La nota que sigue
es de F. William Engdahl y apareció sucesivamente en los sitios web New Eastern
Outlook y The International Reporter. En la misma se argumenta sobre los
verdaderos motivos detrás de la destitución de Dilma Rousseff como presidenta
constitucional del Brasil: vender los más valiosos activos del estado y
debilitar a los BRICS. A ver si los enfurece un poquito:
Título:
Washington Tries to Break BRICS – Rape of Brazil Begins
Epígrafe:
Washington’s regime change machinery has for the time being succeeded in
removing an important link in the alliance of large emerging nations by
railroading through a Senate impeachment of the duly elected President, Dilma
Rousseff. On August 31 her Vice President Michel Temer was sworn in as
President. In his first speech as president, the cynical Temer called for a
government of “national salvation,” asking for the trust of the Brazilian
people. He indicated plans to reform, and has also signaled his intention to
overhaul the pension system and labor laws, and cut public spending, all themes
beloved of Wall Street banks, of the International Monetary Fund and their
Washington Consensus. Now after less than three weeks at the job, Temer has
unveiled plans for wholesale privatization of Brazil’s crown jewels, starting
with oil. The planned Wall Street rape of Brazil is about to begin.
Texto: It’s important to keep in mind that elected President
Rousseff was not convicted or even formally charged with any concrete act of
corruption, even though the pro-oligarchy mainstream Brazil media, led by
O’Globo Group of the billionaire Roberto Irineu Marinho, ran a media defamation
campaign creating the basis to railroad Rousseff into formal impeachment before
the Senate. The shift took place after the opposition PMDB party of Temer on
March 29 broke their coalition with Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, as accusations
of Petrobras-linked corruption were made against Rousseff and former president
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
On August 31, 61
Senators voted to remove her while 20 voted against removal. The formal charge
was “manipulation of the state budget” before the 2014 elections to hide the
size of the deficit. She vehemently denies the charge. Indeed, the Senate
issued its own expert report that concluded there was “no indication of direct
or indirect action by Dilma” in any illegal budgetary maneuvers. According to
the Associated Press, “Independent auditors hired by Brazil’s Senate said in a
report released Monday that suspended President Dilma Rousseff didn’t engage in
the creative accounting she was charged with at her impeachment trial.” Under
an honest system that would have ended the impeachment then and there. Not in
Brazil.
In effect, she
was impeached for the dramatic decline in the Brazilian economy, a decline
deliberately pushed along as US credit rating agencies downgraded Brazilian
debt, and international and mainstream Brazilian media kept the Petrobras
corruption allegations in the spotlight. Importantly, the Senate did not ban
her from office for 8 years as Washington had hoped, and she has promised an
electoral return. The Washington-steered Temer has until end of 2018 to deliver
Brazil to Temer’s foreign masters before his term legally ends.
Notably, Temer
himself was accused of corruption in the Petrobras state oil company
investigations. He reportedly asked the then-head of the transportation unit of
Petróleo Brasileiro SA in 2012 to arrange illegal campaign contributions to
Temer’s party which was running a Washington-backed campaign to oust Rousseff’s
Workers’ Party. Then this June, only days into his serving as acting president,
two of Temer’s own chosen ministers, including the Minister of Transparency,
were forced to resign in response to allegations that they sought to subvert
the probe into massive graft at Petrobras.
One of the two,
Temer’s extremely close ally Romero Jucá, was caught on tape plotting Dilma’s
impeachment as a way to shut down the ongoing Petrobras corruption
investigation, as well as indicating that Brazil’s military, the media, and the
courts were all participants in the impeachment plotting.
In brief, the
removal of Dilma Rousseff and her Workers’ Party after 13 years in Brazil’s
leadership was a new form of Color Revolution from Washington, one we might
call a judicial coup by corrupt judges and congressmen. Of the 594 members of
the Congress, as the Toronto Globe and Mail reported, “318 are under
investigation or face charges” while their target, President Rousseff, “herself
faces no allegation of financial impropriety.”
The day after the
first Lower House impeachment vote in April, a leading member of Temer’s PSDP
party, Senator Aloysio Nunes, went to Washington, in a mission organized by
former Bill Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s lobbying firm,
Albright Stonebridge Group. Nunes, as president of the Brazilian Senate’s
Foreign Relations Committee, has repeatedly advocated that Brazil once again
move closer to an alliance with the US and UK.
Madeline
Albright, a Director of the leading US think-tank, Council on Foreign
Relations, is also chair of the prime US Government “Color Revolution” NGO, the
National Democratic Institute (NDI). Nothing fishy here, or? Nunes reportedly
went to Washington to rally backing for Temer and the unfolding judicial coup
against Rousseff.
A key player from
the side of Washington, Rousseff’s de facto political executioner, was, once
again, Vice President Joe Biden, the “Dick Cheney” dirty operator-in-chief in
the Obama Administration.
Biden’s fateful
Brazil trip
In May, 2013, US
Vice President Joe Biden made a fateful visit to Brazil to meet with President
Rousseff. In January 2011 Rousseff had succeeded her Workers’ Party mentor,
Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, or Lula, who constitutionally was limited to two
consecutive terms. Biden went to Brazil to discuss oil with the new President.
Relations between Lula and Washington had chilled as Lula backed Iran against
US sanctions and came economically closer to China.
In late 2007
Petrobras had discovered what was estimated to be a mammoth new basin of
high-quality oil on the Brazilian Continental Shelf offshore in the Santos
Basin. In total the Brazil Continental Shelf could contain over 100 billion
barrels of oil, transforming the country into a major world oil and gas power,
something Exxon and Chevron, the US oil giants wanted tocontrol.
In 2009,
according to leaked US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks, the US
Consulate in Rio wrote that Exxon and Chevron were trying in vain to alter a
law advanced by Rousseff’s mentor and predecessor in her Brazilian Workers’
Party , President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. That 2009 law made the state-owned
Petrobras chief operator of all offshore oilblocs. Washington and the US oil
giants were not at all pleased at losing control over potentially the largest
new world oil discovery in decades.
Lula had not only
pushed ExxonMobil and Chevron out of the controlling position in favor of the
state-owned Petrobras, but he also opened Brazilian oil exploration to the
Chinese, since 2009 a core member of the BRICS developing nations with Brazil,
Russia, India and South Africa.
In December, 2010
in one of his last acts as President, Lula oversaw signing of a deal between
the Brazilian-Spanish energy company Repsol and China’s state-owned Sinopec.
Sinopec formed a joint venture, Repsol Sinopec Brasil, investing more than $7.1
billion towards Repsol Brazil. Already in 2005 Lula had approved formation of
Sinopec International Petroleum Service of Brazil Ltd as part of a new
strategic alliance between China and Brazil.
In 2012 in a
joint exploration drilling, Repsol Sinopec Brasil, Norway’s Statoil and
Petrobras made a major new discovery in Pão de Açúcar, the third in block
BM-C-33, which includes the Seat and Gávea, the latter one of the world’s 10
largest discoveries in 2011. USA and British oil majors were nowhere to be
seen.
Biden’s task was
to sound out Lula’s successor, Rousseff, about reversing that exclusion of US
major oil companies in favor of the Chinese. Biden also met with leading energy
companies in Brazil including Petrobras.
While little was
publicly said, Rousseff refused to reverse the 2009 oil law in a way that would
be suitable to Biden, Washington and US oil majors. Days after Biden’s visit
came the Snowden NSA revelations that the US had also spied on Rousseff and top
officials of Petrobras. She was livid and denounced the Obama Administration
that September before the UN General Assembly for violating international law.
She cancelled a planned Washington visit in protest. After that, US-Brazil
relations took a dive.
After his May
2013 talks with Rousseff, Biden clearly gave her the kiss of death.
Before Biden’s
May 2013 visit Dilma Rousseff had 70% of popularity rating. Less than two weeks
after Biden left Brazil, nationwide protests by a very well-organized group
called Movimento Passe Livre, over a nominal 10 cent bus fare increase, brought
the country virtually to a halt and turned very violent. The protests bore the
hallmark of typical “Color Revolution” or Twitter social media destabilizations
that seem to follow Biden wherever he makes a presence. Within weeks Rousseff’s
popularity plummeted to 30%.
Washington had
clearly sent a signal that Rousseff had to change course or face serious
problems. The Washington regime change machine, including its entire array of
financial warfare operations ranging from a leaked PwC audit of Petrobras to
Wall Street credit rating agency Standard & Poors’ downgrade of Brazil
public debt to junk in September 2015, went into full action to remove
Rousseff, a key backer of the BRICS New Development Bank and of an independent
national development strategy for Brazil.
Selling the Crown
Jewels
The man who has
now manipulated himself into the Presidency, the corrupt Michel Temer, worked
as an informer for Washington the entire time. In documents released by
Wikileaks, it was revealed that Temer was an informant to US intelligence since
at least 2006, via telegrams to the US embassy in Brazil classified by the
Embassy as “sensitive” and “for official use only.”
Washington’s man
in Brazil, Temer, has lost no time appeasing his patrons in Wall Street. Even
as acting President this May, Temer named Henrique Meirelles as Minister of
Finance and Social Security. Meirelles, a Harvard-educated former President of
the Brazilian central bank, was President of BankBoston in the USA until 1999,
and was with that bank in 1985 when it was found guilty of failing to report
$1.2 billion in illegal cash transfers with Swiss banks. Meirelles is now
overseeing the planned selloff of Brazil’s “crown jewels” to international
investors, a move that is intended to gravely undercut the power of the state
in the economy. Another of Temer’s key economic advisers is Paulo Leme, former
IMF economist and now Goldman Sachs Managing Director of Emerging Markets
Research. Wall Street is in the middle of the Temer-led economic rape of
Brazil.
On September 13,
Temer’s government unveiled a massive privatization program with the cynically
misleading comment, “It is clear the public sector cannot move forward alone on
these projects. We are counting on the private sector.” He omitted to say the
private sector he meant were his patrons.
Temer unveiled
plans that would complete the country’s largest privatization in decades.
Conveniently, the process us to be completed by end of 2018, just before
Temer’s term must end. The influential US-Brazil Business Council detailed the
privatization list on its website. The US-Brazil Business Council was founded
forty years ago by Citigroup, Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemicals and other US
multinationals.
Tenders for the
first round of concessions will be issued before the end of this year. They
will include privatization of four airports and two port terminals, all
auctioned in the first quarter of 2017. Other concessions include five
highways, one rail line, bidding on small oil blocks and a later round for
large, mainly offshore, oil development blocks. As well the government will
sell selected assets currently controlled by its Minerals Research Department
plus six electric power distributors and three water treatment facilities.
The heart of his
planned privatization are, not surprisingly, Joe Biden’s coveted state oil and
gas companies along with chunks of the state Eletrobrás power company. Temer
plans to get as much as $24 billion from the selloff. Fully $11 billion of the
total are to come from sale of key oil and gas state holdings. Of course, when
state assets such as huge oil and gas resources are sold off to foreign
interests in what will clearly be a distress sale, it is a one-off deal. State
oil and gas or electric power projects generate a continuing revenue stream
many times any one-off privatization gains. Brazil’s economy is the ultimate
loser in such privatization. Wall Street banks and multinationals are of
course, as planned, the winner.
On September
19-21, according to the US-Brazil Business Council website, the Brazilian
government’s key ministers for infrastructure including Minister Moreira
Franco; Minister Fernando Bezerra Coelho Filho, Minister of Mines and Energy;
and Minister Mauricio Quintella Lessa, Minister of Transport, Ports and Civil
Aviation, will be in New York City to meet with Wall Street “infrastructure
investors.”
This is
Washington’s way, the way of the Wall Street Gods of Money, as I title one of
my books. First, destroy any national leadership intent on genuine national
development such as Dilma Rousseff. Replace them with a vassal regime willing
to do anything for money, including selling the crown jewels of their own
nation as people like Anatoli Chubais did in Russia in the 1990’s under Boris
Yeltsin’s “shock therapy.” As reward for his behavior, Chubais today sits on
the advisory board of JP MorganChase. What will Temer and associates get for
their efforts remains to be seen. Washington for now has broken one of the
BRICS that ultimately threaten her global hegemony. It is not likely to bring
any lasting success if recent history is any guide.
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