Join Our Members List For Exclusive Reports
For anyone who’s interested in making heads or tails out of the governmental crisis in Brazil, this segment on RT’s CrossTalk engages points of view from the Left and the Right to drill down on what’s happening over there.
Hosted by Moscow-based American journalist, Peter Lavelle, this episode of CrossTalk features Brian Becker, a former member of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party, Pepe Escobar, Paris-based Brazilian independent journalist and Andrea Murta, Brazilian economist and journalist with the very Right Wing Atlantic Council Think Tank, which is packed with members of the US Military Industrial complex.
After Andrea Murta explains that the impeachment process in Brazil could be described as “political,” Brian Becker counters, “If it’s ‘a political process’ to remove a president who won with 54 million votes in 2014, that can be described as nothing other than a ‘coup d’état’.
“In other words, by use of some non-democratic procedure to oust a democratically-elected government. And behind it all, of course is the weakness of the Workers’ Party because of the financial crisis. But the financial crisis was not created by the Workers’ Party and their social programs, although these may have been flawed. It wasn’t caused because workers have financial pensions, even though Neoliberals might argue that. The real cause of the financial crisis [in Brazil] was caused by the meltdown of Wall Street banks in 2007/8, that has rippled through all of the emerging markets…
“The US government and the elites in these various countries are taking advantage of a financial crisis caused by Wall Street to undermine social democratic governments that have remained somewhat of an obstacle to Wall Street’s plans to completely privatize and dominate all of the emerging markets and get rid of sovereignty.”
Pepe Escobar then notes, “[Former President] Lula prohibited US Big Oil from obtaining exploitation rights from the…oil deposits [off the coast of Brazil], the largest oil discovery from the young 21st century. This was anathema to US Big Oil and…this had to be reversed.”
Escobar reminds viewers that, as a result of the Communist Revolution in Cuba, there was a concerted effort by the US State Department to prevent any Left Wing governments from being established anywhere else in South America, which proceeded to experience very repressive Right Wing regimes over the following decades, such as the torture-ridden regime of Pinochet – all of which had, at their core, the US Pentagon.
Becker chimes in, “…let’s not forget that on March 31st, millions of Brazilians marched against another coup [like that of the 1964 military coup in Brazil], which the United States supported, just as, behind the scenes, the United States is supporting today’s coup d’état for its own Neoliberal policies.
“Exxon-Mobil is salivating, so are the Wall Street banks. They want Brazil,” says Becker.
At this point, Murta buts in and says, “It’s 2016, not 1964 and we can’t blame all of what’s happening in Brazil on external forces, as much as we’d like someone else to take the blame. We [Brazilians] brought a lot of what’s happening upon ourselves.
“President Dilma Rousseff has an approval rating of between 5 and 10%. Almost nobody wants her to continue in power.”
Pepe Escobar agrees that nobody wants to see Rousseff in power – especially “Wall Street and the Pentagon, who more importantly, don’t want to see the establishment of the BRICS trading bloc, which runs counter to their 2002 doctrine of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance.’
Escobar says, “The mechanism that was especially tailored for the disruption of Brazil [in this era] started with the NSA’s hacking of Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned petroleum company, during which priceless insider information was leaked about Petrobras to a federal judge in a Conservative, southern state, who under the laws of the Brazilian government could prosecute other members of the federal government.
Escobar continues, the first phase of the anti-BRICS war would be a regime change “lite”, which is what we’re seeing now. The ideal situation for a Pentagon/Wall Street Neoliberal adjustment would be to create a perfect alignment between Brazil’s executive, legislative and judicial branches with the media-corporate interests, who Pepe says are controlled by four different families and whom he knows well, from personally having worked for them. He claims that these families were for the military dictatorship in 1964 and that they would like to see a military takeover happen again.
Becker talks about the rise of the US’ “unipolar power” in the post-Cold War era. He says that the invasion of Iraq, the overthrow of the Libyan and Ukraine governments and the current attempt to do so in Syria, along with the renewed destabilization of Latin American governments would not have been possible without the fall of the former Soviet Union.
He says that the BRICS alliance represents a “possible return of something that would balance the unipolar power of the United States and NATO and the IMF…Russia, China, India, South Africa, Brazil – these emerging powers could provide an alternative to the US, which definitely wants to destroy BRICS.”
Peter Lavelle wraps up the show by asking Andrea Murta if removing Dilma Rouseff from power will solve any of Brazil’s problems, she answers, “That’s very unlikely, not only with the corruption but really, with the economy, there are structural problems that are going to take a long time to be solved.
“If I wanted to take the optimistic view, I might say, change in government might bring some fresh air, to the legislative as well and the markets might start moving in the right direction – but that’s very optimistic. Even if they are able to approve some measures, which remains to be seen, these are problems that will need to be solved in the long term. We need to do pension reform, very strenuous fiscal changes in the country and none of this is going to be solved overnight. I think that people who are wanting to remove the President are being way too optimistic.”
Add comment