Meanwhile, fires rage in the Amazon and Brazilian President Bolsonaro has become a target of global indignation.
Pepe ESCOBAR
Brazil has always been a land of superlatives. Yet nothing beats the current, perverse configuration: a world statesman lingers in jail while a clownish thug is in power, his antics now considered a threat to the whole planet.
Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept discusses the record-setting Amazon forest fires, the struggle against Brazil’s far-right government, and how his…
The post Glenn Greenwald on the Amazon fires and the fight for Brazil’s future appeared first on The Grayzone.
On 28 October 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected President of Brazil with 55.1% of the vote and with a gigantic help from Cambridge Analytica.
At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in January 2019 in Davos Switzerland, Bolsonaro made a sumptuous presentation, “We Are Building a New Brazil”. He outlined a program that put literally Brazil up for sale, and especially the Brazilian part of Amazonia. He was talking particularly about Brazil’s water resources, the world’s largest, and the rain forest – offering a huge potential for agricultural development and mining.
Fifty Years after rhapsodic auguries of the acid-informed era involving the coming “Woodstock Nation,” the US citizenry — convulsed by violence, strung out on all the wrong drugs, and with the Rolling Stones still touring — stumble in mortification through the grim phantasmagoria of the United States Of Altamont. What a long, strange, bad (Nixonian in its dour, paranoid cultural and political aura; Reagan/Clinton/Obama in noxious, neoliberal fantasy; Bush/Trump in cresting tsunamis of raging stupid) trip it has been.
By now most environmentally conscious people understand that Jair Bolsonaro is a bad guy. Brazil’s president has scandalously blamed environmentalists for starting fires burning in the Amazon region, after having called for more “development” of the huge forests.
Canadians are lucky we have a prime minister who is not such an embarrassment and understands environmental issues, right?
There is a new type of pirate on the international scene. These are not the swashbuckling brigands of yore but national leaders who are intent on plundering and pillaging the world’s most-environmentally sensitive resources. From the Amazon rainforest, described as the “lungs of the Earth” because it provides 20 percent of our planet’s oxygen, to Greenland and the Antarctic, unscrupulous and ignorant leaders are placing the entire planet in jeopardy.
Eric S. MARGOLIS
Cut down the trees. Kill the wild animals. Burn the bush. Pollute the rivers. Pave over the grass. Raise more beef, pigs and poultry in cages.
That’s the credo of the new right. Hatred of Nature is an integral part of its politics. President Donald Trump is the high priest of such environmental vandalism. In his narrow land-developer mind, Nature is a left-wing liberal conspiracy.
Over the past several years Latin America has become a strategic battleground which involves much more than merely “geopolitical power plays” between the USA vs China as many commentators are asserting. Of course this is not to say that there are no geopolitical battles occurring.
Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, reads as a meditation on the reliability of memory. Or even as a bill of indictments against the self-serving selectivity of memory. The book beautifully, if kaleidoscopically, reveals how an older man misremembers events of his youth, how his memories cast him in the warmth of the sun rather than cool shadow, as it were, until the actual character of his early behavior, and its consequences, is revealed by a figure from his past.
