Mediocre incompetent opportunist, corrupt coward traitor, and certified political usurper, interim President Michel Temer, refused to go to the closing ceremony, afraid of being booed out of a packed Maracana stadium. According to the latest polls, 79% of Brazilians want Temer The Usurper out. Now.

Thus Temer The Usurper was not able, according to protocol, to pass the baton (for Tokyo in 2020) to visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Team Temer offered a meeting later on in the capital, Brasilia. Japanese diplomats flatly refused; who wants your Prime Minister to meet a coward in hiding?

Former President Lula lobbied hard to bring the Olympics to Rio, and preparations went on under President Dilma Rousseff. Coupled with Temer The Usurper’s primal fear of being booed just as in the Olympics opening ceremony, which led to his subsequent diplomatic humiliation, a noxious, pathetic political propaganda campaign was deployed right to the end of the games, trying to diminish or even extinguish Lula’s and Dilma’s role. Quite a few Brazilian athletes with great performances at the games benefited from government-supported sport programs.

Now the Scoundrel Games are back in Brazil – with a parliamentary junta disputing gold medals with an institutional racket involving big banks, big business, corporate media and sectors of the Judiciary and the Federal Police. The farce is being sold as a trial in the Senate of President Rousseff, accused – without proof – of financially embellishing the state budget.

Unlike the cowardly usurper, Rousseff is going to the Senate to stare all 81 members in the face; these are the people who by the end of this month will for all practical purposes save or bury Brazilian democracy for good. Rousseff, in case of – miraculously – not being impeached, proposes a referendum leading to new elections.

As it stands, it does not look good. The late, great Jean Baudrillard – a great lover of Brazil – would characterize Rousseff’s impeachment drive as a simulacrum, obliterating the real crime; the parliamentary/institutional coup orchestrated by a notorious bunch of scoundrels, Temer included.

The multi-layered coup, with modified Hybrid War elements, comes with a prearranged finale. It does not matter that even Brazilian Public Ministry experts have repeatedly admitted there’s no juridical basis for Rousseff’s impeachment. Even the federal prosecutor on the case concluded a few weeks ago that she did not commit a crime – «responsibility» or otherwise.

The prosecutorial gang includes two of every three members of the Brazilian Congress who are facing an array of scandals. The overall institutional farce points to the Legislative, the Judiciary and the Public Ministry dragging their feet on indicting the legislative scoundrels while accelerating the procedure against Rousseff. That’s the definition of organized crime.

The endgame, from the point of view of the coup plotter galaxy, is to criminalize and finish off with the Workers’ Party for good – from Lula and Rousseff downwards – under an upcoming barrage of hazy «obstruction of Justice» allegations.

And the Obama administration loves it

The president of construction company giant Odebrecht, incarcerated for months now, accused Temer The Usurper of pleading for – and receiving – undeclared «electoral help», in cash, for his party, the PMDB. Temer has already been convicted for violating election finance laws and banned from running for office for eight years.

Interim Foreign Minister Jose Serra also received «electoral help» for his presidential campaign in 2010; part of the loot was paid overseas, something that properly investigated could lead his party, the PSDB, to lose its registration.

In these past few weeks, Temer The Usurper took no prisoners to turbo charge the impeachment timetable farce, at the same time preventing Dilma to mount a detailed defense. His excuse; he needs to go to Hangzhou, China, for the G20 summit starting on September 4. And he needs to go as president-in-charge – not as «leader» of an unelected caretaker government acting like they’ve earned their mandate in the polling booth.

The real reason for the rush, though, is that Temer feared the serious Odebrecht corruption charge like the plague. Other charges may be imminent. Yet he’s protected – at least for now; the Mob – as in the Goddess of the Market, Brazil’s big banking and their shills in corporate media – is on his side.

Brazil remains totally paralyzed by the political/institutional farce. The 8^th largest economy in the world, second largest exporter of food products, and largest industrial platform in the developing West is bleeding, badly. Oil workers are accusing the Mob for 1.5 million lost jobs. Huge infrastructure projects are stalled. Large construction companies are virtually broke; Odebrecht by itself fired over 70,000 workers.

In parallel Temer The Usurper’s «government» has already started to enact its masterplan – straight from disaster capitalism’s playbook. One of the key «policies» is to sell out Petrobras – and the pre-salt reserves – to foreign, as in US corporate, interests. Lula correctly identified the pre-salt reserves – the largest oil discovery in the 21^st century so far – as the privileged source for a new development drive for Brazil.

But there are way more disasters in store; selling out indigenous Brazilian industrial development via hardcore privatization, abandoning the defense of Brazilian engineering know-how; severe cuts on education, health, science and technology; «flexibilization» of workers’ rights, as in attacking them on all fronts; a regressive attack on pensions; and sabotaging Mercosur – the South American common market – to the benefit of vassal subordination to US interests.

The – legitimate – Uruguayan Foreign Minister, Rodolfo Nin Novoa, was even compelled to denounced the – illegitimate – Brazilian Foreign Minister, the lowly Serra, for trying to buy Montevideo’s help to prevent Venezuela from stepping up to the temporary presidency of Mercosur. In a little over three months, Serra managed to reduce Brazilian diplomacy to a heap of rotten bananas.

And then, of course, there’s the cherry in the cheesecake; the lame duck Obama administration’s full support for the coup and the impeachment farce.

Obama did not have the balls to say it upfront. That came in the form of Secretary of State John Kerry meeting with the repellent Serra in a trip to Brazil in early August. Kerry even issued a long statement – for all practical purposes legitimizing the coup.

Kerry did not have the balls to meet Temer The Usurper. So what; the whole Global South now knows where Washington stands. Parliamentary / institutional regime change is of course OK. As long as it prevents BRICS integration and Chinese trade/commercial advance in Latin America.

Move on, nothing to see here – as Washington proceeds to the serious business of negotiating two crucial military bases with Argentina’s neoliberal vassal Mauricio Macri; one in resource-rich Patagonia, the other smack into the Brazil / Argentina / Paraguay triple border, right by the largest aquifer on the planet.

And there’s all that pre-salt oil about to go to Chevron! How not to love the smell of regime change in the morning? Definitely smells like victory. And you don’t even need to send the Marines for it.

The undercurrents of the coup flow directly from Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil enterprise, currently under fire after Operation Car Wash unearthed several massive corruption scandals in 2014, and multi-partisan thievery saw Rousseff inherit the company’s $130 billion debt. Fortunately, to protect the country’s national currency, the Brazilian real, Petrobras cleverly retained its debt in US dollars for easy convertibility into bonds, while maintaining revenue in reals.“[…] 80 percent of the company’s debts are dollar-denominated, but much of its revenue comes from domestic fuel sales in reals”, an Energy Fuse article stated.

Unfortunately, last year the dollar strengthened and fluctuated, which inflamed the nation’s debt burden. “Inflated by a stronger dollar, Petrobras’ gross debt swelled to 799.25 billion reals [$223 billion] at the end of 2015 […] even as the company slashed investment spending and spent the last six months of the year trying – with limited success – to sell off assets,” MarketWatch states. A combination of weakening exchange rates, high global oil supply, and falling domestic demand, did little to stop Petrobras’s hemorrhaging revenues amidst the corruption scandal.

The swell in global supply was attributed to failed OPEC negotiations with Saudi Arabia, the cartel’s undisputed leader, after it childishly responded to North America’s “shale oil revolution” with a textbook oil glut that needlessly shrank global revenues to historic lows and threatened Petrobras’s limited 2.7 bpd upstream rates. With dwindling funds, the company was forced to sell assets to avert the onset of reverse Dutch disease. “If oil prices stay low, I’m not very hopeful,” Fabio Fuzette of Antares Capital mentioned.

With rising debt in US dollars and tanking profits in reals, Petrobras found itself at the mercy of the petrodollar. The company’s Q4 report reflected staggering losses, where market prices had“decreased 49.6 percent from the year earlier to $33.50 per barrel,” Zack’s Research highlighted. This had been aggravated by a previous Moody’s downgrade to “junk”status, which “rocked the country’s equities and currency, with […] the real tumbling 1.3 percent.” the group also discovered.

Another Energy Fuse article also revealed increasing bouts of in-fighting between the government and private investors after the 2007 discovery of pre-salt extraction reserves. “A 2010 reform under former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva requires Petrobras to be the sole operator in all pre-salt fields with a minimum 30 percent stake, severely limiting private investment in those areas.” To protect them from corporate exploitation, the Worker’s Party leadership mandated this to safeguard current and future welfare programs, but still required borrowing from the Central Bank of Brazil. Borrowing also heavily subsidized petrol costs to domestic consumers using the state bank. “Petrobras was not allowed by the government to pass on higher input costs to its end consumers and the company had to sell gasoline, diesel, and other refined petroleum products in Brazil at a sharp discount to international prices,” a Seeking Alpha article illustrated.

This explains the rampant embezzlement and the central bank’s egregious freeze of Selic benchmark rates at 14.25 percent. Recently, Temer replaced the bank’s leadership with IMF/ World Bank crony Ilan Goldfein to limit borrowing to all state-funded programs and impose austerity regulations.

Heads also began to roll at Pemex, Mexico’s Petrobras equivalent to which Brazil joined forces via Latin America’s largest trade agreement, dealing a heavy blow to the continent’s energy reform plans. “Emilio Lozoya (Pemex’s CEO) lost his job back in February, after failing to stop a production decline despite heavy leverage.” As a result, Rousseff was forced to continue selling off Petrobras assets, but continued to subsidize oil costs with borrowed money. This was a mistake, but not a crime.

To prepare a motive, the overthrow was preplanned in a businesslike manner. A Folha de Sao Paoloreport containing leaked recordings confirmed the pivotal moment in which Temer’s allies moved into position weeks before the coup. In it, Planning Minister Romero Juca and former Transperto President Sergio Machado commented that they wanted to “stop the bleeding” in Petrobras’s finances; a casus belli to form a national pact with Temer as the acting president. “I think we need to articulate a political action,” mentioned Juca to Machado. Juca has since stepped down in response to the leak.

However, it was her new methodology to reduce company debt that was the final straw. Reuters saliently reported that, following her January lifting of sanctions against Iran, the two countries met on the sidelines prior to the April 17th OPEC summit in Doha to discuss lucrative trading opportunities and bilateral agreements. “[Trade Minister Armando] Monteiro said Brazil aims to triple trade with Iran to $5 billion by 2019” and that “Rousseff lifted UN-imposed sanctions against the OPEC nation last week after meeting with the Iranian ambassador, […] despite tensions with the West,” Reuters continued. This trade was to occur in “euros and other currencies”, not dollars, and fit seamlessly with Petrobras’s 2015-2019 Business and Management Plan. Additionally, Brazil’s recent row with UNASUR and OPEC member Venezuela further encouraged Rousseff to seek new partnerships.

With increasing fallout between Saudi Arabia and the US over the 9/11 bill, coupled with embarrassing results from the Doha summit, Rousseff’s plan became an extra headache for the administration. Amidst all the hostile finger-pointing, she was in fact taking genuine steps to correct the company’s mismanagement using the P5+1 talks as a springboard for cooperation. “Relations between Brazil and Iran […] experienced new momentum in the context of implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) last January and of the lifting of international sanctions against Iran,” Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs quoted.

This is precisely what prompted the desperate political coup, which occurred the day after (April 12th) Brazil’s meeting with Iran—Congress voted during the OPEC summit after Iran’s absence confirmed this. Washington panicked at the thought of endangering petrodollar dominance and losing control of Iran’s post-sanction partnerships. Even Reuters perceived this threat by voicing “…although it is not clear whether any attempt to circumvent the U.S. financial system could raise tensions with Washington, Brazil’s leftist government in the past has annoyed the United States by drawing closer to Tehran.”

Apparently, it did, and Brazil’s plans for reform eventually ran diametrically opposed to Washington’s future Iran ambitions, activating the CIA assets in the Brazilian Congress to overthrow Rousseff. With her impeachment underway, speculators were practically speaking in tongues at the possibility of raking in profits to the private sector. “Brazil’s currency climbed by 1.7 percent to 3.6262 per dollar earlier today on heightened speculation that President Dilma Rousseff is nearing impeachment,” TheStreet rejoiced.

Unrelentingly, Temer has opted for massive budget and department cuts, rather than continuing with Rousseff’s socialist trajectory, threatening Brazil’s long-term autonomy with nearsighted profits and further dollar dependency. Additionally, appointing new FM Jose Serra also poses a serious threat to the BRICS alliance by moving away from a clear and holistic strategy. “Relations with new partners in Asia, especially China […] and India, will be a priority,” expressed Serra, insinuating that, armed with new pre-salt field reserves, it may not honor ties to Russia.

Furthermore, Temer has also replaced Petrobras CEO Aldemir Bendine with Pedro Parente, another favorite of the US financial elite, who was “formerly the top executive at the Brazilian unit of US agribusiness giant Bunge Ltd. and currently chairman of stock-market operator BM&FBovespa SA,” MarketWatch explained.

It is important to recognize that Brazil’s current ‘leadership’ benefits both the American empire and Brazilian capitalists. On the US side, Brazilian debt continues under the US dollar, and US President Barack Obama can maintain the CIA tradition of supporting the “moderate opposition” around the world in order to stifle democracy and plunder foreign markets. While Brazil’s terrorists aren’t chopping heads, they are slashing budgets; bleeding Brazil’s fragile democracy dry, and over the next 180 days, this will reflect in the will of the people as they take to the streets to fight their puppet government. Temer couldn’t have picked a better time, as the Olympics will see him and his enablers persistently humiliated through by a rapturous organization of the masses; from the grassroots to the Most High, until President Dilma Rousseff’s miraculous resurrection.

4thmedia.org

In the eyes of President Barack Obama and his administration, the largest Latin American country is a hostile state because it dares to implement independent policies. The US goal is to subjugate the ruling elite of Brazil and make it dance to the US tune.

This turn of events has been predicted by a number of Latin American presidents, including Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Tabaré Vázquez of Uruguay among others. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro put it bluntly saying the events in Brazil are nothing else but a coup d’état staged by the US. According to Maduro, the attack against Dilma Rousseff threatens democracy in Brazil. It is also directed against such regional organizations as Celac (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), Unasur (the Union of South American Nations), as well as public and political movements protecting people’s interests. Maduro called on all left-wing movements in Latin America to join together and protest against the smear campaign against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The Venezuelan leader believes they must act to protect peace and prosperity on the continent.   

The compromising evidence (real and fabricated) used against the Brazilian leadership had been obtained by the US National Security Agency (NSA) before Snowden escaped to make his revelations public. The information was spread around through controlled media to destabilize the country’s political and public life. It will make it easier for Washington to have its people appointed to key positions. The so called «constitutional procedures» to dismiss Dilma Rousseff are nothing else but a camouflage to cover the creeping coup d’état. Obama will go to any length to achieve the goal before his tenure expires. He may even order to stage a Maidan in Brazil, if need be. 

Some people among the US embassy staff, as well as in American consulates spread around the country, are already working to carry out the assigned mission.  

Liliana Ayalde, the US ambassador to Brazil, started her career path as a Senior Assistant Administrator for the Latin American and Caribbean Bureau of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) coordinating important development assistance programs in Haiti, Mexico, and the Caribbean. She is a member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Career Minister having been posted in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Colombia, and Washington, D.C. with USAID. It means she closely coordinated her activities with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other special services. Between 2008 and 2011 she served as the US Ambassador to the Republic of Paraguay preparing to overthrow President Fernando Lugo. In June 2012 the parliament of Paraguay impeached the President. Back then, Brazil protested. The Brazilian government noted that the President was deprived of his right for defense. According to the constitution, the Vice President of Paraguay took the highest office in the country. Lugo called the impeachment a coup d’état staged against the will of the people. By and large, the same scenario is taking place in Brazil. 

Andrew Bowen is the Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Brasilia. He knows a lot about Latin America. Prior to arriving to Brazil, Andrew was the interim Deputy Chief of Mission and Director of the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) Affairs Section at the United States Embassy in Bogota, Colombia. His previous assignments include Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and Honduras. About fifty people work in economic and political sections of the US embassy mainly used for secret CIA operations. One of them is Alexis Ludwig, Political Counselor, who was involved in well-known scandals in Bolivia and Argentina. Some people working for special services are known for their vigorous activities, including public affairs officer Abigail Dressel, legal attaché Steve Moore, financial management officer Gwendolyn Llewellyn, USAID director Michael Eddy – the list can go on.

Dilma Rousseff had to step down «temporarily». She called the decision a «political farce» and a «coup». Leaving the presidential palace, she called her removal from power an act of «sabotage» and a tragic day for young Brazilian democracy. Rousseff said it was not her suspension from the office, but the respect for election results, the will of people and the constitution that mattered. «I may have committed mistakes, but I never committed crimes», she said. «It’s the most brutal thing that can happen to a human being – being condemned for a crime you didn’t commit. No injustice is more devastating».

Rousseff struck a defiant tone, condemning the «treachery» of those who sabotaged her government and vowing to fight on against the coup.

Vice President Michel Temer, who was elected on Rousseff’s coat-tails in 2014, became Acting President. If he ran for office, he would never get more than 2 percent of the votes. He is a kind of a man who always knows where the wind is blowing. Temer is also known as a master of compromise able to form coalitions. Back in the 1990s his Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) cooperated with the Brazilian Social Democracy Party led by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. In 2003 PMDB formed a coalition with the Workers’ Party headed by Lula da Silva.

Temer formed a new government. One of the first steps was to reduce the number of ministries from 32 to 24. There are no women in the new cabinet. There was no such discrimination in the government of Dilma Rousseff. «Trust me», he said in his emotional inaugural speech at the Planalto presidential palace. «Trust the values of our people and our ability to recuperate the economy». «My first word for the people of Brazil is the word ‘confidence», he said vowing national salvation. «Confidence in the values that form the character of our people, the vitality of our democracy», he added, with an acknowledgement that «it is urgent we pacify the nation and unite Brazil. It is urgent to create a government of national salvation».

He spent most of his speech talking about the damaged Brazilian economy, vowing to renew trust in the country on the part of foreign investors and attract corporations that could provide jobs and take the burden off the government. He did not elaborate on foreign policy issues. He is expected to be a pro-US leader.

Temer is the son of Maronite Lebanese immigrants. He is a lawyer, who chairs the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party the largest party in Brazil. In the 1980s he served as State prosecutor and twice as State Secretary for Public Security, in both capacities working in São Paulo. That’s when he established close ties with the US embassy.

He took the office of Vice President after standing as the running mate of the Workers' Party candidate Dilma Rousseff in the 2010 election. Actually, he was a US Trojan horse in the administration. His party left the government coalition after the Petrobras scandal broke out.

It should be added that he barely avoided an investigation over testimony implicating him in the Petrobras graft scandal.

The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff paved the way for neo-liberal reforms focused on privatization of state companies. The United States will take an active part in the process. The people who have come to power in Brazil are involved in corruption scandals, but this time their integrity is not questioned by the US.

Currently, Washington is conducting operations against Latin American presidents who tried to represent their own peoples instead of American business interests and Washington’s foreign policy. Washington is trying to unseat and indict President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, President Evo Morales in Bolivia, President Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Washington has succeeded in getting the president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner, out of office, and is now seeking to have her indicted. To round off its attack on Brazil’s reformist political party, Washington is orchestrating crimes with which to tar and indict Rousseff’s predecessor, Lula da Silva.

Everyone on Washington’s Latin American list of people to be destroyed is a far better person than anyone in Washington. Washington’s Latin American targets have far more integrity, are tainted with far less corruption, and are far more committed to those who voted for them than anyone in Washington.

The danger that these reformers face is due to their innocence. They naively believe in good will between classes. They think that the rich elites, who are well connected to Washington, and that Washington itself, will accept democratic outcomes.

They believe this despite the fact that Washington, using the Spanish elite that Hugo Chavez left unmolested, overthrew Chavez. Chavez had to be rescued from Venezuela’s Spanish elite, who are agents of the CIA, by the Venezuelan people and military, who secured Chavez’s release and reinstatement before Washington’s Spanish elites could kill him.

Chavez, being a man of good will, did not exact retribution against the Spanish elites who cooperated with the CIA to overthrow him. Consequently, the elites are now working with the CIA to overthrow Chavez’s successor, who lacks Chavez’s charisma.

Lenin did not make this mistake. Lenin made his power stick by eliminating unreliable elements.

So did Pol Pot.

Pol Pot is regarded in the West as some crazed figure who emptied entire cities and turned the inhabitants into piles of bones and skulls. He is seen as a madman, but he was just a good Marxist. He understood that if he left the elites and the bureaucracies that served them in place, his revolution was history. The elites would use their media and Washington’s money to overturn the people’s revolution.

The complete and total inability of Washington to accept democratic outcomes in Latin America means that unless Latin America has a Lenin or Pol Pot in its future, Latin America can forget about existing independently of Washington’s control and exploitation by US corporations. America’s Latin American colony will continue to be ruled by Washington, Wall Street, and American corporate interests. Latin American governments will represent Washington, not the peoples of Latin America.

In the online journal, Strategic Culture Foundation, Nil Nikandrov provides a view of how Washington operates against those who do not accept Washington’s control.

paulcraigroberts.org

With no votes counted, so traitors would not be publicly identified, the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro or PMDB) in Brazil abandoned the coalition that supports President Dilma Rousseff in power in Brasilia, thus increasing the chances of a – Kafkaesque – impeachment drive against Rousseff being approved in April.

The PMDB is Brazil’s largest party – accounting for 69 out of 513 members of Parliament. In the short term, the party will be contributing for one of its own, current vice-president Michel Temer, 75, a not exactly brilliant constitutionalist lawyer, to ascend to the presidency until the next elections in 2018, thus fulfilling the white coup/regime change scenario dreamed about by the proponents of Hybrid War in Brazil and their lowly vassals.

The Brazilian Constitution allows for impeachment; but in Rousseff’s case, no undisputable «crime of responsibility» has been proven. The alleged accusations – centered on embezzling of public debt and fiscal mismanagement – are essentially bogus.

It gets worse; this undisguised white coup/regime change process will run in parallel to a dirty deal preventing the leader of the lower house in Brasilia, notorious crook Eduardo Cunha, from being thrown out of office for corruption. Cunha would simply «resign» – under the assumption that the new Temer administration would need to articulate a new majority in Parliament.

A jury of crooks

This new phase in Brazil’s massive, ongoing politico-economic crisis now privileges the right-wing opposition, bolstered by the PMDB gang, all geared up to snatch the necessary two-thirds majority (342 votes) to bring the accusations against Rousseff to the Senate.

What should be expected is a massive PSYOP for the next few weeks, where the vicious politico/mainstream media/old comprador elite combo will impose the perception on the majority of the population that the jig is up. Well, the jig is not up, because those 342 votes essential for the white coup/regime change scenario are far from a given.

Some PMDB congressmen – to their credit – still support Rousseff. Brazilian Federal Police has shown that quite a few PMDB members are directly involved in the massive Petrobras scandal at the heart of the Car Wash investigation – including Temer himself. Corrupt to the core Cunha, the lower house leader, should have been in jail already. In this landmark case of Soft Hybrid War, as I argued before, the heart of the matter is a woman President who has not been found guilty of any wrongdoing being «judged» by a bunch of crooks.

Assuming a Temer administration born out of a white coup/regime change comes to fruition, its political platform, according to Brasilia insiders, will have been concocted by the current right-wing opposition, soundly defeated at the previous four presidential elections.

Temer will be at best a tampon. He will not be allowed to run in 2018. He will be gently «persuaded» to compose a ministerial team of right-wing notables. And he won’t meddle with the Car Wash investigation, which will be dissolved into a bathtub full of nitrate, as its initial intention was never to investigate those notables, only the Workers’ Party.

Watch that dustbin

Car Wash will then be unmasked for what it is. This tropical remix of the Mani pulite in Italy in the 1990s was never a legitimate drive to purge the Brazilian political system from corruption; absolutely everybody profiting from this system is corrupt to the core.

Car Wash instead was conceived as a relentless New Inquisition machinery operating to the benefit of the same old comprador elites which are already celebrating Rousseff’s impeachment, plus the potential destruction of Lula’s aura, in case he’s legally prevented from running for President again in 2018.

As for the whole Rousseff impeachment drive, it rests on a dubious legal proceeding by a former opposition Congressman who is – what else – being investigated himself for corruption.

Military coups are so Pinochet-era. It’s never enough to stress that what’s taking place in Brazil is advanced Hybrid War, a white coup/regime change operation organized by the Federal Public Ministry, corporate media (controlled by four families) and a significant part of Congress. 

All bets are still off, though. The regime changers are in a hurry because in an extremely fluid situation in a country totally paralyzed and polarized, damning new information will certainly come to light; rats are ratting on a full-time basis, and many a regime changer is bound to be reduced to road kill.

And if by yet another elaborate twist of fate the Brazilian Senate deliberates that Rousseff did not commit a «crime of responsibility» – after all, there’s no evidence she did – the President will be back in power. And the provisional regime change «government» will be thrown to where it already belongs; the stinky dustbin of History.

In Brazil, the government of Dilma Rousseff is facing a major destabilization campaign orchestrated by powerful right-wing elements in the country and their U.S. backers. Under the always convenient banner of “anti-corruption,” millions have turned out in the streets to demand the ouster of the twice-elected Rousseff government on the heels of a series of revelations about alleged corruption pertaining to the quasi-state, quasi-private Petrobras oil company.  

According to the allegations, a number of leading political figures, some of whom are connected to President Rousseff and the Workers’ Party, have skimmed at least 3 percent of the billions in oil revenue from Petrobras, illustrating the still active tradition of corruption in Brazil.  

The latest target is former President Lula da Silva, who was forcibly removed from his home in an ostentatious show of force by law enforcement authorities meant to humiliate the 70-year-old founder of the Workers’ Party. Because of his working class background, the former president was seen as the hope and pride of the left in Brazil, and the public removal from his home earlier this month sparked the latest round of protests.

But what — or who — is really behind the soft coup in Brazil?

The right wing is the driving force of the protests, despite any progressive-minded, anti-corruption sentiment being expressed by various segments of the protest movement. Two of the principal groups responsible for organizing and mobilizing the demonstrations are the Free Brazil Movement (MBL) and Students for Liberty (EPL), both of which have direct ties to Charles and David Koch, the right-wing, neocon, U.S. billionaires, as well as other leading figures of the far right, pro-business neoliberal establishment.

One of the leading faces of the movement is Kim Kataguiri, a 20-year-old “activist,” who is both a founder of MBL and a leader in EPL. Unabashedly pro-big business, he’s an adherent of the so-called Austrian School of Economics, the economic ideology that advocates total deregulation of the economy in the interests of private business, and a great admirer of Milton Friedman, the father of what is known today as neoliberal capitalism.

Kataguiri and his fellow right-wing activists have been quick to distance themselves from the blood-soaked legacy of right-wing coups in Brazil and Latin America for obvious reasons. Yet they espouse precisely the same economic policies as those enacted throughout the region, perhaps most famously in Chile under the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whose economic policies were directly guided by none other than Friedman.  

As Kataguiri explained to The Guardian in 2015:

“We defend free markets, lower taxes and the privatisation of all public companies… In Brazil, the left is still seen as cool by young people… We want to destroy this idea that if you defend free markets then you’re an old man who is asking for a dictatorship…  Unfortunately, we don’t have any big sponsors. The government and some sectors of the press say that we are financed by rich people. We would have no problem in being financed by rich people.”

Unfortunately for Kataguiri, Ostermann, Torres and their colleagues, the truth about their connections to powerful finance capital and business in the U.S. and throughout Latin America is well known. Still, the corporate media whitewashes these connections, presenting the protests as some sort of pure expression of people’s discontent, rather than a manufactured form of political manipulation and destabilization which has seized upon difficult economic times to cynically exploit public opinion. Brazil’s economic downturn over the past two years has made this much easier.

Other influential groups such as VemPraRua (“Come to the Streets”) are directly funded by powerful right-wing business interests inside the country, including Brazil’s richest man, Jorge Paulo Lemann. As Bloombergnoted in a 2013 profile of Lemann:

“In the U.S., Lemann is virtually unknown, even though he and his two longtime partners, Marcel Herrmann Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira, now control three icons of U.S. consumer culture: Heinz ketchup, Burger King, and, after the $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch in 2008, Budweiser beer. The combined market value of the companies they run is $187 billion – larger than that of Citigroup.

In Brazil, Lemann is a business-class hero… Worth some $20 billion, Lemann is No. 32 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, seven slots behind George Soros and three ahead of Carl Icahn.”

Meanwhile, the reactionary, pro-U.S. elements inside (and outside) Brazil are particularly angered at the Workers’ Party and, more broadly, the left. This is not because of corruption – though corruption undoubtedly remains a problem – but because of the ascendance to power of political forces representing working class and poor Brazilians.

As the North American Congress on Latin America correctly assessed in April 2015: “Don’t believe the right-wing media’s emphasis on corruption—the recent demonstrations are motivated by entrenched elite discontent over expanding economic and political inclusion for the nation’s majority.”

Bringing BRICS to heel

In short, despite all the fancy anti-corruption rhetoric, the assault on Rousseff’s leftist government is the result of a coordinated campaign by business interests tied to the U.S. Washington and Wall Street that see in Brazil a dangerous precedent in which a left-wing government sympathetic to and allied with Bolivarian movements in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and until recently, Argentina, was able to gain power and preside over an economic boom.  

Indeed, this point should not be understated — namely, the economic downturn in commodities such as oil which has put the brakes on Brazil’s rapid economic progress.

In fact, recent data shows that the expansion of anti-government sentiment directly correlates to the stagnation of GDP growth, which itself directly correlates to the decline in commodities prices. As many have convincingly argued, the collapse of oil has no doubt been fomented and encouraged, if not directly orchestrated, by the U.S. and its allies in the Gulf in order to target non-Western countries whose economies are tied to oil and gas revenue — Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and especially Russia.

Essentially, what’s unfolding in Brazil is a multi-pronged effort to destabilize the country via a variety of political and economic means, with the ultimate goal of bringing to heel a key member of BRICS. But it is not the only one.

Brazil is certainly not the only BRICS member facing an offensive by the U.S.-NATO system. The next article in this series will examine the destabilizing forces reaching into South Africa. Future pieces will examine the growing military relationship between the U.S. and India, as well as the multi-faceted strategies to contain, isolate, and destabilize Russia and China.

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The Associated Press wistfully wrote, «There are not enough outstanding votes left to be counted to allow her [Rousseff] rival [Neves] to catch up with her». And Alberto Ramos, Goldman Sachs’s chief economist for Latin America, warned that Rousseff should abandon her policies that help Brazil’s poor or «market confidence» in Brazil will continue to suffer. Bloomberg News predicted the value of Brazil’s real currency would continue to be weakened with Rousseff’s win and when the markets opened on October 27, Bloomberg’s wishes were realized. The Financial Times of London happily reported that the real slumped 3.1 percent in value against the U.S. dollar and that its performance was worse than that of the Mozambican metical, which also was deflated by the global vulture bankers after the long-governing leftist Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) won the election against the Soros- and banker-backed and CIA-created Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO). For the democracy manipulators of Soros and the CIA, the election news from the Lusophone capitals of Brasilia and Maputo was hardly encouraging.

The «usual suspects,» Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, and The New York Times, all wailed in anger over Rousseff’s decisive win over Neves. The neo-conservative Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal lamented that Brazil had opted to stick with «statism,» which for the Wall Street vulture capitalists who worship the Journal as if it were a Talmudic scroll, is a blasphemy.

Neves was advised on economic policy during the campaign by Arminio Fraga Neto, a former executive for Soros’s Quantum hedge fund and on foreign policy by Rubens Barbosa, the senior director in the Sao Paulo office for former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s Albright Stonebridge Group (ASG).

The reaction of Wall Street and London to immediately devalue Brazil’s currency after Rousseff’s victory indicates the strategy of the global capitalists in dealing with Brazil. Undoubtedly, Brazil is to be subjected to the same type of economic warfare that has been meted out to Venezuela since the re-election victory last year of Venezuelan Socialist President Nicolas Maduro. Venezuela has been pressured by artificially-created shortages of basic commodities and foreign transaction problems as a result of Wall Street’s – and the CIA’s — sabotage of the Venezuelan economy.

The CIA’s and Soros’s heavy interest in defeating Rousseff was aimed at derailing the emerging BRICS economic alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa that threatens to weaken the domination that global bankers and their inherently corrupt World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) contrivances wield over the world economy. The bankers and their CIA centurions believed that with Neves or Marina Silva, a Green Party operative groomed by Soros, in charge, Brazil would withdraw from BRICS and re-enter the global banker community with Brazilian state assets such as the Petrobras oil company being sold off in a «fire sale». Soros and his CIA friends failed to understand that Brazil’s poor owe their relative new social standing to the state-led economic policies of Rousseff and before her, those of Workers’ Party icon Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

With Rousseff now re-elected, the BRICS will continue to develop the New Development Bank (NDB) and its $100 billion currency reserve arrangement (CRA), or currency basket, that member countries can loans draw from, thus weaning themselves away from the Western political controls of the World Bank and IMF. Rousseff’s re-election will also permit BRICS, which faced losing Brazil as a member had Rousseff lost the election, to expand its membership base. 

Argentina, which has faced a concerted economic campaign from New York vulture capitalist, right-winger, and committed Zionist Paul Singer to seize Argentine assets, has expressed a strong interest in joining BRICS. Argentine Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman has stated that Argentine intends to join BRICS and recent trade agreements between Argentina on one hand, and China, Russia, and India, on the other, indicate that Argentine would be welcome in the anti-U.S. «club» of emerging economic powerhouses. Iran, Indonesia, and Egypt have also expressed an interest in joining BRICS. Indonesia’s new president Joko Widodo is a member of the party of former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of President Sukarno, ousted by the CIA in a bloody 1965 coup d’état aided and abetted by President Barack Obama’s Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro and his USAID/CIA mother Ann Dunham Soetoro. Indonesia’s Sukarnoist foreign policy makes its alliance with BRICS a natural alignment. 

The interventionist forces of the CIA and Soros will now look to obtain a consolation electoral victory in Latin America in order to apply pressure on both Brazil and Argentina. Uruguay’s president José «Pepe» Mujica, a former Marxist Tupamaro guerrilla, is barred from running for re-election and his Broad Front’s standard bearer is his predecessor Tabare Vasquez. Winning 45 percent of the vote in the first round election on October 26, the same day of Brazil’s election, Vasquez is now forced into a run-off with right-wing National Party presidential candidate Luis Lacalle Pou, the son of former Uruguayan conservative president Lacalle Herrera, who placed Uruguay under the economic control of the World Bank and IMF. Just as the CIA banked on Neves, the grandson of Brazil’s former elected president Tancredo Neves, who died from a suspicious ailment just prior to being sworn in as president in 1985, the CIA and Soros are now placing their bets on Pou to defeat Vasquez to be able to brag that Latin America’s progressive base of nations is not permanent. Pedro Bordaberry, the third place finisher in Uruguay, who has now endorsed Pou in the same manner that the Soros-financed Silva endorsed Neves in Brazil after losing the first round, is the son of the brutal CIA-installed Uruguayan dictator Juan Maria Bordaberry, arrested in 2005 for ordering the assassination of two Uruguayan legislators.

Ironically, Vasquez, who like Mujica, favors legalization and government regulation of marijuana sales is facing opposition from his Soros-financed opponent who is against marijuana legalization, citing nebulous and unfounded statistics on a rise in crime under the Broad Front presidencies. Soros is on record as favoring the legalization of marijuana. However, Soros compromises on his stance in countries like Uruguay where his and the CIA’s interests dictate opposition to marijuana legalization.

In Brazil and Uruguay, the CIA- and Soros-backed candidates and their major supporters represent reactionary forces who wish to turn Latin America’s clock back to the days of fascist rule. The Brazilian election threw a spanner in the CIA’s and Soros’s works. The November 30 Uruguayan run-off will provide the deadly duo of the CIA’s John Brennan and George Soros with another opportunity to place a roadblock not only in Latin America’s steady march toward steady progressive rule but also in the plans of the BRICS alliance to expand into a permanent economic and political force to challenge the neo-imperialism of the Washington-London-Brussels-Israeli true «axis of evil».

However, thanks to an aware Brazilian investigative journalism press corps, Silva’s connections to Soros and his team of interventionists and hedge fund tycoons was exposed. With Brazilian voters wise to Silva’s puppet strings to Soros and other global bankers, she managed to only come in third on October 5. Silva subsequently endorsed Neves, Soros’s second selection to take over the reins of presidential power in Brazil from Rousseff.

Neves’s chief economic adviser and the man who would become Finance Minister in a Neves presidency is Arminio Fraga Neto. A former close friend and associate of Soros and his Quantum hedge fund, Fraga is hoping that a Neves presidency will open up Brazil to “market forces,” the very same forces that have declared economic war on Venezuela and are attempting to swindle Argentina through vulture funds run by Soros’s Wall Street friends. Fraga, a habitué of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is also a former executive with Salomon Brothers and a former president of the Brazilian Central Bank. Fraga has also been linked to Goldman Sachs through a Manhattan real estate deal involving the purchase of a $7.5 million condominium from a former Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers executive. Fraga’s membership of the elitist Council on Foreign Relations and Group of 30 puts Fraga in the same camp as such Wall Street villains as Alan Greenspan, David Rockefeller, former Bank of Israel chairman Jacob Frenkel, and Wall Street apologist/columnist Paul Krugman, and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Rousseff’s easy first place victory on October 5 sent Wall Street and its owned-and-operated media outlets opposed to Rousseff's plans to create an alternative development bank among Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa to compete with the World Bank into extreme propaganda mode. Questionable polls suggesting that Rousseff and Neves are running neck-and-neck as the October 26 second round election approaches were featured as credible news stories by the usual Wall Street pathetic “stenographers” masquerading as journalists at The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, and Forbes.

Neves's grandfather, Tancredo Neves, a left-of-center threat to the longtime Brazilian military dictatorship, fell seriously ill just as he was to sworn in as president on March 15, 1985. Neves's illness resulted in his lackluster and more conservative vice presidential candidate José Sarney being sworn in as president. Tancredo Neves never recovered from what was said to be diverticulitis and he died on April 21. Later, it was revealed that Neves had a cancerous tumor that was not discovered until it was too late. Rousseff's sudden illness after her October 16 televised debate with Aecio Neves alarmed a number of Brazilians who remember the fate of Tancredo Neves. 

In addition to the Central Intelligence Agency arranging for convenient plane crashes such as those that killed Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco Sá Carneiro, Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos, and Ecuadorian President Jaime Roldos all within a six-month period between December 1980 and April 1981 [after the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. president and the return to power within the CIA of George H W Bush's and William Casey's infamous gunslingers], the agency's Technical Services Division continued to develop biological weapons, including cancer weapons, to assassinate its political targets.

In recent years, a number of Latin American leaders have been felled or have been stricken with cancer or heart attacks. The two most notable victims were Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Argentine President Nestor Kirchner. Kirchner's wife, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was reported to have thyroid cancer, later denied by her spokespersons. The sudden onset of varying degrees of cancer also plagued such Latin American leaders as former Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo (later ousted in a CIA-engineered coup), Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (after he signed a peace agreement with the left-wing FARC guerrilla movement), former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Bolivia's recently-reelected President Evo Morales.

Guyana's President Forbes Burnham died from throat cancer and Nauru's President Bernard Dowiyogo died from a sudden heart attack while being cared for in Washington, DC hospitals. Suspicions surrounded the two deaths at Georgetown University and George Washington Hospitals, respectively.

The CIA's macabre Jewish-Hungarian chief scientist Dr. Sidney Gottlieb developed a host of biological weapons for the CIA's MK-ULTRA program during his over 20 years of service with the agency. One was a biological toxin that was put inside a tube of toothpaste that was to be used by Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and another was a botulism-infected handkerchief that was to be handed to Iraqi leader General Abdul Karim Kassem.

As for Aecio Neves abandoning the left-of-center credentials of his grandfather, this represents another aspect of CIA influence operations. Aecio Neves represents the interests of Wall Street, which is manifested by the presence of Fraga as his chief economic adviser. Wall Street vultures, including Soros and Fraga’s other associates in New York, want to privatize the Brazilian state-owned Petrobras oil corporation. Therefore, Aecio Neves has been handsomely bought off by the same globalized financial interests who attempted to engineer Marina Silva into office. With her defeat, these same forces have unsurprisingly rallied behind Neves.

For the CIA, blood is not thicker than water. It actually doesn't matter to Aecio that the CIA may have played a part in assassinating his grandfather. Omar Torrijos's son, Martin Torrijos, became president of Panama only to sign a pro-Wall Street free trade agreement with Washington. Martin Torrijos also gladly followed the global bankers' orders to increase Panama's retirement age and reform social security. Martin Torrijos also became a close ally of U.S. President George W. Bush even though Bush's father, George H W Bush, likely signed off on the CIA's operation to assassinate Torrijos's own father.

George Soros's favorite Asian opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, does not seem to mind the fact that it was Soros's friends at the Office of Strategic Services/CIA who ordered British intelligence to assassinate her father Aung San. Aung San, a founder of the Burmese Communist Party, was slated to become independent Burma's first post-independence leader. Aung San was killed by terrorists working for pro-British former prime minister U Saw. The weapons for the assassins came directly from British Army Captain David Vivian, who managed, with high-level “assistance” from the Burmese government, to escape from a Burmese prison in 1949.

Canada's Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, has, unlike his father, warmed up to the United States, Wall Street, and the cause of globalization. Justin Trudeau and Aecio Neves are prime examples of how the CIA eagle will take under its wings the progeny of leftist icons to achieve its goals.

President Rousseff's policies have created powerful enemies within the walls of the CIA in Langley, Virginia and among the board rooms of Wall Street and the West's most powerful corporations. She succeeded in proving the polls and pundits wrong on October 5 but October 26 remains yet another hurdle. The people of Brazil will be voting on October 26 as if their lives depend on it. For Brazil’s poor and new middle class, a Neves victory will destroy their livelihoods, as well as their very lives.

Dilma said that according to FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) her country defeated hunger, “A few days ago FAO announced that Brazil is no longer in the World Hunger Map”. The lack of foodstuffs has become a thing of the past. This transformation was the result of economic policies which generated 21 million jobs and appreciated the minimum wage, increasing its purchasing power by 71%. Thirty six million Brazilians have been lifted out of extreme poverty to enjoy normal life.

The Brazil’s ruling Working Party has reached evident achievements in education, health care, and guarantee of minorities’ rights. Brazil jumped from being the 13th to being the 7th largest economy in the world at the time of global economic slump. The President implements coherent energy policy with state company Petrobas playing the key role. These and other achievements should  be made remember by the 142 million voters who will define the Brazil’s policy for the next four years in October.

Speaking at the United Nations she condemned the United States operation in Iraq and Syria and expressed solidarity with the people of Palestine subject to the Israeli attacks. Dilma Rousseff believes such military interventions pose a serious threat to world peace, “Each military intervention leads not to peace, but to the deterioration of these conflicts. We witness a tragic proliferation in the numbers of civilian victims and humanitarian catastrophes. We cannot allow these barbaric acts to increase, harming our ethical, moral and civilizational values”. As an example she mentioned, “the tragic national destructuring of Iraq; the serious insecurity in Libya; the conflicts in the Sahel; and the clashes in Ukraine”. Media always remembers her September 2013 United Nations speech when she lambasted the total spying of the United States, including those whom America considers to be its friends. American journalist Glenn Greewald described the details of US eavesdropping operations when the conversations of Dilma, her relatives, the members of government, power structures and other government agencies officials were tapped. Those events have once and for defined the Brazilian President’s negative approach to Washington’s modus operandi. The Brazil’s external actions are to large extent influenced by mistrust towards the US officials who have relation to shaping the US foreign policy.

Latin America political foreign policy experts believe that the US and NATO military adventures aimed at establishing the new world order and weakening the financial and economic potential of the Western bloc pose a serious threat for the region. The US chaotic international policy envisages the use of force. It provokes “unfriendly” states, including nuclear powers. Inevitably it evoked concern among reasonable politicians of the Latin American continent. During the tenure of Obama the US has made attempts to topple legal governments in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. The heads of states were deprived of power in Honduras and Paraguay seen as “populist” by Washington which suspected they wanted to get rid of US military facilities on their soil.

Frustrated with Dilma Rousseff the White House is looking for loyal politicians in the country. It relies on Marina Silva and her financial sponsor Maria "Neca" Setubal. The latter graduated from San Paolo University and holds degrees in sociology and political science. She has experience of working in international organizations, including the World Bank and served as minister of education. Neca is widely known in Brazil, she controls Itau bank and belongs to the one of the richest families in the country. Since 2010 Neca provides funds for Silva’s election. In 2014 she coordinated the Silva’s staff and contributed $2 million to her campaign fund. The real support to the Silva’s election efforts on the part of Brazilian and foreign industrialists is much more significant.

The US special services use their secret funds for propaganda efforts in Brazil. They spread around fake information to discredit those who belong to the Dilma’s team, the members of government and some activists of the ruling Workers Party. It’s easy to understand why Setubal wants Silva to come to power – it’s the best way to put an end to the case in court as Itau bank has been brought charges against accused of tax evasion. The sum in question is 18, 7 Brazilian reals. Six years ago Itau and Unibanco banks merged. 11, 8 billion reals were not paid as income tax, as well as 6, 8 billion of interest, social and penal damage payments.

During her first tenure Dilma Rousseff proved she was an ardent fighter against corruption. The second term will give her a chance to modernize the country, create favorable social and political conditions for making millions of Brazilians involved in the process. The news of Marina Silva’s sudden rise to the candidacy of Socialist Party (instead of Eduardo Campos who died is an air crash that occurred under the most suspicious circumstances) is losing the effect. She finds it real hard to cope with the mission of pretending to be a politician concerned with the fate of the common people. Psychological pressure during the race is high, Silva often pulls blunders, for instance she diminutively spoke about the poor saying she doubted the expediency of providing them with government support. It’s rather shocking as Marina Silva herself belongs to those who made it from rags to riches.

A Datafolha poll conducted a week before October 5 showed that Dilma boasted the support of 40% of voters, the figure was 27% for Silva and 18% for Aesio Neves, the candidate from the Social-Democrats. Dilma has real good chances in the run-off election (October 26) with 47% ready to vote for her in comparison with 43% supporting Silva. With a deviation of 1-2% Dilma is to become a winner if the United States does not stage a massive provocation against her.

In New York journalists tried to know what Dilma thinks about her run-off election chances. She shied away from giving an answer. Dilma said that, as she had explained before, she never comments on forecasts no matter what polls said. A Brazilian reporter made one more attempt to get a word from her asking if her mood was better as the recent polls raised her chances. Dilma said with a broad smile,”Dear, I remain hilarious. Otherwise life is not worth anything. You do agree, don’t you?” she said.