Green Left, BY JORGE JORQUERA

Within 100 days of taking office on January 1 this year, Brazilian President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva's Workers Party (PT) government had demonstrated its commitment to neoliberal economic policies beyond anything Washington had expected. A joint meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank at the end of April praised da Silva's government, and urged it to proceed with its planned pension “reform” and the partial privatisation of the country's central bank.

The PT government proposes a massive reduction in pensions, especially to public sector workers, and a partial privatisation of pension funds. In true social-democratic style, the “reform” is being promoted by a demagogic campaign against the tiny number of upper-level public servants, who the government claims can retire on amounts of up to US$16,000 a month. The real meaning of the reform is to free up billions of dollars in public savings to be redirected to tax cuts for the wealthy.

The pension reform also demonstrates the political acumen of the PT neoliberals. If they can smash opposition to this reform, which the labour movement has been particularly resistant to, then further attacks aimed at cutting workers' incomes and weakening union power will be much easier.

A big business government

In its first budget, the PT government slashed $3.9 billion from spending. This included a cut in the promised minimum wage from $69 to $67 per month which, when inflation is considered, amounts to a minimum below the level under the previous conservative government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. In an article posted on the Rebelion web site on March 21, left-wing analyst James Petras estimated that social spending cuts amounted to 35.4% of the budget reduction.

Da Silva's much vaunted “Zero Hunger” program also had its funding reduced, leaving $492 million to tackle the problem of 40 million malnourished Brazilians. This means that the funds budgeted for the hungry amount to 2.5 cents per day.

In fact, none of the “social programs” promised by da Silva — Zero Hunger, First Employment for Youth, and public works projects — have received any significant budgetary allocations. To date, none of the 1400 million Brazilian reales in funds allocated to state governments for basic public works have been released. Neither have the 700 million reales promised for housing.

The PT government has adopted the standard principles of neoliberal policy. Protectionist measures have been rejected, with the government preferring instead to lobby Washington for “fair trade” rules.

A study by the Brazilian embassy in the US shows that 60% of Brazilian exports to the US face protectionist measures and that, while these exports pay an average tariff of 45%, US exports to Brazil pay no more than an average of 15%.

The PT government hopes that by doing all the IMF, World Bank and Washington demand, Brazil will get a better deal. More likely Brazil will be “rewarded” for its loyalty just like Argentina has been.

Brazilian finance minister Antonio Palocci has plans to privatise four state banks, including the partial privatisation of the central bank, under the pretext of securing its autonomy from elected officials.

In order to win the electoral endorsement of Brazil's domestic capitalists, the PT campaigned on promises to lower interest rates, but within days of the government's inauguration, the central bank had raised rates from 25% to 25.5% and one month later to 26.5%, privileging the profits of international financial speculators.

By February, the PT government had also eliminated price controls on 260 pharmaceutical products and promised to do so for another 3000 medicines by June this year.

The PT government has helped give cover to the US-backed campaign of the Venezuelan capitalists to oust that country's radical left-wing government by sponsoring a group of “friends” of Venezuela (including primarily the US and Spanish governments) supporting the opposition to President Hugo Chavez. When the Chavez government asked that a few actual friends of Venezuela be added to the “Friends of Venezuela” group, the whole initiative was dropped.

Bureaucratisation of PT

The brutality of the PT government's neoliberal reform package is the result of a long process of bureaucratisation of the PT. According to Brazilian intellectual and PT sympathiser Emir Sader, at the last national conference of the PT, held in Recife in November 2001, 75% of delegates were functionaries employed by PT administrative and parliamentary structures.

The PT originated as a party of militant workers, with origins in industrial and anti-dictatorship struggles in the late 1970s, located especially in the massive urban sprawls created by the industralisation wave of the 1970s. The party rapidly became a centre for opposition to Brazil's ruling elite, drawing into its ranks landless peasants, urban poor activists, ecologists, liberation theologians, feminists and many other social movement activists.

The PT's initial ideological orientation remained ill-defined, but lent toward an abstract “democratic socialism”. What was clear was that it was a party of struggle, where electoral work complemented the organisation and leadership of extra-parliamentary struggles.

Under the pressure of the retreat of the international working-class movement in the 1980s, a wing of the PT increasingly focused on electoral gains and building an electoral apparatus. This process was deepened by the reorganisation of the PT.

Initially, the PT had been organised in large part through party-nuclei within factories. These nuclei came together in regional, state and national meetings and had a critical influence on the direction of the party.

Beginning in 1983, out of the PT itself, emerged the movement to form the CUT trade union federation, a left-wing alternative to the then dominant trade union federation, the CGT. The formation of the CUT was then used by the PT right wing to get rid of the direct organisational link the PT had with the workers' movement, handing the CUT the role of “organising workers” and prioritising the building of an electoral machine.

From 1985-86, the base nuclei (branches) of the PT, both those organised on a sectoral basis and local territorial basis, began to disappear. In addition, those who argued for the PT to at least maintain some sort of trade union arm — an internal party structure for organising its labour movement work — were squashed by da Silva and the PT majority.

By failing to give any clear ideological lead within the CUT, the PT also contributed to the rightward drift of the CUT itself. This drift was confirmed and deepened by the decision at the 1988 CUT congress to henceforth only recognise delegates from established unions in each work place. Prior to this statutory change, an important part of the CUT's development as an independent and militant union federation had been its recognition (as congress delegates) of “rank-and-file union lists” from the factory floor.

As the PT became separated from the ranks of the labour movement, the left of the party became increasingly reduced to distinguishing itself from the right purely through “programmatic” statements of difference, without the benefit of providing an alternative leadership in practice. Practical leadership of the left, at least in the workers' movement, was siphoned off to the CUT bureaucracy.

In other sectors, there was not sufficient social weight to produce a counter-organising pole for the left, with the one exception being the landless peasants' movement which, organised in the framework of the MST (Movement of those Without Land), continues to be the only alternative pole of left-wing mass-based leadership to the bankrupt PT.

As the PT became an increasingly successful electoral formation, the left-right struggle in the PT was increasingly contained within the electoral sphere — the battle over “policy” and for government posts. While right and left PT administrations ran city and state governments, the “Lula” faction of the PT watched on, accumulating experience — learning from the opportunist policies and alliances of the right (e.g., from the PT administration in the city of Ribeirao Preto in Sao Paulo state), and from the mechanisms of “worker participation” developed by the left (e.g., the city of Porto Alegre and state of Rio Grande del Sul).

The latter project could just as easily be used by PT governments to demobilise and co-opt the popular movements. The “participatory budgets”, for example, were first initiated by the left PT government of the city of Porto Alegre 14 years ago. However, despite “democratic” intentions, given that city and state budgets are tied to federal government restraints, the “participatory” aspect of the budgets was only relevant to a small amount of the municipal budget.

This made the entire process susceptible to becoming an exercise in “administrating austerity”, and drawing the attention and energies of the movement away from mass action and toward government lobbying. Not surprisingly, the World Bank took to advertising the “participatory budgets”, and in the 2000, according to the bank, 143 municipalities in Brazil had implemented “participatory budgets”, among them 67 centre-right (non-PT) administrations.

Suppressing dissent

The federal PT government is now drawing on all this experience in co-opting and demobilising the social movements, combining carrot and stick to suppress opposition to its neoliberal program in and out of the party.

At the end of May, the national leadership of the PT voted 13 votes to 7 to submit three of the party's left-wing MPs — Heloisa Helena from the Democratic Socialist (DS) tendency, Luciana Genro from the Socialist Left Movement tendency and Joao Batista de Araujo from the Workers Socialist Current — to a disciplinary commission (known as the Ethics Commission) for taking public positions against various PT government measures and proposals.

Subsequently, Genro and another MP, Joao Fontes, were suspended from the PT's parliamentary bench for distributing a 1987 video showing da Silva denouncing the same measures for pension reform that he now champions. The MPs have also been removed from the parliamentary commissions they were part of.

The heavy-handed tactics of the PT leadership depend on alliances with right-wing parties, religious groups and political notables, which strengthen its hand by publicly isolating the left of the party and discrediting the popular movements against the government's neoliberal policies.

The PT leadership is willing to go as far as it takes to achieve these alliances and keep its hands on government. In late February, one of its right-wing allies — Senator Antonio Carlos de Magallaes — was proved to have tapped the telephones of at least 200 MPs and other political figures. Despite the scandal, when numerous MPs demanded congressional hearings, the PT ordered its MPs to vote against any congressional investigation.

The PT right utilises the entire power and influence of the state and big business to win its agenda. The PT left, on the other hand, confines itself to “internal” party criticisms and is rewarded for its loyalty with marginal posts in government, or worse still, with posts such as the agrarian development ministry, in which DS member Miguel Rossetto has the responsibility, as the minister, to defend the government's failure to implement agrarian reform.

Already, according the March 7 issue of the Argentinian daily newspaper Pagina/12, Rossetto has criticised the MST for resuming land occupations after the election of the PT government. This was after 500 MST women and children occupied the state offices of the Agrarian Reform Institute in Goiania, near the capital, Brasilia, earlier this year, and similar occupations in five other states demanded the government carry through its promised agrarian reform.

As the recently censured PT MP Batista de Araujo said in a May 20 interview with the Agencia de Noticias RedAccion: “The left of the PT is staying quiet, they have criticisms but they don't speak out because they occupy public offices and if they put forward differences they would be exposed.”

Such leftists in the PT may be unwillingly complicit in the government's program, but there are many ex-leftists who are consciously participating in the PT's neoliberal orgy — such as CUT president Joao Felicio — and have been co-opted into various positions as ministerial advisers. Others have been co-opted onto bodies like the Social Economic Development Council, which has 13 trade unionists working with 41 business leaders and is charged with overseeing the “national social pact” that the PT government aims to tie the trade union movement into.

According to Felicio: “We have a certain sympathy for the [neoliberal] reforms, but they have to be negotiated and imposed gradually.”

Looming crisis

Continued neoliberal “reform” is likely to have devastating effects in Brazil, along the lines that it already has had in Argentina. In the 1970s and '80s, both countries built up significant industrial infrastructure and long-term links to the world market. Now these have collapsed. Brazil is also being suffocated by foreign debt — in 1992 its debt represented 28% of GDP; in 2002 this reached 62%. According to UN figures, in 1999 debt servicing amounted to 110.9% of Brazil's exports.

While da Silva won office by promising the Brazilian capitalists a greater share of the cake at the expense of foreign investors, he has instead pursued the sort of unreconstructed neoliberal policies that can only benefit the transnational corporations, financial speculators and their Brazilian hangers-on. At some point, Brazilian manufacturing capitalists will jump ship and leave the PT government to deal with the inevitable social explosion, which may well be more powerful than that in Argentina.

Brazil may be the 11th largest economy in the world, but it's also the most socially unequal country in Latin America. Up to one-third of Brazil's population — 54 million people — live in misery, and 55% of the work force is in the informal sector.

Brazilian industrialists have already started to break ranks with the PT government. Da Silva's vice-president, textile industry capitalist Marcelo Alentar, is emerging as the leading critic of the PT nominated Central Bank president, former Bank of Boston CEO Henrique Meirelles. Alentar concurs with the president of the National Confederation of Industry, Armando Monteiro, who claims that the monetary policy being pursued by Meirelles frustrates industrialisation and favours speculators.

That the PT is already beginning to alienate Brazilian industrialists is demonstrated also by recent comments by Leonel Brizola, the historic leader of the Workers Democratic Party (PDT), one of the PT's allies in the lower house of parliament (where the PT has only 91 of 513 MPs). According to Brizola, quoted in the April 24 issue of the Stockholm Spanish-language paper Liberacion: “[Da Silva's] policy of reform is far too similar to that which ex-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso attempted, and which was thoroughly defeated at the polls.”

As the PT government continues to lose the support of its industrialist allies, it will be forced to rely more on the traditional landed oligarchy. This is why the PT government needs to keep the brakes on agrarian reform.

After his inauguration, Da Silva announced that for 2003 the agrarian reform target was to settle 5500 families on 200,000 hectares of land. According to Petras, with the PT government's agrarian policy, it would take 1000 years to settle the existing 4.5 million current landless families in Brazil.

Da Silva's policy also means that the MST must be kept in check, which is why its occupations earlier this year were met with a clear message from the government that if they continued they would be met with repression. PT president Jose Genoino made it clear that while “lobbying is legitimate … occupations are not”.

The PT left and the social movements in Brazil face the real possibility in the near future of losing a significant base of support to right-wing parties that demagogically oppose the PT regime. The opportunities for developing an independent left alternative to the PT government grow slimmer with every day that the PT left remains trapped in “policy debate” rather than shifting its energies to organising the movement's resistance.

At a meeting of the PT national leadership on March 15-16, the Left Articulation Current and the DS presented alternative policies for government and were defeated, with 54 votes approving the current policy direction of the government and only 13 votes for the Left Articulation proposal and eight for that of the DS.

The DS document demonstrates just how trapped the PT left is. It says that, “rather than question the adoption of specific measures, we want to propose a discussion about the global orientation that is being adopted”. This is exactly the trap the PT right has set — to keep the left of the party engaged in general policy debate while the PT's implements its neoliberal policies.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian working class is left without practical leadership and increasingly ideologically disarmed, as the “workers' president”, the “workers' party” and a host of left intellectuals justify the neoliberal onslaught with discourses about the humble origins of “Lula”, the complexities of the current world order, the negative relationship of forces and every other excuse known to social democracy. n<|>

From Green Left Weekly, June 25, 2003. Visit the <a href=www.greenleft.org.au<Green Left Weekly home page.

Green LeftBY SUE BOLTON

Of the 213 trade unionists assassinated around the world last year, 184 were murdered in Colombia, according to the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

On June 10, the ICFTU released its Annual Survey of Trade Union Rights Violations in 133 countries. The survey documents violence, murder, disappearances and intimidation of unionists, legislative restrictions on the formation of trade unions and union activity, exploitation in export processing zones and discrimination against migrant workers.

Eight countries in Latin America accounted for 206 of the murders. Hundreds more unionists in Latin America received death threats, disappeared, received severe beatings or were sacked — the highest total for any region in the world.

The Colombian government, which receives massive amounts of aid from the United States, tries to wash its hands of responsibility for the violence against trade unionists by claiming that it is a direct consequence of the civil war.

However, the ICFTU report points out that the Colombian state not only fails to prevent such crimes but also fails to ensure that the perpetrators are brought to justice. None of the investigations of attempts on trade unionists' lives in 2002 have resulted in the sentencing of those responsible.

Numerous investigations opened in previous years have been deliberately suspended, dismissed or blocked by an “inhibitory decision” whereby the case is closed before those responsible are found.

The report notes that the United States denies 40% of public sector workers basic collective bargaining rights. At the national level, only postal workers enjoy such rights. Some 2 million employees of the federal government are governed by legislation which outlaws strikes and proscribes collective bargaining over hours, wages and economic benefits. Most state public sector workers are also prohibited from taking strike action.

However, one glaring omission in the section on the US is any mention of restrictions on union activity under the guise of “anti-terrorism” laws such as the Homeland Security Act. The report also fails to mention the massive round-up of 13,000 immigrant workers of south Asian or Middle Eastern background, who have been detained for many months without any charge and are now threatened with deportation.

This omission, plus the sections on Venezuela and Cuba, indicate that the ICFTU is still politically blinkered by its origins as a Cold War organisation. The ICFTU was formed in 1949 when a number of anti-communist unions split from the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Venezuela is condemned by the ICFTU report which unquestioningly recounts the viewpoint of the corrupt Workers Confederation of Venezuela (CTV), an organisation discredited in the eyes of the majority of workers for its involvement in the unsuccessful April 2002 business-backed military coup against the left-wing government of President Hugo Chavez.

CTV president Carlos Ortega endorsed two general “strikes” called by the big employers' organisation, Fedecamaras. In both cases, most Venezuelan trade unionists described the “strikes” as lock outs by the bosses and opposed them.

During his 48 hours in power, Fedecamaras leader Pedro Camona ordered the police to raid the offices of trade unions opposed to the coup, and abolished the parliament, the constitution and 49 laws that benefitted unwaged and low-waged workers. Camona's supporters also shot at and killed unarmed civilian demonstrators who opposed the coup.

Since March 2003, 2500 out of 3000 trade unions have left the CTV to join the new national union federation, Fuerza Bolivariana de Trabajadores (FBT). Only 20% of the work force is covered by the CTV compared with 50% by the FBT.

Cuba is also condemned in the ICFTU report for not allowing “independent” unions to exist, and for arresting “independent trade unionists”.

In a letter sent in April to the French CGT trade union federation, Pedro Ross Leal, secretary-general of Cuba's CTC trade union federation, responded to similar criticisms. He disputed claims anyone in Cuba has been arrested for belonging to an independent labour organisation. “A labour union cannot be said to exist if it is not elected by the workers and if it does not have affiliates”, he noted.

The “independent unionists” who were among 75 opponents of the Cuban Revolution arrested and jailed in early April, were not elected by any Cuban workers. Furthermore, they had received money and equipment from the US Interests Section, Washington's unofficial embassy in Havana, with the aim of assisting the US economic war against the Cuban workers' state.

Since the rabidly anti-labour gang headed by former oil bosses George Bush junior and Dick Cheney took over the White House, the US has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush-Cheney gang has abandoned any respect for the right of countries to sovereignty and independence by adopting a policy of “pre-emptive” strikes against governments it is hostile to.

Is it any wonder then that the Cuban government would regard organisations that are funded and organised by Washington as provocative threats to the existence of the Cuban Revolution?

From Green Left Weekly, June 25, 2003. Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

OP-ED COLUMNIST <a href=www.nytimes.com>NYT, By WILLIAM SAFIRE E-mail: safire@nytimes.com WASHINGTON

Voters of Venezuela and California have this in common: a growing number of disgusted voters are determined to upset, through referendum, the election of their chief executive.

Neither President Hugo Chávez nor Gov. Gray Davis has committed an impeachable crime. But both men's popularity has plummeted as a result of a sloppy or mismanaged economy, many voters' sense of betrayal and in Chávez's case, ever-deepening division among the electorate.

Is "recall" of a leader — elected by a majority for a fixed term but supported only by a minority — a good idea? Or should voters stare decisively at election returns and wait for retribution on a regular schedule?

First consider oil-rich Venezuela, long run by a corrupt oligarchy. Chávez and his populist party rode in on a wave of reform, captured the National Assembly and started packing the courts. His reach for greater power led to strikes, riots, capital flight, an abortive coup and, despite high world oil prices, an economy nose-diving by 10 percent a year.

Chávez is an ardent admirer of Fidel Castro. Like the Cuban dictator, he intimidates those who dare to oppose, encouraging violent attacks on his critics by thuggish supporters.

In a deal to permit re-election, he agreed to a referendum on his rule. But now Chávez is throwing up procedural roadblocks. His party is denying the National Assembly a quorum (an old Texas trick). Chávez is resisting a recall vote because he presumes that if the referendum to oust him succeeds, his currently divided opposition will unite against him in the election to follow.

California's governor, Gray Davis, though not a Castro follower, is in a similar position. Last year, as Republicans were about to choose a strong candidate in a primary to oppose him, he poured millions into TV advertising to tear down Mayor Richard Riordan of Los Angeles; when a weaker Republican candidate won, Democrat Davis easily defeated him. Picking one's opposition, though unprecedented, was considered a nifty trick.

Not so nifty was Davis's failure to disclose a looming huge deficit, necessitating nearly $40 billion in budget cuts or tax increases. Now that his heavy-spending chickens are coming home to roost, a bipartisan he-lied-to-us crowd is out in force and his approval rating is in the low 20's.

Seizing on what has been aptly called "voter remorse," the wealthy Republican Representative Darrell Issa is financing a recall campaign to dump the term-limited Davis. Bettors on the left coast tell me that with enough money, a million signatures could be collected in initiative-happy California to indict a ham sandwich (on whole wheat toast, of course, with alfalfa sprouts). If enough voters are egged on by TV advertising, talk-showboating and Weblog fury, the governor's recall will be on the ballot along with a separate list of potential successors.

Speculation centers on G.O.P. opponents like Issa, Riordan, previous opponent Bill Simon and "Arnold" (whose last name, Schwarzenegger, is too long for headline writers but somehow fits on a movie marquee). Democratic candidates such as Senator Dianne Feinstein are too shy to come forward lest they be considered backstabbers.

Thus, if Davis is afflicted with total recall, a replacement with as little as 15 percent of the total vote could be the next California governor. Is this any way to run a state as large as Iraq, to reverse a favored comparison?

With the world's fifth-largest economy and the world's fifth-largest oil exporter both in such a fix, a pundit should take a consistent stand. Thus:

Venezuelans should be given their right to oust their power-expanding president, because Chávez would then have the right to run in a subsequent race against the choice of the opposition. If that bunch cannot unite, they deserve their Castroite bully.

But Californians should suffer Gray Davis for three more years, voting like grown-ups not as penance for their mistake last year, but to uphold the principle that election results are final for a fixed term and officeholders should not be removed merely when ratings fall.

Wait — is it inconsistent to root for ouster of Chávez while espousing the retention of Davis? Walt Whitman: "Very well then I am inconsistent." Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. . . . With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do."  

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, June 22, 2003 By: Roy S. Carson

Venezuela's National Executive is studying legal options associated with the rescinding of dozens of mining concessions for gold and precious metals awarded to corrupt political interests at home and abroad by previous governments.

Speaking from the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas on his weekly 'Alo Presidente" radio/TV chat show, President Hugo Chavez Frias said "there is a group of people who have mining concessions and who in reality have no connection with Venezuela ... some of the concessions are gargantuan, several hundred thousand hectares in size ... they come on a visit once every so often, or they are represented by front men ... corrupt businessmen and politicians of the 4th Republic who live in luxury abroad."

Accompanied on the nationwide broadcast by Energy & Mines (MEM) Minister Rafael Ramirez and other top government officials, Chavez Frias said his government is dealing with the question as a matter of urgency and is expected to make a policy statement shortly.

The move is seen as the latest in a series of judicial and economic reforms to be introduced by the Chavez Frias government in its efforts to kick-start the nation's mining industry which has remained virtually undeveloped for the greater part of three decades since nationalization in 1976.  Rights to mineable resources remain within the gift of the Venezuelan government, but the update reforms seek to regulate a previous system where concessions to mine for diamonds, gold and other precious metals had been handed out in hugely corrupt deals to powerful political and economic interests at home and abroad.

The Monitor's View from the June 23, 2003 edition

Brazil is too crucial to the US dream of a Western Hemisphere free-trade zone for Washington to hold a grudge for long. That's why President Bush held a fruitful summit on Friday with President Inácio Lula da Silva, despite Brazil's opposition to the war in Iraq.

"Lula," as he's known, was the first such "opposition" foreign leader to visit the White House since the war. That alone highlights Brazil's central role in Mr. Bush's continuing pre-Sept. 11 vision of a new US partnership with Latin America.

The low-key summit was designed to accentuate the positive. Brazil views itself as a Latin giant standing up to the US on many issues, and Mr. da Silva's leftist, trade-unionist past has the potential to irk the conservative Bush. But both sides stand to gain much if they can strike a deal on a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). And Da Silva has embraced conservative market economics as necessary to uplifting Brazil's poor. He'll need US support as he juggles the demands of global financiers against pressure for job growth.

The two men launched a number of joint initiatives, and seemed united in how to deal with Venezuela's political crisis. Out of such bonding the US and Brazil can eventually work through their differences.