Brazil is where I belong, the place that feels like home. They love their family, their country and God, and are not afraid to let anybody know it.
-Dionne Warwick
If you swap out Brazil for Texas in the above sentence, it sounds very much like something George W. Bush would say. I don’t think Brazilians are very much like Texans and I certainly don’t think the soul singer Dionne Warwick is anything like George W. Bush, but you never know. They both love guns, oil, and a game called football, and any Texan worth his cowboy boots can build a friendship based on those things.
But that’s beside the point. I don’t think anyone other than Texans or Brazilians could pull off a respectable Olympic games when their economic and political systems are in dire straits.
Everything went right on schedule. The games began. The torch worked. The Chinese won synchronized diving. The U.S. dominated basketball. The U.S. dominated pretty much everything else. Brazil won men’s soccer. Americans got caught doing stupid stuff in the middle of the night while drunk. The games ended.
With split-second precision like that, it can only be assumed that the Nazis who escaped to Argentina helped put together the Olympic Games. It sure wasn’t the large Italian population in Brazil. But I digress.
Acting President Michel Temer oversaw the games. He is acting President because the actual President, Dilma Rousseff is under impeachment trials for fudging state finance records, which she doesn’t deny. Her defense thus far has been,” Everyone else has done it.” Whoops.
She was a member of the party that had ruled for the last decade and at one point she had an 80% approval rate. What brought her down was money.
Brazilian Governments have to meet a certain budget surplus, which is set by Congress. That was easy to do when China was buying absurd amounts of commodities from Brazil. Once China’s growth slowed down to a reasonable pace in 2011, they stopped buying commodities in such large amounts. This devastated the commodities-driven economy in Brazil, and when the country is run by the Workers Party, the main economic players are owned by the state, so it devastated the state’s finances. Now it became hard to achieve that budget surplus.
With an election coming up Rousseff had two options. Tell the people about the true state of the economy and probably lose the election. Or she could get the public banks to loan money to the Treasury, make the surplus, and win the election. That’s apparently a no-brainer for any Brazilian politician.
I love these people. This is the country where the “Workers Party” appointed its own candidates to control Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, and stole billions of dollars from it using inflated construction contracts.
Anyway, the future for Mr. Temer and his all Caucasian male cabinet is unclear. Rousseff may not be indicted, and the world might keep spinning, but I think the world will look more favorably on Brazil after the success of these games.
