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The Empregadas and the Epidemic

The Empregadas and the Epidemic

COVID-19 Lays Bare Brazil’s Deep Societal Divide

The coronavirus pandemic is hitting Brazil harder than most other countries, in part because social inequality is so massive. Armies of maids commute between favela slums and middle-class neighborhoods. Taking a closer look at them tells a lot about the country.

By Marian Blasberg

28.05.2020, 18.49 Uhr

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-empregadas-and-the-epidemic-covid-19-lays-bare-brazil-s-deep-societal-divide-a-87d4a43f-ab58-413e-9a2b-0e1d499a7142?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook#ref=rss

I can’t remember whether it was just curiosity or a certain desire to provoke, but at some point, I started an informal survey among my Brazilian friends. From the men, I wanted to know whether they urinate while standing up or sitting down. The number of doubtful looks I got suggested that I was the first to confront them with this alternative. "Sitting, what do you mean?" they asked. "Do you think I'm gay?"

I actually consider these men to be fairly enlightened people. They read newspapers, they don’t eat meat, they change their children’s diapers, but it would never occur to a single one of them to sit down for a pee. At first, I thought it was an expression of machismo deeply rooted in their Latino souls. Over time, though, it became clear to me that there was something else behind it.

In contrast to Germany, toilets in Brazil seem to lie in a blind spot of emancipation. Sit down when you pee, others aren't going to clean up after you - those were words that accompanied me throughout my German youth. Brazilian mothers, on the other hand, didn’t impose such demands on their boys. They didn’t have to because others did the cleaning for them. And when my friends moved away from home in their mid-to-late twenties, they earned enough to afford their own maids.

The Brazilians call these workers empregada doméstica. They’re the true reason that men in Brazil don't sit to pee.

In the eight years that I’ve been living in Rio de Janeiro, a theory has emerged from my survey. Just as I explain my home country Germany to Brazilians through the institution of volunteering, I explain Brazil to my German friends through the institution of the empregada. When you crack that door open, it provides a look at one of those extremely unequal societies that have never really overcome their dysfunctional colonial structures. The subliminal racism that poisons relations between the classes. The irresponsibility and the hatred.

Now that only the United States and Russia have more COVID-19 cases than Brazil, with public hospitals collapsing all over the country and a growing number of people dying a silent, unnoticed death in their homes because the ventilators of private, high-end hospitals are out of reach for them, this gap is also revealing how ill-equipped Brazil is to counteract this virus. Is the situation here really that different than in South Africa? Or in India or Mexico?

Steering Toward an Iceberg

There are a few things that have accumulated over the years, thoughts and observations, that only marginally have to do with a misguided president who long dismissed COVID-19 as a "mild flu” that wouldn’t be able to overcome the immune systems of his compatriots. Jair Bolsonaro recently growled that Brazilians are constantly traipsing through sewage and nothing happens. That basically says everything you need to know about him.

Bolsonaro is a man who cares about himself above all else, even in the crisis. Fearing the collapse of the economy and that it could be held against him, he has encouraged people to go out and work. The newspapers have described him as a blind captain steering Brazil toward an iceberg. So, it somehow seems fitting that a saxophonist outside plays Frank Sinatra’s "My Way” punctually at 6 o’clock every day. There’s actually something "Titanic” about the way the echo reverberates among the apartment blocks.

I’m writing this on the 16th floor in the tiny cubbyhole that is my office. A table fits in here, as does a chair and a chest of drawers on which a fan hums to combat the almost unbearable heat. There is no air-conditioning, of the kind found in the other rooms of the apartment. This part of the flat, located behind the kitchen and equipped with its own bathroom, was once reserved for the empregadas. Back in the 1960s, when this building was built, maids usually lived at their workplace.

Rio de Janeiro is a city whose infrastructure, which has grown up over the centuries, was designed to ensure that the paths of servants and the people they are serving do not cross unnecessarily. Like most residential buildings, ours has two elevators. A slightly nicer one with gold bars is called the "social” and is reserved for residents and their guests. A second elevator, called the "serviço,” is used by workers – the servants, nannies, cooks and doormen as well as the "motoboys,” who now deliver the online purchases from the supermarket and place them at the back entrances of apartments.

Even in the modern buildings with their narrow corridors, this hierarchical separation is still there symbolically, even if it is frequently by way of two apartment doors located directly next to each other. It’s a basic pattern that is repeated across the city. If you go up to the famous Sugar Loaf Mountain or the statue of Christ, you can clearly recognize the neighborhoods where people with servants live. They’re located at sea level behind the famous Copacabana and Ipanema beaches. And you can see the favelas that are home to the servants, which have been built over the years on the adjacent hillsides.

The rich have swimming pools on their rooftops. The poor further up have vats which they use to collect rainwater.

The very idea of distancing is an illusion. I don’t know anyone who was surprised that the first COVID-19 victim in Rio was an empregada. Newspapers reported that the employer of 63-year-old Cleonice Gonçalves had been in Italy for Carnival celebrations. The woman was tested for the coronavirus after her return, but she didn’t feel it was necessary to tell her servant. Gonçalves, who as a diabetic belonged to a risk group, continued working. Days later, she died in a public hospital where no doctor had been able to figure out what malady had struck her.

In a way, Gonçalves' death was an eye-opener. It showed that the people who commute between the upper and the lower strata of society could also be transmitters of the disease. The daily newspaper O Globo distilled these fears into an image on its front page that required no explanation at all: All you could see were buildings nested closely together, crooked little huts rising up a hill. You could just imagine the people crowded together there in those tiny spaces – six or eight of them sleeping in damp rooms. Not to mention the trash that nobody removes from the alleys. The urine that runs down the hill in open streams. The weak water pipes from which many ask whether they should be using the drops from the faucet to wash their hands or cook.

What happens, the picture asked, once the virus infects these hills from which the state withdrew long ago? And what, wondered the middle class sitting at their pools, would happen when the people living there brought the virus out of the favelas?

A Feeling of Being Overwhelmed

Even within my circle of friends, there were now discussions about how to deal with empregadas. Many of them, as became apparent from the messages they sent, were horrified by the idea of the mountain of domestic activities that seemed insurmountable – cleaning toilets, working from home, taking care of the children. Just the thought of it triggered a feeling of being overwhelmed, which led some to succumb to the conjecture that perhaps the virus was, in fact, just a mild flu.

Others, the elderly in particular, who are reliant on help, were searching for compromises. Aided by the architecture of their apartments, they considered creating corridors so that they wouldn’t have contact with their empregada. Yet others believed it would make a difference if they reduced the number of days or if they ordered an Uber so that their workers didn’t have to be exposed to crowded buses. For many, the idea of sending someone on paid leave for an indeterminate period of time was unimaginable, and that feeling was also mutual.

Money for just sitting around? That’s what the empregada of my psychoanalyst Francisco asked.

Iraní received our instructions just as stoically as she does all of our instructions. It’s impossible to guess what was going through her mind at the time. She has no bank account of her own, so her daughter got in touch the next day with an account number. That was six weeks ago. Her brown imitation leather apron is still hanging in the small bathroom next door, with her flip-flops underneath. It’s as if she’ll be coming back tomorrow. The last contact we had with her was at Easter. She left a message and said she was doing fine, but she missed the children.

Is she really OK though? And what is she doing right now? Is she staying safe?

It took years for me to get over the unease I felt because of her. I wasn’t familiar with this world in Germany – that someone was always there to empty the ashtrays and run the iron over my underpants. I still remember how, in the beginning, I sometimes lurked and waited for her to disappear into the bedroom with the vacuum cleaner before I scurried into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. I avoided her as if I could have suppressed her presence by doing so, but I basically didn’t have a choice, I had to accept her as a part of the family.

It’s been 40 years since Iraní began working in the household of my mother-in-law, who was a public school teacher until her retirement. She had hardly reached the age of majority at the time. She experienced the family’s grief when my wife’s uncle disappeared forever because of his resistance against the dictatorship. She was there when my wife’s baby teeth fell out. And when she graduated from law school. Iraní was always there. Now, she’s watching our children grow up.

Staying Out of the Way

Ever since my wife moved into her first apartment, Iraní has been splitting her time. She spends three days a week at my mother-in-law’s and then she is with us for two days. She’s a small, stocky woman with strong arms and an inscrutable look of pride. She goes about her work quietly and correctly. The routing is always the same. She starts with the laundry before ironing and then preparing the food. She cleans the bathrooms and makes the beds in the afternoon, when the children are at the daycare center.

With everything she does, she is careful not to disturb anyone. When her old Nokia phone hums, she retreats to her small bathroom, and she waits to eat when no one else is in the kitchen. Unlike other empregadas, she doesn’t have the television running in the background as she does her work. She doesn’t sing, she doesn’t complain and occassionally even has a smile on her face. When we compliment her on her food or when the children call out "Ciao Iraní” as they leave, she turns away from the sink for a moment and beams. She can also turn to stone if she perceives something as unjustified criticism or if her routine is somehow disturbed by special requests. Otherwise, though, she’s always consistent. She's someone very familiar, but she's also still a stranger.

But what goes through her mind when she irons over the holes in my T-shirts?

Iraní hears what we laugh about at lunch. She hears what we argue about. She wipes the dust off the records and the photos of my parents. My life lies before her like an open book, but I don’t even know her last name. I don’t know where she lives or her birthday. There is no document in our apartment that tells us anything about her, and when I scroll through the photos on my mobile phone, it’s as if Iraní doesn’t even exist.

Of course, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

There are a few things that I can say for sure – that she wasn’t at school for long, for example. You can tell by the shaky writing on the notes she leaves to remind us that we are out of beans and rice. I have also picked up on other things, like the fact that she didn’t tell my mother-in-law about her pregnancy. When her secret came out, she said through tears that she had been afraid of losing the job she had just started. Iraní raised her daughter Luciene on her own. She finished school and is doing something with computers today. She once came to our house to pick up a bed we wanted to get rid of.

As far as I know, they live together on a piece of property my wife’s father helped to buy. It’s located somewhere in one of those bedroom towns that were built when the hills in the city got too cramped. Drug gangs and militias wage bloody wars there today. Sometimes, when we rush through the area toward the mountains with our car windows closed, I wonder if Iraní becomes a different person in this place, a self-confident woman who others look up to, someone who not only nods to orders but also explains things to others?

Does she speak before the congregation in an evangelical church? Does she dance when samba is played in her neighborhood? Is there stunned laughter when she tells stories from the open book of life in our apartment? I can sometimes imagine that. When she stands in front of the elevator and ties her headscarf over her hair, it seems as though she is going through a transformation.

Brazil is home to some of the most pronounced inequality in the world. The top 10 percent of society accounts for 55 percent of all income, but half of all citizens live on a mere 66 euros a month. That includes many of the 500,000 or so women who work as empregadas in Rio alone. Almost two-thirds of them are dark-skinned like Iraní. Most are no longer so young and aren’t particularly svelte. Many women who employ domestic help insist on it so that their husbands aren't tempted.

Streets of Mistrust

To assess the significance of their work, it helps to look at another dividing line, one that sociologist Roberto DaMatta calls the "dichotomy of house and street.” DaMatta writes that you have to think of the street as being like a wilderness. It is the site of fleeting encounters, mistrust and dubious intentions. Most importantly, it is the place of filth. As a European, you sometimes wonder why Brazilians never put their bags on the floor. Or why parents stop their children when they try to pick up a stick – but they have their reasons, and by that I don’t just mean that every time it rains, the drains overflow and the pavements flood with bacteria. What I mean are the collective fears that are deeply rooted in the consciousness of a Brazilian middle class that for centuries has feared little as much as deadly epidemics.

The house, meanwhile, is everything the street is not. It’s a bunker, usually sealed off by bars, a place where you feel safe and secure and to which mostly family and close friends have access. In addition to that are the exterminators, who use their poison to drive away the vermin. And the men who service the air conditioners. And then there are the empregadas who, in the eyes of many of their employers, are essential workers. The brightly polished surfaces are more than just an indicator that there is no street dirt contaminating this safe space – they are also an issue of health.

But there's more to it than that. More than 5 million men, women and children crossed the Atlantic from Africa in several waves up until the end of the 19th century. For most, the journey led via the slave markets in the old port of Rio further inland, where they toiled on the plantations of coffee and sugar cane barons as slaves. But many remained in the city and became domestic slaves owned by simple families. Even if the conditions were modest, there was always a damp attic available as roof over their heads.

Slavery in Brazil wasn’t just the preserve of a small, rural elite – it extended deep into the center of society. Having someone to keep the house in order was a status symbol that many people were willing to save money to buy. Those who could afford slaves were tapping a bit of the glamour brought by the royal court, which had moved from Lisbon to Rio in the 19th century.

When it ended slavery in 1888, Brazil was the last country on the continent to do so. The resistance that prevented the abolition of slavery for years and the hesitation to dispense with the use of empregadas during the coronavirus crisis is rooted in the same sentiment: The idea that once they were gone, the societal decline would be complete.

Rage Against the Establishment

Bolsonaro's ascent is also based on a fear held by many that no one else is beneath them in society. At a time when Brazil was staggering through a deep economic crisis and large sections of the middle class feared for their very existence, Bolsonaro succeeded in transforming those anxieties into rage against a corrupt political establishment.

Although slavery itself may have been abolished, the existing structures changed very little. The same people were still doing the same jobs, only now they were informal cheap labor. The dependence remained, the reliance on benevolent employers who treated domestics like family members in an emergency. Up until the 1960s, there were still job listings for "maids with black skin.” When those same listings today call for a "pleasing appearance," it is little more than politically correct code for the same thing.

It wasn’t until 2013, under the left-wing president Dilma Rousseff, that a law came into force that placed the empregadas on an equal legal footing with other workers. Anyone with an employment contract can now get paid for overtime work and obtain pension and unemployment benefits.

The rich have swimming pools on their rooftops. The poor further up have vats which they use to collect the rainwater.

But the law’s impact has been modest. The vast majority of all domestic workers are still employed informally. Their children go to public schools, where the quality is so poor that few are able to make the leap to one of the prestigious public universities. It’s hardly surprising that the children of those who employ domestic workers, who acquire their qualifications at expensive private schools, make up the majority of the student bodies in those universities. In his book "Tristes Tropiques," French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that large cities like Rio or São Paulo had bypassed civilization, jumping directly from barbarism to decadence.

I realized how deeply ingrained these ideas are when we once visited the parents of a friend of mine in one of those old houses on Flamengo Beach in Rio. It was the World Cup summer of 2014, and the Colombia-Uruguay game was on TV in the antique-filled living room. It was the first time I had met our friend's parents. When I entered, she introduced me to her father. My eyes then fell to a woman sitting on the sofa between a couple of people with a baby in her lap. Her skin was dark and she was wearing white clothing, which led me to conclude that she was probably a nanny. But I was wrong. It was our friend’s mother.

Later, sitting in a taxi in high spirits, I shared how I had fallen into the trap of my own prejudices. It was unbelievable, I said, I actually thought your mother was a nanny. Silence fell. The mood shifted. Hours later, I was told that the problem wasn't my prejudices, but that I had expressed them. By naming the mother in the same breath as a nanny, I had equated her as being at the same level. It was as if I had just walked into a perfectly translucent glass door.

Rio de Janeiro is full of these invisible barriers. At some point, I noticed that you can go out in the evenings for days on end and not a word will be said about work. Pretty much nobody asks you what you do for a living. Now I know that there’s a danger lurking behind this question. In contrast to Germany, where your job can be a conversation starter, in Rio it can open up an abyss that can no longer be bridged.

The people who live at the sea level and the people from the hills live in the same city, but the chasms between their frames of reference are so great that they have little to say to each other.

This speechlessness can be unsettling. And it can hurt. I learned this on the day when Iraní didn’t come to work for the first time since I had arrived. On the phone, she told my wife that her pregnant daughter’s partner had somehow stumbled across a shoot-out. She mentioned that there had been a police control, but the circumstances were unclear. After his mobile phone had been silent for days, Iraní said the authorities had only just now, fully a week later, informed them that he was dead. A stray bullet.

A few days later, though, she was standing at her ironing board again, as if nothing had happened. When I went into the kitchen early in the morning, I asked her how she was doing and if her daughter and the baby in her belly were alright. Iraní looked up. "Tudo bem,” she said very briefly. Everything’s OK. She cursorily reported what she knew about the incident, but it wasn’t much and only raised more questions. Then, she fell silent.

I remember that the seconds I stood before her, rooted to the spot, felt like an eternity. I could feel the invisible glass wall between us. But instead of tearing it down and simply embracing Iraní, I went to the stove and made coffee.

It haunted me for weeks. I did a number of Google searches to see if I could find any information out about the deceased man. Sometimes I would ask Iraní if she had any news, but she usually just shook her head laughing, as if she wanted to say: You are so naive! Of course, I know that the experience in her world is probably that a crime of that nature will never be solved, but that’s not what this was about. I was hoping to make up for something.

An opportunity to do so presented itself two months later. When Iraní told me she had become a grandmother, I finally hugged her. I cried. It felt like redemption.

It was as if I had just walked into a perfectly translucent glass door.

Since that day, our relationship has relaxed a bit. Iraní seems looser, even though we will probably never sit down at the table together and chat the way others do with their empregadas. I prefer it that way. Closeness, I have learned to accept, comes in the form of thoughts. Through questions that are never posed.

What, after all, should I expect Iraní to say? That she likes the children so much because their eyes aren't full of judgment? Because they still don’t understand the hierarchy? Or should I ask her how we can prevent them from intuitively merging the idea of dark skin color and servitude?

Such are the things that go through my mind when I sit in front of the elevator and cover the potentially dangerous surfaces of supermarket products in a fog of disinfectant spray. A few days ago, a friend stood there in the dim light of the ceiling lamp. He was delivering a few boxes of fruit to us from his organic food store. It was late. He leaned against the wall and said through his beard, which has grown quite bushy, that they can no longer manage on their own. Working from home. The children. He said they now had domestic help again.

Another friend also confessed that her empregada had returned. The woman, she said, had promised that she wouldn’t see any other people on her days off. It must have been similar with a family whose story I heard a few days ago. Nobody could explain why they had all come down with COVID-19, one after the other. They finally interrogated their servant until she admitted that she had visited her mother after work.

Her mother, she said, was suffering from pneumonia. She had wanted to see her one last time.

It’s becoming more and more difficult to avoid the virus. It lurks in the lines of people waiting to receive the 100 euros in immediate aid the government is giving its citizens. It lurks at the food banks, where there have been clashes, in the groups of people mourning in front of cemeteries, where bulldozers regularly dig new mass graves, in the waiting rooms of the family clinics, where overworked students offer free preliminary treatment to the people from the hills.

More than a thousand names are now on the waiting lists for a hospital bed. The city has laid off countless doctors in recent years to save money, with almost 2,000 intensive care beds subsequently being taken out of commission. Footage of those decommissioned wards could recently be seen on television. It showed ventilators that are rusting because there are no longer people there to operate them. At Ronaldo Gazolla, Rio’s referral hospital for the treatment COVID-19 patients, painkillers are rationed. At the beginning of May, two patients died there because generators didn't start for several minutes after a power failure. And in this pandemic, it is dark-skinned Brazilians who face a greater risk of death.

"So what?” Bolsonaro said when asked about the dramatically rising death toll in late April. Why purchase a large number of ventilators when you won’t need them after the crisis, asked Nelson Teich before Bolsonaro tapped him as his health minister?

In theory there were other possibilities for easing the situation a bit. Given that many private hospitals are now able to carry out routine operations again because of a lack of COVID-19 patients, mayors or governors could decree a central waiting list, he said. Whoever is next in line would then be provided with a hospital bed, no matter where it was. The Brazilian constitution gives the authorities this power, but in practice, Brazilian politicians aren’t elected to lead a revolution.

Patients with money from the north can fly to São Paulo on chartered jets for 13,000 euros.

The people who installed them in office with their money wouldn’t like to see their own lives end in a line like that.

Everyone has their place.

The truth is that it’s more likely that more unfinished prefab hospitals will be commissioned in Brazil than it is that hordes of poor people will be allowed to cross the invisible threshold. And the truth is that if Iraní doesn’t want to rely on us covering the high costs of one of those luxury suites for her, then she'll have to be careful that nothing happens to her.

Even today, eight weeks after his premiere, my neighborhood saxophonist is still playing his ironic version of "My Way” each night. I read in a newspaper a few days ago that of the 325 first-class passengers on the Titanic, 202 were saved. Of the 706 in cattle class, only 178 survived. It was a metaphor for a country where many still believe that this virus doesn’t discriminate between rich and poor. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The World Bank believes that 5 million Brazilians will slide into absolute poverty as a result of the crisis. Some 50 million people can't make ends meet without the 100 euros the government is doling out. If there were a curve showing inequality, it would likely run quite parallel to the current virus curve.

Banging Pots against Bolsanaro

I have long been convinced that in countries like Brazil, it isn't so much the elites that stand in the way of a society beset by inequality, but the much larger middle class which idealizes the lifestyles of the elites. As such, when this crisis and our isolation began, I recognized an opportunity. I imagined that my friends, now that they were having to do the dirty work at home themselves, might learn how to pee sitting down. It was possible, I thought, that they might emancipate themselves from their empregadas.

Many stood on the balconies in the evening and banged on their pots to express their indignation over a "genocidal president.” It seemed like a moment of empathy – one in which middle-class people felt as exposed and vulnerable as the ones in the hills.

But nothing came of it. The clatter eventually ebbed away. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the return of the silence also coincided with the return of the empregadas. Either way, a Bolsonaro supporter could now be clearly heard, roaring loud threats in an opera singer's voice that the communists should stick their pots up their asses.

Brazil is a deeply divided country today, one where neighbors spew hatred from their balconies. It’s a country that is treading water because the decisive distinguishing feature running through society is still whether a person does household chores themselves, or whether they hire someone else to do them. How is anything ever going to change, I wonder, if millions of employers insist that there be millions upon millions of servants? Or when one life is considered more valuable than another?

A full 132 years after the abolition of slavery, when the mayor of Belém declared a lockdown in his city, he classified empregadas as "essential workers.” At the same time, in light of the overcrowded hospitals, airlines are offering emergency charters that fly patients with money from the north to São Paulo for 13,000 euros.

The last message from Iraní came on Mother’s Day. Everything was OK so far, she said, before sending her greetings to Dona Carmen, my mother. On her first visit, she hadn't felt any of the inhibitions that I had. She hugged Iraní right away.

George Floyd riots: Donald Trump rushed to bunker as protesters surround...

As Protests and Violence Spill Over, Trump Shrinks Back

As Protests and Violence Spill Over, Trump Shrinks Back

The president spent Sunday out of sight, berating opponents on Twitter, even as some of his campaign advisers were recommending that he deliver a televised address to an anxious nation.

As hundreds of protesters gathered outside the White House on Friday evening, Secret Service agents rushed the president to an underground bunker.

Peter BakerMaggie Haberman

By Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman

Published May 31, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/politics/trump-protests-george-floyd.html

WASHINGTON — Inside the White House, the mood was bristling with tension. Hundreds of protesters were gathering outside the gates, shouting curses at President Trump and in some cases throwing bricks and bottles. Nervous for his safety, Secret Service agents abruptly rushed the president to the underground bunker used in the past during terrorist attacks.

The scene on Friday night, described by a person with firsthand knowledge, kicked off an uneasy weekend at the White House as demonstrations spread after the brutal death of a black man in police custody under a white officer’s knee. While in the end officials said they were never really in danger, Mr. Trump and his family have been rattled by protests near the Executive Mansion that turned violent for a third night on Sunday.

After days in which the empathy he expressed for George Floyd, the man killed, was overshadowed by his combative threats to ramp up violence against looters and rioters, Mr. Trump spent Sunday out of sight, even as some of his campaign advisers were recommending that he deliver a nationally televised address before another night of violence. The building was even emptier than usual as some White House officials planning to work were told not to come in case of renewed unrest.

Thousands of protesters demonstrated peacefully near the White House during the day, but by nightfall, with hundreds still in the streets, the scene turned more volatile as crowds surged forward against lines of riot police with plastic shields as the two sides vied for control of Lafayette Square across from the White House. Protesters threw water bottles, set off fireworks and burned a pile of wood and at least one car.

One of the fires on H Street NW a block from the White House may have spread because soon afterward flames erupted in the basement of St. John’s Episcopal Church, the iconic “church of presidents” attended at least once by every chief executive going back to James Madison, but were soon doused by firefighters. Businesses far away from the White House boarded up to guard against vandalism, and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser ordered an 11 p.m. curfew. The White House turned off at least some of its exterior lights.

Mr. Trump remained cloistered inside, periodically sending out Twitter messages like “LAW & ORDER!” until the evening, when he went quiet. While some aides urged him to keep off Twitter, Mr. Trump could not resist blasting out a string of messages earlier in the day berating Democrats for not being tough enough and attributing the turmoil to radical leftists.

“Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors,” he wrote. Referring to his presumptive Democratic presidential opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., he added: “These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW. The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe. Is this what America wants? NO!!!”

The president said his administration “will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” referring to the shorthand for “anti-fascist,” and scheduled a meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr for Monday morning. But antifa is a movement of activists who dress in black and have used tactics similar to those of anarchists, not an organization with a clear structure that can be penalized under law. Moreover, American law applies terrorist designations to foreign entities, not domestic groups.

By targeting antifa, however, Mr. Trump effectively paints all the protests with the brush of violent radicalism without addressing the underlying conditions that have driven many people to the streets. Demonstrations have broken out in at least 75 cities in recent days, with governors and mayors deploying the National Guard or imposing curfews on a scale not seen since the aftermath of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

While Mr. Trump has been a focus of anger, particularly among the crowds in Washington, aides repeatedly have tried to explain to him that the protests were not only about him, but about broader, systemic issues related to race, according to several people familiar with the discussions. Privately, advisers complained about his tweets, acknowledging that they were pouring fuel on an already incendiary situation.

“Those are not constructive tweets, without any question,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate, said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “I’m thankful that we can have the conversation. We don’t always agree on any of his tweets beforehand, but we have the ability to sit down and dialogue on how we move this nation forward.”

Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and supporter of Mr. Trump, said the president, with election looming in five months, is focused on catering to his core supporters rather than the nation at large. “Trump is far more divisive than past presidents,” Mr. Eberhart said. “His strength is stirring up his base, not calming the waters.”

Robert C. O’Brien, the president’s national security adviser, said the president would continue “to take a strong stand for law and order” even as he understood the anger over Mr. Floyd’s death.

“We want peaceful protesters who have real concerns about brutality and racism. They need to be able to go to the city hall. They need to be able to petition their government and let their voices be heard,” Mr. O’Brien said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “And they can’t be hijacked by these left-wing antifa militants who are burning down primarily communities in the African-American sections and the Hispanic sections of our city.”

But Mr. Trump’s absence rankled the Democrats he was criticizing.

“What I’d like to hear from the president is leadership,” Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “And I would like to hear a genuine care and concern for our communities and where we are with race relations in America.”

'He is a destroyer': how the George Floyd protests left Donald Trump exposed

IMAGEM DE OVOODOCORVO

'He is a destroyer': how the George Floyd protests left Donald Trump exposed

As cities reel under protest and violence, Black Lives Matter leaders say the president has failed his country

David Smith in Washington

@smithinamerica

Mon 1 Jun 2020 06.00 BSTLast modified on Mon 1 Jun 2020 06.01 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/01/george-floyd-donald-trump-black-lives-matter

“Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims. I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon – and I mean very soon – come to an end.”

These were the words of Donald Trump, not in May 2020 but July 2016, as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination at the national convention in Cleveland. For many observers, there was a distinct echo of Richard Nixon’s 1968 acceptance speech – “We see cities enveloped in smoke and flame” – and a foreboding that history could take a newly dark and dangerous turn.

For three years, the first president elected without political or military experience rode his luck and skirted past disaster. In the fourth year, the fates demanded payback.

Not even Trump’s harshest critics can blame him for a virus believed to have come from a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, nor for an attendant economic collapse, nor for four centuries of slavery, segregation, police brutality and racial injustice.

But they can, and do, point to how he made a bad situation so much worse. The story of Trump’s presidency was arguably always leading to this moment, with its toxic mix of weak moral leadership, racial divisiveness, crass and vulgar rhetoric and an erosion of norms, institutions and trust in traditional information sources. Taken together, these ingredients created a tinderbox poised to explode when crises came.

Trump, they say, was uniquely ill-qualified for this moment. He tried to wish away the threat of the coronavirus and failed to prepare, then paid no heed to how communities of colour bore the brunt of its health and economic consequences. As unrest now grips dozens of cities, he speaks an authoritarian language of “thugs”, “vicious dogs” and “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.

The nation waits in vain for a speech that might heal wounds, find a common sense of purpose and acknowledge the generational trauma of African Americans. That would require deep reading, cultural sensitivity and human empathy – none of which are known to be among personal attributes of Trump, who defines himself in opposition to Barack Obama.

“He is obviously in way over his head,” said LaTosha Brown, a civil rights activist and co-founder of Black Voters Matter.

“He doesn’t have a clue. He’s a TV personality. He has a cult following that’s centred around this white power broker persona rooted in white supremacy and racism. Wherever he goes, he carries that role and that kind of persona, but ultimately right now with what we’re looking for in this country is real leadership. He is incapable of providing that because that’s not who he is.”

Brown added: “He’s a personality. He’s used to these dog whistles and, instead of trying to uproot division and seeing that the citizens are actually in pain and hurting, he doesn’t have the capacity to address that. He actually adds fuel to the flames and shows how fundamentally intellectually disconnected he is from what is happening and also how ill-prepared he is as a leader to respond to that.”

Trump is not much a child playing with matches as an arsonist hellbent on burning it all down, Brown warned.

“If it would take the destruction of the country for him to protect his position, he is willing to do that. He has shown that he is willing to kill every single thing in this country, including its people, if it protects him.

 He’s willing to kill democracy. He is willing to kill any sense of real respect or trust in his government

LaTosha Brown

“He’s willing to kill democracy. He is willing to kill any sense of real respect or trust in his government. He is willing to kill America’s international and global relationships. He is a destroyer.”

Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy group, said of the current moment: “This is the type of controversy that Trump feels most at home in.

“He didn’t create hostility and division, but he incites it. He creates incentives for it to thrive. He has elevated and put people around him that do that as well.”

The president’s suggestion of moral equivalence between white nationalists and anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 failed to loosen his grip on the Republican party. Perhaps it tightened. At the start of this re-election year, feeling emboldened by his acquittal in a Senate impeachment trial and a robust economy, Trump was confident of his re-election chances.

Now, with health, economic and social crises feeding off each other, polls show him trailing rival Joe Biden. But the situation remains volatile and unpredictable. The president has sought to scapegoat anti-fascist protesters, and there would be little surprise if he returned to Nixonian law-and-order rhetoric to rally Republicans and lay a trap for Democrats, portraying them as “soft on crime”.

“Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors,” Trump tweeted on Sunday, even as protesters gathered outside the White House for the third straight day. “These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW. The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe. Is this what America wants? NO!!!”

Biden has billed the election as a battle for the soul of the nation – the potential to lurch deeper into disarray with a second Trump term, or to reset, rebuild and plot a new direction. The stakes keep getting higher by the day.

Robinson said: “Presidential leadership, when it comes in the form of real action, is incredibly important.

“When a leader can hear the demand and the concerns and work to solve the problem, that’s the power of democracy. President Trump is not interested in either. He’s not interested in leading or solving problems. Like a lot of things he does, he’s treating this as a game.

“The problem here is that we can focus this simply on Trump or we can also focus on all of those folks that have enabled Trump: the Republican leadership, the corporation that may make statements in support of this work but, on the other hand, do all sorts of things to prop up, support, donate to Donald Trump. You don’t get Trump and Trumpism without a whole host of institutions and individuals that support and enable him.”

DeRay Mckesson, a leading voice in the Black Lives Matter movement, said: “Nobody’s a magician, so I don’t expect Biden to change everything on day one, but the demands should be for him to change as much of this by the end as humanly possible.

“If Trump has reminded us of anything, it’s that the government can move as fast as it wants to and nobody, no person of colour, no poor person is going to win if Trump is the president again. So I’m not interested in Trump. I am interested in a plan from Biden’s team around ending police violence. I think that needs to come now. I think it is, frankly, late, and I’m hoping to see it soon.”

Trump’s unconventional inaugural address in January 2017 is best remembered for a single phrase: “American carnage”. His entire presidency may be remembered for it too.

Dominic Cummings took the public for fools. Now they want his head

Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings took the public for fools. Now they want his head

Andrew Rawnsley

Now everyone knows who are the hypocritical elite. Boris Johnson will pay a very high price for clinging to his unelected adviser

Sun 31 May 2020 09.15 BSTLast modified on Sun 31 May 2020 11.17 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/31/dominic-cummings-took-the-public-for-fools-now-they-want-his-head

With increasing desperation, Boris Johnson has urged everyone to “move on” from talking about Dominic Cummings. The public know what they want. They want the prime minister’s chief adviser moved out.

This time last week, Mr Cummings was telling journalists that the revelations about his lockdown-busting excursions to and around Durham were “fake news”, while reassuring the prime minister that this story could not harm them, because it was of interest only to the Westminster bubble. All of which turned out to be as ludicrously wrong as making a 60-mile car trip with your four-year-old strapped in the back as an “eyesight test”.

I have had a ringside seat for many political dramas. Some – such as Black Wednesday, the poll tax revolt and the MPs’ expenses scandal – have mattered a lot. Others have not mattered a jot. To be a consequential episode with lasting effects, a scandal has to have key attributes. It must cut through to the public in a big way. It must change how the country sees its government. And it must redefine opinions in a way that is enduringly bad.

The Cummings affair ticks all of those boxes. The cut-through to the public has been immediate, massive and extremely negative. The Opinium poll that we publish today finds that four out of five voters think the prime minister’s chief adviser broke the rules, two out of three do not believe his explanations, and a similar proportion think he should go. Support for the government has dropped by eight points, the largest weekly plunge ever recorded by Opinium. Boris Johnson has said “people will make up their own minds”. The people have. They think his chief adviser is a rule-breaking liar who should be sacked if he won’t resign.

The reasons why they think this could elude only someone who is supposed to be a genius at reading public opinion. Everyone who has had to make sacrifices during this crisis – and that is many millions of people – has felt stung by the discovery that it was one rule for them and another for Boris Johnson’s court favourite. Those voters who were still inclined to give the government the benefit of the doubt when it claimed “we’re all in it together” have been made to feel like credulous dupes.

This sense of being taken for mugs was compounded by Mr Cummings’ news conference in the Downing Street rose garden, a venue usually reserved for hosting foreign leaders, not contrition-free sophistry by an unelected apparatchik trying to save his job. He was sounding almost plausible until he made the claim that the 60-mile round trip to a beauty spot on Easter Sunday, which just happened to be his wife’s birthday, was to test whether he was fit to drive. Was that the best that the grand wizards of spin at Number 10 could come up with? What alternative alibis did they discard as too risible before they alighted on that one? Or did he fail to come up with a more credible explanation for the side tour to Barnard Castle because he was too busy rewriting old blogs so he could claim he had warned about a pandemic when he hadn’t? People will put up with a lot from their governments, but being taken for idiots who will fall for anything is not one of them.

One of the reveals of this affair – actually, more of a confirmation than a reveal – is that the people running Number 10 do take their fellow Britons to be fools. Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings secured their seats of power by manufacturing a “people versus the elite” narrative with themselves self-cast as the tribunes of the plebs. This was always counterfeit. Mr Johnson is a Latin-quoting Old Etonian. Mr Cummings’s father-in-law lives in a castle. The chasm between what they claim to be and what they truly are has now been definitively exposed. One Tory MP comments: “People are furious. I keep hearing ‘one rule for us’. It’s doing serious damage.” The prime minister and his chief adviser are now the faces of an out-of-touch, hypocritical, unaccountable, unapologetic, unshamable elite.

The effect on public opinion has fomented a ferocious mood in the Conservative parliamentary party. One Tory MP, who has not taken a public position, reports: “I’ve had hundreds of emails – I’m not exaggerating: hundreds – about this. Ninety eight per cent of them are hostile.” Quite a lot of Tories think that the events of the past week, indisputably a gift to Labour, have made the next election harder to win.

 Boris has just used up one of his lives

Former cabinet minister

Around half of Tory backbenchers have been publicly critical of Mr Cummings, with many calling for his resignation. A minister has quit. Many more feel the same way, but have not spoken out for reasons of loyalty or careerism or for fear of retribution by Mr Cummings and his small but powerful gang at Number 10. “Look down the list of those [Tories] who went public with a call for his resignation,” says one senior Conservative. “It’s not all Remoaners or people he’s picked fights with. It’s all sorts of people. It’s long-standing MPs and it’s new MPs.”

So another consequence of this episode is a recasting of the relationship between Number 10 and Conservative MPs. When Boris Johnson won them a parliamentary majority last December, it was said by many, including me, that this would grant him an extraordinary amount of goodwill and forbearance with his backbenchers. A great deal of that capital has just been burnt up in this bonfire of Cummings’ vanities.

“It has hurt Boris,” says one former cabinet minister. “Boris has just used up one of his lives.”

Another price has been paid in the degradation of the cabinet. About half of them didn’t come out in public support of Mr Cummings and about half of them did, and I award no prizes for guessing which half has the more self-respect this morning. It was a humiliation for senior ministers to be ordered to tie themselves in knots trying to defend an adviser who is known to hold most of them in contempt. It was demeaning for cabinet members to issue near-identical tweets in his support as if they were no more than fake accounts operated from a bot farm. Given the lack of evidence that all of them are sentient human beings, perhaps some of these ministers are indeed badly written algos run out of Mr Cummings’ laptop. Generously assuming that at least some of them have a latent regard for their own reputations, the ridicule they have endured will leave a bitter taste. Next time Mr Cummings gets himself into trouble – and there will be a next time – they may be a little more reluctant to come to his defence.

The government has yet to face what could be the most deadly consequence of this episode: what it means for control of the epidemic. How easy will ministers find it to persuade the public to “do the right thing” when these same ministers have spent the past week defending Mr Cummings for doing the wrong thing? The government is moving deeper into the perilous phase of releasing lockdown measures when it cannot be entirely sure that it truly has the disease suppressed and before a test-and-trace regime has been adequately established.

Voicing the anxieties of the scientific advisers, Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief among them, has warned that “we still have a significant burden of infection” and the UK remains in a “fragile state”. Despite that serious caution, Mr Johnson is rapidly moving towards a substantial dismantling of restrictions. He now does so under a dark cloud of suspicion that his decision-making is no long being driven by the best scientific advice but by a desire to get his rule-breaking adviser out of the headlines. Should there be a reignition of the epidemic, should we face the much-dreaded second wave, the government will find it much harder to convince the country that it acted in good faith and did all in its power to ensure maximum public compliance. This will be even more the case if people break the rules with the excuse that “I’m just following my instincts” or “I’m only doing a Cummings”.

Boris Johnson was persuaded that it would look weak to give up his senior aide. The main source of that advice was, no doubt, Mr Cummings himself. Or, it occurs to me, the prime minister may be paralysed by the terror that a sacked Cummings would vengefully spill many rancid secrets. Whichever is the case, it looks both pathetic and dangerous to cling to one unelected adviser at such a severe cost to the government’s authority, the cabinet’s credibility, control of the epidemic, the national interest and even people’s lives. That will not be readily forgotten.

•Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer

Alitalia: Too Italian to fail

Alitalia: Too Italian to fail

Airline’s hallowed status has turned into a drag on the nation.

By HANNAH ROBERTS AND GIORGIO LEALI 5/28/20, 3:18 PM CET Updated 6/1/20, 4:43 AM CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/alitalia-airline-too-italian-to-fail/

Questions about how long Italy can keep treating an airline as the most sacred of cows are only growing louder.

Italy just can’t break up with Alitalia.

And it's an expensive relationship. After at least six failed rescue plans over the past 12 years, the Italian government has once again stepped in to prop up its flag carrier, now bludgeoned by the coronavirus crisis. Rome has decided to renationalize it with more than €3 billion of public money.

For both ordinary Italian voters and European Commission officials policing government subsidies, questions about how long Italy can keep treating an airline as the most sacred of cows (and keep shoveling money into a black hole) are only growing louder.

“Italians see Alitalia as a spaghetti strainer — you pour in money and it comes straight out,” said one former manager.

Indeed, the company has burned through an eye-watering €10 billion in bailouts and loans since it was privatized in 2008.

“You could say the coronavirus has been both the worst thing and the best thing for Alitalia,” the manager continued. “The losses have been enormous, but it has given the government an excuse to nationalize.”

This nationalization, however, is triggering criticism not only from opposition parties, which favored a private investor, but also from some politicians inside the governing majority, who are questioning the wisdom of yet another rescue package.

In Brussels, the big question is whether Italy has violated the rulebook on state aid and a new framework specifically on coronavirus-related aid.

Sacred, sexy symbol

Alitalia has enjoyed a peculiarly talismanic status under successive Italian governments.

Prime ministers from Silvio Berlusconi to Matteo Renzi, representing both left and right-leaning administrations, have battled to keep the carrier in the skies, despite losses of €200 million-€300 million a year for the past five years.

Alitalia first took flight in 1946, later becoming the airline of choice for popes and film stars during the golden postwar reconstruction years. In Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” Anita Ekberg flies Alitalia.

Its branding has long sought to embody the sexy Italy, a leader in food, fashion and design. Uniforms, created by designers including Giorgio Armani and Alberta Ferretti, are presented at catwalk fashion shows.

Politicians like to claim a national carrier is vital to Italy’s strategic interests, facilitating business and tourism. But this has been overstated. Italy’s air traffic is now dominated by no-frills airlines, with Alitalia transporting only around 10 percent of international passengers in 2018.

While almost never profitable, in the early 1990s the airline was among the European leaders. About 4 in 10 of Italy’s international passengers used Alitalia.

But when the aviation market was liberalized, it failed to adapt to the competition: Unprofitable routes were kept running as convenient commuter routes for regional politicos and unionized staff prevented cuts.

Its supposed inefficiency has long been the butt of jokes like “What does Alitalia stand for? Arrived Late In Tokyo. All Luggage in Athens.”

Despite its shortcomings, Alitalia has always been too Italian to fail. To let it do so would be for Italy to concede that its status in the postwar economic primacy had declined irreversibly.

Worried about workers

Besides the prestige that a national carrier affords, the airline is a significant employer — another reason successive governments have always been ready with the bailout bucket.

Entire commuter belt communities such as Ostia and Fiumicino, on the coast near Alitalia’s Roman hub and key strongholds for the anti-establishment 5Star Movement in next year’s election for mayor of Rome, would suffer severe economic damage if the airline collapsed.

The hub generates thousands more jobs around the airport, in ancillary services like food and maintenance, according to Giulia Lupo, a 5Star Movement senator and former air stewardess with Alitalia. “You see a company with 11,000 employees, but I see a large system that generates significant satellite activity,” she wrote on Facebook.

With nothing to show for the years of bridging loans, bankruptcies and bailouts, the news that Alitalia is coming back like a bad boyfriend is deeply unwelcome.

At a time when resources are desperately needed in Italy, the scale of the bailout, equal to the amount to be spent on health care and twice what is earmarked for education, has played badly with ordinary Italians, under severe economic pressure in the lockdown.

There are numerous groups on Facebook with names like “Enough public money to Alitalia.” One Twitter user wrote: “To waste more money now to keep [Alitalia] going would be like spitting in the face of those who are facing difficulty in the crisis. It is time to pull the plug.”

Distortive darling

The latest rescue plan, involving German carrier Lufthansa, failed in December, after unions wouldn’t accept job cuts. The coalition government was still taking proposals from potential private investors when the coronavirus hit in March and sales dropped off a cliff, decreasing 76 percent year on year.

Even now there is still interest in buying Alitalia, whole or in part, from private players, including Bolivian-born billionaire Germán Efromovich’s Synergy.

But some are skeptical that the government is listening. Opposition parties such as center-right Forza Italia oppose a takeover and say a new private investor can be found. Giorgio Mulé, Forza Italia transport spokesman, told POLITICO that renationalizing private companies “is part of 5Star’s belief system ... This is a government that hates the free market. They have never explored the possible partnership offers from private business, rather they have treated them as an annoyance.”

Even inside the governing majority, not everyone is convinced. Raffaella Paita of Italia Viva said the complete lack of any industrial strategy, on restructuring, routes, or joining a group of airlines, made the investment of more resources “incomprehensible,” at a time when Italians are suffering.

Competitors claim that by helping Alitalia, the government could actually damage the Italian tourism industry. A Ryanair spokesman said the takeover “distorts the market, drives away business, creates higher prices for consumer and less connectivity.”

Professor Andrea Giuricin, a transport economist at Milano Bicocca University, agrees. It risks “destroying air travel as we know it, returning it to a 1980s monopoly with only a few rich people who travel,” he said.

The government’s support of Alitalia may also be in violation of EU internal market rules on state aid. Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O'Leary has described airlines such as Lufthansa, Air France and Alitalia as "subsidy junkies running around Europe hoovering up state aid."

Ryanair told POLITICO it had raised the new state takeover with the Commission, but any decision will take years.

The new aid is unlikely to be cleared under a new EU framework which says that funds can only go to companies that were in good health in December 2019.

The EU is already investigating Italy for two loans to Alitalia in 2017 and January this year totaling €1.3 billion. At the conclusion, Alitalia could be ordered to repay the total to Italy. But thanks to the restructuring, the old dead Alitalia would likely retain the debts and the new nationalized Alitalia would not be obliged to pay back the state, according to a state aid expert and former Commission official.

For Giuricin, the economist, the EU's failure to react promptly has been a "grave error" which "has given Alitalia the chance to distort the market with taxpayers' money. It is totally absurd.”

Italian Minister for Economic Development Stefano Patuanelli has claimed that the coronavirus has leveled the playing field in aviation, and that Alitalia“can once again be the feather in Italy’s cap.”

And there are signs that the new Alitalia could gain further advantages over competitors, such as imposed minimum wages for cabin-staff from foreign airlines travelling through Italy. Airport tax will now be diverted to help Alitalia with redundancy and other transition costs.

During the coronavirus outbreak, Alitalia is benefiting from running repatriation flights to and from Italy. It has also been awarded without any tender and with favorable conditions, the contract for operating off-season routes to Sardinia and other islands.

But Alitalia’s long-term problems are unlikely to be solved by a €3 billion cash injection. It is limited by having its hub in Rome, a tourist destination, rather than in the wealthy catchment area of northern Italy, and a lack of large jets for long-haul flights.

Already weak before the coronavirus, it is likely to need even more billions to keep running for the next few years. A different government, perhaps including the far-right League, Italy’s most popular party, is no more likely to be the one to say Arrivederci. As the former Alitalia manager put it: “Every government passes the problem onto their successor; that’s the way it has always been.”

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