"You're Lying Through Your Teeth": Brian Mier v. Glenn Greenwald on Brazilian Politics
Plus, Oakland students tell me about their strike
Brazilian politician David Miranda announced Saturday he was leaving the socialist party he belonged to and joining a new more centrist party.
Miranda left Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL), a traditional ally of Lula's Workers Party, for the Partido Democrático Trabalhista (PDT), which is running candidate Ciro Gomes in the presidential election.
“The PSOL, in my view, is at risk at this moment of sacrificing its essence to become a loyal arm of a party and ideology it was created to oppose,” Miranda wrote.
It’s a decision that earned Miranda criticism, with some corners of the Brazilian left accusing him of opportunism.
“He changed parties because he realized that he would not be re-elected with PSOL,” tweeted Federal University of Ceará professor Lola Aronovich. “In other words, he’s thinking of his career.”
Journalist Brian Mier opined that Miranda is adopting the conservative politics more commonly associated with his husband, journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Greenwald took offense to Mier’s wording suggesting he was supporting Gomes or was involved in his husband’s decision, calling the BrasilWire editor a “pathological liar” and a “piece of shit.”
But a statement from Revista Movimento claims that the couple came to PSOL together before Miranda left the party: “David and Glenn presented, in December 2021, David's exit plan from the PSOL to support Ciro Gomes' presidential candidacy in the PDT.”
I moderated a debate between the two journalists about these issues and Brazilian politics in general on my podcast Monday. You can listen here.
Here’s a clip:
Coming Thursday, a live call-in show with journalist David Sirota. You won’t want to miss this.
The Nation on Monday published my follow-up interview with Oakland student organizers Ayleen Serrano and Nikayla Dean on their strike action for safer conditions in schools.
Here’s a sample:
AS: Besides the strike, we’re also doing a sick-out. [Administrators said that] someone just donated 10 million KN95 masks, could we call off the sick-out? No, we will not do that. Same with the strike. Just because you guys are giving us one of our demands, we won’t be calling it off because that’s just meeting one of them. This really won’t stop till they give us all our demands. We do not have faith in them because they’ve been promising us mass weekly testing for the past two or three months, and we haven’t seen it—we still aren’t seeing it. So we don’t have faith in that.
Check out the full article here.
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