Posted on August 27, 2019 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
No organization, no animal rights group or association alone has the power to change the misery of the animals. We don`t know exact if direct actions, animal liberation or demonstrations can be effective.
One thing has shown us the experience: ALL actions together can bring results and if we hold together then the probability is even greater.
But most of all, we must never allow ourselves to be deprived of action and resistance, by arbitrary taboos, or by intimidation of our powers, because the presentation of animal suffering to the public is our most important weapon.
Every direct action is a reminder of the essential, and that is the pain, the suffering, the slavery of animals in farms and everywhere.
Above all, let us not allow this system to take away the fight for the rights of animals and our freedom to think and speak.
Posted on August 27, 2019 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
“We are in the middle of a period of great species extinction, but most people are blind to it, they are so busy with their trivial circus, anthropocentric pastimes, sports, art, gossip, politics, wine, food and entertainment. People fiddle while the earth is burning. “ (Captain Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd)
Posted on August 26, 2019 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro is a major threat to Latin America’s largest democracy to date. Because he is a proponent of dictatorship, torture, the death penalty and the machine gun in every living room.
Bolsonaro has already stated in the election campaign that he would have accepted no result other than his victory. He never recognized his rival candidate Fernando Haddad as a political rival. He described him and his supporters as “red bandits” who should be “wiped out”.
He announced that he will imprisone Haddad, without saying for what offense. He spoke of a “purge, such as Brazil has not yet seen.” There is no democratic rule of play that Bolsonaro has not yet broken, no elemental human right that he has not yet threatened.
It is therefore not necessary to seek historically clear concepts such as “fascism”. Also no comparison with Trump, Duterte, Pinochet or even with Hitler helps now further to describe the Brazilian`s head of state.
Suffice it to call Jair Bolsonaro what he is: a glorifier of violence. A proponent of dictatorship, torture, the death penalty, the machine gun in every living room.
In Congress, his party represents the second largest faction. He is also supported by a cross-party alliance of religious fundamentalists, ex-military and landowners. This so-called Bancada BBB, the bible, lead and bull faction, will be jointly owned by a majority.
Almost everything that threatens Bolsonaro sounds so absurd that the suspicion arises that it is tasteless jokes. Demoscopes are amazed at a strange phenomenon: many of his voters said it was not a problem to vote for him because he would not implement what he said. That has proved to be error!
This was not a choice left-wing extremism or right-wing extremism, between plague and cholera, as many have claimed from the social center to justify Bolsonaro’s support. It was, in order to stay in the picture, more of a choice between a cold and heart attack. Brazil has decided to infarct.
One of the key projects of Bolsonaro’s dictatorship was from beginning the release of the Amazon for economic exploitation. A chainsaw massacre is imminent. Bolsonaro also openly considered leaving the Paris agreement on climate change, in which Brazil plays a key role.
Bolsonaro is not only a threat to Brazil, but to the entire world. The Brazilian Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, plays an essential role in halting climate change. Bolsonaro, as well as the military and agricultural lobbyists who have power with him, deny it. But the burning Amazon proves it.
This planet is already punished with a president Donald Trump. It can not tolerate President Jair Bolsonaro anymore!
My comment: Only France and Ireland are in favor of a blockade of the Mercosur Treaty, Germany is ONLY outraged.
The EU is the biggest soy buyer of Brazil, the rainforest is burning to feed our pigs.
But there is another question: Why does Germany want to remain loyal to a contract if the partner has proven to be an environmental terrorist?
We have petitions, donations, worldwide protests, massive media war even from the conservative side.
But we still have not made the most important thing: the abolition of the Mercosur Treaty.
And it will not happen because: the federal government is against the Blocade of the Mercosur Agreement.
“The agreement contains an ambitious sustainability chapter with binding climate change regulations “ a government spokesman said, ” a non-closure would not be the appropriate response to what’s happening in Brazil right now. We must support Brazil in its efforts to quickly overcome this severe crisis”!!!
Which would be the “appropriate” response?
The Bolsonaro government does not make any “efforts” and sees no “crisis”; The “forest fires” are indeed targeted slash-and-burn, Bolsonaro must tolerate them, for which the sponsors have brought Bolsonaro into office. He is the puppet of violent landowners. He is much worse than a fascist. A guru-obedient clown with an obscure environment, extremely reactionary, a plaything in the hands of powerful landlords and industrial bosses.
Which would be the “appropriate” solution?
The Hambi forest in Germany only survived because some people chained to trees, not because we suddenly discovered our environmental awareness.
That means we have to take to the streets if we want to save our planet.
The ongoing destruction of the Amazon is taking place because of policy choices made by those who now rule Brazil
As the world watches in horror and terror as the Amazon burns, scientists have made clear that the cause, principally if not entirely, is human activity.
Here in Brazil, that human activity has human names and faces: those of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his extremist Environment Minister, Ricardo Salles. They have not merely permitted these devastating fires, but have encouraged and fueled them.
They have done so with a toxic brew of radical ideology, political corruption and banal greed. Put simply, the ongoing destruction of the Amazon is taking place because of policy choices made by those who now rule Brazil.
The magnitude of these fires, and the severity of the dangers they pose to the world, have been widely demonstrated over the last week. As the New York Times reported on Wednesday, the National Institute for Space Research documented that it “had detected 39,194 fires this year in the world’s largest rain forest, a 77% increase from the same period in 2018.”
The raging fires have become so potent that the smoke they generate plunged the Western Hemisphere’s largest city, São Paulo, into total darkness in the middle of the day on Tuesday. What was particularly shocking about that sudden event was that the Amazonian fires are hundreds of miles away from that city, but have become so dense and overwhelming that they snuffed out light in that distant major metropolis.
To the extent one can locate any silver lining in this literal dark cloud, it is that the cause of these fires are almost entirely manmade, which means they can be stopped with changes in human behavior – specifically, with policy changes by Brazil’s new government.
President Bolsonaro’s election victory last November was a shock to the Brazilian political system because, as a Congressman for almost 30 years, his retrograde and unhinged views had relegated him to the fringe of politics life. His presence in the Congress was regarded by most as a national embarrassment; that he would one day occupy the presidential palace was unthinkable.
But as has happened in numerous other countries in the democratic world, including the United States, a series of crises and failures validly attributed to the establishment class have driven large sections of the country’s population into the arms of any self-styled outsider, no matter how demagogic and radical.
Among Bolsonaro’s many extremist views is climate denialism as stubborn and extreme as any prominent world figure, if not more so. He has long dismissed the scientific consensus about climate scenarios as a hoax. And he campaigned on an explicit pledge to exploit – ie destroy – the Amazon, which currently provides 20% of the world’s oxygen and which climate scientists widely regard as the most valuable asset humanity possesses in our increasingly difficult battle to avoid climate catastrophes.
Since his election, Bolsonaro has not only made good on his promises to fundamentally subvert our country’s long-standing commitment to protect the Amazon, but has done so with a speed and aggression that has surprised even his most virulent critics. To be sure, Bolsonaro’s predecessors – including those from the center-left Workers’ Party – have earned their share of valid criticisms from environmentalists for harming the Amazon for industrial gain. But – after just eight moths in office – Bolsonaro’s damage to the world’s greatest rain forest is in an entirely different universe of magnitude.
Deforestation is an affirmative goal of Bolsonaro. That can be achieved by cutting down trees or, more efficiently, by simply burning large areas that Brazil’s agricultural industry wants to exploit. It also means displacing the indigenous tribes that have lived in those forests for centuries: people for whom Bolsonaro has repeatedly expressed contempt. Their displacement from those lands has often been accomplished with violence against environmental activists and indigenous leaders.
Bolsonaro’s choice for his Environment Minster, Ricardo Salles from the so-called New Party (Partido Novo), exemplifies the radical and even violent anti-environmentalism fueling these fires. Last year, Salles, while serving as a state environmental official in São Paulo, was found guilty of administrative improprieties for having altered a map to benefit mining companies.
He was fined and deprived of his political rights – including his right to seek elected office – for eight years. Bolsonaro evidently viewed these transgressions as a virtue since he announced his selection of Salles to serve in his cabinet a mere three weeks after his conviction.
In 2018, Salles – now the custodian of the Brazilian Amazon – ran for federal Congress with a political ad that displayed bullets from a rifle as his solution for environmental activists, indigenous tribes impeding the destruction of their land, and “leftists.” Salles lost his bid for Congress, but was rewarded with a much more powerful position: Bolsonaro’s Environment Minister.
Bolsonaro and Salles view deforestation as such a pressing priority that they openly despise anyone who seeks to impede it. Earlier this month, Bolsonaro fired a top scientist after he warned the country that deforestation was taking place at an unprecedented and dangerous rate. Last month, when a reporter asked Bolsonaro about the damage being done to the environment by his industrial policies, the President contemptuously told the reporter he should defecate less: “one day yes, one day no.” And, in the face of rising political pressure over the Amazonian fires, he infamously, and baselessly, blamed environmental groups this week for having started them.
The agencies charged with safeguarding the nearly one million indigenous people in Brazil have suffered such severe budget cuts under Bolsonaro that they are now barely functioning. During the campaign, he vowed: “Not one centimetre will be demarcated for indigenous reserves or quilombolas.” In late July, gold miners invaded an indigenous village and one of its leaders was stabbed to death.
All of these dramatic changes have occurred not only from ideology but also political captivity. Along with right-wing evangelicals and supporters of Brazil’s past military dictatorship, Brazil’s powerful agribusiness sector is a critical component of the coalition that swept Bolsonaro into office.
Their gamble on Bolsonaro has paid dividends: a huge array of previously banned pesticides has been approved for use this year with virtually no debate or study. One result: the death of 500 million bees in the last three months alone.
Worst of all, deforestation is consuming the Amazon at a horrifically rapid pace. As The New York Times put it this week: “The destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil has increased rapidly since the nation’s new far-right president took over and his government scaled back efforts to fight illegal logging, ranching and mining.”
The government agency responsible for monitoring deforestation documented the loss of “1,330 square miles of forest cover in the first half of 2019, a 39 percent increase over the same period last year.”
What the world is witnessing is as deliberate as it is dangerous. It is insufficient, and arguably offensive, for already-developed and rich western powers which have done so much damage to the planet to simply dictate to Brazil that it must not exploit its resources the way the west has done with such great environmental damage.
But the world also cannot stand by and let the Bolsonaro government destroy the Amazon. In lieu of unilateral decrees that smack of arrogant colonialism, rich industrialized countries who need the Amazon to survive should fund social programs for poor Brazilians who compose a large majority of our supremely unequal country, in exchange for preservation of this vital environmental asset.
Identifying the culprit – President Bolsonaron and Minister Salles – is necessary but not sufficient to avert the environmental disaster. The Amazon belongs to Brazil, but the need to save the planet belongs to all of humanity, and all of us must bear this burden collectively.
David Miranda is a federal Congressman in Brazil representing the state of Rio de Janeiro with the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL)
Posted on August 25, 2019 by Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)
Jair Bolsonaro’s neglect of the Amazon has made him “the most despised and detested leader” on earth, Brazil’s former environment minister has claimed, as the far-right leader again rebuked French president Emmanuel Macron for challenging his environmental record.
“These people are lunatics,” Ricupero said of Bolsonaro’s administration in an interview with the Guardian.
“In my opinion, he has turned himself into the most despised and detested leader in the world. I can’t see anyone else – not even Duterte in the Philippines … not Trump, not anyone – who today provokes so much anger.”
“Never, in more than 50 years of our history, has there been a disaster involving Brazil’s image and the perception of Brazil so serious and probably so irremediable as this one,” added Ricupero, who was also Brazil’s finance minister and ambassador to the United States.
“Even in the military period – when Brazil had a negative image above all because of human rights, torture and disappearances – what went on here never drew so much attention as now.”
But Bolsonaro has continued to dismiss the crisis as a campaign of “fake news” and “disinformation” designed to discredit his government.
“We are doing what we can,” the rightwing populist told reporters in the capital, Brasília, on Saturday. “The Amazon is bigger than the whole of Europe. Even if I had 10 million people I wouldn’t be able to prevent [these fires].”
At the G7 summit, Macron is pushing for world powers to help put out the fires and fund reforestation and management projects in the Amazon.
Ricupero, Brazil’s minister for the environment and the Amazon in the early 1990s, admitted fighting illegal deforestation was a massive task in a sprawling region where the government’s presence was limited and environmental criminals often armed and dangerous.
“It’s a wild west like in the American films,” Ricupero said of the Amazon. “[It’s not like] Sussex or East Anglia … Even in the best circumstances – even when a government is determined to enforce the law – it is an uphill struggle.”
But Ricupero accused Bolsonaro’s government of simply “folding its arms” when it came to protecting the Amazon, giving criminals a carte blanche to destroy by undermining Brazil’s environmental agency, Ibama.
“[Bolsonaro] has the same mentality as the military rulers in the 1970s: that the Amazon should be colonzied and become soy plantations and cattle ranches,” Ricupero said.
“In the 1970s the government had a slogan: ‘Amazonia will be colonized by hooves of cows’. They never accepted the idea that the Amazon had to be preserved. They see no reason for the forest not to be chopped down and replaced with agriculture and mining. This is his [Bolsonaro’s] mindset.”
Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister from 2003 until 2008, said she felt “deep sadness and anger” at the devastation unfolding in the region where she was born and raised.
Silva agreed Amazon destruction was not a new phenomenon.
“We’ve had fires and deforestation under every government – but with the difference that [before] you had environment ministers … who were genuinely committed to protecting the forests, biodiversity and our water resources,” Silva said.
By contrast, Bolsonaro’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, was “an anti-environment minister” actively working against nature. “Instead of strengthening his employees he strengthens the offenders,” Silva said.
Ricupero said: “He isn’t a minister – he’s an anti-minister. He’s the opposite of what a minister should be.”
Ricupero said he feared Bolsonaro’s antagonistic reaction to European criticism meant international cooperation to control the destruction would be hard.
Only “the fear of economic consequences” – such as a boycott of Brazilian products or the halting of a trade deal with the EU – were likely to make Bolsonaro’s Brazil change course. “If nothing concrete happens, beyond the complaints … this will continue getting worse,” he predicted.
Bolsonaro continued his attacks on Macron on Saturday, accusing the French president of treating Brazil like “a colony or a no man’s land”.
Bolsonaro’s education minister, Abraham Weintraub, branded Macron a characterless, “opportunistic knave” and “a cretin”, while Brazil’s president mocked the French first lady’s appearance on Facebook.
Ricupero said: “The impression I have right now is that Brazil is committing suicide. That the president himself is ‘suiciding’ the country. It is a strong expression – but it’s what I feel. Destroying your own patrimony is tantamount to suicide.”
Serbian Animals Voice (SAV) 