Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The real reason Dilma Rousseff’s enemies want her impeached

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, April 23, 2016

The real reason Dilma Rousseff’s enemies want her impeached

Click here to access article by David Miranda from The Guardian.

The country’s elite class and their media organs have failed, over and over, in their efforts to defeat the party at the ballot box. But plutocrats are not known for gently accepting defeat, nor for playing by the rules. What they have been unable to achieve democratically, they are now attempting to achieve anti-democratically: by having a bizarre mix of politicians – evangelical extremists, far-right supporters of a return to military rule, non-ideological backroom operatives – simply remove her from office.

Indeed, those leading the campaign for her impeachment and who are in line to take over – most notably the house speaker Eduardo Cunha – are far more implicated in scandals of personal corruption than she is.

Politics in Latin America have always reflected real class power conflicts without much of the gloss of rights, justice, and due process that is superficially imposed on the conflicts in the leading Euro-American nations. Thus, like any real war, the ethics of these contests for political domination in Latin America tend to be that of real war: to the victor go the spoils. This has been true even under "progressive" regimes of Argentina and Venezuela. Consequently Latin Americans are much less deceived by the absence of morality under class rule, whereas in the leading Western nations the immorality of extreme inequality is glossed over by a huge propaganda apparatus. But another consequence is that these more "progressive" governments are also infested with corruption which doubtlessly is encouraged by the US Empire to bring down those governments.

The solution, of course, is the elimination of the organization of societies around classes. This would require a revolutionary movement whose objective would be elimination of the basis of inequality of power in today's societies--capitalism. This system gives property rights to a tiny minority to "own" the fruits of labor in economies which are almost entirely devoted to the profit interests of this minority at the expense of the benefits to the vast majority. But revolutions would make Latin American nations a definite target for the wrath of the Empire which would find, or create, some excuse to overthrow them.