Did he really say that?

This picture, with Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, listening to George Bush with what appears to be more than a hint of disbelief, sums up well the new order growing tired of the old order's claims to authority.

While I don't know what President Bush was saying at the moment this picture was taken, chances are it was along the lines of this quote, "History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market --- but too much."

Lula might have been thinking about the kinds of details that an article on Christian Science Monitor's web site about Brazil's oil company Petrobas, which is controlled by the government but includes private investment, highlights.

Details like how Brazil announced "oil independence" two years ago, how they recently discovered offshore oil fields that could yield 80 billion barrels of oil (the largest discovery in this hemisphere in a generation, according to the CSM article) and the technology used to extract it will be manufactured entirely within Brazil may have produced a feeling in him along the lines of:

Why are we even listening to you anymore?

One of the topics that I'm most interested in is development in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Tony Blair, who has offered himself as an adviser to Rwandan president Paul Kigame, said recently during a visit to the country:

"There must be capacity built in the country to sustain itself.  Development today is not about multiple negotiations between aid recipient executives and their donor counterparts talking big figures of funds."

Of course, "sustainablity" has always been the buzzword of development, but it's always been a goal, something, for decades now, to write into applications for aid.  To hear a leader say that "development today" is moving past direct foreign aid is an overdue change.

Not too long ago, we heard so much about an end to poverty, as envisioned by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia.  His plan was based, in part, on the assumption that "people are poor because they lack productivity."  So, give some technology to farmers to increase their yields, they make more money at market, then they re-invest it in their farms. 

An article in the Wahington Post looked at Sachs' grand plan for poverty, which involved huge amounts of foreign aid, and asked the very simple and very important question:  How would your plan work if the $2.3 trillion in foreign aid that has gone to the continent in the last five decades has not worked? 

And the response that the problem was just waiting for Jeffrey Sachs to come along doesn't cut it.

While working in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, I heard about his plan and I considered the increased productivity leads to increased prosperity part of it kind of ludicrous.  Every market day, I walked with middle-aged women and children, five kilometers down a dirt road to market, with baskets full of corn or potatoes or yams sitting on their heads, hoping that it would be a good day and someone would give them a decent price for what they had.  A higher yield was not what they needed. 

They needed a government that built decent roads and didn't export all the domestically produced oil so getting to markets in far-off cities is feasible, a government that didn't waste its surplus from the days when Cameroonian coffee was worth something on mansions in Switzerland; it needed a government that didn't siphon aid funds to members of its tribe in the south and center provinces, it needed a government that wasn't constantly bailed out by rich foreign governments. 

So, Tony Blair, and a columnist writing for the Times of London know that the days of lavish foreign aid are numbered, as well they should be.

And in my final, and the most entertaining, bit of new vs old news is an online exchange (with an even more lively discussion on the relevant articles' comment sections) between Jeff Jarvis and Ron Rosenbaum.

It starts with Rosenbaum ripping into Jarvis for an article blaming journalists for their demise in the new media age and making fun of him a bit, portraying Jarvis as a huckster and opportunist as he tries to present himself as a new media guru.

Jarvis piles on the umbrage in his initial response, tellingly seeking the counsel of public relations executive Richard Edelman, and then follows it with a more pointed rebuttal  of Rosenbaum's article.

Then it moves into the "conversation" part of the online world, eliciting comments from journalists, entrepeneurs and media consumers and this, of course, is the most interesting part.  In general, people seem to find Jarvis a bit pompous, but useful, and question Jarvis' assertions that the MSM need to embrace newsroom cuts and become more like tech companies (he has a deep and abiding love for Google) and that Ron Rosenbaum really has no idea what's going on in the online world and should not have made the issue into a personal thing.

It's worth a read.

 I wish that Lula and Bush would start posting snippy little jabs about one another on their blogs.  Maybe Obama and Sarkozy will get into online tiffs in the coming years.