{"id":73604,"date":"2016-05-16T12:02:08","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T11:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=73604"},"modified":"2016-05-16T13:03:23","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T12:03:23","slug":"brazils-democracy-to-suffer-grievous-blow-as-unelectable-corrupt-neoliberal-is-installed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/05\/brazils-democracy-to-suffer-grievous-blow-as-unelectable-corrupt-neoliberal-is-installed\/","title":{"rendered":"Brazil\u2019s Democracy to Suffer Grievous Blow as Unelectable, Corrupt Neoliberal is Installed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Para ler a vers\u00e3o deste artigo em Portugu\u00eas,\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>clique aqui<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Michel-Temer-article-header\"<\/a><\/p>\n

11 May 2016 – <\/em>In 2002, Brazil\u2019s left-of-center Workers Party (PT) ascended to the presidency when Lula da Silva won in a landslide<\/a> over the candidate of the center-right party PSDB (throughout 2002, \u201cmarkets\u201d were indignant<\/a> at the mere prospect of PT\u2019s\u00a0victory). The PT remained in power when Lula, in 2006, was re-elected\u00a0in another landslide<\/a>\u00a0against a different PSDB candidate. PT\u2019s enemies thought they had their chance to get rid of PT in 2010, when Lula was barred by term limits from running again, but their hopes were crushed when Lula\u2019s handpicked successor, the previously unknown Dilma Rousseff, won by 12 points<\/a>\u00a0over the same PSDB candidate who lost to Lula in 2002. In 2014,\u00a0PT\u2019s enemies poured huge amounts of money and resources into defeating her, believing she\u00a0was vulnerable and that they had finally\u00a0found a star PSDB candidate, but they lost again<\/a>, this time narrowly, as Dilma was re-elected with 54 million votes.<\/p>\n

In sum, PT has won four straight national elections \u2013 the last one occurring just 18 months ago. Its opponents have vigorously tried \u2013 and failed \u2013 to defeat them at the ballot box, largely due to PT\u2019s support among Brazil\u2019s poor and working classes.<\/p>\n

\"brazil<\/a><\/p>\n

\"brazil<\/a><\/p>\n

\"brazil<\/a><\/p>\n

\"brazil<\/a><\/p>\n

So if you\u2019re a plutocrat with ownership of the nation\u2019s largest and most influential media outlets, what do you do? You dispense with democracy altogether \u2013 after all, it keeps empowering candidates and policies you dislike \u2013\u00a0by exploiting your media outlets to incite unrest and then install a candidate who could never get elected on his own, yet will faithfully serve your political agenda and ideology.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s exactly what Brazil is going to do today. The Brazilian Senate will vote later today to agree to a trial on\u00a0the lower House\u2019s impeachment charges, which will automatically result in Dilma\u2019s suspension from the presidency pending the end of the trial.<\/p>\n

Her successor will be Vice President Michel Temer of the PMDB party (pictured, above). So unlike impeachment in most other countries with a presidential system, impeachment here will empower a person from a different party than that of the elected President. In this particular case, the person to be installed is\u00a0awash in corruption: accused by informants of involvement in an illegal ethanol-purchasing scheme, he was just found guilty of, and fined for, election spending violations and faces an 8-year-ban on running for any office<\/a>. He\u2019s deeply unpopular: only 2% would support him<\/a> for President and almost 60% want him impeached<\/a>\u00a0(the same number that favors Dilma\u2019s impeachment).\u00a0But he will faithfully serve the interests of Brazil\u2019s richest: he\u2019s planning to appoint Goldman, Sachs and IMF officials<\/a> to run the economy and otherwise install a totally unrepresentative, neoliberal team<\/a> (composed in part of the same party \u2013 PSDB \u2013 that has lost 4 straight elections to the PT).<\/p>\n

None of this is a defense of PT. That party\u00a0\u2013 as even Lula acknowledged\u00a0to me<\/a> in my interview of him \u2013 is filled with serious corruption. Dilma, in many critical ways, has been a failed\u00a0president, and is deeply unpopular. They have often aligned with and served the country\u2019s elite at the expense of their base of poor supporters<\/a>. The country is suffering economically and in almost every other way.<\/p>\n

But the solution to that is to defeat them at the ballot box, not simply remove them and replace them with someone more suitable to the nation\u2019s richest. Whatever damage PT is doing to Brazil, the plutocrats and their journalist-propagandists and the band of thieves in Brasilia engineering this travesty are far more dangerous. They are literally dismantling \u2013 crushing \u2013 democracy in the world\u2019s fifth-largest country. Even\u00a0The Economist <\/em>\u2013 which is hostile to even the most moderate left-wing parties, hates PT and wants Dilma to resign \u2013 has denounced impeachment<\/a> as \u201ca pretext for ousting an unpopular president\u201d and just two weeks ago\u00a0warned<\/a> that \u201cwhat is alarming is that those who are working for her removal are in many ways worse.\u201d Before he became an active plotter in his own empowerment, Temer himself said<\/a>\u00a0last year that \u201cimpeachment is unthinkable, would create an institutional crisis. There is no judicial or political basis for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The biggest scam of all is that Brazilian media elites are justifying all of this in the name of \u201ccorruption\u201d and \u201cdemocracy.\u201d How can anyone\u00a0who is minimally rational believe this is about \u201ccorruption\u201d when they\u2019re about to install as President someone far more implicated in corruption than the person they\u2019re removing, and when the factions to be empowered are corrupt beyond what can be described? And if they were really concerned with \u201cdemocracy,\u201d why wouldn\u2019t they also impeach Temer and hold new elections, letting voters decide who should replace Dilma<\/a>? The answer is obvious: new elections would almost certainly result in a victory for Lula or other candidates they dislike<\/a>, so what they fear most is letting the Brazilian population decide who will govern them. That<\/em> is the very definition of the destruction of democracy.<\/p>\n

Beyond\u00a0its obvious global significance, the reason I\u2019ve spent so much time and energy writing about\u00a0these events is because it\u2019s been astonishing \u2013 and unnerving \u2013 to watch it all unfold, particularly given how the country\u2019s dominant media, owned by a tiny handful of rich families, allows almost no plurality of opinion. Instead, as Reporters Without Borders put it earlier this month<\/a>: \u201cIn a barely veiled manner, the leading national media have urged the public to help bring down President Dilma Rousseff. The journalists working for these media groups are clearly subject to the influence of private and partisan interests, and these permanent conflicts of interests are clearly very detrimental to the quality of their reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n

As someone who has lived in\u00a0Brazil\u00a0for 11 years, it\u2019s been inspiring and invigorating to watch a country of 200 million people throw off the shackles of a 21-year-old right-wing (US\/UK supported) military dictatorship and mature into a young, vibrant\u00a0democracy and then thrive under it. To\u00a0see how quickly and easily that can be reversed\u00a0\u2013\u00a0abolished in all but name only \u2013\u00a0is both\u00a0sad and frightening to watch.\u00a0It\u2019s also an important lesson for anyone, in countries all over the world, who blithely assume that things will continue as is or that they\u2019re guaranteed stability and ongoing progress.<\/p>\n

Last week, I spoke to\u00a0Democracy Now<\/em> for about 10 minutes on why I think these developments in Brazil are so significant:<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=N1csqcTvU9Y<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

Glenn Greenwald<\/a> – \u2709glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 May 2016 – Brazil\u2019s senate voted this week to begin impeachment proceedings of Dilma Rousseff, suspending the nation\u2019s first female president as she is put on trial by politicians neck-deep in their own scandals. Our co-founder Glenn Greenwald has written blistering critiques of the political turmoil from Rio de Janeiro, where he has lived for 11 years. \u201cThey are literally dismantling \u2014 crushing \u2014 democracy in the world\u2019s fifth-largest country,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}