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(cc photo: Eurico Zimbres/Wikimedia)
This week on CounterSpin: A federal prosecutor in Brazil determined that the bookkeeping maneuver with which twice-elected president Dilma Rousseff had been charged by her right-wing opposition did not constitute a crime. Rousseff’s congressional opponents include a number of people themselves facing charges, including bribery, electoral fraud, kidnapping and homicide. Then Rousseff was ousted. Many Brazilians are calling it a coup, but the official US position is, what now? We’ll hear about what’s happening in Brazil from Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Transcript: ‘They Let Everybody Know the US Was On the Side of This Coup’
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Also on the show: After Kevin Moore filmed Baltimore police dragging Freddie Gray into a van, he says police came to arrest him, with assault weapons and helicopters. Released without charges, Moore said months later, police sit outside his son’s school and ride past him, taunting him with their phones up. Citizen journalists collecting evidence of violence and abuse by law enforcement are literally providing the content for a social movement. So why are they being harassed and jailed and ignored—while corporate journalists collect awards for their work? We’ll talk about the importance of legal—and journalistic—defense of citizen journalists with Shahid Buttar, director of grassroots advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Transcript: ‘We Are Criminalizing Transparency to Protect Illegitimate Uses of Power’
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All that’s coming up but first a quick look back at recent press, including the pipeline protest news blackout, Jeremy Corbyn’s “fringe” positions and the New York Times‘ Aleppo gaffes.
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Just an FYI, Glen Greenwald is “of” The Intercept, not Democracy Now where Amy Goodman interview him for a few segments.
Brian Becker
“The U.S. is only 6% of world population, yet it has 25%
of all the jail and prison inmates on earth. The richest
nation on earth doing such a thing, how could that be?”
Empire USA has the largest laboring-class of any first world country. For if we total all the Afro-Americans, Native-Americans, Latino-Americans and those of the white laboring-class, we find that half of our population is impoverished and of the laboring-class.
My laboring-class does not vote. Slow and careful thinkers that we be, we have not the speed of thought needed to rule, nor the slightest desire to rule.
So, as only the white upper-half of society goes to the polls, invariably the voting majority is the rich ruling class, the 26% most wealthy. Which is why the top forth of society has the political power to own 75% of the wealth and to use wars of aggression to plunder Muslim nations.