In a few short weeks Dilma Rousseff’s government-to-be has already begun to exhibit the damaging infighting and fractioning that many Brazil-watchers had predicted, raising questions about Ms. Rousseff’s strengths as a leader. Meirelles’ Sassy Exit Last week the head of Brazil’s central bank for the past eight years, Henrique Meirelles, criticized the Rousseff government’s aims […]
The 2003 WSF put the movement on map, in large measure because President-Elect Lula chose to emphasize his larger than Brazil leadership making an historic speech at this unique global gathering of social movement activists before boarding a jet to Davos where he called on world leaders from the corporate world and government to combat poverty and make the institutions of global authority more accountable and democratic. Lula was the perfect interlocutor between the rice and bean rebels of the WSF and the champagne soaked elite of Davos.
President Lula made his case for greenhouse gas emissions reductions at the UNFCCC fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) at Copenhagen. In an open letter published in the Christian Science Monitor, Lula admonished, “It is beyond doubt that both the benefits of economic development as well as the costs of environmental degradation over the past […]