This is a last ditch effort; an "I am not a crook" attempt. I think she'd probably best have a bag packed.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/29/brazil-president-dilma-rousseff-closer-impeachment-coalition-partner-quits

President Dilma Rousseff’s hopes of seeing out her term of office have received a potentially fatal blow after the biggest party in the Brazilian congress voted to abandon her ruling coalition.

The vote by the Brazilian Democratic Movement party (or PMDB) could trigger a defection from Rousseff’s coalition by other smaller parties, and greatly increase the prospect that she will lose an impeachment vote in the lower house next month and be suspended from office.

To cries of “Workers party out!” and “Onward Brazil!”, PMDB leaders announced their decision to break up the coalition.

“We’re going to try to change the country. The economic and social crisis is very serious,” senator Romero Juca, the PMDB’s first vice-president, told a party meeting in the capital Brasilia.

Rousseff now leads a fragile minority government. Senior officials in the governing Workers party insist the president can still be saved from what they say is a coup attempt against an elected leader who still has more than half of her four-year mandate to serve....But government efforts to shore up support look increasingly desperate after the PMDB – which has 68 of the 513 seats in the lower house – decided to leave an alliance that has propped up the government for more than 13 years.

I disagree with you on this comparison with Nixon. Rousseff's opponents are either RWNJs or "centrist" much like the repukes and Turd Way "Dems" here in the States, and RWNJs anywhere in the world don't take kindly to taking direction from powerful women.

I think Rousseff is more like Pennsylvania's AG Kathleen Kane, who I believe is being framed on perjury charges for bringing down the Old Boys' Network by exposing the porn emails that caused 2 PASC justices to resign.

parties.

The bulk of the nation wants to throw her out on her ear--even her old allies. Her shit DOES stink.

I'm not talking left/right here--I'm talking ire, hatred, dislike, "Get away from me, you're toxic...." -- that kind of thing.

I don't think she's being framed, though. I think she's suffering from .... "irregularities."

Ha--the New Yorker beat me to it....and I didn't see this when I typed the comment, above:


http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/brazils-unfolding-crisis

and the other Western countries to support the right-wing contingent in Latin America.

Having any left-leaning government in charge is a threat to corporate profits and the US is busy trying to reclaim its "backyard" from its leftward tilt.

Democrats and Republicans are both united in undermining democracy in Latin America, and it's a shame that many Democrats think this is fine.

Not everything is a "Waaah, they're taking the power away from the peeeeee-pul" excercise.

This is corruption and mismanagement that is VIRULENT. It's a mess down there.

And what brought it home to roost? The collapse of those GW Bush high oil prices. When there was oil money all over the place, it was easier to rob the place blind. Now that they are forced to make economies, the corruption is sticking out like a sore thumb.

This is not about "undermining democracy." It's about fucking THIEVES getting caught with their paw in the till.

smh!
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/brazils-unfolding-crisis

Even by Brazilian standards, though, things seem to have gotten out of hand over the last few years. For example, the prosecutors recently charged João Santana, one of Rousseff’s political consultants and therefore only a second-order political figure, with receiving $7.5 million in funds siphoned from bribes that big companies paid the government in exchange for contracts. There are now almost two dozen separate investigations under way under the broad rubric of the Lava Jato scandal.

It seems unlikely that the driving force in the mega-corruption was personal greed on the part of the rather austere President. Instead, it was probably a combination of the party-time atmosphere produced by the economic boom of the aughts—in particular, high oil prices and the prospect of the Olympics—and Rousseff’s political ineptitude. Lacking the charm and cunning of her predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Rousseff seems to have been more reliant on unsubtle means of maintaining a hold on power. In particular, as a far more intellectually consistent leftist than Lula, Rousseff lacks his uncanny instinct for finding a mix of policies that at once reassure economic élites and deliver for an overwhelmingly poor political base. Rousseff’s attempt to bring Lula back into politics as her chief of staff seems to have had two purposes: to immunize him from prosecution, and to enlist him as anti-impeachment lobbyist-in-chief, a role to which he is naturally suited. As of now, a judicial injunction prevents Lula’s appointment from going forward, and that only increases the likelihood of Rousseff’s government collapsing.

The revolt against Rousseff is a middle-class one, in a country that is not yet essentially middle class in the manner of the United States. Like everything that happens in politics, it’s about power and policy, as well as corruption. Brazil’s abrupt shift from prosperity to recession, caused in part by the dramatic fall in oil prices, has made it impossible for investors and politicians to continue to get simultaneous spectacular economic returns. Now they are competitors, and the unlikely consensus over which Lula presided, in which former revolutionaries and bankers appeared to coexist happily within a government ruled by an organization called the Workers’ Party, is gone.

The real losers in the reshaping of Brazilian politics that is to come won’t only be corrupt politicians. The tens of millions of beneficiaries of the generously funded core social programs of the Lula-Rousseff years, Bolsa Família (cash grants to families) and Minha Casa Minha Vida (public housing), are at risk, too. These programs are the heart of the social compact in Brazil, in the way that Social Security and Medicare are here. It will be a tragedy if, in the mad scramble to assemble a new ruling coalition that will almost certainly be more business-friendly, their constituency gets left behind.

grasp of American history in Latin America or the things we do to support business profits abroad if you think this is completely about internal corruption.

Sure, there is corruption among both the political left and right in Brazil, but the ultimate goal is not to prosecute corrupt officials, but to remove them from power so that the country's oligarchic structure (pro-business, pro-American) can be resurrected.

We also want to make sure Lula is not able to run for re-election - he was a little too people-centered for American tastes.

how many is a Brazillion?


Some dumb jokes should be immortalized in the G.W.Bush Presidential Libary.