BRAZIL for SALE! Come one and come all, Brazil is portioning out its assets to the highest bidder! So far, Qatar, Dubai, and investment firms from Canada and Europe are clambering over each other to vie for the most valuable of assets. The auction party will include oil and gas licenses, infrastructure projects, electricity, airports, a railway, a dam, agriculture land, and possibly banks.
With the impeachment of Rouseff concluded the pathway to divest Brazil from Brazil can now proceed. Michel Temer, the ‘acting president’, who was the principle character in prosecuting Rouseff is more aligned to the US and Europe as opposed to the BRICS. As a result, we can expect to see a Brazillian shift from the BRICS to a NATO alignment further alienating our perceived enemies – Russia and China.
According to WikiLeaks, Temer was an embassy informant for the US intelligence military. He led the prosecution of Rouseff and took over as President. The coup is complete. And now Brazil is for sale.
Temer is simply a self appointed acting president mired in his own slew of scandals that could see him prosecuted for bribes and corruption. Although the next scheduled election isn’t until 2018, early elections are a possibility given the majority of Brazilians don’t much care for Temer and think he is a crook. Whether they will manifest is largely dependent on the shadow powers vs the people, as the shadows decide who, what, where, when and how. Right now, the shadow powers like Temer because he is auctioning off the country. Once that has been accomplished, the next president will most likely be a product of the new owners of Brazil, those who purchased the country. Not The People.
While Brazil’s Verde Asset Management, led by Luis Stuhlberg, a prominent hedge fund manager who has consistently won his investors annual gains of 28%, believes that the market reactions to the impeachment and asset sales will be positive, he also believes the up-tic will be short-lived as the hard grind of reality sets in. The soft coup requires quite a bit of re-organizing before Brazil can truly recover, if it does. It could simply be a changing of the guards filling the void of corruption with corruption.
The asset selloff includes agricultural land. Both Brazil and Argentina had put in place strict laws regarding foreign investment in their land, laws that will most likely be repealed by Temer as the ‘Land Grabbing’ escalates. While neighboring Uruguay lifted many of their land grab laws, US and Chinese investors flocked buying up large swathes of rich, rural agriculture land, decimating the woodlands and razing the trees to make way for ‘sugar cane’. Africa, by far has seen the largest land grabs, but until now Brazil’s black soil has been somewhat protected.
Unfortunately, land grabbing in Brazil was still a viable action through elaborate structuring of entities. While foreign investors were limited, if the foreigner was linked to a Brazilian entity, the restriction could be finessed. For example, TIAA-CREF, one of the largest managers of teacher’s pension funds in the US, created a joint venture with a Brazilian Fund, RADAR, to acquire woodlands, restructure them into sugar cane plantations and soy farms thereby making a sizable profit. Through the partnership, somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 hectares of agri-land have been purchased so far. However, a state court has recently filed an injunction claiming that one of TIAA-Cref’s partners was acting illegally.
Like the African Grabbers, the methods employed are usually brutal. “Land grabbers routinely fence off public lands on the chapadas, evict the local people who have used the land for generations, deploy private security forces, and then acquire property titles through the connivance of local notaries and government officials. There are numerous reports of death threats, beatings and assassinations.”
Of course the US corporate greed is not singular, they are partnered with George Soros, as well as Canadian, Swedish and German pension funds. Adecoagro, a Brazilian farm operator in which Soros Investment Group is the top shareholder, holds about 300,000 hectares of land in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. But Soros name doesn’t just end there, he has used his money to create a new investment firm, Tunbridge, which will invest in agriculture land, real estate and real assets using public and private corporate pension funds. The very abrupt website links back to Hodes Weill & Associates another non-transparent company whose website posts a commentary once or twice – per year.
Far from these actions actually benefiting the people, land grabs and real asset grabs put poverty on the table for dinner.
The Clinton Foundation is also mired in the Brazilian scandals involving Petrobas Oil. OAS and the InterAmerican Development Bank are both listed as multi-million donors to the Clinton Foundation. Both companies are under fire, OAS for bribes and kickbacks and IDB for being given contracts by Hillary while Secretary of State without going through the bidding process.
So will the auction of Brazil’s economy be conducted? Umm, well, Temer has announced the auction rules will be printed in English … as well as native Portuguese.