The Age of the Donald - Part One by Dave Jaffe

                 Part One by Dave Jaffe


     During the just recent 2016 U.S. presidential campaign a friend of mine looked south and said, "If Donald Trump wins the election, the United States will get a government like the ones they've imposed on many other countries."
     My friend may be right or wrong. Yet on November the 8th, 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump led the Republican Party to victory over Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Many Americans are already started protesting about a Trump presidency. Still, hundreds of millions of people around the world live or survive under terrible governments that would never have taken power if the U.S. government hadn't helped these rulers take control of their country.  And sadly enough most Americans don't even care or know about what harm their powerful country has done to so much of sthe world.
       Take Brazil for instance which is the biggest country in South America. In 1964 a group of Brazilian generals overthrew a democratically elected government in this Portuguese speaking country. For the next 20 years or so they ruled the men and women of Brazil with an iron hand.
    They slashed social programs to the bone, crushed strikes, throttled all democratic movements, and handed large parts of the country's resources over to big businesses many of whom were American-owned. The United States government back in Washington, D.D. helped the generals come to power.  The American government had already set up the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning Georgia where Latin American generals were taught how to seize power and also inflict torture on political prisoners.
     In turn, the Brazilian generals helped the U.S. government overthrow mildly leftist and straight socialist governments all across Latin America in the 1970's. At last due to the struggles of unionized workers and union leaders like the famous Lula, democracy returned to Brazil and then later to the rest of the continent.
     Yet when Lula led his Workers Party to power in a democratic election in the 21st century, then U.S. president George W. Bush didn't like this result at all. And for the last five years at least, the U.S. government has openly plotted against Lula's successor., Dina Roussief. At last in 2016, Roussief was removed from power by the Brazilian legislature. Now Brazil is run by elected conservatives who want to put Roussief in prison.
     "This is a constitutional coup," one Brazilian legislator  said. And there's no doubt that the C.I.A.
 and the National Endowment for Democracy helped the Brazilian right wing take power.