On the impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff

Another article that I think covers the situation nicely:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/05/dilma_rousseff_was_the_suspension_of_the_brazilian_president_a_coup.html

Yes, I said it was a charade to be calling it a "coup", which was neither illegal or violent, according to the definition of the word. Anyway, it will the same ruling, thieving elites who will take over the nominal leadership position. The elites are all it together for themselves. It's the same political sport played in pretty much all "democracies" around the world. Whichever party is pushed up front to win will follow the elites' class-interested policies. It's like the NFL, NBA, MLB, or UEFA. There's competition but whoever wins, the league will always win...

Does it matter that much if Dilma was really guilty of anything? She borrowed on a much bigger scale than her predecessors, but so what? It became a great great excuse to cause an impeachment stir and divert attention from the overt Petrobras ripoff. She and Lula will retire on what they secretly looted and stashed away somewhere. Even if she was still the president, the system would remain the same anyway.

No one at the top in the US went to jail for their economic crimes for the subprime ripoff and it will surprise me if anyone at the top in Brazil will go to prison, much as I would like to see it in both countries.

BTW, not sure which of my facebook friends you might be. Let me know (by private message if you prefer)!



Quite unfortunately I agree. But I hold out hope for continued change and continued maturation of the young Brazilian democracy.



To me this is crucial to stopping corruption. If she is guilty yes that is the only thing that matters. Too often the corrupt are excused for other pragmatic reasons and this is how such systemic corruption gets entrenched.

In Brazil it is just expected that everyone will be corrupt, and until ALL corruption is rejected it will always be that way, because otherwise everyone will excuse the corruption of their guys, the ones they side with.



If it were legal I wouldn't care. But if it is not legal, as I am led to believe, then this matters. It was cooking the books to get reelected, and while that is a much smaller crime than the corruption others are being accused of if she is guilty of it that matters.



As the chairperson of the board of Petrobras during the bribery I think she holds responsibility for presiding over such corruption and even though she is not personally implicated yet I find it likely that she participated in it (and it seems clear that Lula did).



What crimes were those? What they did was legal as far as I am aware. The US regulations loosened the capital requirements of banks and they gambled accordingly. I am not aware of anyone major Wall Street institution or person guilty of crimes related to that that were not punished.

And Brazil has already had at least one conviction and hopefully we'll see more. I get the despair about the powerful doing harm with impunity but I think Brazil's actually maturing here, when I lived in Brazil the same corruption was happening and we didn't even get to hear about it, it wasn't even investigated. That the investigations are happening, and that it can take down leaders should embolden Brazilians in their fight against their corrupt leaders.

Admittedly this is an optimistic viewpoint from a person who is inherently optimistic but I do see positive signs in this mess, even if the short term political result is saddening.

Hey Robert, it's Wayne, Tri's brother. I thought you would know already...

The crimes off fraud and predatory lending. All done with "plausible deniability", of course, so it was "legal". Just google "subprime mortgage crisis/fraud/conspiracy" and you'll get more info. than you want. There's even a recent movie about it too, "The Big Short". It was a total fraud job ripping off TRILLIONS from US tax payers. A genius plan, really.

Here's how US bankers stayed out of jail and how only one banker went to prison. I hope it will be different in Brazil but I'm not holding my breath.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wall-streets-bankers-stayed-out-of-jail/399368/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html

Ah! I thought about you, but because we weren't discussing anything on Facebook didn't quite put two and two together. Good to see you here, hope you join some of the other discussions!

I've have actually read and studied a lot about the subprime mortgages and there certainly was a lot of fraud going around, but for the most part it didn't seem concentrated at the top (Wall Street) so much as downstream, including significant fraud by home buyers too. Smaller regional lenders knew they were gonna resell the debt upstream anyway (which was then packaged and resold over and over) and didn't care about whether the loans were going to be repaid or not. I think in the subprime mortgage crisis the fraud was concentrated in smaller banks, not the ones at the top (and that I thought you were referring to).

But that being said I guess I do agree that the initial focus was just on averting crisis and not punishing those who broke the law, and do wish that there was more punishment there. I just think that the key to the crisis was that we loosened regulations and the laws to the point that much of what was done at the top (Wall Street) was legal, but shouldn't have been (i.e. relaxing the capitalization requirements for banks was stupid, and not regulating all the new financial instruments better was a big error).

This documentary very thoroughly discusses who was involved, and how the scam was orchestrated. There's footage from Senate hearings where admissions are made.

The outcome wasn't just about the handouts, but also about making the TBTF orgs even bigger.

A fraud this big needs to be directed from the top: from Wall Street to the ratings agencies to Washington: to rate, sell, and buy what they all knew were bundles of ****; to bail them out and not prosecute after. It's fine with me if you believe it was concentrated in the smaller banks. I see them following the rules and directives set from the top.

In any case I think your source material and what it inspired me to peruse (and remember) has convinced me that my claim that there was little to no fraud at the top was an incorrect overstatement. I still do think this was driven more by fraud below (the big banks were buying "bundles" of debt that had a lot of fraud built into it by smaller banks) but that does not negate that my conception of there being little to no fraud at the top was incorrect.

Just based on the enormous settlements that have happened with big banks since I formed that early opinion it is clear that it was not quite right.

Who allowed the fraud below to happen? Answer: Deregulation from the top. It was impossible to get "ninja" loans before deregulation, for the good reason of guaranteed default on the loan. Imagine if you were a lender/loan shark and you knew that your loans would be guaranteed by the government, wouldn't you be giving out loans to anyone with a pulse? That's what the top allowed to happen, which is part of their plan to get people into debt. This has been the plan since the 1970's, resulting from the protesting, trouble-making times of the 1960's, when people had NO DEBT.

Sure but them getting the government to agree to rules that favored them (the repeal of Sections 20 and 32 of the Glass–Steagall Act) was self-interested but legal. Our government effectively legalized much of the dangerous behavior that banks later took advantage of and I blame the legislators who let this happen more than the banks, they are acting naturally within their self-interest and it is up to us to decide how far they can go.

In any case I do already agree that fraud occurred at the top during the 2007 financial crisis.

When bundled toxic debt is rated as a TripleA investment by Moody's et al, and sold to hedge funds and pension funds, that indicates high-level complicity in crime. This was discussed at Senate hearings in detail.

I've conceded that I was wrong about there being crime at the top a few times now, I'm going to avoid repeating myself to stay on topic.

Wall Street and the banks own the legislators. It's a revolving door up there anyway so it's basically the same people. You have to be involved with the 1% to play in that game so it basically shuts out democracy for the rest of us.

Does the BRICS investment bank come into this equation, you think?

Which equation?

The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff.

The BRICS investment bank, while "welcomed" by the IMF, gives developing nations an alternative to being indebted to a globalist power.

Russia and China are dealing in their own currencies for oil and gas deals, and China recently stated that US treasury bonds won't be acceptable for trade.

It all ties together, right?

Only in the minds of Russians on the internet.

I've read dozens of screeds by Russians telling us the BRICS bank is going to make the dollar no longer valuable and cause financial chaos in the US the likes of which we have never seen while newly wealthy Russians dance in the streets, ha ha ha. Meanwhile, the dollar appreciates in value, the ruble has lost over 50% of its value, the Russian economy is a stinking mess and most of the rest of the BRICS countries aren't doing too well. By the way, the BRICS bank opened up already, so far it hasn't made a single loan to a developing country.

What a laugh.

This may (or may not) be because of the corporate media choke-hold on your news outlets.

RT news and Al Jazeera are far more reliable and responsible sources than CNN or Fox.

You might have missed the latest from China's admin, refusing US dollars for exchange. That's what you get from a controlled media.

The first casualty in any conflict is the truth, Blickers.

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Really??? You mean all those Chinese companies making stuff for American's companies like Apple are not going to accept dollars as payment anymore?

That's terrible. The US companies will just find some other low-wage country who will accept our dollars as payment for their products, and China will go into a Depression. Poor China.

LOL. Poor China indeed.

For exchange, right? Meaning no swapping your money for theirs.