Glenn Greenwald✓

Wall Street Journal Opinion @WSJopinion

Flávio Bolsonaro joins numerous dissident Brazilian journalists, bloggers and opinion makers who have gone into exile rather than risk prison.

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

One more amazing thing about Brazil and Lula's campaign: The NYT today has a gushing profile of a Congressman named @AndreJanonesMG, who became the face of Lula's campaign, its chief communication strategist. and -- as a result of admittedly innovative though extremely creepy digital strategies -- the greatest hero of the Brazilian left. But listen to what the article doesn't mention: Just 2 years ago -- not 20 years ago or 10 years ago, but 2 years ago -- Janones got caught committing one of the most despicable crimes imaginable: he forced his Congressional staff employees to transfer a portion of their (quite low) monthly public salary to him as a condition for keeping their jobs. The money he stole from his workers didn't go to his campaign: it just went to enrich himself, into his pocket,. He got caught when the employees secretly taped him angrily telling them they should stop complaining. When all this emerged, the left-wing members of Congress loyal to Lula -- who, remember, claims to lead a movement of workers! The name of Lula's party is the Workers Party -- protected him from all consequences from stealing the salary of his workers. The pro-Lula judiciary let Janones confess guilt and simply pay back the money that he stole. And yet this doesn't bother anyone on the Brazilian left. Janones has become a beloved figure overnight among left-wing celebrities and is now one of Lula's closest allies. The NYT profile doesn't even mention this in their gushing profile. In the scheme of Brazil's authoritarianism, it's not the biggest issue, but to me it's one of the most revealing about what frauds these people are:

Jeremy Barr @jeremymbarr

During her on-stage interview, according to the article, Bari Weiss dismissed concerns about weak ratings at 60 Minutes by saying: “I could never build anything if I were focused on the precise number of people that happen to tune in to the second feature on 60 Minutes on a given Sunday.”

Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson

Ambassador Huckabee, this is unreleased video of an American who was beaten almost to death last week by Israeli settlers. You know his name because he came to you for help, but you blew him off. That’s disgraceful. Do your job. @GovMikeHuckabee @SecRubio @davidamilstein @WhiteHouse

André Fran @andrefran

Glenn, as someone who respects you and once admired you a great deal, I think you're right about many things. But I genuinely believe you should take a deeper look at the weight, or perhaps the lack of weight, you give to the far right Bolsonaros, its involvement in criminal schemes, and the attempts to stage a coup and drag Brazil back into a dictatorship. Don't throw your reputation in the thrash and don't help those who want to bring Brazil back to its darkest times. All the best.

Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis

I am going to write something below that should be seen as the musings of one who celebrated – and still celebrates – Lula’s victory over Bolsonaro Jr. Here it goes: I cannot for the life of me justify why o why Brazil’s courts had to demand of Bolsonaro that he hands over his passport the moment he lost the election. That he disputed the veracity of the election result is a sign of a faulty character, evidence that he is a bad loser. BUT, he had every right to being a bad loser; to dispute, rightly or wrongly, any result. As for the argument that he was being investigated for other misdemeanours or crimes, that doesn’t wash either: What would have happened if Bolsonaro had won the election? Would the judges also prevent him from travelling abroad, as President-elect? I very much doubt that – which means that the judges were conflating executive and judicial powers. To those who tell me that the Bolsonaro clan is a fascistic, criminal family, my reply is: You and I may very well think that. Alas, the judiciary has no right to use its powers to indict and to pursue someone because – or immediately after – they lost an election. It is shameful, to be precise. And it is also dangerous for those of us on the left who know what it means to be banned and hounded by rogue judges and police commissioners. But I also have a message to Bolsonaro supporters, or those sitting on the fence, who assume that Lula is somehow behind the judges. He is not! This is the same court that imprisoned, falsely, Lula himself. What we have in Brazil is a judiciary that overreaches and habitually crosses the line that ought to separate judicial from political power. It is such a shame that a judge took it upon himself to go after Bolsonaro on the eve of his defeat and, in doing so, to sully Lula’s stupendous victory. One last point that my comrades in Brazil should note: If Bolsonaro and Rubio wanted to mount a campaign against Lula and Brazilian democracy they could never have been aided better than by that judge’s reckless writ.

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

It seems as Flavio Bolsonaro and his allies just deleted that statement in which Flavio declared himself "the true president-elect of Brazil," and then re-posted the letter without that declaration. I had just spent 30 minutes speaking to everyone I could trying to understand how it made any sense at all to make this claim -- either in general or the way they did it: so impulsively and suddenly, with no groundwork laid for it -- and nobody could make sense of it. So it seems wise that they removed it.

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

In the statement that Flavio Bolsonaro just issued from the US declares himself the "true president-elect of Brazil," based on allegations of electoral fraud. While Trump has casually said he thinks there was fraud, the US Government has not said if it shares this view.

Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis

WHAT LULA’S RE-ELECTION TELLS US: The Class War Need Not End in Fascism On Sunday, Brazilians did something that the commentariat had told us was a lost cause. On the eve of his eighty-first birthday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former metalworker, turned the Trumpist, evangelical, neofascist, Zionist tide in Latin America to get re-elected President of Brazil. Three weeks earlier, he had come second in the first round, behind Flávio Bolsonaro, son and political heir of the man who trumpeted the merits of fascism, who had embraced Trump as his lord and master, who plotted a cynical coup against Brazilian democracy – moreover, the main candidates that were eliminated were rightists whose voters were meant to move to Bolsonaro. Yesterday, Lula overturned this deficit and won with a margin of nearly four and a half million votes. I want to use Lula’s victory to tell a broader story. A story about a war, the class war that the few are waging against the many across the Western world. And a story about how that war need not end, as so many now fear, in a neofascist revival. THE HIDDEN CLASS WAR “There’s class warfare, all right,” Warren Buffett once said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Mr Buffett was not exaggerating. For almost four decades, Western governments and central banks have pulled every policy lever in the same direction: to make the assets of the few burgeon at the expense of the incomes of the many. Consider the numbers. Between 1952 and 1988, economic growth explained nearly all the gains of the West’s stock market. From 1989 onwards, growth explains only about a quarter. The largest share, around 40 per cent, came from income diverted from workers to shareholders. Another third came from cheaper money and lower perceived risk. That is not wealth creation. It is wealth extraction: a transfer from those who work to those who own, inflated by cheap money and paraded on the evening news as “a strong economy”. Then look at the rescues. 2001, 2008, 2020, the British gilt crisis of 2022, Silicon Valley Bank in 2023: each time, the state rushed in to save the asset holders. Together they reveal the rule: to save the economy, you must save the wealth of those who own it – not those who produce stuff, not even productive companies. In the United States, the top tenth own almost 90 per cent of all shares. The Fed and the US federal government insure it for them, doing ‘whatever it takes’ to prop them up whenever their prices tank. The rest of us in the West pay the premium, in the form of the austerity that always follows the bailout. And the owners need never sell. Why do billionaires pay so little tax? Because they do not earn incomes - they accumulate capital gains, taxed only when sold. So they borrow against their soaring assets at 1 or 2 per cent and live on the loan. Then they die and pay no tax on their capital gains, passing on the loot to their kids at ridiculously low inheritance taxes. Meanwhile, to pay bills and put food on the table, the worker borrows on a credit card at 20 per cent, her debts the mirror image of their fortunes. Then, a large chunk of these accumulating assets seek even higher rents in places like Brazil where the US government intervenes to ensure that the local governments will also place the defence of these assets’ values above all else. CAPITAL IS NOT A THING, NOT MERELY AN ASSET Why does austerity keep returning, even though it is economically self-defeating? Marx tells the story of Thomas Peel, who in 1829 sailed to Western Australia’s Swan River with £50,000 of provisions and three hundred working-class men, women and children. On arrival, his workers walked off into the bush and worked for themselves. Peel had brought money, tools and labour, but he could not bring capitalism along, because his workers had an alternative. Capital, Marx concluded, is not a thing but a social relation: the power of those who own to get those who don’t own to do things they’d rather did not do. Austerity is not an economic policy. It is a disciplinary device, keeping the many sufficiently insecure and indebted to accept whatever is on offer. The ruling class’s deepest fear is not inflation or debt. It is to end up like Peel: rich, but without the power to compel. IS FASCISM INEVITABLE? Here is the part of the story that keeps so many of us awake at night. When centre-left politicians, from Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Tony Blair to Gerhard Schröder, Francois Hollande and Andy Burnham abandoned the language of class, a void opened up in the working-class heartlands of the West. Into that void stepped a venomous storyteller with a century of experience in filling such voids: the recalcitrant far right, the rebranded fascists. They offer left-behind workers a story of dignity, then redirect their fury away from the owner who shipped their factory abroad or sold their council house to some fund and towards the migrant next door. It does not end the class war. It merely divides one side – the workers – to rule over them. It camouflages it. From the red suburbs of Paris to south Piraeus, from England’s red wall to Italy’s rust belt in Taranto, from the American rust belt to eastern Germany, the pattern seems relentless. And so, a fatalism has set in: the class war waged from above, we are told, must inevitably end in a neofascist, racist, misogynist revival. Brazil has just refuted this fatalism. Brazil knows the monster intimately. It lived through four years of Jair Bolsonaro, with his nostalgia for the military dictatorship. On 8 January 2023, his followers stormed the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. Brazil’s far right is not a fringe. Unlike Trump’s rag tag storm troopers, they had years of running a dictatorship. It won the first round of this election. They had the White House fully behind them, while the US Democrats, once again demonstrating their irrelevance, stayed mute. And yet, yesterday, they were defeated. How? Not by hand-wringing about “populism”, nor by a centrist promise to manage the status quo more efficiently. Lula won because he did what the Western centre-left forgot how to do: he spoke the language of class, and backed it with policies that shifted power, however modestly, from the few to the many. His government exempted those earning up to five thousand reals a month from income tax and paid for it with a minimum tax on the very richest. During Brazil’s G20 presidency, it proposed a global minimum tax on billionaires. When Lula tells Brazilian workers that the elites have rigged the game, he points his finger upwards, at the rentier and the speculator, not sideways, at the migrant or the poor. PIX – AN EXAMPLE OF AN ANTI-OLIGARCHY DIGITAL TOOL But the most innovative weapon in Brazil’s arsenal is one that few outside Latin America have heard of. It is called Pix. Every time you tap a card to pay for a coffee, a toll is levied. Visa, Mastercard and the banks take a cut, often 2 or 3 per cent, from every transaction. Multiply this by billions of purchases a day and you grasp one of the most lucrative rent-extraction machines ever devised. These are not profits made in competitive markets but rent extracted by those who own the digital rails on which our economic lives now run. It is part of what I call technofeudalism. Unlike Britain, Europe or, of course, America, Brazil’s central bank moved to limit this rabid exploitation. It launched an alternative: a public, instant payment system, free for individuals and with capped fees for merchants. A Brazilian pays a street vendor in Salvador or sends money to her mother in Recife, instantly, using Pix from her phone, with no card company or bank taking its slice. Brazilians took to it with astonishing enthusiasm. Last year, Pix processed almost 80 billion transactions and overtook credit cards as the most popular way to pay online. Pix is, in effect, the Swan River of the digital age. It gave tens of millions of Brazilians, including the poorest, who had never had a bank card, an alternative to the toll booths of Big Finance. And, like Peel, the toll collectors did not take it lying down. This summer, Washington imposed 25 per cent tariffs on most Brazilian exports, and its trade representative explicitly named Pix as a grievance, complaining that it “unfairly disadvantaged” American payment companies! The most powerful government on Earth deployed its trade arsenal against a free public service for being too successful at denying rents to Visa and Mastercard. Lula did not blink. He defended Pix as a Brazilian public good, and Brazilians rewarded him for it. Here, at last, is a concrete example of limiting the power of Big Business, Big Finance and Big Tech: not with slogans, but by building public digital infrastructure that removes the opportunity to extract rent in the first place. NOT A REVOLUTION, BUT AN AUSPICIOUS PORTENT Let me not romanticise. Lula is no revolutionary. His margin was narrow. Brazil’s Congress remains in the grip of agribusiness and evangelical blocs. Its central bank still keeps interest rates punishingly high, a weapon of the class war if ever there was one. Lula himself has compromised much too much with these vested interests, and lost support as a result. But Brazil has shown three things the rest of us must learn. First, the class war waged against the many does not have to end in fascism. Fascism wins only when the left vacates the battlefield of class. Second, a progressive government can win by pointing upwards, at those who extract rent, rather than downwards, at those who suffer. And third, Big Business can be defeated, at least forced to lose some battles, by building public alternatives to its rent-extracting machines. So, here is the challenge to Britain, to Europe, to the people of the United States. -Build your own Pix: public payment rails that end the tolls of Visa and Mastercard. -Tax capital gains, ill-gotten wealth that is, not just income. -Make every rescue conditional, with the public receiving real, permanent equity in return. -Create a public investment bank as an alternative to the bond markets. Restore the bargaining power of the workforce. And give working people what Peel’s workers found at Swan River: an alternative, and the freedom to say no. Buffett was right. There is a class war, and his class has been winning hands down. But yesterday, in Brazil, it lost a battle though not the war. It lost because a working-class president dared to name the war and fight it using weapons fashioned to defend the many.

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

CRUCIAL FACTS ON THE FLAVIO BOLSONARO MATTER: It's not just Flavio Bolsonaro who fled Brazil to escape the tyrannical persecution of Alexandre de Moraes and the pro-Lula wing of the Supreme Court. There are dozens of Brazilian exiles who have done the same: dissident journalists, activists, bloggers, and politicians who all fled to avoid certain prison for political opposition. In most of these cases, Moraes has demanded the extradition of those who fled and whom he wants to imprison back in Brazil. But Moraes' extradition requests have been repeatedly denied by multiple countries and institutions on the grounds that these prosecutions are politically motivated or otherwise corrupted. Among those concluing this: Spain, Italy, INTERPOL, and even the US under Biden. Just today, Italy refused Brazil's demand to extradite a person named @edutagli, who was once a top aide to Moraes, but then fled to Italy after Moraes accused him of having been my source in a huge leak from Moraes' office that I obtained for reporting I did with @Folha in 2024. That massive leak enabled us to publish roughly 20 articles proving systemic abuses of power by Moraes against his political enemies: exactly the reason so many Brazilians, including Bolsonaro, know they can't get a fair trial in Brazil. Italy today refused to extradite the person accused of being our source on the grounds that the proceedings would be a farce because Moraes — as he so often does — wants to act as the supposed victim, investigator, and judge, and thus his demand falls well outside of Italy's extradition standards. Again, multiple countries have concluded the same, showing what a farce Brazil's once-respected judicial system has become under the Lula/Moraes regime. Moraes has overseen a system of political persecution masquerading as criminal justice that has been recognized as a sham by multiple countries that are not exactly Bolsonaro allies. Nobody in their right mind who is a political enemy of Moraes would remain in Brazil once if it is clear that he intends to imprison you, since he has proven that guilt is a foregone conclusion and he operates with no legal or constitutional limits of any kind. That is why asylum under international law exists: to protect those who cannot obtain justice in their own country because the justice system has been corrupted and commandeered for political persecution. Many people, such as Julian Assange, have needed that protection (which Lula cheered). Now people need it from Moraes in Brazil. That is sadly one of the main legacies of both Lula and Moraes over the last six years.

Folha de S.Paulo @folha

Itália nega extradição de Eduardo Tagliaferro, ex-assessor de Alexandre de Moraes

Hugo Freitas @hugofreitas_r

@ggreenwald Brazil just happened to be chosen by many Americans as a screen they can use to project their own, domestic political narrative, with no real regard or interest for what's actually happening here. Bolsonaro is not Trump. Lula is not Biden. Et cetera

Felipe Neto 🦉 @felipeneto

If you still take Glenn Greenwald seriously, take it from a Brazilian: Glenn has completely abandoned reason, and his credibility in Brazil is in ruins. The cases he portrays as judicial persecution actually involve serious crimes committed by people who plotted a coup against Brazil’s democracy. That plot even included plans to assassinate President Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and others. Glenn is no longer the journalist he once was. He no longer cares about facts. He cares about one thing: desperately trying to convince himself and his audience that he has uncovered another earth-shattering scandal. He hasn’t. And he knows it. The judge Glenn keeps portraying as a dictator is no dictator. That doesn’t mean he’s above scrutiny. In fact, his ties to corrupt banker Daniel Vorcaro absolutely warrant investigation. But here’s what Glenn conveniently leaves out: Flávio Bolsonaro had even closer ties to that very same banker. We want BOTH to respond to justice. Glenn demands that the judge be investigated, yet somehow, when it comes to Flávio Bolsonaro, suddenly it’s all “political persecution” and “censorship.” The hypocrisy is breathtaking. He’s completely lost the plot. If you’re reading this from outside Brazil, understand one thing: Glenn Greenwald has burned through virtually every ounce of credibility he once had in this country. After four years of outrageous claims, shameless distortions, and an absolutely colossal mountain of bullshit, he’s become a walking parody of the journalist he used to be.

Ricardo Berezin @RicardoBerezin

A regra no Brasil é clara: todo mundo pode ser investigado menos o Alexandre de Moraes

Sam Pancher @SamPancher

Nota da PF diz que não há registro de saída de Flávio Bolsonaro do país e que senador não é considerado foragido, nem poderia ser preso ou vigiado permanentemente.

Brian Winter @BrazilBrian

It is very hard to tell simple stories about Brazil.

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

CRUCIAL FACTS ON THE FLAVIO BOLSONARO MATTER: It's not just Flavio Bolsonaro who fled Brazil to escape the tyrannical persecution of Alexandre de Moraes and the pro-Lula wing of the Supreme Court. There are dozens of Brazilian exiles who have done the same: dissident journalists, activists, bloggers, and politicians who all fled to avoid certain prison for political opposition. In most of these cases, Moraes has demanded the extradition of those who fled and whom he wants to imprison back in Brazil. But Moraes' extradition requests have been repeatedly denied by multiple countries and institutions on the grounds that these prosecutions are politically motivated or otherwise corrupted. Among those concluing this: Spain, Italy, INTERPOL, and even the US under Biden. Just today, Italy refused Brazil's demand to extradite a person named @edutagli, who was once a top aide to Moraes, but then fled to Italy after Moraes accused him of having been my source in a huge leak from Moraes' office that I obtained for reporting I did with @Folha in 2024. That massive leak enabled us to publish roughly 20 articles proving systemic abuses of power by Moraes against his political enemies: exactly the reason so many Brazilians, including Bolsonaro, know they can't get a fair trial in Brazil. Italy today refused to extradite the person accused of being our source on the grounds that the proceedings would be a farce because Moraes — as he so often does — wants to act as the supposed victim, investigator, and judge, and thus his demand falls well outside of Italy's extradition standards. Again, multiple countries have concluded the same, showing what a farce Brazil's once-respected judicial system has become under the Lula/Moraes regime. Moraes has overseen a system of political persecution masquerading as criminal justice that has been recognized as a sham by multiple countries that are not exactly Bolsonaro allies. Nobody in their right mind who is a political enemy of Moraes would remain in Brazil once if it is clear that he intends to imprison you, since he has proven that guilt is a foregone conclusion and he operates with no legal or constitutional limits of any kind. That is why asylum under international law exists: to protect those who cannot obtain justice in their own country because the justice system has been corrupted and commandeered for political persecution. Many people, such as Julian Assange, have needed that protection (which Lula cheered). Now people need it from Moraes in Brazil. That is sadly one of the main legacies of both Lula and Moraes over the last six years.