[Rant] No more iHWEPs for me

Update: Financial Times published an article about all that. They sum everything even better.

Ok, this is a rant post, about the politics and economics of other country, so it probably won’t be interesting for many. Brazil is ruled by the Worker’s Party (even more leftist than the English WP) for 13 years now, and they completely destroyed our economy by now. Between 1994 and 2002, the president was from a center-left social democratic party, and had some free market insights, which greatly helped our economy and currency to get stronger, the life get better and to put our country in the radar of the investors. In 2003 the first president of the WP won the elections, and it soon began to demonize the “neolibertarians” who were privatizing the state-run companies and so on.

Years later, during the 2008 economic crisis, we shouldn’t had been affected, because China and other developing countries were growing up very fast. The incredibly fast China growth needed iron and other commodities we produce, so we had a golden ticket: Loads upon loads of money coming from China and a world in crisis with investors seeking safer ports like we used to be. What the WP did? Sent our money to finance huge projects in Cuba, in Venezuela, in Ghana and in other African dictatorships. Our money was literally used to built those only because these countries share an ideology with the WP: They’re all dictatorships or protodictatorships with far left dictators.

Recently, our Polícia Federal (our Feds) discovered that the WP asked for huge bribes to the companies who were building those projects. If they won’t pay the bribes, they won’t finish the works. These bribes, according to some sources, sum up to more than $10 bi USD.

Add a lot more of bad decisions and we have the BRL as the second currency to lose more value against the USD in the world, losing only for the Russian ruble. Our official inflation is in 9.2% per year, but if you go to the supermarket it’s almost that number per month. The BRL x USD exchange is rising steadly, currently in 3.3 BRL x 1 USD. All taxes rose, and the government is spending circa 45% of our GDP on government stuff. We, Brazilians, work until May just to pay taxes!

On top of that, the vanilla, base price of international packages rose up from R$56 to R$95!!! The salaries or (in my case) scholarships didn’t rose, so we’re struggling to pay our bills.

And Hot Wheels mainlines now cost R$9 ($2.8 USD), instead of R$5 like three years ago.

Sorry for the long rant, I needed to put it our of my chest. Sometimes I feel like a hostage, because I have no possibility of getting out of here. If I had the smalled possibility of getting a permanent visa to US or other country, I would gladly go.