Beware the New Normal

In the US, a wealthy, powerful and privileged plutocracy has defined a new normal that fails normal people, according to an article by Anand Giridharadas in TIME magazine (December 2-9, 2019), His observations apply equally to the elite hyperwealthy who govern in many countries throughout the world. Those who Giridharadas calls plutes know how to mask their influence by using the following tactics real normal people need to recognize and reject.

They:

• Emphasize job creation, when they expect tax breaks where they locate a new business, contribute to climate change, or disregard environmental and worker safety laws. 
• Benefit from ongoing corruption involved in constructing a sports arena that provides a day of entertainment for fans.
• Offset massive returns from investments of questionable social value, such as production of sugary soda drinks, by making some do-good investments and philanthropic contributions.
• Learn to describe their fear of losing wealth to taxes as harmful to those who benefit from their philanthropy and research to develop new products and drugs.
• Win elections by posing as the ones who are providing the food supplied by humanitarian organizations.
• Prefer paying fines, even major ones, to making actual reforms of harmful and unfair practices.
• Hire public relations' experts to brand harmful and unfair practices with deceptive labels and descriptions that sound like public services.
• Blame poverty on the victims of government policies or people who just don't like to work.

Whatever a person's religion or lack of religion, the Christmas season offers a reminder that it takes a god to be a savior. The world is too complicated for a wealthy individual to govern alone; it takes an administration. Fair elections enable lucky voters to choose between a one-person administration dedicated to maintaining a wealthy elite or an administration with a president, cabinet, congress, and courts devoted to the rule of law and institutions that serve the public interest.

The Congo Needs A Dec. 23 Miracle

Instead of a miracle, a suspicious fire destroyed voting materials and moved the December 23 election of a new president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to December 30. Provisional results of the delayed election showed the  surprise victory by Felix Tshisekedi, son of a deceased opposition leader popular in Kinshasa. Nonetheless, controversy surrounds his victory over Martin Fayulu, who was seen as a greater threat to former president Joseph Kabila's history of corruption and disregard for the rule of law. An NGO that fielded 40,000 election observers said their results showed former oil executive, Fayulu, had won, just as a pre-election survey also predicted. 

     Russia quickly recognized Tshisekedi as the Congo's new president while Martin Fayulu rejected the final election results as a deal engineered between Tshisekedi and Kabila. Many feared protests and violent repression would  frustrate the hoped for calm transition.

     The former Belgian Congo, nearly three times the size of Nigeria, has almost one million fewer people. On the surface, the 105,000 electronic voting tablets ordered from South Korea for 84,000 polling places created the appearance of a modern election process for the country's 40 million eligible voters. Concern that the tablets could be hacked prevented them from being hooked up for fast transmission of election results. Also, there was concern that the population, especially spread out beyond the Kinshasa capital, had little experience with technology, and unpaved roads and remote areas, only accessible by boats, motorbikes, or helicopters, prevented easy access to voting places.

     Voters also have to contend with 100 rebel groups that terrorize the country. From Beni south to Butembo on the eastern border with Uganda, for example, the machete wielding Allied Democratic Forces and Mai Mai militia, who prevent health workers from vaccinating people threatened by the spreading Ebola virus, are not likely to facilitate passage for voters. At the polls, voting also may be prevented by the lack of electricity and charged batteries needed to power voting tablets.

     Nothing about the Congo's history suggests a new president offers King Leopold II's former private colony relief from nearly 150 years of suffering that began with harvesting rubber under slavery conditions. Only a year into independence, its first president, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered in 1961. Next, General Joseph Mobutu changed the country's name to Zaire and used the Congo's uranium to become a Cold War player who amassed a private fortune with funds from East and West.

     With the flight of Tutsis escaping genocide by Hutus in neighboring Rwanda, fighting began spilling over into Zaire in 1994. Mobutu's opponent, General Laurent Kabila, seized the opportunity to recruit Tutsis and to lead rebels west toward Kinshasa. Mobutu fled into exile in 1997. Kabila seized control of the country, again named the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and ruled as a dictator until a bodyguard assassinated him in 2001.

     Kabila's son, Joseph, took over the troubled country. In 2006, a new constitution limited a president's time in office to two, 5-year terms, and the UN oversaw a presidential election. In a runoff, Joseph Kabila, head of the People's Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (PPRD), defeated a former Congolese vice president and rebel leader, Jean-Pierre Bemba. Benba was arrested for war crimes committed by his troops during fighting after the election. Kabila failed to step down as president when his term ended in 2016.

     When the December 23, 2018 date finally was set for a new presidential election, Kabila's PPRD selected as its candidate, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, a former interior minister and the party's permanent secretary. Shadary, who has no powerful military or other political base of his own, was viewed as Kabila's puppet. In June, 2018, Bemba's war crimes conviction was overturned. He returned to a hero's welcome in August only to be barred from running for president due to a second charge. Another potential presidential challenger, Moise Katumbi, the wealthy former governor of Katanga's southern cobalt and copper mining province, was sentenced for property fraud and also barred from running for election and from returning to the Congo from Belgium.

     Joseph Kabila is adept at eliminating his opposition. When the Catholic Church, which counts at least 40% of the Congo's population as members, began holding parades in support of December's election, police killed 18 marchers. Gaining popularity for any reason is a danger. After the Congo's Dr. Denis Mukwege won a Nobel peace prize in 2018, he narrowly escaped assassination.

     Observers, both inside and outside the Congo, suspected Kabila was counting on votes split among the weak slate of presidential candidates, the potential for polling machine irregularities, and protests by Bemba, Katumbi, and others to cause violence that would invalidate the election and leave him as president. The people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo deserve a better Christmas present: a president devoted to bringing them lasting peace and prosperity.

   

   

     

   

World Goes to the Polls in Brazil

At the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, a reporter went up into the hills to interview young boys flying kites. A translator conveyed the false notion that people living in the crowded makeshift homes above Rio preferred their friendly communities to the lonely confines of the modern homes in the city below. Those flying the kites told a different story. They saw the kites as a symbol of their dreams to escape.

     By a margin of 55% to 45%, Jair Bolsonaro was elected Brazil's new President on October 28, 2018. His concern for money laundering, financing of terrorist groups, and other suspicious transactions in Brazil led to granting more power to the country's Financial Activities Control Council (COAF). Promoted as a way to speed investigations and integrate the functions of various government agencies, others view this bureaucratic reorganization as a threat to traditional guarantees of bank and financial secrecy.

     Brazil's most popular politician was not running in the first round of voting for president on Sunday, October 7, 2018. An independent judiciary found Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president from 2003 to 2010, guilty of corruption and sentenced him to prison. Like others in Brazil's political elite, Lula, as he is known, was charged with taking bribes from construction companies looking for contracts from Brazil's state-controlled Petrobras oil company. Since the Odebrecht construction company was not satisfied only to bribe itself into Brazil's political process, the world has an opportunity to prosecute its corrupt tentacles in at least ten Latin American countries, the United States, and Switzerland. (See the latest news about Odebrecht's bribery case in Colombia in the post, "Cut Off the Head and the Colombia Snake Dies?") In the United States, Petrobras itself, which trades in the US market, was fined $853 million for corruption under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

       Fernando Haddad, the former Sao Paulo mayor with degrees in economics, law, and philosophy, represented Lula's Workers Party (PT) in the first round voting of the presidential election. The PT, which once brought prosperity to Brazil under Lula from 2003 ti 2011, gave way to the mismanaged economy, recession, and bribery of his successors: Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached for hiding the country's budget deficit, and Michel Temer, who fought a charge of corruption . Haddad is tainted with his association to PT's past sins and a suspected willingness to end an investigation into corruption.

      The Brazilian rainforest, considered the world's lungs for its ability to absorb carbon dioxide and combat rising temperatures, drought, and fires, is endangered by Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who belonged to nine different political parties during his 28-year congressional career. As expected, Bolsonaro and Haddad met again in the second round of voting. In the first round,  Bolsonaro nearly won half the vote needed to avoid a runoff

     Bolsonaro is the hero of Brazil's soybean farmers and cattle ranchers, because he would withdraw Brazil from the Paris Climate Accord and open the way to finance unlimited deforestation of the rainforest. With his running mate, General Hamilton Mourao, he shares an authoritarian approach to reversing the effects of Brazil's lingering 2014 recession: unemployment, reduced personal income, and a lack of education, health, and other government services. It also should be noted, Brazil's National Museum of historic treasures, housed in a once beautiful Portuguese palace, burned down on September 2, 2018, despite warnings about a lack of maintenance. Mourao claims the army has the ability to solve Brazil's problems, including drug-related violence, the way Brazil's military dictatorship did from 1964 to 1985.

     Bolsonaro's supporters like his outspoken attacks on indigenous rainforest communities, women, blacks, and homosexuals. During the first round of voting, Bolsonaro was in the hospital while recovering from being stabbed in the stomach at a campaign event. He claims to be Brazil's President Trump, when one is more than enough for the world.

     Brazil, once one of the promising emerging markets known collectively as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), has fallen on hard times, but the country is too important for the world to ignore. There will be as many as 30 different political parties in Brazil's new congress. The Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) that dominates congressional coalitions has to deal with members used to receiving pay-offs in jobs, funds for pet projects, and graft in return for passing necessary reforms.

     The world's multinational corporations are in a position to exploit Brazil's political, economic, and social woes or to dream up win-win solutions for their stockholders and the country's kite flyers.

     Local farmers complain that the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) that developed maize, soybeans, eucalyptus trees, and zebu cattle to thrive in the tropical heat and acidic soils on the savanna that covers 5% of Brazil's farmland no longer helps them. Biotechnology, now in the hands of Bayer, which just acquired Monsanto, and Syngenta, a Swiss pesticide producer, serves their agribusiness interests. Meanwhile, Munduruku tribe members, who formed the COOPAVAM cooperative, watch farms press toward the patch of forest where they harvest the wild Brazil nuts they press into oil for eco-friendly Natura cosmetics and school lunch food. At the very least, multinationals could abide by government regulations requiring only 20% of forest areas should be cleared for farming.

     Boeing is in a position to honor or undercut the interests of Brazil's Embraer aircraft company employees and its metalworkers union. Young engineers are used to moving from projects on commercial aircraft to executive jets to defense projects. Since Boeing is only interested in acquiring the company's short-range, 70- to 130-seat commercial jet business in order to compete with Canada's Bombardier, Inc. and Airbus, excess employees rightly fear they would lose their jobs. Couldn't Boeing's worldwide operations offer them employment elsewhere?

     All in all, Brazil's presidential election is a world, not just a national, event worth watching.