Brazilian Corruption, Community Solar, Voter Suppression

Brazilian Corruption Crisis or Attempted Coup d’Etat?

Interview with Ted Snider, journalist, conducted by Scott Harris

For months now, Brazil has been embroiled in a swirling corruption scandal, known as “Lava Jato” (or “car wash”) involving the state oil company Petrobras, construction contractors, the ruling Workers’ Party and opposition politicians. As the nation prepares for this summer’s Olympic games, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has been dogged by a slumping economy and an impeachment drive by conservative opponents who charge that she had “cooked the books” in the run-up to the 2014 presidential election.

Prosecutors have attempted to implicate popular two-term President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, known as “Lula.” In mid-March, prosecutors questioned Lula on allegations of money laundering involving a vacation home and a construction company, which the former president denied. When his successor President Rousseff sought to appoint Lula as her chief of staff, the move was seen by opponents as a way to shield Lula from possible future prosecution. A justice on Brazil’s Supreme Court responded by blocking the appointment, which Lula has appealed.

Amid large anti-government and pro-government street protests, President Rousseff has charged that the allegations against her are false, and part of a coup attempt to remove her from office orchestrated by her political enemies. Between The Line’s Scott Harris spoke with Canadian journalist Ted Snider who discusses his recent article, “A ‘Silent Coup’ for Brazil?”, which examines the current crisis in Brazil against the backdrop of the U.S. exercise of “soft power” in the post-Cold War era to destabilize and topple governments it viewed as adversaries in Eastern Europe and Latin America. [Rush transcript.]
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TED SNIDER: So what’s going on in Brazil right now has the appearance of democracy in action, has the appearance of massive street protests against Dilma Rousseff’s (Worker’s Party) PT government. And it has the appearance of a noble judicial effort to bring members of the government up on corruption charges. So the way it’s being presented in the North American media and most of Brazil’s media is sort of this model of mass democracy expressing itself in a really noble way. So you’re getting impeachment attempts against Dilma Rouseff. You’re getting former President Lula Da Silva being held for questioning. You’re getting people arrested for kickbacks and bribery. But what’s scary about it is that it fits a pattern that’s been occurring in Latin America, but elsewhere in the world since the beginning of the Obama administration since 2009, where things that look like democratic moves to improve government are actually coups that look like democracy.

These are very different from the first stage of Latin American coups that involved the (U.S.) Marines and guns, and the second state of coups that began in 1954 with the CIA covert coup in Guatemala. And the pattern that strikes me in the last few years is that these coups have gone even deeper into the shadows where they don’t look like coups at all, they actually look democracy.

I raise the question in my article of whether this appearance of democracy isn’t just in fact part of this pattern of what I perceive to be a new style of coup.

BETWEEN THE LINES: I think to the casual reader of the U.S. corporate press, they would look at the stories written and the TV coverage of what’s going on in Brazil and believe that there is a lot of evidence that would suggest the Workers’ Party leadership has been corrupted and deserved to be held to account. How do you counter the notion that this is some kind of mass democratic rejection of the Workers’ Party for this apparent corruption and not somethng more nefarious, like an opposition party-led coup d’etat?

TED SNIDER: So Scott, I think there’s two or three things to be said to that. And the first is this thing called “Lava Jato” or “car wash” or “corruption cleaning.” I think it did start as a sort of noble judiciary and police action against real corruption in the government. So I don’t want to pretend that there’s no corruption in Brazilian government or in the Workers’ Party (PT). There certainly is corruption.

But I think that two things need to be said about that. The first is the specific charges brought up against the current president and the former president. Actually, they have nothing to do with “lava jato” and they have nothing to do with corruption. The impeachment charge against Dilma Rousseff is that she used borrowed money to make it look like Brazil’s budget was still on track. This is not an impeachable offense, it’s not even an illegal offense, it’s a common practice. So they found no corruption charges against Dilma herself. So the attempt to impeach the president was actually outside of “Lava Jato”, it’s outside of the corruption charges.

Similarly with Lula da Silva, the charges that have been brought against Lula are that he owns some beachside property that he claims not to own and that he accepted money from corporations for giving speeches. Now, the two things we said about that is that neither one is illegal, neither is an impeachable offense, and more importantly, they both occurred after he was president. So although there is certainly corruption in the PT, the charges against the current and former presidents have nothing to do with the corruption. More importantly, the corruption was present in both parties. It was present in the PT and probably to a greater extent in the right-wing opposition, the PSDB(Brazilian Social Democracy Party). So it started off as finding dirt in both parties. But what happened is that the “car wash” got car jacked and it got transformed from finding corruption in both parties to shielding the PSDB and only really only going after corruption in the PT.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So what is the role of Washington here in supporting what you contend is really a coup d’etat that is in part supported by external forces?

TED SNIDER: Scott, I think that’s the ultimate question. I think there are indications that there could be U.S. involvement. But I don’t think that those indications have been proven yet. The reason that I raise the question the article I am suspicious of is that the other countries that fit this pattern have been shown to have U.S. involvement.

The two coups that happened first in South America this way were Honduras, when President Manuel Zelaya was taken out in a coup in what looked like a constitutional move and you had a constitutional coup. Shortly after that in Paraguay, the same thing happened, also in Latin America where the right-wing opposition seized power in the legislature, where they took advantage of a skirmish over a disputed land that left about a dozen people dead. They unfairly blamed it on the left-wing President Fernando Lugo.

We know that the Americans knew about both of these coups, because leaked documents, WikiLeak documents show it. The pattern in Brazil is similar, so one wonders if it’s backed by the States and certainly, there’s that suspicion. So I don’t think there’s proof yet, but I think the pattern demands that we ask the question.

Read Snider’s recent article “A ‘Silent Coup’ for Brazil?” at consortiumnews.com/2016/03/30/a-silent-coup-for-brazil/.

Related Links:
mp3 Interview with Ted Snider, conducted by Scott Harris, Counterpoint, April 4, 2016 (27:10)
“Is a Silent Coup in Democratic Disguise Taking Place in Brazil?,” Antiwar.com, April 6, 2016
“Attempted Coup in Brazil Seeks to Reverse Election Results,” Huffington Post, April 4, 2016
“The Coup d’Etat in Brazil,” Times of India, April 4, 2016
“Globo TV in Brazil Fomenting Conditions for Coup Says Expert,” Telesur TV, March 21, 2016
“Rousseff backers take to streets against Brazil ‘coup’,” The Citizen, March 19, 2016
“CIA directed Coup underway in Brazil,” MINA, March 17, 2016
“Brazil justice orders impeachment process for VP, heightens crisis,” Reuters, April 5, 2016
“Brazil Government to Fight Court Decision on Lula in Appeal,” Bloomberg, March 19, 2016

Community Solar Programs Can Deliver Cheap Renewable Energy to All Income Groups

Interview with Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

Solar power is booming across the United States, in part because the cost of solar panels has plummeted in recent years. The solar industry forecasts that roughly 20,000 mega-watts of solar capacity will come online over the next two years, doubling the country’s existing solar capacity, which today only provides a tiny fraction of the nation’s overall energy mix.

Residential rooftop solar panels that produce electricity are one of the fastest growing sectors of the solar boom, but more than three-quarters of America’s homes are not suitable for solar installation, for a variety of reasons. However these homes can benefit from what’s called community solar, in which solar arrays are built in a separate location – and residents can buy into the system to receive electricity. But community solar is not available in every state, mostly due to opposition from the electric utility industry.

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Tyson Slocum, director of the Energy Program at Public Citizen. Here he explains how solar installations work, why utilities often oppose these systems, and how community solar programs that target the participation of low income groups can establish a business model that will allow the greatest number of people to benefit from solar energy.
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TYSON SLOCUM: There is no question that when you’ve got more and more customers generating their own electricity – either from their own solar panels that they own, or generating power through a community solar program – that is in opposition to the financial interest of the incumbent distributional utility, because a utility earns money based on the sale of electrons to its customers, and if a larger proportion of its customers are not buying those electrons from the utility anymore, or, in some cases, actually requiring the utility to buy electrons from them, in the case of a successful rooftop solar facility that is producing electrons in excess of what the household uses in electric power. So there’s no question that the nature of the electric utility business model that’s existed since the 1880s when Thomas Edison invented the first centralized power plant in New York City, we have to recognize that technology, in the form of cost-effective rooftop solar requires dramatic changes in the corporate and business structure of electric utilities.

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BETWEEN THE LINES: Tyson Slocum, how are solar systems funded, and who benefits?

TYSON SLOCUM: The primary way that rooftop solar owners can get compensated for their costs associatedwith buying and installing and operating these systems is through various tax subsidies. At the federal level, there’s an investment tax credit that is set to phase out and expire over the next five years. And that simply allows you to take a tax credit based on the value of the cost of the solar system that you’re installing on your rooftop. There’s also, depending upon the state or municipality, a number of different state and local tax incentives.

But the biggest incentive, this is featured in more than 30 states, is something called net metering, which says that if I am producing more electrons from my rooftop solar system than I am using in my household, then every month I can get credit on my electric bill for the excess electricity that my solar panels sold into the grid. But the amount of the payment that is provided to the solar owner is based upon the retail price of electricity. Now, if you’ve got one percent of households in a utility service area that are getting paid by other, non-solar customers, that’s not a big deal. But if 5 percent, or 10 percent or 20 percent of all of a utility’s customers are producing their own electricity from rooftop solar, and are getting paid by customers that don’t have rooftop solar, it does create an equity issue, where those that have the financial or technical capability to generate their own power from rooftop solar, they are going to see dramatically lower electric bills, and those customers that cannot afford access to rooftop solar or don’t live in a building where it’s possible – because they live in a multi-family building, they don’t own their building because they rent, or if the building is just not in a suitable sunny place because of trees or whatever, they’re going to see higher rates.

So the problem has been that the utilities are saying, There’s this cost shifting, and that’s why we shouldn’t do rooftop solar at all. That’s not an excuse. The fact of the matter is that all we need to do is to design programs that maximize not only the deployment of rooftop solar, but the equitable access to rooftop solar. And I think the community solar concept is one of those ways that we can ensure that we get penetration of rooftop solar into low-income and other communities that otherwise might not be able to get it, because you can design a community solar program with specific targeted goals for low income participation and you can do that by pooling resources together. So that’s why we like what’s known as a Value of Solar Tariff, that tries to more accurately pinpoint the benefits of solar production to the environment, to the climate, to the utility system and for the household.

For more information, visit Energy Program at Public Citizen.

Related Links:
“Report: Community Solar Market In US Could Be Worth $2.5 Billion In Revenue By 2020,” Clean Technica, April 4, 2016
“LEC to build first community solar project in Upstate,” Upstate Business Journal, April 4, 2016
“Why are utilities trying to disconnect communities of color from solar?,” Grist, Oct. 14, 2014
“Battle of solar pits rooftop against utility-scale systems,” Denver Post, July 26, 2015
“Solar Advocates Fight Utilities Over Grid Access,” NPR, Sept. 25, 2014
“Minnesota Company Commits To Community Solar,” Solar Industry, April 4, 2016
“Colorado Public Utilities Commission shoots down Xcel’s community solar garden agreement,” Durango Herald, March 16, 2016
“”Shared Solar” Gets 2nd Look; Utilities Opposed,” New Haven Independent, April 7, 2015

With Voter Suppression and Unverifiable Electronic Voting, 2016 Election Results Vulnerable to Theft

Interview with Harvey Wasserman, author and activist, conducted by Scott Harris

Since the U.S. 2000 election where Vice President Al Gore won the national popular vote, but lost the White House to George W. Bush after a controversial Supreme Court decision that left thousands of crucial Florida votes uncounted, a growing number of Americans have lost faith in the machinery of U.S. elections. The skepticism only deepened when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with election protection activists Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis presented documentation that accused Republican election officials of employing a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the 2004 election, where George W. Bush defeated his Democratic challenger Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. The allegations focused on the state of Ohio and its 18 critical Electoral College votes, where according to reports, at least 357,000 voters – the overwhelming majority of them Democratic – were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004.

According to a recent article and forthcoming book by Wasserman and Fitrakis, U.S. elections are vulnerable to partisan dirty tricks using methods they call “strip and flip.” Historically, “stripping” has been based on race and centers on voter suppression tactics that includes the purging of minority voters from registration rolls, imposing restrictive voter ID laws and establishing barriers to make voter registration and early voting more difficult for Democratic party-leaning groups such as blacks, Hispanics, youths and the poor. “Flipping” relates to electronic voting machines that are vulnerable to hacking, and have no mechanism to verify vote totals such as a paper trail.

Between The Line’s Scott Harris spoke with author and activist Harvey Wasserman, who explains why he’s concerned that the results of the 2016 national election could be open to manipulation and outright theft.
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HARVEY WASSERMAN: There’s one thing and only one thing you need to know about the 2016 election – I’ve read so many things – but the number one thing about the 2016 election is the reality that 80 percent of the vote in the United States presidential election in 2016 will be cast on electronic voting machines and they are completely unverifiable. There is no system in place in the United States in 2016 to verify the electoral outcome on these machines. Most of these machines were paid for with money that was voted by Congress in 2002, the Help America Vote Act, and as a result, we will be conducting our election in this country – millions of dollars spent all this time, yelling, screaming, debating – but the bottom line is we’re conducting this election on machines that are 10 years old. And I don’t know anybody who has a personal computer or a cell phone that’s 10 years old, or even a desktop.

And these machines are so easily hackable. There was a public demonstration done not long ago where a professor took an electronic voting machine and played PacMan on it. It’s ridiculous. There’s no accountability on the state level, so that you have a situation in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Arizona and North Carolina where the governor and the secretary of state are both from the same party and they can at midnight, as was done in Ohio in 2004, simply flip the electronic vote count. And so, the title of our book, which is forthcoming is “Strip and Flip Selection of 2016”, because what they’re doing is they’re “stripping” – and there’s a long history of this of course, in the United States – they’re stripping the voter rolls mostly of African Americans, Latinos, young people, people suspected of being liberals or progressives so that millions of Americans, literally, are being denied the right to vote. And then if that’s not sufficient, then on Election night, which happened in 2004, they just can flip the vote electronically and no one will know the difference.

You know, we get accused of being conspiracy theorists all the time. All you have to do is answer the simple question. Tell us exactly, how will the electronic vote count be verified in 2016. There is no answer. So we’re voting in black boxes and governors and secretaries of state in every state will have the capacity to flip the vote count in a matter of about 60 seconds, however they want to do it.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Harvey, I did want to ask you about this proprietary software that powers up these electronic voting systems and machines that are purchased or leased by state government. How is it that state officials of one sort or another or party officials could actually get into the guts of the vote count itself to manipulate the results? What kind of collusion are you alleging between these government and party officials and the companies that manufacture the software for these voting machines?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, they issue contracts to run these elections to the owners of these machines or to companies that specialize in manipulating the nature of the machine. In Ohio 2004, there was a no-bid contract given to a guy named Michael Caddell. The electronic machines for the Ohio vote count in 2004 were in the basement of a building in Chattanooga, Tennessee that also has the servers for the Republican National Committee and for Karl Roves’ email. And the guy, Michael Caddell who was charged with doing the tallying was a long-time Bush family associate, who died mysteriously, by the way, in a single-engine plane crash in 2008 while he was being deposed by us.

States do contract with companies to tally up the vote count, and while there’s no public accountability, the governors and secretaries of states are pretty much in charge of operating with the IT companies to the vote count.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Well Harvey, what are some of the important elements that you want our listeners to know about, a sound plan to protect the vote in future elections?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: We advocate universal hand-counted paper ballots – four-day national holiday for voting. Universal automatic registation; registration rolls kept with a paper backup. The polls need to be run by students and elders working at $15 an hour, and we also, of course need to get money out of politics. There has to be restored campaign finance laws. Abolish the Electoral College, for God’s sakes. The Electoral College is ridiculous.

For more information, visit Harvey Wasserman’s web page at solartopia.org.

Related Links:
mp3 Interview with Harvey Wasserman, conducted by Scott Harris, Counterpoint, April 4, 2016 (29:04)
“Why We Must Now Adopt the “Ohio Plan” to Prevent the “Strip and Flip” of American Elections,” Free Press, Jan. 23, 2016
“Long Lines in Arizona Signal Electoral Chaos; Voters of Color Face Steep Barriers to the Ballot,” Free Press, March 25, 2016
“Is the 2016 Election Already Being Stripped and Flipped?” Truthdig, April 4, 2016
“Electronic Voting Fraud: A Real Threat to Any Democrat Running for President,” Truthout, June 24, 2015
“The Biggest Factor Affecting the 2016 Election That Nobody is Talking About,” Antimedia, Feb. 26, 2016
“Voter ID Laws Strike Again – This Time Wisconsin,” Greg Palast, April 5, 2016
“Was the 2004 Election Stolen?,” Common Dreams, June 1, 2006
“RFK and Rolling Stone nail Ohio’s stolen 2004 election, but much more must be done,” Free Press, June 3, 2006
“Ohio vote count battles escalate amidst new evidence of potential criminal activity,” Dec. 18, 2004
“2016-01-07 – Voter Data Breaches,” Black Box Voting.org, Jan. 7, 2016
“Could the 2016 Election Be Stolen with Help from Electronic Voting Machines?,” Free Speech TV, Feb. 24, 2016

This week’s summary of under-reported news

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Compiled by Bob Nixon
In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin boycotted the Nuclear Security Summit, a gathering of 50 world leaders meeting to tackle nuclear proliferation. (“Russia’s absence means nuclear summit likely to end as anticlimax for Obama,” Guardian, March 26, 2016; “North Korea Tests: U.S., China to cooperate,” BBC News, April 1, 2016)
Conservatives who control the Arizona state legislature are moving to dismantle the state’s “clean election” campaign finance law, enacted in the late 1990s. (“Arizona Becomes Ground Zero in Fight Over Secret Political Spending,”The American Plea, March 29, 2016)
Yale student Alex Zhang is outraged at the sight of a stained glass window showing a slave kneeling before John Calhoun in one of the Ivy League university’s residential colleges. (“On campus, a new civil rights era,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 12, 2016)

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