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A
succession of appalling audio leaks has revealed that key sectors
of the Brazilian military as well as selected Supreme Court justices
have legitimized the coup against aPresident that
has always protected the two-year-old Car Wash corruption
investigation. Even Western mainstream media was forced to admit that
Dilma did not steal anything but is being impeached by a bunch
of thieves. Their agenda; to stifle the Car Wash investigation, which
may eventually throw many of them in jail.
Meanwhile,
the final judgment of Dilma’s impeachment at the Senate is bound
to happen on August 16 – 11 days after the start of the Olympic Games.
The coup plotters suffered a heavy blow as they were trying hard
to accelerate the proceedings. As it stands, the outcome is uncertain;
after the leaks, four to five senators are already wavering, as the
leaks also implicate Temer personally. The “leader” of a
zero-credibility, corruption-crammed scam, he’s among the targets
of several corruption investigations and has just been bannedfrom running to political office for the next 8 years.
The
man best positioned to be the national savior in this case is former
president Fernando Henrique Cardoso – also former “Prince of Sociology”
and a major star (during the 1960s and early 1970s) of the dependency
theory, then metamorphosed into an avid neoliberal. Cardoso is a very
close pal of both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The Beltway/Wall Street
axis loves him. Cardoso would be “elected” mostly by the pack
of Congress hyenas who got the Dilma impeachment rolling on April 17.
Neoliberalism may have failed, as even the IMF research wing
has concluded. But its rotten corpse still encumbers the whole planet.
Neoliberalism is not only an economic model; it surreptitiously takes
over the juridical realm as well. In another perverse facet of shock
doctrine, neoliberalism cannot prevail without a juridical framework.
It’s
a short window of opportunity after all those years under the
Bush-Obama continuum where Washington was obsessed with MENA (Middle
East/Northern Africa), a.k.a. the Greater Middle East. Now South America
is back in a starring role in the geopolitical (soft) war theatre.
Getting rid of Dilma, Lula, the Workers’ Party, by all means available,
is only the start.
So
every coup is now literally allowed in South America; indirect attacks
to the Brazilian currency, the real; bribing local comprador elites
with the backing of the global financial system; a concerted attempt
at the implosion, simultaneously, of the top three economies: Brazil,
Argentina and Venezuela. SOUTHCOM went so far as to produce a report on
“Venezuela Freedom” earlier this year, signed by commander Kurt Tidd,
which proposes a “strategy of tension”, complete with “encirclement” and
“suffocation” techniques and allowing to mix street action with a
“calculated” use of armed violence. Echoes of Chile 1973 do apply.
Hillary
Clinton is the presidential candidate of Wall Street, the Pentagon, the
industrial-military complex and the neocons. She is theGoddess of War –
and in a Bush-Obama-Clinton continuum she will go to war against any
player in the Global South that dares to defy Exceptionalistan.
Kill List: Smashing the 'B' in BRICS
Host photo agency
The stakes could not be higher. Not only the future of the BRICS, but the future of a new multipolar world is in the balance. And it all hinges on what happens in Brazil in the next few months.
Let’s
start with the Kafkaesque internal turmoil. The coup against President
Dilma Rousseff remains an unrivalled media theatre/political tragicomedy
gift that keeps on giving. It also doubles as a case of information war
converted into a strategic tool of political control.
© AP PHOTO/ IVAN SEKRETAREV
The
leaks also unveiled a nasty internecine carnage between Brazilian
comprador elites — peripheral and mainstream. Essentially the
peripherals were used as lowly paperboys in Congress for the dirty work.
But now they may be about to become road kill – along the illegitimate,
unpopular, interim Michel Temer “government”, led by a bunch
of corrupt-to-the-core PMDB politicians, the party that is heir to the
sole opposition outfit tolerated during the 1960s-1980s military
dictatorship.
Meet the vassal chancellor
An insidious character in the current golpeachment scam is the interim Minister of Foreign Relations, senator Jose Serra of the
PSDB party, the social democrats turned neoliberal enforcers. In the
2002 presidential election – which he lost to Lula — Serra had already
tried to get rid of peripheral Brazilian oligarchies.
Yet
now he’s incarnating another role — perfectly positioned not only
to retrograde Brazilian foreign policy to some point around the 1964
military coup, but mostly as the Beltway’s point man inside the coup
racket.
Exceptionalistan’s
key ally in Brazil is the oligarchy in Sao Paulo, the wealthiest state
and home to the financial capital of Latin America. This is Brazil’s
A-list. It’s from their ranks that an eventual “national savior” may
eventually spring up.
Once
the peripherals are history, then no holds would be barred
to criminalize – and imprison – an array of leftist leaders, Lula
included, as well as manufacture a fake election legitimized by a
noxious Supreme Court justice, Gilmar Mendes, a PSDB stooge.
It
all hinges on what happens in the next two months. The prosecutor
general finally asked the Supreme Court to throw three top peripherals
in jail; they are all accused of plotting to derail the Car Wash
investigation — an extremely complex juridical-political-police network
of myriad concentric/parallel circles.
The
Brazilian mainstream media monopoly (five families) – popularly
referred to as PIG, the Brazilian acronym for Pro-Coup Media Party – has
changed its anti-left tune and is now also going after selected members
of the Temer racket.
According
to the constitution, if both the Presidency and Vice-Presidency are
vacated in the last two years of a given term, it’s up to Congress
to elect the new President.
This
implies two possible scenarios. If Dilma is not impeached, it’s
increasingly likely she will call for new presidential elections
before the end of the year.
If
she is impeached, the PIG will tolerate the stooge-crammed Temer
interim racket until January 2017 at the most. The next step would be
what Serra and about-to-be-jailed Senate leader Renan Calheiros are
campaigning for; the end of direct presidential elections and the onset
of Brazilian-style parliamentarianism.
The
hard node of golpeachment goes way beyond peripheral Brazilian elites.
It is comprised of a political party (the PSDB); the Globo media empire;
the Federal Police (very cozy with the FBI); the Public Ministry; most
of the Supreme Court; and sectors of the military. Only the Beltway/Wall
Street axis has the means and the necessary pull to regiment all these
players – by hard cash, blackmail or promises of glory.
And
that ties in with key unanswered questions regarding the recent audio
leaks. Who taped the conversations. Who leaked them. Why now. Who
profits from a nation in total political/economic/juridical chaos,
with virtually all institutions totally discredited.
Neoliberalism or chaos
Those
were the days when Washington could mastermind, with impunity, an
old-fashioned military coup in its backyard – as in Brazil 1964. Or
as in Chile during the original 9/11 – in 1973, as seen through crack
Chilean film maker Patricio Guzman’s moving documentary about Salvador Allende.
History,
predictably, now repeats itself as farce as the 2016 coup has turned
Brazil – the 7th largest economy in the world and a key Global South
player – into a Honduras or Paraguay (where recent US-supported coups
were successful).
I have shown how the coup in Brazil is an extremely sophisticated Hybrid Waroperation
going way beyond unconventional warfare (UW); four generation warfare
(4GW); color revolutions; and R2P (“responsibility to protect”), all the
way to the summit of smart power; a
political-financial-judicial-mainstream media soft coup unveiled in slow
motion. This is the beauty of a coup when promoted by democratic
institutions.
When
constitutional attributions are redirected to Congress that keeps the
Executive under control while generating a culture of political
corruption. Politics is subordinated to economics. Companies engage
in campaign financing and buy politicians to be able to influence the
political powers that be.
That’s
how Washington works. And that’s also the key to understand the role
of former leader of the Brazilian lower house Eduardo Cunha; he ran a
campaign financing racket out of Congress itself, controlling dozens
of politicians while profiting from proverbially fat state contracts.
The Three Stooges in what I called the Provisional Banana Scoundrel Republic are
Cunha, Calheiros and Temer. Temer is a mere puppet while Cunha remains a
sort of shadow Prime Minister, running the show. But not for long. He’s
already been suspended as the speaker in Congress; he bagged millions
of US dollars in kickbacks for those fat contracts and stashed the loot
in secret Swiss accounts; now it’s a matter of time before the Supreme
Court has the balls – it’s not a given — to throw him in the slammer.
NATO vs. BRICS, all across the spectrum
And that brings us once again to The Big Picture, as we proceed in parallel with an
analysis by Rafael Bautista, the head of a decolonization study group
in La Paz, Bolivia. He’s one of the best and brightest in South America
who’s very much alert to the fact that whatever happens in Brazil in the
next few months will drive the future not only of South America but the
whole Global South.
Exceptionalistan’s
project for Brazil is no less than the imposition of a remixed Monroe
doctrine. The main target of a planned neoliberal restoration is to cut
off South America from the BRICS – as in, essentially, the Russia-China
strategic partnership.
It
all comes back to the same, defining 21st century war; NATO against the
BRICS; the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); and ultimately the
Russia-China strategic partnership. Smashing the “B” in BRICS carries
with it the bonus of smashing Mercosur (the South American common
market); Unasur (the political Union of South American Nations); ALBA
(the Bolivarian Alliance); and South American integration as a whole,
compounded with integration with key emerging Global South players such
as Iran.
The
ongoing destabilization of “Syraq” fits the Empire of Chaos; when
there’s no regional integration, the only other possibility is
balkanization. And yet Russia graphically demonstrated to Beltway
planners they cannot win a war in Syria while Iran demonstrated
after the nuclear deal that it won’t become a Washington vassal. So the
Empire of Chaos might as well secure its own backyard.
A new geopolitical framework had to be part of the package. That’s where the concept of “North America” fits
in, backed by the Council on Foreign Relations and devised mostly
by former Iraq surge superstar David Petraeus and former World Bank
honcho Bob Zoellick, now with Goldman Sachs. Call it a mini who’s who
of Exceptionalistan.
You
won't see it enounced in public, but the Petraeus/Zoellick concept of
“North America” presupposes regime changing and gobbling up Venezuela.
The Caribbean is seen as a Mare Nostrum, an American lake. “North
America” is in fact a strategic offensive.
It
implies controlling the massive oil and water wealth of the Orinoco and
the Amazonas, something that would forever guarantee Exceptionalistan’s
preeminence south of the border.
The
Caribbean is already a done deal; after all Washington controls CAFTA.
South America is a tougher nut to crack, roughly polarized by what’s
left of ALBA and the US-driven Pacific Alliance. With Brazil falling
to a neoliberal restoration, it’s over as a promoter of regional
integration. Mercosur would eventually be absorbed into the Pacific
Alliance – especially with a man like Serra as Brazil’s top diplomat.
So, politically, South America must be annulled at all costs.
What’s
left for South America would be its aggregation — as marginal players,
part of the US-driven Pacific Alliance — to those NATO on trade deals,
the TPP and TTIP. The “pivot to Asia” – of which TPP is the trade arm —
is the Obama doctrine’s push for containment of China, not only in Asia
but also across Asia-Pacific. Thus it’s natural that China (Brazil’s
number one trade partner) should also be contained in the hegemon’s
backyard, South America.
From the Atlantic to the Pacific, and beyond
It’s
never enough to stress the geo-economic importance of South America.
The only way South America can be fully integrated to the multipolar
world is by opening up to the Pacific, boosting its strategic connection
with Asia, especially China. That’s where the Chinese push to invest
in a massive high-speed rail project uniting
the Brazilian Atlantic coast with Peru in the Pacific fits in. That’s
South American interconnectivity in a nutshell. If Brazil is politically
annulled, none of this will ever happen.
South
America is now arguably the prime geopolitical space where
Exceptionalistan is laying the bases to restore its unrivalled
hegemony — as part of a multi-dimensional, geo-finance war against the
BRICS bent on perpetuating the unipolar world.
All
previous moves have lead to this geostrategy of imploding the BRICS and
reducing South America to an appendix of North America.
Wikileaks
revealed how the NSA spied on Petrobras. In 2008 Brazil came up with
its own National Defense Strategy, focused on two key areas; the South
Atlantic and the Amazon. This did not sit well with SOUTHCOM. Unasur
should have developed it to a continental level, but they didn’t.
Lula
decided to award to Petrobras the prime exploitation of the pre-salt
deposits – the largest oil discovery of the 21st century. Dilma’s
administration gave a firm push to the BRICS’s New Development Bank
(based on the Brazilian BNDES) and also decided to accept Iranian
payments bypassing the US dollar. Anyone involved in South-South trade
bypassing the US dollar enters a kill list.
So
the die is cast. We will know for sure by the time there’s a new US
President — and arguably a new, unelected Brazilian President — in early
2017. The geostrategic game though remains the same; Brazil must fall
so BRICS-led integration must fall, and Exceptionalistan may concentrate
all its firepower in an all-out confrontation against Russia-China.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
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