By TARSUS GENUS*
After 40 days in government, it can be said that Lula, in a “setting brake” must better regulate his relationship with the Minister of Economy
Giuseppe Volpi, minister of Benito Mussolini in August 1926 said: “the fate of the government is linked to the fate of the lira”. It was in the slow times, in which “each morning, in the London market, a hundred men dressed in their gray clothes, inherited from dead parents, will exchange lire for pounds sterling”. The losses, profits, dividends, speculative or not, which were synthesized in weeks and months, today are unfolded in minutes and seconds and their intelligence crosses the world, from end to end: it creates glories, suicides, fortunes, undue appropriations of alien blood and coups d'état. Just as Hegel, on October 14, 1806, saw “reason on horseback” in the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte crossing the bridge of the small city of Jena, sacked, reason – today – transits in the trillions of intelligent signs that make the world “flat”. ” and mark the decadence of the Enlightenment.
The earthquake in Turkey and Syria has already claimed more than 17 deaths, a natural catastrophe that quickly moves international solidarity. The war between Russia and Ukraine, on the other hand – a political catastrophe guided by the interests of the central countries – enters into a threatening strategic stalemate, far from a just peace that protects the peoples from a zero-sum war. There works, not solidarity in peace, but collusion for War, sheltered in the excuse of seeking a lasting peace, which will only occur – if it occurs – after much blood and destruction.
The war, which is internal to the colonial-imperial system, shakes the foundations of old Europe, which never made its reckoning with the past, except for what happened, in part, in small-great Portugal, in the most powerful period of the Carnation Revolution. . The Popular Party in Spain promotes its Francoist “spark”, in complicity with the extreme right of Vox, after the long transition. Sanchez Castejon, president of the government, resists and does so bravely. Joe Biden, in his address to the nation at the US Congress, highlights his progressive internal agenda, attacks Russia, scolds China (who doesn't even care!), but says nothing about the swastikas of the Azov Battalion, which support Volodymyr Zelensky in power: internal progressivism and external imperial pragmatism, slowly asphyxiating liberal democracy in the empire itself.
In Brazil – having overcome the most aggressive moment of the coup with the unexplained events of January 8th, the majority of political journalists in the mainstream press reiterate their criticisms of President Lula, in the face of his impious criticisms of the sacrosanct Central Bank. It is the right of both: the press, to criticize our government's ambiguities, and Lula, to call to responsibility – in a government that is just beginning – an unelected State organism, which has an extraordinary power to design what will happen, both in the near future, as in more remote moments of his presidential mandate.
Liberal democracy sobs in the Europe of the colonial-imperial past, but it is revitalized – in South America – even if limited by an ill-born freedom, in civic-military guardianships with exposed fractures. The crisis in Europe comes from the excess of power of its richest countries, which are separated – in the theaters of great world politics – not by any social-democratic filigrees, but by the greater or lesser possibilities of transmitting the crises of their welfare states. stand for the treasure chests of their former colonies; or for the weakened countries of Eastern Europe: the Euro unifies and separates, glorifies the market and humiliates social Europe.
The recurrent assertion against President Lula's behavior issued by the “experts” is that he “imagines that the country's situation is the same as that found in January 2003”. And that makes you think that the same policies from the beginning of the government should be applied by the economic area of the Government. In my opinion, the criticism is unfair and manipulative, on the one hand because the policies applied in the “Palocci era” – accepted and guided by the President in his first government with reservations from the Council – were formulated for a rentier “adjustment” (mitigated by compensatory policies and social), so that the government would have governability and – gradually – move, without anti-democratic upheavals, towards exponential growth with income distribution in the second Lula administration.
It is also unfair because the President visibly “does not think” that the situation is the same. And she is not. Lula knows that today's situation is "much worse" than the situation of January 2003 and his political movement is legitimate and necessary, so that institutions move to reconcile the responsibilities of those who preside over the country, with the delegated responsibilities by Congress, for whom it is the “guardian of the money”. Lula is the spearhead of the team of guardians of stomachs and the moral survival of the poor.
Today, anarchic global vectors are combined, commanded by colonial-imperial interests, whose core is the movement of money in the global sphere, with a greater concentration of income and power in the world of States and in the “civil” world. In Brazil, there is an unprecedented destruction of crime control mechanisms, defense mechanisms for the natural environment and defense mechanisms against international crime that targets our territorial and economic sovereignty.
From what I know about Lula and his way of proceeding, I maintain that he could even be wrong, but not because he thinks that everything is the same as “January 2003”. He could be wrong for not saying, with all the letters, that exactly because he “is not equal” – because the situation of the country and the world besieged by fascism is more serious – is that he must prevent responsibility! The mainstream press, whose vast majority decisively supported Jair Bolsonaro in the first two years of his government (and thus strengthened the monster), cannot take into account the internal factors that alarm the country destroyed by Bolsonarism, as this would clash with naturalization what they did to him. That's why they make a baseless and formless criticism.
After 40 days in government, it can be said that Lula, on a “setting brake”, must better regulate his relationship with the excellent Minister of Economy he chose, who will be his permanent mediator with the “market”, but who cannot abandon the programmatic aspirations it represents, adopting – by political choice – the necessary techniques for currency control in a world “without reason” and with many treacherous corners.
The game has just begun and it is heavy: the problems are not the same nor their remedies, but even in its first minutes we already know that it is possible to win, blowing more and more democracy into the Republic. And the current President, unlike the coup-mongering sociopath who preceded him, is a “expert” in spreading confidence in democracy, inside and outside the prison that the history of infamy has reserved for it.
*Tarsus-in-law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).