'Brazil is run by software'
The hope that Congress could potentially analyze the removal of earmarks from the budget revenues lasted less than a week. Senator Marcio Bittar (Brazilian Democratic Movement, MDB, of Acre), rapporteur of the emergency constitutional amendment proposal (PEC), which creates triggers to control government spending, sacked the proposal before even putting it to a vote.
The losers are precisely those that the biggest advocates of earmarks claim to represent: the poorest, those who, in the "race" for opportunities in democracy, fall behind the rich, the corporatist, the owners of the State, in short, the owners of power.
Budgetary earmarks have existed for a long time not only here, but in many other countries. In the Brazilian case, the current system was instituted by the 1988 Constitution. This was debated and formulated at the end of two decades of dictatorship, when, naturally, there was a pent-up thirst for social justice in this territory marked for centuries of social inequality.
A National Constituent Assembly brought together the most diverse political forces to write the Constitution of the democracy we would have from then on. That was the birth of the so-called "Citizen Constitution," so baptized by the main political leadership of the New Republic, congressman Ulysses Guimarães, then president of the Chamber of Deputies, who died in a helicopter crash in 1992.
If, on the one hand, it brought us closer to a project of civilization by enshrining fundamental rights and guarantees of equality among us, regardless of ethnicity, origin, gender, age, etc., as well as ending censorship and giving everyone free universal access to education and health care, the Constitution of 1988 embraced the interests of specific groups, historically accustomed to receiving more from the State than most Brazilians.
The 1988 Constitution was written in the midst of a terrifying macroeconomic context: uncontrolled inflation, hyperinflation, and the country's successive defeats in confronting the evil that had been disorganizing the national productive system, concentrating income, and sabotaging the future.
It is obvious that in such an atmosphere there was fertile soil for the adoption of populist measures, such as the establishment of a limit for the basic interest rate (12% per year), the earmarking of funds to force governments to invest in education and health, the indexing of the Social Security to the variation of the minimum wage, and the...
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