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July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
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CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
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Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
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on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
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The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
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Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
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for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
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Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
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Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
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Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
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Robert Jensen
Alternative
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David Vest
Darryl Kile's
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Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
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David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
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Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
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James T. Phillips
Serbian
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Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
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Jacob Levich
The War
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Mark Weisbrot
What
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Jeffrey St. Clair
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Fire
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June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
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Alexander Cockburn
The
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July
2, 2002
Brazil, the
Workers' Party and the FT
Casino Real: Brazil's Other Challenge
Futebol's
not the only place where Brazil's on top, though this time the
players are international risk agencies and creditors
by Norman Madarasz
As North American tourists and media people fly
into Rio de Janeiro, "A Garota de Ipanema" can't help
ringing in their ears. The Tom Jobim classic, just as the bossa-nova
(or new beat) samba jazz melange he crafted, sounds the eternal
music of South Side Rio de Janeiro. Beaches stretch out, growing
longer in succession, and interrupted only by whale-finned mounts
sprouting sharply out of Paleolithic times.
The more curious among the northern folk
turn away from a horizon once streaked by the pirates and buccaneers
covertly coveted by the British and French. In shifting sights,
this tourist or that journalist first end up seeing a mountain
range carpeted by Rio's infamous favella slums. Don't let the
tarnished picture perfect tropical scene bother you. Many favellas
are beautiful in their own right.
If you were swept up by one of the hand
gliders at fashionable, though polluted, Sao Conrad beach, rising
up over the coastal range you would begin to surge above the
extremities of the North-West Zone. Down below, conditions of
squalor concord only remotely with the surfing seaside breeze.
Hotter than the coast, pagode and (Brazilian) funk music pump
through lusting sweetness only more deceptively to bring contrast
to the violence of daily living. For the ears of whom the reality
principle is noise, Villa-Lobosian dissonance would now be clashing
with the smooth timber of Jobim's "Wave".
As stiffly as the wind repels courageous
swimmers in Ipanema, Brazil's progressive movements are being
turbulently rocked as the tide of presidential elections slowly
surges higher. On the national and state levels, Brazil is now
going to have a chance to truly and really embark upon a long-term
endeavor to curtail the ebullient effusion of endemic poverty.
Polls for October's presidential election show Lula, the head
of the Workers' Party (Partida dos trabalhadores, or PT), as
holding a strong lead over the government candidate Jose Serra
from the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB). The most recent
June 24 CNT/Sensus poll published in Brazil has Lula beating
for the second month running any of his opponents in not just
the first, but second round of elections -- prior to forming
any alliances.
Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has been in
this position before. Emerging as an autoworkers trade union
leader in the late 1970s, he has been at the helms of the PT
ever since its inception. Though failing to capture the title
in three successive presidential elections, he was ahead in pre-election
polls for each of them. He may have lost in the second rounds
to shifting alliances, but over the years his Party has moved
into running towns and states throughout the country. Showpiece
cities like Porto Alegre and states like Rio Grande do Sul are
both governed by PT leaders at the municipal and state levels.
In addition to the city of Sao Paulo, the state of Rio de Janeiro
itself, headed by Ms. Benedita da Silva, has turned to interim
PT governance, at least until her expected re-election this fall.
Even more, the PT has the allure of an
honest party. Deeply averse to the populist stances so typical
of Brazilian politics since the 1964 coup d'etat, it has developed
a solid record of public administration, attention to culture
and research, and commitment to middle and lower class concerns
and aspirations regarding education, health, purchasing parity
and policing. Moreover, once in Brasilia, the PT plan to focus
on implementing an efficient, which means real, tax strategy
in order to curb the flight of capital, often illegally resting
in offshore accounts. Internationally, through the exposure given
to it from the two Social Economic Fora in Porto Alegre, the
Party has come to congeal the hopes of a fractured and betrayed
left, whose alternative for citizens of G7 countries has been
increasingly falling into simple albeit vocal abstentionism.
BRAZIL'S LEFT IN THE INTERNATIONAL SPOTLIGHT
The international left have not been
alone in focusing attention on the PT. Despite the PT's good
work on the local level and its generally positive outlook, the
pre-electoral context in Brazil has become increasingly dramatic.
The critical situation affects all of the so-called emerging
markets in the global capitalist system. When they are not draped
in the epic of Brazil's brilliant surge toward the World Cup
title, North Americans may have been reading of Brazil's many
social problems in its highest profile dailies and periodicals.
In the perception of an average American whose little knowledge
of its gigantic southern neighbor relies on what the media affords
to inform, Brazil fits the bill of a tropical land being torn
by innumerable problems.
These North Americans will have sweated
from the news of the triple-type dengue fever outbreak and its
toll on tourism. They will have trembled at the stories of tourists
being mugged and, worse, shot while visiting the Cidade Maravilhosa.
They will have been shocked to hear about the drug traffic related
violence, and brutal murder of journalists and civil servants.
Positive stuff. And unless they are fairly wealthy, these North
Americans will have probably skipped over the financial pages
with their daily mises-au-point of how the Brazilian currency
is faring.
This is primarily where the injustice
begins. In spite of its exoticism, few countries get as bad press
in North America as Brazil. By contrast, were one to attentively
follow the Financial Times, its pages would revealingly deliver
in hallucinatory detail the real political pattern of the northern
disruption of southern economies. Whereas northerners figured
out long ago that Lula is the next candidate to be crushed by
capitalists, these same readers may not even get very close to
hearing about Lula's fundamental positions. The northern establishment
press still wallow in the half-hearted argument on how socialism
only works well on paper -- while the capitalist system moves
into yet another of its predicted and predictable crises, perhaps
the only laws by which the system as a whole really abides.
So what are some of Lula and the PT's
positions? The fact that the question even has to be asked carries
an annoying air about it. In the countless dailies and weeklies
filling the stands of Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo,
any number of articles by northern political and economic analysts
and intellectuals are translated. The circulation of northern
ideas gives a particular advantage to being in a peripheral country,
though it is precisely this advantage that accounts for its sidelining.
It is symptomatic that Anglo-American global dominance has little
of the same concern for what its multilingual counterparts are
saying and thinking. Even in Rome -- the historical model currently
favored as a precursor by the current empire's advocates -- had
absorbed Greek and Judaic thought and culture. But the triumph
of English, as the Economist recently touted, really does point
to world dominance by other means.
On June 23, during a question period
on a Brazilian television station, Lula was asked to describe
the PT's economic platform. The question was set against the
background of the infamous imperial summons addressed to him
by the June 13 editorial of the Financial Times. In a professed
move to calm foreign investors, the editorial was penned after
the real, Brazil's national currency, had once again come under
attack.
After seeking to discredit the wild speculation
of a future PT government's reluctance to abide by scheduled
IMF loan payments, the FT's editors wrote: "the PT should
be prepared to make an early announcement about the composition
of its future government team, possibly including some figures
from outside the party, to bolster confidence." The image
could not be more perfect of the tactics and interests of market
players in the faceless global economy. Since then, all eyes
and ears have been on Lula and his promise to make a declaration
following the June 22-23 PT workshop in Sao Paulo on how the
party is reacting to the crisis.
First the crisis, then the PT. But prior
to all that, a remark or two on the FT. To its credit, on May
1st (don't worry, wit has never failed a cynic) the Financial
Times editorial came out in full support of the strengths of
the Brazilian economy. It decried the nervousness being spread
by bond risk rating agencies, such as JP Morgan with their Embi+
index, as well as other firms like Moody's. It did so only days
after featuring a highly favorable article on current president
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, despite the fact that Cardoso is in
the last months of his two terms at the helm.
Cardoso's brainchild, the "Plano
Real", now eight years old, established him in the favors
of neo-liberal capitalist economic analysts and planners. The
plan pegged the Brazilian real to the American dollar, managed
to squash the spiraling inflation that was turning the economy
over throughout the early nineties, and attracted considerable
foreign investment in consequence. Nonetheless, Cardoso's real
plan was undone in the lengthy wake of the debacle that flattened
the east-Asian economies. The pressure was such that the currency
was unpegged, following which the real was devalued to half of
its worth.
In fact, the Financial Times has conducted
itself not unlike the way one of its gurus, the Hungarian-American
financier George Soros, had back in the dark days of 1999. Shortly
after the crash of the Sao Paulo stock exchange on January 13,
1999 Mr. Soros spoke out at the Davos meeting for investors to
trust the Brazilian economy. In a gesture which has made him
the country's single most important foreign creditor, Soros stepped
in with a "wall of money" to continue to resource Brazil's
capital reserves as they came under attack in a cat-and-mouse
game of increased interest rates on both lending and bonds. Thereafter,
President Cardoso shocked local business circles by naming Arminio
Fraga Netto, the head of Soros's $20 billion Fund Management
to take control of the Central Bank only two weeks after naming
the economist Francisco Lopes to the post. Since its first symptoms
were sighted on January 29, the attack on the real threatened
to empty the nation's capital reserves.
As it was Soros' money that primarily
bolstered Brazil's fledging currency, the seat of the Central
Bank was given to one of his closest associates. A <Ph.D>.
from Princeton and former vice-president of Solomon Brothers,
Fraga had been one of Soros's leading financial managers. If
there can be anything taken at face-value in pronouncements made
by Soros in his much discussed writings, he would seem to believe
that the ethics of speculation are redeemed if their means are
noble ones. Helping to uphold massive economies, for Brazil has
the world's ninth GDP, is part of the Sorosian philanthropic
project. Whatever the ethics of his principles, since 1999 the
real has been generally held within a four margin point range,
fluctuating from 2.30 to 2.70 US Dollars. After a rocky spring
in 2001, and in the market turbulence after 9/11, the real had
been sitting comfortably at around 2.5. Then to celebrate its
eighth anniversary on July 1, 2002, trading pierced the 2.9 ceiling,
a historic low.
Following his appointment to head the
Central Bank, Mr. Fraga claimed to have grown autonomous from
Soros. Two weeks ago however, Mr. Soros publicly declared that
it would be disastrous for Brazil were Lula to be elected president
in the fall. And, on June 26, he issued a notice on how he once
again stands ready to "save the Brazilian economy".
According to an InterPress report from 1999, through his persistent
investing Soros had become the Mercosul's strongman. But there
has been little news of the state and/or movement of his assets
in the South American free-trade zone since the collapse of the
banking system in Argentina.
What can be said with relative certainty
is that the current crisis has no single cause to it, though
it is rooted in microeconomic interpretation of Brazil's future.
The mouthpieces of investment firms, namely bond risk agencies,
are laying the blame primarily on future political uncertainty
linked to the strong showing of the PT in projections for October's
presidential elections. These firms are both Brazilian and international,
so the thesis of a global foreign conspiracy should not be pursued.
Still, the Financial Times has not hid its distaste for the PT,
and it has been extending the carrot to its economic team to
move away from the social commitments which otherwise require
considerable public spending. For in the eyes of its foreign
creditors, Brazil's most important spending concern has to be
to repay its debt.
When creditors fear that a leftwing government
may seek other solutions than to prioritize the payback, as in
a de facto sharing of needs, risk agencies begin to turn the
heat up on the emerging market index point rating system. For
example, JP Morgan's Embi + evaluates the interest rate offered
on C-bonds in emerging markets. C-bonds allow national governments
to repay debt by offering investors the chance to "buy"
debt, in exchange for a handsome compensation. The higher the
interest percentage has to be in order to attract investors,
the higher the rating. The index baseline is U.S. Treasury Bonds,
currently considered by the market as risk free. With economic
instability comes a high rating, like Argentina's, currently
topping the list. The inverse works as well: by increasing the
rating, economic instability grows.
Faced with pressure from Brazil's national
and international banks and creditors, the PT leadership decided
it had to act. When questioned as to its economic policies, Lula
answered: "the PT's platform is first of all to fight misery
and hunger. This is what the PT is going to do." He went
on to add that all of the PT's economic decisions will flow from
this commitment. But most striking to market ears was his statement
emphasizing that, if elected, the PT would abide by the 3.5 to
3.75% primary surplus rate on Brazil's GDP as an indicator of
the type of social spending the government should conduct. Furthermore,
he announced his vice-presidential candidate, the head of the
Liberal Party (PL), Senator Jose Alencar, a successful entrepreneur
who speaks for a certain sector of the business community, while
embracing a Fordist-model political agenda toned with evangelical
religious hues. The PT rank and file has voiced growing pains
regarding the alliance. Yet in front of the camera, the leaders
spoke of a deep alliance between workers and entrepreneurs in
a mutual commitment to "valorizing workers before capital",
in Senator Alencar's words.
PROMISE OF
A BRIGHTER FUTURE
By now, North-American tourists should
be relieved. Rio and Brazil will be attended to. Not only is
the PT going to work on reducing the widest gap between rich
and poor found in a wealthy nation (Brazil's GDP pales terribly
with its standing when translated into per capita terms, while
its place on the purchasing power parity (PPP) index spirals
downward to 83rd out of the 204 countries listed (source: World
Bank Indicators database for 2001). After all, it will especially
make the streets of Copacabana safer for them to stroll.
So then why, one might ask, was Mr. Paul
O'Neill, Secretary of the US Treasury, quoted by the Financial
Times on June 24, 2002 as adamantly asserting that the current
pressure on the Brazilian real "is driven by politics. It's
not driven by economic conditions"? Paul O'Neill, as any
law-abiding American citizen should expect, is entitled to his
own personal political opinion. But the fact that his word towers
over IMF policies on loan allocation changes the matter considerably.
If O'Neill is right, then the fact that
Brazil is under financial attack has just about nothing to do
with the Embi+ index. Rather, the Embi+ turns out not to be an
objective measuring gage at all. It works more as a marker of
feelings. And as anyone knows, there's nobody moodier than a
creditor.
The Embi+ plots a mood curve and a jumpy
one, to be sure. For every time the PT manages to convince another
sector of business that, indeed, it is now time for Brazil's
opposition to assume power, that is if the people so chooses,
the risk curve split-ends into the sharpest of peaks. Which is
why the Embi+ emerging markets index, despite its pseudo-scientificity,
is not even a marker of subjectivity. It traces opinion, and
a limited self-interested one at that. The next thing the public
will be told is that the index works as an echo of the way investors
feel about the American market, that with each new corporate
corruption scandal showing the real nature of American neo-liberal
capitalism, Embi+ marks the way emerging markets will be the
ones to sweep up the consequences. For when cash needs meet up
with the structural instability of short-term capital flow, no
resting place is sacred.
Notwithstanding the dramatic tone, it
would not be outlandish to profess such claims when considering
the fine performance of Brazil's economy. President Cardoso has
confirmed that the economy is running well, with expected 2 to
3% growth this year - provided the real not falter into lost
ground against the US dollar, in which case expectations would
nose-dive to barely 0.5%. (This figures do not raise any questions
about the accounting standards on capital expenditures lying
behind the purported 6.2% quarterly growth result in the U.S.,
but that's another story for economists to better inform us on
with clarity and conviction.)
On June 24, after opening the Rio + 10
(Earth Summit), president Cardoso advised the press to heed the
words of Alan Greenspan, head of the Fed, and Stanley Fischer,
deputy executive director of the IMF, who have both declared
that Brazil's economic stability is very solid, and its finances
solvent. "We do not have the same problems as other countries
do. We have to pass on a message of confidence to everyone, including
what is said regarding political questions," Cardoso stressed.
A few days later, the president congratulated Lula on accepting
to favor the primary surplus rate.
Now, is anyone surprised at how little
these statements have calmed the currency casino? Once again,
one need not quote Mr O'Neill, nor Joseph Stiglitz for that matter,
to spell the foul putrescence speculators leave in their dirty
play. Were there appropriate laws in place for controlling the
fine art of 'investing', speculators would be at least be criminally
accountable for the squalor to which they subject emerging markets
in their globalized casino. As it stands, barely a silhouette
is cast on their shadows.
How then does a Party maneuver when it
seeks to pass programs intent on making life more livable according
to northern standards for the citizens of this powerhouse of
a country?
ECONOMICS OF
DISTASTE
This is not the place to deal with descriptions
of misery and the narcotraffic violence that have come to fill
in the social void left gapping through years of military dictatorship
and oligarchic rule. After all, this article is meant to be a
contribution to economic analysis in the North American style.
There's no place for the vivid and putrid poverty amid the world
of reeling numbers and the smooth whisper of crisply rubbed cash
as it spins through the bill counter. Nothing obliges anyone
to hear of the 15 daily murders afflicting Rio de Janeiro state
alone, as drug traffickers -- Rio is a major pivot for the national
and Columbian drug and arms trade -- begin to wage war against
state institutions as the latter improve the efficiency of their
combat against this poverty-related, if not induced, scourge.
Added to the pressure on Brazil is its
neighbor, Argentina. One of the richest countries in the world
only a half century ago, with its pegged peso-to-the-dollar policy
it most recently stood as an exemplary case in the IMF's eyes
of an emerging market. Following collapse of its banking system
in December, the country is now undergoing pauperization, with
the barter system returning to the most fortunate sectors. Advocates
of globalization, however, have repeatedly explained how neither
the remoteness nor proximity of economies stand alone as regulative
factors of instability on a national economy. The economy has
become global through the power of information superhighways
-- which is how capitalist advocates fed the good news message
to gullible souls with eyes at least open enough to catch a gaze
of those getting rich from options in the nineties. But remoteness
did bring its ills, too, as any materialist law could predict.
It was, after all, Russia's defaulting on its debt in 1998 that
led to the crash of the Sao Paulo stock exchange (BOVESPA) in
January 1999, the key event leading up to the real's devaluation.
Brazil's economic policies have had almost
nothing to do with Argentina's apart from once being its leading
trading partner. The fact that the IMF purportedly did not foresee
the gravity of the Argentine collapse may not make their reassurance
regarding Brazil particularly reliable, much less reassuring.
So perhaps Paul O'Neill is really right to believe that "throwing
the US taxpayers' money at political uncertainty in Brazil doesn't
seem brilliant to me". Which is why he informed the Bloomberg
network that he will oppose additional IMF assistance to Brazil.
Mr. O'Neill, just as the Bush Administration,
has one outstanding merit. Regarding matters of taste, they say
it like they feel. Lula is not the president's favorite, who
could imagine he would be? The problem is that the US's own economy
is not performing along the good-will lines of American capitalism
either. And the market friendly neo-libs in Brazil see that as
clearly as they feel the pinch on their pocketbooks because Anglo-American
financial establishments are stirring around the Brazilian debt
treasure, ensuring that if Brazilians do end up paying it back,
they won't before paying more.
This is how the current crisis has come
to a head. Anglo-American financial establishments, risk agencies
like JP Morgan in particular, but they were soon joined by Lehman
Brothers, Morgan Stanley and Moody's, all buoyed by their main
press organ, the Financial Times, claim to fear the PT's attitude
toward Brazil's huge outstanding debt. Since last Sunday, the
PT, in the voice of Lula himself, has said that, if elected,
it would respect restrictions on public spending. Moreover, it
would not see its arrival in office as a break with the previous
government.
Still, the North American tourist should
be aware that the debt is a remnant of a series of governments
that successive American administrations supported to the point
of providing military and intelligence back-up to install, implement
and maintain a network of regimes meant to destroy the growing
South American popular revolt. This coordinated plan, codenamed
Operation Condor, bolstered the two decades of military dictatorship
Brazil lived under from 1964 to 1985. After presiding over several
boom years, but then under pressure of a liberal capitalist uprising,
the dictatorship handed power over to a democratic process still
largely directed by regional oligarchies.
With a strong dollar, Brasilia could
move swiftly to repay its outstanding debt. And this is a key
point to Cardoso' self-defense in this crisis that the debt is
largely due to the policies of previous governments. With the
global stock market crisis begun in 1997, which was actually
an effect and not the cause of the global currency crisis sparked
off back in 1992 by George Soros' attack on the British Pound,
Brazil's payable debt increasingly seems to recede on the horizon
as the value of the local currency grows ever weaker.
Two weeks ago, the IMF agreed to lend
Brazil $10 billion in relief aid. In addition, it lowered the
ceiling of its federal reserve to $15 billion from $20 billion
to let the government bolster the real. To top things off, the
federal government in Brasilia has been allowed to adjust its
primary budget surplus rate from 3.5 to 3.75%, which will also
apparently lead to alleviating the brutally high interest rates
on loans which are stifling local businesses.
These measures may or may not prove to
be effective in this latest round of Casino Real. But its costs
to the population are high. As I write, throngs of Brazilians
are gathering below behind Candelaria Cathedral, downtown Rio
de Janeiro, to greet the World Cup 'pentacampeoes'. The Selection
will be weaving its way down Avenida Presidente Vargas, then
try to veer right through a barely navigable human sea onto Rio
Branco and onward to Flamengo and Copacabana. All Brazilians
sense, however, that once the festivities over, their true struggle
lies in dealing with the behavior of creditors and how speculators
will take advantage of the fluctuating risk rating level. On
June 28 Brazil returned to being the third most risky nation
to invest in, now behind Nigeria as well as Argentina. Yet one
week prior, it held the number two spot.
There is nothing to suggest the struggle
will be easy whatever the outcome of the presidential elections.
France has not escaped a major drop in the CAC 40 even though
Chirac managed to bring in his squad at both the presidential
and prime ministerial levels. If trigger happy speculators steered
PT voters to what they claim to be steadier ground, recall that
Argentina's ex-president de la Rua was about as close to the
street as Mount Aconcagua. Well before Brazil's semi-final World
Cup match against England, the Financial Times, perhaps enjoying
some vengeance on their team's wilted performance, smirked snidely
at how Brazil's risk rating would be adjusted positively depending
on whether victory was finally secured. This type of cynicism
is what tarnishes the good-will tone of the May 1 and June 13
editorials.
Robert Maxwell, the distinguished author
of "Adios, Columbus" and unabashed Brazilianist, has
point out how it would be erroneous to believe that Washington
had their relationship with Brazil all worked out. Despite recurrent
attacks against Brazil in the U.S. Congress, and with Secretary
Colin Powell looking for something constructive to do by denouncing
child prostitution and labor, exploitation of the Amazon rainforests
and commercial piratery as ills profoundly setting the countries
on opposing courses, Dr Maxwell believes there not to be a coherent
agenda. And with every new protectionist gesture concocted by
Washington, the FTAA is becoming a distant memory -- all the
better as even Cardoso would contend.
On the other hand, if Dr Maxwell has
had to remain pessimistic on the future of Brazil's relationship
with the north, the "rocky times" he has referred to
in the pages of the Folha de Sao Paulo has much to do with the
debt treasure as only bond and financial risk agencies can smell
one. Nobody ought to think Maxwell as being too economically
deterministic. Just as economics and management studies have
co-opted the very principle of how to organize social groups
and collectivities, so also have economists co-opted the political
process. It is with the awareness of this backdrop that Brazil's
victory ought to be hoped for on many fields more than that of
futebol.
The staccato twitch of the pandeiro's
cupped cymbals recedes and parts to greet the voice of Nelson
Sargento. A living Samba legend from Mangeira mountain in Rio's
North Zone, Sargento sang to Lula three weeks ago during a meeting
between the artistic community and the PT executive: 'Don't let
Brazil's culture go to waste, Lula, don't let it'. Being deprived
of the acute sensuality of a beautiful Brazilian samba back-up
vocalist should not be a reason to fail to passionately join
in with the refrain.
Norman Madarasz
holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Paris. He
is editor and translator of Alain Badiou's "Manifesto
for Philosophy", published by SUNY Press in 1999.
He writes from Rio de Janeiro, and welcomes comments at normanmadarasz@hotmail.com
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