It Could Happen Here - The Brazilian Election Part 2: The Gravediggers of the Working Class

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

In part 2 of our series about the recent Brazilian election we look at how imperialism, the police, shifts in class composition, and PT collaboration with capitalists doomed the Brazilian working classSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where we celebrate the destruction of Jair Bolsonaro and the concept of Christianity in the human soul. Both of which happened recently in Brazil, as far as I understand from skimming the news on Twitter. How's everybody else doing today? Utterly exhausted, but you know, such is the world without Christ. We have destroyed. Yeah, that's what the woke mob did. Speaking of woke mobs,

what are we doing today? What are we talking about? We are talking more about the Brazilian election. I guess we should start with our with our perennial update about what seems to be happening there right now. So, OK, currently is what, 11 a.m. Pacific time. We're recording this on. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah.

Yeah, that one so as of right now bolsonaro like still so he's appeared but he still hasn't conceded the election um he sure hasn't yeah and okay so the other thing that's been going on is that there's been... Okay, so one of the sort of perennial Bolsonaro things is that he has a bunch of support among a bunch of sort of like... Like a bunch of different sort of like kinds of truckers. Yes. And there's been a bunch of... There's been a bunch of barricades. I...

Okay, from talking to people on the ground and from what I've seen from it, I don't know. It's hard to gauge how serious these blockades actually are. I mean, some of these blockades, I've seen videos of some that involve several dozen vehicles. Yeah, I mean, they have a lot of vehicles. Okay, so the Supreme Court has ordered the police to like clear the barricades and as best i can tell they're kind of just getting their asses kicked like they're not really resisting like particularly hard and so i i don't know if this is like... Yeah, I mean, it's the kind of thing that it will present perhaps a model for other people in the future if there's any efficacy to it.

It certainly could be part of an effective coup, like locking down the roads in this way. Yeah, I mean, this is how the coup against Allende started, for example. This is how the coup against Allende started, for example. If Bolsonaro and the military don't both go declared I'm remaining president, everybody rise up. Well, then a whole thing might have happened, but he didn't. And so the momentum that might have kind of led into a more thorough takeover of the government fizzled out with a bunch of guys getting, you know, into fistfights with the Capitol Police and shit. Yeah, and there's an aspect, I think, too,

that's sort of important of, like, so these have, like, Bolsonaro, like, this whole sort of, like, truckers blockade thing, like, this has been going on in various forms for, like, the entire time he's been in office, and, like, he sort of turned them into these motorcades that he would do, but they're really weird in that. Like,

okay. So like they are blocking roads, but a lot of it is kind of pure spectacle. Like there's this whole wave of sort of right-wing candidates, like, like basically, but like there's, there's a whole wing of sort of like right-wing politicians who like got

their start from like doing Instagram videos from like, or like TikToks or like shit, like whatever, like basically like from these blockades. So like, or like Tik TOKs or like shit, like whatever, like basically like from these blockades. So like, I don't know. They don't, they don't seem to be like,

as of right now, I don't think they're like an incredibly serious fighting force, but you know, I mean, it's not good. This is happening. It's also not good that the police was like initially cooperating with them and that the police set up their own roadblocks to stop people from voting. So I don't know. The situation is not good, but it's also not good that the police was like initially cooperating with them and that the police set up their own roadblocks to stop people from voting.

So I don't know. The situation is not good, but it's not as bad as it could be. And yeah, I want to reiterate that, like the U.S. has recognized that Lula has won the election, which I think makes it like infinitely harder. infinitely harder. Yes. The fact that, and this is one of those things when people on the left talk about like, is there a harm reduction point in voting? Well, this is harm reduction, right? Because if Trump had been in office, he would have backed Bolsonaro and Lula would be in prison again. And there would be absolutely no hope for stemming the destruction of the rainforest. Not that things are going to work. Things could still be a nightmare in brazil don't get me wrong but we've we've at least avoided the most obvious way things could have been a disaster yeah although i i do want

to point out that the obama administration had a huge role in uh like this entire shit to be fair the obama administration i don't think was trying to put Bolsonaro in power they were trying to put the neoliberal ghouls in power but they definitely we'll get into that next episode but they definitely like helped get us here no I mean that's true and it

also follows in the continually building story that like Biden's actually a much better president than Barack Obama. Yeah. Low bar, but. I mean, incredibly low bar because Barack Obama led directly to Donald Trump for a variety

of reasons. Yeah. There you are. This is a weird world that we live in. Yeah. And it's also like people are now starting, you know, rightfully so. I know we're going to be talking about a bunch of fucked up stuff about Lula, most recently kind of bringing up his very bad takes on Ukraine. But it's also like, I don't care.

Like, obviously, I think I would always like for people to have if they're going to have a representative democracy better leaders but at the end of the day like the the rainforest being destroyed at the rate it's being destroyed is an existential existential threat to all life on earth and lula has a proven track record of reducing deforestation in the amazon so like what i like i don't care that he has a bad take on you i just don't like it. It doesn't matter really. Yeah. Yeah. I,

I, I saw, I saw articles that were like, ah, Lula, like, uh, supports democracy in Brazil, but supports authoritarianism abroad.

It's like, I guys shut up. Like, holy shit, Jesus Christ. Like I, I can, I,

if, if I go back to 2000, like 17, I can find all of you like writing, pull fucking provost and our articles. So like, shut up. So, okay.

So let's get to how everything went to shit. So last episode, we sort of left the PT like riding high. Lula's out with like a, like 80, 90% approval rating. He's done like an economic miracle. He's pulled one street by poverty. I, and you know, if things had continued like that,

I, we wouldn't be here right now. So obviously something happened. And to understand what happens, unfortunately we have to do some materialism. Um, okay. So bear with me through the materialism.

I promise we're going to get to a bunch of like absolutely horrific crimes against humanity. But first we need to do a bit of crimes love crimes against humanity yeah yeah they're it's oh there there are lots of criming they're they're oh it's oh boy i'm already hard wait maybe i shouldn't have said it that way moving moving swiftly on so okay i i i'm good i'm gonna quote here from one of the sort of more famous marx quotes from 18th premier uh that is genuinely a very good way of understanding history which is men make their own history but they do not make it as they please they do not make it under self-selective circumstances, but under circumstances existing already,

given and transmitted from the past. So, okay, what are the circumstances that, like, 2002 Lula is inheriting? Lula's sort of social democratic plan is able to sort of grow the economy and also pay off the ruling class to be able to stay in power at the same time because of something called the commodity boom um a commodity boom broadly is just like it's a large spike across the board in the prices of commodities over a sort of period of time uh we're using the sort of like mainstream bourgeois definition of commodity which is like primary commodities it's stuff you can like pick up off the ground dig up or harvest so it's things

like soybeans like copper iron horses uh lead um condoms yes we understand what commodities are yes look brazil condom tree i don't know i got nothing so okay and lula lula like takes office and leaves power like almost exactly perfectly to take to take advantage of like the peak of the commodity boom right lula comes into power in 2000 and well okay so he wins 2002 election he takes off 2003 um the commodity boom according to a cambridge to cambridge is a handbook of primary commodities in the global economy took off in 2004 and ended in about 2014, but it's slowing by about 2010, 2011-ish. And Lula exits office in 2010 due to the two-term limit, which means he never has to deal with the consequences of the downturn. And let's stop here for a second. How do term limits work in the Brazilian system? Because

it's not the same as here. Here, like a term limit means you get your two as president, and then you're done. Yeah. So I, okay. So the way I think it works and I could be wrong about this, but I'm 90% sure the way it works. Okay. So you can have two terms and then you can't run again in a row, but if like someone else

comes in, you can then run again after that. It's just that you can only do two in a row. I mean, I'm happy that he's beaten Bolsonaro, but that is a very silly way to do it yeah well and i will say something about this is something about lula that like i think kind of infuriates a lot of the people who like don't like him politically and want to sort of scream about his authoritarianism or whatever like he he was always like like mostly really scrupulous about the sort of like democratic norm stuff like he a lot of other sort of like pink tide leaders in the same position like this is actually how even morales originally gets in trouble is that he tries to

seek a third term and lula is just like not i'm out i'm fuck it like which is which is good yeah yeah i mean it it kind of like on the one hand it in in theoretical terms this is sort of like good for brazilian democracy etc etc in practical terms it's kind of a disaster because i mean it's it's good because i i think that it's always good when popular leaders acknowledge like absolute limits but yeah, I mean, the timing wasn't ideal. Yeah, and you know, it... But the reason that he's able

to sort of like... If the Constitution had allowed him to run for a third turn, he would have just like... He would have clobbered everyone. There's just not even any remote competition to him and the reason he's able to do this again is because people like this guy he got he got like 10 less of the vote this time uh i mean yeah but what was that yeah okay

like this election was like really close compared no no oh you're talking about this most recent one most recent one i'm talking one, yeah, yeah. I'm talking about Lula back then, yeah. Yeah, yeah, Lula back then, like literally unstoppable political drug. He's very, very popular at this point. Yeah, but this is because of the commodity boom. And we need to,

in order to understand what is going to happen to the PT, we need to understand why the commodity boom happened in the first place. This turns out to be very important. There's a lot of causes technically that have to do with a lot of complicated macroeconomic stuff. The single most important cause for us, and I think generally the one that is credited with the reason that these commodity prices are increasing, is the skyrocketing growth of the Chinese economy in the 2000s. When I say skyrocketing growth, we are talking like double digit gdp increases

every year this is when we have that olympics where they have all the drummers and you have that newsweek article about how scary china is maybe it's time um yes and and you know and the sort of the massive increase in industrial production like they are the ccp is like like chinese industrializing on a scale that is i think like almost hitherto unimaginable and this means you know there's an enormous increase in demand for primary commodities but this boom was only sustainable as long as the chinese economy can maintain something like double digit gdp. But the problem is after 2008, the Chinese economy starts to slow. And sort of in response to this in 2009, the CCP does like one of the largest

stimulus projects ever. And they spend 4 trillion RMB on like infrastructure and welfare programs to save off a recession. And it works, but, you know, like this is like the largest like stimulus program ever and it can't really keep the economy growing like ever ever since 2010 uh every single year well okay i excluding the weird rebound stuff in 2021, but like, like every single year,

like year on year growth, the rate of growth of the Chinese economy has been decreasing. Right. And, okay, well, the commodity boom, you know,

is produced by, by feeling, you know, by, by increased Chinese demand, but, okay, what happens when that,

you know, isn't true? But, but, you know, okay, so in, in, in the, in the 2000s, like, this is great.

These are the sort of material conditions that make ludicrous, like, politics possible, right? You have enormous economic growth, and this economic growth is happening in sectors, like, in very important sectors of the Brazilian economy to the extent that it's able to provide a revenue, a stable revenue base for the state that allows it to fund welfare programs like and pay off the bourgeoisie which is you know this is sort of like like papering over this sort of like fundamental contradiction of of of the pts base right which that they have they have to like they have to keep the economy running so they have to have to pay off a bunch of sort of like incredibly corrupt dudes and also just sort of like brazilian capitalism they also are trying to sort of feed their welfare programs but you know the commodity boom collapses and suddenly there's only enough money to either pay the capitalists or pay the workers and not both and the project begins to collapse and and this this happens across latin america um

like i i i would make the argument that like the end of the commodity boom like is the reaper that came for the latin american left it is at least as important if not more so in the collapse of the sort of the pink tide over over the the course of 2010s like then the actual cia like the cia is very heavily involved in this but the commodity boom just sort of like just nuking all of these economies, like coming to an end is like that. That is an enormously important sort of like element of this entire story. And there's also there's another thing that we should note, which is that there's a problem with organizing your economy to be sort of like in a way that's reliant on sort of like primary commodity, like export production, a handbook of primary commodities in the global economy specifically notes, quote,

Brazil significance in coffee, cotton, iron, or sugar and tobacco. And Chile is a dominant exporter of coffee. So, okay. Brazil exports like 11% of the world's cotton, 20% of the world's iron or 15% of its coffee,

39% of its sugar and 18% of its sugar, and 18% of its tobacco. And it also has an enormous cattle industry. It's got like a bunch of soybean farming, which is actually really important because it turns out as China gets richer, they have – It turns people into soy boys. Yeah, it also makes soy sauce, is are very important for i mean more importantly our reserves of of beta cuck energy would be disastrously low if if we didn't have brazilian soy so thank you jay bolsignaro for keeping the soy flowing yeah well i mean this this is sort of like like this is a joke like this is this is sort of the issue with this right like okay Like, okay. So politically, this is a,

there's also a massive timber industry, which has been literally destroying the entire planet. Yeah. But like, okay. So like, here's the thing. If you know anything about sugar,

coffee, cotton, and tobacco, you know, those are slavery crops. And you know, like these are, these are like the primary exports of a plantation economy.

And the people who run those kind of like like economies the people who like those plantation owners are like the scariest people who have ever lived anywhere like at any time on earth and you know in brazil these people have been in power for 500 years and unfortunately this is like a big part of what sort of lula's economic miracle is resting on it and and this this isn't really like a big part of what sort of Lula's economic miracle is resting on. And this isn't really like a base that produces socialism. Like if your economic base is relying on these like unbelievably psychotic racist like planter oligarchs, like your economic base is something that creates fascism. However, Robert, do you know what else produces fascism um the products and services that support this podcast ding ding ding ding ding that's some of them i guess are fascism

just directly so true yeah yeah the gold the gold people probably would be would be the main example example of this um but we also are sponsored by bigfascism.org com ah shit i don't i don't know i don't just roll the fucking ants welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows Presented by iHeart and Sonorum An anthology of modern day horror stories Inspired by the legends of Latin America From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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As part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola mi gente. It's Honey German. And I'm bringing you Gracias Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture,

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where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Boy, that was a good ad pivot. I hope everybody's happy chris why don't you continue talking about lula yeah so uh speaking of fascism

i was doing a uh yeah i went into it not not well no this is great. It's hard to hard to. Well, we'll have Dan will fix that up in post. Yeah. OK, so speaking of creating fascism, yeah, let's talk about that time Lula invaded Haiti. All right. Well, OK, to be fair, whom among us hasn't invaded Haiti? This is true. I've actually never invaded Haiti. That's right.

I've never been in Haiti. However, the US and Canada also and the UK. OK, well, that is more what I've actually never invaded Haiti. That's true. I've never invaded Haiti. However, the U.S. and Canada also and the U.K. Okay. Oh, well. That is more what I was saying. Okay. Like, it's... Yeah.

So, okay. So, in 2004, a CIA-backed coup ousted Haiti's democratically elected leftist president, Jean-Baptiste Aristide. And initially... Okay. Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And initially, okay, so the initial sort of occupation force that's sent in by the UN is

a US, like an American, French and Canadian force. And they're sent in like ostensibly under the sort of guise of like restoring stability or whatever. When I think about who can make Haiti stable, it's France and the United States.

Yeah. Partners in Haitian stability. And Canada. And Canada now. I'm glad you guys are, you know, getting involved in your big brother's crimes against humanity. Yeah. I'm wondering, for the Canadian stuff, how did they ship all of the Mounties all the way to Haiti? They took their horses over the water, Garrison.

We built the land bridge. The thing about this force, right, is that like okay, so even to like the most casual observer, having literally France in thes and also canada which

is like the it was just the u.s but there's also a french part of it uh like literally weird fucking sausage soup on their goddamn french fries disgusting it turns out okay so like like the the the optics of these people just militarily occupying Haiti is really bad. So, OK, the UN is trying to figure out like a permanent force. And initially, Lula like opposes Brazil getting involved in this, which is good. But that's that would make sense. When I think about change, when I think about whether or not Brazil should be involved in places Haiti would not be the top of my list you know this is always this is always just like a really sad thing of sort of like just

like the history of Latin America of like how many countries like owe their existence to Haiti over and over and over again like sending them troops and ships and weapons and then every single one of these countries are like ah fuck you Haitiiti so lula like basically lula becomes convinced that like this is this is like his big opportunity to like build the influence of brazil on the international stage and so brazil just like takes over the occupation or the auspices of the united nations stabilization mission in haiti which has the like utterly impronounceable acronym minishta or something i god damn it guys come on i you know how to do an acronym you have enough money jesus you would think however comma no it's this bullshit and okay so apparently this is part of a plan to try to get u.s and french support for a bid to get brazil a permanent seat in the u.n security council uh if you google

who is currently on the u.n security council you will see how this went which is to say it did not work and shit starts going horrifically badly almost immediately um basically like at the outset of the occupation brazilian troops in haiti launched an attack on a quote gang leader and note by the way here the terminology that is used to describe this operation and the people that they're fighting is exactly the same way as the paramilitary forces in haiti are described like right now by the u.s and the u..N. as the U.S. tries to stage another invasion, this time with the backing of Mexico's nominally leftist president, AMLO. So, yeah, a real sort of legacy of people who Americans think are leftists doing imperialism

in Haiti. Good job, everyone. Well, everybody does a little bit of imperialism in Haiti, you know, as a treat I mean this is the thing right right every every single country in Latin America is bound and determined to prove that you actually cannot do I I I contrary to contrary to sort of popular opinion

about this you actually can't do social democracy without imperialism and every single time someone tries to do a social democracy they have to invade Haiti it's just sort of like it's it's it's it's it's it's in the contract here okay and so they they the the the un the sort of like the and by the way i should point out the un force is commanded by a brazilian general like the entire basically once the brazilians take over it's commanded by brazilian generals the entire time. Those guys seem nice. They go after this guy

and they fire 22,000 rounds of ammunition into basically just apartment buildings. To this day, nobody knows how many people they killed, but from eyewitness reports, we know they killed babies, they killed children, they killed pregnant women. It is Vietnam shit. It is absolutely awful. Augusto Helano know they killed babies they killed children they killed pregnant women it is it is vietnam shit it

is absolutely awful um augusto helano who helen i guess heleno i don't know how to pronounce this guy's name uh he's the guy who leads this operation uh becomes the head of bolsonaro's institutional security bureau um here here's a headline from poder 360 from last week uh quote it is not possible to admit the return of the red gang says helano and by the red gang he means uh lula he's calling lula a communist and this is fine and good from a guy who again is the head of the institutional security bureau um Um, uh, this guy like sucks so much. Um, when he retired in 2011, uh, Helano defended, uh, this is from Reuters. When he retired in 2011, Helano defended Brazil's 1964 to 1985 military dictatorship as a bulwark against the communist, of course, the communization of the country.

Sure. And okay. So like we can say that as much as sort of brazil's like fascism is home grown and this is absolutely true they're also just like eating the ass end if you go as boomerang because all of the fascism that they're about to do is exported to haiti before it comes back um here's some writers uh this is talking about uh bol cabinet. His proposed defense minister, former General Fernando Alvarez de Silva, served under Helano as an operations chief. Bolsonaro's incoming infrastructure minister, Torcício Freitas, was a senior UN military engineer in Haiti, arriving shortly after Helano left in 2005. Retired General Carlos Alberto dos Santa Cruz, Brazil's next government minister, led UN troops in the Caribbean nation in 2007.

All of those guys, by the way, this was written before the election. All of those guys took office. Two, fully two of Bolsonaro's secretaries of government were part of this occupation. fully two of bolsonaro's uh secretaries of government were part of this occupation so yeah this this obviously uh it went great for lula like yeah okay good job you you you you sent a bunch of colonial troops to occupy haiti and then all of the generals came home and were like let's fucking do fascism here too yeah so i in this episode we're talking a lot about sort of the brazilian fascism because you know we're this is a brazil episode but i don't want to minimize like what this did to haiti

where like to this day lula is like fucking despised um for you know like betraying the haitian people and fucking occupying the country with troops like there's there's this whole thing where like he lula goes to haiti and he has this whole thing about how like he has he's playing like a soccer match and he's like okay we're going to show the world there's an alternative to bullets and meanwhile this soccer stadium is literally surrounded by the brazil by the brazilian army and it's oh boy um i love i love showing the world there's i mean there is an alternative to bullets and it's just threatening people with your guns because they know you've shot enough people that you'll use them if they and drones too by the way uh this is this is where

this is where the un learns how to do drone warfare um the other thing that's happening here is this this occupation is where the un starts to like fight quote like hybrid wars for the first time it you know the like the wars that they're that they're doing these sort of peacekeeping operations quote unquote uh they're starting they're starting, they starting to do kind of insurgency shit where like the enemy can be mixed in with the population and you know, they kill a shit ton of people. There is rampant rape and sexual assault because it turns out that I, when you,

when you send troops to another country to occupy it, this is what happens. And when, when, when, when this force eventually pulls out in 2017, they just like leave a shit ton of fatherless babies behind because the people who did all this shit were like, fuck it. We're just going to leave.

We're just going to like leave these children behind. I think most famously – okay, so there's a giant earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and this leads to this like enormous sort of redoubling of the occupation. And troops are brought in from other parts of the world including there's a condition from nepal and the result of this is that yeah definitely haiti seems like a place nepalese soldiers ought to be this is this is by the way like the this this is like the new revolutionary government in nepal that has like finally defeated the monarchy after like god decades like decades it's like we all looked at the british empire and we're like well that's clearly fucked up but what if we did it in a decentralized

way right like what if what if it wasn't just the british what if everyone was sending nepalese shock troops into crackdown on yeah popular insurgencies well and you and the thing that the thing that particularly goes wrong with the Nepalese troops is that the Nepalese troops would bring cholera to Haiti. Okay, well, again, who hasn't? You know, okay, here's the thing. The defeat of cholera,

this is like one of the few genuine victories we have had over sort of like, over the last 200 years, over the forces that have caused like human misery and suffering for like this time immemorial is that we defeated cholera and then we brought it back the fucking u.n occupation brings like this is the this is the first large-scale cholera outbreak in modern times um 800 000 haitians get cholera as a result of this fucking christ yeah it's it's not hard to not spread cholera yeah Yeah, we success.

Like even if you're looking by the standards of military occupations, like the Russians didn't haven't spread cholera in Ukraine. It's not hard to not spread cholera in Vietnam. No, we didn't create a cholera epidemic in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is not hard to not create a cholera epidemic. To be fair, the Saudis have managed to create one in Yemen now, too. Yes. But that's probably worse than this one. But, yeah.

That more just reinforces my point that most imperialist occupations are able to not cause cholera epidemics. It's hard. And, okay, you know, and obviously, right, like, okay, you've now created your colonial army. The colonial army is going to come home and literally these same troops go back to Brazil and launch a war in the favelas. Like, under Dilba Rousseff's PT, like, the fucking army is literally occupying the favelas. And, you know, this is all part of the PT's,ts like massive campaign to sort of buy weapons and modernize the army which you know and and by like i i i think currently they're involved in like well okay i i okay i i i i i i'm not entirely sure about my dates on this i i i i'm not entirely sure if they're if they're currently involved in nine umpc

operations or 16 but uh there are like there are Brazilian troops like all over the world still doing this bullshit and you know again as we've talked about like literally the people who are in Haiti like are the people who are going to help put Lula in prison and put Bolsonaro in power

so you know this is some this is some fucking enormous like like, creating your own gravedigger shit. Okay, so, okay, we've now gotten through one of the sort of sets of gravediggers that the PT is building for themselves. But also, back in Brazil, things are also like, you know, not going great for them, which, and the way that this is simply not going great is that like,

even, even, you know, sort of in the hour of triumph, triumph of the workers party, right? Lula ascendant, et cetera,

et cetera. There was a massive Fisher opening under the feet of the Brazilian left. And that Fisher is the gig economy. We, we have talked like literally ad nauseum on this show about how the gig economy is bad for workers. For our purposes, the thing that's kind of important here is that doing this kind of gig work, right, like becoming an independent – like an independent contractor, it has a profound social and political effect and it creates a sort of profound social political atomization right it breaks down the sort of social bonds that like built the workers who've been the pt and transform and instead of instead of the sort of like

you know massification right like the the conversion of people into sort of like these these these like like concrete mass social entities who can like take collective action you get these neoliberal subjects who are incredibly atomized incredibly isolated and vulnerable to sort of like you know fascist projects that promise like community and unity like this new organic whole and you know guess where bolsonaro draws the support from oh wait it's a it's a newly evangelical section of the working class. And to be clear here, the informal sector in Brazil has always been massive, but the way the PT runs their welfare programs

makes everything just exponentially worse. We talked about this a bit last episode, but one of the big things that the PT's welfare programs do is they're about giving people access to microcredit. And okay, so in the short run, this is technically incredibly effective at combating poverty, but it had another effect,

which was to sort of like deeply and firmly sort of like ingrain vast sections of Brazilian workers into the banking system and turn them into microentrepreneurs. And, okay okay so being a social democratic party and on purpose constructing an entire class of micro entrepreneurs is like maybe the single best example of producing your own gravediggers that i've seen since like the military dictatorship cooperated with lula in the first place this is a terrible idea but you know

okay so i i think i think I think it's worth asking, like, why is the PT doing this shit, right? Like, this is something that is, like, otherwise absolutely incomprehensible. And the answer is that the PT was never quite the party that people think it is. Here is from a group of Brazilian anarchists writing in Crimethink.

The rulers linked to the realization of mega-events cheaply reaped political rewards. For FIFA and its corporate cronies, not coincidentally the same companies that financed the electoral campaigns of the PT, the benefits were financial. Profits stretched into the billions, underwritten by public resources and guaranteed by police repression. The PT could not have done this alone. It was the party that received the largest total of private donations in recent years, 75 million in 2013, while other parties like the PSDB, the Social Democratic Party, and PMDB, Party of Democratic Movement, the biggest and oldest party inousseff's re-election the pt received 47 million dollars from contractors facing lawsuits and investigations while the pmdb got 38 million the psdb got 28 million this demonstrates the symbiosis between the workers party and those

who control the flow of capital in the country a connective tissue of economic and political power. So this is not good. And you can sort of ask, what was the PT really doing here, right? Like, why? Okay, why are they doing microloans? Why are they taking all this money? And there's a really, really good pair of articles from a Brazilian group called Militants in the Fog that was published at Illwill called Work and Revolt in in brazil's dead ends and i'm going to read from some of it a bank account a smartphone with access to the internet and a profile in an app the means to collect emergency aid which is emergency aid is um part of this is talking about bolsonaro stuff so i bolsonaro implements this policy

called emergency aid which is like it's kind of the equivalent of like the US's, like the stimulus checks that we got, but slightly different. But the means required to collect emergency aid are the same required to create an account for Uber, a sign that we are facing fundamental parts of this quote new way of working. this quote new way of working years ago it was already possible to identify the bolsa familia program which is that giant um pt uh like workers party uh cash transfer program that we talked about last episode whose dimensions were small in the face of the 2020 financial aid program the the objective of forming a unified workplace more deeply subjugated to capitalist relations the quote bankification promoted by the program contributed to expanding the reach of microcredit systems, a process of financialization of informality, which was deepened in recent years with the dissemination of increasingly agile and easy payment terminals and electronic

payment systems, such as PIX, a quicker and tax-free money transfer method. The phenomenon reached unprecedented intensity due to the emergency aid. The state-owned bank, Caxia Economica Federal, absorbed 30 million customers in 10 days in what was possibly the fastest bankification process in history, thus reaching a record profit in 2020. Access to credit is essential for the emergence of a precarious workforce to which capital costs and risks are transferred while interest rates introduce a new level of productivity to the old okay this is a portuguese word that oh boy via caro which is like getting by which is this sort of like it's a sort of slang term for kind

of like doing stuff in the informal economy to survive, which is now directly connected to global financial markets. Thus, the focus of these income policies would be less on expanding consumption capacity for the beneficiaries, as in the Keynesian distributive model, and more on expanding their investment capacity, financing the acquisition of work instruments and, quote, self-valuing their human capital. Enthusiasts of such programs claim that the financial cushion provided by basic income can represent enough stability for people to be able to spend their own savings or other capital starting a business. So, okay, what's happening here

and Milton Safog is arguing this after the work of a Brazilian academician academic named uh ludmilla abilio is okay what's happening here is is the real subsumption of the formal economy which okay so like what what does that mean i we need to take a step back and do like a little bit more marks so marks makes this distinction between what he calls formal and real subsumption so assumption is this like whole philosophy thing i'm not going to get into here but basically what he's talking about is stuff getting like subsumed by capitalism right like

becoming a part of the of the sort of capitalist like processing system and this comes in stages right the first is formal subsumption where okay so say you have a peasant right formal subsumption is where the peasantasant enters the market for the first time and suddenly, instead of being a peasant, is now like a wage worker, right? And in this phase, capitalism has entered a new sphere, right? Someone who was a peasant, who was not doing capital stuff before, right? Who was going for self-production and had feudal dues and obligations is now a wage worker. But, you know, and then they're selling the goods to the market but the actual process of production which is like okay so like how a peasant does like how how your former peasant new agriculture

worker like grows their crops and what crops they grow and like when they decide to work in in in this first stage this is still the peasant's choice. That ends with real subsumption, where all control over the workplace that workers had had is completely destroyed, and you're just, you know, okay, this is what we think of as a regular job, right? We're like, okay, the way the job works is your boss tells you what to do. Your entire labor process has been fully integrated into these sort of broader capitalist production processes that you have no control over.

And this is what's been happening in the informal economy over the past few decades in brazil this is a real subsumption right like and and you know what like it it stuff that had formerly been you know like people taking wage labor but the the the sort of structure of how people do the jobs that they're doing right right, was still up to them. This has been ending. And the way it's been ending is through, basically, the degree of control offered to employers by apps like Uber. Yeah, the control that these apps give you over the informal economy.

And the results have been absolutely catastrophic. On the one hand, the sort of limited autonomy that the informal economy used to give you has been crushed by algorithmic control from gig economy apps that you know like track where you are and tell you where you need to go and how how fast you have to get there and like what lights you have to run in order to get there and also increasingly uh these gig workers are being squeezed by a new level of middle management who work basically the same way as like gang, like the old gang bosses that controlled Chinese labor in the turn of the 20th century, where you have these guys who act as like private recruiting companies and foremen for workers who, okay, so you go to this place, right?

These people are like, okay, I will give you a job and they negotiate. They're the people who negotiate directly with the company and take money from the company and then use that money to sort of like pay the employer and this this you know this sucks right because on the one hand you have all of the bad parts of a regular job which there's a guy who tells you what to do and if you don't uh do what he tells you like you get fired and then you have all the bad parts of an informal sector job which is that you don't have any legal protections that like workers with formal contracts have. And, you know, the effect of this has been to create super hell for like vast, vast swaths of the Brazilian working class. And this has been a just unbelievably catastrophic sort of disaster for Brazilian politics.

But okay, you know what else is creating super hell for the Brazilian working class? I mean, not the products and services that support this podcast. Those ones just do it for the American working class. Now,

now, yeah, okay, here's a fucking ad. working class now now yeah okay here's fucking the ad welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter nocturnal tales from the shadows presented by iheart and son. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors ¡Suscríbete al canal! Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories.

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I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home

and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back.

Wow. I, for one, think everything's going to be fine. The fact that Lula won this resounding victory over Jair Bolsonaro by nearly a whole percentage point is going to mean none of these problems that you're talking about are ever things again. Yep. Nope. And, you know, okay. So speaking of reasons why this will not be a problem again, the sort of like financialization bullshit, this doesn't just like stick in sort of labor process. Like this stuff spreads to the social movements as well, which are in a lot of cases spreads to the, like to the social movements as well, which are in a lot of cases,

like very old and powerful Brazilian social movements are reduced to these sort of like state-backed financialized husks of the former selves where like, you know, you have like, you have social movements that are literally like issuing bonds to like fund their, their members businesses.

You have social movements that are like, okay, if you show up to assemblies, you can earn points so that you can get access to be put on a waiting list for a government rent-stabilized apartment or something. It is a shitshow. And this whole process

sort of leads to the hollowing out of the Brazilian left. And, you know, as the left is sort of like being sort of like torn apart from the inside out, and as you get into sort of like 2011, 2012, 2013, as the Brazilian economy begins to slow, you get Brazil's version of the sort of like movement of the squares, like 2011, 2013 uprisings, which is going to be waged against a hostile well okay a a pretty hostile pt governments like there's a sort of public show by dilma rusev they're like yeah i know i support the protests uh when they're not violent and we're gonna do stuff but okay this goes badly very quickly so these protests start over these like raises in public trans in the cost of public transportation like the fair cost raises in a bunch of cities and very quickly there were like three million people in

the street um the the sort of conventional narrative about what happened here is that so the protests start off leftists right but then the leftists get run out as as the protests sort of keep going by these sort of like fall away political, like conservative nationalists that like take them over and turn them from this sort of like leftist call for like a more egalitarian society and for like the right to the city and like stopping evictions and stuff like that to this sort of like anti-corruption crusade against PT, against the PT, against the marusaf and against sort of like the left itself and okay this is true like as far as it goes um we'll be talking more about that impeachment campaign like next episode but there's more going on here and the more going on here is that in 2013 there were massive protests like 800 000 people um protest the confederation cup which is which is like the soccer tournament hosted by uh like that that's perceived like is it's one of the things that like precedes the world cup i don't know i'm not a soccer knower but yeah and there's massive protests against them and they are just unbelievably brutally suppressed like 50 54 000 cops are sent out to like stop this shit and they they beat the absolute shit

out of everyone and to understand why these movements were crushed and how the right was able to take power we need to talk about the brazilian police so i i think you know most of our listeners you to me like we we are familiar with the American police, right? Like, if you're listening to this show, odds are decently good. You have seen them beat your friends to a bloody pulp. You have seen them tase the parents of children locked in a building with a mass shooter. You have seen them slaughter men, women, and children in the street for no other reason

than they can because they are a fascist death squad fused with organized crime outfits funded by putting guns to the heads of the American working class. They are descendants of slave catchers working each and every day to keep the American racial hierarchy firmly intact. Okay, well, you put it that way, it sounds bad. But I don't know. Like, I like Law & Order.

So, like the TV show. Yeah, you know, they have good propaganda. You've never watched Law & Order SVU? Oh, no. Oh, Garrison. You're missing out on all've never watched Law and Order SVU? Oh, no. Oh, Garrison. You're missing out on all of the good Law and Order. Is that the one with the goth chick in it? I honestly don't know.

There's like 40 different Law and Order shows. It's impossible to keep track of them. But there is that one goth chick that they brought in because our grandparents would think she was hot. Yeah, I think I'm getting the power of goth chicks to extend police budgets. Yeah, it's it's it's fun and good

and okay, you know, like we know how bad the US police are. I'm going to read this from the LA Times quote Brazilian cops kill at nine times the rate of US law enforcement nine times well that's pretty bad yeah you know and it's worth pointing out here that brazil was the last country in this hemisphere to evolve slavery like they abolished it like 20 years

after the fucking u.s did right and so you know when you're thinking about what the brazilian police is take everything you know about the american police and understand that the brazilian police right okay so with the american police right the murder dial goes up to 11 with the brazilian police that murder dial goes up to 99 and that's where they've cranked it to um here's some crime think in 2014 brazil's prison population became the third largest in the world, with 570,000 prisoners. There's like 600-something thousand prisoners today, most of whom are black. During the PT administration, this figure increased by 620%. Cool.

Yeah. cool yeah like and this this this is a part of the pt that people really sort of tiptoe around which is that they preside over like a a regime of mass executions and mass incarceration that is like utterly atrocious and as an aside here um okay so like there are probably some of our listeners whose thing is that they want to go into electoral politics and if you are doing this you have one job like solely you have one responsibility and your job is to fucking annihilate the police your job is to destroy them so utterly and completely that their very name is spat as a curse in the street by people who make the sign of cross for protection every time

they think about them. Like, by the end of your first term, these people need to be living in fucking hovels in the woods without access to a weapon that even as deadly as a 2x4, and every time they attempt to enter a town,

people need to be, like, chasing them and throwing rocks at them. And if you do not do this, you will live like lula has to see literally everything you have ever done crumble beneath the weight of a fascism that is too terrible to imagine and uh you will also experience in your lifetime and instead of doing this the pt is like fuck it no we're going to use the police to stamp out protests against the mega events that they're putting on uh the police repression around the world cup is like arguably

worse than the stuff for the confederation cup in order to prepare for the world cup the pt stage is this like massive social cleansing campaign we talked about this a bit in our sports episode like they they carry out mass evictions against both like regular people and also against like like there's a bunch of sort of leftists and also sort of just like regular people who squat in brazil right like a huge part of the social movements have been about seizing property and building like building stuff on and seizing abandoned buildings and yeah this stuff all gets evicted so they can be replaced with world cup businesses it's you know like what is happening here is it's like all the violence gentrification but in the

span of like a year right the pte are literally rolling german tanks through the favelas because like you know subtlety is something that happens to other people not like to reality and you know as we talked about before they're putting them under literally military occupation with colonial troops who were like fighting in haiti right evict 250 000 people for this fucking tournament. Here's some other shit they did. This is from a series of pieces by a Brazilian anarchist group called Fictional Faction.

In 2012, the federal government in FIFA signed the General Law of the World Cup to ensure that the country would quote, uphold FIFA standards of organization during the 2013 Confederation Cup and the 2014 World Cup.

This agreement constituted an enormous legal offense to the Brazilian people, entailing the suspension of many constitutional rights and norms that were already precarious for most. For example, a court established to rule within 48 hours on strikes that occurred within the World Cup. Workers lost the right to strike or fight for improvements, while FIFA avoided paying taxes on businesses within Brazilian territory. A special secretary to public security for great events was created, breaking the laws stipulating that justice may not have special sponsors or clients who demand priority. The privatization of public space was legitimized by the creation of

exclusive streets for FIFA and its partners, in which even local businesses were required to keep their doors closed within the exclusion zone around the stadium. The laws allowed FIFA to intervene directly in the market without the oversight of the state. FIFA was able to stipulate the price to charge for tickets, suspending the usual half price for students and any application of consumer protection code. In addition, more than 20,000 people were allowed to work as unregulated volunteers during the World Cup. These volunteers did not receive the protections of basic labor rights and operated outside of constitutional norms in situations analogous to slavery. According to Brazilian law, these exceptions

to labor and safety law are supposed to be limited to volunteer work for non-profit institutions that have a quote civic, cultural, education, recreational or social assistance purposes, which hardly describe FIFA. The state even overlooked the use of child labor in

activities related to the game, such as the role of Ball Boy, which had been banned in Brazil since 2004. This goes great. So this happens in 2014 under Dilma Rousseff, but it's worth noting, like, this is Lula's project from the beginning, right? Like, he has been fighting

to get Brazil the World Cup, like, since the opening for applications to get this World Cup in Brazil to happen. And what, you know, this campaign to get the World Cup in Brazil to happen. And what, you know, this campaign to get the World Cup takes the form of a literally all-out war

against leftist protesters, squatters, workers, people living in favelas, people who are literally all of those at the same time who are, you know, supposed to be the PT's base. And this is what the PT spends literally the rest of its time and power doing, right? Like Dilma Rousseff implements a bunch of austerity measures, like this, the expanding

police powers, like this is the shit that the PT is doing, like literally as the Grim Reaper is coming to their door, like two months before Dilma Rousseff is impeached, she passed a pair of anti-terrorism laws targeted at protesters. And okay, we'll go into the impeachment next episode, but I want to close on this. Preventing this from happening, right? Preventing the party of workers from fucking rolling tanks through the streets in fucking working class neighborhoods. through the streets, in fucking working-class neighborhoods. Like, this is the actual sort of beating of,

this is the actual sort of principal politics of anti-capitalism. This is why there is a sort of rigid anarchist opposition to the state, right? This isn't just ideological purity. It is the concrete knowledge that any other path is death, because we literally cannot continue to do, as the PT has been doing for the past fucking 20 years, to produce our own gravediggers. Literally the ecosystems we draw our life from will not survive. If we keep doing this, it does not matter how many people you live, you lift out of poverty. If you do not actually destroy the class system, capitalism and fascism will force them back into poverty.

All of the poverty, like almost all the poverty gains that Lula gained during his entire time in office were destroyed in four years of Bolsonaro. Every day that the state is allowed to exist, every day the class system is allowed to exist, it creates a thousand more Bolsonaros. It creates a thousand Bolsonaros in the police. It creates them in the armies. It creates them in corporations.

It creates them on the street. And they have to be destroyed or this world will fucking burn. And in the next episode, we are going to watch a thousand Bolsonaros burn the entire country. And that is my incredibly angry response to this absolute fucking bullshit. That is the reason like our, our, our, a lot of the reasons why everything

is completely fucked. Cool. Well, everybody, have a happy start of November, and hopefully Brazil isn't in a state of civil war by the time you listen to this episode. Yeah, I update at the end of the episode. I don't think there's been any change.

And remember, folks, if you somehow take control of the political apparatus in Brazil, dismantle the police and the military. don't think there's been any change remember remember folks if you somehow take control of the political apparatus in brazil dismantle the police and the military um that's that that should be that should be a lesson for you i know a lot of you are on the verge of taking power in brazil so hopefully hopefully that message will get out yeah and i mean in general don't fund them like don't give them more money. Don't spend a bunch of money buying them German tanks.

Like, well, OK, like, why? Why are we focusing on German tanks? They make fine tanks. OK, but hear me out here. Can you name a single good thing a German tank has ever been used for? Yeah. Defeating the commies, I'm guessing. Yeah, some communists,ists probably I don't know

anyway killed a lot of Englishmen anyway and Canadians it could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonezonemedia.com,

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An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,

where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories,

combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba?

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.