RESPONSIBILITIES OF POWER:

Lula's star dims for anti-globalists (Todd Benson, January 27, 2005, The New York Times)

The last time this prosperous city in southern Brazil hosted the World Social Forum, an annual gathering of anti-globalization activists cast as an alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the mood was jubilant.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former metalworker and union leader, had just been sworn in as Brazil's first working-class president, fueling hopes on the left that the new government would break from mainstream economics and spend heavily to ameliorate the country's vast social disparities.

For many of the globalization critics that flocked here at the time, da Silva's administration was to be a shining example of how a leftist government could successfully buck the capitalist establishment.

But two years later, as the World Social Forum returns to its original setting in Porto Alegre after a one-year stint in India, the mood is more somber. Instead of steering Brazil off its free-market course, da Silva has embraced the so-called neoliberal economic policies that he so harshly criticized while in the opposition. While that position has won the president fans on Wall Street, it has put him at odds with the far left of his own Workers' Party and with many of the founders of the social forum, which started here Wednesday.

The buck stopped there.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 27, 2005 10:31 AM