Never
in modern political history has it been so easy to “abolish the
people” and simply erase 54 million votes cast in a free and fair
presidential election
by Pepe
Escobar
Forget about
hanging chads, as in Florida 2000. This is a day that will live in
infamy all across the Global South – when what was one of its most
dynamic democracies veered into a plutocratic regime, under a flimsy
parliamentary/judicial veneer, with legal and constitutional
guarantees now at the mercy of lowly comprador elites.
After the
proverbial marathon, the Brazilian Senate voted 55-22 to put
President Dilma Rousseff on trial for “crimes of responsibility”
– related to alleged window dressing of the government’s budget.
This is the
culmination of a drawn-out process that started even before Rousseff
won re-election in late 2014 with over 54 million votes. I have
described the bunch of perpetrators of what Brazilian creativity has
termed ‘golpeachment’ (a mix of coup – “golpe” in
Portuguese – and impeachment) as Hybrid War hyenas.
Sophisticated
golpeachment – supported by what amounts to an Electoral
Inquisition College – has propelled Hybrid War to whole new levels.
Hybrid War
as applied to Brazil exhibited classic elements of a color
revolution. Of course there was no need for no-fly zones or
humanitarian imperialism to “protect human rights” – not to
mention provoking a civil war. But considering the high resistance
level of the victim state, where civil society is very dynamic,
Hybrid War designers in this case bet on a mix of capitulation –
and betrayal – of local elites, mixed with “peaceful protests”
and a relentless mainstream media campaign. Call it ‘Civil War
Light.’
That carried
with it a fabulous cost-benefit ratio. Now the (immensely corrupt)
Brazilian political system and the current
executive/legislative/judiciary/mainstream media alignment can be
used by the usual suspects for their geopolitical agenda.
Welcome to
regime change light – politics, in a nutshell – as war by other
means on the BRICS. A new software, a new operating system. Carrying
a pathetic corollary; if the US is the Empire of Chaos, Brazil has
now gloriously reached the status of Sub-Empire of Scoundrels.
Scoundrels
galore
Rousseff may
be accused of serious economic mismanagement, and of being incapable
of political articulation among the shark pool that is (immensely
corrupt) Brazilian politics. But she is not corrupt. She made a
serious mistake in fighting inflation, allowing interest rates to
rise to an unsustainable level; so demand in Brazil dramatically
dropped, and recession became the norm. She is the (convenient)
scapegoat for Brazil’s recession.
She
certainly may be blamed for not having a Plan B to fight the global
recession. Brazil essentially works on two pillars; commodity exports
and local companies relying on the teats of the state. Infrastructure
in general is dismal – adding to what is described as the
“Brazilian cost” of doing business. With the commodity slump,
state funds dwindled and everything was paralyzed – credit,
investment, consumption.
The pretext
for Rousseff’s impeachment – allegedly transferring loans from
public banks to the Treasury in order to disguise the size of
Brazil’s fiscal deficit – is flimsy at best. Every administration
in the West does it – and that includes Clinton’s, Bush’s and
Obama’s.
The
Operation Car Wash investigation, dragging on for two years now, was
supposed to uncover corruption in the Brazilian political system –
as in the collusion of oil giant Petrobras executives, Brazilian
construction companies, and political campaign financing. Car Wash
has nothing to do with the golpeachment drive. Yet these have been
two parallel highways converging to one destination: the
criminalization of the Workers’ Party, and the definitive – if
possible – political assassination of Rousseff and her mentor,
former President Lula.
When
golpeachment reached the lower house of Congress – an appalling
spectacle – Rousseff was eviscerated by Hybrid War hyenas of the
BBC variety; “BBC,” in English, stands for “bullet,”“bible”
and “cattle,” where “bullet” refers to the weapons and
private security industry, “bible” to pastors and evangelical
fanatics, and “cattle” to the powerful agribusiness lobby.
The “BBC”
hyenas are members of almost all Brazilian political parties,
paperboys for major corporations, and – last but not least –
corruption stalwarts. They all benefited from millionaire political
campaigning. The whole Car Wash investigation ultimately revolves
around campaign financing, which in Brazil, unlike the US with its
legalized lobbies, is a Tarantino-worthy Wild West.
The
Brazilian Senate is not exactly an “upper” – as in more
polished – house. Eighty percent of members are white men – in a
country where miscegenation rules. A staggering 58 percent is under
criminal investigation – linked to Car Wash. Sixty percent hail
from political dynasties. And 13 percent – as alternates – were
not elected at all. Among those favoring impeachment, 30 out of 49
are in trouble with the law. Charges include mostly money laundering,
financial crimes and outright corruption. Renan Calheiros, the
president of the Senate – who oversaw today’s impeachment vote –
is the target of no fewer than nine separate money
laundering/corruption Car Wash lines of investigation, plus another
two criminal probes.
Meet the
three Banana Republic amigos
Rousseff is
now suspended for a maximum 180 days while a Senate committee decides
whether to impeach her for good. Enter President-in-Waiting Michel
Temer – a dodgy, shady operator – who has been branded a
“usurper” by Rousseff. And usurper this provincial Brutus
certainly is – according to his own words. On March 30 last year,
he was tweeting that,“Impeachment is unthinkable, it would
create an institutional crisis. There is no judicial or political
basis for it.”
His
administration is born with the original sin of being illegal and
massively unpopular; his approval rating floats between an epic 1
percent and 2 percent. He was already fined last week for violating
campaign finance limits. And, predictably, he’s drowning in a
corruption swamp – named in two Car Wash plea bargains and accused
of being part of an illegal scheme of ethanol buying; he may become
ineligible for the next eight years. Almost 60 percent of Brazilians
also want him impeached – on the same charges leveled against
Rousseff.
Brutus 1
(Temer) would not bask in the glow of his 15 minutes of fame without
the shenanigans of Brutus 2 (Brazil’s number one crook, former
speaker of the lower house Eduardo Cunha, facing charges of bribery
and perjury, holder of illegal Swiss accounts, and now finally
sidelined by the Supreme Court). It was Brutus 2 who fast-tracked
impeachment as pure vengeance; the Workers’ Party did not cover his
back as he was facing a tsunami of corruption charges. Brutus 2 used
all his vast powers – he runs a campaign financing scam inside
Congress – to obstruct the Car Wash investigation. His replacement,
the interim speaker, is also under investigation for bribery.
So meet
Temer, Cunha, Calheiros; these three amigos are the true stars of the
Banana Republic of Scoundrels/Crooks.
As if the
Supreme Court would be rascal-free. Judge Gilmar Mendes, for
instance, is a lowly plutocrat vassal. When an attorney for the
government entered a motion to suspend impeachment, he quipped, “Ah,
they can go to heaven, to the Pope, or to hell.” Another
pompous judge received a request to sideline Cunha as early as
December 2015. He only examined the request over four months later,
when the whole golpeachment scam was in its decisive phase. And still
he argued, “there’s no proof Cunha contaminated the
impeachment process.”
Finally,
complementing the whole scam, we find Brazilian mainstream media,
with the toxic Globo media empire – which lavishly profited from
the 1964 military coup – at the forefront.
All hail
the neoliberal restoration
Wall Street
– as well as the City of London – could not hide its excitement
with golpeachment, believing Brutus 1 Temer will be an economic
upgrade. Arguably, he might dare to tweak Brazil’s Kafkaesque tax
code and do something about the enormous hole in the pension system.
But what that mythical entity – the “markets” – and myriad
“investors” are salivating about is the prospect of fabulous
rates of return in a reopened-for-speculation Brazil. The Brutus 1
game will be a neoliberal feast, actually a restoration, with no
popular representation whatsoever.
The
golpeachment gang gets really incensed when they are identified as
coup plotters. Still, they could not give a damn about the OAS,
Mercosur, Unasur – all of them condemned the coup – not to
mention the Holy Grail: the BRICS. Under Brutus 1, the Foreign
Ministry, to be led by a sore loser senator, is bound to sink
Brazil’s key role in BRICS cooperation, to the benefit of
Exceptionalistan.
All one
needs to know is that neither Nobel Peace Prize-winner Barack “kill
list” Obama nor Queen of Chaos Hillary “We came, we saw, he died”
Clinton condemned the ongoing regime change light/golpeachment.
That’s predictable, considering Exceptionalistan’sNSA spied on
Petrobras and Dilma Rousseff personally – the genesis of what would
develop as the Car Wash investigation.
White House
spokesman Josh Earnest limited himself to the proverbial platitudes:
“challenging moment”; “trust in Brazilian democratic
institutions”; or even “mature democracy.” Yet he added,
significantly, that Brazil is “under scrutiny.”
Of course,
the current stage of a very sophisticated Hybrid War strategy has
been accomplished. But there are countless cliffhangers ahead. The
Car Wash investigation – currently in slow motion – will pick up
speed as a rash of dodgy plea bargains is already in store to create
the conditions to criminalize for good not only Dilma Rousseff but
the key piece in the chessboard: Lula.
Game over?
Not so fast. The anti-golpeachment front does have a strategy: to
imprint especially in “deep Brazil,” the vast masses of the
working poor, the notion of illegality; to rebuild Rousseff’s image
as the victim of a profound injustice; to re-energize the progressive
political front; to make sure the Brutus 1 government will fail; and
to create the conditions for the man who will come in from the cold
to win the 2018 presidential elections.
Brazilian
House of Cards? Bets could be made this may even end up as Anaconda,
with Lula immobilizing the Hybrid War hyenas in a cobra clutch.
Source:
Comments
Post a Comment