On one hand, the success of his first 5 years of his administration was made possible exactly by those bankers, with the pre-crisis global growth spurt.

On the other, Lula’s speech writers come from a wing of the party not allowed anywhere close to economic matters. They write speeches for an imaginary anti-colonialist leader from the sixties. The blue eyed blond reference comes from one of them, I doubt they can grasp the implication. In the other world economic crisis of this magnitude the proto-Hitlers indeed blamed Jewish bankers.

In the end Lula had to go out and explain the remark over and over. And it gets worse at every attempt. Now it became a cry in defense of African and Latin American immigrants in Europe. The odd thing is that Brazilian immigration laws are particularly draconian. Just ask a typical Bolivian worker in a an apparel sweat shop in Sé£o Paulo.

It’s being done to protect a socialist policy of giving mortgage loans to people who cannot possibly pay the loan back.

However, it’s a different story over at the Health Ministry. The minister, Dr. Siti Fadillah Supari, is a woman of Islamic extremist tendencies, conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, and certifiable whackjob. Despite the fact that Indonesia has the world’s highest incidence of H5N1 (bird flu) deaths, she has prohibited the sending of H5N1 cultures (among others) to overseas health organizations like WHO and NIH because of her stated belief that it would be turned over to those evil, profit-making pharmaceutical companies for their own research. Uhhh, yeah. Kinda hard to develop treatments without cultures, doncha think, Doc? She then says Indonesia will produce its own medicines to treat bird flu. Quick, Doc, name one Indonesian pharma company (and not one of the local subsidiaries of North American, Australian, or European companies, either). Can’t? No cutting-edge medical research institutes either? Well, no matter. Those evil Westerners would just use the cultures to produce biological warfare agents to kill Muslims and Indonesians anyway (yes, she said this), so we (Indonesians) are better off without them. That’s what she says she thinks the US Naval Medical Research Unit (NAMRU-2), that’s been here since 1970 or so, is really doing. That, and spying, of course. There’s a lot more that she has said and done that effectively cripple Indonesia’s ability to deal with its rather large health issues, but you get the idea.

Unfortunately, this nutcase is quite popular, so SBY can’t just dismiss her without damaging himself politically. Although most of her remarks are in the Indonesian language and not widely translated or reported outside of Southeast Asia, she has the same kind of mindset that Lula has. So while her words don’t have the same global impact as Lula’s comments about the blue-eyed bankers, her views on medical research have the same chilling effect on cooperation with the wider medical community.

The founders of our nation knew that the Republic and its Constitution required a moral people to keep it. So far, we are proving ourselves unworthy of the sacrifices they made and our men in arms have made to keep us a free people.”

You keep hitting the nail on the head! I have endeavored the last few months to send a portion of my tithe and offerings to one of the Children’s homes that the Baptist Churches run. I began feeling burdened to support Orphanges run by the Church. Then not long after that the pastor at the church I have been visiting went on a multi week push for adoption and support of Orphanages. This apparently had been in the planning stages for a while. There is an organization within this large Church that is attempting to begin a nationwide push for this within churches.