Monday, October 7, 2019
Jair Bolsonaro pictured with second accused in Marielle Franco murder case
Jair Bolsonaro pictured with second accused in Marielle Franco murder case
Sam Cowie. The Guardian. October 3, 2019
Brazilian opposition figures and human rights observers are seething after a photo emerged of the country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, grinning and giving the thumbs up alongside a man arrested in connection with the murder of the Rio de Janeiro city councillor Marielle Franco.
It was the second time the president has been photographed alongside a suspect in Brazil’s most high-profile political murder in a decade.
In March, a photo of Bolsonaro with Élcio Vieira de Queiroz, a former policeman accused of driving the car used in Franco’s killing, circulated on social media.
Queiroz’s arrest appeared to support suspicion that Franco had been targeted by the paramilitary gangs known as “militias” that control large swaths of Rio and are usually made up of or commanded by active or retired police officers.
“Another [suspect] who has a photo with the president. Bolsonaro’s relations with the militias need to be urgently investigated,” tweeted Guilherme Boulos, a leftwing politician.
The journalist Glenn Greenwald, a friend of Franco, tweeted: “None of this means Bolsonaro was involved in Marielle’s assassination. That is unlikely. But it shows how intertwined, multi-pronged & close are the Bolsonaro Family’s ties to militias.”
Franco, a popular socialist councillor and rising star in Rio politics who fought against police brutality in the city’s favelas, was killed last year with her driver Anderson Gomes when a gunman sprayed the car they were driving in.
Josinaldo Lucas Freitas, a martial arts instructor, was arrested on Thursday. He is accused of disposing of the guns used in the murder by throwing them in the sea.
Soon after his arrest, two photos of him posing with Bolsonaro and one with the president’s Rio councillor son Carlos were published by the conservative-leaning weekly magazine Veja.
“This demands an answer,” said Antônio Carlos Costa, founder of the Rio NGO Rio de Paz (Rio of Peace). “The president must explain to the public what kind of relationship he had with this guy.”
Three others were also arrested on Thursday morning, including the wife of Ronnie Lessa; a former special forces police captain and alleged leader of a gang of contract killers.
Lessa is accused of firing the fatal shots and is awaiting trial in a federal prison.
But it remains unclear who ordered the assassination.
“We continue to follow the development of the investigations and, still, with great concern about the delay in discovering the intellectual authors of the crime,” Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil, wrote in a press note.
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The primary problem with mainstream economics
October 5, 2019Lars SyllLeave a commentGo to comments
from Lars Syll
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/the-primary-problem-with-mainstream-economics/
Jamie Morgan: To a member of the public it must seem weird that it is possible to state, as you do, such fundamental criticism of an entire field of study. The perplexing issue from a third party point of view is how do we reconcile good intention (or at least legitimate sense of self as a scholar), and power and influence in the world with error, failure and falsity in some primary sense; given that the primary problem is methodological, the issues seem to extend in different ways from Milton Friedman to Robert Lucas Jr, from Paul Krugman to Joseph Stiglitz. Do such observations give you pause? My question (invitation) I suppose, is how does one reconcile (explain or account for) the direction of travel of mainstream economics: the degree of commonality identified in relation to its otherwise diverse parts, the glaring problems of that commonality – as identified and stated by you and many other critics?
Lars P. Syll: When politically “radical” economists like Krugman, Wren-Lewis or Stiglitz confront the critique of mainstream economics from people like me, they usually have the attitude that if the critique isn’t formulated in a well-specified mathematical model it isn’t worth taking seriously. To me that only shows that, despite all their radical rhetoric, these economists – just like Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas Jr or Greg Mankiw – are nothing but die-hard defenders of mainstream economics. The only economic analysis acceptable to these people is the one that takes place within the analytic-formalistic modelling strategy that makes up the core of mainstream economics. Models and theories that do not live up to the precepts of the mainstream methodological canon are considered “cheap talk”. If you do not follow this particular mathematical-deductive analytical formalism you’re not even considered to be doing economics …The kind of “diversity” you asked me about, is perhaps even better to get a perspective on, by considering someone like Dani Rodrik, who a couple of years ago wrote a book on economics and its modelling strategies – Economics Rules (2015) – that attracted much attention among economists in the academic world. Just like Krugman and the other politically “radical” mainstream economists, Rodrik shares the view that there is nothing basically wrong with standard theory. As long as policymakers and economists stick to standard economic analysis everything is fine. Economics is just a method that makes us “think straight” and “reach correct answers”. Similar to Krugman, Rodrik likes to present himself as a kind of pluralist anti-establishment economics iconoclast, but when it really counts, he shows what he is – a mainstream economist fanatically defending the relevance of standard economic modelling strategies. In other words – no heterodoxy where it would really count. In my view, this isn’t pluralism. It’s a methodological reductionist strait-jacket.
Real-World Economics Revi
Pelosi Wants to Prosecute Snowden But Protect Trump Whistleblower
October 4, 2019
House Democratic leader Nancy
Pelosi was quick to condemn NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden when he revealed
the U.S. government’s vast surveillance programs. “I think that he should be
prosecuted,” Pelosi told reporters,
just days after Snowden’s name became public in June 2013.
Later that month, speaking about
Snowden at a Netroots Nation conference, Pelosi rendered a quick summary
judgment: “He did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents.”
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” she reiterated that
Snowden “did break the law” — and added the flagrant lie that “he’s threatening
in any event to share information with Russia and China.”
Sticking to a basic script for
leaders of both major parties, Pelosi has vehemently denied the systematic
violations of the Fourth Amendment that Snowden exposed. Such denial is
routine, while sometimes going over-the-top to blame the messenger for the
accurate news. “Edward Snowden is a coward,” the Obama administration’s top
diplomat, Secretary of State John Kerry, said in
a TV interview one year after Snowden’s revelations. “He is a traitor. And he
has betrayed his country.”
Bottom of Form
Fast-forward to the present:
House Speaker Pelosi, now the most powerful Democrat in the U.S. government, is
suddenly voicing grave concern for the rights and safety of the whistleblower
who filed the complaint that has led to an impeachment inquiry against
President Trump. The intelligence agency insider, she declared, “must be provided
with every protection guaranteed by the law to defend the integrity of our
government and ensure accountability and trust.”
But leading Democrats and
Republicans have shown scant interest in ensuring genuine “accountability and
trust.” On many profound issues, whistleblowing is essential to fill the gap
left by powerful politicians who use soothing rhetoric to fog up their
dedicated service to corporate America and the military-industrial-surveillance
complex.
Congressional Democrats and
their Republican counterparts didn’t inform the public about a vast array of
war crimes by the U.S. military in Iraq. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning
did.
The bipartisan leadership in
Congress didn’t inform the public about the torture procedures of the George W.
Bush administration. CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou did.
Congressional leaders didn’t
inform the public about the wholesale shredding of the Fourth Amendment by the
Bush and Obama administrations. NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Edward
Snowden did.
The persecution of “national
security” whistleblowers is an ongoing effort to block the flow of crucial
information. The entire concept of democracy is based on the informed consent
of the governed. Without whistleblowers like Manning, Kiriakou, Drake and Snowden,
we’re left with the uninformed “consent” of the governed, which is not
meaningful consent at all.
With few exceptions, officials
running all three branches of the U.S. government are unwilling to disrupt
systems of secrecy that hide what cannot withstand the light of day. Those
systems protect multibillion-dollar industries profiting from huge military
budgets and surveillance operations. Without unauthorized disclosures, we would
know far less about the destructive effects of what’s done with our tax dollars
in our names.
Routinely, with its
fabrications and omissions in realms of “national security,” the official story
amounts to a lie. No wonder dissembling officials in high places are so eager
to intimidate would-be whistleblowers by ferreting out and punishing those who
reveal classified information.
Meanwhile, tacitly authorized
disclosures of classified information — self-serving stories leaked by the
powerful — are routine. The methods of such leaks are among the most pernicious
open secrets in Washington: hidden in plain sight, ever-present and constantly
useful to the powerful. One of the few lawmakers to publicly point out the
glaring contradiction was Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote in a
September 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton that “leaking information to
the press in order to bring pressure to bear on a policy question” had become
“a routine aspect of government life.”
Moynihan added: “An evenhanded
prosecution of leakers could imperil an entire administration.” But even-handed
prosecution is nowhere in sight. Instead, selective
prosecutions — and selective expressions of outrage, based on
nationalistic fervor and partisan calculations — are standard operating
procedures.
At the same time, while often
eager to run with information provided by brave whistleblowers, the media
establishment rarely
stands up for them. Commonly — as in the cases of Manning, Kiriakou
and Jeffrey Sterling —
journalists get prizes while whistleblowers get prison. In a relay race for
truth, reporters and editors cross the finish line to accolades, while severe
punishment awaits the whistleblowers who handed them the baton.
Hypocrisy and double
standards, of course, are nothing new in the nation’s capital or from corporate
media outlets. But the current deluge of mainstream reverence for “national
security” whistleblowing shouldn’t be taken at face value.
To a significant extent,
similar problems exist among self-described liberal and progressive groups that
are now so enthusiastic about the whistleblower who has exposed Trump’s
indefensible efforts to manipulate the Ukrainian government for his political
advantage. Organizations should look at themselves in the mirror and assess
whether they’ve imitated the expedient double standards of the Democratic
Party’s approach to whistleblowers.
When the largest online
progressive group in the country, MoveOn.org, suddenly becomes a champion of a
whistleblower who has exposed Trump — after refusing
to support courageous whistleblowers like Manning, Snowden, Kiriakou,
Drake, Sterling and others who were persecuted by the Obama administration —
the corrosive effects of mimicking the Democratic leadership should be
apparent.
None of this changes the
reality that the Trump regime must be completely opposed and removed from
power. Nor should we fall into conflating the two major parties across the
board, when it’s clear that on numerous crucial issues — such as those often
determined by Supreme Court decisions — the stark differences have huge
consequences.
But Democratic Party leaders
as champions of whistleblowers? The idea is a ridiculous fraud.
Who Would FDR Endorse?
OCT 01, 2019
During her
speech at Washington Square Park in New York last week, which drew a
massive crowd of both supporters and curious bystanders, Massachusetts Sen.
Elizabeth Warren evoked the legacy of Frances Perkins, the longest-serving
secretary of labor and first female member of the presidential Cabinet.
The Warren campaign’s decision
to stage a speech at the famous park in lower Manhattan was inspired partly by
the fact that it is a block away from the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory,
where 146 garment workers—most of them young immigrant women—died in a fire in
1911. The disaster, as Warren told her audience, prompted major reforms, which
Perkins was instrumental in pushing. As the presidential candidate put it in
her speech, “With Frances working the system from the inside, the women workers
organizing and applying pressure from the outside, they rewrote New York state’s
labor laws from top to bottom to protect workers.”
Twenty years later, Franklin
D. Roosevelt selected Perkins as his labor secretary (a position she would hold
during his entire presidency), and the administration passed everything from
Social Security and unemployment insurance to minimum wage and the Wagner Act,
which guaranteed labor’s right to organize. One “very persistent woman,” Warren
declared, “backed up by millions of people across [the] country,” achieved
major structural reforms that had a transformative effect on the country.
Warren isn’t the first 2020
Democratic candidate to give a major speech on the legacy of the New Deal. In
June, in his widely discussed speech
on democratic socialism, Sen. Bernie Sanders repeatedly invoked FDR and his
“bold and visionary leadership” as an example for what we need today.
Though some commentators (including
me) questioned the Vermont senator’s decision to make FDR and New Deal
liberalism the focal point of a speech about democratic socialism, which
presumably goes beyond Roosevelt’s brand of social democracy (a program
designed to preserve and stabilize American capitalism, not
replace it), from a strategic standpoint, it makes perfect sense to employ
Roosevelt as a model for the kind of leadership needed in the 21st century.
Roosevelt, along with members of
his administration like Perkins, fought for transformative change that was, in
Sanders’ words, “opposed by big business, Wall Street, the political
establishment, by the Republican Party and by the conservative wing of FDR’s
own Democratic Party.” At the time, Roosevelt was called everything from a
fascist to a communist, and he had to deal with smears from members of his own
party, such as 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith, who founded a
group called the Liberty League to oppose the New Deal. At a 1936 Liberty
League rally, Smith gave a then-27-year-old Joseph McCarthy a template for his
future tactics, painting Roosevelt as a Bolshevik in disguise: “There can be
only one capital, Washington or Moscow. There can be only … the clear, pure fresh
air of free America, or the foul breath of communistic Russia. There can be
only one flag, the Stars and Stripes, or the flag of the godless union of the
Soviets.”
Roosevelt and his
administration didn’t just face ad hominem political attacks, but institutional
barriers that threatened to make real structural reform impossible. With a
conservative majority, the Supreme Court ruled numerous New Deal policies
unconstitutional, and stood in the way of any kind of economic reform. At one
point, historian Jeff Shesol tell us in his 2010 book, “Supreme Power: Franklin
Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court,” FDR thought that the court would “nullify
virtually everything of significance that the administration had done.” This
thought didn’t lead Roosevelt to despair, however, as he believed that after
the “nine old men” overruled his popular reforms, it wouldn’t be long before
“the nation’s streets were filled with marching farmers, marching miners, and
marching factory workers.” In other words, Roosevelt was prepared for a fight,
and counted on popular support against the so-called “economic royalists.”
There would always be those who cried “unconstitutional” at “every effort to
better the condition of our people,” Roosevelt observed
in 1937. “Such cries have always been with us; and, ultimately, they have
always been overruled.”
Roosevelt’s struggle with the
Supreme Court culminated with his plan to add more justices to the court, which
ultimately failed, but not before the court—Justice Owen Roberts in
particular—shifted its tune on New Deal legislation.
Both Warren and Sanders have
invoked Roosevelt and the New Deal not just because of policies, but because of
the aggressive style of politics that Roosevelt and his team employed to
achieve such transformative change. Roosevelt wasn’t afraid of being denounced
as a communist or a dictator by right-wing detractors, and he eagerly embraced
conflict with the wealthy business leaders who funded such groups as the
Liberty League. Roosevelt used the bully pulpit to push his progressive agenda
and famously welcomed the hatred of his opponents, who stood against economic
and political reform widely supported by the American people—just as many
progressive reforms are today.
One of the most frequent
criticisms leveled at progressive candidates, often from centrists who claim to
sympathize with their agenda, is that their plans are unrealistic and will
never make it past Congress, let alone the Supreme Court. Reporting on Warren’s
speech at Washington Square Park, The Atlantic’s Russell
Berman observed that while Warren’s policy plans are “detailed and
specific, her strategy for achieving them is less so.” Like Sanders, Warren
calls for a sustained grassroots movement to pressure Washington, but,
according to Berman, “that was also Obama’s plea, and while the former
president was able to enact the Affordable Care Act, Wall Street reforms, and a
large economic-stimulus package early in his tenure, his entreaties for outside
help did not succeed in pressuring Republicans to support his plans.”
This is the conventional
wisdom one often hears today about the Obama years, and while it is certainly
true that President Obama faced unprecedented Republican obstructionism, it is
simply false to claim that the 44th president fought aggressively for a
progressive agenda and did everything he could to push for radical change. Even
before he entered office, Obama had settled on a “pragmatic” response to the
financial crisis, hiring centrists and neoliberal ideologues like Timothy
Geithner, Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel, while desperately working to achieve
a “post-partisan” consensus (which was far more naive than the progressive
approach toward movement-building).
One notable example of the
Obama administration’s timid response was its failure to push for legislation
that would have allowed judges to modify the terms of home mortgages,
colloquially known as “cram down.” As David Dayen reported in
2015, it was within Obama’s power to prevent millions of people from losing
their homes (just as it was within the administration’s power to criminally
prosecute bank executives for their fraudulent behavior). “The administration’s
eventual program, HAMP, grew out of the banking industry’s preferred
alternative to [cram down], one where the industry, rather than bankruptcy judges,
would control loan restructuring,” Dayen writes. “Unfortunately, the program
has been a success for bankers and a failure for most hard-pressed homeowners.”
The idea that Obama was once a
populist, and that a Warren or Sanders administration would end up just like
the Obama administration did, is simply wrong. The two leading progressive
candidates have already expressed a willingness to adopt the Rooseveltian style
of politics that Obama was never willing to adopt, and the 44th president never
favored the structural changes that the former do. “I am prepared to go to
every state in this union and rally the American people around [a progressive]
agenda to put pressure on their representatives, whether they are Democratic or
Republican,” Sanders recently remarked in an
interview, saying that he would also support primary challenges to
Democrats who are not supportive of progressive policies like “Medicare for
All.” This is an aggressive strategy in the tradition of Roosevelt, and it is
the only strategy that could potentially lead to his progressive agenda
becoming a reality in the future.
It is completely legitimate to
ask how progressives would pass major legislation without a supermajority in
Congress, and the fact is that Roosevelt had much more favorable circumstances
in 1933 than any Democratic president is likely to have in the foreseeable
future. There are certain measures that could give Democratic presidents some
wiggle room. Warren has advocated
eliminating the filibuster, for example, while Sanders has, curiously,
rejected this approach, favoring the complicated budget reconciliation process
instead.
None of this will matter,
however, if progressive Democrats don’t manage to create a wave of popular
enthusiasm for their agenda. It is important for progressive leaders to be
honest and forthright about this to their supporters. None of their proposals
stands a chance without a popular movement that goes well beyond the election cycle.
Roosevelt understood the power of popular will; perhaps it is time for
Democrats to refresh their memory.
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