President Correa spoke today at the Assembly's closing ceremony. There was just a somewhat cheesy ceremony involving a bunch of kids getting big pencils to "write Ecuador's future." Correa then went on to criticize neoliberalism (yey!) to attack "infantile environmentalism" and "infantile indiginism" (ugh). I just finished a piece on Correa and the Ecuadorian Left.
A very smart professor that I had the pleasure of corresponding with the other day brought up the subject of Christian millenarianism, folks who believe the end times are coming soon.
It got me thinking that we're witnessing a form of secular millenarianism with Obama (who I do plan to reluctantly vote for) and Correa right now. When people live through a really tough period or are led by a really bad government for a while, then a conjuncture opens where people want something transformative--in the case of Ecuador and the US, a committed social justice and peace advocate--and can be less than thorough in choosing their champion. For example, the 2004 "anybody but Bush" phenomenon.
In other news...
Here's an interesting article by Glenn Greenwald on how, given the elitism and cowardice of the Democratic Party and mainstream media, groups like the ACLU have taken up holding the Bush Administration accountable, particularly in getting the torture memos released.
And here's my article about the Assembly and, more generally, Correa' s conflicts with the Ecuadorian Left. Although he gets a reputation as a Lefty in the US, things down here are a lot more complicated.
And Steve Clemons wrote an interesting note arguing that Obama's speech in Germany, where he said "...the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another," should have been given in Israel. But that would take political courage and independence from violent and monied interests, which might be the greatest danger to American politics...
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