Brazil lower house approves amendment to cap government spending

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Brazil lower house approves amendment to cap government spending

October 11, 2016 03:22:23 pm

[JURIST] The Brazil Chamber of Deputies [official website, in Portuguese] on Monday voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that would limit government spending to counteract the country’s alarming economic downturn. The Brazilian population has been struggling [WSJ report] with rising unemployment rates and an overwhelming recession, and government efforts to stabilize the economy and decrease national debt have been restrained by constitutional provisions that largely determine government spending. President Michel Temer has focused on changing such provisions to limit spending, stressing the government’s obligation to take responsibility for the country’s financial woes. The amendment proposal must pass two rounds of voting in the lower House and Senate [official website, in Portuguese]. Should it be passed, the government would limit spending increases to the rate of inflation and cut back education and health spending for the next ten years. The government could then seek Congressional approval of spending limits before the amendment finally expires ten years later. Following approval, the amendment would take effect in 2017 while changes to education and health spending would not take effect until 2018.

While Temer pushes economic, pension, and labor reforms, he must currently face corruption allegations that link him to the Petrobas scandal that continues to plague the country. Last month, the Brazil Supreme Court [official website] approved a motion [JURIST report] to open a preliminary investigation into accusations that Temer sought donations for his 2012 campaign in exchange for illegal kickbacks on contracts with Petrobras. More than 100 individuals and 50 other politicians have been arrested in connection to the scandal. A Brazilian judge in September accepted charges [JURIST report] against former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva relating to the Petrobas Oil Scandal. In July da Silva filed [JURIST report] a petition with the UN Human Rights Committee, claiming that his corruption investigation has been riddled with impartiality and abuse of power by the judge. In May Brazil’s Supreme court suspended [JURIST report] lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha after being suspected of obstructing investigations into his allegedly corrupt activities. Also in May local media in Brazil reported [JURIST report] that the country’s top prosecutors had requested an investigation into sitting-President Dilma Rousseff over alleged connections to the Petrobras corruption scandal. In April the Supreme Federal Court in Brazil ordered [JURIST report] the legislature to commence impeachment proceedings against Temer.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.