Ed President of Brazil Impeached

[Puppycow]

Anyone else been following the political situation in Brazil lately?

I've seen some headlines about it, but I admit that my knowledge of what is happening there is pretty shallow. I would like to learn more though. The latest development is that President Dilma Rousseff has been impeached:

Dilma Rousseff Is Impeached by Brazil’s Lower House of Congress (New York Times)

BRASÍLIA — Brazilian legislators voted on Sunday night to approve impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the nation’s first female president, whose tenure has been buffeted by a dizzying corruption scandal, a shrinking economy and spreading disillusionment.

After three days of impassioned debate, the lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, voted to send the case against Ms. Rousseff to the Senate. Its 81 members will vote by a simple majority on whether to hold a trial on charges that the president illegally used money from state-owned banks to conceal a yawning budget deficit in an effort to bolster her re-election prospects.

Those pressing for impeachment had to win the support of two-thirds of the 513 deputies in the lower house; the decisive 342nd vote for impeachment happened at about 10:10 p.m. Eastern time. At that time, there were 127 no votes, and six abstentions.

If the Senate accepts the case, Ms. Rousseff will step down temporarily while it deliberates her fate. Vice President Michel Temer, a constitutional law scholar and seasoned politician, will assume the presidency.

Given the larger-than-expected margin of deputies voting for impeachment, some political analysts said the Senate was likely to remove Ms. Rousseff from office, a ruling that would require a two-thirds majority.

“Politicians know how to read society pretty well, and they can sense that the people want her out,” said Paulo Sotero, the director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

I also heard that Ms. Rousseff accused the Vice President of a conspiracy against her, so that he could assume the presidency. Some of her supporters see this as a coup.

“This is a coup, a traumatic injury to Brazil’s presidential system,” said Pedro Arruda, a political analyst at the Pontifical Catholic University in São Paulo. “This is just pretext to take down a president who was elected by 54 million people. She doesn’t have foreign bank accounts, and she hasn’t been accused of corruption, unlike those who are trying to impeach her.”

Some background:

The vote to impeach is a crushing defeat for Ms. Rousseff and her Workers’ Party, a former band of leftist agitators who battled the nation’s military rulers in the 1980s and who swept to power in 2002 with the election of one its founders, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to the presidency.

Mr. Da Silva, a skillful politician who endeared himself to both rich and poor, presided over heady economic growth and a generous expansion of social welfare benefits that helped lift millions of Brazilians out of abject poverty.

He also moved to strengthen the government’s control of key industries like petroleum. That set the stage for abuses at Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, that would later ensnare scores of the nation’s political and business elite in a scheme that funneled kickbacks into campaign coffers.

Barred from running for a third term, he anointed Ms. Rouseff as his successor, and she easily won election in 2010.

A former Marxist guerilla, Ms. Rousseff had never before held elected office, and critics say her lack of political skills hampered her ability to work with opposition members in Congress as well as key figures in her governing coalition.

In 2014, she was re-elected by a thin margin after an especially divisive campaign.

As the economy went into a tailspin and a huge corruption scandal took down once-untouchable political figures, Ms. Rousseff was abandoned by many of her allies, giving momentum to an impeachment initiative conceived by her rivals.

. . .

The impeachment drive has been deeply polarizing, spurring raucous street protests, sundering friendships and provoking widespread anxiety over the potential impact to Brazil’s democracy.

Ms. Rousseff and her supporters have likened the impeachment drive to a slow-rolling coup by her political rivals, among them Mr. Temer, her vice president, who last month joined those calling for her impeachment.

The recent fortunes of Brazil, once an economic powerhouse of the developing world, have gone from bad to worse, with the economy expected to contract at least 3.5 percent for a second year in a row. Millions of Brazilians have lost their jobs since the days of double-digit growth, fueled in part by China’s hunger for commodities.

In recent months, her once-favorable approval ratings have dipped below 8 percent.

Brazil's economy is in bad shape right now, there have been lots of corruption scandals at the same time, and her government is extremely unpopular right now. There are also possible corruption scandals involving the Vice President, and the leader of the Lower House:

Next in line for the presidency after Mr. Temer is Eduardo Cunha, the powerful leader of the lower house, who has been a driving force behind Ms. Rousseff’s impeachment. An evangelical Christian who is fond of using his Twitter account to spread biblical verse, Mr. Cunha is accused of using a Swiss bank account to conceal $40 million in bribes.

It seems like the political class is corrupt through-and-through.
There's actually a lot more in the article I would like to quote but I don't want to bend the forum rules too far.

 

[fuelair]

Might wanna get your title fixed!!!!!

 

[Corsair 115]

It seems like the political class is corrupt through-and-through.

So, pretty much like everywhere else then?

 

[Puppycow]

So, pretty much like everywhere else then?

There are matters of degrees. Of course no country's political class is perfect, but some are worse than others.
Politicians, like the rest of humanity, are subject to human frailties. And while nobody is perfect, I'll happily take the best of humanity over the worst any day. There seems to be a pretty big gap between a country like Brazil and one like Denmark (and Denmark ain't perfect of course, but it's still a huge difference).

You may have heard of Transparency International, an organization which ranks countries according to perceived corruption. Here's their latest report:

http://www.transparency.org/cpi2015

Brazil gets a score of 38 out of 100, whereas Denmark gets 91.

In one sense though, Brazil is more "normal" than Denmark: that is, serious corruption seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

Sixty-eight per cent of countries worldwide have a serious corruption problem. Half of the G20 are among them.

Not one single country, anywhere in the world, is corruption-free.

So in that sense, there is a grain of truth to what you say. Brazil is more like the majority of countries than Denmark is.

 

[McHrozni]

I also heard that Ms. Rousseff accused the Vice President of a conspiracy against her, so that he could assume the presidency. Some of her supporters see this as a coup.

This is actually quite telling. Apparently some of her supporters view her leadership as her right that trumps pretty much everything. Each of them is deranged.

McHrozni

 

[Puppycow]

This is actually quite telling. Apparently some of her supporters view her leadership as her right that trumps pretty much everything. Each of them is deranged.

McHrozni

Yes, and given that impeachment is a constitutional legal process, it simply is not a coup d'état by definition.

 

[theprestige]

Yes, and given that impeachment is a constitutional legal process, it simply is not a coup d'état by definition.

I guess it depends how you define a coup. If Vice President Gore had conspired with key members of the Senate, to remove Clinton from office by impeachment, in exchange for favors once he assumed the presidency, would that have been a coup?

If Vice President Ford had done the same, in the impeachment of Richard Nixon, would that have been a coup?

 

[Beerina]

Nixon may have been the opposite -- people wondered if his resignation wasn't purchased at the cost of agreeing to pardon him.

Clinton was impeached, but the Senate declined to remove him from office, which was probably the proper level of response for his crime of lying about an affair. But the Republicans were pushing hard for it, talking it up. Was that a coup attempt? Or is the political nature of it part of the proceedings?

The People are watching, and either support or do not. That matters quite a lot for an impeachment.

 

[Darth Rotor]

Clinton was impeached, but the Senate declined to remove him from office, which was probably the proper level of response for his crime of lying about an affair. But the Republicans were pushing hard for it, talking it up.
Was that a coup attempt?

No, it was due process per the Constitution and it failed in the Senate for all of the right reasons.

When someone tells me that a nation south of the Rio Grande has corrupt politicians, my generic response is "and fish swim in water." We have corrupt nitwits here who cause us more trouble.

What would make Brazil an exception to the general rot that is politics in Latin and South America? What makes them special?

 

[Puppycow]

I guess it depends how you define a coup.

Sure. There's the original, narrow definition of the word: a coup d'état, which "is the illegal and overt seizure of a state by the military or other elites within the state apparatus", and there's a looser usage of the word, which could include legal, nonviolent takeovers, like "a boardroom coup". I meant the stricter definition of the word.

 

[sackett]

Where's Luciana when you need her?

 

[AcesHigh]

Senate will vote on her suspension (180 days) this night, after all 80 Senators had their 15 minutes speech each. To suspend her a simple majority (41 senators) suffice.

After 180 days, where she can prepare her defense, there will be a new Senate Session, presided by the president of the Supreme Court, where 2/3 of Senate votes are needed, and if guilty, she will then be "really" be impeached, that is, removed from office.

 

[AcesHigh]

PT, like all bolivarians, won´t drop the bone of power. That's why they call this a coup, when it´s clear Dilma broke the Fiscal Responsibility Law.

she spent more money than was authorized by congress and then (this is the worst part) she borrowed money from public banks to present a surplus. This is illegal, its a reckless form of "creative accounting" that would put any CEO of a private company in jail. The result isn't just a legal technicality it allowed the country's fiscal situation to spin out of control.

There is of course a political aspect if the economy was booming and she was popular she probably wouldn't be impeached but the point is the crime is an impeachable offense.


I would also add that this creative accounting was done exactly in election year, so she could win the re-election, which she did by a small margin (51% of votes).

 

[Henri McPhee]

Creative accounting? What a shock! I'm sure that never happens if you work for the government, or in big business, in other countries. You just need some mates in a remuneration committee and a big pay rise for the CEO every year, even if the company is making losses in business every year.

It looks to me as though it's another CIA coup plot backed up by their allies in Wall Street, and all their moronic economists and corrupt bankers and corrupt brokers, and Hillary Clinton and hedge fund managers. They did the same thing to Allende in Chile about 45 years ago and installed Thatcher's boyfriend General Pinochet, who promptly bumped off thousands of students and opposition in Chile. It's not furthering the interests of the people.

Most, if not all, the people who are to replace Rousseff are under investigation for corruption. I don't know if the CIA did the same thing in Argentina and Nicaragua but it seems likely to me. What can you do about it?

 

[NWO Sentryman]

OK, chile is a lot more complicated than "lolcia!". Allende and the legislature had been clashing to the point that civil war was on the horizon. Pinochet had acted on his own, with little CIA prodding. And frankly it's offensive to deny Latin Americans their own agency when it comes to the seedy antics of the Americans in that time to say the dictators were all automatons who obeyed Washington's beck and call.

Now, the workers party in Brazil, from all accounts are scum through and through.

 

[Darth Rotor]

It looks to me as though it's another CIA coup plot backed up by their allies in Wall Street,

FFS, give it a rest, will ya? Brazil is a grown up country that can have its own issues and problems without it all being some freaking plot or conspiracy.

 

[Damien Evans]

Creative accounting? What a shock! I'm sure that never happens if you work for the government, or in big business, in other countries. You just need some mates in a remuneration committee and a big pay rise for the CEO every year, even if the company is making losses in business every year.

It looks to me as though it's another CIA coup plot backed up by their allies in Wall Street, and all their moronic economists and corrupt bankers and corrupt brokers, and Hillary Clinton and hedge fund managers. They did the same thing to Allende in Chile about 45 years ago and installed Thatcher's boyfriend General Pinochet, who promptly bumped off thousands of students and opposition in Chile. It's not furthering the interests of the people.

Most, if not all, the people who are to replace Rousseff are under investigation for corruption. I don't know if the CIA did the same thing in Argentina and Nicaragua but it seems likely to me. What can you do about it?

 

[AcesHigh]

Creative accounting? What a shock! I'm sure that never happens if you work for the government, or in big business, in other countries. You just need some mates in a remuneration committee and a big pay rise for the CEO every year, even if the company is making losses in business every year.

depending on what kind of creative accounting is done, it can land a CEO in jail.

Dilma's government "creative accounting" are forbidden by law in Brazil and amounted to billions and billions of dollars loaned from Government Banks to not show the budget problems. This was done during her RE-ELECTION campaign.

The loans were paid AFTER the re-election.

Most, if not all, the people who are to replace Rousseff are under investigation for corruption.

No. Michel Temer has no solid corruption evidence against him. The OAS CEO cited his name as the source of donations, but it was proved those donations were legal AND had already been declared to brazilian IRS and Electoral Tribunal, according to law.

 

[Henri McPhee]

This new Minister of Agriculture in Brazil want to to encourage deforestation in the Amazon in order to promote climate change, and to destroy and kill wildlife. I find it rather alarming.

 

[AcesHigh]

This new Minister of Agriculture in Brazil want to to encourage deforestation in the Amazon in order to promote climate change, and to destroy and kill wildlife. I find it rather alarming.

of course.

and men never landed on the moon, Monsanto is controlled by Illuminatti and the Earth is flat. Which btw makes all climate models obsolete, since they are based on a spherical Earth lol