The 2021 Latinobarometer, the most important measure of Latin Americans’ satisfaction with democracy, showed widespread public discontent.
The report showed that in the region there is a general repudiation of the performance of the elites (70% are dissatisfied with the current management of their country), only 22% say that their rulers care about others, and only 17% believe that the distribution of riches of their countries is just.
The research also highlighted the deterioration of democracy in Brazil under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Against the coup threats by Bolsonaro and his supporters, different sectors of society have publicly demonstrated in defense of Brazilian democracy, even signaling the direction of a plebiscitary vote in the first round of the October presidential elections. Although important and necessary, it is a defensive agenda, limited to the contours of a public debate guided by Bolsonaro’s destructive agenda.
It is a defense of democracy that is not capable of dialoguing with the population’s desire for profound changes in the country, incapable of exposing the anti-systemic farce of Bolsonarism. It’s because?
Because, simply, it does not expose nor reach those who, in fact, concentrate power and hijack any possibility of change in favor of the majorities. In other words, the financial oligarchy that drains increasingly larger portions of the population’s income, using, more recently, Bolsonaro’s ultra neoliberal policies.
It is not by chance that such oligarchies, supporters of the Bolsonaro government, are also today signatories of manifestos and public pronouncements in favor of democracy. In the current debate, between Democrats and Bolsonaristas, the financial oligarchies are not only safe, but are often protagonists. Taking the argument a little further, the defense of democracy, without questioning the hypertrophy of the power of such oligarchies, risks revealing itself, like Bolsonaro’s anti-systemic defense, to be a farce.
The point here is not to fulanize the financial oligarchy. Nor, according to Oxfam’s 2017 report “The distance that unites us”, that six Brazilians have wealth equivalent to the wealth of the poorest 100 million in the country and that the richest 5% hold the same share of income as other 95%.
At the global level, in the two decades of the 21st century, financial dominance within the capitalist dynamics has been gaining unprecedented magnitude, something that accelerated in the post-2008 crisis.
In fact, a 2021 report by the Financial Stability Council, created by the G20 to monitor the international financial system in the post-crisis period, reveals that the total value of global financial assets jumped from 230, in 2009, to more than 400 trillion dollars, in 2019, reaching almost five times that year’s world GDP.
Considered by liberals, more or less orthodox, just an excess or a failure of the market, such rentier-financial logic has also dominated the dynamics of our peripheral capitalism and made the concentration of property and income advance. A recent study by Fonacate shows that in Brazil, in 2020, of each real allocated in investment or gross capital formation, there are more than six reais invested in financial assets (public or private debt securities, company shares, exchange contracts and commodities).
It is necessary to democratize the economy and finance
But where do financial agents extract their enormous profitability? In 2021, 60% of the total stock of financial assets in Brazil were invested in public debt securities. Something that certainly explains why we have the highest real interest rate in the global economy, the so-called autonomy of the Central Bank and the stranglehold on social spending with the “spending ceiling”. An assault on public savings accompanied by the precariousness of rights.
On the other hand, these same financial agents seek to advance their “investments” in social policies (pension, health, education, energy and sanitation). In the privatization of Companhia Estadual de Águas e Esgotos do Rio de Janeiro (Cedae), which took place in April 2021, the big winner of the auction was Águas do Rio, which belongs to AEGEA, which, in turn, is controlled by financial institutions. , such as Banco Itaú and Fundo Sovereign of Singapore.
More recently, with the privatization of Eletrobras, the company’s largest private controller became 3G Capital, owned by Jorge Paulo Lemann, the richest Brazilian according to Forbes. There is no better way to back up financial profitability than by accessing public services at tariffs, also capturing labor income therein.
This speculative financial logic, which has its privileged operators in large banks and investment funds, also commands large non-financial private groups, but which have financial institutions in their corporate structure – as in the case of mining company Vale, which has Banco Bradesco as one of its controllers. Thus, large corporations have a significant part of their profits devoted to the payment of dividends to their shareholders, the repurchase of the company’s own shares and financial investments.
Such behaviors discourage productive investment and change management practices in favor of financial allocation and profitability, resulting in pressure from shareholders, owners, for maximum extraction of value from work and spoliation of nature. Hence the legalization of precarious work, through Michel Temer’s labor reform, and the day-to-day pressure for flexibilization of environmental law and indigenous peoples.
With compressed income, devoid of rights and with reproduction increasingly in the hands of the private sector, the majority of the population finds itself hostage to indebtedness, which already affects more than 77% of Brazilian families. Debts that further fuel the usurious, speculative predation of rentiers.
The financial oligarchy, which today is posing as a democrat, is the same that operates and benefits from the macroeconomic, fiscal, social security, labor and privatization policies of the last governments, true machines for grinding people.
Before Brazilian independence, there were the so-called “good men”, large landowners and people who took care of the local administration. Will we, after 200 years, remain hostages, now of a financial caste, of “new good men” commanding the entire Republic, a kind of untouchables, unimputable?
