Bolsonaro: ecocide, genocide and class violence in Brazil

Well, before we all use that word, he'll need to actually DO some dictator-ish stuff, yes?

If he proceeds to stack the Supreme Court, or imprison political opponents, or merge the military into the government, or use state media for his own partisan purposes, or consolidate power under him, or appoint family and cronies to government positions, or forgo elections, or rule by decree, or ignore his own Constitution then I'm certain we'll all agree that he's a dictator.

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Not everything is about Venezuela, Magoo.   Please don't drag it into this.

Do you mean cco?  He mentioned Venezuela; I didn't.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

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Not everything is about Venezuela, Magoo.   Please don't drag it into this.

Everything in your second post was about everything you think happened in Venezuela.   And, given what's been posted about Bolsonaro, why are you so blase' about his getting elected?  His program is nothing but ruling-class payback and letting the cops kill anybody they want.

Do you mean cco?  He mentioned Venezuela; I didn't.

The widespread destruction of the Amazon would have a great impact on global weather as the following article explains. 

"The issue is that the Amazon is so big that it affects weather at the continental and even the global scale," Meg Symington, Amazon director at the World Wildlife Fund-U.S. (WWF), said.

According to Symington, researchers have been looking for teleconnections, the impacts such a massive forest can have beyond on just its immediate environment. The World Bank released a report in 2011, Assessment of the Risk of Amazon Dieback, which discusses how changes in the Amazon could transform it from a carbon sink to a carbon source. The density of the trees in the rainforest absorb a great deal of carbon dioxide, 0.8 to 1.1 billion metric tons of it. As the ecosystem changes, however, it could begin to release more of the greenhouse gas than it takes in, which could affect global temperatures.  ...

Because of the size and location of the Amazon, as well as the amount of rain that it produces, the effects it has on weather patterns reach well beyond its immediate area. "Studies have shown that rainfall in southern South America is actually impacted by the Amazon and could decrease significantly if you have additional deforestation," Symington said. "Maybe even the American Midwest, parts of North America, in terms of the weather pattern, could be affected."

Symington said that trade winds bring 50 percent of all the rain that falls in the Amazon from evapotranspiration, which is a crucial part of the water cycle that includes water evaporated from plants; as precipitation falls in the rainforest into the lush vegetation, the evaporation of that rain from the plants creates more rain to fall. Fifteen percent of the atmosphere's water vapor comes from this process. ...

"All of this has to do with a tipping point," Symington said. "With deforestation, if you go beyond a certain point in the Amazon there's an issue of where the whole system becomes destabilized and you would switch from a tropical, moist forest system, to something that was much drier and more like the Cerrado of central Brazil, sort of a dry forest, savanna system. If that happened it would have a huge impact on species in the Amazon and also on the climate."

About 20 percent of the fresh river water in the world comes from the Amazon River, and drying of the forest can negatively influence that water source. Symington told Accuweather.com that changes to this freshwater output would affect the entire current off the coast of South America, which could affect the jet stream, which would ripple into a change in weather patterns across the globe.

There is also an immediate issue of how the balance of the rain forest affects its own ecosystem.  "The Amazon is home to at least 10 percent of the world's species, probably more, because there are a lot of species that have not been discovered yet that live in the Amazon," Symington said.  ...

"The most fish species in the world are found in the Amazon. Too much deforestation and you lose not only the terrestrial species, but you would completely change the hydrological system in the Amazon with flooding. The river comes up meters in the rainy season and that would all change if you had this forest dieback as well."

Without the trees to absorb the river's flooding, the soil and landscape around the river would be drastically altered. In Brazil, where a large percentage of their electric energy comes from hydropower, a change to the flow of the river would affect the amount of gigawatts that the hydropower dam produces. Moderate, careful and controlled use of the Amazon also supports local food sources, livelihoods and pollinating animals and insects that agriculture depends on. Some scientists and researchers seek out genetic resources that could be used for global medicinal purposes.

Too much unnecessary change to an ecosystem can create a chain reaction on its species and on the general environment, and we may not fully know the extent of where this chain reaction may go.

"We always talk about conservation in terms of 'don't throw away the rivets,'" Syminton said. "If you pull rivet by rivet out and throw them away, the whole system falls apart, so we need to be careful. People may think, 'What's one species?' but then you never know what happens when the whole system falls apart."

The World Bank's assessment supports the same idea, stating, "Changing forest structure and behavior would have significant implications for the local, regional and global carbon and water cycles. Amazon forest dieback would be a massive event, affecting all life-forms that rely on this diverse ecosystem, including humans, and producing ramifications for the entire planet."

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/amazon-climate-change/20184965

Canada Congratulates Brazilians Following Presidential Election

https://twitter.com/mbueckert/status/1056945828617748481

"Here it is: Canada 'congratulates' Brazil on their election, looking forward to business opportunities..."

After our fervent support of coup plotters in Venezuela, fascists in Ukraine, head-chopping jihadists in Syria, murderous Zionists in Apartheid Israel, we should not be at all surprised to see Canada already buttering up  Bolsonaro in Brazil. 

Glenn Greenwald on Bolsonaro: Brazil Has Elected “Most Extremist Leader in the Democratic World”

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GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I think it’s really important to put it into its proper context. For a long time, the Western media was referring to him as “Brazil’s Trump.” That’s how he was marketing himself. The reality is much different. He’s by far the most extremist leader now elected anywhere in the democratic world. He’s far closer, as we’ve discussed before, to Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, or even General Sisi, the dictator of Egypt. A journalist, Vincent Bevins, based for a long time in Brazil and now in Indonesia, has made the argument that he’s far more extreme than Duterte.

I think that the key thing to understand about Bolsonaro is that he really comes not from this modern “alt-right” movement of the type of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen, but the Cold War far right that carried out enormous atrocities in the name of fighting domestic communism, which is what Bolsonaro believes his primary project to be. He recently vowed to cleanse the country of left-wing opposition, which he sees as a communist front.

And so, the threat and the ideology is far more extreme than anything in the democratic world. But the dynamics as far as why he won are quite similar, in that it was driven not by a sudden far-right ideology conversion on the part of this population in Brazil, but anger and desperation and hopelessness about the failures of the establishment class.

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GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, that’s why I say he’s a real throwback to the kind of far-right movements of, say, the '60s, ’70s and ’80s than he is this more updated, modernized version. So, if you look at far-right leaders throughout the West, you don't really see much of a focus on, say, abortion and LGBT issues. If anything, sometimes the far right in Europe coopts those issues as a way of inciting xenophobia against Muslims, saying Muslims are regressive and want to drag the country back thousands of years in terms of social issues. Whereas Bolsonaro is kind of this much more old-school fascist, where a major part of his campaign was depicting LGBTs as a direct threat to children, saying that the reason LGBTs want to infiltrate public schools is because they want to convert people’s children into being gay so that they can have sex with them—an obviously highly inflammatory claim to make about a marginalized population in a society that’s already pretty conservative on social issues.

But the much graver threat is the fact that he explicitly reveres and wants to replicate the worst elements of the military dictatorship. When he stood up, very recently, in 2016 on the floor of the Congress and voted to impeach Dilma Rousseff, he specifically said he was doing it in honor of the notorious colonel who tortured not only dissidents in general, but Dilma specifically. So this is the kind of regime he wants to reinstate. Whether he’ll be able to do that is a looming question, but that’s definitely his intention.

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Canada Congratulates Brazilians Following Presidential Election

Yes, Canada basically said "congratulations on holding an election".  No congrats to Bolsonaro.  It's about as little as they could possibly say while still saying much.

ed'd to add:  Canada issues terse statement after far-right candidate elected president of Brazil

Benjamin Netanyahu

https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/1056989327434137600

"I spoke this evening with the president-elect of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. I congratulated him on his victory. I told him I'm certain his election will lead to a great friendship between our peoples and a strengthening of Brazil-Israel ties. We are waiting for his visit to Israel!"

Mr. Magoo wrote:

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Everything in your second post was about everything you think happened in Venezuela.

Stuff "I think" happened?

It's not a matter of opinion, Ken.

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And, given what's been posted about Bolsonaro, why are you so blase' about his getting elected?

I think my first post made clear that I think the Brazilian electorate made a bad choice.  Beyond that, you're right, I'm not sitting here pulling my hair out in anguish.  Am I supposed to or something?  Or else what is it you expect I should be doing??  Should I be angry with the Brazilian electorate??

No, you shouldn't be angry with the Brazilian electorate.  But you shouldn't be acting like this situation is somehow trivial and unimportant compared to anything in Venezuela, that, until Maduro is overthrown and replaced with whatever regime you want, nobody gets to talk about anything else-I don't particularly like how things have played out in VZ, but it's not as though the place is now the Hoxha's Albania of the Americas.  It's not hell on earth.  It's simply a country where a government under organized siege from without made the choices such a siege was designed to cause.  And none of it can be made better through continued pressure to force the existing government out.  Venezuela is simply one country which has made the choices a lot of countries have made.  It's not a singular failure or a singular failure; and no government, facing a sudden, massive decline in oil prices could possibly have made any choices that would have made any significant difference.  Things would be just as bad now if the MUD had taken over, since they have no policies for improvement; they simply had policies for greater inequality.

But this thread, as you refuse to accept for some reason, is about Brazil.  If you knew any Latin American history, you'd know why a lot of people are terrified of what Bolsonaro will do; you'd know why this isn't trivial; instead, you're just sniffing down at us with the another "nothing matters more than how terrible Maduro is" thread.  There was simply no reason to bring that into this thread.  You don't have to denounce the Bolivarians to have the right to have a valid reaction to anything else.

We're talking about a situation in Brazil that can only end up echoing Chile under Pinochet here.  Why 

Ken Burch wrote:

But this thread, as you refuse to accept for some reason, is about Brazil.

Magoo is correct that I'm the one who brought up Venezuela. It's partly on me. My apologies.

cco wrote:

Ken Burch wrote:

But this thread, as you refuse to accept for some reason, is about Brazil.

Magoo is correct that I'm the one who brought up Venezuela. It's partly on me. My apologies.

Thank you.  I hope we can all agree to leave the discussion solely on Brazil in this thread from now on.  

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Does the stuff that happened just before the election not count

If he were the incumbent then it totally would.  But it's not clear how he had the authority to order this prior to the vote, and being sworn in.

Who commanded the military police prior to the election/inauguration?

Mr. Magoo wrote:

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Does the stuff that happened just before the election not count

If he were the incumbent then it totally would.  But it's not clear how he had the authority to order this prior to the vote, and being sworn in.

Who commanded the military police prior to the election/inauguration?

He served in a paratrooper unit and two artillery units.  The raids were carried out by police and electoral justice officials.

Now perhaps they were more than happy to help -- after all, 55% of the country seemed to like the guy -- but it's quite a stretch indeed to blame him for this, and then to say it's proof of his dictatoriness.

You may be right, though, that he'll probably do similar stuff when he's in office, and that's pretty clearly a different situation.   But really, it's pretty hard to declare someone a dictator when they haven't taken office yet.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

He served in a paratrooper unit and two artillery units.  The raids were carried out by police and electoral justice officials.

Now perhaps they were more than happy to help -- after all, 55% of the country seemed to like the guy -- but it's quite a stretch indeed to blame him for this, and then to say it's proof of his dictatoriness.

You may be right, though, that he'll probably do similar stuff when he's in office, and that's pretty clearly a different situation.   But really, it's pretty hard to declare someone a dictator when they haven't taken office yet.

Why are you making such an effort to give the guy the benefit of the doubt?  He's made it clear that his agenda is environmental plunder and letting the cops do whatever the hell they want.  It's not as though anyone who comes in like that could possibly end up being some sort of moderate "pleasant surprise" once in office.

And it's not even clear that the people who voted for him "like the guy"(or even that all of them actually MEANT to cast their votes for him...his campaign did a lot of dirty tricks, like putting out fliers that looked like they were for Haddad that instructed the person reading them to vote the ballot number actually designated for Bolsonaro).  And there's that "stabbing" he supposedly experienced mid-campaign, which was awfully damn suspicious for a guy who had heavily armed campaign security at all times and who was able to use the "stabbing" as a pretext to avoid pubilc appearances and debates in favor of staged "photo opportunities" in private locations which were totally under his campaign's control.

A lot of people who DID vote for the guy saw it as a protest vote, a vote to "shake things up", as a significant number of 2016 Trump voters claimed to have done.

Knowing full well while doing it that the hammering will for the most part come down hardest on an underclass they have become quite used to ignoring anyway. One day the worm may turn. A wise man once observed that the chief problem of the middle class is that it never realizes until it's too late, just what it's in the middle of. 

Bolsonaro's proposed environmental policies are much worse than what the previous government did. 

For a start, Bolsonaro has previously said that, if elected, he would withdraw Brazil from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, arguing that global warming is nothing more than “greenhouse fables.” 

Ultimately, his power to reverse the decision is limited, however. This is because the Paris deal was approved via the Brazilian congress, which is currently divided between 30 parties, and Bolsonaro would face the tricky task of convincing a broad church of conservatives. Although Bolsonaro may be unable to withdraw from the Paris framework, his election is still a direct threat to the regime of environmental protection in Brazil. ...

Although never directly linked, Bolsonaro’s environmental policies would likely be welcomed by the so-called “ruralistas”—a powerful alliance of agribusiness and big landowners within the country’s Senate and Chamber of Deputies. The ruralista faction previously supported the outgoing president Michel Temer and is infamous for its regressive environmental agenda, which seeks to further deforest the Amazon to make way for cattle farms, soy plantations and the mining industry.

Bolsonaro has called for the neutering of both Brazil’s environment agency (IBAMA), which monitors deforestation and environmental degradation, and its Chico Mendes Institute, which issues fines to negligent parties. This would eliminate any form of oversight of actions that lead to deforestation.

Bolsonaro has also threatened to do away with the legislative protections afforded to environmental reserves and Indigenous communities. He has previously argued that what he describes as an “Indigenous land demarcation industry” must be restricted and reversed, allowing for farms and industry to encroach into previously protected lands.

By removing these protective organs from the equation, the message that Bolsonaro is sending is clear: vast swathes of Brazil’s biologically diverse and ecologically important landscape will be opened up for development and extraction. With the Brazilian soy industry profiting from the current trade war between the US and China, it is highly likely that promises of this potential expansion would be well received.

In the run up to this election, figures were released which showed the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is continuing to climb. In August 2018, 545 square kilometers of forest were cleared—three times more than the area deforested the previous August. The world’s largest rainforest is integral to climate change mitigation, so cutting back on deforestation is an urgent global issue. Brazil, however, is heading in the opposite direction.

Any collective relief at the far right not winning the first round outright has now proven short-lived. While the previous government of President Michel Temer rolled back environmental protections, it is likely that a Bolsonaro government will adopt a brazen anti-environmental strategy. With a Bolsonaro presidency now assured, a corner has been turned and it will likely be the environment that is first to suffer.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43ejw3/jair-bolsonaros-brazil...

kropotkin1951 wrote:

josh wrote:

NDPP wrote:

CBC: Bolsonaro Good For Business

https://twitter.com/CBCAlerts/status/1056692366470471682

"Brazil's new president elect Jair Bolsonaro is a right winger who leans towards more open markets. This could mean fresh opportunities for Canadian companies looking to invest in the resource rich country..."

Canadian state media much prefers Bolsonaro over Maduro

CBC 1933:  Hey this Hitler guy could be great for business.

In the long run of course it is good for business. After all we are talking about fascism.

That’s up to you. I’m just puttin’ the information out there. Here are 11 companies that you may not realize collaborated with the Nazis.

1 | Kodak

During World War Two, Kodak’s German branch used slave laborers from concentration camps. Several of their other European branches did heavy business with the Nazi government.

And Wilhelm Keppler, one of Hitler’s top economic advisers, had deep ties in Kodak. When Nazism began, Keppler advised Kodak and several other U.S. companies that they’d benefit by firing all of their Jewish employees. (Source: The Nation)

2 | Hugo Boss

In the 1930s, Hugo Boss started making Nazi uniforms. The reason: Hugo Boss himself had joined the Nazi party, and got a contract to make the Hitler Youth, storm trooper and SS uniforms.

That was a huge boon for Hugo Boss… he got the contract just eight years after founding his company… and that infusion of business helped take the company to another level.

The Nazi uniform manufacturing went so well that Hugo Boss ended up needing to bring in slave laborers in Poland and France to help out at the factory.

In 1997, Hugo’s son, Siegfried Boss, told an Austrian news magazine, “Of course my father belonged to the Nazi party. But who didn’t belong back then?” (Source: New York Times)

3 | Volkswagen

Ferdinand Porsche, the man behind Volkswagen and Porsche, met with Hitler in 1934, to discuss the creation of a “people’s car.” (That’s the English translation of Volkswagen.)

Hitler told Porsche to make the car with a streamlined shape, “like a beetle.” And that’s the genesis of the Volkswagen Beetle… it wasn’t just designed for the Nazis, Hitler NAMED it.

During World War Two, it’s believed that as many as four out of every five workers at Volkswagen’s plants were slave laborers. Ferdinand Porsche even had a direct connection to Heinrich Himmler, one of the leaders of the SS, to directly request slaves from Auschwitz. (Source: The Straight Dope)

4 | Bayer

During the Holocaust, a German company called IG Farben manufactured the Zyklon B gas used in the Nazi gas chambers. They also funded and helped with Josef Mengele’s torture “experiments” on concentration camp prisoners.

IG Farben is the company that turned the single largest profit from work with the Nazis. After the War, the company was broken up. Bayer was one of its divisions, and went on to become its own company.

Oh… and aspirin was founded by a Bayer employee, Arthur Eichengrun. But Eichengrun was Jewish, and Bayer didn’t want to admit that a Jewish guy created the one product that keeps their company in business. So, to this day, Bayer officially gives credit to Felix Hoffman, a nice Aryan man, for inventing aspirin. (Source: Alliance for Human Research Protection, Pharmaceutical Achievers)

5 | Siemens

Siemens took slave laborers during the Holocaust and had them help construct the gas chambers that would kill them and their families. Good people over there.

Siemens also has the single biggest post-Holocaust moment of insensitivity of any of the companies on this list. In 2001, they tried to trademark the word “Zyklon” (which means “cyclone” in German) to become the name a new line of products… including a line of gas ovens.

Zyklon, of course, being the name of the poison gas used in their gas chambers during the Holocaust.

A week later, after several watchdog groups appropriately freaked out, Siemens withdrew the application. They said they never drew the connection between the Zyklon B gas used during the Holocaust and their proposed Zyklon line of products. (Source: BBC)

6 | Coca-Cola, specifically Fanta

Coke played both sides during World War Two… they supported the American troops but also kept making soda for the Nazis. Then, in 1941, the German branch of Coke ran out of syrup, and couldn’t get any from America because of wartime restrictions.

So they invented a new drink, specifically for the Nazis: A fruit-flavored soda called Fanta.

That’s right: Long before Fanta was associated with a bunch of exotic women singing a god-awful jingle, it was the unofficial drink of Nazi Germany. (Source: New Statesman)

7 | Ford

Henry Ford is a pretty legendary anti-Semite, so this makes sense. He was Hitler’s most famous foreign backer. On his 75th birthday, in 1938, Ford received a Nazi medal, designed for “distinguished foreigners.”

He profiteered off both sides of the War — he was producing vehicles for the Nazis AND for the Allies.

I’m wondering if, in a completely misguided piece of logic, Allianz points to the Detroit Lions giving Ford the naming rights to their stadium as a reason why they should get the rights to the Meadowlands. (Source: Reformed Theology)

8 | Standard Oil

The Luftwaffe needed tetraethyl lead gas in order to get their planes off the ground. Standard Oil was one of only three companies that could manufacture that type of fuel. So they did.

Without them, the German air force never could’ve even gotten their planes off the ground.

When Standard Oil was dissolved as a monopoly, it led to ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, all of which are still around today. (But fortunately, their parent company’s past decision to make incredible profits off of war have not carried on.) (Source: MIT’s Thistle)

9 | Chase bank

A lot of banks sided with the Nazis during World War Two. Chase is the most prominent.

They froze European Jewish customers’ accounts and were extremely cooperative in providing banking service to Germany. (Source: New York Times)

10 | IBM

IBM custom-build machines for the Nazis that they could use to track everything… from oil supplies to train schedules into death camps to Jewish bank accounts to individual Holocaust victims themselves.

In September of 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the New York Times reported that three million Jews were going to be “immediately removed” from Poland and were likely going to be “exterminat[ed].”

IBM’s reaction? An internal memo saying that, due to that “situation”, they really needed to step up production on high-speed alphabetizing equipment. (Source: CNet)

11 | Random House publishing

Random House’s parent company, Bertelsmann A.G., worked for the Nazis… they published Hitler propaganda, and a book called Sterilization and Euthanasia: A Contribution to Applied Christian Ethics.

Bertelsmann still owns and operates several companies. I picked Random House because they drew controversy in 1997 when they decided to expand the definition of Nazi in Webster’s Dictionary.

Eleven years ago, they added the colloquial, softened definition of “a person who is fanatically dedicated to or seeks to control a specified activity, practice, etc.” (Think “Soup Nazi.”)

The Anti-Defamation League called that expanded definition offensive… especially when added by a company with Nazi ties… they said it, quote, “trivializes and denies the murderous intent and actions of the Nazi regime… it also cheapens the language by allowing people to reach for a quick word fix… [and] lends a helping hand to those whose aim is to prove that the Nazis were really not such terrible people.” (Source: New York Observer, ADL)

—

 

I was familiar with some of these but not 10 and 11. How will the same companies behave with Fascism at home I wonder? In the case of both Canadian and US business they often want different things at home than is consistent with their behaviour abroad: it is part of the colonial mindset. 

Many companies are extremely happy with a descent into Fascism, you can see this based on the politicians they buy. 

Of course it is known here that the desires of business are against the interests of people, but many incorrectly think they have a common interest. Business can exist regulated and prosperous in a country that respects people so it is not a conflict of interet but one of greed versus interest.  Business once in a while discovers that it actually works better with limits since unfettered competition is not as efficient or as safe as a more predictable environment.

Business in general does not have morality - it travels to the profits. I do not expect them to do anything else. I support the idea, as everyone, I think, does here, that not all actors in the economy have to do the same thing. Business is not there to provide equity, or to promote the public good - just to respect it. I do not expect business to be very good at anything other than accumulating money. That is why I support government restraining and regulating the impulses of business and being considerably active ensuring the public good is advanced and protected and that justice will prevail and that decency and respect for human rights exist. It is the right wing that expects business to be the powers in deciding what are our common morals and what rights ought to be respected and how resources ought to be shared. It is the right that considers business the source of wealth rather than those who do the work and creating, working people. Business is unqualified in structure, accountibility, motivation, or ability to assume the roles it has. It is not useless for its purpose but pretty much is for anything else.

When business controls govevernment the worse it gets the extreme in fascism but it is unhealthy long before it gets that far. This includes any hold it has over elections or policy. 

Galloway: Is Brazil's Bolsonaro a Pinochet or a Populist?

https://on.rt.com/9hjd

"The victory of the far right Bolsonaro in Brazil, Latin America's most populous country and co-founder of the BRICS bloc, has understandably caused much fluttering in the dovecoats of leftists and liberals around the globe. But what the Bolsonaro victory shows is not so much the strength of far-right ideas as the weakness of the left.

A left-wing movement which accepts neo-liberal orthodoxies of austerity and which fails to dramatically redistribute wealth to the masses, and in a country like Brazil which does not  mobilize, even militarize, the advanced sections of the workers in defense of an actual (as opposed to a rhetorical) transformation will be over-thrown. And they have been..."

Are you listening NDP weak-tea people? 

Maybe Bolsonaro won't be seen as such a bad guy, especially if he buys a couple billion dollars worth of armoured vehicles from General Dynamics Land Systems in Ontario.

I was in Brazil in 2002 just before Lula's election.  My friend, who'd left Colombia, was afraid of a Lula vistory. Did the Workers' Party victory lead to Bolsonaro ?  Such a unique and complex country of 200+millions is Brazil. I was at a World Esperanto Congress. E-o has a surprising following there.