A Ucrânia será uma terra arrasada - Stephen Collinson and Shelby Rose (CNN)

 

 

Stephen Collinson and Shelby Rose

CNN Meanwhile in America, March 14, 2022

Ukraine will be a 'wasteland'

Drone footage shot on Sunday captures fighting in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.(Reuters/AZOV)

Russia is talking to Ukraine. Ukraine has an open line to the West. France and Germany chat with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and French President Emmanuel Macron then calls President Joe Biden with updates. Turkey and Israel are leaning on Russia to stop the onslaught in Ukraine. And the US made clear to China in talks in Rome on Monday that it wants China to cut loose its new “no limits” friend in the Kremlin.

But more than two weeks into the Russian invasion, two-way talks between Russia and Ukraine, as well as the broader international effort, are getting nowhere. For “off-ramps” — the diplomatic buzzword of this crisis — to work, leaders have to want to take them. And there’s no sign that Putin, despite turning his country into an economic, diplomatic, cultural and sporting pariah, is getting cold feet. 

 

Outsiders see the crawling Russian advance and reported heavy losses of Putin’s troops as a humiliation. But that's not prompting the Kremlin strongman to pull back; his psychology and contempt for Ukraine’s independence is likely to only unleash more mayhem. Brutal assaults on Ukrainian cities and an air raid on a military base near the border of NATO member Poland over the weekend are proof of that. Devastation in the city of Mariupol, including the horrific bombing of a maternity hospital, may well preview what is in store for the capital of Kyiv. While Putin may not be able to suppress all of Ukraine in a full occupation, he has the firepower to slowly destroy it and to send an exodus of refugees into Western Europe, which could upset the political equilibrium of the continent — another of his strategic goals.  

An additional impediment to a swift diplomatic breakthrough is the fact that while strangling economic sanctions piled on Russia may create deep pain for Russians, they do not yet seem to be creating political turmoil that might threaten Putin’s authoritarian rule. And so far, the Russian leader appears more than willing to pay the price in Ukrainian and Russian blood to pummel Ukraine into submission. That means there’s little diplomatic leverage that can be brought to bear on Putin.

As Heather Conley, a former senior US national security official who now heads the German Marshall Fund of the United States, put it: “If Ukraine will not bend the knee for Russia, (Putin) will make sure that Ukraine is going to be a wasteland.”

Ucrânia-Rússia-OTAN: desenvolvimentos da crise e a opinião de George Kennan em 1997 (CNN)

 

CNN Meanwhile in America, February 7, 2022

 

 

Stephen Collinson and Shelby Rose

Was the Ukraine crisis tragic and unnecessary?

Does Vladimir Putin have a point?

The underlying cause of the Ukraine crisis is the Russian President’s belief that NATO, by expanding into former Warsaw Pact states in Eastern Europeafter the Cold War, is threatening the security of its old enemy Russia. As well as seeking a guarantee that Ukraine will never join the Western alliance, Putin wants NATO to pull troops and weapons out of states like Poland and Romania that were once behind the Iron Curtain. President Joe Biden has refused such demands since they would shatter the alliance’s core purpose, appease Russian aggression and desert nations that embraced democracy after decades under Soviet repression. He ordered US troops to both Poland and Romania last week.

Putin is right that NATO moved east after the Cold War, in a way that may almost have been guaranteed to anger Moscow. The bloc's assurances that it is a defensive alliance get no hearing in the Kremlin. Had Russia transformed into a western-style European democracy, this wouldn’t have been an issue. But starry-eyed optimists who held such hopes in the 1990s were always disregarding lessons of the country’s scorched-earth political history.

So did NATO’s triumphalism and stampede over Russian pride pave the way for where we are now? It was always a possibility that a future strongman in the Kremlin would use NATO expansion to spark a foreign policy crisis and as a nationalistic tool for his own legitimacy as Putin has done. George Kennan,the diplomat who in the 1940s coined the core US containment policy against an expansionist Soviet Union, predicted exactly this scenario after the Clinton administration decided to go ahead with NATO expansion.

“That the Russians will not react wisely and moderately to this decision of NATO to expand its boundaries to the Russian frontiers is clear,” Kennan wrote in his diary on January 4, 1997. He predicted a “strong militarization” of Russian politics and claims by Russia that it was an innocent victim of foreign aggressors. He predicted Moscow would seek to unite Iran and China to form an anti-Western bloc. “Thus will develop a wholly and even tragically unnecessary division between East & West and in effect a renewal of the Cold War," he wrote.

 

Twenty-five years later, the final plank of Kennan’s warning fell into place as Putin clinched a new strategic friendship Friday between China and Russia in his Olympian summit with President Xi Jinping in Beijing.

===============

The case for NATO expansion

But what would have happened had NATO not expanded? 

President Bill Clinton told historian Taylor Branch for his contemporary taped oral history of his administration that he spent a 1994 trip to Europe dancing between Russian fears of NATO expansion and NATO’s fear of Russia. He said then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl worried about the possibility of Russian influence on the eastern border of his newly unified nation and also about the threat of authoritarianism in newly liberated post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Clinton also presciently noted that Poland’s move west would leave Ukraine isolated.

Critics of NATO expansion must also answer the question of why nations that had been suppressed, ruled by outsiders and even been wiped off the map at times, should not grasp the freedom denied them even before Soviet domination? And would a vacuum in Eastern Europe have already caused a resurgent, imperial Russia to move west once more and again threaten European democracies?

Biden’s actions have reaffirmed a 70-year American commitment to Western European security. US power allowed market democracies in Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltics to grow and thrive, despite some political backsliding in recent years. But Putin also knows that US commitment is not a given in the long term. In a speech in Poland in 2017, then-President Donald Trump implied that the West was more threatened by the weakening of white culture and tradition through waves of outside immigration than it was by the Kremlin. His far-right populism and vision of national sovereignty is closer to Putin’s worldview than the traditional US creed. A new Trump presidency, should he run again in 2024, would raise new doubts about NATO’s purpose and his own affinity for Putin. Already, pro-Trump Republican senators are questioning Biden’s dispatch of more troops to Europe.

With all this in mind, the current standoff is hardly remarkable. It’s perhaps surprising that all the post-Cold War forces that have precipitated the crisis took so long to hit boiling point.

 

Ukraine’s plight is part of a broader crisis. It's about whether individual nations have the chance to choose their own political destiny or whether they must live in the sphere of influence of a greater, hostile power. And whether the US still has the stomach to serve as Europe’s security guarantor nearly a century after the political madness that caused World War II and forged the modern world.

Mensagem de Natal de F. D. Roosevelt, 24/12/1943, EUA em meio à guerra mais terrível da história -

 

 

Meanwhile in America, CNN

Stephen Collinson and Shelby Rose

'Today, I express a certainty'

Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers his national radio address on December 24, 1943, at his home in Hyde Park, New York.

Two years in, the pandemic seems to have dragged on forever. And the end seems dispiritingly distant as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus rages and much of the world, outside of the richest nations, waits in vain for vaccines. 

 

The worst public health emergency in 100 years is an outlier among other crises that have stalked developed countries in modern times, including economic recessions, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, civil unrest, endemic poverty and national disasters. That’s because there’s probably not one human being who has not seen their freedom curtailed, health compromised, prospects dimmed or family ties interrupted owing to Covid-19. The closest equivalent of shared suffering may be World War II, when the dangers and deprivations of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen abroad were mirrored at home, with air raids in Europe and a mass civilian mobilization in the name of the war effort in the United States. Then, as now, memories of pre-crisis life were fading, and the end was over a horizon clouded by fear and tragedy. 

 

President Franklin Roosevelt set out in his Christmas address in 1943 to instill optimism and determination among his compatriots and to steel them for losses to come with a vision of life as it had once been known returning better than before. Predicting ultimate victory, he promised education, jobs and economic security to the millions of Americans fighting abroad when they came home. An early version, if you like, of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better. Six months before the D-Day Normandy invasion, FDR drew the line under past reversals in the fight against “international gangsterism and brutal aggression in Europe and in Asia.” 

 

Recalling the previous two wartime festive seasons, he remarked, “We have said, ‘Merry Christmas—Happy New Year,’ but we have known in our hearts that the clouds which have hung over our world have prevented us from saying it with full sincerity and conviction.” From his home in Hyde Park, New York, he went on: “On Christmas Eve this year—I can say to you that at last we may look forward into the future with real, substantial confidence that, however great the cost, ‘peace on earth, good will toward men’ can be and will be realized and insured. This year I can say that. Last year I could not do more than express a hope. Today I express a certainty—though the cost may be high and the time may be long.” 

 

Roosevelt had spent a decade forging a relationship with Americans he addressed as “my friends” through his Fireside Chats on the radio. His tone was one of a benevolent but firm leader taking his fellow citizens into his confidence. On this occasion, he offered a sweeping survey of the war in the Pacific and Europe, after recently returning from strategy talks with leaders of Russia, China and Britain.  

 

Listening to FDR decades on, it’s hard to imagine an American leader ever again being able to co-opt such a sense of national unity in the face of a common crisis. The pandemic has shattered any such illusions that the national good could surmount the politics of a bitter, divided era. But his words are a reminder that however dark the present seems, hopes for the future can never be truly extinguished, and they underscore the power of strong, yet often elusive, political leadership. This is as welcome now, as America contemplates its third pandemic year, as it was after two years of an earlier national crisis, on Christmas Eve 78 years ago. 

A paranoia da internacionalização da Amazônia volta com Bolsonaro - Luiz Romero (CNN)

 Tratei desse assunto quando estava na embaixada do Brasil em Washington, e depois de dois desmentidos cabais, achava que o assunto já tinha morrido.

Não, engano meu: bastava chegar um governo ESTÚPIDO, como o de Bolsonaro, para o assunto ser revivido, sem qualquer consistência.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

How Brazil's fear of losing the Amazon guides Bolsonaro's policies towards the forest

Analysis by Luiz Romero

CNN, June 22, 2021

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/22/americas/brazil-amazon-fear-meme-bolsonaro-intl/index.html

(CNN) In 2000, when the internet in Brazil was still in its infancy, an email with an alarming message about the Amazonwent viral. It claimed that the United States and the United Nations had taken the forest from Brazilians and transformed it into a protected area -- a falsehood, but one that reflected a long-running conspiracy theory still promoted today by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

The email described a purported geography textbook being used in "important American schools," which labeled the Amazon as an "international control zone." Next to a map, a misspelled text said that the forest was "surrounded by irresponsable, cruel, and authoritary countries" and that the United States and the United Nations, with the backing of the "G23," transformed it into "an international park with very severe rules of exploration."

"The value of this area is unable to calcule," it continued, "but the planet can be cert that The United States won't let these Latin American countries explorate and destroy this real ownership of all humanity." 

Despite the multiple signs that the textbook was fake -- the writing was riddled with mistakes, the map looked doctored, and the obvious fact that the Amazon had not been turned into an international reserve -- the rumor touched a chord with Brazilians, circulating so widely that both the Brazilian embassy in Washington and the American embassy in Brasília tried to debunk it. "The idea is so hilarious that I feel silly to have to talk about it," Anthony Harrington, the American ambassador in Brazil, said at the time, according to news website G1. 

But the viral image also illustrates a pervasive fear that grips Brazil and that has profound consequences for the forest. 

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's president, speaks during the UN General Assembly meeting in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2019. 

President Bolsonaro has repeatedly invoked the idea that the Amazon is under threat from a foreign takeover as he pushes back against foreign leaders, indigenous groups, and environmental organizations when they show concern for the forest, demand more reservation areas, or denounce environmental destruction.

Deforestation in Brazilian Amazon surges to 12-year high

In May 2018, during his campaign for president, President Bolsonaro hinted at the conspiracy theory: "The Amazon is not ours," he claimed. "I say that with a lot of sadness, but it is a reality." Later that year, after being elected but before taking office, he threatened to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, claiming that it weakened Brazilian control over the Amazon.

And in April 2019, already in power, he spoke openly about a murky plot to steal the forest from Brazil that involved the creation of indigenous reserves. "If we don't change our policies, we will lose the Amazon," he said in a radio interview with Jovem Pan. "The United Nations has been discussing, for a while now, that through the auto-determination of indigenous peoples, you could have new countries here inside," he added. "That could happen."

A fear with roots in the military

Fears of foreign meddling in the Amazon are not entirely unfounded. Two years ago, Stephen Walt, a respected professor of international relations at Harvard University, wrote an article for Foreign Policy, a respected publication on international politics, titled "Who Will Invade Brazil to Save the Amazon?" The title, which the scholar said on Twitter had not been written by him, was later softened to "Who Will Save the Amazon (and How)?"

Walt's article started with a hypothetical description of an American president ordering an invasion of Brazil due to environmental breaches. "The president's decision came in the aftermath of a new United Nations report cataloging the catastrophic global effects of continued rainforest destruction," Walt fantasized. It continued with a discussion of the merits of that move, including the international mechanisms and historical precedents that would allow it to happen.

Aldi and other big grocers threaten to boycott Brazil over deforestation in the Amazon

It is also true that foreign leaders have repeatedly made statements that could be perceived as questioning Brazil's sovereignty over the Amazon. They include former vice president Al Gore, then a senator, ("Contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon is not their property, it belongs to all of us"), then French president François Mitterrand (Brazil should accept a "relative sovereignty" over the forest), and then British prime minister John Major (who threatened military action to expand the rule of law "over what is common to all in the world"). 

But as with other conspiracies, that germ of truth has been extrapolated into absurdity. The rumor about the textbooks is a good example of that. It actually started in the armed forces, as a short text in a small independent website kept by retired military officers in Brazil, according to a dossier compiled by Paulo Roberto de Almeida, a diplomat at the embassy in Washington in the early 2000s, when the email went viral for the first time. 

The title of the website -- "Brazil, Love It or Leave It" -- is a slogan of the military dictatorship, and its content is nationalistic. Its stated goal is to fight disinformation, but it actually features a multitude of conspiracies, many referring to the Amazon. 

The authors of the website see foreign leaders' disparaging remarks about Brazil's guardianship of the Amazon as attempts to weaken Brazilian sovereignty over the forest, and as a means to open it for interference, exploitation, and invasion. 

One article claims that a reserve granted to an indigenous group was a "nation within the nation" with covert separatist intentions. Another claims that an "ecologist hysteria," fueled by foreign-sponsored activists and journalists, were part of a plot to internationalize the Amazon, "taking away from Brazil the right to use its wealth."

Brazil has unveiled its plan to protect the Amazon. Critics say it's not enough

"We are undergoing a process in our country that is beyond logic," the authors of the website explain in an editorial. Rich countries are using globalization, environmentalism, and humanitarianism to force poor nations to open their markets, politics, and territories to foreign interference. Brazil is failing to fight that invasion, the editorial claims. "A full opening is underway," and the forest is central to that process. 

The authors, whose full names are not displayed on the website, did not respond to a request for comment from CNN.

To defend, but not to protect

President Bolsonaro, a military man himself, is no stranger to such fears of encroachment on Brazilian sovereignty. Since he reached power two years ago, he seems to have been fighting some of the internal enemies identified by the creators of the rumor about the textbook -- indigenous peoples and environmental groups.

Not a single indigenous reservation was created during his first two years in power, a considerable drop compared to predecessors. Right-wing president Fernando Henrique Cardoso approved an average of 36 indigenous reservations every two years during his presidency in the 1990s. Left-wing president Lula da Silva approved an average of 22 per two years. Now, approvals of indigenous reservations have fallen to zero, according to newspaper O Globo.

Activists call for the end of oil exploration in the Amazonia region in front of the Leblon Sheraton Hotel in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on December 04, 2020.

The Bolsonaro administration has also frozen some state funding that supports environmental groups, a move that O Globo described as "a declaration of war on NGOs." Bolsonaro later claimed that environmental organizations were setting fires to the Amazon, recording them, and sending the images abroad to make him look bad to international audiences. 

The president has also aimed fiery statements at the foreign enemies supposedly plotting a takeover of the Amazon in collusion with international organizations. 

"We saw recently a great candidate for head of state say that if I don't put out the fire in the Amazon, he will put up commercial barriers against Brazil," he said in 2020, referring to comments made by Joe Biden during a presidential debate. 

"How can we deal with all that? Just diplomacy is not enough," he said. "When saliva runs out, one has to have gunpowder."

In August 2019, following an infamous fire season in the Amazon, French President Emmanuel Macron tried to pressure Brazil into improving environmental protections. "Our house is burning," he tweeted ahead of the 2019 G7 summit, urging his fellow leaders to discuss the "emergency." During the summit, he made a reference to Brazilian control of the forest. "The Amazon forest is a subject for the whole planet," he said. "We respect your sovereignty", he added, "but we cannot allow you to destroy everything." 

A vessel transports logs on a raft along the Murutipucu River in the municipality of Igarape-Miri in the region of Baixo Tocantins, northeast of Para, Brazil, on September 18, 2020.

Aerial view of a burning area of Amazon rainforest reserve, south of Novo Progresso in Para state, on August 16, 2020.

The following month, during a meeting with presidents of South American countries that include portions of the Amazon, President Bolsonaro criticized Macron's remarks, making clear that he saw in them a potential plan to wrest the vast forest from Brazil. "A plan to turn this large area into a world heritage site is still on the table," he said at the time.

Colombian President Iván Duque, the host of the meeting, said Amazon states needed to better coordinate their actions to stop the cutting and burning of trees. Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno sang a song about environmental preservation. Bolsonaro, meanwhile, insisted that the summit's final declaration mention sovereignty. 

"We have to say that the Amazon is ours," he said. "We have to take a firm position in defense of our sovereignty, so that each country can, within its land, develop the best policy for the region, and not let that this policy be dealt with by other countries." 

The Brazilian President's fears of a foreign takeover of the Amazon might be irrelevant if they did not pose a material effect on the forest itself.

Should Biden and Bolsonaro partner to protect the Amazon? Some Brazilian activists say no

If history is any indication, the effect might be catastrophic. The Amazon was a central concern of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between the 1960s and 1980s. The officers in power believed that the region was highly vulnerable to foreign interference, being too vast, too isolated, and too precious for its own good. They tried to end that vulnerability by encouraging people to move there, stimulating agriculture, ranching, and mining, paving the forest with highways, and building ports, mines, refineries, and dams. These initiatives were devastating, and deforestation spiked in the period between 1965 and 1985.

In early 2019, the Bolsonaro administration sketched an ambitious development project guided by similar ideas. The Baron Rio Branco Plan, created by retired military general Maynard Marques de Santa Rosa, then a member of the administration, aimed at building a dam and a bridge over two Amazon rivers, expanding an existing highway all the way to Suriname, and incentivizing mining and farming. Indigenous peoples and environmental groups issued statements repudiating the project, in part because the expanded highway would pass through multiple areas of protected forest.

In late 2019, Santa Rosa left the government and the plan lost strength, but specific parts, like the highway, are still planned by the government and could still become a reality.

Bolsonaro's goals to protect the Amazon hint at tragic outcomes. His first two years in office have only ushered in more destruction of the forest. His attacks on indigenous peoples, and the organizations that support them, weaken the most efficient guardians of the forest. And his plans to "develop," "colonize," and "integrate" the Amazon, like the plans of the military officials who preceded him, risk accelerating its disappearance. 

COVID-19: o que falta ao mundo: Liderança de ESTADISTAS para superar a desigualdade vacinal - Paulo Roberto de Almeida, Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu (CNN)

 CNN (abaixo) sobre a desigualdade mundial das vacinas (o que nada mais é do que a reprodução do que já existe em termos de PIB per capita, IDH e outras desigualdades)

O que falta, sempre faltou, desde o início e mesmo antes da pandemia, é um diálogo mínimo e um entendimento entre o P5, entre os grandes do G20, e as grandes organizações internacionais, ONU, PNUD, OCDE, OMS, Bretton Woods, OMC, BIS, grandes corporações e tutti quanti importantes para conceber um plano global de enfrentamento da pandemia, o que não ocorreu devido a insistência do Idiota do Trump e pretender chamar o Covid-19 de "virus chinês" e ao insinuar que seria um golpe baixo dos "comunistas chineses" (postura imitada por nossos idiotas nacionais, a começar pelo patético chanceler acidental) para minar o Ocidente.

Está na hora de Biden fazer um apelo ao Guterres para convocar IMEDIATAMENTE uma conferência diplomática internacional para estabelecer um programa de vacinação em massa nos países pobres, com licenciamento negociado das patentes existentes, com vistas a uma oferta abundante, de todos os tipos de vacinas, aos miseráveis do mundo (entre os quais infelizmente nos incluímos, devido à INCÚRIA do GENOCIDA que preside o Brasil).

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Agora a matéria da CNN:

'It's very frustrating'

Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu

CNN, March 22. 2021

----------

World leaders know Covid-19 will never be beaten until every nation, rich or poor, is blanketed with vaccines. But they also understand that doling out doses to foreigners before their own people are taken care of is political self sabotage.

The gap in vaccine availability between wealthy and developing nations is becoming more “grotesque” every day, World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned Monday. The world’s most powerful nation, the US, has been slow to corral a global effort to get vaccines for everyone. Marinating in the bitterness of Brexit, the UK and European Union are locked in an ugly showdown over vaccine exports. Meanwhile, entire nations are being overcome by new viral surges: In Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro has made a politicized hash of the pandemic, hospitals warn they're running out of drugs necessary to keep patients intubated.

The vaccine race has emphasized a trend stirred by a wave of populism in the West — the revival of the nation-state. The advantage goes to countries with deep pockets and pharmaceutical capacities that can churn out the completed vaccines. This is despite the fact that chemical components of the dose rely on a global supply chain. Winners in the vaccine race like Israel, the UK and now the US boast of their success — especially since it’s covering up their blushes at botching earlier efforts to stifle the virus.

The WHO says countries should prioritize health workers and high-risk populations everywhere in the world, before vaccinating their own healthy citizens who are at low risk of dying from the virus. No one is doing that, though Washington has started to make some limited moves to improve access: It’s “lending” 2.5 million AstraZeneca doses to Mexico and 1.5 million to Canada, and leading an effort that also includes India, Japan and Australia to get a billion vaccines to countries in Asia. More choices will loom when the supply of doses in the US outstrips the number of Americans willing to take them.

No one will be free of Covid until everyone is free. But domestic politics ensure that when it comes to vaccines, charity begins at home.

A mensagem dramática do jornalista negro da CNN: Van Jones chorou no programa

 Ouçam a mensagem deste jornalista da CNN: 

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/cn-ns-van-jones-breaks-down-in-tears-at-joe-bidens-presidential-win-its-vindication-for-a-lot-of-people-who-have-really-suffered-191723588.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=ma

Van Jones's tearful reaction to Joe Biden's presidential win: 'It's easier to be a parent this morning'

CNN analyst Van Jones broke down in tears on camera Saturday, after hearing news that Joe Biden had defeated President Donald Trump in the election, as projected by the Associated Press. (Photo: Paul Marotta/Getty Images)

CNN analyst Van Jones was overcome with emotion Saturday upon the news that Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, as projected by the Associated Press.

"It's easier to be a parent this morning,” Jones said on camera as he struggled to hold back tears. “It's easier to be a dad. It's easier to tell your kids: 'Character matters, it matters. Telling the truth matters. Being a good person matters.’”

Jones, 52, went on to explain that as the 46th President of the United States, Biden would make life better for those whose livelihood was threatened under the Trump administration.

“It’s easier for a whole lot of people. If you're Muslim in this country, you don't have to worry if the president doesn't want you here. If you're an immigrant, you don't have to worry if the president is going to be happier to have babies snatched away or send dreamers back for no reason," he said, finally breaking down and wiping away his tears.

Jones tweeted a video of his passionate statement on Twitter, writing, “Today is a good day. It’s easier to be a parent this morning. Character MATTERS. Being a good person MATTERS. This is a big deal. It’s easy to do it the cheap way and get away with stuff — but it comes back around. Today is a good day.” The video has been viewed 2.3 million times.

Jones said the change in administration was welcome after a summer of racial upheaval and police brutality that sent shock waves throughout the country.

“It’s vindication for a lot of people who have really suffered. You know 'I can't breathe?' That wasn't just George Floyd; that was a lot of people who felt that they couldn't breathe," said Jones. He referred to Floyd’s death in police custody on May 25, after an officer, responding to a report that Floyd used a counterfeit $20 bill, held his knee on Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. Floyd, 46, repeatedly told the officers he couldn’t breathe.

"Every day you're waking up and you're getting these tweets and you just don't know — and you're going to the store and people who have been afraid to show their racism are getting nastier and nastier to you," Jones continued. "And you're worried about your kids and you're worried about your sister. And can she just go to Walmart and get back into her car without somebody saying something to her?"

“This is a big deal for us just to be able to get some peace,” said Jones. “And have a chance for a reset. And the character of the country matters and being a good man matters. I just want my sons to look at this, look at this. It’s easy to do it the cheap way and get away with stuff. But it comes back around...and this is a good day for this country.”

“I’m sorry for the people who lost — for them, it’s not a good day — but for a whole lot of people, it’s a good day,” he said.