Life After Lula: Meet Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's first woman president

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:




Life After Lula
Meet Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's first woman president.

by Kenneth Rapoza
posted Nov 12, 2010




Brazil elected its first woman president on Sun., Oct. 31, when Dilma Rousseff, 62, received 56 percent of the vote in a run-off against Jose Serra, a longtime rival of her Workers’ Party. This is the second time Serra, the São Paulo state governor—home to the third-largest city in the world—has lost a presidential election. The first was a clobbering back in October 2002 by current two-term president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and now this one, by Lula’s chief of staff, Dilma.

Even a playbook that Serra’s campaigners pulled from the American right couldn’t save him. Attempts to instill fear of Dilma’s pro-abortion stance and Marxist past were not enough to send him to Brasília, the nation’s capital. Brazil’s voters mainly vote their pocketbooks, not their Catholic faith. The national news media are not overburdened by pundits spouting dramatic “he said, she said” vitriol, especially the kind funded by political action committees. Brazil has its independent and opinionated anti-Dilma and anti-Lula pundits, but it lacks the US-style echo chamber that would get everyday Brazilians spinning like a top. The mainstream concern of politics in Brazil is keeping the economy growing and keeping the crime in big cities like Rio de Janeiro in check.

Dilma was radicalized in the late 1960s in Minas Gerais, a large state roughly the size of Texas about an hour’s flight north of Rio. Most of her ideological positions were influenced in her late teens and early 20s by the anti-capitalist political movements of Europe—Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. She trained in the left’s counter-military insurgency and intelligence, she has said on record, but never shot at any officials or military personnel during her time with the National Liberation Command, or Colina.

The poorer north and northeast voted for Dilma, while the richer south and big agricultural states voted for Serra, partly out of a suspicion that Lula’s party will expropriate farms from landowners and give the land to peasants. Lula never did any such thing, but perception is greater than reality. The rich, educated south has always been anti-Lula, as if he somehow embarrasses them on the world stage. It’s hard to see how that could be, when leaders around the world and from ideologies as vastly different as Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have all spoken highly of Lula. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/life-after-lula

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

1. K&R

[Peace Patriot]

2. This story is too breezy, once-over-lightly, Time magaziney for me...

...and it takes a typical pot shot at Hugo Chavez (one of Lula da Silva's strongest friends and allies, who ALSO drastically cut poverty rates in his country), but it does contain this stunner. After reciting Lula da Silva's many successes, ending with an 80% approval rating (!), with Dilma Rousseff as his chief of staff, there's this...

---

"But Brazil also weathered the greatest housing and derivatives bubble and crash in history, partly because Brazil’s banks, which are tightly regulated, were not highly leveraged like their U.S. counterparts."

---

You know why our banks weren't regulated? Bill Clinton de-regulated them (killing the bank regulations that had kept this country steady and prosperous for half a century (since the Great Depression and FDR's "New Deal" banking regs). Know what happened next? The Bushwhacks looted and crashed our economy--again!

I just CRINGED when I read this about Brazil. Lula da Silva gave the finger to Wall Street (called them the "blue-eyed wonders") and to the World Bank/IMF and refused their de-regulatory "advice"--and took a cue or two from Hugo Chavez in that and other respects--and kept Brazil on a steady, prosperous course through the worst and most unnecessary U.S.-trigged world economic crisis anybody born after 1932 has ever seen, and that may well exceed the Great Depression before it's over, because Obama and the Democrats are still listening to Wall Street and the banksters!!!

It just makes you want to tear your hair out--even if you KNOW the history of the Democratic Party since Reagan (who de-regulated the Savings & Loans and re-wrote the tax code to favor the rich). This is no longer the party of the "New Deal." It is the OTHER party of the rich and powerful. Even if you KNOW how rigged the elections are (quite literally, now, with the 'TRADE SECRET' code voting machines). Even if you saw it all coming. Even if you warned people that Obama COULD NOT fulfill your hope in what you thought he was saying. Even if you KNEW that Obama was a "liberal" placeholder, truly elected but also PERMITTED TO BE elected, to take the blame for the Bush Junta. Even if you KNEW he would be ousted in 2012, with the GOOD POSSIBILITY of a regime worse than the Bush Junta being installed. Even if you KNEW all this and more, it is still crazy-making and TRAGIC that the poor and the middle class in this country HAVE NOWHERE TO GO. We HAVE no political party. We are the great majority and we have no representation in Washington DC.

A choice between "liberals" who serve the rich and fascists who serve the rich is no choice at all. And, frankly, I think choice itself is gone. We no longer have a choice. ES&S--which just bought out Diebold and gained an 80% monopoly over U.S. "TRADE SECRET' voting machines--had, as its initial funder and major investor, far rightwing nutball Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals (among other things). THAT WHO'S COUNTING ALL OUR VOTES! Nutballs! With SECRET code that we are barred, by law, from reviewing!

Ah, me. This article on Dilma Rousseff--which bends over backwards to make her seem "nice" and not a leftist guerrilla at all--has really set me off. Leaders who oppose fascism are NOT NICE. They are tough as nails. They piss off Wall Street. They defy banksters. They say, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "Organized money hates me--and I welcome their hatred!"

Not possible any more here. But possible in Brazil and throughout most of Latin America, where they hold HONEST ELECTIONS!

[Blue_Tires]

4. I read at the bottom that the reporter

is a former Dow Jones/WSJ guy, which explains a few things...

[Vidar]

3. Lovely! Representing the Worker's Party & having been Lula's

chief of staff she would have my vote. Damn, I can't vote in Brazil.