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Comment by klhugo | Hacker News Reader

Brazilian politics is complex and dirty. Those interested in understanding a bit more of it I recommend the TV series "The Mechanism". My personal opinion (as a brazilian myself) is that significant progress has been been achieved last 10 years, but we are still quite far from the level of corruption found in developed countries.

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The series is full of inaccuracies and based on a judicial process that was more political than legal. Even the director of the series regrets it now after it served as propaganda to elect a president who has yet to do something good for the benefit of the Brazilian population.

Want to watch a good movie that probably portrays well the current president and his sons’s connections to the militia in Rio try “Elite Squad: The Enemy Within”.

Although the series might expose how corruption works in Brazil, keep in mind there's plenty of controversy and (valid, imo) accusations of partisanship in the way the show portrays certain politicians and situations, which even if based in real life, have switched characters and quotes, effectively targeting an specific political party.

Most of the same corruption is happening in developed countries as well. It was bizarre for me to see so many common practices in American politics (lobbyists and corporations writing entire bills, companies funding political campaigns, politicians awarding large public money contracts to their own companies, insider trading in Congress) happening openly and legally while they would have been massive scandals in my "corrupt" home country.

Brazilian politics are so backwards its very independence from Portugal was declared by the Portuguese king, who had fled Europe years before when his home country was invaded by Napoleon, and who was subsequently crowned Emperor of Brazil...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_I_of_Brazil

His father fled Napoleon, Pedro I was a child when his family fled to Brazil. He declared independence pressured by the nobles in Brazil who were opposed to restrictions coming from Portugal that limited their commerce to Portugal only and no other countries.

Contrast that with the French Revolution or the American Independence War, to name only a couple of geographically close examples

How is that corruption exactly? Didn’t they already openly run the Brazilian government and he was accepted in the role by the local power players?

That anecdote was relating 'backwardness', not corruption.

Tied for 105th place out of 176 countries in the Corruption Perception Index. And actually getting worse over the past 6 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

(I never liked "Perceptions" in the title, it suggests that a country may have a better score if the population cares less about corruption than other countries).

And ranked 109th out of 190 countries in the World Bank's Doing Business Index[0], behind Lesotho[1], Kuwait, Vietnam and Bosnia and Herzegovina, to name a few surprises

__________

0. https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/rankings

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=lesotho&tbm=isch

I want to know which countries are the most lopsided between the two indices.

Name has to be perception because after taking Fixed Income and Currency, the business has additional expenses. Large companies track this expenses and business practices, they then classify this as perceived corruption.

Because it affects only business, things like the corruption scandal accounted on the article are not accounted.

Rupert Murdoch runs the US, UK, and Aus.

we have as much corruption as you, its just our politicians have learnt how to hide it.

> we have as much corruption as you

That's bullshit. There is corruption in Western countries too, but not at the same level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

Key word is perception. A society can be very inaccurate in how it perceives its own country. Take the US, for example. In a recent survey, people were largely off regarding inequality. There are other instances of crooked relationship between entities that people (and laws, even) don't regard as corruption, such as lobbying, affecting perception outcome in surveys.

In many developing countries, you can buy a policeman with a $10 bill. Try that in the UK.

What does "buying a policeman with a $10 bill" says about a society's corruption levels? It reinforces the point that I was making regarding corruption perception. Maybe you are unaware that REAL and impactful corruption doesn't happen at street level.

Without defining what you mean by corruption and how to measure it, your comment is useless.

If you cannot somehow show that Brazil, Russia, the UK and Denmark have the same level of corruption, I call your argument bullshit.

Not in the past 10 years, the Workers Party literally setup corruption schemes like this you just linked.

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