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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 5/13/16

Dilma out: Brazilian plutocracy sets 54mn votes on fire

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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's NSA 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.

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Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia (more...)
 

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