“Out! All of you!” That’s, more or less, a proper translation for the title of this article. It was the insurgent yell of the Argentine people directed at “their representatives,” all of them, when taking the streets in December 2001.
Yet, I don’t want to write about Argentina here, a country of which I empirically know only but a few areas. What I want to deal with is the country that I know best. More deeply than any other where I’ve been, worked and lived: Brazil.
“What is, or how is Brazil?”
A question that is sometimes directed at me by foreigners (very rarely by Brazilians), who are routinely very badly informed on Brazil by their careless if not plainly mendacious (Pinocchio) media.
People get their “knowledge” via a handful of news agencies and/or so-called “correspondents” who spend their time in front of a computer entrenched in their urban electro-fence and armed-guard protected high-middle class ghettos. “Correspondents” who never ever get in grassroots contact with the hundreds of diverse Brazils (and victims of Brazil) in this heterogeneous and continental-size country, apart from the one narrow and untypically well-off strip of society where they dwell.
No wonder thus that when I read readers’ comments on Brazil in the global press it’s more than enough to make my hair stand on end. It’s either pure fantasy, or a reflection of their ideological convictions (without any connection to the Brazilian reality) or a parrot-fashion repetition of what they’ve read somewhere (in an often not less ideologically biased source). And the worst are those who, in order to “legitimate” their comments, add that they “know Brazil”, since they “always spend their holidays there”… It’s preposterous.
The (supposedly) liberal and/or left-leaning media isn’t any better. For many years (and still sometimes today) for example I have been forced to read of our “leftist governments” (Lula and Dilma) and the “successful social welfare programs” they have introduced and “that have helped hundreds of thousands” if not millions of formerly miserable to achieve a decent life. And then they cite (as a “proof”!) exactly the figures that the government had published before. Like if they were foreign speakers of the government. (And maybe they are. And get paid for it.)
What does it help when I, every now and then, also publish a reader’s comment (somewhere in England, Germany, Spain…) pointing out that none of the Lula and Dilma governments has had anything to do with leftist politics? That they rather stand for the (neoliberal) contrary. And that some of our major industrialists (Odebrecht) and bankers (Setubal) had known it long before I did (and before Lula was elected). They even cared to calm down their upper ten peers and reassured the financial hemisphere of Brazil: “Lula has nothing of a leftist”.
It doesn’t help at all (that I comment these facts). Since readers (are conditioned to) believe “their” Pinocchio “correspondents”. What brings us back to a classic vicious media circle.
(Poster: Federal Government – Brazil – Rich Country without Poverty
What the “correspondents” of course don’t know (logically, deliberately isolated in their above-mentioned ghetto and reading government papers) is that thousands of social welfare houses built for the poor are in fact so poorly built that they can’t be inhabited at all, that millions of the monthly social welfare checks (bolsa família, bolsa escola and so on) are cashed in by people (crooks) who are well off and that people who really need help don’t see a cent of it and stay hungry, that fairy-tale figures of the reduction of (illegal) deforestation are in starkest contrast with what we see – on the ground that is – year by year travelling all over Brazil again and again. And that when they talk of corruption in Brazil, they in fact haven’t seen anything yet. Because they talk about the tip of a gigantic iceberg that our local media is revealing now thanks to a few brave and lonely judges who dare to look into it. No judge, no journalist (much less foreign) though has the slightest clue of what’s happening in the vast interior of Brazil. In the hinterland, far away from the media and legal-authority-focused urban centers. It isn’t any exaggeration when I say, empirically, as an eye witness (and victim), that everything is stolen there by the local mafias, pardon: politicians. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.
I write this article thus to offer helpful information to those who are genuinely interested in today’s Brazilian situation. And I can start from three decades of intensive and very diverse grassroots observances and experiences all over this 8.5 million km² giant in order to help you view the real picture:
Brazil is where the Constitution stands for the greatest national literary work of fiction. (Since if it weren’t so none of the following would be possible.)
It’s where you go to the bakery to buy bread and are fatally shot by a conventional bandit or one in uniform (the latter, however, paid by us taxpayers, month by month).
It’s where some 60,000 of its 202 million inhabitants get murdered per year and where the bancada da bala (multi-party arms faction in Senate and Congress) works on pumping more and more weapons into society.
It’s were police forces kill more people per year than anywhere else in the world.
It’s where eight in 100 of the killings get investigated by police and even less turn into court proceedings. It’s a killers’ paradise.
It’s where more completely innocent people, chicken thieves and pot smokers who smoked in wrong place at the wrong time are rotting in medieval and lethal prisons than bandits proper.
It’s where you pay high tariffs for public water-supply yet stay thirsty or get the runs.
It’s where you pay the highest electricity tariffs in the world and need to stock up on candles and matches.
It’s where we have one of the largest oil companies in the world and huge reserves and pay one of the highest prices for gas and diesel fuel in the world (and thus, because contrary to basic intelligence we move all goods exclusively on roads, making all products that are not produced in one’s own backyard more and more expensive).
It’s where we have extraordinary good conditions to massively produce clean energy (lots of sunshine, wind, ocean waves) and prefer to spend billions of taxpayers ‘ money and exterminate entire (indigenous) communities and biotopes in order to build power plants that after completion won’t or will barely function.
It’s where construction of a subway line begins in the year 2000 and the first stretch of 12 km is inaugurated with presidential pomp in December 2015, 12 years late and at the triple of the originally stipulated price.
It’s where you head for a public hospital or clinic, but will arrive at the cemetery without having managed to get into a hospital or without having ever seen a doctor.
It’s where a curious little kid walks into a “school” and a few years later an adolescent will come out with no imagination and capacity of reasoning left.
It’s where you go to the Bank (Post Office, Municipal Authorities, Social Security Office, Department of Transportation, Notary’s Office, Federal Police…, whatever) and wilt in an interminable queue without being able to solve anything (apart from wasting time and health of mind and money).
It’s where you want to take legal action/go to public prosecutors or a public lawyers office seeking your right and end up either crazy or in Nirvana.
It’s where you want to call a friend or open a Web page and merely enrich the phone/telecommunication company (we pay the highest charges in the world!) without being able to talk to anyone or open any page.
It’s where you leave your electronic device that has a problem at the licensed workshop to do revision and repair and get back your device, weeks if not months later, with exactly the same problem or completely broken.
It’s where public transport for many is far too expensive in order to go to work/study(!) and if you can afford it and are lucky to get on a bus/train/metro you end up travelling like sardines (and get frequently robbed a/o molested as a woman passenger).
It’s where “men” are more likely kill their spouses/girlfriends/partners than anywhere else in the world.
It’s where we have anti-racist laws, yet the most popular urban sport among (military) police officers and their sponsors of the affluent neighborhoods is shooting young male blacks in the slums. What’s commonly nicknamed as cleaning-up. (Upcountry, in the hinterland, it’s the big landowners and their gunmen who practice the sport with equal passion aiming at Indigenous people.)
It’s where the trucker gets attended at the gas station with both diesel and cocaine.
It’s where cars circulate without legal papers or brakes, but equipped with the most powerful sound machine in the world.
It’s where anyone who drinks and doesn’t drive is considered a lame duck.
It’s where you take the road and vanish in a crater.
On Federal Highway 235 in Bahia State
It’s where some 50,000 die on the road each year.
It’s where we build football stadiums with public money in the woods while there is hunger, municipalities without an ambulance, universities without electricity…
35% suffer from lack of food in Brazil. Lixo=Garbage, Pão=Bread, Circo=Circus/GamesIt’s where you go to the market to buy fruits and vegetables and might well get toxic bombs. We’re the world #1 in selling, buying and applying pesticides and herbicides. (Including those banned for decades in all other countries of the world).
It’s where you go to an Indigenous Reservation or an Environmental Protection Area and meet the permanent party of lumberjacks, miners, cattle raisers and their gunmen and arsonists.
It’s where we waste billions (of tax money) in a project to tap and divert to regions hundreds of km away a once mighty river that has been drying-up for the last two decades due to man-made catastrophic interference along its tributaries.
It’s where we insist on damaging agricultural practices even in the midst of heavy desertification processes.
It’s where three in every ten homes are not connected to any sewerage system, water-supply or garbage collection.
It’s where two hundred thousand peasants continue without a piece of land to plant on.
It’s where many of them most likely will end up as slave-like rural laborers.
It’s where land concentration keeps growing and the latifundiums already amount to an equivalent to three times the size of Sergipe (State), with more than half of these x-large estates being unproductive.
It’s where about 1 per cent of landowners hold around 46% of all the lands.
It’s where the Secretary of Agriculture claims that latifundiums do no longer exist in Brazil, and that it is necessary to take land away from Indigenous Territories to maintain and increase productivity.
It’s where the tiny and small estates (with less than 10 hectares) absorb 40.7% of the workforce. While in the case of properties above 1000 hectares it’s only 4.2% .
It’s where the tiny and small and medium-sized properties, those that produce most of the food Brazilians consume and that create most of the up-country jobs, don’t stop dwindling.
It’s where criminal big landowners (like the very Secretary of Agriculture) control the Legislature and the Executive and destroy land and water, the remaining Indigenous Communities, as well as the social cohesion up-country in general and (what’s left of) parliamentary democracy itself.
It’s where what a typical representative of the richest 10% gains in little more than a week is equivalent to what takes one of the representatives of the poorest a year to earn.
It’s where the added income of nearly half a hundred of the poorest families is equivalent to the income of a single family of the richest 10%.
It’s where we have a minimum wage stipulated by law that outside the biggest cities of the (wealthier) South almost no one is ever paid.
It’s where the poor pay proportionately the highest taxes thus keeping things cheap for the rich.
It’s where the children of the poor will be little and badly schooled, will later have underpaid jobs and will themselves have badly schooled kids.
It’s where children of the rich will be well schooled in private institutions, will have the highest incomes and will have best educated kids.
It’s where a person on average reads two books throughout her/his life, and where a non-streamlined intellectual has to emigrate in order to not die of hunger or of society’s hostile disdain.
It’s where the only economic branch that always grows and functions without any problem and can count on great diligence and skills on the part of its practitioners and officials is: Corruption.
It’s where R$ 200 billion a year are diverted by Corruption (according to the prosecuting attorney’s office, others guess a much higher figure). R$ 200 billion is enough money to annually triple the budgets for health and education, or quintuple resources for public safety.
It’s where public health care “lacks” money for medicine and stitch for surgery (…), public schools “lack” money for chairs and roofs and toilets (…), and no money’s left to pay the salaries of nurses and teachers (…). The poor thus die of simple infections and their daughters and sons fail to conclude their hard-fought-for university course because unpaid professors either are on strike all year or simply abandon the sunken ship.
It’s where you’re obliged to hear the national anthem (and often the State Anthem too) even before any insignificant regional football game like if it was North Korea or Nazi Germany, just to ignite hollow national pride although there’s nothing to be proud of.
It’s where school directors that do not perform the national anthem every day first thing in the morning, have to appear in court.
It’s where you vote for parties and candidates and get (no matter who you actually voted for) a mafia and thief-assassins. Who then take responsibility that everything above mentioned – the system – will be extended over another congressional (or presidential…) term.
No doubt, Brazil is special. A country of superlatives.
Text: The real bandits are in power!After this incomplete list of real Brazilian characteristics one has to become aware that we are talking of one of the richest, if not the richest country (by Nature) in the world!
So we live in the richest country, we, especially the poor, pay some of the highest taxes and tariffs in the world for basic care and supplies and half of our 202 million people live between poverty and misery and in deep and perfidiously guarded ignorance (although the latter is also self-chosen true for the bigger part of the middle and upper stratums of society).
And since Brazil is the South American tailender in terms of education and (therefore) political awareness (and of everything else but the widely accepted “jeitinho” – the knack to get things done illegally or by offending decency) we never reached the same level of enraged popular action of our Argentine neighbors inviting the politrickster plague-class to retreat entirely.
Brazilian popular protest almost arrived there in 2013. But the tripod Political Power – Economic Power – Manipulative Power (TV mass media) managed to confuse and divide the masses between “the good” that “unfortunately” and “for their safety” should avoid the streets/stay home and the “bad” (those who pressed for substantial change) and entirely (black-)labeled (by mass media and politicians) as “Black Blocks” (with how many infiltrated agents provocateur among them?) that “have to be extinguished” for the sake of the Nation. A request that our notorious forces of repression immediately attended with its usual brutal dedication and thus bringing the protests to a quick end.
As if these (Black Block) boys and all the other less agitated demonstrators for systemic change were the ones responsible for the above-described Brazilian characteristics and the (at least) R$ 200 billion robbed of the people year by year.
It’s the same old cynical tragicomedy performed by those in power. A performance that is successful where the rightly outraged people don’t see through the production, are cognitively unprepared, without a plan how to proceed and not firm in their convictions.
Furthermore there is an aggravating factor of this apathy, this unpreparedness and lack of firmness on part of the average Brazilian to strive for freedom and (obeyed) human rights through systemic change or, at least, the fulfillment of what is written in the (fictional) Constitution: his Cultural Autism.
He lacks experience with/in other societies and cultures (and therefore diverse ideas) and he consequently can’t put his own miserable situation in a perspective to other societies and cultures. Those who can travel abroad is a tiny and economically privileged minority and those who could read books in English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin (…) are even less. Not in spite of, but because of the increasingly weakened public “schools”. (English is a subject “taught” for at least four years in all “schools”, yet you won’t easily find a person able to basically communicate in this language. Commonly that includes “the teachers”.)
No wonder, since the main function of the “school” tool (under the command of the Supreme Mafia of the Grand Economy of Corruption) is maintaining the Brazilian people’s reflective-cognitive desert by deploying it within all children.
The Brazilian is an eternally deceived and exploited and when he occasionally explodes he lets his anger loose exclusively on his neighbor in similar conditions. Never his anger is directed upwards, to those responsible for his problems and misery.
Directed like this since the very beginning by the proto-Brazilian bosses, the first “adventurers”-invaders from Portugal to install themselves along the Brazilian coastline.
It is the continuation of the old Bandeirante pattern. Brute men and without a cultural nexus, sons of Portuguese outcasts and their sometimes hundreds of indigenous women, trained by their fathers for the sole purpose of hunting, enslaving and exterminating their very indigenous matrix. For progress and economic growth of their warlord fathers and also the new and increasingly arriving invaders from overseas.
The Brazilian, but not only him, is trained to be suspicious of those who are working for his emancipation, and conditioned to support and defend his “masters”.
Thanks to the “schools” and the great brain washing machine Globo-Band-Sbt-Record. (The four most influential and brain devastating public TV networks/channels.)
Banner: The Police that oppresses in the streets is the same that kills in the slumsWith the current exception of some pupils and students in urban centers (who have learned to protest from fellow Chileans and Argentines and are trashed by police for exercising their democratic rights) the common Brazilian never takes the street (the last possible stage of People’s Power = Democracy), doesn’t recover what’s his but was taken away by “the authorities” and never and nowhere (neighborhood, block, etc.) takes any initiative.
He rather waits, waits, waits. For the day that God willing He interferes…
And the hermanos, the Argentine people?
Unfortunately, they neither achieved their yelled goal “Out! All of You!”
Doctor: Does it hurt a lot? Patient: Only when I remember who I voted for!Because they didn’t follow up at that time, with revolt strong in both, heads and hearts.
The Argentines protested, exclaimed, marched, barricaded …, with no clear plan until they tired. And 14 years later they went to the polls and voted for one, the new president Macri, who represents exactly the reason of their previous anger.
“What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. .” — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel1
But what can be done when all candidates are, one way or another, mobsters and/or unable — just like in Brazil?
Refute Hegel, and his thesis!
Think, discuss, organize, make a plan…
And strip off, at first in our Inner Self, the shackles of “representation” (of the masses and of each and every one through a handful of privileged “representatives” without transparency).
We don’t need anyone to speak for us. We can speak and act for our own! As it has been the case for a long time in (pre-) human history. And how it is today in some places (very well hidden by the Manipulative Power because the System Operators fear with reason that this “fashion” might become broadly and rapidly popular).
Why being afraid of imagining the world, your town, your block (…) without any personified and corrupted hindrances like bosses/”superiors”, directors, presidents, senators, mayors…?
Why not without these?
Could it really become worse than the actual diagnosis of Brazil (and so many countries and regions elsewhere) already is, where the electoral democracy system has been taken hostage by a group of global bankers and directors/CEOs of mega-corporations and their corrupt lackey mafias in mass media and politricks, known as lobbies and “factions”?
One World – One Love – Many Cultures – No bosses!
- Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Introduction.