We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Brazil: A Pyrric Victory and What Comes Afterwards

Click here to access article by Atilio Borón from teleSUR. (Note: this article suffers from a rather inadequate translation into English.)

This political sociologist from Argentina assesses the meaning of the re-election of Dilma Rousseff as Brazil's president. She is heir to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the Workers' Party (PT) which was first elected in 2002 by quite a margin. However, in the elections since then the mildly social-democratic PT has been winning by ever decreasing numbers. In this recent election she barely won out over a neoliberal candidate. Borón sees the threat of a right-wing coup by the neoliberal elites.
Dilma runs the risk of being asphyxiated by her rivals whose extreme bellicosity was made apparent in the electoral campaign, and they do not seem willing to wait another four years in order to form the government. That is why the hypothesis of an “institutional coup” has emerged, even if it is unlikely, it should not be discarded aprioristically, same with the unleashing of ferocious destabilizing offensive aimed at ending the PT “dictatorship” that according to the caveman right that meets in the Military Club is “sovietizing” Brazil. What happened with Jose Manuel Zelaya in Honduras and Fernando Lugo in Paraguay should serve as evidence to prove to convince the skeptics of the impatience of local capitalists and their North American mentors to take power by force even if conditions are not favorable to such acts.