5/5 – Hear Mark Weisbrot: Will Obama Keep Bush’s Latin Am. policy?
April 21, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 7pm
UWM Union, Fireside Lounge
2200 E. Kenwood Blvd
“A historic transformation is underway in Latin America. After more than a quarter century of neoliberal economic reform, and the worst long-term economic growth failure in more than a century, a revolt at the ballot box has elected leaders who are looking for democratic alternatives that will restore economic growth and development, and reduce poverty and inequality. The U.S. government is opposing these efforts… [and] the U.S. and international media have enthusiastically embraced this agenda, with journalism that make [the] worst articles in the run-up to the Iraq war look fair and balanced by comparison.”
WILL THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION CHANGE U.S. POLICY TOWARDS LATIN AMERICA?
*Mark Weisbrot recently met with heads of state across South America, traveling with Oliver Stone as an advisor on his new movie on Venezuela entitled “South of the Border.”
Biography:
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He has written numerous research papers on economic policy, especially on Latin America and international economic policy. He is also co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000).
He writes a weekly column for The Guardian Unlimited (U.K.), and a regular column on economic and policy issues that is distributed to over 550 newspapers by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. He also writes a column for Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de Sao Paulo. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and almost every major U.S. newspaper. He appears regularly on national and local television and radio programs. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.
Commenting on international matters, Weisbrot argues that globalization, as understood by the United States government and American lending institutions, has failed to live up to its promise of making poorer countries grow rich, stating that “no nation has ever pulled itself out of poverty under the conditions that Washington currently imposes on underdeveloped countries.” He has criticized the role played by the IMF and has taken an active role in developing the Bank of the South, a joint project by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela spearheaded by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and designed to make South America financially less dependent on the IMF and World Bank. Weisbrot acted as a consultant to the governments concerned and has been described as the artífice intelectual, the intellectual architect, of the concept. Weisbrot’s work on Latin American countries (including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela) has attracted national and international attention, and in 2008 was cited by Brazilian Foreign Secretary Celso Amorim. In early 2010, Weisbrot’s work on Latvia’s economic crisis attracted national and international attention.
