By BRASILWIRE June 7, 2022
Bradesco Bank, and its Bolsonaro-supporting CEO, face backlash over his video praising the military on the eve of a coup-threatened election. It is the latest signal that international capital will back Bolsonaro and the military-political project he fronts, as it did in 2018.
Last year an economist from Santander provoked anger when, in an internal document circulated around the company and its partners, he proposed a “new coup” to prevent former president Lula da Silva returning to office at the forthcoming elections.
Now, Banco Bradesco, and its CEO, Octavio de Lazari Junior, have given the latest sign that it is backing neofascist Bolsonaro, as they did in 2018.
Both banks are members of State Department and CIA-linked corporate lobby, Council of the Americas. Santander’s head of corporate & investment banking Marco Antonio Achón is a director on the Council of the Americas board.
A video of the Bradesco President praising the Armed Forces has circulated on social media, in which de Lazari talks about his own time in the Army, in 1982. It features Bradesco official branding and appears institutional.
“I am the CEO of Banco Bradesco, where I have worked for 43 years. But four decades ago, I presented myself like this: Soldier 939 Lazari, at your command”, de Lazari tells viewers, explaining that military life taught him his principles.
“These principles, which were consolidated over the years, were fundamental for me to build my career, here at Bradesco and in the market, but also to shape my character”, the Banker explains.
Following a backlash, Bradesco insisted that that the video was personal. In a message sent to friends on social media, de Lazari says that the video was for internal use only, made at the request of the commander of the battalion in which he served, and for a visit to the Quitaúna barracks, in Osasco São Paulo, where it was intended to “motivate recruits”.
“Robust democracy”
Weeks earlier in Davos, Switzerland, for World Economic Forum, Bradesco’s two main directors, Chairman Luiz Carlos Trabuco and de Lazari Junior, played down coup threats by Jair Bolsonaro, and described Brazil’s democracy as “robust”, echoing language the U.S. government has recently re-adopted, after earlier warnings about the election. Despite those threats, United States President Joe Biden invited Jair Bolsonaro for bilateral talks during the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.
“We have a robust democracy and the recognition of a judicial system that works. The context of Brazil as a country is being – and will be even more so – a very safe harbor for the flow of international capital,” Trabuco told Estadão newspaper when asked about Bolsonaro’s brazen threats to the October elections, which he is on course to lose.
De Lazari Junior, one of the biggest supporters of Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, said that he had spoken with big hitters of international capital, such as Philipp Hildebrand, vice-president of the board of the BlackRock hedge fund, and that “their feeling is that the Brazil has a consolidated democracy”.
“There may even be a fiercer discussion on one side or the other, but democracy is consolidated and we are not taking any risks in relation to that. The election will be fierce, but I believe that what was built is preserved and we will not have this type of problem.” de Lazari insisted, in the face of widespread threats to the democratic process from his own preferred candidate, Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro came to power through the intervention of the Military in the judiciary, and the subsequent jailing of election frontrunner Lula da Silva, who then, as now led polls by 20%. Generals were assured that Lula would not be released before the election, and thus that their candidate, ex Army Captain Bolsonaro, would have a clear shot at the presidency. Lula’s jailer, disgraced formed judge Sergio Moro, was awarded multiple military honours for his lawfare assault on the Workers Party.
De Lazari also talked of the need for more privatizations, while Trabuco, responding to question on Bolsonaro/Guedes Education policy that “human capital retraining” is needed to serve the financial system. With re-election unlikely, Bolsonaro has sought international capital’s support by embarking on an effort to fast track privatisation of state control oil and energy giants Petrobras and Eletrobras.
Bolsonaro and his economy minister Paulo Guedes have been highly profitable for Brazil’s banks. In their first year of government, Bradesco’s profits leapt 13.8%. In the third quarter of 2021, Bradesco, Santander and Banco Itaú saw a 29% annual increase in profits.
“Coup Talk”
Bolsonaro opponents see the de Lazari video as approximation between Bradesco and the far-right, military-dominated government. National coordinator of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), João Paulo Rodrigues, called it a “promiscuous alliance” between the bank and the military.
“We were surprised. On the eve of an election, the president of Bradesco advertising the Armed Forces, especially the Army, which had behaved ridiculously in the pandemic, in addition to being unnecessary, is to create the idea that banks, as well as the army, want to participate in the electoral process. It is a promiscuous alliance that constrains democracy. On the eve of an election, it smells like coup talk. I hope history tells us different” – Rodrigues told Blog do Noblat.
https://www.brasilwire.com/bradesco-ban ... -military/
Brazil’s Coup May Come After Lula Takes Office
By MARCELO ZERO July 26, 2022
In 2023, the bolsonarista horde, kept mobilized by the discourse of electoral fraud, may return to the streets demanding the deposition of the new “illegitimately elected” president.
By Marcelo Zero
Bolsnonaro has been following a well known script, inherited from Steve Bannon, to try to stay in power. He is attacking the electoral system, “denouncing” in advance, without any type of proof, that there will be election fraud. He is also slandering leaders of the judiciary in an attempt to show that they have ties to “terrorism” and have a “secret communist agenda”.
In the bolsonaristas toxic bubble, disconnected from reality, these pseudo-accusations ring deep and keep the horde motivated for unrestrained hatred.They are being primed – well in advance – for an assault on democracy.
This script has two obvious potential outcomes:
1- Refusal to hold elections, under the excuse they are impossible to hold fairly; and
2- Contesting the results of the election with no proof, based only on complaints from bolsonarista voters, which could result in a new version of the US January 6 assault on the Capitol.
However, there is a third possible outcome. This would involve preventing Lula from governing and promoting a coup to remove him after his inauguration as happened with Dilma Rousseff just one year after her reelection. From the ground, this seems like the most likely outcome.
Lula will have to govern in difficult circumstances and in a context of high expectations. The country is destroyed and nearly all the social, economic, political and cultural advances achieved during years of Workers Party governance have been reversed. From 2016 forwards, there haven’t just been 7 lost years, but deep setbacks which will require great effort to repair. Furthermore, the international scenario is conflictive and restrictive due to the economic crisis – now fueled by the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia – which is harming the world’s poorest populations. This creates a delicate and unstable political framework, conducive to coup attempts.
Another factor is the lack of real commitment to democracy by vast sectors of the so-called traditional right. Now disguised as supporters of a “third path”, these sectors actively participated in the 2016 coup and could, given favorable circumstances, easily promote a new coup as long as it is, once again, cloaked in an a veneer of legality.
In order to try to improve the quality of life of the poor a future Lula government will have to promote a progressive tax reform which will certainly displease Brazil’s oligarchies. Another source of great friction with elites is a possible full or partial reversal of the deeply neoliberal 2017 labor reforms, which failed to generate new jobs while deeply exacerbating labor insecurity.
Policies aimed at protecting the environment will displease the most backward sectors of agribusiness. Furthermore policies designed to protect the so-called minorities will certainly encounter resistance in the vast sectors of our population currently dominated by medieval reactionism.
In these circumstances the bolsonarista horde, kept mobilized by the discourse of electoral fraud, may return to the streets demanding the deposition of the new “illegitimately elected” president. The spark of the discovery of a new case of alleged “corruption” will be enough for a great political fire to be ignited. This fire could return bolsonarista neofascism to power.
Therefore, the commitment to democracy cannot not end with the holding of elections and the inauguration of a new elected president. It is essential that such a commitment also extends to ensure that the freely-chosen new administration can govern and to guarantee that a new president can finish his term without major setbacks.
Lula is the great hope of Brazilian democracy. No other ruler has contributed so much to strengthening our democratic process. After all, there is no great solid and advanced democracy without income distribution, without social inclusion and without the full enjoyment of not only political and civil rights, but also social and economic rights. However, this hope needs to be channeled into actions and policies that can change the sad reality of a destroyed, divided and profoundly unequal country that is once again suffering from hunger.
The fascist beast of bolsonarismo will always be on the prowl. Lula and the aligned democratic and progressive forces will need to govern for a long time to disarm all the traps against democracy and put Brazilian neo-fascism where it belongs: in the garbage can of history.
https://www.brasilwire.com/brazils-coup ... es-office/
Greenwald Book’s Curious Blindspot for US Involvement In Brazil
By SEAN T. MITCHELL May 17, 2022
Brazil-based lawyer turned journalist Glenn Greenwald made his name in 2013 with exposures of US spying on the world, including the then government of Dilma Rousseff. Despite regular critiques of US imperialism elsewhere in the world, since 2015 he has published little or nothing on his government’s involvement in Brazil, and his latest book puzzlingly omits documented, openly admitted US participation in Operation Lava Jato, the disgraced bilateral lawfare operation which jailed Lula and brought Bolsonaro to power.
With Bolsonaro now running against Lula for re-election, the United States government has moved to distance itself from any anti-democratic actions which threaten the October vote, making scrutiny of its involvement over the past decade all the more important. – Editors
Review: Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, by Glenn Greenwald. 2021. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
By Sean T. Mitchell. Originally published at FAIR.
Glenn Greenwald’s book, Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, opens with his recollection of a conversation in which Carl Bernstein, the US journalist of Watergate fame, told him that he’d never get another scoop as “big or impactful” as the Snowden archive (p. viii), for which Greenwald was the principal journalistic source.
Not so. On Mother’s Day 2019, just a few months into the administration of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, Greenwald, the US-born, Rio de Janeiro–based journalist (and endless source of Twitter controversy), would receive his second “once-in-a-lifetime scoop” (p. vii). The scoop arrived from a source who had hacked a massive archive of leaks that would go on to transform Brazilian politics. The archive contained years of conversation on the Telegram app by the key prosecutors and judge of the Brazilian “anti-corruption” task force known as Lava Jato (Portuguese for “Car Wash”). Securing Democracy tells the story of the reporting on those leaks by Greenwald and his colleagues at the Intercept.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of all this for Brazil. While the massive, multi-year Lava Jato investigation was receiving rapturous praise in Brazilian and foreign media (FAIR.org, 3/8/21), it was releasing illegally obtained and misleading wiretaps to the media that created the conditions for the soft coup that unseated President Dilma Rousseff of the PT (Workers’ Party) in 2016. And then Lava Jato put the PT’s 2018 presidential frontrunner, former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, behind bars, securing Bolsonaro’s election. The work done by Greenwald and his colleagues (and, later, by Lula’s defense team, once they got the archive) showed all this to be deliberate and farcical: Lava Jato was operating illegally with a key goal of destroying the electorally successful left.
Explosive revelations
Working in secrecy, Greenwald and his colleagues simultaneously released three articles at the Intercept in June 2019, all based on those Telegram conversations. Cleverly named “Vaza Jato” (vaza means “leak” in Portuguese), the series in its first installments showed that Sergio Moro, the key judge involved in Lava Jato (who by then was Bolsonaro’s security minister), had been acting unlawfully as “clandestine chief of the prosecution” (p. xiv).
Those early releases also showed that, despite their denials, the “task-force members openly plotted how to use their prosecutorial powers to prevent Lula’s Workers’ Party from winning the 2018 election” (p. xv). And they showed that the task force brought criminal charges against Lula despite “an absence of evidence…secure in the knowledge that Moro would be the one adjudicating the charges” (p. xv).
Over the coming months, the explosive revelations kept on coming, released by the Intercept Brasil and a variety of Brazilian journalistic partners. To name just a few sordid examples discussed in Securing Democracy: Moro instructed the task force to protect Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former center-right president, because he was “an important political ally”; the task force mocked the death of Lula’s seven-year-old grandson; and they “conspired to conceal information from the Supreme Court” (pp. 158-159).
The work that Greenwald recounts in Securing Democracy leaves no reasonable doubt about the corrupt and politicized character of the “anti-corruption” operation that took down the left and brought the far-right to power in Brazil through extra-democratic means. The book also offers harrowing accounts of the dangers and threats (both legalistic and violent) that Greenwald and his collaborators faced from Bolsonaro’s government and followers for their journalistic work.
For all this, the book is well worth reading, and provides a fundamental service to democracy and freedom of the press in Brazil and globally. But the omissions in the book about the sources that Greenwald utilized are also telling and important.
The missing US connection
As Brian Mier (Brasilwire, 2/18/21) noted, the Intercept and its partners had already published 95 articles based on the Vaza Jato archive, over the course of nine months, before releasing the first article examining the frequent appearance of US government officials in that archive. This, and the series of articles that followed, “The FBI and Lava Jato,” would go on to win Brazil’s Vladimir Herzog Prize. Greenwald’s earlier Vaza Jato reporting had also won this prize, and he refers to it in Securing Democracy as “the most prestigious and meaningful prize a journalist can receive in Brazil” (p. 222), although Securing Democracy does not mention this second Vladimir Herzog Prize.
Intercept Brasil (3/12/20): “Lava Jato did everything to help American justice—including circumventing the Brazilian government.”
This second award-winning part of the larger Vaza Jato series examines how the United States government collaborated with Lava Jato at all phases of its existence, often in secrecy, and under both Obama and Trump administrations. These facts have received criticism from major scholars and political figures, yet not from Greenwald. The first article examining US involvement was released by the Intercept Brasil (3/12/20), drawing on Greenwald’s archive, but only after Greenwald had stopped publishing articles based on that archive. Greenwald does not examine the US role in Lava Jato in Securing Democracy.
Greenwald and his colleagues had shared sections of the archive with some of Brazil’s major journalistic outlets, such as Folha de São Paulo and Veja, both because of the assistance they could offer and to help provide a shield against persecution by Bolsonaro’s government (p. 150). The Intercept reported on the involvement of the United States in Lava Jato, however, with the partnership of a smaller outlet, Agência Pública.
In July 2019, Brazil’s Federal Police apprehended Walter Delgatti Neto, the hacker who had accessed the Telegram archive and contacted Greenwald. Delgatti currently faces the possibility of a lifelong prison sentence. Brazil’s supreme court released parts of the archive to Lula’s defense team in 2021, and the entire archive in January 2022.
It’s from this later examination of Delgatti’s archive that we know that Lava Jato’s chief prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, referred to Lula’s arrest as a “gift from the CIA” (Progressive International, 12/2/21), a fact that was published after the release of Securing Democracy. It is worth noting that Bolsonaro and Moro, the Lava Jato judge–turned–security minister, made an unusual visit to CIA headquarters during Bolsonaro’s first presidential trip to the US.
‘Born in the Department of Justice’
I read Securing Democracy with deepening surprise at the lack of analysis of US involvement in Lava Jato. I read the book carefully, and have done searches on the e-book since, worried I had missed something. It’s not there.
Its absence is especially surprising because Greenwald has long been a critic of US foreign policy; because the first bit of the archive that Greenwald examined involved the US Department of Justice (p. 58), although Greenwald does not follow up on this; and because US involvement received passing mention at the very start of the Vaza Jato series.
The Telegram transcripts published in the first Vaza Jato release by Greenwald and his colleagues at the Intercept (6/12/19) included a 2016 comment that Lava Jato’s chief prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, made to Moro about something that “depends on articulation with the Americans.” It is not precisely clear from the context what the comment means, although Moro and Dallagnol were discussing the prosecution of Lula and other figures. This first appearance of the US at the start of Vaza Jato received analysis at the time in Portuguese (Revista Forum, 6/13/19) and in English (Brasilwire, 6/13/19), but Greenwald never followed up on the thread.
In Vaza Jato releases that came after Greenwald’s involvement with the series, but before the publication of Securing Democracy, his colleagues show that US investigators from the Department of Justice and FBI met frequently with Lava Jato prosecutors (Intercept, 3/12/20). This team, which at times included at least 17 agents, met with Lava Jato prosecutors in Brazil for several years (Agência Pública, 7/1/20), and worked on cases including the investigation that removed Lula from the 2018 presidential elections (Agência Pública, 2/12/21). These US investigators were working in Brazil without the authorization of the country’s minister of justice, which is required by treaty to oversee foreign law enforcement in Brazil (Intercept, 3/12/20).
Prior to Vaza Jato, there had been some knowledge of and reporting on US participation with Lava Jato (New York Times, 12/21/16), and Lula’s defense team had filed a motion arguing that this was a violation of Brazilian law (ConJur, 3/16/18).
Additionally, according to the hacker Delgatti, Greenwald only accepted a small portion of the full archive that Lula’s defense team eventually received (Brasilwire, 2/18/21). I’m not sure what to make of that claim, which I find strange. But I do want to flag that the Vaza Jato archive is not the only source of information about US participation in Lava Jato, and Greenwald may never have possessed the full archive.
However, we know of the extent and duration of US participation in Lava Jato because of the work Greenwald’s colleagues did with the archive that he did possess. And their publications are what made US participation in Lava Jato a matter of wide public significance.
For example, Lula responded on Twitter to the reporting by Greenwald’s colleagues with the allegation:
The goal was Petrobras [Brazil’s state-owned oil giant]. It was the Pre-Salt [Brazilian offshore oil]. And the Brazilian companies that were winning bids from US companies in the Middle East.
Lula’s claim, which he has elaborated elsewhere, is that the idea of Lava Jato was “born in the Department of Justice in the United States,” with the aim of destroying Brazilian competitors to US companies (in petroleum, naval construction and civil engineering, all sectors targeted by Lava Jato) (PT, 7/9/20). Perhaps Greenwald disagrees with Lula here. Then surely Lula’s claim deserves a refutation, especially because its principal evidentiary basis is Greenwald’s own archive.
Securing Democracy does note that Greenwald’s work on the Snowden archive “proved that the NSA and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK were spying on [Petrobras,] the state-owned oil company whose proceeds fund Brazil’s social programs” (p. 125). But the question of foreign intervention in Brazil appears principally in the past tense in Securing Democracy, and never in relation to Greenwald’s own Vaza Jato archive.
I should note that I have not seen enough evidence to weigh in with confidence on Lula’s assertion about the economic intentions of the Lava Jato team and its US collaborators, but he is correct about Lava Jato’s economic effects. Brazilian scholars have shown that Lava Jato did severe damage to Brazil’s major companies, and, consequently, to the economy and to employment in Brazil. In contrast, most of the US financial corporations responsible for the fraud that precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis were protected as “too big to fail.” Whatever the mix of intentions involved, Lava Jato was part of an asymmetrically structured global politics of corruption that disables companies from the Global South and frequently protects those from the Global North, contributing to global inequality.
From ‘inevitable’ to unmentionable
Despite Greenwald’s silence about US participation in what he convincingly shows to be a regime change operation in 21st century Brazil, Securing Democracy runs through the long history of US regime change operations in Latin America. Discussing US support for the 1964 coup against a center-left Brazilian government that was replaced by a 21-year military dictatorship, Greenwald notes that US “refusal to tolerate any form of leftism in Latin America’s largest country—even if it meant the imposition of despotism where democracy had been taking root—was virtually inevitable” (p. 3). Greenwald also mentions Brazil’s enduring “colonial relationship with the United States” (p. 12), and notes that he learned from Edward Snowden that Brazil has the “largest CIA presence in the hemisphere” (p. 12).
So why doesn’t Securing Democracy examine US involvement in the process that removed the elected left from power in that country in 2016 and brought an admirer of right-wing despotism to power in 2018? What changed between 1964 and 2016 that made US involvement in left-to-right regime change operations in Brazil noteworthy, even “inevitable” then, but not worth mentioning now?
As Greenwald acknowledges in the book, to the United States, the PT governments’ forging of a “foreign policy in a way that diverged from US dictates was intolerable” (p. 14). Fortunately for the US officials who found the PT’s independent foreign policy intolerable, Lava Jato resolved this problem for them. Upon inauguration, Bolsonaro assumed a posture of alignment with Trump’s government in matters of foreign policy.
Although Greenwald does not examine the involvement of the United States in Lava Jato in Securing Democracy, this involvement has become politically important in Brazil and the United States. (One can find further English-language examination of the US role, drawing on both the Vaza Jato archive and other sources, in Le Monde and Brasilwire.) Besides Lula himself, Brazilian public figures ranging from members of Brazil’s supreme court to politicians from Brazil’s so-called “big center” have been critical of the US/Lava Jato collaboration.
In the US, 13 congressmembers wrote a 2019 letter to then–Attorney General William Barr demanding an explanation for the Department of Justice’s collaboration with Lava Jato. That letter was followed up in 2021, when 23 congressmembers sent a similar letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, noting that “it is a matter of public record that US DOJ agents provided support to Brazilian prosecutors that were part of the Lava Jato operation.”
That statement links to a 2017 speech by Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco, in which he exults in DoJ collaboration with Lava Jato and in Lava Jato’s conviction of Lula. The congressmembers’ letter also notes that members of the DoJ and FBI were briefed by Lava Jato prosecutors in Brazil, linking to Agência Pública’s reporting (3/12/20) on the Vaza Jato archive. No hint of this appears in Securing Democracy.
I think there is still room for debate about the intentions behind US involvement in Lava Jato—a Brazilian “anti-corruption” investigation that, as Greenwald shows, pursued aims consistent with the history of US policy towards Latin America that Securing Democracy outlines. However, I see no justification for the complete omission of US involvement in a book that is largely about the politics of Lava Jato, and that draws on the sources from which we know much of what we do about the US role. Whatever Greenwald’s position is here, it deserves clarification, and the failure to examine the US role in Lava Jato is a significant flaw in an important book.
The Greenwald wars
I have no perfect theory of why Greenwald chose to omit evidence, stemming from his own “once-in-a-lifetime scoop,” that Lava Jato worked with support from the United States, some of it clandestine. Greenwald is hard to figure out. He’s a former hero of the left (he spoke at FAIR’s 25th anniversary benefit alongside Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman and Michael Moore) who is now a regular and chummy guest of Trump-favorite Fox News host Tucker Carlson—whom Greenwald has absurdly referred to as a “socialist,” along with Steve Bannon and “the 2016 iteration of Donald Trump.” His merciless polemics against US liberalism often hit the mark, yet he can be dumbfoundingly credulous when conservatives espouse “working-class, anti-imperialism, anti-corporatist politics.”
Securing Democracy was released back in April 2021. (A Brazilian edition will be released at the end of April 2022.) Since then, English-language media outlets have largely ignored it. I was sent a review copy by a highbrow US publication, but they canceled the review before I had written a word, because (they told me) of Greenwald’s brutal feud with his former colleagues at the Intercept. The book got a few reviews in non-US publications, and some from the ideological peripheries of mainstream US politics. But there isn’t much else. In contrast, his book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State, had been covered in pretty much every publication that reviews books of political journalism within weeks of its publication.
Although he is now spurned by most of the mainstream, Greenwald knows how to pick an underserved market niche for his polemics, and to serve that niche relentlessly. Perhaps addressing US collaboration in Lava Jato is inconsistent with the niche he is aiming for in Brazil. Or maybe that interpretation is too cynical.
Greenwald does have considerable courage, and he remains an important critic of US foreign policy. He is nearly alone today among English-language journalists of major reach in his principled critiques of the deepening liberal/neoconservative embrace in the US (Glenn Greenwald, 1/25/22)—work that has become especially crucial as a flood of war propaganda (Glenn Greenwald, 2/27/22) raises the horrific peril of nuclear war, and as tolerance for dissent on matters of foreign policy diminishes in the US (Glenn Greenwald, 3/15/22).
‘One of the most consequential reporters’
So I offer no theory of Greenwald, or of Securing Democracy’s strange omissions. But I’ve decided to publish this belated essay because the book’s flaws (as well as its substantial virtues) have been underacknowledged, and because Greenwald, with his 1.8 million Twitter followers and boundless appetite for battle, has a major influence on how foreigners understand Brazilian politics.
I want to make it clear that I haven’t written this review to argue that every analysis of Brazil’s sad political trajectory over the second half of the 2010s must include analysis of the role of the US in this process. There are many domestic factors to examine, and many excellent scholars and journalists examining them.
But because of Greenwald’s influence, his perspective is probably the most important source from which English speakers will form impressions about Lava Jato’s role in Brazil’s recent history (whether they read Securing Democracy or not). Greenwald had unique access to the sources from which we know much of what we do about the US role, and his silence about that role leaves a misleading impression for the US public—the only public with any hope to affect US foreign policy.
In a critique of Greenwald, Current Affairs‘ Nathan Robinson (6/17/21) concedes that “there is a good case to be made that for his role in freeing Lula da Silva from prison and exposing the reach of the US surveillance state, Glenn Greenwald is one of the most consequential reporters in the world.” Yet while the pinnacles of Greenwald’s work have been his exposures of the Brazilian right and US surveillance (and security) state, which deserve high praise, Securing Democracy is also notable for its strange silence about the connections that Greenwald’s own sources of evidence revealed between the Brazilian right and the US security state.
https://www.brasilwire.com/greenwald-bo ... in-brazil/
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Fox Seeks Allies Across the Political Spectrum to Shill for Bolsonaro
BRIAN MIER
Tucker Carlson interviewing Jair Bolsonaro
“Particularly since the 1930s, the connection of PSYOP with ideology and mass communication has made it a constant strategic element of international politics.”
— An Overview of Psychological Operations (PSYOP), Federal Research Division, Library of Congress (1989)
It is no secret that, since the 2016 legislative coup against President Dilma Rousseff and 2018 arbitrary imprisonment of front-running presidential candidate Lula da Silva, multinational corporations have made billions of dollars from environmental deregulation, dismantlement of labor rights and privatization of Brazil’s natural resources. It’s also now known that corporate media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post normalized the breakdown of Brazil’s rule of law and rise of fascism by ignoring crimes committed by high-profile Judge Sergio Moro that were widely publicized in Brazilian media.
Some people in the US even know how Anglo media outlets like the Washington Post and Guardian misrepresented Lula’s conviction for receiving a nonexistent apartment upgrade by unethically associating it with an alleged multi-million dollar graft scheme in state oil company, Petrobras. Analysis of US media coverage over the last seven years shows systematic bias against Lula, president of Brazil from 2003-10, and his Brazilian Workers Party, even in many left-leaning outlets (Brasilwire, 12/12/18).
However, this year’s Brazilian presidential election appears to have the media in a quandary. Opposing frontrunner Lula, whom they smeared for years (FAIR.org, 12/14/19), looks like public support for neofascist incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, as no other candidate has hit double digits in the polls. On the other hand, supporting Lula implies support for his proposed policies, such as reversing the post-coup labor, pension and environmental reforms that made billions of dollars for their corporate advertisers.
Despite his commitment to austerity policies, however, Bolsonaro is clearly not the right kind of neoliberal for news organizations like CNN or the New York Times. As the old saying goes in Brazil, the bourgeois prefer to support the kind of fascist who eats with a knife and a fork. With the elections looming less than three months away, and Bolsonaro trailing by nearly 20 points in polls, it seems late in the game to revamp his image to make any kind of clinging to power more palatable to an Anglo public.
These limitations, however, haven’t stopped one corporate media giant from stepping into the fray. During the last week of June, the Murdoch-owned Fox Corporation sent its most popular newscaster, Tucker Carlson, to Rio de Janeiro to slander Lula and weave a false narrative of Bolsonaro as a faithful ally in the US’s new cold war against China, which Carlson claims is “trying to take over the world.” (FoxNews.com, 6/30/22).
Justifying his visit by filming a documentary on Chinese “colonization” of Latin America, Carlson projected the US political situation onto Brazil’s vastly different political landscape (e.g., it currently has 23 political parties represented in Congress) while making a laughable claim (Fox News, 6/1/22) that Lula, a former steelworkers union leader who is currently polling by more than 2-to-1 against Bolsonaro with the working class, is supported by “a coalition of billionaires, college professors and CNN.”
Fox’s Tucker Carlson visited Brazil to promote neofascist incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro.
In fact, CNN Brasil franchise owner Rubens Menin supported Bolsonaro’s campaign for the presidency, and poached the most right-wing, reactionary commentators from Globo TV to work for the network–including Alexandre Garcia, the former press secretary to military dictator João Figueiredo, who has been attacking Lula for 40 years.
Fox frontman Carlson is occasionally praised by US foreign policy critics—including Rio de Janeiro–based pundit Glenn Greenwald—for giving voice to a wider range of opinions than most corporate news program hosts. Opening space for controlled opposition, however, is a tried-and-true tactic of US intelligence, widely employed during the Cold War by the CIA (see Cultural Cold War, by Frances Stoner Saunders) and its partner organizations like Voice of America, which was directed by Carlson’s father Dick Carlson from 1986-91.
Carlson’s wider-than-average variety of guest commentators shows that he and his producers are hardly the “wingnuts” that DNC-aligned media try to portray them as (New Republic, 7/1/22). There is clearly method behind the madness, and it is easy to identify psyop propaganda tactics at work in Carlson’s Brazil coverage.
The world’s 2nd-most important election
In April 2021, at Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Steve Bannon introduced Brazilian member of Congress Eduardo Bolsonaro–son of the president–on stage. Bannon warned of the dangers of a Lula presidency, proclaiming that the 2022 presidential elections in Brazil are the world’s “second-most important” (Business Insider, 8/11/21). Fox Corporation picked up Bannon’s rallying cry, beginning with Carlson claiming that the Bolsonaro administration is Latin America’s last US ally in the battle against China, which he frighteningly claims has a goal of destroying the US way of life.
Villainizing China puts Carlson firmly in alliance, not only with Murdoch family news outlets like the London Sunday Times and New York Post, but with CNN, the New York Times and other so-called liberal news companies that he regularly criticizes on his program for representing elite interests. Claiming that Bolsonaro is allied with the US in standing up to China, thus establishing him as an important asset in the new cold war, hinders efforts by progressive Democrats to pressure the Biden administration to break relations with Brazil’s far-right government. Contrasting “friendly” Bolsonaro with “red” Lula, whom he suggests will immediately transform Brazil into a Communist vassal state, feeds into the Cold War–era safety/fear dichotomy used by psyop actors like Voice of America. Although this kind of dichotomy may strike a chord with casual US news consumers, it has little correspondence with reality, as Brazil is currently much more dependent on China than it ever was when Lula was President.
China has been Brazil’s most important trade partner since 2009, when it passed up the US, but since Bolsonaro took office in 2019, trade with China has increased dramatically. In 2021, the total value of Brazil’s exports of goods and services to China was $125 billion, over four times the $31 billion in exports to the United States. Furthermore, the primary beneficiary of the Bolsonaro administration’s selloff of Brazil’s offshore petroleum reserves has been China, with its state companies being the only foreign investors in auctions in 2019 and 2020.
Due to his son’s relationship with Bannon and xenophobic statements by some of his cabinet chiefs on their social media accounts, many expected Bolsonaro to leave BRICS and cut trade relations with China. It didn’t happen. After labeling everyone from center-right political rivals to the Economist as Communists, Bolsonaro proclaimed, during his first official visit to Beijing in 2019, that China was a capitalist country. When asked about the trade war between China and the US, he said: “This isn’t our battle. We don’t want to get involved in any ideological fight between the world’s [big] economies.”
Shortly thereafter, Bolsonaro forced his two biggest anti-China ideologues to resign, Foreign Affairs Chancellor Ernesto Araujo and Education Minister Abraham Weintraub, and continued to work within the BRICS framework, most recently praising Brazil’s “strategic relationship” with China to Xi Jinping at the BRICS Summit on June 23.
The fact of the matter is, no matter who is elected in October, Brazil will maintain its neutral stance in the new cold war, and will not engage in sanctions against China or Russia, or any other geopolitical enemy of the US. Taking sides against important trade partners does not make rational economic sense to Brazil, which has worked to remain nonaligned in conflicts between world super powers for decades. Fox Corporation certainly knows this, therefore fearmongering about China to drum up support for Bolsonaro can best be viewed as propaganda.
Full-spectrum dominance
Full-spectrum dominance is a military term that was originally used to describe a battle in which once side controls the land, air, sea and political narrative. In the modern era of hybrid warfare, it is often employed to describe control over all sides of a debate, as the CIA attempted to do in the Cold War when it coined the term “non-Marxist left,” and opened up funding for progressive academics and writers who opposed the Soviet Union and other Cold War enemies, often through front organizations like PEN (Cultural Cold War).
Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci viewed bourgeois media as fulfilling the task of maintaining capitalist hegemony–the dominance of the ruling class in the ideological and cultural spheres. Under that lens of analysis, the polarizing arguments over cultural issues between pro-capitalist media corporations like Fox and Carlson’s former employer MSNBC, even as they align on economic and foreign policy, can be seen as a kind of full-spectrum dominance over American news consumers.
Fox‘s Tucker Carlson Tonight program frequently engages in this practice by giving airtime to anti-imperialist critics of US foreign policy in the Middle East and Eastern Europe (but never China), as long as they don’t challenge capitalist economics, or advocate for labor unions or immigrant rights. This goalpost-limiting attempt at full-spectrum dominance was used by Fox in Brazil through the use of Carlson’s frequent guest, Glenn Greenwald–a move that exposed contradictions between Greenwald’s Brazilian and US public personas. Interviewed by Carlson, Greenwald openly supported his former enemy Bolsonaro for the first time ever, in alignment with Fox Corporation.
During a short interview (7/5/22) in his adopted home town of Rio de Janeiro, where Carlson based himself during his visit, Greenwald claimed that Bolsonaro had been “democratically elected”–even though Greenwald wrote an entire book about the illegal tactics used to frame Lula, Bolsonaro’s most serious rival, and remove him from the 2018 presidential election. He claimed that Bolsonaro’s “anti-establishment” platform had turned Brazil’s right-wing media oligarchies against him, and said that Big Tech social media companies had censored him repeatedly over comments he made against Covid-19.
In psyop terminology, Greenwald uses the concept of censorship as a glittering generality. Anthropologist William Yaworsky (Low Intensity Conflict & Law Enforcement, Autumn/05), former enlisted man in US Army’s First Psychological Operations Battalion, defines the propaganda tactic of glittering generality as
After a multipartisan Congressional investigation, the Supreme Court ordered social media companies to block disinformation from Bolsonaro; Glenn Greenwald (7/5/22) described this to Tucker Carlson’s viewers as Bolsonaro having “been repeatedly censored by big tech platforms.”
vague phrases and buzzwords so closely associated with the values of the target audience that they are accepted without having any genuine propositional content…. Such phrases gain popularity because they activate richly laden inference systems in the human brain.
Censorship is an emotionally laden term in the US, a country whose citizens grow up being told they live in the land of the free. It is arrogant and imperialist, however, to believe that all other countries in the World should have the same interpretation of free speech that the US does. It is true that Bolsonaro had several videos about Covid-19 pulled off the air, but it wasn’t done by Big Tech companies, and only happened after a lengthy congressional investigation into criminal negligence in response to the pandemic.
After hearing hundreds of witnesses and looking over thousands of pages of evidence, Brazil’s multipartisan Congress found that Bolsonaro had deliberately used social media to convince followers that ineffective treatments like chloroquine, worm medicine and blowing ozone into the anus cured Covid-19 and that, therefore, it was unnecessary to follow state and municipal public health systems’ social distancing or vaccination guidelines. They concluded that he sabotaged Brazil’s Covid-19 response and that this, in turn, had caused 300,000 additional deaths. They accused him of abuse of authority — a crime for which he is currently under review by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and which he will certainly be formally accused of in Brazil as soon as he leaves office.
Based on the congressional ruling, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered the major social media companies to block Bolsonaro from communicating disinformation on Covid-19 on his social media accounts. In other words, it wasn’t Big Tech that “censored” Bolsonaro—Big Tech was forced to obey a court order. Far from making an impassioned plea for the glittering generality of freedom of speech, Greenwald’s comments on the US’s most popular cable news program suggest that US-based social media corporations ought to ignore the laws of foreign countries they operate in. Meanwhile, the left-branded pundit established full-spectrum common ground with Carlson by portraying Bolsonaro as a victim of authoritarian liberal elites.
Audience and effect
To millions of casual US news consumers, Fox‘s propaganda blitz preemptively sets the stage for the normalization of a possible military coup in Brazil this October–something which is already being announced by Bolsonaro’s vice presidential candidate, Gen. Walter Braga Neto. Furthermore, in the Cold War psyop tradition (Rolling Stone, 10/20/77), it sends a message to Brazilian elites that at least part of the US integral state would support an extra-legal maneuver by Bolsonaro and his military to stay in power, even if he loses the election to Lula.
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