How do Lula government figures keep their parliamentary seats if people know they’re corrupt and are angry enough to protest?
[ol]
[li]All the other parties are just as bad - except PMDB, who are even worse, but politicians switch parties so often that most successful politicians and all presidents have a PMDB past[/li][li]The Bolsa Familia - poor people get a monthly payment for being poor. High enough to life off, just, and low enough to keep people in poverty and ignorant. PT claim ownership of it (originally it was a program under the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government to give an incentive to poor families to send their kids to school instead of making them work. PT removed all conditions, so now it’s just free money for staying poor)[/li][li]Voting is obligatory - so people who are ignorant of or uninterested in politics still have to vote or face a fine; others sell their votes[/li][li]In other democracies, when a corruption scandal breaks, people say “that’s shameful! Throw him out!” and the politician (usually, hopefully) loses their job. So far in Brazil, when a corruption scandal breaks, people have said “That’s shameful! How can I get in on this?”[/li][/ol]
There are other factors - alliances with politicians who own TV channels (Fernando Collor’s dad controls/controlled the main TV channel in their home state, for example), rampant populism, bribing other parties (Mensalão, and handing out ministries {creating new ministries when necessary} to allied parties), bribing/undermining journalists (the main media channel, Globo, is absolutely biased) etc. etc. etc. but I think the above are the main reasons.
Edited to add: people have accepted it so far because things weren’t that bad, there were excuses that made some sense (Great Recession), etc. This time, people are actually pissed enough that there might be real change in the next election. The question is who can replace them, since most parties are PT allies, due to bribery, back-scratching, or other reasions.
Yes - they call it cachaça. 
Toffe, thanks for all the great info. Do you think the military will get involved in this?
In an earlier post, gracer mentioned that there are no leaders. Do you agree with that? If this protest gets results - what sort of results do you think might arise?
I know the folks booking crews for the Olympic Games down there. I’ve shot Olympics before. You could not pay me a high enough day rate to insert myself into that maelstrom.
You think it’s bad now? Wait a year or two.
Nitpick: Isn’t Portuguese spoken in Brazil?
You’re welcome! RE: military - well, on my way home from work yesterday - had to leave early because the neighbourhood was being shut down by protests 
- I saw a truckful of soldiers driving around in Tijuca. Never seen that before. The Rio de Janeiro state public security secretary has suggested that he’ll ask the army for help if the available police isn’t enough. I figure that’ll happen fairly soon - I expect the army to be called out late next week.
The vote on the PEC37 has been postponed. I think most people are waiting to see what happens with this vote before actually going out and protesting. If the vote happens, and is in favour (which my wife says is a certainty), I think things will escalate very far and very quickly (many more demonstrators, much more use of force by the authorities, and the possibility of a bona fide revolution).
There are indeed no leaders at the moment. At first the leaders were people from “Passe Livre”, a movement for free public transport. They are no longer in charge - their latest public statements are very odd, like they cut a secret deal with authorities. Worse, apparently the representative in Rio is a 17-year-old airhead.
People are aware of this lack of leadership being a problem, and want to focus on specific issues. Hopefully specific leaders will pop up along the way (my personal pipe dream is that Joaquim Barbosa, head of the Supreme Court and one of the only people in government who is squeaky-clean and actively trying to combat corruption, will join in somehow and make a run on the presidency - but it’s not likely), but if not, the main groups and movements are after all pressing on specific issues. Not just “no corruption”, but things like “Renan Calheiros out” and “No to PEC37” with concrete aims and measurable results. Personally I’m impressed with Anonymous on this - on Thursday night while I was getting gassed, they broadcast a video with 5 very specific aims now that the bus fares had gone back to previous levels, all of which are concrete and which I and many others support entirely.
The sort of results that might arise depend on how ugly things get and how long the protests continue. People will die if PEC37 passes. The system of oil royalties will change, to appease Rio de Janeiro - that’s already been announced by the president but not implemented (oil royalties will go to public health). Beyond that, it’s hard to say. Politicians feel like kings, so it’s hard for people like Renan Calheiros to be removed even if the president orders it. Politicians are also unbelievably tone-deaf, so they’re sure to legislate something about bus fares because they still think that’s what it’s all about. Starting a new political party is almost impossible due to bureaucracy, and people don’t trust the system anymore - but it’s possible (yet very unlikely) that a tiny party gets taken over by activists and builds a reformist platform on this for next year’s election.
Realistically, the government will want to do as little as possible, and will do as little as they can get away with. Pres. Dilma will probably have to veto PEC37, and if she doesn’t, she won’t get reelected. I hold hopes that she won’t be reelected no matter what, and that the PT era will end. Realistically, I think the protests will get bad enough that Renan Calheiros will at least surrender the presidency of the senate under a face-saving excuse, but it’ll take a real revolution or political assassination to remove him as a senator. It’s all hard to say, but I’m pushing for the full “Eastern Europe 1989 Special”.
As an aside, I think it’s freaking amazing that over a million Brazilians have already taken to the streets to protest against football
Cartooniverse, it wouldn’t be so bad for crews if not for the fact that the cops have so far had a habit of shooting journalists in the face. Rubber bullets, but still. The authorities don’t like journalists.
cochrane, yup, we speak Portuguese here.
Yes. I pretty much murdered all three languages with my OP and thread title. Sorry about that.
Toffe - thanks again and take care of yourself down there. It’s interesting that you mention Anonymous possibly being helpful in establishing goals. I know it’s not really correct to talk about them as if they were a single organization but I havne’t heard much about their international efforts. It would be weird if they turned out to be useful.
Hi Toffe, good to have some news from on the ground, thank you! And please do be careful 
What I was wondering, and haven’t got round to asking friends yet, is: at first I kept hearing the police were largely on the side of the protesters, and then suddenly there was a lot more teargas etc. What was your experience? Are we talking different forces? (Brazil has lots of types of police.)
You described well the pervasiveness & depth of the corruption in Brazil. I can only agree. I must say that the scale of the protests is astonishing to me, after my experience living there telling me corruption is simply a fact of life. FFS I used to have to attend these disgusting parties in tight-fitting dresses, hosted by our vile mayor, to secure funding for our children’s home for another year. This is the thing: you just have to play the game. You do it, because you have to. And everyone has to, because that is the only system. Unless everyone gets pissed off just enough!
And just as you say: against football?! ‘Nuf said! A friggin’ million…
Seconding all the people thanking you for the great post, Toffe.
You’re all very welcome!
gracer, I haven’t heard a peep about police being on the side of the protesters, although that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened somewhere at some point. Some of my friends mention seeing videos of police simply doing nothing to interfere, but all I’ve seen - in person and from various online sources from around the country - is police brutality. People getting shot for shouting at police, people getting shot just for being at the front of a peaceful demonstration, unarmed solitary women getting pepper-sprayed by riot police without provocation or presenting any sort of threat, journalists being shot for doing their job, and everyone getting tear-gassed early and often with little or no provocation, and far beyond the necessary to force the crowds to retreat. If the media - domestic or foreign - would focus on actual police activity, the theme would be unprovoked unjustified brutality. (the reason that this hasn’t happened is that by historical standards, it could be much worse - like the Spetsnaz breaking up protests in the Baltics in 1989-91 with sharpened shovels) I have personally been shocked by the enormous social conscience of the protesters, going far above and beyond what I had hoped in terms of preventing violence, vandalism, and hooliganism - even restraining potential perpretrators when necessary. It’s all singing, shouting, and marching until the fuzz brings out the guns and grenade launchers.
From what I remember, those New Zealanders (and also a bunch of Brits) were hired because the construction of the structures of the Olympics apparently required intensive and widespread use of very sophisticated and specialised machinery – and it seems that they couldn’t find enough Spanish workers who were certified to use it 
Most of the workers using those machines were hired from the UK, New Zealand and Australia.
Just what I heard about it, anyway.
Indeed the danger issues are not hyperbole. And then there’s the more insidious and equally unnerving aspects of being in a somewhat lawless area unable to obtain safe housing or food.
I can tell you from ( unfortunately ) first-hand experience that the boxed lunches being fed to Olympics Broadcast crew members in 1996 in Atlanta were prepared and boxed by prisoners. Feces and urine were found in some boxed lunches.
I would not be comfortable drinking the water or eating the prepared foods. Lacking hydration and nutrition, I’m unsure how I’d work the show. Simple as that. COUPLED with the statements above regarding the loathing coming in towards crew members and journalists from the locals, well…
For the Villa? I remember the information about the Chapel, but the houses too? There actually was a slump in construction work in the years before the Games! I was living in Barcelona at the time and Vallvidrera’s tunnels happen to be right in front of my college: Spaniards in ditches, sure, but if you went to any of the big jobs, it seemed to be all foreign crews.
In any case, it’s about public perception, and the local public perception was, there were a lot of jobs going to foreigners while our own unemployment grew. Oshosientomil*…
- At one point, one of our parties successfully campaigned by promising, among other things,* ochocientosmil* new jobs (800,000). They won. When later the jobs failed to materialize, people joked that we’d misunderstood: they’d actually promised ochocientos o mil, 800 to 1000, which those politicians had created and promptly given to their relatives - they had fulfilled their promise, it was just that we had misunderstood it.