[Marxism] Re: Another view of Lula

["Carlos Eduardo Rebello" <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Counterpunch, March 25, 2004
>
> Rebuffing the IMF
> Brazil's Begins to Throw Off Austerity Plans
> By ROGER BURBACH
>
> The cabinet ministers of Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva's government who
> have kept the Brazilian economy in a neo-liberal economic
> straight-jacket are coming under sustained attack from the more popular
> sectors of the governing Workers Party.

Wrong- that what comes from confusing parliamentary bourgeois pork-barrel
and feuilletons with genine Left politics.

What is presently at stake is that part of the PT topbrass have simply
counted 2+2 and arrived at the result 4. That's to say they have simply
forseen that continued subservient allegiance to the IMF recipes - something
that has shrunk the Brazilian GDP some -0.3% last year and made the
unemployment rate in S.Paulo soar to some 19.8% last month (on the national
level some 12%) - plus the erosion in the capital of petit-bourgeois
moralism amassed by the PT by recent scandals, spell electoral disaster in
the forthcoming elections and a possible no-second-term scenario for Lula in
2006.




Even Lula himself has given
> signs he is moving away from the budgetary and financial prescriptions
> imposed by the International Monetary Fund that he has adhered to during
> his first fifteen months in office.
>
> Interestingly the start of the discord had nothing to do with economic
> policy. In mid- February Lula's chief of staff and closest political
> adviser, Jose Dirceu, became embroiled in a political scandal. Waldomiro
> Diniz, a close friend of Dirceu's who serves as his aide on
> congressional affairs, was caught on video camera accepting payoffs from
> the head of one of the country's major bingo parlor operators. The funds
> were allegedly used to back the political campaigns of candidates of the
> Workers Party.
>
> Diniz was quickly fired and the opposition in Congress began calling for
> a full-scale investigation and the removal of Jose Dirceu from office.

> As Emir Sader of the Public Policy Laboratory of the State University of
> Rio de Janiero noted: "The reactionaries are making their move. They are
> trying to bring down Dirceu and gut Lula's government."

Sader is an academic pundit (and cable TV commentarist) that has chosen to
remain in support of Lula when many other pundits have chosen not to, so his
opinions have to be taken with a grain of salt (in my case, a ton of salt).
I only can say that I've friends who think that Lula government can still be
redeemed, and that many of them are fine chaps.

 Dirceu however,
> is not an easy target, having served for years as a talented political
> strategist at the head of the Workers Party before becoming Lula's most
> powerful aide in the government. His first line of defense to prevent
> Congress from opening an independent investigation was to point out that
> the video camera taping occurred before the 2002 election and that the
> bingo scandal had only taken place in Rio de Janeiro, not in other parts
> of Brazil, therefore not allowing for federal prosecution. Then in early
> March to smash the opposition,

Dirceu began to mobilize the Workers
> Party behind him by openly criticizing the finance minister and the
> economic policy team.

"Openly" is far off the mark. Dirceu may be covertly stimulating political
friends and allies to lodge complaints against the government's economic
policies, but so far he has concentrating in dodging a investigation of his
ties to  Waldomiro Diniz and complaining about nosy federal attorneys. Be as
it is, Dirceu is simply the second most powerful man in Brazil and has
personally no need to "criticize" the economic policy team, that would be
gone the instant he chose too turn openly against them. What he might be
doing is to somehow nudge the IMF team into moderating some of its most
brutal demands, pointing to the risk of political destabilization prompted
by this going by the book on the IMF's part, which explains the following:


> While Lula has thus far remained above the domestic fray among his
> ministers, he threw down the gauntlet against the IMF and other
> international institutions when he met with Argentine President Nestor
> Kirchner in Rio de Janeiro on March 16. The presidents of South
> America's two largest economies jointly released "The Declaration of
> Cooperation On Cooperation for Economic Growth with Equality." It
> demanded that the international financial institutions act "sensibly"
> and that they end the deep contradictions between the economic demands
> they place on the developing countries and the countries' real needs for
> sustainable development. The two presidents stated "this financial
> architecture requires mechanisms to avoid causing the crises that have
> afflicted Latin America." As a step in this direction Lula and Kirchner
> asserted that investments in productive infrastructure projects should
> not be included as part of regular government expenditures. Brazil and
> Argentina called on the other full and associate members of the Mercosur
> trade bloc--Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Chile-to sign on to the
> declaration. The presidents also issued "The Act of Copacabana," a wide
> ranging document that called for the formation of a "Community of South
> American Nations."
>
> Emir Sader of the Public Policy Laboratory, who has been severely
> critical of Lula's economic policies, declared that "in the foreign
> policy arena Lula is making a profound difference. He is staking out a
> new agenda in Latin America and the global South in general."

If you think that bragadoccio and good feelings can stand for genuine
commitment, then Sader is right. Tariq Ali, for instance, has another
opinion about Lula's stance on the Gulf War (see his _Bush in Babylon_, name
index, "Lula", or "Brazil").

Prior to
> the Iraqi war, Lula was one of the most outspoken opponents of the
> impending US invasion. Then, he helped forge the bloc of 22 nations that
> stopped the World Trade Organization in its tracks at Cancun in August
> 2003. Next at the close of the year he lead the charge that forced the
> Bush administration to back off from its plans to impose the
> corporate-dominated Free Trade Area of the Americas on the entire
> Western Hemisphere by 2005.

The rest are the paranoiac musings of the gusano-friendly people in the Bush
administration, which I will decline to comment upon, except by noting that,
when even an accomodating "Left" leader like Lula cannot get clearance in
the Department of State's eyes, then, who will get it except a plain pupett?

> Right-wingers in Washington, like the State Department's top aide for
> Inter-American Affairs, Roger Noriega, are becoming obsessed with Brazil
> as they fear the emergence of another "evil axis." Lula has provided
> political and economic support to Hugo Chavez, the charismatic president
> of Venezuela who is at odds with his country's economic elites as well
> as Washington. In December, Brazil extended a billion dollar loan to
> Venezuela to enable it to purchase Brazilian goods it urgently needed.
> Conservatives in the Bush administration fear an emergent alliance of
> Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, and now Argentina as Nestor Kirchner works with
> Lula to challenge the political and trade policies of the United States.
>
> full: http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach03252004.html
> --
>
> The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
>
>
>
>



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