Joe Stiglitz Deploys to Brazil To Derail Its G20 Agenda—and Argentina’s Entry into the BRICS

Sept. 23, 2023, (EIRNS)—In what is clearly an enemy operation, Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize laureate who proves Lyndon LaRouche’s assertion that only stupid and/or evil people can win a Nobel Prize in Economics, deployed to Brazil from Sept. 11-15 to derail President Lula da Silva on economic policy generally, but particularly from his energetic support for Argentina’s fight against the IMF and for joining the BRICS, and on the agenda for the G20, which presidency Brazil will assume in December. Traveling with Stiglitz was Martin Guzmán, his longtime protégé from Columbia University who served as Finance Minister in the Alberto Fernández government in Argentina until he was forced to resign in June 2022 after making a mess of things and pushing accommodation with the IMF—always under Stiglitz’s watchful eye.

According to Brazil’s CartaCapital magazine, Stiglitz and Guzman met with Lula, his Finance Minister Fernando Haddad, Vice President Geraldo Alckman and Central Bank officials, to peddle their noxious “advice.” Reportedly, both men are now official advisers to the Lula government. In that capacity, Stiglitz is insisting that Lula use the G20 presidency to push for a green agenda to fight climate change and demand tax reform, both for Brazil and internationally, to redistribute income, and tax the rich and multinationals to help poor populations. When Lula is officially G20 president, Stiglitz specifically wants him to “influence” the debate on a global tax on multinationals, which the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced in 2021, and the G20 officially approved in July 2023, although Stiglitz demands that the tax rate on multinationals must be much higher than the proposed 15%.

What about a new international financial and development architecture to end colonialism, as the Global South is demanding? What about the BRICS and its new members—emphatically including Argentina? What about Lula’s critical role in trying to break Argentina free from the death grip of the IMF? Forget all of that and go with tax reform, Stiglitz says. Passage of Lula’s tax reform, which has already been voted up in the lower House, is “urgent,” argues Stiglitz, because it will tax the rich and provide more revenue to finance the needed green transition. To hype the tax nonsense, Stiglitz and Guzman attended a seminar in Brasilia organized by Oxfam Brazil, sponsored by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, on which Stiglitz is co-chair and Guzman is a commissioner. Stiglitz has had a cozy relationship with Soros for years, including Soros’s generous funding of Stiglitz’s Columbia Initiative for Policy Dialogue.

During that event, Stiglitz argued that since things don’t look good for the future of the global economy, the green transition to combat climate change is more urgent than ever, as is tax reform to counter the negative effects of the economic crisis. The masses should mobilize and go into the streets to demand passage of Lula’s tax reform, he warned, to make the rich pay up. Otherwise, distortions in the current tax system are “undemocratic.”