[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Italy’s former interior minister Matteo Salvini took to the streets on Monday in an ethnonational protest against the new coalition government’s moves to undo his signature hardline policies.
Last week the 21 members of the new cabinet signalled a softer approach to immigration at their first meeting.
One of their first moves was to challenge anti-migrant measures introduced in the northeastern region of Friuli Veneto Giulia, a stronghold of Mr Salvini’s [...] League Party, branding them “discriminatory”.
Mr Salvini last month sank the coalition government between the League and [...] Five Star Movement (5SM). His plan to return as prime minister via an early election was foiled by the 5SM agreeing to join a new coalition with the centre-left Democratic Party (PD).
“Challenged by the new government,” Mr Salvini tweeted in response. “It does not harm Salvini, but the citizens.”
Mr Salvini used his role in the previous government to promote his party’s aggressive stance against the European Union and wage war on charity vessels saving migrants in the Mediterranean.
The new interior minister, Luciana Lamorgese, an unaligned technocrat, has the delicate task of adapting Mr Salvini’s handiwork without scrapping the policies that have made him the country’s most popular politician - with support still running above 30 percent.
Ms Lamorgese is a 65-year-old civil servant who has served interior ministers from the left and the right in the past. Unlike her predecessor, she does not use social media and few are sure of what to expect.
“We could see the partial removal of the previous government’s security decrees that allowed for the seizure of migrant ships and arrest of NGOs,” Lorenzo Castellani, political science professor at Rome’s Luiss University, told the Telegraph.
“The new government is trying a softer approach but the electorate has not changed its mind on immigration,” he said.
The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, welcomed the new government last week but some Brussels diplomats expressed their reservations.
“To be honest we are not sure it will make a difference,” said one EU diplomat. The moment she (the minister) lets a migrant ship dock she will be slaughtered by Mr Salvini.”
Mr Salvini has told his supporters to keep their heads up. He is focusing on regional elections in October that will give voters their first chance to say what they think of the political winds of change.
Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman nterviewed on Fox Business Network, 27 Apr 2018. Photo: Richard Drew/AP
TWO BRAZILIAN FIRMS owned by a top donor to President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are significantly responsible for the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest, carnage that has developed into raging fires that have captivated global attention.
The companies have wrested control of land, deforested it, and helped build a controversial highway to their new terminal in the one-time jungle, all to facilitate the cultivation and export of grain and soybeans. The shipping terminal at Miritituba, deep in the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Pará, allows growers to load soybeans on barges, which will then sail to a larger port before the cargo is shipped around the world.
The Amazon terminal is run by Hidrovias do Brasil, a company that is owned in large part by Blackstone, a major U.S. investment firm. Another Blackstone company, Pátria Investimentos, owns more than 50 percent of Hidrovias, while Blackstone itself directly owns an additional roughly 10 percent stake. Blackstone co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman is a close ally of Trump and has donated millions of dollars to McConnell in recent years.
“Blackstone is committed to responsible environmental stewardship,” the company said in a statement. “This focus and dedication is embedded in every investment decision we make and guides how we conduct ourselves as operators. In this instance, while we do not have operating control, we know the company has made a significant reduction in overall carbon emissions through lower congestion and allowed the more efficient flow of agricultural goods by Brazilian farmers.”
Map: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
The port and the highway have been deeply controversial in Brazil, and were subjects of a 2016 investigation by The Intercept Brasil. Hidrovias announced in early 2016 that it would soon begin exporting soybeans trucked from the state of Mato Grosso along the B.R.-163 highway. The road was largely unpaved at the time, but the company said it planned to continue improving and developing it. In the spring of 2019, the government of Jair Bolsonaro, elected in fall 2018, announced that Hidrovias would partner in the privatization and development of hundreds of miles of the B.R.-163. Developing the roadway itself causes deforestation, but, more importantly, it helps make possible the broader transformation of the Amazon from jungle to farmland.
The roadway, B.R. 163, has had a marked effect on deforestation. After the devastation that began under the military dictatorship and accelerated through the 1970s and ’80s, the rate of deforestation slowed, as a coalition of Indigenous communities and other advocates of sustaining the forest fought back against the encroachment. The progress began turning back in 2014, as political tides shifted right and global commodity prices climbed. Deforestation began to truly spike again after the soft coup that ousted President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party in 2016. The right-wing government that seized power named soy mogul Blairo Maggi, a former governor of Mato Grosso, as minister of agriculture.
Yet even as deforestation had been slowing prior to the coup, the area around the highway was being destroyed. “Every year between 2004 and 2013 — except 2005 — while deforestation in Amazonia as a whole fell, it increased in the region around the B.R.-163,” the Financial Times reported in September 2017. That sparked pushback from Indigenous defenders of the Amazon. In March, Hidrovias admitted that its business had been slowed by increasing blockades on B.R. 163, as people put their bodies in front of the destruction. Still, the company is pushing forward. Hidrovios recently said that, thanks to heavy investment, it planned to double its grain shipping capacity to 13 million tons.
amazon-destruction-map-1-01-1566850165Map: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
The Amazon, where a record number of fires have been raging, is the world’s largest rainforest. It absorbs a significant amount of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to the climate crisis. The Amazon is so dense in vegetation that it produces something like a fifth of the world’s oxygen supply. The moisture that evaporates from the Amazon is important form farmlands not just in South America, but also in the U.S. Midwest, where it falls to the earth as rain. Protection of the Amazon, 60 percent of which is in Brazil, is crucial to the continued existence of civilization as we know it.
During a recent speech, Hungary’s nationalist-populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attacked the idea that replacement migration should be used to solve the demographic problems that many Western countries face.
Orbán’s speech was delivered at Budapest’s 3rd Demographic Summit that was held on the 5th and 6th of this month. During the speech, Orbán emphasized that the most important problem currently facing Europe is its population decline, Hungary’s 888 online newspaper reports.
“Why is this the case? It’s most certainly not because of some sickness of Christian civilization – after all, the number of Christians are rising all around the world. This is a sickness of Europe in general,” Orbán said.
For the Hungarian Prime Minister, immigration must never be regarded as a solution to demographic problems.
“We must never accept population exchange,” Orbán declared.
Orbán also noted that his government was currently working towards a strong policy which prioritizes the family and incentivizes having children.
Without families and children, the national community will disappear, he explained, “and if a nation disappears, something irreplaceable will disappear from the world,” reports Hungary Today.
According to Orbán, the future of a nation and people can only be secured if the nation’s families are guaranteed better financial opportunities to have children as opposed to not having children
“We win only if we can build a system where those who bear children live significantly better than if they hadn’t started a family,” Orbán continued.
This is the way by which the Hungarian government is pursuing its pro-family policy.
Orbán also criticized the “meaningless” so-called green argument that Europeans should stop having kids to save the earth, saying that this kind of talk should be completely dismissed.
“I just want to give you a sense for what liberalism is. The United States is a thoroughly liberal country. It is a liberal democracy. Both Republicans, who we sometimes refer to as conservatives, are liberals and Democrats are liberals. I’m using the term liberal in the John Lockean sense of the term.
The Unites States was born as a liberal democracy. The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, these are thoroughly liberal documents.”
We are a liberal people, okay? But what exactly does that mean? It’s very important that you understand it, because you have to understand what liberalism is to understand liberal hegemony and what went wrong. Then, it’s very important to understand what nationalism is.
John’s argument is very simple here.
Nationalism is the most powerful ideology on the planet.
And in a contest between liberalism and nationalism, nationalism wins every time.
And what I want to do is explain to you what liberalism is, what nationalism is, and why nationalism defeats liberalism. Then what I want to do is talk about what liberal hegemony is. What does it mean to say that The Unites States is interested in remaking the world in its own image? So, I’ll describe that. Then I want to talk about why we pursued liberal hegemony.
...of course I tipped you off by telling you that The United States is a thoroughly liberal country, but there’s more to the story.
Then I want to tell you what our track record is. I want to describe our failures ...in the Middle-East, with regard to NATO expansion, and Russia, and with regard to engagement in China. Lets talk about the evidence that we goofed.
Then I want to talk about why liberal hegemony fails, and this, again, is basically as story about nationalism and realism trumping liberalism. And then I want to make the case for restraint, what I think is a wise foreign policy, okay?
Let me start with what is liberalism…
There are two bedrock assumptions that underpin liberalism:
One is, that it is individualistic at its core.
And number two is that there are real limits to what we can do with our critical faculties.
...to reach agreements about first principles or questions about the good life.
And what exactly am I saying?
You have to decide, when you think about politics, whether you think human beings are first and foremost individuals who form social contracts or if you think that human beings are fundamentally social animals, who carve-out room for their individualism.
Right? This is very very important to think about alright?
Liberalism is all about individualism. Liberal theorists are known as social contract theorists because they believe that individuals come together and form social contracts, so the focus is on the individual.
The assumption underpinning liberalism is not that human beings are social animals from the get-go.
That’s the first point.
The second point is that liberalism assumes that we cannot use our critical faculties - we cannot use reason to come up with truth about first principles (think about issues like abortion, affirmative action - you cannot get universal agreement on those issues, right?). And I’ll talk about this more as we go along.
But the roots of liberalism are traced-back, in my opinion, to the liberal wars of Britain between Catholics and Protestants. And the fact is that you cannot use your critical faculties to determine whether Catholicism is a superior religion to Protestantism or vice a versa, or whether atheism is superior to both of them ..or Judaism or Islam is superior to Catholicism and Protestantism, Who knows? Right? You just can’t reach agreement. You just can’t reach agreement. There are real limits to what we can do with our critical faculties, okay?
So these are the two bedrock assumptions: One, you focus on the individual, and number two, you accept the fact that you can’t reach universal agreement.
Now, central question - how should politics be arranged to deal with this potential for violence?
And you say to yourself, what does he mean, potential for violence?
The fact is that Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in huge numbers, not only in Britain, but all over Europe. People today, Shias and Sunnis, kill each other, because they can’t agree on whether Shi ism or Sunnism is the correct interpretation of Islam ..or communists versus liberals, people can’t agree on first principles. And when they can’t agree on first principles, if they feel really strongly about them, there is potential for violence.
So, when you have all these individuals running around, who, don’t agree, they may agree in some cases but don’t universally agree, there’s tremendous potential for violence.
So, liberalism is basically an ideology that’s based on conflict, and the question is, how do you solve that conflict?
There’s a three part solution:
And this should be dear to all of your hearts.
The first is, you focus on individual rights. Remember, the importance of the individual. You know The Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” - those are natural rights, those are inalienable rights.
This means that every person on the planet has a particular set of rights, sometimes defined as freedoms. This is to say, you, if you want to be a Protestant, have the right to practice that religion, and if I want to be a Catholic, I have the freedom, I have the right to be a Catholic.
The name of the game is to recognize that everybody has these freedoms to choose. This makes perfect sense when you think about Catholics killing Protestants, right? Or Jews killing Muslims or whatever group you want, atheists killing believers, communists killing whatever, right?
The point is, you want to focus on the individual and let the individual choose for him or herself what kind of life they want to lead. You want to let them lead, as much as possible, their version of the good life. And, very important, every person on the planet has that right, and let me get ahead of myself here, just put this seed in your brain.
If you focus on individualism and inalienable rights, you go almost automatically from an individualistic ideology to a universalistic ideology, right? Because again, you’re focusing on the individual, you’re saying every individual has a set of rights, every individual on the planet. And that individualistic ideology becomes a universalistic ideology. But we’re talking about the individual here.
The second is, you purvey the norm of tolerance. We talk about tolerance all the time. Universities are really big on tolerance. We’re supposed to tolerate opinions that we don’t like. You bring in speakers, or you allow speakers to come in who say things that you find reprehensible, right? Tolerance really matters.
But the fact is that tolerance only takes you so far. because you’re dealing with people who sometimes are so committed to their beliefs. Somebody who believes that abortion is murder is willing to murder a doctor who practices abortion, alright?
So, you need a state, that’s the third element of the equation.
You need a state that’s effectively a night watchman. That makes sure that those people over there who want to live as Protestants don’t attack those people who want to live as Catholics and vice versa.
This is the liberal solution.
This is what America is all about.
Individualism - we talk about it all the time. We talk about rights, everybody has rights. My kids, over the years, have always reminded me when I tell them that they have to do X, Y and Z that they have rights and I cannot interfere with their rights, right? It’s the way we’re educated from the get go and of course, we’re a remarkably tolerant people as societies go. Not completely, but that’s, of course, why we have a state, right?
You’ve got to have a police force, you’ve got to have a system of courts, right?
So, that’s what liberalism is all about, right? Liberalism focuses on the individual, purveys the norm of tolerance and accepts the fact that you need a nightwatchman state.
Now, let’s talk about nationalism. Different animal…
Nationalism is based on the assumption that human beings are social animals.
We are born and heavily socialized into tribes.
We are not born in the state of nature.
We are not individuals, born and left alone in the woods.
We are born into groups. We are very tribal.
So, you see in terms of starting assumptions, or bedrock assumptions, what underpins nationalism, what underpins liberalism, very very different.
And individualism takes a back seat to group loyalty, right?
Somebody around the world kills an American, ISIS kills an American, it’s fundamentally different than killing a Saudi, or killing a Brit, because you’re killing one of us. This is the tribe, right? You’re an American. Americans look out for other Americans.
We are social animals from the get-go.
And aside from the family, the most important group, remember I said that you are born into and heavily socialized into particular groups ...tutting aside the family, the most important group in today’s world, is the nation (I’ll say more about that in a second).
What’s nationalism?
Here’s my simple definition:
It’s a set of political beliefs which holds that a nation, a nation, a body of individuals with characteristics that purportedly distinguish them from other groups, should have their own state. Think of the word nation-state.
Nation-state. Nation-state embodies what nationalism is all about. It says the world is divided up into all these tribes called nations and each each one of them wants its own state.
If you think about the world today, just look at a map of the world today, it is completely covered with nation-states. Nothing but nation-states.
If you went back to 1450 and looked at a map of Europe, there isn’t even a single state on that map. Over time, the growth of the state, and then the growth of the nation-state, you move to a world that is filled with nothing but nation-states. Look at the Palestinians and Israelis. The Jews who believe in Zionism, what is Zionism all about? It’s all about having your own Jewish state. Theodore Herzel, who is the father of Zionism, his most famous book is called, The Jewish State, Jewish nation-state.
What do the Palestinians want? Two state solution? Palestinians want their own state. Palestinians as a nation, want their own state.
The planet is filled with nations, many of which have their own state, almost all of which want their own state, nation-state, right?
That’s what nationalism is all about.
Take it a step further. Nations place a enormous importance on sovereignty, or self-determination, which is why they want their own state.
The Palestinians don’t want the Israelis deciding what their politics should look like. Palestinians want their own state. Jews want their own state.
Germans want their own state.
Americans want their own state.
..because they believe in sovereignty.
[...]
Liberal hegemony is based on intolerance. It says that everybody has to be liberal…
[...]
Mearsheimer argues against trying to impose liberal democracy, as it is necessarily a failed foreign policy against staunch nationalism, but he defends “liberal democracy” as a good way of life for The US.
However, he does not observe that The U.S. has failed democratic principle in important ways - notably in the open border/ opening of group boundaries policies in exploit of the “civic nationalist” concept that his YKW people have perpetrated through power niches in cahoots with liberals/right wingers to overturn democratic will (for closed borders) ..open borders and boundaries, weakening The United States nationhood and putting The U.S. effectively, on a trajectory of non-nationhood.
Note Mearsheimer’s use of the pejorative word “purportedly” when discussing nationalist claims to distinguish their people in ways (e.g., important biological differences) requiring a nation-state to protect their differences; i.e., that they are only “purportedly” different from other people in significant ways which require national boundaries/borders to protect them.
Nevertheless, in places, Mearsheimer makes the point, quite eloquently, that people are social, very profoundly social, from the start; thus making nationalism as it protects their sociality something they care about more deeply than liberal democracy. They will defend more ardently the security, social order and stability that provides for general fairness and just recourse against the secondary priorities, bullying ‘prerogatives’ of individual liberal choice over the security of group interests. Noting our deep social nature (including Europeans) from the start is correct, and is the point of correction that Whites need to understand and prioritize as opposed to right wing reaction (itself a species of liberalism) reaction to Jewish didacticism.
We are again reaching the point in the business cycle known as “peak debt,” when debts have compounded to the point that their cumulative total cannot be paid. Student debt, credit card debt, auto loans, business debt and sovereign debt are all higher than they have ever been. As economist Michael Hudson writes in his provocative 2018 book, “…and forgive them their debts,” debts that can’t be paid won’t be paid. The question, he says, is how they won’t be paid.
Mainstream economic models leave this problem to “the invisible hand of the market,” assuming trends will self-correct over time. But while the market may indeed correct, it does so at the expense of the debtors, who become progressively poorer as the rich become richer. Borrowers go bankrupt and banks foreclose on the collateral, dispossessing the debtors of their homes and their livelihoods. The houses are bought by the rich at distress prices and are rented back at inflated prices to the debtors, who are then forced into wage peonage to survive. When the banks themselves go bankrupt, the government bails them out. Thus the market corrects, but not without government intervention. That intervention just comes at the end of the cycle to rescue the creditors, whose ability to buy politicians gives them the upper hand. According to free-market apologists, this is a natural cycle akin to the weather, which dates all the way back to the birth of modern economics in ancient Greece and Rome.
Hudson counters that those classical societies are not actually where our financial system began, and that capitalism did not evolve from bartering, as its ideologues assert. Rather, it devolved from a more functional, sophisticated, egalitarian credit system that was sustained for two millennia in ancient Mesopotamia (now parts of Iraq, Turkey, Kuwait and Iran). Money, banking, accounting and modern business enterprise originated not with gold and private trade, but in the public sector of Sumer’s palaces and temples in the third century B.C. Because it involved credit issued by the local government rather than private loans of gold, bad debts could be periodically forgiven rather than compounding until they took the whole system down, a critical feature that allowed for its remarkable longevity.
The True Roots of Money and Banking
Sumer was the first civilization for which we have written records. Its notable achievements included the wheel, the lunar calendar, our numerical system, law codes, an organized hierarchy of priest-kings, copper tools and weapons, irrigation, accounting and money. It also produced the first written language, which took the form of cuneiform figures impressed on clay. These tablets were largely just accounting tools, recording the flow of food and raw materials in the temple and palace workshops, as well as IOUs (mainly to these large public institutions) that had to be preserved in writing to be enforced. This temple accounting system allowed for the coordinated flow of credit to peasant farmers from planting to harvesting, and for advances to merchants to engage in foreign trade.
In fact, it was the need to manage accounts for a large labor force under bureaucratic control that is thought to have led to the development of writing. The people willingly accepted this bureaucratic control because they viewed the gods as having decreed it. According to their cuneiform writings, humans were genetically engineered to work the fields and the mines after certain lower gods tasked with that hard labor rebelled.
Usury, or the charging of interest on loans, was an accepted part of the Mesopotamian credit system. Interest rates were high and remained unchanged for two millennia. But Mesopotamian scholars were well aware of the problem of “debts that can’t be paid.” Unlike in today’s academic economic curriculum, Hudson writes:
Babylonian scribal students were trained already c. 2000 BC in the mathematics of compound interest. Their school exercises asked them to calculate how long it took a debt at interest of 1/60th per month to double. The answer is 60 months: five years. How long to quadruple? 10 years. How long to multiply 64 times? 30 years. It must’ve been obvious that no economy can grow in keeping with this rate of increase.
Sumerian kings solved the problem of “peak debt” by periodically declaring “clean slates,” in which agrarian debts were forgiven and debtors were released from servitude to work as tenants on their own plots of land. The land belonged to the gods under the stewardship of the temple and the palace and could not be sold, but farmers and their families maintained leaseholds to it in perpetuity by providing a share of their crops, service in the military and labor in building communal infrastructure. In this way, their homes and livelihoods were preserved, an arrangement that was mutually beneficial, since the kings needed their service.
Jewish scribes, who spent time in captivity in Babylon in the sixth century B.C, adapted these laws in the year or jubilee, which Hudson argues was added to Leviticus after the Babylonian captivity. According to Leviticus 25:8-13, a Jubilee Year was to be declared every 49 years, during which debts would be forgiven, slaves and prisoners freed and their property leaseholds restored. As in ancient Mesopotamia, property ownership remained with Yahweh and his earthly proxies. The Jubilee law effectively banned the outright sale of land, which could only be leased for up to 50 years (Leviticus 25:14-17). The Levitican Jubilee represented an advance over the Mesopotamian “clean slates,” Hudson says, in that it was codified into law rather than relying on the whim of the king. But its proclaimers lacked political power, and whether the law was ever enforced is unclear. It served as a moral rather than a legal prescription.
Ancient Greece and Rome adopted the Mesopotamian system of lending at interest, but without the safety valve of periodic “clean slates,” since the creditors were no longer the king or the temple, but private lenders. Unfettered usury resulted in debt bondage and forfeiture of properties, consolidation into large landholdings, a growing wedge between rich and poor, and the ultimate destruction of the Roman Empire.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 29 August 2019 05:04.
When this tweet speaks of “the socialist party” it is speaking of a party that would not delimit social accountability to native interests first and foremost.
The sane management of pervasive ecology has been dealt yet another serious blow as a central element, the management of human ecology through the accountability that ethnonationalism provides, has been pushed aside - at least temporarily - by liberal internationalist interests.
Matteo Salvini’s crucially necessary nativist, ethnonationalist anti-immigration platform has been sidelined by a coalition of the 5-Star Party, which is in cahoots with foreign interests and the corporate internationalist sell-out, Giuseppe Conte, reinstalling him as Prime Minister; allowing him to continue his border liberalization policies which are destroying Italy, Italians and European peoples broadly.
Italy’s corrupt Five-Star Movement announced Wednesday that it had made a deal with the Liberal Party to form a coalition government — keeping Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte in place while avoiding elections and ousting the ethnonationalist League led by Matteo Salvini.
Conte’s position was strengthened this week when President Trump, who pretends to share a similar vision on immigration to Salvini, tweeted his support of Conte – calling him a “very talented man who will hopefully remain Prime Minister!”
Showing his true colors form the start, Trump shunned a meeting with Salvini, who was prepared to endorse him as Trump campaigned for the Presidency.
While Salvini was able to gain popular support by broadening his party’s platform from Lega Nord, to one that represents all of Italy, he sought to gain elite support along with the 5-Stars and Conte’s party by joining the ass-kissing of the Kremlin, the Knesset and the Trumpstein agenda.
Salvini might have added Trumpstein, Putin and Netanyahu to the list of people not to trust with native European interests.
And with friends like that, highly practiced in the art of treachery, the message is: lay down with dogs and wake up with fleas.
Rather, wake up sidelined by the truly corrupt - corrupt enough to push aside your crucially necessary anti-immigration, nativist position and sell out your people and their ancient birthright.
Dr. Jörg D. Valentin@drjdvalentin
#RT
@EchoPRN: RT
@BasedPoland: It’s official.
The #FiveStarMovement & the [liberal] party have reached an agreement to form government
Ibid: #Salvini will be out of government until 2023 (unless snap elections at some point).
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 27 August 2019 15:49.
Euractiv File photo. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro attends the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Leaders’ meeting on the sidelines of G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, 28 June 2019. [Kremlin pool/EPA/EFE]
G7 agrees on €18 million plan for forest fires but Brazil refuses aid
On Monday (26 August), the second day of the G7 meeting in Biarritz, France, climate protection was on the agenda. Even though states agreed on a plan to tackle forest fires in the Amazon rainforest, Brazil rejected foreign aid. EURACTIV Germany reports
During the G7 summit, heads of state and government agreed on an emergency programme with almost €18 million to tackle the forest fires in the Amazon region. French President Emmanuel Macron had put the topic on the meeting’s agenda at short notice.
However, only a few hours later, Brazil’s cabinet chief Onyx Lorenzoni rejected the programme. He told a news portal that Brazil was not prepared to take the money and urged Europe to reforest ‘its own backyard’. The Brazilian press office of the presidency confirmed the rejection to AFP.
The Amazon rainforest, which is about twice the area of France (1.2 million km2), has been seeing many forest fires. For Macron, this is “a drama that concerns all of humanity”. That is why states want to provide Brazil with immediate financial and technical help.
The UK has been the largest donor, as it has proposed to deploy €11 million for the emergency fund. The UK also pledged to double its contribution to the international climate fund. Since 2014, the fund has provided $100 billion each year for regions afffected by climate change. The UK will therefore contribute almost €1.6 billion over the next four years.
Green Climate Fund
@GCF_News
The UK announces a doubling of their contribution to the #GreenClimateFund! Cheers for your leadership in turning #ClimateAmbition into #ClimateAction. #G7 #G7Biarritz @DFID_UK https://g.cf/2Nz89vB
10:29 - 26 Aug 2019
Macron also stated that a comprehensive reforestation programme for the Amazon region should be agreed at the climate summit in New York in September. Nine countries affected by the forest fires – Brazil, French Guyana, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Suriname, Bolivia, Ecuador and Guyana – should benefit from the programme.
In these areas, forest fires have increased dramatically in recent weeks. Many of the fires are not natural as they result from fire clearances that create free space for animal breeding, for example.
According to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, 60% more rainforest was subject to slash-and-burn practices in June compared to the same month last year.
G7 weekend sum-up: Trump deepens divisions by pushing for Russia’s readmission
The readmission of Russia in the Group of Seven most industrialised countries became a bone of contention between Donald Trump and his partners during a summit held in Biarritz (France), as the Europeans and Canada insisted on maintaining the group as a “club of liberal democracies”.
Forest fires for financial interests
Brazil rejecting aid is not that surprising. The country’s right-wing populist president Jair Bolsonaro said such foreign aid had a “colonialist mentality” behind it.
It was not until France and Ireland threatened to block the long-planned trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur states that Brazil started to act. The president deployed 43,000 army troops and two military aircraft to deal with the forest fires over the weekend. Observers accuse Bolsonaro of at least tolerating the fires in his own country and of expecting economic benefits from the clearance.
France and Ireland threaten to vote against EU-Mercosur deal
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has threatened to vote against a trade deal between the EU and South American trade bloc Mercosur unless Brazil, where wildfires continue to devastate the Amazon rainforest, takes its environmental obligations more seriously.
The trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur states has thus become a driver of forest fires, criticised Martin Häusling, a spokesman for agricultural policy for the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament.
“Brazil is creating space for grazing land and soy plantations – because Europe is to be supplied with the meat of 600,000 cattle and countless chickens. And that needs space,” Häusling said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was satisfied with the talks on climate protection. Yesterday morning, Merkel held talks with UN Secretary-General António Guterres. It had been agreed that in the run-up to the COP25, the “commitment of as many countries as possible to climate neutrality by 2050 was of utmost importance”.
Trump’s chair remained empty
Further details on the G7 climate session are not yet known.
In addition to fires in the Amazon rainforest, the states at the G7 summit had also debated the protection of the oceans. In July, the EU and Canada launched a joint ocean programme.
Why the ocean should be on the G7 agenda
Surfrider Europe, a French organisation fighting for clean oceans, is organising an event ahead of the G7 summit in France. The aim is to call for incorporating ocean protection into international negotiations, particularly those concerning climate change. EURACTIV’s partner la Tribune reports.
US President Donald Trump did not take part in the working session on environment issues.
When journalists asked him whether he had been present after the working session, he replied that “the meeting will take place soon” and did not respond to the objection that it had already taken place.
According to media reports, US government representatives had snubbed Macron’s agenda for including “niche issues” such as biodiversity rather than economic issues.
According to Macron, there should be a final summit statement, albeit a minimalist one. At the previous summit, Trump withdrew his support from the joint statement At the last G7 summit, Trump decided not to sign the final summit statement.
When this tweet speaks of “the socialist party” it is speaking of a party that would not delimit social accountability to native interests first and foremost.
Salvini might have added Trumpstein, Putin and Netanyahu to the list of people not to trust with native European interests.
TOP FINANCIER OF TRUMP AND MCCONNELL IS A DRIVING FORCE BEHIND AMAZON DEFORESTATION
Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman nterviewed on Fox Business Network, 27 Apr 2018. Photo: Richard Drew/AP
Map: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
Hungarian PM Viktor Orban - Photo Credits: MTI
Euractiv File photo. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro attends the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Leaders’ meeting on the sidelines of G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, 28 June 2019. [Kremlin pool/EPA/EFE]