Expanding the Legacy
Tag: Brazil
5 Posts
High Noon at X Corral: Brazilian Justice Faces Off Elon Musk
On Monday, the federal supreme court of Brazil voted unanimously to uphold the ban on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Last week, Alexandre de Moraes, one of the court’s justices, ordered the shutdown of X for its failure to comply with Brazilian law and its refusal to appoint a legal representative in the country. The platform went blank over the weekend as service providers scrambled to block access. Justice De Moraes also decreed that anyone using ‘technological subterfuge’ such as a virtual private network (VPN) to evade his ban would risk a fine of €8,000 per day.
President Bolsonaro Keeps Spending
Army generals are a mostly pliant lot. To reach to the top of the military chain of command it is advisable to follow orders from above without asking too many questions. This helps explain why presidents in Latin America prefer to entrust the running of state-owned enterprises to retired generals...
Paulo Guedes: Time for Resolve
Brazil’s all-powerful economy minister Paulo Guedes (69) looks south for inspiration. He has long mulled a Pinochet-style approach to economic management. Mr Guedes is determined to introduce a set of contemporary monetarist policies similar to those that, he says, saved Chile from bankruptcy some forty-odd years ago after a disastrous flirt with socialism – not quite unlike Brazil’s own dalliance with leftist policies.
President Bolsonaro Seeks Early Victory
In Brazil, spending on pensions absorbs fully one third of federal tax revenue. For close to forty years, successive presidents have promised, and failed, to reform the country’s complex pension system which, it is often noted, combines welfare state generosity with pioneer market funding and represents a resilient leftover from the corporatist development model pursued from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s.
Brazil’s Bolsonaro: Looking Behind the Façade
It never takes long for Brazilian voters to regret their choice. After the restoration of democracy in 1985, some eighteen year went by before the country’s electorate turned to an outsider in near desperation over successive failed presidencies. Long discarded as a dangerous extremist by a nation that traditionally seeks compromise and prefers to avoid confrontation, Workers’ Party frontman Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva was reluctantly dispatched to the Palacio do Planalto – the Brazilian seat of power.
