Former Vice Presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro gives her thoughts on the selection of Governor Sarah Palin as Senator McCain’s running mate in an interview with Fox News.
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
A great lady is dead. Most people are probably not familiar with her and it’s a damn shame! The Guardian has a good obituary:
“Ruth Cardoso, who has died aged 77, was a leading Brazilian anthropologist and former first lady renowned for her pioneering work with the poor. Despite her prominent public position, she was notorious for her discretion, avoiding the press and rarely giving interviews. But when she did speak one idea was ever present: that, for Brazil to progress, an understanding of its historical and sociological roots was fundamental. “We have only advanced because we have history,” she told a local TV station shortly before her death.
Born in Araraquara, Cardoso studied at the University of São Paulo. After graduating in 1953, she married Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist whom she had met during her student days and who went on to become the Brazilian president. Following the 1964 military takeover, Ruth and her husband were forced into exile, living in France, Chile, the US and later the UK, where she became an associate scholar at the Centre of Latin American Studies, Cambridge. (…)
She also became one of the first Brazilian academics to carry out detailed studies of the country’s favelas or shanty towns, settlements that were not included on many city maps until the 1990s. She played a fundamental role in pushing impoverishment and marginalisation on to the academic agenda.
In 1995, during the first year of her husband’s presidency, she seized the opportunity to put her ideas into practice, creating Comunidade Solidária (Community Solidarity) a project which, among other things, brought literacy to 3 million young Brazilians. Her innovative use of public-private partnerships in the fight against poverty, illiteracy and hunger, developed during the period of her husband’s rule, are now seen by many as the basis of Bolsa Familia, a wide-reaching aid programme implemented by Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and which is today being replicated in numerous Latin American and African countries.
A staunch feminist who supported a woman’s right to abortion, Cardoso reputedly hated the term “first lady”, which she described as being an unnecessary Americanism. “A first lady is a human being, not a Barbie,” she told the influential news magazine Veja. (…)
Though her husband was no longer in office, “Dona Ruth” vowed to continue her social crusade, creating an NGO called Comunitas, which worked with education and vocational training, and supported small business initiatives in poor rural areas.”
Truly sad. (Wikipedia page)
Entrevista com Dra. Ruth Cardoso realizada durante o X Congresso Internacioanal de Cidades Educadoras no dia 26 de maio de 2008. Antes de tudo, o Brasil e o globo pierde uma dama digna prudente sensible, um exemplo da mulher contemporânea. O Brasil perdeu uma grande mulher. Se lamenta a morte de dona Ruth Cardoso.
Notícia em português
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
Louise Arbour, outgoing UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, give an interview to Le Monde as she takes stock of the current state of human rights around the world.
Every time human rights are mentioned in conversation or even academic meetings, the objection always comes up that human rights are a Western creation that the United States and European countries are ramming down people’s throats all over the world. It is nonsense, of course (to everyone who knows the history of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and it is reverse patronizing (as if only Western people could have come up with the idea of human rights).
But now, emerging countries, groups and powers such as China, Russia or the Muslim world claim a right to a different version of human rights (unsurprisingly, one that is much more restrictive, in terms of, well… rights). So how do we preserve the universality of these rights?
According to Louise Arbour, there are different lines of fracture in this debate. Developing countries, including China, tend to favor social and economic rights more than civil and political rights whereas the United States has done the opposite. This is a line of fracture inherited from the Cold War.
But the main line of fracture now has to do with the rise of religious groups, especially fundamentalist groups who declare these rights secular and therefore inapplicable to them. These groups claim that they should be adjusted.
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.
Via the BBC,
“Christine Lagarde, the country’s first female minister for finance and the economy, says it is time for French people to “roll up their sleeves” and stop thinking about holidays.”
Bon Chance!!!! Good luck with that, Madame Le Ministre for Finance and the Economy. We, lazy French people, have survived attempts at reform from a lot of conservative governments. And you know what, we love our five week vacations and social benefits, so, you know what you can do with your US-neo-liberal-style reform?
Actually, Madame Le Ministre seems quite clueless:
“She says she was struck on her return [from the US] by an “ethical change” in the French. “Instead of thinking about their work, people were thinking about their weekend… organising, planning and engineering time off,” she says.
Not that Christine Lagarde believes that life should be “work and nothing else”.
Looking out from her office window in the huge Soviet-style finance ministry, she points out the barges on the River Seine below - a reminder she says, of how slow things can be when other events are moving at high speed.
Making rapid progress recently has been the minister’s pet project, a bill to modernise the French economy. Last week it passed its first reading in the National Assembly and will shortly go before the Senate.
“More enterprises and more competition” were the objectives, she told parliament earlier this month, in order to obtain three concrete results: “more growth, more jobs and more purchasing power”.
Christine Lagarde’s task is to sell some of the most challenging reforms of the Sarkozy era to the French people. Her call for harder work, as well as the measures contained in the economy bill, can touch a raw nerve.”
Oh yeah, pass that bill and you know what she’ll be seeing next out from her office window? The huge demonstrations that are sure to follow. The French people (like me) can be profoundly (and proudly) annoying but we are not stupid. When we hear reform, we know it means cutting back our social benefits.
Has it occurred to Madame Le Ministre that the French might actually prefer vacations to money? No, of course not, neo-liberals can only conceive that everybody is as soullessly greedy as they are.
Photo Source: AFP from article.
Sexism in the Media
Well, I have heard this sort of talk in locker rooms before but hearing it on the national media is quite another matter. I am seething after watching that video. Those comments are unacceptable and have no place in political discourse. Now Howard Dean wants to discuss sexism. Where has he been the past five months? In hibernation in a locker room? It is offensive because for him this is borne of political desperation as he gets to witness his precious nominee get raked over the electorate’s coals.
The Gender Divide in Politics
Which country has the largest representation by women in a parliament or Congress?
A) Norway
B) India
C) Rwanda
D) Iceland
E) Cuba
If you have been reading this blog, you would know the correct answer is C) Rwanda.
There is a reason for this and it dates to the Rwandan genocide of April 1994. The Rwandan gencide left at least 800,000 and perhaps as many 1.1 million, mostly ethnic Tutsis, dead and the dead were disproportionaly men. After the genocide, women made up over 60% of the Rwanda population. Of necessity, women had to take a larger role in the halls of government. Now 14 years later, women make up 53% of the population in Rwanda about a two percentage positive imbalance in standard male to female ratios. However, women have retained their involvement in Rwanda politics and society. Women still make up just over half the members of Rwanda’s parliament. (Read my earlier post on Rwanda: Where Men Fail, Women Succeed)
Of these five European countries, which has the lowest female participation in a parliament or congress?
A) France
B) The United Kingdom
C) Poland
D) Belarus
E) Moldova
And if you had to guess would the Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have a higher or lower female participation than the United States?
The answer is below the fold.
From All Africa:
On the eve of the formal opening of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said the achievement of gender equality and parity must start with the girl child, who has been left behind in receiving the education that is required for competing, and contributing to Africa’s development. Too often, the President observed, the girl child has accompanied the mother in the fields and market places and neglected in favor of the boy child when resources are inadequate to send all to school. Addressing a symposium Tuesday on Africa’s Development and Girls’ Education, the President also spoke of the plight of the African girl child, who often gets married off too young, most times involuntarily.
How true, it’s why I do what I do for a living, provide funding to groups that primarily work with female empowerment. In light of this, I thought I would profile Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the exceptional leader of a war-torn country and one with deep ties to the United States, Liberia. Liberia was founded in 1822 by emanacipated slaves returning to Africa from the United States. Its capital is Monrovia, named for the fifth President of the United States, James Monroe.
Several women now serve as Prime Ministers or Presidents of their countries. And in Spain, the Spanish Prime Minister and self-avowed feminist, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has appointed a cabinet with a female majority that I highlighted earlier in a post. A conservative Spanish commentator dismissed it as “battalion of inexperienced seamstresses” and the Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi added:
“Zapatero has formed a government that is too pink, something that we cannot do in Italy because there is a prevalence of men in politics and it isn’t easy to find women who are qualified.”
Misogyny knows no borders. Happily the Spanish cabinet is winning praise from all sectors of Spanish life though the seven months preganant Defence Minister Carme Chacon did ruffle a few feathers when she banned the Ministry’s personnel from cruising the Internet, especially sport and leisure sites. Spaniards, however, were quite pleased with her toughness.
Another woman, Helen Clark of New Zealand has been quietly, after all we are talking about New Zealand, governing in Wellington for nine years.