https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5SpXncR5fM
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Postal Banking: Brought to You by JPMorgan Chase?
Raul Carrillo August 31, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/postal-banking-brought-to-you-by-jpmorgan-chase/
The largest Wall Street bank is reportedly in discussions with the U.S. Postal Service for the exclusive right to solicit postal banking customers.
(Common Dreams) Imagine if activists and elected officials were clamoring for emergency provision of food and McDonald’s offered to place a drive-thru window in every post office. Calling it #postalfood. That makes as much sense as JPMorgan Chase’s recent attempt to place its own ATMs in every post office and call it #postalbanking.
According to recent reports, JPMorgan Chase — the largest bank in the United States, with $3.2 trillion of assets — has offered to lease space from USPS in exchange for the “exclusive right” to solicit postal banking customers.
First off, let’s be clear: this is not “postal banking.” As Mehrsa Baradaran told Fast Company right after the news broke, “having a private middleman defeats the entire purpose of postal banking, which is a public bank competing against banks like JPMorgan Chase.”
Although some advocates have discussed ways private sector entities might facilitate postal banking — aiding in the provision of savings and checking accounts, electronic money transfers, cash and coin conversion, bill payment services, etc. — most proposals envision USPS, in conjunction with the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Department, taking the lead and retaining control.
That’s because postal banking is about building on the core fact that USPS is legally required to serve everyone at uniform price and quality, without centering the profit motive…like JPMorgan Chase does. Even if this Wall Street bank were to successfully place an ATM in every post office branch, people without the appropriate accounts would still be unable to use them. And people without JPMorgan Chase accounts wouldn’t be able to use the ATM without paying higher fees.
Although many advocates envision postal branches housing ATMs, the plan would entail free usage, at least for people using Treasury Direct Express cards and other government payment services. From a financial inclusion standpoint, JPMorgan Chase’s proposal accomplishes nothing — except for giving an already large and powerful bank an unfair advantage.
Secondly, the involvement of a multinational bank complicates the privacy and security dimensions of postal banking. As a general rule, unlike private businesses, USPS only collects information necessary to satisfy a statute or executive order. Legal firewalls prevent USPS from sharing information with other government agencies, to say nothing of third party corporations. But if a private bank has access to the data, these protections collapse.
Finally, experts at the Action Center for Race and the Economy (ACRE), a member of the Take on Wall Street coalition, have pointed out, JPMorgan Chase has a particularly troubling history when it comes to racial discrimination. The bank has historically refused to provide proper branch services in immigrant and low-income neighborhoods of color in major cities. It has been the fossil fuel industry’s biggest backer. The trade associations that represent them and other big banks have donated tens of thousands of dollars to the campaigns of white supremacist Congressional candidates.
Private-sector partnerships might save the USPS some money. They might not. But revenue generation is not the primary point of postal banking. The point is the people. Wall Street has consistently opposed the return of postal banking since its destruction in the 1960s. JPMorgan Chase and other nefarious actors are attempting to prevent competition before it even forms. The 2020 Democratic Party Platform and Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force recommendations both call for postal banking. But they also call on policymakers to separate retail banking institutions from more risky investments and protect consumers from high rates, onerous fees, inequitable credit reporting, and other harms. Allowing a multinational megabank like JPMorgan Chase to hawk its own products within public infrastructure only undermines these goals.
Facebook’s Business Model Thrives on the Virality of Hate
Prabir Purkayastha August 31, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/facebooks-business-model-thrives-on-the-virality-of-hate/
The problem of hate news is built into the genes of big digital monopolies like Facebook. We need to break up these monopolies and regulate them as the new public utilities of the digital age.
A recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, “Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide With Indian Politics,” has blown the lid off Facebook’s unholy alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the right-wing ruling party in India.
In the August 14 article, WSJ reporters Newley Purnell and Jeff Horwitz detail how Ankhi Das, Facebook’s high-flying public policy director for India and South and Central Asia, blocked action against the ruling BJP party leaders. Facebook had tagged these leaders internally as promoting “hate speech” and “dangerous” and with the potential to cause, as Purnell and Horwitz write, “real-world violence.” The reason Das reportedly gave for letting these violations of Facebook’s policy go unpunished was that such action would harm Facebook’s business in India.
Facebook also has recently invested $5.7 billion in leading Indian telecom company Reliance Jio for 9.99 percent of its shares—one of the largest investments ever by any tech company for a minority stake. The largest number of Facebook and WhatsApp users in the world are from India, with Facebook having more than 300 million and WhatsApp in excess of 400 million users. Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014 and has business offerings on this platform, whose rules of engagement are completely opaque. Even more than Facebook, WhatsApp has been the major social media platform for the BJP and its troll army to spread disinformation, as it was for President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
On August 21, Horwitz and Purnell wrote that Facebook has subsequently come under attack internally for its failure to address violations of its hate speech policy in India: “Facebook employees are pressing the company’s leadership to review its handling of hate speech in India, saying [in a letter addressed to ‘FB Leadership’ that] the company has tolerated toxic content by prominent political figures.”
This is not the first time Facebook’s sheltering of hate speech and divisive right-wing figures has been exposed. In a 2017 article for Bloomberg, Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier wrote that Facebook “actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of ‘troll armies’ that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.” They also wrote that “a little-known Facebook global government and politics team… led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign,” has helped specific political parties “from India and Brazil to Germany and the U.K.—the unit’s employees have become de facto campaign workers.” In 2018, a five-article series for Newsclick by Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta ahead of India’s 2019 general elections investigated the close ties between Facebook executives and the BJP, particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s team, and found that the ties went far beyond Facebook’s relationships with other political parties in India.
The August 14 WSJ article identified three prominent BJP figures whose Facebook posts included hate speech: T. Raja Singh, a state legislator from Telangana, had threatened to kill Muslims who ate cows and to shoot Rohingyas, Muslim refugees fleeing Myanmar; Anantkumar Hegde, a member of Parliament from Karnataka, posted cartoons and essays on Muslims spreading “Corona Jihad.” (The WSJ reported that after it asked Facebook about some of Singh’s and Hegde’s posts, “Facebook deleted some of… them” and “said Mr. Singh no longer is permitted to have an official, verified account, designated with a blue check mark badge.” Similarly, “Facebook took no action until the Journal sought comment from the company about… [Hegde’s] ‘Corona Jihad’ posts.”) Kapil Mishra, a former Delhi legislator, played an active role in inciting violent riots earlier this year in New Delhi, for which he has been widely condemned by opposition parties, independent groups, the press, and even (though not by name) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. These three were among BJP figures flagged internally by Facebook’s team implementing its policy on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” as worthy of a permanent ban, as was done in other countries including the United States.
The WSJ coverage may make us believe that the problem in Facebook is an individual’s fault, that of Ankhi Das, its policy head for India. The real issue goes far deeper. The power of digital monopolies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—is not merely determined by their wealth. The social media platforms—Google and Facebook—have taken over the media space, not only in terms of advertising revenue, the lifeblood of the media under capitalism, but also in terms of influence. The greater the engagement that you can generate, the greater the likelihood of gaining a significant viewership and following. Purnell and Horwitz reported that “within two months of the video of the speech” by Kapil Mishra—in which he incited physical violence in clearing protesters—“being posted, the engagement for Mr. Mishra’s Facebook page grew from a couple hundred thousand interactions a month to more than 2.5 million.”
Earlier, it was widely accepted that the press—what Thomas Carlyle had called the Fourth Estate in a democracy—has a social role and therefore needs to be regulated for public good. The Press Council of India, however weak it might be in actual practice, has a code that the press is expected to follow. In the U.S., cross-holdings between different kinds of media are regulated.
There are two issues we need to recognize. The first is that the media is not just any other business but is important for democracy. And the second is that monopoly by itself is also a danger to democracy. U.S. Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis is widely quoted to have said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
More than 75 years after Brandeis lived, his words on monopoly were cited in the congressional hearing in July with the CEOs of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. The combined market value of the four companies is nearly $5 trillion. If we compare this to the GDPs of entire countries, they come out above Germany, and behind only the U.S., China and Japan. It is this market power that gives them the ability to bend, or in the case of weaker economies, twist out of shape, their legal and regulatory structures.
Unfortunately, the interests of tech companies with this much capital are less and less often aligning with the interests of society. This is becoming clearest with the case of Facebook, as 98.5 percent of its income is from advertisements. Advertisements depend on the number of views, and the virality of posts and engagement are the main drivers of Facebook’s revenue model. Facebook has discovered, as MIT researchers did, that hate and fake news posts drive virality, and therefore it has no incentive to curb such posts. While it has professed lip service for community standards and healthy discourse, the driving force of its business empire comes from its need to have more eyeballs, and therefore it feeds off hate and fake news. An internal study had found that 64 percent of members who had joined extremist groups did so thanks to Facebook’s recommendation tools.
This pathology of social media is not limited to Facebook. Google’s search engine has shown similar problems, as has its image recognition algorithms. But undoubtedly, Facebook has been the leader in spreading hate politics and fake news in the world.
What Trump, Bolsonaro and Modi have in common, apart from their right-wing politics, is their reliance on Facebook and WhatsApp in their campaigns. Though we have seen the phenomena of troll TV—Fox News in the U.S. and Republic TV in India—penetrating the traditional media space, WhatsApp and Facebook have been the primary playground of trolls, aided by Facebook’s algorithms. While it may seem that the right understands digital platforms better than others, and that is why it has had so much success with them, there is increasing evidence that the support that Facebook provides to various right-wing figures and hate speech is not an accident but a part of its strategy.
In the language of new tech, hate speech is not a bug in the systems of social media but a basic feature. The problem of hate speech cannot be solved by politely petitioning the Zuckerbergs of digital monopoly platforms to behave more responsibly. It needs, at the very least, breaking up their monopolies and regulating them as public utilities.
American Involvement Poisons Brazilian Democracy
Will Bacha August 31, 2020
https://citizentruth.org/american-involvement-poisons-brazilian-democracy/
The United States has a long history of meddling in the political affairs of other nations and using shadowy military and espionage techniques as a means of overthrowing governments seen as being a threat to American political and monetary interests. Beginning with the Monroe Doctrine of the early nineteenth century and continuing through the Cold War, Latin America has been at the epicenter of American efforts to subvert democracy, deny national sovereignty, and serve capital abroad. From the American-backed coup that replaced Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende and replaced him with the brutal fascist dictator General Augusto Pinochet to the recent failed efforts to depose of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, the United States has a long history of attempting to influence politics and government affairs in this part of the world.
Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, has long weighed heavily on the minds of American political and economic elites wary of any perceived threats to U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and eager to profit from Brazil’s enormous mineral, petroleum, and agricultural wealth. In the early 1960s, as his administration prepared to back the 1964 military coup that would depose the democratically-elected President João Goulart and result in the establishment of over two decades of military rule in Brazil, President John F. Kennedy made his promise to “prevent Brazil from becoming another China or Cuba” a signature component of his Cold War-era Latin American policy.
While CIA-backed military coups may today be viewed as relics of a distant Cold War past, the recent political history of Brazil demonstrates conclusively that American involvement into Brazilian economic and political affairs has persisted well into the twenty-first century. Recent evidence consisting of leaked memos, messages from the encrypted messaging service Telegram and other documents have implicated the United States government and the Department of Justice in deeply entrenched plots to destabilize Brazil’s democracy for political and economic gain for years. The United States government worked closely with Brazilian “anti-corruption” probes into the activities of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as “Lula” and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, drastically transforming Brazil’s economic and political trajectory to the apparent benefit of American and multinational business interests.
The most famous of these maneuvers was known as Operation Lava Jato, Portuguese for “car wash.” This less-than-scrupulous investigation, spearheaded by a Curitiba-based judge, Sérgio Moro, and prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, was initiated in 2014 as a money-laundering investigation; however, the scope of the Operation quickly expanded to include allegations of bribery and corruption at Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned petroleum giant, eventually implicating a laundry list of prominent political and business figures. For several years, Lava Jato was widely praised, both in Brazil and internationally, as a long-overdue reckoning into political and economic networks historically rife with clientelism and corruption. Moro himself was celebrated as a hero, an impartial and independent crusader against the impunity of Brazil’s political and economic elite.
However, since 2019, investigations by The Intercept and Agência Pública have shown that Lava Jato, far from representing a non-partisan campaign against corruption across the Brazilian political spectrum, had a special prosecutorial interest in the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT), and especially in two of the Party’s most prominent figures: Lula and Rousseff. These investigations have further confirmedthat Moro and Dallagnol, almost from the inception of their investigation, enjoyed extensive assistance and cooperation from the United States Department of Justice and other American government agencies.
Leaked Telegram messages and other documents indicate that Moro engaged in many unethical and illegal acts during the investigation, including wiretapping Rouseff’s phone and leaking an edited phone conversation to Rede Globo, Latin America’s largest commercial television network.
When questioned in 2019 about the Department of Justice’s involvement in the operation by a group of United States congressmen and women, Attorney General William Barr’s response provided little in the way of answers, but did clarify that the Department of Justice was involved in the Lava Jato operation by including links to articles on the DOJ website proving collaboration between American and Brazilian officials.
While serving as Attorney General under the administration of George H.W. Bush, Barr was instrumental in issuing pardons to six officials from the Reagan administration who had been charged with serious crimes related to the Iran-Contra Scandal, indicating that he is unwilling to hold American officials who have participated in illegal acts in foreign nations accountable for their actions.
In July 2017, Moro sentenced Lula to nine and a half years in prison, ostensibly on charges of money laundering and corruption; according to the charges, Lula had received $1.2 million in improvements to a beachfront apartment from a construction firm that, in turn, had allegedly received large contracts from Petrobras. Announcing his verdict, Moro promised that the charges would ensure that Lula would be banned from political office for 19 years, or twice the length of his prison sentence. As Lula was 71 years old in 2017, such a sentence would in effect end Lula’s political career.
In April 2018, the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court, in a 6-5 vote, ordered Lula to begin serving his sentence, despite the fact that he had not yet exhausted all of his appeals. On the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision, with the outcome of the vote still in doubt, Chief of Staff of the Brazilian Army, General Eduardo Villas Boas, made an ominous statement that was widely viewed as suggesting that the Brazilian military would be willing to intervene in order to ensure Lula’s imprisonment and removal from the presidential race.
On November 8, 2019 – once Bolsonaro had won the 2018 presidential election and been sworn in as President of Brazil – Lula was released from prison after 580 days. Nevertheless, the damage had been done: as a result of his conviction, Lula was not allowed to run for president in the 2018 elections, even though he was the obvious frontrunner. By allowing Bolsonaro to ascend to the presidency with relative ease, this ban had dramatically changed the dynamic of Brazil’s modern political history.
Lula, while immensely popular at home – especially among Brazil’s poor and working classes – was regarded with some apprehension by American interests eager to uphold the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” in Latin America and distrustful of Lula’s close ties to left-wing governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina. While his government stopped short of the policies of nationalization pushed by other foreign leaders famously overthrown by the United States, such as Salvador Allende or Mohamed Mossadegh, Lula strenuously opposed the privatization of Petrobras, and promoted Odebrecht, Brazil’s privately-owned engineering and construction powerhouse, at the possible expense of American business interests in South America, southern Africa, and the Middle East. Thus, Lula not only posed a large threat to his political rivals on the right, but also to American corporate interests.
Bolsonaro and Lula’s other political rivals had reason to fear his success in the looming 2018 presidential election. Lula, who President Barack Obama in 2009 referred to as “the most popular politician on earth,” had easily won two previous presidential elections in 2002 and 2006, and left office in 2010 with an 87% approval rating. There was no question that he was the obvious frontrunner in 2018.
With Lula barred from the ballot, Bolsonaro coasted to victory in the 2018 presidential election. Bolsonaro, for one, did not allow Moro’s crucial role in securing his victory go unrewarded. Only days after the election, Bolsonaro announced that Moro would serve in his administration, even creating a new post for him; this new position, commonly known as that of the Supreme Justice Minister, gave Moro immense power until his resignation in April of this year, as it put him in charge of a consolidated force of specialized surveillance teams and other law enforcement agencies.
Leaked phone conversations show that Moro colluded with Prosecutor Delton Dallagnol, violating the Brazilian Judiciary’s Code of ethics by not acting as an impartial judge. In fact, Moro exerted a huge amount of control over the entire legal process; he would let prosecutors know of his decisions in advance, decide the order in which individuals would be prosecuted, and urged other officials to move as quickly as possible, among other ethical transgressions. In essence, he acted as a consultant to the prosecution instead of a disinterested third party.
The main justification for initiating impeachment proceedings against Rousseff was her alleged engagement in a practice known in Brazil as pedeladas. This can be translated to English as “peddling,” and generally refers to the practice of delaying repayment to state banks as a means of masking public debt. The final report from Brazil’s Senate concluded that Rousseff had not engaged in any such practices, which should have effectively dismantled the case against her. However, Brazilian and American actors were already conspiring to ensure that this would not be the case.
A unique characteristic of Brazilian politics is that the Vice President is almost always from a different party than the President and each office has constitutionally separate terms. Thus, although Rousseff was a prominent PT member, her Vice President, Michel Temer, belonged to the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), a center-right party that ultimately supported the impeachment proceedings against her.
Temer’s brief tenure as President was marred by scandal after scandal and deep unpopularity. Within less than two months after taking office, three of his ministers were removed from their posts due to allegations of corruption. Furthermore, taped recordings of conversations between these ministers indicate a massive conspiracy involving the military, mass media and Brazilian judiciary that had as its aim the removal of Rousseff from power.
Additionally, evidence from undercover informants indicate that that Temer was the recipient of illegally sourced campaign funds and massive bribes while also violating several election laws.
Given Temer’s own implication in massive bribery and corruption schemes – crucially, unlike Rousseff and Lula, Temer has been credibly accused of lining his own pockets with bribes, including payments sourced from Odebrecht and JBS, one of the world’s largest meat-packing companies – the political motivations underlying the push for Rousseff’s impeachment come into focus. For Temer, Bolsonaro, and the rest of the Brazilian right, removing Rousseff from office was never a question of accountability for alleged government improprieties or preserving the integrity of the office of the presidency. Rather, as Azadeh Shahshahani, a past president of the National Lawyers Guild who also served as a juror for the International Tribunal for Democracy in Brazil, writes in The Nation, Rousseff’s impeachment represented “an attempt by Brazil’s elite to regain power through non-electoral means and re-implement the neoliberal agenda” that had been rejected, at least partially, by successive PT governments.
In a 2016 speech in New York, Temer explicitly stated that the reason for Rouseff’s impeachment was that her economic policies were not in line with those espoused by the MDB. Lula, Rousseff, and the PT had won four consecutive presidential elections on platforms of increased public spending and modest expansions of social programs that lifted an estimated 36 million Brazilians out of poverty in the decade from 2003 until 2013. Temer and the MDB, meanwhile, sought the implementation of a more traditionally business-friendly, albeit electorally unpopular, agenda of privatization and austerity.
Further demonstrating the fundamental, political nature of impeachment proceedings against Rousseff is the fact that many members of the Chamber of Deputies who voted for impeachment cited bizarre, irrelevant reasons – such as their desire for “peace in Jerusalem,” to protect the freemasons of Brazil, or to prevent Communism from taking hold in the country – as the reasons behind their votes.
More hideously, Bolsonaro – then a congressman from the state of Rio de Janeiro – dedicated his vote in favor of Rousseff’s impeachment to Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, a notoriously brutal agent of the military dictatorship. Rousseff, who as a young woman was active in the left-wing armed resistance to the military regime, was imprisoned and tortured from 1970-1972 by the DOI-CODI torture unit headed by Ustra.
Ultimately, a report from the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s office even concluded that Rouseff was not guilty of any of the crimes with which she had been charged. Even more damning, the aforementioned, independent International Tribunal for Democracy in Brazil tasked with investigating Rouseff’s impeachment concluded that, “what is happening in Brazil is a conspiracy against democracy. Impeachment is being used for partisan purposes to depose a democratically elected leftist president. This is, in effect, a coup, and those who engineered it are guilty of massive corruption and grave crimes, and must be held to account.”
The constitutional legitimacy of Rousseff’s ouster aside, upon illegitimately assuming the presidency in 2016, Temer wasted little time playing straight into the hands of American economic interests, giving American companies rights to oil reserves and other natural resources, and even going so far as to provide huge tax breaks to international petroleum giants such as Chevron and Exxon.
Brazilians were not the only individuals violating the laws of their country during the Lava Joto investigation. The United States’ Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) was instituted to prevent American citizens from bribing foreign officials or using other methods in order to help American business interests outside of the country. According to The Intercept, the FCPA is “the legislation through which the U.S. claims jurisdiction to prosecute the bribery of foreign officials, even if the acts occurred outside of the U.S., as long as the transactions — or the corporations or individuals who made them — use the U.S. financial system.” (Petrobras, for instance, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, despite being a Brazilian state-owned enterprise).
The FCPA, therefore, is also frequently invoked by the American government in order to justify its involvement in the political and economic affairs of foreign countries, although the FCPA explicitly prohibits Americans from engaging in international operations of this sort without acknowledgement and approval from the government of the nation where such an investigation is taking place. Functionally speaking, the FCPA may be wielded abroad by the U.S. government as a powerful tool in the interests of American capital. For example, referencing the creation of a new Miami-based FBI squad dedicated to prosecuting corruption in Latin America, Leslie Backschies, the chief of the FBI’s international corruption unit, described her unit’s mission as ensuring that American businesses “can compete fairly” in Latin America.
Nonetheless, despite the consent of certain members of the Brazilian judiciary, the involvement of the FBI and DOJ in Lava Jato never received the necessary acknowledgment and approval by the leaders of Brazil’s executive branch. Rather, in violation of the FCPA, FBI agents colluded with Lava Jato prosecutors and judges without the required consent from the very PT-controlled executive branch that they sought to prosecute.
Citizen Truth spoke with Priscila D. Carvalho, a post-doctoral researcher at INCT -Institute of Democracy (Instituto da Democracia e da Democratização da Comunicação) in the Brasilian city of Belo Horizonte. She indicated that one must be careful of assigning too much agency to American or other foreign actors with respect to Rousseff’s impeachment, Lava Jato, and the ascendance of Bolsonaro. According to her, the Brazilian situation is perhaps more analogous to recent events in Chile – it has been documented that in 2014, as the center-left president Michelle Bachelet prepared to enter office, the World Bank unexpectedly downgraded Chile’s investment rating, precipitating massive foreign capital flight and contributing to the defeat of Bachelet’s Nueva Mayoria coalition in the 2017 presidential election – than to the 1964 coup in Brazil, the 1973 ouster of Allende, or even the U.S.-backed military coup this past November that removed Evo Morales from office in Bolivia. “The problems that our democracy has today are very much internal problems,” and originate fundamentally from Brazil’s “own institutions,” she emphasized.
Regardless of the real extent to which American actors and interests played a consequential role in Rousseff’s impeachment, Lava Jato, and Bolsonaro’s rise to power, recent events in Brazil undeniably demonstrate the contemporary significance of “lawfare” in Latin America, and America’s role in exporting and encouraging such tactics abroad. “Lawfare” can be generally understood as the manipulation of legal systems and institutions for political or partisan gain; in recent years, “lawfare” operations in Latin America – from Peru to Venezuela to Bolivia to Argentina – have almost unanimously targeted center-left or left-wing leaders and parties, and have been conducted with the support of the United States, often in collaboration with other multinational bodies, such as the World Bank (in the case of Chile) or the Organization of American States (in the case of Bolivia and Venezuela).
What might have been the motivations underlying American cooperation with a “lawfare” campaign aiming to cripple the PT and destabilize Brazil’s democratic system? Without a doubt, Rouseff’s 2013 decision to cancel a meeting with Barack Obama did not go unnoticed in Washington; the reasoning behind this decision shed even more light on America’s shadowy intrusions into Brazilian democracy. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden proved that the National Security Agency was using advanced espionage techniques to keep tabs on both Petrobras and the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy.
Lula, for his part, has also cast Lava Jato as an American-backed campaign to deny Brazil its economic sovereignty, and to punish him and the PT for refusing to privatize Petrobras, and for protecting the enormous “Pré-Sal” oil deposits off the country’s northeastern coast from foreign exploitation.
There is another troubling dimension of the FBI’s involvement in Brazil and other foreign nations – although the FBI is ostensibly a domestic intelligence agency and security service, the organization has hundreds of agents based in at least 90 countries, including Brazil .
As a result of the outcome of the Lava Jato operation, companies such as Petrobras were forced to pay upwards of $8 billion in fines to United States courts which had issued the sentences as a consequence of the corruption charges. Most of this money was eventually sent back to Brazil, but instead of being entrusted to the Brazilian government the majority went straight to Dallagnol, who planned to use the money to establish an independent anti-corruption fund, most like to appease friends in the United States. Nonetheless, Dallagnol’s plan was not successful, and Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled the proposal unconstitutional last year.
Today, Brazil has suffered nearly four million cases of the coronavirus and is rapidly approaching 120,000 deaths. The pandemic has struck Brazil’s indigenous communities with a particular ferocity – indigenous Brazilians are dying of COVID-19 at a rate nearly twice that suffered by non-indigenous Brazilians; in the Amazon region, the coronavirus mortality rate among indigenous peoples is nearly 250% higher than that of the general population. Few governments in the world have rivaled Bolsonaro in terms of callousness and incompetence with respect to his response to the pandemic. Meanwhile, fires are raging uncontrollably in some of the most ecologically rich regions of the planet – the Amazon rainforest and the Pantanal, the largest wetland on the planet which straddles the borders between Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. According to Brazil’s national space agency, fires in the Amazon increased by 84% from 2018 to 2019 (Bolsonaro’s first year in office), and 2020 promises to be worse still; according to the same agency, fires in the Pantanal have tripled since 2019.
It is the slate of crises currently afflicting Brazil – simultaneously economic, political, ecological, and epidemiological – that is the true legacy of Moro, Dallagnol, and Lava Jato. Perhaps more than the egregious violations of the FCPA committed by the FBI and DOJ over the course of their involvement in the Lava Jato investigation; more than the active collaboration of American government agencies with an anti-PT, pro-capital plot thinly disguised as an apolitical war on corruption; more than Lava Jato’s slow erosion of Brazilians’ popular trust in electoral democracy; more than the ugly resonance that such collaboration has with previous instances of American intervention in Latin America during the twentieth century; it is Bolsonaro, and his crimes against Brazil and its people, that must be remembered as the outcomes of Moro’s zealous crusade.
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