True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 264: Lulag Archipelago
Aired: 2023-01-16
Duration: 01:33:20


=== February Show in Montreal (04:29) ===

[00:00:00]  All right, Liz, if I get anything really wrong, please correct me.
[00:00:03]  Wait, but I don't know anything about it.
[00:00:04]  But if it just sounds wrong, you can see what I'm reading.
[00:00:08]  Okay.
[00:00:10]  Hola.
[00:00:11]  I think that's wrong.
[00:00:12]  Ole subres beldin.
[00:00:16]  Benvindo.
[00:00:17]  Autru na un podcast.
[00:00:20]  Y unprezer estar con voches aquí joje.
[00:00:26]  Tao feliz feliz porte voche.
[00:00:30]  Conosco aquí hoje.
[00:00:32]  Joje?
[00:00:34]  Oh, this is a rough one.
[00:00:38]  Nos o vimos suás legachauis.
[00:00:43]  Y nos acitemos tire a camisa y vamos para o Brasil.
[00:00:51]  I hope we didn't just alienate all of our Portuguese listeners.
[00:01:19]  Insert audio now.
[00:01:22]  We did forget to put these in the actual episode, and so we are putting it superimposed at the beginning.
[00:01:27]  You know what's funny is that we've got Crack Shop producer here, Fantastico manager of our editing staff, Jordan Strong.
[00:01:38]  And we could just, we could just insert this in.
[00:01:42]  Listeners, none the wiser.
[00:01:44]  But you know what?
[00:01:45]  Our commitment to transparency here, we choose not to do so.
[00:01:49]  We just keep our big old mouse blobbing on.
[00:01:53]  Would you like to hear some tour dates?
[00:01:55]  Brace.
[00:01:56]  I would.
[00:01:57]  The 2nd of February of this year in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[00:02:01]  We are playing at.
[00:02:03]  What?
[00:02:05]  We are playing at the Sinclair Ballroom.
[00:02:08]  I think it's actually just called the Sinclair.
[00:02:10]  That is the 2nd of February.
[00:02:12]  Please come.
[00:02:13]  There's tickets still available.
[00:02:14]  Not so for the next night at the Sinclair, which is sold out.
[00:02:18]  Then on the 4th of February, that's, of course, in Canadian terms, 2023, we are playing Montreal, Quebec.
[00:02:25]  Oh, you mean 04022023?
[00:02:28]  Oh, yeah, because they do it that funky little way.
[00:02:30]  It's going to be the time.
[00:02:32]  We are doing the Theatre Fairmount.
[00:02:36]  That is still tickets on sale.
[00:02:39]  The next night, Toronto, I'm sorry, the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern.
[00:02:43]  Hopefully, it's not a legendary show because you cannot go.
[00:02:45]  It is sold out.
[00:02:47]  Later in the month on two hyphen, excuse me, Dash 16-2023 in Denver, comma, capital C, capital O.
[00:02:58]  We are playing at the Blue Bird Theater.
[00:03:03]  The next day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we are playing at the Fine Line, named after a thin line of cocaine.
[00:03:14]  The next day.
[00:03:16]  And for fans of the pod, Bean Pole Women.
[00:03:20]  Well, they don't know about that yet because the episode hasn't started.
[00:03:22]  Spoiler alert.
[00:03:23]  Yes, but we are talking about Brazil.
[00:03:27]  The next day, on February 18th of 2023, let's hope for no flight delays here, folks, because that could seriously put a kink in our plans.
[00:03:36]  We are playing at the far out loud.
[00:03:48]  Oh, far out, man.
[00:03:51]  In Keep Austin Weird.
[00:03:55]  We're at the Giga Factory.
[00:03:56]  We are playing at the Keep Austin Weird Far Out Lounge in Austin, Weird, Texas.
[00:04:02]  Tejas.
[00:04:03]  Tejas.
[00:04:04]  Yes, bringing me back to Austin at last.
[00:04:09]  And now, with that, back to the show.
[00:04:27]  Hola, Liz.
[00:04:28]  How you doing?

=== Pronouncing Ola Correctly (15:20) ===

[00:04:29]  Hi, Brace.
[00:04:30]  How you saying ola?
[00:04:31]  Brace.
[00:04:32]  Brace.
[00:04:32]  How you saying hola in Portuguese?
[00:04:35]  Ola, pronuncia.
[00:04:36]  Ola.
[00:04:37]  It's hola.
[00:04:38]  So I got that right, even though I asked you guys if I got that right.
[00:04:41]  Oh, I'm sorry.
[00:04:41]  I was just making a joke.
[00:04:42]  No, it's cool.
[00:04:44]  All good.
[00:04:45]  I think you did a great job.
[00:04:47]  Aki.
[00:04:51]  Wait.
[00:04:53]  Feliciamos.
[00:04:54]  Thank you.
[00:04:55]  Hello, everyone.
[00:04:56]  I'm Liz.
[00:04:57]  My name is Brace.
[00:05:00]  And of course, we have with us today our producer, Yang Chaunski.
[00:05:04]  And the podcast is called True Enaon.
[00:05:08]  I like when you do that, like, now.
[00:05:10]  So this is, yeah, this has actually been a long, long-running sort of goof between us because I always, the Portuguese no in Portuguese is like N-A with a little squiggle O.
[00:05:23]  And in my head, which is, you guys know I'm, you know, narrow atypical.
[00:05:29]  I read that as now.
[00:05:31]  Now, Roe.
[00:05:32]  Now typical.
[00:05:33]  Now, Ro atypical.
[00:05:37]  We are in Brazil.
[00:05:39]  I wish it would be summer.
[00:05:42]  It would be, I guess.
[00:05:43]  Yes.
[00:05:44]  It's summer down there.
[00:05:45]  Yeah, it's not summer up here.
[00:05:47]  No.
[00:05:49]  We are in Brazil and we are, we are, we're actually here for football.
[00:05:53]  We're camped out.
[00:05:54]  We're camped out.
[00:05:55]  We're in front of the military base.
[00:05:57]  We're like, where is everybody?
[00:05:58]  I love all these automatic rifles you have with you.
[00:06:01]  Oh my God, so strong, so big, so many patches.
[00:06:06]  And we are basically here to sell new IR devices that's infrared to the Brazilian military.
[00:06:14]  And exciting new plastic surgery techniques.
[00:06:17]  Yeah, we're bringing the British butt lift to Brazil.
[00:06:22]  It's like a reverse Brazilian butt lift.
[00:06:25]  It is the English butt melter.
[00:06:30]  It makes your butt look like the really thin lips of like an old crone.
[00:06:35]  So like, but move sideways.
[00:06:37]  I always called the, I always referred to something as, I think I've said this on the podcast before, as Protestant flat sea butts.
[00:06:46]  Yeah, yeah, you've said something like that.
[00:06:48]  Like Protestant butt.
[00:06:48]  It's like real flat seas, but we should probably amend that to include Anglican.
[00:06:52]  Anglican.
[00:06:53]  Well, that's the Brazilian butt lift.
[00:06:54]  We just kind of just, it's crazy because it's, it's, we're lifting your butt off of your body because we're basically taking a giant cleaver, equivalent of a giant cleaver, and just out.
[00:07:05]  Your butt needs to be completely in line with your shoulder blades.
[00:07:08]  One cheaper blades.
[00:07:10]  One straight.
[00:07:11]  One straight.
[00:07:12]  Everyone loves that look.
[00:07:13]  Yeah, it's called the bean pole.
[00:07:15]  And let me tell you, 2023 is going to be a great year for it.
[00:07:17]  That's on your ins and outs list.
[00:07:19]  That's it.
[00:07:20]  Yeah.
[00:07:20]  In bean pole, out butt.
[00:07:23]  Just at all.
[00:07:24]  I'm not even talking about big ones.
[00:07:27]  Well, we're not in Brazil.
[00:07:29]  We're not in Brazil because it's too dangerous.
[00:07:33]  We are in the safety of our own little homes.
[00:07:35]  Uh-huh, where nobody can do it.
[00:07:37]  Well, we're not.
[00:07:37]  No, we're in our studio.
[00:07:38]  Well, you know what I mean.
[00:07:39]  Proverbially.
[00:07:40]  You've been sleeping here?
[00:07:44]  But we did see the news coming out of Brazil January 8th.
[00:07:51]  Just a couple days ago.
[00:07:54]  Yeah.
[00:07:54]  Right?
[00:07:55]  Yeah, like five days ago.
[00:07:56]  Well.
[00:07:57]  Yeah, but some days ago.
[00:07:58]  I always use a couple.
[00:07:59]  People get mad at me for this.
[00:08:00]  I use a couple to not mean two.
[00:08:01]  Yeah, it's definitely Friday, the 13th of January, and this episode will almost certainly come out on Monday.
[00:08:07]  Say, I think a couple is like a handful, like a grab bag.
[00:08:10]  Okay, yeah, but at that point, it's going to be, what, the 16th?
[00:08:14]  I could grab 15 things.
[00:08:16]  It's going to be over a week after it happened.
[00:08:19]  Brazil, January 8th, a day that will live in Infaumi.
[00:08:26]  Liz, what happened?
[00:08:29]  On Sunday, important to note it was a Sunday, January 8th, thousands of Bolsonaristas descended upon the capital of Brazil.
[00:08:40]  That's Brasilia.
[00:08:43]  There had been protests there for some time and in other locations that we'll talk about throughout Brazil.
[00:08:50]  But ahead of the riot, there had been kind of like a bunch of messages going through WhatsApp warning that a storm was coming.
[00:08:58]  Yeah.
[00:08:58]  So a little context.
[00:09:00]  And this is something that, you know, I am not Mr. Knowledgeable about Brazilian politics.
[00:09:05]  I know a decent amount about them.
[00:09:07]  But one thing that I do know pretty well is that WhatsApp, big in Brazil.
[00:09:12]  WhatsApp is pretty much big everywhere.
[00:09:13]  But WhatsApp is particularly big in Brazil for right-wing political organizers.
[00:09:17]  Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
[00:09:19]  And beyond political organizing, just like crazy rumor mongering.
[00:09:22]  And so the old chain letter lives.
[00:09:27]  I mean, I don't know if you remember, but I think during the 2018 campaign, there was a ton of like really crazy messages going out.
[00:09:36]  And one in particular I remember was like, the PT government, if they are elected, will be teaching your first grader sex ed.
[00:09:44]  And they had all these like, you know, pictures and stuff.
[00:09:46]  It was like going like wildfire.
[00:09:47]  Yeah, there was something like PT was handing out dildos to children.
[00:09:50]  Yes, that was like PT giving dildos to kids.
[00:09:53]  Yeah.
[00:09:54]  And like, so, but it is, it is, it is sort of like, it is a kind of cohesive, not cohesive, but like a unifying thing that like a lot of people on the right and extreme right use in Brazil to sort of like spread rumors and also organize political actions.
[00:10:09]  Yeah.
[00:10:10]  So they were going crazy in the up and the sort of lead up to January 8th.
[00:10:14]  Absolutely.
[00:10:16]  Brasilia is the capital.
[00:10:19]  It's kind of known as in this area, Three Powers Square.
[00:10:23]  I love that name.
[00:10:24]  I know, it's nice, right?
[00:10:25]  We could talk a little bit about kind of some of the symbolism behind this maybe a little later.
[00:10:30]  But it's a huge plaza.
[00:10:32]  It includes, you know, a bunch of government buildings, but, you know, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidential office, they're all kind of right there.
[00:10:39]  And the Bolsonaristas, as they're kind of like getting bussed in and we should say being escorted very calmly by the federal police and military, it was just like a fucking riot mob crazy scene.
[00:10:54]  I mean, they broke everything, windows, they broke in and stole a copy, like squared away copy of the 1988 Constitution.
[00:11:04]  There was like a video of some guy pooping on a like desk.
[00:11:09]  I mean, they slashed like pretty important and famous art.
[00:11:13]  They destroyed like, I mean, countless artifacts.
[00:11:17]  I mean, it was a full desecration.
[00:11:19]  Yeah.
[00:11:20]  I want to correct you really quick.
[00:11:23]  I think he was pooping off of a desk.
[00:11:25]  He was sort of perched on.
[00:11:26]  I got to say, I saw the video like as I was watching it unfold.
[00:11:30]  I saw it like kind of go like I scrolled through it and just right on past it on Twitter.
[00:11:36]  I was like, I don't need to see that.
[00:11:37]  Don't want to investigate.
[00:11:38]  Not interested.
[00:11:39]  Yeah.
[00:11:39]  Yeah.
[00:11:40]  I will say it was like there are tons of videos and pictures.
[00:11:43]  This is the thing.
[00:11:44]  This is people love videotaping themselves doing really illegal things.
[00:11:51]  And I will say, if I'm in, let's say, the Supreme Court of Brazil, right?
[00:11:57]  And I am just putting a knife through a painting.
[00:12:01]  I'm just standing there stabbing a painting that's on the wall.
[00:12:04]  And some guy's got his phone out doing the phone video thing.
[00:12:08]  I'm like, put that down, brother.
[00:12:09]  But that occurred in none of these cases.
[00:12:11]  And so there's like, and I, I, I, you and I were talking about this right, right, sort of as it was happening and afterwards.
[00:12:19]  It is sort of like astounding how much they just like, everything they destroy, especially in comparison to, and we'll get to this a little more later, January 6th, like these guys really were just like, we're destroying this place.
[00:12:32]  Yeah.
[00:12:33]  You know, sprinklers going off, people set fires.
[00:12:36]  And so like everything's flooded.
[00:12:38]  Everybody's offices are destroyed.
[00:12:40]  I mean, people stole weapons.
[00:12:42]  People like, it was just like a fully, like really brutal riot.
[00:12:46]  I think in January 6th, you see a lot of people who, whatever their actual political sensibilities, we might call, believe themselves to be like defenders of democracy or whatever.
[00:12:58]  And that like the election was stolen.
[00:13:00]  We need to restore like the spirit of 1776 to this country, you know?
[00:13:04]  And so they're like occupying the, I mean, they obviously cause damage and stuff like that, but they were for all intents and purposes, like, or intensive purposes, who knows which one it is.
[00:13:15]  You could say both.
[00:13:16]  I could say both.
[00:13:17]  You know what?
[00:13:17]  You can say both.
[00:13:18]  When you got a mic in front of you, you can say whatever you want.
[00:13:20]  That's true.
[00:13:21]  And you can pronounce any word however you'd like.
[00:13:24]  No.
[00:13:25]  You know, they're like, they're in there, like, they're occupying.
[00:13:27]  Like, we want to take, we want to like take control of Congress and all this stuff.
[00:13:31]  I mean, some of these people, if you actually queried them on what they want, they would probably describe essentially a dictatorship, right?
[00:13:39]  But it's in the trappings of like the American democratic tradition.
[00:13:44]  Whereas I think what you saw in Brazil is people actively trying to destroy these symbols of the Brazilian democratic or modern post-military dictatorship democracy, you know?
[00:13:58]  Yeah.
[00:13:59]  And I think that you see a big difference too in that a lot of the, in fact, the protesters in Brazil were many of them explicitly calling for the military to intervene and take control of the country, either paving the way for Bolsonaro to return or having a military dictatorship, right?
[00:14:20]  And so a lot of these people, like you're saying, there's people who are camped out sort of at the Capitol, but there's also been people camped out around military bases in Brazil for months at this point.
[00:14:32]  And I think a lot of people expected, you know, it's like now, this is a big tactic now.
[00:14:38]  And it kind of was a traditional political tactic, I guess.
[00:14:41]  There's always been people camping out when they want bonus army and all that kind of shit.
[00:14:45]  But like, you know, it's a pretty common political tactic.
[00:14:48]  It's like you camp out somewhere and you're sort of, it's like this like carnival-like permanent protest outside of somewhere.
[00:14:55]  And a lot of almost all of them in Brazil were outside of military bases with people calling for a military coup.
[00:15:05]  That did not occur on January 8th.
[00:15:09]  No, no, no, no.
[00:15:11]  Like you said, the military, excuse me, like the security forces and some military police did basically doing the same thing.
[00:15:18]  Same kind of shit as January 6th, like taking selfies with protesters, basically allowing people to come in, not really fighting back against them.
[00:15:25]  There's some pretty arresting images, no pun intended.
[00:15:28]  Literally, I did not mean to make a pun there, of like protesters beating the shit out of like horse cops and stuff like that.
[00:15:36]  And I mean, we should say, too, you know, obviously there were people higher up in the security forces and in even the executive that were that knew about this and were allowing it to happen, right?
[00:15:49]  Yeah.
[00:15:51]  You know, whether it was like on, you know, the governor or the people in charge of security in the state or, you know, and all of that is going to like get rooted out.
[00:16:01]  But yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear that they had a lot of sympathizers.
[00:16:07]  100%.
[00:16:08]  The majority of sympathizers in the military.
[00:16:10]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:11]  And like that, that I think has been pretty well noticed that the police and military are like, from top brass to rank and file men are pretty fucking pro-Bolsonaro.
[00:16:23]  Yeah.
[00:16:23]  You know, they basically were his, yeah, his big support.
[00:16:26]  I mean, yeah, absolutely.
[00:16:28]  You know, it's interesting.
[00:16:29]  The military in Brazil, like socially and culturally and politically, is like a very, it's sort of like a very interesting institution.
[00:16:41]  They don't hold the kind of sway that, like, they're very important, right?
[00:16:45]  And the federal police obviously are very important and they're very dangerous, but they're not like an internationally recognized force.
[00:16:53]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:16:54]  Like, they're not like the American troops.
[00:16:56]  Like, the Brazilian troops don't get sent anywhere.
[00:16:58]  Do you know what I'm saying?
[00:16:59]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:00]  Well, Haiti.
[00:17:02]  Right.
[00:17:02]  But you know what I mean?
[00:17:03]  Like, they're not like a big international force.
[00:17:08]  No.
[00:17:08]  They are domestically, they hold a very interesting kind of like social significance.
[00:17:14]  I mean, I think still there are pretty significant social benefits that military members are allowed that other members of society aren't.
[00:17:27]  There's like a very clear, like sort of like caste-like beneficiary system there.
[00:17:32]  100%.
[00:17:34]  But even just like more structurally, I mean, yes, I think Brazil has had two military dictatorships in their history, right?
[00:17:42]  There was one kind of before and during World War II, and then obviously the one after the 64 coup that lasted through the 80s.
[00:17:50]  But even before that, like Brazil's, the Brazilian Republic was declared by the military.
[00:17:56]  Yeah.
[00:17:56]  Right?
[00:17:56]  Like they have never had a bourgeois revolution, which is very different from a lot of other Latin American countries.
[00:18:05]  And in this sense, like they went from literally like a slave society straight into a quote unquote like republic without any kind of social revolution.
[00:18:18]  And so there that, you know, that the kind of contradiction there, the social contradiction there can explain or helps us to kind of understand how some of these sort of like confusing impulses can be there and why the military holds like such a unique place in like, you know, the public and the middle class and the lower classes.
[00:18:45]  Yeah.
[00:18:46]  I mean, and Bolsonaro, obviously a military man himself and somebody who, when he came to power, definitely tried to juxtapose like the military's like discipline and incorruptibility and all this stuff against what was popularly seen, at least, you know, portrayed by the media as like the PT's lawlessness and graft and corruption.
[00:19:08]  Right.
[00:19:08]  And so when he gets into power, he appoints military men to a lot of different pretty high up posts.
[00:19:14]  I think his entire inner cabinet at one point was former gener, or I don't know how that really works, but generals, essentially.
[00:19:23]  You know, there's, he gave a lot of sinecures.
[00:19:26]  Is that how you pronounce that?
[00:19:28]  Sinecures to like, to military men.
[00:19:31]  In fact, like there was a lot of people in the military who were basically doing double duty as civil servants and active duty military at the same time.
[00:19:39]  And contrary to like wage caps and all that stuff for public servants, were basically allowed to take salaries from both, which is essentially a bribe.

=== 2021 Military Sinecures Controversy (14:22) ===

[00:19:50]  You know, I think it was during 2021, like the budget, I think he was like, he insisted that the military was basically the only people who got wage hikes and stuff like that.
[00:19:58]  Like he was very much like a military man through and through.
[00:20:02]  Yeah, I think he was really courting their favor as well.
[00:20:05]  The problem is he did sort of blow a good amount of support, I think, from some of the upper echelon people during COVID, because this has been, I mean, you know, so many things have happened since then.
[00:20:18]  But like famously, like Bolsonaro went pretty wild.
[00:20:22]  He did, he was like DeSantis style COVID, like I'm going, I'm forging my own path kind of shit.
[00:20:30]  And he fired a bunch of people because they wouldn't follow his orders, which were not always necessarily maybe the most sensible during sort of the COVID crisis in Brazil.
[00:20:43]  He fired his defense minister, I believe.
[00:20:45]  He actually tasked the military with production of hydro it's been so long since I pronounced this, but hydroxychloroquine, which is, I didn't know that he actually had them making it, but I read that in a couple places last night.
[00:21:00]  But after he fired the defense minister, the commanders of the Army, Navy, and Air Force all resigned the next day.
[00:21:05]  And, you know, this is 2021.
[00:21:07]  I think it was in March 2021.
[00:21:09]  And so really not that long ago.
[00:21:11]  And so he had been pretty well supported by the military, but I think that definitely did some damage.
[00:21:17]  I mean, there was some pretty chaotic times in Brazil in 2021 in terms of like, we didn't really, like, Bolsonaro's popularity was really, really low.
[00:21:27]  COVID was raging out of control in a lot of places, and there was basically nothing being done.
[00:21:31]  And I think there was sort of like, I mean, there was, I think, probably pretty fanciful talk of like, what if the military removes him or something, you know?
[00:21:39]  But that obviously did not happen.
[00:21:42]  We should say, too, that, like, the Bolsonaro family and specifically his sons are enmeshed with the security forces in the sense that they are, they are the heads of a gang that runs Rio.
[00:21:54]  Yeah.
[00:21:55]  And by running Rio, I mean they go into fucking favelas under the guise of looking for quote-unquote drug dealers and are murdering people like left and right.
[00:22:07]  I mean, just really brutal, brutal shit.
[00:22:10]  Yeah.
[00:22:10]  And they run all of that in Rio.
[00:22:12]  And his sons, I think, have fled, are living in Florida.
[00:22:18]  Obviously, Bolsonaro is there now in Orlando, visiting Epcot or whatever.
[00:22:25]  Yeah, he's like eating a sandwich at Publix.
[00:22:29]  Publix.
[00:22:30]  I'm not from Florida.
[00:22:31]  I don't get it.
[00:22:32]  Whatever.
[00:22:32]  You can have your things.
[00:22:33]  You know what?
[00:22:34]  It's a Florida thing.
[00:22:35]  You wouldn't understand.
[00:22:36]  Yeah.
[00:22:39]  I just realized, oh my God, I hate this fucking family so much.
[00:22:42]  Yeah, that's the thing that like fucking criminals.
[00:22:46]  Yeah, that's the thing that's like, they really are, and it cannot be stressed enough, literally gang leaders and criminals.
[00:22:51]  Yes.
[00:22:52]  Right.
[00:22:52]  Like doing the like, and not like, oh, they're like, it's not like Trump style like crime, like in the ledgers and like, you know, leaning on people and stuff like this.
[00:23:01]  It's like fully like there's.
[00:23:04]  They shot a congressman.
[00:23:05]  They shot a fucking car.
[00:23:06]  They killed a congresswoman.
[00:23:07]  Yes.
[00:23:08]  Exactly.
[00:23:08]  And it's like, and act with total impunity, enmeshed in the security forces.
[00:23:13]  I mean, Brazil, in many ways, like many countries, is a mafia state, right?
[00:23:18]  And they are part of the mafia.
[00:23:20]  There's a lot of rumors about, yeah.
[00:23:22]  And so I think that really has to be kept in mind here is that like these are real deal like actual gangster criminals.
[00:23:29]  I was telling, I was, we were talking about this before we started recording, but there was this big story that broke, I think, yesterday, about it's not, I don't know if it's like the presidential credit card.
[00:23:38]  I don't want to say that that's what it is, but it's like a presidential personal account, right?
[00:23:42]  Yeah.
[00:23:43]  And Bolsonaro, he passed this law almost immediately after he took office that the records of payment account, like the records of the account, would be under seal for 40 years, so no one could see what he was spending on.
[00:23:57]  And Lula gets an office and he, you know, immediately overturns that.
[00:24:01]  And so everyone's kind of going through it.
[00:24:02]  And they found just like, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of AIs like spent at bakeries where like the average thing costs, you know, it's like it's a fucking bakery.
[00:24:15]  You're getting like papaya juice and fried bread, which is delicious, by the way.
[00:24:21]  But obviously, I think it's pretty clear that those are like payments to gangs.
[00:24:27]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:28]  And like, you know, a little trunant tip here.
[00:24:32]  You're the president of Brazil, right?
[00:24:34]  Classic job, fresh out of college.
[00:24:37]  Don't use the presidential credit card to pay off gangs or to be like to make very high, suspicious payments to places that might not otherwise receive it.
[00:25:03]  So I think like, you know, what we were talking about this before we started recording, but like what a lot of the protesters wanted was a military coup, right?
[00:25:17]  And people are calling this a coup.
[00:25:19]  And maybe it, maybe, I'm, maybe I'm rushing ahead here a little bit.
[00:25:23]  But people are sort of calling this a coup.
[00:25:26]  And I would say, in my opinion, and I know this is splitting hairs, but there's a reason we're splitting hairs here.
[00:25:33]  I would say this was a riot, a pretty devastating riot, which, by the way, similar to January 6th, all of the Brazilian right-wing fascist people are saying that it was Antifa who infiltrated.
[00:25:46]  And because there's a guy with a PT flag.
[00:25:48]  There's this crazy woman.
[00:25:49]  I was looking at her Twitter account last night who's like one of the big kind of Bolsonaristas, who I think has been arrested.
[00:25:56]  And she was proudly being arrested by the military, you know, on January 8th or whatever.
[00:26:02]  And they have since, now there's all these rumors.
[00:26:05]  They're trying to say that she's like left-wing.
[00:26:07]  She's like a psycho right-wing fascist woman.
[00:26:10]  A lot of female Bolsonaristas, by the way, which is very interesting.
[00:26:14]  But now they're really, they're like trying to paint her specifically.
[00:26:19]  They're like, oh, yeah, she's a left-wing infiltrator.
[00:26:22]  Crazy.
[00:26:23]  So just deep cover.
[00:26:24]  Yeah, totally.
[00:26:25]  Well, I will say, like, and again, now I'm backtracking here, but like, there was some pretty crazy violence right after the election when, remember, all those people blocked off like huge swaths of like interstates and freeways in Brazil.
[00:26:40]  The military had, yeah, the military had stepped in and was and had was stopping traffic so people couldn't vote.
[00:26:46]  Yeah.
[00:26:46]  And they had to get a Supreme Court order and the, you know, to kind of like come down and clear them and all of this stuff that Lula, I think, had to sue for.
[00:26:55]  I mean, it was like a whole thing.
[00:26:56]  It was a crazy thing.
[00:26:56]  And Bolsonaro also did try to really integrate the military into the voting process because it's a digital, they use a digital system there.
[00:27:08]  In fact, they're the only country in the world that uses that particular system where there are no paper records.
[00:27:13]  Which, by the way, this goes against, I don't know, this is not on the TrueNAN rules list, but we got to add it.
[00:27:19]  Paper ballots hand-counted in public, the only thing that...
[00:27:23]  Only thing that works.
[00:27:24]  Only thing that works.
[00:27:24]  And we don't, I mean, the U.S. doesn't have that.
[00:27:27]  That's an example of get it in motherfucking writing.
[00:27:29]  You know what I mean?
[00:27:30]  Absolutely.
[00:27:31]  Yeah.
[00:27:31]  I like that.
[00:27:32]  That's the underlying.
[00:27:32]  Get it in fucking writing right there.
[00:27:34]  But your vote.
[00:27:35]  Brazil does have an electronic-only voting system.
[00:27:40]  Bolsonaro has long been an opponent of it, although I guess at first he was a proponent of it, but things happen.
[00:27:46]  It's been a long time.
[00:27:48]  And has always sort of made these gestures towards like pretty actually substantial gestures towards there being a lot of ways to change votes, basically, rigged elections.
[00:28:02]  And so in the lead up to this election, and again, I hate to be this kind of guy.
[00:28:07]  Similar to how Trump was doing in the U.S., Bolsonaro was really like doing his best to cast aspersions on the Brazilian voting system prior to the election.
[00:28:20]  I think because, well, it's pretty obvious the polling was not very good.
[00:28:24]  Even though he actually did much better than the polling would have suggested, the polling was really bad for Bolsonaro prior to the election.
[00:28:30]  So he was not only being like, the system is prone to fraud and corruption, but he was also like, we need the military to run a parallel count.
[00:28:40]  And he was really trying to integrate the military into the electoral system to begin with.
[00:28:46]  And so what he ended up doing was actually just, I guess, having the military prevent a lot of PT areas from voting in the first place.
[00:28:52]  I assume, I mean, Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of his freak sons, pretty close to banning, et cetera.
[00:28:59]  And it does seem like they were being advised.
[00:29:01]  I think it was Jason Miller, too, was like going down to Brazil and all that shit.
[00:29:05]  I think he got arrested there.
[00:29:07]  I assume it's part of this general strategy.
[00:29:12]  But yeah, I mean, that leads us essentially to like, you know, was this a coup?
[00:29:20]  Was this not a coup?
[00:29:21]  You know, like I said, I think it's a riot by people who really wanted a military coup.
[00:29:30]  But like people who, it was basically just, I don't know.
[00:29:35]  I mean, I guess that's just kind of how I think about it.
[00:29:37]  It's just like there was no, the military is the decisive factor there.
[00:29:41]  2,000 or 3,000 or whatever insane raving Bolsonaristas are not capable of taking control of the political and military apparatus of Brazil.
[00:29:53]  They were beseeching somebody else to do it.
[00:29:56]  And when the military really did show up in force, they were being cheered by the Bolsonaristas.
[00:30:02]  And this was pretty edifying to watch, actually.
[00:30:04]  And I hate to say it, but it's hard not to take a little bit of joy in it.
[00:30:07]  Sure.
[00:30:08]  You know, these military men are sort of marching through.
[00:30:11]  They're being cheered by the Bolsonaristas.
[00:30:13]  And then they turn around and arrest everybody.
[00:30:16]  About 1,500 people, I think.
[00:30:17]  Yeah, as of now.
[00:30:18]  I mean, and I think more arrests are coming.
[00:30:22]  It's interesting.
[00:30:23]  I mean, I think that there has been a rush.
[00:30:25]  I saw a bit in the Western press and also in the Brazilian press and in Brazilian left press, which is interesting, to really call this a coup or an intended coup.
[00:30:38]  And I think it's interesting because, you know, there's sort of this like, you know, we were talking about this.
[00:30:45]  There's kind of, there's these sort of like mirror events, right?
[00:30:49]  And so you have, you know, in my opinion, you have this event that happened in Brazil, in Brasilia, where you have this fascist mob, you know, rushing these like government buildings, like we said, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the presidential office, and everyone's, you know, calling it a coup.
[00:31:07]  And it looks kind of like a cart, it looks like a putsch, right?
[00:31:09]  That's it.
[00:31:10]  I mean, the photos of this like crazy mob swarm, and it kind of brings up these images of what you would read about as a coup in a, in a history book, you know, calling for the military.
[00:31:22]  It's Latin America.
[00:31:23]  You know, it's kind of hitting all of these moving moments.
[00:31:27]  Yeah.
[00:31:27]  You know?
[00:31:28]  Yeah.
[00:31:29]  But it wasn't a coup and it didn't happen.
[00:31:31]  And also there was no plan really to take power, right?
[00:31:35]  And then you think back and you say, okay, well, but in Brazil in 2016, there was a coup.
[00:31:44]  And there was a coup in those same buildings in Brasilia, in the Supreme Court, in the Senate, in the Congress, when Dilma was impeached and Lula was imprisoned.
[00:31:54]  And everyone at the time said, this is not a coup.
[00:31:59]  This is not a coup.
[00:31:59]  This is not a coup.
[00:32:00]  No.
[00:32:01]  And it was.
[00:32:02]  Yeah.
[00:32:03]  And I think that kind of like thinking back on these, like the, so you have these like two big events in the same fucking place, not that far apart, right?
[00:32:12]  And my worry is that, you know, I worry that the kind of rush to To call this a coup and say all these things, it runs the risk of kind of obscuring or erasing a little bit that history.
[00:32:30]  And I think some of that too is like a lot of people very excited about Lula coming back.
[00:32:35]  I mean, obviously, understandably, right?
[00:32:38]  Yeah.
[00:32:39]  Especially in Brazil.
[00:32:41]  But that shouldn't, in some ways, act as a kind of like, oh, now we can kind of forget what happened and how like how these things, how coups actually look.
[00:32:54]  And it looks like the media telling you it's not a coup and cheering it on.
[00:32:57]  It looks like the middle class cheering it on.
[00:32:59]  It looks like all of the pillars of international institutions and powerful institutions, you know, saying this is the correct process and ushering it in.
[00:33:13]  Yeah.
[00:33:14]  And that's exactly what happened in 2016.
[00:33:17]  So I think we need to go back in time a little bit and lead up to maybe what actually did happen in 2016.
[00:33:25]  Because I am in full agreement with you that it is a coup.
[00:33:28]  And like there have actually been kind of a lot of coups.
[00:33:31]  And I got to be honest with you, if we're counting Lula as a failed coup now that he's president again, I would say it's a successful coup that backfired in the end, actually.
[00:33:40]  Wait, which one?
[00:33:41]  The 2016 coup against Lula, because now he's back.
[00:33:45]  I don't know if it backfired.
[00:33:46]  Well, yeah, we can talk about it.
[00:33:47]  I mean, I guess that, yeah, I see what you're saying there, and I don't necessarily disagree.
[00:33:54]  But like in terms of like that government, well, it's not the same government, actually.
[00:34:00]  So yeah, maybe not.
[00:34:02]  But coups in South America haven't been doing very good lately.
[00:34:06]  Yeah, well, maybe not in the case of Peru.
[00:34:10]  Peru, well, yeah.

=== Cutthroat Politics in Brazil (03:10) ===

[00:34:12]  Very complicated.
[00:34:12]  Very complicated situation there.
[00:34:14]  But yeah, of course, you know, the Venezuela, many have tried.
[00:34:18]  Many have tried, few have succeeded.
[00:34:20]  Well, look, I'm hitting my computer out of pure.
[00:34:23]  I love the guy.
[00:34:25]  And in Bolivia, it was reversed, although we did not get EBO back.
[00:34:29]  In Peru, it's just, it's may the least popular man win.
[00:34:36]  It's a race for whoever's the least popular to now take power.
[00:34:40]  And well, anyways, we'll get there.
[00:34:45]  Back in, let's go back in time, 2010, Brazil.
[00:34:50]  What's going on?
[00:34:51]  So 2010, Lula leaves office.
[00:34:57]  We should say Brazilian presidents, they're allowed two successive terms, but then they're not barred from running for reelection again, but they can only, you know, they have to wait, basically.
[00:35:06]  They didn't learn their lesson of the tyrant FDR.
[00:35:09]  Yes.
[00:35:11]  So Lula had served two, and he was a super popular guy.
[00:35:14]  I mean, when he left office, he had approvals of like 80 to 87 percent, depending on what polling you're looking at.
[00:35:20]  I mean, great margin of error there.
[00:35:23]  He chose, he hand-chose his successor for the PT, Dilma Rousseff, who she had never run for office.
[00:35:33]  She had never held any office before.
[00:35:35]  She was kind of a bureaucrat.
[00:35:36]  In her youth, though, she was part of the resistance against the military.
[00:35:40]  She was tortured by the military during the dictatorship in the 60s.
[00:35:46]  In general, I mean, she's like a very like soft-spoken woman.
[00:35:50]  Yeah.
[00:35:51]  Very just like, she's a gentlewoman lady.
[00:35:55]  I hate saying that, but she's not like a cutthroat politico.
[00:35:58]  Yeah.
[00:35:59]  She's a bureaucrat.
[00:36:00]  And to be clear about, how do I say to be clear?
[00:36:03]  Why is that like a break?
[00:36:05]  But I'm not even, I'm about to be clear.
[00:36:08]  You know, sometimes I say that to be clear, and then I'm just more confusing.
[00:36:11]  Yeah.
[00:36:12]  Why am I prefacing a clear statement?
[00:36:14]  Now I've just made it all confusing by digressing about, regardless.
[00:36:20]  Brazilian politics are cutthroat, literally.
[00:36:23]  Yeah.
[00:36:24]  But basically, I mean, the Senate and Congress in Brazil are essentially like, I would say 80% just like criminals, like literal criminals.
[00:36:37]  You know, not like all politicians are crooks, but like literally just like some of the biggest criminals in Brazil, right?
[00:36:45]  And with that, some pretty cutthroat political arrangements, too.
[00:36:49]  It's also, we don't have time and we're not going to get into the, I think, as described, serpentine nature of Brazilian party politics.
[00:37:00]  But because of the, I mean, this is like Perry Anderson's work, right?
[00:37:02]  But like because of the kind of bizarre parliamentary presidential system that they have and the way that that leads to these coalition politics, it's like, it's totally insane.
[00:37:18]  Like I was asking, I asked the other day, like, wait, how many parties are there in Congress right now?

=== Commodity Boom and Political Shrewdness (06:58) ===

[00:37:22]  And it was like, I don't know, fucking 80, 90, 200.
[00:37:26]  You can just like, yeah, it's like totally psychological.
[00:37:28]  And people switch parties all the time, which I mean, I think that should be illegal.
[00:37:33]  But like, it was like when I was in the Philippines, I was like, how many political parties are registered?
[00:37:36]  They're like, oh, 500.
[00:37:38]  Yeah.
[00:37:39]  Totally.
[00:37:39]  Oh, and they're like, but they don't mean anything.
[00:37:41]  It's just like, they don't have any politics or anything behind most of them.
[00:37:44]  And I think that's sort of similar in some respects to many of the like congressional and senatorial parties in Brazil.
[00:37:52]  Obviously, there are big parties with ideological lines, but it's looser in a lot of ways than like you might expect.
[00:38:00]  But not Lula, right?
[00:38:02]  Member of the PT.
[00:38:04]  He had governed for two terms, and he and also the PT at this time were pretty popular.
[00:38:11]  And Dilma was pretty popular for like two, the first two years, let's say.
[00:38:17]  Most of this was because, I mean, during the Lula years, there was basically a huge commodity boom, which led to really great years for the Brazilian middle class.
[00:38:28]  Yeah.
[00:38:29]  Famously so.
[00:38:30]  Yeah, you got this like kind of crazy boom of commodity prices, and then that leads to a huge consumption boom.
[00:38:37]  And there was all this Chinese investment.
[00:38:40]  So they had exports rising.
[00:38:43]  You know, you had more raw materials and more development, which leads to more greater social spending.
[00:38:50]  You know, all of this.
[00:38:50]  PT had a pretty famous program as well called the Bolsa Familia program, which was basically cash transfers to the poor.
[00:39:00]  And so during this time, they were able to raise both the minimum wage and alleviate some of the like deep, deep entrenched poverty.
[00:39:09]  So you had, you know, basically thanks to all of these changes in the economy and unfortunately, but fortunately for some people, I mean, huge injections of credit, right?
[00:39:19]  But poor people got a little less poor and lower middle class people got, you know, more middle class, which are good things.
[00:39:28]  But it comes with a social price, right?
[00:39:31]  Which is not a lot of middle class people were happy now that they were having to share social resources with poor people.
[00:39:41]  I mean, and specifically, of course, in the case of Brazil, poor black people.
[00:39:44]  Yeah, because that should be sort of kept in mind here, too, is that like there's a pretty extreme racism in Brazil.
[00:39:50]  Yeah, and it looks very different than it does in America, but it is very, yes, very, very prominent.
[00:39:58]  I think that that in part explains a lot of the widespread hatred for Lula that we'll talk about amongst the middle class.
[00:40:09]  And there were, you know, there's like reports of those times of all of these people complaining like, I can't believe, you know, we're in the airport now.
[00:40:15]  It's like being at a bus stop because poor people would take buses across the country.
[00:40:19]  But then during the Lula years, they started being able to fly and classic kind of middle class grievances in those ways, right?
[00:40:29]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:40:33]  I mean, a kind of like succinct but not nuanced way to put this would be that at one point the PT was the party of the middle class.
[00:40:41]  And after Lula left, it was the party of the poor.
[00:40:44]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:46]  So you had kind of when Dilma took office on the one hand, like a lot of this social unease percolating amongst the middle class.
[00:40:53]  And on the other, this like commodity boom that was fueling a kind of huge historically social spending package.
[00:41:01]  I mean, they were, you know, classically broadening, you know, university spends.
[00:41:06]  You know, there was big government works projects.
[00:41:09]  There was all these cash transfers to the poor, you know, and cheap credit kind of driving all of this.
[00:41:14]  Yeah.
[00:41:14]  Right.
[00:41:15]  Okay.
[00:41:16]  Setting the stage.
[00:41:16]  So what happens next?
[00:41:17]  So it's 2008.
[00:41:19]  Liz is one of Liz's favorite years.
[00:41:21]  Classic Liz year.
[00:41:22]  Liz is 9-11.
[00:41:24]  Would be 2008.
[00:41:28]  It's kind of like you're January 6th.
[00:41:31]  My 63 even.
[00:41:32]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:34]  Huge, unprecedented financial crisis.
[00:41:36]  You know where I'm going this.
[00:41:37]  But guess what?
[00:41:41]  No.
[00:41:42]  No, you don't.
[00:41:44]  It doesn't really hit Brazil in the same way that you think or that I think maybe some people thought I was going to say.
[00:41:50]  Exactly, because Brazilians all live in favelas.
[00:41:53]  And so they did not have mortgages.
[00:41:56]  Actually, well, it has to do with the southern hemisphere.
[00:41:58]  You see, it's sort of like the honor.
[00:42:00]  Everything is reverse.
[00:42:01]  Everything's reverse, including the financial crisis.
[00:42:04]  No.
[00:42:06]  So Lula, you know, when he was in power, right?
[00:42:09]  I think a really good description of Lula is shrewd.
[00:42:13]  He's very smart politically, very calculating, very like deal-making, behind the scenes, making things happen.
[00:42:23]  I'm going to be honest with you here.
[00:42:24]  I think the most important quality in a successful politician is shrewd.
[00:42:30]  Yes.
[00:42:30]  And when I was younger, I liked to think of myself as shrewd.
[00:42:35]  We're not as shrewd as we should be.
[00:42:37]  I'm probably one of the least shrewd people on earth.
[00:42:39]  No one is ever as shrewd as they should be.
[00:42:41]  No, because shrewd involves a lot of people.
[00:42:43]  I think Lula's height has to do with why he's so shrewd.
[00:42:46]  He's a sort of a shorter guy, and I think it's easier for shorter people to be shrewd.
[00:42:50]  Interesting.
[00:42:51]  Yeah.
[00:42:51]  Not, wait, excuse me.
[00:42:53]  But I'm, of course, 5'2 ⁇ .
[00:42:56]  That means that you have a lot more potential to shrew up.
[00:42:59]  I can shrew up.
[00:43:00]  Yeah.
[00:43:01]  Oh, of course.
[00:43:01]  The root word.
[00:43:06]  But, you know, I mean, Lula's ability to kind of like wield and deal power.
[00:43:09]  I mean, some of that has to do with how he himself kind of came into power, how he was able to build political coalitions, and the nature of the parliamentary system, kind of like as we were talking about.
[00:43:18]  Well, Lula, Lula was a big time union organizer, right?
[00:43:21]  And that gives you, there's a reason that you see a lot of union people who become, well, I guess in the case of Pedro Castillo, that's kind of, that theory's out.
[00:43:32]  But like Evo Morales and stuff.
[00:43:34]  Like in Latin America, I think being a union organizer, specifically there, it seems like it does actually give you a pretty good ability to sort of like bypass the traditional political routes that a lot of people took where they kind of learned those abilities on the job being like the mayor or the governor or something.
[00:43:52]  Absolutely.
[00:43:52]  And I think also even beyond skill level, I mean, it teaches you how like institutional power works and like, you know, being an organs of that hold power in their own right, you know, as opposed to being outside of that.
[00:44:06]  Also, you're making lots of deals.
[00:44:07]  You're wheeling a dealing.
[00:44:08]  You're wheeling a deal.
[00:44:09]  You're Donnie Deals, but very different.
[00:44:11]  South American.
[00:44:12]  Yeah.
[00:44:16]  Dilma, it looked like, would be very similar to Lula.

=== Bus Fares Fuel Protests (02:47) ===

[00:44:21]  At first, she took office in 2011 and she, you know, 2011, global investment is starting to dry up because of the financial crisis, right?
[00:44:31]  And so she gives, it looks like she's going to give these kind of, you know, I don't know, throw a bone to finance and, you know, tighten, she's like, starts tightening monetary policy a little bit.
[00:44:45]  But as things got kind of worse globally, the Dilma administration took like a totally different turn and introduced like this huge stimulus package, which included cutting payroll taxes, electricity costs.
[00:45:01]  There was like, she was imposing capital controls.
[00:45:04]  I mean, it was very popular, but not amongst the bourgeois front.
[00:45:09]  And we should say that, you know, finance in Brazil, I'm going to talk about this a little bit later, but is very, very strong and structurally holds like a very important role in Brazilian politics.
[00:45:27]  In 2013, so she's still in office, the central bank undercuts this by raising interest rates.
[00:45:35]  That causes costs to rise.
[00:45:37]  That includes higher bus fares.
[00:45:39]  That triggers a pretty famous wave of mass protests.
[00:45:42]  I think we all remember in 2013.
[00:45:44]  And I think, well, let's speak for yourself.
[00:45:46]  I think you can remember.
[00:45:47]  I was a little busy back then.
[00:45:49]  But you know what I'm talking about.
[00:45:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:51]  Yeah, yeah, I do know.
[00:45:52]  No, I do know what you're talking about because I read about them later.
[00:45:57]  But if memory serves, a lot of the original protests were from people on the left.
[00:46:05]  Yes.
[00:46:05]  Right?
[00:46:06]  And which is, you know, higher, listen, protesting higher bus fares has long been something that I hate bus fares.
[00:46:16]  I think buses should be free.
[00:46:17]  That's why I pay the goddamn taxes for it, right?
[00:46:21]  But they definitely became sort of these more generalized anti-PT protests.
[00:46:26]  Yeah, we'll talk about that.
[00:46:27]  I mean, at first, it's funny because, yeah, it was, you know, bus fares, it was a huge mobilization of students as well because of cuts to the universities.
[00:46:37]  But it's the media, which again is also very, very concentrated in very few hands and extremely powerful in Brazil.
[00:46:47]  They were cheering on at first the police attacking the protesters.
[00:46:52]  And then when they were able to kind of repackage it all, as we'll see, as a kind of like generalized middle-class anger toward Dilma and the PT for how poor things were kind of going in Brazil at this time, the media starts really cheering on and supporting the protesters.

=== Poking the Jaguar (02:43) ===

[00:47:08]  Yeah.
[00:47:09]  The political response to all of this was like really, really bad.
[00:47:13]  I think there was like, you know, Dilma thought in a gesture to kind of like win over the suddenly kind of out of control press that the administration was getting and all this middle-class resentment that if they cut social spending further, they would lay off their back.
[00:47:30]  It didn't happen, and that just made the economy worse, obviously.
[00:47:34]  But it's crazy because in the middle of all of this going on, Dilma miraculously gets re-elected.
[00:47:41]  And it was a very close election.
[00:47:43]  I do remember that.
[00:47:46]  You know, I think there's some questions of why she ran for re-election, and perhaps Lula should have been the one running and not her.
[00:47:54]  But aside from that, I mean, it was close.
[00:47:57]  It wasn't close, like Nixon Kennedy close to give a, you know, it wasn't that close, but it was still pretty close.
[00:48:04]  And I think it's safe to say that the upper middle class and finance, the media, they were not prepared to lose that election.
[00:48:12]  And they were like fucking pissed.
[00:48:14]  Yeah.
[00:48:15]  Yeah.
[00:48:31]  So we said there was a coup, right?
[00:48:32]  So we should get to the coup part, huh?
[00:48:35]  Andre Singer, who's a Brazilian, I don't know, political theorist.
[00:48:40]  Singer.
[00:48:41]  No.
[00:48:43]  He called Dilma's like economic package, the huge stimulus package.
[00:48:48]  He called it poking the jaguar with short sticks.
[00:48:52]  Oh, you definitely want to be really good.
[00:48:54]  Here's my, maybe I am.
[00:48:56]  First of all, so I love that it's like South America.
[00:48:58]  So of course you're going to talk about the Jaguar.
[00:49:00]  I'm blowing that Jaguar's head off with a fucking M60.
[00:49:05]  I'm not poking it with a stick.
[00:49:06]  Are you crazy?
[00:49:07]  It's going to bite you.
[00:49:08]  Not even a short.
[00:49:09]  Yeah, especially not a short stick.
[00:49:10]  A short stick?
[00:49:11]  Do you ever hear my hand?
[00:49:12]  How close my hand is to that thing's mouth?
[00:49:14]  But that's how he, I think it's so good because that's how he described like how politically damaging this package was because basically poking the finance bear and poking the bourgeois bear or jaguar, I guess, with short sticks.
[00:49:31]  And they just had no response.
[00:49:33]  I mean, she tried, like you say, to calm them.
[00:49:36]  She fires her economic minister who was responsible for that package and immediately puts in a Chicago-trained asset manager from Brazil's second largest bank.
[00:49:47]  I mentioned that Brazilian finance is a really strong force in the country.

=== Poking the Finance Jaguar (04:40) ===

[00:49:52]  And it is.
[00:49:53]  The two largest private banks are more than twice as large as the huge extraction firms, which get a lot of attention.
[00:50:00]  But Brazil is also home to the sixth largest pension fund in the world.
[00:50:04]  And it has the largest investment bank in South America.
[00:50:09]  I mean, finance is it's hard to overstate how powerful the banks are in Brazil.
[00:50:19]  My phone just, you saw that?
[00:50:20]  I didn't do a fucking thing.
[00:50:21]  That phone just.
[00:50:24]  I think it was a ghost.
[00:50:28]  Not to mention cattlemen.
[00:50:30]  Yes.
[00:50:31]  I will say cattle ranchers are a big political force in Brazil, too, just like my home state of Texas.
[00:50:36]  Well, I mean, it's interesting, right?
[00:50:38]  Because all of the growth under Lula had been basically fine for industrialists, right?
[00:50:43]  Because, you know, social positions improve and then so does consumption, which spurs investment and so on and so forth.
[00:50:48]  Classic.
[00:50:49]  But when all that growth died under Dilma, the government, I mean, the Dilma government, they basically tried to woo the manufacturers and those kind of, and even the, you know, the ranchers and that kind of side of things and producers to their side.
[00:51:05]  But it didn't last very long, you know, the support.
[00:51:08]  And I think this is a kind of sometimes often missed point about financialized countries.
[00:51:14]  And Brazil is, of course, famously highly financialized.
[00:51:18]  I mean, that was part of the sort of deal of the re-democratization, right?
[00:51:22]  I mean, it was like a huge, I mean, the neoliberalization of Brazil is well documented.
[00:51:28]  But I always think of financialization as a kind of, I think it's like, I don't know which Spider-Man movie it's in, but I think it might be the one where there's the bad Spider-Man.
[00:51:40]  You know, I'm going to be honest with you, Liz.
[00:51:43]  I've never seen a Spider-Man movie.
[00:51:45]  Okay, but there's this like black ooze.
[00:51:47]  Okay.
[00:51:48]  Or is that Deadpool or is it Spider-Man?
[00:51:50]  No, that's Venom.
[00:51:51]  Venom.
[00:51:52]  Okay, Venom, yeah.
[00:51:53]  I love Venom as a child, but comic book Venom, yeah.
[00:51:56]  That's cute.
[00:51:57]  I thought he was really cool.
[00:51:57]  It was Venom and there was, who's the other guy?
[00:51:59]  Crimson?
[00:52:00]  No.
[00:52:01]  Deadpool?
[00:52:02]  No, there was a red venom.
[00:52:05]  No, it's.
[00:52:06]  You'd think it was Carnage.
[00:52:08]  It was Carnage.
[00:52:09]  And I had a comic book that was Venom and Carnage when I was a little kid.
[00:52:13]  I love comic books as a little kid.
[00:52:15]  I learned the word symbiote.
[00:52:18]  Symbiote.
[00:52:19]  Yeah.
[00:52:19]  That's how I learned the word venom, probably.
[00:52:21]  To be honest, Carnage.
[00:52:23]  And Spider-Man.
[00:52:24]  But it's weird because I liked Venom and Carnage, but I thought Spider-Man was, I didn't like him.
[00:52:28]  Yeah.
[00:52:29]  I couldn't figure out how the web thing worked.
[00:52:31]  No one can.
[00:52:32]  I'm like, is it out of his hand?
[00:52:34]  Yeah.
[00:52:34]  He made it?
[00:52:35]  So he's just a genius.
[00:52:35]  He seems like a mess.
[00:52:38]  Anyway, I often think of financialization.
[00:52:41]  I always imagine that Venom thing where it's like kind of like oozing and seeping and then it just kind of like covers everything and then remakes it in its image.
[00:52:49]  Fern Gully.
[00:52:50]  Similar, yes.
[00:52:51]  But so we throw around that term a lot and financialization means a lot of things.
[00:52:56]  Yes, okay.
[00:52:58]  But one of those things is that it expands, it structurally expands finance influence through the creation of kind of cross-class coalitions of basically rent to your capitalists.
[00:53:09]  So people who would have not been before, but are now through investments earning interests, they are suddenly now in a cross-coalition with financiers who are earning high salaries and commissions based on investments, right?
[00:53:24]  And so it creates this new sort of cross and much stronger coalition, cross-class coalition that really wasn't there before without that kind of new methodology of extraction.
[00:53:38]  In addition to all of this, manufacturers as well are very like vocal and they're just socially part of like an upper middle class society in Brazil, right?
[00:53:50]  And so suddenly you have in these kind of, in this like moment of from Lula to Dilma, this very highly organized and common, you know, common class interests between upper middle class society, bankers, manufacturers, and middle class professionals.
[00:54:09]  And all of them are fucking ready to pounce on the PT.
[00:54:12]  Also, that's the classic fascist coalition.
[00:54:15]  Absolutely.
[00:54:16]  So in response to all of everything that's going on, the central bank raised interest rates so high that they hit 14.25%, which is very high, even for Brazil.
[00:54:27]  I mean, the country went in, goes into deep recession, falling investment, unemployment, wages are declining.

=== Coup and Collapsing Politics (05:59) ===

[00:54:33]  It's a fucking disaster.
[00:54:35]  And the meltdown of Dilma's government basically happened overnight.
[00:54:40]  There's a real heart, really heartbreaking quote from Lula where he says, I think looking back on this, he says, we won the election one day and the next day we lost it.
[00:54:49]  And part of this is because PT didn't have a coalition to support them, right?
[00:54:57]  Yeah.
[00:54:57]  And I think that like that's an important structure because listen, I'm learning a lot here too, right?
[00:55:04]  Like you know a lot more about Brazilian politics than I do.
[00:55:08]  But I do know how politics works in general, right?
[00:55:13]  And you got to have your guys, you know?
[00:55:16]  That's a classic true and on rule.
[00:55:17]  That is a true non-rule, but that's just a rule.
[00:55:19]  Like you got to have your fucking guys.
[00:55:21]  And like more importantly, if you are, and this actually is true for extreme right-wing organizations too, hopefully none of them are listening, but you got to have your organizations too, right?
[00:55:31]  You got to have your little organs of power throughout the country.
[00:55:34]  You really kind of want an armed one too.
[00:55:37]  But, you know, you can't really, what are you going to do?
[00:55:40]  They're a Social Democratic Party.
[00:55:43]  But Lula, I do know, did not have that.
[00:55:46]  Yeah.
[00:55:46]  Or excuse me, the PT, I do know, did not.
[00:55:48]  The PT, yeah, or Lulismo, if we want.
[00:55:50]  Like, that coalition of support wasn't really anywhere to be found.
[00:55:55]  And it's important to kind of explain why.
[00:55:58]  I mean, the poor were beneficiaries of the PT for sure.
[00:56:02]  100%, yeah.
[00:56:03]  But it was in a passive way, right?
[00:56:06]  I mean, cash transfers are not, and this is a classic kind of criticism of the PT, but cash transfers aren't a replacement for education and organizing people into a kind of political, like solid class form, right?
[00:56:22]  I mean, that's part of the limitations of social democracy.
[00:56:25]  And I would say purposeful limitations of social democracy and the social democratic movement too, is that like it really, the best you're going to get out of them is these kind of cash transfers to the poor.
[00:56:37]  I mean, you know, and education and stuff like that too.
[00:56:40]  But like there is sort of a structural incentive in a lot of ways not to build working class organs of power that look out for their own interests as a class, because that might lead to some pretty, might lead to some breaks with the social democratic movement, which is kind of what happened in the first place.
[00:56:59]  And so, yeah, I think that like, you know, you've kind of seen this, I mean, you know, it's complicated because you also like Venezuela, I mean, you could also make the argument there that like it's a social democratic government there as well, right?
[00:57:15]  I guess a more left social democratic government, but still, I think in many ways a social democratic, not a communist government.
[00:57:22]  And I think that's really what you run up into in all of 20th and 21st century social democracy is that like you get to like not even the edge, but you get to like, you know, within spitting range of the edge.
[00:57:36]  And you're like, well, we're going to stop here.
[00:57:38]  Right.
[00:57:39]  And obviously, like, listen, if you want to make gains, my advice is don't let your gains be reversed.
[00:57:47]  And a good way to make- You really don't want to let your gains be reversed.
[00:57:52]  And like, you know, that's just sort of the tragedy of the social democracy in general, right?
[00:58:00]  Is that like, yes, there can be these great gains for the poor and the working class or great, well, yeah, I'll say gains, right?
[00:58:09]  Like, but there's no actual like, in general sense, like not a lot of actual like political movement forward there.
[00:58:19]  Yeah.
[00:58:19]  And I mean, this is like a big criticism of the PT of that time.
[00:58:23]  I mean, you know, it's like you're drenching people, lower middle class, not even just the poor, right?
[00:58:29]  In cheap cars and movie theaters and malls and just cheap consumption.
[00:58:35]  And it, you know, it wasn't, even with the cash transfers from like, you know, single mothers and stuff, it wasn't organizing anyone into a political force.
[00:58:46]  Absolutely not.
[00:58:47]  Exactly.
[00:58:48]  So like, I'm being honest with you, instead of like a movie theater or whatever, a credit card, these people should have been given rifles and a commander.
[00:58:57]  I'm not kidding.
[00:58:58]  But additionally, I mean, even when you look at the ways in which the poor benefited under Lula, like they weren't even structured to create political solidarity.
[00:59:06]  And now some of that is due to the just like political and like the realities of Brazilian governance.
[00:59:18]  Like, I mean, there wasn't any kind of really redistribution of wealth or a changing of the tax structure.
[00:59:24]  That would take an incredible amount of political leverage that probably just wasn't there.
[00:59:29]  Brazil has an incredibly regressive tax structure, which leads itself to obviously an incredibly regressive class structure.
[00:59:38]  All of that kind of coming from, again, the quote-unquote democratization years.
[00:59:46]  So distribution could only take a highly individualized form, right?
[00:59:52]  That's all it could take.
[00:59:53]  And wage increases is good.
[00:59:55]  It means more people have jobs and labor is expanded.
[00:59:58]  But if there's no organizing, like we're saying, then there's no organizing into unionization.
[01:00:03]  And that didn't happen under PT.
[01:00:05]  So when cheap credit, it means private consumption rises, but it's at the expense of investment into public services.
[01:00:14]  You saw the deterioration of schools, of the health system.
[01:00:18]  I mean, all that stuff happened under PT as well, right?
[01:00:23]  And those public, remember, those public services are shared by a middle class that is now not just resenting that they're sharing it with the poor, but they're seeing also the quality decrease.

=== Evangelical Reform Vacuum (06:00) ===

[01:00:33]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:00:34]  So all of this is like that we're kind of laying out, because I promise we get to the cuckoo part.
[01:00:40]  The cuckoo part?
[01:00:43]  Like a coup happens in a political vacuum, right?
[01:00:47]  Yeah.
[01:00:48]  When highly organized and acute class interests can take advantage of a collapsing political status quo.
[01:00:55]  And in Brazil, which I want to say this is the case with basically every country in the fucking world, that happens with the support and the recognition of the United States government.
[01:01:07]  Yes, yeah.
[01:01:08]  Which I would say has been a crucial factor in many coups that are not even necessarily linked to the U.S. Right.
[01:01:18]  And certainly this one in 2016.
[01:01:21]  Yeah, 100%.
[01:01:22]  100%.
[01:01:23]  Yeah.
[01:01:23]  So I mentioned earlier, we were just chatting that there's been two military dictatorships in the history of Brazil.
[01:01:30]  The one in the 30s, I think it went through like the mid-40s.
[01:01:32]  I can't remember the year it ended.
[01:01:33]  I can't either.
[01:01:34]  1945?
[01:01:36]  Don't quote me on that, even though we're recording.
[01:01:38]  Even though a lot of things.
[01:01:39]  I love saying don't quote me on that while recording.
[01:01:42]  I think that was funny.
[01:01:43]  You know, I think actually a lot of governments that Liz liked ended in 1945.
[01:01:48]  And then, of course, the one that, you know, from the mid-60s up into the mid-80s, the military coup d'état in 64.
[01:01:55]  We talked a little bit.
[01:01:56]  Did we talk a little bit about that with Vince Bevins, Beavins?
[01:02:00]  I think we've done like a couple Brazilian.
[01:02:02]  Dude, we've been a podcast for so long.
[01:02:04]  I feel like we didn't really talk too much about the 64 coup, but, you know, obviously 64, the military, seized power in Brazil, protecting capital from the rest of the – and, you know, this is all – you know, at this moment, look, I'll say, Brazil in the 50s was getting probably a bit – and in the early 60s, close to some exciting, not revolutionary moments, but –
[01:02:30]  and I wouldn't say communist, but it was moving in a progressive direction, in that direction, in a left-wing direction.
[01:02:37]  Absolutely.
[01:02:38]  There was land reform.
[01:02:39]  Absolutely.
[01:02:40]  You know, you know, my take on land reform.
[01:02:42]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:02:43]  Always push the government to do land reform and then overthrow them.
[01:02:46]  Yes.
[01:02:47]  Which is a great position.
[01:02:50]  The U.S. was basically an invisible partner in the coup and, you know, was quite vocal through diplomatic cables of their support of the military in 64.
[01:02:59]  You know, we had shipped, we shipped ammunition, we shipped arms, we shipped like an entire task, like naval task force to Brazil in preparation for the military intervention.
[01:03:10]  By the way, is that shipping that the naval always with coups, look where the navy is too, because we saw the same thing in Italy as well.
[01:03:18]  Yeah.
[01:03:18]  You always got the Navy, the U.S. Navy parked outside.
[01:03:21]  Yeah.
[01:03:22]  The military didn't end up needing it because that's how fragile the situation, the political situation was in 64.
[01:03:28]  But the U.S. was like standing at the ready.
[01:03:30]  They also recognized the military dictatorship immediately, almost before it even happened.
[01:03:36]  It was so quick.
[01:03:38]  And the thing is, from what I understand, right?
[01:03:41]  And again, like, I'm not Mr. Genius about this kind of stuff.
[01:03:45]  I read about it, right?
[01:03:46]  But like, I'm not.
[01:03:47]  I'm not really good.
[01:03:49]  I mean, I think I'm probably better than the average guy in the street unless he's Brazilian.
[01:03:53]  But like, you know, the average guy in the street, you know, couldn't tell Brazil from Portugal, which I can.
[01:04:00]  A lot of, I would say, right-wing Brazilians look favorably upon the military dictatorship because they do, like, there is still a huge, like anti-communism is still a huge part of the right wing in Brazil, right?
[01:04:20]  Yeah.
[01:04:21]  And they do view that military dictatorship as a bulwark against communist movements that they saw as destabilizing the rest of South America and Central America during the 1960s through 1980s.
[01:04:33]  I think also in addition to that, kind of globbing onto and morphing with the explosion of the evangelical movement.
[01:04:41]  Yes, because Satanism and communism are inextricably.
[01:04:44]  I mean, you really, like, there is a lot of people, and I am not exaggerating here, that would call Lula straight-faced a Satanist.
[01:04:53]  Yes.
[01:04:53]  Oh, like on the Brazilian.
[01:04:55]  I mean, the evangelical, oh, God, these are fucking frightening.
[01:04:59]  I mean, evangelical fascists in Brazil and their like rise and grind economy, which is all tied into like YouTube, digital.
[01:05:06]  I mean, it's like a total, but it, I mean, you know, you think Brazil, oh, it's a Catholic country, Latin America.
[01:05:12]  That is an evangelical, crazy psycho.
[01:05:16]  I mean, fucking Bolsonaro was like, didn't he get baptized in Israel?
[01:05:21]  Like, it's like something psychotic.
[01:05:24]  I gotta be honest, Bolsonaro, the guy's got like 50 shirts that just like say Israel.
[01:05:29]  Like, he's always chilling, like, with like, and there was.
[01:05:32]  Did you see the Israeli flag at the Brazilian?
[01:05:34]  Bolsonaro were flying in Brazilia.
[01:05:37]  They love it.
[01:05:38]  Yeah, because it's evangelical.
[01:05:39]  It's fucking psycho.
[01:05:41]  Anyway, yeah, they're fantastic.
[01:05:42]  And by the way, they're no friend to the Jews.
[01:05:46]  I want to be clear.
[01:05:47]  They're no friend to the Jews.
[01:05:48]  They want us all to go there, and so it's the end of the world.
[01:05:51]  Okay.
[01:05:52]  Back to 64.
[01:05:56]  So, yeah, the U.S. immediately recognizes the dictatorship and gets immediately together like a new economic plan for the country.
[01:06:04]  I mean, that's, of course, the role.
[01:06:06]  The coup that occurred in 2016 basically required similar support from the U.S.
[01:06:11]  And we know now, thanks to very recent reporting, I think it was like 2019, 2020, that all of this started coming out in the intercept, that the U.S. was pretty much hand in hand with this coup.
[01:06:28]  Yeah.
[01:06:28]  Right.
[01:06:29]  So, okay, 2014, two years prior to the coup.

=== Lot of Reasons for Corruption (07:04) ===

[01:06:33]  Federal, we're not going to get into the weeds about this because it's a little complicated, but I'm going to try and do my best to kind of give an overarching summary and hopefully move through it as quick as I can.
[01:06:47]  But federal investigations begin into corruption dealings at Petrobras.
[01:06:54]  Now, Petrobras is one of Brazil's state-owned oil company.
[01:06:59]  Yeah.
[01:07:01]  I think it's the largest state-owned company, okay?
[01:07:04]  Okay.
[01:07:05]  But not private, state-owned.
[01:07:07]  These hearings, people may have heard, were called Operation Car Wash.
[01:07:14]  Lava Jacob.
[01:07:16]  You know exactly what to insert there, right, Ardomski?
[01:07:20]  We're getting at the car.
[01:07:24]  For a year, these investigations were basically only really ostensibly focused on Petrobras.
[01:07:32]  And it was, you know, who at the company higher up were kind of giving and receiving bribes.
[01:07:38]  Now, culturally, corruption as a like political bugadoo, it has like a big place in Brazilian political history for a lot of reasons that we really don't have time to get into, even though I know this is going long anyway.
[01:07:56]  But so just kind of understand that.
[01:07:59]  And it's a real middle class.
[01:08:00]  It's like that classic middle class.
[01:08:02]  Like we want to get corruption out.
[01:08:04]  Yeah, yes.
[01:08:05]  And there's a lot of reasons why.
[01:08:07]  You know, again, the structure of the Brazilian parliamentary and presidential system, like we were talking about, it thrives on political coalitions, which means like bangalan, and people kind of creating their own parties and just being electors.
[01:08:20]  And then also, like I was kind of saying about the, you know, with the import of bourgeois society onto a slave society, right?
[01:08:29]  That the kind of this is like social, the kind of bourgeois social norms that we kind of take for granted, but we don't think about, but that come with the classic bourgeois revolutions in Europe and, you know, somewhat in America, like were not fully socially integrated and politically integrated in Brazil because they were not homegrown.
[01:08:51]  They were also imported, right?
[01:08:54]  So there's a lot of reasons for that.
[01:08:56]  Anyway, in 2015, April 2015, the federal investigators and the presiding judge, remember this name, Sergio Moro, they basically focused their attention away from Petro Bras and onto the PT.
[01:09:10]  Yes.
[01:09:11]  The treasurer of the party is the first to get brought down.
[01:09:14]  And then two of the largest, you know, two of the heads at the largest construction company that they basically are seen as receiving bribes from PT.
[01:09:25]  Yeah.
[01:09:25]  You know, getting sweetheart deals, development deals.
[01:09:28]  PT now is getting portrayed by an increasingly insane media as like corrupt through and through, through.
[01:09:38]  Like the way the media is showing DOMA, by the way, is completely psychotic and misogynist, by the way.
[01:09:45]  But they're calling her, they're like, she's crazy.
[01:09:47]  She's like doing these weasel deals.
[01:09:49]  She's a witch.
[01:09:50]  She's like, she's the most soft-spoken woman you've ever seen in your life.
[01:09:54]  Like it is such a complete and total like just fake reality.
[01:10:00]  And now there's starting to be protests in the street in support of Moro and punishing the PT.
[01:10:07]  It's kind of difficult to overstate how big of a political scandal this was because it was being fueled so much by the media.
[01:10:17]  And a lot of that was because Moro was such a fucking star.
[01:10:21]  He was an incredible, incredible, incredible smooth operator.
[01:10:26]  I mean, I remember when this was going down.
[01:10:28]  He's young.
[01:10:28]  He's good looking.
[01:10:29]  Sergio Moro is a, sounds like a musician.
[01:10:32]  Like, sounds like a fake name.
[01:10:33]  Like, it sounds like that.
[01:10:35]  Yeah.
[01:10:36]  You know, more of a wind.
[01:10:37]  And he, yeah, he really like, I mean, he played, he played the media so fucking well in this.
[01:10:44]  And they were happy to play along, too.
[01:10:46]  Yeah, I mean, he's like feeding them targeted leaks very early on to get the media to start associating Dilma with corruption, like examples of corruption at Petro Bras.
[01:10:58]  Like beginning all the way in 2014, he's, which, by the way, is illegal for a presiding judge to give media information.
[01:11:05]  And he was just going on like all the time, running his fucking money.
[01:11:08]  Take it, take it, take it, take it.
[01:11:09]  And after two years of leaking a bunch of innuendo to the press that they ran with, they still couldn't come up with anything real that Dilma did.
[01:11:19]  And what she ends up getting impeached on is like quote unquote fiscal peddling, which is like not an impeachable offense.
[01:11:25]  And then the Senate legalized it one week after she was removed from office.
[01:11:28]  Fiscal peddling?
[01:11:29]  Yeah, it's total bullshit.
[01:11:31]  But what, like DoorDash?
[01:11:33]  Morrow didn't.
[01:11:34]  What's interesting about what Moro did is that he didn't just arrest construction industry like insiders that he found guilty for bribing politicians and all of that.
[01:11:44]  He basically forced that company and the five biggest construction companies in Brazil to halt all of their projects, which caused 500,000 people to lose their jobs.
[01:11:56]  Okay, so I see where this is going, right?
[01:11:58]  So you've got Dilma sort of under fire for all of these so-called shady deals or whatever.
[01:12:05]  They haven't been proven.
[01:12:07]  It was never like, you know, that.
[01:12:09]  But like, you know, she's being like harangued in the media and, you know, about a lot of like construction industry stuff too, right?
[01:12:18]  And then you have at the same time, construction industry basically halting all these people losing their jobs.
[01:12:23]  Public anger is going to even more focus on Dilma and the PT.
[01:12:29]  Yes.
[01:12:29]  I mean, that move that Moro did, which is also, by the way, it's hard to see that outside of any kind of like forced like recessionary move, right?
[01:12:41]  Like it, it's estimated, the BBC estimated that it dropped Brazil's GDP, that move alone, by 2.5%.
[01:12:48]  That's how big the halting of all those construction projects and those development projects was.
[01:12:55]  And that it, that move alone tripled the effects of the Brazilian recession.
[01:13:00]  Wow.
[01:13:00]  Which is just, I mean, it's like, you know, to use the brace word, it's astounding.
[01:13:05]  Do I be saying that?
[01:13:06]  Yeah, it's really cute.
[01:13:07]  I love when you say it.
[01:13:08]  It reminds me of Draymond Green because I think he says it's a lot.
[01:13:11]  You know, no, he says that that's incredible.
[01:13:15]  I say incredible a lot too.
[01:13:16]  I will say that's not the first time compared to Draymond.
[01:13:21]  I get the Draymond thing a lot.
[01:13:22]  And it's actually, honestly, kind of bugs me.
[01:13:24]  You are a baller.
[01:13:25]  It's true.
[01:13:26]  In March of 2016.
[01:13:29]  I'm tall.
[01:13:31]  You are.
[01:13:32]  In March of 2016, Sergio Moro, he moves in not just on Dilma.

=== Lula's Immunity Controversy (15:25) ===

[01:13:38]  Now he's focusing on Lula.
[01:13:39]  Lula?
[01:13:40]  Lula, who is not in office.
[01:13:42]  Yeah.
[01:13:43]  But still remains, even outside of that, very popular.
[01:13:46]  Okay.
[01:13:47]  My name, when I was, if my, if I was born to be a girl, if I was born to be a girl, was going to be Lulu.
[01:13:53]  So I feel like.
[01:13:54]  Lulu?
[01:13:54]  Yeah, I was going to be Lulu.
[01:13:55]  Wait, spelled how?
[01:13:56]  L-U-L-U.
[01:13:58]  Oh, Lulu, okay.
[01:13:59]  Lulu.
[01:13:59]  That was going to be my name.
[01:14:01]  My friend's kid is named Lou, but L-O-U.
[01:14:04]  That's why I asked.
[01:14:04]  Oh, well, that's a regular, that's a name for a guy.
[01:14:07]  Yeah.
[01:14:08]  Anyway.
[01:14:10]  Okay.
[01:14:11]  So March 2016, the federal police bring in Lula for questioning in the early hours of the morning right in front of cameras.
[01:14:23]  Total perp walk.
[01:14:24]  I mean, it was psycho.
[01:14:25]  Yeah.
[01:14:26]  100%.
[01:14:27]  I mean, that's pretty common in any police force or whatever.
[01:14:30]  Like there are informants, not inform, I guess it would be informants, but there are members of basically every police force in every country in the world who have a paid relationship with the press where they're like, hey, this important person's going to come in, come take a picture.
[01:14:45]  But it was such a stunt.
[01:14:46]  That's going to say this, though, you know, this came from the top.
[01:14:49]  Yes.
[01:14:51]  Moro tapped Lula's phone and released to the press a call that happened from Lula to Dilma about that basically he was like, you should appoint me chief of staff.
[01:15:05]  Now, the thing to know about Brazil is that members of the government have immunity from prosecution while they are like still members of the government, unless it goes to the Supreme Court and they can overturn that.
[01:15:16]  Which is funny because I'd always been under the impression that that is to prevent coups and that sort of thing.
[01:15:22]  It is.
[01:15:22]  Yeah.
[01:15:23]  That's what's very funny.
[01:15:24]  That really worked for that.
[01:15:25]  That was put in place after the dictatorship.
[01:15:27]  Yeah.
[01:15:28]  Now, the press used this to basically push the story that this is PT shielding Lula from what should be a just arrest.
[01:15:38]  Yeah.
[01:15:39]  So meanwhile, at this same time, the car wash investigators are, it starts spreading through the political class in Brazil that the car wash investigators now have a list of names, 200 Brazilian politicians that they have that from all different parties, because you know there's a billion, that are all involved in corrupt deals, and they're ready to arrest all of them or start proceedings.
[01:16:08]  That freaks out basically every single member of Congress in Brazil.
[01:16:14]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:16:15]  And they are now looking at, they're basically like, who do we have to S?
[01:16:22]  Whose D do we have to S to get this car wash operation to end?
[01:16:28]  Because basically, I mean, this kind of happened in Italy.
[01:16:31]  Yes, very similar.
[01:16:32]  And like everybody got arrested and was like, except for the communists, was like linked to basically like, you know, influence peddling, organized crime, corruption, all that kind of stuff.
[01:16:43]  And so these guys were like, oh, hold on.
[01:16:46]  We don't want to be Italian.
[01:16:47]  Yeah.
[01:16:48]  I mean, yeah.
[01:16:50]  I was about to make a joke about Brazilians and Italians, but I won't.
[01:16:53]  You won't.
[01:16:54]  A top guy at PMDB, which is one of the political parties, he's taped telling a colleague that, quote, the guys in the Supreme Court told him.
[01:17:05]  Okay, that's an actual.
[01:17:06]  He says, literally, the guys in the Supreme Court told him.
[01:17:08]  These guys in the Supreme Court.
[01:17:10]  That basically car wash and everything would continue unless Dilma is impeached, replaced by her vice president, Temer, Michael Temer, and then a national government is formed around him, backing, which is backed by the Supreme Court and the army.
[01:17:28]  And this guy says he's already spoken to the army and that they have his full support.
[01:17:33]  Okay.
[01:17:33]  This is a coup.
[01:17:34]  Yeah, 100% this is a coup.
[01:17:36]  And this is exactly what happened, right?
[01:17:38]  So almost immediately, the House, because they're all incentivized now, they're freaked out, they're all going to get arrested or whatever.
[01:17:47]  They immediately, literally the next day, vote to impeach Dilma.
[01:17:52]  And then the Senate immediately finds her guilty on all the charges.
[01:17:58]  You know, if you can find a video of the Senate vote and you understand Portuguese or you can find a translation, like I highly recommend you watch this.
[01:18:05]  It's really fucking disgusting to see.
[01:18:07]  There's all these kind of like young, young-ish, friends, some oldies, Brazilian politicians, like fucking holding up Bibles.
[01:18:16]  And like, I mean, it's just horrifically sexist and disgusting and anti-I mean, it's just anti-liberal.
[01:18:22]  It's like so many horrible things.
[01:18:24]  And this includes, of course, famously.
[01:18:27]  Bolsonaro.
[01:18:28]  Bolsonaro.
[01:18:28]  This I remember vividly because he gave this sort of speech before his vote where he says they lost in 64 the coup and now they lost in 2016.
[01:18:42]  And he dedicates his vote to the memory of Colonel Carlos Alberto Bruhante Ostra, which I'm no doubt, well, it's a name.
[01:18:50]  I can say it however I want.
[01:18:51]  The dread of Dilma Rousseff.
[01:18:54]  So that is actually the military officer who oversaw the apparatus that tortured Dilma when she was imprisoned by the dictatorship.
[01:19:02]  So he is literally dedicating his vote to the guy that like arrested and tortured the woman that he's impeaching.
[01:19:11]  And I mean, there's, I guess, a lot of gender stuff that goes into this as well because he is, I mean, Bolsonaro is well known for his, I guess, unique takes on Dilma and women in general.
[01:19:29]  And so there's sort of that subtext to that as well.
[01:19:32]  So remember, you know, Brazilian presidents, right, they're limited to two successive terms, but basically they can run again after that or after like a little interregnum, as people like to say.
[01:19:45]  So what's important to then point out is that for this coup to be successful, there had to be a double move because it wasn't just enough to get Dilma out and put Temer in.
[01:19:57]  Lula needed to be imprisoned so that he couldn't run.
[01:20:01]  Because if you're in prison, you can't run.
[01:20:04]  Unlike the U.S., actually.
[01:20:05]  Yeah.
[01:20:06]  Oh, yeah, of course, Debs.
[01:20:08]  But so at the time of Lula's conviction, all polling showed him as like the overwhelming frontrunner to win again in 2018.
[01:20:17]  With the criminal conviction, like I said, you know, he would be ineligible to run.
[01:20:21]  And that basically cleared the way for Bolsonaro.
[01:20:24]  So Lula gets arrested in 2018 on corruption charges that he committed, quote, indeterminate acts.
[01:20:33]  This is literally what it was called.
[01:20:35]  You don't want to be arrested for that.
[01:20:37]  With zero evidence is presented.
[01:20:39]  But he was basically convicted by the media, right?
[01:20:41]  Because this had all been primed and ready.
[01:20:44]  And all of this sort of class resentment had been building in Brazil for so long, right?
[01:20:49]  We're trying to kind of present all these different angles.
[01:20:52]  Lula appeals his case, you know, famously, of course, on habeas corpus grounds.
[01:20:57]  And it goes all the way to the Supreme Court, to the very fucking building, the Bolsonaristas, trashed, right?
[01:21:03]  This is in this building.
[01:21:05]  The head of the Brazilian army says that granting Lula habeas corpus would threaten the stability of the country.
[01:21:12]  And the Supreme Court votes six to five, basically barring him from running.
[01:21:17]  Well, I will say, too, that a general, when Lula was arrested, had a tweet drafted by Army High Command that said the Brazilian Army believes that it shares the desire of all citizens to repudiate impunity and respect the Constitution, social peace, and democracy, as well as keeping its eye on its institutional missions.
[01:21:36]  So this was coordinated, right?
[01:21:38]  I mean, you have the Brazilian high command of the army writing fucking tweets for generals about like, yes, this is the right thing to do.
[01:21:46]  We need to arrest this guy.
[01:21:47]  The fucking army.
[01:21:49]  Yeah, the army working hand in hand, by the way, with the organs in Congress, the Supreme Court, right?
[01:21:57]  The vice president, who completely, I mean, absolutely knew what was going on.
[01:22:03]  Seven.
[01:22:04]  Absolutely.
[01:22:06]  So in Dilma's own cabinet, in the executive, in the presidential office, again, the three buildings that were attacked January 8th.
[01:22:13]  And then in the media and the middle class and the upper middle class and finance and the industrial, all these interests were coming together, right?
[01:22:22]  I mean, this is a coup.
[01:22:24]  But Like I said, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the final boss that has to give its approval.
[01:22:34]  Good old US Abe.
[01:22:36]  Yeah.
[01:22:37]  And, you know, I got to say that Brazil Wire has done a fantastic job.
[01:22:43]  Great website.
[01:22:44]  Yeah, they are great journalists there of putting together kind of a timeline here and piecing together through what they can of how involved the U.S. was in the coup.
[01:22:55]  Yeah.
[01:22:55]  And I think it's pretty, pretty damning.
[01:22:58]  You know, so they have, according to a leaked State Department cable from back in 2009, this is so crazy.
[01:23:06]  DOJ ran a training camp for prosecutors in Rio called Project Bridges.
[01:23:10]  This is as early as 2009.
[01:23:12]  So Lula is still in power.
[01:23:15]  Sergio Mora was the keynote speaker.
[01:23:17]  He must have been in his fucking 20s at the time or something.
[01:23:21]  And during the event, the U.S. and the Brazilian delegations discussed the possibility of beginning a joint corruption investigation located in Curitiba, which is, of course, where Operation Car Wash was located.
[01:23:34]  Then in 2013, Ed Snowden reveals that the NSA had been spying on and listening into Petro Brass and looking in on internal communications.
[01:23:47]  In 2014, right, you get Operation Car Wash, and that's announced as a joint operation between the U.S., DOJ, the FBI, the SEC, and local Brazilian public prosecutors in Curitiba, along with the Brazilian federal police.
[01:24:02]  And that's important to know.
[01:24:03]  The U.S. was like a was, the FBI was a partner in this investigation.
[01:24:09]  And the Intercept has done a lot of reporting through basically a tranche of leaked telegram communications of how much the U.S. was overstepping its legal bounds in its involvement in this investigation.
[01:24:28]  So after the installation of the coup regime, the Temur, you know, when Temer became president after the impeachment, the government immediately, one of the first things they do, in addition to all of the kind of classic neoliberal, I mean, they passed a law that they froze all social spending for 20 years.
[01:24:48]  Yeah.
[01:24:48]  Literally, there's no social spending in Brazil for 20 years above the rate of inflation.
[01:24:53]  I mean, it's a fucking death spiral, right?
[01:24:58]  But not just that, the government immediately starts selling off Brazil offshore petroleum at market rates that below market rates to Exxon and Chevron.
[01:25:09]  And then they pass a $300 billion tax break for foreign oil companies to come into Brazil.
[01:25:14]  I mean, this shit sounds like something that you read from back when you're like, oh, we used to call them banana republics.
[01:25:20]  I think too, like, wasn't there also at one point, didn't the US create, like, just give the prosecutors a bunch of money too?
[01:25:29]  They like made a foundation and put them in charge of it.
[01:25:31]  Yeah.
[01:25:32]  There's a whole bunch of pay-to-play stuff happening as well.
[01:25:34]  Yeah.
[01:25:35]  In 2017, acting assistant attorney general Kenneth A. Blanco, he gives a speech at the Atlantic Council, Friends of the Pod, where he basically bragged that of how, you know, how successful DOJ's quote-unquote informal involvement in the car wash operation was.
[01:25:58]  And then, of course, the lead prosecutor, very famous guy, the lead prosecutor for the car wash investigations, he described Lula's 2018 arrest as literally, he says it, a gift from the CIA.
[01:26:10]  Oh, that's kind of, that's shooting a little straight there, right?
[01:26:14]  I mean, he's being honest.
[01:26:15]  But yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's, I think what you saw in Operation Car Wash and the removal of Dilma and Lula from political life is a full like law affair style coup.
[01:26:30]  Yeah, right.
[01:26:31]  Absolutely.
[01:26:32]  And I think that like that's a pretty important thing to keep in mind, that a coup does not necessarily look like tanks on the Grand Boulevard.
[01:26:40]  You know, a coup can oftentimes look like telegram messages or whatever between prosecutors.
[01:26:47]  And then, you know, a bunch of people, I mean, what you have here is a real deal, true, no shit criminal conspiracy to get the PT out of power and then put in, well, turned out to be Bolsonaro.
[01:27:04]  And I mean, just, you know, and to what end?
[01:27:06]  To freeze social spending, to, you know, reassert finance's structural role that like just even the gains that, yes, you know, we have criticism of during PT, right?
[01:27:20]  But even just poor people getting a little less poor was too much.
[01:27:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:27:26]  You know what I mean?
[01:27:26]  Like, I don't want to be misunderstood here.
[01:27:28]  Like, I like it that poor people got money.
[01:27:32]  Absolutely.
[01:27:32]  No, I mean, I think we're just trying to describe some of the structural contradictions and frustrations with this type of program and why it led to a collapse of the coalition.
[01:27:46]  But now.
[01:27:48]  Well, Lula's back.
[01:27:49]  Lula's back.
[01:27:50]  Yeah.
[01:27:51]  Right?
[01:27:51]  Lulu's back and I don't, which is, you know, wonderful, right?
[01:27:56]  I don't think he's in as strong a position as he once was.
[01:28:00]  Well, it's interesting, you know, because I think that the question then is, well, okay, well, you know, if you say, oh, this is a coup, then why would they let him back in?
[01:28:11]  You know?
[01:28:11]  And I think people kind of misunderstand how interests change and calculations change based on historical conjunctures, right?
[01:28:19]  None of this is personal.
[01:28:21]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:28:22]  It became when those, when the kind of insanity of Bolsonaro, I think, became too much for the media to turn a blind eye to.
[01:28:35]  Because, you know, we were talking about this before.
[01:28:36]  When during the election, when Bolsonaro was running, I mean, the media, the whole line was, okay, we know he's kind of crazy.
[01:28:43]  We know he says some things, but don't worry, his finance people are fantastic.
[01:28:50]  The people behind him, that will steward the country is fantastic.
[01:28:54]  And the media was overwhelmingly pro Bolsonaro, which is a big distinction between what happened with Trump, right?
[01:29:01]  Yeah.

=== When the Position Became Completely Untenable (03:00) ===

[01:29:03]  When that position became completely untenable, like you're describing in this, you know, in the years, especially with COVID, right?
[01:29:09]  And, you know, how bad things were getting in Brazil.
[01:29:15]  And then you had the revelations of these Telegram groups and all the reporting that was coming out.
[01:29:20]  And it became completely untenable for Moro to, I mean, he was named justice minister under Bolsonaro, right?
[01:29:28]  Like for him to continue in that position and it became politically unpopular, things change, right?
[01:29:34]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:29:36]  I don't think that means that finance is structurally tamed, that it doesn't have, it doesn't occupy that same role, that the middle class in Brazil is somewhat suddenly okay with Lula.
[01:29:48]  Yeah.
[01:29:49]  I mean, things, you know, things are contingent.
[01:29:52]  I think there are some rays of hope, though.
[01:29:55]  I think that, listen, you know me.
[01:29:58]  You know that I actually know shit, like not doing a podcast bid here or whatever, like firmly believe that like once you get into power, you should arrest your political opponents.
[01:30:10]  In a situation like this, I'm not saying like when you become mayor of Milwaukee.
[01:30:14]  Although, you know, you know, we'll see how far it goes.
[01:30:19]  I think one similarity to January 6th that January 8th has is that there are certain political figures here who did overplay their hands, right?
[01:30:29]  Like it looks like this former security minister definitely fucked up.
[01:30:35]  And like, you know, they found that document in his house about overturning the election, which didn't they do something?
[01:30:39]  Didn't Trump have some similar, like some like wacky thing like that?
[01:30:43]  I would bet that there's a lot of internal stuff that gets like, hey, we might as well develop and then suddenly your boys, you're like, hey, where'd everyone go?
[01:30:52]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:30:53]  You know, where's my support?
[01:30:55]  Yeah.
[01:30:55]  And then it falls through.
[01:30:56]  And so who knows if Bolsonaro will be arrested?
[01:30:59]  I mean, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility.
[01:31:01]  It would be crazy for the U.S. to extradite him.
[01:31:04]  Yeah.
[01:31:05]  Well, I don't know if he can stay here a lot longer than 30 days anyways.
[01:31:08]  I mean.
[01:31:09]  I mean, maybe he could just be like, oh, my tummy hurts again.
[01:31:11]  Yeah, that's what he always does when he doesn't know what to do.
[01:31:14]  Yeah, he's been in the hospital.
[01:31:16]  I mean, this is sort of done to death, but Bolsonaro loves going to the hospital as much as I love not being in the hospital.
[01:31:23]  But I do hope just that Lula does take this seriously because I don't think that, like, you know, it's not like I think that there's going to be this big military coup against Lula in like a year or two or whatever, but I do think this sort of like purge of the security forces, purge of the political forces, you know, these arrests that like should, I mean, literally by Brazilian law, come in and be pursued.
[01:31:50]  I hope that they do happen just because that will not only probably make it safer to be a poor Brazilian, but, you know, it's these people play dirty, right?

=== Finding Balance in Brazilian Politics (01:16) ===

[01:32:03]  Yeah.
[01:32:04]  I mean, it's tough because I think like it's like you want Lula to come back and basically like laser eyes mode, dark Lula, revenge for my imprisonment.
[01:32:15]  Tall Lula.
[01:32:17]  But on the other hand, because of the realities of the political system, he's got to govern with some pretty unsavory guys.
[01:32:25]  Yeah, he's got some, he's got right-wing, classic right-wing guys.
[01:32:29]  Yeah, in his coalition, yes.
[01:32:30]  Yeah.
[01:32:31]  And so it becomes a question of like, how do you balance those things?
[01:32:34]  Now, being the shrewd politico that he is, perhaps he'll be able to find a balance.
[01:32:41]  But I would not be surprised to see a lot of these ugly enemies rear their head again in the next couple years.
[01:33:05]  Well, my name is Brace.
[01:33:11]  I'm Liz.
[01:33:12]  We're, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called It's called Truanon.
[01:33:18]  And we'll see you next time.
[01:33:19]  Bye-bye.