José Carlos de Assis

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BRAZIL`S ENSLAVEMENT ON THE GEOPOLITICS ALTAR

The Brazilian elites traffick our people’s future like black bosses sold their brothers to the white slavery man in the more brutal time of slavery.

josé carlos de assis

Brazil’s political and military elites are condemning us to enslavement by the United States. Brazil is at the center of geopolitical conflict between Americans and Russians. Due to a double-crosser view of the 2015 coup-d´état supporters, the Brazilian elites proved to be vassals of American interests and unable to strategically see the advantages of neutrality between the two military superpowers.

The Brazilian elites traffick our people’s future like black bosses sold their brothers to the white slavery man in the more brutal time of slavery. With this, they are consolidating us in the position of political and economic subordinates on one side to the detriment of national development and the consolidation of a state of social welfare.

This kind of auction of Brazilian values refers to the Russian recovery of the disaggregation of the Soviet Union and the economic consolidation of China as the largest economic force in the world in dynamic terms. The American empire, which imagined itself in a hegemonic situation in the world, lost the practical and ideological possibility of presenting itself as the owner of the land.

The strategic alliance between Russia, in nuclear parity with the United States, and China, in virtual economic superiority, contradicted the expectation of prolongation of the Sino-Soviet conflict beyond the end of the Cold War. These countries ended up articulating the core of an economic-military power that cannot be defeated by the frontal war, or even by American economic force, without unacceptable retaliation.

The United States’ departure from this impasse, from western dominant ideology, occurred progressively through “peaceful” actions. To this end, they claimed a political and moral superiority in the construction of a circle of allies around their interests to contain Russia, which was unjustifiably accused of being expansionist. Politically, the argument has been to promote democracy; the defense of human rights, and the fight against corruption.

In the nuclear age, as observed, absolute hegemony cannot be conquered by war. The alternative was to dominate peripheral countries by controlled mobilizations from within, converting to the Western regime especially Russia’s potential partners, through destabilizing expedients of local governments.

ATTACK ON BRAZIL

In Brazil, the legal system set up through Lava Jato, with the full support of TV Globo and the mainstream press, served as the direct arm of the U.S. lawfare to settle with Lula’s independent foreign policy. The country committed the boldness of integrating the BRICS, becoming an indirect associate of Russia and China; organized Unasur, outside the control of the United States; Mercosur, and rejected the FTAA, in a direct challenge to Washington. It was too much. A kind of pseudo-insurgency was then promoted in 2013, with objectives that are not understood to date, but finally unveiled as expressions of the influence of the United States through the co-opted media.

Since, in the Brazilian case, the pretext of the struggle for democracy for the change of international and local regime could not be used, the instruments of democracy in full operation were used to dismantle the foreign policy seen as favorable to Moscow and Beijing. As a result, in the face of a weak president, the legacy of external independence of the Lula government began to be liquidated through Lava Jato, whose magistrates and prosecutors had become regulars of the United States Department of Justice. The only point left of the threads of Brazilian external autonomy was the material interests linked to China and Russia, through agribusiness, pragmatically maintained by Xi Jinping and Putin despite the ideological bravado of Jair Bolsonaro.

This brief report, mostly based on a U.S. magazine of global credibility, aims at three objectives: first, to strategically highlight the aggressive interventionist character of the United States as a through this siege of Russia and China, which has moved mainly defensively; second, the total subservience of the Brazilian media and military instructed by it to the stories produced by the U.S. Department of State and Department of Justice, with absolute partiality in favor of U.S. interests; third, the identification in this geopolitical tangle of what is the space reserved for Brazil in the future, if we have one outside the North American hegemonic orbit.

It should be noted that the continuation of the Cold War in the form of geopolitical warfare is under the same nuclear deterrence protocol that prevailed before. However, there is a second level of deterrence represented by military resources of mass destruction that can be used in internal conflicts, spurred from outside. In Libya, close to Russia, there was, as stated above, the virtual destruction of the country by internal forces undertaken by the United States, and Syria only did not have the same fate due to Russian intervention defending its territory. This also seems to be happening in Venezuela, despite internal mobilizations against Maduro and his Cuban and Russian allies.

In any case, civil war is no longer, in general, an instrument of effective political action by forces opposed to anti-national regimes, alienating sovereignty, without risk of the country’s disintegration. The opposition would be crushed mercilessly, as is the case in Bolivia and Peru, with strong U.S. support, internal police action and legal cover, including launching the Armed Forces against the people and the legal apparatus against selective enemies like Lula – which, in Peru, led to the suicide of former President Alan García accused of corruption by a hoax. It is that the Bolsonaro government is already preparing to face popular rebellions, including the legal apparatus of the principle “excluding illegality”, under discussion in Congress, which is a kind of “license to kill” protesters opposed to the politically contested regime.

At another time, in the Brazilian case, it was to be expected a nationalist action by the military that could weigh in favor of national interests, as happened in the dictatorship with Geisel. There is no such possibility anymore. The senior Brazilian officials are trained in American schools and indoctrinated in neoliberal thought, presenting a clumsy view of the history and reality of the country, as has shown the speeches of generals such as Vilas Boas, sponsor in the Army of the election of Jair Bolsonaro, and Hamilton Mourão, vice president of the Republic. Unlike positive action on behalf of the people, they settle in the position of guardians of the law and order dictated from abroad while threatening internal citizens.

The widespread mass manipulation operation against progressive forces in the 2018 election articulated an unprecedented majority of the government in Congress, and Lava Jato’s election campaigns favored this result, as well as intimidated the judiciary itself, which became an anchor of the frankly authoritarian Executive. Thus, in the same movement, Executive, Judiciary, Congress, Attorney General of the Republic, Federal Police all align against the rest of the country’s nationalist forces. Without civil war, without greater conflicts, almost without resistance, Brazil has subjugated itself to American interests led by its financial and political elites – the new slave traders.

Alternatives

However, would it be so bad to be an explicit ally of the United States, as the Bolsonaro system wants, given experiences such as japan and post-war Germany? The response requires consideration of u.S. strategic movements in the post-war period. They were focused on containing the ideological aspiration of socialism in the world, as opposed to the relations between current Geopolitics and Neoliberalism. These two instances go hand in hand. The neoliberalism preached in Davos responds to a strategy of world capital under American leadership that seeks to counter the “exaggerations” of the welfare state, which would have led to a reduction in the efficiency and productivity of European national economies. In practice, this has resulted in a rematch against the progressive social order, which has led to the almost complete financialization of the world economy under the label of globalization, and which aims to have a world without frontiers for financial capital.

The mechanism of transferring income from the productive sector to the financial sector is made through interest rates that, even at low levels because of competition, expand horizontally through the banking of the poor. In emerging countries such as Brazil, absurdly high-interest rates represent an opportunity to further deepen the extraction of added value in favor of the financial sector on an unprecedented scale. Pressured by the social base, on the one hand, and the financial appetite, on the other, even the most advanced states in Europe are condemned by the international agencies commanded by the U.S. government, such as the World Bank and IMF, and in Europe, by the ECB and the European Commission, they have resorted to increasing domestic fiscal adjustments that sanction the bloodletting of productive income and degrade social life. Interestingly, the only country in Western Europe that has escaped the neoliberal siege is tiny Portugal, through an expansive policy that worked. At the world level, the most categorized voice that stood up against the excesses of finance was that of Pope Francis, in a daredevil document.

The Lula government advanced in a nationalist social and economic policy without greater awareness of geopolitical constraints, but had spectacular results in both spheres. In the face of the global crisis, the Obama administration stimulated in its Keynesian political interest of resuming demand in the world, which included Brazil. The Lula government injected 200 billion reais into the economy in 2009 and 2010, through financing from the Treasury to BNDES, for financing companies by the latter, maintained the social policy of valuing the minimum wage and combating hunger, possibly contrary to conventional neoliberal policies of fiscal adjustment and contraction of demand.

In response, the economy that had contracted in 2009 of almost -2% showed a surprising growth of 7.5% in 2010. It seemed like a victory against neoliberalism, but it was chimeric. The fact is that the neoliberal team of the government ended up returning to the traditional bed of restrictive economic policy. Perhaps frightened by its success, the government took a hit on the economy in 2010, tipping the growth rate in the following years to mediocre levels due to permanent fiscal adjustments, via primary surpluses.

This brief moment in Brazilian politics proved to be possible a successful economic and social policy provided that under competent and informed leadership. Income distribution improved and, for the first time in decades, income concentration decreased. The country was pacified, the workers and the financial elites themselves seemingly satisfied. However, this directly contradicted the interests of capital. New fiscal adjustments – notably the policy of generating primary surpluses – continued to fuel the process of transferring income to the financial sector through the public debt service mechanism. Later, this was reinforced by Temer’s labor reform and Bolsonaro’s pension reform, aimed at extracting added value directly from workers in the productive sector in favor of banks.

Few understand how this process of income transfer is manifested in practice. In the developed world, social resistance is relatively strong and the welfare state consumes a significant part of national income. This limits the share of banks, although this is not reduced absolutely, especially in the case of international banks and their correspondents that exploit the added value on a global scale. In the developing world, social resistance is weak, wage earners are more politically vulnerable and the welfare state is limited. In return for its virtual enslavement, there is a growing share of specific and social added value in favor of banks and the financial sector as a whole.

In countries emerging from western orbit, the advanced cavalry of the system is the banking. Once listed in their registers the poor account holders, banks immediately press for them to take loans based, for example, on payroll loans, pay very high rates, make financial investments in private pension systems, buy insurance, use credit cards and special loans with very high emergency interest, and subject themselves (in the Brazilian case) to the invasion of their privacy through positive registrations to ensure greater security and cost reduction in customer raising. To get an idea of what this means, in the largest Brazilian banks the revenue from tariffs is equal to or greater than the total cost of personnel. This financial income comes from somewhere. And the place is the added value produced by workers in a system that the Brazilian ruling elite is forcing towards the minimum state.

It is precisely in the context of the search for the minimum State that the privatization program of the state, including the strategic Petrobras and Eletrobrás, should be understood. No minimum prices or political reserves such as golden share are at stake; the goal is to completely strip the state of its productive components. On an even more deceivable scale, the government has put on sale substantial parts of the pre-salt, which has not been fulfilled, for the time being, only by the lack of interest of international oil companies in the production model that is already being adapted to their taste. They are strategic entities, without any doubt. Your privatization should upset the military. They, however, the defenders of the Fatherland, are deceivable in a position of shameful silence and acceptance of the destruction of the national physical patrimony.

Limits

The answer is therefore given to the above question: because of financialization, there is no remote possibility for Brazil to have a benign ally in the United States. It’s against their nature. And our possibilities for autonomous development are narrow in the current economic policy record. Traditionally, U.S. foreign policy was aimed at the penetration of its industrial companies into the world market, or at least in the non-socialist half. This was a form of exploitation, but with positive effects on the industrialization of the periphery, including in Brazil.

Getúlio took advantage of the situation to install the Brazilian industrial infrastructure, including Petrobras, Eletrobrás, and Vale do Rio Doce, while Geisel created the tripartite companies, gluing the national business to foreign partners. They both succeeded. Now, however, who is in charge is Wall Street. And Wall Street, through banking alliances on the periphery, is a more powerful extractor of added value than the industrial system. Therefore, it will not give in to the promotion of financialization in the name of competitiveness by the income of the world banking oligopoly, including Brazil.

To illustrate the power of American financial capital, when applied in favor of itself, just consider the devastating effects of the 2008 débâcle and the way it ended up being circumvented. President Obama had to bury resources equivalent to a 7.5 trillion fiscal deficit in the economy from 2009 to 2014, and the EDF extended zero-cost loans to the banking system in amounts of more than twice that to stabilize the system. However, it failed to pass on a bill in Congress to restore the principle of separation between a commercial bank and investment bank to avoid further future crises. For Wall Street, this would reduce U.S. banking competitiveness in the world. Historical revenge will eventually end up happening in the form of a devastating crisis as widespread defaults, implicit in the system’s contradictions – reducing individual and family income, and tendency to default on the poor and middle classes – trigger a chain-breaking process in finance.

Brazil, therefore, has a difficult perspective in this global context, especially due to the turncoat character of its political and military elites. The possibilities for a resumption of development are virtually nil if there is no profound political change. The radical economic policy imposed by the economic team goes in the opposite direction to a Keynesian-based developmental program, the only one that would enable significant economic and employment growth. From the United States, nothing can be expected, therefore, except neoliberal “councils” through the World Bank and the IMF. Parallel to this, the onslaught of financial capital will keep the pressure for more real interest and fewer wages – a contradiction that, as stated, could abort the whole process by the global imbalance that this tends to represent.

The pragmatic Xi Jinping offered a credit of 100 billion dollars to the Brazilian government, but the effectiveness of this is highly dubious. It may just be a smart strategic move to keep Bolsonaro in the network of Chinese interests. It is not known how the minimum state of the economic team can absorb this funding, even because, for ideological reasons, it did not absorb the huge resources of the Amazon Fund funded by Norway and Germany. The Chinese will want state guarantees, and they will not accept that money ends up in the Western banking system as speculative financial capital. It is necessary to have projects and physical works with a sovereign guarantee, especially for infrastructure projects. But the government doesn’t seem interested in cutting its economic policy, as it strives to cut public investment rather than expand it. The same is true of the resource possibilities of the New Development Bank, the BRICS bank, despite Chinese-Russian pragmatism, which naturally has limits. 

Extract from article originally published in portuguese in Tribuna da Imprensa Livre