
There’s graft, and then there’s Odebrecht graft - Geekette
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-08/no-one-has-ever-made-a-corruption-machine-like-this-one
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paulmd
One of the impressive things about American democracy is just how cheap it is
to buy politicians. To use the numbers from this article, Odebrecht spent $439
million to secure contracts whose profit totalled $1.4 billion, while in the
US you could probably have done it _legally_ for less than a million or two.

$10,000 is still big money for a US Rep, $50k will easily buy you a senator.

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crdb
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Duties_Act_of_2005)).

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Buge
So they got a court order against Microsoft to hand over a hotmail account
simply because the account was copied on a mass reply-all chain about a rat in
a barbecue grill where one other person on the chain was under investigation?
That seems like massive governmental overreach. And Microsoft didn't even
fight the order?

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eekthecat
There's way more from where this came from. Brazil is a nightmare in that
regard.

Probably because it was never a settlement colony, just a place to explore and
take advantage of everything (and that permeates society to this day).

I think this bribery scandals displays a core characteristic of the Brazilian
society.

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andersonmvd
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](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.

