Those steelworkers lifting Lula back in ’77 knew real power comes from production, not financial games. Same fight today for BRICS and against the fascists and Wall Street’s austerity. #LulaPelaDemocracia

Kushner denies the Vanity Fair allegations of Gulf slush funds. But the allegations point toward a documented precedent: al-Yamamah. That 1985 arms-for-oil agreement was signed by the British and Saudi defense ministers and brokered for the Saudis by Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Saudi Arabia committed one tanker of oil per day. BP and Shell marketed the crude on world markets; the proceeds were routed through a special British Ministry of Defence account that paid BAE Systems for Tornado and Hawk aircraft and related services. The structure placed a vast flow of money outside ordinary public budget scrutiny and under layers of official secrecy. EIR estimated the oil sales at approximately $125 billion in contemporaneous dollars against an arms package valued at about $80 billion, arguing the arrangement created an enormous pool of clandestine funds. EIR reported that portions of those funds were directed to clandestine arms purchases, including supplies for the Afghan mujahideen fighting Soviet forces and operations linked to the conflict in Chad. The arrangement combined British arms production, Saudi royal finances, major oil traders and covert geopolitical activity under the protection of official secrecy and City of London and offshore financial channels. The Kushner allegations raise the same questions: Gulf money, opaque accounts and foreign-policy objectives converging around a senior American official. Kushner denies it. The pattern doesn’t need his confession. British Empire financial warfare, dressed up as “peace.”

Timothy Rush of @execintelreview traces the personnel chain linking Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign to the Pentagon faction pushing tactical nuclear weapons, and explains what a Flávio victory would mean for BRICS, Brazil’s rare earths, and the hemisphere: “If Flávio Bolsonaro comes in, Brazil will leave the BRICS; Brazil will join what’s called the Shield of the Americas, which is essentially a US militarization for its own interest in the whole continent. It will surrender its rare earths. It has the second largest deposits of rare earths in the world, second only to China. Surrender that to basically US and London control. And you’re going to see vicious austerity policy, as Eduardo has indicated, be imposed. So it’s not just within Brazil. I hope it’s clear to everybody listening: it is an absolute fundamental choice of direction for Brazil. It is equally important as an international moment. The EIR news service, Executive Intelligence Review, has done [a scoop, in effect] on certain relationships of individuals that tie together this Bolsonaro apparatus in Brazil and a core in the Trump administration which is gunning for using nuclear weapons as part of an effort to suppress the positive potentials emerging around the world in terms of getting out of the London and Wall Street dictatorship. Danielle Marques is the director of economic policy for Flavio Bolsonaro. On Monday of this week, she got on a radio show in Brazil and, for the first time, admitted publicly that a Flavio Bolsonaro administration would reduce and, in effect, begin to hobble the Bolsa Familia program, the family allowance program. This created a storm of controversy. She was under the first Bolsonaro administration, Jair Bolsonaro, the second-in-command of economics in Brazil. The man who led the economics of Brazil is Paulo Guedes. Guedes was the economics minister. He appointed Marques to be in charge of all the key policy areas for the economic ministry. And they put through a policy based on what Pinochet, the bloody dictator of Chile after the coup he led in 1973, Pinochet’s economic policies were designed in the United States around the figure of Milton Friedman. Friedman was what they call the Chicago Boys. They had radical free market ideas in dismantling state programs of any benefit to the broad population, turning economies into essentially economic hell. And you can see it in flaming colors in Chile for the next 30 years. Guedes not only trained in Chicago directly under Friedman, but then went and taught with Pinochet’s people in Chile, was brought in by Jair Bolsonaro to run the economics of Brazil. Susana Cordeiro Guerra was another big protege of Guedes, brought to a very senior position in Brazil from 2019 to 21 in charge of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, which has 12,000 people. She headed that, the youngest person ever to be there. She lives in the United States now. She had studied at Harvard and MIT. She has a big footprint in Brazil, close to the Bolsonaro family. She is married to Elbridge Colby, who is the under secretary for policy in the US Pentagon and is the public face of a group in the Trump administration urging the United States adopt a policy of using tactical nuclear weapons when it gets corralled in situations like Iran. She’s so close to the Trump family that Ivanka and Jared Kushner have asked her to be the godmother to one of their children. She’s an intimate of the whole Trump group. So she’s simultaneously integrated into this Pinochet economic team in Brazil and in the war-making elements in the White House. This whole strategic picture is absolutely vital that people absorb because we’re dealing with a combination of austerity policies igniting the kind of thing you see on the streets of France, with a drive for war that is more and more converging on nuclear war. So a victory for Lula in the second round, even though he will have a follow-up huge battle to regain control of the economy in Brazil, is absolutely crucial to throw a monkey wrench in this whole apparatus.”