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Brazil

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Greenwald Testifies to Brazilian Senate about NSA Espionage Targeting Brazil and Latin America

This past Tuesday, investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald testified before the Brazilian Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations and National Defense (CRE) at a public hearing on the clandestine surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in Brazil.

Greenwald, who has published many top-secret NSA documents leaked to him by whistleblower Edward Snowden, explained how the agency’s surveillance programs go far beyond gathering intelligence related to terrorism and other national security threats, as the U.S. government has suggested. According to Greenwald, NSA spying has focused on foreign business interests as a means for the U.S. government to gain a competitive advantage in negotiations. Greenwald mentioned that he has information regarding instances of NSA surveillance of the Organization of American States (OAS) and secret intelligence documents on economic agreements with Latin American nations. He explained that this type of surveillance has helped the U.S. to make the agreements appear more appealing to Latin American countries. Brazil’s concern about this economic espionage is particularly understandable given that it is the U.S.’s largest trading partner in South America.

During the hearing, Greenwald made reference to a 2009 letter wherein Thomas Shannon, the former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs (from November 2005 – November 2009) and current U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, celebrated the NSA’s surveillance program in Latin America and how it has helped advance U.S. foreign policy goals in the region. Greenwald wrote a detailed account of his findings in an article entitled “Did Obama know what they were thinking?” in the Brazilian print magazine, Época. In this piece, Greenwald explains that Shannon’s letter, addressed to NSA Director Keith Alexander, discusses how the spy agency obtained hundreds of documents belonging to Latin American delegations detailing their “plans and intentions” during the summit. Shannon asserted that these documents were instrumental in helping the Obama administration engage with the delegations and deal with “controversial subjects like Cuba” and “difficult counterparts” like former President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, and Bolivian President, Evo Morales. In the same letter Shannon encouraged Alexander to continue providing similar intelligence as “the information from the NSA will continue to give us the advantage that our diplomacy needs,” especially ahead of an upcoming OAS General Assembly meeting in which he knew discussions on Cuba’s suspension from the OAS would ensue.

CEPR and Mabel Duran-Sanchez / August 10, 2013

Article Artículo

Do We Want High House Prices or Affordable Housing? Lessons on the Government Debt

Matt Yglesias asked this question of President Obama on his twitter feed. It's a very good question and reporters at President Obama's speech in Phoenix would have been asking it if they were awake.

In case folks missed it, President Obama touted immigration reform as one of the actions he would do for housing. He said that this would raise house prices.

There probably is some truth to this. Normalizing the status of 10-12 million immigrants living in the country will allow more of them to be homeowners, which should have some upward impact on house prices.

(Don't get too carried away on this one. The incremental boost to homeownership will be modest. Furthermore, these people were living somewhere. If they had been living in rental units, these units would become vacant. Then rents would fall, other things equal. That would cause some would be homeowners to rent instead and for some rental units to be converted to ownership units. In other words, don't expect to make your fortune on immigration reform sending the price of your home soaring.)

However this raises a basic question, why would we think that high house prices are good? Obviously high house prices are good for people who own homes. But they are bad news for people who are renting and hope to become homeowners or young people just starting their own households.

Saying that we want high house prices is in effect saying that we want to transfer wealth from those who don't own homes to those who do. That looks a lot like upward redistribution, which is not ordinarily an explicit goal of government policy, even if that is often an outcome.

Dean Baker / August 07, 2013

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World

Recap of Threats and Intimidation from Washington Over Snowden

Whistleblower Edward Snowden has finally been granted asylum by a country that he’s actually able to travel to.  Regardless of whether asylum in Russia is only temporary, this is precisely the situation that the U.S. government has been trying to avoid ever since Snowden’s identity became known on June 9th.  According to the State Department, “Mr. Snowden is not a human rights activist, he’s not a dissident, he’s been accused of leaking classified information, has been charged with three very serious felony counts, and must be, should be, returned to the United States to face a free and fair trial as soon as possible.” 

When confronted with accusations that the extreme measures taken by the Obama administration to try to capture Snowden are a form of political persecution, the State Department offers contradictory rebuttals, first saying, “he would be tried as any U.S. citizen would be, and he remains a U.S. citizen.”  and then stating, “I wouldn’t want to compare [Snowden’s] case to any other case in the U.S. or elsewhere.”  This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the incoherent public statements made by U.S. government officials trying to justify their pursuit of Snowden. 

Many countries have received threats or suffered blowback for even considering Snowden’s asylum request.  Indeed, in perhaps one of the more dramatic moments so far in the Snowden saga, Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, had his plane rerouted and searched based on an unfounded suspicion that Snowden was on board.  Given that Snowden seems to have found himself a stable living situation - at least for now - let’s step back for a moment and review some of the actions and statements of the Obama administration and members of the U.S. congress with regard to Snowden.  They reveal how important this case is to the government, and also some of the contradictions that have emerged in the process:

    1. Various parts of the U.S. government were involved in trying to win China’s cooperation with efforts to capture Snowden, and after he left for Russia strong words were used to illustrate U.S. frustration with China.  White House spokesperson Jay Carney said on June 24:

I think it’s fair to say that this is a setback in the effort by the Chinese to help develop mutual trust.  And I think, as we’ve said with regards to the failure by Hong Kong to provisionally arrest Mr. Snowden, that we don’t buy suggestions that the Chinese weren’t a part of -- that this was just a logistical or technical issue in Hong Kong alone.  So we do believe it’s a setback.  

While censuring China, he also tried to build a case for why Russia should cooperate:

I can note, as I have, that we have worked cooperatively with the Russians in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings and have a fairly substantial history of law enforcement cooperation with Russia as a backdrop to this discussion.  But I wouldn’t want to characterize communications at this point or speculate about outcomes.  This is clearly fluid and we’re monitoring --

Although it is difficult to be certain since other bilateral meetings were not open to the public, it seems like this tough rhetoric was not toned down during the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue.

CEPR / August 06, 2013

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Workers

Slow Progress for Fast-Food Workers
In recent weeks, fast-food workers have gone on strike in seven U.S. cities. Their demand for a $15-per-hour minimum wage in their industry – about $30,000 per year for a full-time worker, typically with no benefits – has underscored just how low the $7.2

John Schmitt and Janelle Jones / August 06, 2013