JOEL WHITNEY
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LULA'S DREAM: FIVE PROPOSALS FROM BRAZIL'S DA SILVA TO CHANGE HISTORY

Socialist Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s election to Brazil’s presidency in late 2002 was an astonishing--if not revolutionary--feat. I Have a Dream gathers five of Lula’s speeches, from his October 2002 victory address in Brazil to his passionate pleas throughout 2003 to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the G8 summit in Evian, and the Council of Andean Presidents in Quirama, Colombia.

Although Brazil is the world’s eighth largest industrial economy, its poverty is staggering, and Lula begins his presidency with a pledge to eradicate hunger. He notes that his power represents the harnessing of the power of labor unions, which he helped to radically restructure before his bid for the presidency. In subsequent speeches, he offers variations on such issues as peace, international cooperation, agrarian reform, and the elimination of poverty.

Echoing almost verbatim sections of Che Guevara’s firebrand 1964 speech to the UN, he pleads with wealthier nations for fairer trading practices, asking that they lift subsidies and trade tariffs, and pay a fair price for the resources extracted from poorer nations.
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The collection of course takes its title from Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech, and the goals of this charismatic figure are no less ambitious than the civil rights leader’s, the idealism no less far reaching, the hope no less infectious. Here we have what claims to be the voice of the new New Left for the 21st century, a left that, like many of its predecessors, came to power democratically with the goal of eliminating corruption, mismanagement and rampant poverty, and that will face unlimited resistance and even sabotage from the familiar pressure points of north, right and center. Regardless, even those who disagree with Lula’s politics will be served by a clearer understanding of the mind of one of this century’s great political thinkers.

                                                                                                                                                                      March/April 2004, Criticas

PRAISE

"Listen to this book, because it talks in a very clear way about what has been silenced." —John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and winner of the Man Booker Prize

"Another odd episode steps out from the Cold War's shadows. Riveting."

--Kirkus, Starred Review 

"The CIA's covert financial support of highbrow art & fiction may seem like a quaint, even endearing, chapter in its otherwise grim history of coups, assassinations, and torture. In Finks, Joel Whitney argues otherwise and shines a discomfiting spotlight on this obscure corner of the cultural Cold War. The result is both an illuminating read and a cautionary tale about the potential costs—political and artistic—of accommodating power."
—Ben Wizner, Director of Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, ACLU
  

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