Bolsonaro
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see 2 omg
change clown to skull icon b/c tip pt
see eduado (flavio) sons
wapo
‘This will not stick’: Brazilian president lashes out over alleged links to left-wing politician’s killing
By
Terrence McCoy,
Marina Lopes and
Teo Armus
Oct. 30, 2019 at 3:43 p.m. PDT
RIO DE JANEIRO — He shouted. He swore. He pointed a finger at the camera. His voice wavered and cracked. This was Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro indignant, airing grievances, vowing retribution.
“Why do they want to destroy me?” he asked during the live stream at 4 a.m. Wednesday from Saudi Arabia. “I shouldn’t lose it,” he said at another point, a tear glistening on his cheek. “I’m the president of the republic.”...
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Opinion
The Rise of the Milícia State
Just how deep do the connections between Brazil’s paramilitary “death squads” and the government run?
Vanessa Barbara
By Vanessa Barbara
Ms. Barbara is an author and a contributing opinion writer.
April 10, 2019
"Who commissioned the murder of Marielle?" asked a banner last month, one year after the murder of the city councilwoman and human rights activist Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes.
"Who commissioned the murder of Marielle?" asked a banner last month, one year after the murder of the city councilwoman and human rights activist Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes.Credit...Ian Cheibub/picture alliance, via Getty Images]
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — A little more than a year ago, a member of Rio de Janeiro’s City Council was murdered with four shots to the head and neck. The councilwoman, Marielle Franco, was headed home from an event when a car pulled up and someone opened fire, killing her and her driver. It was obvious from the beginning that this was a premeditated, professional assassination. Ms. Franco was a black, feminist L.G.B.T. activist, a fierce human-rights defender who wasn’t afraid to take on sensitive issues: the use of state violence in favelas, for instance, or the involvement of police and politicians in Rio’s paramilitary groups.
There was finally a breakthrough in the case last month, when the state police arrested two suspects. Unsurprisingly enough, they were former military police officers. The alleged shooter, Ronnie Lessa, had retired from the force after being injured in a car-bomb attack; according to investigators, he then took a job as a contract killer and gun runner for one of the most powerful militias in Rio de Janeiro, called the Escritório do Crime, or Crime Bureau. The other suspect, Élcio Vieira de Queiroz, who might have acted as a getaway driver, had been expelled from the police force under suspicion of providing security for an illegal gambling house. (Both men deny involvement in the murders.)
But who ordered the assassination? That’s where things get messy. So messy that last year, the federal police began an inquiry into the local murder investigation, after allegations that it had been systematically obstructed by militia members, public officials and politicians. Last November, Brazil’s public security minister at the time said that it’s “more than a certainty” that powerful people are involved in the murder. Some say, half-jokingly, that it might be easier to pinpoint who is not involved.
By now the federal task force has searched the residences of a former state representative, a former civil policeman, a former federal agent and an active-duty federal police official. Even the current president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has come under public scrutiny for his ties to both of the suspects in the killing. He and Mr. Lessa were neighbors in a luxury seaside condominium in Rio de Janeiro, and his youngest son once dated Mr. Lessa’s daughter. There is also a picture of Mr. Bolsonaro posing alongside Mr. Queiroz. (The president has denied knowing the men.)
But these could be just coincidences. More troubling is the outspoken sympathy of the president and his family for the paramilitaries.
The infamous “milícias,” in their current form, were established in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in the late 1990s and early 2000s, under the pretext of protecting residents from drug traffickers. They are mainly formed of active-duty and retired police officers who assume control of the communities and extort money from ordinary citizens and shopkeepers. A 2013 academic report concluded that of the roughly 1,000 favelas in the city, 45 percent are controlled by militia organizations and 37 percent by drug gangs.
During his 27 years as a congressman, Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly supported death squads and militias. In 2003, he said, “As long as the state does not have the courage to adopt the death penalty, those death squads, in my opinion, are very welcome.” In a 2008 interview, the future president of Brazil declared that the government should support militias and potentially legalize them, since they “offer security and in this way they can maintain order and discipline in their communities.”
It runs in the family, apparently. Mr. Bolsonaro’s eldest son, the senator Flávio Bolsonaro, was recently revealed to have connections to a former military police captain, Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, the purported head of the Crime Bureau. (The ex-police officer is now a fugitive from justice.) Both Mr. Nóbrega’s mother and wife were employed for years in Flávio Bolsonaro’s office when he was a Rio de Janeiro State lawmaker. In a news release, Senator Bolsonaro claimed that the women were hired by someone else and that he was the victim of a smear campaign. But he also praised Mr. Nóbrega twice in Rio’s Legislative Assembly for his work as a police officer, awarding him the highest honor granted by the assembly — the Tiradentes Medal — while he was still in jail on a homicide conviction. (The murder victim was a favela resident who had just denounced crimes of torture and extortion allegedly committed by his police squad.) Incidentally, when Mr. Nóbrega was found guilty and sentenced to 19 years in prison, Jair Bolsonaro, too, came to his defense in the Congress, saying he was a “brilliant officer” and demanding a review of the conviction. (Mr. Nóbrega was eventually acquitted on appeal.)
In 2015, Flávio Bolsonaro was the only legislator to vote against the establishment of a parliamentary commission to investigate frauds in “autos de resistência” — killings on the part of the police that are reported as having occurred in self-defense. He argued that the investigation would put a “knife in the throat” of police officers, who already do not have legal security to carry out their work. In 2008, he spoke of the “happiness” of the people “residing in these communities, supposedly dominated by militiamen.” Finally, last year, he was the only legislator to vote against awarding the Tiradentes Medal — that same honor he once gave to a purported militia leader — to Marielle Franco.
Which brings us back to her assassination. Bank records have showed a cash deposit of 100,000 reais (about $25,000) into the alleged shooter’s account. Who ordered the crime? And why? How widespread is the influence of paramilitary gangs in Brazil’s police force and politics?
Those questions are met with silence while the country remains one of the deadliest places for human rights defenders in the world. Many cases are never solved. Most of them seem to be quickly forgotten. The situation looks poised to get only worse, since our new president loathes the concept of human rights (in a 2016 tweet, he compared them to “manure”) and welcomes the actions of death squads (“If it were up to me, they would have all the support,” he told Congress in 2003).
It looks like there’s no need to legalize militias in Brazil, after all. Today one might have the impression that paramilitary groups are not merely acting as a parallel state — they are the state.
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Eduardo Bolsonaro’s comments reportedly shocked many Brazilians, but they aligned with previous statements made by his father, who also served in the legislature before being elected president in 2018 During his presidential campaign, the theme of which was “Brazil before everything, and God above all,” Jair Bolsonaro supported the torture carried out by the military dictatorship that ran the country from 1964 to 1985, and warned that under his regime, minorities would have to**“bow to the majority … or disappear.”**
Right Wing Watch noted last year, a week after Jair Bolsonaro’s inauguration, that he “didn’t waste much time issuing executive orders and taking other actions going after the people he had targeted in his campaign rhetoric: the LGBTQ community; indigenous people; descendants of former slaves; civil servants deemed not on board with Bolsonaro’s ideological agenda; nonprofit organizations; and the media.”
Just this week, Eduardo Bolsonaro launched a social media attack on filmmaker Petra Costa, whose documentary “The Edge of Democracy” has been nominated for an Academy Award, The Guardian reported. Eduardo Bolsonaro tweeted that Costa was a “scumbag” and a liar. He and other government officials are angry about the movie and an interview in which Costa criticized government policies encouraging the plunder of the Amazon region, a spike in police killings, the administration’s anti-gay actions and increased government censorship.
In August 2018, months before the election that made his father president, Eduardo Bolsonaro met with Bannon and announced that Bannon would be offering suggestions on online strategy and data analysis for his father’s presidential campaign. He declared that he and Bannon would “join forces” against “cultural Marxism.”
Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign was backed by U.S. religious-right leaders, including former Rep. Michele Bachmann, who met with Eduardo Bolsonaro and recorded a video message to Brazilian Christians urging them to vote “only for a candidate for the president of Brazil who will support moving the Brazilian embassy [in Israel] to Jerusalem.” Trump-supporting “prophet” Cindy Jacobs and her husband Mike Jacobs declared that Jair Bolsonaro is establishing God’s kingdom in Brazil—turning it from a “goat nation” into a “sheep nation.” (There’s a biblical passage that refers to Jesus’s second coming when all the nations will be gathered before him and he, like a shepherd, will separate the sheep from the goats.)
The Times of Israel reported that, in a visit to Israel in December, Eduardo Bolsonaro portrayed the trip as a first step toward moving Brazil’s embassy to Jerusalem this year. He refused to endorse a two-state solution to peace and said he could imagine the government closing the Palestinian embassy in Brazil. While in Israel, Eduardo “reiterated his opposition to gay marriage,” saying in a television interview “that if he wedded his dog it would still not make them a family,” the Times of Israel reported.
The Bolsonaro government has been warmly embraced by the Trump administration as an ally in promoting “family values” around the world. At Jair Balsonaro’s inauguration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave the new president a hug.
Last summer Jair Bolsonaro announced plans to make Eduardo Bolsonaro the country’s ambassador to the U.S, touting Eduardo’s friendship with President Trump’s sons, but the plan was abandoned in the face of resistance to “such a blatant act of nepotism.” President Trump had supported the plan, saying, “I know his son, and that’s probably why they did it. I don’t think it’s nepotism.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/4/paulo_paulino_guajajara_amazon_indigenous_killings
indigenous forest protector named Paulo Paulino Guajajara was shot dead in the Amazon by illegal loggers on Saturday. It is the latest incident in a wave of violence targeting indigenous land protectors since the election of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro last year. Guajajara was killed when he and another forest protector were ambushed by a group of illegal loggers inside the Araribóia reservation in the northeastern state of Maranhão. We speak with João Coimbra Sousa, a field coordinator and legal adviser for Amazon Watch, in São Luís in the northeastern state of Maranhão. And in San Francisco, we speak with Christian Poirier, program director at Amazon Watch.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/17/brazil-criminal-networks-target-rainforest-defenders
São Paulo) – Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is driven largely by criminal networks that use violence and intimidation against those who try to stop them, and the government is failing to protect both the defenders and the rainforest itself, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 165-page report, “Rainforest Mafias: How Violence and Impunity Fuel Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon,” documents how illegal logging by criminal networks and resulting forest fires are connected to acts of violence and intimidation against forest defenders and the state’s failure to investigate and prosecute these crimes.
“Brazilians who defend the Amazon are facing threats and attacks from criminal networks engaged in illegal logging,” said Daniel Wilkinson, acting environment and human rights director at Human Right Watch. “The situation is only getting worse under President Bolsonaro, whose assault on the country’s environmental agencies is putting the rainforest and the people who live there at much greater risk.”
The criminal networks have the logistical capacity to coordinate large-scale extraction, processing, and sale of timber, while deploying armed men to intimidate and, in some cases, kill those who seek to defend the forest, Human Rights Watch found.
On September 23, 2019 the United Nations will hold a summit meeting to discuss global efforts to mitigate climate change. As its contribution to those efforts, Brazil committed in 2016 to eliminate illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030.
Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 170 people, including 60 members of Indigenous communities, and other local residents in the states of Maranhão, Pará, and Rondônia. Researchers also interviewed dozens of government officials in Brasília and throughout the Amazon region, including many who provided inside accounts of how President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies are undermining enforcement efforts.
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Brazil's right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro is giving President Trump a run for his money in the alternative facts department.
Responding to international outrage following the news that there are record numbers of wildfires burning in the Amazon rainforest, Bolsonaro tried to shift the blame away from his pro-business administration and onto an unlikely culprit: non-governmental organizations.
"Everything indicates" that NGOs were planning to set fires to the forest, Bolsonaro said on Facebook Live Wednesday, as Reuters reported. When asked if he had proof, he could not provide any, answering that he had "no written plan."
Later the same day, he repeated the claims at a steel industry congress in Brasilia, The Guardian reported.
"On the question of burning in the Amazon, which in my opinion may have been initiated by NGOs because they lost money, what is the intention? To bring problems to Brazil," he said.
Environmental groups, however, say that the fires are a result of deforestation encouraged by Bolsonaro's policies. He has promised to open the Amazon to mining and agriculture, and that has encouraged farmers to start illegal fires in order to clear land. Local papers report that farmers emboldened by weaker enforcement are even organizing "fire days" in some regions, according to The Guardian.
"This is a sick statement, a pitiful statement," Greenpeace Brazil Public Policy Coordinator Marcio Astrini told Reuters of Bolsonaro's remarks. "Increased deforestation and burning are the result of his anti-environmental policy."
The fires came to global attention this week when Brazil's space agency announced that the number of fires burning in the year since Bolsonaro took office were up more than 80 percent when compared with the year before. On Wednesday, the hashtag #PrayforAmazonas was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter worldwide.
Experts attribute the fires to deforestation because this year has not been particularly dry.
"In the previous years [wildfires] were very much related to the lack of rain, but it has been quite moist this year," ecologist Adriane Muelbert told National Geographic. "That leads us to think that this is deforestation-driven fire."
Farmers and ranchers start fires to clear forest for soy or grazing land, but the fires then catch and spread. If this continues, ecologist and National Geographic Explorer-at-Large Thomas Lovejoy explained to the nature magazine that it could have devastating consequences for the rainforest, and for the world:
Lovejoy describes a cyclical system in which deforestation fuels forest loss, making the region drier, spurring even more deforestation. Much of the rain in the Amazon is generated by the rainforest itself, but as trees disappear, rainfall declines. Experts worry that this downward spiral could increasingly dry out the forest and push it to a point of no return, where it more resembles savannah than rainforest.
"The Amazon has this tipping point because it makes half of its own rainfall," says Lovejoy. That's why, he says, "the Amazon has to be managed as a system."
Not only would such a change endanger the 40,000 species of plants, 1,300 species of birds, 430 mammals and 400 to 500 indigenous communities that call the Amazon home, it would also make it harder to fight the climate crisis. The world's largest tropical rainforest is an important store of carbon, absorbing millions of tons of emissions per year.
Given the global stakes, it's no wonder that Bolsonaro has come under international scrutiny for his policies, as The Guardian explained. Both Germany and Norway recently suspended donations to the Amazon Fund, and there is pressure for the EU to block a trade agreement with Brazil and other countries in South America.
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Jessica Corbett
Pointing to the deaths of more than half a billion bees in Brazil over a period of just four months, beekeepers, experts and activists are raising concerns about the soaring number of new pesticidesgreenlighted for use by the Brazilian government since far-right President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January — and the threat that it poses to pollinators, people and the planet.
Indigenous and green groups have expressed alarm about the dangers of Bolsonaro's anti-environment policies — especially for the Amazon rainforest — since even before Bolsonaro's inauguration. Recent reports highlighting that the Bolsonaro government has approved a record 290 pesticides so far this year have further heightened worries about his environmental agenda and its consequences.
"Between December 2018 and March 2019, more than 500 million bees were found dead by beekeepers in four Brazilian states," SciDev.net reported Friday, citing figures revealed earlier this year. "Beekeepers' associations and agriculture authorities suspect this was caused by the widespread use of two classes of pesticides — fipronil and neonicotinoids — on flowering crops."
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-youtube-radicalized-brazil/
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How YouTube radicalized Brazil
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2019
Max Fisher and Amanda Taub have spent two years researching and reporting on the internet’s role as a force for radicalization. But as Fisher said on Twitter, nothing has disturbed him more than their recent story about how YouTube radicalized Brazil.
Most of us have been exposed to the fact that individuals like the El Paso shooter were engaged with white supremacists in online forums. We’ve heard about how people like Steve Bannon used Cambridge Analytica to psychographically target young white men with racial messages. But Fisher and Taub decided to ask a different question.
Wherever we looked, the rate and consequences of online radicalization seemed far beyond what we’d anticipated, and were growing fast. So, in January, we decided to ask the question in a different way: Could the consequences of online radicalization go beyond a few extremists and, in ways that might be less obvious but perhaps just as consequential, radicalize large swaths of an entire society?
That is what led them to travel to Brazil.
Brazil’s politics have experienced a sudden, world-shaking shift, with Jair Bolsonaro, the once-fringe, far-right politician, becoming president this year. Years of political corruption crises had undoubtedly played a role. But something else was clearly happening there.
And Brazil is the second-largest market for YouTube, after the United States. YouTube has not received as much scrutiny as, say, Facebook. But experts say the platform has the power to radicalize people and communities in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Here is what they found that was so disturbing.
Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.
New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.
A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.
Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors.
Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates.
And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation.
Renan Santos, the national coordinator of a group that used YouTube videos to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff, made a chilling statement: “Reality is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.”
On Monday I wrote about how tyranny takes hold via a process of malignant normalcy. Here is how Dr. John Gartner explained the process.
Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else. So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society. This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.
What Fisher and Taub found in Brazil is that social media platforms like YouTube can advance malignant normalcy in their quest to maximize watchtime (i.e. make money).
In the wake of the El Paso shooting, Beto O’Rourke wrote an opinion column for CNN titled, “It’s America’s Moment of Truth.” This is the portion that caught my eye.
When President Donald Trump describes Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “bringing crime,” or refers to undocumented immigrants as individuals who “infest our country” — he speaks not as America’s President but as an emissary of hate. And his vilification and fear-mongering connect with those who are open to receiving it.
The seeds of terror we saw that August day are transmitted day and night on Fox News, the most watched cable news channel in the country. They are amplified by right-wing websites like Breitbart, and in messages forced onto local news broadcasts by Sinclair Media.
They metastasize on Facebook. And they filter up from grotesque online havens for white supremacists who preach intolerance and worship violence.
What O’Rourke just described are the forces that have aligned to make a profit off of hate—gaining either political power or money, perhaps even both. As O’Rourke said, our moment of truth has arrived. Silence is complicity.
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// US ct saves our ass?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/huge-victory-for-press-freedom-brazil-supreme-court-bars-bolsonaro-from-investigating-glenn-greenwald-and-the-intercept/
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‘Huge victory for press freedom’: Brazil Supreme Court bars Bolsonaro from investigating Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept
Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams August 9, 2019
The Brazilian Supreme Court delivered a major victory for press freedom on Thursday by barring President Jair Bolsonaro from investigating journalist Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept for reporting that exposed unethical and possibly unlawful behavior by Justice Minister Sergio Moro.
“The Brazilian Constitution robustly and expressly protects exactly the work we’re doing, and I’m grateful that the Brazilian Supreme Court has applied those guarantees against the repressive, retaliatory acts threatened by the Bolsonaro government against us,” Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept, said in a statement.
“This crucial precedent ensures that not only we, but all Brazilian journalists, can do our jobs even in the Bolsonaro era without fear of official retaliation from the state,” Greenwald added.
The decision by Minister Gilmar Mendes comes after the right-wing Brazilian government, and Bolsonaro himself, threatened Greenwald with an investigation and imprisonment following The Intercept Brazil‘s publication of a series of articles on a trove of leaked documents, which detailed Moro’s efforts to jail former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and prevent him from winning the 2018 presidential election.
“A free press is a pillar of any democracy because it is one of the few tools for shining a light on the corrupt acts carried out by society’s most powerful actors in the dark,” said Greenwald. “That’s precisely why those same powerful actors so frequently want to punish journalists for doing our jobs, as Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and his Minister of Justice and Public Security Sergio Moro have been explicitly threatening to do in response to our exposés.”
Freedom of the Press
?
@FreedomofPress
A HUGE victory for press freedom in Brazil: A Supreme Court judge has ruled the Bolsonaro government must halt any and all investigations into @ggreenwald and @TheInterceptBr for their journalism. https://theintercept.com/2019/08/08/brazil-supreme-court-glenn-greenwald/ …
Brazil Supreme Court Minister Rules to Protect Press Freedom for Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept...
The Bolsonaro administration and Justice Minister Sergio Moro have been barred from investigating The Intercept Brasil and journalist Glenn Greenwald.
theintercept.com
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2:01 PM - Aug 8, 2019
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Trevor Timm, executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, reported Thursday that Mendes’s opinion should bring to a halt any ongoing investigations into Greenwald and The Intercept by Bolsonaro’s administration and prevent it from opening new probes.
“Minister Mendes’s ruling is only preliminary, but the full court may take months or years to take on the case, so Mendes’s ruling may stand for a significant length of time,” Timm wrote. “It is a powerful rebuke of those in the Bolsonaro government who have indicated they would like to sweep aside important press freedom rights for all journalists.”
In his decision, Mendes wrote that any effort by the Bolsonaro government to investigate journalists for their work would “constitute an unambiguous act of censorship.”
“The immediate right of free speech is the right to obtain, produce, and disseminate facts and news by any means,” said Mendes. “The constitutional secrecy of the journalistic source makes it impossible for the state to use coercive measures to constrain professional performance and to impede the form of reception and transmission of what is brought to public knowledge.”
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How Evangelical Conservatives Are Gaining Power in Brazil
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/.../how-evangelical-conservatives-are-gaining-power-...
Mar 7, 2019 - During the 2018 presidential campaign cycle, evangelical Christians rallied behind Bolsonaro, but the Catholic Church remained officially ...
'We Are God-Fearing Men': Brazil's President a Friend to Trump and ...
https://www1.cbn.com/.../exclusive-interview-we-are-god-fearing-men-brazils-president-...
Mar 20, 2019
CBN Chairman Pat Robertson leads a prayer with evangelical Christian leaders for Brazilian President Jair ...
The Christian Coalition That Helped Elect Bolsonaro Has Started to ...
https://foreignpolicy.com/.../the-christian-coalition-that-helped-elect-bolsonaro-has-sta...
Apr 6, 2019 - That angered Bolsonaro's Christian Zionist supporters while also ... Bolsonaro can partially thank Brazil's evangelical mega-pastors for his ...
Bolsonaro's Evangelical Support Is Falling. Why? | Americas Quarterly
https://www.americasquarterly.org/content/bolsonaros-evangelical-support-falling-why
Apr 11, 2019 - In late October, Bolsonaro received 69% of the evangelical vote. ... In the “new Christian right,” I said, “Coalitions between rightist politicians ...
Will evangelical legislators follow the rightist agenda of Brazil's ... - Vox
https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/.../evangelical-legislators-brazil-bolsonaro
Feb 26, 2019 - Though Bolsonaro still identifies as Catholic, his wife is evangelical and ... anti-globalists who think China threatens their Christian “fatherland.
Jair Bolsonaro - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jair_Bolsonaro
Jair Messias Bolsonaro is a Brazilian politician and retired military officer, serving as the 38th .... In January 2018, Bolsonaro abandoned the Social Christian Party and switched to the Social Liberal Party (PSL). Following Bolsonaro's arrival ...
Bolsonaro Renews Call for Evangelical Christian on Brazilian ...
https://riotimesonline.com/.../bolsonaro-says-it-is-time-for-an-evangelical-christian-on...
Jun 14, 2019 - RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – President Jair Bolsonaro again suggested the nomination of an evangelical Christian to the position of Federal ...
US evangelical leaders met, prayed with Brazil's ... - The Christian Post
https://www.christianpost.com/.../us-evangelical-leaders-met-prayed-with-brazils-cons...
Mar 21, 2019 - A group of about a dozen American evangelical leaders led by Pat Robertson met with Brazil's new President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday ...
The Rise of the Brazilian Evangelicals - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/...evangelical.../551423/
Jan 24, 2018 - Meet Jair Messias Bolsonaro, the ultra-conservative military ... the Assembly of God's donations to the Christian Social Party (PSC), a new ...
Bolsonaro thanks evangelicals for support at huge religious event ...
https://www.efe.com › English edition › World
Jun 21, 2019
Ultrarightist President Jair Bolsonaro, the first Brazilian leader to ... and head of the Reborn in Christ Church ...
Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro threatened journalist Glenn Greenwald with possible imprisonment Saturday, following recent reporting by Greenwald’s news website The Intercept implicating Justice Minister Sérgio Moro in a possible plot to smear and convict former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Speaking to a reporter, Bolsonaro said Greenwald could not be deported because he was married to a Brazilian, but that he might be imprisoned instead. Journalists and press freedom activists blasted Bolsonaro’s threats, and Greenwald responded via Twitter: “Contrary to what the president says, he is not (yet) a dictator. He doesn’t have the power to order people to stop. To detain someone, you need to present evidence to a court showing that a crime was committed. That evidence does not exist.” Click here to see our interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Glenn Greenwald on The Intercept’s exposé of Sérgio Moro and the Operation Car Wash scandal.
:{Strict Amazon protections made Brazilian farmers more productive, new research shows:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);left:-12px;position:relative"):}:
**The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest and a major global food exporter.**
But deforestation in the Amazon has begun to climb again recently.
Brazil’s agricultural innovations
https://www.ecowatch.com/amazon-deforestation-unrecoverable-tipping-point-2639358982.html
The Amazon rainforest in Brazil is being clear cut so rapidly — a rate of three football fields per minute — that it is approaching a "tipping point" from which it will not recover,according to the Guardian.lnx]
As trees are lost, researchers said there is a risk that large areas could transition from rainforest to savannah as they lose the ability to make their own rainfall from evaporation and from plants giving off watervapor, according to Newsweek.
A transition on that scale could have significant implications for global warming since the rainforest absorbs vast amounts of atmospheric carbon. Recent research has shown the potential for massive tree plantings to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.
"It's very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away," said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, as the Guardian reported. "We can't see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem."
The alarming rate of deforestation and its acceleration confirms suspicions that new president Jair Bolsonaro has allowed illegal land invasion, logging and burning. Bolsonaro has called his own government's satellite data lies.The president's comments followed preliminary satellite data that showed more than 400 square miles of the rainforest had been cleared in the first half of July — an increase of 68 percent from the entire month of July last year, according to the BBC.
Bolsonaro, the far right politician who has said he is fulfilling a mission from God, dismissed concerns expressed by European Union members and called it hypocritical since so many European forests have been wiped out.
"You have to understand that the Amazon is Brazil's, not yours," Bolsonaro said, as the Guardian reported. "If all this devastation you accuse us of doing was done in the past the Amazon would have stopped existing, it would be a big desert."
The DETER-B satellite system that the Brazilian government started to use in 2015 to track deforestation has shown that the record setting July deforestation is on pace to clear enough forest to fit New York City twice by the end of the month.
The DETER satellite data is considered preliminary. Detailed figures are released at the end of the year when data from other satellites and observatories is also collected, according to Newsweek.
"Unfortunately, it is absurd, but it should not catch anyone by surprise. President Jair Bolsonaro and minister Ricardo Salles are dismantling our socio-environmental policies," said Carlos Rittl, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, an NGO formed by a coalition of environmental groups, as the Guardian reported.
After years of conservation, Brazil's environmental track record has nose-dived in the first seven months of Bolsonaro's administration. He has given environmental oversight to the agriculture minister, who is the leader of a farming lobby. His foreign minister called climate science a part of a global Marxist plot.The government has invited businesses to register land counter-claims in areas that are protected nature reserves, indigenous territories and areas dedicated to sustainable production by native forest people, according to the Guardian.
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trump faLLOUT:
https://www.ecowatch.com/amazon-deforestation-unrecoverable-tipping-point-2639358982.html
The Amazon rainforest in Brazil is being clear cut so rapidly — a rate of three football fields per minute — that it is approaching a "tipping point" from which it will not recover,according to the Guardian.lnx]
As trees are lost, researchers said there is a risk that large areas could transition from rainforest to savannah as they lose the ability to make their own rainfall from evaporation and from plants giving off watervapor, according to Newsweek.
A transition on that scale could have significant implications for global warming since the rainforest absorbs vast amounts of atmospheric carbon. Recent research has shown the potential for massive tree plantings to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.
"It's very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away," said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, as the Guardian reported. "We can't see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem."
The alarming rate of deforestation and its acceleration confirms suspicions that new president Jair Bolsonaro has allowed illegal land invasion, logging and burning. Bolsonaro has called his own government's satellite data lies.The president's comments followed preliminary satellite data that showed more than 400 square miles of the rainforest had been cleared in the first half of July — an increase of 68 percent from the entire month of July last year, according to the BBC.
Bolsonaro, the far right politician who has said he is fulfilling a mission from God, dismissed concerns expressed by European Union members and called it hypocritical since so many European forests have been wiped out.
"You have to understand that the Amazon is Brazil's, not yours," Bolsonaro said, as the Guardian reported. "If all this devastation you accuse us of doing was done in the past the Amazon would have stopped existing, it would be a big desert."
The DETER-B satellite system that the Brazilian government started to use in 2015 to track deforestation has shown that the record setting July deforestation is on pace to clear enough forest to fit New York City twice by the end of the month.
The DETER satellite data is considered preliminary. Detailed figures are released at the end of the year when data from other satellites and observatories is also collected, according to Newsweek.
"Unfortunately, it is absurd, but it should not catch anyone by surprise. President Jair Bolsonaro and minister Ricardo Salles are dismantling our socio-environmental policies," said Carlos Rittl, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, an NGO formed by a coalition of environmental groups, as the Guardian reported.
After years of conservation, Brazil's environmental track record has nose-dived in the first seven months of Bolsonaro's administration. He has given environmental oversight to the agriculture minister, who is the leader of a farming lobby. His foreign minister called climate science a part of a global Marxist plot.The government has invited businesses to register land counter-claims in areas that are protected nature reserves, indigenous territories and areas dedicated to sustainable production by native forest people, according to the Guardian.
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ref
https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/amazonian-rainforest-near-unrecoverable-tipping-point
guk no lnx
Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable 'tipping point'
Data confirms fears that Jair Bolsonaro’s policy encourages illegal logging in Brazil
Jonathan Watts in Altamira
@jonathanwatts
Thu 25 Jul 2019 17.40 BST Last modified on Thu 25 Jul 2019 21.37 BST
Amazon rainforest turned into farmland. An area the size of Greater London has been lost this month. Photograph: Nacho Doce/Reuters
Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover.
The sharp rise – following year-on-year increases in May and June – confirms fears that president Jair Bolsonaro has given a green light to illegal land invasion, logging and burning.
Clearance so far in July has hit 1,345 sq km, a third higher than the previous monthly record under the current monitoring system by the Deter B satellite system, which started in 2015.
With five days remaining, this is on course to be the first month for several years in which Brazil loses an area of forest bigger than Greater London.
The steady erosion of tree cover weakens the role of the rainforest in stabilising the global climate. Scientists warn that the forest is in growing danger of degrading into a savannah, after which its capacity to absorb carbon will be severely diminished, with consequences for the rest of the planet.
“It’s very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away,” said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research. “We can’t see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem.”
It may also complicate ratification of Brazil’s biggest ever trade deal with the European Union if EU legislators decide the South American nation is not keeping its side of the bargain, which includes a commitment to slow deforestation in line with the Paris climate agreement.
The official numbers from the National Institute for Space Research are a growing embarrassment to Bolsonaro, who has tried to fob them off as lies and criticised the head of the institute.Earlier this week, the president insisted the numbers should be screened by the ministry of science and technology and shown to him before being made public so that he did not get “caught with his pants down”.
This has raised fears that the data could be vetted in future rather than automatically updated online each day as is currently the case.
In his first seven months in power, Bolsonaro, who was elected with strong support from agribusiness and mining interests, has moved rapidly to erode government agencies responsible for forest protection.
He has weakened the environment agency and effectively put it under the supervision of the agricultural ministry, which is headed by the leader of the farming lobby. His foreign minister has dismissed climate science as part of a global Marxist plot. The president and other ministers have criticised the forest monitoring agency, Ibama, for imposing fines on illegal land grabbers and loggers. The government has also moved to weaken protections for nature reserves, indigenous territories and zones of sustainable production by forest peoples and invited businesspeople to register land counter-claims within those areas.
This has emboldened those who want to invade the forest, clear it and claim it for commercial purposes, mostly in the speculative expectation it will rise in value, but also partly for cattle pastures, soya fields and mines.
Earlier this month, it was reported that thousands of gold miners illegally invaded Yanomami indigenous territory near the border with Venezuela. Elsewhere, illegal loggers have mounted at least two attacks in response to Ibama enforcement operations,according to the Folha newspaper. On 4 July, they reportedly burned an Ibama truck in Espigão d’Oeste, Rondônia state and last week they were said to have burned bridges in Placas, Pará state.
Rather than defend his officials, the environment minister Ricardo Salles appeared to side with the loggers when he gave a speech to a group of them in Rondônia soon afterwards, in which he reportedly told them: “The timber industry deserves to be respected … What happens today in Brazil, unfortunately, is the result of years and years and years of a public policy of producing laws, rules, regulations that are not always related to the real world. What we are doing now is precisely bringing the legal part of the real world that happens in every country from north to south.”
During a recent G20 meeting, Bolsonaro told the German chancellor Angela Merkel that she had no right to criticise because Brazil’s conservation record was superior to that of Europe’s. This is a dubious claim, according to Climate Observatory, which cites World Bank data that shows Germany has given protected status to a bigger share of its land than Brazil.
Brazil is also going backwards fast. After an 80% reduction in the rate of deforestation between 2006 and 2012, successive governments have relaxed protections. Clearance has been creeping up. Last year, deforestation rose 13% to the highest level in a decade. This year is on course to be far worse and the trend is back towards the dark days of the early 2000s.
“Unfortunately, it is absurd, but it should not catch anyone by surprise. President Jair Bolsonaro and minister Ricardo Salles are dismantling our socio-environmental policies,” said Carlos Rittl, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, an NGO formed by a coalition of environmental groups.
He said Salles had eradicated the department responsible for policies to combat deforestation, that no leaders have been appointed in eight of the nine Ibama regional offices, and that operations to combat environmental crimes declined 70%between January and April 2019 compared with the same period last year.
The Deter satellite data is considered preliminary, but it is usually a guide to the longer-term trends. More detailed annual figures are usually released towards the end of the year, after the National Institute for Space Research has calculated data from the more powerful Prodes satellite system.
Trees are considered essential to climate stability. Earlier this month, a study indicated that planting a trillion trees could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities. But scientists say maintaining existing forests, particularly in the tropics, is far more important.
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https://www.mintpressnews.com/report-corporations-brazil-bolsonaro-destroy-amazon/260112/
As deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest reaches the highest level in a decade, the rainforest’s indigenous peoples and their supporters have called for action against the political and business interests they blame for a spike in illegal logging and other resource extraction.
A report released by Amazon Watch as part of its ongoing “Complicity in Destruction” campaign aims not only to spotlight the role of North American and Western European financiers, importers, and traders in the ongoing destruction of the Amazon, but also to mobilize support for a boycott launched by the National Indigenous Mobilization (MNI) against the Brazilian agribusiness and mining interests encroaching on the threatened region. The report says:
The MNI requests solidarity from the international community to support these efforts, which aim to leverage global markets in order to moderate the behavior of the agroindustrial sector, as a means to halt [Brazil President Jair] Bolsonaro’s assault, ultimately protecting and restoring environmental safeguards and human rights.”
Christian Poirier, Amazon Watch’s Program Director, told MintPress News that the inauguration of right-wing strongman Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s president on January 1 lent fresh urgency to the campaign.
[~ fb appeal]
"Bolsonaro has overseen the most significant rollback of, and full-on assault on, human rights and environmental protection in Brazil since the fall of the country’s military dictatorship and the reinstallation of democracy in 1985,” Poirier said, adding:
He’s hearkening back to an era of rampant environmental destruction and rights abuses that some would call genocide of indigenous peoples, by attacking socio-environmental policy that is responsible for indigenous land rights, that is responsible for the protection of forests in the country, and he’s doing so at a very rapid pace.”
Among his first moves as president, Bolsonaro stripped Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) of its authority to create new reserves for indigenous nations and transferred control of both it and the country’s forest service to its agriculture ministry.
“Human rights abuses and environmental rollbacks”
Satellite data released by INPE, Brazil’s space agency, earlier this month showed the clear-cutting of 285 square miles, or 739 square kilometers, of the Amazon in May, the highest level of deforestation in a decade and more than twice the rate two years ago.
Observers cite an escalation in illegal logging and land theft during the Bolsonaro administration, with the first raid on an indigenous reserve occurring December 30, two days before Bolsonaro took office.
A specialized inspection group, Ibama, walk through an illegal mining camp in Munduruku indigenous lands in Para state in Brazil’s Amazon basin. Vinicius Mendonca | Ibama via AP
Poirier added that the MNI campaign intended to target corporate interests culpable not only for their own abuses, but also for Bolsonaro’s presidency:
The ‘Complicity in Destruction’ campaign works to pressure the most important sectors in Brazil’s economy — which are also responsible for human-rights abuses and environmental rollbacks, and also bringing Jair Bolsonao to power.
By targeting these sectors, we also intend to influence the behavior of the Bolsonaro regime, because we are targeting a strategic economic actor that is also a strategic political actor behind Bolsonaro’s rise to power, and that is responsible for his socio-environmental policy.”
In April, Bolsonaro — who once paid a fine of $2,500 for illegally fishing in a forested coastal reserve — announced the dissolution of Brazil’s National Council of the Environment (CONOMA), a government body with over 100 members, including independent representatives of environmental groups, tasked with protecting the Amazon.
He proposed replacing it with a new committee of six: Ricardo Salles, his nominee for environment minister and a close ally, along with five other presidential appointees. Poirier noted:
These are a wish list of Brazil’s agribusiness sector and its mining sector, to penetrate into protected areas,and that’s precisely what Bolsonaro’s doing, to the detriment of the human rights of indigenous peoples and traditional peoples in the Amazon, and to the detriment of global climatic stability.”
As one of the world’s largest non-oceanic “carbon sinks,” the Amazon plays a significant role in tempering climate change, absorbing a large — though declining — amount of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, while also emitting 20 percent of its oxygen.
“By ‘worst actors,’ I’m talking about environmental criminals”
Despite their staunch backing of Bolsonaro and the ruralista caucus supporting him from within Brazil’s Congress, the companies profiled by Amazon Watch had achieved notoriety well before Bolsonaro’s rise to power. Poirier told MintPress:
The specific corporate targets in the report are commodity importers, traders, and financial institutions that are doing business with the worst actors in Brazil’s agro-industrial sector.”
An illegally deforested area on Pirititi indigenous lands in Brazil’s Amazon basin. Felipe Werneck | Ibama via AP
By ‘worst actors,’ I’m talking about environmental criminals, those who have been found guilty and fined by Brazil’s environmental agency, Ibama, for environmental crimes ranging from illegal deforestation, to improper paperwork for wood, to even slave labor in their supply chains, since 2017.”
While an earlier report also analyzed Brazilian mining interests and their international ties, the most recent focuses on agribusiness, particularly its beef, soy, leather, timber and sugar sectors. Poirier stated:
The corporate actors internationally — the 27 importing companies and commodity traders that we list, and the dozens of financial institutions — are essentially enabling the behavior of these actors, which we consider to be emblematic behavior of these industries.”
Through their campaign, Poirier added, Amazon Watch and the MNI hope to “call on these companies to become agents to moderate the behavior of the worst actors, which is to say that they should carry out their own due diligence with their supply chains, and cut ties with the worst actors.”
Joe Catron is a MintPress News contributing journalist. He covers Palestine and Israel and other human rights issues. Catron has written frequently for Electronic Intifada and Middle East Eye, and co-edited The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag, an anthology of accounts by detainees freed in the 2011 prisoner exchange.
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https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-archive-operation-car-wash
INTERCEPT BRASIL today published three explosive exposésshowing highly controversial, politicized, and legally dubious internal discussions and secret actions by the Operation Car Wash anti-corruption task force of prosecutors, led by the chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, along with then-Judge Sergio Moro, now the powerful and internationally celebrated justice minister for Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
These stories are based on a massive archive of previously undisclosed materials — including private chats, audio recordings, videos, photos, court proceedings, and other documentation — provided to us by an anonymous source. They reveal serious wrongdoing, unethical behavior, and systematic deceit about which the public, both in Brazil and internationally, has the right to know.
These three articles were published today in The Intercept Brasil in Portuguese, and we have synthesized them into two English-language articles for The Intercept. Given the size and global influence of Brazil under the new Bolsonaro government, these stories are of great significance to an international audience.
This is merely the beginning of what we intend to be an ongoing journalistic investigation, using this massive archive of material, into the Car Wash corruption probe; Moro’s actions when he was a judge and those of the prosecutor Dallagnol; and the conduct of numerous individuals who continue to wield great political and economic power both inside Brazil and in other countries.
Beyond the inherent political, economic, and environmental importance of Brazil under Bolsonaro, the significance of these revelations arises from the incomparably consequential actions of the yearslong Car Wash corruption probe. That sweeping scandal implicated numerous leading political figures, oligarchs, Bolsonaro’s predecessor as president, and even foreign leaders in corruption prosecutions.
Most importantly, Car Wash was the investigative saga that led to the imprisonment of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last year. Lula’s conviction by Moro, once it was quickly affirmed by an appellate court, rendered him ineligible to run for president at a time when all polls showed that Lula — who was twice elected president by large margins in 2002 and in 2006 before being term-limited out of office in 2010 with an 87 percent approval rating — was the frontrunner in the 2018 presidential race. Lula’s exclusion from the election, based on Moro’s finding of guilt, was a key episode that paved the way for Bolsonaro’s election victory.
Perhaps most remarkably, after Bolsonaro won the presidency, he created a new position of unprecedented authority, referred to by Brazilians as “super justice minister,” to oversee an agency with consolidated powers over law enforcement, surveillance, and investigation previously interspersed among multiple ministries. Bolsonaro created that position for the benefit of the very judge who found Lula guilty, Sergio Moro, and it is the position Moro now occupies. In other words, Moro now wields immense police and surveillance powers in Brazil — courtesy of a president who was elected only after Moro, while he was a judge, rendered Bolsonaro’s key adversary ineligible to run against him.
The Car Wash prosecutors and Moro have been highly controversial in Brazil and internationally — heralded by many as anti-corruption heroes and accused by others of being clandestine right-wing ideologues masquerading as apolitical law enforcers. Their critics have insisted that they have abused and exploited their law enforcement powers with the politicized goal of preventing Lula from returning to the presidency and destroying his leftist Workers’ Party, or the PT. Moro and the prosecutors have, with equal vehemence, denied that they have any political allegiances or objectives and have said they are simply trying to cleanse Brazil of corruption.
But, until now, the Car Wash prosecutors and Moro have carried out their work largely in secret, preventing the public from evaluating the validity of the accusations against them and the truth of their denials. That’s what makes this new archive so journalistically valuable: For the first time, the public will learn what these judges and prosecutors were saying and doing when they thought nobody was listening.
Today’s articles show, among other things, that the Car Wash prosecutors spoke openly of their desire to prevent the PT from winning the election and took steps to carry out that agenda, and that Moro secretly and unethically collaborated with the Car Wash prosecutors to help design the case against Lula despite serious internal doubts about the evidence supporting the accusations, only for him to then pretend to be its neutral adjudicator.
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Brazilian universities fear Bolsonaro plan to eliminate humanities and slash public education budgets
Renato Francisco dos Santos Paula, Universidade Federal de Goias
Brazil's new president was elected on promises to radically restructure Brazil. But proposed education spending cuts and curricular changes have students and teachers marching in the streets.
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https://news.littlesis.org/2019/05/03/major-u-s-banks-hedge-funds-sponsoring-gala-to-honor-brazils-jair-bolsonaro
Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right president of Brazil, has attracted condemnation from across the world because of his open misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Now, some corporations are pulling their sponsorship from an upcoming gala in New York City that will honor Bolsonaro.
But not Wall Street.
The Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerceis set to host a gala on May 14 to celebrate Bolsonaro as its 2019 “Person of the Year.” The gala was originally scheduled to take place at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, but the Museum cancelled the gala’s reservation due to outrage that a science and nature museum would host a president intent on rolling back protections of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest for mining and agribusiness corporations.
The gala is now set to be held at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. (CNBChas pointed out that the hotel’s decision to host the award ceremony for Bolsonaro seems to contradict company’s statements in support of LGBTQ right.)
In the face of growing pressure, several original corporate sponsors of the gala, including Delta Air Lines, Bain & Company, and the Financial Times, have pulled their sponsorship. But many well-known banks, hedge funds, and other companies – discussed more below – have not.
Bolsonaro has a history of making extremely homophobic and misogynist remarks. For example, he told a newspaper in 2002: “I will not fight nor discriminate, but if I see two men kissing in the street, I’ll hit them.” He told a Brazlian Congresswomen in 2003: “I would never rape you, because you do not deserve it … slut!” (You can read a compilation of some of his other remarks at the *Intercept*).
Bolsonaro has also been condemned for opening up Amazon’s rainforest to big corporations whose mining and agribusiness operations could further degrade and destroy it. Major questions also exist over Bolsonaro’s family connections to the mafia, as well as to the 2018 assassination of Rio de Janeiro councillor Marielle Franco. Bolsonaro has also praised Brazil’s U.S.-backed dictatorship – including its torture of leftists – that lasted from 1964 to 1985.
Bolsonaro’s popularity has plummeted in the few months since he has been in office. This makes the upcoming gala all the more important for him, since it will offer a chance for his administration to seek more support from corporate America in the face of Bolsonaro’s growing isolation.
By sponsoring a gala that honors Bolsonaro, major banks and Wall Street firms – including household brands like Bank of America and JP Morgan, and the powerful private equity firm Blackstone – are helping to prop up Bolsonaro’s legitimacy and power.
What corporations are sponsoring the gala honoring Bolsonaro?
A host of major U.S. banks and hedge funds remain sponsors of the gala that will honor Bolsonaro.
- Big U.S. banks: JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citi, BNY Mellon, and Morgan Stanley are all gala sponsors. Other major banks that are headquartered outside of the U.S. but have significant U.S. operations include Santander, HSBC, UBS, and Credit Suisse.
- Blackstone: The Blackstone Group, the powerhouse Wall Street hedge fund led bybillionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman is a 55% owner of Refinitiv, a financial markets data firm that is sponsoring Bolsonaro’s award dinner. Schwarzman is worth $14.6 billion and is a major Trump ally.
Other notable sponsors of the gala include:
- Forbesand Thomas Reuters: Media empire Forbesis a gala sponsor, and Thomson Reuters is a 45% owner of Refinitiv, a sponsor.
- UnitedHealth Group: A major U.S. for-profit healthcare company that the U.S. Justice Department has accused of overbilling Medicare by billions of dollars.
- Law firms: Shearman & Sterling and McLarty Associates are powerhouse law firms that works with businesses and in international affairs. McLarty, in particular, sells itself as a firm of former ambassadors and diplomats that “understand the complexities of international markets and help our clients navigate the strategic and operational challenges they face around the globe.”
View map at LittleSis.org.
Here is a full list of the corporate sponsors, provided by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, which is calling on companies to pull their sponsorship from the gala (the gala’s official page that lists sponsors now appears to be down).
When pressed on why it was continuing to endorse the gala, UBS stated that “[a]ttending the dinner has never involved selecting or endorsing the honoree in any way.”
While it may be true that the gala’s corporate sponsors were not involved in selecting Bolsonaro, many would argue that their refusal to now revoke their sponsorship from the gala – in the face of growing demands to do so, and with the fact that other businesses have begun to pull back – does represent an implicit endorsement of who the gala is celebrating.
Moreover, many of the corporate sponsors have issued human rights statements that appear to fly in the face of backing an event that honors someone like Bolsonaro. For example, Bank of America states that “our company policies and practices promote and protect human rights, and we strive to conduct our business in a manner consistent with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and other international agreements. Many would argue that Bolsonaro’s regime is a clear threat to the human rights of LGBTQ people, among other groups.
There is precedent for the gala’s sponsors to revoke their support. Last year, dozens of companies – including some who are now sponsoring the Bolsonaro gala – pulled out of a Saudi investment conference that was scheduled in Riyadh shortly after the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This added to the sense of urgency around Khashoggi’s death and contributed to the global condemnation the regime of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
There are other examples, too, of corporations using their leverage to fight the kind of homophobia and transphobia that Bolsonaro’ espouses – for instance, the corporate opposition the so-called “bathroom bills” in Texas and North Carolina.
For now, Delta Air Lines, Bain & Company, and the Financial Times have all revoked their sponsorship of the gala honoring Bolsonaro. Will Bank of America, Blackstone, JP Morgan, and others follow?
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But Europe is only part of Bannon’s plan. For someone who has vented so much spleen at “globalists” like financier and philanthropist George Soros, Bannon is quite the internationalist. In Latin America, he’s already appointed Jair Bolsonaro’s youngest son as his regional representative to help build on the right’s electoral successes in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Paraguay. Bannon has also partnered with a Chinese billionaire to create a Rule of Law Fund that’s meant to be the point of a spear aimed at the regime in Beijing.
https://theconversation.com/brazils-long-strange-love-affair-with-the-confederacy-ignites-racial-tension-115548
the aroma of fried chicken and biscuits roused my appetite as the country sounds of Alison Krauss, Alan Jackson and Johnny Cash played over the loudspeakers.
This might have been a county fair back home in Tennessee, but it wasn’t. I was in a cemetery in rural Brazil, at the “Festa Confederada” – the “Confederate Party” – an annual celebration of southern U.S. heritage held each April in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, in São Paulo state.
A sign explaining “What the Confederate Flag Really Means” in both English and Portuguese greeted the roughly 2,500 visitors – most of them white – at the entryway of the American Cemetery. Inside, women wearing Antebellum-style hoop skirts square danced with men clad in gray Confederate uniforms. Couples in T-shirts were doing the two-step.
Just outside cemetery grounds stood black activists protesting the April 28 party with signs and banners saying, “Down with the Confederate flag.”
How did an American debate about racism make its way to Brazil? That’s a tangled question I’m unraveling in my dissertation research on the history and meaning of Confederate symbols in Brazil.
The Confederacy comes to Brazil
Brazil has a long, strange relationship with the United States Confederacy.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, ending slavery in the United States, some 8,000 to 10,000Southern soldiers and their families left the vanquished Confederacy and went to Brazil.
There, slavery was still legal. Roughly 40% of the nearly 11 million Africans forcibly brought across the Atlantic between 1517 and 1867 went to work on sugarcane plantations in Brazil. It was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to formally abolish slavery, in 1888 – 23 years after the United States.
Legal slavery may have been a draw for the Confederate soldiers who migrated to Brazil after abolition.
Brazilian political economist Célio Antonio Alcântara Silva analyzed letters sent to Brazilian consulates and vice-consulates in the United States at the end of the Civil War and found that 74% of Southerners inquiring about emigration were slaveowners.
At the time, 25% of white Southern households owned slaves. That means the people interested in moving to Brazil in the 1860s disproportionately represented a relatively small, slaveholding slice of the free Southern population.
Because the exact number of Confederate families that migrated to Brazil is unknown, it is impossible to state with certainty how many rejoined the slave trade upon arrival. Silva’s research finds records of 54 Confederate families that purchased, in total, 536 enslaved Africans in Brazil.
The Brazilian historian Luciana da Cruz Brito has also found evidence in the 150-year-old Confederado journals she dug up that slavery attracted white Southerners to Brazil.
In one, an American named Charles Gunter wrote about his desire to purchase enslaved people in Brazil at a lower price than he could in the U.S. Another Confederado, James Gaston, expressed disappointment that he couldn’t bring recently freed African Americans to Brazil.
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no lnx twit
https://www.ecowatch.com/brazil-bolsonaro-pesticides-2636194015.html
JAIR BOLSONARO
Brazil's Bolsonaro Green-Lights 150+ Pesticides This Year
Mongabay May 03 POLITICS
Isac Nóbrega / PR / Flickr
By Sue Branford and Thais Borges
With the ruralist lobby now in control of key sectors of the federal government, Brazil is rapidly approving new pesticides for use, some of which critics say are either unnecessary or excessively toxic. During the first 100 days of the Jair Bolsonaro administration, the Agriculture Ministry authorized the registration of 152 pesticides, putting Brazil on course to authorize more pesticides this year than in any previous year. Brazil is already the world's largest user of pesticides.
The number of pesticides authorized each year has risen rapidly, from 139 in 2015 under the Dilma Rousseff administration, to 450 in 2018 under the Michel Temer government (see graph). An even higher number is expected to enter the Brazilian market this year, as the Agriculture Ministry considers registration of roughly another 1,300 pesticides. Most of these requests are coming from foreign multinational companies, mainly based in the U.S., Germany and China, which is increasingly becoming an important supplier.
IBAMA / Mongabay]
An employee from Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources surveys a heap of emptied pesticide containers on a farm.]
Pro-Pesticide Government vs. Environmentalists
Despite the rapid rise in authorizations, Bolsonaro's agriculture minister, Tereza Cristina, said "there is no general liberation" of new pesticide registrations. According to her ministry, the products will merely give farmers a greater choice of existing pesticides, and access to new chemicals and there is no reason to be concerned: "The use [of pesticides] is completely safe, provided they are applied as instructed, within a context of good farming practice and with the use of individual protective equipment," said the government.
Events within Brazil seem to deny the truth of Cristina's claims. Brazil has a higher per capita consumption of pesticides than any other country in the world — 7.3 liters per year per person — and it is already facing a serious problem with pesticide intoxication.
According to Guilherme Franco Netto, an Environment, Health and Sustainability Specialist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, one of the world's top public health research institutions, about 100,000 cases of intoxication are recorded in Brazil each year. According to Alan Tygel, from the Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and for Life, this figure seriously underestimates the real situation, as many rural workers fail to report pesticide intoxications.
Brazil: Pesticide Poisonings in Rural Areas
In July 2018, the human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, published a report documenting acute intoxication at seven locations in Brazil, including indigenous communities, schools and quilombolas — communities of runaway slave descendants.
"Pesticides sprayed in large plantations intoxicate children in schoolrooms in many parts of Brazil," said Richard Pearshouse, assistant director of the environmental and human rights division of Human Rights Watch. But the report found that many local inhabitants were too frightened to speak out.
In five of the seven impacted communities, people said they were afraid of suffering reprisals if they complained. In 2010 a rural farmer was shot dead after putting pressure on local government to forbid aerial spraying of pesticides — a common application practice in Brazil, even though it allows wind-carried toxic sprays to settle far from crops in surrounding communities and natural areas.
New Formulations Raise Alarms
Many of the requests given the go-ahead this year are for new formulations of already authorized pesticides."Once the initial manufacturer loses its patent, other companies start requesting registration so they can use the [same] active ingredients to produce new agricultural products," said Murilo Souza, from the State University of Goiás.
Leonardo Melgarejo, vice-president of the Brazilian Association of Agroecology, believes that this practice is harmful as it will inevitably lead to a big increase in consumption nationwide. "We are approving several variations of the same pesticide," he said. "We're heading for a situation in which farmers will be able to 'self-medicate,' with two pesticide shops on every block." Little research has been done to see how hundreds of various pesticides might interact to become more damaging.
The torrent of new approvals is also making it easier for Brazil's farmers to gain access to toxic pesticides with which the global community has serious concern. One such case is that of 2,4-D, an active ingredient in controversial defoliant Agent Orange, used by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and whose use is increasingly being controlled in other countries, after the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified it in 2015 as "possibly carcinogenic to humans."
The latest wave of Agriculture Ministry authorizations seen on 10 April, gave the go-ahead to 31 products via an official federal decree — Act 24 — including three new formulations of 2,4-D requested by multinational pesticide makers and distributors. One request came from the Chinese company, Rainbow Defensivos Agrícolas, while the other two were initiated by Dow AgroSciences for formulations to be manufactured in South Africa and exported to Brazil.
These new Brazilian authorizations took place at a time when the Rio Grande do Sul Public Ministry, a group of independent public litigators, was carrying out an investigation into an allegation made by the Brazilian Wine Institute that last year the state lost almost a third of its grape harvest as a result of the aerial spraying of pesticides containing 2,4-D. Farmers spray this pesticide before they sow soy — also a time when grape, apple and olive trees are flowering, and when the spray can easily drift over neighboring farms.
"The data from our survey [that showed a loss of almost a third of the grape harvest] is a conservative figure, as it relied only on information spontaneously offered by farmers," said Helio Marchioro of Brazilian Wine Institute. In fact, grape farmers themselves are calling for a 2,4-D ban, even as the Bolsonaro administration approves new 2,4-D formulations.
Controversial Pesticides Approved for First Time in Brazil
Several of the pesticides authorized this year will be entirely new to Brazil. Some have already been classified by Brazil's National Health Surveillance Agency as "extremely toxic." These include: mancozeb, a broad-spectrum fungicide used in agriculture and horticulture; the fungicide fluazinam; and the insecticide chlorpyrifos. In 2018 the Pest Management Regulatory Agency banned the use of mancozeb in Canada, except for foliar use on potatoes, due to "unacceptable risks to human health." The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned the use of chlorpyrifos in 2018 after its use had been associated with development disabilities in children.
One particularly controversial newly approved chemical is sulfoxaflor. This pesticide was one of several believed to have caused an outbreak in Brazil of colony collapse disorder — the catastrophic sudden disappearance of worker bees from a bee colony, leading to the death of hives. According to a survey carried out by Agência Pública and Repórter Brasil, half a billion bees were found dead in four Brazilian states in the first quarter of 2019 — a staggeringly large die off posing a threat to the pollination of fruits and vegetables and to native vegetation.
But at a press conference on April 9, Agriculture Minister Cristina seemed unaware that Brazil has already authorized sulfoxaflor. "The problem with the bees is that a product called sulfoxaflor was used. This [toxin] is not registered in Brazil," she said. "It probably entered Brazil illegally and is being used incorrectly and thus caused the death of the bees." In fact, sulfoxaflor was authorized at the end of last year by the Temer administration, though the official decree was only issued in January of this year under the Bolsonaro government.
Sulfoxaflor is classified by Brazil's National Health Surveillance Agency as "averagely toxic," but this evaluation is challenged abroad. Dow Chemical initially developed sulfoxaflor as a safer alternative to neonicotinoids, known to be harmful to bees. It was initially approved by the US EPA in 2013, a decision reversed in 2015 when studies found that sulfoxaflor was also dangerous to bees. Today sulfoxaflor can still be used in the U.S., but only in restricted circumstances.
Pesticide Deregulation in the Works
Environmental activist Alan Tygel believes that the rapid rise in the number of pesticide authorizations is directly linked to the growing power of the bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby in Congress. This lobby, he said, made its support for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 dependent on government backing for pro-agribusiness measures. "From then on, the counterweight that came from progressive sectors, from family farming and from agroecology, was lost, and today the ruralist agenda faces fewer obstacles in its drive to have more pesticides approved and to push through more permissive laws," Tygel said. The Bolsonaro presidential campaign greatly benefited from ruralist support, and it greatly helped sweep the former Army captain and legislator to victory last October.
The next goal of the ruralist agenda — more permissive laws — may well get a major boost this year with congressional approval of PL 6299/2002, dubbed as the "poison package" by critics. The legislation, which would greatly deregulate pesticides, was endorsed by a Chamber of Deputies commission in June 2018 and it now awaits plenary debate. The Temer government justified the bill, presented to Congress by then Agriculture Minister and dedicated ruralist, Blairo Maggi, claiming that the country desperately needed to simplify the complicated process of getting new pesticides authorized in order to help farmers.
But Castro Moreira, president of the prestigious Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science, representing more than 100 scientific societies, disagreed strongly. He said at the time that the bill, "could have very serious consequences for the health of the Brazilian population and the environment … Its approval would be a backward step, because it follows the logic of mechanized agriculture, with high investments in fertilizers and pesticides, which is an outmoded way of thinking, dating from the end of the Second World War."
Current Agriculture Minister Cristina is a strong proponent of PL 6299/2002, but there is bound to be opposition to the bill's approval, though it will likely be difficult for critics to block the measure. The ruralists have never had a stronger grip on both the legislative and executive branches, and they seem determined to press their agribusiness agenda.
As President Bolsonaro ended his first 100 days in office, his popularity was slipping fast, with 30 percent of the population already assessing his administration as "very bad" and the markets believing the government is becoming unstable. However, that very perception of growing uncertainty seems to have only caused the ruralists to move forward with greater urgency. Meanwhile, conservationists and food experts continue to warn of the national and global environmental and health repercussions of Brazil's deregulated pesticide use — permissiveness likely to soon outstrip that seen among other major agricultural nations.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Mongabay.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/conservative-jonah-goldbergs-fraudulent-claim-that-fascism-is-really-a-left-wing-phenomenon-will-not-die-more-than-a-decade-later/
Jonah Goldberg just keeps inspiring people—whether he intends to or not.
Take Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro,for example. Earlier this week, after visiting a Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Bolsonaro was asked whether he agreed with comments made by his foreign minister claiming that the Nazis of Germany were “leftists.”
He did: “There is no doubt, right?” he said to reporters. He added that the appearance of theword “socialist”in the Nazis’ official party name proved it.
The museum he had just visited, however, isclear about the matter, telling visitors at its website that the German Nazi party arose out of “radical right-wing groups” in Europe.
Where would Bolsonaro get such ideas? He didn’t credit anyone, but the ultimate lineage of this idea really belongs to Goldberg. Perhaps, secondarily and more contemporarily, he’s been absorbing the derivative work of Dinesh d’Souza.
Worst of all, he is far from alone. From Charlottesville to Portland to Christchurch, we’re awash in the effects of a resurgent white-nationalist movement that considers the “liberal smear” that fascism was a right-wing movement further evidence of a “cultural Marxist” campaign against white Western civilization.
D’Souza’s book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left—which has been a bestseller, despite having been systematically dismantled by everyone from Ross Douthat to Mark Bray to Kevin M. Kruse and exposed as a risible fraud from start to finish—was in fact, as Douthat suggests, essentially a dumbed-down, frat-boy repackaging of Goldberg’s 2008 best-seller, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.D’Souza also made a slickly produced “documentary” pursuing this thesis further, titled Death of a Nation.
Indeed, it seems that even though Goldberg has been previously supportive of d’Souza’s work—including appearing in, as well helping to promote, his previous film, Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party,which in fact includes his earliest iteration of the “Nazis were leftists” claim—he’s becoming uncomfortable with where the whole thing has been going.
This all came up, I should mention, in the context of a post Goldberg published at National Review’s blog The Corner last weekend, attacking me for a series of tweets in which I had tweaked him recently. But this is an argument dating back more than a decade.
“I am not a fan of Dinesh D’Souza’s effort to take my argument and twist it into the kind of indictment of liberals Neiwert levels at conservatives or that I was accused of doing,” he wrote.
It was something of a mere side-note to an otherwise long-winded defense of what he has always believed is a deep and subtle argument that partisan simpletons like myself cannot comprehend. But in many ways it encapsulates perfectly the argument we’ve been having for the past decade—the way it caricaturizes my argument en route to building a strawman, the way he shifts the goalposts, and most of all his continued evasion in confronting what his little intellectual exercise has produced in the real world, a la Jair Bolsonaro.
Distancing himself from d’Souza is probably how Goldberg eases some of the resulting cognitive dissonance, but then, unfortunately, there are annoying little ankle-biters like your humble correspondent around to remind him of this evasion. (I also like to remind him that he himself actively helped promote this supposedly bastardized version of his original thesis back when it was Glenn Beck doing it.) Thus the odd way of striking back at a Twitter critic in a forum that lets him not have to deal with the inevitable responses.
The argument dates back to 2008, when I published a harshly negative review of Liberal Fascismat American Prospect,headlined “Jonah Goldberg’s Bizarro History.” As I pointed out at the time, its chief flaw was that it conveniently omitted any consideration of the history and continued presence of actual fascist and neo-Nazi organizations in the American landscape, and their relationship to movement conservatism:
"Beyond the Klan, completely missing from the pages of Goldberg’s book is any mention of the Silver Shirts, the American Nazi Party, the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, or the National Alliance — all of them openly fascist organizations, many of them involved in some of the nation’s most horrific historical events. (The Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, was the product of a blueprint drawn up by the National Alliance’s William Pierce.) Goldberg sees fit to declare people like Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and Hillary Clinton “American fascists,” but he makes no mention of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald L.K. Smith, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Potter Gale, Richard Butler, or David Duke — all of them bona fide fascists: the real thing.
This is a telling omission, because the continuing existence of these groups makes clear what an absurd and nakedly self-serving thing Goldberg’s alternate version of reality is. Why dream up fascists on the left when the reality is that real American fascists have been lurking in the right’s closet for lo these many years? Well, maybe because it’s a handy way of getting everyone to forget that fact.
Goldberg responded, and we had a brief but spirited exchange at our blogs that ended after he decided I was unworthy of his time, which seems to be his most recent conclusion as well. Most of those exchanges can be found at my old blog *Orcinus,*though most of Goldberg’s original retorts seem to have vanished into the ether.
I remained dismayed at seeing how readily Goldberg’s fundamentally fraudulent thesis not only spread into the mainstream but became a kind of received wisdom among movement conservatives, especially because I was fully aware how dimly real historians of fascism viewed this work. So in 2010 I organized a group of them into a forum to air their grievances with Goldberg’s book at History News Network. We invited Goldberg to participate, and he did offer one relatively meek attempt at rebuttal that mostly complained about my participation and how mean everyone was to him.
[Note: Goldberg’s claim in his Corner post that I “tried valiantly to exclude me from it at the time” is just a straight-up lie. I eagerly welcomed his participation. I wrote to Rick Schenkman, the HNN.com editor at the time, to ask if he could recall me doing any such thing, and he replied he couldn’t recollect anything either way.]
Our most recent exchange on Twitter began when Goldberg rebukedRep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her recent remarks about “economic injustice” being closely connected to “environmental justice,” which Goldberg dismissed as “Embarrassing hogwash.”
AOC’s remarks might have the odor of liberal cant, but they also have a factual grounding reflected in serious academic work—unlike certain hoax theses I could name. So I tweeted back the same phrase to him, accompanied by a mock cover of his book and his own core thesis, from those pages: “Fascism, properly understood, is a not a phenomenon of the right at all. It is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left.”
Goldberg winced: “David, I’m sorry I’m your white whale.”
I answered: “As long as your hoax thesis continues to pollute our discourse — thanks, in recent years, no small part to the @DineshDSouza permutation of it — I will remain compelled to call it out for the toxic nonsense that it is, Jonah.”
His reply: “I don’t like what Dinesh did with my book. But I still think you’re essentially a shill talking up your business model rather than dealing with my actual arguments. You’ve acted in bad faith for over a decade now. It’s kind of sad.”
The next day, obviously still irritated, he subtweeted a response that didn’t actually link to me, but which of course I saw anyway:
Me: Conservatism/classical liberalism in the Anglo-American tradition = limited government, sovereignty of the individual, moral and religious traditionalism, and free market economics. Therefore fascism is not “right wing.”
Left wing obsessive: HOW DARE YOU, YOU IDIOT!?
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) March 31, 2019
This occasioned my response pointing to our long-ago debates that in turn drove him to reply to me at The Corner. It was classic Goldberg, really, as I’ve noted before:
"One of the more striking aspects of Goldberg’s dishonesty is how he manipulates his definitions in self-serving fashion that lets him move the goalposts at will, as though we were playing Calvinball. John Cole calls this “the Goldberg Principle”: “You can prove any thesis to be true if you make up your own definitions of words.” For instance, his operative definition of fascism is actually just the generic definition for totalitarianism, and it omits entirely the special characteristics that distinguish fascism from other forms of totalitarianism. One of these, for instance, is its overpowering, indeed dominant, antiliberalism – a fact that Goldberg conveniently omitted from throughout his entire 400 or so pages, and later dismissed by claiming that the “liberalism” it opposed was not modern liberalism, but classical liberalism (as though the two have no connection whatever).
All of the classic Jonah tactics—building strawmen, arguing from self-created/self-serving definitions that counter consensual reality, moving the goalposts, gliding over damning counter-evidence and considerations he considers irrelevant—were present in that little aside in which he again tossed d’Souza under the Jonahbus: He characterizes d’Souza’s output as “the kind of indictment of liberals Neiwert levels at conservatives.”
And what kind of indictment was that? According to Goldberg, it was that “his definition of Fascism must indict American conservatives — and only American conservatives.”
This is complete and utter rubbish, of course, because this is never what I’ve argued. I have insisted all along that fascism must be understood as a phenomenon of the right and not the left NOT because I have a project of smearing all conservatives by association, as Goldberg has assumed and insisted for a decade without an iota of evidence, but because it is the very real frame that helps the public understand how fascism can infect our politics.
You know, like most people, I recognize that there’s a spectrum of behavior, and that mainstream conservatives are distinct from right-wing extremists. Or at least were at one time.
Indeed, I’ve argued for many years—as a onetime Republican from Idaho myself—that it’s essential for mainstream conservatives to publicly oppose the radical right because their denunciations carry more weight with the intended audience. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’ve been able to persuade any mainstream conservatives to join that cause, but that may be a product of my pleasing personality.
I do know that when I first began reporting on the Aryan Nations and The Order in the 1980s, followed by Ruby Ridge and the militia movement in the ‘90s, it wasn’t considered a partisan thing at all to do this reportage. It was simple common sense that we needed to shine a spotlight on hate groups and the poisons they bring to communities, not just among people on the left but among communities of faith and chambers of commerce too, all of whom understood that hate is bad for communities.
At one time, Goldberg composed a theory about what kind of person I must be:
Here’s my grand theory about this guy. He’s made his career hyping the terrible threat from the Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations and American Nazi Party and so like the bureaucrats in Office Space who think TPS reports are the most important thing in the world, he can’t seem to grasp that they’re pretty trivial.
In other words, he came to his understanding of fascism by following bands of racist white losers in the Idaho woods while using some Marxist tract or other as a field guide to identify the various species he encountered. In other words, he’s internalized every cliché and propagandistic talking point I set out to demolish in my book. Moreover, his career depends on maintaining his version of the fascist peril. So, he’s banging his spoon on his highchair a lot because my book undercuts his whole reason for being.
This is what Goldberg means when he dismissively references my “business model”. But as I noted at the time, I wasn’t reading any Marxist tracts to frame my work: I was listening to what these guys were preaching to their crowds and pitching to their recruits. If the neo-Nazis of the Aryan Nations were not definably fascist because of what they preached and not because they were “bad guys,” then the term no longer has any meaning. Which I suspect is Goldberg’s intent all along.
More to the point, they were right-wing—but extremists, as opposed to mainstream. They not only opposed abortion, they believed providers should be executed. They not only resisted civil rights for minorities, they sought to exclude nonwhites from their rights. They not only opposed gay rights, they believed gays should be put to death. Sometimes their views could be indistinguishable from a mainstream conservative, but the body of beliefs put them on the far right. I learned this from talking with and listening to people.
Fascism in reality—as I know it in its on-the-ground American variant, not a theoretical version cooked up as an intellectual exercise—is a kind of right-wing populism turned metastatic, unleashing an authoritarian tide, fueled by a belief in a phoenix-like national rebirth, that uses violence in defense of business interests, established authorities and leaders, and against perceived liberal enemies. I know this from reporting on what they say and do for 30 years, not because I’ve been influenced by some unknown Marxist texts.
But I have researched them deeply over the years in hopes of understanding them. And their orientation has never been in question. Fascism is fundamentally right-wing in large part because it is fundamentally anti-left. As George Orwell wrote, “the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world.”
Of course, Jonah’s assumptions notwithstanding, not only am I utterly unflummoxed by Goldberg’s ready recitation of various facts about how many contemporaneous liberals and progressives flirted with fascist ideas, and how many left-wing ideas were woven into the early fascist appeals (thus the National Socialist Party business), but I’ve always acknowledged their existence, dating back to that first review in the Prospect.
Goldberg, however, accords them more weight than most historians, who have good reason for taking a broader view of these strands as part of the natural complexity of human ideas and their history. As Robert Paxton explained, placing undue weight on fascists’ (frequently misleading) words and propaganda is a categorical mistake, since the reality of their political base and orientation is revealed by their real-world deeds:
"Goldberg simply omits those parts of fascist history that fit badly with his demonstration. His method is to examine fascist rhetoric, but to ignore how fascist movements functioned in practice. Since the Nazis recruited their first mass following among the economic and social losers of Weimar Germany, they could sound anti-capitalist at the beginning. Goldberg makes a big thing of the early programs of the Nazi and Italian Fascist Parties, and publishes the Nazi Twenty-five Points as an appendix. A closer look would show that the Nazis’ anti-capitalism was a selective affair, opposed to international capital and finance capital, department stores and Jewish businesses, but nowhere opposed to private property per se or favorable to a transfer of all the means of production to public ownership.
A still closer look at how the fascist parties obtained power and then exercised power would show how little these early programs corresponded to fascist practice. Mussolini acquired powerful backing by hiring his black-shirted squadristi out to property owners for the destruction of socialist and Communist unions and parties. They destroyed the farm workers’ organizations in the Po Valley in 1921-1922 by violent nightly raids that made them the de facto government of northeastern Italy. Hitler’s brownshirts fought Communists for control of the streets of Berlin, and claimed to be Germany’s best bulwark against the revolutionary threat that still appeared to be growing in 1932. Goldberg prefers the abstractions of rhetoric to all this history, noting only that fascism and Communism were “rivals.” So his readers will not learn anything about how the Nazis and Italian Fascists got into power or exercised it.
The bottom line: Does toying with the concept of “liberal fascism” as an intellectual exercise enhance the public’s understanding of fascism—or does it confuse it, in effect destroying it with Newspeak-like negation? After all, given that its antiliberalism is universally understood as an essential component of the complex phenomenon fascism can be, it’s an obvious kind of oxymoron, as useful an idea as “hateful love.”
I’d argue that not only has the latter happened, but the muddied waters have obscured the incoming white nationalist tide—which Goldberg now says he despises, but whose growing presence he really doesn’t really want to acknowledge. So, naturally, he accuses me of being pleased that the alt-right has arisen and spread, when my eternal and ongoing dismay is already well established.
But Goldberg’s idea—that fascism is really a left-wingphenomenon—has been part of that incoming tide. Some of that, of course, is attributable to d’Souza. But the combined effect of Goldberg’s foundation-laying and d’Souza’s sheer demagoguery has meant that the idea of a “fascist left” is everywhere now, particularly among the “Patriot” militias, the Proud Boys, and the alt-lite media mavens who defend them avidly as victims of an insidious antifascist movement.
And now even South American right-wing strongmen are parroting it.
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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/20/trump_bolsonaro_join_forces_to_back
visit w/ trump
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about U.S.-Brazil relations, we’re joined by Maria Luísa Mendonça, the director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil, visiting scholar at City University of New York Graduate Center.
Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. The significance of the meeting yesterday, Bolsonaro’s first as president, the former Army captain coming to meet with Trump, and what came out of it?
MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: I think that, basically, Brazil gave out many things and didn’t receive anything back. For example, Bolsonaro promised that now U.S. citizens will not need a visa to travel to Brazil anymore, and that won’t be the case for Brazilians coming to the U.S., which is a big change in foreign policy. Brazil has a history of reciprocity in its foreign policy, and independent of the government. It’s part of the Brazilian diplomacy.
Also, Brazilian diplomacy has a history of resolving conflicts through a peaceful process of negotiation. And the discourse about Venezuela is very different than how Brazil has dealt with conflicts in the region historically. Venezuela is being used as an external enemy in Latin American countries as a way to help elect far-right political leaders. That was the case of Bolsonaro in Brazil and also in Colombia. And that’s very dangerous, because a war in Venezuela will have catastrophic consequences in the region.
Another issue that they both talked about is looking at Venezuela as a country that needs humanitarian aid. But that doesn’t make any sense. For example, President Maduro offered to buy agricultural products from Brazil, so they don’t need aid from Brazil. Also, Venezuela is a very strategic partner for Brazil, because Brazil exports industrial products to Venezuela. So, even from a pragmatic perspective, it doesn’t make any sense not to have good relationships with Venezuela and other Latin American countries. Historically, Brazil always had good relationships with Latin American countries.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about President Bolsonaro’s family connections to militia groups in Brazil and the fact that you have a sitting president who some of his family members have been connected to groups—for instance, thekilling of Marielle Franco was linked to one of those militia groups. Could you talk about that?
MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: Yes. Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, who was a state legislator in Rio de Janeiro, employed the mother and the daughter of one of the heads of this militia group that is being accused of killing Marielle Franco. Also, the two suspects who were arrested in connection to the case, one of them is a neighbor of Bolsonaro. They live in a very luxurious condo in Rio. They are both neighbors, although he’s a former police officer, so how he was able to live in such an expensive condo, that’s something to be investigated. Also, one of the suspects, his daughter dated one of Bolsonaro’s sons, as well. And Bolsonaro himself appeared in a photo with one of the suspects. And he himself and his sons also have praised members of these militia groups in the past. So there are several connections that need to be investigated.
AMY GOODMAN: And why would they want her dead? I mean Marielle Franco, a member of the Rio de Janeiro City Council, human rights activist, LGBTQ activist, who challenged police brutality in one of the world’s most notorious police forces.
MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: Well, she was one of the city councilmembers that was investigating the militia groups. They had a very long investigation, a detailed report, accusing the militia group—this militia group and other groups—of several crimes. So, I think this investigation was probably part of the problem, you know, that—the reason why people wanted her to be killed....
GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo. I believe he was in the audience when he was meeting with President Trump. Yeah, let’s go to that moment.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: By the way, I see in the audience the son of the president, who has been fantastic. Would you please stand up? The job you’ve done, during a very tough period of time, is just fantastic. And I know your father appreciates it, that I can tell you. OK? Thank you very much. Fantastic job.
AMY GOODMAN: Who is Eduardo Bolsonaro?
MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: Well, he’s been the one that built relationships with Steve Bannon,at least as far as we know from the reports that we have seen. And there was actually a dinner prior to this meeting, a few days ago, in which Steve Bannon was present. And they talk about the possibility of expanding a far-right coalition, global coalition, to promote the views that they have.
It’s important to know now that the situation in Brazil is so extreme that this group that took power because of the coup, the political vacuum that was created after the parliamentary coup against President Dilma in 2016, and then the fact that former President Lula was put in jail although there is no evidence against him—so you create this political vacuum that opened the space for a far-right candidate that is connected to the most extreme paramilitary sectors of the military. So, now what we have, the situation that we have, is the military officers in government are the more moderate forces in power in Brazil. So we have a very extreme situation.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about President Bolsonaro’s stance on climate change. Brazil was supposed to host a U.N. climate summit and pulled out of that. The impact of that, given the importance of Brazil in terms of the future of our planet when it comes to climate change?
MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: Exactly. That was also a surprise, because Brazil negotiated being the host of the conference, and then he decided to cancel it. And the situation is very dramatic, because he said that he’s going to allow, for example, mining exploitation in indigenous land. He’s going to cancel all land rights of indigenous people. He has threatened peasant communities.
And also he defends expansion of monocropping of soy in the Amazon. The minister of agriculture is related to the pesticide lobby. And we already are the country that consumes the most amount of pesticides in the world, and they are allowing pesticides that have been prohibited in other countries for many years.
And now the latest is that he is also negotiating with Trump to allow the U.S. to have a spaceship base in Alcântara, which is the Northeast region, that is also close to the Amazon. It’s a very strategic region of the country. And in 2002, that agreement was not approved by Congress, because it would allow military presence of U.S. officers in Brazil, and the Brazilians won’t have access to this space anymore, or to have—you know, even to enter the base. So, it would be the U.S. taking over part of Brazilian territory, in a region where we have hundreds of Afro-Brazilian rural communities, the quilombola communities, that have the same rights to land as indigenous people. And it’s already a struggle for them to have access to land in that region.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, as we wrap up, we have 20 seconds. But do you think Bolsonaro would engage in a military invasion against Venezuela to topple Maduro?
MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: I think that some sectors of the military in Brazil oppose that, and that there would be a catastrophic consequence if they move into that. So I think it’s important to have resistance here in this country, to understand that the discourse about Venezuela is very similar to the discourse about Iraq. At the end, it’s about, you know, lying, misinformation, to promote a war that, at the end, is about oil.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Maria Luísa Mendonça, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil.
When we come back, The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.
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dailybeast
NEW LITTLE COLD WAR
Trump Helps Take Central and South America Back to the Strongman Future
Bolton and the Trump gang understand the human suffering caused by the “stooges of socialism”—but seem blind or indifferent to the dangers posed by the new strongmen of the right.
Ronald Radosh
01.10.19 5:01 AM ET
OPINION
Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast
It appears that the further we get into the 21st century, the closer we are coming to a repeat of the Central American wars of the 1980s.
Back then, the Soviet Union and Cuba were sending arms and money to the Communist guerrilla movements that threatened pro-U.S. regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, and had taken power in Nicaragua when the Sandinistas took over that country in 1979 and forced the dictator Anastasio Somoza to flee.
Speaking for the Trump administration, John Bolton said in an interview with The Miami Herald this week that “This Troika of Tyranny”—referring to the regimes of Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela—“is the cause of immense human suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability, and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the Western Hemisphere.” That’s why the United States, he continued “is taking direct action against all three regimes.” As in the 1980s, he called for free elections in Nicaragua that could end the reign of Daniel Ortega, who had once held power as “Comandante” until the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1989, only to return to power in 2007, when he again was elected president.
Bolton also said that the tyrants ruling these nations “fancy themselves strongmen and revolutionaries, icons and luminaries. In reality they are clownish, pitiful figures…‘Three Stooges’ of socialism;…true believers [who] worship a false God.”
Bolton is not incorrect in that characterization of the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. In Nicaragua, the Washington Post reported recently, Ortega’s army “launched a wave of repression against civil society groups and journalism outlets that is choking off what little remains of democracy in this Central American country.” The government is closing down civil society groups, seizing their asserts, and has charged some editors with conspiring to commit terrorist acts. Jamie Chamorro, who now runs the opposition paper La Prensa, said the attacks on the media are worse than those in the Sandinista heyday, when an actual war was being waged against the government by the “contras,” who were supported by the Reagan administration. There is also little doubt that Ortega is supported by both Iran and Russia and is trying to make deals with the Chinese government.
But while Bolton blasts the proto-totalitarian nature of these “leftist” governments and condemns the repression of its people, there is a danger that by allying with right-wing authoritarian regimes in order to defeat the evil “troika,” the administration will give them a green light and look the other way on civil rights and human rights abuses, much like it is doing with MBS and the Saudis.
This is likely to be the case with Brazil, where the country’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, was sworn in on New Year’s Day. The president enthusiastically supported him and sent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to attend the inauguration. Afterward, Pompeo said that Bolsonaro seeks “to reinforce our shared commitment to democracy, education, prosperity, security and human rights.”
This is highly questionable, to put it politely. Bolsonaro is a hard-right figure with strong authoritarian tendencies. He easily won the national election due to the loss of support for the previous era of left-leaning administrations, whose once popular leader, Lula da Silva, is now in prison for 12 years after being convicted of corruption and money-laundering. Bolsonaro resembles strong men like Juan Peron in 1940s and '50s Argentina, a “populist” who had the support of the people and reigned in opponents of his regime, and today with the government of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who uses extra-legal means, including the killing of drug dealers by the police. Bolsonaro, as Eli Lake has pointed out, sees Duterte as a role model, and looks fondly at Brazil’s military dictatorship that existed from 1964 to 1985.
Bolsonaro’s new foreign minister, Ernesto Araujo, also gives lip service to respecting human rights. He also considers “climate change” a Marxist conspiracy and has praised “illiberal” governments such as Poland and Hungary as models for Brazil. Bolsonaro’s vice president and other government ministers are all former military officers. Bolsonaro himself has said that he regretted the military governments during the dictatorship did not torture still more leftists than it did. When he cast a vote in 2016 to impeach the leftist President Dilma Rousseff, the Washington Post reported, “he did so in the name of the military commander who had presided over her torture in 1970. He and his allies have cheered the junta’s grisly program that saw countless leftist activists disappeared, brutalized, raped and murdered.” Bolsonaro has promised to give the police “carte blanche to kill,” as Duterte has in the Philippines.
Pursuing strategic cooperation with Brazil in its attempt to curb China’s economic incursions is a valid goal, but that does not mean that the United States should remain silent if Bolsonaro takes the thuggish actions he has all but promised against real and imagined opponents. An American left-wing academic, Benjamin Fogel, writes in Britain’s Independent that “fascism has arrived in Brazil,” and that Bolsonaro’s government will be “worse than you think.” Perhaps Fogel, a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history at New York University is somewhat wide of the mark in declaring Brazil fascist before Bolsonaro has had a chance to do very much. But he is correct to write that Bolsonaro “is openly hostile to democracy and will probably be the most extremist elected leader in the world.”
Today there is no Soviet Union threatening to take over nations in our hemisphere, but the threat of authoritarianism is a very real danger to the people of Brazil and Nicaragua. There is no need for U.S. officials and the Trump administration to unequivocally welcome Jair Bolsonaro as if he was the kind of true democratic leader the U.S. has an affinity with. In 1981, when Elliott Abrams was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, he noted that the U.S. cut off military aid to the Lucas Garcia government in Guatemala, which he says really deserved to be called a “fascist murderous regime.” And when the military overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in Chile, replacing it with the brutal military rule led by General Augusto Pinochet, Abrams told Secretary of State George Shultz that “we have to protest this publicly, we have to condemn it.” He understood that for a human rights policy to have credibility, it had to also protest those of U.S.-backed governments, not just those of the Castro communist government. Abrams said that Shultz’s policy, and his, was not “to support any authoritarian dictator who is pro-American. It [was] rather to try to figure how to support moderates, pro-American centrists as the alternative.”
President Trump has already nominated Robert Destro, a law professor at Catholic University, for the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Should the Senate confirm Destro and he takes his post, he should start his tenure by requesting a thorough briefing from Elliott Abrams.
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Bolsonaro’s anger won over :{working-class:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent;white-space:nowrap"):}:Brazilians, but his presidency may betray them
Benjamin H. Bradlow, Brown University
Brazil's new president – often called the 'Trump of the tropics' for his inflammatory, right-wing rhetoric – won over poorer voters by stoking fear and resentment. Can he make them happy?
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rise-populist-nationalist-leaders-turning-point-global-climate-talks
The election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil not only marks the rise of another populist nationalist leader on the world stage. It’s also a turning point for the global politics of climate change.
When the new president takes office in January 2019, by my estimate at least 30 percent of global emissions will be generated from democracies governed by populist nationalist leaders.
As climate policymakers meet at this week’s UN climate conference in Poland (a country itself governed by a populist nationalist party) people who care about achieving the Paris Agreement goal should push for and develop new strategies for advancing policies to reduce emissions within countries headed by these leaders.
Populism and cutting national emissions
What is populist nationalism? Although both populism and nationalism are contested terms, political scientist Francis Fukuyama, offers this tidy synthesis of the characteristics associated with populist nationalists leaders in democracies.
Firstly, these leaders define “the people” narrowly to refer to a single national identity which is oftentimes anti-elitist. Secondly, they promote policies which are popular among their selected people, or base of support, in the short term but may not be in the long-term economic, social or environmental interests of the country. Thirdly, populist nationalists are expert at capitalizing on their supporters’ cultural fears about a loss of status in society.
Over the past five years there have been several populist electoral victories in countries that are among the highest emitters of greenhouse gases. This includes the U.S., India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland and the Philippines. While these regimes each represent a different brand of populist nationalism, they exhibit the basic characteristics I’ve just described.
From my perspective as a scholar focused on global energy and climate policies, it’s clear that the political structure of populist nationalism makes introducing policies to reduce, or mitigate, emissions in democracies difficult.
Mitigation policies require leaders to expend short-term political capital for long-term economic and environmental gains. However, populists have shown a particularly strong disinterest for doing so, particularly if those short-term costs would affect their prioritized group of the people.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is President Donald Trump’s unwinding of the Clean Power Plan. It may bring short-term benefits to his base, which includes coal miners and related interests, but it is not aligned with long-term energy market trends in the U.S. toward natural gas, wind and solar for generating electricity and away from coal.
Resistant to global pressure
Secondly, as several country-level case studies have shown, developing policies to reduce national emissions is often a top-down and elite-driven activity. This is particularly true in high-emitting middle-income democracies like Mexico or Indonesia. In these countries, mitigation policies, like carbon taxes, have not emerged by way of large scale social movements but by top-down policy processes supported by international donors and nongovernment actors. In these countries, climate mitigation is at risk of being overridden by policies with more popular appeal.
In a forthcoming paper on Mexico, a colleague and I investigate incoming President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO’s) mitigation policy. The AMLO administration has publicly committed to reduce emissions through a little-known set of carbon pricing policies, while at the same time responding to a popular demand to reduce fuel prices by increasing domestic oil refining. In the contest between the top-down mitigation policy and the widespread popular demands for low gasoline prices, it is likely that the latter will take priority.
A third issue relates to the international governance of climate mitigation. Under the Paris Agreement, governments are asked to progressively ratchet up their emission reduction goals. This mechanism assumes political leaders will respond to international pressure to increase their ambition. However, populist nationalists have shown that they are not motivated by international reactions to their climate policies.
Take Indonesian President Joko Widodo, for instance, who was elected into office in 2014. As I have described elsewhere, one of his first moves in office was to shut down a US$1 billion mitigation policy program funded by the Norwegian government. This decision to close the agency breached the bilateral agreement between Indonesia and Norway, and points to the disregard shown by some of these leaders to international political pressure.
As these short anecdotes suggest, the mechanism by which populist nationalists hold and retain political power makes it difficult to introduce climate mitigation policies. Their interest is to prioritize short-term programs which favor their select group of the people, rather than longer-term mitigating policies which have widespread economic and environmental benefits. Also, because they don’t comply with traditional norms of international relations, it will not be possible to coerce this group into meeting the Paris Agreement goals.
However, there are some ways countries that want to make reach consensus on global climate policies can better engage these leaders.
Ways to engage
As a starting point, it is important to emphasize the short-term benefits of climate mitigation policy to populists.
I believe policymakers and advocates would be well-served in drawing attention to how clean energy may bring multiple short-term benefits to the people on whose support these leaders rely, including lowering domestic air pollution, low cost energy, improved health outcomes and less reliance on foreign fuel imports. Indeed on some of these points, Bolsonaro, has recently said that he will increase the country’s hydropower and nuclear capacity.
Further, recent research suggests the cultural dimension of populist nationalism is of central importance. Rather than reducing emissions and tackling global climate change, it may be better to frame mitigation as part of a large-scale effort towards modernization; that is, modernizing energy systems, transportation systems and infrastructure. A narrative built around modernization, highlighting the economic and societal benefits for all, may resonate more with the disaffected middle classes who have led the rise of populist nationalism.
At the international level too there may be some approaches to ensuring the international governance regime continues in the face of this current wave of populist nationalism. As scholars David Victor and Bruce Joneshave recently argued, it may be useful to form small groups – or clubs – of countries which share similar interests to focus on clean technology and policy innovation. Focusing on shared interests within small clubs may work better than trying to push populist nationalists to comply with broad international agreements.
Populist nationalist leaders, like Bolsonaro, are the consequence of deeply entrenched economic, political and cultural shifts that have occurred in democracies over decades. These leaders, in other words, are likely to be a feature of democratic politics for some time into the future.
To continue to make progress on global climate agreements, I think it’s crucial that negotiating countries meet national populist leaders on their own terms for ongoing attempts to save the climate.
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207
Environmental and land activists killed in 2017
60%
Of those killed were in Latin America
115
Killings linked to government security forces
25%
Of those killed were from indigenous groups
46
Killings linked to agribusiness
57
Activists killed in Brazil, the worst year on record for any country
92%
Of killings went unpunished
Source: Global Witness
Bolton will declare the election of right-wing firebrand Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil as a "positive sign" for Latin America while denouncing Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as a "Troika of Tyranny," according to excerpts seen by Axios of a speech he will give at 1 p.m. ET in Miami.
Why it matters: Bolton’s speech is among the clearest statements of the administration’s views on Latin America that we’ve seen so far, and Bolton depicts it almost as a struggle of good versus evil. That he considers Bolsonaro, who has made numerous homophobic and sexist remarks and spoken fondly of military rule, an ally in the fight to "advance the rule of law and increase security and prosperity" is likely to garner attention. So too will his inclusion of Nicaragua, where President Daniel Ortega has brutally suppressed protests calling for his ouster, alongside Venezuela and Cuba in the "troika."
Show less
Jason Marczak of the Atlantic Council notes that "there is a high degree of alignment between the Trump administration's key priorities and those of the incoming Bolsonaro administration," most notably when it comes to Venezuela. Like Trump, Bolsonaro also campaigned in direct opposition to the establishment.
Bolton appears to be evoking communism with his use of the word "troika," and there are parallels between his "Troika of Tyranny" and George W. Bush’s "Axis of Evil."
Worth noting: Bolton's remarks come in the lead-up to two crucial elections in Florida — for governor and senator —where the Cuban vote could play a significant role.
What he'll say:
"The United States is thrilled to be partnering with nations such as Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and many others to advance the rule of law and increase security and prosperity for our people. The recent elections of likeminded leaders in key countries, including Ivan Duque in Colombia, and last weekend Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, are positive signs for the future of the region, and demonstrate a growing regional commitment to free-market principles, and open, transparent, and accountable governance."
"Under this administration, we will no longer appease dictators and despots near our shores in this Hemisphere. We will not reward firing squads, torturers, and murderers. We will champion the independence and liberty of our neighbors. And this President, and his entire administration, will stand with the freedom fighters. The Troika of Tyranny in this Hemisphere — Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua — has finally met its match."
"In Cuba, we continue to stand firmly with the Cuban people, and we share their aspirations for real, democratic changes. … Our concern is with sanctions, not selfies."
"The crisis in Venezuela has led to a massive humanitarian disaster and the largest mass migration in the Hemisphere. More than 2 million desperate Venezuelans have fled Maduro’s oppressive rule since 2015. Sadly, this human tragedy was entirely preventable. Maduro and his cronies are the singular cause of all of this suffering."
Go deeper:
Disgusted by their government, Brazilians look to far right
The White House roadmap for intervening in Venezuela
Why Trump skipping a Latin American summit earlier this year mattered
https://www.alternet.org/world/bolsonaro-brazil-slayer-amazon
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judge who jailed lula promoted
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https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/09/20/jair-bolsonaro-latin-americas-latest-menace
,..
Bolsonaro is the latest in a parade of populists—from Donald Trump in America, to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and a left-right coalition featuring Matteo Salvini in Italy. In Latin America, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing firebrand, will take office in Mexico in December. Mr Bolsonaro would be a particularly nasty addition to the club (see Briefing). Were he to win, it might put the very survival of democracy in Latin America’s largest country at risk.
Brazilian bitterness
Populists draw on similar grievances. A failing economy is one—and in Brazil the failure has been catastrophic. In the worst recession in its history, GDP per person shrank by 10% in 2014-16 and has yet to recover. The unemployment rate is 12%. The whiff of elite self-dealing and corruption is another grievance—and in Brazil it is a stench. The interlocking investigations known as Lava Jato (Car Wash) have discredited the entire political class. Scores of politicians are under investigation. Michel Temer, who became Brazil’s president in 2016 after his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached on unrelated charges, has avoided trial by the supreme court only because congress voted to spare him. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, another former president, was jailed for corruption and disqualified from running in the election. Brazilians tell pollsters that the words which best sum up their country are “corruption”, “shame” and “disappointment”.
Mr Bolsonaro has exploited their fury brilliantly. Until the Lava Jato scandals, he was an undistinguished seven-term congressman from the state of Rio de Janeiro. He has a long history of being grossly offensive. He said he would not rape a congresswoman because she was “very ugly”; he said he would prefer a dead son to a gay one; and he suggested that people who live in settlements founded by escaped slaves are fat and lazy. Suddenly that willingness to break taboos is being taken as evidence that he is different from the political hacks in the capital city, Brasília.
To Brazilians desperate to rid themselves of corrupt politicians and murderous drug dealers, Mr Bolsonaro presents himself as a no-nonsense sheriff. An evangelical Christian, he mixes social conservatism with economic liberalism, to which he has recently converted. His main economic adviser is Paulo Guedes, who was educated at the University of Chicago, a bastion of free-market ideas. He favours the privatisation of all Brazil’s state-owned companies and “brutal” simplification of taxes. Mr Bolsonaro proposes to slash the number of ministries from 29 to 15, and to put generals in charge of some of them.
His formula is winning support. Polls give him 28% of the vote and he is the clear front-runner in a crowded field for the first round of the elections on October 7th. This month he was stabbed in the stomach at a rally, which put him in hospital. That only made him more popular—and shielded him from closer scrutiny by the media and his opponents. If he faces Fernando Haddad, the nominee of Lula’s left-wing Workers’ Party (PT) in the second round at the end of the month, many middle- and upper-class voters, who blame Lula and the PT above all for Brazil’s troubles, could be driven into his arms.
The Pinochet temptation
They should not be fooled. In addition to his illiberal social views, Mr Bolsonaro has a worrying admiration for dictatorship. He dedicated his vote to impeach Ms Rousseff to the commander of a unit responsible for 500 cases of torture and 40 murders under the military regime, which governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Mr Bolsonaro’s running-mate is Hamilton Mourão, a retired general, who last year, while in uniform, mused that the army might intervene to solve Brazil’s problems. Mr Bolsonaro’s answer to crime is, in effect, to kill more criminals—though, in 2016, police killed over 4,000 people.
Latin America has experimented before with mixing authoritarian politics and liberal economics. Augusto Pinochet, a brutal ruler of Chile between 1973 and 1990, was advised by the free-marketeer “Chicago boys”. They helped lay the ground for today’s relative prosperity in Chile, but at terrible human and social cost. Brazilians have a fatalism about corruption, summed up in the phrase “rouba, mas faz” (“he steals, but he acts”). They should not fall for Mr Bolsonaro—whose dictum might be “they tortured, but they acted”. Latin America has known all sorts of strongmen, most of them awful. For recent proof, look only to the disasters in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Mr Bolsonaro might not be able to convert his populism into Pinochet-style dictatorship even if he wanted to. But Brazil’s democracy is still young. Even a flirtation with authoritarianism is worrying. All Brazilian presidents need a coalition in congress to pass legislation. Mr Bolsonaro has few political friends. To govern, he could be driven to degrade politics still further, potentially paving the way for someone still worse.
Instead of falling for the vain promises of a dangerous politician in the hope that he can solve all their problems, Brazilians should realise that the task of healing their democracy and reforming their economy will be neither easy nor quick. Some progress has been made—such as a ban on corporate donations to parties and a freeze on federal spending. A lot more reform is needed. Mr Bolsonaro is not the man to provide it.
https://www.alternet.org/world/theres-growing-international-alliance-right-wing-demagogues
no lnx few
There’s a Growing International Alliance of Right-Wing Demagogues
From Brazil’s Bolsonaro to the Philippines’ Duterte to the leader of them all, Trump.
By Vijay Prashad / Independent Media Institute October 23, 2018, 12:06 PM GMT
Lula in His Cell
Lula da Silva—Brazil’s former president—is sitting in his prison in Curitiba, a small town southwest of São Paulo. He should not be there. Evidence of corruption against him hangs on the words of a felon. Lula should have been on the ballot. But the oligarchy refused to allow this most popular man to run for the presidency. Lula is visited by Pastor Anete Roese of the Evangelical Lutheran Confessional Church of Brazil. The pastor steps outside the prison and makes a statement. She says that Lula is concerned about the escalation of violence in Brazil. People are being murdered when they express their political support for the Workers’ Party candidate for president—Fernando Haddad. “The gates of violence are opening,” said Pastor Roese. The election—on October 28—will signal an “unprecedented avalanche of violence,” warned the pastor. Lula, sitting in his cell, unjustly incarcerated, worried with her. It is the poor who will suffer. It is always the poor who suffer.
Bolsonaro’s Fraud
Jair Bolsonaro, the candidate of the far-right who is now the candidate of the oligarchy, leads in the polls. He is nostalgic for Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) and wants to use unconstitutional force against those whom he sees are a problem for Brazil. His targets are the poor and the social minorities—Afro-Brazilians, Gays, Leftists. The oligarchy flooded the Bolsonaro camp with money. Democracy needs lubrication, and money does the trick. Some corporations used their money to create WhatsApp groups that carried fraudulent messages about Haddad, who is running against Bolsonaro. This is illegal. The hashtag #Caixa2doBolsonaro zipped across the internet. The whiff of fraud should have triggered an immediate investigation. It did not happen. It is Lula in prison. Bolsonaro hides his fangs behind his smile.
Bannon’s Fascist International
Steve Bannon said as he left the White House that the shackles were off his hands. He was no longer imprisoned by propriety. He wanted to be in the trenches, building his white supremacist, fascist international. Bannon calls his group The Movement. One of Bolsonaro’s sons said that Bannon has advised his father’s campaign, that Bannon—in sum—has drawn Bolsonaro into The Movement. Bolsonaro hastily denied this claim. To be linked to Bannon is not an advantage. Nor to Bannon’s fascist international directly. Nothing Bolsonaro says is varnished. He called people from the African continent, from Haiti and from the Arab-speaking world the “scum of humanity.” Bolsonaro’s moral geography mirrors that of Donald Trump, who called many of these places “shithole countries.” Of Afro-Brazilians, Bolsonaro called them lazy and obese, saying, “I don’t think they’re even good for procreation anymore.” Another member of the fascist international—Marine Le Pen of France—said that Bolsonaro’s comments are “extremely unpleasant.” Bolsonaro distressed her. This is Bannon country. Precise and clearly articulated hatred and venom.
Gunmen
Bolsonaro has been proud to say that he is “Brazil’s Trump.” But this is not a good comparison. It is clearer to say that Bolsonaro is Brazil’s Duterte.Rodrigo Duterte is the president of the Philippines. He came to office with a gun in his hand.Duterte was the mayor of Davao, where he empowered death squads to kill anyone deemed to be a criminal. “Kill them all,” he said in 2015 in reference to criminals. “Kill a drug dealer and I’ll give you a medal,” he said. He likes to be photographed with a gun in his hand, preferably a machine gun. Duterte would like to give out 42,000 guns to deepen the civil war in his society. Violence is the antidote to social problems. No policy of economic and social reform is sufficient. Gunfire is Duterte’s solvent. It is the glue of the Bolsonaro family. Jair Bolsonaro’s son—Eduardo—won re-election to the Federal Assembly on October 7 with a massive margin. In a video from last year, Eduardo holds a 50-caliber Barrett sniper rifle and says of the school shootings in the United States, “Thanks to you who support gun-free zones and this initiative to disarm people—you are responsible for these massacres.” Duterte also likes high-caliber sniper rifles, the M-4 Armalite being a favorite. These are men with guns, men who believe that guns make good policy.
Money and Monsters
In August, Steve Bannon told New York magazine that the rise of Trump—and the other neo-fascists (or monsters)—can be directly linked to the financial crisis of 2008. “The legacy of the financial crisis is Donald J. Trump,” Bannon said. “You know why the deplorables are angry? They’re rational human beings. We took away the risk for the wealthy.” Wall Street dislikes this analysis. They would like to maintain a firewall between their shenanigans and the rise of what they like to call “populists.” Bannon is both right and wrong. He is right that the neoliberal “moderates” drove a policy from the 1980s onward that allowed the rich to avoid paying taxes and to avoid investment, while the working people failed to earn their share from the gains of productivity and technology. High inequality rates around the world drained the legitimacy of the neoliberal “moderates.”
The neo-fascists that emerged with acid on their lips did speak clearly about the fraud of the system, the theft from ordinary people by the oligarchy. But they did not point their fingers at the oligarchy or at high finance. Instead, true to form, the neo-fascists pointed their guns at migrants and refugees, at the urban poor and the rural distressed. For them, social marginality is the crime. Under cover of the monsters’ corrosive rhetoric, the oligarchy and the bankers have continued their plunder. None of these neo-fascists wants to implement Basel-III, a framework to regulate banking by increasing capital holdings. Nor do they want to make sure that corporations bear the downside of risks, rather than take the profits and burden taxpayers with losses. None of these elementary reforms are on the lips of the neo-fascists. They are too busy oiling their guns.
Hunger and Illiteracy
Hunger hangs heavily over the Brazilian poor. In 1960, the Afro-Brazilian writer Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote in her diary, “What a surprising effect food has on our organisms. Before I ate, I saw the sky, the trees, the birds—all as yellow. But after I ate, everything became normal to my eyes.” Hunger is blistering. It is what Lula’s government focused upon with its Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program. According to the UN, hunger was almost eradicated by Lula’s government. Haddad was Lula’s education minister. They used public funds to expand Brazil’s public university system. Food and reading were at the heart of the Workers’ Party agenda. Poverty was reduced by 55 percent, while extreme poverty was reduced by 65 percent. No guns were needed. Lula’s agenda was to expand democracy. Bolsonaro’s agenda is to deepen neo-fascism.
No Neutrality
Five hundred people of good sense—from Bernie Sanders to Angela Davis, from Noam Chomsky to Pablo Iglesias—signed a short document, an international declaration against fascism in Brazil. The document calls upon the Brazilian population to reject Bolsonaro, whose presidency would be a “threat to any free, tolerant and just society.” Brazilians will have to choose between “liberty and pluralism” on one side and “retrograde authoritarianism” on the other. “There can be no neutrality,” the signatories write, “in the choice between democracy and fascism.” This is a document. It might have a small impact. But it will not be able to compete with fake news and with hatred. Hatred is a more powerful emotion than love. It is what so easily undermines democracy. If Bolsonaro wins, asks the Portuguese political theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, will Brazil still be a democracy?
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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Roger Waters Is Using His Tour to Urge Voters to Oppose Far-Right Brazilian Presidential Candidate Jair Bolsonaro
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lost mod rt, went hard right
soft coup, hollow out norms and institutions?
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/20/dilma_rousseff_lulas_imprisonment_is_part
lgbt assasination?