Chess door spectacle

The best summary of what we learned about the unspeakable meeting between the captain and his cronies was offered to me by my friend Álvaro Ribeiro da Costa, former Attorney General of the Union: a single flagrant crime. A good example for any practical criminal law class, as it piles up crimes committed, crimes in planning, criminal intentions revealed by perpetrators, co-perpetrators, and accomplices. A spectacle worthy of a chess game. Something more abject is unthinkable, in form and content, in its factual character, its symbolic character, and its political drama. The moral debasement of a corrupt government in full control of illegality—that is what was offered by the revelation of one, just one (let's imagine the others), meeting of the president of the republic with his ministers and main advisors. Language worthy of a brothel on the edge of a dock. All awaiting an Attorney General of the Republic who is neither indebted to the office nor a disciplined candidate for the Supreme Court. This is what the republic, which is ailing, is suffering from.

Although some delinquents have distinguished themselves in their eagerness to recount services and complicit loyalty to the leader, what stands out from any analysis is the overall work, or opera buffa, a mixture of tragedy (to which the nation is exposed) and scalarism, bringing to light, for believers and skeptics alike, the risks that threaten us all. In that gang there is no "good guy": everyone, the talkers and the silent ones, are accomplices in the collective work, whether it be the former judge and former minister of justice, undaunted in his pusillanimity, or the uniformed courtiers, present and absent, until now the praetorian guard of a corrupt regime, engaged, at the same time, openly, in the deconstruction of the social fabric and in the organization of militias that it is officially beginning to arm.

And this will go unpunished? Just as the self-incrimination of the current president, who admitted to organizing his own very particular and clandestine "intelligence" service, went unpunished?

Our country, which in the recent past was one of the six or seven richest nations in the world, is today, going from bad to worse, a veritable ship without a rudder, a boat without a rudder, a leaky canoe; the economy is being driven to bankruptcy, industry is being destroyed, while financial speculation, unproductive capital, is having a field day: the stock market registers a rise on the same day that the immoral video is released, the five largest banks have in their coffers a volume of reais greater than the national GDP (O State St. Paul(May 26, 2020); this country, once respected worldwide, is now a laughingstock in the international press, and investors—those whom the charlatans of one-eyed neoliberalism had announced as a reward for the destruction of the national economy—are fleeing out of fear of its government. Our population finds itself destitute, left to its own meager fate in the face of the pandemic. In the short term, there is no reason for hope, for what looms, managed by an incompetent and insane government (in the midst of a pandemic, we have been without a Minister of Health for a month!), is a relentless economic recession, with its burden of increased unemployment, misery, and hunger exploding into a serious social crisis. What awaits us, if the current situation is not reversed, that is, if the current regime is not removed, is chaos, which is what our asylum-dwelling Napoleon is betting on. Only those who refuse to see it can't.

Much of the mainstream news, still betting on that charlatan that is the former Minister of Justice, spent its best lines demonstrating the obvious: that the revelation of the video proved the accusation that the captain had intervened or attempted to intervene in the federal police to protect family members accused of crimes and "friends," among whom must be people of the ilk of a Queiroz or a Hang.

But that's not all, nor is it the most important thing.

The scum of the earth has its own scum, and its best representative is not the imbecile who attacks education with impunity, accuses the Supreme Court justices of being "bums" and calls for their imprisonment; it's not the idiot who claims to have seen Christ hanging from a guava tree branch and announces that she will arrest the governors and mayors who are looking after the health of their constituents; nor is it even the poor man.  nerd who wants to take advantage of the pandemic – which the meeting failed to address – to exempt land grabbers, illegal miners, mining companies, logging companies, polluting industries, and predatory agribusiness from Brazil's exemplary environmental protection legislation.

The justified emphasis given to the president's perversions has overshadowed the criminal rationality of the economy minister. He continues, at this point in the events, to bet on compressing public spending, ending investments, dismantling state actions, and weakening public development agencies.

Therefore, he is a partner of the captain in the undertaking of promoting chaos. Both sow the wind, hoping that the storm will fall only on the masses. This lowly usurer, successful in the dealings of the financial system and in the services rendered to the Pinochet dictatorship, refers to the country's largest public bank as a "piece of shit" and, disparaging it, demands its privatization; he announces the betrayal of public servants and, before an audience of fools, lies shamelessly by stating that Europe had recovered economically in the two post-war periods by following the liberal catechism. The only example of the application of this archaic and defeated policy, even as a doctrine, is offered, more recently, by the Chile of the Pinochet dictatorship (which the minister served as a dedicated Chicago Boy) that is now experiencing its social hangover, exacting a very high political price. But, without realizing his blunder, he confesses to being intellectually limited, acknowledging that he needed to read Keynes's work three times to understand it – and apparently still didn't.

The former "Ipiranga gas station" (a reference to a gas station chain, implying a reliable source of information), the only accomplice praised by the capo (a powerful figure in Brazilian politics), recounts conversations he didn't have with supposed foreign businessmen and economic leaders whose names he doesn't disclose, to say that his policy, supposedly endorsed by unknown figures, is the sure path to his boss's reelection, despite the fact that, under his leadership, our economy grew by only 1,1% in 2019! And he doesn't blush when he promises growth without investment, and nobody demands consistency from him. At no point in this assembly of scoundrels is the public interest discussed. But there's plenty of time to attack our trading partners, jeopardizing the trade balance (dangerously dependent on exports of...). commodities(as in the not-so-fondly remembered 1930s of the last century), to scare investors, demoralize public companies, attack governors and mayors, both groups christened either as "shit" or "manure".

Not much beyond July, we should expect the macabre convergence of the consequences of the pandemic, the recession (heading towards depression), the mass collapse of medium and small businesses, the fall in public revenues of federal entities, the bankruptcy of states and municipalities, the explosion of unemployment, the fall in consumption and services, and the final blow to what remains of the manufacturing industry. But the banks will be doing very well as they are now, because they have never earned as much as they are earning now, while the economy contracts and social inequality grows alarmingly. Following the curves of the social tragedy, disapproval of the government and the captain's leadership will grow, and is already growing. There lies his Bastille. There, perhaps, we will see a ray of light in the dark sky.

Brazil lacks the economic, social, and political conditions to support the current regime. I say regime to make it clear that it's not about replacing the captain with a general. It's about removing the entire gang (including the nostalgic uniformed officers from the dungeons of the dictatorship), while there's still time, before the explosion and disaster that are predicted.