James
Petras
Introduction
Leftwing academics, writers and journalists have written
tendentious articles where they manage to transform
reactionary political leaders into working class heroes and
present their dreadful policies as progressive advances.
Recently, leftist pundits throughout US and Latin America
have plagued the reading public with gross distortions of
historical events contributing, in their own way, to the
demise of the left and the rise of the right.
The leading international figures in this deceptive leftwing
punditry include the famous Noam Chomsky, once eulogized by
the New York Times (NYT) as ‘America’s most
important public intellectual’. Such effusion is not
surprising: Professor Chomsky and the NYT both supported
the presidential candidacy of the warmongering Hillary
Clinton, the perpetrator of seven wars that uprooted 20
million people from Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen,
sub-Sahara Africa (Is this any different from Stalin in the
‘30’s?) and author/supporter of numerous coups and attempted
‘regime changes’ in Brazil, Honduras, Venezuela, Paraguay
and Ukraine.
The same MIT intellectual turned his prestige-laden ire on
the authors of the definitive critique of the pro-Israel
lobby (The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,
Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2007)) and
slandered the most effective activist group against
Israeli colonial land grabbers – the Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions movement (BDS). So much for America’s
most ‘prominent intellectual’ – a crypto-warmonger, who not
only supported the candidacy of the blood-gorged war goddess
Clinton, but has become a leader of the post-election
propaganda and ‘regime change’ campaign to overthrow the
buffoonish President-Elect Donald Trump. Chomsky’s wild,
hysterical diatribe against Trump claimed nothing less than
the world now faced the gravest danger in all its history
with the election of the real estate-casino King Donald.
Noam deftly papered over his defeated candidate Hillary’s
vow to unleash possible nuclear war by shooting down Russian
planes over Syria – in opposition to Trump’s reasoned
proposal to work with Putin in ending the brutal war in
Syria.
There are different versions of the
‘leftist’-imperial-collaborator apologist Chomsky throughout
Latin America. One is Emir Sader.
Emir Sader, professor of Political Science at the University
of Rio de Janeiro and author of the book celebrating the
first ‘workers’ President of Brazil, Lula DaSilva (Without
Fear of Being Happy: Lula, The Workers Party and Brazil
(1991)) is a frequent contributor to the leading
‘progressive’ daily newspapers throughout Latin America,
including La Jornada of Mexico, as well as the
influential bi-monthly The New Left Review in Great
Britain.
Needless to say, Sader never cited any inconvenient facts
when praising the leadership of Lula Da Silva and Dilma
Rousseff, Brazil’s last two elected presidents from the
Workers Party. For example, Sader omitted the fact that
President Da Silva implemented an IMF-mandated austerity
program upon taking office. He tiptoed around the Wall
Street Bankers’ awarding Lula a “Man of the Year” prize.
Professor Sader forgot to cite the abrupt drop in farmland
expropriations (guaranteed under Brazil’s Constitution) for
rural landless workers movement (MST) – leaving hundreds of
thousands of landless peasant families under thin plastic
tents. His ‘Worker President’ Lula appointed neo-liberal
economists and central bank directors to his cabinet. Lula
supported the interests of big agro-business, big oil and
big mining oligarchs who slashed and burned the Amazon rain
forest murdering indigenous leaders, peasants and ecologists
who resisted the devastation and displacement.
Sader lauded, as ‘generous’, the monthly ‘food baskets’,
equivalent to $60 dollars, which the local Workers Party
operative passed out to about 30 million destitute families
to create a rural client-base. Sader and his string of
leftist followers in North and South America, England and
France never attacked the high level bribery, fraud and
corruption linking Workers Party leaders to construction
multi-nationals and Petrobras, the state oil company and
billions of state contracts.
Sader and his international acolytes celebrated Brazil’s
ascent to world power as a member of the BRICS (Brazil,
Russia, India, China and South Africa) with Lula as a leader
in bringing the poor into the ‘middle class’. He never
stopped to analyze how Lula managed to balance the interests
of the IMF, Wall Street, agro-business, bankers while
enticing a huge voting majority among the poor and workers.
Lula’s
‘miracle’ was a temporary mirage, its reality evident
to only a few critics who pointed to the reliance on a
prolong commodity export boom. The business elites backed
Lula because of state subsidies and tax incentives.
Hundreds of rightwing Congress people and cabinet members
jumped on the Workers Party bandwagon to enjoy the payola
payoffs from contractors. But by the end of Lula’s eight
year term, exports of primary commodities to China sharply
declined, commodity prices collapsed and the business elites
and bankers turned their backs on the ‘Worker President’ as
they looked for a new regime to rescue them by sacrificing
the poor.
The
rest of the story is well known: Former PT allies launched
corruption investigations to pull down the PT government.
Twice-elected President Dilma Rouseff was impeached in a
bizarre legislative coup, orchestrated by a corrupt PT ally
from a rightwing party, Congressional head Eduardo Cunhal;
Rouseff’s corrupt Vice President Temer took over and Lula
was indicted for corruption by rightwing prosecutors
appointed by the PT. The House of Cards in Brasilia became
a grotesque comic opera with all the major players waltzing
in and out of jail (except the impeached Rouseff).
But Professor Sader did not looked back in contemplation,
let alone class analysis, at the 13 years of Worker Party
power in coalition with the worst of Brazil’s crooks.
Instead, he bellowed that Lula’s former allies, the
corrupt politicians from the rightwing parties, had unjustly
ousted the PT. These ‘traitors’ were the same politicians
that Professor Sader embraced as ‘strategic allies’ from
2003 to 2014. Any serious observer could understand why
Lula’s was first embraced and then divorced by the
financial elite – for its own class interest.
Lula
and Dilma’s ‘Three-Cornered Ménage’ with Bankers
Contrary to Sader’s PT propaganda and the predictably
ill-informed kudos of Chomsky, et al, the Workers Party
policies benefited the banks and the agro-business elites
above all others, to the detriment of the popular movements
and the Brazilian people. Brazilian investment bank
revenues rose from $200 million dollars in 2004 to $1.6
billion dollars in 2007 and remained close to the peak until
the commodity crash reduced bank revenues drastically.
Likewise, the financial speculators and corporate monopolies
took part in the capitalist bonanza under Presidents Lula
and Dilma. Merger and acquisitions (M & A’s) rose from
$40 billion in 2007 to $140 billion in 2010 but then sharply
declined with the drop in world commodity prices down to $25
billion in 2015. The banks made billions of dollars in
management fees for arranging the M&A’s over the
eight-year period (2007-2015).
The
Fall of Banking Revenues and the Rise of Corporate
Activists
If we examine Brazilian merger and acquisitions activity and
investment bank revenues, one sees a close correlation with
the rise and fall of the PT regime. In other words, when
the bankers, speculators and monopolists flourished under
the PT policies, they supported the government of Lula and
Dilma. When the export agro-mining commodity boom
collapsed, slashing profits, management fees and interest,
the financial sector immediately mobilized their rightwing
allies in congress, allied prosecutors and judges and
successfully pushed for Dilma’s impeachment, Lula’s
indictment, the arrest of former PT allies and the
appointment of Vice President Temer to the Presidency.
With the recession fully underway, the business and banking
elite demanded large-scale, long-term cuts in public
expenditures, slashing budgets for the poor, education,
health, housing and pensions, severe wage reduction and a
sharp limit on consumer credit. At the same time they
pushed through the privatization of the multi-billion dollar
petroleum industry (Petrobras) and related state industries,
as well as public ports, airlines and airfields, highways
and whatever else among Brazil’s public jewels could
compensate for their drop in investment bank revenues and
management fees for M&As.
For
the finance sector, Lula and Dilma’s main crime lay in their
reluctance to impose the brutal ‘new austerity policies’
fast enough or totally privatize public enterprises, reverse
subsidies to the destitute, freeze wages and slash social
budgets for the next two decades.
As soon as the economic elite successfully ousted President
Dilma Rousseff through a legislative ‘coup’, their newly
enthroned (Vice) President Michel Temer rose to the task: He
immediately announced the privatization of Petrobras and
froze health and educational budget for the next twenty
years. Instead of recognizing the true nature of the ruling
class interests behind the coup against Dilma and the
arrest of Lula, the PT party hacks and writers denounced
political ‘plotters’ and “traitors” and imperialist agents .
. . puppets who were only following orders from the banking
and export elite.
After the fall of Dilma and faced with resounding defeats in
the 2016 municipal elections wiping out almost all of the PT
big city mayors and city officials, Lula finally called for
a ‘Left Front’ – fifteen years after having
pursued an allied bankers’ . . . front!
Reflections
on a Debacle
What stands out is how pro-PT intellectuals and
writers have failed to understand that the party’s
vulnerability, opportunism and corruption were present early
on and reflected the class composition, policy decisions and
lack of ethical principles among the PT leadership.
Wide-eyed and seduced at their warm reception at PT
functions and international conferences, the ill-informed
US, Canadian and European intellectuals understood nothing
about the real structural and strategic flaws within the
party and instead published hundreds of shallow ‘puff
pieces’ about Lula’s poverty reduction, minimum wage
increases, and consumer credit – ignoring the real nature of
class power in Brazil.
Apparently, they threw out two centuries of even the most
basic grammar school level history lessons describing the
cyclical boom and bust nature of commodity export
economies. They ignored a half-century of left-right
‘populist front’ governments, which collapsed into coups
once bourgeois support was withdrawn – and instead whined
about ‘betrayals’ – as if the elite were capable of anything
else.
The fundamental problem was not the stratospheric
intellectual pronouncements – the key was the economic and
political strategies and policies under Lula and Dilma
The PT Presidents failed to diversify the economy, institute
an industrial program, impose content regulations on foreign
producers, nationalize the banks and monopolies, prosecute
corrupt political officials (including PT leaders) and stop
the practice of funding political campaigns through
kick-back rewards for rotten deals with construction
contractor-cronies.
Once in power, the PT ran expensive campaigns with heavy
mass media saturation, while rejecting their own twenty
years of effective class struggle that had built the
political party with a strong working class cadre.
By the time it was elected to the presidency, the PT
membership had shifted dramatically – from workers to middle
class professionals. By 2002, 70% of active party members
were professionals. They formed the leadership base running
for office, designed the new strategies and forged new
allies.
The PT discarded its popular class allies in order to gain
short-term capitalist alliances based on the export
commodity boom economy. During the height of the ‘boom’
they managed to satisfy the bankers and stockbrokers, while
providing some subsidies to workers and the poor. When the
budgets and the boom economy crashed, the business allies
turned against the PT. Meanwhile, the PT had also lost its
mass base, which was experiencing double-digit
unemployment. The once reliable PT voters knew that, while
they suffered, some of their ‘Workers Party’ leaders had
become millionaires through corruption and were living in
‘soap-opera’-style luxury. They could imagine them
consulting their gold Rolex watches so not to miss an
appointment with the corrupt contractors…
Lacking critical and knowledgeable advisers, depending on
allies and ministers from the capitalist elite, abandoning
the politics of class struggle, and failing to implement any
national industrial strategy - including the most basic
processing of Brazil’s agro-mineral products, the Left
disintegrated losing Latin America’s historic best
opportunity to build a workers’ and peasant government from
below.
The fiasco of left intellectuals and politicos is not
confined to the case of Brazil. The same capitulation to
the hard-right keeps happening: In the US, France, England,
Greece and Portugal, there were the Bernie Sanders, Noam
Chomskys and a small army of left journalists and identity
activists rushing to support the candidacy of Hillary
Clinton--the most bellicose imperial politician in recent
memory. Despite her record of supporting or launching
seven wars, creating twenty-million refugees and over one
million deaths, despite her reckless advocacy of nuclear war
with Russia over Syria, the self-declared ‘anti-fascists’
joined hands to support a recidivist catastrophe-candidate,
whose only real success would be her million-dollar speeches
before the financial elite and speculators! But then
again, the famously furious Greek Left voted for Syriza’s
Alexis Tsipras who then imposed history’s worst peacetime
austerity program on the people of Greece. It must console
Lula and Dilma to know they have plenty of company among the
left politicians who speak to the workers and work for the
bankers.
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