Meanwhile, in Brazil

Each day in Brazil of late is more dramatic than the one before, and the news is uniformly grim. There is a political crisis [due to a $2-billion kick-back scandal involving the state-owned oil company], an economic crisis and, as if that wasn’t enough, a public-health crisis. [ed: Zika virus]

[...]

There are no precedents for any of this; there is only a national mood of bewildered anxiety. Will the police interrogations be extended to the President herself? Will she resign, or be forced out? And if so – who takes over? (The Vice-President is implicated in one of the legal processes targeting the President. The third in line, the lower-house Speaker, was ordered on Thursday by the Supreme Court to stand trial on charges related to the scandal. No. 4 is the President of the Senate, who is, yes, also under investigation).

[...]

The country has careened from hottest of the emerging markets to the sharpest economic contraction in decades. GDP fell a staggering 3.8 per cent last year. Inflation and unemployment rates are rising steadily, swiftly eroding gains in social inclusion made under Mr. da Silva’s time in office.

[...]

[W]hile the case initially looked at the ruling Workers’ Party, by now there are politicians from every major party indicted or being investigated.

  Globe and Mail

Welcome to politics in the Third World, where we are rapidly moving to take our place. We don't yet do the majority of our business in kick-backs, but rather, huge government contracts for government-connected elites.

On the other hand, Brazil's legal system is (so far) going as far up the ladder as the case takes it. We certainly don't do that here.

[The case began] in August, 2014, when a low-profile former Petrobras director, Paulo Roberto Costa, agreed to a plea bargain after he was arrested on bribery charges. Mr. Costa named names – and names, and names. The case landed in the courtroom of Sergio Moro, a federal judge in the southern state of Parana [...] . It was driven by a team of young, male prosecutors, many of whom had studied in the United States, who are now sometimes referred to in the media as the Nine Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

[...]

[Moro] now presides over a Hydra-headed investigation [...] unlike any in the country’s history in its scale and in the way that it has moved relentlessly up the political ladder, with increasingly influential people implicated.

[...]

Although [President Dilma Rousseff, who was once a Marxist guerrilla and was tortured while imprisoned by the military dictatorship,] was energy minister in [former President] da Silva’s cabinet, and thus chair of the Petrobras board, when much of the activity under investigation allegedly occurred, she has insisted she did not know about it and no evidence has tied her to it.

Although I do hate to see leftist government officials who were champions of the people be shown to have feet of clay, I'm feeling just a tiny bit skeptical about her Reaganesque assertions.

[H]er Minister of Justice, Jose Eduardo Cardozo, [recently] asked to be relieved of his post, saying he was tired of pressure from party members to intervene in the case. He moved to the job of Solicitor-General.

[Immediately following,] a senator named Delcidio do Amaral, arrested on charges of interfering with the [...] investigation last year, [was said to be] negotiating a plea deal in which he implicates both Ms. Rousseff and Mr. da Silva.

She said - He said. This will only get more interesting.

There's more. Way more. Read this article to get a sense of the huge mess unraveling in the country.

Hillary won't do it, but if Bernie were to be the presidential nominee in this country, I can only imagine the GOP political ads pointing to Latin America to denounce all socialists.

On Sunday, nearly two million people took to the streets in 121 cities across Brazil to protest government corruption and to demand the impeachment or resignation of President Dilma Rousseff.

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[M]any senior political figures, including former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, are now implicated.

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Brazil’s economic crisis has seen a huge spike in unemployment – 1.5 million jobs were shed in 2015 and another 2.2 million are expected to be lost as the contraction continues this year. For many women who had new pink-collar positions in the economy that boomed under Mr. da Silva, that has meant a reluctant return to domestic work, traditionally the chief occupational sector for women of colour in Brazil.

[...]

The half-dozen large anti-corruption demonstrations in the past year have been dominated by white and upper-middle-class protesters, who tend to be supporters of the opposition Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), and to have little love for Ms. Rousseff’s left-leaning Workers’ Party, which has won four successive elections, the last one with a narrow defeat of the PSDB in 2014. Rousseff supporters say they are using the corruption scandal – in which politicians from virtually every party have been named – to try to unseat a democratically elected government.

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It’s a troubling moment for the country, [Deborah Thome, a Rio writer and political scientist] said. “The debate now –nothing will convince me otherwise – is between different and conflicting political visions. I don’t support the protests, but like many friends who went to the street, I want a better country. But the paths we want to take to get there are very different. And, in most cases, those paths will not meet.”

  Globe and Mail

Here's a picture of some protesters that has become the iconic symbol for many Brazilians:

In case you don't get its significance:

Among the people who went to march were Claudio Pracownik and Carolina Maia Pracownik, a white couple who live on a leafy street in Ipanema. They brought with them their little white dog, on a colour co-ordinated leash, and their two toddler daughters, who rode in a stroller pushed by a black maid wearing the all-white uniform that some wealthy Brazilians prefer their domestic employees to wear.

[...]

Brazilians, who are deft and fast with memes, reposted the picture with a thousand snarky captions, such as “Speed it up, there, Maria [the generic ‘maid name’], we have to get out to protest against this government that made us pay you minimum wage.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.