August 6, 2007 (LPAC)--"We are going to transform this country into a real infrastructure construction site," Brazilian President Lula da Silva announced in his weekly radio show today. Roads, railroads, ports and airports will be built under the government's over $250 billion infrastructure plan, named the Program for Accelerated Growth (PAC). The first priority chosen by the government for the PAC, however, is to bring clean water and sewage services to the nation's poor.

Lula (as the President is known) has been traveling the country for the past two weeks, launching basic sanitation public works projects, which he says are vital to keep Brazil's children from diseases like diarrhea. In the process, he has been delivering exactly the kind of nationalist speeches, defending the population, which the oligarchic financial interests, such as the agents of Spain's Santander Bank and Boston's FleetBank which are ensconced in the government, most fear. These bankers will do everything in their power to ensure Lula's words are not translated into action.

For thirty years, no government has thought strategically about Brazil's development; not since the government of Ernesto Geisel in the 1970's has there been big investment in the nation's infrastructure, the President said in a July 26 speech launching the PAC's sanitation program in the state of Paraiba. People thought small, and listened to economists, who came with their "pretty, color graphs" to argue that investing in the poor North East, in railroads, in the great TVA-like water management project for the Sao Francisco river basin, etc., are "not economically viable."

This is why today we have so many youth, age 20 to 30, who are caught up in crime, violence and marginality, Lula said. These youth that we see today on television committing crimes "are the children of this country, the result of a historic period in our country in which social policies were not taken into account as a factor of our country's development. And why were they not taken into account? Because in this country, the habit was created that it was much easier to channel, as if they were investments, billions of reals [Brazil's currency] to economic groups, and to see the pennies channeled to attend to the poorest part of the population as an expense."