There’s graft, and then there’s Odebrecht graft

If a US politician can be substantially influenced by $10-50k - how many reasonably well paid Bay Area software engineers could be out actively buying influence using nothing but their personal salary?

As an example: Joel Myers of Accuweather and his brother donated $11,000 to Rick Santorum (a senator) shortly before he introduced the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005, whose "effect would be to eliminate public dissemination of National Weather Service data and forecasts except in case of severe weather alerts. [...] The bill had very few supporters outside the commercial weather industry" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Dutie...).

Your reasoning is intuitive, but I'm afraid you're wrong to some extent.

It's true that it's not an isolated case and PART of the society may be susceptible to pay or receive bribes, but according to a Brazilian historian, Marco Antonio Villa, PhD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Antonio_Villa), when Brazil was nominated as independent by Dom Pedro I, there was no corruption cases. The few cases that happened afterwards were severity punished. It's not clear exactly, however, when corruption was installed between that time and today. Now Brazil is going through a transformation. Corrupts are being caught, or at least giving satisfaction to prosecutors. The federal police is doing a wonderful job with many operations to uncover / dismantle white collar crime. Pushing forward this momentum will lead to a new country. And it is happening as I can see very close. You are just seeing many news in this regard because many cases got uncovered at once, so don't take the wrong idea. Your country or any other country have corruption or nefarious things going on that are only discovered in the future. That's all.

This is a very common oversimplification of how Brazilian society works that's popular among many who didn't really spend too much time studying Brazilian or American history.

The justification goes like this: Brazilian society was based on exploration of large farms and American society was based on settlement by Puritans and other immigrants. Since that's the main difference in the two countries formation it must play the main role about their outcomes.

This common folk explanation is used in some circles and probably took hold after WWII when Brazilian upper classes began to use the USA as a role model (before that, Europe, and especially France, was used more as a model than the USA[1]).

It generally ignores every nuance of the history of both countries. For example, people that make this comment in Brazil largely ignore that the USA had to deal with something like the Spoils System. They also largely ignore that the Southern USA had something very close to what they describe as an "exploration colonization." It was what formed the base of the wealth of the local elites[2].

There are many more differences and similarities between Brazil and the USA during their formation years and after their independence that can't be ignored.

One similarity that is not acknowledged is that both countries had debates about having a stronger central government or a weaker one.

In the USA, Alexander Hamilton argued strongly for this. In Brazil, Emperor Dom Pedro I tried to install a unitary state in the new country, only to fail under the pressure of the local elites that wanted more autonomy for themselves. The Additional Act of 1834 turned provincial autonomy into the law of the land. When the monarchy was overthrown, the new constitution gave even more powers to the local elites.

I generally think the leeway given to the elites during colonization, after the passage of the act of 1834 and especially during the first Republican government was way more of a problem than what system of colonization was adopted. This generally allowed local strongmen to run their region as some sort of quasi-warlords. It's where the whole thing we call "Coronelismo" in Brazil came from and something like it still dictates how politics is done in Brazil to this today.

[1]: You can read more about this in the book "The Seduction of Brazil."

[1]: More about this in the book "The Grandees of Government."