November 15th - Republic Day and Protests...

Hi there,

There wouldn't be a better time to start a blog about Brazilian Politics than having the first post just one day after the Republic Day. On November 15th, Brazil commemorates the end of the Empire of Brazil and the proclamation of the Brazilian Republic, that happened in 1889. Following the trend of protests that have happened after the last "controversial" and doubtful presidential election, the social networks were used once again to organise massive protests in the capital of most of Brazilian states. As I personally expected, the Brazilian press barely gave attention to the thousands of people on the streets complaining about corruption of PT (Workers Party), the elections that have had always increasing tips of fraud, and finally, asking for impeachment. While the Brazilian press reported that there were max 10.000 people protesting on the streets of Sao Paulo, CNN reported more than 50 thousand people, showing the usual practise of the Brazilian press to discredit the protests. Furthermore, part of the press kept the focus on some minority of protesters who asked for military intervention, what finally tends to mislead and separate the opposition initiative, given that the involvement of military (an extreme right-wing measure) is indeed a "touchy" discussion, for the lack of a better term. I will leave my opinion out of this subject in the meantime...

So, I really found very patriotic the initiative of those thousands of people that went to the streets to show their indignation and protest against PT (Workers Party), but, in my opinion, there wasn't enough leadership to keep people focused on the objective. And by the way, what was the objective? There are just so many things wrong in Brazilian Politics, that I had the feeling that people were just letting it go and speaking / chanting everything they had in mind, which I believe isn't really effective to give a clearer direction for the "follow-ups".

I could start writing pages and pages about everything that (in my humble opinion) I see wrong about the way PT has governed Brazil. However, since this is my first post and I will have many more to speak my mind, I will focus on one topic: 

The voting system in Brazil.

Article from Stanford about Electronic Voting - Arguments Against

http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/2006-07/electronic-voting/index_files/page0002.html

There are just too many arguments against the electronic vote in Brazil, so I will highlight some relevant FACTS: 

1. Firstly, the supervision/inspection process during the preparation of the software that will be running on the machines during the elections is completely discredited for various reasons, which I've read in many articles and interviews with engineers who actually took part of this inspection process. Here are some facts: the inspection needs to be done on TSE's (Superior Electoral Court) computers, without the use of any tool to analyse the consistency of the code of millions of codification lines. To make it worse, after the inspection process is over, there's NO GUARANTEE that the software which the engineers were looking at is indeed the software loaded on the machines. 
2. The Brazilian Superior Electoral Court (TSE) is chaired by Dias Toffoli, who was nominated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (or Lula)  to the Supreme Court in 2009. To make it even more interesting, Mr. Toffoli worked as PT's lawyer for the presidential campaign of Lula in 1998, 2002 and 2006. Yes, the former lawyer of the Workers Party is now the president of the governmental department that organizes, creates audit rules and pretty much owns the voting system in Brazil.  (sorry, but I had to put this piece of text in bold). 
3. SMARTMATIC, the company that designs and deploys the technology solution used for the electronic voting system in Brazil, has been under investigation by U.S. federal government due to potential fraud during elections in Venezuela (see article from the NYtimes)
4. To finalise, the countries using or planning to start using SMARTMATIC for the voting system are the same countries part of the Foro de Sao Paulo (Sao Paulo Forum), the conference/network of extreme leftist political parties in Latin America, founded in 1990 by Lula and Fidel Castro, but maintained in secret until few people (especially professor and philosopher Olavo de Carvalho) started talking about it. There's much to talk about what the Sao Paulo Forum is, the organised and synchronised methods that the countries part of this "entity" have driven extreme leftist politics in the same direction and what their goals are, but that shall be part of whole new post... 

Back to the protests, I have the opinion that, instead of claiming for impeachment and complaining about so many things, the main focus (at this moment) should be to invoke the Brazilian federal police (and internacional police) to really investigate SMARTMATIC and the overall voting system in Brazil and Latin America, with the objective of annulling the election, given that proof about election results manipulation are found (enough evidences already exist...).

Petrobras Scandal Widens - "Operation Car Wash"

It's also worth pointing out that the Brazilian Federal Police has gained "trust" of Brazilians, as the Petrobras scandal widens and having Brazilian police arrested 18 in Petrobras corruption raids via the operation "car wash. This is another topic that doesn't stop developing and, even with the police warning opposition "not to politicise Petrobras scandal" (see article from wallstreet), it's just impossible not to, considering that state-controlled Oil corporation has majority of board occupied by PT's nominates and furthermore, the former Petrobras director Paulo Roberto Costa continues contributing with the police through plea deal/agreement to help police unveil the scheme of money laundry led by Alberto Youssef, the man responsible for the financial transactions, which also consisted of diversion of funds directed to the Workers Party, as reported by Mr. Paulo Roberto Costa. In a very interesting timing, Alberto Youssef delated also that former and current Presidents, Lula and Dilma, knew everything about the corruption in Petrobras. And to make it worse, this Petrobras case has been reported to be under investigation by the U.S. FBI as well.

As the "Car Wash" operation continues, the president Dilma Rousseff maintains the obvious position of not knowing about anything and encouraging investigation to proceed.

Even though I am very interested in seeing the next chapters of this story, I just can't believe anymore in anything completely controlled by the state due to so many reasons (not only corruption with public money) and really would like to see Petrobras being privatized, as it was done with other strategic sectors such as the telecommunications sector, that was privatized during the government of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso between 1995-2002. I am not going to elaborate too much about the subject "Privatization", as this may be the topic for a whole future post.

Please feel free to leave comments, questions or to share this blog in your network.

Regards
Gustavo Firmino

Getting started...

Hello world,

After countless posts on Facebook, discussions in forums and  other spaces talking about Politics in Brazil (which would be a more appropriate name for my blog, but the name was taken...), I realised that I needed a better place and format to write, save, and finally share my thoughts about this subject that has made me obsessed for quite a long time.

By writing this blog, I am not trying to pretend that I am a option leader of any sort, and before someone asks, I do not have any political affiliation either. However, after noticing how little my European friends understand about politics in Brazil, yet being very interested in the subject (as it's part of the culture, Europeans are by nature more interested in politics than any Brazilian), I got to the conclusion that I have the role of, at least, sharing to my fellows around some information that do not reach or are not well covered by the global media outlets, and obviously, sharing my opinion about everything, not to buy "support" in my belief and ideology, but actually, just to make people understand a bit better what's going on in Brazil, from the perspective of a Brazilian citizen. I won't pretend that I am "neutral" - that doesn't exist, everybody has an opinion and will transmit that while writing about something. However, I judge myself as not being an "extremist", especially after having lived in Holland for so many years, a country where I learnt that the common sense, respect, and equilibrium can provide an incredible quality of life to everybody.

All in all, this is a place for me to express my ideas and learn from the comments I may receive. I believe that nobody knows everything, hence I consider that good discussions about the world we live in, based on facts and with the goal of having a better world for everybody, are the kind of discussions that I will always love to have with anybody.

Regards,

Gustavo Firmino