Showing posts with label BRICS Development Bank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BRICS Development Bank. Show all posts

Friday, March 18, 2016

SPECIAL REPORT. U.S. fomenting "constitutional coups" in BRICS alliance by Wayne Madsen Report



SPECIAL REPORT. U.S. fomenting "constitutional coups" in BRICS alliance
by Wayne Madsen Report
When President Obama flies over Brazil on his way from Cuba to Argentina, he will be flying over the latest member of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South African (BRICS) alliance to feel the effects of the Central Intelligence Agency's new brand of coup generation. After trying to mount an electoral defeat of Brazil's progressive leftist president, Dilma Rousseff, through a combination of presidential candidate assassination, "rent-a-mob" street demonstrations, and corporate media propaganda, the Langley spooks are now trying to run Rousseff from office through a "Made in America" impeachment process. Aware that Rousseff's progressive predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has been targeted by Brazilian prosecutors on the CIA's payroll, for arrest and prosecution for bribery, she has appointed him to her government with ministerial rank. 

Bribery charges, involving Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras and, in the case of Lula, construction firms, have also been leveled against Rousseff. George Soros, whose operatives in Brazil have been involved in launching "themed revolution" street protests, has made no secret of his desire to see Petrobras totally privatized so he can sink his fangs into the company and drain it for all it is worth. Soros operatives have turned thousands of people out into the streets of Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, and Rio de Janeiro in the "green and yellow" revolution. Protesters carry green and yellow banners and signs and dressed in green and yellow clothes have been confronted by an equal number of government supporters dressed in the red color of the ruling Workers' Party.

The anti-Rousseff/Lula movement bears a signature Soros name, "Vem Pra Rua," Portuguese for "To the Street." As with the disastrous Soros-inspired and CIA-nurtured Arab Spring protests in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia and Euromaidan protest in Ukraine, the Vem Pra Rua movement is basically nothing more than a politically-motivated capitalist campaign using Facebook, Twitter, and pro-insurrection television and radio networks, newspapers, and websites.

Vem Pra Rua's protests were marked by quickly-manufactured inflatable dolls of Lula in black and white prison garb and a placard cartoon drawing of Rousseff with a red diagonal "No" sign drawn through it.

Brazilian prosecutors on Langley's payroll recently arrested the popular Lula after staging a massive police raid of his house. Police also arrested the former First Lady of Brazil, Lula's wife Marisa Leticia. Lula said he felt that he was kidnapped by the police. In 2009, Honduran troops actually kidnapped President Manuel Zelaya in the middle of the night and detained him in a military cell prior to expelling him from the country. That operation, like the one against Lula and Rousseff, was backed not only by the CIA and NSA, but by the U.S. Southern Command in Miami. The Honduran coup was also backed by the Supreme Court of Honduras. To prevent a further political arrest of her predecessor, Rousseff has made Lula her chief of staff, a cabinet position that affords Lula protection from continuing prosecutorial harassment and legal proceedings by the federal court.


Soros's and the CIA's latest themed uprising, the Green and Yellow Revolution in Brazil. Soros's "revolutions" only serve the interests of Wall Street, the Pentagon, and Israel.

On March 16, Judge Sergio Moro, who is in charge of Operation "Lava-jato" ("Carwash"), the two-year investigation of Petrobras and the alleged bribery involving Rousseff and Lula, released two taped intercepts of phone calls between the president and former president. The bugged phone conversation involved Rousseff's plans to appoint Lula to her cabinet as a way to afford him some protection from the CIA's judicial-backed coup operation now in play. When the classified National Security Agency documents leaked by whistleblower Ed Snowden illustrated how NSA had spied on Rousseff's office and mobile phones, President Obama said he had ordered an end to such spying on world leaders friendly to the United States.

Rousseff, in a 2013 speech to the UN General Assembly in New York, said the following about the NSA spying on Brazilians: "
Personal data of citizens was intercepted indiscriminately. Corporate information, often of high economic and even strategic value,  was at the centre of espionage activity . . Also, Brazilian diplomatic missions, among them the permanent mission to the UN and the office of the president of the republic itself, had their communications intercepted." President Obama followed Rousseff on the General Assembly's podium and, in answer to Rousseff's blistering attack on the U.S. and NSA, stated, "We have begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so as to properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies, with the privacy concerns that all people share." Obama did not say that the U.S. would not use intercepted phone calls and email to bring down foreign leaders.

The NSA's wiretaps of Brazilian leaders and businessmen involved systems with such cover terms as SILVERZEPHYR, BLACKPEARL, FLYING PIG, and ROYALNET.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGJDy68FxJpS3xH4TToBhA9yGK_JdISNQ2VGvQD6KUPGUHiE4O2kBeAUGGVqmYfgzaDBGLXq-i2Fb4yFUP99UfXCqqp_F417rKaAZ40NMSu_CdVFjhysuCZ3hsHrrVURhEF90G/s1600/satc-03.jpg
NSA spying on Rousseff and Lula continuing. Intercepted phone calls being turned over to Brazilian judge with CIA ties.

Judge Sergio Moro's name appears in one of the leaked State Department cables. On October 30, 2009, the U.S. embassy in Brasilia reported that Moro attended an embassy-sponsored conference in Rio de Janeiro held from October 4-9. Titled "
Illicit Financial Crimes," the conference appears have been an avenue for the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to train Brazilian federal and state law enforcement, as well as other Latin American police officials from Argentina, Paraguay, Panama, and Uruguay, in procedures to mount bogus criminal prosecutions of Latin American leaders considered unfriendly to the United States. Former Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and members of her leftist political party also faced investigations by prosecutors and judges on the CIA's payroll. The State cable from Brasilia states: "Moro . . . discussed the 15 most common issues he sees in money laundering cases in the Brazilian Courts." Moro is also taking inspiration for his prosecution of Lula and Rousseff from the prosecutors in the Watergate affair that brought down President Richard Nixon.

The rece
nt intercepts of Rousseff's phone conversations with Lula, believed to have been gathered by NSA and turned over to Moro by the U.S. embassy in Brasilia, shows that Obama lied. The American president's forthcoming visit to Latin America has avoided Air Force One touching down in Latin America's biggest power, Brazil. Obama, who once prepared Latin America analytical reports for CIA front company Business International Corporation, is keenly aware that Brazil is now undergoing a "constitutional coup" aided and abetted by the CIA and Soros. Obama cannot be seen giving the imprimatur of legitimacy to a government being actively targeted by Langley and other U.S. intelligence agencies, including NSA.

The transcript of one phone call between Rousseff and Lula is hardly a reason to impeach Rousseff and throw her and Lula into prison, regardless of the aims of Soros, the CIA, and their Brazilian lackeys:

Phone call between Rousseff and Lula, 16 March
Rousseff: Hello.
Lula: Hello.
Rousseff: Lula, let me tell you something.
Lula: Tell me, my love.
Rousseff: It’s this, I am sending Messias [Jorge Rodrigo Araújo Messias, deputy head of legal affairs at the cabinet office] round with the papers, so that we have them, just in case of necessity, that is the terms of office, right?
Lula: Uh-huh. Ok, ok.
Rousseff: That’s all, wait there, he is heading there.
Lula: OK, I’m here. I’ll wait.
Rousseff: Right?
Lula: OK.
Rousseff: Bye.
The phone call is hardly an impeachable offense but a tactical move to protect Lula from a runaway prosecutor.
----
The CIA previously used judicial cover in its coups against Honduras's Zelaya in 2009 and Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo in 2012. Both Zelaya and Lugo were ousted by a relatively new CIA methodology for deposing leaders its dislikes -- the "constitutional coup" -- using legislatures and high courts to justify ousters brought on by Soros-financed street demonstrations and manipulation of private media, including newspapers and television. Rousseff and Lula are using the legal powers afforded to the Brazilian presidency to bring charges against Moro.

Lula sees Moro as the CIA rat he is. He condemned Moro's witch hunt, saying that "
with the press leading the investigative process they [the prosecutors] are going to re-found the republic. We have a totally cowardly Supreme Court, a totally cowardly High Court, a totally cowardly parliament  . . . a speaker of the house who is fucked, a president of the senate who is fucked, I don’t know how many legislators under threat, and everyone thinking that some kind of miracle is going to happen."

In South Africa, the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), which receives its support from Soros and the Jewish-dominated South African diamond and gold industry, is targeting president Jacob Zuma. The CIA has traditionally maintained strong influence over the DA, especially when it was led by Tony Leon, a former visiting fellow at the right-wing libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, DC. The tactics in South Africa are similar to those in Brazil. There are calls for Zuma to resign because of alleged bribes received by the wealthy Gupta family and influence peddling by the family. The charges against Zuma also extend to the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which has, since the apartheid era, been the target of the CIA. Even the South African Communist Party, a member of the ANC government, has taken on the taint of a Soros-infiltrated party by demanding Zuma reveal the full nature of his connections with the Guptas or face the political "consequences."

As far as Brazil is concerned, it is apparent that the CIA and Soros want to see Rousseff and Lula gone and in prison by the time the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics opens in August. The goal of the anti-government agitators in Brazil is to see a head of state chosen by the usual globalist suspects opening the Olympiad before an international audience.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

THE ROVING EYE BRICS against Washington consensus By Pepe Escobar




THE ROVING EYE
BRICS against Washington consensus
By Pepe Escobar

The headline news is that this Tuesday in Fortaleza, northeast Brazil, the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) fights the (Neoliberal) World (Dis)Order via a new development bank and a reserve fund set up to offset financial crises.

The devil, of course, is in the details of how they'll do it. 

It's been a long and winding road since Yekaterinburg in 2009, at their first summit, up to the BRICS's long-awaited counterpunch against the Bretton Woods consensus - the IMF and the World Bank - as well as the Japan-dominated (but largely responding to US priorities) Asian Development Bank (ADB).

The BRICS Development Bank - with an initial US$50 billion in capital - will be not only BRICS-oriented, but invest in infrastructure projects and sustainable development on a global scale. The model is the Brazilian BNDES, which supports Brazilian companies investing across Latin America. In a few years, it will reach a financing capacity of up to $350 billion. With extra funding especially from Beijing and Moscow, the new institution could leave the World Bank in the dust. Compare access to real capital savings to US government's printed green paper with no collateral.

And then there's the agreement establishing a $100 billion pool of reserve currencies - the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), described by Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov as "a kind of mini-IMF". That's a non-Washington consensus mechanism to counterpunch capital flight. For the pool, China will contribute with $41 billion, Brazil, India and Russia with $18 billion each, and South Africa with $5 billion.

The development bank should be headquartered in Shanghai - although Mumbai has forcefully tried to make its case (for an Indian take on the BRICS strategy, see here )

Way beyond economy and finance, this is essentially about geopolitics - as in emerging powers offering an alternative to the failed Washington consensus. Or, as consensus apologists say, the BRICS may be able to "alleviate challenges" they face from the "international financial system". The strategy also happens to be one of the key nodes of the progressively solidified China-Russia alliance, recently featured via the gas "deal of the century" and at the St. Petersburg economic forum.

Let's play geopolitical ball 
Just as Brazil managed, against plenty of odds, to stage an unforgettable World Cup - the melting of the national team notwithstanding - Vladimir Putin and Xi Xinping now come to the neighborhood to play top class geopolitical ball.

The Kremlin views the bilateral relation with Brasilia as highly strategic. Putin not only watched the World Cup final in Rio; apart from Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, he also met German chancellor Angela Merkel (they discussed Ukraine in detail). Yet arguably the key member of Putin's traveling party is Elvira Nabiulin, president of Russia's Central Bank; she is pressing in South America the concept that all negotiations with the BRICS should bypass the US dollar.

Putin's extremely powerful, symbolic meeting with Fidel Castro in Havana, as well as writing off $36 billion in Cuban debt could not have had a more meaningful impact all across Latin America. Compare it with the perennial embargo imposed by a vengeful Empire of Chaos.

In South America, Putin is meeting not only with Uruguay's President Pepe Mujica - discussing, among other items, the construction of a deepwater port - but also with Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro and Bolivia's Evo Morales.

Xi Jinping is also on tour, visiting, apart from Brazil, Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela. What Beijing is saying (and doing) complements Moscow; Latin America is viewed as highly strategic. That should translate into more Chinese investment and increased South-South integration.

This Russia-China commercial/diplomatic offensive fits the concerted push towards a multipolar world - side by side with political/economic South American leaders. Argentina is a sterling example. While Buenos Aires, already mired in recession, fights American vulture funds - the epitome of financial speculation - in New York courthouses, Putin and Xi come offering investment in everything from railways to the energy industry.

Russia's energy industry of course needs investment and technology from private Western multinationals, just as Made in China developed out of Western investment profiting from a cheap workforce. What the BRICS are trying to present to the Global South now is a choice; on one side, financial speculation, vulture funds and the hegemony of the Masters of the Universe; on the other side, productive capitalism - an alternative strategy of capitalist development compared to the Triad (US, EU, Japan).

Still, it will be a long way for the BRICS to project a productive model independent of the casino capitalism speculation "model", by the way still recovering from the massive 2007/2008 crisis (the financial bubble has not burst for good.)

One might view the BRICS's strategy as a sort of running, constructive critique of capitalism; how to purge the system from perennially financing the US fiscal deficit as well as a global militarization syndrome - related to the Orwellian/Panopticon complex - subordinated to Washington. As Argentine economist Julio Gambina put it, the key question is not being emergent, but independent.

In this piece, La Stampa's Claudio Gallo introduces what could be the defining issue of the times: how neoliberalism - ruling directly or indirectly most of the world - is producing a disastrous anthropological mutation that is plunging us all into global totalitarianism (while everyone swears by their "freedoms").

It's always instructive to come back to Argentina. Argentina is imprisoned by a chronic foreign debt crisis essentially unleashed by the IMF over 40 years ago - and now perpetuated by vulture funds. The BRICS bank and the reserve pool as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank offer the possibility for dozens of other nations to escape the Argentine plight. Not to mention the possibility that other emerging nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Iran and Turkey may soon contribute to both institutions.

No wonder the hegemonic Masters of the Universe gang is uneasy in their leather chairs. This Financial Times piece neatly summarizes the view from the City of London - a notorious casino capitalism paradise.

These are heady days in South America in more ways than one. Atlanticist hegemony will remain part of the picture, of course, but it's the BRICS's strategy that is pointing the way further on down the road. And still the multipolar wheel keeps rolling along.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.