Brazil In Political Turmoil And Social Chaos

[82_28]

I understand that Brazil is warm/hot and whatnot basically year round, but once the Olympics begin won't it be technically the winter olympics as it is in the southern hemisphere?

[Nordic]

India - China - Russia aren't going to happen. Russia would be the likeliest, and we're talking highly unlikely.

We'll see how it goes at the Olympics - which if this new regime can hang on will doubtless produce a climax, either their fall or an open militarization of their dictatorship.

I agree. They won't happen. But what scares me (for real) is that the "West" is gonna try. Could easily start WW3. Obama seems to be determined to get into a shooting war with Russis before he leaves office. I'm sure that will go well.

[JackRiddler]

Obama seems to be determined to get into a shooting war with Russis before he leaves office. I'm sure that will go well.

Not to me. He could have had that ages ago and went different ways -- remote control carnage that Americans don't notice (and they don't -- I've had occasion to ask representative groups recently who didn't even know there were drone attacks happening).

He'll want to leave in a simulation of peace and prosperity. An insane provocation of war with Russia is more a thing for HRC and her neo-neocon humanitarians to enact. For democracy. Human rights. All that.

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.h ... the-amazon

BRASÍLIA, Brazil — The new Brazilian president’s first pick for science minister was a creationist. He chose a soybean tycoon who has deforested large tracts of the Amazon rain forest to be his agriculture minister. And he is the first leader in decades to have no women in his Cabinet.


The new government of President Michel Temer — the 75-year-old lawyer who took the helm of Brazil on Thursday after his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff, was suspended by the Senate to face an impeachment trial — could cause a significant shift to the political right in Latin America’s largest country.

“Temer’s government is starting out well,” Silas Malafaia, a television evangelist and author of best-selling books like “How to Defeat Satan’s Strategies,” wrote on Twitter.

“He’ll be able to sweep away the ideology of pathological leftists,” Malafaia added of a conservative lawmaker whom Temer chose as education minister.

For more than a decade, Brazil has been an anchor of leftist politics in the region, less strident than the governments in countries like Venezuela and Cuba, but openly supportive of them and committed to its own platform of reducing inequality.

But parts of Latin America are now drifting away from the left after elections in neighbouring countries like Argentina and Paraguay. Temer seems to be embracing a more conservative disposition for his government as well, with the country’s business establishment pressuring him to privatize state-controlled companies and cut public spending.

To many of Temer’s critics, the shift is perhaps most evident in the role of women in his and Rousseff’s administrations.

The contrasts could not be more glaring. Rousseff, 68, was a former operative in an urban guerrilla group. She was tortured during the military dictatorship and eventually rose to lead the board of the national oil company before becoming Brazil’s first female president.

Until recently, relatively few Brazilians had even heard of Temer. When they did, it often involved references to his wife, Marcela Temer, 32, a former beauty pageant contestant who is 43 years younger than he is. They met when she was just 18.

A profile of Marcela Temer in Veja, a newsmagazine, caused a stir by glowingly referring to her as “pretty, demure and of the home.” It said Michel Temer was “a lucky man” to have such a devoted, unassuming housewife as a spouse, especially one who wears knee-level skirts.

The magazine did not mention the tattoo on the nape of Marcela Temer’s neck featuring her husband’s name, but the message was clear: Michel Temer, a law professor and career politician, embodies a more conservative approach than Rousseff in the corridors of power and in his own home.

Then there is the issue of race. After a long stretch in which Brazil pressed ahead with affirmative action policies, Temer’s critics point out the lack of Afro-Brazilians in his Cabinet, especially when nearly 51 per cent of Brazilians define themselves as black or mixed race, according to the 2010 census.

“It’s embarrassing that most of Temer’s Cabinet choices are old, white men,” said Sérgio Praça, a political scientist at Fundação Getulio Vargas, an elite Brazilian university. He drew a contrast with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, who formed a Cabinet in which half of the 30 ministers are women.

In a speech to the nation on Thursday, Temer said he would seek to soothe tensions in Brazil, a nation polarized by the impeachment trial of Rousseff. She is accused of manipulating the federal budget to hide yawning deficits, a budgetary sleight of hand that her critics say helped her get re-elected in 2014.

“It’s urgent to seek the unity of Brazil,” Temer said during a ceremony introducing his ministers. “We urgently need a government of national salvation.”

The new president’s supporters point out that he considered a couple of women for Cabinet-level posts, including Renata Abreu, 34, a lawmaker, to oversee human rights policies.

But that effort, along with other test balloons, did not prosper. First, it became widely known that Abreu had voted in favor of legislation to make it difficult for women who are raped to get abortions. Then Temer opted to fold the human rights post into the Ministry of Justice, making it a second-tier appointment.

Temer’s offer of the Science Ministry to Marcos Pereira, an evangelical pastor who does not believe in evolution, also fizzled. He named Pereira trade minister instead. Then, to the dismay of leaders in Brazil’s scientific community, Temer merged the ministries of Science and Communications.

Like many of Brazil’s political leaders, Temer has legal problems of his own. He was recently found guilty of violating campaign finance limits, a conviction that could make him ineligible to run for office for eight years, leaving a cloud of scandal that has raised concerns about his capacity to govern with a strong mandate.

“Temer faces the fundamental problem of legitimacy,” said Michael Shifter, the president of Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington. “He did not become president as a result of a popular vote, but rather because of a controversial impeachment process.”

But some argue, in Temer’s favor, that his Cabinet includes officials who held important posts when Rousseff’s leftist Workers’ Party was in control. Henrique Meirelles, a banker who is the new finance minister, served as central bank president for eight years during the government of Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from 2003 to 2010.

During that time, Brazil’s government gained the respect of investors as incomes soared during a commodities boom. Prominent figures in Brazil’s financial markets hope that Meirelles can rebuild that credibility.

Some environmental activists are blasting Temer’s choice for agriculture minister, Blairo Maggi, a soybean farmer and politician who has pushed for opening huge areas of the Amazon to agricultural development. Yet some point out that Maggi was also open to dialogue, winning plaudits for reducing deforestation rates while he was governor of Mato Grosso state.

Still, Maggi, along with an array of other members of Temer’s Cabinet, has been battling corruption inquiries. For three years, investigators examined claims tying Maggi to a money-laundering scheme. Just this week, the Supreme Court shelved the case.

Other ministers appointed by Temer remain under investigation in separate cases, including Geddel Vieira Lima, a former executive at one of Brazil’s largest government-controlled banks who is now the president’s secretary, and Henrique Alves, a tourism minister in Rousseff’s government who will occupy the same post under Temer.

The rancor around the ouster of Rousseff, who will go on trial in the Senate, was evident Thursday on the streets of Brasília, the capital. Dozens of women chained themselves to barriers surrounding the presidential palace, shouting slogans in support of Rousseff and expressing alarm about Temer’s top advisers.

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/m ... mpeachment

The credibility of Brazil’s interim government was rocked on Monday when a senior minister was forced to step aside amid further revelations about the machiavellian plot to impeach president Dilma Rousseff.

Just 10 days after taking office, the planning minister, Romero Jucá, announced that he would “go on leave” following the release of a secretly taped telephone conversation in which he said Rousseff needed to be removed to quash a vast corruption investigation that implicated him and other members of the country’s political elite.

It is unlikely to be the last blow for the interim president, Michel Temer, whose centre-right cabinet includes seven ministers implicated by the Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation into kickbacks and money laundering at the state-run oil company Petrobras.

Temer took power earlier this month after the senate initiated an impeachment trial of Rousseff, who is suspended for up to six months pending the upper house’s verdict on allegations that she manipulated government accounts before the last election.

Supporters of the Workers’ party leader say the charges are a pretext for a “coup”. Temer’s allies counter that the impeachment was constitutional and necessary to address political paralysis and the worst recession in decades.

But the dubious motives and machiavellian nature of the plot to remove Rousseff are apparent in the transcript of a phone conversation between Jucá – a powerful ally of Temer’s in the Brazilian Democratic Movement party (PMDB) – and Sérgio Machado, a former senator who until recently was the president of another state oil company, Transpetro.

After discussing how they are both targeted by Lava Jato prosecutors, Jucá says the way out is political: “We have to stop this shit,” he says of the investigation. “We have to change the government to be able to stop this bleeding.”

Machado concurs: “The easiest solution would be to put in Michel [Temer].”

The conversation took place just weeks before the lower house voted to impeach Rousseff, according to the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, which published the transcript.

At one point, Jucá appears to mock the Lava Jato investigators for their high-mindedness and determination to tackle all corrupt senators and congressmen. “[They want to] put an end to this political class so [a new one] can rise, to build a new breed [that will be] pure.”

He then says the “penny has dropped” on this threat not just for him, but for the leaders of the Social Democratic party, such as former presidential candidate Aécio Neves, Senator Aloysio Neves, José Serra and Tasso Jereissati – all of whom are now either in the cabinet of the interim government or key supporters of the coalition.

Later in the conversation, Juca says he talked about his plans to supreme court justices, who told him the “shit” (referring to the corruption investigation and its media coverage) would never stop as long as Rousseff remained in power. He also said he received “guarantees” from military commanders that they could prevent disturbances from radical leftwing groups such as the Landless Workers Movement.

Jucá – who took the influential post of planning minister in the interim government – admitted on Monday that the conversation had taken place, but he said his words were taken out of context. He argued that he was referring to economic losses when he talked about “the bleeding”. His lawyer, Almeida Castro, reiterated this: “At no time was Jucá speaking against Lava Jato or seeking to interfere with the operation.”

But Machado, who was the source of the recording, is already reportedly negotiating a plea bargain with prosecutors. According to reports in local media, Jucá has said he will stay on leave until prosecutors decide whether he has committed any crime.

During the Lava Jato investigation, Jucá was named in a plea bargain by former senator Delcídio Amaral as a beneficiary in a 30m reais (£5.7m) kickback scheme from inflated contracts for the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon. He has denied the charges, which are being considered by the supreme court.

The Workers’ party has also been deeply implicated in this and other wrongdoing, though Rousseff – who has not been charged with any crimes – allowed the Lava Jato investigation to continue while she was in charge.

Temer has insisted that he too would not interfere. But many fear his new justice minister, Alexandre de Moraes, will reduce the scope of federal police activities. Moraes has previously been a defence lawyer for Eduardo Cunha, the suspended lower house speaker who is a chief target of Lava Jato investigators.

In an interview with the Guardian last month, Jucá denied that he, Cunha, Temer and other members of the PMDB were planning to rein back the Lava Jato investigation for the sake of stability.

“On the contrary, I think it’s necessary to accelerate Lava Jato,” he said. “You need to separate the wheat from the chaff, separate the guilty from the innocent. Political stability will be created by the innocent and by the credibility of politics for society. Today, credibility is low and the level of representability of politicians and parties is very low. We have to recover politics, which is an instrument to diminish conflicts and set a direction for the country.”

But the interim administration he helped to create has shown little sign of reducing tension or restoring credibility. The all-male, all-white cabinet has been heavily criticised as unrepresentative of the country, its austerity policies are unpopular and its leader has already backed down on removing the ministerial status of the culture ministry in the face of protests by leading artists, musicians and film-makers.

[coffin_dodger]

New Political Earthquake in Brazil: Is It Now Time for Media Outlets to Call This a “Coup”? The Intercept May 23 2016

Brazil today awoke to stunning news of secret, genuinely shocking conversations involving a key minister in Brazil’s newly installed government, which shine a bright light on the actual motives and participants driving the impeachment of the country’s democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff. The transcripts were published by the country’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, and reveal secret conversations that took place in March, just weeks before the impeachment vote in the lower house was held. They show explicit plotting between the new planning minister (then-senator), Romero Jucá, and former oil executive Sergio Machado — both of whom are formal targets of the “Car Wash” corruption investigation — as they agree that removing Dilma is the only means for ending the corruption investigation. The conversations also include discussions of the important role played in Dilma’s removal by the most powerful national institutions, including — most importantly — Brazil’s military leaders.

The transcripts are filled with profoundly incriminating statements about the real goals of impeachment and who was behind it. The crux of this plot is what Jucá calls “a national pact” — involving all of Brazil’s most powerful institutions — to leave Michel Temer in place as president (notwithstanding his multiple corruption scandals) and to kill the corruption investigation once Dilma is removed. In the words of Folha, Jucá made clear that impeachment will “end the pressure from the media and other sectors to continue the Car Wash investigation.” Jucá is the leader of Temer’s PMDB party and one of the “interim president’s” three closest confidants.

cont - https://theintercept.com/2016/05/23/new ... is-a-coup/

[backtoiam]

This is so chopped up with quotes that i'm not gonna attempt to post it in its entirety. Best to click through.

Wall Street Behind Brazil Coup d’Etat
Published: June 3, 2016

(Image) Wall Street Mastermind Henrique de Campos Meirelles, Interim Minister of Finance

Control over monetary policy and macro-economic reform was the ultimate objective of the Coup d’Etat. The key appointments from Wall Street’s standpoint are the Central Bank, which dominates monetary policy as well as foreign exchange transactions, the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Brazil (Banco do Brasil).

On behalf of Wall Street and the “Washington consensus”, the interim post coup “government” of Michel Temer has appointed a former Wall Street CEO (with U.S citizenship) to head the Ministry of Finance.

Henrique de Campos Meirelles, a former President of FleetBoston Financial’s Global Banking (1999-2002) and former head of the Central Bank under Lula’s presidency was appointed minister of finance on May 12.

New President of the Central Bank of Brazil Ilan GoldfeinIlan Goldfajn [Goldfein] (right) appointed to head the Central Bank, was chief economist of Itaú, Brazil’s largest private bank. Goldfajn [Goldfein] has close ties to both the IMF and the World Bank. He is a financial crony of Meirelles.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/wall-stree ... at/5526715

[backtoiam]

Brazil Revolts as Temer Forces Austerity, US Dependency After Coup Exposed

01:01 03.06.2016(updated 06:40 03.06.2016)

Michel Temer’s interim government has moved rapidly to reverse 13 years of social programs advanced by the democratically elected Workers Party, despite increased turmoil in his beleaguered administration.

In two weeks, the highly-orchestrated rightwing impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, viewed by many Brazilians as a coup, has been beleaguered by a combination of incompetence by the Temer government and a series of leaked audio files implicating key cabinet ministers in their plotting of the “impeachment” as a means to derail a far-reaching corruption probe.

The façade of Michel Temer’s legitimacy unraveled just days into his administration, when Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo released an audio recording and transcript of a conversation between the country’s Planning Minister, Romero Juca, and oil executive Sergio Machado, discussing how to put Temer into office to “stop the bleeding” from the so-called Car Wash Investigation into petroleum giant Petrobras.

At the time, Juca also served as the president of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, the same political party of the chief participants in the impeachment, Temer, Senate leader Renan Calheiros, and disgraced former lower-house leader Eduardo Cunha. Juca stepped down from office immediately following the release of the news story.

On Monday, it was Fabiano Silveira who became the second official to resign his post in the Temer Administration, after a second leaked recording exposed Brazil’s Transparency Minister, who is tasked with combating corruption, offering advice to Calheiros on how to undermine the Car Wash corruption probe, in which he, along with most of the country's high-ranking government officials, is implicated.

In the two weeks that Temer’s transition government has held power, it has moved to unravel the country’s social welfare state, eliminating the minister of culture, and has moved to replace regional commitments and the BRICS alliance with renewed deregulated system of trade with the United States. Temer, to many Brazilians is systematically reversing 13 years of policies advanced by the Workers Party.

With the once vibrant South American economic powerhouse reeling under a neoliberal agenda, Loud & Clear’s Brian Becker sat down on Wednesday with Aline C. Piva and Juliana Moraes, of the group Brazilian Expats for Democracy, to discuss what might happen next.

"Brazilians have taken to the streets," said Piva. "When Michel Temer first assumed control of the government he started a rollback of the social policies that have been in effect for a decade and a half in Brazil. He cut back social programs and he extinguished the minister of culture. In less than one week he rolled back 13 years of social achievement."

The current administration is evidently corrupt, but what about Dilma Rousseff?

"There are no investigations under Dilma Rousseff’s name for corruption, and there is nothing that would show that she is a corrupt politician," explained Moraes. "What we are seeing is that the people who are looking to oust her actually have dirty records. The current interim president is supposed to be somebody who is unelectable. He has dirty records, which mean corruption charges against him, so for the next eight years he is not supposed to even be in office."

She also explained that the recent release of audio files exposing Romero Juca’s coup plot and Fabiano Silveira’s plans to undermine the corruption probe have led to cries for Temer to go, with many protesters labeling him "Golpista" for "coup leader."

Was this coup orchestrated to force US-backed neoliberal economics on Brazil?

"Absolutely," said Piva. "The first day of Temer’s administration made clear that the neoliberal agenda is back in place in Brazilian politics."

The activist explained that Temer’s administration has moved to revoke or offset existing commitments in Latin America, the developing world, and with Russia and China in favor of a push toward US-centric bilateral trade deregulation.

"Jose Serra, the new minister of foreign affairs, in his first speech, made very clear that Brazil is going to roll back the policies that led to more independence in the region," said Piva.

Moraes took a stronger line, comparing the present situation to the US-backed 1964 Brazilian military coup, noting similar involvement in the proceedings by the US ambassador. "Now we have Liliana Ayalde, the current ambassador to Brazil and the former ambassador to Paraguay in 2008 to 2011, when there was a coup there, who is writing op-ed in the right-wing newspaper O Globo about how Brazil is an essential market for American corporations, a must-play for US business."

She said that America aims to undermine the multilateral associations established by Brazil’s Workers Party with South American countries, and also looks to fracture the BRICS economic alliance for challenging the domination of the World Bank and the IMF. "Yes, there is some involvement by the US," stated Ayalde.

http://sputniknews.com/latam/20160603/1 ... dilma.html

audio file at link i don't know how to post

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazi ... SKBN1532WH

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Teori Zavascki was killed in a plane crash on Thursday, his son said, raising doubt over who will take over his blockbuster graft investigation into dozens of politicians.

Rescuers found three bodies in the wreckage of the small, twin-prop plane that crashed off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state amid heavy rains, according to firefighters.

"Dear friends, we have just received confirmation that our dad died! Thank you all for your thoughts," his son, Francisco Prehn Zavascki, said on his Facebook page.

A judicial source earlier told Reuters that Zavascki was on board the aircraft.

Zavascki had been reviewing explosive testimony from dozens of executives at engineering group Odebrecht that has been expected to implicate hundreds of politicians in the biggest corruption case in Brazil's history.

The dual propeller Hawker Beechcraft C90GT carrying Zavascki left a Sao Paulo airport around 1 p.m. local time (1500 GMT) and crashed into the sea about 80 minutes later near the town of Paraty, which was the plane's destination, according to air force and civil aviation authorities.

The plane belonged to luxury hotel group Emiliano, according to civil aviation authority ANAC. There was no information provided on the identity of the two other bodies retrieved.

The investigation led by Zavascki, involving at least 6.4 billion reais ($2.0 billion) in bribes for contracts with state-run enterprises, has led to the jailing of dozens of senior executives and threatens to batter the ruling coalition of President Michel Temer.

Under Supreme Court rules, Zavascki's case load would normally fall to the justice named by Temer to replace him, but an exception can be made for urgent matters, according to a court representative.