Opinion, by Michael Royster
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Dilma has been visiting the U.S., making nice with POTUS the SuperSnoop, visiting the MLK monument, and incidentally signing or approving a bunch of totally innocuous and futile pie-in-the-sky agreements that neither side will ever keep.
For instance, she’s promised to eradicate all illegal Brazilian deforestation within the next fifteen years. This is a promise she won’t keep, for one big reason. She has been persuaded by the farm lobby that farming creates jobs for people and food for export, which get many more votes than saving the planet. Farming requires deforestation. The “agreement” shows a total disconnect from reality.
Leaving DC, she’ll fly over Middle America until settling in Silicon Valley to visit Stanford and Google. Officially the visit has to do with the “Science without Borders” program which sends tens of thousands of Brazilians abroad for STEM courses (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
The disconnect with reality is that her visit coincides with her cutting down on educational spending in general, and in particular, funding to the Brazilian agency that pays the foreign universities the outrageous tuition they insist upon: CAPES is close to a default situation.
The worst disconnect is political. She compared the Public Prosecutor’s leniency program (authorized by a Law she signed) to the torture she herself suffered under the military regime, simply because both want “stool pigeons” to rat on their companions.
That comparison implies that the jailed executives are being tortured, which she knows is untrue. Moreover, those executives now fingering their cronies are admitted criminals, whereas she and her leftist cadres never admitted to any crimes—they were revolutionaries.
The Curmudgeon has previously congratulated Dilma on not playing the “I was tortured” sympathy card in her presidential campaigns. Now that she’s been elected twice, she’s changed her mind. Perhaps she intuits that after Lula goes to jail, she may be next. That’s not going to happen; it’s just another disconnect.
The Curmudgeon has been doing Smidgens for some time now, he enjoys writing them and hopes his readers enjoy reading them too.