Thursday, November 14, 2019
Released Lula in Greatest Fight of His Life
November 12, 2019 • 1
Comment
Pepe Escobar
He’s back. With a bang.
Only two days after his
release from a federal prison in Curitiba, southern Brazil, following a narrow
6×5 decision by the Supreme Court, former President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva
delivered a fiery, 45-minute long speech in front of the Metal Workers Union in
Sao Bernardo, outside of Sao Paulo, and drawing on his unparalleled political
capital, called all Brazilians to stage nothing short of a social revolution.
When my colleagues Mauro
Lopes, Paulo Leite and I interviewed Lula
at the federal prison, it was his Day 502 in a cell. By August, it was
impossible to predict that release would happen on Day 580, in early November.
His first speech to the nation
after the prison saga — which is far from over — could never be solemn; in fact
he promised a detailed address for the near future. What he did, in his
trademark conversationalist style, was to immediately go on the offensive,
taking down a long list of every possible enemy in the book: those who have
mired Brazil into an “anti-people agenda.” In terms of a fully improvised,
passionate political address, this is already anthology material.
Lula detailed the current
“terrible conditions” for Brazilian workers. He ripped to pieces the economic
program —basically a monster sell-out — of Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, a
Chicago boy and Pinochetist who’s applying the same failed hardcore neoliberal
prescriptions now being denounced and scorned every day in the streets of Chile.
He detailed how the Brazilian
right wing openly bet on neo-fascism, which is the form that neoliberalism
recently took in Brazil. He blasted mainstream media, in the form of the so far
all-powerful, ultra-reactionary Globo empire. In a stance of semiotic genius,
Lula pointed to Globo’s helicopter hovering over the masses gathered for the
speech, implying the organization is too cowardly to get close to him on ground
level.
And, significantly, he got
right into the heart of the Bolsonaro question: the militias. It’s no secret to
informed Brazilians that the Bolsonaro clan, with its origins in the Veneto, is
behaving as a sort of cheap, crude, eschatological carbon copy of the Sopranos,
running a system heavy on militias and supported by the Brazilian military.
Lula described the president of one of the top nations in the Global South as
no less than a militia leader. That will stick — all around the world.
So much for “Lula peace and
love,” which used to be one of his cherished mottos. No more conciliation.
Bolsonaro now has to face real, fierce, solid opposition, and cannot run away
from public debate any more.
Lula’s prison journey has been
an extraordinary liberating experience — turning a previously wounded statesman
into a fearless warrior mixing the Tao with Steppenwolf (as sketched in Herman
Hesse’s book). He’s free like he’s never been before — and he said so,
explicitly. The question is how he will be able to muster the organizational
work, the method — and have enough time to change the dire conditions for
democratic opposition in Brazil. The whole Global South is watching.
At least now the die is cast —
and crystal clear: It’s social democracy against neo-fascism. Socially
inclusive programs, civil society involved in setting public policy, the fight
for equality versus autocracy, state institutions linked to militias,
racism and hate against all minorities. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, to
their credit, have offered Lula their unconditional support. In contrast, Steve
Bannon is losing sleep, qualifying Lula as “the poster boy of the globalist
Left” across the world.
This all goes way beyond Left
Populism — as Slavoj Zizek and Chantal Mouffe, among others, have been trying
to conceptualize it. Lula, assuming he remains free, is now ready to be the
supreme catalyst of an integrated, progressive, “pro-people” New Global Left.
‘Cocaine Evangelistan’
Now for the really nasty bits.
I saw Lula’s speech deep into
the night in snow stormed Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan’s capital, in the heart of the
steppes, a land trespassed against by the greatest nomad empires in history.
The temptation was to picture Lula as a fearless snow leopard roaming the
devastated steppes of urban wastelands.
Yet snow leopards, crucially,
are a species threatened with extinction.
After the speech I had serious
conversations with two top interlocutors, Bern-based analyst Romulus Maya and
anthropologist Piero Leirner, a crack authority on the Brazilian military. The
picture they painted was realistically gloomy. Here it is, in a nutshell.
When I visited Brasilia last
August, several informed sources confirmed that the majority of the Brazilian
Supreme Court is bought and paid for. After all, they de facto legitimized all
the absurdities that have been taking place in Brazil since 2014. The absurdities
were part of a hyper-complex, slow-motion, rolling hybrid war coup that, under
the cloak of a corruption investigation, led to the dismantling of industrial
national champions such as Petrobras; the impeachment of President Dilma
Rousseff on spurious charges; and the jailing of Lula, the work of judge, jury
and executioner Sergio Moro, now Bolsonaro’s justice minister, who was
completely unmasked by The
Intercept’s revelations.
The Brazilian military are all
over the Supreme Court. Remember, Lula’s liberation happened after a narrow
6-to-5 score. Legally, it was impossible to keep him in prison: the Supreme
Court actually bothered to read the Brazilian Constitution.
But there are no structural
changes whatsoever on the horizon. The project remains a Brazil sell-out —
coupled with a thinly veiled military dictatorship. Brazil remains a lowly U.S.
colony. So, Lula is out of jail essentially because this system allowed it.
The military abide by
Bolsonaro’s abysmal incompetence because he cannot even go to the toilet
without permission from General Heleno, the head of the GSI, the Brazilian
version of the National Security Council. On Saturday, a scared Bolsonaro asked
the top military brass for help after Lula’s release. And crucially, in a
tweet, he defined Lula as a “scoundrel” who was “momentarily” free.
It’s this “momentarily” that
gives away the game. Lula’s murky juridical situation is far from decided. In a
harrowing but perfectly plausible short-term scenario, Lula could in fact be
sent back to jail — but this time in isolation, in a maximum security federal
prison, or even inside a military barracks; after all, he’s a former chief of
the armed forces.
The full focus of Lula’s
defense is now to have Moro disqualified. Anyone with a brain who’s been
through The Intercept’s revelations can clearly identify Moro’s
corruption. If that happens, and that’s a major “if,” Lula’s already existing
convictions will be declared null and void. But there are others lawsuits,
eight in total. This is total lawfare territory.
The military’s trump card is
all about “terrorism” — associated with Lula and the Workers Party. If Lula,
according to the harrowing scenario, is sent back to a federal prison, that
could be in Brasilia, which not by accident holds the entire leadership of the
PCC, or “First Command of the Capital” — the largest Brazilian criminal
organization.
Maya and Leirner have shown
how the PCC is allied with the military and the U.S. Deep State, via their
asset Moro, to establish not a Pax Brasilica but what they have
described as a “Cocaine Evangelistan” — complete with terrorist false flags
blamed on Lula’s command.
Leirner has exhaustively
studied how the generals, for over a decade on their website, have been trying to
associate the PCC with the Workers’ Party. And the association extends to the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Hezbollah and the Bolivians.
Yes, this all comes straight from His Masters’ Voice’s playbook.
Lula, Putin and Xi
With the military betting on a
strategy of chaos, augmented by Lula’s immense social base all over Brazil
fuming about his return to prison and the financial bubble finally burst,
rendering the middle classes even poorer, the stage would be set for the ultimate
toxic cocktail: social “commotion” allied with “terrorism” associated with
“organized crime.”
That’s all the military needs
to launch an extensive operation to restore “order” and finally force Congress
to approve the Brazilian version of the Patriot Act (five separate bills are
already making their way in Congress).
This is no conspiracy theory.
This is a measure of how incendiary Brazil is at the moment, and Western
mainstream media will make no effort whatsoever to explain the nasty,
convoluted plot for a global audience.
Leirner goes to the heart of
the matter when he says the current system has no reason to retreat because its
side is winning. They are not afraid of Brazil turning into Chile. And even if
that ends up happening, they already have a culprit: Lula. Brazilian mainstream
media are already releasing trial balloons – blaming Lula for the spike of the
US dollar and the rise of inflation.
Lula and the Brazilian Left
should invest in a full spectrum offensive.
The 9th BRICS summit
takes place in Brazil this week. A master counter-coup would be to organize an
off-the-record, extremely discreet, heavily securitized meeting among Lula,
Putin and Xi Jinping, for instance in an embassy in Brasilia. Putin and Xi are
Lula’s real top allies on the global stage. They have been literally waiting
for Lula, as diplomats have confirmed to me over and over again.
If Lula follows a restricted
script of merely reorganizing the Left, in Brazil, Latin America and even the
Global South, the military system currently in place will swallow him whole all
over again. The Left is infiltrated — everywhere. Now it’s total war. Assuming
Lula remains free, he most certainly won’t be allowed to run again for the
presidency in 2022. But that’s no problem. He’s got to be extra-bold — and he
will be. Better not mess with the Steppenwolf.
Experts Warn This Industry-Backed Attack on Science at EPA Would Be Among 'Most Damaging' of All Trump-Era Policies
"Let's call this what it
is: an excuse to abandon clean air, clean water, and chemical safety
rules."
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Advocates of strong public
health protections responded with alarm to a Monday night New York Times report on
the Environmental Protection Agency's new draft proposal for the Trump
administration's drawn-out effort to dramatically scale back the scientific
research that can be used in government policymaking.
"Let's call this what it
is: an excuse to abandon clean air, clean water, and chemical safety
rules," said Andrew
Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of
Concerned Scientists. "This is a blatant removal of well-established
science from the policymaking process, to the benefit of polluters and at a
huge cost to the marginalized communities who face the biggest threat from
pollution."
The draft proposal (pdf), titled "Strengthening
Transparency in Regulatory Science," would force the agency to only
consider research that discloses all raw data, including private medical files.
It follows a similar proposal unveiled by
former EPA chief Scott Pruitt in April 2018 that provoked nearly 600,000
comments from the public, the majority of which were critical.
Pruitt's successor as EPA
administrator, ex-lobbyist Andrew
Wheeler, delayed the prior proposal, purportedly to consider concerns from
environmental and public health groups. However, the new version "headed
for White House review and obtained by The New York Times shows that
the administration intends to widen its scope, not narrow it."
According to the Times:
The measure would make it more
difficult to enact new clean air and water rules because many studies detailing
the links between pollution and disease rely on personal health information
gathered under confidentiality agreements. And, unlike a version of the
proposal that surfaced in early 2018, this one could apply retroactively to
public health regulations already in place.
"This means the EPA can
justify rolling back rules or failing to update rules based on the best
information to protect public health and the environment, which means more
dirty air and more premature deaths," said Paul Billings, senior vice
president for advocacy at the American Lung Association.
Public health experts warned
that studies that have been used for decades—to show, for example, that mercury
from power plants impairs brain development, or that lead in paint dust is tied
to behavioral disorders in children—might be inadmissible when existing
regulations come up for renewal.
One key example of scientific
research that wouldn't be permissible for government use under the EPA proposal
is a 1993 Harvard University project known as the Six Cities study, which
connected air pollution to premature deaths and subsequently informed
nationwide air quality policies.
"A separate internal EPA
memo viewed by The New York Times shows that the agency had
considered, but ultimately rejected, an option that might have allowed
foundational studies like Harvard's Six Cities study to continue to be
used," the newspaper reported Monday.
As journalist Emily
Atkin put
it in her HEATED newsletter Tuesday: "In other words,
air pollution denial is becoming U.S. policy for the first time." She
noted that this proposal "is a key priority of Steve Milloy, a former tobacco
and fossil fuel industry lobbyist who served on Trump's EPA transition
team."
Atkin recalled speaking with
Stan Glantz, a professor of tobacco control at the University of California San
Francisco, when reporting on Pruitt's version of the proposal last year. The
tobacco industry, Glantz told her, "realized that, rather than fighting
every single study that came out linking them to cancer, if they could get the
rules of evidence changed, they wouldn't have to worry about it."
The Times report on
Wheeler's revived and expanded version elicited impassioned warnings and
critiques on Twitter:
An EPA spokesperson told
the Times in an emailed statement that "the agency does not
discuss draft, deliberative documents, or actions still under internal and
interagency review." Wheeler, for his part, said in September that
"we're moving forward [with the proposal] to ensure that the science
supporting agency decisions is transparent and available for evaluation by the
public and stakeholders."
UCS's Rosenberg said Tuesday
that "Wheeler's claims about the need for these restrictions don't pass
the laugh test. Everything about this rule makes a mockery of the EPA's claim
that this change is necessary for transparency. This rule was driven by
political operatives. It's being rushed through with minimal opportunity for
public comment. And it introduces pointless hurdles and delays into the
policymaking process that will compromise the federal government's ability to
protect the public."
"The Trump administration
has a clear pattern of sidelining science and undermining public health
protections," he added. "If this rule is finalized, it would be one
of the most damaging and far-reaching policy changes enacted by the
administration. It would put the entire enterprise of developing science-based
public health safeguards at risk."
The Times report
came ahead of a Wednesday morning hearing planned by
the Democrat-controlled U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee
about the Trump administration's effort to restrict the use of scientific
research in federal policymaking, which will feature testimony
from various scientists and public health experts.
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