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Can Brazil compete to host Olympics?
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Steve Chiotakis: You've probably heard about Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics. What you may not know is that Brazil's Rio de Janeiro is also bidding for the games. And the International Olympic Committee traveled there this week to take a look at the country's assets. Besides the sun and samba, Brazilian officials tout the economy, which has fared relatively well in this global economic fallout. So what makes Brazil so special?
From the Americas Desk at WLRN, here's Marketplace's Dan Grech.
Dan Grech: Brazil once was the world's most indebted country. But last year, fat with profits from biofuels, iron ore and oranges, Brazil paid off that debt.
Brazil once had one of the world's biggest gaps between rich and poor. But it plowed money into poor areas, raising 30 million people out of poverty since 1995.
Paulo Sotero directs the Brazil Institute at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars:
Paulo Sotero: There is an important phenomenon of an explosion of consumption in poor areas of Brazil.
That new consumer class has kept the economy afloat, even as exports take a nose dive.
Sotero: The country seems to have recovered a sense of optimism, a sense of hope that was not present a few years back.
Sotero says this confidence, while intangible, is one of Brazil's greatest assets. It has helped sustain Brazil through these tough times.
I'm Dan Grech for Marketplace.
Brazil is a country that went from Colonialism to Empire to Military Dictatorship and now to Lula's Dictatorship with the help of the Military. The people are still slaves after more than 500 years. They have been fooled into thinking they are a free society. Carnival football and cheap beer are government sponsored distraction just as the Romans gave the Coliseum to their people.
The average Brazilian earns only one basic salary, equivalent to less than 180 dollars, in a country where a cheap small efficiency apartment rent is over 250 dollars. The appliances they buy, at two or three times what they cost in the USA, break in less than a year but the payments last forever since 145 (one-hundred and forty-five) percent per year is the average cost of credit.
The Olympics are going to be paid by a special tax dole out to the people. They have selected the Barra de Tijuca for the Games, an upper class neighborhood. After the Olympics the sale of the buildings and apartments will benefit the rich as all will pass to the hands of corporations that support the government and the rest to foreign companies.
An items you should also research is the infamous Pré-Sal oil deposits. If there is any oil, it cannot be produced because the technology required to drill the wells does not exist yet. It’s just a trick to increase the value of the government owned Petrobras and some pockets. If in doubt, for additional information, read the History of Brazil and its Portuguese Imperator, and reports about the multi-billion dollar scam run by one Sao Paulo Governor Paulo Maluf , where an obscure labor leader, Luis Ignacio Lula Da Silva took part in the 1980's. I was a petroleum engineer then working for one of the oil companies assigned to study the Paulipetro discovery… a scam! Maluf was prosecuted but set free because of insufficient evidence to the fraud.
As for Human Rights... when I was there last time.. I was in a hotel above a Police Headquarters. Every night we could not sleep because of the screams coming from below. Next morning the newspapers would say the police had successfully captured the men who robbed something or somebody; surprisingly, they always confessed! There are no trials... the criminals are just happy to be alive and go to overly crowded jails. By the way... have you heard about the large number of pregnant women, ready to deliver who died waiting to be attended at public hospitals???
There is a Brazilian song that tells it all: "The poor Brazilian works all year to buy a costume to celebrate Carnival, but 3 days later comes Ash Wednesday and the party os over!!!"
