MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Stormy forecast for President Rousseff ten-party ruling coalition
Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff is facing further political unrest in the ruling coalition following the naming of a new Transport Minister, apparently a unilateral decision that was not shared by several allies. Read full article
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Disclaimer & comment rulesSacking one - after another - after another - after another, as each known corruption becomes too public for comfort, is no way to manage a Government or a coalition.
Jul 14th, 2011 - 05:56 pm - Link - Report abuse 0The perpetrators are well known by those 'in the know' - and that is especially true for Dilma, who has been aware and appraised of these activities over many years.
Courage is what is needed.
Courage to DECLARE to the politicians and the public servants of Brasil that THIS is where the line is. Step over it and you are 'dead' - politically and in terms of future government employ.
I firmly believe the Presidenta WANTS to do this, but she needs a nucleus of importantly placed, uncontaminated people around her before she can make it happen.
The massive hike in politicians' salaries SHOULD have been the time to say “I give you this, this is what you earn, this is ALL you will take home, any corruption from this day forward will be a prison sentence in the common-man's jail with no remissions and no appeals”.
Wow, how inspiring, Geff. Ever thought of becoming a speech writer? Seriously, I've got goosebumps.
Jul 14th, 2011 - 11:08 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Funny, that. Yes, I have been a speech writer; and a speech presenter.
Jul 15th, 2011 - 08:29 am - Link - Report abuse 0Lecturers/professors are frequently asked to do the public speaking thing using their own material.
Because of my disciplines of environmental academic study I frequently presented on bio/geographical/legal/political/economic aspects of ambiental importance to general audiences.
But I would prefer to hear your comments on the substance, not the style:
Have you got your own opinions about how Brasil should go about erradicating state corruption?
I would certainly like to hear them,
and in some detail too, if you have thought them through.
Considering how human nature works, the only thing that will force people to behave according to social norms is accountability. If the prospect of public exposure or official punishment is small, people will feel free to pursue their self-interests in the crudest of ways. Um, it seems that Northern European societies are the ones that least suffer from the ill of public corruption. Serious policy-makers should get clues from how institutions evolved in those societies in a way that forced policy-makers not to mess around with public resources. Or pehaps, to avoid a cultural shock, our Chilean and Uruguayan neighbors also povide good examples of institutions that suffer far less from public corruption than the rest of the developing world. I know that this is all too vague, but then again I'm not a scholar on the sociology of corruption, so I have no detailed advices concerning this issue. But I do know that ranting and throwing self-righteous insults, like most Brazilians do, is not the way to go to achieve a less shameless political class.
Jul 15th, 2011 - 09:57 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Thanks, Forgetit.
Jul 16th, 2011 - 06:51 am - Link - Report abuse 0Public exposure - needs explicitly the maintenence of a free press, and the recognition that Veja can be right in part or in whole, for there is rarely smoke without fire.
Official punishment - this needs a sanction more than just the removal from office and, because of the disbursements of illegally obtained assets to family members, friends and 'names' who take the risk for a 'cut', there must be severe legal punishment for secondary corruptions. Removal of all assets down to the official 'poverty line' is necessary as a discouragement, along with the jail parameters I mentioned earlier.
Because the corruption paradigm is so firmly fixed in (Brasilian) society, it needs a disproportionately vicious set of sanctions to break the paradigm and flip the society into a different stable state (entropy & catatrophe/chaos theory).
The Ficha Limpa needs imposing in its full strength - so Senate needs to re-work the watered-down agreement.
Drug money, timber money and expropriation of funds from public contracts and works should command the most severe - longest - sentences, and I do not exclude the death penalty. The latter would be, of course, the greatest deterrence once the first few high-profile politicians were publically strung-up.
You see how focussed my suggestions are. I don't talk in general terms or abstract terms; I see the problems as they are here, today, and seek to create real solutions that will work on the ground.
Yes, it will be initially a more intrusive state, but subsequent loosening up, once the limpa paradigm is fixed, can be achieved with great care and sensitivity to reversion to previous behaviour patterns.
This process can be introduced by a civil authority, it does not need military governance, though it does need military support. It is not Right or Left and the introductions need broad based support in Senate along with an Amnesty clause that cannot be and will not be revoked at every change of government.
I wouldn't relie on Veja* to be part of a media seriously interested in accountability. The BR media, like most of its South American counterparts, gives little thought to institutional stability; it's instead more focused on producing news peices - sometimes non-news pieces - that attract readership. It stimulates in the populace lowly and unproductive instincts of a priori cynism based on seriously caricatured impressions on the political scene. The average Brazilian loves to hurl self-righteous rants about how politicians should work, but his own grasp on the political scene is minimum. He likes to demand from politicians that they behave properly but he won't say what's going to make them do so. Simply asking people to be moral won't do. Instead you have to create conditions that stimulate moral behavior. The Ficha Limpa legislation is a useless piece of demagoguery. Terminating the madates of corrupt politicians AFTER they're caught, won't do a thing to reduce levels of public corruption. After all, who can say, of the newer politicians who'll replace the older ones, that they'll be any less corrupt? Instead of worrying about politicians already caught in misdeeds, we should instead create controls that force politicians to be transparent about their behavior, deals, bank accounts, etc. even BEFORE anything suspicious on their part becomes known. In a system where one can have easy access to public resources, even well-intentioned persons can be corrupted as time passes by. For this to be avoided, there needs to be control and transparency over how such resources are managed BEFORE anything bad happens.
Jul 16th, 2011 - 08:36 pm - Link - Report abuse 0* Veja may be hostile to corrupt Petistas, but it ran a very simpathetic piece on the ex-governor Arruda about how he'd redeemed from his past actions of corruption: this, of course, before Arruda was caught in a new scandal. Bashing politicians from the party you dislike, but standing up for the ones of parties you like, isn't my idea of accountability.
Fair response,
Jul 17th, 2011 - 08:31 am - Link - Report abuse 0with little refutation of my points.
No comment on my death penalties as a sanction?
I think Dilma has the ability to set up the structures for an uncorrupt governance; I see this as one of her great strengths; she may need a second term to see them emplaced - antagonistic Senate and a hopeful Lula could confound her.
Vega is an exremely valuable starting point to getting to grips with the Brasilian scene but, like the Telegraph or News of the World (UK), it is only a starting point; keeping an eye on how stories develop in the minstream press is important, alongside Veja updates.
I agree with your comment on a partial media approach to political parties; I tend to find Veja doing the same to *any* party contributing to governance AND to all 'opposition' parties eg. on matters of illegal collusion, fund raising for elections, etc.
We shall only see this tested when the opposition becomes the Government coalition.
China already has many laws that prescribe death penalty for various acts of corruption. According to Transparency International, however, China doesn't fare well on corruption indicators - in fact, it does even more poorly than Brazil. As I said before, regulating officials' behavior is more important than the punishment itself. What makes people behave is mostly the likelihood that they'll be caught, not the severity of the punishment.* Like the Ficha Limpa legislation, a hypothetical imposition of capital punishment on corruption charges would sound more like a piece of demagoguery, a populistic proposal to comply with the population's reactionary needs to feel better about itself by resorting to self-righteous spectacles.
Jul 21st, 2011 - 10:46 pm - Link - Report abuse 0As for Veja, I don't quite understand what you said about it. For me, the mag is irremediably biased. Would they ever write, for a 'redeemed' corrupt Petista, the same piece they wrote on Mr. Arruda? No, they wouldn't, and the reason is that their journalistic method is based on selective indignation - bash the politicians from the parties you dislike (that is, those left-of-center) and whitewash any wrongdoings by the parties you like (that is, the right-of-center ones).
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* Imagine you live in a country with very severe legislation regarding any sort of ill behavior, no matter how trivial. However, police is so inefficient, nothing is ever brought to court. If you found a case filled with gold in the middle of the street, you would be tempted to grab it if you knew in advance no one would ever punish you, even if the law prescribes death punishment for this offense - wouldn't you?
#8: I have yet to come across a right of centre Brasilian political party!
Jul 22nd, 2011 - 07:53 am - Link - Report abuse 0And the Brasilian police death squads, visiting senior corrupt politicians rather than favela drug-runners, is not the answer.
The swiftly applied and harsh punishment through the law courts - with the associated publicity - is the route to changing the mind-set.
As I said before, IMO the sort of punishment people are subjected to won't be sufficient to change anything. As for there not being right-of-center parties - well, you sound just like Olavo de Carvalho. What we don't have is parties like the Republican Party - parties who live more in the clouds of abstract ideologies than reality. Even the Republican Party pre-Reagan would look social democratic by comparison to today's.
Jul 22nd, 2011 - 08:02 am - Link - Report abuse 0Commenting for this story is now closed.
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