jones wrote:
Thanks for the write up RC8 but I will have to question quite a few points in there. To be blunt it makes sense for someone from the outside looking in because its a nice write up but there are some pretty huge omissions in there.
Jones, I think you misunderstood quite a few points. I will clarify.
Also, please note that my overall point is not to explain how Bolsonaro came to power per se (hence the omission of all the dirty tricks on the right), but rather to elaborate on why so many Brazilians cast their vote for the guy.
I don't think that's true at all. Crime does not have a "particularly horrible impact on the rich and upper middle classes", it hits the poor at an incredibly disproportionate rate. That's not to say it cannot hurt the rich all the same but unlike the poor they do have ways to live with it, they live in areas which Brazilian police patrols and they can afford to live in gated communities altogether while the poor are outside told to fend for themselves.
Crime does affect the poor disproportionately. But while it is the poor who are objectively most victimised, crime is often normalised in poverty-stricken areas and takes a back seat to other priorities. In the favelas if you are visibly scared of crime other people will even make fun of you, while in the upper classes it's socially acceptable to lose sleep over the fear of being kidnapped. If you ask Brazilians in PT strongholds to list government priorities, they often put more emphasis on healthcare and education than crime. Meanwhile, upper middle-classes generally put crime as top priority.
I can assure you that if you measure the amount of self-reported psychological angst related to crime, it increases as socio-economic indicators do, even if those at the bottom of this scale are the ones who have it worse.
I am not making a value judgement here, but this is one of the most important reasons why Bolsonaro did so well in upper-middle class areas.
This is probably the part that irked me the most. Not to say there isn't massive corruption everywhere in Brazil - there is not a single country in this world that does not suffer from some form of corruption anyway - but to raise Operation Lava Jato ("Carwash") as if it were some standard board of enquiry is highly misleading to say the least. The judge presiding over it is Sergio Moro, probably the most corrupt person in all of Brazil and the last person ever you would want to ask to clear up widespread corruption. He's visited US State Department financed and led "task force" training courses on Brazilian soil for at least seven years (Wikileaks link), is good friends with Aecio Neves and a confidante of the Marinho family who own the largest media corporation of the country Globo. Apart from raising his own salary several times a year and pushing through a massive increase for the already bloated judiciary sector he's also the judge who presided over the largest corruption case in Brazilian history - not Petrobras but the Banestado money laundering scandal worth $125bn which involved highest members of the Cardoso government smuggling currency and bribes to the US. Both the leading police commissioner and prosecutor have come forward to testify how their work has been continuously derailed from above, and in 2007 Moro closed the case because the hundreds of thousands pages in account information and links between the government, judiciary, media and business elite apparently were not enough evidence to prosecute any of the higher ups. I could literally fill pages about Moro and that's just what I've learned from a couple of Brazilian friends who have been predicting this exact outcome - Rousseff impeached, Lula in jail, a fascist in power - since Moro started making his moves in the early 2010s, maybe you can see why Lava Jato isn't exactly a neutral party to explaining the current clusterfuck.
Big misunderstanding here. I agree Lava Jato was not impartial, and Dilma's impeachment was actually a coup. But Brazilians are not that stupid and saw through the whole thing that both PT and PSDB were deeply involved in a series of corrupt schemes.
The big before-and-after Lava Jato is that all political parties, left, right, and centre, collapsed due to lack of credibility. If people had really believed in Lava Jato's findings per se they wouldn't have wanted Lula back, but we know he would have likely won if he'd run.
Brazil has always had a extremely right wing elite ruling since before the days of the junta. I don't even see how you can label the deranged evangelicals or the outright white supremacists who are the majority owners of the country's agrobusiness anything else. Brazil's elite are as racist as their American counterparts and have always been.
You are referring exclusively to the economic elite (which is super fascist), whereas I was referring to the elite more broadly, including artists, doctors, engineers, architects, and the new political class that surged during the PT years.
Regarding the rest of that paragraph I don't see where to start really. When Lula handed power to Rousseff he had reduced extreme poverty in Brazil by more than 75% according to the FAO, tens of millions of Brazilians were lifted out of poverty. I'd like to see an adequate solution to Brazil's woes if this man is called grossly insufficient.
I never called Lula insufficient. It's the opposite! Lula was a massive success. His successors were grossly insufficient, is what I said.
Also if you already mention that Lula would have given Bolsonaro a run for his money - according to every poll I've seen he would've been a runaway winner even - you might want to mention why he's not on the ballot. He was put in jail by yours truly Judge Sergio Moro, first for nine years and then after appeal he even added a couple years on top to add insult to injury.
Now try and make an educated guess who was appointed as the new Minister of Justice by Bolsonaro yesterday.
Yes, that's on the same level as the coup against Dilma. Horrible corruption.
Is it really true though that crime rates went up when poverty went down? Every paper I've seen on the topic states the opposite, during Lula's reign at least violent crime went down significantly. During the two years after Neves's fraudulent impeachment of Rousseff and Temer's government (which you termed moderate neoliberal) it has immediately soared again.
Violent crime did go up as poverty went down. In 2004 homicide rate in Brazil was 26/100,000. Now it's 30/100,000.
Since 2004 they have gone from 50,000 homicides a year to 60,000 homicides a year, getting worse year after year (though this number is also affected by population growth, the per 100,000 people rate is clear).
That's a pretty vacuous statement don't you think. People elected Macron because it "felt" right, they did the same with Trump, Merkel, Putin, Erdogan, Varadkar or Modi. Lula didn't help them cope for some imaginary reason like Bolsonaro does when he talks about handing free guns to people to protect themselves. He did it because as the first president of the New Republic he actually came to power with an intention and the means to provide wealth, security and stability to his people. I think putting the two even in the same sentence or comparing the reasoning behind their being elected is pretty insulting.
When Lula came to power he was notoriously unprepared and many claimed he would never deliver on his 'outrageous' utopian promises. He was a populist who rode the people's emotion to power, and then did a pretty damn good job at administering it (like Evo has done in Bolivia). A lot of elections are indeed tipped by this emotional component.
I think Bolsonaro is less likely to deliver on his promises based on the insane ways in which he plans to approach various issues, but while I'm quite fond of Lula personally he wasn't exactly a technocrat with a proven track record.
