Rio is burning. Feb. 7, 2014 the city government once again tried to raise bus fares from 2.75 reais to 3.00 reais. In response, the people who use the service, many of whom pay anywhere from one sixth to one-third of their income on transportation, exploded in fury.
There is a slide show of images from the Sao Paulo paper, Folha De S. Paulo, at their?site. ?It’s certainly worth checking out the people of a major world city rising up and fighting back against the growing trend of rising prices for less service that our governments are asking us to accept.
Fabiana Aragon, a?health worker from Rio who spends a third of her income on transportation costs. Ms. Aragon voiced a common complaint about long delays and hot, dirty, crowded trains with no air conditioning and high cost.
Aragon stated:
?I totally support this protest, the situation now is absurd.?
In this latest conflict, the protesters took over a main bus terminal and allowed passengers free passage into the terminal.
From The People’s View the Liberal Librarian:
“But we have slid into a world of bread and circuses, as with the Roman Empire. Except with this one caveat: we have not much bread…What’s sought is a dismissal of things which actually matter for things which don’t, but are marketed in such a way as to make them seem of existential necessity…The only solace is that the Wurlitzer is grinding to a diminishing audience. As people realize they’re being bamboozled and anesthetized to what is real.”
The excerpt from a recent blog post illustrates much of what seems to be happening in the world today. We are greeted with ever more spectacle as our water disappears and as bread becomes a luxury item for many. The attempt by Brazil to seduce their population with both the World Cup and the Olympics seems to be backfiring. How could this be?
For decades, Brazilians have put up with high prices, high taxes, and mediocre service from the government. It was always assumed that the government was stealing the taxes of the people and enriching themselves, as it just seemed the nature of Brazil. What has changed is that Brazilians now see billions of dollars being spent on athletic fields and projects for temporary events. They can now SEE the money and the wealth of the country, and they want to know why their schools are so poor. They want to know why their health care system is second-rate. In short, now that they know there is money there AND that when the government wants to do something it CAN build buildings and roads. They want their fair share of what they have been denied. The people are no longer buying the “lazy, incompetent” story the government and rich have been selling them because the proof is now in front of their eyes. Every world class stadium built, every new world-class road, and every clean bus with air conditioning bought for either of the games is one more finger in the eye to the people who have always been told it was their fault for their circumstances not government unwillingness to invest in the people. Well now they know.
Brazil is a very difficult country to be poor in. If you are lucky enough to have a job in a store as a clerk, you usually work six days a week and 10 hours a day for a flat wage — no overtime, no hourly, and a flat wage. It’s usually a low wage from 700 to 1,000 reais a month, so at a minimum, if you are lucky enough to only take the train that would be six reais a day, six days a week, four weeks a month, which comes out to 144 reais a month. If you have to take a bus and train, it can be more. If ?you live further out and have to take one bus line run by one company to a bus line run by another and then a train — well you can see how making a thousand or less, things can get tight very quickly.
The people of Brazil are standing up to their government and demanding better. We should follow their example.
EDITED: MB
