Everyone knows that the Workers' Party governments did much more good than bad for the country.
Fernando Haddad
Lula is off the charts. You cannot reproduce Lula; and you will always have to count him in.
Without public investment, without families spending, without cheap credit, the economy won't recover.
No one thinks of controlling inflation of a continental-sized country by holding back municipal tariffs. Macroeconomic stability cannot be achieved through microeconomic intervention.
I really believe in the power of social control coming from within the community itself. The community protecting itself, its children, its teenagers, you know? I think that's far more effective than a police presence.
Lula aimed to both internationalize big Brazilian capital and improve the domestic market and the condition of the poorest in Brazil. In the gaze of a lot of people, this was a big contradiction, but for Lula, this was the most natural thing in the world, to think about these two things together.
What seems not yet to have been sufficiently explored is the emancipating potential of the discursive form of psychoanalysis in politics as a counterpoint of marketing.
I'm against using Petrobras to combat inflation.
Bolsonaro is a tropical Trump. They have a very common agenda, a very regressive agenda, when it comes to civil rights, social rights, and environmental rights.
My father - a Lebanese-origin small businessman - had a stroke in 1997 and couldn't work anymore. I paused my career and made sure he was taken care of by overseeing the sale of his businesses, but after that, I was able to dedicate myself to politics. It's what I had always wanted.
Bolsonaro is adopting a regressive policy as regards rights but a neoliberal policy when it comes to economic policy.
Taken as a whole, the work of Marx, at the same times it shows the thesis of the growing pauperization of the non-propertied classes, relativizes it when contemplating the possibility that the class struggles result in distributive effects.
Lula's political culture translated into a government project that sought to include the poor in the budget with minimal efforts in terms of structural transformation. The inclusion of the poor would trigger the economy, creating a virtuous cycle of mass consumption market, increased tax collection, more investments, and more benefits.
In the nineties, the PT had wrongly decided to attribute its electoral failures to its virtues.
I would say that I am an academic in politics. I have never abandoned my academic approach to observe reality, independently from the subject and its constant changes.
For the conservatives, Lula is seen as someone who constantly seeks demarcation and even rupture. For the Left, however, Lula is always seen as someone who conciliates, as he acknowledges the role of owners in improving the conditions of workers.
Lula's foreign policy goal was to turn Brazil into a sub-imperial power, with a presence in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. This strategy must be understood as a reaction to his concerns that the extractive sector would threaten Brazil's industrial tissue.
My master's was in economics, and my Ph.D. was in philosophy, and I became a professor at USP. But after three years, I was invited to be secretary of finance for Sao Paulo mayor Marta Suplicy. They reached out to be because of my economics background.
A lot of people abroad know Lula's campaigns against poverty and hunger, but he had a tremendous legacy in education too. He invested 2 percent of GDP, more than other administration, putting the PT's education programs in motion.
We combine fiscal responsibility with social responsibility.
To be consistent with this discourse of lifting up the military dictatorship in Brazil, the dictatorship that extended from 1964 to 1985, Bolsonaro, his whole life, has been uplifting not only the dictatorship itself but also the methods that the dictatorship used to stay in power, including torture.
The objective of politics is always to build scenarios in which persons' horizons can be expanded evermore. Any political action that is aimed at restricting individuals' horizons is, as I see it, a regressive action in relation to the political values that I embrace.
A president with a pen in their hand is a very powerful person.
Brazil needs peace and not hate.
The Workers Party rose to power when the Western Left began its descent.
Brazil must resume and deepen Latin American integration.
If you want to be able to teach, then you need to listen - a lot.
When I'm out there on the streets, I enjoy meeting people and listening to their complaints and critiques. It's something that I take great pleasure in.
