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More Important Than the Olympics

While almost everyone seems focused on who will be the fastest swimmer today, Brazil's first female president is being impeached for what some might say are less than legit reasons. Here's Sanders is getting his two cents in.

Sanders yesterday denounced in harsh terms the impeachment of Brazil's democratically elected president. As the Brazilian Senate heads toward a final vote later this month, Sanders described his position, set forth in a statement posted on his Senate site, as "calling on the United States to take a definitive stand against efforts to remove Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff from office." He added: "To many Brazilians and observers the controversial impeachment process more closely resembles a coup d'état."

Sanders also condemned the unelected center-right coalition under Michel Temer that has seized power during Rousseff's suspension and is now trying to install themselves through 2018. "After suspending Brazil's first female president on dubious grounds, without a mandate to govern," he said, " the new interim government abolished the ministry of women, racial equality and human rights" and "replaced a diverse and representative administration with a cabinet made up entirely of white men." They are now attempting to implement radical policies that could never be democratically ratified: "impose austerity, increase privatization and install a far right-wing social agenda."

Sanders' statement comes as Brazil's elites - virtually unified in favor of Dilma's impeachment - have taken extraordinary (and almost comically futile) measures during the Olympics to hide from the domestic public, and the world, how deeply unpopular Temer is. Brazil's largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, last month was caught manufacturing polling data when it claimed that 50% of Brazilians want him to stay (in fact, their own poll showed a large majority (62%) want Temer out and new elections held and the paper's Ombudsman harshly criticized them). Brazilian media spent months hyping the prospect of Temer's election in 2018 without mentioning the rather significant fact that he's been banned by a court for running for 8 years because he violated election law (they were forced to mention that last week when the São Paulo prosecutor called attention to this fact in the wake of a new media movement to have Temer run).

Originally, Dilma's impeachment hinged on an accusation that she did some sketchy bookkeeping to hide government debt. The Brazilian Senate investigator's report then said there was no evidence of this. "Shockingly", this didn't stop the impeachment proceedings.

In just over 30 days since his installation, Temer lost three of his chosen ministers to corruption. One of them, his extremely close ally Romero Jucá, was caught on tape plotting Dilma's impeachment as a way to shut down the ongoing corruption investigation, as well as indicating that Brazil's military, the media, and the courts were all participants in the impeachment plotting.

Link

Now you may go back to watching your sports.

By min | August 9, 2016, 1:24 PM | Liberal Outrage


Comments

I'm Brazilian and this does worry me more than the Olympics (for which I couldn't care less tbh).

Brazil's government right now is borderline ridiculous - there's been even discussions about the creation of a law to ban all talk of communism and the communist symbol. Idiotic stuff like that which makes me really pissed off.

Bernie Sanders just bought a $600k mansion in Vermont. His 3rd piece of real estate.

I'm keenly aware for the need of a social safety net for those who cannot compete as well economically as the upper-four quintiles of income earners, let alone relative to the standard-bearer "median" of the same. (College degree[s] or not!)

However, I also understand Temer et al. want to steer Brazil from "progressing" down the road to the socialist privation that plagues Venezuela.

And though the CIA might have played a role in the regime change, I'm glad for two things:

1) The CIA's impact on Brexit seems negligible, i.e. the voters had their say. (Unlike what apparently happened in Brazil.)

2) Brazil's economic decline won't damage the U.S. economy nearly as much as the Brexit helped the American economy.