#deep state oligarch

[awesomecooperlove]

💥💥💥💥💥💥JUST A REMINDER 💥💥💥💥💥💥

🤡🤡🤡

[wilwheaton]

Frederick Douglass, who was born into Southern slavery, described the South as “a little nation by itself, having its own language, its own rules, regulations, and customs.” Fewer than 2000 families — six-tenths of one percent of the Southern population — owned more than 50 enslaved people and ruled the oligarchy that we call the Confederacy with an iron fist. The 75 percent of white people in the South during that era who did not own any enslaved persons generally lived in deep poverty. Women had no rights, queer people were routinely tortured and murdered, education for both enslaved Africans and poor whites was generally outlawed, religious attendance was often mandated, and hunger and disease stalked all but those in the families of the two thousand morbidly rich planter dynasties. Modern-day Red states are doing their best to recreate that old Confederacy, right down to state Senator Kathy Chism’s new effort to return the Confederate battle flag to Mississippi's state flag. Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence have both emphasized their presidential pledges to restore the names of murderous Civil War traitors to American military bases, celebrating their armed defense of the “values” of the Old South. Today’s version of yesteryear’s plantation owners are called CEOs, hedge and vulture fund managers, and the morbidly rich. They use the power of political bribery given them by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — with Clarence Thomas’ tie-breaking Citizens United vote on behalf of his sugar daddy Harlan Crow — to lord over their Red states, regardless of the will of those states’ citizens.

Why are red state 'welfare queen' oligarchs allowed to mooch off of blue states?

[socialjusticeinamerica]

They don’t even know of a time when life was better in America. Actually Gen X was the first generation in America not to do better than their parents. The same being true for the last few years of the Boomer generation. Y also is struggling.

The lady Boomers and X’ers remember what it was like before Reagan took over and busted unions in 1980. Wages dropped, factory owners took their shops to the Deep South where unions had long since been busted or never allowed to set up in the first place. Then the oligarchs outsourced their work and shuttered factories nationwide.

Before Reagan one parent working 40 hrs a week at a union job could afford a mortgage, a new car, medical insurance, and college for their 2.5 kids. That also applied to “minorities” or marginalized people who benefitted from union protections and negotiated standard pay scales.

With Reagan a home went from two years salary to 10+ years salary. Tuition did the same. Cars that cost a month’s salary soared to a year’s salary. Wages have remained stagnant for about 40 years. The wealthy paid high taxes and we had everything. Now the remnants of the middle class pay the bulk of taxes while multimillionaires and billionaires pay little or even nothing. Credit card interest soared to over 20% in some cases while Republikkkans passed laws making it easier for those card companies to sue you whilst making it nearly impossible for you to sue them. Mentally disabled people were literally dumped into the streets causing widespread homeless which is criminalized in affluent areas and red states. Guns and drugs flooded the streets. Bigoted white nationalists became radicalized when Reagan granted Australian Rupert Murdoch citizenship so he could open Fox News and then shut down the Fairness Doctrine so propaganda could be spread under the guise of news.

All the societal problems we suffer today began with the birth of the modern RepubliKKKan party led by their racist Dotard Ronald Reagan in 1980. The GOP became an organized crime syndicate and the government became a tool for the rich. The middle class shrunk from a sizeable percentage of the population to a handful of areas in the north and along the west coast. Many foolish people believe themselves to be in the middle class but in fact they are just perpetual debtors.

If you’re young your first reaction might be to blame the Boomers because that’s incorrectly become a marketed belief. The Boomer generation fought against the GOP and its wars, racism, pollution, big oil, corporate welfare, and black hole military industrial complex. They were the hippies and political activists that marched on Washington and other places. They booted the racist Dixiecrats (southern conservative racist Dems) from the Democratic Party while shifting educated liberals left. Sadly the GOP under Nixon and his colleagues welcomed the racists and conservative nut jobs. Don’t fight a generational war when you should be fighting a class/culture/political war.

The younger generation needs to educate itself about the political parties and how life was better just a few decades back and begin to vote. Vote, then organize in the workplace through unions and in the streets to attract more young voters and to counter protest the Republikkkan right-wing oligarch take-over of America. Complaining and taking refuge in the internet won’t turn things around. Become politically active, become stoke, bring back lower tuition, affordable health care, labor unions, workers rights, voters rights, etc.

[republikkkanorcs]

His wife killed herself after reading the detailed journal of his affairs. In one year alone he had 37 affairs. RFK Jr is not a Democrat. His friends and associates are Republican oligarchs, right-wing media personalities, Qanon assholes, and Republican politicians. He attends Republican events and is often a guest speaker where he rambles on about Covid anti-vax conspiracies, the deep state, being oppressed by the liberal media, and other MAGA nonsense. He is funded by Republican oligarchs and his campaign has been organized by Republican political operatives whose goal is to confuse uniformed Democrats and get them to vote for RFK Jr instead of Biden, thus helping Trump. Feel free to do your own research.

Republicans can’t win without cheating.

Republicans lie about everything.

Republican clown show.

[beautiful-basque-country]

A foreshadowing message by Basque representative in the Spanish Congress Mertxe Aizpurua the first day of Sánchez's term in office.

It sadly serves for many many countries around the world nowadays.

A third ingrediente will be necessary, one that represents the third great challenge that your Government and the political parties that will make it possible have before us: the deep democratization of this state. A democratization that reaches all that is known as deep state. A democratization that includes all the systems in this state, all of them, Mr. Sánchez. Because the political, judiciary, media, policial, corporate, or oligarchical scheme that is today revolving and acting against popular will - all of it with the blessing of the Crown itself - will not accept, today or anytime, to give up the privileges and power that the regime of '78 granted them. To defend these privileges is the goal of that perfectly orchestrated strategy by all of the right wings that we are witnessing these days against the popular and democratic expression in the elections. I will say it clearly: the regime of '78 in its whole antidemocratic dimension is trying to prevent a term in office of national and social progress, trying to prevent any democratizing shadow. This is what we are witnessing these days.

[san-demetrio-corone]

Ralf Beste of Germany’s Foreign Office said the Russians were ‘looking for cracks of doubt or feelings of unease and trying to enlarge them’.

It is absolutely a threat we have to take seriously.

A network of more than 50,000 fake accounts posting as many as 200,000 posts a day sought to convince Germans that the government’s help for Ukraine was undermining German prosperity and risking nuclear war.

Russian disinformation campaigns to undermine support for Ukraine in Europe have grown significantly in scale, skill and stealth, one of Germany’s most senior diplomats has warned.

“It is absolutely a threat we have to take seriously,” Ralf Beste, head of the department for culture and communication at Germany’s Federal Foreign Office, told the Financial Times. “Overall, [there] is an increase in sophistication and impact to what we have seen before.”

Russia is combining greater subtlety and plausibility in its messaging with automation to make its disruptive attacks more effective and harder to combat, he said.

“There is probably a lot going on we can’t even see. More and more conversations are happening in private . . . channels on Telegram and WhatsApp. It is very difficult to understand what is happening there.” Beste’s department has a dedicated cell that leads the German government’s efforts to track and stop Russia’s information operations overseas.

Germany has emerged as one of the Kremlin’s main targets for disinformation over the war in Ukraine. Under the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Berlin has dramatically revised its security and defence policy and become the second-largest donor of military aid to Kyiv after Washington.

Disagreements over the shift run deep — particularly among supporters of Scholz’s own Social Democratic Party — and many Germans are concerned over economic growth and the impact of the country weaning itself from Russian gas supplies.

Beste said: “[The Russians] are looking for cracks of doubt or feelings of unease and trying to enlarge them.”

His department this year uncovered one of the biggest attempts to manipulate German public opinion yet, on the social media platform X.

A network of more than 50,000 fake accounts posting as many as 200,000 posts a day sought to convince Germans that the government’s help for Ukraine was undermining German prosperity and risking nuclear war.

The network sought to “launder” such claims by making them look as if they had been published as opinions in reputable news outlets such as Der Spiegel and Süddeutsche Zeitung. But it also simply sought to amplify existing anti-Ukrainian views and make them appear to be more widespread.

Last week the Czech government, acting with other European states, accused the Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk of secretly cultivating a network of influence among European politicians to spread pro-Russian narratives and undermine support for Kyiv.

Countering such efforts is hard, Beste said, and indicates the extent to which Russia has moved on from the days of running infamous “troll farms”, which employed real people to spread dissent, often in a clumsy and obvious manner.

Beste said: “[Now] it’s not just a question of information that is verifiably true or false. It’s more than that. It’s about skewing opinions. Trying to tilt the balance of debate. Or to convince people that the frame of the debate is different to what it is in reality.”

The techniques being used were more like “nudging”, he said, referring to the concept in behavioural science of using small social and informational cues to subtly shift opinion or action.

“If you say, for example, ‘there is increasing doubt that XYZ . . . ’ then you will make people more receptive to doubts about that topic,” Beste said. “They are taking elements of reality in these campaigns and then warping them to create a different impression.”

Trying to rebut such campaigns is hard because the basic elements are often unfalsifiable, and engaging can often counterproductively lend claims to credibility.

Artificial intelligence tools are also a serious concern because of their ability to mimic human behaviour.

“AI is clearly something we have to watch very carefully,” Beste said. “What I worry about is how it will be used to create the impression of interaction . . . You enter a de facto second world, not just fake pieces of information or fake films or pictures but an entire alternative information ecosystem.”

[haxyr3]

The book Putin's People by Catherine Belton is now available for free - in Russian.

Amazon: In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche―a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad. Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach―and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match―Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Dungeon:  The Rot of the Jaw

The long abandoned remnants of a spelljamming warship have come to rest in a sunken cavern, leaking all manner of alien oddness into the wilds that has now begun to reach up to the party’s homeland. Though the potential savlage from this ship is great so too is the danger lurking within, both in the form of the ship’s ancient defences and the secret they have stayed online to protect.

Hooks:

Under the protection and benefit of the crown, an esoteric group of monks in the high hills are known for keeping an artifact known as “the verdant bed” a sarcophagus like device rumoured to be able to cure any illness. Known for charging exorbitant prices for access to the bed, the monks have recently closed their doors to even the most giving of petitioners, leaving a wealthy merchant and his increasingly ill husband in a lurch. Desperate for answers if not solutions, the merchant is willing to pay the party to sneak into the abbey and discover what the monks are hiding.

Something, as it turns out, is deathly wrong with the bed. Where once it sapped away sickness leaving behind only a coating of crumbling green lichen on those it healed, the bed now overflows with a russet mold that is slowly overtaking the abbey and all within. Worse yet, the mold is producing crude huamnoid fungus monsters that seem mindlessly intent on feeding more people to the bed and spreading thier blight. The monks have them barricaded to a specific section of the abbey for now, but give it to the heroes to blunder in and unleash the mould upon the populace.  

The bed is but one of many wondrous devices Scattered about the realm are wondrous devices scattered around the realm with uncertain origins: magical cannons that can shoot dragons out of the sky, person sized fabric cocoons that can send a dreaming individual’s perceptions to far off places in just a blink, all held by covetous hands. To find a means of repairing the bed, its up to the players ( and some helpful archives staff) to research where these devices came from, and to discover that their source is deep underground in some forboding place called “ the hollow”

Background: Though it exists in a sorry state today, the vessel known as the Mandible of Hydax (crude translation) was once a force to be reckoned with, its living stone hull quarried from the body of a fossilized god, bristling with weapons under the direction of a gith warlord who was the terror of the astral sea

Hydax was just as fearsome as her ship, a self styled “tyrant for hire”, she, her mercenary crew, and her warship would contract out for any body of extradimensional oligarchs who didn’t have the strength to put a boot to the neck of their lessers, breaking strikes, defeating rebellions, and ensuring the peasants kept doing their job. This was until Hydax was hired to go after who she and her superiors thought was merely a unusually fucked up spellcaster but was in fact a Kaorti, an emissary of the far realm possessed of terrifying, reality warping powers.   Hydax managed to get her quarry in a cage, and was just in the process of finding a nice void rift to throw the bastard into when the Kaotri ripped them from the astral sea, overriding the ship’s spelljamming helm and throwing them at the nearest material plane ( the party’s home) with enough force to bury the ship beneath the skin of the world like shrapnel. 

Challenges & Complications:

The subterranean path required to reach the Mandible are a hazard unto themselves, with many requiring perilous detours to avoid cave ins and other geological instabilities caused by the ship’s impact. The inhabitants are likewise dangerous, including more than one band of cave-things wielding weapons salvaged from the gith crew or the Mandible itself.

Hydax’s ship contains all manner of wonders and dangers, raging from an arsenal of unearthly weapons and other memorabilia to an archive of (centuries out of date) information regarding the goings on of many alien worlds. Perhaps most valuable of all is the ship’s spelljamming helm, which could be refitted into a new vessel to allow the party to explore the stars. Removing it however may trigger any number of defences, ranging from malfunctioning constructs to a curse from the long dead captain, wraith against any who would loot her prized ship.

The Kaorti, for its part, is still stuck within its cage at the heart of the ship, unable to break the seals that hold it there trapped and undying. It has instead flung its consciousness out into the surrounding caves, directing the unwitting inhabitants to act as its guards and search witlessly for a means to free it.  The party will be better tools by far, and the ghostly presence of the aberrant mage will pretend to be a malfunctioning ship AI, seeming to help them with their goal while leading them to free it.

[socialjusticeinamerica]

I’ve told you this before but I’ll repeat it. George “Dubya” Bush began the practice of paying Evangelical pastors to preach against Democrats and in favor of Republicans.

After coming out of rehab for coke addiction “Dubya” became a born again evangelical. As dumb as he is he quickly realized that southern and rural evangelicals were poorly educated and completely uniformed bible thumpers that could easily be bought off and used as a political propaganda props.

“Dubya”, who had deserted the Texas Air National Guard and had many scrapes with the law, had his record expunged by his father who had been director of the CIA. Papa Bush helped Nixon open China to Republikkkan corporations and then as VP assisted Reagan in his war on the American middle class and poor. When “wimpy” dad ran for President, Jr fell in with evil brain bug Karl Rove who put the coke addict in charge of buying evangelical clergy. A fairly easy task because evangelical churches are independent, for profit businesses with no hierarchy to answer to like the mainstream Protestants churches or the Catholics. The effort brought in so many new Republican recruits that it continues to this day.

During the Obama years the Justice Department investigated and revoked the non-profit status of evangelical and Baptist churches that were preaching Republican culture war bullshit. This infuriated them and was largely responsible for the massive backlash against Obama and the Dems. Although this was highly underreported it was a very sore point for the GOP thieves. Even today most Dems think the overreaction by Republicans to Obama was purely racism (and let’s face it they are racist bastards) when in fact it was partly that Barry Obama had cut deeply into their lucrative propaganda/fundraising in the south and rural areas. Although it’s not entirely clear that Obama led this effort to undermine the fascist GOP it shook them to the core. They need the pastors to tell the MAGAts how to vote and who to donate to.

Today the evangelical fake Christians of the old Confederacy are the backbone of the MAGA cult and they have been groomed to accept Trump as a “mercenary” for their bastardization of religion. They are willing to overlook his embodiment of the seven deadly sins because he pushes their agenda, not because he believes in it but because he needs their money and votes. It’s a match made in the bowels of Fox News Hell. They’re aware he’s the biggest sinner in the country but he’s their last best chance to set up a Christo-fascist state. Something that wasn’t even on their radar until the Bush dynasty, Karl Rove, and the RNC came knocking on their doors. They think they’re driving the car but they’re just the limo drivers for the oligarchs and their GOP puppets.

It should be noted that there are some cracks in the armor as many college age evangelicals have been speaking up against the tidal wave of cruelty and evil coming from Trump and the GOP. Somebody must have introduced them to the New Testament and Socialist Jesus. For the most part however the old guard televangelist figureheads have been silencing dissent. The young on both sides, while very vocal, haven’t exactly turned out in the massive numbers we keep hoping for.

Republicans still rely on a coalition of evangelical bible thumpers, far-right Nazis, southern/rural gun nuts, the wealthy, and Deep South Americanized Hispanics. The Dems are still largely a coalition of adult African-Americans, Northeast/West coast progressives, the over educated, urban dwellers, and union members (except for police unions). Thanks for reading and following.

[workersolidarity]

Another crash course in the United States' connection to Nazis in Ukraine:

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in WWII, various Nazi groups were formed locally, in particular in Western Ukraine where they believed the historical population to be of "Aryan" ancestry.

Many western Ukrainians readily joined these Nazi organizations, believing themselves to be part of a master Aryan race superior to the Slavs, Jews, Poles, Roma and Russians whom they intended to purge from an independent Ukraine, free of non-Aryan ethnic groups.

The history of the Ukrainian Nazis such as Yaroslav Hunka's 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, to Stepan Bandera's Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and how they slaughtered their way through Ukraine is well documented. Together, they were responsible for the genocide of men, women and children by the hundreds of thousands. Their brutality was extreme beyond words and on an industrial scale.

When the Soviet Union managed to finally push the Nazis out of Ukraine, more than 150'000 Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Nazis fled to Germany, but equally many stayed behind, with more than 30'000 soldiers and members of the OUN ingratiating themselves locally and using terror to keep others silent.

During this time, these tens of thousands of Ukrainian Nazis formed a resistance that continued to fight a guerilla war, as well as an espionage, sabotage, assassination, and terrorism campaign across Ukraine. The resistance was led by the OUN and like-minded Nazi and Fascist groups in Ukraine, but was run by the Nazi Galen organization which ran intelligence on the Eastern front, which in turn was managed and funded by the Nazi German leadership in Berlin.

When the war ended, the OSS (the forerunner to the CIA to which it became after 1947) then took control over the Galen organization and its operations, including local Ukrainian Nazi stay-behind militias like the OUN which continued to fight a bloody guerilla war throughout Ukraine well after the war ended.

This went on well into 1954, and in that time roughly 200'000 people died, with over 40'000 Soviet soldiers killed in Ukraine from 1945-1954. To put that into perspective, the United States lost 50'000 soldiers in 10 years of Vietnam, so similar rates of losses, except this was inside their own territory. This was a war, and the Soviets won.

Eventually, these Ukrainian Nazis fled to Western countries like Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States and many more were captured and justly sent to the gulags where they should have rotted for the rest of their days as they deserved.

But, of course, Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev famously released them from the Gulags as part of reconciliation between the Soviet peoples during his "De-Stalinization" process, and so eventually, the CIA re-activated these troops who maintained a loose underground organization of Ukrainian Nazis under US control.

Slowly, over many decades, these Nazi organizations and their members have infiltrated every level of Ukrainian governance and society. This assisted in a significant way the fall of the Soviet Union, and this was also how a Maidan Coup was even possible in 2014.

It's all a part of a continuous policy by a feudal Nazi elite in Ukraine with roots stretching back to the very initial founding of the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets in December 1917 and these feudal powers' subsequent fall from power.

The United States has stood firm in assisting the Nazi Ukrainian oligarchs in their goals from the very beginning, just as they did the Russian oligarchs, having joined the Western Powers' invasion of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic immediately following its founding after the October Revolution.

The US government is, and always has been, neck deep in this Nazi mess.

[haitilegends]

#Film - Assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise Getting Doc From ‘I Am Not Your Negro’ Filmmaker Raoul Peck

Alex Gibney is among the producers of the feature, which is currently in production.

BY BORYS KIT

MARCH 18, 2024 10:36AM

"Raoul Peck, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind 2016’s I Am Not Your Negro, is in production on his latest documentary, an investigation into the 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise.

Tentatively titled The Hands That Held the Knives, Peck is not only directing but producing the film under his Velvet Films banner alongside Jigsaw Productions, with Imagine Documentaries, Anonymous Content, and Double Agent, who are also financing the project.

Peck’s take is being described as a “documentary thriller, in the tradition of Graham Greene or John Le Carré.” Per Monday’s announcement, Peck is going deep into the politics of Haiti, its relationship with the United States, and the corrupt business empires and criminal organizations that have now rendered the country a hellscape for its citizens.

The film will take audiences right up to the present moment, per the producers, “as ruthless gangs backed by oligarchs with well-paid lobbyists in Washington, D.C. now control 80% of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.”....

(CONTINUE READING...

[eelhound]

"[Nathan J.] Robinson 

Something that makes the United States an incredibly dangerous actor is the lack of self awareness and to perceive ourselves as others see us: to see through the eyes of anyone on the receiving of our policy. It’s an arrogance that says that we would never act in a purely self-interested way because we’re America. There’s a fundamental assumption of idealism and goodness. I don’t think it’s widely realized that everyone in the world thinks they’re good, and you don’t know if you’re actually good and idealistic until you check how you look to other people. 

[Van] Jackson 

That’s totally true and this is a genuine source of danger, ironically. I used to believe all this stuff, too. I was a true believer in this kind of evangelical exceptionalism, the triumphalism of America as the 'shining city on a hill' in foreign policy, even though I could see that our domestic politics were a little messed up. And, in fact, for the foreign policy mandarins in DC, having external threats and being able to externalize America’s problems onto another is psychologically the salve and the psychic wage that prevents us from having to deal with our own problems.

And so, China is a godsend to the foreign policy establishment because it means that they don’t have to take a hard look at the American surveillance state, the de facto policing of Black communities, or the deep economic precarity of the majority of the population. They don’t have to face the threat of the far-right militias, or the way that politics is post-democratic in many senses, with the oligarchic political economy that we run — there’s no time for any of that. And also, there’s no time for the climate crisis either because we got to smite the big bad."

- Van Jackson being interviewed by Nathan J. Robinson, from "Why This Foreign Policy Expert Thinks Americans Dangerously Misunderstand China." Current Affairs, 16 May 2023.

[zvaigzdelasas]

At his initial court appearance, Castillo looked downcast as he gave simple yes or no answers and his attorney argued that he had been arbitrarily ousted from Peru’s presidency on trumped-up charges of rebellion.

The U.S. condemned Castillo’s power grab as illegal and even leftist allies have refused to speak out against his overthrow. A major exception was Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who called Castillo’s removal a “soft coup” fueled by deep-seated racism against the former school teacher from the heavily indigenous Andean highlands.

“It is no longer military intervention,” said López Obrador. “It’s done with control of the media by the oligarchs, undermining legal and legitimately constituted authorities, especially if they want to do something for the benefit of the long-suffering people who do not belong to the elites.”

Meanwhile , Castillo’s successor, like many Peruvians, seemed eager to turn the page. In comments to journalists Thursday, Dina Boluarte, who served as Castillo’s vice president, appealed for a “truce” from the political feuding that has paralyzed Peru for years so that she can “reorient” the country. With polls showing Peruvians despising Congress even more than they do Castillo, she suggested that she would consider holding early elections — something that requires approval of a hard-to-muster constitutional amendment. [...]

But once in office he cycled through dozens of inexperienced Cabinet choices, a number of whom have been accused of wrongdoing. He also faced a hostile Congress, which first tried to impeach him last December. At the time, a relatively small group of opposition lawmakers cited an investigation by prosecutors into illicit financing of the governing party. To remove the president requires two-thirds of the 130 lawmakers to vote in favor. Only 46 voted in favor.

Congress tried to impeach Castillo again in March for “permanent moral incapacity,” a term incorporated into Peruvian constitutional law that experts say lacks an objective definition and that Congress has used more than a half dozen times since 2017 to try to remove presidents. The effort failed, this time with only 55 votes in favor.

On Wednesday, Peru was girding for a third impeachment vote. The night before, the president said in an unusual midnight address on state television that a certain sector of Congress had it out for him and that he was paying for mistakes made due to inexperience. [...]

The president can dissolve congress to end a political standoff but only in limited circumstances — after losing two votes of confidence in Congress, which last occurred in 2019, when then President Martin Vizcarra dismissed lawmakers. [...]

Despite the high political drama, only small clashes erupted between a handful of Castillo supporters and riot police on guard outside.

Boluarte, a 60-year-old lawyer, was sworn in as Peru’s first female president. She said her first order of business would be to address corruption, ostensibly what led to Castillo’s downfall. [...]

López Obrador said Thursday that he had greenlighted Castillo’s request for asylum that he made in a phone call to the Mexican president’s office. But he said those plans were frustrated when Castillo was intercepted by police on his way to the Mexican Embassy in Lima, where a group of protesters awaited.

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro said Castillo had committed “political suicide” by weaponizing a seldom-used clause of the constitution to combat his adversaries in Congress, who he said never allowed Castillo to govern.

Anti-democracy can’t be fought with more anti-democracy,” he said, echoing similar comments by Brazil’s incoming president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

8 Dec 22