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CounterPunch
January
28, 2003
The Promise
of Lula
Another
World is Possible, and Necessary
by MARK WEISBROT
PORTO ALEGRE.
"I will tell the people at Davos
that the world does not need war, the world needs peace and understanding,"
said President Lula da Silva to a cheering crowd of tens of thousands
in this sunny port city in Southeastern Brazil. If there is one
theme that unified this year's World Social Forum -- and captures
the irrationality and destructiveness of letting a handful of
people determine so much of the world's fate -- it is opposition
to the looming war against Iraq.
The World Social Forum began three years
ago -- under the slogan, "Another World is Possible"
-- as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, an exclusive
gathering of the rich and powerful held at the same time at the
mountain resort of Davos, Switzerland.
The WSF has grown enormously, attracting
more than 100,000 participants to Porto Alegre for this year's
series of events. And among the delegates from 126 countries,
the largest contingent outside of Brazil this year is -- to the
surprise of many -- from the United States.
This, too, is related to the war. While
Secretary of State Colin Powell works the crowd in Davos in an
attempt to bully and bribe other governments into going along
(e.g. a giant $16 billion IMF loan and $4 billion grant to the
government of Turkey, where 90 percent of the people oppose the
war) the sizeable American anti-war movement has also reached
out to their counterparts around the world.
It is a sad testimony to the state of
American democracy that we need the help of other countries to
stop our President from getting our own people killed -- along
with thousands or tens of thousands of innocent civilians --
in a war that most Americans don't want.
But the war is not the only issue here
that brings people throughout the world together against American-led
policies that cause so much harm throughout the world. The largest
number of delegates are from Latin America, where the profound
failure of the policies known here as "neo-liberalism"
has become painfully obvious. The last 20 years have seen the
region's worst performance in more than a century, with income
per person hardly growing at all. The US recipe of substituting
the indiscriminate opening of trade and financial flows for what
used to be development policy, along with punishingly high interest
rates and budget austerity, has failed miserably even on its
own terms.
The rejection of the "Washington
Consensus," often imposed on Latin America by US-controlled
institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, is what brought
Brazil's President Lula da Silva to power last October. And so
he is an appropriate symbol of the growing importance of the
WSF and its ideas, relative to its elite counterpart in Davos.
Last year Lula was also welcomed enthusiastically by the crowds
here, as a genuine working-class hero who everyone loved but
few thought would actually win. Now he is president of the second
largest country in the Americas.
But he still has to deal with the unelected
"Masters of the Universe" as the London Financial Times
dubbed the leaders gathered at Davos, where Lula also spoke.
Chief among these masters is the IMF, which has a program for
Brazil's government that is literally impossible. The previous
government piled up an enormous public debt: it swelled from
29 percent to more than 65 percent of GDP during former President
Cardoso's eight years of office. With domestic interest rates
at 25.5 percent (as compared to our own Federal Reserve's 1.25
percent), this debt burden is not sustainable.
Brazil will have to either lower its
interest rates considerably or renegotiate its debt, but the
IMF and the financial markets are against both of these options.
Instead they hope to keep squeezing ever larger debt payments
out of the government budget. This cannot be sustained, and for
as long as these policies are pursued it will be very difficult
for the government to restore economic growth or deliver on its
other promises to end hunger and help the poor. A confrontation
is inevitable.
"I was not elected by the financial
markets, and I was not elected by the powerful economic interests
. . . I was elected through the high level of consciousness of
Brazilian society," Lula told the crowd in Porto Alegre.
The people here seem to agree. A banner
at one of the big marches here said "Give it up, Davos:
Lula is one of us."
Mark Weisbrot
is Co-Director of the Center
for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington D.C.
and the co-author of Social
Security: the Phony Crisis.
Yesterday's
Features
Walt Whitman
Respondez!
Respondez!
Jennifer Berkshire
Porto
Alegre Diary 3: Lula, Savior or Sell Out?
Chris Floyd
Street
Legal
Linda Heard
Are You a Friend of Freedom?
Agustín Velloso
Santisteban
Spain
and the War on Iraq
Rich Procter
We Can Stop This War
A National Rifle Association of Peace
Saul Landau
A Guide to Bush's Political Bipolar Disorder
Ralph Nader
Protecting Public Education from Corporate Tax Giveaways
Robert Fisk
The Human Cost of War
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January 25
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