{"id":382903,"date":"2018-10-30T02:29:29","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T01:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/welcome-to-the-jungle-consortiumnews\/"},"modified":"2018-10-30T02:29:29","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T01:29:29","slug":"welcome-to-the-jungle-consortiumnews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/welcome-to-the-jungle-consortiumnews\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Jungle \u2013 Consortiumnews"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A troubling new era has begun in Brazil with the election on Sunday of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro as president, writes Pepe Escobar.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

By Pepe Escobar<\/span><\/strong>
Special to Consortium News<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Jean Baudrillard once defined Brazil as \u201cthe chlorophyll of our planet\u201d. And yet a land vastly associated worldwide with the soft power of creative joie de vivre<\/i> has elected a fascist for president. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Brazil is a land torn apart. Former paratrooper Jair Bolsonaro was elected with 55.63 percent of votes. Yet a record 31 million votes were ruled absent or null and void. No less than 46 million Brazilians voted for the Workers\u2019 Party\u2019s candidate, Fernando Haddad; a professor and former mayor of Sao Paulo, one of the crucial megalopolises of the Global South. The key startling fact is that over 76 million Brazilians did not vote for Bolsonaro. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

His first speech as president exuded the feeling of a trashy jihad by a fundamentalist sect laced with omnipresent vulgarity and the exhortation of a God-given dictatorship as the path towards a new Brazilian Golden Age. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

French-Brazilian sociologist Michael Lowy has described<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>the Bolsonaro phenomenon as \u201cpathological politics on a large scale\u201d. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

His ascension was facilitated by an unprecedented conjunction of toxic factors such as the massive social impact of crime in Brazil, leading to a widespread belief in violent repression as the only solution; the concerted rejection of the Workers\u2019 Party, catalyzed by financial capital, rentiers, agribusiness and oligarchic interests; an evangelical tsunami; a \u201cjustice\u201d system historically favoring the upper classes and embedded in State Department-funded \u201ctraining\u201d of judges and prosecutors, including the notorious Sergio Moro, whose single-minded goal during the alleged anti-corruption Car Wash investigation was to send Lula to prison; and the absolute aversion to democracy by vast sectors of the Brazilian ruling classes. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

That is about to coalesce into a radically anti-popular, God-given, rolling neoliberal shock; paraphrasing Lenin, a case of fascism as the highest stage of neoliberalism. After all, when a fascist sells a…<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A troubling new era has begun in Brazil with the election on Sunday of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro as president, writes Pepe Escobar. By Pepe EscobarSpecial to Consortium News It\u2019s darkness at the break of (tropical) high noon. Jean Baudrillard once defined Brazil as \u201cthe chlorophyll of our planet\u201d. And yet a land vastly associated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2524,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-382903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2524"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}