weisbrot on bolivia:
Morales had promised to regain control over the country's hydrocarbon - mostly natural gas - resources. This was accomplished and has brought in an extra $1.5 billion of revenue to the public treasury. (For comparison, imagine an extra $1.6 trillion, or four times the current U.S. federal budget deficit, in the United States.)
(...) These provinces produce about 82 percent of Bolivia's natural gas, and get nearly three times the gas revenue per person as do the other five provinces. The Media Luna states have a per capita income that is about 40 percent higher than the other five states. Their population is also much less indigenous: ranging from 16 percent (Pando) to 38 percent in Santa Cruz, as compared to 66-84 percent in the other states.
(...) The Media Luna states also have the big landholdings that give Bolivia one of the most concentrated land distributions in the entire world. Well under one percent of landowners have two-thirds of the country's farm land. These include the big soybean producers of Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest province and bulwark of the Media Luna alliance. Some of the big landowners are leaders of the political opposition.
(...) With forty percent of the labor force in agriculture and more than three-quarters of rural Bolivians in poverty, a redistribution of arable land is not only a central demand of the voters, but an important part of an economic development strategy that can boost employment and income in the countryside.

Recently Obama was asked by CNN's Candy Crowley if "there's anything that's happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize for in terms of foreign policy?" Obama responded by saying, "No, I don't believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a mistake. We didn't keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. But, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm much more interested in looking forward rather than looking backwards." The United States, Obama told Crowley, "remains overwhelmingly a force of good in the world" [1].

As the privileged thin layer of the society distances itself from the poor, the speed at which the secession takes place comes to be celebrated as a measure of the rapid growth of the country.

derail doha:
It's estimated that about 60% of the world's use of oil goes to transportation activities which are more than 95% dependent on fossil fuels. An OECD study estimated that the global transport sector accounts for 20-25% of carbon emissions, with some 66% of this figure accounted for by emissions in the industrialized countries.
(...) From the point of view of environmental sustainability, global trade has become deeply dysfunctional. Take agricultural trade. As the International Forum on Globalization has pointed out, the average plate of food eaten in Western industrial food-importing nations is likely to have traveled 1,500 miles from its source. Long-distance travel contributes to the absurd situation wherein "three times more food is used to produce food in the industrial agricultural model than is derived in consuming it."
(...) A study by the OECD done in the mid-nineties estimated that by 2004, the year marking the full implementation of free-trade commitments under the WTO's Uruguay Round, there would have been an increase in the transport of internationally traded goods by 70% over 1992 levels. This figure, notes the New Economics Foundation, "would make a mockery" of the Kyoto Protocol's mandatory emissions reduction targets for the industrialized countries.
(...) "Each ton of freight moved by plane uses forty nine times as much energy per kilometer as when it's moved by ship....A two-minute takeoff by a 747 is equal to 2.4 million lawn mowers running for twenty minutes." In support of trade expansion and global economic growth, authorities have by and large not taxed aviation fuel as well as marine bunker fuel, which now account for 20% of all emissions in the transport sector.
(...) A derailment of Doha won't be a sufficient condition to formulate a strategy to contain climate change. But given the likely negative ecological consequences of a successful deal, it's a necessary condition.

Fuel efficiency standards for passenger vehicles in the United States have barely changed since 1985. If we had chosen to raise these standards (for cars and light trucks) by less than one half mile (0.4 miles) per year, the average car on the road would be getting 32 miles per gallon. This would reduce our oil consumption by 3.3 million barrels per day, or more than 16 times what McCain's offshore drilling would get us twenty years from now.