Brazil

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 12, 2018 1:57 pm

Brazilian presidential election – a setback for the masses
Only communists have the power to shatter workers' illusions in bourgeois democracy and help them to see that voting will never solve their problems.
Lalkar writers

Sunday 11 November 2018

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Jair Bolsonaro, the 63-year-old right-wing reactionary and former army captain, has won the Brazilian presidential election, having secured in the final round 55.1 percent of the votes. His opponent, Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party (PT) received 44.8 percent (45 million voted for him).

Bolsonaro gained notoriety for his absurd, nauseating and extremist rhetoric rather than for anything he has accomplished during his seven terms as a congressman for the misnamed Social Liberal Party. He has routinely hurled insults at women, blacks and homosexuals, encouraged the police to kill suspected criminals, and portrayed the military junta that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985, perpetrating repression and violence on an industrial scale, as a role model.

An ultra-reactionary tool of imperialism
He is pliant to the agribusiness lobby and was backed by the latter to undermine efforts to preserve the country’s exceptional biodiversity. He will not, his supporters say, give one centimetre more land to the indigenous communities claiming traditional land. He has railed against what he calls “shi’ite ecologist activism” and has threatened to take Brazil out of the Paris climate accord.

He is pro-gun, pro-torture, against rainforests and the rule of law, saying that the “police who shoot most criminals dead should be decorated not punished”. His chief economic adviser, Paulo Guedes, is a freemarketeer who wants to cut pensions and privatise state-owned enterprises. Mr Guedes is, incidentally, under investigation for fraud.

At an October meeting in New York at the Council of America, Bolsonaro outlined his basic plan for a small state, privatisations and lower taxes. No wonder then that formerly sceptical business leaders, in Brazil as well as abroad, were won over to Bolsonaro’s side, regarding him as a ‘defence of last resort’ against the PT, especially the highly popular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula).

Not surprisingly then, no sooner was he elected than US president Donald Trump called Bolsonaro to congratulate him on his electoral success, with both of them expressing strong commitment to working together, according to the White House.

Equally unsurprisingly, on the Monday (29 October) following his election, stock markets in Brazil registered significant gains.

To give the reader an idea of the character and thinking (thoughtlessness would be more appropriate) of the president-elect of Brazil, we reproduce below his choicest utterings:

• In 1999 he called for the Brazilian congress to be closed, adding that the former military regime “should have shot some 30,000 corrupt people, starting with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso”.

• In 2003, he told a fellow legislator in front of television countries: “I am not going to rape you because you do not deserve it.” He repeated the comment on the floor of the congress in 2014, resulting in a formal reprimand and a $3,000 fine.

• In 2011, on being asked what his reaction would be if one of his sons turned out to be a homosexual, he said: “I would be incapable of loving a homosexual son. I’d rather he died in a car accident.”

• On being asked what he would think if one of his sons married a black woman, he shot back to say: “That will never happen because my sons are well brought up.”

• In 2016, he dedicated his vote to impeach President Dilma Rousseff to an army colonel who tortured progressive people during the Brazilian junta’s rule.

• He characterised Brazilian communities known as Quilombos (founded by descendants of slaves) as people who “don’t do anything – they’re not even good for breeding any more”. A federal judge condemned Bolsonaro for his offensive words and fined him $15,000.

• In 2017 he said: “A policeman who does not kill isn’t a policeman.”

• Also in 2017, he said: “I have five children. Four are men, and then in a moment of weakness the fifth came out a girl.”

‘Anti-corruption’ narrative
The question that must be answered is: How could a person like Bolsonaro, bigoted and ignorant in equal measure, get himself elected as the president of the largest country in Latin America?

He was able to do this through a mixture of utilising the legitimate concerns of the electorate and arousing the basest sentiments and playing on the prejudices of significant sections of the population.

Brazil (like most other capitalist countries) is characterised by the prevalence of large-scale corruption, and many of its politicians have gaily partaken of it. Every politician is now perceived to be corrupt by the Brazilian masses.

This is epitomised by Operation Car Wash (operação lava jato), an ongoing criminal investigation into $5bn in bribes to company executives and political parties. The investigation was used as a cover for the coup against the former progressive president Dilma Rousseff (Lula’s PT successor), but it also exposed a vast and intricate web of corruption involving company executives and politicians. While railing against corruption, Bolsonaro was able to portray himself as an honest man above all this.

Then there is the question of widespread violence, for which Brazil is notorious, with 60,000 homicides a year. Nineteen of the 50 most violent cities in the world are in Brazil. Unemployment stands at 12 percent, and since 2014 the economy has shrunk by 10 percent a year.

Bolsonaro made skilful use of these statistics, promising in his campaign to give people jobs and guns to fight crime: “With me you will get a job, a gun and be able to walk the streets at night.” What is more, he was able, no matter how tenuously, to link corruption and violent crime, as though there were a direct link between the two.

Last, but not least, with his anti-working-class policies, he was able to win domestic and foreign business lobbies to his side and to produce a reactionary rebellion by the conservative, mainly well-off Brazilians who long for order, old customs, a more organised society with clearly-defined hierarchies, discipline and authority – a desire to return to the past. He played on the grievances of the petty-bourgeois sections who complain about blacks ‘jumping the queue’ and feel excluded by ‘identity politics’.

He successfully portrayed himself as an honest, selfless figure fighting for the common man while actually espousing the interests of domestic and foreign capital. He was helped to victory by the successful attempts of the business lobby to keep Lula out of the race by ensuring he stayed in prison on trumped-up corruption charges.

Had Lula been allowed to contest, he would have won handsomely. Fernando Haddad was no match for Lula; in addition, he entered the race rather late. All the same, he polled 45 million votes.

In the congressional elections, meanwhile, the PT has emerged the strongest, thanks to its strength in the poor northeast, although Dilma Rousseff lost her race for a senate seat in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.

The broad masses of Brazilian people gained enormously during the presidency of Lula, with tens of millions lifted out of poverty as the Workers’ Party government redirected a larger proportion of the country’s wealth towards the toiling masses than imperialism found acceptable.

Even a progressive, anti-imperialist government cannot prevent capitalist crises of overproduction, however, any more than can any other capitalist government, and when the latest one erupted, causing a devastating reduction in demand for Brazil’s export commodities, no government would have been able to shelter the masses from its negative consequences.

The PT government did better than most, but imperialism and Brazil’s reactionary rulers took advantage of the crisis to accuse it of bringing on this crisis and to direct the anger of the masses against the government on the basis of allegations of corruption, which encouraged people to believe that their political representatives were living the high life on ill-gotten gains while they, the masses, were suffering.

Lula and his successor Dilma Rousseff, though demonstrably innocent of any corruption, were thrown into jail.

Bolsonaro, however, will be equally unable to satisfy the masses, yet he will find it difficult to ignore them, or the 45 million who voted for Haddad.

With the Brazilian economy in dire straits, Bolsonaro will not be able to deliver on his campaign promises. The honeymoon will not last, and those workers who voted for him will rebel aginst him as surely as they were lured into his trap.

https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2018/11/11/news ... bolsonaro/

Undoubtedly some workers voted for this scum bag but I think the vast majority of the middle class voted for him and that's why he won. Undoubtedly US cash & expertise were involved and that help targeted the middle class.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 12, 2018 5:41 pm

Defeat of democracy in Brazil
Many wonder how it was possible, after the enactment of the Citizen Constitution of 1988 and the democratic governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula and Dilma Rousseff, that the Brazilians have elected as president a dark and avowedly federal deputy in favor of the torture

Author: Frei Betto | internet@granma.cu

November 11, 2018 17:11:03

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With Temer, the crisis deepened with millions of unemployed. Photo: Internet taken

In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany through the democratic vote. In 2018, 85 years after the electoral victory of the Nazi leader, former army captain Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil with 57.5 million votes of the 147 million voters. His adversary, Professor Fernando Haddad, deserved 47 million votes. There were 31.3 million abstentions, 8.6 million null votes and 2.4 million blank votes. Therefore, 89.3 million Brazilians did not vote for Bolsonaro.

Many wonder how it was possible, after the enactment of the Citizen Constitution of 1988 and the democratic governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula and Dilma Rousseff, that the Brazilians have elected as president a dark and avowedly federal deputy in favor of the torture and the summary elimination of prisoners, intransigent defender of the military dictatorship that subjugated the country over 21 years (1964-1985).

Nothing happens by chance. Multiple factors come together to explain the meteoric rise of Bolsonaro. Brazilian democracy has always been fragile. Since the arrival of the Portuguese to our lands, in 1500, autocratic governments have predominated. Under the condition of colony, we were governed by the Lusitanian monarchy until November 1889, when the Republic was decreed.

The first two periods of our Republic were headed by the military. Marshal Deodoro de Fonseca ruled from 1889 to 1891 and General Floriano Peixoto from 1891 to 1894. In the 1920s, President Artur Bernardes ruled for four years (1922-1926) through the semi-dictatorial resource of the State of Siege. Getulio Vargas, elected president in 1930, became dictator seven years later, until he was deposed in 1945.

Since then, Brazil has known brief periods of democracy. Marshal Dutra succeeded Vargas who, by direct vote, returned to the Presidency of the Republic in 1950, where he remained until right-wing forces induced him to commit suicide, in 1954. The power was provisionally occupied by a Military Junta that transferred to Ranieri Mazzilli and, immediately, admitted the inauguration of Joao Goulart (Jango), vice president of Janio, who governed from 1961 to April 1964, when he was deposed by the military coup that was introduced by the dictatorship, which lasted until 1985.

In these last 33 years of democracy, a president died before taking office (Tancredo Neves); his vice, José Sarney, took over and brought the country into bankruptcy; an avatar, Fernando Collor, was chosen as "hunter of marajás" and, two and a half years later, he was subjected to an impeachment for corruption, being the presidency occupied by his vice, Itamar Franco. This was happened during two presidential terms by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), two from Lula (2003-2011) and one integral from Dilma (2011-2014) who, re-elected, was also subjected to a clearly coup-driven impeachment after a year and eight months of government, being replaced by his vice, Michel Temer, who will transfer the presidential band to Bolsonaro on the 1st. January 2019

ACIERT AND ERRORS OF THE PT

How is it explained that, after 13 years of PT government, 57 million Brazilians, among 147 million voters, out of a population of 208 million, choose as president a low-ranking military, federal deputy along 28 years old (seven mandates), whose notoriety does not result from his parliamentary activity, but from his cynicism in praising torturers and lamenting that the dictatorship has not eliminated at least 30,000 people? How to understand the victory of a man who, in his campaign speech in Sao Paulo, via the Internet, proclaimed loudly and with a firm tone that, should he be elected, his opponents should leave the country or go to prison?

It is not time to "make firewood from the fallen tree". But even when the social advances promoted by the PTP governments have a great weight, such as having freed 36 million Brazilians from their misery, it is necessary to highlight errors that the PT has not yet publicly acknowledged and which, however, explain its political erosion. . Of them I highlight three:

- The involvement of some of their leaders in proven cases of corruption, without the party's Ethics Commission having sanctioned any of them (Palocci was excluded from the party before being expelled).

- The lack of attention to the political literacy of the population and the media that are favorable to the government, such as community radios and television stations and the alternative press.

- Not having implemented any structural reform during 13 years of government, except for the one that altered the system of contribution to the social security of federal functionalism. The PT is today a victim of political reform that failed to promote.

The following year, Dilma was re-elected with a small margin of votes over her adversary, Aecio Neves. The PT did not understand the message of the polls. It was time to ensure governance by strengthening social movements. He chose the opposite way. The economic policy of the opposition government program was adopted.

With Temer, the crisis deepened with millions of unemployed; false growth of GDP; labor reform contrary to the elementary rights of workers; 63,000 murders per year (10% of the world total); military intervention in Rio de Janeiro to try to avoid control of the city by drug trafficking. And corruption permeating politics and politicians, not even saving the president of the Republic, with photos and video evidence displayed on prime-time TV.

All this has contributed to deepening the political vacuum. Of the parties with the largest caucus in Congress, only the PT had a representative leader: Lula. Even when imprisoned, he came to deserve 39% of the intentions to vote, at the beginning of the electoral race. However, the judiciary has confirmed the obvious: he was detained without evidence so that he would be excluded from the presidential dispute.

Then came Bolsonaro. How do you explain the meteoric rise of the candidate of a tiny, insignificant party that wounded during the campaign left the streets and did not participate in the televised debates?
I repeat, nothing happens by chance. The captain received the support of three important segments of Brazilian society:

First, of the only sector that, in the last 20 years, has obstinately dedicated itself to organizing and serving as the head of the poor: evangelical churches with a conservative profile. The PT should have learned that it never had as much national capillarity as when it had the support of the Basic Ecclesial Communities (CEBS). But no base work was carried out to expand the capillarity and the formation of the partisan nuclei, the unions and the social movements, except movements such as the Landless (MST) and the Homeless (MTST). ).

It has also been supported by that military police segment that feels nostalgia for the times of the military dictatorship, when it enjoyed wide privileges, its crimes were covered up by censorship and the press and enjoyed total immunity and impunity. Now, according to a promise of the elect, they will have a license to kill.

And it has also been supported by the sectors of the Brazilian elite that complain about the legal limits that hinder their abuses, such as the agricultural business and the mining companies in relation to the indigenous reserves they want and the protection of the environment, especially the The Amazon.

There is also a new factor that favored the election of Bolsonaro: the powerful lobby of digital networks monitored from the USA. UU Millions of messages were sent directly to 120 million Brazilians with Internet access, almost all voters, since in Brazil the vote is mandatory for those between 16 and 70 years of age.

Bolsonaro knew how to exploit this new resource that seriously threatens democracy and was used successfully in the election of Donald Trump, in the USA. UU., And in the referendum that decided the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union (Brexit).

CHALLENGES OF THE FUTURE

And now, what to do? The progressive movements and what remains of the left in Brazil will surely promote marches, demonstrations, down signatories, etc., in an effort to avoid a fascist government. None of that seems enough to me. We have to return to the popular bases. The poor voted for the project of the rich. The left fills the mouth with the word "people", but is not willing to "lose" weekends to go to the favelas, to the villages, to the rural area, to the neighborhoods where the poor live. These are the priorities of the current Brazilian situation: that the PT should make a self-criticism and recreate itself; let the left resume the basic work; that the progressive movement redesign a Brazilian project that is a viable political project. Otherwise,

http://www.granma.cu/mundo/2018-11-11/d ... 8-17-11-03

Google Translator

bolding added. That is how the text ended, I'll check for correction.

I have been supporting the argument that the 'left' in the Global South is different than the mess we have here. Perhaps not.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 13, 2018 11:58 am

Bolsonaro: the danger that lurks
The president-elect of Brazil, the ultra-rightist Jair Bolsonaro, has been compared to figures such as Donald Trump or Pinochet. There are also those who consider it the renewed expression of international fascism

Author: Daina Caballero | internet@granma.cu

November 11, 2018 18:11:18

The president-elect of Brazil, the ultra-rightist Jair Bolsonaro, has been compared to figures such as Donald Trump or Pinochet. There are also those who consider it the renewed expression of international fascism, undoubtedly an issue to be taken care of within Brazil and in the properties of the Latin American continent.

The foreign policy of Jair Bolsonaro will be one of the topics to follow. During the election campaign, the politician spoke of prohibiting the "ideological bias" in diplomacy and even leaving the UN, but despite the fact that the president-elect and his allies have indicated that they will adopt different positions than the current ones, the new ones Brazil's international routes are still speculations.

However, earlier this month Bolsonaro reported on the determination of his next government to move the embassy of Brazil based in Tel Aviv, Israel, to Jerusalem, a territory in dispute with Palestine.

No doubt another way to follow in the footsteps of the Lord of the North. This, like other actions that have come from Bolsonaro's hand and that will continue to arrive, are due to the intention of imitating the foreign policy movements that the United States has been applying with the Trump administration.

In addition to moving the embassy to Jerusalem, he announced that he plans to close the embassy of Brasilia in Palestine, and has said: "Is Palestine a country? Palestine must first be a country and then have the right to an embassy. "

With respect to Venezuela, the president-elect only explained that his ambassador is in Brazil and the Embassy was already deactivated, "we have no more contact". Before the announcement, the vice president-elect, Hamilton Mourao, made reference to a policy of pressure against Venezuela.

He also questioned maintaining diplomatic relations with Cuba.

During an interview, Bolsonaro was ironic when asked what business they can do with the Caribbean archipelago. «Look, respectfully, what business can we do with Cuba? Are we talking about human rights? "He said after being questioned about whether he plans to close his Embassy in Havana.

The ultra-rightist also criticized the fact that in Brazil there are some 11,000 Cuban doctors working in the poor regions of the South American nation.

Bolsonaro's statements come after the US National Security Adviser, John Bolton, referred to the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, as the "troika of evil", then, is all part of the same rhetoric imposed ?

Beyond his xenophobic, discriminatory and offensive statements during his electoral campaign, Bolsonaro was seen as the man who would plunge his country even further into neoliberal policies. It is known of his admiration for the unbridled form of governing of the North American president, of his relations with Senator Marco Rubio, in short, he knows of his submission to money.

Initially, Bolsonaro adopted a speech very similar to that of Trump in the United States, speaking, for example, of the departure of some organs of the United Nations Organization, such as Unesco and the Human Rights Council and the withdrawal of the Agreement of Paris on climate change.

Bolsonaro has excluded women and African-Americans from his work team, has vetoed the national press, said he will eliminate the Brazilian Ministry of Labor, a country where employment is lacking for more than 27 million people, has stated that will begin to conceive of social movements as internal enemies, as dangerous terrorists that will have to be fought with special laws. That is what the South American giant faces and with him, all of Latin America.

http://www.granma.cu/mundo/2018-11-11/b ... 8-18-11-18

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 14, 2018 12:25 pm

Hidden History: The US “War On Corruption” In Brasil
The story of how an overlooked Bush-era Foreign Policy edict led to Brazil's Coup of 2016 and its consolidation in the conviction of Former President Lula

“US involvement in Lava Jato is not relevant” argued a Brazilian commentator recently, recognising its self-evidence. This is a familiar sight; the great taboo of empire is breaking the fourth wall, winking to camera, and acknowledging its existence.

Like “Market forces”, US imperialism is considered by hegemonic media as elementary, as natural as the breeze, unnecessary background detail that we simply don’t need to question or discuss. This denial of empire is central to its persistence, and the accusation of “blaming the Yanqui for everything” is the dusty rhetorical device used by both US pundits and the comprador class across Latin America, to shut down any rational criticism of a status quo which has historically protected their privileges.

In recent years commentators have even tried to deny the extensively documented US role in Brazil’s Military Coup of 1964, or point to Dilma Rousseff’s own diplomatic remark that “we have enough coup plotters of our own” to shut down any discussion of the enormous geopolitical ramifications that surrounded Brazil’s Coup of 2016.

Despite public ignorance and its root in the media blindspot on this matter, US involvement in Brazil’s Anti-Corruption Operation Lava Jato, which has already resulted in $3bn payout to North American investors, is not some fringe theory, as some like to pretend – US Acting Attorney General Kenneth Blanco has publicly boasted about it himself:

“It is hard to imagine a better cooperative relationship in recent history than that of the United States Department of Justice and the Brazilian prosecutors. We have cooperated and substantially assisted one another on a number of public matters that have now been resolved, and are continuing to do so on a number of ongoing investigations.

The cooperation between the Department and Brazil has led to extraordinary results. In just the last year alone, for example, the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and the Brazilian Lava Jato task force have cooperated and coordinated resolutions in four FCPA cases: Embraer, Rolls Royce, Braskem, and Odebrecht. Odebrecht is particularly noteworthy due to its breadth and scope.

Indeed, just this past week, the prosecutors in Brazil won a guilty verdict against former President Lula da Silva, who was charged with receiving bribes from the engineering firm OAS in return for his help in winning contracts with the state oil company Petrobras. It is cases like this that put Brazil at the forefront of countries that are working to fight corruption, both at home and abroad.”

With the fall of its allied Washington consensus governments to the so called pink tide at the turn of the century, US primacy in the region was genuinely threatened for the first time in generations. Many lauded this as Bush Jr’s failure, and the United States “losing” the region permanently, as if assuming there would or could be no response. In answer to these defeats, parallel to the War on Terror in the Middle East and War on Drugs already present in the region, a new front, a “War on Corruption” opened up across the continent, becoming part of official foreign policy in 2002, just prior to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva taking the Brazilian Presidency at his fourth attempt. Around the same time, a new rebranded hemispheric agency would replace notorious “exporter of torture” the School of Americas with expanded scope, and was tasked with bringing the continent to heel via its own police forces and militaries.



Then in Government, Cuban-born cold warrior and Office of Public Diplomacy propagandist Otto Reich, with characteristic hubris, took credit for encouraging the new focus on corruption in Latin America, describing it in military terms as a “target rich environment”. It was embraced in Washington as a new method to force political-economic realignment and “win back” the continent, especially having seen David Rockefeller’s baby the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) brought down by an alliance of Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and Brazil’s Lula at the Mar del Plata conference in 2005. This was an escalation, and the US Government was, according to cables, fearful that the regional trade bloc, Mercosur, and its parallel military institution, Unasur, would be consolidated.

Lava Jato’s inquisitor judge Sérgio Moro’s first recorded visit to the United States was in 1998, on an exchange programme with Harvard University, to study anti money laundering practices in Brazil’s domineering hemispheric neighbour. That year the US stood accused of multi-faceted interference in Brazil, to guarantee the re-election of its favoured candidate, the pro-market former dependency theorist, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Currency crash, IMF bailout followed, and cut-price privatisations continued.

In 2004, following graduation from University of Paraná, Moro published the paper “Considerations of Mani Pulite”, his interpretative thesis on the 1990s Italian (with US-cooperation) anti-corruption probe which decimated Italy’s political order, in particular its centre-left, and paved the way for both political emergence of Silvio Berlusconi, the most corrupt leader in its history, and a wave of privatisations of its massive public sector nicknamed “the pillage of Italy“. Mani Pulite, in particular its use of the media to whip up public indignation in support of convictions, served as the prototype for Moro’s own operation Lava Jato, launched a decade after his paper. US officials’ open admission of involvement was all but ignored in Italy, as it has been in Brazil.

Also in 2004, the Mensalão scheme of cash for votes in Congress was being uncovered. It developed into a media scandal so great it almost gained traction enough to trigger the impeachment of then President Lula, despite originating under previous administrations. Lula was not charged, but it did result in prison for some of his closest party allies. A private spy agency, Kroll, which operates a revolving door with the CIA, was implicated in attempts to ensnare Lula when caught spying on communications of Government staff. In 2010 it was also exposed as a recruiter of Latin America based journalists to spy on behalf of Oil Giant Chevron, its client. It would, almost unbelievably, then go on to be given the contract for running the CPI (Parliamentary Inquiry) into state-controlled Oil company Petrobras, which would provide the seeds for Operation Lava Jato. Somewhat perversely, architect of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment Eduardo Cunha (whose prosecution was delayed until after Rousseff was gone) would later suggest using Kroll to shut down Lava Jato before it reached the coup plotters themselves. The company was more recently in the news after being hired by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein to smear his victims.

Following Lula’s re-election, in 2007 with the new US “War on Corruption” displacing clumsy attempts to spread its spurious War on Terror to Brazil, Moro would visit the US again, this time on an official State Department fellowship, the “International Visitor Leadership Program“, liasing with U.S. agencies and institutions responsible for combating money laundering.

Then, in 2009, Judge Moro appears in leaked State Department cables, speaking at a joint event with the US DOJ under the banner “Project Bridges” in Rio de Janeiro. Outlining an operation similar in configuration to the future Lava Jato – ostensibly set up to investigate illicit funding for terrorism – the event coordinators talked about creating a partnership between the Department of Justice and the Brazilian judiciary to investigate corruption. The cable talks about how task forces could be set up in cities such as Campo Grande or Curitiba, which they identify as having a strong fervour for action on corruption. Those cities are known for their conservatism and default opposition to then governing centre-left Worker’s Party. Curitba and Campo Grande are also amongst the most enduring power bases of de-facto heirs to the dictatorship Government, ARENA, now called “Democratas”, which despite a collapse in its vote between 2002 and 2014, is now in Temer’s Post-Coup coalition, and enjoying life in Government for the first time in almost 20 years.

Around the same time as the Rio de Janeiro conference in 2009, new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave an address to the Council of the Americas in New York, which now feels prescient. In her speech to the David Rockefeller-founded Wall Street lobby, a grinning Secretary Clinton promotes a theme that “the ballot box is not enough” in Latin America, and that “sustainable democracies do more than have elections”. While pointedly reaffirming her commitment to democratic “ideals”, she suggests a “independent, capable judiciary” and “vibrant civil society” are what is really needed in the region for its democracies to mature.



The speech is all the more remarkable coming off the back of US loss of influence in the hemisphere following electoral defeats of its favoured candidates, and that in the intervening decade since, the US Government has gone on to bet on the most powerful, unelected arm of government in Brazil – the Judiciary – which is predominantly white, male and conservative, and now nicknamed “The Dictatorship of the Toga”.

Clinton’s predecessor John D. Negroponte (Council of the Americas Chairman Emeritus), as outgoing Director of National Intelligence, identified “Democratisation in Latin America” as a primary threat to US National Security, alongside Chinese Military expansion and Iran’s Nuclear programme – on which Lula, along with Turkey’s Erdogan, later broke from UN security council’s shackles and negotiated a deal directly. Negroponte also lamented high oil prices as a gift to governments who do not support US interests. By this point, along with Mercosur, the worldwide multipolar bloc of China, Russia, India and Brazil, BRIC (later BRICS following addition of South Africa), was being consolidated as a direct challenge to US hegemony, in particular the continuing reliance on the US dollar. Brazil, along with Russia, Venezuela and Iran, would later, under Barack Obama’s administration, fall victim to Negroponte’s desired policy of encouraging low energy prices in order to throttle competitors’ Oil-dependent economies. US Presidents and their approach to public relations change, objectives do not. Between the mandated freeze of Lava Jato, those low energy prices, and change in law enabled by the removal of Dilma Rousseff, Petrobras, despite record production, lost its monopoly on Brazil’s massive offshore oil reserves which are being sold off for cents to foreign producers such as US Chevron & ExxonMobil, UK’s BP & Shell, and Norway’s Statoil, at an estimated loss of R$1 trillion – funds once earmarked by Dilma Rousseff for a revolution in public education & health investment, deemed Brazil’s “Passport to the future”.

As publicly available cables cease in mid-2010 we do not know what level of collusion there was between Moro and the United States Government in the intervening years prior to Lava Jato’s official inception in early 2014, but his endorsement or presence at think tanks featuring current and ex-USG personnel such as CFR, Wilson Center, AEI, AS/COA (Council of the Americas), and NATO adjunct Atlantic Council – which launched its own Latin America wing in 2013 – are at the least an indicator of continued collaboration, as is the level of unanimously positive international media coverage, unprecedented for any foreign judge, lawyer or legal operation (an often excruciating parade of grey men in suits which would otherwise generate no outside interest). Those organisations come complete with their own patronage networks of journalists, scholars, thought leaders and promoted commentariat.



Although she was never officially implicated beyond innuendo, Moro’s selective and accelerated pursuit of figures from her Workers Party supplied the essential media pretext for elected President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, only for her to be replaced by her actually proven corrupt PMDB vice, former US informant Michel Temer. We can see in leaked 2011 emails from “Shadow CIA”, Stratfor, that the wider intelligence community were already betting that Temer would take office during Rousseff’s first term, and become the “bulldog” they needed to push through their Wall Street-prescribed reforms – against the will of the Brazilian electorate. This desired outcome was finally delivered in 2016, with tacit support from the Obama Administration in the form of Clinton’s replacement Secretary of State John Kerry and 2009-13 US Ambassador to Brazil Tom Shannon, who by then had returned to State Dept Bureau of Hemispheric affairs, having taken a demotion for his tenure in Brazil. Shannon was replaced in Brazil by Liliana Ayalde, who is now at Southcom overseeing the rollout of US Military presence across the continent, having been earlier implicated in Paraguay’s 2012 Coup while serving as Ambassador there. Obama’s VP Joe Biden recently boasted of manipulating Ukraine’s Judiciary by blackmailing the Government into firing their Prosecutor General in late March 2016, a few weeks before the Congressional vote on Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment – now revealed to have had votes secured via bribes to congresspeople.

Even before the impeachment was officially concluded, accelerated privatisations, decimation of workers rights and overhaul of the pension system, all demanded by Wall Street, were hastily set in motion by the interim Government. Temer himself admitted in a speech to the Council of the Americas that the real reason for Dilma Rousseff’s removal was her refusal to implement the capital-friendly “Bridge to the future” policy platform, which brought with it a 20 year constitutionally protected freeze on investment health & education, tying the hands of any near-future social democratic government. Science and Technology funding was also slashed. In 2017, with Rousseff gone, Attorney General Janot addressed the economic elite at Davos, and eulogised Operation Lava Jato, which he described as “Pro-Market” – a clear political/ideological position that both its protagonists and ardent supporters insisted it did not have.

Whether by accident or design, Moro has helped change the course of Brazil’s political history already. His continued pursuit of former President Lula – the single politican popular enough to reverse what Temer has done – on a flimsy charge without material evidence, which has been admonished by Brazilian legal scholars and the international legal community alike, now threatens democracy further, with the clear 2018 front-runner facing a decade in jail, with a dangerous precedent set.

Whatever theoretical long-term advantages Lava Jato was supposed to bring, with Temer’s Brazil institutionally and morally adrift, Government decision making processes are increasingly captured with the unholy trinity of bribery, blackmail and violence.

Now imagine if you will that Moro was a Prosecutor-Judge (if such thing existed) from the United States and his training, fellowship and collaboration was with Russia. US media, and the that of the Anglosphere at large, would go into meltdown.

The emergence of more evidence is inevitable, but it can already be established on the basis of what is available that despite denial and obfuscation, Sérgio Moro has, in collaboration with various wings of the US Government and its expanded apparatus, aided the removal of an elected President, convicted a former President, and future candidate – all of the same party – and with that significantly contributed to a change in Brazil’s political direction, away from social democratic, mildly redistributive developmentalism, and towards discreet re-colonisation as authoritarian client state or neoliberal viceroyalty. This comes combined with a new US Military presence on Brazilian territory which was simply unthinkable just a few years ago.

While transnationals scramble for its riches, delivered to them by an entreguista elite whom in his seminal ‘Open Veins of Latin America‘ Eduardo Galeano christened the “commission-agent bourgeoisie”, ordinary Brazilians go about their daily business unaware that they are now akin to a population on the losing side of a kinetic war.

Post-coup recipient of military honours, Sérgio Moro is reportedly planning a move to the United States once the Lava Jato investigation is concluded.

http://www.brasilwire.com/dont-call-it-brazilgate/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 14, 2018 2:21 pm

Intensify militancy and reorganize the trade union and popular movement
November 13, 2018
ImageNational Coordination of Classroom Unit

Bolsonaro was elected, supported in a good part of the population and in sophisticated machines of ideological propaganda, mainly through the social networks. The next government, in partnership with the current one, takes its first steps towards fostering private ownership of the means of production, intensifying the exploitation of labor and convincing the people that the pillars of their policy are fundamental to improving working conditions and life of all.

Among the attacks to come, we can highlight: the counter-reform of social security, privatizations and outsourcing, ratification and deepening of the labor counter-reform, the abolition of the Ministry of Labor, the implementation of green and yellow wallet, criminalization of social movements and persecutions to the unions and parties of our class.

Since the coup de 64, the correlation of forces has never been so unfavorable to the workers: we pay the price of employer policies and the widespread class conciliation in social movements, unions and parties. Regrettably, the irreconcilable relationship between social classes has been relativized by who bureaucratically directs most of these instruments.

The alarming numbers of unemployment, the increasing informal profile of employees, the fall in the number of strikes when the class most needed to go to fight, and the vote of a large portion of the workers in a program contrary to their interests clearly demonstrate our disorganization and lack of perspectives .

Thus, it is urgent to intensify the struggles to reorganize the trade union and popular movement, to start a new cycle of struggles based on a program combining resistance to attacks and overcoming class society.

Therefore, we propose the immediate accomplishment of a National Meeting of the Working Class , with a view to accomplishing two fundamental tasks: a) to discuss and approve a common plan of resistance and struggle; b) to create a National Forum of Mobilization, bringing together all trade union and popular organizations willing to close ranks in defense of democratic freedoms, national sovereignty and social, political and labor rights.

* AVANTE, COMRADE! *

* CLASSIST UNIT, FUTURE SOCIALIST! *

Watch the video at: http: // unidadeclassista. org.br/uc1/3510

https://pcb.org.br/portal2/21377/intens ... e-popular/

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 14, 2018 4:48 pm

Declaration from the Ministry of Public Health
Jair Bolsonaro, president elect of Brazil, who has made direct, contemptuous and threatening comments against the presence of our doctors, has declared and reiterated that he will modify the terms and conditions of the More Doctors program , disregarding the Pan-American Health Organization

Author: ministerio salud publica | internet@granma.cu

november 14, 2018 11:11:05

The Ministry of Public Health of the Republic of Cuba, committed to the solidarity and humanist principles that have guided Cuba’s medical cooperation for 55 years, has been participating in Brazil’s “More Doctors” program since its inception in August of 2013. This initiative launched by Dilma Rousseff, who was at that time the president of the Federal Republic of Brazil, pursued the noble purpose of guaranteeing medical assistance to the majority of the Brazilian people, following the principle of universal health coverage promoted by the World Health Organization.

The program had planned the inclusion of Brazilian and foreign doctors who would work in poor and remote areas of the country.

Cuba’s participation in this program was arranged through the Pan-American Health Organization with one distinctive feature: it was intended to fill the vacancies left by doctors from Brazil and other foreign nations.

During these five years of work, some 20 000 Cuban collaborators have assisted 113,359,000 patients in more than 3,600 municipalities. They were able to provide health coverage to a vast 60 million Brazilians, when they accounted for 80% of all the doctors who were taking part in the program. More than 700 municipalities were able to have a doctor for the first time ever.

The work of Cuban doctors in areas of extreme poverty, in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Salvador de Bahia, and the 34 Special Indigenous Districts, particularly in Amazonia, was widely recognized by federal, state, and municipal governments of that country and its population, 95% of which expressed their acceptance, according to a survey carried out by the Federal University of Minas Gerais at the request of the Ministry of Health of Brazil.

On September 27, 2016, the Ministry of Public Health, in an official statement issued on a day close to the expiration date of the agreement and amidst the events associated to the legislative and judicial coup d’ etat against president Dilma Rousseff, announced that Cuba “would continue to honor its agreement with the Pan-American Health Organization for the implementation of the Program More Doctors, providedthat the guarantees offered by local authorities were maintained”, something that has been so far respected.

Jair Bolsonaro, president elect of Brazil, who has made direct, contemptuous and threatening comments against the presence of our doctors, has declared and reiterated that he will modify the terms and conditions of the Program More Doctors, in full disregard of the Pan-American Health Organization and the agreement reached by this organization with Cuba, since he has questioned the qualification of our doctors and has conditioned their permanence in the program to a process of validation of their titles and established that contracts will only be signed on an individual basis.

The announced modifications impose conditions that are unacceptable and fail to ensure the guarantees that had been previously agreed upon since the beginning of the Program, which were ratified in 2016 with the re-negotiation of the Terms of Cooperation between The Pan-American Health Organization and the Ministry of Health of Brazil and the Cooperation Agreement between the Pan-American Health Organization and the Ministry of Public Health of Cuba. These unacceptable conditions make it impossible to maintain the presence of Cuban professionals in the Program.

Consequently, in the light of this unfortunate reality, the Ministry of Public Health of Cuba has decided to discontinue its participation in the Program More Doctors and has informed so to the Director of the Pan-American Health Organization and the political leaders of Brazil who founded and defended this initiative.

The decision to bring into question the dignity, professionalism and altruism of Cuban cooperation workers who, with the support of their families, are currently offering their services in 67 countries is unacceptable. During the last 55 years, a total of 600 000 internationalist missions have been accomplished in 164 nations, with the participation of 400 000 health workers who, in quite a few cases, have fulfilled this honorable task more than once. Their feats in the struggle against the Ebola virus in Africa, blindness in Latin America and the Caribbean and cholera in Haiti as well as the participation of 26 brigades of the International Contingent of Doctors Specialized in Disaster Situations and Great Epidemics “Henry Reeve” in Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Venezuela, among other countries, are worthy of praise.

In the overwhelming majority of the missions that have been accomplished, all expenses have been covered by the Cuban government.

Likewise, 35 613 health professionals from 138 countries have been trained in Cuba at absolutely no cost as an expression of our solidarity and internationalist vocation.

All Cuban cooperation workers have preserved their posts and their full salary in Cuba, together with all due labor and social benefits, just as the rest of the workers of the National Health System.

The experience of the Program More Doctors for Brazil and Cuba’s participation in it show that it is indeed possible to structure a South-South Cooperation Program under the auspices of the Pan-American Health Organization in order to promote the achievement of its goals in our region. The United Nations Development Program and the World Health Organization have described it as the main example of good practices in triangular cooperation and the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals.

The peoples from Our America and from all over the world know that they will always be able to count on the solidarity and humanistic vocation of our professionals.

The Brazilian people, who turned the Program More Doctors into a social achievement and, from the very beginning,has trusted Cuban doctors, recognized their virtues and appreciated the respect, sensitivity and professionalism with which they have assisted them, will understand who are to be held responsible for our doctors’not being able to continue offering their fraternal contribution in that country.

Havana, November 14, 2018.

http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2018-11-14/dec ... lic-health

The 'Brazilian Trump', indeed. These guys are the cancerous wet shit of capitalism. Could be a trend...

Edit: On consideration it may be that Cuba needs to get it's people out of there in a hurry. I find the official explanation weak given the resulting action. This asshole has already talked about killing or exiling communists.
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 16, 2018 2:14 pm

222 days after political imprisonment, Lula speaks

With Bolsonaro’s new Justice Minister Sergio Moro claiming he was on vacation, Lula testified to a substitute judge in Curitiba on charges involving an allegedly illegal kitchen remodeling which took place after he left public office in a house that the courts do not claim he ever owned, located in a state outside of their jurisdiction. The former President said that he is being used as a trophy.

by Brian Mier

After 222 days in solitary confinement, barred from speaking to other prisoners or to the press, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was finally allowed to speak in public on November 14th, during a testimony in the Paraná 13th Criminal Court in Curitiba as part of the US Department of Justice-backed Lava Jato investigation, on accusations that he enabled illegal remodeling of a kitchen in a country house that he does not own, after he left public office. Lula, who led all polls for the presidency by a wide margin until his candidacy was barred one month before the election, resulting in victory for neofascist candidate Jair Boslonaro and his team of military advisers, announced to the courtroom and the video cameras that he feels like a trophy.

“Doctor, I only want to ask, for my own clarification,” he said, “am I the owner of this property or not? Because I am willing to answer all and any questions. Am I the owner of this property?” The answer was “no”.

US-backed judge Sergio Moro, who is both leading the investigation and ruling on it, pulled a stunt to avoid showing up, declaring that he was on vacation. Moro, who illegally wiretapped and leaked phone calls between Lula and President Dilma Rousseff and leaked previously discarded plea bargain testimony to the media damaging to Lula’s replacement candidate, Fernando Haddad, one week before the elections, recently shocked the international journalists who have treated him as an impartial judge by agreeing to serve as Justice Minister in the openly neofascist Bolsonaro government after condemning his leading election opponent with no material evidence.

With a crowd of hundreds of social movement and union activists standing in front of the court room in solidarity with a man who they say is a political prisoner, Lula was finally allowed to speak in public. During a testimony that lasted several hours, during which substitute judge Gabriela Hardt only let him speak 40% of the time, he continually expressed his frustration with a case that, technically speaking, does not even fall within the geographical jurisdiction of the Curitiba court system. In the subtitled, linked video filmed during the testimony, Lula complains that he is being used as a trophy.



“I get really, really upset with the lies that were made about me in the power point presentation,” he said. “I get very irritated. I don’t know if I will live long enough for the truth to come out because I am 73, and nature is unforgiving when it comes for us. I ask God that at some moment in the history of this country the truth come out about what happened in the Lava Jato investigation, which could have been something done correctly to capture thieves, arrest corrupt people, and it went off track – in my case, I am talking about my case – and so I hope that we can prove this. I am not involved in any issue that should cause me to be here today. I thought I was here because of the vacation property, but I guess I’m not, the property isn’t mine but I am here because of a reform that was made on a property that isn’t mine. I shouldn’t be here because of the apartment in Guarujá, but they invented an offshore company in Parana and used it to summon me here, then they disconnected Petrobras [Petroleum company] from the case, but I stayed here.. And so on. And you see there is an obsession and I consider myself to be – you know what, your honor- a trophy. I was the trophy that Lava Jato had to deliver. I don’t know why they don’t like me, but it was a trophy that they had to deliver. I saw so many journalists say, over and over, “if they don’t arrest Lula it’s no good, if he doesn’t go to jail its no good, they have to arrest Lula”. I told judge Moro I’m sorry but from what has happened so far, for everything that was set up, you wouldn’t have had any alternative but to condemn me.”

http://www.brasilwire.com/222-days-afte ... la-speaks/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Tue Nov 27, 2018 6:34 pm

Chile-Brazil: A New Laboratory For The Far-Right

The Neoliberal model implemented in Chile after the 1973 Military Coup gives us hints as to what will happen in Brazil under a future Jair Bolsonaro Government. The resemblance is no mere coincidence.

By Joana Salém Vasconcelos and Rejane Carolina Hoeveler.

Still shocked by the electoral results in Brazil, many Brazilians are asking how an avalanche of votes for Jair Bolsonaro and General Hamilton Mourão took place and what exactly will happen when a right wing extremist government takes over. We are still a long way off from answering this, but the connections between Bolsonaro’s main economic guru, Paulo Guedes, and the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), give us important leads about the underlying plans.

Until recently, Paulo Roberto Nunes Guedes (69) was relatively unknown to the Brazilian public. Although he was a columnist for Epoca magazine and O Globo newspaper and founder of the Millenium Institute, the economist spent decades isolated from the mainstream, rejecting all of Brazil’s economic plans for the last 35 years, from those of President José Sarney to Dilma Rousseff. Reading some of his articles it becomes clear why. Guedes shows an aversion to the social contract guaranteed in the 1988 Constitution, which he interprets as an obstacle to his political project. For him, Brazil suffered from an “interventionist curse” which has blocked the “irreversible evolutionary process (…) towards a great open society.”

On May Day, 2017, Guedes wrote, “the right wing hegemony governed for two decades and the left wing hegemony governed for three, both with a disastrous, interventionist economic model.” In his mind, the 30 years of democratic Brazil, from Fernando Collor to Itamar Franco, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula and Dlima all comprised part of the same hegemonic left. Looking at this tabula rasa, it’s not hard to understand his political preferences. The social rights system guaranteed in the 1988 Constitution may have has survived to the present day, at least on paper, but Guedes is part of the group that wants to exterminate it by capitalizing on the authoritarian wave of Jair Bolsonaro. This implies a radicalization and destruction of the democratic contract. But how will he try to do it?

From Chicago to Chile

Guedes got his PhD in Economics from University of Chicago, a center of Austrian-American neoliberalism dominated by figures like Milton Friedman, in 1978. As Friedman says in his book Freedom of Choice, it was a time in which his “apostles” were “wandering in the desert”. Forged in Chicago, Guedes economically-extremist vision has not caught on in Brazil until now. But the contrary happened in Chile. The first laboratory of the Shock Doctrine, as Naomi Klein designated the process, resulted from the Freidman-Pinochet alliance. It was there that the brothers in faith from Chicago found perfect partners for their economic plans after September 11, 1973: Chilean militarism and fascism promised, at the same time, repression and “innovation”.

The inspiration for Guedes’ recent proposals for pension and education reform come from the Pinochet dictatorship, tied to the idea of a “subsidiary state.” Antithetical in many ways to the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, the Chilean Constitution of 1980 was imposed by the Dictatorship and preserved to this day. Contrary to the idea of State as guarantor of rights, the subsidiary Chilean State was relieved of the responsibility for promoting welfare to its citizens and converted into a financier for market expansion. This has taken place through massive transfers of public resources to the private sector while generating a perverse public debt.

In Chicago, Guedes earned his doctorate with a 63 page, typewritten dissertation. His work, according to Folha de São Paulo newspaper, “was never published and had no repercussions in Brazil,” which caused him to resent his more successful colleagues. This bitterness became public recently, when he called his ex-student, economist Elena Landau, “mediocre”, alleging that he had flunked her during her Master’s degree work at PUC University in Rio. Elena Landau, 9 years younger than Guedes, was one of the most important economists in Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s privatizations, coordinating the sale of Electrobras state energy company for the National Destatization Council during the 1990s. With her transcripts in hand, Landau disproved his claim, saying, “It’s Paulo who was a poor professor. He missed classes and didn’t correct papers.”

Professor Paulo Guedes entered the University of Chile in a suspicious manner during the 1980s, during the height of the dictatorship, after a broad purge of critical intellectuals. As Federico Fullgraf writes, the Chilean dictatorship viewed the universities as one of the main “theaters of war”, a territory to be retaken from the “Marxist enemy”. In the place of critics, professors were hired who were aligned with the only school of thought that the military supported in academia. Milton Friedman and his allies had been attracting Chilean economists to Chicago since the 1950s, working to reinsert them into academic positions in the country’s main universities. However it was only with Pinochet that the Chicago Boys political experiment consolidated. Guedes was part of this movement, along with his colleague, the Chilean businessman Jorge Constantino Demetrio Selume Zaror (67). In returning from Chicago, where he first med Guedes, Selume also joined the economic cathedral of the University of Chile. In a few years he became Pinochet’s director of budgets and oversaw privatizations of state companies such as Chliectra and Entel. At the same time, he built a financial empire which included banks and real estate. Among them, Rupanco, a 47,000 hectare farm which had been redistributed to the workers during the Salvador Allende government, but that was appropriated by the military in 1979 and given to the El Cabildo S.A. company, which was later taken over by the Selume family. According to Fullgraf, “ Selume is a kind of unofficial spokesman of the hard line Pinochet supporters in the private sector.

It was in this manner, taking over the position of a professor who was arbitrarily fired by the dictators, that Guedes left his part-time teaching jobs at PUC-Rio, IMPA and FGV-Rio, in exchange for, according to him, a “too good to refuse” salary of $10,000/month. When asked about his ties to the Chilean dictatorship, however, he changes the subject to his supposed academic qualifications and tells a story of how he was once inspected by Pinochet’s political police.

Private retirement pensions and the shock of poverty

During the years in which Guedes lived in Chile, José Pinera, the most powerful Chicago Boy and brother of current Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, completely privatized the retirement system through a decree issued by Dictator Pinochet on November 13, 1980. In this system, formed today by an oligopoly of six private pension funds, wage earners are required to deliver 10% of their salaries for capitalist speculation with no counterpart from the employer. Currently, after 30 years of contribution, 90% of Chilean retirees receive pension checks worth less than half of the national minimum wage of 154,000 Pesos (approximately $220). Symptomatically, the pension system privatization does not apply to members of the military.

Driven by the same kind of pro-capitalization rhetoric that paved the way for Michel Temer’s failed pension reform efforts in 2017, the Chilean pension system represents the appropriation of more than 10 million worker’s retirement funds. Today, five of the six existing pension funds manage 69.6% of the country’s GDP and 94.6% of its social security contributions, having accumulated profits of $ 1.5 million a day in 2017, according to the Sol Foundation.

The collection system is based on individualism, not solidarity, because each worker depends exclusively on himself to increase the value of his pension. Furthermore, pensioners are susceptible to market volatility, trapped in the pension fund managers’ mathematical models. During recent years, the retirement pension crisis has led to dramatic increases in suicides of Chilean seniors: nearly 1000 in 5 years. Since 2016, popular anger against the privatized retirement system has caused gigantic street protests, led by the #No+AFP movement.

In Brazil, the project that would accelerate the deterioration of public welfare was rejected by the population in 2017. But popular resistance was only one of the factors that blocked the Temer government from approving the project, as it was also bogged down in the costly bribery dynamics of a system of corrupt political parties. It is worth noting here that Paulo Guedes is under investigation on the federal police’s Operation Greenfields, which is investigating fraud in management of private pension funds that generated R$6 billion in profit between 2009 -2013. There is also evidence of money laundering by the HSM Educational SA company, which paid Guedes millions of reais in speaking fees.

Guedes privatization crusade finds itself confronted by resistance on the streets on the one hand, and on the other, by a governmental machine which wants a piece of the spoils. This is why he seems be thinking of the Pinochet era when he calls for a shock of capitalism that can only be imposed through militaristic force, all for his own benefit.

Pinochetista clans and big data

The Millennium Institute has an ideological sister organization in Santiago with much more influence over its nation‘s politics: The Liberty and Development Institute, a private organization run as a company which was founded in 1990 in the luxurious neighborhood of Las Condes. Organized by business leaders and high level cabinet ministers from the Pinochet administration like Hernán Buchi, Carlos F. Cáceres, Cristián Larroulet and Luis Larrain Arroyo, the institute is recognized for working as a revolving door for business executives from major corporations to enter the government and consolidate their company’s market positions from inside the state apparatus.

This organization provided ten important members of the government of President Sebastian Pineira, who recently said, “on the economic front, Bolsonaro is heading in the right direction.” It is not only the Pineira family, however, who view the emergence of Bolsonaro positively. His right wing extremist competitor from the 2017 Chilean presidential elections, José Antonio Kast, is the Chilean politician most invested in a partnership. The businessman of German descent was the fourth most popular presidential candidate last year, with 523,000 votes. On October 18th, Kast traveled to Rio de Janeiro to meet with Bolsonaro. Afterwards, he published a photo smiling next to the captain in his social media accounts. “Today we met with Jair Messias Bolsonaro and wished him luck in the election. We gave him a Chile jersey so that we can continue strengthening the relationship between both countries and, together, build an alliance that can definitively defeat the left in Latin America,” he said.

In addition to both being admirers of Pinochet, Kast and Bolsonaro rely on a political strategy based on clans. Senator Felipe Kast, nephew of José Antonio Kast, ran for office as part of the coalition which elected Pinera, and was his planning minister in his previous government. During the primaries, Felipe Kas was supported by Jorge Selume Aguirre, the son of the businessman who studied with Guedes – a 37 year old psychologist who was recently nominated as Pinera’s Communications Secretary. Selume Jr.’s resume features a diploma from Adrés Bello University (part of the Laureate, for profit university multinational, directed by his father), and years of work at Cambridge Analytica. Not less important is the fact that young Selume is the owner of Artool, the largest Chilean big data company.

If there are signs that the Jair Bolsonaro campaign in Brazil could have been strengthened – as was the case of Donald Trump in the US – with the theft of millions of people’s personal data from the social media networks, among them WhatsApp, and the dissemination of fake news on a previously unseen scale, the Chilean far-right has all of the tools to do it.

A revolving door with private education

The narrow circle of Brazilian and Chilean right wing extremists closes with the Arab businessman Jorge Selume, father of Pinera’s recently nominated communications secretary. As previously mentioned, Selume was Guedes’ classmate in Chicago during the 1970s. During the 1980s, he built an economic empire from the largest financial operation ever to take place in Chile at the time. Together with Laz Diez Mesquitas, a consortium of Arab-owned companies, he bought Banco Osorno and sold it to Santander in 1985 for 495 million dollars. At the same time he served as Pinochet’s Budget Director.

Today it is more and more clear that education and culture are priority frontiers for the expansion of neo-pinochetista business negotiations. Jorge Selume Jr. created a powerful communications and political marketing machine with Artool and spurred the election of 46 mayors from the Partido Renovacion Nacional in 2016, using Cambridge Analytica techniques. Furthermore, Banco de Chile and Banco Santander, which together hold at least half of the national population’s bank accounts, are among Artool’s top clients.

Meanwhile, Jorge Selume, the father, has been investing in education for years and is now one of the most influential executives in the for-profit education multinational Laureate, which is being investigated for fraud in the private university accreditation system. In Brazil, Laureate has prioritized distance learning. It is no coincidence that Paulo Guedes defends a “shock of digital inclusion in grammar school,” Bolsonaro has been talking about distance learning for children and the name of Stravos Xanthopoylos, international relations director for the Brazilian Association of Distance Learning, has been cited for Education Minister in the future right wing extremist government- if the ministry will even continue to exist.

What is in store for us?

During his first interview with the international press after his connection with Jair Bolsonaro became public in November, 2017, Guedes said, “the last 30 years have been a disaster – we corrupted democracy and stagnated the economy (…) We should have done what the Chicago Boys defended.”

When asked why he would associate with known defender of the Brazilian military dictatorship, during an event organized by the Credit Suisse bank in São Paulo, Guedes classified this type of question as “patrolling”. In talking about his long conversations with Bolsonaro, he repeated one of his favorite catchphrases, playing on the words on the Brazilian flag: “who knows if order isn’t speaking with progress?”

It is not hard to decipher the message between the lines. The first time that Latin America witnessed an organic union between the military and the Chicago Boys in a government was in 1973 in Chile, a chapter of history written in buckets of blood. All that is left for Brazilians is to find out what kind of situation this dangerous association will lead to.

This article was originally published in LeMonde Diplomatique Brasil, was translated by Brian Mier and can be seen in its original form here.

http://www.brasilwire.com/chile-brazil- ... far-right/

"Chile-Brazil: A New Laboratory Capitalism" there, fixed. Gotta watch these guys.
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 30, 2018 4:26 pm

Brazilian president-elect's son to pass laws against opposition groups

Image

Brasilia, November 15 (RHC)-- In Brasilia, listing the bills he will submit as a lawmaker, the son of Brazil’s President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, Eduardo, said he will not hesitate to criminalize social movements like the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) and ban opposition political parties “if necessary.”

“What’s going on now is that groups such as the Landless Workers' Movement sometimes use their criminal power in order to invade lands, set tractors on fire in order to force the ranchers to sell their lands below market price," the far-right lawmaker said in an interview with the daily Estadao. "They impose terror in order to obtain benefits. This is what people are trying to fight against."

Denying the realities of thousands of campesinos struggling to survive in one of the most unequal countries in terms of land distribution, Bolsonaro insisted his job in Congress will consist in "making their lives harder."

“If arresting 100,000 people was a necessity, what is wrong with that? Rather I find it problematic to be leaving a hundred thousand people with this kind of stance, believing that land invasion is normal, feeling they are free to commit such crimes. This is my main fear. I want to make life harder for these people,” he said.

He also expressed his intention to create a right-wing version of Sao Paolo Forum named the San Pablo Forum inviting Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon.

“One of the legislators’ roles consists in raising awareness among people. They have unusual duties. And they have to use their position as representatives of a part of society to speak out on the dangers of Communism, just like prostate cancer.”

He added that he was in favor of a foreign intervention in Venezuela because “on top of Communism, there is also Hezbollah and drug trafficking.”

Eduardo's father was elected president despite being an open supporter of Brazil's dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, which was responsible for arbitrary arrests, torture, murder and forced disappearances.

As a legislator, Bolsonaro dedicated his vote in favor of impeaching democratically-elected president Dilma Rousseff to dictatorship-era Colonel Carlos Brilhante, "the terror of Dilma Rousseff." Brilhante was convicted of torture and ran the detention center where Dilma was tortured in her youth.

Brazil's new president also said the dictatorship's mistake was to torture people and not kill them, and has spoken against LGBTI groups, women and Afro-Brazilians.

http://www.radiohc.cu/en/noticias/inter ... ion-groups
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sun Dec 09, 2018 6:04 pm

2 MST Leaders Gunned Down in Paraiba

Violence against social movements expected to increase across Brazil before Bolsonaro takes office

On the night of Saturday (12/8), two activists from the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) were assassinated inside the Dom José Maria Pires agrarian reform camp, in Alhandra County, Paraiba, around 45 km from João Pessoa. Witnesses say that the criminals entered the camp wearing masks and riddled the area where the farmers were eating dinner with machine gun fire. The victims are Rodrigo Celestino and José “Orlando” Bernardo da Silva, both camp coordinators, which suggests that the crime was committed to intimidate people engaged in the struggle for land rights. 450 families live in the Dom José Maria Pires camp, where they are exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to farm on land that was abandoned and not being used productively when they settled on it. The official owner of the property is the Santa Tereza business group.

Orlando’s wake will take place in the Nossa Senhora de Aparecida Chapel in the Zumbi dos Palmares agrarian reform settlement in Mari, Paraiba, at 2 PM this Sunday. The MST Paraiba directorate is inviting activists and friends to come to the wake and participate in a big demonstration in homage of comrade Orlando. Rodrigo Celestino will be buried in João Pessoa in a ceremony with friends and family. Orlando was the brother of Odilon da Silva, who was also assassinated, 9 years ago in Paraiba. Odilon was a member of the Movement of People Effected by Dams (MAB), which issued a letter of solidarity with the MST today. Other organizations, like the Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG), have manifested their solidarity and are demanding justice in yet another crime against social movement members in the Brazilian countryside. PT President, Senator Gleisi Hoffmann, issued a statement today saying that the assassination of the social movement leaders is a serious crime. “The execution of two comrades from the MST in Paraiba is very grave. Violence against social movement leaders is expected to increase across Brazil, even before Bolsonaro takes office,” she said, adding that she has contacted the Paraiba governor and will come to the wake this Sunday.

The MST issued a statement demanding justice and punishment for the culprits for assassinating rural workers. “In these times of anguish and of doubts about the future of Brazil, we cannot let those who have political and economic power control our destiny. Therefore, we continue reaffirming our struggle in defense of land as the central issue to guarantee dignity to the workers of the city and the countryside,” it says.

http://www.brasilwire.com/2-mst-leaders ... n-paraiba/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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