Brazil New President Quotes

Depression ended, and factory output more than doubled during the 1930s. Getúlio realized that, by co-opting the new urban working classes, he could gain a powerful, up-and-coming ally and stoke the engine of economic growth.

There was just one problem for Putin: Russia wasn’t a superpower anymore. Despite having a nuclear arsenal second only to our own, Russia lacked the vast network of alliances and bases that allowed the United States to project its military power across the globe. Russia’s economy remained smaller than those of Italy, Canada, and Brazil, dependent almost entirely on oil, gas, mineral, and arms exports. Moscow’s high-end shopping districts testified to the country’s transformation from a creaky state-run economy to one with a growing number of billionaires, but the pinched lives of ordinary Russians spoke to how little of this new wealth trickled down. According to various international indicators, the levels of Russian corruption and inequality rivaled those in parts of the developing world, and its male life expectancy in 2009 was lower than that of Bangladesh. Few, if any, young Africans, Asians, or Latin Americans looked to Russia for inspiration in the fight to reform their societies, or felt their imaginations stirred by Russian movies or music, or dreamed of studying there, much less immigrating. Shorn of its ideological underpinnings, the once-shiny promise of workers uniting to throw off their chains, Putin’s Russia came off as insular and suspicious of outsiders—to be feared, perhaps, but not emulated.

Victory arrived unexpectedly in June 2001, when a UN AIDS conference was due to open in New York. On that same day, the United States withdrew the complaint against Brazil from the WTO. I have no doubt that this favorable outcome was decisively influenced by global public opinion.

Early in its history, Google famously instituted a “20-percent time” program for all Google engineers: for every four hours they spend working on official company projects, the engineers are required to spend one hour on their own pet project, guided entirely by their own passions and instincts. (Modeled on a similar program pioneered by 3M known as “the 15-percent rule,” Google’s system is officially called “Innovation Time Off.”) The only requirements are that they give semiregular updates on their progress to their superiors. Most engineers end up drifting from idea to idea, and the vast majority of those ideas never turn into an official Google product. But every now and then, one of those hunches blooms into something significant. AdSense, Google’s platform that allows bloggers and Web publishers to run Google ads on their sites, was partially generated during 20-percent time. In 2009, AdSense was responsible for more than $5 billion of Google’s earnings, nearly a third of their total for the year. Orkut, one of the largest social network sites in India and Brazil, originated in the Innovation Time Off of a Turkish Google engineer named Orkut Büyükkökten. Google’s popular mail platform, Gmail, has roots in an Innovation Time Off project as well. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Search Products and User Experience, claims that over 50 percent of Google’s new products derive from Innovation Time Off hunches.