Requião: brazilian safe step forward

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Thursday October 15, 2009 21:56 by Emilio José Lemos de Lima - Brasil que Queremos emiliodelima at gmail dot com

Big problems, big solutions

For those people who dream and advocate a more radical solution, I let my suggestion: read "The five trillion that the "debt" have swallowed" and coolly examine the implementation of the budget over the past fifteen years.

Lula and Requião

Requião: big problems, big solutions.

To say it's untenable a situation which lasts 15 years, makes us smile, between incredulity and irony.

As you can see better in "The five trillion the "debt" have swallowed", we are talking about that which is at the same time, to a few people, the largest and the most peaceful of the sources of income, and for the overwhelming majority, almost 190 million Brazilians, though always going unnoticed, the biggest national problem.

This is the business of investing big money in Brazilian government bonds: banks, financial companies, pension funds and some individuals have done it for years, earning big profits at no risk because the security is Brazilian national state and their annual incomes that get near the trillion and a half reals. R$ 1,73 real a U.S.$ right now.

It is the greatest legacy of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose economic team has set in motion this literally hellish merry-go-round. More than five trillion dollars have disappeared down this drain.

During all these years any time that some brazilian federal authority talked about to expand or on to guarantee the primary surplus, using the encrypted code of experts he meant that public funds would be eliminated beforehand from the budget, to the detriment of health, education or defense, to ensure payment of more interest to those private investors.

Fascinating: the only institution that acts this way in the whole world, COPOM, within a central bank increasingly independent of government and of apparent politics, desperately increased the interest rate, burdening this way, mysteriously, the actual budget of the Union

This mechanism was reportedly created to raise funds for the private financing of public administration, since those that came from the taxes collection were insufficient.

No one ever explained how to borrow private money at high interest rates and at short terms could contribute to the financing of the governmental structure.

Why to explain it, if no one asked, and if the media even mention the subject?

Instead, the tax collection had at those days the largest increase in Brazilian republican history, becoming one of the heaviest in the world.

I can not make now an estimate of which
percentage of those five trillion dollars were consumed by this type of interest rate, however, it was
certainly much above the amount dedicated to investments throughout these long years in which our country has suffered so many and so unnecessary needs.

Fifteen years later, and five trillion reals consumed, it remains clear that the group of interests that supports this policy of transfer of income is very powerful, with very visible ramifications for watchful eyes, throughout the real power structure installed in Brazil.

Lula, even unable to change significantly this policy, had the merit of making money flow into Brazilian society, in other ways, especially after the international seminar on diagnosis and facing the global economic crisis, held in Curitiba, in December 2008 for an initiative of Roberto Requião.

And this is the same Roberto Requião now hoisted by Lula to the condition of the best alternative to Dilma, who points the ways of possible: these resources must be redirected with profitability and safety also guaranteed by the Union, to finance the infrastructure that the country needs to undertake a path of development commensurate with its greatness.

No losses to investors, on the contrary, this money will lastly work for the whole Brazilian society.

For those people who dream and advocate a more radical solution, I let my suggestion: read "The five trillion that the "debt" have swallowed" and coolly examine the implementation of the budget over the past fifteen years.