A surprising Supreme Court decision that, while not definitive, restores Lula’s political rights has hit Brazil like a semiotic bomb and plunged the nation into a reality show being played in a wilderness of shattered mirrors. At first, it looked like three key variables would remain immutable. The Brazilian military run the show – and...
Read MoreTwo decades after a political earthquake, a powerful aftershock that should be rocking Brazil apart is being met with thunderous silence. What is now termed “the Banestado leaks” and “CC5gate” is straight out of vintage WikiLeaks: a list, published for the first time in full, naming names and detailing one of the biggest corruption and...
Read MoreDid Washington sic Brazil’s gangster president Bolsonaro on journalist Glenn Greenwald because Greenwald brought to light Edward Snowden’s evidence of NSA spying on the world? In Brazil unfavorable reporting on the gangster government is being labeled a “cybercrime.” Greenwald was cleared by the Brazilian police and Supreme Court, but the lawless Bolsonaro is not deterred...
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Better not mess with the former Brazilian president; Putin and Xi are his real top allies in the Global Left
He’s back. With a bang. Only two days after his release from a federal prison in Curitiba, southern Brazil, following a narrow 6×5 decision by the Supreme Court, former President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva delivered a fiery, 45-minute long speech in front of the Metal Workers Union in Sao Bernardo, outside of Sao Paulo,...
Read MoreThe presidential election in Argentina pitted the people against neoliberalism and the people won. What happens next will have a tremendous impact all over Latin America and serve as a blueprint for assorted Global South struggles. The presidential election in Argentina was no less than a game-changer and a graphic lesson for the whole Global...
Read MoreNeoliberalism is – literally – burning. And from Ecuador to Chile, South America, once again, is showing the way. Against the vicious, one-size-fits-all IMF austerity prescription, which deploys weapons of mass economic destruction to smash national sovereignty and foster social inequality, South America finally seems poised to reclaim the power to forge its own history....
Read MoreMeanwhile, fires rage in the Amazon and Brazilian President Bolsonaro has become a target of global indignation
Brazil has always been a land of superlatives. Yet nothing beats the current, perverse configuration: a world statesman lingers in jail while a clownish thug is in power, his antics now considered a threat to the whole planet. In a wide-ranging, two-hour, world exclusive interview out of a prison room at the Federal Police building...
Read MoreCut down the trees. Kill the wild animals. Burn the bush. Pollute the rivers. Pave over the grass. Raise more beef, pigs and poultry in cages. That’s the credo of the new right. Hatred of Nature is an integral part of its politics. President Donald Trump is the high priest of such environmental vandalism. In...
Read MoreThe corrupt Brazilian government installed by Washington has decided to destroy the Amazon Rain Forest. This will adversely affect the Earth’s climate by eliminating a massive carbon sink. The beneficiaries of the destruction of the rain forest are the timber loggers who are buddies with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, environmental minister Ricardo Salles, and farming...
Read MoreBeijing could be forever tarnished if it does ‘dirty business’ with the Bolsonaro government in Brazil
China is South America’s top trading partner. Together, China’s policy banks – the China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank of China – are the top source of development finance for the whole of Latin America. Over the past few decades, the Brazilian government, leading national companies and multinational corporations have configured what Fernando Mires, already...
Read MoreThe Jewish world is outraged this morning with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who apparently said he believes the crimes of the Holocaust can be forgiven, but not forgotten. The far-right leader made the comments on Thursday night at a meeting with evangelical pastors in Rio de Janeiro. “We can forgive, but we cannot forget. That...
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Introduction The US embraces a regime doomed to failure and threatens the world’s most dynamic economy. President Trump has lauded Brazil’s newly elected President Jair Bolsonaro and promises to promote close economic, political, social and cultural ties. In contrast the Trump regime is committed to dismantling China’s growth model, imposing harsh and pervasive sanctions, and...
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How long have you lived overseas? Well, I've been spending half my time overseas for about the last 20 years. The vast majority of it has been in Brazil, and this country is quite strict about its immigration policy. It can be done, but for someone like myself, it's just too difficult of a nut...
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See, earlier: Brazil’s Bolsonaro—Among Other Things, A Pentecostalist Triumph? We constantly hear the Dem/ Main Stream Media Complex gloating that the US will be a majority non-white country by the 2040s. This prediction makes white Democrats hopeful as they naively envision a rainbow future of equality, love and electoral hegemony. It makes white Republicans despondent,...
Read MoreThe victory of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s presidential election last week has won Israel a passionate new friend on the international stage. The world’s fifth-most populous nation will now be “coloured in blue and white”, an Israeli official said, referring to the colours of Israel’s flag. The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately called to...
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With Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil’s presidential election at the weekend, the doom-mongers among western elites are out in force once again. His success, like Donald Trump’s, has confirmed a long-held prejudice: that the people cannot be trusted; that, when empowered, they behave like a mob driven by primitive urges; that the unwashed masses now...
Read MoreA troubling new era has begun in Brazil with the election on Sunday of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro as president
It’s darkness at the break of (tropical) high noon. Jean Baudrillard once defined Brazil as “the chlorophyll of our planet”. And yet a land vastly associated worldwide with the soft power of creative joie de vivre has elected a fascist for president. Brazil is a land torn apart. Former paratrooper Jair Bolsonaro was elected with...
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If the polls are correct, on Sunday October 27 the Pentecostal movement will effectively take power in the world’s fifth most populous country—the “Donald Trump of the Tropics,” former paratrooper and current senator Jair Bolsonaro, seems poised to win Brazil’s presidency. [Brazilian elections 2018: New poll claims far-right Bolsonaro may win over HALF of votes,...
Read MoreIntroduction In recent weeks the White House has embraced the contemporary version of the world’s most murderous regimes. President Trump has embraced the Saudi Arabian “Prince of Death” Mohammad bin Salman who has graduated from chopping hands and heads in public plazas to dismembering bodies in overseas consulates – the case of Jamal Khashoggi. The...
Read MoreIntroduction The decisive electoral victory of far-right Brazilian presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro startled politicians and analysts of the traditional parties of the left and right. The possible implications for the present and near future raises a number of fundamental questions whether it represents a ‘model’ for other countries or is the result of the specific...
Read MoreNothing less than the future of politics across the West – and across the Global South – is being played out in Brazil. Stripped to its essence, the Brazilian presidential elections represent a direct clash between democracy and an early 21st Century, neofascism, indeed between civilization and barbarism. Geopolitical and global economic reverberations will be...
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Brazil under Lula Da Silva 2003-2010
Introduction: Leftwing academics, writers and journalists have written tendentious articles where they manage to transform reactionary political leaders into working class heroes and present their dreadful policies as progressive advances. Recently, leftist pundits throughout US and Latin America have plagued the reading public with gross distortions of historical events contributing, in their own way, to...
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Pre-mature Political and Military Ejaculations
Introduction: Wall Street and the Pentagon greeted the onset of 2016 as a ‘banner year’, a glorious turning point in the quest for malleable regimes willing to sell-off the most lucrative economic resources, to sign off on onerous new debt to Wall Street and to grant use of their strategic military bases to the Pentagon....
Read More<Introduction: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office through a well-organized, carefully planned operation among the corrupt Brazilian political elite, closely linked to the stock-market, financial institutions and foreign energy companies. This ‘legislative coup d’état ‘eliminated the democratically-elected ‘political intermediaries’ and installed a regime directly controlled by the CEO’s of leading multi-nationals. The corporate...
Read MoreWilliam Engdahl recently explained how Washington used the corrupt Brazilian elite, which answers to Washington, to remove the duly elected President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, for representing the Brazilian people rather than the interests of Washington. Unable to see through the propaganda of unproven charges, Brazilians acquiesced in the removal of their protector, thereby providing...
Read MoreA powerful array of institutional/oligarchic interests is behind the rabid demonization of all things Workers’ Party. The interminable, ghastly telenovela aiming at turning Brazil, the seventh-largest economy in the world, into a Banana Republic of Scoundrels while destroying its economy, is—like the infamous GWOT (Global War on Terror)—a gift that keeps on giving. No, this...
Read MoreDilma Rousseff entered the Senate and calmly stared down her accusers. She left with her head held high after exhorting those Senators to vote with their conscience. Most of those politicians present probably had no idea what conscience means; they’re no more than corrupt messenger boys. But the Brazilian collective unconscious – Jung to the...
Read MoreThe Rio Olympics are gone – Bolt, Phelps, Neymar, the green pool, the Ugly American Lochte and all – but a global audience may have been spared a shameful last act. Mediocre incompetent opportunist, corrupt coward traitor, and certified political usurper, interim President Michel Temer, refused to go to the closing ceremony, afraid of being...
Read MoreThe 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...
Read MoreIn Brazil the country’s largest newspaper has published a transcript of a secret recording leaked to the newspaper. The words recorded are the plot by the rich Brazilian elite, involving both the US-corrupted Brazilian military and Supreme Court, to remove the democratically elected president of Brazil under false charges in order to stop the investigations...
Read MoreEvery political junkie on the planet has to be glued to the ongoing Brazilian House of Cards, consistently offering an unparalleled feast of cheap thrills. The latest cliffhanger was the leak of a conversation between one of the key operators involved in the oil giant Petrobras corruption scandal and a senator and short-lived Minister of...
Read MoreThe gloomy and repulsive night when the female president of the 7th largest economy in the world was the prey of choice fed to a lynch mob of hyenas in a drab, provincial Circus Maximus will forever live in infamy. By 367 votes for and 137 against, the impeachment/coup/regime change-light drive against Dilma Rousseff cleared...
Read MoreNever in modern political history has it been so easy to “abolish the people” and simply erase 54 million votes cast in a free and fair presidential election. Forget about hanging chads, as in Florida 2000. This is a day that will live in infamy all across the Global South – when what was one...
Read MoreWe are all living in Hybrid War time. From R2P (“responsibility to protect”) to color revolutions, from currency attacks to stock market manipulations. From judicial-financial-political-media enabled “soft” coups – as in Brazil – to support for “moderate” jihadis, multiple stages of Hybrid War now cross-pollinate and generate a vortex of new mutant viruses. Hybrid War,...
Read MoreBrazilian creativity knows no bounds. A popular, viral neologism perfectly defines what is going on in the 7th largest economy in the world: golpeachment – a mix of coup («golpe», in Portuguese) and impeachment, as applied to the current institutional circus farce thoroughly supported by US neocons, the military-industrial complex, and Wall Street financial interests,...
Read MoreSoon after the impeachment motion against President Dilma Rousseff was approved in the Brazilian Congress by what I chose to call Hybrid War hyenas, President-in-Waiting Michel «Brutus» Temer, one of the coup’s articulators, dispatched a senator to Washington as special paperboy to deliver the news on the coup in progress. The senator in question was...
Read MoreHaving removed the reformist President of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Washington is now disposing of the reformist President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff. Washington used a federal judge to order Argentina to sacrifice its debt restructuring program in order to pay US vulture funds the full value of defaulted Argentine bonds that the vulture funds...
Read MoreThe gloomy and repulsive night when the female President of the 7th largest economy in the world was the prey of choice fed to a lynch mob of hyenas in a drab, provincial Circus Maximus will forever live in infamy. By 367 votes for and 137 against, the impeachment/coup/regime change-light drive against Dilma Rousseff cleared...
Read MoreIt took only 3 minutes for a bunch of lowly crooks – more known for excelling in corruption than competent administration – to (literally) throw young but vibrant Brazilian democracy to the dogs. With no votes counted, so traitors would not be publicly identified, the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro...
Read MoreCompared to the political/economic rollercoaster in Brazil, House of Cards is kindergarten play. Only three days after massive street demonstrations calling for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, and less than two weeks after his legally dubious four-hour detention for questioning, former Brazilian President Lula is about to spectacularly re-enter the Brazilian government as a...
Read MoreIntroduction: The Brazilian working class is facing the most savage assault on its living standards in over a decade. And it is not just the industrial workers who are under attack. The landless rural workers, public and private salaried employees, teachers and health professionals, the unemployed and the poor are facing massive cuts in income,...
Read MoreIntroduction: For decades social critics have bemoaned the influence of sports and entertainment spectacles in ‘distracting’ workers from struggling for their class interests. According to these analysts, ‘class consciousness’ was replaced by ‘mass’ consciousness. They argued that atomized individuals, manipulated by the mass media, were converted into passive consumers who identified with millionaire sports heroes,...
Read More[Update, November 24, 2014: Despite dire predictions, TEPCO has successfully removed 1331 spent fuel rods from the cooling pond at Number 4 reactor. Removal of the 204 fresh fuel rods is underway. On the other hand, Mainichi reports that the "freeze play" plan to freeze contaminated water to keep it from draining into a trench...
Read MoreIntroduction: Brazil has witnessed one of the world’s most striking socio-economic reversals in modern history: from a dynamic nationalist industrializing to a primary export economy. Between the mid 1930’s to the mid 1980’s, Brazil averaged nearly 10% growth in its manufacturing sector largely based on state interventionist policies, subsidizing, protecting and regulating the growth of...
Read MoreReports on the premature death of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have been greatly exaggerated. Western corporate media is flooded with such nonsense, perpetrated in this particular case by the head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Reality spells otherwise. The BRICS meet in Durban, South Africa, this Tuesday to, among other...
Read MoreAs much as their attention may be focused on the stinging cold-war battle being fought by the two Koreas, Pentagon analysts have got to be paying close attention to what's going on in the steamy slums of Rio de Janeiro. After all, this is revealing itself to be an unprecedented tropical remix of the Pentagon's...
Read MoreSAO PAULO - In his wildest White House dreams, United States President Barack Obama swoops like an angel over the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert "Rally to Restore Sanity" that brought at least 200,000 people to the Mall in Washington, DC, this Saturday; he makes sure that "sanity" wins over "fear" - as it did, with a...
Read MoreSAO PAULO - Brazil is a country the world loves to love. Brazil is a (joyful) riddle wrapped in a (chaotic) enigma, with the added complexity that the riddle and the enigma are ritualistically juggling with football, dancing a samba, ogling a sensual mulata, watching a telenovela and sipping a lethal caipirinha - all at...
Read Moreand Keep Its Economic Surplus for Itself
CDES Conference, Brasilia, September 17, 2010 I would like to place this seminar’s topic, ‘Global Governance,’in the context of global control, which is what ‘governance’ is mainly about. The word (from Latin gubernari, cognate to the Greek root kyber) means ‘steering’. The question is, toward what goal is the world economy steering? That obviously depends...
Read MoreTwo elections in Latin America this fall will have decisive importance in the direction of economic and foreign policy for the coming decade. Introduction Venezuelan legislative elections on September 26 will determine whether President Chavez can secure the two-thirds majority needed to proceed with his democratic socialist agenda without the procedural obstructionism of an increasingly...
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