The Far Right Wants to Gut the EU, Not Kill It

BERLIN—Ahead of this month’s European Parliament elections, the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has been advocating leaving the euro zone and even, potentially, the European Union entirely.

A few years ago, the party membership’s decision to include a so-called Dexit in its 2019 platform—dependent, they say, on whether or not the EU accedes to its demands for significant reforms, including dissolving the European Parliament—would hardly have been notable. After all, the AfD was founded in 2013 as an anti-euro movement, and its counterparts across Europe rose to new electoral heights in part by portraying themselves as the bloc’s chief foes.

But among today’s far-right populist parties, that part of the AfD’s platform is more an exception than the rule. Leaders such as Marine Le Pen, of France’s National Rally, and Matteo Salvini, of Italy’s League, keen to consolidate right-wing support domestically and be taken more seriously internationally, have changed their tune when it comes to the EU. Instead of talking about referendums on EU membership or ditching Europe’s common currency, they advocate for a “Europe of nations” and more pragmatic change “from within.” Even the AfD’s top leaders seem to recognize that campaigning on Dexit isn’t as electorally helpful as it once was: The party now also talks about a “Europe of nations,” and co-leader Alexander Gauland has stressed that the AfD sees leaving the EU as a last resort and would prefer to “correct” it than “abolish” it.

The ultimate goal of the AfD and other parties, of course, remains the same: to return more decision-making power from the EU to the national level, particularly on policies related to refugees and migration. Were these parties to get their way, the EU would be gutted of all but its most basic duties—and after decades of greater integration and moves toward an “ever closer union,” the trajectory of Europe would turn back to having countries fend far more for themselves.

“None of them want to come across as crazy right-wing populists anymore—they all want to come across as serious politicians that represent the main right-wing party of their country,” Catherine Fieschi, the executive director of Counterpoint, a London-based think tank, told me. “They’ve all gone from deciding the best thing they could do is agitate and say outrageous stuff, to realizing … their best bet is actually to use [the EU] to make sure that they graduate to the next step, of legitimate politician.”

[Read: A new European political bloc wants to dismantle Europe]

Europe has had a difficult decade: Two major crises, one financial and one migration-related, have helped fuel euroskeptic rhetoric and given rise to parties that espouse it. After the 2008 financial crisis, the EU’s decision to bail out debt-ridden countries such as Greece helped bring about anti-euro movements. And when an influx of refugees arrived in Europe in 2015 and 2016, the resulting debate over who—if anyone—should take them in became the primary mobilizing issue for far-right parties.

Running as a euroskeptic in European Parliament elections seems, at first glance, a bit counterintuitive. If a party favors getting rid of EU structures entirely, why is it fielding candidates to serve in one of the bloc’s main institutions? When leaders of these groups have an answer to that question, they’ve suggested that as long as the EU exists, a seat at the table is better than being left standing on the outside. But contradictions aside, euroskeptic, far-right parties have typically performed well in European elections, benefiting from low turnout and a core base of energized supporters ready to air their grievances.

Still, the tide has changed since the last time these parties ran a European-level campaign—public support for the EU remains fairly high in many of their respective countries, and the ongoing Brexit saga makes replicating Britain’s path less palatable. In a Eurobarometer survey last fall, a record 68 percent of EU residents said that being part of the bloc has benefited their respective countries.

When Le Pen ran for president of France in 2017, opponents painted her as the potential destroyer of the EU. Anti-EU rhetoric, and especially her proposal to leave the euro zone, played a pivotal role in her campaign pitch. But after flopping in a televised debate when asked how her plan to ditch the euro would actually work, Le Pen paid the price at the polls, losing to now-President Emmanuel Macron by 32 points. After the election, she vowed to lead a “deep transformation” of her party and acknowledged that her strategy on Europe hadn’t helped. “We have heard the French people,” she said later that year. “In numerous areas it is possible to improve the daily life of the French without quitting Europe or the euro currency.”

[Read: How to discuss the far right without empowering it]

Italy’s Salvini has a similar story. After rising to the leadership of his far-right League in 2013, Salvini intensified the party’s rhetoric on both the euro and immigration. His strategy took the League from a struggling regional movement to a national force, earning 17 percent of the vote in last year’s Italian elections. Since entering into a governing coalition with the antiestablishment Five Star Movement last year, however, he’s taken a more pragmatic tack on Europe and talks today about “common sense” solutions and reforms, even as he blasts the bloc for its handling of migration policy. At his gathering of like-minded far-right parties in April, the tagline Towards a Common Sense Europe! appeared on a banner. “We don’t want to leave anything; we want to change the rules of the EU from the inside,” Salvini told Italian television in December.

In Austria, too, the far-right populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) had long been critical of the EU; some of its leaders even raised the possibility of a referendum for an “Oexit,” using the German name for Austria, Österreich, to build on the Brexit portmanteau. But when the FPÖ entered a governing coalition with Sebastian Kurz and his center-right People’s Party, in late 2017, Kurz took pains to make clear that the FPÖ had committed to a “pro-European” government. Standing alongside Kurz, the FPÖ’s leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, said at the time: “We stand by the European Union; we stand by Europe’s peace project.” (And earlier this year, the FPÖ’s top candidate in the European elections, Harald Vilimsky, said the party never actually wanted to leave the EU.)

The same transformation can be seen elsewhere. Jimmie Åkesson, the head of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats, wrote in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet recently that his party was revising its stance on the EU. In order to truly be effective in today’s European political environment, Akesson wrote, one must “be pragmatic and fully utilize the opportunities that exist.”

How, precisely, these parties intend to actually reform Europe is typically not well explained. Apart from weakening the decision-making power of EU institutions and generally handing key functions back to individual nations, they have offered little in the way of concrete plans. Even among themselves, little agreement seems to exist, beyond the overall belief that Islam is a threat to what the parties perceive as a Christian Europe, and their desire to keep refugees and migrants out.

[Read: How the far right weaponized Europe’s interior ministries to block refugees]

“It’s mainly empty rhetoric; it’s really vague,” says Julian Göpffarth, a researcher at the London School of Economics who focuses primarily on the German far right. “I don’t think they have a real concept of what the EU would look like in the future.”

But these concerns will presumably only come to a head after this month’s vote is over. In the meantime, far-right leaders see a strong performance in the European Parliament elections as a key step toward being taken seriously as legitimate political players—and surely consider their toned-down EU rhetoric a way to realize that goal.

Jordan Bardella, the top candidate for Le Pen’s National Rally, put it this way in January: “There is this last step to reach—that of credibility, and we’re doing it.”

Universal deu altar a empresa de bitcoin acusada de sumir com dinheiro de clientes

No Templo de Salomão, os cultos diários contam sempre com fervorosos testemunhos. Às segundas-feiras, o tema é prosperidade na sede mundial da Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, em São Paulo. Em uma das últimas reuniões do Congresso para o Sucesso de 2017, em 18 de dezembro, vários fiéis subiram ao palco para falar durante mais de duas horas sobre a prosperidade que Deus trouxe para suas vidas. Os testemunhos eram intercalados por citações da Bíblia e pela coleta do dízimo: mais de 50 obreiros com máquinas de cartão passavam recolhendo as doações.

De repente, o bispo Edson, que conduzia o culto, disse: “tá cansado de ler as histórias dos outros na Bíblia? Então, suba no altar e escreva sua própria história com Jesus Cristo!” O telão gigantesco que cobre toda a parede atrás do altar projetou fogo, e as pessoas foram incitadas a subir e sacrificar para Deus tudo que tinham para que ele abrisse seus caminhos no novo ano que se aproximava. Centenas de fiéis fizeram isso. Grandes sacos foram enchidos de envelopes e objetos e depois retirados por portas que ficam atrás do altar.

O bispo repetiu várias vezes: quem doasse poderia sair da igreja confiante porque, do lado de fora, estariam esperando oportunidades financeiras revolucionárias.

Nós saímos. Encostadas nos portões da igreja, pessoas entregavam cartões de uma tal Airbit Club. Achamos, na época, que talvez fosse uma coincidência. Depois, descobrimos que as maiores lideranças da empresa, uma mistura de clube de investimentos e marketing multinível, têm uma relação bem próxima e mal explicada com o império evangélico e colecionam reclamações de falta de contrato com os investidores e dificuldades para recuperar o dinheiro investido. O Ministério Público de São Paulo está investigando a empresa.

O maior ‘clube de investimentos do mundo’

A AirBit Club se apresenta como um clube de investimentos fundado para “educar com as melhores informações possíveis” sobre as criptomoedas bitcoin, ethereum e bitcoin cash. A empresa promete a seus participantes ganhar dinheiro com a valorização das moedas virtuais – a AirBit Club gera lucro com uma comissão na compra e venda. A missão da empresa, segundo o site, é popularizar o uso de criptomoedas.

Para ser um dos investidores do clube, é preciso comprar um pacote de adesão, que se divide em categorias. Os valores começam em US$ 1.000. A empresa diz que uma das formas de ganhar dinheiro com o investimento é com a flutuação dos valores das moedas, usando taxas de valorização e porcentagem de acordo com o plano de adesão. Na prática, porém, os participantes podem recuperar o dinheiro aplicado atraindo novos investidores, ganhando bônus por cada um que se juntar à plataforma por seu intermédio. Ou seja: quanto mais pessoas o investidor trouxer para o clube, mais dinheiro ele pode ganhar. Um mecanismo idêntico ao das pirâmides financeiras.

Os responsáveis por angariar novos investidores são os chamados “líderes”, que costumam ostentar nas redes sociais a prosperidade trazida pelos negócios. Um dos mais entusiasmados investidores da empresa foi o jovem milionário Gabriel Fonseca Reis, que costumava chamar o AirBit Club de “o maior clube de investimento em criptomoedas do mundo”. Em um vídeo gravado em 2017, o Reis explica como os interessados podem se tornar investidores: depositando em contas bancárias ou entregando dinheiro vivo diretamente nas mãos dos líderes.

Nascido em São José dos Campos, no interior de São Paulo, e filho de uma obreira da Igreja Universal, Gabriel Reis começou a carreira na Multiclick Brasil, uma empresa de “marketing multinível” – método de venda produtos sem lojas, a partir de redes de distribuidores individuais, como Herbalife, Mary Kay e Hinode. Em um vídeo de propaganda da equipe, Gabriel, então com 17 anos, mostrou sua BMW recém adquirida. “Se apaixone por esse projeto porque é uma empresa séria, legal, ética, moral. É uma empresa que vem mudando vidas e realizando sonhos”, ele diz. No fim do discurso, o jovem – que não possuía permissão legal para dirigir – entra no veículo, cuja placa é ocultada por um pano branco, e parte por uma movimentada rua sem cinto de segurança.

Em novembro de 2013, a Multiclick Brasil teve suas atividades bloqueadas pelo Ministério Público de Santa Catarina por indícios de atividade econômica irregular. A suspeita é de pirâmide financeira: para receber, os membros deviam trazer novos membros ao sistema. Os promotores estimaram que mais de 300 mil pessoas tinham caído no esquema. Há ainda três processos em andamento contra a empresa no Ministério da Fazenda, outros três movidos pelo Ministério Público Federal, e 76 processos nos tribunais de Justiça de São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro e Minas Gerais.

Em 2015, já fora da empresa, aos 20 anos, Reis foi a estrela de um culto pela prosperidade no Templo de Salomão. No depoimento, gravado em vídeo, ele falou sobre como a igreja mudou a sua vida e como construiu sua fortuna trabalhando com bitcoin. No altar, Reis não detalhou como aplicava seu dinheiro nas criptomoedas ou como o investimento. Mas as suas redes sociais deixam pistas.

Em junho de 2016, Reis se reuniu com empresários no Trump Ocean Club, um hotel cinco estrelas na cidade do Panamá. O jovem postou uma foto no Instagram acompanhado do mexicano Pablo Renato Rodríguez e do brasileiro Gutemberg dos Santos, a quem chamou de “amigos e mentores”, e avisou que voltaria ao Brasil cheio de novidades. As hashtags evidenciam o assunto do encontro: a AirBit Club.

Carismático, o jovem se tornou o rosto da prosperidade na Universal – seja em entrevistas à Folha Universal ou apresentando o programa do Congresso Para o Sucesso – ao mesmo tempo em que se tornava um importante líder da AirBit Club.

Também apresentou o Futshow, evento esportivo da Força Jovem Universal que teve como missão conscientizar os jovens sobre os perigos do uso de drogas. Em campo, os Amigos da Record, em uniforme azul, perderam por 3×1 dos Amigos do Bispo Marcello Brayner, vestidos de branco, que ostentavam no peito o logo da Airbit Club.

Nessa época, a empresa patrocinava a equipe Telmex na prova da Nascar na cidade de Guadalajara, no México, em 2017. Os carros estampavam no capô o logotipo do clube – patrocínio que permanece até hoje. Gabriel Reis assistiu à prova do backstage, acompanhado da dupla de empresários Santos e Rodríguez.

Quando viajava para fora do país, o jovem líder aproveitava para visitar os templos da Igreja Universal. Esteve em pelo menos dois, em Portugal e na Rússia, e se reuniu com os bispos – tudo documentado em seus posts em redes sociais. Em Portugal, sua publicação termina com a hashtag #eusouauniversal.

Entramos em contato com Gabriel Reis para entender sua relação com a AirBit Club e com a igreja. Ele nos atendeu, mas, quando soube o assunto da reportagem, parou de responder. Questionada, a Universal nega qualquer relação com o jovem. Por meio de sua assessoria de imprensa, a igreja diz que Gabriel Reis é um “frequentador” assim como outras “7 milhões de pessoas pelo Brasil”. Também afirma que o patrocínio da Airbit Club ao time de futebol foi um “apoio pontual” e que não pode ser ligada a uma empresa que doa 22 camisetas. Mais tarde, descobrimos que esse patrocínio não foi o único.

Dono oculto

A AirBit Club tem presença intensa em vários países. No Brasil, porém, não encontramos o CNPJ da empresa. Os registros de domínio do site são ocultos. Reportagens já apontaram que a sede da empresa fica no Panamá, mas não conseguimos achar endereço físico e nem telefone de contato. Também não há informações oficiais sobre seus fundadores.

‘Bitlionários': o carinho de Goreti Fonseca, mãe de Gabriel, pelo mentor do filho.

Reprodução/Facebook

Entretanto, Gutemberg dos Santos e Pablo Renato Rodriguez, os mentores de Gabriel, são constantemente apontados como fundadores em reclamações, blogs, vídeos e também por líderes da própria empresa nas redes sociais. Os dois também apresentam vários dos eventos da AirBit Club. Em entrevistas, Pablo se denomina diretor geral do clube, e Gutemberg se diz “master distributor”.

No Panamá, existe uma empresa chamada AirBit Club, mas nenhum dos dois são sócios. Eles comandam, na verdade, uma offshore com outro nome: a VZ Market S.A, que tem Renato Rodríguez como presidente e Gutemberg dos Santos como diretor e tesoureiro. Santos também tem negócios no Brasil: junto com seu irmão, Alysson dos Santos, ele é sócio de uma empresa com o mesmo nome, VZmarket, sediada em uma zona de preservação histórica no centro de Recife. O telefone de contato disponível no registro da empresa não funciona.

Mas os negócios da VZmarket, ao menos na teoria, nada têm a ver com bitcoin – sua atividade registrada é agenciar profissionais para atividades esportivas, culturais e artísticas. Nada relacionado à criptomoedas ou a atividades financeiras.

Tentamos contato com a AirBit Club pela única forma disponível, o formulário no site. Não tivemos resposta. Também tentamos falar com Rodríguez pelo Instagram, mas ele também não respondeu – assim como Alysson dos Santos, contatado por e-mail, WhatsApp e telefone. Gutemberg dos Santos não foi localizado.

Apontados diretamente pelos líderes como fundadores em vários posts, Renato Rodríguez e Gutemberg dos Santos vivem entre hotéis de luxo e palcos imponentes pelo mundo. Colecionam fotos com celebridades – Enzo Fittipaldi e Cafu, patrocinados pela empresa, estão entre elas – e elogios dos líderes. Em um post no Facebook de janeiro de 2017, Goretti Fonseca – mãe do líder prodígio Gabriel – posou no Panamá ao lado de Gutemberg e comentou: “juntos na AirBitClub somos mais abençoados, fortes, lindos e vamos ficar bitlionários!!!”

Os dois empresários viveram nos EUA – Gutemberg dos Santos é dono de uma casa em Las Vegas – e são conhecidos pela justiça americana. Em 2016, Rodriguez e Santos foram denunciados pela Securities and Exchange Comission – o equivalente americano do órgão que regula a bolsa de valores no Brasil, a CVM – por comandar uma pirâmide financeira chamada Vizinova. Eles fizeram um acordo e pagaram US$ 1,4 milhão de dólares de multa. Na Bolívia, a dupla foi denunciada pelo Ministério Público por estelionato. Como a justiça boliviana não os localizou, eles estão foragidos e podem ser presos se pisarem no país. Também há problemas na Colômbia:  a Superintendencia Financiera, uma espécie de CVM da Colômbia, apontou que a atuação da AirBit Club no país é ilegal, assim como a operação de bitcoins. Atentou ainda para a possibilidade de se tratar de um “esquema piramidal”, segundo a API, uma agência de jornalismo investigativo colombiana.

No Brasil e em outros países, a AirBit Club, sem ligação clara com os dois sócios, segue funcionando a pleno vapor.

Clube de 171

No fim de março, Andressa Costa, uma das mais proeminentes líderes da AirBit Club, postou uma foto em seu Instagram dentro da Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus em Monterrey, no México. “Não só frequente uma igreja, seja a própria igreja”, dizia o texto da postagem. Costa estava na cidade para assistir a mais uma prova da Nascar do backstage, regalia dada aos líderes pela patrocinadora AirBit Club. Junto com os outros, ela se encontrou com bispo Renato, que toca a IURD na cidade, com a dupla sertaneja Junio e Cezar e com o ex-jogador Cafu, todos devidamente paramentados com os uniformes e logotipos da empresa.

Assim como outros líderes bem-sucedidos, Andressa Costa propagandeia seu sucesso pessoal para incentivar outras pessoas a aderirem ao clube – e é uma das mais conhecidas lideranças do litoral paulista. Seu marido, chamado Antonio Marcos Rodrigues e conhecido como Niko, é seu parceiro de negócios. O casal já foi tema de reportagem da Universal News, versão em inglês da Folha Universal, e já testemunhou algumas vezes em altares da igreja – uma delas ao lado do Bispo Edir Macedo, em Miami, nos EUA.

Em 2017, Antonio Marcos, marido de Andressa, comemorou uma “conquista” ao lado dela no Instagram.

Ao lado de Gutemberg dos Santos, Andressa também já foi entrevistada em uma reportagem do Balanço Geral no final de 2017. Na ocasião, os dois acompanharam um jantar beneficente promovido pelo Instituto Ressoar, o braço filantrópico da Record. O evento, que contou com a cúpula de celebridades e executivos da empresa, foi patrocinado pela AirBit Club.

Mandamos perguntas para o Instituto Ressoar para entender melhor o patrocínio e o destaque dado aos líderes da AirBit Club no evento mais importante do ano da instituição. Eles não responderam.

Contatada por e-mail, a líder da AirBit Club minimizou sua importância. Ela nos disse que é só uma fiel da igreja.

 

Em um dos eventos da AirBit Club no litoral paulista, Carlos*, investidor que prefere não se identificar por medo de represálias, conheceu Andressa. Levado ao clube por uma amiga, seu ingresso na AirBit Club dependia da entrega do valor do pacote de adesão para um líder. Carlos diz que o pagamento foi feito em dinheiro vivo. Ele começou a perceber que havia algo errado quando reclamou que estava com problemas para receber seu saque. Foi retirado do grupo de WhatsApp do clube e perdeu o contato com as lideranças. Revoltado, ele denunciou o clube ao Ministério Público Federal.

Clientes lesados pela AirBit Club criaram até grupos no WhatsApp para falar sobre os problemas. Nós acompanhamos um deles.

Andressa nega depósitos em sua conta. “São [pessoas] maldosas ou trabalham em empresas que eu não aceitei entrar, resolvem através de denúncias vazias denegrir minha imagem e do negócio”, argumentou. Seu nome é citado em denúncias no Reclame Aqui – no total, são 31 no site envolvendo a empresa. Nenhuma delas foi respondida. A líder nos disse que vai “verificar a identidade” da pessoa que a mencionou no site e “tomar as medidas judiciais cabíveis”.

Os usuários se queixam, principalmente, da falta de registro no Brasil, das dificuldades para saque, da falta de transparência quanto às taxas para reaver o dinheiro investido, da ausência de contratos e da pressão para busca de novas pessoas para integrarem o clube. Também há acusações de que o esquema é uma pirâmide financeira – um crime que pode render até cinco anos de prisão.

As denúncias à Airbit Club chegaram à CVM, responsável por investigar crimes e fraudes financeiras. O Intercept teve acesso ao processo, com exceção de alguns ofícios e e-mails. O órgão chegou à conclusão de que não há “elementos de autoria e materialidade que permitam a apresentação de uma acusação por infração à legislação do mercado de capitais”, uma vez que a AirBit Club trabalha com criptomoedas, não regulamentadas no Brasil.

A CVM, no entanto, recomenda o encaminhamento do processo ao Ministério Público, por acreditar que “existem indícios de que estamos diante de uma fraude, que poderia ser de crime previsto no art. 171 do Código Penal”. Ou seja: estelionato. Além disso, atesta a inexistência de CNPJ da empresa e indica a relação de Gutemberg dos Santos e Pablo Renato Rodríguez com a operação da empresa no país.

A empresa foi investigada pela Polícia Civil, que finalizou um inquérito, e o caso está com Ministério Público de São Paulo desde setembro de 2018. A AirBit Club está sendo investigada por estelionato e crimes contra a economia popular.

Garoto bitcoin

No final do ano passado, Andressa Costa foi uma das escolhidas para apresentar a retrospectiva da AirBit Club em um vídeo institucional gravado no Panamá. Ela também revelou seu novo título: Master Council, espécie de super-representante da empresa ao redor do mundo. Foi apresentada pelos colegas como a “motivadora”. Ela falou sobre os mega eventos, cujos ingressos deveriam ser comprados diretamente com os “líderes”.

Gabriel Reis já está em outra empreitada. Em outubro do ano passado, ele divulgou em suas redes sociais a Yat Solutions, empresa especializada em cursos de investimentos e assessoria financeira. A página inicial da empresa no Facebook diz que se trata de um “Serviço financeiro em Malta” – país que, assim como o Panamá, é um paraíso fiscal. Sua mãe, Goretti, ainda se apresenta como “consultora de bitcoin”.

Cinco anos após o bloqueio da primeira empresa que fez parte, o garoto-propaganda da prosperidade na Universal parte para a terceira. Em sua publicação, amigos o parabenizam: “Garoto Bitcoin, onde vc estiver o sucesso é garantido pois você é bom no que faz!”.

Colaborou nesta reportagem: Eduardo Goulart.

The post Universal deu altar a empresa de bitcoin acusada de sumir com dinheiro de clientes appeared first on The Intercept.

How to Dismantle the Absurd Profitability of Nuclear Weapons

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists currently has its Doomsday Clock set to two minutes to midnight — the closest we’ve been to self-obliteration in nuclear history.

But nuclear weapons are more than just a terrifying threat to every living thing on earth. For decades, they’ve been a terrific way to make money.

A new report from PAX, a Dutch peace organization, both illuminates how profitable it can be for multinational corporations to manufacture Armageddon and provides a roadmap for taking the money out of mass death.

The PAX report identifies a total of $116 billion in current contracts between governments and the private sector to design, build, and maintain the world’s nuclear arsenals. The actual amount may be significantly higher, since all nine nuclear powers maintain some degree of opacity about their nuclear programs. “We know what we can trace,” says Susi Snyder, the report’s principal author, “but there’s definitely more out there.”

Many powerful corporations therefore have incentives to push governments to expand their nuclear stockpiles. At a recent investor conference, a managing director of the investment bank Cowen Inc. questioned the CEO of Raytheon, one of the nuclear contractors listed by PAX. “We’re about to exit the INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty] with Russia,” the managing director said, and excitedly asked if this means that “we will really get a defense budget that will really benefit Raytheon.” (The planet may be destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time, they will have created a lot of value for shareholders.)

Snyder believes that President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the INF Treaty may be paying literal dividends for Raytheon already. She points out that over a period of three months after Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal last fall, Raytheon received an anomalous 44 separate missile contracts worth more than $500 million.

Moreover, corporate lobbying has already nudged the U.S. to commit to a nuclear “modernization” program — initiated under former President Barack Obama and expanded under Trump — that will cost an estimated $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years. And while modernization sounds good, what’s planned will actually make U.S. nukes much more deadly, something to which Russia is already planning to respond. The final result may be an extremely modern nuclear war.

PAX, however, does not counsel despair, but instead sees the intertwining of the private sector and nuclear weapons as a potential point of leverage.

The five largest known current beneficiaries of nuclear weapons spending are all U.S.-based multinationals: Huntington Ingalls Industries ($29.9 billion), Lockheed Martin ($25.2 billion), Honeywell International ($16.5 billion), General Dynamics ($5.8 billion), and Jacobs Engineering ($5.3 billion).

The report also identifies large nuclear contracts with companies elsewhere. Airbus, headquartered in the Netherlands, develops nuclear-armed missiles for France. A British company called Serco has a 25-year contract to help manage and operate the U.K. Atomic Weapons Establishment, the center of the United Kingdom’s nuclear program. Bharat Dynamics Limited in Hyderabad helps make two of India’s nuclear-capable missiles.

Among the hundreds of nuclear contracts are some gems of nuclear insanity. Boeing has received $16 million to develop a “Flight Termination Receiver” that would theoretically allow nuclear missiles to be destroyed after a mistaken launch.

This could change the U.S. nuclear calculus in an extremely dangerous way. There have been many false alarms in the past that Russian missiles were headed toward the U.S. We’re here now only because no president responded to the alarms, in part because they knew such a response would be irrevocable. If future presidents believe that they have an end of the world “take back,” they may be tempted to launch U.S. nuclear missiles in response to another false alarm. But of course, no technology is ever 100 percent effective — especially when it’s built by the company that brought us the 737 Max. And if just one missile failed to self-destruct, a full-out nuclear war would soon follow.

That’s the bad news. Here’s the qualified good news.

PAX is a member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. ICAN played a key role in the promotion of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, which was adopted that year at the United Nations and therefore, opened for ratification by member states.

ICAN’s strategy with the TPNW is a sneaky one. They do not aim to begin by trying to persuade countries with nuclear weapons to abandon them. Rather, they aim to start by persuading non-nuclear countries to ratify the treaty. Such countries will then be prohibited from possessing nuclear weapons — and from allowing them to transit through them or permitting their production on their territory.

If all goes according to plan, this will create a slowly tightening noose around the nuclear weapons states. If the Netherlands were to ratify TPNW, Airbus could no longer help build France’s nuclear missiles. The Italian company Leonardo also lends a hand with France’s nuclear program and likewise could not do so if Italy ratifies the treaty.

But beyond legal restrictions, ICAN hopes that grassroots organizing for TPNW country by country will eventually create a societal taboo around nuclear weapons that will put severe pressure on private-sector corporations and eventually the current nuclear states. If this sounds utopian, it should be remembered that such taboos have been created around biological and chemical weapons, as well as land mines and cluster bombs. There are still holdout countries for each, but they’ve faced greater and greater opprobrium as time goes by, and it’s not impossible to imagine that there will be eventual complete compliance in each case.

PAX points out that the TPNW has already helped create enough stigma surrounding nuclear weapons that two enormous pension funds have divested from nuclear arms producers. The Norwegian Government Pension Fund, the second-largest pension fund on earth, has sold its investments in, among other companies, Huntington Ingalls, Lockheed Martin, Airbus, and Boeing. The Dutch civil service fund ABP is the world’s fifth-largest and has also divested from the nuclear arms industry. “Changes in society, also at an international level,” said an ABP executive, mean that “nuclear weapons no longer fit in with our sustainable and responsible investment policy.”

This perspective is now quietly making its way across the Atlantic. This January, a bill was introduced in the Massachusetts State Legislature that would require the state’s pension funds to divest from nuclear manufacturers. The city of Cambridge has already done so. Ojai, California, will not make any future investments in the makers or funders of nuclear weapons.

“If Lockheed Martin can stop making cluster bombs because they’re losing investors across Europe,” says Snyder, “we know corporations can be moved. … It takes a long time with businesses, but you can do it faster than with governments.”

And that’s the point of Pax’s report: It wasn’t created for passive consumption, but to put basic information in the hands of activists, so that they can exert the power of basic sanity.

The post How to Dismantle the Absurd Profitability of Nuclear Weapons appeared first on The Intercept.

‘Unknown Outside Indiana’

The previous four “Our Towns” posts have been about Indiana: One about Angola and the importance of its relationship with Trine University; one about Fort Wayne and its ambitious reconstruction of a cavernous abandoned GE works; and two about Muncie, first about sustainability programs and then about a virtually unique approach to the long-troubled public schools.

They had a common theme: how surprising it was simply to show up in these towns and hear about what was happening there, since so little (or none) of this news had ever made its way to the national press.

A reader in Indianapolis challenges one part of my argument:

Interesting and informative to hear about Muncie and Ball State. My only quibble is with your first sentence: “This post is about a development that few people outside the state of Indiana have ever heard or read about …. ”

I live in Indianapolis, and consider myself well-informed, and I hadn’t heard or read about what’s going on in Muncie. This is a direct result of the death of local journalism ….

Our “local” paper, the Indianapolis Star … has very little coverage of what is going on even in Indianapolis, other than the occasional sensational crime, much less elsewhere in the state (as you know from your recent visit, Muncie is not that far away).

To be fair, the Star is doing a reasonably good job on some environmental issues, but it is telling that the environmental coverage is essentially funded by a grant from a charitable trust—without that grant, that coverage would not exist either. But coverage of local and state “meat and potatoes” issues is cursory at best.

I’m putting down a marker for ongoing coverage in this space: the crucial importance of local journalism, the economic pressures pushing it down, and the rapidly increasing experimentation in a search to buoy it back up.

Also: If you’re looking for a very skeptical local view of recent developments, which presents the Ball State University/Muncie Community Schools interaction as a “coup” and as the latest manifestation of “Muncie’s Oligarchy,” you can check out the Muncie Voice.

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In my first Muncie post, I mentioned both Robert and Helen Lynd’s famed sociological study of the city, Middletown, from 1929, and a 2004 book about Muncie’s African American citizens who were largely left out of the Lynds’ work. That later book is The Other Side of Middletown, edited by Luke Eric Lassiter, Hurley Goodall, Elizabeth Campbell, and Michelle Natasya Johnson.

A reader whom I’ve known for years, and who has family ties in Muncie’s African American community, writes to recommend the Other Side book, and to add:

The problem with those famous Middletown studies is that they did what Whi’ Peepo so often do: they erased/ignored us. They wished us away.

Po’ White Folk have found themselves in the same box of late. But instead of forming common cause with Black Folk, or asking us: “Hey, how’d y’all survive a couple of centuries of this treatment?” they lost their shit. (Sorry, it’s coarse language, but it’s the most precise way to convey the point, really.) They’ve become meaner. They’ve retreated further into those old, tired myths about “The True America.” Blech.

Anyway, Black Folk lived and worked in Muncie. Maybe y’all can wander over to “the other side of (middle)town” and see for yourselves.

I last went there decades ago … My father left for many good reasons. I’m glad he acted on them.

More to come on this front. Thanks to these and other readers.

‘There Is Not Enough Land Here’

ZOLANI, South Africa—On the outskirts of this overcrowded township in South Africa’s Cape Winelands, Phumlani Zota, a 32-year-old pig farmer, sifted through piles of waste in a refuse dump beneath the Langeberg mountains, filling a burlap sack with scraps of food for his livestock. “There is not enough land here,” he told me.

Yet on all sides, the impoverished settlement was hemmed in by great tracts of white-owned farmland, neat rows of fruit trees and grapevines punctuated by ornate Cape Dutch architecture.

The disjuncture is jarring, but mirrored all over South Africa. During apartheid, Zolani was designated a “blacks only” area by the Group Areas Act, one of about two dozen federal policies that dramatically restricted black South Africans’ access to land and opportunity. Today, the township stands as contemporary evidence of the wholesale land dispossessions carried out by successive colonial regimes, from the 17th century until as recently as the 1980s.

According to a 2017 land audit by the South African government, 72 percent of the country’s arable land remains in the hands of whites, who account for fewer than 10 percent of the total population. Since the ruling African National Congress came to power in 1994, under the stewardship of Nelson Mandela, one of its central undertakings has been to relieve this disparity. But to date, the spotty efficacy of the ANC’s land-restitution efforts has seen barely a quarter of such land restored to black farmers, according to the farmers’ organization AgriSA.

Now, with general elections slated for May, the renewed promise of meaningful and long-overdue land reform is once again a key feature of the ANC’s political campaign. The country’s lack of progress on resolving the issue speaks not just to the varied issues facing South Africa—from poor economic growth to spiraling unemployment—but also to the broader difficulty of finding practical solutions to redress historical injustice. It is a challenge informed not only by domestic politics, but also by years of chaos in neighboring Zimbabwe, which has seen ill-fated attempts at land redistribution of its own.

Black farmers pick grapes on an expansive white-owned wine farm in the Western Cape. (Shaun Swingler)

The issue of land reform—and more specifically, of taking land from white farmers—has become a cause célèbre in the United States, Canada, and Britain, largely among white right-wingers, and even reached the Oval Office last year, when Donald Trump tweeted about it. Here in South Africa, the issue of land redistribution is complex, and has a long history characterized by a series of ineffectual and ill-defined government programs and a lack of political will that spans successive cabinets.

[Peter Beinart: Trump’s peculiar sympathy for white South Africans]

In the debate’s most recent incarnation, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa proposed a constitutional amendment last year that would allow the government to seize “unused” private land without compensation, a process known as expropriation, and redistribute it to disadvantaged black farmers. The ANC has made repeated, albeit vague, promises that this change would have far-reaching economic benefits. In December, after months of emotive public hearings that showed strong support for the amendment, the National Assembly, the elected house of Parliament, voted overwhelmingly to draft it, and an ad hoc committee has been established to oversee that process. Ramaphosa also created an advisory panel on land reform, which is due to submit a final report of recommendations before elections.

Yet it’s unclear how the ANC ’s proposed policies would be implemented, with critics voicing concern around potentially slow, cumbersome, and costly legal processes and a lack of cohesion between national and local government structures. Draft legislation also gives no guidance for dealing with customary and communal forms of land ownership, such as where traditional authorities administer land on behalf of rural people.

Ramaphosa shakes hands with the chief of the KwaMkwanazi community, whose members were forced from their land beginning in 1915, to mark the transfer of the land back to the community in October 2018. (Rajesh Jantilal / AFP / Getty)

The system in place now has its own pitfalls. It relies on the so-called willing-buyer, willing-seller approach, which effectively calls for volunteers, allowing white landowners to refuse to sell or to demand exorbitant fees. Deficient regulation has also resulted in nonarable land often being sold first.

The failure to fix the system has been compounded by rampant corruption, which has decimated provincial land-reform budgets and prioritized spurious land claims. Combined with a protracted drought and persistent concerns about state maladministration, the corruption and uncertainty are harming South Africa’s agricultural sector, driving investor confidence lower.

Even for those black South Africans who have managed to buy farmland, government assistance is minimal. Many of the farms that have been transferred to black farmers, including former farm laborers, through past ANC-supported restitution programs now lie fallow. New farmers installed on expropriated land have received scant financial, operational, or infrastructural support, despite promises from the state. Others are never installed: Because of woefully slow processing, as many as 4,000 farms bought by the government have yet to be distributed to new owners.

[Read: How apartheid haunts a new generation of South Africans]

In the verdant northern province of Limpopo, Thato Moagi—a 28-year-old commercial farmer and a member of Ramaphosa’s advisory panel on land reform—is among the minority of black farmers who have attained the means to secure their own success. Her father, who was directly affected by forced removals in the 1960s, repeatedly applied for agricultural funding. But, in 2013, after more than a decade of appeals, he and his wife used their life savings to buy the Limpopo farm that Moagi, who graduated from the University of South Africa with a degree in agricultural science, now runs.

Despite the success of the farm, which has livestock, food crops, and an apiary, Moagi still believes that she could do much more with government investment. “The government is not addressing the issues that young or emerging or first-generation farmers are experiencing,” she told me, adding that access to start-up capital is often foremost among these issues.

Moagi is heading up a new social-development project in the Cape Winelands, working with a luxury residential estate and a golf course to establish a commercial farm that will also serve as an incubation platform for young prospective farmers. “Generations of people have been affected by past laws and actions, and we need to start addressing that with the next generation,” she told me.

A tractor leaves a Limpopo-area farm that was reclaimed by the black community in June 2017. (Mujahid Safodien / AFP / Getty)

For white farmers, however, the government’s moves have sparked trepidation. “Today I’ve got an asset. Tomorrow, maybe I’ve got no asset, no means of making any living as we know it,” Denys Hobson, a former national-team cricket player who owns a 500-hectare goat farm near the village of Greyton, told me.

Those I interviewed not only worry about their land, and thus their livelihood, being taken, but also noted that expropriation without compensation could have devastating economic implications for their predominantly black workforce. Jacques Beukes, a 37-year-old fourth-generation grape farmer whose family owns 100 hectares of land in the fertile Hex River Valley, about an hour’s drive from Zolani, also told me many farmers feared a repeat of the violent state-sanctioned land grabs that left the Zimbabwean economy in tatters in the early 2000s.

That fear of violence was a persistent topic brought up in conversations with white farmers. Research from AgriSA shows that farmland murders are at a 20-year low, accounting for just 47 of the more than 20,000 murders recorded in South Africa from April 2017 to March 2018. However, many I spoke with suggested a correlation between populist land-reform rhetoric adopted by the ANC and by the Economic Freedom Fighters, a far-left opposition party, and what the white farmers said was an upsurge in racially motivated farmland murders.

One advocate for white farmers—Ernst Roets, the deputy CEO of AfriForum, a right-wing Afrikaner-rights organization—told me that, should Ramaphosa’s constitutional amendment pass, there could be violence from the farm owners as well. But Beukes believes that such claims are unhelpful, and said there were “definitely scenarios where government and commercial farmers could work together.”

For some, the preelection political rhetoric has been too narrowly focused on the proposed constitutional amendment. Politicians within Ramaphosa’s own party, as well as prominent political opponents including the centrist Democratic Alliance, have said that the constitution is being scapegoated for the state’s failure to restore land.

[Read: How to save the African National Congress]

“This does not help us resolve the really big debates about who should be getting land, where do we need to focus this program, and what do people want land for,” Ruth Hall, a land-reform expert at the University of the Western Cape, told me. But she expressed hope that the emergence of land reform as a key election issue had “not only focused attention on questions of historical redress, but also on making land available to meet people’s needs now.”

With around 14 percent of black South Africans living in squalid and ever-expanding informal settlements on the periphery of major cities, fast-tracking well-located urban land for housing is foremost among those needs. In his State of the Nation address in February, Ramaphosa said that his cabinet had identified state-owned land in urban areas for imminent redistribution. This land could also make a considerable contribution to addressing rural land reform. More than 11 percent of South Africa’s total land falls under public ownership.

Back in Zolani, Phumlani Zota, whose forebears labored on largely unproductive farmland in the former black homelands of the Eastern Cape during apartheid, said that he didn’t trust the ANC to deliver on its renewed promises.

On a scruffy patch of communal land at the edge of the settlement, he leaned his short, sinewy frame on the makeshift fence that wrapped around his small plot, as his 30 pigs noisily devoured the scraps that he’d lugged down the hill from the refuse dump. About a hundred meters away, a rusty barbed-wire fence marked the perimeter of an expansive white-owned farm. “Maybe things will change for the next generation,” he said.

O Exército vai pagar um tour milionário de coronéis pela Europa

O roteiro começa por Paris. O dia é livre, mas há a opção de conhecer o Palácio de Versalhes. Depois, o grupo segue para a Galeria Lafayette, uma luxuosa loja de departamentos que impressiona pela imponente arquitetura. O grupo passa mais um dia na Cidade Luz antes de seguir de ônibus para Bruxelas, na Bélgica. Lá, são dois dias de atividades para os homens, mas suas mulheres podem aproveitar um city tour. As noites são livres, perfeitas para experimentar a tradição cervejeira do país.

A próxima parada do roteiro é a Alemanha, começando pelas cidades de Munster e Hamburgo. De novo, há atividades apenas para os homens – as mulheres podem, se quiserem, conhecer a cidade em um passeio incluso no pacote. A última parada é Berlim, onde os casais podem visitar o imponente castelo de Charlottenburg. De volta ao Brasil, eles ganham uma folga para se recuperar do cansaço da viagem.

Esse é o roteiro de da Viagem de Estudos Estratégicos ao Exterior promovida pelo Curso de Política Estratégica e Alta Administração do Exército, o CPEAEx, da Escola de Comando e Estado-Maior do Exército, a Eceme. Em 2017, uma viagem do curso custou pelo menos R$ 1 milhão.

Estadia em hoteis ‘4 ou 5 estrelas’

O Intercept teve acesso à programação da viagem dos oficiais, prevista para próximo outubro. O roteiro descrito nos primeiros parágrafos dura 16 dias. A comitiva brasileira tem cerca de 78 pessoas – os nomes não foram divulgados pelo Exército – e todas ficarão hospedadas em hotéis de 4 ou 5 estrelas, a um custo total de hospedagem de 2 mil euros por pessoa (cerca de R$ 9,1 mil, na cotação da última semana de abril). Segundo os documentos, as mulheres dos oficiais estão incluídas na programação – há, inclusive, um roteiro específico para elas.

A viagem tem fins educativos, é claro. Enquanto as mulheres fazem city tours, os oficiais visitarão o Ministério da Defesa e a equivalente à Eceme da Alemanha, assistirão a apresentações de embaixadores e militares franceses e visitarão a OTAN. Na comunicação oficial do Exército, há destaque para as parcerias esperadas para a viagem, como a assinatura de um memorando de entendimento com o Defense Studies Department do Reino Unido.

O Curso de Política Estratégica e Alta Administração do Exército foi criado em 1986 pelo então presidente José Sarney. É voltado aos oficiais que já têm o Curso de Altos Estudos Militares e visa habilitar os militares aos cargos de generais de brigada, divisão, armas, quadros e serviços. Os coronéis que participam dele são selecionados “por mérito”.

O curso dura um ano – e, no final, a viagem de estudos já virou tradição. O objetivo é preparar os coronéis “para o assessoramento de alto nível aos altos escalões do Exército, do Ministério da Defesa e do Poder Executivo”, me explicou o Centro de Comunicação Social do Exército, em resposta a perguntas que eu fiz via Lei de Acesso à Informação. Neste contexto, a viagem serve para “ampliar a projeção” da instituição no cenário internacional e “fortalecer a dimensão humana”. Segundo o Exército, o roteiro da viagem inclui visitas a órgãos militares e civis “relacionados aos níveis político e estratégico”.

Museus, cervejas e selfies

Em 2016, a viagem durou 11 dias, e a comitiva percorreu Madri e Bruxelas antes de chegar a Paris. O coronel Anderson Clayton Francisco fazia parte do grupo e é um dos poucos que tem a despesa da viagem especificada no Portal da Transparência: foram R$ 10,2 mil em passagens aéreas. Não estão ali, no entanto, os gastos da viagem de sua mulher, Evelcy, que esteve nas mesmas cidades europeias nas mesmas datas descritas no programa.

A viagem dela, segundo suas postagens no Facebook, começou por Toledo, na Espanha, de onde há fotos de um passeio acompanhada de uma comitiva só de mulheres. De lá, seguiu para Bruxelas – também com o grupo. Por fim, em 9 de outubro, a comitiva feminina visitou o Palácio de Versalhes, na França. O Exército garante que custeia apenas as despesas dos oficiais.

Lembrança de viagem: comitiva só de mulheres percorreu as mesmas cidades dos oficiais – mas teve uma programação exclusiva.

Foto: Reprodução/Facebook

Em 2017, o Boletim do Exército publicou a lista dos oficiais designados para a viagem de estudos. O roteiro incluiu Paris, Londres, Irlanda do Norte e Bruxelas, entre os dias 6 e 18 de outubro de 2017. Para a viagem, foram designados 52 oficiais da Eceme. Segundo a nota, assinada pelo comandante, “a missão está enquadrada como eventual, militar, sem mudança de sede, sem dependentes e será realizada com ônus total para o Exército Brasileiro”.

Mas, mais uma vez, as lembranças de viagem no Facebook contam outra história. Em seus registros, publicados sem restrição de privacidade na rede social, o coronel Roger Herzer não economizou nas fotos em museus, restaurantes, bares e passeios, muitas vezes ao lado da mulher e de amigos também acompanhados das cônjuges. Segundo dados do Portal Transparência, Herzer recebeu R$ 14.092 do Exército – portanto, verba pública – para trocar por euros e gastar em diárias no exterior. A quantia foi paga a todos os oficiais que viajaram na comitiva brasileira.

Em muitas fotos, Herzer e a mulher estão acompanhados do coronel Mario Flávio Brayner e a esposa, Alyne. A viagem pela Europa, postada ostensivamente nas redes sociais, incluiu o Moulin Rouge e a Torre Eiffel, em Paris, bares em Bruxelas e museus na Alemanha.

À frente, os coroneis Roger Herzer e Mario Flávio Brayner, acompanhados das esposas e outros coronéis, durante um passeio de barco por Paris.

Foto: Reprodução/Facebook

R$ 1 milhão do nosso bolso

É difícil estimar quanto exatamente a viagem custou ao bolso do contribuinte – no Portal da Transparência, os gastos estão espalhados, classificados sob diferentes rubricas e não foram classificados como “viagem”. Encontramos, no entanto, R$ 881 mil só para diárias para a “viagem de instrução do CPEAEX 2017″. Foram R$ 15 mil para cada um dos oficiais comprar 3,8 mil euros, na cotação da época. Cada militar teve à sua disposição o equivalente a R$ 1,7 mil para gastar por dia na Europa.

Ainda há os gastos de passagens. Em junho de 2017, o Exército comprou pelo menos 62 passagens internacionais – 40 de uma vez e depois mais 22, no valor de R$ 4,5 mil cada. Foram gastos R$ 289 mil de passagens – um valor que veio dos cofres do governo federal, ou seja, do seu bolso. No total, a viagem de estudos de cada um dos oficiais em 2017 custou quase R$ 21 mil, um valor total de pelo menos R$ 1,170 milhão.

Ainda não estão disponíveis no portal os gastos previstos para a viagem de 2019, tampouco a lista de participantes. O Intercept, porém, teve acesso a uma lista com 76 pessoas que, teoricamente, irão viajar em 2019. Ela inclui os oficiais e suas esposas. Os nomes coincidem com os alunos do curso de 2019, divulgados publicamente no Boletim do Exército. Se a média de gastos for a mesma de 2017, podemos prever que a viagem à Europa de cada casal custará R$ 30 mil entre ajuda de custo, passagens e hospedagem – em um total de, pelo menos, R$ 1,1 milhão.

‘A eventual presença de familiares juntos aos militares ocorre segundo critério pessoal’, diz o Exército.

Os documentos obtidos pelo Intercept incluem as esposas na compra de passagens, hotéis e programação de city tours. Mas, questionado via Lei de Acesso à Informação, o Exército diz que que os gastos da viagem “cobrem, unicamente, as despesas com os militares designados em Portaria do Comandante do Exército” e obedecem à Lei 5.809, de 1972. Sancionada pelo ditador militar Emílio Médici, a lei estabelece as regras para os servidores da União em serviço no exterior. Ela determina que, em missões eventuais – caso da viagem dos oficiais –, o estado deve arcar apenas com o transporte do servidor.

A previsão de gastos em ajuda de custo para esse ano, segundo o Exército, é a que está no decreto 6.576: R$ 390 por dia, ou R$ 6.240 no total, para um oficial superior em país europeu. É menos da metade do que foi gasto em 2017, com as esposas a tiracolo: R$ 15 mil por oficial – valor suficiente para um casal. Para fins de comparação, uma viagem para a Europa, por duas semanas, sai por cerca de R$ 10 mil por pessoa já com as passagens. O Exército gastou o dobro disso para cada um dos coronéis. Os valores deste ano, no entanto, só serão divulgados depois da viagem.

Oficialmente, o Exército confirma que custeará a viagem de 61 militares em 2019 (quatro instrutores e 57 alunos). Apesar de as esposas estarem na lista de viagem, a instituição garante que vai bancar apenas os servidores. “A Eceme não se envolve em questões relacionadas aos acompanhantes”, disse o Exército, em resposta via Lei de Acesso à Informação. “A eventual presença de familiares juntos aos militares ocorre segundo critério pessoal, sem custos para a união e sem prejuízo das atividades de instrução.”

The post O Exército vai pagar um tour milionário de coronéis pela Europa appeared first on The Intercept.

The First-Ever Medicare-for-All Hearing Was Strangely Collegial

If Medicare for All is ever signed into law, what’s known as the “legislative history” will date back to April 30, 2019, and the first word heard by Congress on the question will have been from activist Ady Barkan.

The legislative history will also reveal a quirk indicative of the tensions underlying the fight for single-payer health care: The first-ever hearing on Medicare for All was hosted not before any of the major committees with jurisdiction over the legislation, but instead in the cramped quarters of the Rules Committee, which typically only sets terms under which bills will be considered on the House floor.

Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the top-ranking Republican on the committee, noted the unusually obscure venue for such a major piece of legislation. “There’s a reason,” he said, suggesting that Democratic leadership and the chairs of the relevant committees were reluctant to grapple with the issue. “That’s because this is an extraordinary bill.”

Rules Committee Chair Jim McGovern quipped: “I like to think that it’s an enlightened chairman” that motivated leadership to choose his panel for the history-making hearing.

The banter between Cole and McGovern also reflected how far the bill still has to go.

The Tuesday hearing marks the highest point yet in the movement for single-payer health care, which has been debated since the advent of the New Deal. It represents a new phase in the process, coming after an organizing effort grew public support for single payer over the last several years, drawing energy from the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.. That organizing led to the introduction of the most detailed legislative proposals in the House and Senate yet, followed by the first hearing on Tuesday.

The banter between Cole and McGovern also reflected how far the bill still has to go. The two committees with the most significant claims of jurisdiction over the bill are Ways & Means and Energy & Commerce. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., chair of Energy and Commerce, has yet to agree to a hearing, but on Tuesday, Jayapal told reporters that Ways & Means Chair Richard Neal, D-Mass., had agreed to hold one. Neal announced his support of a hearing at a private Congressional Progressive Caucus gathering that met as the Rules Committee hearing was ongoing.

Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth, D-Ky., has said that he will also hold a hearing on Medicare for All, though he hasn’t scheduled a full hearing with a variety of witnesses. He has requested that the Congressional Budget Office analyze elements of the bill, a report expected to be released on Wednesday afternoon. He plans to follow up by inviting the CBO to testify about the results. The Oversight and Government Reform Committee also has jurisdiction and its chair, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., is a supporter, though that committee has not scheduled a hearing either.

The bill that was the subject of Tuesday’s hearing was authored by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state and the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It would enhance Medicare’s benefits; eliminate co-pays, deductions, and premiums; and extend coverage to all American residents.  The bill’s legislative progress dates back to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s fight to become House speaker and pass a reformed rules package, during which Jayapal extracted a series of concessions to hold hearings.

But without a hearing or vote in major committees, it’s unlikely to get a vote on the floor of the House this term. In the Senate, meanwhile, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has suggested he may hold a version of a vote, but only as a way to try to put centrist Democrats in a tough spot.

Given that Medicare for All isn’t a threat to become law while Donald Trump is in the White House and Republicans control the Senate, the hearing took on a collegial feel. “It’s a noble and worthy goal you all share,” Cole told the supporters of Medicare for All — while going on to dub the means toward that end as a “socialist proposal” and “Medicare for None.”

The hearing gave Democrats a chance to have a serious debate on policy, as they lay the groundwork for how they would govern if they were to win the White House in 2020. Many of the presidential hopefuls support Medicare for All, though they have different ideas about how it would take shape. Public support for Medicare for All has increased increased in recent years, with a majority of Americans backing it in theory, though a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that support drops when people are asked about the details of the plan.  

Ady Barkan testifies before the House Rules Committee at a hearing on a “Medicare for All” bill for government-provided health care on April 30, 2019.

Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

When the witness list was settled on for Tuesday’s hearing, advocates were frustrated to find that some of the most high-profile supporters of Medicare For All had not been invited, which suggests another tension: the more seriously the bill is being considered, the more it moves away from its cadre of core, original supporters. McGovern said afterwards that he didn’t want to stock the panel with veteran pro-single-payer advocates, but wanted to mix in different perspectives. The pressure was eased late last week when it was announced that Barkan, who is universally well-regarded across the Democratic Party, would be taking part as well.

Dying of ALS, Barkan spoke with a computer-generated voice, relying on software that tracks his eye-movements to enable him to type onto a screen. He told the committee that objections related to cost of single payer are political, not economic, and that the “richest country in the world” can afford to provide health insurance to its people. He also spoke of his personal experience being denied care by insurance companies and needing to spend his precious remaining time battling with them. His home health care costs are running at $9,000 per month, he said.

McGovern said Pelosi was the one who suggested inviting Barkan. She met briefly with him ahead of the hearing in a sideroom, where he showed her his software-driven communication technique. During a recess, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a civil rights icon, also paid his respects.

A broad swath of activists, staffers, and lawmakers attended the hearing, further signaling its importance. Staffers for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., attended and helped organize the hearing; the bill’s sponsor, Jayapal, attended, despite not being on the committee, and sat beside Barkan. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., stopped by to give Barkan a hug and sat by his side briefly as he testified, as well. Linda Sarsour, one of the founders of the Women’s March, and Winnie Wong, a senior adviser to Sanders’s 2020 campaign, were on hand, as were Jennifer Epps-Addison and Ana Maria Archila, co-executive directors of the Center for Popular Democracy, where Barkan works.

After Barkan’s moving testimony, the panel turned to Charles Blahous, an economist at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center. He talked about his analysis that projected costs for a 2017 version of the Medicare for All bill, which he pegged at $32 trillion over 10 years — far too expensive, he suggested.

“Are economists always right?” asked McGovern, jokingly. He then asked Blahous whether it was fair to characterize his analysis as saying “Medicare for All would cost a little more or a little less than we’re currently paying, is that right?”

“I think that’s fair,” Blahous said.

“We have all these warnings about the high costs,” McGovern said, referring to one of the most common criticisms of single-payer health care. “I mean, we’re spending an awful lot on health care right now.”

Blahous’s emphasis on cost ignores the current system’s trajectory.

Blahous’s emphasis on cost ignores the current system’s trajectory. A recent projection from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services expects national health care spending will reach $6 trillion by 2027, growing at an average rate of 5.5% over the next decade. Costs will need to be kept down, either through the current approach of rationing care by making it too expensive for some, or through a single payer that negotiates lower rates across the industry.

As conversations about health care tend to do, Tuesday’s hearing veered toward the philosophical. The concept of time, which is at the center of existential thought, came up frequently. “My time to deliver this testimony is running out. And, in a much more profound sense, my time to deliver this message to the American people is running out as well,” Barkan said during his opening statement. “Our time on this earth is the most precious resource we have. A Medicare For All system will save all of us tremendous time. For doctors and nurses and providers, it will mean more time giving high quality care. And for patients and our families, it will mean less time dealing with a broken health care system and more time doing the things we love, together. Some people argue that although Medicare for All is a great idea, we need to move slowly to get there. But I needed Medicare for All yesterday. Millions of people need it today. The time to pass this law is now.”

Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., highlighted the waste and inefficiency of the system. “Time is really a key piece of all this,” he said.

During questioning, Barkan told the panel members he appreciated the opportunity to be there, but it wasn’t where he wanted to be. With time short, he’d prefer to be home in California, he said, playing with his son Carl, rather than on Capitol Hill trying to wake up the representatives’ consciences.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., picked up on the theme and referenced a metaphor made by writer Susan Sontag: “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

A basic sense of democratic solidarity, said Raskin, meant that those in both kingdoms should take care of each other. Barkan, through his computer-generated device, told Raskin that 10 years ago, he saw the representative speak. “I decided you were the kind of lawyer and public servant I wanted to become,” Barkan said.

Testifying for the minority, Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, an organization that promotes public policy research on free-market ideas for health care, raised concerns about rationing health care and extreme wait times for citizens in countries that already have single-payer systems, like France or the United Kingdom. But some of those countries have already addressed long wait times, Sara Collins of the Commonwealth Fund, called to testify by the majority, pointed out. “It doesn’t mean the single payer system there is going to be the single payer system here,” Collins said. The fact that insured people in the U.S. still can’t get coverage they need, or choose to go without care over paying exorbitant costs, essentially means we, too, are rationing care, Farzon Nahvi, an emergency room physician at NYU Langone Health added. Barkan used the opportunity to resurface a central point of his testimony. “Anecdotes aside, we know that single payer systems in other countries have better outcomes than we do,” he said.

“We denied her $300, but now we’re paying thousands of dollars for that.”

Nahvi shared a number of stories that highlighted how the current system is not just cruel, but also ineffective and even counterproductive. He talked about one patient who declined to be treated for appendicitis because she couldn’t afford the CT scan and subsequent treatment. Another young woman came in to be treated for a routine urinary tract infection, but her insurance company denied her claim for antibiotics and she couldn’t afford the $300 medicine, Nahvi said. Instead, she bought some cranberry juice. Two days later, she was back at the emergency room with sepsis and a high fever. She had to be admitted to the hospital. “We denied her $300, but now we’re paying thousands of dollars for that.”

Another one of Nahvi’s patients couldn’t afford antibiotics for a fever, and decided instead she’d be better off going to a local pet store and buying antibiotics meant for fish. She overdosed and ended up in the emergency room days later with severe side effects that impacted her brain and central nervous system. She later had to be admitted to the ICU.

“I’m worried that there’s a lot of finding problems with the solution rather than finding solutions to the problem,” Nahvi said. “I never want to see another patient who thinks their best option for medical care is to go to a local pet store.”

Another theme at the hearing was the racial disparities that exist in the current health care system. Dr. Doris Browne, the immediate past president of the National Medical Association, which represents more than 30,000 African American physicians and their patients, said that the Affordable Care Act didn’t go far enough in addressing the ways in which the current health care system fails African Americans.

“With numerous and often insurmountable obstacles to receiving quality health care,” Browne said in her opening testimony, “people of color experience differences in access to health care, the affordability of these services, implicit biases by some providers, and limited participation in clinical research, which has consequences around viable medical treatments.”

Browne, who is a physician and retired military officer, spoke about health equity, which refers to “the state in which everyone has the opportunity to attain their full health potential and no one is disadvantaged.” She said universal coverage is a pathway to achieving that state. “It has the potential to address poverty, inequality, and discrimination. It can also provide a more efficient and effective, cost savings, healthcare system for everyone. Because health equity and opportunity are inextricably linked, when equity is achieved there will be no health disparities. Whether you call it universal coverage, single payer, Medicare for All, or some other label, the label is not the most important point. What is important – is that the care must be of high quality, accessible, affordable, comprehensive and coordinated.”

Some Republicans on the committee tried to minimize the need to overhaul America’s barely functioning health care system. Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Ga., suggested that he would prefer a system that focused on the truly ill and those in the most need, such as Barkan, rather than remake the system or divert resources to otherwise healthy families. Barkan had noted, though, that none of us can escape the need for medical care, and that we don’t always know when it’ll be needed.

Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko, meanwhile, said she didn’t know why the committee was holding the hearing at all. She used her time to try to poke holes in plan by walking through a hypothetical situation of how a hospital would go through the process of fixing a leaking roof under a single-payer system. She later asked if the plan would “provide health care for illegal immigrants.”

Nahvi interjected to point out that the United States is already providing free health care to undocumented immigrants because of a 1986 law put in place by Ronald Reagan, the Emergency Medical Treatement and Active Labor Act.                

Florida Rep. Donna Shalala, a former secretary of Health and Human Services, said she thought that holding the hearing was a smart move. Tackling such a big problem takes robust debate, she said, rejecting Republican arguments that it’s just too difficult or would simply take too long. “Congress has demonstrated over and over again that they have the backbone to take on big problems, put their arms around it, and try to find a solution,” she said. “I’m perfectly willing to debate the cost issue and how we’re gonna pay for it. But we’re here because the employee system is deteriorating in front of our eyes.”

The notion that an employer-based healthcare system is still the core solution for health care is dead and gone, she said.

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