Cost of Living in Brazil

It would be very useful to talk about the cost of living in Brazil. Thinking about that, Superinteressante magazine published an article in english explaining why everything is so expensive here in Brazil. Click here to read more.

Bible, homophobia, racism, religion and politics in Brazil

During his testimony in the Supreme Court (STF), Marco Feliciano, the new President of the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities of the Brazilian House of Representatives called Africans a cursed people. 

In the defense filed in the Brazilian court, his lawyer, Rafael da Silva Novaes, delivered a document which was written “quoting the Bible [...] African descendants of Ham [or Cam], son of Noah. And, as Christians, we believe in blessings and therefore we cannot ignore the curses”.

According to the text, the only way people of African descent be “cured” is accepting Jesus Crist. Such absurdities led to numerous demonstrations around the country. The evangelical pastor Marco Feliciano, as a President of the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities of the Brazilian House of Representatives has banned the presence of citizens from its sessions to keep out protesters demanding his resignation.

In his church, in a recent sermon, Feliciano said the follow about homosexuals: “I am against their promiscuity. I don't want my daughters to go out on the streets and see men with shaved legs kissing each other. The Brazilian family must be respected”.

In the last few days some actors and singers protested against Feliciano. Even the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, said that she is against any form of discrimination. 

Slavoj Žižek talking about Brazil

He left his apartment in  in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and went to Brazil to talk about politics and James Bond movies. Take a look at the video.

Marco Feliciano: Bible and racism

Yesterday,  the evangelical preacher Marco Feliciano, new President of the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities of the Brazilian House of Representatives, could not preside over the session. Dozens of demonstrators protested against the presence of Feliciano in the presidency. His session lasted only eight minutes.

Sources in Brasilia say that the congressman suffers great pressure to leave office. Feliciano was also subpoenaed to testify next April in the Federal Supreme Court on a charge of embezzlement.

According to the UN, “most discrimination in Brazil is subtle and includes slights, aggressions and numerous other informal practices, while consciously egregious and overt racism directed at particular individuals, especially in the form of racial insults, is more commonly recognized as racist. Even though Brazil’s anti-racism laws target such incidents, which have long been considered un-Brazilian, subtle individual and institutional practices maintain and reproduce racial inequalities. Racialist ways of thinking, in which racial hierarchies are accepted as natural, are apparently as culturally embedded in Brazil as they are throughout the world”.

Feliciano is a product of this racialist way of thinking and he did not seem to regret his remarks on Twitter. Feliciano wrote that “Africans are descended from ancestral cursed by Noah. That's a fact”. The worst is that racist ideas like these receive support from many people in Brazil, especially evangelical fundamentalists. For a multiracial nation with a rich African influence like Brazil, that's a shame.

Brazil: losing billions of dollars

China was eagerly buying Brazilian commodities and Brazilian producers were happily counting money. But Chinese buyers are afraid of one of the biggest problems in Brazilian economy: investments in infrastructure. 

Our production is growing faster than the infrastructure. This year, the country should harvest of 183.6 million tons, an increase of 10.5% in production compared to 2012. This will be the largest crop in our history.

It’s a marvellous growth, no doubt. The problem is the infrastructure to drain all this output. We don’t have ports and logistics infrastructure able to drain this massive amount of commodities. Today, our bigger port, the Port of Santos, located in the city of Santos, in the coast of São Paulo, is suffering. The queue of trucks waiting to transport their cargo at the port of Santos reached 30 km. The lack of infrastructure has created a permanent queue of hundreds of trucks.

All these problems and slowness to drain the production made our biggest importer, the Chinese group Sunrise, cancel the purchase of nearly 2 million tons of soybean due to the delay caused by the lack of infrastructure in Brazil. This decision represents a loss of billions of dollars to Brazilians farmers.

The poor infrastructure also helps to destroy much of the crop. In the state of Mato Grosso, producers have lost part of their harvest for lack of trucks to transport the crop. They also have no place to store the harvested soybeans.

According to The Economist, "Brazil’s government has woken up to the urgent need to improve the country’s infrastructure. It is auctioning road, railway and airport concessions. Last month it added ports to the list, promising to spend 54 billion reais to expand and dredge public ports and to improve landside access over the next five years". But today, in Brazil, the infrastructure problems are still far from a solution.

Brazil: the misogynists and homophobics in our House of Representatives

Marco Feliciano, the new President of the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities of the Brazilian House of Representatives, did it again. Now, O Globo, one of the biggest newspapers in Brazil, is showing an interview that he gave in 2012. In this interview Feliciano said: “When you stimulate a woman to have the same rights as men, she wanted to work, their share as mother starts getting canceled, and so she is not a mother, there's only one way it knows: that she does not marry, or maintain a marriage, a relationship with a person of the same sex, and who will enjoy the pleasures of a union and will not have children. I see a subtle way to reach the family, when you stimulate people release their instincts and live with people of the same sex, you destroy the family, you create a society where only have homosexuals, you see that society tends to disappear because it does not generate children”. (“Quando você estimula uma mulher a ter os mesmos direitos do homem, ela querendo trabalhar, a sua parcela como mãe começa a ficar anulada, e, para que ela não seja mãe, só há uma maneira que se conhece: ou ela não se casa, ou mantém um casamento, um relacionamento com uma pessoa do mesmo sexo, e que vão gozar dos prazeres de uma união e não vão ter filhos. Eu vejo de uma maneira sutil atingir a família; quando você estimula as pessoas a liberarem os seus instintos e conviverem com pessoas do mesmo sexo, você destrói a família, cria-se uma sociedade onde só tem homossexuais, você vê que essa sociedade tende a desaparecer porque ela não gera filhos”). 

The absurd is that Feliciano is not alone. He just reflects the thinking advocated by members of the majority of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front, a very powerful and ultraconservative group in Brazilian politics. His thoughts represent a misogynist and homophobic way of understanding our society, which has undergone vast socio-politico-ideological changes in the last few years. Feliciano is a product of a country that goes, at the same time, one step forward and one step behind.

For Hildete Pereira de Melo, a very important scholar known for his acting and his studies linked to the feminist movement in Brazil, "assign responsibility to homosexuals for the destruction of the family is a delusion". The thing is that this ideological/cultural war is getting dirtier and crazier in Brazil.

The worst is that the number of congressmen linked to the evangelical churches is growing and the future seems not so bright at the moment.

Brazil: a racist in the Human Rights Commission

The name of the new absurd in Brazil is Marco Feliciano. He is a Brazilian congressman, an evangelical pastor and also the new President of the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities of the Brazilian House of Representatives.

His election has been the subject of numerous debates that show the real face of Brazil to the world. A nation where progress and backwardness live side by side and where the evident mixing of races much time veils a terrible aggression of a deep prejudice and a culture of disrespect in Brazilian society. 

The problem is that in the past Feliciano wrote is his Twitter account things like: “on the African continent lies the curse of paganism, occultism, misery, diseases originating from there: Ebola, AIDS, hunger... Etc." ("sobre o continente africano repousa a maldição do paganismo, ocultismo, misérias, doenças oriundas de lá: ebola, aids, fome... Etc."). 

He is also known for his anti-gay remarks. Speaking in his church the pastor referred to AIDS as a “gay cancer”. In his website he claimed that “science itself reveals the prevalence this disease in homosexuals; hospitals do not accept blood donation from this group.” Since the 7th of March, the new President of the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities has been accused of racism and homophobia by hundreds of protesters in São Paulo and Brasília. 

Now, parliamentarians from PSOL (Socialism and Freedom Party), PSB (Brazilian Socialist Party) and PT (Workers Party) filed a new application in the Supreme Court questioning the legality of Feliciano election.

The absurd of Feliciano election lies in the core of Brazilian political establishment. Today, the Evangelical Parliamentary Front, a group of politicians linked to the evangelical churches, is getting stronger in Brazil and trying to push their medieval agenda.

For example, the same Evangelical Parliamentary Front questions the Resolution of the Federal Council of Psychology in Brazil that prevents psychologists from treating sexual orientation as a patient’s disease. Since 2012, the group is trying to introduce a new law that would allow treat sexual orientation as a disease.

Brazil: the same rain, the same chaos

Every year is the same thing. Brazil is known for its spectacular hot weather. But, from December to March, during the rainy season, it does rain almost every day in the Southeast portion of the country. Everybody knows that, including the authorities. They know, but they don’t care.

Every year lots of poor people die during the rainy season. In Rio de Janeiro, 16 people have died this year until now — in 2011 more than 900 people have died in towns near Rio de Janeiro during the rainy season. In São Paulo, some cities have declared state of emergency. It is amazing, but people die yearly in floods and mudslides and the local authorities use the same excuses and make the same mistakes!

In the capital of São Paulo, according to a recent study made by the Faculty of Economics, Management and Accounting (FEA-USP), the total loss from the recent floods that struck the city is estimated at more than US$ 400 million.

The most impressive thing is that every year the same things happen, the same people sit in the same places and absolutely no effort is made to avoid the problems that everybody knows that are going to happen the next year and the year after ad infinitum. When the rains are gone, nobody seems to care anymore. It’s just unbelievable…

O crescimento da economia brasileira depende da classe média?

Em conferência da Coface, a economista Zeina Latif fala que a classe média não é só responsável pelo aumento do consumo no Brasil, mas também pelo crescimento da economia no geral.  

Ela fala das administrações federais desde FHC, que combateu a inflação; passando por Lula, que aumentou o salário mínimo e criou o Bolsa Família; até chegar ao Brasil de hoje, sob administração da presidente Dilma Rousseff. 

Para Latif, a informalidade no mercado de trabalho no Brasil está caindo, a distribuição de renda está melhorando e com isso o consumo está ganhando cada vez mais força. Latif acredita que a classe média deve continuar crescendo nos próximos anos e a razão para esse movimento continuar são os avanços, mesmo que lentos, na educação do país.

Outros fatores importantes para o crescimento da economia brasileira são a melhoria na produtividade, a janela demográfica e a transferência de renda.

Segundo ela, quando o mercado de trabalho deixa a informalidade, a produtividade da economia tende a crescer. Outro ponto importante reside no fato de que quando o trabalhador consegue um emprego formal ele conquista, ao mesmo tempo, acesso à assistência médica e ao crédito. Para ela, o país precisa agora melhorar sua produtividade para seguir crescendo. Assista o vídeo.

O que falta para o Brasil ser mais inovador?

Segundo Marcos Troyjo, diretor do BRICLab da Universidade de Columbia, o Brasil tem todas as condições econômicas para se tornar uma sociedade mais ligada às inovações tecnológicas. Para ele, a única coisa que falta ao atual governo da presidente Dilma Rousseff é um plano claro para atingir tais objetivos. Assista o vídeo.

Etanol e a tecnologia flex

Uma boa análise sobre a produção e o consumo do etanol no Brasil. Segundo o vídeo, outros países deveriam seguir o exemplo brasileiro é incentivar a competição entre etanol e gasolina com a produção de carros com o motor flex. Assista o vídeo.

As mudanças na economia do Brasil

Christina Lopez fala das mudanças econômicas ocorridas no Brasil nos últimos anos. Ela também cita que o crescimento nacional é menor que o de países asiáticos, mas com 20 anos de bons governos o Brasil está se tornando um país cada vez menos desigual. Com mais consumidores no mercado. Veja o vídeo.