The Monitor is doing a three part series on India that I’m reading. Today’s article made a casual reference to a Maoist insurgency and the 2004 elections. I kind of had a “Bwah?” moment while reading that. I knew nothing of a serious Moaist insurgency in India. So, I decided to dig around a bit to see what I could find. Foreign Policy’s blog lists this as one of the top ten stories you missed in 2005. Yep. I definitely missed it. The Times has a pretty good article in their April 13th edition about it. It’s very interesting stuff. Some of the ethnic, class and economic development stuff at play here does remind me a bit of the Andes in previous decades. As do some of the tactics by both the Maoist and anti-Maoists.

I’d never really given much thought to the notion that India, like Argentina or Brazil, might find itself poised to be a world power, but just fall apart through internal strife and organizational contradictions within the society.

Of course, if anyone really needs a Maoist insurgency, it’s China.

Liberal and female blogging is on the rise in Saudi Arabia, but the blogs and bloggers face censorship from conservatives and the government.

I was surfing the web today and read something that referenced Barbara Ehrenreich’s turn to blogging. I took a look and found that the current front page of her blog to be an entry decrying bossism and seemingly advocating workplace democracy. Ehrenreich, for those of you not familiar with her work made a big splash with Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America a few years ago. The media loved this book. Middle class intellectuals loved this book. A lot of us from working class backgrounds had a kind of “duh, yeah, it’s hard to be poor” moment when they read it. I read it on a flight. She is, at least, an engaging writer. She’s also very upfront that her time spent living and working on low paying jobs is not the same as someone spending a life doing it. All in all, a decent read, but not the revelation you might think it is from reading her reviews.

Via http://hr.cch.com/news/hrm/060906a.asp

In April 2006, employers took 1,148 mass layoff actions, seasonally adjusted, as measured by new filings for unemployment insurance benefits during the month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported May 23. Each action involved at least 50 persons from a single establishment, and the number of workers involved totaled 118,504, on a seasonally adjusted basis. The number of layoff events rose by 66, and the number of associated initial claims decreased by 51 from March 2006.

Thankfully, we’ve not yet taken one of the last steps toward creating a permanent, inherited aristocracy in this country. Yesterday, Senate Republicans were unable to push through a repeal of the estate tax.

Alan Garcia has been elected President of Peru for the second time in his life. His previous term was from 1985-1990. It was a total disaster. Peru is the only country in the region to have a truth commission investigate human rights crimes against elected governments. The others all saw those horrors under dictatorships. Garcia was one of the elected leaders. During his term, the government tolerated or encouraged death squads that killed peasants more or less indescriminately on the assumption that they were part of the Shining Path. The violent instability in the country combined with Garcia’s hamfisted attempts at nominally leftist economics ruined the country’s economy, with inflation topping 7,000 percent at one point during his rule.

News accounts this morning show Garcia defeating his Hugo Chavez styled challenger 55-45. Ollanta Humala, Garcia’s challenger is a former army officer, like Chavez, and a left nationalist who is calling for a “peaceful” revolution of the poor against the rich, also much like Chavez. His party will have the largest number (but not a majority) of seats in the national legislature. The next couple of years ought to be really interesting in Peru.

It must have been really fun to be an upper middle class or wealthy voter in this election.

I have a prediction. This is predicated on the idea that our system will self-correct and remain as democratic (and as undemocratic) as it has been over the last 100 years.

Twenty to fifty years from now, the historical consensus will be that George W. Bush stole both the 2000 and 2004 elections. This view will be widely held by liberal, moderate, and probably even conservative historians.

I can’t say that this will necessarily cause the historical consensus to be that his presidency was illegitimate. There’s pretty widespread agreement that LBJ stole and election or two and that Kennedy’s defeat of Nixon was the product of corruption in Chicago.

My guess is that if the U.S. largely recovers from what Bush has done to us by getting our economic, budgetary, and diplomatic course back on track, he’ll be judged as a mediocre to bad president. If he’s set us on a course of permanent and sharp decline or lingering wars for another decade, he may not be judged so kindly. If he’s judged really harshly and my prediction comes true, there’s a small possibility that he may be judged by history and as disastrous and wholly illegitimate president. It’s the judgment he deserves, but I’m sure that I don’t want things to deteriorate to the point that he gets it.