Lula's Lament: Intro: >'When there is such an overwhelming disaster and you see yourself as part of this disaster, you begin to question your whole life. Why so many years of sacrifice and struggle?' Congressman Fernando Gabeira expresses the feelings of many petistas - members or supporters of the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) - when they heard that the party they built or supported as an instrument of democratic, ethical politics, was governing on the basis of systematic corruption.
The Brazilian left is in a state of profound shock and confusion. Over the past two decades hundreds of thousands of people have devoted their lives to creating the PT as a principled and forceful instrument of social justice against one of the most corrupt and unjust ruling elites in the world. Now they are having to come to terms with their own party's lack of principle.
The exact details of the corruption are still being investigated. It is generally admitted that the cúpula (group at the top) of the PT bribed political parties of the right to join their alliance in Congress and gave monthly payments to congressmen of the right to support their legislation. (The PT president, Lula, won with 67 per cent of the vote but the PT only has a fifth of the seats in Congress - though it is the largest party.)
As for the legislation itself, Lula's government pushed through neoliberal reforms of which Tony Blair would be proud. These included the reform - effectively partial privatisation - of an extremely unequal public pensions system, which nevertheless left the inequalities almost untouched; and amending Brazil's relatively radical, albeit contradictory, 1988 constitution to facilitate the creation of an independent bank with the freedom to raise interest rates as high as it wants. There have been social reforms - for example, a basic (but very low) income for all poor families - though these are hardly adequate to the problems; and many of them, along with the relatively progressive aspects of Lula's ambiguous foreign policy, did not need Congressional approval.<
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posted by johannes,
Thursday, September 22, 2005
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