February 1, 2007
The Lula government's concept of social protection is not to be found in any official document or in any paper from his Workers' Party (PT) or his electoral platforms. This is why it is so difficult for the public at large, unfamiliar with the principles of social policy, to understand the meaning of his proposals and actual policies. In trying to explain this concept, we will discuss the government's reform of the social security system, underlining its impact on the state apparatus. We will analyze the core of its social policy as represented by the Programa Bolsa Família (Family Basket Program) and describe the way the economic cabinet designs social policy. From this start, we make the point that Lula's public policy puts on hold previous advances in the field of social rights, tries to create a private health care system, and erects welfare networks not founded upon rights. This last factor is crucial for the creation of a new base of support for the government, one not structured around social, union, and political workers' organizations
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February 1, 2007
François Chesnais has defined three stages in the process of financial globalization. The first took place in the 1970s and he calls it "indirect financial internationalization of closed national systems." Latin American countries including Brazil took part in this process of attracting a substantial volume of loans. The second stage, 1980-85, started with Paul Volcker's "dictatorship of creditors" and the discovery by Margaret Thatcher of neoliberalism as the doctrine for the new age. The center countries, starting with the United States and Great Britain, unlocked their financial markets by liberalizing the international flow of capital. The interlinking of national systems became more direct and immediate through market finances. In Latin America, the debt crisis exploded with rising interest rates (following the negative Volcker shock) involving massive debt contracted in the prior period brokered by the banking system
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February 1, 2007
n the 1980s the Brazilian economy suffered a long spell of stagnation and inflation caused by the foreign debt crisis affecting all indebted countries. That crisis triggered an acute inflationary process that reached 2,012.6 percent in 1989 and 2,851.3 percent in 1993, according to the general price index from the Getulio Vargas Foundation. The second half of the 1980s and the first of the 1990s saw the deployment of successive anti-inflationary plans, starting with the 1986 Plano Cruzado and ending with the 1994 Plano Real.* The period also marked the end of the industrialization strategy known as "import substitution" and the onset of neoliberal policies in Brazil
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February 1, 2007
Since Fernando Collor's 1989 presidential victory, and most notably since Fernando Henrique Cardoso's two terms in office (1995-98 and 1999-2002, respectively), economic policies have been enacted in Brazil that represent a subordinate alliance of the country's dominant classes with international capital. Unfortunately, under President Lula these same sectors have remained in control, and economic policy caters to their interests
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January 1, 2007
Defining moments in the history of a nation are time and again overshadowed by the drama of war. These critical events are often domestic policy decisions that affect the immediate state of a country and have serious consequences for the future. Significant examples in U.S. history include: the initial decision of the revolutionary government to found a republic dedicated to the lofty principles of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but embracing slavery, a contradiction that ultimately led to civil war; the decision to prematurely end reconstruction efforts in the South after the Civil War, a policy reversal which allowed the long-term oppression and exploitation of the emancipated slaves and their descendents; and the decision during the Second World War to encourage the mass migration of poor African Americans from the rural South to the industrial centers of the Midwest and Northeast to support the war economy, a haphazard resettlement program that resulted in the ghettoization and continued oppression of a significant national minority
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December 1, 2006
The year now ending marks the fortieth anniversary of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's classic work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966). Compared to mainstream economic works of the early to mid-1960s (the most popular and influential of which were John Kenneth Galbraith's New Industrial State and Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom), Monopoly Capital stood out not simply in its radicalism but also in its historical specificity. What Baran and Sweezy sought to explain was not capitalism as such, the fundamental account of which was to be found in Marx's Capital, but rather a particular stage of capitalist development. Their stated goal was nothing less than to provide a brief "essay-sketch" of the monopoly stage of capitalism by examining the interaction of its basic economic tendencies, narrowly conceived, with the historical, political, and social forces that helped to shape and support them
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December 1, 2006
Important bloated men squat on the facts
�thinking they can hide them with their weight:
�men who think their power like King Canute
�ordering the sea to behave, can abolish
�the eons slow inexorable rise of mountains,
�the branching and dying of species, wind
�and water that will grind the Himalayas to dust
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December 1, 2006
Fires crackle in the brittle trees
�bled dry by drought, the grass,
�bleached straw on the dusty hills
�where rain no longer falls
�in what used to be its season
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November 1, 2006
In a series of articles in Monthly Review and in Monthly Review Press books during the 1970s and 1980s, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy proposed that the general economic tendency of mature capitalism is toward stagnation. A shortage of profitable investment opportunities is the primary cause of this tendency. Less investment in the productive economy (the "real economy") means lower future growth. Marx wrote about the possibility of this very phenomenon
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November 1, 2006
"The law is a mask that the state puts on when it wants to commit some indecency upon the oppressed." I put these words into the mouth of a character in my play "Haymarket: Whose Name the Few Still Say with Tears." Jean-Claude Paye has once again done us a service by showing how those words can come true. In theory, the bourgeois democratic state, as defined in the American constitution, was to operate under two basic principles. The first of these was separation of powers. Legislative and executive action would be held to a standard of legality by the action of unelected and therefore presumably independent judges. The second principle, elaborated more fully in the Bill of Rights, is that certain invasions of individual personal liberty are forbidden, and that the judges will provide a remedy against those who commit such invasions
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