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June
17, 2003
Peter
Phillips and Jason Spencer
Entertainment Media 2003
Wayne Madsen
Outting Ashcroft's Latest Hypocrisy
June
16, 2003
Frida
Berrigan
Death in Aceh: US Weapon Aid the
Repression
Publius
Candidate Dem and Citizen Green
Tarif
Abboushi
Roadmap or Roadkill?
Rep. John
Conyers
Bush's Deceptions about Iraq Threaten Democracy at Home
Julian
Samuel
A Review of Pilger's The New Rulers of the World
Uri
Avnery
The Children of Death
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies,
Part 2
June
14 / 15, 2003
Edward
Said
A Roadmap to What and Where?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pryor Unrestraint: Killer Bill Pryor's
Mad Quest for the Federal Bench
David Lindorff
Rumsfeld v. Belgium
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Suicide's Most Willing Accomplice
Lee Sustar
US Tax System: Rigged for the Rich
Ben
Tripp
Of Dissidents and Dissonance
William
S. Lind
Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence
Joanne
Mariner
Rebellious Judges
Gila Svirsky
A Macabre Alliance
Mickey
Z.
Where We Are
Chris Floyd
Metaphysics as a Guide to Murder
Noah
Leavitt
Peru as Our Crystal Ball?
Yves Engler
and Bianca Mugyenyi
The G8 and Africa
Dr.
Gerry Lower
Dear Rudy, Let's Get Those Damned Liberals
Ted Dace
A Review of Kovel's The Enemy of Nature
Adam
Engel
Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Greeder, Albert, and O'Hayer
Website
of the Weekend
AEI: Starts Wars; Creates
Poverty
June
13, 2003
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
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June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
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Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
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Perry
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June
11, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Attack of the Hog Killers: Why the
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Elaine
Cassel
Meet Michael Chertoff: Ashcroft's
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Tom
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Greens, the Antiwar Movement and 2004
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Colombia: The Most Dangerous Place
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Bush Must Stop Telling Us What to
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Spike Lee v. Spike TV
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Eric
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The Empire Expands, Wider and Still
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Perry
DHS: As Big
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June
10, 2003
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Shepard
A Season in the Anti-War Movement
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Floyd
Bush Family Lies About Iraq and Nazi
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Madsen
Weaponsgate
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Richard
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Close
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Guthrie
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Bush's Wars
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June
9, 2003
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Coolman
Male Rape in US Prisons
Elaine
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Ashcroft is Coming!
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Sustar
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Gila
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Some Lives Are Worth Less Than Others
Dr. Gerry
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Human Worth in Bush's America
Michael
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A True Liberation
Ishmael Reed
Iraqi Slaughter, Mayhem and Plunder
Steve
Perry
How to Beat Bush, part 1
June
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The Terrible Truth
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St. Clair
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Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers
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A Different Theory of Everything
Ron Jacobs
Sports, Politics and the 60s
M.
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Pauperizing the Periphery
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If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost
Shelton
Hull
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Tripp
A Fish Story
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Robin
Philpot
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Flanders
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The Last Byline
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June
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Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
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Anthony
Gancarski
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Hamod
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Cracks in the Consensus
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Ari's Great Set
Steve
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Greens and
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June
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Jeffrey
St. Clair
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Imraan
Siddiqi
Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth
Michael
Leon
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Robert
Jensen
Texas Pledge Law Undermines Democracy
Ann Harrison
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Paul
Dean
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Uzma
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June
17, 2003
Brazil Under Lula
Confounding
Friends and Foes
By ROGER BURBACH
Rio de Janeiro.
After nearly six months in office President Luis
Inacio "Lula" da Silva is encountering opposition from
within his own party while he stakes out foreign policy positions
that challenge the Bush administration. As Emir Sader, a political
analyst at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, proclaims:
"The government has adopted a fairly traditional economic
approach that arouses the ire of some in Lula's Workers Party,
while he is using Mercosur, the South American trade bloc, to
confront the Bush administrations' efforts to impose its commercial
agenda on the region."
Within the Workers Party some prominent
members have publicly rebuked Lula for failing to break with
the austerity measures imposed on Brazil by the International
Monetary Fund. To comply with the IMF's demands to balance the
budget and make payments on Brazil's huge international debt,
Lula is maintaining a budgetary surplus that cuts into the country's
ability to sustain some social programs, such as the country's
social security system that is on the brink of bankruptcy. Critical
of Lula's economic team in general, Senator Heloisa Helena of
the Workers Party is leading the charge against government proposals
to tax the income of some of the social security pensioners to
bolster the fund. As a consequence she and a handful of party
congressional members are threatened with expulsion from the
party.
In late May the second highest-ranking
official of the IMF, Anne Krueger, came to Brazil and praised
Lula "for his sound economic policies." Prior to her
arrival the government drew down part of an IMF credit negotiated
last year under the previous government of President Fernando
Henriquez Cardoso. Marcos Arruda of PACS, a non-governmental
research center in Rio de Janeiro, declares: "Lula's economic
team by pursuing IMF-imposed policies is gutting social payments
not just for the retired, but also for the disabled and the poorer
families as well." The pursuance of orthodox economic policies
has also pushed up official unemployment to 12 percent while
domestic interest rates stand at 26.5 percent, among the highest
rates in the world. In Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city, unemployment
has reached 20 percent.
To Lula's credit, he has stood by his
commitment to tackle the hunger and malnutrition that afflicts
over 30 percent of the country's population. On his first day
in office he launched the anti-hunger program, known as "Fome
Zero," At the same time he cancelled military plans to buy
advanced aircraft in order to use the funds for social programs.
As of June pilot projects to fight hunger are well underway throughout
the country, especially in the northeast that is experiencing
drought and has the largest proportion of poor and malnourished
people in Brazil. Unlike social programs for the poor in the
United States that make people jump through bureaucratic hoops
and participate in work programs to receive needed assistance,
the Brazilian plan allows the poor to fill out simple forms and
receive plastic cards to go to the local supermarket to purchase
a canasta of food each month. "We promote the involvement
of the poor, not their humiliation," says Frei Betto, a
theologian who helped design the anti-hunger program.
Some in the Workers Party are also criticizing
Lula for continuing negotiations for Brazils entry into the Free
Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a trade initiative pushed
by Washington that is aimed at turning all of the Americas, from
Alaska to Patagonia, into a huge free trade zone by 2005. However,
Lula has staked out positions on trade and foreign policy that
are at variance with the interests of the Bush administration.
In Latin America he is one of the most vocal critics of the Iraqi
war, proclaiming that the United States "showed a total
disrespect for Iraq and the rest of the world," and "it
does not have the right to decide for itself what is good and
what is bad for the world."
Regarding the FTAA, Lula has repeatedly
made it clear that the United States itself must cease protecting
its own markets if it wants Brazil to join the trade zone. As
the world's largest orange juice exporter, Brazil is demanding
that Bush drop the trade barriers that protect the large orange
producers in Florida where his brother Jeb Bush is governor.
Also a major steel exporter, Brazil is denouncing US restrictions
imposed on steel imports last year by the Bush administration.
In an effort to prevent the United States
from imposing its trade agenda on Latin America, Lula is insisting
that the U.S. trade representative, Robert Zoellick, negotiate
with the Mercosur bloc comprised of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay
and Paraguay. With the election of a left of center government
in Argentina lead by Nestor Kirchner, the two largest economies
in the bloc are even discussing a common monetary union. When
Lula attended the inauguration of Kirchner in late May he proclaimed:
"If we work together we have good conditions to fight against
the protectionist barriers of the rich countries, and to struggle
in international forums for an end to hunger." In a direct
attack on Bush's unilateralist foreign policy, Lula added, "we
need to support multilateralism" in the world community.
Already Lula's government may be facing
the ire of multilateral institutions. The World Bank told Brazil
in January it would provide $5 billion to support its anti-hunger
program. But Francisco Meneses, a specialist in agricultural
and hunger issues at the research center IBASE, notes, "the
World Bank has promised a lot and delivered little. It appears
to be moving in lockstep with the Bush administration to extract
concessions from the government."
One reason for the World Banks' reticence
to assist the anti- hunger program may be that Lula suspended
the Land Bank set up in the 1990s by the World Bank to support
"market-oriented agrarian reform." Under the Land Bank
peasants were compelled to pay for plots of land at relatively
high prices and if they missed payments their lands were confiscated.
As Fernando Moura, a spokesman for the Landless Movement declares:
"While we are hoping Lula will be more forceful in backing
our demands for an accelerated agrarian reform program, the suspension
of the Land Bank is a positive step. We can now push for agrarian
reform based on cooperation, not on market competition that only
favors the big landowners."
Lula is clearly trying to pull off a
delicate balancing act. He is adhering to IMF policies to stave
off capital flight and keep economic pressures from abroad at
bay while carrying out some limited reforms and staking out political
and trade policies that he hopes will give Brazil more independence
and stimulate economic growth in the long run. As Meneses states:
"The Workers Party won the elections but the social and
economic forces affecting Brazil changed little. The government
appears to have little leeway to implement profound changes for
now. Our best hope is that once the economic situation is stabilized,
Lula will be able to implement more radical reforms."
Marcos Arruda argues for a somewhat different
tack for transforming the country's politics: "To move against
anti-social policies like those of the IMF we need to mobilize.
The real alternative is pressure from below, from the landless,
the poor, students, workers, the unemployed and many others who
are left out. The way to open up space for Lula to adopt more
progressive policies is to mobilize so that domestic and international
consciousness can begin to check the power of big capital and
institutions like the IMF."
Roger Burbach
is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA)
and has written extensively on Latin America and globalization.
His next book, "The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and
Global Justice," will be released by Zed Books in the fall.
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