Just over one year ago, Brazil’s elected president, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached — ostensibly due to budgetary lawbreaking — and replaced with her centrist vice president, Michel Temer. Since then, virtually every aspect of the nation’s political and economic crisis — especially corruption — has worsened. Temer’s approval ratings have collapsed to single digits. His closest political allies — the same officials who engineered Dilma’s impeachment and installed him in the presidency — recently became the official targets of a sprawling criminal investigation. The president himself has been implicated by new revelations, saved only by the legal immunity he enjoys. It’s almost impossible to imagine a presidency imploding more completely and rapidly than the unelected one imposed by elites on the Brazilian population in the wake of Dilma’s impeachment. The disgust validly generated by all of these failures finally exploded this week. A nationwide strike, and tumultuous protests in numerous cities, paralyzed much of the country Friday, shutting roads, airports, and schools. It is the largest strike to hit Brazil in at least two decades. The protests were largely peaceful, but some random violence emerged. The proximate cause of the anger is a set of “reforms” the Temer government is ushering in that will limit the rights of workers, raise their retirement age by several years, and cut various pension and social security benefits. These austerity measures are being imposed at a time of great suffering, with the unemployment rate rising dramatically and social improvements of the last decade, which raised millions of people out of poverty, unraveling. As the New York Times put it Friday: “The strike revealed deep fissures in Brazilian society over Mr. Temer’s government and its policies.”

Brazil paralyzed by national strike. Unemployment rate climbs to 13.7%. 14m out of work-Increase of 1.8m since 12/16 https://t.co/4B4JqBMV6b pic.twitter.com/U0nFP46O3x — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 28, 2017

But the actual cause is broader, and it is one familiar far beyond Brazil. During the past three years, Brazilians have been subjected to one revelation after the next of extreme corruption pervading the country’s political and economic class. Scores of corporate executives and longtime party leaders are imprisoned. They include the head of the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, the House speaker who presided over Dilma’s impeachment, and the former governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro. The current House speaker, Senate president, and nine of Temer’s ministers are now the targets of criminal investigations for bribery and money laundering, as are numerous governors.

Photo: Erick Dau/The Intercept Brasil

In sum, the vast bulk of the top-shelf political and economic elite have proven to be radically corrupt. Billions upon billions of dollars have been stolen from the Brazilian public. Recently released recordings from the judicial confessions of Marcelo Odebrecht, scion of one of Brazil’s richest families, depict a country ruled almost entirely through bribes and criminality, regardless of the ideology or party of political leaders. And yet, even in the wake of this oozing and incomparable elite corruption, the price that is being paid falls overwhelmingly on the victims — ordinary Brazilians — while the culprits prosper. The same Brazilian politicians implicated in this criminal enterprise continue to reign in Brasília, as they enjoy virtual immunity from the law. Worse, they continue to exempt themselves from the austerity they impose on everyone else.

Imagine being a Brazilian laborer, working in poverty, spending years listening to stories about how corporate executives bribed political officials with millions of dollars in order to corruptly win state contracts — bribes that these elected officials used for yachts and luxury cars and European shopping sprees — only to then be told that there is no money for your retirement or pension and that you must work years longer, with fewer benefits, to save the country. That’s the tale Brazilian citizens are being fed. The only mystifying aspect is that these types of protests have taken this long to erupt. But this moral perversion — in which ordinary victims uniquely bear the burden for elite crimes — is familiar to citizens far away from Brazil. Indeed, one of the prime authors of Brazil’s economic suffering — the 2008 economic crisis caused by Wall Street — pioneered this odious formula. The reckless tycoons and sociopathic financial wizards responsible for that 2008 economic collapse paid virtually no price for the harm they caused. To this day, none of them have been prosecuted for the financial chicanery that spawned it. Worse, the U.S. government quickly acted to protect the interests of the culprits — bailing them out with public funds, protecting them from nationalization or break-up, preserving their ability to plunder with little risk to themselves.

Photo: Erick Dau/The Intercept Brasil