The Lying Mainstream Press and Media In Canada (Including the CBC… the Castrated Broadcasting Corporation)

 The Lying Mainstream Press and Media In Canada (Including the CBC… the Castrated Broadcasting Corporation)

For the moment … and because the issue is GIANT (though obsessively downplayed) let’s look at Andrew Coyne (Globe and Mail) and SNC LAVALIN.

It is fair, I assume, to point out that the GIGANTIC illegal activity in which SNC Lavalin was involved has not received anything like the coverage required to inform Canadians (a task, surely, that could – should - be carefully undertaken by the CBC, but … isn’t, of course). Nor have the wrongdoings of SNC Lavalin received anything (from MSPM) like the necessary insistence that the Criminal Code be made more strong in the matter… fixing especially upon persons responsible, to be subjected to prison sentences. (See below, the “sentencing” of SNC Lavalin: the Whitewash).

The story is GIANT because SNC Lavalin, it would seem, instructed the Justin Trudeau government (during about 89 Lobbyist meetings in past months) to arrange Corporate Law so that corporate officers would be exempt from the reach of the law and from the principles of law under which other Canadians must live.

Public Prosecutions Service Of Canada released a statement on December 18, 2019 to the effect that an arm of SNC Lavalin had pled guilty to fraud (not to the bribery in which SNC Lavalin was engaged). It had paid something in the range of $125 million to gain contract benefits, etc. in Libya … by BRIBERY. The branch of SNC Lavalin (SNC-Lavalin Construction Inc., SLCI) declared guilty of fraud, made a joint (???) submission with The Public Prosecution Service of Canada to pay a fine of $280,000,000 (with no person convicted), and with all other charges dropped….  Things are so easy for the Corporatocracy!

Neither Andrew Coyne nor anyone else I have observed has noted the most wonderful coincidence in the matter… one that just happens to follow a worn and familiar path. If (embarrassing) legal decisions, findings, judgements can’t be suppressed altogether … then they should be released when the largest part of the population is most likely to be directing its attention elsewhere.  The matter most diverting in Canada is … of course … Christmas.  And so – by the merest coincidence – the Public Prosecution Service of Canada presented news that SNC Lavalin Construction Inc. pled guilty and would pay a fine … on December 18, 2019… just seven days before Christmas. Andrew Coyne doesn’t draw attention to that coincidence.
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But to his credit… he does skate over thin ice daringly enough to have me infer he is telling his readers something staggering.  Remember the long and agonizing revelations by Jodi Wilson-Raybould that the prime minister and powerful others acted improperly to try to force her to direct Public Prosecutions to arrange a “deferred prosecution agreement” rather than a criminal trial of SNC Lavalin?  Well, I infer from Andrew Coyne’s December 21, 2019 column that he is telling his readers the new Jodi Wilson-Raybould – a man called David Lametti (Minister of Justice and Attorney-General) and probably Justin Trudeau did very probably direct the Public Prosecution Service of Canada to allow a subsidiary of [SNC Lavalin] to plead guilty to one count of fraud (not mentioning bribery)… and then to stay all other charges related to the bribery of the Ghadaffi regime….  the Whitewash.

Indeed, Andrew Coyne goes on to write that Public Prosecutions accepted a plea of guilty from only a subsidiary of the Corporation … and, he writes, “dropped the charge of bribery in a case that was wholly about bribery”….  Andrew Coyne doesn’t go nearly far enough in his revelations … which is par for the course in our Main Stream Press and Media. But the story of SNC Lavalin, its apparently marauding criminalities, and the apparent on-going entanglement of the Attorney General, the prime minister, and high-ranking political others with SNC is so outrageous that to scratch the surface is to risk opening a boiling stewpot of corruption involving some of the most powerful people in the Liberal cabinet … nailing especially Justin Trudeau. It is fair to believe that he is the one person who could nip corruption in the bud when it appears in the cabinet itself.  And so when it appears to flower there … the conclusion may seem obvious.

If the December 18 date for the release by the Public Prosecutions Service is a coincidence … there may be another.  During the last federal election campaign … remember … one of the strange ‘issues’ that took up a great deal of MSPM time and attention was (some of us thought) the absolutely trivial revelation that Justin Trudeau had – more than twice – gone to parties “in Black Face” and that was (we were told) a Hideous, Outrageous, RACIST thing to do … which Trudeau humbly apologized for…. The outcome (utterly predictable) was that the Canadian population didn’t really think the actions bad enough to change its vote.  That brouhaha, however, turned attention away from Trudeau’s alleged corrupt actions in the SNC Lavalin case … which may very well be the reason “the Black Face Revelations” were brought to the surface (by friends of the Liberal Party???) as a major issue in the election.  A proper concentration by the MSPM on Trudeau’s involvement with SNC Lavalin might have significantly changed numbers (and seats) in the election ….


I'm really sorry': Justin Trudeau admits wearing brownface ...

The air-brushing of the Trudeau involvement is typical of the Main Stream Press and Media. So is Andrew Coyne’s statement that the 280 million dollar fine SNC Lavalin has to pay is probably “not out of line”… especially since he takes pain in the column to make clear the whole process was probably rotten in every way. But … then … as a kind of comment on anything the MSPM passes on to the public, Coyne’s column is a marvel.  The things he should call for … he doesn’t …. In my opinion, he lets the prime minister off the hook … who, coincidentally, is a relation of his, I believe.  Andrew Coyne – unless I am mistaken – is the uncle of Justin Trudeau’s half sister….

Coincidence… coincidence  (look back in history). The “Lying Mainstream Press and Media”, frequently, coincidentally, miss major news!!  An example from history follows: neither the MSPM in French Canada nor in English Canada reported the following:  When James Cross, the British Trade Commissioner, was kidnapped by the FLQ on October 5, 1970 … the one known “English” member of the FLQ, coincidentally, was involved.  And when it was discovered that poor James Cross had to have prescription drugs to stay alive … it was, coincidentally, the “English” member of the FLQ who boldly and brilliantly eluded all police nets and delivered the drugs to the secret FLQ hideout holding James Cross.­  Coincidentally, the Montreal Police were strictly forbidden to search for James Cross in the neighbourhood where he was held. And, coincidentally, a journalist for Radio Canada found the (silent and terrified) couple who had been removed from the apartment next to Cross and his kidnappers so that Canadian police could occupy that adjoining apartment for the whole, long period of the kidnap (during which time no one in Canada, Canadians understood, knew where James Cross was being held).


CBC: The October Crisis: A radical Quebec group raises the stakes on separation and Ottawa invokes the War Measures Act

By coincidence, James Cross was held a captive for two months … his whereabouts a complete mystery to all Canadian Law and Order forces, which were searching, searching for Cross …while some of them, just coincidentally, occupied the neighbouring apartment for the full period of the kidnap, observing and bugging the kidnap members.…  By some coincidence none of the Lions of Canadian Journalism discovered any of the above facts… EVER: testifying to the power of coincidence in the history of Canadian journalism. Coincidentally, one may suspect the prime minister of the day was in on the whole fake kidnap of James Cross. The prime minister’s name was Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

And … as a fitting footnote … the “English” member of the FLQ was the only one - until enormous pressure was put on the ‘authorities’ very late in the history – to avoid any kind of prosecution ….

Andrew Coyne’s coincidental family relation to Justin Trudeau may make no difference, whatever, to Coyne’s reporting and commentary.  Who knows?  But when some Canadians say that the truth in Canada – about the Mainstream Press and Media and the Corporatocracy (with the government in its pocket) - is a story of unending corruption, they may be correct.  In this case the RCMP appears to have provided sound evidence to the Public Prosecutions Service of Canada … doing something to improve the Mounties’ increasingly tarnished reputation by (alleged) Islamic False Flags and the more than ten years of mess (and court cases) over the RCMP (alleged) murder of Robert Dziekanski in Vancouver International Airport in October 2007…  and its acting against Indigenous protesters with RCMP officers dressed like drunken U.S. Marines in Viet Nam.

Perhaps “some Canadians” are hitting the nail squarely on the head when they claim the “lying MSPM” is not only bad … but actively and by intention bad ... in the service of its corrupt masters.

José Martí, the “quantum supremacy” and a competent socialism

José Martí, the “quantum supremacy” and a competent socialism

By: Luis A. Montero Cabrera: The twentieth century was born with a revolution of scientific knowledge. What was supposed immutable by philosophers, theologians and sorcerers about matter was not. Before it was believed that light was one thing and stones another. The light is impalpable, only detectable with our eyes, and the stones can be touched and weighed, to compare their amounts of mass with respect to the gravity of the earth. Science showed us that mass can behave like light and that light has mass, but much smaller in size than our own human bodies.

One thing is how we see the universe with our senses and from our individualities and another as it really is. We are not its owners, only part of it. We inhabit our own scales of space and time in this great setting. Martí was amazed at the similarities and differences in natural and social processes in 1884 and wrote: "Universe is an admirable word, sum of all philosophy: the one in the diverse, the diverse in the one". [1]

The mathematical reasoning was what allowed us to understand the matter. That science that was born and grown by counting stars and sheep, became our main logical tool. It allows us to think beyond our limited room in the cosmos to understand much of what is not directly within the reach of our senses.

A particular success was with the so-called Quantum Mechanics. It was born without any intention of economic results and thanks to Algebra and Statistics that had developed before and had not created significant material value. Those who developed them did not work for immediate applications, but for the most characteristic and unique of the human race: wisdom. Quantum Mechanics was then used to understand, model and calculate physical phenomena originated in atomic dimensions. It was an extraordinary success because with it it was possible to predict very precisely some magnitudes of those scales that before could only be measured with strange experiments.

Among the cotton tools used in Quantum Mechanics is the “linear combination”. It is the mathematical name of a kind of sum where several independent terms contribute in some way to a resulting value. The weight of each of its contributions in the linear combination is given by certain "coefficients", which multiply such terms of reference [2]. It is as if we are trying to describe the biology of each of us as a sum of terms based on the biology of each of our great-great grandparents. That way, our DNA would be approximately the result of the linear combination of the 16 great-great grandparents that every human being has. The difference between siblings would be given by the way (or the “coefficient”) with which each of these great-great-grandfather DNA participates in the sum. We have the same family tree of DNA as a sister of father and mother. We differentiate ourselves from it because the “coefficients” provided by each of the ancestors do not have to be the same: a Spanish great-great grandmother could influence the sister more and an African great-great grandfather more in her brother.

Most of the recent successes in the applications of Quantum Mechanics are due precisely to the linear combination. The state or form in which a system is at a given time can always be represented in terms of other associated states.

In a very recent news, and apart from the sensationalist tufo that has this term, the consortium of "Google" announced that it has achieved "quantum supremacy." It turns out that they built and operated one of the so-called “quantum computers” with more capacity than their competitor of the “IBM”. They expressed the possible combinations of the active or not, changing states of a system of objects in a very short time compared to what a classical computer would. It is achieved because they work by combining all possible states almost simultaneously. They use the logic of Algebra and Quantum Mechanics intensively.

 
Google claims 'quantum supremacy
 
It is at this point that our needs to “unlock”, as our president usually expresses, socialist forms of production can find a useful reference following the Martian ideology that the universe is unique and also diverse. Socialism and capitalism are in the same universe. They differ essentially by the form of ownership and consequently by the final utility of goodwill. This is the value that workers create and that does not directly go their pockets as wages. In capitalism it is for a few owners and in socialism it is for everyone. The competition with IBM and many other organizations led Google to produce that scientific result in a race without brake for innovation and progress. The competitive and innovative process that drives it is part of the same universe common to capitalism and socialism, where it is the form of ownership and not the management methods that give diversity.

Following patterns of painfully failed socialist attempts, our often "locked" economic system is now oblivious to competition between entities that are all over the people. We thus deprive ourselves of a well-managed engine that could maximize innovation, progress and efficiency in management. Experimenting with the competition could propel us unimpeded thanks to diversity, in this universe that Martí helped us understand. We can do a mental exercise with our daily realities and surely we will come up with many economic and social scenarios where diversity and competition could transform and "unlock" everything. Isn't it revolutionaries to experiment with the competition to change this that must be changed?

Capitalism, its doctors and its medicines Philosophy of Health

After Decades Of Killing Us & Making Us Sicker, It Looks Like Big Pharma Is...

 Capitalism, its doctors and its medicines Philosophy of Health

A sick society, even lucid with diseases
Capitalism, its doctors and its medicines Philosophy of Health

While the health (or diseases) of the villages are a merchant bargain in which many laboratories, universities, government institutions, hospitals and doctors are lit as vampires ... while there are entire people and villages without medical security ... while the habits and pathological manias that inoculate advertising mafias against public health reign ... we will live a monstrous injustice that has been naturalized as part of the miserable decoration of societies divided into classes. Every day, during the early hours, the ranks of people at the hospital doors, waiting for a consultation, suffer huge lists of human rights violations while, for example, the pharmaceutical industry (13 of the 20 most voracious) installed in Puerto Rico, it receives caimanic tax benefits and moves healthy fortunes in the order of 60 billion dollars.

Capitalism trains doctors, nurses and health workers as it trains an army of mercenaries selling cynical analyzes, diagnostic studies, surgeries, medications and therapies. Humanistic subjects and reflections, social conscience, shine brilliantly because of their absence and precariousness. Their heads are uniformed with bourgeois aspirations and dreams (stereotyped to nausea) so that they can impudently display their convincing loyalty to the businesses of laboratory owners who previously trained their bosses. “Pfizer is currently the largest pharmaceutical company, and 45 billion dollars in profitability are reported. The multinational companies including Glaxo Smith Kline, Merck & CO., Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, Aventis, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Wyeth and Eli Lilly, accounted for 58.4% of the market around 322 billion dollars in earnings ”.1

We must see the arrogances of arrogance and petulance that many heads of section, guard, department ... in each clinic, hospital or laboratory walk in front of nurses, students and workers who must learn primarily to turn their humiliation into good qualifications, diplomas, special appointments or awards ... such as attendance at conferences, publication of papers and gifts from laboratories. We are not scared, or silenced, of the medicines that are wrapped in terminological and statistical swarms to be immolated in the realm of archi-specialized scholarship and where not only the most obvious complaints are not accepted, but they are seen as "bad taste" " Of those beautiful demagogues, technocrats and bureaucrats, academies and associations of specialists are full ... and many hospitals. Not all, of course ... of course. But. Many students are trained with “technical” excellence to support the class servitude that justifies the business and also justifies some gifts of medical philanthropy that, with its messianic ethics, benefits some poor in hospitals for the poor and with bureaucracy for the poor.

Is this very exaggerated?

Doctors, nurses and health workers are usually trained to adopt, as theirs and originals, reactionary ideas and mediocre behaviors. His heroicities are reduced to being servile and meek with the business and bringing the glories of bank accounts and earthly goods to the realm of his individualism. His heroic soul has a merciless vanity trained daily in the concentration camp to which they submit their "patients" and their relatives. Many "little doctors" are made to pay their magnanimity with eternal thanks, and compliments, thanks to extorting from everyone with the old trick of haggling information, speaking with didactic and condescending tone, playing time never reaches them and getting out of the sleeve miraculous solutions Many under the shotgun method ... some shot will hit the partridge. The more medicines they try ... the better gifts will send the laboratories. There is an international ranquin of awards in hotels, airlines and multicolored merchandising. It is learned by doctors, nurses and health workers from the first lessons.

 
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They dream of infecting our lives with the saliva of bureaucrats servile to the neoliberal butchery. They are "doctors" of usoculated epidemic inoculants among the pharmaceutical markets, the broth of neoliberal demagogy, the weight of misery and crime, hunger, unemployment, injustice. galloping. We pay it. They call themselves "doctors" to hide their arrogance and sufficiency of functional ignorant people indolent to misery, malnutrition, destroyed hospitals, dilapidated schools, rot and stinking left and right. Depression, bad mood, hopelessness, tiredness, sadness, melancholy, rage ... fury ... hate. Tiredness and loneliness, humiliated workers. Elders victimized with indolence ... sick eaten by bureaucracy. Children look stunned at the future we inherit. It is a monstrosity. We live infested with neglect. The poorest are more unprotected, they are not well fed, they cannot go to the doctor, impossible to pay for medications and in general they have no possibility of attending to their health. It is not a small thing.

We know that the war against corrupt medicine must be a war against capitalism, too. The pharmaceutical laboratory business has taken a monstrous slice. And we have not seen the worst. We know that drug manufacturing corporations own the security of thousands or millions of people. Cynicism reigns. We know that the health crisis expresses capitalist irrationality. Monopolies impose their businesses as if they were health policies and impose market conditions to speculate on medicines and prices. They own the health of millions of human beings.

And ethical thinking about health?

It is clear that the obscene pachanga of trading with diseases, upon reaching millionaire sums in any currency, requires government managers in charge of legalizing the tranza and devising creative mechanisms to get more juice from the victims. That is why they build hospitals whose class seal guarantees a perfect consumption model for the level of corruption reached by the "doctorcitos" and their cronies. For example, they build hospitals to consume the thousand and one products that, more expensive at the price of government, are better for the supplying companies; for example, they will spend full hands on the taxes of the villages to ingratiate themselves with companies that manufacture appliances and articles of all kinds, to, repeatedly, upholster the route of deliveries with tithes in bulk for intermediaries; for example they will put waiting rooms, operating rooms, rooms, corridors, offices and emergency rooms ... at the service of the "Fordist" logic applied to medical care. All this tax to quickly disregard the "patients" so that they do not fatten the expenses that could threaten the pachanga of the corruptelas. Today, in the extreme obscenity of the medical corruption system, patients are forced to take their sheets, forks, water, bandages and baths to hospitals ... there aren't many doctors protesting that.

Many doctors, and their cronies, like to celebrate efficiency figures and patient care. They get drunk on successful statistics that overflow powerpoint graphs, books, treatises and encyclopedias. If every page edited with triumphant figures would involve a person treated efficiently ... there would be no health crisis in the world. And medicine would have stopped being a bourgeois industry to be an inalienable socialist right.

On the cusp of the alma mater in medicated doctors (that is, with a mind set to help sell medicines many of them unnecessary) are the pharmaceutical laboratories knotted all in a multinational network of investors who, as in any trade, govern their tasks by the capitalist laws of supply and demand. Would it surprise us to know how many times they invented epidemics, pandemics and infections to circulate millions of vaccines, syringes, pills, creams or ointments? The capitalist material base of this world industry supports an ideological-methodology-cusp clothed in "science" in which technical operations have been formalized with financial operations where the winners are the owners of the negotiated. Will they be very offended with this portrait?

Is it un philosophical?

 There are few doctors who live from lying and lying. They make fanciful fantasies and explanations to gain the "trust" of their patient-clients. If there were a world collection about the fantasies invented by many doctors about the behavior of the human organism, and its relationship with the prescribed chemicals, we had an encyclopedia of monumental horror. The bourgeois "philosophy" of the "health industry" has produced during its history an insatiable monster entangled with the most deplorable anecdotes of corruption and impunity. What matters least to them is the eradication of diseases because such a thing decreases pharmaceutical revenues. It does not matter that many of the “medical” products (from operating rooms, pharmacies, hospitality hotels and all the paraphernalia) do not have proven efficacy ... the important thing is to cover the monthly sales and collection goals. That is your "philosophy" and period.

His "philosophy" is not committed to an effective fight against diseases that overwhelm workers, what matters are royalties and kidnapping of patents to enjoy exclusivity in the usufruct of a disease and more if it becomes an epidemic. Regardless (there are cases of unfathomable infamies) how toxic medicines, operations or treatments are to people, or their collateral consequences, associated diseases or death (which capitalism has also turned into business)
 
Why are hospitals and  nursing homes drugging patients without their  consent?

Their "philosophy" is also to invest millions, to hide under the table, the business plans related to the research they call "scientific." It is not the social good that determines investments or what determines health policies ... it is starkly, the search for private financial benefits for a handful of monopolies pranched by the servile governments. If for that you have to manipulate and falsify data, if for that you have to publish magazines, organize congresses and deliver “Nobel prizes” ... such a heavy industry will not stop. He will not have methodological or moral pruritus, a dishonest industry that disguises himself with the word Science to hide his "philosophy" from business.

The list of lightnesses and errors with which the industrial manufacture of medicines is handled is enormous. There are complaints and debates that generally hide because they affect the landscape. The pharmaceutical industry has controls over the vast majority of specialized publications and scientific journals. The pharmaceutical industry spends fortunes on advertising and on gifts for their favorite doctors. It is a dictatorship of the pharmaceutical business.

Doctors are the third leading cause of death in the US: they cause 250,000 deaths per year.2 Not all, of course, not all.

Is everything so bad?

We have Cuba, for example. Some indispensable tasks to overcome the pathologies generated by the medical-pharmaceutical industry of capitalism should go through these hours for the expropriation, without payment, and under workers' control, of all the obscene negotiated that today wanders around the world with impunity. There are no alternatives. Capitalism is a crime3 and an infernal machinery of producing ecological crisis, disease and death. At this time it is necessary to reformulate all our theoretical-methodological conceptions in the matter of health and socialist health policies. Take advantage of the best achievements, which are really useful and free them from the clutches of capitalism. Reformulate our ideas and preconceptions about the human organism its interdependencies with the whole nature, its development and its current situation.


Reformulate scientific research and the very principles of medical activity adapted to the concrete reality and urgencies of this stage. Transform teaching models and medical education at all levels. At this time it is inexcusable to guarantee health and services in conditions that allow political sovereignty in concrete policies, revolutionary medical democracy, eradication of medical lag and diseases of poverty. Socialist prevention and planning, education and health culture, decent employment for social security workers ... to establish a socialist health philosophy that privileges decent life as a concrete and inalienable right. Link the health problem with the preservation of ecosystems. Guarantee material conditions of existence, fair and democratic. The most advanced discoveries of medicine cannot be privately owned by a handful of capitalists. The labor movement must demand its immediate nationalization next to the nationalization of the big banks, the large estates and the monopolies that submit our lives to the dictatorship of Capital. Only a rationally planned socialist economy can develop the wealth of health knowledge to truly place it at the service of humanity and its development. That will be really healing.

1 http://www.militante.org/medicinas-laboratorios-monopolios-y-nuestra-salud

2 http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_industryweapons02.htm

3 Antonio Salamanca http://www.aporrea.org/ideologia/a97634.html

Brazil’s Right-Wing Bolsonaro Regime Attacks Leading Critic Glenn Greenwald

Brazil’s Right-Wing Bolsonaro Regime Attacks Leading Critic Glenn Greenwald

Brazil's government faces near unanimous condemnation over its attempt to punish journalist Glenn Greenwald for revealing its corrupt investigation practices.

Story Transcript

This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Greg Wilpert: Welcome to the Real News Network. I’m Greg Wilpert in Baltimore. Brazilian prosecutors have filed criminal charges against the investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald. They accuse him of being part of a criminal organization that hacked into the cell phones of public officials last year. Greenwald and the website, The Intercept, which he works for published a series of stunning articles based on phone chats that revealed prosecutorial bias and collusion between prosecutors and judges who were in charge of putting Brazil’s ex-president, Lula da Silva behind bars. After the articles were published, Brazil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro specifically singled out Greenwald saying that he might wind up in jail for publishing his revelations. Greenwald had already warned about being investigated and receiving death threats after The Intercept’s articles had been published. Supreme Court justice though issued an order prohibiting the further investigation of Greenwald. Here’s a video statement Glenn Greenwald made shortly after the charges were filed against him.

Glenn Greenwald: As you probably know, the Bolsonaro government, President Bolsonaro, multiple members of his government simply don’t believe in a free press. They don’t believe in press freedom. They don’t even believe in democracy. They’ve repeatedly and explicitly praised the military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1985 as a superior form of government, and this is all about ushering in that level of repression.

Secondly, the prosecutor who brought the charges just a couple of months ago unsuccessfully tried to bring similar charges against the head of the Brazilian Bar Association who criticized Minister Sergio Moro. He tried to claim that that criticism constituted a crime in Brazil and it was rejected by the court. He’s obviously somebody abusing his prosecutorial power to punish the political enemies of the Bolsonaro government.

Third, the police, the federal police, conducted a comprehensive investigation of our reporting, of our sources, and concluded any report published just a couple of months ago that everything shows that I never committed any crime. Much to the contrary, I always exercise what they called the highest level of professionalism, caution, and responsibility in ensuring that I was doing my work as a journalist and never got anywhere near a crime.

Greg Wilpert: The website, The Intercept, also released a statement about the charges saying, “We are appalled that Brazil’s public ministry has decided to file such a blatantly politically motivated charge against Greenwald in apparent retaliation for The Intercept’s critical reporting on abuses committed by Justice Minister Moro and several federal prosecutors. We at The Intercept see this as an attempt to criminalize not only our journalism but also that of the dozens of partners who collaborated with our staff on over 95 stories based on the archives.”

Joining me now to discuss these latest developments in Brazil and the charges against Glenn Greenwald is Brian Mier. He’s an editor for the website, Brasil Wire, and is also editor of the book Voices of the Brazilian Left. Thanks for joining us again, Brian.

Brian Mier: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Greg Wilpert: So let’s start with some background information. Briefly give us an idea as to what Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept have been revealing over the past year that’s making the Bolsonaro government so angry about the reporting.

 How Corrupt Is America's Judicial System?

Brian Mier: Well basically, Greenwald got ahold of thousands of hours of social media chats and conversations between Judge Sergio Moro, who was a judge at the time currently serving as Bolsonaro’s super justice minister, with the [Lava Jato 00:03:32] task force, the prosecuting team. Now, in a very unusual situation by US or European legal standards, Moro was allowed to oversee the investigation and rule on what kind of evidence was admitted and also rule on the case with no jury. So what these conversations reveal is that every single step of the way, Moro was giving instructions to the prosecutors on how to prepare a case on something that he was supposedly impartially judging on.

Now, they show that Moro also got involved in Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment. He acted illegally as the leaks show in releasing illegally tapped phone conversations between Dilma Rousseff and former president Lula the day before she was trying to appoint Lula to be her chief of staff to destroy his image and block that from happening. There are conversations between the prosecutors talking about how they were praying to God that Bolsonaro would win the election, and they show that Moro was helping them develop a media strategy to support Bolsonaro in the elections. And then immediately after the elections, Bolsonaro appointed Moro with a cabinet position. It shows that Lula was deliberately removed from the race to open the path for the neo-fascist Jair Bolsonaro to take power, and it also shows him illegally leaking things to damage the reputation of Fernando Haddad who was Lula’s replacement candidate in the 2018 elections during the election season.

So it’s very damning and they’ve still got a lot of information they haven’t even released yet. They’ve been kind of releasing it homeopathically piece by peace in partnership with traditional right-wing Brazilian mainstream media publications like Veja Magazine, [inaudible 00:05:36] Paulo. I think it’s a strategy that’s really interesting because everyone on the left in Brazil already thought Moro was acting illegally and that this was a kangaroo court procedure and everything. So the strategy that he’s used to release these really shocking conversations is in partnership with media companies that initially supported Lula’s imprisonment. So it’s chipping away at the kind of center right in Brazil, chipping away systematically at Moro’s popularity rate, at Bolsonaro’s popularity rate. This is what makes them so mad and this is what is making them go after him.

Greg Wilpert: Now, prosecutors also want to … Basically, they’re charging Greenwald with cyber crimes, with hacking into the smartphones of prosecutors and judges who have been involved in this [inaudible 00:06:30] and other corruption cases. Now, how serious would you say are these charges and what’s the reaction been to them from the media and from politicians in Brazil?

Brian Mier: Well, Greg, the charges are completely frivolous. There was no investigation. Okay? They didn’t investigate Greenwald. The guy who’s making, the public prosecutor who’s making these charges has no investigation to back them up. Right? So not just by my analysis but by the leading legal scholars in Brazil, not only are they frivolous, but they represent an abuse of authority on the part of this public prosecutor who is a close ally of Justice Minister Sergio Moro. The reaction to it, it’s interesting because obviously everyone who’s progressive or kind of on the Brazilian left, which is like almost half of the population here, pretty much automatically believing that these are frivolous charges, but some key figures on the Brazilian right have come out in defense of Glenn Greenwald including Congressional President Rodrigo Maia who tweeted out yesterday that this is an attack against freedom of the press in Brazil. So it’s interesting to see the reaction.

Also, many foreign correspondents who supported Lula’s imprisonment, who never questioned the lawfare attack against Lula, the kangaroo court procedure, they’re immediately questioning these accusations against Greenwald which are being made basically by the same a right-wing, far right-wing coalition within the public prosecutor’s office. So a lot of journalists who kind of scoffed at the Intercept revelations last year or worked to minimize their importance in the mainstream media, they’re now standing behind Greenwald as well. So it’s really this kind of like national and international outpouring of support for him against this fascist attack. Really there’s only one thing you can call it. It’s fascism. It’s attacking. It’s legal harassment. It’s A lawfare attack against a journalist for doing his job.

Greg Wilpert: Now, apparently Greenwald has also been publishing stories about I mean specifically this, I mean Bolsonaro’s connection to fascism and to Nazism, that his culture minister, for example, Roberto Alvim was recently fired for having quoted Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Then there were other issues involving the Bolsonaro government and Nazism. Talk about what’s been going on in this regard and how this might be connected to the charges against Greenwald.

Brian Mier: Well one of the tenants of fascism is that there’s no freedom of the press. I mean Hitler and Mussolini did not have a very good record in relation to journalism and journalists. We all know this, right? So since Bolsonaro started his political career, he’s made a lot of comments showing his affinity with fascism and everyone knows this. So last week, his culture minister gave a speech that it turned out was completely plagiarized from Hitler’s propaganda minister, Goebbels, about the next 10 years of cultural production in Brazil. Right? So this immediately caused him to be fired even though, before he came on the air and gave the speech, Bolsonaro tweeted out lavish praise on his strategy for culture. So the last thing Greenwald wrote before he was accused with these frivolous charges was an article about how just firing this guy isn’t going to change the ethos within the Bolsonaro government which is favorable to fascism. It’s using fascist tactics and it has deep links to Nazism.

I can give you a few examples here. First of all, Ernesto Araujo, Bolsonaro’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, in 1978, his father refused three extradition requests for a former concentration camp director from Poland. All right. Shortly after that, Bolsonaro’s education minister, Weintraub, gave a speech directly plagiarized from Mein Kampf in which he just substituted the word Jews for communists. So he said things like the communists are at the top of the world financial system. On top of that after the culture minister was fired last week, an old video of Bolsonaro resurfaced on Twitter and in the social media in which he talks about how, if he were alive during Nazi Germany, he would have had no problem whatsoever enlisting in Hitler’s army. He goes on to praise Hitler as a brilliant strategist and talks about how his great-grandfather fought with the Nazis in Germany and lost an arm.

So it’s not just … As Greenwald said, it’s not just that, “Oh, how did this happen? How did this Nazi accidentally get into the cultural ministry?” There’s an entire pattern of top officials in Bolsonaro’s government, including Bolsonaro himself, making sympathetic comments about the Nazis or plagiarizing Nazi speeches.

Greg Wilpert: Now, one aspect of the story though that has not been much reported outside of Brazil, I mean in addition of course to this connection to Nazism, but there’s another aspect that’s been under-reported it seems to me which is the situation of the actual hackers that are accused of intercepting the chat messages that this is all about. Allegedly, they’ve been caught, but what do we know about them and what can you tell us about that aspect of the story?

Brian Mier: Well, Greg, it’s very nebulous. At first, they announced that they’d caught these seven hackers. They were from a small town in the countryside of Sao Paulo, that they had been the ones who leaked the information to Greenwald. Then it came out that the leader of this group of hackers was actually someone who had publicly supported Bolsonaro in the 2018 elections. So that raised a lot of suspicion about everything. So they keep saying they found the hackers, they’re talking to the hackers, but nobody really knows what the situation is, who they are, or how the information was hacked.

People don’t know if this was … If Telegram, the social media app, was hacked, which the directors of Telegram say it’s impossible. People don’t know if a phone was stolen by one of the people in this Telegram group connected to the Lava Jato task force or if a phone was cloned. We don’t really have the information yet. It’s very nebulous. They haven’t pulled out anyone and said, “This is the person behind all of this really.” They just keep saying that they’re talking to them, but we don’t really have the information yet. My personal feeling is that they haven’t … I don’t know if they’ve really got the right people. It might just be that they found some scapegoats.

Greg Wilpert: Okay. Well we’re going to continue to follow the story of course, but we’ll leave it there for now. I am speaking to Brian Mier, editor for the website Brasil wire. Thanks again, Brian, for having joined us today.

Brian Mier: Thanks a lot, Greg.

Greg Wilpert: And thank you for joining the Real News Network.

For a new universal declaration of DD. H H.

 
Fear, hope and human rights

By Boaventura de Sousa Santos: The great seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote that the two basic feelings of the human being (affections, in his terminology) are fear and hope. And he suggested that a balance between the two is necessary, since fear without hope leads to abandonment and hope without fear can lead to destructive self-confidence. This idea can be extrapolated to contemporary societies, especially at a time when, with cyberspace, instant interpersonal digital communications, the massification of industrial entertainment and the mass customization of commercial and political microtargeting, collective feelings are increasingly “ similar to individual feelings, even if they are always selective aggregations. That is why currently the identification with what is heard or read is so immediate ("that is precisely what I think", although never before has thought about "that"), as well as repulsion ("had good reasons to hate that ”, even though“ that ”has never been hated). In this way, collective feelings easily become an invented memory, in the future of individuals' past. Of course, this is only possible because, in the absence of an alternative, the degradation of material living conditions becomes vulnerable to a comforting ratification of the status quo.

If we turn feelings of hope and fear into collective feelings, we can conclude that perhaps there has never been such an unequal distribution of fear and hope on a global scale. The vast majority of the world's population lives dominated by fear: hunger, war, violence, disease, boss, job loss or improbability of finding work, the next drought or the next flood. This fear is almost always lived without the hope that something can be done to make things better. On the contrary, a tiny fraction of the world's population lives with such excessive hope that it seems totally fearless. He does not fear enemies because he considers that they have been annulled or disarmed; he does not fear the uncertainty of the future because he has comprehensive insurance; he does not fear the insecurities of his place of residence because at any moment he can move to another country or another continent (and even begins to consider the possibility of occupying other planets); he does not fear violence because he has security and surveillance services: sophisticated alarms, electrified walls, private armies.
 
Every year, millions fall into the poverty trap from which they cannot escape.

The global social division of fear and hope is so unequal that phenomena unthinkable less than thirty years ago today seem normal characteristics of a new normal. Workers "accept" to be exploited more and more through work without rights; young entrepreneurs "confuse" autonomy with self-slavery; Racialized populations face racist prejudices that often come from those who do not consider themselves racist; women and the LGTBI population continue to be victims of gender-based violence, despite all the victories of the feminist and antihomophobic movements; non-believers or believers of "wrong" religions are victims of the worst fundamentalisms. On the political level, democracy, conceived as the government of many for the benefit of many, tends to become the government of few for the benefit of the few, the state of exception with fascist drive is infiltrating democratic normality, while the The judicial system, conceived as the rule of law to protect the weak against the arbitrary power of the strong, is becoming the legal war of the powerful against the oppressed and of the fascists against the Democrats.

It is urgent to change this state of affairs or life will become absolutely unbearable for the vast majority of humanity. When the only freedom left to this majority is the freedom to be miserable, we will face the misery of freedom. To get out of this hell, which seems programmed by a voracious and unintelligent plan, it is necessary to alter the unequal distribution of fear and hope. It is urgent that the great majorities have some hope again and, for this, it is necessary that small minorities with excess of hope (because they do not fear the resistance of those who are only afraid) are afraid again. For this to happen, many ruptures and struggles in the social, political, cultural, epistemological, subjective fields will be needed, subjective and intersubjective. The last century began with the optimism that ruptures with fear and struggles for hope were close and effective. This optimism had the initial and initiatory name of socialism or communism. Other satellite names joined them, such as republicanism, secularism, secularism. As the century progressed, new names joined, such as liberation from the colonial yoke, self-determination, democracy, human rights, liberation and emancipation of women, among others.

Today, in the first half of the 21st century, we live among the ruins of many of those names. The first two seem to be reduced, at best, to history books and, at worst, to oblivion. The remaining remain disfigured or, at the very least, are confronted with the perplexity of accumulating as many defeats as victories they star. For these reasons, ruptures and struggles against the awkwardly unequal distribution of fear and hope will be a huge task, because all the instruments available to carry them out are fragile. Moreover, this discrepancy constitutes in itself a manifestation of the contemporary imbalance between fear and hope. The fight against such an imbalance must begin with the instruments that reflect this same imbalance. Only through effective struggles against this imbalance will it be possible to point out the expansion of hope and the retraction of fear among the great majority.

When the foundations collapse, they become ruins. When everything seems to be in ruins, there is no alternative but to search through the ruins, not only the memory of what was better, but especially the disidentification with what when designing the foundations contributed to the fragility of the building. This process involves transforming dead ruins into living ruins. And it will have as many dimensions as required by the socioarchaeological predictor. Let's start today for human rights.

Human rights have a double genealogy. Throughout their vast history since the 16th century, they were successively (sometimes simultaneously) an instrument of legitimation of Eurocentric, capitalist and colonialist oppression, and an instrument of legitimization of the struggles against that oppression. But they were always more intensely an instrument of oppression than of fighting against it. That is why they contributed to the situation of extreme inequality of the global division of fear and hope in which we find ourselves today. In the middle of the last century, after the devastation of the two wars in Europe (with global impact due to colonialism), human rights had a high moment with the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which came to support ideologically the work from the ONU. On December 10, the 71 years of the Declaration were commemorated. This is not the place to analyze this document in detail, which in its origin is not universal (in fact, it is culturally and politically very Eurocentric) but gradually established itself as a global narrative of human dignity.
 
 Police Repression and Civil Liberties

It is possible to say that between 1948 and 1989 human rights were predominantly an instrument of the cold war, a reading that for a long time was a minority. The hegemonic discourse of human rights was used by Western democratic governments to exalt the superiority of capitalism in relation to the communism of the socialist bloc of the Soviet and Chinese regimes. According to this speech, human rights violations only occurred in that block and in all sympathetic countries or under its influence. The violations that were in the "friendly" countries of the West, increasingly under the influence of the United States, were ignored or silenced. Portuguese fascism, for example, benefited for a long time from that "sociology of absences", as happened with Indonesia during the period in which it invaded and occupied East Timor, or with Israel from the beginning of the colonial occupation of Palestine until today. In general, European colonialism was for a long time the main beneficiary of that sociology of absences. Thus the moral superiority of capitalism was built in relation to socialism, a construction in which the socialist parties of the Western world actively collaborated.

 This construction was not free of contradictions. During this period, human rights in capitalist countries and under the influence of the United States were often invoked by organizations and social movements in resistance against flagrant violations of those rights. The imperial interventions of the United Kingdom and the United States in the Middle East, and of the United States in Latin America, throughout the 20th century, were never considered human rights violations internationally, although many human rights activists sacrificed Your life defending them. On the other hand, especially in the capitalist countries of the North Atlantic, political struggles led to the progressive expansion of the human rights catalog: social, economic and cultural rights joined civil and political rights. Some dissociation then arose between the defenders of the priority of civil and political rights over others (liberal current), and the defenders of the priority of economic and social rights or of the indivisibility of human rights (socialist or social-democratic current) .

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was seen as the unconditional victory of human rights. But the truth is that subsequent international politics revealed that, with the fall of the socialist bloc, human rights also fell. From that moment on, the type of global capitalism that prevailed since the 1980s (neoliberalism and global financial capital) was promoting an increasingly restricted narrative of human rights. He began by provoking a fight against social and economic rights. And today, with the total priority of economic freedom over all other freedoms, and with the rise of the extreme right, civil and political rights themselves, and with them liberal democracy itself, are called into question as obstacles to capitalist growth. . All this confirms the relationship between the hegemonic conception of human rights and the cold war.

In this scenario, two paradoxical and disturbing conclusions and a demanding challenge are imposed. The apparent historical victory of human rights is leading to an unprecedented degradation of the life expectancy of the majority of the world's population. Human rights ceased to be a conditionality in international relations. At most, instead of human rights subjects, individuals and peoples are reduced to the status of objects of human rights discourses. In turn, the challenge can be formulated like this: will it still be possible to transform human rights into a living ruin, an instrument to transform despair into hope? I am convincent that is yes.

* Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a doctor in Sociology of Law, professor at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Wisconsin-Madison (USA). Translation by Antoni Aguiló and José Luis Exeni Rodríguez.