NO SACRIFICES OF THE PUBLIC INTEREST IN TIMES OF EMERGENCY

By Adam M. Sowards, The Revelator.

May 11, 2020
| STRATEGIZE!

https://popularresistance.org/no-sacrifices-of-the-public-interest-in-times-of-emergency/



The Trump Administration Continues To Strip Away Environmental Protections In The Face Of The Pandemic.

History shows that the people can fight back — and win.

Never one to miss an opportunity, the Trump administration has repeatedly used the COVID-19 crisis as cover to enact unwise and dangerous environmental policies against the public interest and to forestall citizen input.

In recent days the Environmental Protection Agency has moved forward with weakening rules for automobile emissions and relaxing pollution standards. The Bureau of Land Management continues leasing for oil and gas drilling even as prices drop. And while much of the country remains under stay-at-home orders and faces the most disruptive public health crisis in a century, deadlines for public statements on forest plans have not been extended and formats for hearings about dams have frustrated citizens who wish to speak up for public resources.

Republicans are using today’s pandemic-related exigencies to undermine environmental protection and the public interest. We’ve seen it before. Hiding behind emergencies is from an old playbook.

Americans have heard excuses about national emergencies in the past and resisted them; we should again.

For a success story that resonates today, we need only look back to the era of the Vietnam War. In late 1966 Kennecott Copper Corporation announced its intent to develop a massive open-pit mine at Miners Ridge, within the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area of the North Cascades in Washington state. The mine would be near the iconic Image Lake, where backpackers enjoy perhaps the greatest views in the entire Cascade Range.

The context of the Vietnam War allowed Kennecott to argue it was merely fulfilling its duty to provide essential materials for the war effort, under which the General Services Administration had established a plan to stockpile critical materials for national security. Seeking to get new mines into operation, the agency promoted incentives that included loans and technical assistance.

Amid all of this, Kennecott pitched its proposed pit as patriotic.

Conservationists quickly grew alarmed. The Wilderness Act, which protected 9.1 million acres of federal land and established the Glacier Peak Wilderness, had just been signed into law in 1964. A compromise in the law allowed Kennecott and other companies to mine claims, but conservationists opposed the giant corporation and demonstrated the obvious: that open-pit mining and wilderness were incompatible.

Everyone knew the mountains held copper — the place name was Miners Ridge, after all. During World War II, at a time when minerals were similarly in demand, the War Production Board approved a road to the mine site, but it never was built.

Dyer was right. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, who had authority over the U.S. Forest Service, which administered the wilderness, soon admitted that the war effort and the public’s standard of living would “not suffer” one bit if the mine was “left undeveloped.”This failure showed that maybe the copper in Miners Ridge really wasn’t that important after all. In 1967, as Kennecott pressed ahead, Polly Dyer, arguably the most important conservationist in Pacific Northwest history, reasoned in a public hearing that “If the Nation was able to pass through that desperate war effort without needing to utilize the copper in Miners Ridge, I am extremely skeptical about Kennecott’s assertion that it is necessary for today’s war operation.”

For all its talk of selfless service to the nation, Kennecott operated primarily to bolster its bottom line — and to establish the precedent of mining within wilderness boundaries. The company’s president was exasperated by having to try the case in the press against an angry public. In his view, the company’s interest was the nation’s interest.

All of this is tiringly familiar in 2020, when the president’s personal interests, antipathy to the press and the public, and desire to establish untoward precedents animate virtually every utterance and policy.

What are the lessons we can take away from this?

Kennecott never built its mine, and the site remains secure as wilderness today, but that was not accidental. It took the efforts of citizens and organizations like the North Cascades Conservation Council and The Mountaineers publicizing the threat, writing representatives, and showing up at hearings. Through it all, Northwesterners demanded that the public’s interest be protected against the corporate bottom line.

In summer 1967 Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas traveled from his summer home in Goose Prairie, Washington, to attend a protest near the mine site. An aroused public, he said to 150 to 200 protestors on the trail, might “appeal to the community’s sense of justice” and declare there are values beyond “a few paltry dollars.”

The public interest, then and now, transcends the bottom line. It sustains democracy; it doesn’t suspend it.

We must not let our representatives use COVID-19 as an excuse to undermine environmental governance. We must continue to stand up for the protections that already exist, which protect not just our wilderness but human health.

History suggests that we can win these fights with determined resistance. Even amid the disruptions visiting our lives with lost lives and jobs, we need to keep one eye on the future and remember that our voices can make a difference.

SOLIDARITY KEY TO POST COVID-19 RESPONSE

By Obiora C. Okafor, Open Global Rights.


May 11, 2020
| STRATEGIZE!




https://popularresistance.org/solidarity-key-to-post-covid-19-response/






Realizing The Vision Embodied By Human Rights Requires Bolder Measures And Commitments To International Solidarity Than The World Has So Far Witnessed.


The COVID-19 pandemic has left a massive amount of disease, death and despair in its stride, and will continue to seriously trouble the world even in its wake. As the result, it has posed a formidable threat to the enjoyment of human rights around the world. More specifically, as is widely recognized, the pandemic (and many of the measures taken to end it) have seriously threatened or harmed the enjoyment by billions of people across the world of the human rights to health, life, education, food, shelter, work, freedom of movement, liberty, and freedom of assembly. Less obvious to many is the fact that the pandemic (and the dominant responses to it) can also constitute serious harm to the enjoyment of the rights to development and democracy, and to freedom from discrimination and gender-based violence. Even more troubling is the fact that these dangers and impacts tend to be exacerbated in the Global South, and in relation to the poor and the racially marginalized everywhere.

The pandemic has also highlighted, rather vividly, the intensity in our time of our interconnectedness as human beings and societies, including the sheer depth of our mutual vulnerability, one to the other. It is now clear to us that a COVID-19 outbreak “over there” is also a COVID-19 problem “right here”. As Samantha Power has recently noted, this pandemic will not end for anyone until it ends for everyone. This reality firmly underlines the absolute necessity of expressing and ramping up our practice of international solidarity, among state and non-state actors alike, if the enjoyment of human rights across the world is to be optimized. There is simply no way of enjoying “our” human rights more fully “over here” whilst the human rights of the vast majority of the world’s peoples who live “over there” hangs in the balance (including their rights to development, health, education, food, shelter, and work). Not even the much richer societies of the Global North can enjoy these human rights optimally without the rights of their indigenous peoples, poor, and racially marginalized communities being respected to a far greater extent. We are all joined at each other’s human rights hip.
It Is Now Clear To Us That A COVID-19 Outbreak “Over There” Is Also A COVID-19 Problem “Right Here”.

As such, if the world “after” this pandemic is to begin to look anything close to the vision of the good life embodied in the progressive human rights texts that have been proposed and/or agreed to for decades now, states and non-state actors must begin to take international solidarity much more seriously. States and non-state actors must pay far more heed to, and implement much more fully, the kind of international solidarity conceived in the Draft UN Declaration on Human Rights and International Solidarity. This entails the expression of a spirit of unity among individuals, peoples, states and international organizations, encompassing the union of interests, purposes and actions and the recognition of different needs and rights to achieve common goals.

“Post” the pandemic, taking international solidarity much more seriously in the struggle to optimally realize all human rights the world over will require much bolder measures than the world has so far witnessed. A few examples of such actionable measures include effective international cooperation to ensure free (or at least affordable) access for everyone in the world to any vaccines or treatments for COVID-19 no matter where in the world they were developed; and modifications, to the extent required, to national and international patent regimes to ensure such free (or at least affordable) access to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.

Further, we require structural reforms in the global economy: ending the net outflows of finances and other resources from Global South to Global North countries so that the former can have more aggregate resources to realize the right to (sustainable) development of their peoples (e.g. by developing their health care and education systems and feeding their hungry); debt cancellation to poorer Global South countries (or at least the great expansion of the debt suspension regimes already in place) to help fund the anti-COVID-19 fight in those places, and ameliorate the economic downturns that are likely to hit most states after the pandemic – some more harshly than others, and similarly we should end (or at least suspend) the economic sanctions imposed on states by certain great powers. Financial grants and more favorable terms of trade must be afforded to the vast majority of Global South countries.
There Is Simply No Way Of Enjoying “Our” Human Rights More Fully “Over Here” Whilst The Human Rights Of The Vast Majority Of The World’s Peoples Who Live “Over There” Hangs In The Balance.

We also need to de-commodify healthcare and treat it instead as the basic human right that it is, including the setting up of schemes that offer universal access the world over to healthcare and medicines. Guaranteed income supplements should be paid to the most vulnerable people in both the Global North and South to stem the expected rise during and “after” the pandemic in mass unemployment, mass hunger, mass homelessness, and mass poverty.

States at the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly should adopt the Draft UN Declaration on Human Rights and International Solidarity. This would help to focus minds on the absolute necessity of practicing international solidarity in the struggle to realize human rights for everyone. It would also help provide a vital additional soft law resource for those who wage the relevant struggles.

Finally, states should adopt and ratify the Draft UN Binding Legal Instrument on the Right to Development, since an element of hard law is much needed to foster greater accountability and more firmly shape the behavior of states and other actors toward the realization of the right to development almost everywhere in the world. Without realizing the right to development much more fully, especially in the Global South—an accomplishment that would be impossible in the absence of greatly enhanced international solidarity—the global human rights situation “after” this pandemic would not become any better than it is today.

PANDEMIC CRASH SHOWS WORKER CO-OPS MORE RESILIENT THAN TRADITIONAL BUSINESS

By Brian Van Slyke, Truthout.

May 11, 2020
| CREATE!

https://popularresistance.org/pandemic-crash-shows-worker-co-ops-are-more-resilient-than-traditional-business/




While we have no way to know yet the full extent of the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, by all accounts it could be as bad — if not far worse — than the 2008 crash. In fact, in terms of unemployment alone, the numbers are already staggering: more than 33 million jobs have been lost so far in the U.S. during the coronavirus shutdowns, compared to the roughly 8.6 million lost in the Great Recession.

Following that crisis, many working people turned to the worker cooperative model as a way to build economic resiliency and stability for themselves. In the decade after 2008, the number of worker-owned cooperatives in the United States nearly doubled, increasing from 350 to 600. I know, because I am a member of one of those cooperatives that formed: The TESA Collective, which creates tools and games for social change.

A worker cooperative like ours is a business that is democratically owned and governed by the employees themselves, called worker-owners. Each worker owns one equal share in the business and has one vote in its governance structure. Essentially, it is democracy at work.

“It does the opposite of what a traditional firm does,” says Esteban Kelly, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, an organization supporting the worker cooperative movement, and of which the TESA Collective is a member. “Traditional firms, when times are good, they take that surplus, they distribute it to the investors or maybe pay off debt, but they don’t necessarily do a lot of bonus pay for rank-and-file or increase wages,” Kelly told Truthout. “When times are bad, they panic. And then maybe they get bailed out, maybe they declare bankruptcy … but it’s basically a model of austerity. They’re slashing jobs and benefits.”

Kelly explains that on the other hand, when worker-owned businesses are doing well, they share the benefits among worker-owners. This is most commonly achieved by increasing wages, expanding benefits, distributing dividends to the employees (instead of absentee stock owners), and reinvesting in their communities. But when business is tough, a worker cooperative equitably shares the burden. Instead of mass layoffs, the workers, who are the equal owners, strive to find collective solutions. Worker-owners might vote to take voluntary pay cuts so no one person loses their job, and worker committees might try to find new markets the cooperative can expand into.

Kelly says that because worker co-ops share the benefits in the good times and the burdens in the hard times, they are a more sustainable form of business. And the data agrees with him:

One 2019 study found that worker cooperatives in the United States survive through their first six to 10 years at a rate 7 percent higher than traditional small businesses. And in 2012, research revealed that in France and Spain, worker cooperatives “have been more resilient than conventional enterprises during the economic crisis” that followed the 2008 crash. Another study of businesses in Uruguay from 1997 – 2009 demonstrated that “the hazard of dissolution is 29% lower” for worker-managed firms. In fact, as documented by the Sustainable Economies Law Center, there is a growing body of evidence that shows across the world, cooperatives in general are a more resilient business model.
Cooperating Their Way Through Crisis

Resiliency does not equal immunity to a global pandemic and economic crisis, however, and worker co-ops have certainly felt the impact from the coronavirus outbreak.

“Whole segments of work have disappeared overnight,” says Ross Newport, a longtime worker-owner at Community Printers. Community Printers, a cooperative with 33 members, is an industrial-scale print and packaging shop, having been in business since 1977.

Still, how a worker co-op business responds to and absorbs its losses is decided through cooperative decision making, not passed down from owners and managers.

“We have not laid anyone off,” Newport reports. Community Printers, which has been deemed an essential business in California and remains open, has had to significantly restructure the shop to maintain social distancing. Half of the workers are voluntarily furloughed and receiving unemployment, all while the co-op continues to pay for their benefits.

Yet, in a worker cooperative, protecting the voices of members and their democratic structure is also key. Here too, cooperatives have found creative solutions during this unprecedented crisis.

“It is very difficult to make group decisions with everyone physically separated,” says Newport. So the decision-making processes of the co-op have evolved to match the needs of the current emergency, with members forming small groups that are entrusted to make decisions that the whole cooperative would normally make together.

“We have made it clear that as we come back together all the decisions that have been made by smaller groups can be reviewed. So far, it seems that people appreciate that the crisis requires new solutions.”

Allie Wilson Plasek, a worker-owner at the Mariposa Gardening and Design Cooperative, also said that their business quickly dried up when the pandemic came into full swing. But she believes the cooperative’s democratic ownership structure has been critical for its survival.

“Co-ownership has made this pandemic much easier to swallow as a small business,” Wilson Plasek says. “Based on skill-set, interest, and experience, we have all sort of divided up what we can and should be working on. It makes it so employees have a stronger sense of well-being. If we were a sole proprietorship, I think someone would have burned out already with all the expectations of keeping the business afloat.”

This crisis has made clear that one of the strengths of a worker cooperative is not just the democratic ownership structure, but also the ability for workers to pool their collective knowledge and passion.

“Because there are so many of us, and we all deeply care about our studio’s mission and survival, we were all willing to make certain concessions,” says Catherine Murcek of Samamkāya, a yoga studio cooperative with 19 worker-owners. “We adjusted our pay scale so that it is similar but allows the studio to make a little bit more money…. Furthermore, many of us volunteered a lot of time to researching different options for moving forward through the crisis.”

Samamkāya had to quickly adapt to the new social distancing reality: the co-op moved its yoga sessions to online classes only and began working together to access emergency funds through cooperative support organizations, such as the $5,000 they received via the Disaster Recovery Fund grant offered by the Cooperative Development Foundation.

“I just have to say I am so appreciative of the fact that I have a vote in how the business is run,” Murcek says. “We were all able together to come up with a solution that was the best possible for both the worker-owners and the survival of the business.”
Transforming Cooperatives To Meet New, Urgent Needs

The democratic ownership structure of cooperatives also allows them to collectively adapt to a changing world.

The worker-owners of Mariposa Gardening and Design Cooperative realized that while they couldn’t offer their normal landscaping services, several of their members were already skilled in growing food gardens. So they launched a new service to build and maintain food beds throughout the Bay Area, in anticipation of growing food uncertainty due to the stress COVID-19 has put on the food system. The purpose of these food gardens is to allow community members to have direct access to food. The co-op will offer to build food beds for customers outside of their homes or apartments, which Mariposa can maintain and harvest — or community members can do themselves.

Meanwhile, the workers at Community Printers have chosen to shift to a model where they are prioritizing work for essential services, manufacturing products that aid in the struggle against the pandemic. They have begun designing and printing large health education posters for freeway overpasses and the sides of busses. And they have also started to expand the type of materials they are producing, manufacturing hospital gowns as well as building partition walls for emergency facilities and homeless shelters.

Some cooperatives have even teamed up to shift their production models to meet aid and relief needs of other cooperatives. Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), the largest worker cooperative in the United States with over 1,000 members, offers home care visits throughout New York City. But shortly after the pandemic struck, CHCA began running out of masks for its staff. Meanwhile, there was a national shortage of surgical masks, and price gouging was making purchasing them in bulk almost impossible.

That’s when CHCA came up with a creative solution: members reached out to another worker-owned cooperative they knew that was skilled in the textile industry. Opportunity Threads, which employs over 50 people and primarily immigrants, typically makes products like special order t-shirts. But by working with CHCA to refine their production line, the worker-owners of Opportunity Threads were able to begin manufacturing the surgical masks for CHCA’s home care workers — offering a desperately needed resource to protect the co-op’s staff and their clients.
Worker Cooperatives As A Path Forward

During a recent online teach-in, author and activist Naomi Klein brought attention to the potential of worker cooperatives as a pathway out of the looming economic crisis.

“As small businesses go into crisis, we need to be pushing for worker ownership. Rather than being shut down, every workplace should have the option for workers to turn it into a cooperative before it goes into bankruptcy,” Klein said.

Many in the worker cooperative movement are already moving quickly to lay the groundwork for such transitions. Matt Cropp, co-executive director of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, says that many small business owners will likely just decide to close down rather than struggle to become a “re-start-up.”

“Staring down the prospect of 70+ hour weeks and going into debt to recapitalize, many will be giving serious consideration to simply liquidating and walking away,” Cropp told Truthout. “Worker co-op developers are working on how we might reach business owners with the worker co-op conversion idea.”

Converting traditional businesses to worker-ownership has been a growing trend for the worker co-op movement over the past few years, and it appears the coronavirus crisis will speed up the necessity of these efforts. Typically, this transition is achieved when owners sell their business to the employees, which gives owners a safe way to exit the company while allowing workers to keep (and democratize) their jobs.

On the national scale, the worker co-op federation is mobilizing and advocating for existing worker co-ops. Together with a coalition of other cooperative organizations, they successfully lobbied to have cooperatives included in the stimulus funding for small businesses. As a result, Samamkāya was able to be included in the first round of stimulus relief offered by the Small Business Administration, while Community Printers and Mariposa were approved in the second round of funding.

Perhaps most impressive, however, is how the worker co-op federation has been helping to repurpose cooperatives that are temporarily closed to aid in relief efforts.

“We’re trying to organize our members into rapid response co-ops,” says Kelly of the federation. “So taking workforces that are not viable during social distancing and repurposing them into some of the value chains that are needed, like more meal delivery co-ops.”

One of the best examples of the formation of rapid response cooperatives is the above story of CHCA and Opportunity Threads. But beyond that, others have emerged as well, such as Sustainergy, a green home improvement cooperative based in Cincinnati, which has pivoted some of their operations to grocery delivery services for the time being. This is in response to the fact that many people will not be looking to do home improvements while belts tighten, but an increasing number of community members need food brought to their doorsteps.

Worker cooperatives, business models based on mutual aid and solidarity, will likely once again see an explosion of interest and energy as this crisis wears on, just like they did after the 2008 crash. We are heading toward a period of great economic upheaval, and worker-ownership may be one of our most powerful tools in the immediate and long-term aftermath to build economic resiliency for everyday people.

VENEZUELA MAKES FRESH ARRESTS AS OPPOSITION SPLINTERS OVER FAILED COUP

By Ricardo Vaz, Venezuelanalysis

May 11, 2020
| EDUCATE!




https://popularresistance.org/venezuela-makes-fresh-arrests-as-opposition-splinters-over-failed-coup/



Trump Said The Operation “Was Not A Good Attack,” Again Denying Any US Involvement.

The Venezuelan government announced 16 new arrests in the aftermath of a thwarted invasion attempt last week.

Two separate raids on Sunday resulted in three and eight arrests, respectively. There were three other arrests on Saturday and two on Friday, bringing the total of those detained to 39.

On May 3 and 4, two speedboats carrying armed groups were neutralized by Venezuelan armed forces on the shores of Macuto and Chuao, in La Guaira and Aragua States, respectively. The first confrontation resulted in eight members of the paramilitary force killed.

US Army special operations veteran Jordan Goudreau claimed he organized the coup plot, which he called “Operation Gedeon,” together with retired Venezuelan Major General Cliver Alcala. Goudreau announced on social media a “daring amphibious raid” of a force of sixty men with the goal of overthrowing the Maduro government.

Among those arrested were two ex-green berets, who confessed to Venezuelan authorities that their mission was to secure the Maiquetia international airport, kidnap Maduro, and transport him to the United States. The latest arrests reportedly include a nephew of Alcala’s.

Speaking Saturday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accused Washington and Bogota of having a hand in the failed operation.

“[Local Colombian] authorities in Riohacha, Barranquilla and Alta Guajira were aware of the mercenaries’ presence and the training camps,” he said during a televised address. “Any independent investigation would reveal the Colombian government’s involvement in this armed incursion against Venezuela.”

Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza vowed to denounce the attack before the United Nations Security Council.

Venezuelan authorities likewise drew attention to a contract in which the Venezuelan opposition hired Goudreau’s Florida-based private security firm, Silvercorp, to topple the Maduro government in exchange for a US $213 million fees. Opposition leader Juan Guaido, as well as advisors Juan Jose (J.J.) Rendon and Sergio Vergara, appear as signatories in a copy leaked by Goudreau.

The agreement stipulates details regarding the opposition’s payments to Silvercorp in addition to the firm’s future role in “counter-terrorism” and “counter-narcotics” activities under a Guaido administration. Likewise, the paramilitary forces are authorized to deploy deadly anti-personnel mines, strike infrastructure and other economic targets, as well as detain and use deadly force against civilians who “commit hostile acts or exhibit hostile intent.”

On Friday, Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced the government had issued 22 arrest warrants for unnamed suspects involved in the coup attempt and extradition requests for Goudreau, Rendon and Vergara, currently based in Florida and Colombia, respectively.

Saab added that ex-green berets Luke Denman and Airen Berry have been charged with terrorism, conspiracy and arms trafficking. The detained Venezuelans were charged with conspiracy with a foreign government, treason, terrorism, among others.

For its part, the Trump administration issued fresh denials of involvement in Operation Gedeon.

On Friday, President Donald Trump said he knew nothing about the paramilitary incursion, which “was not a good attack.”

“If we ever did anything with Venezuela, it wouldn’t be that way. It would be called an invasion,” he told Fox News in a telephone interview.

Questions remain, however, about possible US knowledge of the operation. On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal published a report citing anonymous sources who claimed that the CIA and Colombian intelligence monitored paramilitary training camps headed by Alcala in Colombia.

The failed coup has also reignited internecine disputes within the Venezuelan opposition camp.

Rendon, who was tapped by Guaido to head a “strategic committee” tasked with exploring regime change scenarios, confirmed to the Washington Post that the opposition had hired Silvercorp to lead a coup attempt. He claimed that he did not follow through on his contractual commitments on behalf of the opposition after Goudreau failed to deliver on pledges of men and financing.

In response, Juan Guaido alleged that Rendon and Vergara moved forward with the plans against his explicit orders, citing concerns over the operation’s “legality.” The opposition leader reiterated that he had no connections to Operation Gedeon and to Silvercorp, despite his signature appearing on a leaked copy of the contract. A video leaked by Goudreau also appeared to show a conference call with the opposition leader and his senior aide, Vergara.

Venezuela’s right-wing Justice First (PJ) party additionally weighed in on the operation, rejecting “the hiring of illegal groups.” In a communique published on social media, the party of former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles demanded that Guaido clarify the events and dismiss all officials with ties to the groups.

Since declaring himself head of a parallel transition government in January 2019 with US backing, Guaido has led several unsuccessful attempts to oust Maduro by force. The controversy over the opposition leader’s possible involvement in “Operation Gedeon” follows a series of scandals dating back to last year, including the alleged embezzlement of humanitarian aid funds as well as links to Colombian drug traffickers.

BRAZIL’S ‘OPERATIONAL PRESIDENT’ GENERAL BRAGA NETTO UNVEILS HIS ‘MARSHALL PLAN’

By Brasil Wire
May 11, 2020
| EDUCATE!




https://popularresistance.org/brazils-operational-president-general-braga-netto-unveils-his-marshall-plan/


Chief Of Staff General Braga Netto’s Launch Of A Massive Public Investment Program, Dubbed His “Marshall Plan,” Is The Strongest Indication Yet That President Bolsonaro And Finance Minister Guedes Have Lost Control Of Governmental Policy To The Military.

In early April 2020, the first rumors emerged that Brazil’s Chief of Staff, General Walter Souza Braga Netto, had been quietly anointed “acting” or “operational” President of Brazil. It was a position that did not officially exist, therefore no official confirmation of this was even possible. The reports, from multiple sources, claimed that the incumbent President, Jair Bolsonaro, would not be removed from power as many had excitedly hoped, but be kept in position as a public figurehead, with important decisions taken out of his hands, thus maintaining the democratic packaging for the military government in all but name.

Appointed as Chief of Staff in February, General Braga Netto was the first Military figure to occupy the position since the 1964-85 dictatorship and his expanded powers came about apparently without resistance. The rumored “silent coup” passed without fanfare, without announcement, and was given little media coverage outside independent media. Adding to mystery and speculation, Italy’s La Repubblica published a report on the rumors which then vanished from its website.

Two weeks later, the General’s announcement of a massive Keynesian investment program called Pró-Brasil – informally called a “Brazilian Marshall Plan” – has prompted Brazil’s biggest newspapers Folha de São Paulo and Estadão to acknowledge the General’s position at the de-facto head of government policy.

At a press conference on April 22, without the presence of Finance Minister Guedes or any of his team, Braga Netto announced a complete economic U-Turn: “Pró-Brasil” – a government program of massive investment in infrastructure. Pró-Brasil envisages a total investment of R$300 billion, with R$250 billion in concessions and public-private partnerships, and another R$50 billion in public investment. General Braga Netto will coordinate the program and insists all Governmental ministries are in unanimous support.

The plan contradicts the ultraliberal ideology of Chicago Boy Guedes, his Instituto Millenium, and their economic platform which was used by many in business as justification for backing Bolsonaro in 2018. It resembles the PAC launched by President Lula in response to the economic crisis of 2008/9 which saw Brazil become the last major economy to enter recession and the first to exit. Guedes has reportedly complained that it is a return to the subsequent economic policy of Dilma Rousseff’s Presidency, the so-called Growth Acceleration Programme. Perversely, Rousseff’s policy, which this new program goes some way to replicate, was once used as a justification for her removal by any means.

The Guedes team still insists this can only be paid for with the accelerated privatizations which made him and Bolsonaro the darlings of Wall Street.

Following Braga Netto’s announcement at Planalto Palace, Brazil’s traditional media shifted gear immediately. Estadão led with their report on the Pró-Brasil program, with its headline pointing to the absence of Guedes’ economic team at its announcement. Then, overnight on 23 April, Folha de São Paulo published this article, describing Braga Netto’s emergence, in the midst of the pandemic, as “the main political articulator of the Government”. The article reiterated many details of Braga Netto’s expansion of powers as reported in independent media two weeks prior but unsurprisingly stopped short of repeating the controversial definition of the General as “operational president”.

Braga Netto joined the Army in 1974, and ascended to the rank of four-star General, along the way serving as a UN observer in East Timor, and also as a Military attaché in Poland and in the United States.

The Armed Forces have cemented its place at the heart of Brazilian Governance since 2016, and now occupies more ministries than it did at the end of the Military Dictatorship, and were widely seen as already calling the shots. Thus when the rumors about Braga Netto’s power broke, some argued that the General becoming key political decision-makers in a Bolsonaro-fronted Government was not news.

Then, the firing of Health Minister Mandetta – only after Braga Netto had been credited with saving him from dismissal – was misinterpreted as evidence that Bolsonaro was still in charge. On the contrary, his successor was identified and agreed by Braga Netto and the Generals when they washed their hands of Mondetta. So, whilst the elected President blustered with meaningless public statements and desperate-looking attempts to rally his base – including calls for closure of the Supreme Court and Congress – it was becoming clearer by the day that Braga Netto was indeed now a powerful frontman for the Military core at the heart of Brazil’s Government, and effectively coordinating the ministries. Even former Army Captain Bolsonaro himself is said to trust Braga Netto in this position.

Announcement of the Generals’ “Marshall Plan” is Brazil’s new political reality becoming visible in daylight.

As it was in 2016, once the Pandora’s box was opened by the coup against Rousseff, and the Military re-entered Government, it was unlikely they would ever relinquish power voluntarily. This was demonstrated very clearly by their manipulation of 2018’s Presidential election, and, as they did in the 1960s, Brazil’s democratic forces made a crucial error in judgment that the Military would simply stand aside.

Whilst many will instinctively celebrate any diminishing of Bolsonaro’s power, and await the eventual exorcism of his pathological influence from Government altogether, the future of Brazilian democracy is ever more precarious.

COVID-19 AND A NEW, BETTER WORLD

By Karl Grossman, Counterpunch.

May 11, 2020
| CREATE!




https://popularresistance.org/covid-19-and-a-new-better-world/




Indian writer Arundhati Roy writes that the COVID-19 pandemic is a “portal”—a “gateway”—to a new world. “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

“We can choose,” she says, “to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our…dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through…ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

We can, indeed, hope that somehow this global health calamity might lead to a better world. More importantly, after all the deaths, the profound misery—we need and must—work for a better world.

And there are heavy-duty forces seeking to prevent that outcome.

The pandemic has made clear the oneness of the peoples of the world. As former U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly, said in an op-ed piece in The New York Times. “Seen from space, the Earth has no borders. The spread of the coronavirus is showing us that what we share is much more powerful than what keeps us apart. All people are inescapably interconnected, and the more we can come together to solve our problems, the better off we will all be. One of the side effects of seeing Earth from the perspective of space is feeling more compassion for others.”

Kelly, who spent a year on the International Space Station, wrote: “I’ve seen humans work together to prevail over some of the toughest challenges imaginable and I know we can prevail over this one if we all do our part and work together as a team.”

“Oh, and wash your hands—often,” he concluded.

The disaster surely underlines the folly of humans battling with each other—the horrible human proclivity to war, the folly of pouring national treasuries into armed conflict.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is appealing to warring parties on Earth to pull back from hostilities, put aside mistrust and animosity, silence the guns. “It is time,” says Guterres, “to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives.”

“The virus drastically demonstrates both the mutual global dependencies and the irresponsibility of military conflict,” says Susanne Grabenhorst, leader of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. War, she emphasizes, has “massively weakened” health systems “and made millions of people particularly vulnerable to the current pandemic.”

IPPNW, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, is “demanding that military resources be redirected…for the service of health and peaceful life.”

Mikhail Gorbachev, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, too, in an essay in Time magazine titled “When The Pandemic Is Over, The World Must Come Together,” declares: “Many are now saying the world will never be the same. But what will it be like? That depends on what lessons will be learned.”

“What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security,” says the former Soviet president. “Over the past few years, all we’ve been hearing is talk about weapons, missiles and airstrikes….War is a sign of defeat, a failure of politics….The overriding goal must be human security: providing food, water and a clean environment and caring for people’s health. To achieve it, we need to develop strategies, make preparations, plan and create reserves. But all efforts will fail if governments continue to waste money by fueling the arms race.”

As Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column in 1946, after World War II had ended and the United Nations was established: “Either we make peace and restore the world to a peaceful basis, or we prepare ourselves for the end of our civilization.”

“We must become one world,” she wrote. “There is only one way and that is by working together. Gradually we will come to see each other’s point of view and modify our own. We will come to trust each other. Someday there must be one world or there cannot be peace and the only machinery we have to achieve that end is the United Nations. It is not strong today, but it can become strong if we are determined to make it so.”

The Canadian Peace Congress says: “The global reach of COVID-19 demonstrates once again that all humanity shares a common future. This virus knows no borders; it touches all, regardless of language, culture, ethnicity, financial or social status, gender, age or national origin. Like the threat of nuclear war and global warming, this newest threat can be overcome through genuine international cooperation, friendship and solidarity among all the people of the world.”

In recent times, a nuclear Armageddon has gotten closer. The “Doomsday Clock” of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was reset in February to 100 seconds to midnight—the closest to midnight since it was initiated in 1947.

Nuclear war, with an exchange of some of the more than 14,000 hydrogen and atomic weapons existing today, many on hair trigger alert, would be an atomic COVID-19 for the people of the Earth.

“Why not,” asks State University of New York Professor Emeritus Lawrence Wittner, “work cooperatively to save humanity from massive global death and economic collapse” rather than “waging wars and engaging in vast military buildups with the goal of slaughtering one another.”

Is a world at peace a pipe dream? I know something about conflict and war from, for 20 years, being a member of the Commission on Disarmament Education, Conflict Resolution and Peace of the United Nations and the International Association of University Presidents. The vision of the commission was reducing, perhaps someday ending, the conflict that mires the globe. The same intensity with which humanity has studied and practiced war through the millennia must be applied to peace. I traveled the world with the commission, coordinated conferences. It developed courses used internationally on conflict resolution and peace. It also brought people from all over the world together for retreats—people from where conflict brewed. It was amazing that after a couple of weeks, getting to know each other personally, these folks who otherwise would be at each other’s throats, had become friends. Nations can, through diplomacy, engendering trust and communicating, do the same. Peace is possible.

“The concept of ‘security’ must be redefined, or at least expanded. For a long time, it has been defined singularly in nationalistic terms, measured by military strength. Many trillions of dollars continue to be spent on weapons to defend nations against threats they pose to each other. Vast institutions have been created around these weapons, and outstanding intellects are dedicating their brilliance to strengthening these institutions and designing strategies for using these weapons—all in the name of national security,” wrote Jonathan Granoff, president of the Global Security Institute, and DePaul University Professor Barry Kellman, in Newsweek. “But as this pandemic spirals around the world, and as militaries lie helpless before it, it’s appropriate to ask whether we would be better off if more resources and attention were pooled and devoted to addressing threats to human security.
The pandemic is “telling us that chasing security with an inordinate adversarial perspective, without recognizing the value of cooperative and collective security, has left us unprepared and insecure before this very real global threat.”

“We are in a war, not nation against nation, but humanity against a common affliction. Many of us will die in this war. But it’s the bug or us, and “us” means all of us. We’re brothers and sisters in arms, with a common mission to contain the spread of the disease and heal the afflicted. To do this, we must think and act cooperatively and collectively.”

“It is an existential imperative we need to prioritize now. It is essential to combatting pressing global threats, including climate change and nuclear weapons, as well as pandemic diseases. Our thinking and actions must reflect the reality that we are one human family.”

As to the link between COVID-19 and climate change—some of the same groups and political figures—deny both. As DeSmog, the information center on global warming disinformation, has exposed: “The climate science denial machine created by the fossil fuel industry is now a major source of COVID-19 disinformation. Deniers have deployed many of the same tactics they have used to attack climate scientists and delay action to downplay the severity of the coronavirus outbreak and sow distrust in the response efforts of governments, scientists and the medical community — with deadly consequences that are now unfolding before our eyes.”

Canadian physician Dr. Courtney Howard, in an interview in Yes, says the coronavirus crisis “at first seems unrelated to climate, but it has a lot of consequences for the conversation around climate and health….The whole coronavirus outbreak is a giant wake-up call in terms of planetary health because what it’s saying is, ‘Hey, there’s a lack of care at the intersection of humans and the natural world, and that’s what allowed a zoonotic virus to make a jump into humans.’ Essentially, we’re in a generational tipping point,” she said. “Things have been disrupted, so now we have this opportunity: how can we apply the lessons that we’ve learned to saving lives this century and into the next?”

Professor Dieter Helm of the University of Oxford in England says: “The coronavirus crisis will come to an end even if coronavirus does not…What will not be forgotten by future historians is climate change and the destruction of the natural environment…. There is a broader lesson here…and a really great legacy of this crisis would be that we learn it.”

World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, declared: “Whilst COVID-19 has caused a severe international health and economic crisis, failure to tackle climate change may threaten human well-being, eco-systems and economies for centuries. We need to flatten both the pandemic and climate change curves. We need to show the same determination and unity against climate change as against COVID-19. We need to act together in the interests of health and welfare of humanity not just for the coming weeks, but for many generations ahead.”

As The Guardian, out of the U.K., began an article on the climate crisis: “Drowned cities, stagnant seas; intolerable heatwaves; entire nations uninhabitable…and [with a global population of] more than 11 billion humans. A four-degree-warmer [four-degree Celsius is 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit] world is the stuff of nightmares and yet that’s where we’re heading in just decades.”

UN Secretary-General Guterres on Earth Day said that while “the impact of the coronavirus is both immediate and dreadful,” there’s an “even deeper emergency—the planet’s unfolding environmental crisis.” He said “climate disruption is approaching a point of no return,” that “greenhouse gases, just like viruses, do not respect national boundaries.”

As with the COVID-19 virus situation, action on the climate crisis has been slow or nonexistent. As Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg declared at the UN Climate Action Summit last year: “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough….. You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you.”

The climate crisis, as with the COVID-19 pandemic, must be taken on forcefully with the world together. Totally delinquent has been the Trump administration withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement with Trump calling climate change—like he called the coronavirus pandemic—a “hoax.”

Ending the burning of fossil fuel—the chief cause of global warming—and a conversion to green, renewable energy would deal with this enormous threat.

As “we go from today to tomorrow,” commented New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, this is “an opportunity where after this horrendous period that we have gone through on every level, after the exorbitant cost of this, the personal pain of this, the death…this has to be one of those moments in time when we look back where we say society transformed….It was a learning and growth and transformational period where growth and evolution were accelerated…Society took a terrible blow, but it became a moment of reflection where all sorts of new reforms and innovations happen. That’s what we have to do with this period. So our goal is not let’s get up and turn the machine back on and keep going the way we were. No. How do you make the changes now that you’ve been talking about in some cases for years…but…never had the political will to do it? Or…it was too difficult. We talk about environmental changes that we’re going to make, but we never really do it. We talk about issues of income inequality, but we never really get there. We talk about changes to our public transit system, but it’s too hard, it’s too controversial.”

“All right,” said Cuomo, “well now you have an opportunity in this window to really make changes and reforms and improve things in a way you haven’t. And by the way, if you went through this and you went through this pain and aggravation and suffering and you didn’t learn, well, then shame on us.”

“Now let’s learn, and how will we be going to be ready for the next situation like this because there will be another. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know when it is. I don’t know if this virus comes back in a second wave, but there will be something, and we have to be ready and better for it.”

Jamie Metzel, formerly with the U.S. State Department and a White House fellow and a UN human rights officer, says: “The world is not going to snap back to being exactly like it was before this crisis happened….We’re going to come out of this into a different world.” And he warns: “Our democracies are going to be challenged.”

An immediate political effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been leaders in a number of countries moving their nations toward authoritarianism.

“There will be change,” says social critic, historian, linguist, MIT Professor emeritus Noam Chomsky. “The question is: what kind of change.” He asks: will the COVID-19 pandemic provide an opening for “more repression?”

There is a drive afoot, says Chomsky, of figures “working to institute the kind of change they want.” They’re “carefully constructing” a push “headed by the White House encompassing the most reactionary states in the world” to use the COVID-19 pandemic to foster authoritarian rule. “Will there be counter-pressure?” he asks. People need to understand that it is not enough to just show up on Election Day, says Chomsky. They must be “all the time working, pressing, making changes—that’s the way things are done—and it has to be done on an international scale.”

COVID-19 IS A REASON TO START THE GREEN NEW DEAL NOW

By Sarah Lazare, In These Times.

May 11, 2020
| CREATE!




https://popularresistance.org/covid-19-is-a-reason-to-start-the-green-new-deal-now/





Note: This seems so obvious — we have mass unemployment, and a Green New Deal would create tens of millions of jobs. We have an infrastructure crisis so funding a Green New Deal would remake infrastructure as part of a new sustainable clean energy economy. We are facing a climate crisis and a Green New Deal’s main purpose is to confront it. It makes so much sense yet neither Trump or Biden support it. The only candidate who does is the likely Green Party nominee, Howie Hawkins, who has put out a detailed plan and budget. Hawkins was the first candidate to run on the Green New Deal in the US during his New York gubernatorial run in 2010. – KZ (Disclaimer – KZ works on the Hawkins campaign)
We Can Get Out Of This Depression And Save The Planet All At Once.

Our political leaders, Republican and Democrat, are leaving tens of millions of people in free fall. Instead of a guaranteed income and universal, single-payer healthcare, we are offered paltry, one-time checks and unemployment payments (for those who qualify—and many don’t, including all undocumented people). Epidemiologists tell us that people must stay home to curb the spread of the virus—yet, to do so, people need a consistent income, which most cannot achieve from home. We have been offered no road map for keeping bread lines—like the 10,000 families who showed up at a food bank in San Antonio—from growing ever longer.

Even as there are no jobs, work is piling up. For example, any plan to safely emerge from shutdown also requires contact tracing, which involves mass testing to find people who have been infected with the virus, then tracking down and monitoring anyone they have come in contact with. (Such an effort should remain firmly under the purview of public health, with checks to ensure the data is in no way subject to policing, government surveillance or private interests.) By some estimates, adequate contact tracing in the U.S. would require at least a hundred thousand tracers. As no healthcare expertise is required, it would be a perfect job for the presently unemployed.

Which is to say it has become abundantly clear that, to get to the other side of the Covid-19 crisis without leaving a single person behind, we need ambitious social programs like a universal income and a jobs guarantee. If these calls sound familiar, it might be because they are also vital to address a slower-burning but even more catastrophic emergency: climate change.

We are already experiencing some effects of climate change, but if the atmosphere warms beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, they will be more devastating. A universal jobs program would provide the labor for the urgent transition to renewable energy: cleaning up shuttered coal mines, building robust mass transit systems and energy-retrofitting homes. A guaranteed universal income would provide the means to survive droughts, floods and superstorms to the people most directly affected, in a country where 11.1% of people are food insecure and 40% can’t afford a $400 emergency.

The Green New Deal that emerged from the longtime demands of labor and social movements, and was first championed in Congress by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), would create all of these programs and more.

So, why wait to start the Green New Deal? We can implement a universal basic income right now, during the pandemic, when it is desperately needed. A universal jobs program could put people to work testing, contact tracing and checking in on elders—and later be used to build the zero-carbon economy. As proponents of a “green stimulus” argue, even though social distancing creates a limit on physical labor, we can get millions of green jobs “shovel ready,” and the systems in place now to save lives in the coming months and decades.

While wealth is buffering the rich from the effects of these catastrophes, the poor—disproportionately people of color—are bearing the brunt. To ensure the resilience of the working class and to remedy the long-running crisis of inequality, we need to redistribute wealth downward. Instead, thanks to the corporate bailouts in the CARES Act stimulus package, lawmakers have been orchestrating a tremendous redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. Republicans are the worse offenders, but Democrats deserve blame for their timidity and incrementalism.

As the circles of the vulnerable and dispossessed expand rapidly and dramatically—with 30 million more people unemployed in April than in March—we need a robust Green New Deal now to get through the current crisis, and mitigate the next one.