FOLLOWING THE EUROPEAN UNION

Yes, but Brazil has the largest debt of any of the south american countries because of the iguazu power plant.

Growth reached 6.1 percent in the third quarter from the year earlier. Some analysts have raised their growth estimates for the year to over 4 percent from 3.5 percent earlier. In 2003, the economy shrank by 0.2 percent. Exports this year have also started to boom, and the country's November trade surplus was $2.08 billion. Tax receipts have been rising steadily throughout the year, allowing the government to whittle down the national debt at a slightly quicker pace.

The decline in unemployment has helped fuel household purchases of big-ticket items like appliances and autos, which jumped 20 percent in September from a year earlier. New cellphone subscribers in October shot up 42 percent from October 2003, while retail sales in August rose for the ninth straight month. The economy is expected to grow at a better-than-5.3 percent clip this year, the fastest pace since 1994, according to government projections, and inflation has stabilized at around 7 percent.

In a gauge of investor optimism, Brazil's stock market posted its biggest monthly gain in November.

The rebound in Brazil is being fueled largely by the global economic recovery, which lifted Latin American performance across the board. But the government also used the favorable trade winds from booming commodity prices to pare state costs like pensions and shutter ministries as part of market-friendly reform efforts many of its neighbors eschew today.

The upshot? In November the International Monetary Fund assessed the country's performance as "very good."

I hope the EU fails. If it succeeds, it will have set off a global shift of clamoring for one upmanship that I think may militarize the world. It will make the Cold War look like a picnic.

In example-- You are the leader the most powerful country on earth...You take note of several countries whose people and leaders hate you...You see them marshalling forces, and growing a military...Do you just watch?

I have officially changed my mind about the EU. I didn't think there would be any real problem, and thought a little economic competition may be good for the world as a whole--and the lessened hegemonic gulf would actually improve global relationships....

I hope the EU fails. If it succeeds, it will have set off a global shift of clamoring for one upmanship that I think may militarize the world. It will make the Cold War look like a picnic.

In example-- You are the leader the most powerful country on earth...You take note of several countries whose people and leaders hate you...You see them marshalling forces, and growing a military...Do you just watch?

I (or maybe that should be "We Europeans") do not understand the obsession of the USA with the military idustrial complex as a driving force of good in the world.

We associate by understanding and diplomacy, trying to encourage by offering carrots, not shaking sticks.

We prefer to spend money on looking after the world, and its people, rather than destroying it.

We have lived (within two generations) through wars so terrible to our populations that we know, as if in our blood, the destruction that can ensue from the application of military force.

You talk of the centrifugal effect splittng Europe. In so many ways we, the Europeans, are more understanding of each other than the polarised Liberal v Conservative elements of the USA.

Returning to fantasy land for a moment, Calafornia could leave the USA as a result of its frustration with the fundamentalist Christian intolerance preached by the Midwest and South...joining Canada in an alliance of ideals with Europe. We can all play the "unlikely but possible" line.

A strong military for the US used to mean it was developed and maintained to ensure our security. Under Bush, that has changed to mean we will bring democracy to the whole world - by force.

ROBERT NOVAK COMES UNHINGED.
Zeal of Approval

by Andrew Sullivan

Only at TNR Online
Post date: 12.14.04

Perhaps the least-known aspect of Robert Novak's public persona is that he is a convert not just to Catholicism but to its most hardline sect, Opus Dei. It helps explain Novak's occasional, weird digressions into defenses of the most far-right social causes, and also why those columns appear, without this context, to be, well, slightly unhinged. The latest of these oddities appeared yesterday. Here it is, with my interpolations:

Quote:

Rocco Buttiglione, the internationally esteemed Italian philosopher and statesman, visited Washington last week. Doors were opened to this Italian cabinet member and devout Catholic as a courageous exemplar of conservative Western ideals against the European Union's leftist ruling establishment. But one door was closed to Buttiglione. It was George W. Bush's door.

Some background: Buttiglione was nominated to the EU Commission by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In his nomination testimony, Buttiglione made remarks about the need for women to obey their husbands and about the "sin" of homosexuality. In what appears to have been a grossly unfair process, he decided to withdraw after controversy swirled about his remarks. Hence his emergence as a theoconservative martyr.

But Novak takes this modest point to silly extremes. Start with the slightly breathless description of Buttiglione: an "internationally esteemed Italian philosopher and statesman." This is de trop. Before his nomination to be the European Union's Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security, Buttiglione himself told Corriere della Sera, "I may be a nobody in Italy, but in Europe I will be someone." Yes, Buttiglione is multilingual, a good scholar by all accounts, and is best known for a hagiographic account of the views of the current pontiff, with whom he is apparently very close. Here's a recent essay of his that is certainly cogent, but hardly original. It's a mish-mash of neoconservative Catholic polemic. Anyone familiar with the arguments of Richard John Neuhaus or George Weigel will learn nothing new from Buttiglione.

Quote:

Displaying arrogance, ignorance or both, the Bush White House refused to grant one of America's best friends in hostile Western Europe an appointment with President Bush or a senior aide. There was no pretense of an overly tight schedule. It was just plain "no!" Tim Goeglein, Bush's staff liaison with Catholics, told Buttiglione's entourage there was nothing he could do. Father Robert A. Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, based in Grand Rapids, Mich. (sponsoring the visit), informed the White House the snub was "politically imprudent" and "morally revolting."

It is "morally revolting" for the president of the United States not to meet with a previously obscure Italian Catholic, whose sole claim on public attention is that he failed to win an appointment to the EU Commission? Please.

Quote:

While this conduct contradicts Bush's campaign posture, there is no mystery about what is going on. The re-elected president is offering a hand in friendship to "Old Europe," at the cost of alienating the traditional Catholic constituency so avidly courted the past four years. Never having to worry about running again, Bush can give the back of his hand to Buttiglione, just as the leftist-dominated, anti-American EU refused to seat him as a commissioner.

For an old reporter, this incident brings back memories of nearly 30 years ago, when President Gerald R. Ford snubbed Russian novelist and dissenter Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the symbol of resistance to Soviet tyranny. Then, as now, the White House did not deign to explain itself, but everyone knew Ford stayed away from Solzhenitsyn because Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev warned that detente was at risk. In cases separated by three decades, a Republican president was downgrading values and upgrading realpolitik.

Solzhenitsyn? Is Novak really comparing a democratic nomination process in a free union of liberal nation-states to the Soviet gulag? Yes, it seems; he is. And how on earth is staying out of a now-over controversy within the European Union somehow incompatible with Bush's "campaign posture"? I don't remember Ohio references to the need to reach out to Italian Catholic government officials who don't have EU jobs.

Quote:

The usually helpful Goeglein told me brusquely he could say nothing. Press secretary Scott McClellan said the Italian's treatment "should not be viewed as a sign of disrespect. The president had a heavy schedule, and it is rare when he meets with a minister separate from a prime minister." Sen. Rick Santorum, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, is seen as a rock by fellow Catholics. An Acton Institute award to Buttiglione was presented in Santorum's Capitol Hill office last week with the senator present. But when I sought Santorum's comment about the White House snub, he apparently disappeared, because a staffer said he could not be reached.

This is now reaching the outer limits of paranoia. Isn't McClellan right? How many other failed nominees to EU Commission posts has Bush met with lately? Is the president now obliged to give the privilege of an Oval Office meeting to every Catholic reactionary who is suddenly the favorite intellectual of the Santorum brigade?

Quote:

The guess among well-placed administration sources is that Bush has no idea who Rocco Buttiglione is.

Well, duh. How many congressmen do? Or senators? Or American journalists? Or American Catholics, for that matter? How out of touch has Novak become?

Quote:

The decision to shut him out appears likely to have come not from the White House political office, but from the National Security Council staff and the State Department, where the warmth toward the EU approaches John Kerry's. Although Bush likely could plead ignorance of Buttiglione (a defense denied Ford in explaining his treatment of Solzhenitsyn), that would not be an appealing posture for the president. Catholics all over the world know Buttiglione and recognize him as a figure of towering rectitude, whose treatment by the dominant European left is a global outrage. The EU parliament refused to accept him as justice minister on the 25-member European Commission, and his name was withdrawn. The only constitutional reasons for rejecting Buttiglione would have been incompetence or immorality, and neither charge applied. He told me last week that he failed the EU test on four grounds: He serves in the cabinet of conservative Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi; he is a traditional Catholic; he follows the course of conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger; he is a friend of the United States (called a "crypto-American" inside the EU). "Any one of these would be enough to reject me," he said.

Of course, this is not the whole story. There were some ethical issues Buttiglione had not cleared up. Monaco had subjected him to a series of criminal inquiries into allegations of money laundering; and his senior aide is facing trial in Italy over the alleged disappearance of $6 million of Italian and EU money, according to the conservative Daily Telegraph.

There was also the political context of the nomination. Since Berlusconi's disastrous address to the European parliament in which he called the leader of the Socialist faction a successor to the Nazis, the EU parliament was itching to get back at the Italian prime minister. Buttiglione was collateral damage. Then there was the fact that the European parliament was trying to exercise new-found clout against the EU Commission, and the rejection of Buttiglione was a signal moment in the arrival of actual parliamentary oversight in a sclerotic and often dictatorial institution.

But the main issue was Buttiglione's commentary during his nomination hearings. He has a record, noted in Christopher Caldwell's largely positive assessment in a recent Weekly Standard essay, of saying that AIDS was "divine punishment." In the hearings, he declared that he believed that homosexuality was "a sin" and that women should obey their husbands. The European parliament was essentially saying that no Justice commissioner, required to uphold equal treatment for gays and women, should hold such views.

It seems to me that the parliament was unfair in its treatment of Buttiglione. What's remarkable about Buttiglione is how liberal he appears in an American context. In the letter announcing his withdrawal, Buttiglione wrote:

Quote:

I did not intend in any way to offend the feelings of anybody and in particular of women and homosexuals. Words so emotionally charged as 'sin' should perhaps not be introduced in the political debate. In politics the only relevant issue is 'are you in favour or against discrimination?' To this question my answer is clear: 'I am against any kind of discrimination and I fully subscribe to the (EU's) Charter of Fundamental Rights and to the Constitution of the Union.' Non-discrimination defends those who hold views different from yours. It would be too easy not to discriminate against those who hold your same views and with whom one stands in full agreement. I do not discriminate against anybody and I would like not be discriminated against by anybody because of my religious or philosophical beliefs.

What Buttiglione is saying is that private religious belief about, say, the conjugal subjugation of women to men, must remain private and voluntary; and that the state must maintain strict neutrality with regard to minorities.

He was even blunter elsewhere:

Quote:

The state has no right to stick its nose into these things and nobody can be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation ... this stands in the Charter of Human Rights, this stands in the Constitution and I have pledged to defend this constitution.

In this sense, Buttiglione is almost a left-wing secularist in American terms, which makes Novak's hysterical defense of him all the more mystifying. Does Novak agree that public officials should never discriminate against homosexual citizens? Silly question. The whole point of the columnist's favored social policies is to discriminate against homosexuals.

Back to Novak:

Quote:

It is hard to tell whether anti-Americanism or anti-Catholicism runs deeper in Europe's corridors of power. In The Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell wrote that what was done to Buttiglione looked "like a bunch of progressives gathering round the dead horse that is European Christianity and giving it a few joyous kicks." At the Vatican, Cardinal Renato Martino called the EU parliament's interrogation of Buttiglione a "secular inquisition." The White House last week gave its tacit approval.

Again, the overkill here is absurd. Even if you believe that what was done to Buttiglione was unfair and unjust, it still doesn't follow that the president should somehow herald this man as a key international figure. And it says something about the current hubris and parochialism among the theoconservative right that a leading columnist like Novak should think he should.

Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at TNR.

One could argue that the sanctions regime would have kept Saddam contained. However the embargo was rapidly approaching an end - our Security Council "Allies" renewed their "fondness" for it only after we threatened intervention - without that the sanctions would have been quickly lifted. As we have seen from the corrupt Oil for Food program Saddam had ample inclination and ability to use the money to corrupt the process and senior officials in the governments of Security Council members.