The question then is how much of the push to limits to the power of the legislative assembly dominated by the opposition, and how much of the political repression (including the treatment of opposition leaders, but also the police violence) results from the very violent and anti-democratic push from the opposition itself, that has tried to bring down the government since the very beginning (including a failed coup attempt in 2002). And this is also a valid concern that many (almost all the mainstream media) on the left seem to forget. I can’t honestly respond. But I can provide a perspective, based on my understanding of the Argentine and Brazilian cases that are closer to my experience.Naked Keynesianism
Prof. George Ciccariello-Maher of Drexel University analyzes the latest developments in Venezuela, including a new UN human rights report, US sanctions, and the begrudging admission by President Maduro's foes that he still has popular support
Just imagine the most extreme, primitive cartoon version of a gleefully hypocritical moralizer – a preacher who leaves his weekly whorehouse orgy to go directly to Sunday church to rail against hell-bound sinners – and you’ll have a perfect vision of the majority faction that sanctimoniously paraded itself that day. The slime that oozes from their pores is palpable....
ALFREDO SAAD-FILHO: This constitutional amendment, as you explained in your introduction, limits government spending in all areas by the Federal Executive, by the Legislature and the judicial system to spending this current year plus the rate of inflation for the next 20 years. This is what it is intended to do: the idea is to limit the government deficit and to provide credibility to economic policy in Brazil.
Temer and his cabinet, who have been working towards the implementation of austerity measures in Brazil since they came to power, have proposed a constitutional amendment that will severely limit Brazil’s flexibility in government spending.The Minskys
Introduction: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office through a well-organized, carefully planned operation among the corrupt Brazilian political elite, closely linked to the stock-market, financial institutions and foreign energy companies.
This ‘legislative coup d’état ‘eliminated the democratically-elected ‘political intermediaries’ and installed a regime directly controlled by the CEO’s of leading multi-nationals. The corporate composition of the post-coup regime insured there would be a radical restructuring of the Brazilian economy, with a massive shift from wage support, social spending and public ownership toward profits, a foreign capital take-over of strategic sectors and foreign-domestic elite dominance over the entire economy.
This paper will describe the socio-economic dynamics of the coup and its aftermath, as well as the strategy and program that Brazil’s new rulers will pursue. In the second half of the paper, we will discuss the Workers Party regimes’ policies (under Lulu and Rousseff) that prepared the political and economic ground-work for the right-wing seizure of power…Probably more like a trillion than a billion. This is a grab of Brazil's resources that belong to the people of Brazil by a comprador government to turn over to transnational corporations (read "to the US elite").
The ‘coup’ was no ’secretive conspiracy’ - it was an overt, direct capitalist seizure of power. Once installed, it proceeded to dismantle the public sector economy and transfer the jewels of Brazil’s economy to foreign multi-nationals.James Petras Website
Brazilian President Michel Temer let an open secret become explicitly clear during a speech to business and foreign policy leaders yesterday in New York. The country’s elected and now-removed President, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached because of her position on economic policy, rather than any alleged wrongdoing on her part, her installed successor admitted. Temer’s stunning, and seemingly unscripted, acknowledgement will surely bolster the view of impeachment opponents that Dilma’s removal was a “parliamentary coup d’etat.”
In his remarks, Temer clearly stated what impeachment opponents have long maintained: that he and his party began to agitate for Rousseff’s impeachment when she refused to implement the pro-business economic plan of Temer’s party. That economic plan which Rousseff refused to implement called for widespread cuts to social programs and privatization, an agenda radically different from the one approved by Brazilians through the ballot box in 2014, when Dilma’s Workers’ Party won its fourth straight presidential election. The comments were delivered on Wednesday to an audience at the New York headquarters of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA).…
“And many months ago, while I was still vice president, we released a document named ‘A Bridge to the Future’ because we knew it would be impossible for the government to continue on that course. We suggested that the government should adopt the theses presented in that document called ‘A Bridge to the Future.’ But, as that did not work out, the plan wasn’t adopted and a process was established which culminated with me being installed as president of the republic.”There you have it.
Temer’s comments are yet more confirmation that Rousseff’s impeachment did not occur due to alleged budget tricks, as the Brazilian media and the country’s now-ruling faction regularly claims. Nor was it for the traditional Brazilian family, nor for God, or against corruption, as congresspeople claimed during their “yes” votes. It was conducted on behalf of the interests of business owners and to the detriment of workers. It was for an agenda of impunity, profit, and power that would never be ratified democratically by the Brazilian voting population at the ballot box, and was thus imposed on them under the guise of upholding the law. Anyone still doubting that should simply listen to what the prime beneficiary of impeachment, Michel Temer, just said to his most important constituency.The Intercept
The only exception to this wall of silence was a columnist from the right-wing newspaper Estadão, Lúcia Guimarães, who spent several hours on Twitter yesterday completely humiliating herself in a spirited attempt to deny that Temer actually said this. She began by insinuating that The Intercept Brasil made a suspicious “cut” in the video that altered reality — basically accusing Vieira of committing fraud without the slightest evidence, all to protect Temer.Brazil’s Big Media Ignores Temer’s Confession — Except Estadão Columnist Who Falsely Claimed Video Was Altered
Then, after a Folha columnist sent her a link to the full video showing that nothing was distorted, she nonetheless announced that she would only believe Temer said this once she saw the drives from each camera simultaneously played, and she added that what made the story so suspicious was that President Temer is a best-selling author of a book on constitutional law who would not say such a thing about impeachment. Only once the full transcript of Temer’s remarks was posted would she finally admit that he really said it, but rather than retract her false accusations or apologize to Vieira and The Intercept Brasil for having implied the video was fraudulently edited, she instead simply posted the relevant part of Temer’s remarks without reference to her prior efforts to smear Vieira, as though she were the one who discovered and was reporting these comments for the first time. Even once she did finally admit the truth about Temer’s remarks, she bitterly claimed that impeachment opponents were turning the story into a “carnival” and celebrating the revelation.
From the start of the campaign to impeach Brazil’s democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff, the primary justification was that she used a budget trick known as pedaladas (“peddling”: illegal delay of re-payments to state banks) to mask public debt. But this week, as the Senate conducts her impeachment trial, that accusation was obliterated: The Senate’s own expert report concluded there was “no indication of direct or indirect action by Dilma” in any such budgetary maneuvers. As the Associated Press put it: “Independent auditors hired by Brazil’s Senate said in a report released Monday that suspended President Dilma Rousseff didn’t engage in the creative accounting she was charged with at her impeachment trial.” In other words, the Senate’s own objective experts gutted the primary claim as to why impeachment was something other than a coup.…
But so obviously, impeachment was never about any alleged lawbreaking by Dilma — that was just the excuse to remove a democratically elected president for ideological reasons — which is why the destruction of the primary legal charge against her has barely dented the impeachment momentum. Even the vehemently anti-Dilma paper Estadão documented how leading impeachment advocates this week instantly shifted their rationale: from claiming that pedaladas requires her impeachment to proclaiming that it was never actually important in the first place. Those are the actions of people devoted to an end without caring about the justification: They are determined to impeach Dilma for ideological reasons, so the destruction of the legal case against her makes no difference.…
Even more significant is the growing evidence of the full-scale corruption of Dilma’s installed replacement, Michel Temer. In just over 30 days since his installation, Temer lost three of his chosen ministers to corruption. One of them, his extremely close ally Romero Jucá, was caught on tape plotting Dilma’s impeachment as a way to shut down the ongoing corruption investigation, as well as indicating that Brazil’s military, the media, and the courts were all participants in the impeachment plotting.
A key investigation informant, former senator and construction executive Sérgio Machado, has now said that Temer received and controlled 1.5 million reals in illegal campaign funds, while a separate informant last week said Temer was the “beneficiary” of 1 million reals in bribes. And Temer is now banned by a court order from running for any office for eight years due to his own violation of election laws. Remember: This is who, in the name of fighting “corruption,” Brazil’s elites installed in the place of the elected president.
Meanwhile, Temer’s political party, PMDB, is almost certainly the most corrupt in this hemisphere. Its president of the lower House, Eduardo Cunha — who presided over Dilma’s impeachment — is now suspended by the Supreme Court, and the House’s Ethics Commission just voted to expel him entirely because he lied about bribe-filled Swiss bank accounts he controls. The same construction executive, Machado, testified that three of PMBD’s key leaders — including Jucá — were paid a total of 71.1 million reals in bribes. Meanwhile, two key Temer allies from the center-right PSDB that Dilma defeated in 2014 — Temer’s Foreign Minister José Serra and Dilma’s 2014 opponent Aécio Neves — are now both targets of the corruption investigation.…
Just think about what has happened when it comes to control over the world’s fifth most populous (and very oil-rich) country. The democratically elected president was impeached despite no allegations of personal corruption — by politicians who are knee-deep in bribery and kickback scandals. The primary pretext used to impeach her has just been debunked by the Senate’s own independent expert report. The corruption-plagued man they installed in her place — who currently has a 70 percent disapproval rating, and whom 60 percent of the country wants impeached — is now secretly meeting with the very judges whose supposed independence, credibility, and integrity were the prime argument against calling this a “coup,” all while he plots to save his bribery-enriched fellow party member. And while all this happens, they are blithely proceeding to impose a right-wing agenda of austerity and privatization that democracy would never allow.,,,And these are "our" (US) guys. Yes, they are all men. The women were either fired or resigned.
It has been obvious from the start that a core objective of the impeachment of Brazil’s elected president, Dilma Rousseff, was to empower the actual thieves in Brasilia and enable them to impede, obstruct, and ultimately kill the ongoing Car Wash investigation (as well as to impose a neoliberal agenda of privatization and radical austerity). A mere 20 days into the seizure of power by the corruption-implicated “interim” President Michel Temer, overwhelming evidence has emerged proving that to be true: Already, two of the interim ministers in Temer’s all-white-male cabinet, including his anti-corruption minister, have been forced to resign after the emergence of secret recordings showing them plotting to obstruct that investigation (an investigation in which they, along with one-third of his cabinet, are personally implicated).
But the oozing corruption of Temer’s ministers has sometimes served to obscure his own. He, too, is implicated in several corruption investigations. And now, he has been formally convicted of violating election laws and, as punishment, is banned from running for any political office for eight years. Yesterday, a regional election court in São Paulo, where he’s from, issued a formal decree finding him guilty and declaring him “ineligible” to run for any political office as a result of now having a “dirty record” in elections. Temer was found guilty of spending his own funds on his campaign in excess of what the law permits.…The Intercept
That [rolling back the reforms of the past thirteen years under the WP], in the end, is what the coup was about: not eliminating corruption (which is how it’s been covered here in the United States) but changing the class content of the policies of the Brazilian government.Ownership class "soft coup" against the 54 million people that elected Dilma Rouseff. See Here’s why some people think Brazil is in the middle of a ‘soft coup’ by Héctor Perla, Jr. Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, at The Washington Post – Monkey Cage. Right-wing "soft coups" have a history in Latin America. It's a political tool that most Americans are not familiar with and easily duped by US media propaganda to the contrary.
Temer's cabinet has no women, no Black ministers, no one who identifies as gay, lesbian, or trangender, nor anyone representing social movements or any other of Brazil's minority groups.…
Temer's cabinet, while all men and all white, also includes seven ministers who are under investigation for their alleged role in the Petrobras corruption scandal.…
Temer reduced the size of the cabinet to only 22 ministries, ostensibly in the name of austrity. However, his choice of what ministries to cut or to fold into other ministries is telling of the interim president's right-wing priorities.
The Ministry of Culture has been eliminated
The Ministry of Agrarian Development has been eliminated
The Ministry of Science and Technology has been eliminated (it is now part of a much larger dysfunctional ministry, together with telecommunications)
The Ministry of Women has been eliminated
The Ministry of Racial Equality has been eliminated
The Ministry of Human Rights has been eliminated
The Comptroller General, which once enjoyed independent status, has now become the Ministry of Supervision, Transparency and Control, which could affect its ability to investigate alleged corruption.
The new minister of justice, Alexandre de Moraes, is a person well-known to social movements in the state of Sao Paulo. He previously served as secretary for security for the right-wing government of the state and in that capacity oversaw several brutal crackdowns on social protest, including an incident on Jan. 13, 2016, that was widely condemned for its excessive use of police force.…
The seven ministers facing corruption allegations also now enjoy a form of immunity, as only the Supreme Court can try them if they are sitting government ministers.…The kicker.
All Ministries are now in hands of the right, who lost in the 2014 elections to Dilma Rousseff.How is this not a coup?
“Together we can overcome this moment of great difficulty. It is urgent to calm the nation and unify the nation, create a government of national salvation,” Temer said on Thursday.…
On Thursday, Temer announced a new cabinet where all 24 of his ministers are white men. Brazil has a majority black or mixed race population.
“We must rebuild the foundations of the Brazilian economy and significantly improve the business environment for the private sector so it can get back to its natural role of investing, producing and creating jobs,” Temer said.…
As it turns out, the Temer presidency may be nothing more than the latest manifestation of the US state department's implementation of yet another puppet government. We know this because earlier today, Wikileaks released evidence via a declassified cable that Brazil's new interim president was an embassy informant for US intelligence and military.Zero Hedge
It’s not easy for outsiders to sort through all the competing claims about Brazil’s political crisis and the ongoing effort to oust its president, Dilma Rousseff, who won re-election a mere 18 months ago with 54 million votes. But the most important means for understanding the truly anti-democratic nature of what’s taking place is to look at the person whom Brazilian oligarchs and their media organs are trying to install as president: the corruption-tainted, deeply unpopular, oligarch-serving Vice President Michel Temer (above). Doing so shines a bright light on what’s really going on, and why the world should be deeply disturbed.…*****
In an earning calls last Friday with JP Morgan, the celebratory CEO of Banco Latinoamericano de Comercio Exterior SA, Rubens Amaral, explicitly described Dilma’s impeachment as “one of the first steps to normalization in Brazil,” and said that if Temer’s new government implements the “structural reforms” that the financial community desires, then “definitely there will be opportunities.” News of Temer’s preferred appointees strongly suggests Mr. Amaral — and his fellow plutocrats — will be pleased.
Meanwhile, the dominant Brazilian media organs of Globo, Abril (Veja), Estadão — which Miranda’s op-ed discusses at length — are virtually unified in support of impeachment, as in No Dissent Allowed, and have been inciting the street protests from the start. Why is that revealing? Reporters Without Borders just yesterday released its 2016 Press Freedom Rankings, and ranked Brazil 103 in the world because of violence against journalists but also because of this key fact: “Media ownership continues to be very concentrated, especially in the hands of big industrial families that are often close to the political class.” Is it not crystal clear what’s going on here?
So to summarize: Brazilian financial and media elites are pretending that corruption is the reason for removing the twice-elected president of the country as they conspire to install and empower the country’s most corrupted political figures. Brazilian oligarchs will have succeeded in removing from power a moderately left-wing government that won four straight elections in the name of representing the country’s poor, and are literally handing control over the Brazilian economy (the world’s seventh largest) to Goldman Sachs and bank industry lobbyists.
This fraud being perpetrated here is as blatant as it is devastating. But it’s the same pattern that has been repeatedly seen around the world, particularly in Latin America, when a tiny elite wages a self-protective, self-serving war on the fundamentals of democracy. Brazil, the world’s fifth most populous country, has been an inspiring example of how a young democracy can mature and thrive. But now, those democratic institutions and principles are being fully assaulted by the very same financial and media factions that suppressed democracy and imposed tyranny in that country for decades.Regime change.
As a metaphor of the advanced state of putrefaction plaguing the entire political system of one of the Global South’s leading nations, nothing comes close to what is about to take place in Brazil.* comprador = native manger of a foreign firm
The notoriously corrupt leader of the lower House in the Brazilian Parliament, Eduardo Cunha — holder of 11 illegal Swiss accounts, listed in the Panama Papers, and indicted at the Supreme Court — has scheduled a crucial plenary vote on the possibility of impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff for this coming Sunday. Sunday traditionally is the day when an overwhelming majority of Brazilians relax watching football on TV.
The crook in question also tried to defined the rules of the game; the roll call would start with the wealthier southern states, which are more favorable towards impeachment — a euphemism for coup/regime change, the culmination of the soft Hybrid War strategy deployed from the beginning by the usual suspects allied with the Brazilian oligarchy/comprador* elites.…
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is now threatened with impeachment, but there is no evidence that she is linked to the “Lava Jato“ scandal, or any other corruption. Rather, she is accused of an accounting manipulation that somewhat misrepresented the fiscal position of the government — something that prior presidents have done. To borrow an analogy from the United States, when the Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling in the U.S. in 2013, the Obama administration used a number of accounting tricks to postpone the deadline at which the limit was reached. Nobody cared.
The impeachment campaign — which the government has correctly labelled a coup — is an effort by Brazil’s traditional elite to obtain by other means what they have not been able to win at the ballot box for the past 12 years.…Economic analysis.
