[Media-watch]

[David Wagner]

I found this pretty interesting, so here is a link to the full article if 
anyone else wants to read the rest too:

   http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031201&c=1&s=greider



Dave


On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 12:44:22 +0000, Iain Campbell <iainc2004 at hotmail.com> 
wrote:

> Lula Raises the Stakes
> by William Greider & Kenneth Rapoza
>
>
> The bearded political leader they call Lula is the new phenomenon of 
> globalization, a man with audacious ambitions to alter the balance of 
> power among nations. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the new left-wing 
> president of Brazil, envisions a united South America that gains 
> economic strength by drawing closer together in trade and bargaining 
> collectively, much as the European Union does. He wants to create a 
> global coalition speaking for the not-rich countries--reminiscent of the 
> "nonaligned nations" that decades ago tried to stand between the cold 
> war's two superpowers. And he wants to push the IMF, the World Bank and 
> the United Nations to become more democratic.
>
> Lula may well fail. Nevertheless, his aggressive diplomacy looks like 
> the most promising initiative to reform globalization in many decades. 
> One sure indication that Lula must be taken seriously is that the US 
> government has mounted its own nasty, hardball diplomacy to isolate him 
> from potential allies and crumple his ideas before they can gain 
> momentum. The United States versus Brazil is a most uneven contest, and 
> the smart money will not be betting on Lula. But he does not stand alone 
> in the world, and may speak more authentically to this new historical 
> moment than Washington does.
>
> Toward that end, Lula became an energetic world traveler during his 
> first ten months in office. He has persuaded South Africa and India to 
> join Brazil in a new triangular dialogue that will focus on 
> technological alliances and social issues like world hunger, and also 
> serve as a unifying opposition voice inside the World Trade 
> Organization. Indian Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha defined the purpose 
> as promoting the economic and social interests of the Southern 
> Hemisphere. "We have thought enough about South-South cooperation," he 
> said, "and we have reached this stage now where we want to give it a 
> concrete shape." Lula is courting China to become the next big partner. 
> China and Brazil have already signed a commercial accord covering 
> agribusiness, technology, construction and natural resources. In October 
> the two countries jointly launched an earth-monitoring satellite.
>
> In South America, Lula traveled to Peru and Colombia, where he urged 
> closer economic relations between the Andean Pact nations and their 
> southern rivals in Mercosur (the Southern Common Market), anchored by 
> Brazil and Argentina. He offered to mediate talks between the Colombian 
> government and the revolutionary guerrillas of FARC. In Venezuela he 
> gave embattled President Hugo Chávez a $1 billion line of credit to buy 
> Brazilian exports. In mid-October Lula joined with Argentina's President 
> Néstor Kirchner to unfurl the "Buenos Aires consensus," a proposed 
> alternative to the much-despised "Washington Consensus," which has 
> straitjacketed developing economies with its harsh economic rules. The 
> future, they declared, must give poorer nations the sovereign space to 
> determine their own development strategies, balancing social necessities 
> with economic stability.
>
> Lula was also a hit with delegates at the UN General Assembly, where he 
> laid out a visionary proposal for eradicating hunger worldwide and 
> reforming the UN itself. Then he was off to tour five Southern African 
> capitals, with a December excursion planned for the Middle East and, 
> later, Russia. This past summer his travels took him to Washington, 
> where he chatted up George W. Bush. "Not the man I would like to see in 
> the White House," Lula allowed afterward, but the two "would have to get 
> along."
>
> What Lula has in mind is literally changing globalization as we know 
> it--the version led from Washington. A muscular coalition of developing 
> countries could block the draconian investment rules that multinational 
> corporations and bankers keep pushing for the WTO and the Free Trade 
> Area of the Americas (FTAA), set for debate in Miami this month. A 
> convergence of third-force nations might also generate more trade and 
> capital investment among the developing economies, allowing somewhat 
> less dependence on the wealthiest nations. In short, Lula's vision is 
> for a multilateral world, with power dispersed from the center, shared 
> more equitably with regional trading blocs and alliances. That idea is 
> anathema to Washington (also Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo). But, 
> for many political and economic reasons, this new approach might sustain 
> and stabilize the global trading system more effectively than the 
> present top-down arrangement.
>
> PAGES  1 | 2 | 3 | 4  next
>
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