wright Brothers
24. Alexander Graham Bell
25. John Adams
26. Walt Disney
27. Eli Whitney
28. Dwight Eisenhower
29. Earl Warren
30. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
31. Henry Clay
32. Albert Einstein
33. Ralph Waldo Emerson
34. Jonas Salk
35. Jackie Robinson
36. William Jennings Bryan
37. J.P. Morgan
38. Susan B. Anthony
39. Rachel Carson
40. John Dewey
41. Harriet Beecher Stowe
42. Eleanor Roosevelt
43. W.E.B. DuBois
44. Lyndon Baines Johnson
45. Samuel F.B. Morse
46. William Lloyd Garrison
47. Frederick Douglass
48. J. Robert Oppenheimer
49. Frederick Law Olmstead
50. James K. Polk
51. Margaret Sanger
52. Joseph Smith
53. Oliver Wendell Holmes
54. Bill Gates
55. John Quincy Adams
56. Horace Mann
57. Robert E. Lee
58. John C. Calhoun
59. Louis Sullivan
60. William Faulkner
61. Samuel Gompers
62. William James
63. George Marshall
64. Jane Addams
65. Henry David Thoreau
66. Elvis Presley
67. P.T. Barnum
68. James D. Watson
69. James Gordon Bennett
70. Lewis & Clark
71. Noah Webster
72. Sam Walton
73. Cyrus McCormick
74. Brigham Young
75. Babe Ruth
76. Frank Lloyd Wright
77. Betty Friedan
78. John Brown
79. Louis Armstrong
80. William Randolph Hearst
81. Margaret Mead
82. George Gallup
83. James Fenimore Cooper
84. Thurgood Marshall
85. Ernest Hemingway
86. Mary Baker Eddy
87. Benjamin Spock
88. Enrico Fermi
89. Walter Lippmann
90. Jonathan Edwards
91. Lyman Beecher
92. John Steinbeck
93. Nat Turner
94. George Eastman
95. Sam Goldwyn
96. Ralph Nader
97. Stephen Foster
98. Booker T. Washington
99. Richard Nixon
100. Herman Melville
Any historian, or educated person in general, will dispute some of this. There are some people ranked too high and some too low. Some subjects are overrepresented and underrepresented. And some picks are really weird.
Among the somewhat overrated: Wilson, Grant, Disney, Warren, Olmstead, Joseph Smith, Sullivan, Mead, Nader, Eisenhower
Among the somewhat underrated: King, Whitney, Elvis, John Brown, Edwards, Booker T. Washington
I'm not really sure that the Mormons need to have 2 people on the list. Is Mormonism that huge of a phenonmenon in the US? Smith definitely needs to be there but lower. Brigham Young is an important guy but unless you are Mormon, does he really matter to larger narratives of US history.
Like Lance Mannion, I am pretty disgusted by Ronald Reagan being ranked so high. This isn't because I disagree with him politicially. It's because he didn't really do anything. When you look at massive changes in American history, does Reagan matter all that much? I don't think so. Now Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush--those guys should be on the list. They created huge historical changes.
At the same time, why in the hell is Richard Nixon ranked at 99? No one changed the public persona of the presidency more than Nixon. The damage he caused to the prestige of the presidency cannot be overestimated. Ever since Watergate, Americans have not respected the office nearly as much as before and have generally shown a new cynicism about politics. He should be far higher.
As for people I'd like to see on there. Where is George Kennan? Or more generally, some of our early shapers of Cold War policy. Sure, Truman is important but more people from this period need to be there. Malcolm X? William Tecumseh Sherman? What about Andrew Johnson? No one did more to undermine Reconstruction. Gloria Steinem clearly deserves a place. You could also make good arguments for Alfred T. Mahan, one of the nation's major architects of imperialism, Richard Sears (as one of Mannion's commentators does--you can't overestimate the importance of the Sears Catalog), Billy Graham, John Jay, the 4 North Carolina A&T students who started desegregating lunch counters, Jefferson Davis, Albert Gallatin, and John L. Lewis. And where the hell are the Native Americans? Totally left off the list. That is a major problem. How can such a list exist without Tecumseh, at the very least?
On the other hand, I was glad that John F. Kennedy was not on the list. And I liked that technological advances received as much attention as they did.
Generally though, I enjoy exercises like this. I don't agree with everything but it's a project worth doing. I always like to see public discussions of history, though I wish it wasn't so Great Man oriented.
A remake of the highly lauded Marcel Carne 1939 classic Le Jour Se Leve, The Long Night opens with recently returning serviceman Joe Adams (Henry Fonda) shooting an unknown dandy in his dingy apartment. Upon hearing the shots and the police sirens, the people of this small blue collar town flock around to find out what happened—no way Joe Adams could have done this—and as he sits alone in his home with his thoughts, waiting for the cops, we wind out, through a series of flashbacks, what drove poor Joe Adams to murder.
The story structure of The Long Night is impeccably constructed. It isn’t easy to use flashbacks within flashbacks without becoming convoluted, but there is no confusion of time and place here. The device isn’t used as in Rudolph Mate’s 1949 classic, D.O.A., in which we have one large flashback. Instead, we jump back and forth, back again, then back even further, before we come back to the present again. A complicated web, but one that does a fantastic job of developing complex characterizations of small town lovers and their naivety. These characters are completed, however, by some great performances, especially from Fonda (in one of his first films after returning from the war), who’s experiences no doubt lend a certain amount of insight into Joe Adams’ existential crisis, and Vincent Price, who gives the soon-to-be murdered magician Maximilian the feeling of a powerless Svengali, the kind of manipulator who can only prey on the weakest possible people.
In keeping with the original film’s poetic realism, the small town in which these people live is made up of highly theatrical sets, weird miniatures, and minimal but strangely surreal mattes that immerse the viewer in the scene even though, taken on their own, don’t make any realistic sense. As a result of its poetic nature, too, some of the performances are overwrought and occasionally distracting, but Fonda’s performance tempers a lot of this. The stark photography (the only reason the DVD is in a film noir collection) by Sol Polito and a solid score from possibly the finest early film maestro Dmitri Tiomkin round out what is a surprisingly good production.
What I find interesting about the film is that there are definite anti-military and pro-collective feelings in the story, which I must assume come from the original story. Fonda had just come back from the war with commendations and director Anatole Litvak had also served in the army during WWII in the photography division and worked with John Ford on the US Army’s Why We Fight series. This all helps to serve the story in a substantial way but the HUAC had just started working again when The Long Night came out and, had the film been made even a year or two later, these “anti-American” sentiments either would have not been in the film or all concerned, regardless of prior military service, would surely have summoned for questioning. It comes at a place in Hollywood where people had not yet become afraid of ideas but soon would be. I guarantee that McCarthy would have frowned upon the shooting of an Army uniform, but maybe I underestimate the guy.
People in the U.S. generally think they have a good notion of what universities entail: a main campus (with perhaps branches spread throughout the state in smaller cities); diverse buildings that reflect the area's history and culture (the adobe-assault at University of New Mexico providing a particularly strong example); and a well-thought-out use of space and complementarity within campuses.
For this reason, Brazil provides a remarkable contrast, as I've recently had the chance to see first-hand. One of the most remarkable things (to me) about universities in Brazil is how spread out they are. There is no "main campus"; rather, different organizational units harbor different parts of the city, spread hither and thither with not much rhyme or reason. The Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro offers perhaps the most obvious example. The engineering and natural sciences are located in the very north of the city, by the International Airport (which is itself barely inside the city limits). However, the social sciences and philosophy are located in an entirely different building in the heart of Rio's downtown, while the communications school is located in the far south in the neighborhood of Urca (where the famous Sugarloaf Mountain is). There is no sense of unity within a single campus. Some may blame this on the UFRJ's hasty founding (in 1921 or 1930, depending on who you ask, the creation of UFRJ was just the consolidation of pre-existing schools of medicine, law, and engineering). However, the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Niterói (just across Guanabara bay from Rio), established and built in the 1960s, is no different. While the social sciences/history/humanities are in one part of the city, the natural sciences are in a totally different (and not-too-close) part of Niterói. Thus, students can spend their entire university career without even seeing half of the campus where they attend school.
Another thing that strikes me about the university life in Brazil is its...I hate to use the word, but the only thing that comes to mind is its "hippie-ness." It is not at all uncommon to see students occupying parts of campus or even classrooms, playing guitar and philosophizing. But this isn't like your John-Mayer/Dave-Matthews-wannabes who populate most campuses in the states. It's more like your we're-from-the-middle-class-but-we-can-afford-to-be-leftists group (long hair, often dreadlocks, unkempt beards, etc.). And that's not to mock them completely. Their interests in oppression and poverty generally are earnest, and some of them are definitely from the lower-income-levels. Indeed, one of the most remarkable things to me was that, at UFF, there was an area of tents where poor students who can't afford student housing sleep for free. And, in my favorite example, at the Instituto de Filosofia e Ciencias Sociais (IFCS, part of the UFRJ) in downtown Rio, students will occupy unused rooms and smoke marijuana. It's not like we don't know what they're doing - you can't miss the smell. All of the conservatives who weep and bemoan how "liberal" colleges in the United States are, and how they "lead astray" youth, would probably have a coronary here.
The one remarkable similarity between the U.S. campuses and Brazil's that struck me these past few days was the architecture. Just as in the U.S., they reflect the time period they were created in. Thus, the IFCS campus and the Urca campus of UFRJ reflect the Victorian and 19th century architecture that Brazil mimicked from Europe in order to look "civilized," while the northern campus of UFRJ and the UFF campus (both built during Brazil's dictatorship from 1964-1985) couldn't reflect a more authoritarian style of architecture if they tried (large, near-windowless concrete buildings that are cold and without personality, reflecting the authoritarian and bureaucratic nature of the government under which they were built).
Anyhow, for those who thought university life in the U.S. was pretty much the norm in the world...well, that couldn't be further from the truth. And that says nothing about how classes are taught or what pedagogical approaches are involved in university life in Brazil at the undergraduate and graduate levels (which is a blog, if not a book, unto itself...)
1st Tuesday in the month. You know what that means--Bastard Blogging!!!
In 1951, nearing his retirement as president of the United Fruit Company, Sam "The Banana Man" Zemurray remarked, "All we cared about were dividends. I feel guilty about some of the things we did."
Should have Zemurray felt guilty? Um, yes.
Born in 1877 in Russia, Zemurray's family came to the United States when he was 14. Lacking any education, Zemurray had an intense drive to succeed financially. He entered the banana trade in Mobile, Alabama in 1895. The late nineteenth century saw the beginnings of America's consumer culture. The massive industrialization after the Civil War led to an increasingly middle class that desired new consumer products, including new food products. Until that time, bananas were an upper-class luxury but Zemurray and others turned them into an American staple. He began buying up bananas that ripened in transport ships and therefore could not make it to the lucrative eastern cities. He sold those bananas locally as a product for the average consumer and made a ton of money. He started investing in Central American banana plantations and in 1899 became the president of the Cuyamel Fruit Company. While United Fruit dominated the banana industry during these years, Cuyamel remained a powerful rival.
Zemurray believed that nothing mattered except making money. As Paul Dosal writes in his excellent book, Doing Business with the Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit in Guatemala, 1899-1944, Zemurray "sponsored rebellions, hired mercenaries, bribed politicians, defied Guatemalan, Honduran, and American laws, and almost single-handedly provoked a war between Honduras and Guatemala." That's a hell of a resume right there! In 1911, not pleased with a new US-sponsored Nicaraguan government, Zemurray went to New Orleans where deposed Nicaraguan dictator Manuel Bonilla was living. He brought him back to Nicaragua, began a revolution, and deposed the US-supported government. Bonilla then granted Zemurray widespread land concessions and tax breaks.
In the middle of the 1920s, Zemurray tried to get Honduras to invade Guatemala so that he could control the Motagua Valley, a prime banana-growing area, instead of United which had more sway in Guatemala. It had long been a disputed zone, but neither nation really cared that much until the banana powers got involved. United had closer relations with the Guatemalan military than Zemurray did with the Honduran military, so he failed in his attempt to create war, but only just. Honduran President Miguel Paz Barahona refused to provide the troops Zemurray demanded and then his favored party lost a 1928 election and he was forced to give up. But the gall of a private man trying to create a war so he can grow more fruit is shocking, even to this jaded historian.
United hated the competition and bought out Cuyamel in 1929. But within 4 years, Zemurray managed to take over as president of United where he continued his ruthless ways of dealing with the Central American nations. He led United from 1933 to 1951. Working closely with Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico, Zemurray and UFCO destroyed labor unions, gained signficant land concessions, and increasingly worked the CIA to undermine any smidgen of opposition to the Ubico regime. Ubico had been installed by the US in 1930 and in fact, for most Guatemalans, United Fruit and the United States were the same thing. A 1934 uncovered coup plot allowed Ubico to militarize his regime, something fully supported by Zemurray, United, and the Roosevelt administration. Zemurray worked closely with the powerful businessman John Foster Dulles, later Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower, to gain ever more lucrative contracts and create ties to the US government in case things went sour in Central America.
The US demand for bananas, which soon became one of the cheapest fruits on the market, also spawned widespread environmental destruction. Millions of acres of native jungle were destroyed to provide for bananas, decimating wildlife populations. The monocultures that replaced the jungle became susceptible to diseases such as Panama disease and Sigatoka disease. Today, much of that originial Cuyamel and United land cannot support bananas. When I traveled on the North Coast of Honduras a few years ago, I saw miles and miles of palm oil plantations where jungle and then bananas once grew. In addition, nasty chemicals were used to fight off Sigatoka, exposing workers, animals, and water supplies to chemical pollution.
Eventually, United became too powerful in Guatemala for the US government's tastes. FDR governments was more than happy to work with business, but he could not deal with a company so powerful in a given country that the business could undermine US foreign polciy goals. Essentially, the State Department wanted to increase exports to Guatemala but United's tariffs (and this was the reality--they set the tariffs and the Guatemalan government simply ratified them). They fought until World War II, when FDR's Good Neighbor policy coincided with United Fruit's desire to have a pro-UFCO governmen in power.
Ubico left power in 1944. Guatemalan workers began organizing into labor unions. Guatemala began an experiment in democracy that led to the election of Jacobo Arbenz to the presidency in 1951, the same year Zemurray retired from United Fruit. In 1953, Arbenz exprorpriated 400,000 acres of uncultivated United Fruit land. This move led to the CIA attacking Arbenz and promoting a coup that succeeded in 1954. Of course, Zemurray's associate John Foster Dulles, as well as Dulles' brother Allen, director of the CIA, were behind this move. At the same time, the US government moved to end UFCO's monopoly, figuring that would help US-Central American relations.
Zemurray's close ties to the US government, as well as his decades-long manipulation of Central American nations to promote his own wealth, led to the destruction of the democratic experiment in Guatemala and the onset of a 35 year civil war that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
So, should Sam Zemurray have felt guilty? Absolutely. He died in 1961 of Parkinson's. He lived long enough to see Guatemala turn into a disaster zone. Hopefully, that Parkinson's was particularly painful and made him suffer 1/100th as much as the people of Guatemala.
I've been having a conversation with The Boy from Good Nonsense. Among the topics we discussed--Lawrence Welk, why my music collection is so much better than Mr. Trend's and Lyrad's, how drunk I must have been to start blogging, and why Johnny Cash is overrated and the Louvin Brothers painfully underrated.
Check it out.
Although on some issues I've had begrudging respect for Joe Biden, ever since he decided that he was interested in running for president again, he's continued to put his foot in his mouth. This time, he laments the fact that Delaware didn't join the Confederacy while giving a speech in South Carolina.
I'll bet African-Americans would love a Biden presidency. It would remind them of the halcyon days of the 1910s when the Republican Party had abandoned them in favor of racism and the Democrats still clung to pure white supremacy. The parties would be reversed this time but the effect would be the same!
I guess there is someone I would support Evan Bayh over.
Via Kos and Correntewire
OK, it's not really a last word because Milton Friedman was such an evil force in the world. He needs to be talked about over and over again until all his disciples are discredited. In that spirit, here's a story from Walden Bello from ZNet about how the effect of the Chicago School on the Chilean economy. Among the statistics:
In 1974-75, the GDP declined by 12%, followed by a drop of 15% in 1982-83
The share of the national economy going to the richest 10% when from 36.5% to 46.8%
Average GDP growth between 1974 and 1989 was 2.6%. Compare this to the period between 1951 and 1971, when average growth was over 4%.
A while ago, I wondered what would happen to Republican terrorist Chad Castagana, who sent packages with anthrax-like powder to liberal figures around the nation.
Orcinus picks up on a post from Lambert from Correntewire who shows how the L.A. Times buried the story and no other major media outlets have picked up on it.
Anyone care to speculate on what the media coverage would look like if these packages were sent by a liberal to right-wingers? Or if the terrorists was Muslim? It would be front-page news. But right-wing terrorism--hey, that's just one of our good ol'boys going a little too far.
After seeing violent conflict between landholders, laborers, and environmentalists in the region, Brazil has protected a swath of the Amazon larger than Alabama, leaving it open to only researchers. While no state is so strong as to prevent EVERY individual from crossing a line drawn on a map, it's still good to see this step taken.
Daniel Zwerdling's scathing report on how the Army, at least at Colorado's Fort Carson, deals with soldiers with PTSD after serving in Iraq is shocking. Basically, they are insulted, hazed, denigrated, and not treated. As Zwerdling shows, the military, from the top on down to sergeants, are drumming these soldiers out as quickly as possible. More insulting, they don't dismiss them for PTSD because they would have to pay more benefits. Instead, they kick them out for the misconduct caused by the trauma.
Perhaps the most telling part of the report was Zwerdling's interview with recently retired sergeant Nathan Towsley, who basically said that people with PTSD are weak, lack manhood, and shouldn't be in the army at all. If this is the attitude of sergeants throughout the army, we have again done a disservice to returning veterans.
No doubt there are well-meaning doctors and army brass who see PTSD as a real problem and want to treat these soldiers to the best of their ability. But clearly, the army as a whole continues to try and sweep the issue under the rug. And like in Vietnam, the military and American society as a whole is unwilling to deal with the consequences of sending young people to war.
Probably not. But, in the ongoing joke-that's-frighteningly-true, Starbucks opened its first stores in Brazil last week. Not surprisingly, they opened in Sao Paulo, the commercial capital of Brazil, and they opened in some of the most expensive parts of the city. Paulistas are known (not without reason) as thinking they are more "Brazilian" than Brazilians, and better than the rest of the country (and, not surprisingly, they are somewhat "whiter" than much of the country, leading to a not-surprisingly-significant level of racism, coded in the perjorative of "Bahianos," who are the African-based populations of Brazil's Northeast). As the ecoonomic elite of the country, the Paulisthas spend accordingly (though this is not to say that Sao Paulo lacks poverty - it, too, is dotted with favelas and indications of the gap in extreme wealth in Brazil). Thus, it comes as no surprise that, whereas you could normally get an espresso for about 80 cents or less anywhere else, Paulistas will probably begin hanging out at Starbucks as a claim of status. It will be interesting to see if the phenomenon spreads beyond Sao Paulo (I'm betting not, but stranger things have happened....)
I wanted to write about this last week, but travels to parts of Brazil outside of Rio prevented me from doing so today. In a little-known fact to most Americans and anybody outside of Brazil, Brazil's governmental system is one of the most paradoxical in the world to many laymen and political scientists, both Brazilian and elsewhere, for one reason: it is a parliamentary presidency. Thus, while Brazil elects presidents (most recently being Luis Inacio Lula da Silva's re-election), the presidents themselves depend on coalition-building to get their agendas accomplished with Congress.
This provided one of the biggest obstacles to Lula's first administration, as much of the reform and social improvement he sought to accomplish met roadblocks in a Congress in which his party (the PT) struggled to gain majority votes. Indeed, in 2005, corruption scandals emerged when questionable exchanges of money to rightist senators in exchange for votes to approve some of Lula's plans came to light (to be fair to Lula, this was apparently orchestrated behind his back, and he not only was unaware of the going-ons while they happened, once they finally came to light, he launched a full investigation into his own party. Additionally, the previous administration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso performed a similar practice in order to get congressional approval to amend the constitution so that presidents could run for re-election for a second term, an amendment which he successfully bought from Congress and then used to his advantage, gaining re-election in 1998). This coalition-building (and the sometimes-shady deals it leads to) has dominated Brazil's government since the return to direct elections in 1990, and has led many scholars, in Brazil, in the U.S., and elsewhere, to argue whether a presidential-parliamentary system can function, not only in the case of Brazil, but as a broader model in the abstract.
All this can be debated endlessly, but there was big news for Lula last week. The PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democratico Brasileiro), Brazil's largest party (and the true "center" of Brazil's political spectrum) agreed to join Lula in his coalition building last week, giving him a Congressional majority. The PMDB had abstained from full-party support in his first administration (2002-2006), though certainly many individuals did vote for his programs. Certainly, this will not be an open congressional mandate for Lula to do as he pleases, but it should hopefully allow him to increase his plans for social equality (such as improving educational opportunities, helping the poor be able to afford enough food to stay alive and healthy, etc.) in ways that he was unable to do in his first administration.
2 disturbing stories came to my attention today.
First, Bush is looking to lift the drilling ban in Alaska's Bristol Bay. For a small amount of natural gas, Bush and the petroleum companies want to destroy one of the nation's last solid stocks of salmon, as well as the home to orcas, whales, and other increasingly rare sea animals. This ban went into affect in 1989, after the Exxon Valdez disaster. Corrupt Alaska Senator Ted Stevens naturally supports the drilling. Will Democrats stand up to this? Even after January 20, I have my doubts.
Second, and I think more disturbing, the Environmental Protection Agency has been closing its libraries around the nation and even destroying documents. These libraries have long played a key role in Congress and the EPA making informed environmental decisions. However, the Bush administration has no interest in anyone making informed environmental decisions. The Union of Concerned Scientists is on the case. The reports on document destruction is pretty fresh stuff and they haven't had time to get it on their website yet--it is just circulating my e-mail right now. But check out their website for more information--I assume it will be up on Monday.
