Few people are aware of the scale of the protests in Brazil. Signs such as these are common:
“We shouldn’t be spending public money on stadiums. We don’t want the Cup. We want education, hospitals, a better life for our children.”
The mainstream media calls these protests against corruption, but Dave Zirin, writing in Common Dreams, has this to say:
This isn’t a movement against [corruption in] sports. It’s against the use of sports as a neoliberal Trojan horse. It’s a movement against sports as a cudgel of austerity.