August 13, 2021

Bolsonaro Cuts City Funds and Creates Direct Vouchers for Private Day Care Centers

Measures are in the proposal that creates the Auxílio Brasil, a social program defended by the government to substitute for Bolsa Família


Aug.13.2021 2:16PM

The proposal for the government's new social program, Auxílio Brasil, sent by President Jair Bolsonaro (no party), withdraws resources destined to cities for the education of needy children.

The same proposal establishes the payment of vouchers directly to private day care centers. The government overturned one of the pillars of Brasil Carinhoso, a social program created in 2012 to guarantee children's access and permanence in early childhood education. The objective was to complement the income transfer policy for poor and extremely poor families, the Bolsa Família.

The revoked section required the Union to transfer additional financial aid to the municipalities for places in day care centers and educational development for children from zero to two years old who are from families benefiting from social programs. On the other hand, in the same proposal, which creates Auxílio Brasil, Bolsonaro wants public money to be transferred directly to day care centers accredited by the government, which may even be from the private sector.

Bolsonaro created Auxílio Brasil with an eye on the 2022 election. In addition to increasing spending in the social area, the objective is to replace Bolsa Família, a program associated with the PT administration.

(Short article, no more at link.)

August 13, 2021

The Significance of Latin America's Pink Tide

August 4, 2021 Yanis Iqbal



Pedro Castillo, second from left, is the newest president associated with the Pink TIde of
Latin America / Photo composition by Orinoco Tribune

The Latin American Left is regrouping. On July 19, 2021, Peru’s National Elections Jury announced the official results of the 2021 presidential elections, declaring Pedro Castillo as President of Peru. An important voting survey in Brazil has revealed that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would outperform neo-fascist President Jair Bolsonaro in all scenarios for the 2022 elections in the country. Colombia is in socio-economic turmoil, creating a potential opening for the election of Gustavo Petro – a left-wing politician. In Chile, the result of elections held on May 15-16, 2021, for the 155-member new constituent assembly has thrust progressive candidates to the forefront of national politics. All these dynamics will regionally strengthen the leftist governments already in power in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. An anti-neoliberal shift in Latin America’s political compass carries global significance.

Imperialism

Large swathes of humanity who live in the peripheries of the world system have been witnessing a deadly process of absolute immiseration. Imperialism has restricted the economic growth of the periphery to mineral and agricultural sectors in order to assure raw materials for advanced capitalist nations. Hence, most Third World economies are heavily dependent on the export of primary commodities. In Latin America, such primary commodities account for the majority of exports for nearly all countries. While Latin American countries export primary goods to the Global North, they tend to re-import manufactured products from these same countries. The value added to these manufactured commodities – typically constructed from the primary inputs imported earlier – generates profit for northern countries while maintaining Latin American countries in a perpetual trade deficit.

While some countries in the periphery have facilitated a degree of industrialization through the surpluses accumulated from export-led growth, the disarticulated structures of these economies persists. The imperialist states’ monopolies – technological, financial, natural resources, communications, and military – has meant that there has been a lack of any significant indigenous technical development. Even to the extent that industrial growth has occurred, it has been based on the import of capital and technology, which has considerably reduced the dynamic effects on the economy that are usually associated with industrial growth. Moreover, a relocation of the locus of value creation from the core to the periphery means that the core relies less and less on the unprofitable exploitation of its own workers. Instead, the metropole increasingly divides the world into what has been labeled as Southern “production economies” and Northern “consumption economies.”

The main driver behind this process is undoubtedly the low wage level in the South. Entrenchment of extroverted economies like these has generated cut-throat competition amongst Southern firms for foreign capital. What we have now is a global race to the bottom, marked by a deathly spiral of exchange rate devaluations, hyper-low taxes and depressed wages. Multinational corporations based in the capitalist core have unendingly feasted on this wretchedness, fattening their profits from the extreme exploitation of the Third World’s large labor reserves. As such, the structure of today’s global economy has been profoundly shaped by the allocation of labor to industrial sectors according to differential rates of national exploitation. Thus, only the outward form of value transfers from the South to the North has changed, with the unequal exchange of products embodying different quantities of value steadily continuing. A large pool of precarized workers has been created, which consistently remains enmeshed in networks of informal economy, being forced by the productive configurations to enrich foreign capitalists and nourish the parasitic nature of the comprador bourgeoisie.

More:
https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/americas/the-significance-of-latin-americas-pink-tide/

August 13, 2021

Modern Day Slavery in Brazil: A Report from the Field

By Binka Le Breton - 13 August 2021 HEALTH AND SOCIAL POLICY

This is part of a forthcoming Global Policy e-book on modern slavery. Contributions from leading experts highlighting practical and theoretical issues surrounding the persistence of slavery, human trafficking and forced labour are being serialised here over the coming months.

This chapter provides a brief overview of modern day slavery in Brazil, a clandestine, criminal activity found in every corner of the country and involving activities as varied as illegal logging of valuable timber to harvesting the coffee supplied to well-known chains of coffee houses, or keeping undocumented immigrants in illegal sweatshops to produce garments for the fashion industry. In a continental sized country, with glaring social inequality and a history of racism and exploitation, what measures are being taken to repress and eradicate slavery, how successful are they, and how can they be improved? What role is played by the government at local, state and federal level as well as international organizations? What is the role of the public and private sectors, and of civil society? And in a world where so many competing crises vie for our attention, how can we ensure that the fight for humane treatment of our most vulnerable populations remains as one of our most urgent ongoing priorities?

It is August 2020 and a loudspeaker car is patrolling the streets of the hot little town of Timbiras, Maranhão, in the interior of the dirt-poor northeast of Brazil, bringing good news in a place where jobs are hard to find. The offer is breathtaking: steady work harvesting onions at a salary of 3000 reais a month, almost three times the normal wage. Along with several of his friends, twenty-year old Antonio signs up on the spot.

Two days later they join a busload of forty-two young men bound for Ituporanga in the distant state of Santa Catarina. After a five-day journey they arrive, full of hope and excitement and head for one of the local farms to start the great adventure. But the reality is very different from the dream. It is winter in the south, and there is frost on the ground. The men have no warm clothes, the work is grindingly hard, the overseers drive them relentlessly, and they sleep on old mattresses on the dirt floor of the barn. When payday comes around, they are presented with a steep bill for their bus fare, their food and their work tools, and the contractor brooks no argument. Although he doesn’t know it, Antonio has become a victim of modern day slavery, and It takes several weeks before he admits to himself that he has been tricked. So he does the only thing he can think of. He sends an audio message to his mother by Whatsapp, begging for help.

It’s a sad old story that has changed very little since the late nineteenth century rubber boom, when young men like Antonio were lured into the farthest reaches of the Amazon forest to tap rubber in exchange for their supplies, in a never ending cycle of debt. Or the 1970s when the military government was opening the vast regions of Amazonia promising “land without men” for “men without land,” and proposing a model of economic development based on logging, ranching and mining. All of these activities required a large amount of manpower easily available, then as now, from the impoverished northeastern states.

In response to the government's promise of land, waves of migrants swept into the region, some to make their fortunes, others to eke out a hardscrabble existence in the unfamiliar jungle, and yet others to trade the only thing they had, their labor, for some sort of a living.

When the Amazon frontier was opening up, this is how the system worked, and fifty years later little has changed. Young men like Antonio are still enticed with promises of adventure and good money. To sweeten the deal, they are given a cash advance, and, from that moment on, they are trapped. They are then transported to their workplace, by truck, bus, train or even by plane. Conditions on the job are generally precarious in the extreme. If they are in the forest, they will likely string their hammocks under a plastic sheet, work from dawn to dusk, eat a poor diet, drink dirty water, and suffer from mosquito bites, malaria, and work-related accidents. Divided up into small teams to keep them from any thoughts of rebelling, they are “protected” by armed overseers under the guise of security guards.

More:
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/13/08/2021/modern-day-slavery-brazil-report-field

August 11, 2021

'Economic Warfare [Is] Designed to Starve the Cuban People Into Rebellion'

AUGUST 10, 2021

CounterSpin interview with James Early on Cuban blockade
JANINE JACKSON

Janine Jackson interviewed IPS’s James Early about the Cuban blockade for the August 6, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: In the wake of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests, lawmakers in Florida—as elsewhere—passed legislation increasing penalties for blocking public streets, and offering protection to people who hit protesters with their car. But when people took to the street to show support for anti-government demonstrations in Cuba, the Florida Highway Patrol allowed them to block an expressway in both directions for nine hours. And the Miami police chief marched alongside them.

Anti-government demonstrations in Cuba have received a good deal of glorifying US media attention—in contrast to other, larger movements elsewhere in Latin America. The truth is, neither US governments nor corporate media make much pretense of projecting a single standard when it comes to Official Enemies. And Cuba has been high on that list for 60 years.

So little do the rules apply, multiple US outlets, from the New York Times to the Today Show, illustrated stories on Cuba’s anti-government protests with photos of huge crowds at a pro-government rally. CNN illustrated an article headlined “Cubans Take to the Streets” with a photo of a rally in Miami.

Accuracy—who cares? This is Cuba we’re talking about.

James Early has been writing about Cuba and US/Cuba policy for many years now. Currently a board member at the Institute for Policy Studies, he’s the former assistant secretary for education and public service at the Smithsonian Institution.

He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, James Early.

James Early: Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be with you.

JJ: The fog around Cuba is so dense, and of such long standing, that it can be hard to get a sense of what is even happening—much less why it’s happening. What would you say are the primary factors driving the anti-government protests that we saw in Cuba this past month?

JE: The primary factors are both historical, dating back to 1898, when the US took over Cuba after forcing its secession from Spain, and actually invading Cuba on a number of occasions. And so, over the course of 60-some odd years, up until 1959, the US — in direct and indirect ways — dominated the sovereignty and independence and self-determination of Cuba, in alliance with some of its own elites, turning it into a playground for casinos and gambling and prostitution, and the addition of US racism with the historical racism of colonial Cuba, as is the case across the Americas. That’s one deep historical factor.

Sixty-some years later, in 1959, with the Cuban Revolution, it was the first time that Cuba took full control of its sovereignty and independence, and its own determination of how it wanted to direct its economy and its governance system, which was reinforced in 2019, with a new constitution endorsing—I believe some percentage of Cubans—endorsing Cuba as a socialist republic.

Keeping in mind that since 1959, starting with President Eisenhower, with — CIA report, people can simply go online and find this, don’t take my word for it—a document sent in March 1960 to President Eisenhower about the potential for invading Cuba, and stopping it from having its sovereignty and independence and self-determination. And many noted and acknowledged attempts at the assassination of Fidel Castro, when he was alive, over the years.

The coddling of terrorists in the bedrock of American terrorism in the Americas—which is Miami, Florida—with right-wing Cubans, right-wing Venezuelans, right-wing Colombians, right-wing Brazilians, etc. who have been coddled by the US state—some of them known terrorists—having bombed planes, killing Cuban citizens, citizens from Barbados and other areas of the Americas.

. . .

Specifically, we should dismantle the US government legislation called “the embargo” on this side, and called “the blockade” from the Cuban side. It violates international law. It violates any principles of humanity.

We should also abandon sanctions. We should call for the freedom of US citizens to free travel, to go and see Cuba for themselves, and to have their own interactions. We are denied that opportunity.

More:
https://fair.org/home/economic-warfare-is-designed-to-starve-the-cuban-people-into-rebellion/

August 10, 2021

Living in squalor, Guatemalan mudslide survivors see stark choice: Emigrate to U.S. or die

After heavy rain, a girl hauls wood for cooking in the makeshift settlement of Nuevo Queja in Guatemala.(Rodrigo Abd / Associated Press)

BY ALBERTO ARCE AND RODRIGO ABD ASSOCIATED PRESS
AUG. 10, 2021 3:51 AM PT

NUEVO QUEJA, Guatemala — The day before he left for the United States was a busy one for Victor Cal. He went from relative to relative, collecting money to buy food during the journey north.
His mother was inconsolable. “I begged him not to go, that we could live here,” she said, again and again, “but the decision had already been made”.

He and his parents shared a small lunch — a couple of chiles with sesame seeds — in silence. His mother’s gloom weighed upon him; he announced he had to find somewhere to charge his phone “to receive calls so the coyote can tell me where and when we will finally meet.”

He set off on a bumpy, dirt road, looking to hitch a ride to any place with electricity. A motorbike pulled over and drove him to the nearest outlet, miles away.

More:
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-08-10/survivors-guatemalan-mudslide-face-death-or-emigration

August 9, 2021

Black Women Are Now the Largest Group in Brazil's Public Universities

Advancement occurred along with affirmative actions; vulnerability of black boys helps explain the phenomenon

Aug.9.2021 12:35PM

Black women make up 28% of the Brazilian population and suffer rampant discrimination , but today they comprise the most numerous group in public higher education institutions.

Data from the last Continuous Annual National Household Sample Survey, released in 2019, shows that self-declared Black and brown women make up 27% of public higher education students in 2019. Then comes white women and men, with 25% each, and Black men, with 23%.

The picture differs from 2001, when Black women were the third largest group, representing 19% of university students from public institutions, ahead of only Black men (13%).

Work published in 2020 by Tatiana Dias Silva, from the Institute of Applied Economic Research, shows that Black women have been the majority in the number of students entering public and private universities since 2017, accounting for 29.3% of the total.

For specialists, this result can be explained by factors such as affirmative action, in a context of greater education among women; a premature entry of Black youth into the labor market due to economic vulnerability; and discouragement due to the educational exclusion of Black men from elementary school.

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/brazil/2021/08/black-women-are-now-the-largest-group-in-brazils-public-universities.shtml?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsen

(Short article, no more at link.)

August 9, 2021

Stellar pulses are transformed into a celestial symphony

By Doris Elin Urrutia about 6 hours ago

This subfield of astronomy is called asteroseismology.

A new NASA video showcases the whirring symphony of stars in our cosmic
neighborhood.

Although it usually hunts for alien worlds, or exoplanets in the nearby universe, one NASA mission is also capable of measuring the vibrations produced by behemoth celestial bodies known as red giant stars.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, which launched in April 2018, is designed to find exoplanets. The technique it uses to find these worlds is called the transit method, and it involves surveying nearby stars and waiting to see if their brightness dips at all. These dips are caused by a planetary body passing in front of the star's face, from our perspective in space.



An illustration of red giant stars. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KBRwyle))

Because TESS is already poised to observe changes in stars caused by orbiting exoplanets, it was also capable of detecting the oscillations in the bodies of red giants.

"Our initial result, using stellar measurements across TESS's first two years, shows that we can determine the masses and sizes of these oscillating giants with precision that will only improve as TESS goes on," said Marc Hon, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, who presented the new research this week during the second TESS Science Conference. Hon commented in an Aug. 4 NASA statement about the new work.

More:
https://www.space.com/red-giant-sound-waves-celestial-symphony

August 9, 2021

US-Cuban Relations: How It All Got Started

by Ted Snider Posted onAugust 09, 2021

Although Fidel Castro would eventually become a Soviet allied communist, and although the US ultimatum to Cuba would eventually take the form of the often repeated mantra that there were only two non-negotiable demands, that Cuba cut ties with the Soviet Union, and that they stop supporting leftist movements in the hemisphere, that’s not how it started. The "virus" that could "spread contagion" was not communism.

Castro Was Not a Communist

In the beginning of the Cuban revolution, as Noam Chomsky has said, the US obsession with Castro was not a fear of communism. CIA expert John Prados says that it is important to note that in 1959 – when the US had already decided that Castro was incompatible with US goals – "Fidel Castro had not become a communist." Chomsky says that US plans for regime change in Cuba "were drawn up and implemented before there was any significant Russian connection." "When Fidel Castro’s guerilla forces overthrew the Batista dictatorship in January 1959," Vincent Bevins says in The Jakarta Method, "his movement was neither openly communist nor aligned with the Soviet Union." And so it stayed for an important period of time. "Castro showed no special affinity for the Soviet Union during his first years in office," according to William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh in Back Channel to Cuba.

That was also the view of the State Department. In an April 1959 assessment, the State Department reported that "With regard to his position on communism and the cold war struggle, Castro cautiously indicated that Cuba would remain in the western camp."

When the US literally set its sights on Castro, it was not because he was a Soviet satellite in the western hemisphere because he was not. It was also not because he was a communist in America’s backyard. LeoGrande and Kornbluh say that "U.S. officials suspected that Castro was dangerously radical even if he was not a communist." The US ambassador to Cuba, Philip W. Bonsal, categorized Castro’s policies as "reformist, nationalistic, and somewhat socialistic and neutralist." The CIA agreed. Prados reports that in November 1959, the CIA told the senate judiciary subcommittee that "Neither the Cuban communists nor the CIA consider Castro a communist."

The CIA would go even further in its assessment. At the first actual CIA meeting with Castro, the CIA’s Gerry Droller, who operated under the pseudonym Frank Bender, expressed concern about the Cuban Communist Party. Castro assured him that the communists were a minority and that he could handle them. LeoGrande and Kornbluh report that after a three hour conversation, Droller reported that "Castro is not only not a communist, but he is a strong anti-communist fighter."

More:
https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2021/08/08/us-cuban-relations-how-it-all-got-started/

August 9, 2021

The Maya's ingenious secret to survival

Mayan ruins at Tikal National Park, Guatemala

By Alex Fox
9th August 2021

Tikal was the economic and ceremonial hub of the Maya civilisation. But its stone palaces and temples would never have been constructed without mastery over one vital substance.


Standing in the ancient Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala, visitors are surrounded by steep limestone pyramids nearly as tall as Notre Dame cathedral while the calls of howler monkeys and toucans emanate from the site's rainforest backdrop. Constructed without the aid of beasts of burden, metal tools or the wheel, these grandiose stoneworks served as the seats of power for the kings and priests who ruled over what was one of the most influential city states in the Maya realm, which spanned Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize as well as portions of Honduras and El Salvador.

Tikal was an economic and ceremonial hub of a civilisation that, in light of recent laser-based aerial surveys that revealed more than 60,000 structures hidden for centuries by thick jungle, may have once encompassed as many as 10 to 15 million people in total.

In the presence of Tikal's massive stone palaces and temples, each one oriented to attend to the sun's daily transit across the sky, the Maya's prowess as architects and astronomers looms large. But the Maya never would have accurately predicted eclipses and these monuments never would have risen up towards the sky without the mastery of something much more elemental to Mayan survival at Tikal: water.

With no rivers or lakes nearby, the Maya had to create a network of huge reservoirs at Tikal to collect and store enough rainwater during the region's prodigious wet season to last its sizable population – estimates range from 40,000 to as many as 240,000 people at the city's 8th Century peak – through the four- to six-month dry season. These reservoirs facilitated more than 1,000 years of Mayan presence at Tikal, from roughly 600 BC until the site's urban core was finally abandoned by the ruling class around 900 AD.

Last year, archaeologists using modern scientific techniques revealed a new depth to the Maya's hydrological feats. Sediment cores taken from Tikal's reservoirs show that the Maya created the oldest known water filtration system in the western hemisphere.



More:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210808-the-mayas-ingenious-secret-to-survival

Also posted in Anthropology:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/12297292

August 9, 2021

Excessive Corporate Power Is a Root Cause Of Migration

Excessive Corporate Power Is a Root Cause Of Migration Under U.S. Trade agreements, corporations are suing developing country governments for sums that far outstrip the value of humanitarian aid.

August 8, 2021

By Manuel Pérez-Rocha

During U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent visit to Guatemala, where she urged Central Americans “not to come” to her country, she also emphasized that the migration problem must be attacked at its “root causes,” which have become a central theme of the Biden administration’s approach to the region.


While it is key to address the structural causes that lead thousands of people to flee their countries of origin, the concept has been co-opted to conceal U.S. responsibility for the economic and social crisis faced by the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras).

My colleague Jen Moore has co-authored a detailed article about the KCA v Guatemala case. Basically, KCA argues that the Guatemalan government failed to protect its mine from a peaceful protest outside their site by frontline communities. Activists are protesting the contamination of their scarce water resources as a result of mining activities. Central American countries are facing many similar multimillion-dollar lawsuits and face a constant threat of more under the Central America-DR trade agreement with the United States.

In past articles, I have documented how three mining companies have sued Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement for a staggering $4.54 billion, all while destroying livelihoods across Mesoamerica and causing the violent expulsion of rural and indigenous communities.

More:
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/excessive-corporate-power-is-a-root-cause-of-migration/