Americas Articles

In June, the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, traveled to Cuba for emergency surgery. A month later, the announcement that he was undergoing cancer treatment threw the apparent hegemony of his revolution into disarray and began to cast doubts on the future of his radical social agenda. Since then, updates concerning his health have been scarce, leading to rife speculation as to the exact nature of his illness and his political future. As Venezuela faces its greatest period of political uncertainty in close to a decade, the debate over the influence of 21^st century Latin American socialism and its emblematic leader rages more intensely than it ever has.

During the early months when Occupy Wall Street maintained tent cities in lower Manhattan and other metropolitan areas around the country, the occupations attracted an array of young counter-culturalists and itinerant radicals. To many people seeing the images of the encampments on the news, it looked like a motley assembly, not something out of the American mainstream.

But while some of the images of Zuccotti Park that defined Occupy Wall Street in its infancy may have appeared to depict a fringe, the movement as a whole is far bigger than any of its encampments. In truth, the Occupy movement is a protest against a broken economic compact that reaches into the very middle of America and that is resonating in other parts of the world as well.

Margaret Spellings served as the Secretary of Education in the second Bush Administration and is currently a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics.

Q: Until not too long ago, French and Spanish were the only two foreign languages available in US public schools. How important is it to expand the selection in the globalizing world?

A: Very, very important. I have visited a high school Mandarin Chinese class; we are starting to see more and more of those and Arabic classes, too. You bet we need more of that.