The 61st annual Grammy Awards didn’t kick off so much as they sputtered into gear. In the show’s opening performance, Camila Cabello, the Fifth Harmony alumna, served up just enough razzle dazzle to prep audiences for the still-transcendent Ricky Martin. Katy Perry reached desperately for a broad range of notes during a later tribute to Dolly Parton, only to be outshined by the legendary country star’s goddaughter, Miley Cyrus. And Alicia Keys, first as the show’s host and later as a performer, was flatter than the hair she hid under an ill-advised scarf.
But just about halfway into the lethargic ceremony, a black turtleneck-clad Aubrey Drake Graham shook things up when he accepted his second career Grammy for Best Rap Song. There was no awkward declaration of affection for Rihanna, no heartfelt recounting of his own bar mitzvah. Instead, the rapper took an unexpectedly condemnatory tone when speaking about the industry that’s catapulted him to success and about the Grammys as an institution.
After he sauntered onstage to receive the trophy for “God’s Plan,” the rapper commingled critique of the Recording Academy and affirmations to fellow artists and at-home audiences: “We play an opinion-based sport, not a factual-based sport,” he said. “This is a business where sometimes it’s up to a bunch of people that might not understand what a mixed race kid from Canada has to say, or a fly Spanish girl from New York,” referencing the Bronx-born Dominican and Trinidadian American rapper Cardi B, who performed earlier in the show.
Prior to the rapper’s speech, no artists at the ceremony addressed the industry’s failures to reward the commercially and critically successful work of female musicians and artists of color in its broadest categories. The only meta references to the institution itself came in tonally awkward segments: Early into the show, Keys led a bizarre tribute to the concept of music itself, a Hail Mary that managed to be weak and unconvincing despite several remarks from former First Lady Michelle Obama.
The broadcast cut to commercial before Drake could finish his remarks, but the speech still marked a notable departure from the artist’s congenitally jovial awards show presence—and a clear sign of further artist divestment from the annual ceremony. But even prior to his onstage critique of the Grammys’ arbitrary mechanism of celebrating artists, Drake had already joined a slew of musicians who declined to perform at the ceremony. (Many others declined to attend altogether, among them Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, and Ariana Grande, who had been slated to perform and then bowed out after a disagreement with Grammys producer Ken Ehrlich.) While Drake is certainly not the first musician to note the Grammys’ decreasing relevance, his vote of no confidence might be among the most damning.
Much of the anti-Grammys sentiment has been driven by the Recording Academy’s consistent failure to recognize the achievements of female artists and musicians of color (especially black singers and rappers). As John Vilanova wrote prior to the ceremony, there were a few pre-awards indications that the Recording Academy had been paying attention to the sharp criticism that emerged following last year’s paltry showings:
The 2019 show’s shortlists appear to be the result of successful activism, as the Recording Academy has implemented broader cultural mandates for inclusion. The “Big Four” General Field categories—Album, Song, and Record of the Year and Best New Artist—are full of women and artists of color from a wide array of genres. All told, half of the Record of the Year and Song of the Year nominees are black, and five out of the eight nominees for the headliner Album of the Year category are black as well. Women-led acts account for five of the eight nominations in each category for Song, Record, and Album of the Year, and for six of the eight noms in Best New Artist.
The Grammy award still carries currency in the music industry, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that it’s no longer a relevant measure of success for black artists. Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” with its overt messages about racist violence in the country, took home both Song of the Year and Record of the Year. Though Donald Glover’s work across several genres has reckoned with the effects of white supremacy, “This Is America” is a particularly strange choice for both these awards: The song is far less effective (if also perhaps more enjoyable) without its visual accompaniment. The message behind its selection registers less as a celebration of Glover’s musical accomplishment and more as an endorsement of his inter-racial dialogue-starting capabilities, especially when evaluated alongside the less issue-driven nominees. At the ceremony, Glover was notably absent. (In his Record of the Year acceptance speech on behalf of Glover, the composer Ludwig Göransson was the only person of the night to mention the ICE-detained rapper 21 Savage.)
Despite the night’s curious assessments of black artists’ work, there were, of course, a few bright spots—among them, Cardi B’s performance of “Money” and later securing of the Best Rap Album award (the first such win for a solo female artist). More women were nominated, and awarded, this year than last, perhaps a sign of incremental progress with regard to gender parity. While accepting the award for Best New Artist, the “New Rules” singer Dua Lipa repeated a sly dig she’d made on the red carpet earlier. “I guess this year we really stepped it up,” she said after noting her appreciation for the many women nominated alongside her, a reference to the Recording Academy president and CEO Neil Portnow’s 2018 suggestion that female artists “need to step up.”
Immediately following Dua Lipa’s acceptance, the program aired a montage of celebrities celebrating Portnow and his work. Portnow, who is stepping down after this year, spent much of his own speech reiterating the need for diversity and inclusion within the Academy. Among the artists thanking Portnow for his tenure were Common, John Legend, and Bebe Winans. Even so, Portnow’s career can’t be separated from the clear distrust it’s sown within musical communities led by artists of color. Minutes later, the country singer Kacey Musgraves took home the Album of the Year trophy for her impressive Golden Hour. Musgraves is a talented songwriter, but the announcement felt like a final reminder of the evening’s disinterest in lauding black artists beyond the confines of their de-facto categories. If Drake, that goofy and algorithm-friendly genre-bender of a rapper, is no longer willing to feign appreciation for the award, then who in hip-hop will care about its future?
Late Thursday night, the Court put a Louisiana abortion statute on hold. The 5–4 order in June Medical Services v. Gee has been perceived as a victory for abortion rights—but I’m not sure it is. The stay is purely to allow the Court to decide whether to hear the case. And the Court’s four solid conservatives voted to allow the law to take effect right away, even though it runs directly contrary to the Court’s most recent abortion decision. Chief Justice John Roberts voted to stay the law; but this does not mean he will vote to strike it down.
If Thursday’s order was a win for abortion rights at all, it was a minor and probably temporary one.
June Medical Services is a challenge to Louisiana Act 620, which requires abortion providers in the state to have “admitting privileges” at a licensed hospital within 30 miles of the clinic at which they practice. That precise requirement in a Texas statute had been struck down in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. In that 2016 case, a district court found that the “privileges” requirement provided no genuine health benefit to pregnant women. However, combined with a strict set of physical regulations for clinics, it would in fact cause the closure of most of the state’s licensed abortion clinics; thus, it constituted an “undue burden” on a pregnant woman’s constitutional right to have an abortion.
A federal district court in Louisiana considered the Louisiana law in light of the Hellerstedt decision, and struck it down. In seven pages of Kafkaesque factual findings, the court detailed the current providers’ futile efforts to get admitting privileges—which were blocked for reasons that had little to do with competency and much to do with deep-red Louisiana’s opposition to abortions. Of the six current providers, it found, Act 620 would put four completely out of business, and restrict one to performing abortions at only one of the two locations where he currently practices. The sixth doctor, the court found, would simply stop performing abortions if that happened, out of “a well-founded concern for his personal safety.” If Act 620 took effect, the court concluded, “approximately 70 percent of the women in Louisiana seeking an abortion” would be unable to get one in the state.
But then a strange thing happened: The U.S. Court of Appeals decided that the district judge just didn’t understand the facts, and ruled that Act 620 could go into effect.
The court-of-appeals decision is one of the most remarkable federal opinions I have ever read. To understand why, let’s look at the basic rules for the federal court system. The system has three levels. District courts conduct trials, hear testimony, sift evidence, and “find” facts. Then they apply court-of-appeals and Supreme Court precedent to those facts, and render a judgment. Courts of appeals, except in very unusual circumstances, do not “find” facts. Instead, they ask whether the trial court correctly applied the law to the facts it found. To decide that, they apply Supreme Court precedent, and, if there is none, precedent from the appeals courts. After the appeals court decides, the Supreme Court can step in if it thinks the lower courts got it wrong.
To repeat: Trial courts “find” the facts; appeals courts primarily decide the law. Appeals courts cannot set aside factual findings unless the trial judge committed “clear error.” Even if an appeals panel is “convinced that had it been sitting as the trier of fact, it would have weighed the evidence differently,’’ the Supreme Court has said, it should not second-guess the trial judge unless it has “a definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed.”
But the Fifth Circuit in essence decided that the trial judge had been wrong about virtually every factual question in the case. Whatever might have been the case in Texas, in Louisiana there were hitherto unsuspected benefits to the “admitting privileges” requirement. As for the doctors who hadn’t gotten admitting privileges, they were lying. They had, the appeals court decided, “sat on their hands” and probably really could get admitting privileges somewhere, if they just got off their lazy behind and gave it a real try. And even if some of the doctors were eliminated, the others could just work a few more hours a week and everything would be tickety-boo for the women seeking abortions.
As a result, the Fifth Circuit said, the case in June Medical Services is totes different from the identical case of Hellerstedt. And thus it is totes constitutional too.
It’s hard to believe that the Fifth Circuit’s opinion was even intended to pass the straight-face test. There are two reasons for that suspicion. First, the Fifth Circuit decision was written by Judge Jerry E. Smith. Smith, a Ronald Reagan appointee, during his three decades on the bench has displayed some tendencies toward assuming an authority not strictly warranted by his commission.
Smith was the author of a 1996 affirmative-action case called Hopwood v. University of Texas. In that case, he wrote for a majority that a previous Supreme Court case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, was no longer binding in the Fifth Circuit. The Supreme Court had not said so, but Smith thought the decision was a bad one; he didn’t think the Supreme Court liked it either and thought it was about time the high court reversed it. (The Supreme Court, in fact, later reaffirmed Bakke.) Smith’s self-confidence verged on megalomania in 2012 when he ordered the attorney general of the United States to write him a letter explaining political comments by President Barack Obama about a case that was not before Smith’s court, and to which Obama was not a party.
So we might call Smith’s judicial philosophy freewheeling—or, to be more precise, lawless. In his June Medical Services opinion, he in essence overruled the Supreme Court’s decision in Hellerstedt. That level of hubris is probably explained by the true difference between Hellerstedt and June Medical Services.
The facts on the ground in Louisiana and Texas are roughly the same, but the facts on the ground of the Supreme Court are not. That is to say: Justice Anthony Kennedy, who provided the fifth vote in Hellerstedt, is no longer on the Court. His seat is now filled by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The message of the Smith opinion is: We’ve got the votes now. Hellerstedt, and then Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and then Roe v. Wade, are finished. I can write any nonsense in this opinion and you can’t do anything about it.
Is he right? Kavanaugh’s dissent may be the real news here. He notes the supposed factual discrepancy and suggests that the court should just allow the law to go into effect. The lazy doctors could try again to get admitting privileges. The state has promised not to enforce Act 620 “aggressively,” he says, so no one will be hurt.
His argument, in essence, is: Trust a government regulator with your rights. What could go wrong? This is, let’s say, an uncharacteristic argument for a conservative.
After the temporary stay of Act 620, the Court has a few choices. It could issue an unsigned opinion saying that Hellerstedt—only three years old—is still the law. It could also grant full-scale review and ask the parties to argue whether it should reconsider Hellerstedt. That would suggest a cavalier view of precedent, but at least the Court would be leveling with the country.
The worst choice would be to engage with Smith’s claim that Act 620 is somehow different from the Texas law. Finely parsing nonsense leads to nonsensical law. But I suspect that Kavanaugh is not the only conservative on the Court who would like to take that route. Bogus factual distinctions offer an appealing way of getting rid of Hellerstedt—and then Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and then Roe v. Wade.
The key vote on Thursday’s order was that of Roberts. He dissented in Hellerstedt, which suggests that he believes admitting-privilege requirements are fine, regardless of their impact. Does he respect precedent enough to, in effect, rule against his beliefs? More likely, his inner struggle is only about expediency and timing. Is this a politic time for the Court to reconsider its precedents frankly? Would it be better for the Court to stand by its precedents for a decent interval before making the foreordained assault on Roe and Casey? Or should the Court take the easy route suggested by Kavanaugh, and undo abortion rights while pretending it’s doing nothing of the sort?
Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring blacked up his face in 1980 when dressing as Kurtis Blow. Herring admitted what he did and apologized. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s yearbook page contains a photo of a man in blackface next to someone dressed as a Klansman. Northam admitted that he was one of the men and apologized, then said perhaps he wasn’t in the photograph at all.
Is it right to treat these two acts in the same way, as unforgivable acts of racism, even white supremacy?
I wonder if we are allowing social progress to detour into a kind of reflexive shaming. I wonder if all blacking up is alike, or if even blackface contains shades of grey.
Perhaps there is a difference between blacking up to mock black people, as the person pictured on Northam’s yearbook page seems to have done, and blacking up in affectionate imitation of a black person, as part of seeking to resemble said person, as Herring did. One indication that the latter is reasonable is that it was common among highly enlightened people in times hardly as removed from ours as Al Jolson and The Birth of a Nation.
[Read: As goes Virginia, so goes the Democratic party]
I think of the early ’80s when Herring dressed as Blow—specifically, 1984, when I was in college at Rutgers University. That Halloween, a friend and I dressed as George and Louise Jefferson. I was Louise (I did a mean Isabel Sanford in my day) and my friend was George. He was white, and as part of his role browned his face. No Afro wig, but still.
We lived in Demarest Hall, an unusual dormitory with hallways dedicated to academic and artistic themes, which was very artsy, bohemian, nerdy, and politically committed in flavor. Needless to say, the political commitments were left and lefter. Demarest of this period is perfectly summoned in Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and it was such a community in itself that to live there was essentially to attend Demarest rather than Rutgers.
As such, Halloween for me and my friend was mainly at the dorm, and nobody batted an eye at his being in blackface. We even won the dorm’s costume contest that year. Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if today that friend of mine is worried that a photo from that night may turn up and get him denied a promotion.
That same year, two female friends, one white and one black, “switched” races for the night. The black one wore whiteface and the white one wore blackface. Not with an Afro wig or big red lips, but thoroughly blacked up. I believe she wore a head scarf, which could be seen as a “black” garment under the circumstances. Their idea was to ridicule the very idea of racial categories. They went about with an ironic air, the black one chirping “I’m white!” and the white one chirping “I’m black!”
Yet the black woman was what we would today term a highly woke individual. And no one chided the white one for, say, failing to attend to the fact that blackness is not just a matter of skin tone but of grappling with the coded hostilities baked into a fundamentally racist society. She was read as making a little joke, a wise one, even—and remember, this was a dorm full of people voting for Mondale, renowned (and often ridiculed) for being gay-friendly in a way alien to most of the campus beyond at the time, very comfortably interracial, replete with international students and all manner of the “different,” and professionally intolerant of the repressive, bigoted world of Reagan’s America beyond our dorm doors.
[Read: America can’t seem to kick its racist costume habit]
This was 35 years ago, in the age of Cheers, Atari, and New Coke. Does our nonchalance then about imitative or ironic blackface qualify as antique? After all, in some ways our society’s ethical assumptions have beneficially progressed beyond this era. For example, occasionally in that dorm, as in all dorms, incidents would occur that we would now call, and treat as, date rape. That term didn’t exist, nor was it a topic of discussion. In that, Demarest of 1984 was backwards compared with now.
Maybe a true progressive, a true anti-racist, should have reported my George Jefferson mimic and the “I’m black!” woman to the higher authorities? I’m not sure, especially since sensibilities on imitative blackface were different as recently as 10 years ago. On an episode of 30 Rock—a sitcom with a sensibility directly channeling the Demarest sensibility—the Jenna Maroney character dresses as a black football player and her costume includes brown makeup. There was no outcry over this, since the moment was perceived as an expression of Jenna’s cluelessness, presumably let pass by the “sensible” writer characters on the show.
Only since then have we gotten to the point that a similarly arch, satirical show, even from the left, would sagely avoid even that kind of blackface. The idea, apparently, is that whenever any white person puts on brown makeup, it can be read as a salute to, or at least not attendant to, the brutally dismissive blackface practices of minstrel performers from the 19th century well into the 20th. To wear blackface is to condone white men prancing around onstage talking in cartoonish syntax and promulgating an idea that the essence of blackness is resounding ignorance, sexual rapacity, and buffoonery.
But minstrelsy was a very long time ago now. Ever fewer people now living experienced it live. While we must never return to minstrel-style hijinks, does it really make sense, does it really serve a purpose, to ban anyone ever putting on brown makeup as part of mimicking a person of color regardless of his or her intent? Must we really have it that a white person dressing as a black person must do it with his or her own pale skin on view? The likely outcome will be a tacit societal rule that black Americans are the only people in the country who are never to be imitated, even in praise, except by other black people. And what purpose would that glum, peculiar stricture serve?
[Read: Blackface Halloween is a toxic cultural tradition]
Yes, many say that intent doesn’t matter and that the key is how a message feels to the receiver. Okay—but there is an extent to which we control how we receive a message, and tarring Mark Herring as having channeled Al Jolson exhibits a certain hypersensitivity.
That’s a predictable take, yes, from someone who has written here recently in defense of Anders Carlson-Wee’s use of Black English in a poem and the meteorologist Jeremy Kappell’s inadvertent distortion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s name. But my consistent concern is the culture of heightened sensitivity that has arisen over the past five years or so, that has drifted beyond what even Demarest-minded people can embrace.
If Carlson-Wee was racist for using Black English in his poem, why did no one lob the same charge at Michael Chabon for the speech of some of his characters in, for example, his acclaimed novel Telegraph Avenue? Kappell slipped and said Martin Luther Koon because in speech we often reproduce a sound from before (or anticipate one afterwards—Koon anticipates the oo in Junior as well). And last week I heard a white woman in a question session at a conference say “blacklash” instead of “backlash” for the exact same reason, and no one listening cared. What mattered was the content of what she was saying—the intent, as it were.
Much of this special kind of vigilance, which leaves many people who thought of themselves as on the barricades a few years ago scratching their head, can be seen as a quest for power. To get someone fired from his job and publicly shamed for, say, having blacked up to dress as a black pop artist 40 years ago is to wield force, to have an effect; it is a kind of whip held at one’s side.
If we not only ban brown makeup even as part of an affectionate costume, but also declare that past use of brown makeup is sufficient for banishment from polite society, then we lay claim to a wisdom that people just a few years ago lacked, and accuse the recent past of deep ignorance. Could we not instead acknowledge gradations, the layered kind of communication we call wit? I can’t see the Demarites of 1984 as unintentionally benighted. We were lefty college students—a kind of normal. We would have burned in effigy someone who blacked up with minstrelese or disrespectful intent, in the vein of Northam. But I cannot honestly say I feel any shame about that Halloween night in 1984, or that anyone else who was there now should.
Ralph Northam must go. But must Mark Herring?
“This is a criminal proceeding and not a public relations campaign,” declared the federal judge presiding over Roger Stone’s arraignment last week. But the evidence indicates otherwise—and that’s one reason why the conspiracy theories Stone and others are promoting may prove so difficult to dispel.
Leaving the courthouse that day, Stone flung his arms out into a Nixonian V for Victory—the second time he had made use of the former president’s signature gesture in recent weeks, after striking the pose on the steps of the federal court in Fort Lauderdale following his arrest. The Daily Caller—where Stone writes as the “men’s fashion correspondent”—soon uploaded a video of Stone providing winking advice on “how to dress for your arraignment.” Meanwhile, Stone has continued to make appearances on cable-news outlets from Fox to CNN, and found time to sit down with his colleagues at the fringe website Infowars. He is selling T-shirts that read “Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong!” along with “Roger Stones” (pieces of rock with his signature on them), and aggressively soliciting donations for his legal-defense fund.
These are good times to be Roger Stone—which might seem like a strange thing to say about someone indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But Stone is only the most recent person to treat ending up on the wrong side of the Mueller investigation as a star turn. In November 2018, Stone’s former Infowars colleague Jerome Corsi leaked what appeared to be documents relating to a draft plea agreement between himself and the special counsel’s office and is now selling a book on How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s “Witch Hunt.” George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser and the first person to plead guilty in the Mueller investigation, went straight from expressing remorse before a judge to spinning murky conspiracy theories on Twitter about his persecution at the hands of the deep state. He, too, has a book coming out.
[Ken White: Roger Stone’s greatest liability]
Despite what the judge in Stone’s case might argue, in other words, being charged with a crime—or, in Corsi’s case, almost charged with one—does actually turn out to be an excellent public-relations opportunity. For people in the greater Trump orbit, the publicity of a legal clash with Robert Mueller provides a chance to tap into the thriving marketplace of fringe pro-Trump media. Disinformation in America is a business. And the profit to be turned from that business is a warning sign that the alternative stories of the Mueller investigation spun by the president’s supporters will have a long shelf life.
Stone has always dined out on controversy. As he describes in the 2017 film Get Me Roger Stone, he prides himself on being the youngest person to testify before the Watergate grand jury; rather than trying to move on from his relatively slight involvement in the “dirty tricks” spun by the Committee to Re-Elect the President, he made a career out of it. (Any in-depth discussion of the man must, inevitably, make note of his Richard Nixon back tattoo.) Recently, he argued in a court filing that a gag order against him would be a “violation of [his] right … to be part of the public discourse.” “Whether it is his pursuit of a posthumous pardon for Marcus Garvey, or the style of his clothes, or the state of the Nation,” the filing declared, “Roger Stone is a voice.”
Likewise, though Corsi doesn’t market himself as a dirty trickster, he too has made a business out of playing to the more disreputable corners of the American right. He rose to prominence in 2004 for his leading role in the “swift-boating” of John Kerry and has since published a string of successful, conspiratorially minded books, most notably promoting the baseless theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (“Birtherism” claimed Donald Trump as one of its most prominent adherents, and arguably launched Trump into the political spotlight in advance of his run for president.)
If Stone made a living in part by selling notoriety, and Corsi by selling disinformation, they formally signed on in 2017 with the king of monetizing conspiracies: Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars. Charlie Warzel, who has done some of the most in-depth reporting on Jones and Infowars, writes that Stone met Jones in 2013 “at a conspiracy theorist event marking the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.” According to court documents prepared by the special counsel’s office, Corsi and Stone joined forces over the course of the 2016 election in an effort to obtain information from Julian Assange about disclosures of documents hacked by the Russian government. Then, following the election, Stone helped Corsi secure a job with Infowars as the site’s Washington bureau chief. Stone himself began co-hosting Infowars broadcasts along with Jones.
[Read: Decades of dirty tricks finally catch up to Roger Stone]
Jones’s empire may be the best example of how conspiracy theories and fringe politics can make for a profitable business. In 2013, Alex Seitz-Wald estimated in Salon that Jones was pulling in roughly $10 million a year from advertising across his various Infowars platforms—web, radio, and paid subscribers. Over the past few years Jones appears to have switched to a similarly lucrative business model built on hawking dietary supplements, what one former Infowars employee described to BuzzFeed News as “QVC for conspiracy.”
Corsi no longer works for the publication, due to an opaque dispute from some time in 2018, and is currently suing Stone for defamation largely on the basis of Stone’s Infowars appearances. But the Infowars store still sells both Corsi’s and Stone’s books, and Stone remains one of Jones’s correspondents. His first interview after his arrest was with Jones: “America is under attack,” he declared over a sputtering phone connection, before requesting that listeners donate to his legal defense fund. He later appeared at an Infowars press conference in front of placards promoting StoneDefenseFund.com, which warns that Stone’s “legal fees in this epic fight could top $2 million.”
The connections between Jones, Stone, Corsi and the president are well-documented. Trump appeared on Jones’s show during the 2016 election, declaring, “I will not let you down.” In 2011, he spoke with Corsi regarding President Obama’s birth certificate, Mother Jones reported. While the extent to which Corsi and Jones remain in touch with Trump is unclear, they don’t have to be communicating personally in order to influence the president. As Warzel writes, the “conservative media food chain … frequently aggregates and propagates Infowars stories.” A study from the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University refers to this as an “attention backbone,” through which material from Infowars and other fringe outlets travels through outlets like the Daily Caller and Breitbart to end up on Fox News. Corsi’s and Stone’s complaints about mistreatment by Mueller’s team—originally aired, in Stone’s case, on Infowars—were both picked up by Fox. If there is good business in misinformation, in other words, there is also good business in laundering that misinformation into quasi-respectable shape for the consumption of viewers, including the president.
George Papadopoulos, once derided by Trump as a “coffee boy,” appears to understand this. He has appeared on Infowars, and the site has continued to champion him as he has popped up on Fox and the podcast of pro-Trump pundit Dan Bongino—who himself recently secured a paid position as a Fox contributor. Papadopoulos kept quiet at first following his guilty plea, but began dropping ominous hints on Twitter in the months before and after his sentencing that he had been the victim of a conspiracy to bring down the president. He has a book coming out in March along those lines, with the evocative title, Deep State Target. He is filming a documentary about his plans to run for Congress and his wife’s modeling ambitions. Most recently, he announced on Twitter that he had joined the board of a medical marijuana startup, netting the previously-obscure company a spurt of news coverage. The Chicago Sun-Times writes that the startup’s founder “is now using Papadopoulos to gain access to the Trump administration, and ... he hopes the connection will help him secure an appointment to the president’s opioid commission.”
[David Frum: Roger Stone’s arrest is the signal for Congress to act]
Crucial to Papadopoulos’s success is his apparent grasp of a foundational principle of the pro-Trump media universe: “The only rule seems to be not to let yourself disappear,” Warzel told me, describing the playbook he views as popularized by Alex Jones. “All press is good press, and scandal is the best possible.” In this view, the ultimate aim of these grifts may be not only money but also attention. Whatever the immediate financial rewards they’ve achieved, Stone and Corsi have succeeded in keeping themselves on television.
According to the special counsel’s sentencing memo, Papadopoulos seems to have been little more than a bit player in a much larger story. But his portentous tweets have made him a minor star on the fringes of right-wing media. The self-styled victim of the conspiracy of the moment—the deep state plot, spearheaded by Mueller, to take down Trump—can do, it seems, quite well for himself.
The idea of a definitive “Mueller report” spelling out just what happened during the 2016 election is powerful because of its imagined ability to dispel conspiracy: Surely the alternative facts provided by the president and his supporters will wilt in the face of evidence marshaled by the no-nonsense special counsel. But the success of Stone, Corsi, and Papadopoulos in selling stories about their persecution by the deep state suggests that the conspiracy theories will be harder to do away with.
Anyone can read the court documents spelling out the cases against the three men, and yet Stone has been able to sell the idea that, according to his T-shirts, he “Did Nothing Wrong!” and is accused of mere “process crimes” engineered by an over-aggressive prosecutor. (In a flourish of showmanship, he appears to have been wearing one of the T-shirts announcing his innocence when arrested by the FBI.) Despite Mueller’s detailed account of Papadopoulos’s interactions with a Russian government agent promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” Papadopoulos has told a parallel story in which the real collusion involves some opaque and dreadful conspiracy between the U.S. deep state, the U.K., and Australia. Corsi has gone further, preemptively leaking his draft plea agreement and hawking a book detailing his version of events.
Whatever form any report issued by the special counsel’s office eventually takes, it’s anyone’s guess whether it will have the narrative weight to counteract the pull of conspiracy theories. Perhaps the moment when Stone faces consequences and enters prison, or begins to cooperate with Mueller, is the moment when the grift falls to earth. Or perhaps he’s good enough at selling himself as a martyr to keep his version of the story going. After all, he’s spent the last 45 years turning Watergate from blemish to selling point. In a sense, he’s been preparing for this his entire life.
“Mas no meu lugar se ponha e suponha que / No século 21, a cada 23 minutos morre um jovem negro / E você é negro que nem eu, pretin, ó / Não ficaria preocupado?”.
Essa é uma parte da música Favela Vive 3, cantada pelo rapper Djonga, que desperta em mim um alerta que me acompanha desde criança: o medo de morrer nas mãos da polícia.
Não é novidade que a polícia do Rio de Janeiro está entre as que mais mata do país. O Atlas da Violência 2018 aponta que a cada 100 pessoas mortas no Brasil, 71 são negras.
A violência policial que muitos lêem no jornal e a militarização que tantos pedem – o Rio estava até dezembro sob intervenção federal na segurança, com os militares à frente da Secretaria de Segurança Pública – é, parte do meu cotidiano. E esse diário sintetiza como é ser um negro de 20 anos morador de uma favela na zona norte do Rio de Janeiro.
GIF: Reprodução/Youtube
Vou contar pra vocês como o racismo me fez chorar hoje com duas duras em menos de dez minutos. Era dia de operação – quando a polícia ou o Exército entram na favela atirando para todos lados supostamente atrás de drogas e criminosos. Esses são os piores dias. Os comércios não abrem as portas até a operação acabar, a internet cai, às vezes, a luz também. As crianças não vão à escola, e os adultos ficam impedidos de ir ao trabalho – o que não é nem de longe o pior, quando mesmo dentro de casa e embaixo da cama a bala pode te achar.
A operação tinha começado de madrugada. Por volta das 4h, eu acordei com o som de tiros e já pensava que seria um dia perdido de trabalho. Por volta das 9h, os tiros haviam cessado e resolvi sair de casa. A polícia ainda estava dentro do morro, e o Bope vasculhava tudo com seus carros, cachorros e policiais que parecem mais transformers, grandes e robóticos. Todos a procura de traficantes. Passei por eles, mas, logo à frente, ainda dentro da favela, fui parado por soldados do Exército que estavam ao lado de uma espécie de tanque de guerra, parado próximo à linha do trem. Me mandaram “encostar”. Todos os soldados aparentavam ter no máximo 25 anos, e eram todos negros. Eles pareciam assustados ou minimamente incomodados de estarem me parando para me revistar. Eles com certeza também são moradores de favela e, quando não estão de farda, também são abordados, como eu fui. Durante toda a revista, chamei os soldados de “mano”. Foi involuntário. Eles pareciam com os meus amigos, gente que cumprimento voltando do trabalho, que encontro no baile funk. Fui liberado e segui para o metrô pensando em como aquilo era errado de várias formas. O estado faz com que jovens negros morram dos dois lados de uma guerra que nenhum deles começou.
O estado faz com que jovens negros morram dos dois lados de uma guerra que nenhum deles começou.Já me aproximava da estação de metrô, um trajeto que costumo fazer em dez minutos a pé, quando vi um carro da PM vindo devagar na minha direção. Como estava na calçada do supermercado, que também funciona como estacionamento, eles não conseguiram chegar perto de mim com o carro – não havia lugar para pararem. Eles passaram por mim e pensei que ficaria por isso, quando o carro deu meia volta e subiu uma ruazinha transversal com a avenida Dom Hélder Câmara, a principal do bairro, que dá acesso a rua a estação de metrô Maria da Graça, onde eu pretendia embarcar. Pensei, “eles vão fazer isso pra me pegar vindo de frente na rua do metrô, pra não ter como eu fugir”. Não que eu fosse fazer isso, mas quem não deve também teme. Os quatro policiais desceram do carro, com toda a sutileza que um negro merece em uma abordagem: um fuzil e uma pistola apontadas pra minha cara. O PM que me apontava a pistola era o mesmo que tinha me parado na mesma semana, também próximo ao metrô. Ele chegou me mandando encostar na parede, abrir as pernas e a mochila. Me perguntou 40 vezes pra onde eu ia, se já tinha sido preso e riu todas as vezes que eu respondi que era universitário.
Quem não deve também teme.Muitas pessoas passavam na rua no momento e nenhuma foi parada. Eu respondia de forma ríspida – estava com muita raiva, esse mesmo cara já tinha me parado há dois dias – e eles seguiam me ironizando, falavam que era tudo pra minha segurança. Quando falei que era jornalista, eles gargalharam. “Tu ainda tá na faculdade, seu merda, tu não é nada.” Retruquei que não era bandido. “Se tu fosse bandido já tava com a cara no chão”, completou o PM que me apontava a pistola.
Fui liberado, largaram minha mochila no chão, e mandaram eu seguir. “Vai lá, jornalista, vai escrever uma matéria sobre nós hoje”, gritavam, enquanto eu caminhava. “Ia adorar um jornalista dando uma volta de carro com a gente, quer ir não, jornalista?” Eles seguiam gritando enquanto entravam no carro. Coloquei os fones de ouvido e segui ouvindo Racionais. Essa não foi a pior abordagem que já sofri, mas foi a primeira vez que me lembro de ter chorado.
9:30h.Relatei no Facebook o que aconteceu, e o texto viralizou. Depois da minha publicação, a minha esposa ficou muito nervosa. Mesmo sabendo da rotina dos abusos da PM (ela mesmo já sofreu várias abordagens quando estava comigo), resolveu me levar até o metrô achando que a presença dela serviria para evitar que eu fosse abordado novamente. Ela estava errada. Antes mesmo de chegar em frente ao SuperMarket – um supermercado próximo ao metrô, quase em frente à Cidpol, que reúne as delegacias especializadas da cidade –, enxergamos uma viatura vindo em nossa direção. Várias pessoas seguiam para o metrô no mesmo trajeto que nós, mas só nós dois fomos abordados pela PM. Eram os mesmos policiais que haviam me parado no dia anterior – o motorista já partia para me parar pela terceira vez na mesma semana. Vieram com aquela cara irônica, mandando eu levantar a camisa e abrir a minha mochila. Perguntaram para onde eu ia (não existe direito de ir e vir quando se é negro e de favela), e respondi: “Eu tô indo trabalhar, cara. Vocês me pararam ontem e antes de ontem para a mesma coisa, eu tô com a mesma roupa, a mesma mochila. Olha aqui a minha marmita, a mesma, olha aqui a minha identidade”. O que já havia me abordado três vezes deu uma risada e voltou pra dentro do carro. O outro falou: “É mesmo, cara? Lembro não”, e riu.
22/09/2018IR E VIR?18h.Nos finais de semana, por volta das 16h, a PM costuma formar uma blitz na Dom Hélder Câmara e para boa parte dos veículos que passam pelo local. A pista fechada é sempre a que segue no sentido do bairro de Del Castilho, na zona norte, a fim de parar as pessoas que estão saindo do Jacarezinho, Manguinhos, Arará ou de qualquer outra favela próxima. Minha esposa e eu pegamos um ônibus para Cascadura, na zona norte, onde a mãe dela mora e, assim que chegamos próximos a blitz, nosso ônibus foi parado. Dois PMs subiram no ônibus e começam a apontar o dedo para as pessoas que eles julgavam suspeitas. “Tu, tu, tu e tu, desce agora.” Pra variar, fui um dos escolhidos pra descer. Comigo desceram mais cinco jovens, três homens e duas mulheres, todos negros. Minha esposa não foi intimada a descer, mas, assustada, desceu mesmo assim pra tentar garantir a minha segurança.
Me chamaram de mentiroso e falaram que eu estava escondendo minhas drogas na minha esposa.O retrato da dura todo mundo já conhece: mãos na parede, pernas abertas, todos olhando para o chão. Eu e os outros homens ficamos quase dez minutos na mesma posição, enquanto eles revistaram nossas mochilas e aplicavam um terror psicológico nas garotas, já que não tinha nenhuma policial mulher pra que elas fossem revistadas. Eu não ouvi, porque estava longe, mas minha mulher disse que ficaram chamando elas de mentirosas, que levariam todas para Bangu por tráfico, lembrando todas as coisas horríveis que acontecem com mulheres na cadeia… Tentaram de todas as formas me intimidar. Me chamaram de mentiroso e falaram que eu estava escondendo minhas drogas na minha esposa; ela já tinha o choro no rosto quando fomos “liberados”. Os outros que haviam sido retirados do ônibus junto comigo permaneceram parados com as mãos na parede e cabeça baixa.
Perdemos o ônibus, a nossa passagem não foi devolvida nem fomos realocados para outro carro.Perdemos o ônibus, a nossa passagem não foi devolvida nem fomos realocados para outro carro. Voltamos ao ponto, que fica um pouco antes da blitz. Quando finalmente estávamos dentro de outro ônibus, fomos parados novamente na blitz. Subiram os mesmos policiais que fizeram a mesma seleção. “Tu, tu e tu.” Fui escolhido novamente. Antes mesmo de eu retrucar, o PM se recordou que havia me feito descer do outro ônibus há pouco e falou: “ah não, tu eu já fui, fica ai”, sinalizando que eu já tinha sido revistado, portanto poderia seguir viagem. Uma viagem que costumo fazer em 20 minutos levou duas horas. Chegamos em Cascadura abalados. Foi uma semana muito difícil.
25/09/2018A PRÉVIA22h. Voltando da faculdade, desço no metrô Maria da Graça e caminho em direção ao Jacarezinho. Em frente à Cidade da Polícia, mais uma blitz abordava carros e pedestres que iam no sentido Jacarezinho. Quando me aproximo, sou recebido com a delicadeza de sempre da PM: uma arma apontada para cabeça seguida da ordem “levanta a camisa, rápido!” e do interrogatório. “Tá indo pra onde?”, “onde tu mora?”, “já tem passagem [pela polícia]?. Eu respondia, eles repetiam as perguntas. “Onde tu estuda?”, “onde tu trabalha?”. Eles usam essa estratégia acreditando que, se você der uma resposta diferente para a mesma pergunta num momento de tensão, está mentindo. Eu estava muito cansado para retrucar, só queria chegar em casa e fui, como de costume, monossilábico. Respondi “sim”, “não” e o necessário para ser liberado o mais rápido possível.
Ilustração: Amanda Miranda/The Intercept
8h.A blitz do dia anterior era a prévia de uma operação que viria na madrugada. Às 4h, já se ouviam muitos tiros na comunidade. Às 8h, os tiros aparentemente cessaram, e sai de casa para o trabalho. Achava que a polícia já havia saído da favela, mas eu estava enganado. Carros e agentes da Core, o Bope e o blindado da UPP, a Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora, estavam por toda a parte. Os agentes vestiam toucas ninja com a face da morte ou de um esqueleto. Quando me aproximava da entrada da favela fui abordado por um grupo de quatro policiais da UPP que já estavam revistando dois garotos – como sempre, negros. Novamente, fui monossilábico. Revistarem a minha mochila e todo o meu corpo e me liberaram. Os garotos que lá estavam quando fui parado não tiveram a mesma “sorte” e lá seguiram sendo inquiridos e abusados – digo, revistados.
30/09/2018SEM HERÓISDepois do dia 26, passei a usar rotas e horários alternativos para ir para a faculdade e para o trabalho a fim diminuir o número de abordagens. Minha esposa e minha família começaram a me pressionar para eu deixar o Jacarezinho. É complicado: eu amo esse lugar como não amo nenhum outro na cidade, mas eles estão certos quanto à violência a que eu estou me expondo, principalmente depois de falar pros policiais que sou jornalista. A minha esposa sofre de ansiedade e depressão, e as crises dela têm piorado, principalmente quando demoro a chegar em casa. Começamos a procurar casas fora da favela. Eu amo muito o “Jaca”, mas amo mais a minha familia e eu sei que eles precisam de mim vivo. Não sou o herói que vai mudar a história da favela só por estar lá dentro, e aqui no Rio eles matam os heróis. Marielle Franco é a prova disso. Acho que está chegando a hora de me despedir da favela.
17h.Por volta das 17h, minha esposa me manda uma dezena de mensagens. Ela não conseguiu voltar pra casa por conta de uma operação que começou no meio da tarde, num momento em que todos estavam na rua circulando pelo comércio, e as crianças voltando da escola. Estava muito assustada e não sabia para onde ir. Me ligou imediatamente e foi para a faculdade, onde poderia esperar a poeira abaixar para poder voltar. Estava no trabalho quando recebi a ligação, tentei acalmá-la e fui ao seu encontro para que ela não voltasse sozinha. Conseguimos chegar em casa só por volta das 20h.
10/10/2018CAVEIRÃO DA PAZ11h.Também trabalho no Observatório de Favelas. Estava no ponto esperando o ônibus para a Maré (conjunto de favelas também na zona norte do Rio), onde fica a sede do Observatório, quando uma carro da polícia passou e parou. Dos quatro policiais, três eram negros, mas a abordagem é a mesma de um policial branco. “Tem passagem?”, “tá indo pra onde?” ,”tá indo fazer o que lá na Maré?.” Pegaram a minha identidade e olharam algo no celular. Acho que era alguma coisa para checar se eu realmente não tinha passagem pela polícia. Fui liberado. Meu ônibus chegou, mas bastou chegar no ponto seguinte, na avenida dos Democráticos, para cruzar com um blindado da UPP. É o mesmo Caveirão do Bope, só que branco e com o logotipo da UPP. Os policiais que me abordaram estavam perto do blindado conversando com outros policiais. Fiquei tenso e já pensei como seria a volta pra casa. Com certeza teria operação.
9h.A favela enfrentava o segundo de três dias consecutivos de operação policial. Um morador havia sido baleado indo pro trabalho. Um cachorro de rua também levou um tiro e ganhou as manchetes – ainda não se sabe o estado de saúde do morador. O Bope e o Choque fazem uma operação de vingança depois que policiais da UPP teriam sido baleados enquanto faziam uma ronda na parte alta da favela.
Acordei no domingo com dois agentes com fuzis e touca ninja abrindo a janela da minha casa.Isso acontece com certa frequência. O Comando Vermelho domina a parte baixa da favela, enquanto o “morrinho” é o território da UPP. Sempre há confrontos quando o CV tenta tomar a parte alta da favela. Era mais ou menos 9h da manhã de domingo quando ouvi passos no bequinho da minha casa. Dois agentes usando fuzis e touca ninja abriram a janela da minha casa. Eu estava deitado, dormindo com minha esposa. Levantei rapidamente e fui em direção à janela com as mãos levantadas, para eles não suspeitarem de nenhum movimento e atirarem em mim. Ainda com o fuzil apontado para mim, abri a porta e só pedi para que esperassem a minha esposa se vestir antes deles entrarem.
Após isso, revistaram os dois cômodos da casa e olharam dentro e atrás da geladeira várias vezes. Normalmente é pior. Nesse dia, só jogaram as roupas no chão para olhar dentro da cômoda. É uma sensação horrível, que não dá pra explicar: você percebe que o morador de favela não tem direitos. Entreguei todos os meus documentos para eles e, quando falei que era jornalista, eles perguntaram que tipo de jornalismo se tratava e se era “jornal de crime”. Respondi que o jornal cobre mais política, e eles aceitaram. Na hora que estavam indo embora, ainda mandaram eu e minha esposa aproveitarmos que estava tendo operação e não íamos sair para arrumar a casa “porque está uma zona”. Ficamos em casa o resto do dia. No dia seguinte, na segunda-feira, houve mais um dia de operação – mais um dia perdido e dentro de casa.
12/01/2018O ADEUS E A ROTINA14h.Depois de alguns meses procurando casa fora da favela, finalmente consegui me mudar. Para não me afastar muito dos amigos, mudei para um bairro próximo. A intervenção militar no Rio terminou na virada do ano, mas a rotina continua a mesma. No dia 12 de janeiro, retornei ao Jacarezinho para limpar a casa e entregar as chaves ao senhorio. Nessa mesma semana, a favela tinha vivido uma semana inteira de “operação vingança” devido à morte de mais um policial. Quando cheguei lá, já fui recebido pela vizinha de porta, dona Branca, uma senhora nordestina de uns 60 anos que mora na favela desde que mudou para o Rio, contando uma história que não sei se me deixava feliz por não ter vivenciado ou triste pela situação das pessoas que continuavam lá. “Vizinho, tu não tá perdendo nada indo embora daqui. Eu que queria ir. Eles entraram aqui em casa de novo, deram 15 tiros no transformador de luz e não deixaram a Light entrar na favela. Ficou todo mundo sem luz. Fiquei três dias sem. Perdi tudo da geladeira, nesse calor que tá, não dava nem pra ligar o ventilador”. Não sou religioso, mas rezo pra que alguma entidade olhe por essas pessoas, porque a mão do estado vai ficar mais pesada em cima delas.
The post Suspeito profissional, bacharel pós-graduado em tomar geral. Um diário de um jovem negro morando numa favela do Rio. appeared first on The Intercept.
There is a brazen, bipartisan push by the U.S. government for regime change in Venezuela with the Trump administration officially declaring opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the “legitimate” president. The economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the U.S. are aimed at starving the population into submission with notorious neoconservatives John Bolton and Elliott Abrams coordinating the campaign to overthrow the government of Nicolás Maduro. What we are witnessing right now in Latin America is a modern iteration of the same dirty tactics that the U.S. has historically used against the nations south of the U.S. border. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. The U.S. has tried since the early 2000s to overthrow its socialist government beginning with Hugo Chávez. At the same time, it poured money into right-wing movements and backed open fascists like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. All of this is a modern version of the era of overthrowing leftists who won at the ballot box or by ousting U.S.-friendly dictators. And all of the mass murder, the sanctions, the regime changes, the election interference, the covert support for anti-democratic forces determined to be good for so-called free markets is, today, as it was in the 1950s, sold in the name of bringing freedom and democracy.
Powerful Democrats and Republicans alike have sold the notion that economic sanctions are somehow a cleaner way of forcing change than military action. They portray sanctions as targeting the dictators, the oligarchs, the criminally corrupt. But the filthy truth is that not all sanctions are created equal. Yes, there are sanctions that go after individual criminals. But the sanctions we’re talking about on Venezuela right now are not going harm Maduro and his inner circle personally. No, these sanctions are aimed at punishing the Venezuelan people by depriving them of food, medicine, wages, and their very humanity. The strategy is to use these sanctions as a cudgel against an already suffering people in a campaign to torture them into submission.
The former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield has been aggressively lobbying for more sanctions, saying “perhaps the best solution would be to accelerate the collapse.” He says this while actually openly acknowledging that sanctions will kill innocent people, increase malnutrition, and bring “fairly severe punishment” for “millions and millions” of Venezuelans. Brownfield recently admitted the following:
If we can do something that will bring that end quicker, we probably should do it, but we should do it understanding that it’s going to have an impact on millions and millions of people who are already having great difficulty finding enough to eat, getting themselves cured when they get sick, or finding clothes to put on their children before they go off to school. We don’t get to do this and pretend as though it has no impact there. We have to make the hard decision — the desired outcome justifies this fairly severe punishment.
This is the former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela speaking at a Washington D.C. think tank, publicly saying that it is worth the price of lives and health and humanity of ordinary Venezuelans in order to overthrow a government the U.S. does not like. These sanctions are going to cost Venezuela $11 billion in oil revenue in 2019 alone. That amounts to nearly 95 percent of the money that Venezuela spent on the import of food and other goods last year. This isn’t targeting Maduro. Even The Economist stated the following about the logic behind the sanctions: “Mr. Guaidó and Mr. Trump are betting that hardship will topple the regime before it starves the Venezuelan people.” That’s not Chávez speaking from the grave. That’s The Economist.
When powerful political leaders in the U.S. want to change governments, the price of killing innocent people is always worth it. It’s the American way. And this is why Trump is being embraced on his Venezuela policy. He is promoting and advancing the bipartisan politics of empire. It is the same dynamic when the so-called adults on Capitol Hill support giving Trump sweeping surveillance powers or unending funds for an already insane military spending budget. For all the screaming about Trump being a grave threat to democracy, the worst president ever, or an unhinged maniac, when he boosts the policies of imperialism, he gets to join the club of the cops of the world.
On Intercepted this week, historian and journalist Vijay Prashad joined us to discuss the state of imperialism in the world, the situation in Venezuela, the upcoming elections in India, and the recent one in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Prashad is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. That’s a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and the chief editor of LeftWord Books. Prashad is a prolific writer, authoring 25 books, including “The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World” and “The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South.” An excerpt of this conversation aired on Intercepted. What follows is the complete, unedited conversation.
This interview begins at 20:03.
Jeremy Scahill: Vijay Prashad welcome to Intercepted.
Vijay Prashad: Thank you so much.
JS: Vijay, I want to start by asking your response to the recent developments in Venezuela. Earlier this week, the New York Times did a big profile on the opposition leader Juan Guaidó who has declared himself president and the Times notes that more than 20 countries have now recognized Guaidó as the legitimate interim president of Venezuela. Among those countries: The United States, Canada, most of South America. Then on Monday several European Union countries [joined] that list, among them: France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Austria, Sweden, and Denmark. You recently wrote that what happened to Chile in 1973 — when there was a U.S. initiated coup against the democratically elected leader Salvador Allende — is precisely what the United States has attempted to do in many countries of the Global South, and you say the most recent target for the U.S. government and Western big business is Venezuela. What are the parallels that you see between the overthrow of Allende in 1973 and what we’re seeing now with the push to overthrow Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela?
VP: I’m glad we’re starting here, Jeremy, because this is really the most important issue, I think, of our period. Which is, you know, this very extravagant set of claims made by particularly the United States and its closest allies about countries in the Global South — whether it’s Iran, or Venezuela, or a host of other countries. Let’s think about the Chilean example. In 1970, when Salvador Allende was coming close to winning a very legitimate election to come to office, the United States government said, we will not tolerate it if people like Allende decide to nationalize resources. In the case of Chile, it was copper, and so they began to plan to, in a way, undermine Allende through barricading his economy long before Allende even won the election. And after he won the election they did everything possible to prevent Chile from selling copper outside its boundaries, therefore bankrupting Chile, creating distress within the country, and then winking to the military to take over. And by the way, Chile is not the beginning of this.
We saw this in 1954 in Guatemala where the issue was the nationalization of the United Fruit Company and we saw this in 1953 in Iran when the issue was oil. The government of Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the oil company. This was something seen as totally inappropriate by Western oil companies, the so-called Seven Sisters. And the United States in alliance with Great Britain conducted a coup against Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and against Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. I mean, there [are] so many examples of precisely this situation.
With Venezuela, just very quickly, it’s got to be said that this is a country that has never been able to diversify its economy. About 98 percent of its external revenues comes from oil and from petroleum products. In the last few years, oil prices have collapsed by 50 percent which means that Venezuela’s external revenues have also collapsed by about 50 percent.
When Venezuela was swimming in oil money and when there were difficulties in the United States, and Britain, and other countries, the Venezuelan government provided cheap oil to poor people in Boston, in the Bronx in New York, — in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in London, and other places. But when Venezuela went into a crisis, rather than tending to the problem — which was basically a problem of a one-commodity economy — rather than help the Venezuelans, what we begin to see is the Obama administration in 2015 declaring Venezuela a national security threat and now the Trump administration with the very close help of Mr. Trudeau from Canada [is] trying to essentially overthrow the government of Mr. Nicolas Maduro. You know, the people will concentrate and they’ll say well, you know, Maduro did this, Maduro did that, but before Maduro can do anything is the suffocation of the one commodity economy.
JS: Well, and Vijay, you have this exception in the sanctions, the latest round of sanctions that the Trump administration has imposed on Venezuela and its state oil company allowing Chevron to continue doing business as usual and also the former company of Dick Cheney, Halliburton, [is] also allowed to continue on in Venezuela.
VP: See, one of the interesting things about the Trump administration and Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton is they just don’t seem to care. I mean, they don’t have any pretense about anything that they’re doing. Whereas one saw, even with George W. Bush’s administration, we saw some measure of pretense. You know, they’d come up with theories about humanitarianism and whatever it is — there [are] weapons of mass destruction. All kinds of shifting goal posts that they used as a fig leaf for the invasion of Iraq. Even, of course, with Mr. Obama, we saw all kinds of high-minded principles. Obama was an expert at concocting high-minded principles to defend essentially naked aggression. With Trump and with Bolton, I mean, we’re at a situation where they just don’t care. Include with Trump and Bolton, Senator Rubio. They just don’t care. They come out directly and say, “we’re in this for the oil.” They come out directly and say these people can’t behave like that. I mean, of all audacious things Nicolas Maduro is a bus driver. You know, how dare he be the president of a country? You should be an oligarch, one of the old aristocracy from Venezuela. That’s the kind of person that should run things in collaboration with Chevron and Halliburton and so on. So, you know, they’re not even [trying] to pretend that this is about democracy.
JS: Briefly, Vijay, you also have many prominent Democrats including Dick Durbin of Illinois, but also members of the Democratic side of the House Foreign Relations Committee backing the Trump Administration. And over the weekend, we saw huge protests in Venezuela. The ones that were in support of Juan Guaidó were covered everywhere and the footage was shown everywhere. But the massive protests that were Venezuelans in the streets to defend Maduro, that was not shown. Or there were allegations, “Oh, they’re just doctoring the video.” So, it’s clear that we are seeing a major propaganda push, on the one hand, in the news media with glowing coverage of Juan Guaidó, and then on the other hand, Democrats who are screaming on the top of the hill that Donald Trump is the biggest threat ever to American democracy and he’s going to ruin the country. The Democrats on this issue are saying “Oh no, but we were actually with Trump on this one and Nicolas Maduro has to go.”
VP: The American political establishment makes a big deal of bipartisanship. And in a sense, the real arena where bipartisanship can be seen is when it comes to foreign policy. Particularly the behavior of the United States government against its so-called adversaries — whether it’s Iran or it’s Venezuela. You know, people get confused on Iran thinking that the Obama administration was on one side of the issue and Trump was on the other. In fact, they were both on the same side of the issue, which is that the United States has the right to intervene, to pressure Iran. To use its various controls of things like the control of the U.S. dollar, trade with Iran, to use pressure on the Europeans against the SWIFT network. That’s the network that moves currency around. Both Obama and Trump are in agreement that it’s perfectly permissible for the U.S. to use any instrument to control Iran. There was some difference in strategy. Obama wanted to use the multilateral agreement that would essentially prevent Iran from doing certain things and Trump said no, let’s go a different way. But they totally agreed in the final aim and in the attitude of the United States to other countries in foreign policy.
Much the same in Venezuela. There is no difference in attitude across the political spectrum from Democrats, to Republicans, to the New York Times. You know, utter unanimity of opinion that the United States can interfere in another country’s political matters, can come in and, in fact, anoint leaders. Here’s the irony, you have a country, the United States, which is up in arms about Russian interference in the elections. I can’t watch Rachel Maddow’s television show any longer because there she is going on and on about, you know, how the Russians are doing this, the Russians are doing that. Meanwhile, the United States is there openly, brazenly intervening in Venezuela as they do in so many other countries and these people have no problem with it. I mean, you know, Rachel Maddow, Ph.D. from I think Oxford — have some decency — at least let the goose and the gander be treated by the same standard, but that is just not going to happen. In fact, things are so bad, Jeremy, that when Medea Benjamin went in twice to intervene, to shame the Organization of American States and to shame people anointed by this Lima Group as representatives of Venezuela, CNN Spanish used footage of Medea to make the case that she was protesting on behalf of the opposition against Maduro. So, not only do they frame these issues in a way that’s quite, you know, just inconsiderate of the truth, but here they are openly lying.
JS: Well, let me ask you: I, of course, agree with your analysis on the U.S. intervention. But we are seeing millions of Venezuelans over the past several years fleeing the country. Yes, the opposition, some elements of the opposition to Maduro, have killed people. There has been racist action on the part of some sectors of the opposition. At the same time, Maduro controls most of the state mechanisms of organized violence: the police, the military, etcetera. And we have seen real brutality and lethal force used over, and over on the opposition. My question for you is, and I’ve been hearing this from Venezuelans who say look, we are not Trump supporters. We are not fans of any kind of a “lighter-skinned Venezuelans are the one that should be in control of the country” mentality that seems to be permeating a lot of the so-called opposition. But Maduro is running the country into the ground. Yes, we understand sanctions. Everything Vijay is saying we agree with that. At the same time, Maduro has built himself a kleptocracy. Are you saying that there is no legitimacy whatsoever to any sector of the opposition against Maduro right now?
VP: Well, look let’s put it this way. There are obvious problems. As I said, when your revenues declined to almost 50 percent you’re going to suffer great problems inside the country. You’ve got an economic stranglehold by the sanctions regime and so on. Yes, there are Venezuelans fleeing the country. But, Jeremy, there are 69 million people who have been displaced around the world. And that’s a very conservative figure, largely displaced because of the very structural policies that are disturbing countries, not only Venezuela but countries across West Africa, in Central Asia. You have wars, you have economic policies that are displacing people. So, of course, there are people moving, you know? Of course, there are people who feel that this government is not representing them, but that’s what the political process is about. I mean, are we saying that Nicolas Maduro is a dictator? Now in the last election, which the opposition only partly boycotted, he only won 67 percent of the vote. You know, if this was truly a dictatorship, let’s look at the case of our old friend, you know, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Mubarak won almost 90 percent of the votes. That’s [a] questionable election and when that election took place, the U.S. State Department said this is a new day for Egypt.
In this case, Maduro won 67 percent. The opposition is politically divided. It’s not able to come together. One section of the opposition has turned to the United States and said essentially give us a hand to use any means to overthrow this guy. Why don’t you build the opposition? On any day in Caracas, Jeremy, you open the newspapers, they’re all deeply critical of the Maduro government. If this is a dictatorship, I don’t understand what freedom, you know, in our limited sense is. He gets hammered on television. He is getting hammered [in] the newspapers. The fact is the opposition is not able to come together. And the deep residues of Chavista loyalty to the Maduro government, but also to the institutions of the missions, and so on is not to be set aside. In other words, you have this very loyal section of Chavistas who are committed to the Bolivarian Revolution. They understand the problems. They’re willing to fight to defend the government and they come out in large numbers to vote for the government. But yet their large numbers, as I said, amount to 67 percent. There is a political process. Maduro has said let’s go back. Let’s have a negotiation. Let’s think about a new election. You know, the Venezuelan government in this last election last year, asked the United Nations to send monitors. Why did the United Nations not send monitors? You know, why is the United States government attempting to cripple the political process in Venezuela to create the preconditions where you can then think there’s nothing else to be done except U.S. intervention to anoint somebody as the president? A deeply undemocratic act.
JS: Also, I wanted to point out — and you’ve been writing about this and offering analysis on it — that at this moment in Latin America, you have this rise again of overt authoritarian fascist leaders like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. But you also have a leftist president who came to power in Mexico, Andres Manuel López Obrador known by his initials AMLO, and you wrote about López Obrador — that he comes to the presidency as a man of the left but the space for maneuvering that he has for a left agenda is minimal. I feel like if this was 10 years ago there would have been a lot more excitement about what’s happening in Mexico with López Obrador coming to power but that has sort of been drowned out by the situation in Venezuela on the one hand. And then Trump’s inane dangerous threats about building a border wall and then also the active, ongoing threat of separating families from their children, militarizing the border patrol, ICE, which serves as a kind of storm front for enforcement of extremely racist xenophobic immigration policy. But what is your sense of what room to maneuver López Obrador has right now in Mexico?
VP: You see Mexico, like Venezuela, like any of these countries, their space for what we call fiscal creativity is almost zero. These countries are reliant upon borrowing commercial capital going to, you know, private banks to raise money. There’s been immense pressure on these countries from the IMF not to run deficits. So, that means that if you can’t raise enough money from banks to cover your basic running operation of your government, what you’re going to do is you’re going to end up cutting social services. I mean, let’s put this in some context, Jeremy. Oxfam’s recent report showed that last year, that is in the calendar year of 2018, 2,230odd billionaires increased their wealth by 2.5 billion dollars per year and meanwhile the lowest 50 percent of humanity lost eleven percent of its wealth. Why am I raising this? The top 10 people among those 2,230 odd billionaires, of them there’s only one person who’s not from North America, that is not from the United States, and from Europe, and that person is Carlos Slim of Mexico.
You see what we have to remember is the very top people, these 2,000 odd billionaires and their families, no longer pay tax. You know, they are essentially bloating tax havens. They are hiding their money in banks. They’re just not paying tax anymore. They have gone on, what I consider, a tax strike. Because these elites like Carlos Slim of Mexico have gone on a tax strike the governments of countries like Mexico have a very difficult time raising, financing to do anything on the humane side of government policy. So, they’ve been cutting health care, they’ve been cutting education, they’ve been slicing everything that produces civilization. So, for, you know, for López Obrador, the government he’s inherited is basically a government which doesn’t have any ability to provide the good parts of life for people, which is why he was very eager to take back control of PEMEX — which is the Mexican petroleum company — take back control of it, put some money to invest in it to revive PEMEX. The moment he made those comments after he won the election, he was told directly by banks, by the IMF, and by international oil companies that don’t you dare do that. Don’t you dare try to use public financing to revive PEMEX. The only thing we’re going to allow you to do is to basically sell more parts of PEMEX off to international privately-held, you know, energy companies.
So what’s happening to Venezuela is just a much more vulgar and dangerous, kind of, portfolio of events than what is happening to Mexico where things are not yet at a boiling point. But basically, López Obrador has been told there is no exit for Mexico. No way for you to raise finances to basically enrich the population and therefore you’re going to see people continue to move towards the border. You’re going to see people continue to move, put pressure on the United States to build these walls, and to create essentially a military force that stands there the border and shoots at people.
JS: Now, let’s jump to the other side of the globe for a moment. One of the major areas of focus of the Trump administration that, I think, has the potential to be the most dangerous is the obsession with Iran and the fact that the Trump administration is littered with people including notorious neocons who have always wanted regime change in Iran. You have the situation in Yemen, which the Trump administration has used as, really, a proxy war against Iran and, of course, there’s a lot of issues with facts in this administration and certainly, that’s been the case in Yemen. But you do have Yemen being used as a proxy war. You have this network of allies that’s emerged where you have the Saudis, Israel, The United States, and then some lesser states that really seem to be pushing in that direction. The U.S. has been quietly negotiating with the Iraqi government to have hundreds of Special Operations forces, troops from the United States deployed inside of Iraq with the purpose of potentially striking against Iran. How do you see the fact that Trump is saying that he’s going to take U.S. troops out of Syria, take U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, but now re-deploy some of the most elite hunter-killer teams in the U.S. arsenal in Iraq with the explicit purpose of, number one, confronting Iran and then, secondarily, dealing with ISIS?
VP: Well, Trump made a comment to CBS News where he said that we have American troops in Iraq to monitor Iran. The word he used was monitor. And within hours, the Iraqi Prime Minister made a comment saying, you know, this is inappropriate, that the United States’ presence in Iraq is to combat terrorism. Not to, essentially, rattle the cage with Iran, because we, that is the Iraqi government, have a relationship both with the Iranians and the United States. So, again Trump, no ability to hold back, just says things openly and the contradictions then emerge on the world stage. I think the United States is going to have a very difficult time using Iraq as a lily pad. Using any of the neighboring states apart from those that you mentioned. That is Saudi Arabia, the UAE. These states would be quite happy to help. But remember, Saudi Arabia cannot have American troops located there. So, I don’t know what kind of practical support — the Turks are not going to allow troops to come in. So, it’s going to be very difficult for the United States practically to take on Iran apart from, you know, occasional bombing runs maybe and one or two special forces people going in to do sabotage operations.
You know, when Nicolas Maduro was under immense pressure he made a little video where he warned the American [saying] don’t come and invade us, we’ll make this another Vietnam. I want you to consider, Jeremy, that the population of Iraq is just about 40 percent of the population of Iran. The Iranian population is highly motivated. If the United States decided to do any kind of military action against Iran it would, I think, be a great mistake. I mean Maduro evokes Vietnam. I would also evoke Vietnam at a different scale for the for the Iranian situation. I think that they are trying to intimidate the Iranian government and they’re trying to do something which — this is why the playbook between Iran and Venezuela is the same — they’re trying to produce so much, you know, economic hardship in the country that you’re going to have millions of people get disaffected with the government. You will have immense propaganda saying that it is this government’s fault and not these other external policies and you will try to create some kind of internal uprising which then gets cracked down upon by the government because it naturally doesn’t want to have some internal uprising, you know, just continue and [the] moment that crackdown takes place, the United States is going to say to the Europeans “look they are authoritarian, they’re a dictatorship, they’re crushing their people, let’s go in.” And NATO is going to say yes, and they go in, you know, all guns blazing.
It’s an incredibly similar playbook that they are following in all these countries which is why these countries are all sort of, you know, in a similar way, concerned. I think it’s silly how people talk about the axis of resistance, and so on. I don’t think anything like that exists. These countries have very different approaches to foreign policy. But at the same time, since they’re all under the same kind of playbook, there’s a kind of sympathy in these capitals for what’s happening in each place. And I think this is also why the Russians are very keen to be involved in each of these places to provide a shield. I think the question of a Russian shield over Iran is already there. The issue of a Russian Shield over Venezuela is also there. And I would say, Jeremy, this is exactly the reason why the United States has withdrawn from the missile treaty. This is why the United States is going to try directly to undermine Russian military power in the next few months.
JS: Well, but in fairness, Russia has its own imperial agenda as well. It’s not like Russia is only acting in the human interest of the world. I mean, Russia clearly is facing down NATO encroachment on the part of the United States. The U.S. moving further and further to the east. You have the potential, and it’s been there for some time, to have an all-out hot war between U.S. and Russian forces in Syria. Certainly, that would be the case if the U.S. did escalate even a little bit in Iran. But, let’s be clear here, though. I mean, Russia is not an ideological actor trying to stand up for the Global South. They’re also acting on their own imperial interests that occasionally aligned with the agenda that you’re describing there.
VP: Well, I would say stronger than that. I wouldn’t use the word imperial. I would say Russia is entirely a defensive power. Why do I say that? You know, it’s interesting when you look at military bases, particularly naval bases. The United States has a hundred and some-odd naval bases around the world. In fact, has the ability to encircle the planet. Years ago I was talking to a senior U.N. official — this is in March of 2011 when the Security Council was debating U.N. resolution 1973, that was the resolution that allowed the war in Libya — and I asked the U.N. official I said, you know, it’s so funny you guys, you produce these resolutions which say any member state can act under chapter seven, which means any member state can use armed forces to defend, you know, to help this resolution along and, of course, that means the United States because who else has bases all over the world? You know, the Indians can’t intervene in Libya, and so on. Well, the Russians had only, not a hundred naval bases around the world, but they had two warm water bases and I think it’s important to underline this.
One warm water base was in Sevastopol in the Crimea and the second warm water base is in Latakia in Syria. It’s no secret, therefore, that from 2013-14 the Russians were terrified about losing the Sevastopol naval base and the intervention into Ukraine, particularly into Crimea. I think this is the reason for the intervention to Crimea. They were defending that warm water base. And secondly, in2015, in September when Russian planes entered Damascus and they intervened militarily to prevent an American bombing run on the city. It was to defend their naval base in Latakia. So what I would say is that it’s an entirely defensive power. It’s much weaker than the United States but it’s basically using military force and using, you know, its ability as limited as possible to secure these alliances. It’s not out there to defend the south. I totally agree with that, but it has its own agenda and these agendas contradict those of the United States. At present, what’s interesting about this agenda that the Russians have is that, from let’s say the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 to the attempted overthrow of the Syrian government in 2012-13, I think in that space there was no check on U.S. power. And when the Russian planes entered Syria in 2015, that was the first time in about, you know, almost 25 years that somebody had come in to check U.S. power. And it’s my feeling that this current tussle over missile defense over space, overall these kinds of new tensions around military hardware, the presence of the military, etcetera between the United States and Russia is to, once again, weaken the Russian ability to provide these shields. These shields are not there for humanitarian purposes. But nonetheless, these are shields.
JS: Now, you mentioned India there and I want to remind people that India is a massive country not just in land mass, but in population — upwards of 1.3 billion people like what, you know, we’re talking about like one in every six people in the world is from India. And India has very, very important elections that will be coming up in the spring, scheduled for May. Right now India is under the control of a far-right extremist. The BJP won the majority in India’s Parliament. I want to ask you about the resistance to Narendra Modi in a second and what your analysis is of the upcoming elections there and there [have] been huge protests and you’ve been tweeting about that and showing pictures and videos. But first, explain for people the impact that the far-right BJP government has had on India.
VP: Well, Jeremy, in 2013 when the last parliamentary elections took place, the far-right won 31 percent of the vote. But because of the nature of the Indian parliamentary system, they got a majority in Parliament. But I want to start there because people should understand that they are essentially a minority government in terms of the votes they were able to get. Even though Mr. Modi rules India as if he had won a major majority of the population’s favor. You know, 60 percent plus of the public did not vote for the BJP or its allies. I think that’s very important to remember. Nonetheless, Mr. Modi didn’t govern as if he represented India. He governed from the agenda of his political party. He attempted to push the fascistic agenda of the BJP. In terms of what does it mean to be an Indian? No longer does the BJP want India to be composite plural country. As you say 1.3, 1.4 billion people, you know with — let me say, you know, a hundred, tens of hundreds of different kinds of cultural worlds, over a hundred different kinds of languages, highly diverse population, yet more they wanted to govern it in a very narrow, suffocating, cultural way.
He also attempted certain dramatic economic, you know, let’s call them gimmicks. Demonetization, which meant that suddenly one day you wake up and two of your main currency bills have been withdrawn from circulation. This was supposedly to go after black money. You know that is money hoarded by the rich. Of course, the rich, no longer keep their hoarded money in bank accounts under their beds. They keep it in tax havens, in shelters all around the world. So this was a big gimmick, which backfired, created a lot of distress for people and so on. So Modi attempted to push the country in a rightward direction. But right from the beginning, there was immense resistance against him and, interestingly, even on foreign policy.
When Modi tried to move into, basically, the American camp, he was prevented. He was the first Indian Prime Minister to go to Israel but he was forced by the political class and by the Indian foreign ministry to also have continued relations with the Palestinians — which he wanted to break. Modi was very eager to join in the American project to isolate Iran. That was prevented, not only by the foreign ministry and by the other political parties, but also, of course, by the needs of India which is entirely reliant on import of oil and imports quite a large amount of Iranian oil.
In the case of Venezuela, there was pressure on Mr. Modi to join with some of these European countries and the Lima Group to isolate the government of Maduro, but, the political class just wouldn’t have it. And India had to put out a quite a strong statement saying that “no foreign intervention is permitted and the sovereignty of Venezuela must be respected.” So, I want to just say at the same time as Modi is quite a ruthless, nasty piece of work, he was not able to capture fully the institutions of Indian government and the imagination of the Indian people and it’s quite likely, Jeremy, that he is going to lose this election quite badly.
JS: Well, that’s interesting. I want to ask you more about that. I also want to just draw people’s attention to the fact that just last month in January there were upwards of 200 million workers in India that took part in a two-day strike protesting the government’s labor policies. And then at the same time, over the weekend, you tweeted a photo of a sea of people in red and you wrote the following “My home city of Kolkata bristled today with the energy of the Left Front with our comrades thronging the Brigade Ground. There are many photographs of our comrades as they interact with each other, dance with each other from the bus stands and the train stations to the maidan.” What is the Left Front and how are they challenging the BJP?
VP: Well, you know, it’s let’s begin with the major labor protest. I was driving up and down the length of Kerala during those two days of the strike in January —
JS: I mean, that’s just for people to understand! I mean 200 million workers – I mean that’s like two-thirds of the population of the United States in, you know, in the streets on strike.
VP: That’s quite right and these are workers from not only where you’d expect them, rail workers, people closed down the trains in different parts of the country, but also Anganwadi workers. These are workers who are child care workers, ASHA workers. These are health care workers went out on strike. We saw IT workers. The internet workers in Bangalore in some IT companies go on strike. It was a range of workers to add up to 200 million and these workers were on strike not for wages. I think that’s very important to recognize. But they were angry with the direction of economic policy. They were angry with the kind of political culture in the country. It’s a very broad set of demands and quite a very powerful strike.
But before that, last year there was an immense wave of agrarian struggles. People may not know that in the past 18 years almost 300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide. They’ve committed suicide largely because there is a deep agrarian crisis with no exit that has struck India. You’ve had — because of the commercialization of agriculture — you’ve had input prices rise, prices of fertilizer, prices of pesticide, prices of seeds. And you’ve had the government cut support prices to buy the goods. That means that the input prices [have] risen and the buying price has dropped which has left farmers in immense debt. And what you’ve seen, which is so tragic, is many of these farmers commit suicide by drinking pesticide, the very thing that has bankrupted them. Well over the course of these 15 odd years, the Kisan Sabha which is the Farmers’ movement in India has been struggling very hard to build the political confidence of farmers. And you saw in Bombay last year, you know, hundreds of thousands of farmers, march for over two weeks into the city of Bombay and force the right-wing state government to accede to the demands. So, what I’m saying is that we move from suicide to the politicization of the agrarian crisis. This had an enormous impact in three state elections last year in the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh.
And it’s because of this farmer’s protest which has been, you know, organized by the left, by the communists, by the socialists, and other constituents of the Left Front. Because of these farmer’s protest you’ve seen a shift in the political needle away from the BJP in these key states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh. And in the very large, the largest state in India, the state of Uttar Pradesh, where there are 80 members of parliament — you know, the parliament in India has about 500 members, 80 of them come from Uttar Pradesh. In the 2013 election, Modi’s party won 70 of those seats but this year the two, I mean, so-called socialist parties, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, have united. They are going to fight the elections together. And it’s actually a marriage that is made in heaven, as they say, because in 31 seats in the 2013 election, in 31 of those seats the Samajwadi party, the socialist party came second, and in 34 seats the Bahujan Samaj Party, which is the party of oppressed castes, came second. So, that means they don’t actually compete with each other in 65 of the seats where the BJP won.
So, what we are anticipating is that this alliance is going to win about 50 to 60 seats out of 80 Uttar Pradesh. Because the BJP cannot win seats in South India because it’s going to have a hard time in those agrarian states of Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh and because it’s going to lose in this very large state of Uttar Pradesh to this new alliance of socialists and oppressed caste parties. Because of that, there is no way BJP is going to get a plurality in the Parliament and I think, in fact, it will it will not be able to form a government in April and May of this coming, this year.
JS: What are the chances that a new Indian government would be legitimately leftist or anti-imperialist?
VP: No, no, no. I mean, Jeremy, that’s not the –
JS: I’m asking you, brother!
VP:[Laughter] You see the issue is — this is the situation that we are going to face for a generation. Which is that again in these three state elections, it was really immense work done by the left among, you know rural communities, farmers, landless workers, and so on to build a political momentum that defeated the BJP governments. But of course, the left doesn’t have the kind of political structure needed to win elections. You know, whether this is in Brazil or it’s in India, we have to recognize that democracy has been completely shattered as an institutional form. It requires so much money to run in elections. There are so many crooked things that have happened to the democratic process. You know, in Brazil Jair Bolsonaro’s friends were sending WhatsApp messages, to WhatsApp groups that number, you know, hundreds and thousands of people. These WhatsApp messages, that were very cruel, they were suggesting that the Workers’ Party in Brazil, you know, was going to force their children into sex education and so on, you know, as if that’s a problem. I mean children deserve sex education but they were doing it in an extremely nasty way and delegitimizing the Workers’ Party in Brazil. We see the same thing in India. In other words, you know, lots of money being put by corporations into BJP deniable groups that are creating these WhatsApp networks and you know, inking essentially the political process by, you know, saying things about other candidates that are not true where it’s very difficult for the candidate who doesn’t have money to come out there and say look that’s just not true and let me show you how. So, you know to capitalize on the kind of mass mobilizations, on the struggles and so on into this democratic sphere is becoming increasingly difficult which is why I think that you know, we need to very seriously consider reconsider what democratic institutions are and what has become, what has happened to them.
JS: Last month was the anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the independence leader in Congo who was the first prime minister of the independent Democratic Republic of Congo. He was assassinated and the United States, we know for a fact, had previously plotted to assassinate him. Just recently there were elections in Congo and you had the election of Felix Tshisekedi. He is now Congo’s fifth president taking over from Joseph Kabila. You recently, with Kambale Musavuli wrote a piece about the legacy of the crisis in Congo and how Patrice Lumumba-inspired-youth are trying to break the culture of plunder and corruption that has been foisted upon the political system in Congo. Explain today’s crisis, how it began in Congo, the significance of this new election, and the fact that the so-called opposition in Congo right now is headed by a former ExxonMobil executive.
VP: You know, it’s a great tragedy and I’d like to just back up for a minute. It’s not just a situation of the Congo. You have to look at this belt that runs through the center of Africa including Zambia, you know, including any country in the center of Africa and the many of them that are rich in rare earth minerals, in various raw materials from cobalt, which is an essential ingredient in electric batteries, to coltan which is essential for you know, the smartphones, the iPhone and so on. So, these countries —
JS: Oh many, many people are probably listening to you right now, Vijay, on devices that contain some natural resources from Congo or this belt that you’re describing.
VP: Well, they will definitely have devices that have cobalt and coltan which mainly come from this belt of countries. And it’s very important to say that however much there is, kind of, this dismay about the Chinese intervention in Africa, that actually most of the companies that are able to work to mine these goods are actually not Chinese. Many of them are Canadian. We, in fact, are doing a study about these Canadian firms like Barrick and so on which dominate the mining in these parts of the world. And what you’ve seen is that these mining companies essentially misprice what they’re doing. They pay these countries revenues based on a very deflated price for the goods. These goods as soon as they cross the border from the Congo, say they go to Mwanza port in Tanzania. As soon as they cross the border into Tanzania or into Uganda, the prices of these goods rise by miracle because within the Congo they keep the price low. So they say to the government we’ll give you 20 percent per ton of coltan’s price but the price is, you know, only so many hundred dollars. As soon as it crosses the border the price increases. This is what we call mispricing.
So places like the Congo have essentially been plundered and stolen from for over a hundred years. They haven’t been able to build up any kind of public finances. They haven’t been able to build up proper institutions to take care of the people of the Congo or of Zambia, wherever. And what you see in the Congo is, I mean you cannot imagine what corruption looks like. It’s the corruption of these big Canadian and other mining companies, resource companies, Australian companies and so on. Then it’s the corruption of the political class. At this moment, the kind of tentacles of Joseph Kabila who governed, you know, almost entirely since democracy came to Congo.
I mean democracy, again that word, you know, what does it mean for places like the Congo where you know, you strong arm people you have elections which means so little and, bizarrely, elections which means so little but in the case of a place like the Congo because it’s pliant, because it allows its raw materials and rare earth materials to leave the country at low cost, every time there is an election the State Department and, you know, all the Europeans, everybody says, well, you know, they’re moving towards democracy. I mean, if you are a pliant government, then your stolen election is validated. If you are not a pliant government, this is coming back to Venezuela, then you’re going to be told your election was fraudulent. So, they have had fraudulent election after elections and it got to such a point that Joseph Kabila simply refused to have an election. You know, his term ended in 2016. He just refused to allow an election to take place and nobody said peep. There was no statement about moving American troops into Tanzania. I mean nothing. Why? Because essentially all the minerals are being looted from that country so that we can have iPhones which cost — Okay, the huge price of $999 dollars, but if you actually priced the minerals inside the iPhone, the price may go up to $30,000 per iPhone. Some people have estimated $100,000 per iPhone. Imagine that. Walking into the Apple store and saying I’ll take three of those. I mean, who can afford that?
So, as long as you have a pliant government, and Kabila was pliant, they allowed him to keep going even though his mandate ended in 2016. You had these massive protest — yes, Lumumba inspired youth but also, you know, some of them are devout Christian groups and so on — out on the street demanding change. The pressure was too high. They allowed an election. They thought that Kabila’s, you know, his successor would come in. And here’s the whole trick of it, you know, again what is a democracy? Who can afford to build a political party? Necessarily you get people from the elite who build the opposition. And here? Yes, of course, it’s an ExxonMobil, you know, executive who becomes the face of the opposition. I mean, there is no real opposition in a country like Congo until it’s built from the grassroots. From these young people and so on.
And that is why, Jeremy, I’m sorry to say that, for at least a generation, places like the Congo will not be able to have, you know, robust political movements. Movements that will have any kind of impact in the electoral domain. In Zambia, a socialist party is being built up particularly in the copper belt. They are going to run for presidential elections. The candidate is going to be Fredman Membe. Fred used to run a newspaper in Zambia. He has been arrested several times by this government. His newspaper has been confiscated. The press was confiscated. The men’s pressure against the Socialist Party of Zambia and I can bet you that 99 percent of the people listening to this have never heard of the Socialist Party of Zambia or of Fred, you know, because of course, these are people who will not be pliant when it comes to mining companies, if they ever come to power.
JS: Well, and I also want to remind people, just briefly, of the history that you’re talking about here of the Congo, which was under the brutal reign of Belgian colonialism. And then you had the CIA-backed government of Mobutu Sese Seko and he himself was an actual CIA asset who ran that country with extreme brutality and kept it open for U.S. president after U.S. president.
You also had Dwight Eisenhower authorizing the CIA to develop a chemical poison that was made to look like toothpaste that they wanted to try to assassinate Patrice Lumumba with. We’ve seen so many of these independence movements or nationalist movements in Africa and Asia, around the Global South just be completely obliterated or severely damaged in the ensuing decades of imperialist encroachment around the world.
VP: Well, it is a very great tragedy. I mean, again, the playbook is similar. You look for the most charismatic person, assassinate that person, and then squeeze the rest of the political forces into exceeding to your demands. I mean, you take the case of any of these countries when they attempted to do something, put forward an alternative project. Suddenly, there’s an assassination: whether it’s Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, or it’s AmílcarCabral, or it’s the coup against Kwame Nkrumah. I mean, none of them was allowed to have a tenure where they were able to develop independent economies. And, of course for my generation, the assassination of Thomas Sankara in May of 1987, the very charismatic and important political leader in Burkina Faso which used to be known as Upper Volta but then when Sankara came to power he changed the name of his country. [He] said, “why should we be called Upper Volta? Why should we be defined by colonialism? We are Burkina Faso, the land of upright people.” And he pushed an agenda to revive the agriculture of Burkina Faso. He pushed an agenda for the sovereignty of the country. It’s such an interesting agenda that he pushed that he set for instance, by government fiat, by law, on Wednesday, men must do childcare. He said I would like to have half the week be for men to do childcare and domestic — take care of the house, clean things, cook food, but I’m going to start only with Wednesday. I mean, this was a man who understood that political power is not about the parliament. It’s not even about the boardroom of companies — it’s the kitchen, the house.
You know, it’s the old saying Jeremy that it’s not enough to be Che Guevara on the street and Pinochet in the kitchen. You have to be [a] liberated person from you know, your house out onto the streets and Sankara pushed a great agenda for his country, Burkina Faso, and he was assassinated. You know, just seven years later the hope of South Africa, Chris Hani, you know, the leader of [the South African Communist Party], the leader of the urban poor in South Africa. Just as South Africa was coming out of Apartheid, before the elections, Chris Hani was shot to death. I mean, every time you look at an African country when a young leader is produced that comes up with an agenda that is not blind to mining companies, not pliant to the Western capitals, that person is killed almost immediately and I think people need to really reflect on that, reflect on the assassinations of Houari Boumédièneat the north of the country in Algeria all the way down to Chris Hani at the South.
JS: You know, as we wrap up Vijay, I wanted to get your big picture take on the ascent of Donald Trump to the chamber of ultimate power in the United States at the White House. Taking into account this history that you and I are discussing of populist movements, leftist movements, socialist movements, and the kind of expansion of the imperialism of the United States. Set Donald Trump’s rise to power in the context of all of this history that you and I have been discussing.
VP: Well, you know it brings us back to this tax strike that began about 40 years ago. About 40 years ago when basically government policy allowed the big elites to no longer pay taxes, corporate tax rates began to fall. You saw government budgets desiccate. You saw municipal budgets basically devolve to nothing. At this point, the kind of liberal consensus, the liberal agenda, was to move in a direction [of] what we call neoliberalism. They produced a policy framework called neoliberalism which basically accepted the fact that the rich were not going to pay taxes. And they tried to raise public financing, whether it’s the budgets of governments or municipalities, they wanted to raise funds by selling off hard-won public assets, whether it’s concessions to water delivery, or it’s, in fact, education institutions, and so on. They privatized, they opened up parts of human existence that had not been for money and commodified them.
So again, water is a great example. You had water utilities which basically ran things as a not-for-profit entity. You start privatizing water, making water into a commodity. This was the way in which the liberals tried to finance this crisis of government budgets because the rich were not paying taxes. And they were not going to challenge the rich. In fact, they said that’s good. It creates entrepreneurialism. You see jobs trickle down. Essentially, this is the agenda of Tony Blair, of Bill Clinton, and you know, around the world they have their cognates. But by the financial crisis of 2007, the liberals with the neoliberal policies were essentially totally delegitimized.
I mean, nobody took seriously, after the financial crisis, the idea that you should just go out there and become an entrepreneur as if it’s so easy. I mean, as if it’s so easy to go out there and just start a business. Have an idea and somebody will finance it. Who? Who is going to finance it? Which bank is going to give me money for my idea when banks are basically hoarding wealth on behalf of the wealthy, not lending for business purposes at the rates at which they should, and so on? So, when these neoliberals are delegitimized, from the right appears characters, people like Donald Trump. But again, this is not a specific American story. This is a global story. The delegitimization of the liberals, whether it’s the Congress party in India, or it’s to some extent, the Workers Party in Brazil, the Democratic party in the United States, these far-right people show up and they make strong claims saying that “we’re going to come, we’re going to grab the economy by the throat, we’re going to make it cough out jobs.” And then they make [an] even more dramatic statement saying that “the reason you don’t have a job has nothing to do with the fact that you’re not an entrepreneur or that you’re not a get-up-and-go person. The reason you don’t have a job is because the migrants, because these migrants come in and take your jobs.” I mean, it’s a classic bait and switch.
On the one hand, they quite correctly attack the neoliberals saying that “you’ve basically hollowed out the economy.” They attack them saying that “you’re not able to provide well-being for the population.” Well, that’s true. But then the bait and switch is they turn around and they say “the reason why this is happening is because of the migrants.” They, in other words, the Trumps of the world, just like the Clintons of the world, don’t point their fingers at those 2,000 billionaires and so on who are just not paying taxes. Who are sucking up social wealth and not providing any return to public finances to improve health to improve education. And, by the way, to create public institutions that prevent people from desperation like universal health care. If you had publicly funded universal health care, individual families wouldn’t have to scramble to pay premiums and struggle to get health insurance and so on. This is what public financing should have been. But because the left is weak now, the liberals have been delegitimized. The field is open to the right and not only to the right but [to] these very vicious strongmen. So, my sense is that for some time now, we’re going to have to tolerate this right-wing political presence until we build up the forces of the left to produce a robust critique of the way in which the wealthy have not been contributing at all.
I mean, I don’t really want philanthropy. I want them to pay taxes.
JS: Well on that note, we’re going to leave it there. Vijay Prashad, thank you so much for joining us.
VP: Thanks a lot.
The post Pox Americana: Vijay Prashad on Venezuela, India, Mexico, Congo, and U.S. Hegemony appeared first on The Intercept.
Migrants die and disappear in staggeringly high numbers along the U.S.-Mexico border, as Washington over the years has shut down relatively safe, traditional urban entry points, forcing border crossers into hostile desert terrain. Migrants also sustain severe life-threatening or crippling injuries. They fall into mine shafts and break their backs. Dehydration damages their kidneys. Others are bitten by snakes or injured in chases. The tall metal fences that run as barriers along segments of the border also serve as weapons. Migrants sever limbs climbing the barriers and break bones falling off them.
“Border-related trauma is so common,” anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte writes, “that it has become normalized.”
First responders who work the borderlands around Nogales, Arizona, told Jusionyte that they believe the sheet-metal border fence that used to separate Nogales from its Mexican sister-city was intentionally designed to sever body parts. Border crossers, one Nogales firefighter said, regularly used to get their fingers cut off. That fence was replaced in 2011, but the new high bollard-style fence, 20 or 30 feet high in places, frequently causes broken bones when migrants fall from it.
In recent months, Border Patrol agents and federal troops have festooned long stretches of the border fence with razor wire, including in Nogales. “That wire is lethal, and I really don’t know what they’re thinking by putting it all the way down to the ground,” Nogales’s mayor complained. Now, six coils of concertina wire cover the fence like vines, facing a residential neighborhood, onto a street that serves as a route for school buses. Every weekday, the city’s children look out and can imagine that they are living inside a concentration camp. More than two years into the administration of Donald Trump, such gratuitous displays of cruelty are common, working to wear down on the nation’s moral sensibility.
Photo: Laura Saunders for The Intercept
But the use of border barriers to inflict pain, in the hope that news of injuries and deaths will serve as a deterrent to other would-be migrants, long predates the Trump presidency. The idea reaches back at least to the 1970s, to the presidency of Jimmy Carter, when the U.S. began to turn its attention away from Vietnam toward its southern border. A weaponized fence is a feature, not a bug, of federal policy.
Carter’s FenceIn 1978, Carter’s Immigration and Naturalization Service requested, and Congress approved, $4.3 million to build a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border. The plan was to quietly replace some 27 miles of existing slack, rusted chain-link around the ports of entry in San Ysidro, California, and El Paso, Texas, and then add a new fence along an additional 6 miles of border.
After consulting with the U.S. Army, the INS hired Potomac Research, a Virginia firm, to design the new barrier and then signed a $2 million federal contract with Houston-based Anchor Post Products to build the fence. The Carter administration had inherited the project from Richard Nixon, who was the first president to propose building some kind of barrier along the entire 2,000-mile border.
The project moved forward largely ignored by the press until October 1978. That month, a big-mouthed manager from Anchor Post named George Norris told a reporter that the “razor-sharp wall” was designed to be bloody, built with “punched-out metal that would leave edges sharp enough to cut off the toes of barefoot climbers.” Norris said that his company had double-checked with the engineers at Potomac Research whether they “wanted the metal deburred (filed) when we first got the job.” The engineers, according to Norris, said no. Leave it sharp, they instructed, as “part of the deterrent.” The cut metal was meant to sever body parts, Norris said; a climber would “leave his toe permanently embedded in it.”
The remarks were picked up by Mexican dailies. As outrage spread, representatives from the INS and Potomac Research issued denials. “Nobody in the INS ever told anyone to design a fence that would hurt people,” said one of Potomac Research’s engineers. “We were told explicitly that there could be no barbed wire. No barbed tape, no electrification.” But, Carter’s head of the INS, Leonardo Castillo, admitted, the proposed “steel latticework” did appear “sharper than it was intended to be.”
Photo: Stephanie Maze/Corbis via Getty Images
Carter, who would soon visit Mexico City, was caught off guard, telling a reporter that he didn’t know anything about the fence and that “any sort of fencing device that would injure people is certainly contrary to my own inclinations.” The “Tortilla Curtain,” as the scandal was soon dubbed, was condemned by Mexican politicians as an assault on national “dignity.” Mexico’s president, José López Portillo, claimed that he first learned of the fence from press reports, calling the matter “serious, very serious” and criticizing efforts to “form walls of separation in the world.”
“No more walls,” López Portillo said.
López Portillo was right to fear a new era of geopolitical barrier-building. A quick survey of State Department cables from the time reveal walls and fences going up in many places — along borders in South Africa, India, Israel, and Northern Ireland — with much diplomatic energy spent on figuring out how to justify them according to the principles of international law.
The Border LobbyThere existed, in the mid-1970s, a number of domestic constituencies in the United States pushing for more stringent border control, of the kind that a razor-sharp border fence might provide.
One was the INS itself, which around 1973 had become more vocal in lobbying Congress and the public to expand its power. The service was notoriously corrupt, involved in many of the illicit moneymaking operations associated with border crossing, including migrant, drug, and sex trafficking. Operation Clean Sweep, established by Nixon’s Justice Department in 1972, investigated hundreds of agents, revealing widespread Border Patrol and INS involvement in selling immigration documents, smuggling migrants, and running drugs. Agents also arranged visits to Mexican brothels for U.S. judges and congressmen, and then used knowledge of such visits as kompromat to secure favorable rulings and votes.
Operation Clean Sweep might have done to Border Patrol and the INS what the Church Committee, later in the 1970s, did to the CIA and FBI: reveal to the public rogue operations engaged in widespread, systemic abuse. It didn’t. The inquiry was sidelined when, as reported by New York Times’s John Crewdson, it turned up damaging information on Rep. Peter Rodino. An INS official — described by an informant as the service’s “chief pimp” whose job was to get U.S. officials “laid” in Mexico — had reportedly arranged for Rodino to visit a Juárez brothel. A New Jersey Democrat, Rodino was, as Crewdson wrote, too powerful a figure to bring down. He not only chaired the House Judiciary Committee, which oversaw the INS, but was in charge of the impeachment vote against Nixon.
Nixon resigned in April 1974, and Clean Sweep was shut down for good. Hundreds of agents had been investigated for “every federal crime,” as its lead investigator, Alan Murray, put it, “except bank robbery.” Few were indicted.
Rather than facing constraints on their activities — as the CIA and FBI soon would — Border Patrol and the INS’s power only increased. Their budgets and staff grew and new laws were passed giving them even more enforcement authority, and giving corrupt agents what in effect was a federally funded monopoly advantage as they competed with Mexican criminals over the routes used to traffic migrants and drugs.
A second constituency for border militarization came from Vietnam-era research-and-development firms. Founded in 1966, Potomac Research, the designer of the controversial fence, was one of many companies looking to keep signing federal contracts in the wake of the Vietnam drawdown. “War technology is Americanized,” wrote David Rorvik in Playboy in 1974, of the move to use Vietnam weapons and surveillance equipment for domestic policing. Sylvania Electronics successfully pushed for its ground sensors — developed as part of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s multibillion dollar project to build a physical and electronic fence separating North from South Vietnam — to be used on the border. “Vietnam’s $3250 million automated battlefield is coming home to America, the land where it was conceived,” wrote New Scientist in 1972; “Smugglers on the US/Mexican border are treading softly these days, now that the US Board Patrol (an arm of the Justice Department) has adopted the same anti-infiltration barrier used by the military to detect troop and truck movements on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
A third group that wanted less Mexican migration was organized labor, including both the AFL-CIO and the United Farm Workers, since it applied downward pressure on wages. For its part, the UFW — largely unprotected by New Deal labor laws guaranteeing the right to form unions — feared the use of undocumented workers as strikebreakers. For about three months in 1975, writes Frank Bardacke, in “Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers,” an extralegal “UFW Border Patrol” — comprised of between 35 and 300 people paid $10 a day — “hunted illegals” near Yuma, Arizona, with federal Border Patrol agents and local police officers happy to turn migrant interdiction into an intra-racial conflict.
And elected politicians, both law-and-order Republicans and reform Democrats allied with organized labor, supported increased border control. In 1978, the “unreconstructed” New York City liberal, James Scheuer (who, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez today, represented the Bronx and Queens) called for a “firm, hard sealing” of the border (it was around this time that the verb “to seal” — a phrase usually applied to more militarized, war-ravaged border zones, like the one that separated Israel from Gaza or West from East Berlin — began to be applied to the U.S.-Mexico border). Earlier, in 1964, Democrats pushed for the end of the guest-worker Bracero Program and, in 1965, for an unrealistically low quota on the number of visas available to Mexico. And in 1974, none other than Rodino, working with Sen. Edward Kennedy, sponsored legislation that would have made it illegal to hire undocumented migrants. The bill passed in the House, 336-30, but lost in the Senate.
By 1978, no one wanted the controversy sparked by Norris’s confession that the fence was meant to maim. But the idea of a fence itself was uncontroversial. “The new fences would be no more of a symbol of exclusion,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “than are the present barriers.”
Members of Mexico’s Socialist Workers Party carry placards with anti-Carter slogans in Mexico City on Feb. 7, 1979, ahead of Carter’s visit to the country.
Photo: Valente Cotera/AP
The weaponized fence was one complaint that López Portillo, the Mexican president, presented to Carter, when Carter landed in Mexico City on February 14, 1979. Another had to do with oil.
Two momentous events preceded Carter’s visit. First came the confirmation, in early 1977, that Mexico possessed much more petroleum, in vast onshore and offshore fields, than had heretofore been realized. Then, on January 16, 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled Iran, marking the triumph of that country’s Islamic Revolution.
Washington already had been pushing Mexico, before the Shah’s downfall, to make up for the falling supply of Persian Gulf oil. An alliance with the Shah was key to Washington’s post-Vietnam pivot: Iran’s ample supply of crude mitigated the worst effects of the ongoing energy crisis, with the country’s petrodollars either deposited in New York banks or spent lavishly on U.S. weapons. In response to the crisis in Iran, which led to a drop in the nation’s oil exports, the Carter administration began pressuring Mexico in late 1978 to sell its fuel to the U.S. at below global market price. Mexico refused.
Then — just a few days before the story of the border fence’s “razor-sharp” design broke in the press — the White House voided a deal to buy Mexican natural gas. The move was meant to force Mexico to reconsider the asking price for its oil. With a pipeline to the U.S. half-finished, where else was the country going to sell its gas? Mexico was left “hanging like a paintbrush,” López Portillo said.
Mexico wasn’t a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. And its oligarchy and security forces were brutal to their own people. But its political elite were heirs to the economic nationalism of the Mexican Revolution. López Portillo was something like the Hugo Chávez of his decade, though more mannered: Petroleum, he said, was the “patrimony” of all of humanity, and its profits should be used to finance the development of “a more just international order.”
Access to cheap fuel and cheap labor are the two elements absolutely essential to the functioning of global capitalism, though they aren’t often linked together in discussions of foreign policy. López Portillo though, in response to Washington’s demand that Mexico serve as its private oil spigot, repeatedly — in discussions with China and Japan, even in sidebar talks with California’s governor, Jerry Brown — emphasized the connection between energy and migration. Mexico’s untapped oil reserves, he said, would help the country “enter the coming century as a country that offers full employment to its people. We either do that, or we risk a full financial failure and suffer the humiliation of becoming a country of wetbacks.”
Other Mexican policy and opinion-makers made similar connections between petroleum production and migration. One columnist warned of “big trouble along the border” were Mexico to capitulate to Washington and sell its fuel at below global market value. Economic inequality between the two countries would only grow worse, he said, predicting that by the year 2000, “Mexicans will flow into the U.S. at the rate of 5 million a year, instead of the 1 million a year now.” “Mexico will eat its gas,” said a Mexico City banker, “before it will sell it at less than $2.60” — then the going global rate.
And so Carter landed in Mexico City on Valentine’s Day to a cold welcome. The airport reception was cordial but brief, with López Portillo using his lunchtime remarks to lecture his U.S. counterpart. Referring to the borderlands as “scars,” López Portillo complained of Washington’s “sudden deception” and “abuse,” warning that manipulative policies on the part of the United States would only worsen the “silent migration” and deepen resentment and fear on both sides of the border.
Newspapers reported that Carter was “stung” by the criticisms, to which he responded with a joke that didn’t go over well: He said he first started jogging during an earlier visit to Mexico City, when he “discovered I was afflicted with Montezuma’s revenge.”
Terrorizing the BorderlandsCarter’s fence fiasco receded from public attention, after his administration promised a scaled-down, humane design. But the controversy, along with diplomatic tensions over energy policy, signaled a major realignment of politics on both sides of the border.
In the United States, the rising Chicano movement broke with the anti-immigrant position of both the United Farm Workers and the middle-class League of United Latin American Citizens (which earlier had supported Operation Wetback, as Border Patrol’s mass deportation campaign of the 1950s was called). Activists mobilized against the fence, and then against INS raids in East Los Angeles, describing them as a form of domestic terrorism. One INS officials admitted that the “symbolic content” of the green uniform worn by Border Patrol agents “is very high, sort of like showing a swastika in a synagogue.” Soon, both the United Farm Workers and LULAC (followed years later by the AFL) reversed their positions and began advocating on behalf of undocumented migrants.
Photo: Walt Frerck/AFP/Getty Images
The fence scandal likewise marked the growing importance of Mexican migration to domestic electoral politics.
For instance, Sen. Ted Kennedy, in April 1980 shortly after announcing that he would challenge Carter for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, flew to Mexico City to meet with López Portillo. Kennedy had a few years earlier backed legislation meant to crack down on the hiring of undocumented workers. Now, in Mexico City, he criticized Carter’s “unilateral” approach to border security and said that he favored an “amnesty” to legalize the status of undocumented residents in the United States. There was, the Massachusetts senator believed, a “growing consensus” within his country for such a solution. “Electric fences,” he said, are not the answer.
Ronald Reagan, shortly after securing the Republican nomination, also jumped on both the fence controversy and the energy crisis. “You don’t build a 9-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations,” he said on a campaign swing through Texas in September 1980. “You document the undocumented workers and let them come in here with a visa,” he continued, and let them stay “for whatever length of time they want to stay.” Reagan quickly gave up the idea, careful as he was, to thread between the business and nativist wings of the Republican Party. But he also, in response to the United States’s energy dispute with Mexico, put forward the first real proposal for what would evolve into the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The details of Reagan’s “North American Accord” were fuzzy, and the final NAFTA treaty, as negotiated by Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush and signed, in late 1993, into law by Bill Clinton, didn’t include, as Reagan had suggested, the integration of Mexican, U.S., and Canadian fuel markets. The agreement focused mostly on non-energy-related trade and investment. But in the decades following ratification, Washington steadily pushed to break the Mexican government’s monopoly on oil and gas production. That push was eventually successful, with Mexico’s Congress passing legislation in 2014 to open up its energy sector to U.S. corporations, a move which hastened the worldwide decline of energy prices.
The cost of labor, too, remains cheap. Back in 1978, the country’s “Roma”-era business elites, in contrast to the public indignation voiced by Mexico’s politicians, privately told U.S. diplomats that they supported the idea of a border fence, so long as it was put up without fanfare. A hardened border, they hoped, would keep their labor costs down. And so after López Portillo, Mexican presidents gave up the idea of creating a more just international order and instead promoted the opening of its economy, while at the same time, largely going along with Washington’s hardening of its border policy.
NAFTA freed investment and commodities, allowing them to cross borders at will. But the treaty didn’t grant the same freedom to workers. In fact, the opposite occurred. Continued militarization of the border — including the expansion of sharp-edged sheet-metal border fences that did sever body parts — limited the range of movement allowed to Mexican workers, ensuring that Mexico’s comparative advantage for the U.S. economy — low wages — remained intact.
Mexican wages today are among the lowest in the world, significantly lower than, for example, in China.
Meanwhile, after the “Tortilla Curtain” controversy died down, the border fence continued to expand, including, in the 1990s, using the Army Corp of Engineers to build 60 miles of fence out of old surplus steel landing pads that the military had used to land Hercules cargo planes and Huey helicopters in Vietnam. The pads included an “anti-climb guard” that regularly severed the fingers of migrants.
Those pads are now considered obsolete, though many are still in place in California, New Mexico, and Arizona. And U.S. border policy is weaponized beyond anything imaginable to 1970s-era engineers. In the last months of Barack Obama’s presidency, the migrants’ rights organizations, No More Deaths and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos, produced a series of harrowing reports examining how Border Patrol “treats the borderlands as a low-intensity war zone where federal agents commit violence with impunity.”
Border patrollers often violently tackle nonresisting migrants and beat those they catch, gratuitously destroying sources of drinking water and denying humanitarian aid. “Habitual acts of cruelty by agents are entirely consistent with the logic and objectives of deterrence,” one of the reports states, “which are premised on amplifying the risks and harms inflicted on border crossers in order to deter future crossing attempts.” Agents regularly use helicopters and terrain vehicles to scatter border crossers, chasing them over cliffs, into fast-flowing rivers, or deeper into the desert. Many, as a result, die from exhaustion of dehydration or simply disappear: The borderlands have “been transformed into a vast graveyard of the missing.”
The post How the U.S. Weaponized the Border Wall appeared first on The Intercept.
“Hoje é o dia mais feliz da minha vida”, contou Nilson Papinho, 72 anos, em um vídeo que viralizou e fez dele o grande youtuber do momento. Nilson finalmente havia conseguido fazer a sua slime — uma massa que estica e puxa adorada pela criançada. Papinho mora no interior de São Paulo com esposa e filho, leva uma vida simples. Há 11 meses, ele grava vídeos para o seu canal, onde costuma mostrar o seu café da manhã, as árvores do seu quintal, as plantas do seu jardim, os passarinhos que o visitam. São altas doses de fofura por vídeo. Não tinha como o vovô youtuber não cair nas graças do país.
Mas o Brasil de hoje não perdoa ninguém. A imagem de seu Nilson foi amassada pelo rolo compressor das milícias virtuais organizadas que servem a propósitos políticos.
Até o dia 1º de fevereiro, Nilson tinha menos de 2 mil inscritos no seu canal. Dois dias depois, com a viralização do vídeo da slime, pulou para mais de 700 mil. Foi nesse mesmo dia que o grupo Corrupção Brasileira de Memes, ligado ao MBL, começou a usar a imagem de Papinho para criar piadas. Eles acharam engraçado colocar o senhorzinho como um criminoso que ensina a falsificar documentos para burlar o INSS ou que publica vídeos pornográficos no YouTube.
Um perfil chamado @nilsonpapinhoyt, criado no último dia 31 de janeiro — três dias antes de Nilson ficar conhecido na internet — começou a se passar por Nilson Papinho.
É uma pausa rápida, mais logo logo estarei trazendo vídeos a vocês de slime, de brincadeiras e tudo mais, não irei parar de fazer videos jamais, estou aqui e no YouTube por vocês, vocês são uma família pra mim, por enquanto vou me comunicar com vocês por aqui, obrigado ??
— Nilson Izaias papinho (@nilsonpapinhoyt) 6 de fevereiro de 2019
O perfil enganou todo mundo. Celebridades como a Maysa do SBT passaram a seguir a conta, passando ainda mais credibilidade. Em apenas um dia, o perfil já contava com quase 30 mil seguidores. Começaram a surgir rumores de que Nilson já teria sido preso por pedofilia no passado. Vários perfis, curiosamente todos com fotos de mulher, surgiram dizendo que conheciam Nilson pessoalmente e contando detalhes da sua vida. A @Bi4_cr disse que sua mãe é amiga da mulher de Nilson e que ela contou que não deixa as netas perto dele.
A alegria do “vovô do slime” se transformou em caos por uma mentira plantada pela patrulha feminista.
Um senhor humilde perdeu o sorriso e a tranquilidade apenas por ter exercido o direito a voto.
A esquerda mostra quão monstruosa e rasteira é. Canalhas! pic.twitter.com/9E7sj9OEmW
— Rubinho Nunes (@RubinhoNunesMBL) 8 de fevereiro de 2019
Manchetes como “Militante anti-Bolsonaro ataca ‘Vovô do Slime’ com fake news sobre pedofilia” se espalharam pela rede. A esquerda e as feministas foram parar nos bancos dos réus pelo crime hediondo.
O cientista de dados Rodolfo Viana começou a achar tudo muito estranho e resolveu puxar o fio dessa história. Ele publicou uma série de tweets que nos levam a crer que há mesmo uma motivação política em torno dessa campanha difamatória contra Nilson Papinho, mas de um jeito bem diferente da contada pela militância virtual bolsonarista.
Rodolfo mostra que, além da falsa Yasmin, outros perfis anônimos apareceram para desmascarar “as mentiras dos esquerdistas”. Um deles é o @LibertarioBRA, cujo nome é “Libertário Opressor” e que chegou ao Twitter com o único intuito de desmascarar as mentiras sobre Papinho. Todos os tweets publicados por ele são sobre o caso.
Agora voltemos ao perfil @nilsonpapinhoyt, o perfil fake do senhor Nilson citado no começo do texto. Ele passou a compartilhar os tweets do Libertário Opressor, dando legitimidade às denúncias e lhe rendendo seguidores, já que todos acreditavam ser o próprio Nilson quem estava tuitando.
Coincidentemente, a conta falsa do vovô foi criada no último dia 31 de janeiro, apenas dois dias depois da criação do Libertário Opressor. Talvez também por coincidência, ela segue os apoiadores mais relevantes do governo Bolsonaro nas redes sociais como Olavo de Carvalho, MBL, Allan dos Santos, Isentões, Ódio do Bem e Caneta Desesquerdizadora.
A descrição do perfil fake de Nilson garantia que aquele era o twitter oficial e que ele próprio era o autor dos tweets. Mas a casa caiu quando Pyong Lee, um famoso youtuber que faz mágicas e hipnoses, foi até a casa de Papinho e confirmou que ele não tem perfil no Twitter nem em nenhuma outra rede social além do YouTube. Imediatamente, o perfil fake alterou a sua descrição no Twitter para: “Nilson não tem nenhuma rede social! Este perfil é administrado pela família dele, mas ele pega o celular e responde vocês, então é como se fosse dele.”
Hoje a conta @nilsonpapinhoyt está com quase 100 mil seguidores e continua enganando muita gente. As milícias virtuais bolsonaristas costumam se utilizar de uma tática manjada para angariar seguidores e simular relevância no Twitter: primeiro surfam em algum hype, ganham muitos seguidores e, de repente, mudam de nome e começam a falar de política para milhares de pessoas. Tudo indicava que era isso o que ia acontecer: o perfil fake de Nilson mudaria de nome e se tornaria mais um miliciano virtual do Twitter com mais de 100 mil seguidores. Mas como a farsa foi descoberta, o criador do perfil achou prudente entrar em contato com a família para tentar oficializar a conta. Depois de enganar milhares de pessoas fingindo ser Nilson e ajudar a alimentar a teoria de que a esquerda e as feministas tramaram contra ele, o farsante se aproximou da família de Nilson como um fã que só queria divulgar o trabalho do vovô da slime. A conta foi repassada para o filho de Papinho e hoje é ele quem a administra. Agora ninguém mais poderá dizer que a conta é falsa, apesar de sempre ter sido.
Criaram perfis falsos para fazer acusações falsas. Depois criaram perfis falsos para desmentir. Chegaram até a criar um perfil falso do vovô, que repercutia os desmentidos feitos por um perfil anônimo recém-criado. E, assim, a esquerda e as feministas foram sumariamente condenadas pelo tribunal das redes sociais. Não é possível dizer quem são os criadores dos perfis fakes, mas está claro quem foram os grandes prejudicados pela arapuca armada por eles. O histórico recente das milícias virtuais bolsonaristas na internet não permite que sejamos inocentes. Este é o jeito Steve Bannon de pautar o debate público.
No ano passado, os bolsonaristas implantaram um falso debate às vésperas da campanha presidencial. Durante uma semana, a esquerda foi acusada de ser tolerante com a pedofilia nas redes sociais. Enquanto se fazia um balanço da fracassada intervenção militar no Rio apoiada por Bolsonaro, bolsonaristas pautavam as redes sociais com o tema pedofilia. Como essa e tantas outras, a mesma arapuca foi armada agora para desviar a atenção. Quem vai querer pensar na ligação da família Bolsonaro com o crime organizado carioca enquanto monstros da esquerda estão assassinando a reputação do velhinho mais fofo do Brasil?
The post As milícias virtuais usaram o ‘vovô da slime’ para armar uma arapuca contra a esquerda appeared first on The Intercept.
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