What a Left-Wing Presidency Looks Like

Hat tip to the Open Left blog for first alerting me to this item.

The American right wing’s accusations of President Barack Obama and his policies as Socialist has always baffled me. Because Obama has demonstrated through his Cabinet appointments, attempts at bipartisanship with obstructionist Republicans, and actual policies that he is no Socialist – nor even a leftist. He is very much a traditional American Democrat with strong free-marketer, corporate leanings.

For a portrait of what a strong, Left-leaning presidency of a large country and major economy might look like it would be much better to set one’s sights overseas towards someone like President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.

From Spiegel Online:

Brazil's President Lula: 'Father of the Poor' Has Triggered Economic Miracle

His supporters liken him to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who dammed the Tennessee River in the 1930s to provide electricity to the region and who launched the New Deal, a massive investment program to overcome the Great Depression. But critics see the undertaking as a massive money pit…

Now he is both the darling of bankers and the idol of the poor. With the so-called worker-president at its helm, Brazil is attracting investors from around the world. Jim O'Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, invented the acronym BRIC, for the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, and predicted a bright future for the South American giant. But his colleagues derided him. China and India certainly had prospects, but Brazil? For decades, the country was seen as a shackled giant, plagued by never-ending crises and inflation…

The country has repaid its foreign debt, and it has even become a lender to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The government has accumulated more than $200 billion in reserves, and the Real is considered one of the world's strongest currencies. International experts foresee a decade of prosperity and growth for the country. Lula predicts that Brazil will be one of the five biggest economies on Earth by 2016, the year Rio de Janeiro hosts the Olympic Games. It will host the soccer World Cup in 2014…

All of Brazil is basking in the fame of its president who, less than seven years after coming into office, now enjoys an approval rating above 80 percent. The opposition has all but disappeared and the national congress has become submissive. Lula runs the country like a patriarch, so much so that his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, is already accusing him of "authoritarianism" and warning that Brazil is on the road to state capitalism.

There is a kernel of truth to Cardoso's claims. Lula has never had any confidence in the market's ability to heal itself, and he sees the state as the framer of a new social order. He loves impressive projects and nationalistic gestures. He is a pragmatist, but he despises speculators. "White people with blue eyes" brought the world to the brink of financial ruin, he said recently. He meant bankers.

The financial crisis has only confirmed Lula's skepticism toward capitalism. Lula believes that Brazil coped with the crisis more effectively than other countries because the government took corrective action early on. According to Lula, fighting poverty and the equitable distribution of income cannot be left up to the market.

Full article at Spiegel Online.

This is my response to American free-market worshipping conservatives whenever they invoke “Socialism” in their accusations of the Obama administration. If they want to see what a leftist does once he has attained power they shouldn’t look to Obama. They should, instead, look at Lula and see what he has done for Brazil. And to see that perhaps a little bit of Socialism -- and I mean Socialism for real instead of pretend boogeyman Socialism that the American right likes to invoke -- would do the USA a lot of good.

Lula’s Brazilian success story is what real reform looks like and a portrait what real reformers do. It is what pushing through and delivering on a populist agenda looks like without compromising on one’s beliefs and commitment to ordinary people as one’s primary constituency. Lula is an example of how an unabashed leftist skeptical of capitalism and its potential to spread wealth evenly among the population rules as President. His success is a shining example of the power of government and the economy harnessed for the interests of ordinary people primarily rather than speculators and bankers.

Precarious Progressives

A couple of news items that caught my eye today:

The good: as reported in the Open Left blog

An exciting new piece of progressive infrastructure is emerging to help progressive candidates in federal campaigns: The Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Rather than focusing on large, independent expenditures, ala the Club for Growth, it seeks to help progressive federal candidates, such as Tom Geoghegan, by providing them with expert staff, advice, strategy and connection to the netroots. The focus will be on open seat primaries, and progressives who face competitive general elections, but primaries against conservative Democrats might also come into play.

The bad: as reported in Personal Democracy Forum

Some of the most popular state, local, and general-interest blogs in the progressive blogosphere were brought low this morning, when the lone developer behind the hosted community-blogging service SoapBlox threw in the towel. Well-regarded sites like Pam's House Blend, Blue Jersey, Michigan Liberal, Swing State Project, and MN Progressive Project found earlier today that they couldn't access either the public-facing front ends of the site or their sites' content-management backend. As of this afternoon, the sites are (mostly) back up, but that hasn't eased fears that a core part of the left's online infrastructure isn't all that sustainable.

SoapBlox became a building block of the progressive blogosphere, especially amongst state-level group blogs, by offering all the same powerful tools that blogging platforms like Scoop offer but at a fraction of the price or effort. Scoop, which powers the blog giant Daily Kos, can be difficult to deploy and maintain, and can cost in the thousands of dollars. A hosted alternative to Scoop, SoapBlox replicates all the weaponry of big-name blogs at a bargain price that runs in the neighborhood of $10 or $15 a month. But that low price and ease of use comes at a cost. SoapBlox has been the part-time project of one man, and he's burnt out. Earlier today, Paul Preston, a.k.a., "pacified," posted a note on SoapBlox.net calling an end to the service.

There is momentum in creating a Progressive infrastructure. But as the example of Soapblox points out, much of this infrastructure is put together pretty much with duct tape and wire. The operator of Soapblox has since turned back from his retirement of the platform and an effort is underway to save the system from total breakdown but it really is a wake-up call to Progressives and other outsider political movements to see how precarious their positions really are in relation to the Establishment they seek to reform.

Naomi Klein Profile at the New Yorker

Visit the New Yorker for an excellent profile of the work of Naomi Klein, political author, activist and critic of neoliberal globalization economics.

The profile contains a synopsis of Klein's latest book, The Shock Doctrine:

The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism -- at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes -- is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors -- indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort -- a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government.

Full article at the New Yorker.