Some Brazilians reacted negatively to our recent article on Brazil who are basically saying that Lula has been a corrupt leader and so his successor President Dilma Rousseff after him.
However, Pepe Escobar, who is currently based in Brazil, is saying that’s not the whole story.

What we can deduce from these two opposing views is the reality that Brazil may now be experiencing what the Philippines exactly had gone through when the strongman Marcos was kicked out from the country and exiled into Hawaii.

In 1986, about 2 million souls tired of Martial Rule flooded EDSA, the main avenue in Metro Manila.
It was in response from the call of the late Cardinal Sin to help Gen. Fidel Ramos and Juan P. Enrile, two key personalities within the Marcos dictatorship who had launched a coup d’ etat to oust Marcos.

Yes, there were military abuses during the Martial Law era, but it was Juan Ponce Enrile who was the defense secretary then. Yes, there were police brutalities at the time, but it was Gen. Fidel Ramos who was the Chief of the Philippine Constabulary then. Were they both purposely encouraging those abuses to defame Marcos?

Aside from the two cronies, there were other cronies of the late dictator who had greatly benefited from the Marcos rule. They were collectively called as the Rolex 12.
We must understand that the Philippines was, just like other targeted countries, under a CIA attack known as low intensity conflict [LIC], a combination of political intrigue and active insurgency, two methods which the Jesuits are known experts of.
This is what Marcos was trying to defeat with his imposition of the Martial Law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkS7yn2Cr88
Most notable from the Marcos’ speech above is the willingness of the Philippine government to share “non-conventional” energy technology. There’s only one non-conventional energy technology at the time, i.e. Dingel’s waterfuel technology powering his car.
In the end, he was hijacked by his own trusted “cronies” who continue to lust power for themselves:

‘In the Official Gazette report, Marcos said he met with the 12 men “repeatedly, in all-night sessions at Pangarap, Malacañang Park,” five or seven days before the actual proclamation.”

But according to a general interviewed by National College of Public Administration and Governance dean Alex Brillantes Jr., and quoted in his book, “Dictatorship and Martial Law: Philippine Authoritarianism in 1972,” six of the 12 knew of Marcos’ decision to impose martial law two months before the actual proclamation.

Referred to as the “seven wise men” by Marcos’ civilian aides in Malacañang, the group–Marcos himself, Enrile, Ver, Diaz, Montoya, Gatan and Cojuangco–met in early July 1972 at the Pangarap rest house after a party held to celebrate the promotion of some military officers.

…

Montoya was to implement the declaration of martial law in Metro Manila, Diaz was to direct its implementation in the First PC Zone, and Ver was to handle the “conclave in Malacañang.”

One of the generals noticed Ramos’ absence and asked Ver why he was not included, given that he was a Marcos relative. [Gen. Fidel Ramos graduated from WestPoint Military Academy; later became a consultant to the Carlyle Group after his presidency.]

…

Enrile also reportedly said Cojuangco was involved because “he was the political leader trusted by the President to supervise the Central Luzon area.”

Another general interviewed by Brillantes said Cojuangco was involved “because he had contact with, and knew how to handle, [Sen. Benigno “Ninoy”] Aquino.”

Ninoy Aquino, who was assassinated on Aug. 21, 1983, was Marcos’ archenemy. His wife, former President Corazon Aquino, is a cousin of Cojuangco’s.

…

He said that at the time of the Omega 5 meetings, he was PC provincial commander of Tarlac, a hotbed of insurgency and Ninoy Aquino’s home province.’

http://marcosgold.blogspot.com/2011/10/rolex-12-marcos-cronies-and-philippine.html

The strongest proof that it was Cojuanco who ordered the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, his own cousin-in-law, and not dictator Marcos, is the fact that even during the presidential tenures of Corazon Aquino and incumbent Pres. Noynoy Aquino, wife and son of the victim, the mastermind of the death of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino was never identified conclusively by the courts even when the actual assassins behind bars are already pointing their fingers on Cojuanco.

MANILA — Eduardo (Danding) Cojuangco Jr. was the king of cronies.

Under his friend and mentor, Ferdinand E. Marcos, Cojuangco amassed $1.5 billion in corporate assets through illegal monopolies and massive fraud, prosecutors say. And although it was never proved, President Corazon Aquino reportedly suspected her long-estranged cousin of a role in the 1983 assassination of her husband, Benigno S. Aquino Jr.

… Over a year later, Cojuangco remains not only free but a jarring public reminder of Aquino’s growing political impotence.

…

His family, including his wife, two children, their spouses, and two grandchildren, returned to the country two days before Christmas when the government finally gave up its effort to deny them passports.

A month earlier, Manila’s anti-graft court gave Cojuangco a resounding legal victory when it lifted a 1986 government order sequestering more than $500 million in stock. The government, which has filed at least eight criminal charges and two civil cases against him, is appealing.

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-01-01/news/wr-7589_1_corazon-aquino

The Aquinos’ are purposely not putting a closure to the Aquino assassination in 1983 to perpetually blame the Marcos family for Ninoy’s death as a deterrence to the Marcoses’ return to power. Besides, blood is a lot thicker than water.

Yes, even within the local Oligarchy, and even within in-laws, there’s a battle raging on for the absolute control of my country. At the same time, outside forces are also feeding the fire for their own vested interests, too, i.e. the plunder of our rich natural resources.
One illustration is the grossly abhorrent US robbery when 22 large crates of valuables were airlifted by US military together with the Marcos family from the Malacañang Palace into Hawaii. The Marcoses may have already returned with the son currently running for the Vice Presidency, but those crates of gold, not cash as mainstream media reported, will never be seen again.
Although we applauded the ouster of the Marcos dictatorship, but with the benefit of hindsight, it turns out that all of those who succeeded the late dictator since 1986 paled miserably to his accomplishments, i.e. massive infrastructure projects to support a fully industrialized country that could have rivaled Taiwan, or Japan today.
This doesn’t mean that Marcos was right all along with his proclamation of Martial Law, which allowed the flow of power into the hands of those who were not specifically trained to exercise it, i.e. poorly trained police force under WestPointer Fidel V. Ramos.
It’s just that all those who succeeded him were too naive and  ignorant about how the covert geopolitical game was played that should have enabled them to counter external pressures and manipulations inherent in every high position of power.
This is the experience we wish Brazilians should take into account when they condemn Lula and not those people surrounding him who were reported to be directly involved in corruption and who might have already become Khazarian conscripts purposely to politically demolish the man.

The Brazilian Earthquake

Sputnik

This is the stuff Hollywood is made of. And that was exactly the logic behind the elaborate production.
The public prosecutors of the two-year-old Car Wash investigation maintain there are “elements of proof” implicating Lula in receiving funds — at least 1.1 million euros — from the dodgy kickback scheme involving major Brazilian construction companies connected to Petrobras. Lula might — and the operative word is “might” — have personally profited from it mostly in the form of a ranch (which he does not own), a relatively modest seaside apartment, speaking fees in the global lecture circuit, and donations to his charity.
Lula is the ultimate political animal — on a Bill Clinton level. He had already telegraphed he was waiting for such a gambit, as the Car Wash machine had already arrested dozens of people suspected of embezzling contracts between their companies and Petrobras — to the tune of over $2 billion — to pay for politicians of the Workers’ Party (PT), of which Lula was leader.
Lula’s name surfaced via the proverbial rascal turned informer, eager to strike a plea bargain. The working hypothesis — there is no smoking gun — is that Lula, when he led Brazil between 2003 and 2010, personally benefited from the corruption scheme with Petrobras at the center, obtaining favors for himself, the PT and the government. Meanwhile, inefficient President Dilma Rousseff is herself under attack engineered via a plea bargain by the former government leader in the Senate.
Lula was questioned in connection to money laundering, corruption and suspected dissimulation of assets. The Hollywood blitz was cleared by federal judge Sergio Moro — who always insists he’s been inspired by the Italian judge Antonio di Pietro and the notorious 1990s Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) investigation.
And here, inevitably, the plot thickens.
Round up the usual media suspects
Moro and the Car Wash prosecutors justified the Hollywood blitz insisting Lula refused to be interrogated. Lula and the PT vehemently insist otherwise.
And yet Car Wash investigators had consistently leaked to mainstream media words to the effect, “We can’t just bite Lula. When we get to him, we will swallow him.” This would imply, at a minimum, a politicization of justice, the Federal Police and the Public Ministry. And would also imply that the Hollywood blitz may have been supported by a smoking gun. As perception is reality in the frenetic non-stop news cycle, the “news” — instantly global — was that Lula was arrested because he’s corrupt.
Yet it gets curioser and curioser when we learn that judge Moro wrote an article in an obscure magazine way back in 2004 (in Portuguese only, titled Considerations about Mani Pulite, CEJ magazine, issue number 26, July/September 2004), where he clearly extols “authoritarian subversion of juridical order to reach specific targets ” and using the media to intoxicate the political atmosphere.
All of this serving a very specific agenda, of course. In Italy, right-wingers saw the whole Mani Pulite saga as a nasty judicial over-reach; the left, on the other hand, was ecstatic. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) emerged with clean hands. In Brazil, the target is the left — while the right, at least for the moment, seems to be composed of hymn-singing angels.
The pampered, cocaine-snorting loser candidate of the 2014 Brazilian presidential election, Aecio Neves, for instance, was singled out for corruption by three different accusers — and it all went nowhere, without further investigation. Same with another dodgy scheme involving former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso — the notoriously vainglorious former developmentalist turned neoliberal enforcer.
What Car Wash has already forcefully imprinted across Brazil is the perception that corruption only pays when the accused is a progressive nationalist. As for Washington consensus vassals, they are always angels — mercifully immune from prosecution.
That’s happening because Moro and his team are masterfully playing to the hilt Moro’s self-described use of the media to intoxicate the political atmosphere — with public opinion serially manipulated even before someone is formally charged with any crime. And yet Moro and his prosecutors’ sources are largely farcical, artful dodgers cum serial liars. Why trust their word? Because there are no smoking guns, something even Moro admits.
And that leads us towards the nasty scenario of a made in Brazil media-judicial-police complex possibly hijacking one of the healthiest  democracies in the world. And that is supported by a stark fact: the right-wing Brazilian opposition’s entire “project” boils down to ruining the economy of the 7^th largest global economic power to justify the destruction of Lula as a presidential candidate in 2018.
Elite Plundering Rules
None of the above can be understood by a global audience without some acquaintance with classic Braziliana. Local legend rules that Brazil is not for beginners. Indeed; this is an astonishingly complex society — which essentially descended from a Garden of Eden (before the Portuguese “discovered” it in 1500) to slavery (which still permeates all social relations) to a crucial event in 1808: the arrival of Dom John VI of Portugal (and Emperor of Brazil for life), fleeing Napoleon’s invasion, and carrying with him 20,000 people who masterminded the “modern” Brazilian state. “Modern” is an euphemism; history shows the descendants of these 20,000 actually have been raping the country blind for the past 208 years. And few have ever been held accountable.
Traditional Brazilian elites compose one of the most noxious arrogant-ignorant-prejudiced mixes on the planet. “Justice” — and police enforcement — are only used as a weapon when the polls do not favor their agenda.
Brazilian mainstream media owners are an intrinsic part of these elites. Much like the US concentration model, only four families control the media landscape, foremost among them the Marinho family’s Globo media empire. I have experienced, from the inside, in detail, how they operate.
Brazil is corrupt to the core — from the comprador elites down to a great deal of the crass “new” elites, which include the PT. The greed and incompetence displayed by an array of PT stalwarts is appalling — a reflection of the lack of quality cadres. Corruption and traffic of influence involving Petrobras, construction companies and politicians is undeniable, even if it pales compared to Goldman Sachs shenanigans or Big Oil and/or Koch Brothers/Sheldon Adelson-style buying/bribing of US politicians.
If this was a no-holds-barred crusade against corruption — which the Car Wash prosecutors insist it is — the right-wing opposition/vassals of the old elites should have been equally exposed in mainstream media. But then the elite-controlled media would simply ignore the prosecutors. And there would be nothing remotely on the scale of the Hollywood blitz, with Lula — pictured as a lowly delinquent — humiliated in front of the whole planet.
Car Wash prosecutors are right; perception is reality. But what if it backfires?
No consumption, no investment, no credit
Brazil couldn’t be in a gloomier situation. GDP was down 3.8% last year; probably will be down 3.5% this year. The industrial sector was down 6.2% last year, and the mining sector down 6.6% in the last quarter. The nation is on the way to its worst recession since…1901.
There was no Plan B by the — incompetent — Rousseff administration for the Chinese slowdown in buying Brazil’s mineral/agricultural wealth and the overall global slump in commodity prices.
The Central Bank still keeps its benchmark interest rate at a whopping 14.25%. A disastrous Rousseff neoliberal “fiscal adjustment” actually increased the economic crisis. Today Rousseff “governs” — that’s a figure of speech — for the banking cartel and the rentiers of Brazilian public debt. Over $120 billion of the government’s budget evaporates to pay interest on the public debt.
Inflation is up — now in double-digit territory. Unemployment is at 7.6% — still not bad as many a player across the EU — but rising.
The usual suspects of course are gloating, spinning non-stop how Brazil has become “toxic” for global investors.
Yes, it’s bleak. There’s no consumption. No investment. No credit. The only way out would be to unlock the political crisis. Maggots in the opposition racket though have a one-track obsession; the impeachment of President Rousseff. Shades of good ol’ regime change; for these Wall Street/Empire of Chaos vassals, an economic crisis, fueled by a political crisis, must by all means bring down the elected government of a key BRICS player.
And then, suddenly, out of left field, surges…Lula. The move against him by the Car Wash investigation may yet backfire — badly. He’s already on campaign mode for 2018 — although he’s not an official candidate, yet. Never underestimate a political animal of his stature.
Brazil is not on the ropes. If reelected, and assuming he could purge the PT from a legion of crooks, Lula could push for a new dynamic. Before the crisis, Brazilian capital was going global — via Petrobras, Embraer, the BNDES (the bank model that inspired the BRICS bank), the construction companies. At the same time, there might be benefits in breaking, at least partially, this oligarchic cartel that control all infrastructure construction in Brazil; think of Chinese companies building the high-speed rail, dams and ports the country badly lacks.
Judge Moro himself has theorized that corruption festers because the Brazilian economy is too closed to the outside world, as India’s was until recently. But there’s a stark difference between opening up some sectors of the Brazilian economy and let foreign interests tied to the comprador elites plunder the nation’s wealth.
So once again, we must go back to the recurrent theme in all major global conflicts.
It’s the oil, stupid
For the Empire of Chaos, Brazil has been a major headache since Lula was first elected, in 2002 (for an appraisal of complex US-Brazil relations, check the indispensable work of Moniz Bandeira).
A top priority of the Empire of Chaos is to prevent the emergence of regional powers fueled by abundant natural resources, from oil to strategic minerals. Brazil amply fits the bill. Washington of course feels entitled to “defend” these resources. Thus the need to quash not only regional integration associations such as Mercosur and Unasur but most of all the global reach of the BRICS.
Petrobras used to be a very efficient state company that then doubled as the single operator of the largest oil reserves discovered in the 21^st century so far; the pre-salt deposits. Before it became the target of a massive speculative, judicial and media attack, Petrobras used to account for 10% of investment and 18% of Brazilian GDP.
Petrobras found the pre-salt deposits based on its own research and technological innovation applied to exploring oil in deep waters — with no foreign input whatsoever. The beauty is there’s no risk; if you drill in this pre-salt layer, you’re bound to find oil. No company on the planet would hand this over to the competition.
And yet a notorious right-wing opposition maggot promised Chevron in 2014 to hand over the exploitation of pre-salt mostly to Big Oil. The right-wing opposition is busy altering the juridical regime of pre-salt; it’s already been approved in the Senate. And Rousseff is meekly going for it. Couple it to the fact that Rousseff’s government did absolutely nothing to buy back Petrobras stock — whose vertiginous fall was deftly engineered by the usual suspects.
The meticulous dismantling of Petrobras, Big Oil eventually profiting from the pre-salt deposits, keeping in check Brazil’s global power projection, all this plays beautifully to the interests of the Empire of Chaos. Geopolitically, this goes way beyond the Hollywood blitz and the Car Wash investigation.
It’s no coincidence that three major BRICS nations are simultaneously under attack — on myriad levels: Russia, China and Brazil. The concerted strategy by the Masters of the Universe who dictate the rules in the Wall Street/Beltway axis is to undermine by all means the BRICS’s collective effort to produce a viable alternative to the global economic/financial system, which for the moment is subjected to casino capitalism. It’s unlikely Lula, by himself, will be able to stop them.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20160306/1035858412/brazil-interrogation-petrobras-scandal.html

“This is what all of you, around the world, need to know about class struggle in Brazil. It’s based on a pic that has gone viral all over the country – of a middle class couple in Rio joining today’s demonstrations calling for the impeachment of President Dilma. “Justice for Brazil”, yes – and don’t touch my maid.”
https://web.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153954390136678&set=a.10150294029661678.381794.775051677&type=3&theater
Just like Brazil, the Philippines is home to large oil deposits, and deuterium. It is also rich in platinum, gold, nickel, copper, etc. Its capacity to harness these resources for its own benefit must be retarded through “divide and conquer” by an organization deeply embedded within the moral and political fabric in its society, i.e. Jesuits controlled Vatican Church.

The Jesuits, who benefited greatly from the people’s continued kneeling in their churches, don’t want that economic progress elsewhere but the Vatican. We must be an impoverished nation in Southeast Asia by:

• sowing conflicts between political groups like the Vatican assassins’ bombing of Plaza Miranda during the opposition proclamation rally, dubbed as “Light a Fire Movement” ; during these trying times both sides, i.e. Marcos government and communists, didn’t know exactly who were bombing whom;
• keeping the people ignorant by controlling those who owns the broadcast media, and control the narrative;
• by establishing schools advertised as the best source for quality education for future leaders, which actually promotes social engineering skills as defined in the leaked document “Silent Weapons for Quite Wars“.

They have succeeded so far.
Here’s Marcos asking the CIA installed president Corazon Aquino to switch on the Bataan Nuclear Plant, the first in Southeast Asia, to help the Philippines gain energy independence from Big Oil Cartel.
https://youtu.be/96Yg-mIP4hI
Cory Aquino chose to mothball the nuclear plant, the construction of which was through a World Bank loan which we continue to pay for even today.
When it comes to politics, there’s no absolutely clean politician. It’s just a choice between two evils. The difficulty is in choosing between them, and most of the time, the people will only realize who the lesser evil was after the damage is already done.
Right now, the people of my country is betting on a Duterte, a man who ruled a city 3 times larger than Metro Manila for the last 22 years, and yet is still living in his poor man’s “mansion”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78VIRW_V16M
Will the people be right?
Only time will tell.
The bigger question above all would be, who will train them the proper way of using power when all of them belong to a church with grossly questionable morality?
In the end, the world that we want is the world that we should create by ourselves, and not by the Middlemen.