Brazil’s President Booted from Office
HAVANA TIMES — After a marathon session, the Brazilian Senate voted early Thursday to temporarily oust President Dilma Rousseff from office and start impeachment proceedings that could make her departure permanent.
Rousseff, who suffered a resounding 55-22 defeat after 20-hours of speeches, will be replaced today by Vice President Michel Temer, who had favored the president’s removal.
Amid a general crisis of mass corruption weighing across the board of Brazil’s political spectrum, Rousseff stands accused of malfeasance for tampering with accounts to hide a budget shortfall. She has not been accused of embezzling or taking pay offs.
The new interim president, Michel Temer, and his top advisors are already implicated in the mass corruption scandal involving the Brazilian State Petrobras oil company and several major construction companies, noted Democracy Now, adding that just last week Temer was ordered to pay a fine for violating campaign finance limits.
Brazil’s attorney general Jose Eduardo Cardozo defended Rousseff and called the Senate vote a “historic injustice.” He said:
“An honest and innocent woman is, right at this moment, being condemned. A judicial pretense is being used to oust a legitimately elected president over acts which have been practiced by all previous governments. A historic injustice is being committed; an innocent person is being condemned.”
Democracy Now reported that during the Senate debate, military police fired tear gas at thousands of protesters who had gathered outside Congress, the vast majority supporters of President Rousseff.
The reason Rouseff has gone was a consequence of a vote by the Senate which followed the mass demonstrations by the public following Rousseffs approval ratings falling to 9%. The political choice is not one between socialism and dictatorship, it is whether the public wish to have freedom of choice or socialist dictatorship as in Cuba.
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article4495
What they want is a dictatorship in Brazil. A dictatorship which may not even take the military form, because it is really not presentable at the international level, but which will surely the form of a state of emergency, with civilians in the government, which will control through physical violence the increasingly frustrated masses. To implement this process of transition to a regime of accumulation based on social deprivation articulated with a political mode of authoritarian regulation, there is no other word than dictatorship.
Socialists are always declared to be innocent, faultless and brimful of integrity by their fellow travelers. The name changed Rouseff was Chair of the Board of Petrobras with Lulu as President of the country when corruption occurred. So who had overall responsibility? Demonstrations by the left are also always acceptable, but when such demonstrations are by others, they are declared to be ‘fascists’. The left is now quaking in anticipation of the next loss that they will suffer – that of Nicholas Maduro who by pursuing the policies taught by Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez has driven his country to achieve the highest inflation rate in the world. So Cuba awarded him the Jose Marti Medal.
The left will blabber that it is all a consequence of a capitalist or ‘neoliberal’ plot when actually it is a consequence of socialist policies and incompetence creating debt, corruption and economic difficulty for the people they claim to represent. Countries run by a socialist administration build up debt. The historical evidence is there.