Was candidate José Serra whacked on the noggin with an unidentified flying object hurled by a supporter of his political opponent during a campaign event in Campo Grande, Rio de Janeiro earlier this week?

Maybe.

Was the incident transformed into a piece of crude political agitprop by the Globo TV network? Yes.

The contention that he was has been used to paint characterize political opponents as “fascist thugs,” a theme heavily amplified by political advertising in this, the final week of the national runoff campaign.

The response of the opposing camp has been to liken the incident to an infamous penalty kick awarded to Chile after phony histrionics by its goalie.

The SBT network aired a report suggesting the candidate had been struck on the head by a wad of paper, then exaggerated the incident. See

• “Facing Down The Fascist Horde”: Factoid of the Sambodian Year

Now, the Globo primetime evening newscast begs to differ, citing cellphone video taken by a Folha de S. Paulo reporter.

The network used violent clashes between police and protesters in France as its lead-in to the story.  The 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. cable news editions covered the French civil disturbances heavily, with dramatic footage of tear gas and riot police in action.

The infotainment barrage stopped short of playing “Street Fighting Man” over the footage. Given the crudity of its framing of the incident, I see no reason why it should not have gone whole-hog and used the song.

Precedents

The case is reminiscent of the electric typewriter scandal that overthrew Dan Rather of CBS News in 2004 after a 60 Minutes report on the military service of George W. Bush.

Amateur sleuths organized by the Powerline blog, run by scholars at the neoconservative Claremont Institute, endlessly debated whether a document presented in the report could have been produced by a 1970s-era IBM electric typewriter.

The issue hinged on whether machines of that period could have produced the automated superscripting of the ordinal numbers, such as “5th” and “6th.”

The report, which otherwise provided solid circumstantial evidence that Bush used his father’s influence to avoid combat duty in Vietnam, was thereby discredited.

The “magic bullet” of the Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination also comes to mind.

Update, 22 October: A reporter for a rival network who refers to himself as the “Brazilian Huffington” is now suggesting the Globo footage showing a roll of tape striking the candidate was digitally altered.

He presents with a frame-by-frame deconstruction of the footage aired by Globo. TMI alert! Illustrative of the Globo Standard of Quality, however.

I translate for the record.

Images captured by the Folha show the PSDB candidate, José Serra, being struck by a circular, transparent object during the walking tour of Campo Grande on Wednesday.

The images were examined by expert Ricardo Molina at the request of TV Globo and aired on Thursday evening on the Jornal Nacional primetime newscast.

Molina also examined the images recorded by SBT, in which Serra is struck by an object that appears to be a wad of paper. He concluded they were two different moments.

The SBT video clip is being used to accuse Serra of exaggeration in his reaction to the episode.

The images released by the Folha, recorded with the cellphone camera of reporter Italo Nogueira, who was accompanying the event, show the candidate putting his hands to his head seconds after entering the van on the run.

The candidate arrived at about 1 p.m. at the main promenade of Campo Grande. In an event that was peaceful at first, he greeted voters. During the walk, he decided to enter a store to speak with shoppers.

At that moment, two trade unionists showed up near the store with picket signs criticizing the candidate’s mandate as federal health minister.

According to my personal political focus group of one — my wife, a PT voter with Green leanings — his stint in Health was Serra’s one moment of stellar public service. He played an important role in providing affordable, universal AIDS treatment, and has legitimately played up that accomplishment in his campaign.

PSDB supporters tore down the signs, initiating the first physical aggression. Campaign organizers of the PT joined the anti-Serra duo, generalizing the conflict on the promenade, which involved nearly 100 persons.

Upon leaving the store, the candidate became the target of the protests. PT supporters tried to approach him but were pushed back by PSDB campaign organizers. At this moment, the SBT campaign captured the candidate being struck by a wad of paper.

The 200 Meters of Death

For a stretch of some 200 meters, the PSDB candidate originally tried to ignore the chaos around him. He then grew angry and was contained by his vice-presidential candidate, Índio da Costa.

At the end of the promenade, Serra placed his hand on his head, indicating he had been struck by some object — the moment captured by the cell phone of the Folha reporter.

Green Party federal deputy Fernando Gabeira and Christian pastors who were accompanying Serra say they saw some object striking the candidate.

It has been remarkable to watch the opposition red-bait the situation’s presidential candidate for her time underground as part of an armed resistance group — she did not participate in any armed actions, despite a ginned-up “dossier” to that effect run uncritically by the Folha de S. Paulo — while sparing Gabeira, a coalition partner and very badly defeated gubernatorial candidate in Rio.

Gabeira was one of the political prisoners exchanged for the kidnapped U.S. ambassador during the military dictatorship, in a celebrated incident also involving PT folk devil José Dirceu.

Within seconds, Serra runs into the van, parked on Widow Dantas Street, impelled by security guards.

The van proceeded for about 100 meters, then stopped. Serra got out, surrounded by campaign aides. At this moment, he is shown touching his head, as if in pain. He said he felt “a bit groggy” and put a bag of ice on his head.

Struck by unidentified flying object.

Drives 100 meters.

Stops, emerges, signals pain, applies ice bag to head in presence of photographers.

Give me a break, please.

Source: Jornal da Mídia.

It has been remarkable in all this coverage that no journalist has yet covered the security arrangements for the event — especially significant in a Rio community once dominated by the “Batman”mafia  protection racket.

The introduction of the permanent UPPs — “police community pacification units,” roughly — in the shantytowns has been claimed as an accomplishment by pro-situation campaigns.

Do federal candidates use government security, or provide their own?

Update: according to some cross-checking of first-hand accounts assembled by a sympathizer of the federal situation, the two protesters were members of a union representing mosquito abatement workers who lost their jobs when Serra was health minister.

… os seguranças do candidato José Serra, liderados por Júnior, filho da vereadora e deputada estadual eleita, Lucinha (PSDB), rasgaram os cartazes dos mata-mosquitos, aí o tumulto começou.

«Security guards for Serra, led by Junior, son of Rio city councilwoman and state deputy-elect Lucinha (PSDB), tore up the placards of the “mosquito killers,” and there the trouble started.»

Mosquitos are a vector for dengue, and abatement a significant source of patronage jobs.

Some election humor on the episode shows “the great debate” between the wad of paper and the role of tape.

Bat macumba iê iê
Bat macumba oba

Sambodian business rumor of the day: that Miramax may be interested in taking a stake in Zazen, the Brazilian production company responsible for the Elite Squad — Tropa de Elite — series, whose second chapter has just been released.

The setting of the opening chapter of the Hulk sequel in the shantytowns of Rio was a coup for the local economy, as well as a political boost to the governor and mayor.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the rumor, reported by the daily dealsheet Relatório Reservado, but I can say it represents a remarkable development in the public treatment of a social issue not frequently covered by the international press — and tending to be treated in a distorted manner when it is .

Based once again on the experiences of screenwriter Rodrigo Pimentel, a former commanding officer of BOPE — the Rio de Janeiro SWAT battalion known as “The Men in Black” — the sequel has raised eyebrows for dealing squarely with the involvement of politicians and corrupt police in the, shall we say, ad hoc privatization of public safety in informal communities — in plain English, mafia-style protection rackets, black marketeering and Colombian-style «parapolitics».

I recall reading an AP story once on the «militia» phenomenon in which the principal expert interviewed was a federal deputy, a former senior Rio police inspector, who was later overheard on wiretaps recommending the whacking out of a colleague who had denounced militia involvement by members of her political group.

“What that guy really needs is two slugs right between the horns,” as I recall. The lawmaker trotted out the usual defense: Don’t we all often say we could just kill someone with whom we are angry?

Not long after, someone tried to whack out this colleague, in broad daylight on the Avenida Atlántica, the world-famous Rio beachfront.

Brasil Econômico reports, and I translate.

In the very first moments of Elite Squad 2, a subtitle appears informing the audience that the film is a work of fiction and that any resemblance to actual persons is mere coincidence.

Less than a week after the film’s premiere, that statement is causing heated debate in Rio de Janeiro.

Some of the film’s producers have told this newspaper that most of the characters are in one way or another based on the world of Rio de Janeiro politics.

Screenwriter Rodrigo Pimentel, a former commander of BOPE and the inspiration for the character of Captain Nascimento, has given interviews in the past in which he makes direct connections between the character of state public security chief Guaracy, a supporter of the militias, and federal deputy Marcelo Itagiba, who held the same post.

Itagiba says in his defense that he firmly opposed the militias  of Rio during his tenure. According to the congressman, no evidence against him was uncovered by the commission of inquiry conducted by the state legislature in 2007.

Itagiba, a former federal police official, is involved in another controversy at the moment: a case of political espionage in which the private data of the daughter of the opposition presidential candidate — a perfectly respectable Harvard-trained investment banker and venture capitalist specializing in e-commerce — was illegally obtained by a journalist at the Estado de Minas daily newspaper for R$12,000.

It has leaked out in recent days that the journalist claims to have been working to counter an alleged political espionage operation commanded by Itagiba and targeting a rival candidate for the party nomination, Minas Gerais governor Aécio Neves.

Dangerous Liaisons

While it is widely know that the plot of the film is inspired by real life, the identification of some characters with real-life figures is more explicit.

Former state legislator Natalino Guimarães and ex-city council member Jerominho — the two men are brothers and ex-policemen — are currently detained at the federal penitentiary in Campo Grande, in Mato Grosso do Sul state, awaiting trial on murder charges and other alleged crimes.

The two have already been convicted on some charges. Police say Natalin commanded the League of Justice militia, which controlled areas of Campo Grande in Rio’s western district.

See also Rio: “Armed Groups Interfere With Freedom of Association” …

In recent days, a visit by the opposition presidential candidate to the very same area in the Zona Oeste resulted in “confusion”, as the local papers have it, when situation supporters mounted a counterdemonstration.

Who started it is the burning topic of the hour.

The candidate was struck on the head with some object — the details are also hotly debated — and taken to hospital, where the former municipal health secretary, a political ally, called a press conference to declare that an MRI had revealed no brain damage.

Another Good Man Gone

Meanwhile, in the real world, as reported by the Portal da Imprensa, covering organized crime and police corruption is a dangerous business for Brazilian journalists, even as their union takes public pride in the fact, as they claim — this really pisses me off, I have to say — that “at least Brazil is not as bad as Mexico.”

Really, in a lot of ways, it is. Excuse me for saying so.

Translating again.

Radio announcer and journalist  Francisco Gomes de Medeiros, popularly known as  F. Gomes, was shot to death on Monday last in the city of Caicó, in Rio Grande do Norte state. According to the local Polícia Civil, two persons riding a motorcycle opened fire on the journalist, who was on the sidewalk at the time, then fled.   Gomes was taken to the regional hospital in Seridó, but succumbed to his injuries. The news portal  Na Boca do Mundo reports that F. Gomes worked for the Tribuna do Norte and Diário de Natal newspapers, as well as an announcer at the Voz do Seridó e Rural AM radio stations. The journalist was recently hired to head the journalism department at Caicó AM.

Gomes enjoyed a reputation as one of the most respected crime journalists in the region, and his articles were published on a blog. In September, Gomes posted a note denouncing an alleged case of vote-buying in exchange for crack cocaine in Seridó, a story that received nationwide coverage. Persons close to the journalist say that drug traffickers may have had something to do with his death.

You think?

Brazil has a rule — dating back to the Vargas dictatorship and the  República Nova alike; enforced equally by the April Fools Revolution and the democratic Goulart government it overthrew; and enduring down to the present day: Foreign-owned media companies are prohibited from owning more than a 30% stake in any Brazilian mass media outlet.

During the military dictatorship, Time-Life had high hopes of taking a big stake in Globo and ch0wning the explosive growth of the Brazilian television market, but the generalíssimos shot them down.

There is an enormous amount of pressure to amend the legislation, however.  Brasil Econômico, to take a recent example, has apparently gotten around the rule by assigning the majority of shares to the Brazilian-born wife of the proprietor, a Portuguese from Portugal.

The Abril group has tested the limits of the rule as well, taking on Naspers of South Africa as a 30% stakeholder in its publishing arm and Telefonica of Spain as a partner in its cable TV operation, TVA — a deal that generated a great deal of political heat, with opponents claiming that the complex structure created to swing the del violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Thirty Percent Solution.

Abril has functioned as a content pipeline for foreign content producers from the very beginning: Its initial succes came as a local publisher of Disney comics in translation. Scrooge McDuck = Tio Patinho.

Rolling Stone Brasil, Playboy Brasil, MTV Brasil … the list is a long one. The flagship  Veja is essentially the bastard child of a Time magazine clone with the New York Post.

When Time dedicated its cover and unprecedented editorial space to the launch of the iPhone, Veja did the same thing, the same week.

Men’s Health. Cosmopolitan. Elle. National Geographic. The insufferable Piauí magazine, despite its innovative format, is a New Yorker clone through and through, with translated articles and lots and lots of exposure for Art Spiegelman.

Properties formerly owned by Abril include Abril include ESPN Brasil, HBO Brasil, Bravo Brasil, and the Universo Online portal — which, although now part of the Folha de S. Paulo group, hosts such Abril content as MTV’s Web presence.

My wife used to work for a local clone of Sassy — although this is a Hearst title, I think.

A fresh case, according to Relatório Reservado — an interesting investor tip and rumor sheet, published by veterans of the alt.press of the “festive left” back in the 1970s —   is the quarrel between NET and GVT in the cable TV space.

NET — a partnership between Globo and holdings of Carlos Slim, the grand Mexican telecoms tycoon — is evoking the 30% Solution against the expansion of GVT — recently acquired by Vivendi of France.

NET’s complaint to ANATEL — the Sambodian FCC — argues, according to RR, that

the model deployed by GVT — a hybrid system combining Vivendi’s Canal Plus satellite pay-tv operation with TV over Internet Protocol — violates the [30% Solution].

I have now officially written myself into a corner. The useful thing to do at this point would be to summarize a bunch of complicated deal flow over the past several years. But I have now exceeded my alloted blogging time for the morning. The BOVESPA is in session. I have to do some things for money now.

So I will end on a purely personal note. As my wife is a journalist — and writer, who has just received a provisional offer to bring out a book of her collected short stories! — I have to confess I am sentimentally attached to the cause of Brazilian culture by and for Brazilian cultural consumers.

As I like to joke to readers of my Portuguese-language blog, I did not move to another hemisphere just to watch endless reruns of Law & Order, with subtitles — although the subtitles are a good tool for the language learner, it must be said.

Where is the Law & Order Sambodian edition? HBO, spending the minimum necessary to satisfy weak rules requiring a small percentage of programming to be locally produced — produced an absurd show called São Paulo 9mm a year or so ago, but it owed more to Miami Vice than to the sober spectacle of justice that is the L&O franchise. Plus, it sucked.

I do appreciate being able to see Boardwalk Empire, however. I have terrible saudades of home some days that only an episode of The Simpsons — bypassing the godawful local dubbing of the show with the green button on my NET remote — can alleviate.

This is the third Brazilian national election I have witnessed firsthand, and I would have to say perhaps the craziest.

Even crazier than the last, when São Paulo’s governor — outed as an Opus Dei supernumerary by his spirtual adviser, a leading local professor of journalistic ethics, during the campaign — accused the party of the federal government of conspiring with the Colombian FARC and the PCC — the Microsoft of Sambodian cocaine — to murder military police in order to undermine his presidential candidacy.

He repeated this savagely implausible claim over and over and over again. He has been overheard in recent years to repeat this paranoid yarn. It is one of the most astonishing examples of the Dick Morris school of “say anything” political rhetoric I have ever witnessed.

Strange tales unwind faster than your capacity to absorb them, much less sort them out critically. Perhaps only the political climate of Thailand in recent years approaches the frenzy we are witnessing here, though unlike Thailand, for the most part, here in the Sambodian capital, at least, the streets are calm and business proceeds as usual.

The guerra nos sertões is a war of extermination in the virtual backlands.

I cannot attest to the conditions on the ground in Teresina, João Pessoa, Maceió or Curiópolis.

Update, 18 September: take this TV advertisment by the Folha de S. Paulo daily, sponsor of last night’s presidential debate.

The dots of a newsprint photograph. The point of view gradually pulls out as the narrator describes economic and political successes of a government, reminiscent of the progress claimed by supporters of the Lula government.

Surprise! The capable leader described is not Lula, but Hitler.

Can you believe that? Personally, I read Valor, and the Estado de S. Paulo in homeopathic doses.

Today, the federal police seize 1 million of  what is reportedly a nationally coordinated consignment of 20 to 35 million copies of a document purportedly signed by  Catholic bishops, ordering voters not to vote for the continuity of government candidate.

The National Council of Catholic Bishops disowns the document. Its provenance remains murky.

A flimsy personal outburst by a nebulous Facebook user claims that the wife of the opposition candidate — a woman overheard whispering to a voter during a flesh-presser that the other candidate “wants to kill babies” — had had an abortion herself.

A senator from Ceará has to be restrained from assaulting a parish priest who excoriated political candidates from the pulpit for money-changing in the temple during a photo-opportunity mass in a small Northeastern backlands city.

Audio circulates over the CBN (Globo) radio network, while both auido and video are freely available on the Internet, although the entire incident is ignored by the CBS Evening Sambodian News With  \Mr. & Mrs.William Bonner, the national primetime newscast on Globo.

The best thing to do at this point is to automate your information gathering, recording the raw flow for later — “recollection in tranquility,” as Wordworth said — and denying it access to your naked brain, for the sake of your own sanity.

With that in mind, I am finding a lot of opportunity for calm historical reflection on the present facts in Lira Neto‘s masterful biography of Father Cícero — the legendary backlands priest who hired the infamous bandit Lampião to hunt down the communist Prestes Column in the 1930s, among many other remarkable episodes. The journalist had access to secret Vatican archives on the priest-caudillo.

On which, more later.Still reading.

Dipping a test tube into this Amazon of agitation and propanda, meanwhile, I came up with the following as a plausible Zeitgeist vignette of the day — sufficient to the evil thereof — as reported by journalist Mauricio Stycer of UOL. My hasty translation.

A few hours after using Twitter to declare his support for Dilma Rousseff while calling opposing candidate José Serra “a fascist,” actor José de Abreu had his account deleted.

Using the video service TwitCam, the actor expressed his views on the political situation for nearly two hours on Friday evening. The following morning, users searching for his account — nickname “Joe the Anvil” — were informed that no such account existed.

The actor has yet to comment on the incident.

We are talking about someone as well known as, say, Jack Nicholson. His theatrical debut, a collaboration with Chico Buarque on the 1967 musical Severina, Life and Death, remains legendary.

Abreu attracted an audience of some 10,000 users during his telecast. Besides criticizing Serra, he called the vice-presidential candidate, Índio da Costa, a “little surfer girl from Rio.”

I am not sure why that is insulting.

Perhaps it is a reference to media celebrity Bruna Surfistinha, “the little surfer girl,” whose blog-driven biography of a teenage hooker sold — well, about 5,000 copies, as I read at the time, even after being effusively praised by Larry Rohter in the New York Times.

One of the creepiest things I have ever read in the Grey Lady: a middle-aged man celebrating an underage hooker with the Marquis de Sade as ghostwriter as a feminist icon. Wow. Last I heard Larry had been assigned to China, although he has a wife and family in Copacana. I should update my file.

He defended the legalization of marijuana, “just like ex-President Cardoso,” and railed against “the conservative wave that is taking Brazil by storm.” “I am 64 years old, with five children and four grandchildren. And it is incredible to see how reactionary young people are now, how backward, they are probably smoking a joint while they sit there attacking me. Hypocrisy is a dangerous thing·”

Various Twitter users asked the actor at various points during the broadcast if he was drunk. Abreu answered that he was just having one beer.

The actor was also asked about the Globo network. He noted that he has been an employee of the network for more than 30 years, and was respecting its rule against appearing on TV as part of a political campaign. “I’m not on TV, I’m on Twitter,” he said.

Abreu said he had been cast in the network’s upcoming primetime soap opera, Heedless Heart, by Gilberto Braga, scheduled to air starting in January. “Unless, that is, you call up Globo telling them I’m a commie son of a bitch. But Globo wouldn’t do that to me.”

Famous last words.

Globo’s chief of journalism, Ali Kamel, notoriously ratfinked several journalists who refused to sign a petition circulated among Globo staff in 2006, attesting to the supposed impartiality of the network’s coverage of the elections that year.

One of them became the presidential press secretary, Franklin Martins.

I recently read that Movements.org founding partner Jared Cohen, while working for the State Department, had asked the owner of Twitter not to take the site down for routine maintenance at a crucial juncture during the Iranian elections.

That would be something, if true. Are they really weaponizing Web sites now? Yes, I think so.

The odd thing is that someone called “zebigorna” has reappeared with 24,000+ tweets and zero followers.

Ah, now I see the “this account has been suspended” notification.

That is a bit different than “This user does not exist.”

Time to reread those terms of use.

Brazil’s Green presidential candidate Marina Silva, former environment minister and dissident of the ruling PT, is being badly used by the Green Party machine after delivering some 20% of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections.

Silva is a genuine icon of the environmental movement with a dramatic personal history and a popular charisma that appealed to a sincere idealism in her voters. Like Lula before her, she presented voters with a  distinctly, deeply Brazilian face not ordinarily seen in the corridors of power here.

That the federal senator from deepest, darkest Acre alone deserves credit for the success of her third-party run is testified to by the trivial results obtained by Green candidates for lesser office.

The PSDB-Green alliance for the governorship of Rio de Janeiro was obliterated by 46 — forty-six — points. Cesar Maia, DEM-PFL mayor of Rio for 16 years and father of DEM national president Rodrigo Maia, came in a distant fourth in his bid for a Senate seat.

The Green Party picked up not a single seat in the federal congress in addition to the 15 it currently occupies. I may be off by a seat or two, but that is about the size of it.

The PSDB-DEM alliance also saw a sharp decline in seats in the lower house for the third national election running, accordingto a tally I read in Carta Capital today, in the waiting room at the Hospitl das Clínicas — one point of pride the social democrats can genuinely point to as  product of their hegemony in the state, be it said.

According to the Folha de S. Paulo — via the smarmy Noblat –  and I translate hastily

Marina was harshly attacked in a meeting organized hastily by Green Party president José Luiz Penna in the federal capital. Some 20 persons took part, some of them officials in the state government of São Paulo and the municipal government of its capital city, controlled by the far-right DEM-PFL. Senator Silva was not invited to the meeting.

The São Paulo Greens — a noxious cabal of nepotistic, thinly greenwashed real estate speculators, generally speaking — the Rivers Tiete and Pinheiros still reek of human shit after all these yers — want the party to throw its support to the social democratic candidate, José Serra, until recently governor of São Paulo.

Senator Silva had ordered party officials to take no position on the runoff election until a meeting scheduled for October 17, three days before the vote.

The party leadership of Tocantins, in the Amazon region, has already told her to stuff it, along with any notions of negotiations to leverage a  policy plank or two in favor of the party’s ostensive priorities.

Pernambuco.com, a news portal for the Northeastern coastal state, adds a useful history of the relationship. I translate in haste.

Marina Silva’s group is a minority in the Green Party — it makes up less than 20% of the members of the National Executive– and has had a difficult time asserting the candidate’s desire to remain neutral during the runoff election, declaring support for neither candidate.

After facing off against the PT and PSDB and garnering 19.6 million votes, she now finds herself embroiled in a dispute with the party’s dominant faction. Of the 58 members of the National Executive, only 10 support the candidte, having joined her in affiliating with the party in August 2009. They do not have the power to prevent the party throwing its support to Serra, as senior Greens from São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais desire.

Marina’s vice-presidential candidate was the CEO of Natura Cosmeticos S.A.., a listed natural beauty products company with BRL 1.3 billion in assets …. which, if it reminds you a little bit of The Body Shop, well, duh.

Revenues were down year on year this quarter, from BRL 2.3 billion in 2Q09 to 1.9 billion in 2Q10.

In the discussion forums of the Green Party network, plaintive appeals:

Marina Silva for President … of the Green Party!

Brazilian commentators have recently begun explaining the English term «greenwashing» to their readers. It is a tough translation, technically, requiring you to explain the metaphorical associations of whitewashing first. But conceptually, it is not rocket science.

In any event, the drama of the comrade in arms of Chico Mendes versus the São Paulo establishment will make for a fascinating contest of wills between genuine charismatic appeal and the cynicism of an entrenched but decaying political machine.

As someone was saying just now, if the woman has the balls to say no to Lula, nd tell Greenpeace Brasil to go fuck itself, she should certainly have no trouble leading her voters to the holy city of Canudos and waging a jagunço crusade against Sambodia City Hall.

It is election day in old Sambodia.

My wife has gone off to vote for an assortment of leftist candidates, some of them at odds with one another, but no matter. She was tempted for about two seconds to vote for the Green candidate, Marina Silva, but immediately perceived the Al Gore connection and was immediately turned off.

That Ms. Silva chose the CEO of Natura, a listed natural beauty products conglomerate, to share the platform may have turned out to be a miscalculation.

All I really have to say is, Expect a day of crazy Brazilian journalism.

Above, in dispatches filed minutes apart with Google News, the O Globo daily of Rio de Janeiro reports that

1. The outgoing President Lula believes there will be a runoff, and
2. The outgoing President Lula has faith there will be no runoff

Globo journalism often demonstrates an affinity for that principle elaborated in the Logic of Hegel known as the «identity of identity and non-identity».

This was a particular favorite of Mao Tse-Tung.

Truth is falsity, ugliness beauty. Good is bad and fact is fiction.

A memorable example was the pair of reports aired by the Globo Sunday evening magazine show Fantastico.

In the first report, the medical benefits of biomagnetism were touted uncritically, with testimonials from famous athletes and celebrities.

In the second, aired some months later, a company promoting biomagnetic therapies was excoriated as a practicioner of junk science — using laughable junk science arguments itself.

Ecce Globo. The Washington Times practices better journalism, and they all work for an auto-proclaimed South Korean messiah.

For its part, the Estado de S. Paulo proclaims that the performance of the Green Party candidate will be the deciding factor in whether there will be a runoff election or not.

The prognostication is based on extremely iffy polling.

If the ESP turns out to be wrong, I plan to taunt them mercilessly — I am on a treasure hunt today for Dewey Beats Truman moments — even though the Big State tends to be one of the best general-interest metro dailies, along with A Tarde of Salvador, Bahia.

Actually, given the projections for an eventual run-off, it would be better for the Social Democrats to just get it over with. They lost by 20% in 2002 and 21% in 2006. All indications are that this time it will be much, much worse. Twelve years of declining support is not a happy trend.

They should simply move on to the internecine purge that will hopefully produce new leaders, like the young, photogenic, gentlemanly Aecio Neves of Minas Gerais, and a final rupture with the retrograde, extreme-right ARENA-PFL-DEM.

The only really interesting horserace is for the governorship of Sao Paulo, where Geraldo Alckmin — the losing presidential candidate in 2006 — is going for a nonconsecutive reelection. If the fractured left can combine to create a matchup with Mercadante of the PT in the runoff — my wife finds the federal senator wishy-washy but says she will vote the slate in this case — then you might have something to write home about.

As you can see from the screenshot, I am posting this in Puppy Linux, my favorite lightweight Linux on a live CD.

Debian had a brain fart, so I booted up Puppy in order to google for the solution, which turns out to be

apt-get install --reinstall Xorg

or possibly

dpkg-reconfigure Xorg

I think I already knew that.

At this point in a national election in Brazil, the safest bet is to assume that the vast majority of political news from commercial sources is hysterical disinformation and ignore it completely.

Just to give you the flavor of the thing, however, consider the recent flap over a technical failure in the São Paulo subway system.

God knows why, the opposition candidate has made Soninha Francine, a former São Paulo city councilwoman, MTV veejay, ESPN color commentator and Playboy centerfold the anchorwoman of its campaign on the Web.

A former miiltant of the Workers’ Party now affiliated with the opposition coalition partner, the PPS  — the former Braziilian Communist Party — Soninha became the butt of a satire campaign that reached the top of the Trending Topics of the day on Twitter when she suggested that trade unionists sympathetic to her former party sabotaged the east-west Red Line, the busiest and most densely utiilized in the system, in order to undermine the candidacy of the opposition candidate, José Serra.

In 2006, the opposition candidate Geraldo Alckmin — also a former São Paulo state governor — repeatedly stated that the ruling PT had conspired with the FARC guerrillas of Colombia and the PCC cocaine retail cartel of São Paulo to assassinate police, creating chaos in order to undermine his campaign.

It is hard to fathom why Serra, a noted economist with serious policy credentials — a former federal health minister, mayor and governor of São Paulo — would allow a naked veejay who works for the media group Abril to represent him in what the press has made the most visible forum in this year’s elections. It is a bit like Reagan naming Bonzo for the second slot on the ticket. But he is doing so.

Internecine strife broke out when the Serra campaign decided to change Internet gurus in midstream, retaining the services of Ravi Singh — the self-styled guru of “turban power,” reportedly engaged through Election Mall, Microsoft’s election campaign in a box political marketing service.

When Singh assumed as Web campaign coordinator for the PSDB — reportedy for a $1 million fee — the principal Web sites of the campaign were immediately migrated to IIS7, Microsoft’s integrated server product, from plain old LAMPP — Apache Server on Linux with PHP.

The migration apparently failed, and when the sites reappeared several days later, they were running IIS6, an eariler version of the Microsoft server. Party officials hinted that malicious hackers might have been behind the outage.

I and others watched the site closely during this period, however, and it was never defaced, as hackers tend to do when they «PWN» a site. Instead, the domain redirected to a Microsoft site promoting the IIS7 product.

Hackers signing themselves as proponents of the opposition party had taken down the main Web site of their principal rivers towards the beginning of the campaign season.

The guru of turban power  lasted less than a month amid malicious rumors that, for example, he had asked a meeting of the campaign what the initials FHC stood for.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso was the PSDB president of Brazil from 1994-2002 — a man with a distinguished international profile and a decent claim to the credit for restoring economic stability to Brazil who has inexplicably been sidelined during the current campaign.

In the meantime, the subway system seems troubled. It has been dogged recently by corruption charges brought in Switzerland against Alstom, the firm that furnished the cars for the system. The head of new projects appointed by the mayor when he assumed in 2005 was the mayor’s brother. A major excavation on a new station collapsed catastrophically in 2007, killing 7. Questions were raised about why the New Austrian Tunneling Method was being used in the flood plain of the Pinheiros River, rather than using a elevated track for that stretch.

We happen to live on the first stop on the Green Line, a less-traveled line which means our travel experience is normally a very positive one, I should say. The CMTP — the Sambodian Metro North and LIRR — on the other hand …

Agência T1 begins today to counter official accounts of the incident eariler this week.

The Metro authority says that the activation of an emergency button on one of the trains between the Sé and Pedro II stations as it traveled toward the Barra Funda terminal, caused the interruption of service and the cutting off of power. This account does not, however, jibe with eyewitness testimony from system passengers who were aboard the train during the incidents.

The trains came to a stop between stations with the doors closed and ventilation systems turned off. Some passengers became ill, leading others to break out the windows of the train to let air in and permit the evacuation of passengers.

Stations such as Tatuapé, Sé and Pedro II were closed. These stations suffered no vandalism, but the demand for alternative transporation caused overcrowding of busses and van services.

Luis Fernando de Vasconcelos, a passenger on his way to the Sé station, near where he worked, says the origin of the problem was not that described originally by the Metro authority.

Vasconcelos says the emergency button was only pushed when the situation inisde became unbearable, after more than 15 minutes of standstill, with the doors closed and the train overcrowded.

“The driver kept repeating that the train was stopped while ‘waiting for the train in front to move on’ (a standard procedure), but no one could stand being stuck any longer. So people broke the seal on the emergency button so they could communicate with the driver and ask for the doors to be opened.

“I can’t open the doors, please return to your seats,” the driver reportedly said, a response that led to the outbreak of the disturbance. “No one could even move, how were we supposed to return to our seats? That was when people got angry and started breaking windows, so they could breathe. And then the doors were opened,” says Luis.

Official accounts of how the emergency system is supposed to work that I wound up giving up on trying to fathom the issue.

Apparently, the emergency button is supposed to alert the driver to open the door and cut electrical power so that passengers can evacuate through tunnels designed for that purpose without zapping themselves on the third rail.

Electrical power should not be cut when the train stands still awaiting clearance to proceed.

So I am still confused about when the power went off, when the ventilation failed, and when the evacuation was started.

The really odd thing is that the incident was not exploited politically by the São Paulo opposition — that is, the party of the federal situation — that I could see, until our veejay centerfold — a proponent of more liberal rules for human experimentation with ayahuasca, a DMT-based herbal psychogenic used in the rituals of the Santo Daime church — raised a huge stink among her 48,000 Twitter followers.

At one point, Soninha even expresses surprise that the opposition has not exploited the issue.

Not so surprising, really: the best tactic for the other side so far has been a pause calculated to give the opponent an opportunity to insert foot A in mouth B.

Foreign press reports on this sort of activity have been judiciously couched in terms of “media scandal could tarnish image of probable president-elect” — opting to treat the scandal over alleged influence peddilng in the office of the presidency as a fact in itself, without entering into the merits of the accusations.

I dislike that approach, which banks on the notion that a rip-roaring scandal, whether vaild or not, is good for the advertiser’s yearn to churn.

I would bet blind that 9 out of 10 factoids published in support of the current scandal are totally bogus.

Journalist Luis Nassif has already pointed out some astonishing non-truths devised by the Folha de S. Paulo and Veja magazine to support specious inferences in the affair.

Takeaway for Brazil watchers: activate industrial-strength noise filters in such cases, turn off your TV, and keep your eyes peeled on reliable sources in the business press — The Estado de S. Paulo to a decent extent, Valor Econômico.

And now  to take my own advice. From this day forward, I will read Twitter no more.

Fafá de Belém is a full-figured democratic icon of a popular singer who appears to be taking a deep breath as the curtain appears ready to come down on this year’s Brazilian presidential elections.

The chattering classes in Brasil have been saying it for weeks, and now the opinion polls predict: The candidate of continuity will cream the candidate of change — in an astonishing breach of common sense, the very same candidate walloped in 2002 — in this year’s presidential elections in Brazil.

It is a rare event in American politics for a previously defeated candidate to stand again, have you noticed? My personal take is that this very factor dictated the tabula rasa Obama over baggage-laden Hillary. It makes sense. People remember you as someone who got handed their head.

My copy of the investment newsletter Relatório Reservado the other day joined various gatherings of pundits in diving straight into the complex business of who will end up minister of what.

The candidate of the PSDB-DEM-PP alliance has created a stir by claiming that he has been the victim of a vast conspiracy of left-wing blogs — a moment eerily reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s vast conspiracy on the other side of the aisle remarks.

I have been doing an extensive crawl based on the political internet here — 700.000 sites and 8.6 million documents, using the WIRE bot developed by C. Castillo et al. of the University of Chile — that is tending to show that that the exact opposite is true: the opposition has deployed net campaigning tactics that owe much to Howard Dean, and has depended a great deal on soft-money ideological campaigns directly linked to the Cato Institute, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and the usual suspects at NED-USAID.

I have been writing up my lab notes in a sort of Portuguese for Brazilian readers of my other blog, a paean to the virtue of three-toed sloth.

Perhaps I will try to summarize the project here one of these days. Web crawling, I have found, can be a really useful tool for journalistic beat-building and source-vetting.

More generally, however, it is simply tragic that a social democratic party with liberal economic inclinations would decline so badly over the course of a decade, unable to jettison, in its political horse-trading, the retrograde, anti-democratic elements that have so poisoned its reputation.

José Serra, then an ex-Minister of Health, lost by 20 points in 2002.

Geraldo Alckmin, from a São Paulo political family with explicit ties to Opus Dei and the military dictatorship of 1964-1985, lost by 20 points in 2006 even after a roaring, media-driven corruption scandal in 2005.

Serra now trails in the polls by 27 points.

That scandal — the “big monthly allowance” — reminded me of the episode of The Simpsons in which a meteor threatens life on Earth. At one point, Homer says, offhand, “Aw, the thing will probably burn up in the atmosphere and wind up being no bigger than a chihuahua’s head.” This is exactly what happens, as Lisa points out. Homer: “I know, honey, I’m scared, too.”

The social democrats had a marvelous candidate in the governor of Minas Gerais, Aécio Neves, the young, handsome grandson of a revered pro-democracy statesman and a candidate who operates with a civility contrasting markedly with the vile, Rob Allyn-style slander machine that has now proven unsuccessful twice.

What were they thinking?

The match-up would have pitted a gifted technocrat with a radical past from the heartland of Minas Gerais against an up and comer, also from Minas — an unprecedented shift of power away from the Rio-São Paulo corridor, which functions as sort of a New York-California dyad in the resentment directed toward it by salt of the earth Brazilans from places like Juazeiro e Diamantina — ridiculed by the megalopolitan press on a consistent basis as the “jungle clearings” of the outer darkness.

The only interesting political horse-race that remains — I am really not that interested in the sport, but it has some epoch-making implications — is the gubernatorial race in São Paulo, where the PSDB-DEM alliance is degenerating into eye-gouging and ear-biting.

Aluizo Mercadante is a courtly senator for the Workers’ Party, pitted against Geraldo Alckmin, the failed presidential candidate from 2006 and not a governor remembered all that fondly. Really, I much preferred Serra, despite his handling of that shooting war between the Military and Civil Police in front of the gubernatorial palace — one of the most nightmarish  crisis-management photo opps I have ever seen.

At least Serra got the Rodoanel, a strategic traffic interchange, built, as promised.

I found myself revolted by Alckmin’s response to the 2006 war between the PCC and the Military Police — essentially, a warbetween two criminal organizations, to be frank.

Evidence of indiscriminate summary executions in reprisal for the shootings of troopers were swept under the rug. The recording system for the patrol dispatch center conveniently went down for  ”scheduled maintenance” just as the blood started flowing in the gutters. It was painfully obvious that heavily armed men were running the streets.

A colonel of the PM who moved against death squads in his region of the urbs was whacked out, sicário-style, on a showcase thoroughfare in the full light of day. Examples can be readily multiplied. Brazil deserves its poor human rights record, but not because its policies do not respect those rights.

It is simply because regional political leadership is powerless to stop it, and looks very much as though it does not give a damn, as long as the blood is mopped up before upper middle-class constituents are troubled by the notion that they might not actually be living in the mall-focused utopia celebrated by the luxury retail trade and its bought and paid for journalist corps.

At the moment, Alckmin’s lead has slipped from 51% to 47% as Mercadante and a bevy of one-percenters have picked up momentum quickly. This is really the first we are hearing of this campaign, drowned out by national politics. Can Mercadante reproduce the Dilma curve in time to unseat the Toucans?

That could be an interesting thing to watch. Dirty blogging will definitely be engaged in.

Personally, as a Brooklyn voter, it is none of my business, of course.

And yet I think you have a classic case here of a political machine nearing collapse, its foundations rusted, the glowing promises of founders like the revered Mario Covas largely unkept.

I personally believe that political machines gone dinosaur have got to be shocked back onto the evolutionary superhighway — regardless of whether they are YOUR political machine or the other fellow’s. I am perfectly willing to consider voting for the other guy’s guy for a change if my traditional party — still run by Howard Dean after two straight losses! — is not doing it for me.

Politics mechanized are politics dehumanized, and God knows this city is a dehumanizing enough of place to start with.

Private Data Sold Openly on São Paulo Streets | O Globo/Portal ClippingMP.

The last big Windows releas was on the streets before it arrived on the shelves as well, all pre-cracked with valid registration codes.

Informações sigilosas do Departamento Nacional de Trânsito (Denatran) sobre proprietários de carros e dados bancários de aposentados e pensionistas do INSS são facilmente obtidos nas ruas do Centro de São Paulo em poucos minutos. O repórter do GLOBO Lino Rodrigues, sem se identificar, comprou dois CDs com dados desses dois órgãos públicos na Rua Santa Efigênia, na capital paulista, por R$ 200. A negociação com o “vendedor” durou menos de meia hora e, ao final, certo de que o “cliente” não era policial, o ambulante ainda ofereceu listagens do Itaú Unibanco. Os dois CDs serão entregues ao promotor José Mário Barbuto, que se comprometeu a abrir investigação no Grupo de Atuação Especial contra o Crime Organizado, do Ministério Público de São Paulo. O Denatran e o Ministério da Previdência vão pedir investigação à Polícia Federal. O Itaú Unibanco não se pronunciou.

Private information from the National Traffic Department (DENATRAN) regarding car owners and banking information of pensioners and retirees from the federal social security agency are readily obtainable on the streets of downtown São Paulo in just a few minutes. A Globo reporter, without identifying herself as such, bought two CDs with data from these two agencieson them on Santa Efigênia Street for R$200. Dealings with the seller took less than half an hour,  and once convinced that the client was not a policewoman, the street vendor also offered information from the large retail bank Itaú Unibanco. The two CDs will be handed over to a state prosecutor who has promised to open an investigation by the office’s organized crime division. DENATRAN and the Ministry of Social Security will call for an investigation by the Federal Police. Itaú Unibanco had no comment.

To substantiate the authenticity of the data, the reporter called a person at random from the lists received.

One person. The Globo Standard of Quality at work.

Santa Efigênia — or Ifigênia, as I recall it and as the amateur photographer who snapped the street sign has it  – is a portion of the so-called Cracolândia region that has been slated for some time now for a massive overhaul, with lots and lots eminent domain exercised, to be redubbed Nova Luz, or “New Light”, with anchor tenants like Microsoft, Sun and Apple making it the Silicon Alley of Sambodia.

Six years on, Sambodia has yet to discover its Robert Moses — a hard-nosed crooked bastard, yes, but oriented to getting shit done rather than lining his pockets.

Our original immigration attorney, a moonlighting cop, was arrested for a scheme to shake down street vendors in the nearby streets of Mooca and Brás — a time-honored Sambodian racket that rolls on unabated.

What always strikes me about the city government’s graphics showing the utopian transformation, endlessly delayed, is the total absence of the human figure — as in the paintings of A. Hitler.

Pointed questions are quite appropriately asked here by the Rio de Janeiro daily of the federal agencies in question, but not, oddly, of the local authorities. The national justice secretary — son of the former No. 1 political policeman turned Senator-for-life — was recently canned for proximity to a similar figure from the Sino-Paraguayan smuggling scene, and we heard ourselves from the immigration desk at the federal police that an internal investigation into facilitation of visas and citizenship for persons originating from China.

As to GAECO, the organized crime divison of the State Public Ministry, one of its leading prosecutorial lights, a Mr. Blat, was summarily sacked several years ago for very similar reasons. Every once in a while, some reporter from O Globo points a finger and gasps! This town is mobbed up to the gills! Who knew?

There is no question but that my next computer will be expertly assembled to my specifications by one of the many fine craftsmen in the electronics district of Cracolândia, where you could probably find all the components you needed to build your own Deep Blue on the cheap, or mission control for a voyage to Tralfamadore .

A visit to the bustling and somewhat dangerous streets of the area is an off-the-map tourist experience worthy of a Luc Santé.

Just make sure you trust your guide. Having a getaway car trailing you as you walk down the street is not a bad idea. The nearby Mercado Municipal is actually a modest success, a nice place to lunch and gawk at the extraterrestrial fruits and vegetable.

Yes, this is my first note on life in Sambodia in the English language for some months. I have been writing a series of lab notes on a crawl I have been doing on the neocon propaganda machine and its Brazilian clones, in Portuguese, as a gift to my hosts.

I am happy to repeat their verdict, which I am in absolute agreement with in many, many case: These people, the Brazilian press, are simply  unbelievable. I mean that literally.

I have also been explaining and illustrating to friends how USAID and NED operate in the promotion of “free and independent media,” for example. The reports by CIMA, the NED agency tasked to that end, are exemplary and freely available on their site.

“Basically, we now do openly what the CIA was doing in the 1970s,” a USAID official says on the record in an agency newsletter. And how! But no one practices black-hat SEO quite like a Brazilian, I must say.

Still, this blog — to date, mostly repercussions in English of the complaints of local cumpadís about the abysmal state of Brazilian journalism, para inglês ver, as they say — has actually garned some queries from people who pay money for words about local matters in recent months.

I set out to build myself a homemade Portuguese-speaking bullshit detector to save myself the hassle of piling through all the nhemnhemnhem — the local version of yada yada, said to stem from the Tupi-Guaraní nhe-enga, “to speak” — in order to get to the meat and potatoes.

I am actually quite proud of my clipping and filtration system and the proprietary databases my robots are building for me. Perhaps it is time to take this blogging nonsense seriously and aspire to the level — an impossible goal — of great blogs like D&O Diary.

In the coming weeks, we shall see. Perhaps even a daily newsletter via e-mail, with a Pat Kiernan-style look at the headlines for folks with an interest, literary or otherwise, in Brazilian risk scenarios.

He’ll build a glass asylum
With just a hint of mayhem
He’ll build a better whirlpool
We’ll be living from sin, then we can really begin
–Bowie, “Big Brother”

I have been inoculated — by Greg House, M.D. —  against TV Globo’s Big Brother Brasil 10 (BBB10), but not even X-men mutant antibodies can shut down the virus completely.

Every newspaper in Brazil dedicates about ten times as much space to developments in the “show of life” — references to The Truman Show are common — than they do to the details of pending legislation. A random sample of top news items as selected by the Google News algorithm:

Corinthians F.C. is the grand champion of the moment, but the “unprecedented” paredão — putting someone up against the paredão means executing them by firing squad — that ousted Angêlica is 2.5x more important than whether or not avian flu is a pandemic.

The show is hosted by “actor-journalist” and former filmmaker Pedro Biale, co-host of Globo’s Sunday night infotainment magazine, the aptly named Fantástico. See, for example

• Biomagnetism: TV Globo Debunks Itself

TV Globo (Fantástico) debunks “quack science” that TV Globo (Fantástico), in a past report, has uncritically endorsed.

My favorite example is this moment from another Fántasico segment:

Voiceover: Corruption is genetically determined! Just ask this doctor!
Doctor: Corrupt behavior is mainly the result of environmental influences later in life.
Voiceover: QED! The corrupt are born corrupt! Corruption is a disease without a cure!

Pedro Biali of Fantaśtico and BBB10: "Actor-journalist." Fact is fiction. Gabba gabba HEY!

These idiots are too lazy even to line up an expert who will actually corroborate their thesis. They simply declare that black is white and move on with their brainless diatribe.

The references to The Truman Show (Truman: o show da vida) in critical discourse on, and promotional copy for, the program — which can be hard to differentiate — prove once again that some Brazilians are completely tone-deaf to cultural irony.

The utopian planned community of Alphaville, here in São Paulo, Sambodia, for example, derived its name from the dystopian sci-fi flick of the same name by Godard.

Still, no notebook on the current cultural moment in Brazil is complete without some reference to this virulent meme, and so I offer two vignettes fresh from the morning papers.

First, digital democracy Globo style.

Digital Democacracy, Globo-Style

O blogueiro José Mello, de Limeira, no interior de São Paulo, decidiu fazer uma campanha ousada contra o lutador Marcelo Dourado, participante do “Big Brother Brasil 10″.

Blogger José Mello of Limeira, in upstate São Paulo, has decided to launch a daring campaign against fighter Marcelo Dourado, the BBB10 contestant.

O paulista criou um endereço na internet que ganhou repercussão rapidamente por oferecer um prêmio a quem votasse para eliminar Dourado do programa.

The São Paulo resident created a Web site that quickly generated buzz when it offered a cash prize to those who vote to eliminate Dourado from the program.

Source: Folha Online, which links to the site so you can go claim your easy money.

Buying votes: It will be interesting to see how Globo responds — and how this buzz will affect the secondary prediction markets, if any.

It has been some time since I checked in on such sites as Intrade. (I used to get paid to be interested in experimental economics and market structure.)

(Unwarranted suspicion: A scam to garner sympathy votes for the alleged future victim of the vote-buying scheme.)

In at least one other case, Globo cheerfully egged on readers and viewers to essentially defraud an election in another promotional scheme.

When the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio was nominated for that (bogus) Seven Wonders of the Modern World award, Globo made a point of explaining to viewers exactly, step by step, how it was possible to “vote early and vote often.”

You could, for example, vote via SMS from your cellphone — the operators here charge the highest rates in the world for this service — and also from the Internet. The contest Web site had no safeguards against multiple registrations and votes.

Ergo, Globo is ACORN as described by John McCain.

Cell phone penetration as of 2009: reportedly 80%(!?)

Fixed line penetration: astonishingly low, for historical reasons. (My wife remembers having to save up six months for her first phone, the installation of which cost her R$4,000.)

Internet penetration as of September 2009: 35%.

Reason hypothetico-deductively from those factoids.

In 1989, Globo conspired with a technology contractor called Proconsult — owned by two ex-(?)military intelligence colonels — to defraud the gubernatorial election in Rio, preventing the victory of “fiery leftist” Leonel Brizola.

At some points, the manipulation was so blatant that Globo’s running vote count, a direct feed from Proconsult, broadcast live, would actually show negative quantities of votes for Brizola.

As in

Capivaralândia District 10:

Quimby: 10,247
Brizola: -3,054.

The Globo standard of participatory democracy.

Mars Attacks!

Ambush journalism as a humoristic form is alive and well and eking out a living on minor Brazilian TV networks, despite the gradual demise of the tele-theater of cruelty practiced by the likes of João Kleber.

The most successful example at the moment is CQG, on the Bandeirantes network, spearheaded by former Globo infotainment “actor-journalist” Marcelo Tas, who rose to fame with his impersonation of the fictitious reporter Ernesto Varela.

Varela-Tas once asked Paulo Maluf: “A lot of people don’t like you. They say you’re corrupt. Is this true?”

So, a sort of Brazilian Daily Show translation: fake journalists doing real journalism. Or do they?

(Tas also created the wonderful children’s program Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum. I love that show!)

Rede TV’s “Pánico na TV” caused a stir recently, to cite an example of the same genre, by crashing the BBB10 party.

A TV Globo estuda medidas judiciais contra a Rede TV! após a invasão de um humorista do programa “Pânico na TV”, no último dia 2, ao “Big Brother Brasil 10″, que foi levada ao ar na noite de ontem.

TV Globo is studying legal action against Rede TV! after a comedian from the program Panic on the TV! crashed the set of BBB10 on February 2, during the taping of an episode aired last evening.

Na ocasião, o personagem De Lari, que atua no quadro “O Impostor”, conseguiu se infiltrar na torcida da eliminada Tessália, obteve imagens clandestinas com uma câmera amadora e chegou a aparecer no programa ao vivo.

The character De Lari, protagonist of the the show’s “The Impostor” series, managed to infiltrate the crowd of fans supporting Tessália, since eliminated from the show, and to capture images from an amateur camera that were broadcast live on Panico.

Segundo a Central Globo de Comunicação, a emissora irá reforçar as medidas de segurança e está estudando quais são as medidas jurídicas cabíveis contra a Rede TV!.

Accoreding to Globo Communication Central, the broadcaster will beef up security and is studying appropriate legal measures.

Tessália também comentou no Twitter que pretende acionar a emissora. “Quero enfatizar que não estou satisfeita com as atitudes referentes a gravação do programa Pânico e que medidas serão tomadas”, escreveu a ex-BBB.

Tessália commented on Twitter that she intends to sue Globo. “Let me be clear about this, I am not happy about their response to the clandestine taping by Pánico and the steps being taken,” wrote the ex-contestant.

Latest update: Tessália confirms on Twitter that she has signed a contract to “bare all” in Editora Abril’s Playboy Brasil.

On Globo-Abril naked-lady synergies, see also

• “Globo Journalist and Playboy Centerfold is Celebrity Horseflesh Auctioneer of the Month”

And a final note for cultural iconographers of the paranoid school: Note the resemblance between the lidless (blue) eyeball of BBB and the lidless  (blue) eyeball of that Veja magazine (Editora Abril) cover story on (confirmed bogus prior to publication) allegations of illegal bugging at the Supreme Court.

Veja journalism is gabbling moral panic journalism.”]

“They are watching us. Even the Presidency and the Supreme Court suspect they have been targeted for espionage. No one is safe. This is the end of privacy in Brazil.” The Brazilian spy agency called Veja’s reporting “irresponsible,” in a press release. The justice allegedly spied upon reportedly “minimized” the incident. Or did he? [Yes, he did. The e-mailed "bug threat" had already been unmasked as a disgruntled civil-servant hoax

"Big Brother and You!" Below: "Augmented Reality!"

Your home is Big Brother!

Your house is Big Brother! Transform your house into the BBB house! Win a fridge, sofa, Japanese hot tub, and more!

Someone to claim us, someone to follow
Someone to shame us, some brave Apollo
Someone to rule us, someone like you
We want you Big Brother … Big Brother!

And then the fuzzed-out Mick Ronson outro riff.

"Don't forget to vote!" You have to pay the highest cellular rates in the world to exercise this right, however.

The official Kassab Sidewalk System

Consultor Jurídico says: In Brazil it is controversial whether you and some of your neighbors can take over public streets and collect “security fees” from other neighbors, even if they object.

For information on the dosage of salt with which you ought to take anything this publication says, see

• When Hacks are Flacks: Luis Roberto Demarco on Consultor Jurídico

One of my very first impressions of São Paulo was walking up my girlfriend’s street — now our abode of marital bliss — and noticing how every stretch of sidewalk outside every home was wildly different, where actually present (our house lacks sidewalk).

Every homeowner seems to have the responsibility to provide their own stretch of sidewalk.

The variations are infinite.

Our street (unpaved until the 1970s, then paved with a XIXth century cobblestone surface — like you see in and around Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, peeking through the modern asphalt like an x-ray of a palimpsest revealing Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy — in the 1980s, and finally getting a thin coat of tar in the 1990s) is a crazy quilt of individual interpretations of what a sidewalk is and ought to be.

In some parts of the city, sidewalks do seem to follow a standard code here and there, in stretches spanning several properties.

City hall, which implemented the Free Passage program in 2005, was bragging during the election about its imposition of standardized, permeable sidewalks to help with flood control, but as soon as the election was over, it stopped installing them except where a photo op might be arranged.

Passeio Livre FAQ:

Q: Who is responsible for sidewalk maintenance?
A: The property owner. Sidewalks found in a irregular state are subject to fines.
Q: Is there a standard for sidewalk renovation?
A: Yes. Executive Decree nº 45,904/05 establishes a new architectural standard for all sidewalks in the city. It contains rules on accessibility and specifies the materials to be used.

They had a representative of a (the?) company that makes these specific materials on the TV around election time, explaining why they were so groovy — they will put an end to flooding, for one thing! — and everyone was going to love buying them.

I am not able to find any statistics about what percentage of city sidewalks have been so converted between 2005 and now.

Despite having swynked and swyved as a concrete monkey in my youth, I don’t believe I would be able to install the Kassab Sidewalk System according to the building code — assuming there is one. Casual observation of the general lack of coherent zoning patterns does not immediately suggest the presence, or consistent enforcement, of one.

The predominance of the crazy quilt model makes life difficult for skatepunks, as you can imagine, and registers as emblematic of the São Paulo urban experience — where zoning laws seem to be treated as nothing more than suggested best practices, and where the boundaries between public and private property get fuzzy.

C.O.P.S and the One-Man Private-Public Partnership

Neuza does not know I know this, but every month she pays the kid on the motorcycle, who whistles the whole night long, a few shekels for “security,” over my objections. She is afraid of what might happen if she doesn’t — which pisses me off no end. I hate to see my baby be afraid.

If something is wrong with my baby (oo-oo-oo)
Something is wrong, with me-uh

My main objection is the extent to which the scheme — introduced by the kid on the motorcycle who whistles all night long with the presentation of a rumpled, illegible xerox of a xerox of a xerox of an obviously bogus and in any case unintelligible pseudo-official document — resembles the “security” scheme imposed by the flanelinhas, whom you pay to guard your car when you park on a public street.

In downtown Rio in recent days, the police broke up groups of flanelinhas charging as much as R$50 to “secure” a parking spot on public streets.

The implicit covenant here, though nearly always left ambiguous, being “give me money and I will protect your car from being stolen or pillaged (by me).”

ConJur:

A falta de segurança no país torna cada vez mais comum o fechamento de ruas e os chamados condomínios fechados. O Judiciário está abarrotado de ações questionando a cobrança de serviços de segurança e conservação desses locais por associações das quais nem todos os moradores fazem parte.

The lack of public security is making making both closed condominiums and the blocking off of public streets increasingly common. The courts are swamped with lawsuits questioning the levying of fees for security and maintenance services in these area by associations of which not all residents are members.

Na  Rio de Janeiro, as associações de moradores costumam alegar que prestam serviços como segurança e conservação do lugar, já que o poder público é omisso. Em São Paulo, sustentam que todos os moradores se beneficiam das melhorias propiciadas pelos serviços, inclusive com a valorização do imóvel. No entanto, os argumentos, que eram encarados como justos pelos tribunais — afinal, se uma pessoa recebe benefícios, em troca, tem de pagar por eles —, começam a sofrer resistência. Moradores que recorrem à Justiça para não serem obrigados a pagar as taxas por serviços que não pediram têm conseguido derrubar as cobranças.

In Rio, resident associations are in the habit of arguing that they provide such services as security and maintenance because the public administration does not do so.

For “resident associations,” in reportedly well over 150 cases at last report (probably an undercount), read “militias” — extortion-protection, vice and black marketeering rackets run by off-duty or retired police and firemen, armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry.

They also provide (untaxed because black-market) bottled cooking gas,  pirate cable TV and gypsy van service. Customer loyalty program: Like I said, the fuckers are armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry, and have the fix in at City Hall to boot.

I shit you not.

In São Paulo, these associations benefit all residents and can even increase the market value of the property. These arguments, however, once viewed by the courts as valid — after all, if someone is benefited by these services, they should pay for them — are beginning to encounter resistance. Residents who go to court to avoid paying for a service they never contracted have succeeded in overturning such fees.

Just walk up the street here and you will find a number of ddjacent streets blocked off with checkpoints manned by private security — usually, moonlighting police, a fact which renders the argument of “the failure of the public administration to provide the service” decidedly circular.

As a private party on his own free time, the policeman whose salary your taxes pay charges you a second time for doing his job.

Not mentioned here is that the federal police, a couple of years ago, began running “fair warning” seminars for private security firms before starting to enforce new federal legislation on this topic.

[more]

ConJur again:

“No início, firmou-se o entendimento de que, mesmo não sendo condomínio sob a lógica da legislação especial de regência, os loteamentos fechados passaram a ter tratamento igual, através de associações constituídas por moradores, obrigando a todos sob o princípio jurídico que repudia o enriquecimento sem causa”, explica o advogado Lauro Schuch.

“At first, there was a firm understanding according to which blocked-off residential tracts, even though not technically condominiums under the law, could receive the same treatment through the funding of associations with residents as members, obliging all residents to pay under the legal principle that bars self-enrichment without due cause,” explains lawyer Lauro Schuch.

If the squeegee man wipes your windshield, even though you asked him not to, you have to pay him. It’s settled jurisprudence.

O consultor legislativo do Senado Federal Bruno Mattos e Silva, que já escreveu diversos livros sobre o tema, explica quais as diferenças entre condomínio e loteamento. O primeiro é um empreendimento, pode ser de casas ou prédios, que dá aos moradores o direito de usar uma área comum. Já o loteamento são diversos terrenos, com ruas no meio (desde que autorizadas pela prefeitura e pelo estado). “Nestes casos, as ruas passam para o domínio do município, assim como as áreas institucionais exigidas pelo poder público.” Aí, começa uma discussão sem fim: se pode ser impedido o livre tráfego na rua desses loteamentos.

Bruno Mattos e Silva, a legislative consultant to the federal senate who has written a number of books on the subject, explains the difference between condominiums and residential tracts.

The former is a private real estate development, residential or commercial, which gives property owners the right to use a common area. Tracts, on the other hand, comprise individual lots that are separated by public streets (so long as they are authorized by the city and state government.)

“In such cases, the streets become the domain of the city government, as do [[institutional areas]] required by elected authority.”

And so begins the endless debate: whether private parties can inhibit free movement on public streets.

Endless Debate or Tempest in a Teapot Dome?

“Endless debate?”

As far as I know, federal law — on public security, at least — trumps state and local law. End of debate. So that the “endless debate”" boils down to something like the “state’s rights” — hello, Jim Crow — doctrine preached by the Federalist Society.

And whether these people have the authority to grant what I seem to remember being called “easements,” and charge you rent for them, even though they have expropriated those rights?

It happens all the time, but I am pretty sure it is technically unambiguously illegal. The current government is not very latifúndio-friendly.

I really do not know much about how such matters are handled by different jurisidictions back home, but I am pretty sure that public streets as a general rule belong to the commons.

Here is a basic little tutorial on neighbor law affecting sidewalks, fences and trees from Realty Times.

WalkingInfo.org provides basic advice on rioting to realize this communist-inspired doctrine of Boston commonism.

When our tree fell over on top of the neighbors’ car here in the Vila, private auto insurance (theirs) took care of it — we helped the nice people with the claim by taking photos of the carnage.

I remember as a kid coming home one day and finding the enormous mountain ash tree, planted in like 1930, in our back yard, gone. Though situated well within our property, its root system was cracking the public sidewalk of both neighbors.

I was too young to understand the situation in detail, but it seems to me as though we had to pay for the tree removal while the city sent their guys in to bring the sidewalks back up to code, using materials purchased by the city at wholesale prices.

Now, enforcing a standard specifying materials that have to be purchased at retail prices and installed to code: Nice work for some people, if they can get it.

Potemkin Villagers Bused to the Vila!

Mayor Kassab (DEM) — currently governing pending appeal of a conviction on illegal campaign finance charges — was actually here the other day to inaugurate our local park-creek renovation project.

(The park project is nice, but the creek project seemed totally unnecessary to the neighbors, including the civil servant geologist up the street.)

City workers arrived the day before to repaint the little bridge over the creek and to remove the folk art contributed by neighbors — deeming it unsuitable as a televised backdrop to yet another photo op in the Cidade Limpa “clean city” campaign.

More city workers arrived on the day with no apparent reason to be there other than to swell the ranks of an underwhelming turnout by us local yokels.

It continues to be notable how often the local press, previously and traditionally supportive, to a fault, of the PSDB-DEM alliance formed under the auspices of Malufism during the Pitta years, now reports extensively on facts not necessarily favorable to the DEM side of the alliance.

Conjecture: I think the DEM may be losing its hold and getting sent to political Siberia (PQP, in local parlance) by the One Big Party.

Above: Underground Rio van service vehicle, loaded with black-clad corpses wearing combat boots. See Rio de Janeiro: “Carobinha Death Toll Reaches 10″

A childhood friend — we used to play Stock Market while listening to the White Album over and over and over as kids — recently wrote me through Facebook, asking for advice to pass on to a colleague who will spend Carnaval in Rio this year.

Number one on the list of directives: Never hail a taxi on the street. The infamousSimpsons episode on Rio — which offended many Brazilians — was actually directly on point on this subject.

Ideally, hire a cab through the doorman of your hotel — make him your friend! –and make a side deal with the same trusted driver to drop you off and pick you up wherever you are going.

Top story in the O Globo daily of Rio this morning: 4,000 pirate cabs still in operation.

And as a sidebar, another apparent assassination involving the other major branch of black-market transportation in Rio: underground van services.

Favela residents really heavily on VW vans to get around parts of the city where no formal bus services is provided.

The services are controlled by “militias” — paramilitary protection rackets comprising cops and firemen supplementing their income, mainly — and the turf battles get ugly. See

• Rio: “Nextel Cell in Van War Hell”
• Rio: Deadly Days for the Man With the Van
• Rio: “Police Arrested In Murder May Have Run ‘Van Mafia’”

I translate in haste para inglês ver.

RIO – A polícia prendeu nesta quarta-feira o suspeito de ter matado o subsecretário de Transportes de Niterói , Adhemar Reis, no dia 20 de janeiro. O sargento da Polícia Militar Adair Correia da Silva Filho, conhecido como Daizinho, foi preso pela manhã no 35º BPM (Itaboraí), onde é lotado. O delegado responsável pelo caso, Mario da Silva, da 77ª DP (Icaraí), investiga também quem seria o mandante do crime. Adair Correia já havia sido preso em novembro de 2008, acusado de envolvimento com a máfia das vans no município de São Gonçalo, mas continuava na ativa.

The police arrested a suspect Wednesday in the 20 January murder of Niterói municipal transportation undersecretary Adhemar Reis. Military police sergeant Adair “Daizinho” Correia da Silva Filho was arrested Wednesday morning at the 35th Military Police Battalion in Itaboraí where he is stationed. The state judicial police official in charge of the case, Mario da Silva of the 77th Precinct in Icaraí, is also looking into who may have ordered the crime. Daizinho had previously been arrested in November 2008, accused of involvement in the “van mafia” in São Gonçalvo, but remained on active duty.

Niteroí is a neighboring city connected to Rio by the famous causeway — one of the “Pharaonic labors” of the generalíssimo regime, 1964-1985.

(Gilson: Acusado denunciou crimes e teve prisão revogada em 2009)

[RELATED STORY LINK] Gilson: Accused denounced crimes and was released in 2009.

- Acreditamos que o PM não tenha assassinado o subsecretário por uma motivação pessoal. As investigações apontam que ele foi contratado para executar visando aos interesses ilícitos de uma outra pessoa ou até de um grupo – disse o delegado.

“We believe the policeman did not murder the official for personal reasons. Investigations indicate that he was hired to execute the man in order to serve the illegal interests of another individual, or possibly a group of individuals,” the investigator said.

Segundo a policia, o sargento vai responder pelo crime de homicídio qualificado e pode ser condenado a 30 anos de prisão. O preso foi levado ao Batalhão Especial Prisional, onde deverá cumprir a prisão temporária de 30 dias. Procurada, a PM não respondeu por que o sargento continuava na ativa, mesmo acusado de diversos crimes.

Police say the sergeant will be tried for first degree murder and could be sentenced to 30 years in prison. The prisoner was taken to the Special Detention Battalion of the military police, where he will serve a temporary detainment of 30 days. Sought for comment, the military police did not respond to the question of why the sergeant remained on active duty despite being accused of various crimes.

That is, the Policia Civil want him tried by a civilian court on a common criminal charge. Typically, the Polícia Militar will want him tried by a military court — courts notoriously reluctant to convict their comrades in arms. That is why he is being housed in disciplinary barracks rather than a common jail.

- Os autos indicam que o crime foi premeditado e foi praticado com o objetivo de garantir vantagens ilícitas. Além do mais, a vítima não teve a menor possibilidade de defesa – explicou o delegado Mario da Silva.

“The case file indicates that the crime was premeditated and carried out for the purpose of obtaining illegal advantages. Furthermore, the victim had no opportunity to defend himself,” said da Silva.

“… for the purpose of obtaining illegal advantages”: for money.

O preso foi reconhecido por testemunhas .O acusado já tentou duas vezes se eleger vereador por São Gonçalo, sem sucesso. Ele também já havia sido preso em sua casa, naquele município, em novembro de 2008, por agentes da Delegacia Repressão às Ações Criminosas Organizadas (Draco) que cumpriam mandados de prisão contra envolvidos com a máfia das vans.

The accused was recognized by witnesses to the crime. He had run unsuccessfully for the  São Gonçalo city council on two occasions. He had also been arrested at his home in November 2008 by agents of DRACO, the anti-organized crime division of the state judicial police, as they served arrest warrants on persons suspected of involvement in the van mafia.

State and city politics + cops + militias + traditional organized crime = the Brazilian version of Colombian parapolítica.

Source: O Globo, 4 February 2010.

The Battle of the Bandeirantes Palace: Military police "shock troops"are summoned to confront striking state judicial police outside the seat of government, August 2008. A small number of lethal rounds were reportedly expended.

HOMICÍDIOS CRESCEM EM SÃO PAULO APÓS DEZ ANOS : The homicide rate and other statewide crimes statistics for 2009 are out.

São Paulo state recorded the first rise in its homicide rate for a decade, says the Folha de S. Paulo.

The state had been hoping to finally achieve a homicide rate per 100,000 that would remove it from the “epidemic” category, as defined by the WHO.

The Folha de S. Paulo editorializes today that the head of the state judicial police (Polícia Civil) cannot credibly explain this “reversal” as a result of the financial crisis, as he allegedly tried to do:

As razões para a inversão na curva de homicídios e a disparada de roubos e latrocínios parecem bem mais domésticas. Uma pista: reportagem de André Caramante publicada no último dia 24 informou que cerca de um quarto dos delegados da polícia civil paulista é alvo de algum tipo de processo.

The reasons for the reversal in the murder-rate curve and the explosion of robberies and thefts are to be found much closer to home, it seems.  Here’s a clue: the 24 January report by André Caramante according to which nearly 25% of state judicial police delegados are the target of some type of misconduct inquiry.

First of all, the story referred to is bogus, a mass of gabbling factoids. See

• Sambodian Police and Thieves: Show of Efficiency on Police Corruption as Son of Top DOPS Cop Is Dropped!

Second of all, this editorial manages to misstate the central factoid presented by that essentially bogus report.

The report stated that some 800 senior police officials have been reassigned, either because of pending disciplinary matters or because they were considered “inadequate” to their current posting for some other reason.

As to the “explosion” in thefts and robberies, state governor José Serra has a perfectly reasonable explanation:

Serra atribuiu ainda o aumento de crimes menos graves, como furtos e roubos, à subnotificação de ocorrências em 2008, ano em que a Polícia Civil passou meses em greve. “Houve uma elevação artificial em 2009.”

He attributed the increase in less serious felonies such as thefts, burglaries and robberies, to the undernotification of crimes in 2008, a year in which the Polícia Civil spent months on strike. “There was an artificial spike in 2009.”

That seems plausible on the face of it, although Serra himself is criticized for his flat refusal to negotiate with police unions, leading to a violent confrontation between state military police and Polícia Civil outside the seat of government.

Also, Serra does not help his cause with a long, complex explanation of the term “hysteresis” to explain the correlation between financial crisis and a bump in crime.

the lagging of an effect behind its cause; especially the phenomenon in which the magnetic induction of a ferromagnetic material lags behind the changing magnetic field …

Though this explanation is plausible — “things get worse faster than they get better”: Serra is a highly reputable economist — you need to keep the vocabulary at a sixth grade level for the benefit of the local press.

But what is really inexplicable is here the exclusive focus on the Policia Civil.

The silence on the role of the state Military Police in police corruption and criminality is deafening.

As a recent Human Rights Watch study indicates, there remains the troubling fact that as the homicide rate declines in São Paulo and Rio, the number of killings by police officers has not declined along with it. See

• Brazil: Human Fights on Human Rights

And chiefly responsible for the pandemic of suspected summary executions — the euphemism is “resistance followed by death” — is the military police force, the PM, which is in charge of street policing.

U.S. police kill one suspect out of every 37,000 suspects arrested, notes HRW.

São Paulo military police kill one suspect for every 348 arrests.

Rio military police kill one suspect for every 23 arrests.

The Rio and S. Paulo police combined killed more than 11,000 people in the period 2003-2009, or 1,833 per year. That we know of. Some of those killings may be counted as part of the criminal murder statistics, given the death-squad activities and paramilitary protection racketeering of some police officers.

A senior PM commander, head of  patrol in the Zona Norte of S. Paulo, who confronted subordinates over death-squad activities was assassinated on a busy avenue in the full light of day last year. Death-squad style.

Crime statistics based on police BOs, or boletins de ocorrência, are probably not reliable. Many cases of systematic perjury on BOs have come to light over the years. The military police report incidents of “resistance followed by death” and foil crime scene investigations by taking corpses with multiple bullets in the head off to the hospital in an attempt to save the victim’s life. The PC simply writes this nonsense down and signs off on the whole farse.

But for what it’s worth, here is the official story on Sambodian homicide, 2009:

Pela primeira vez em dez anos, o número de homicídios cresceu em São Paulo em 2009, puxado pelo aumento dos crimes no interior do Estado.

For the first time in ten years, the number of homicides in São Paulo increased in São Paulo, driven up by an increase in crimes in the interior of the state.

No ano passado, as polícias paulistas registraram 4.557 homicídios (4.771 vítimas no total, porque há casos com mais de um morto). Em 2008 foram 4.426 casos (4.690 vítimas).

Last year, state police registered 4,557 homicides, with a total of 4,771 victims, taking into account the fact that some cases involve more than one death. In 2008, there were 4,426 cases, with 4,690 victims.

Na capital e na Grande São Paulo, permaneceu a tendência de queda do número de assassinatos registrada desde 2000.

In the capital city and the metro area, the downward tendency in the murder rate since 2000 continued.

Porém, nas cidades do interior e do litoral, essa evolução se reverteu e a violência voltou a níveis similares ao de 2007.

In upstate and coastal cities, however, the trend was reversed and violence returned to levels similar to those observed in 2007.

O resultado disso é que o governo José Serra (PSDB) não atingiu a meta de tirar o Estado da faixa considerada “epidêmica” para homicídios -menos de 10 casos por 100 mil habitantes, de acordo com critérios da OMS (Organização Mundial da Saúde)-, conforme anunciou em outubro de 2008 o sociólogo Túlio Kahn, da Secretaria de Segurança Pública. Em 2009, foram 10,95 no Estado.

As a result, the state goverment of José Serra (PSDB) failed to reach its goal of removing the state from the category of “epidemic” homicide rates, defined by the WHO as 10 murders per 100,000, as announced in October 2008 by sociologist Túlio Khan of the state secretariate of public security. The 2009 state murder rate was 10.95 per 100,000.

O registro de queda da violência que vinha ocorrendo em outros tipos de crime na última década -furtos e roubos/ furtos de veículos- também se reverteu em 2009. O número de roubos já havia crescido no ano passado.

The decline in violence in relation to other types of crime in the last decade — burglaries, robberies and vehicle theft — was also reversed in 2009. The number of robberies had also increased in the previous year.

O governo sempre atribuiu a redução geral nos índices de criminalidade aos investimentos nas polícias, no aumento da apreensão de armas e na construção de mais presídios.

The government has always attributed the general reduction in crime to its investment in the police forces, to the increased apprehension of weapons, and to the construction of new prisons.

Agora, questionado sobre o assunto, o delegado-geral da Polícia Civil, Domingos Paulo Neto, não soube explicar o motivo do aumento dos assassinatos no interior. Ele disse que precisava se reunir com os delegados para analisar os dados.

Now, questioned about the matter, the chief of the state Polícia Civil, Domingos Paulo III, could not explain the reason for the rise of the murder rate in outlying areas of the state. He said he would have to meet with his senior staff to analyze the data.

Why was the state commandant of military police not asked the same question? Why was the response by the state judicial police chief paraphrased rather than quoted ipsis litteris?

As duas áreas mais violentas do Estado são ligadas aos Deinter (Departamento de Polícia Judiciária de São Paulo – Interior) 1 -São José dos Campos, que abrange todo o Vale do Paraíba e litoral norte- e ao Deinter 6 -com sede em Santos, que atende a região da Baixada Santista e o litoral sul.

The two most violent areas of the state are the areas policed by DEINTER 1 of São José dos Campos, covering the entire Vale do Paraíba and the North Shore, and DEINTER 6, headquartered in Santos and responsible for the Baixada Santista and the South Shore.

Following the model used by state police all over Brazil, the policia civil investigate crimes reported by the policia militar, who perform virtually all patrol and emergency response work.

So it seems to more plausible to me that PM jurisdictions should be “blamed” for occurrences of homicides, while PC jurisdictions, in charge of investigating and solving cases, should be queried about their closure rate on homicide and other types of crime.

I guess I will have to comb through the SSP Web site to see if they are any numbers on the latter. The SSP has a reputation for creative numerology.

Os índices de homicídios chegam próximos de 16 por 100 mil habitantes nessas duas regiões. São superiores, inclusive, à região metropolitana de São Paulo, onde o índice por 100 mil habitantes é de 12,3.

The murder rate is close to 16 per 100,000 in these two areas, outpacing even metropolitan São Paulo, which reported a rate of 12.3 per 100,000.

Foi o Deinter 6 (Santos) que teve o maior crescimento no número de homicídios em 2009 -37,05% sobre 2008.

DEINTER 6 saw the largest growth in homicides last year: 37.05% over 2008.

Na capital, houve queda de 2,22% no número de mortes. Na Grande SP, a redução foi mais significativa: 10,4%.

In the city of S. Paulo, there was a 2.2% decline in the number of murders. In the metro area, the decline was more pronounced: 10.4%.

“Em locais onde, em 2000, havia quase 15 mortes por dia, agora há 3,4″, disse Paulo Neto.

“In areas where there were nearly 15 deaths a day in 2000, now there are 3.4,” said Paulo.

Mesmo algumas regiões do interior tiveram menos homicídios no ano passado. São os casos do Deinter 4 (Bauru), com menos 7,8%, e do Deinter 8 (Presidente Prudente), queda de 13,5% no número de casos.

There were even some upstate regions where homicides were down last years, such as DEINTER 4 (Bauru), with 7.8% fewer killings, and DEINTER 8  (Presidente Prudente), with a 13.5% reducation in murder cases.

Segundo o delegado-geral, o aumento de alguns índices criminais se deve também à crise econômica pelo qual o país passou no final de 2008 e no primeiro trimestre de 2009. “O ciclo se encerrou no fim do primeiro trimestre. Por isso temos alguns índices em elevação.”

According to the chief of the state PC, the increase in some categories of crime was due to the economic crisis of late 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. “The cycle was over by the end of the first quarter. For that reason we saw some indices rise.”

Kassab's highly effective media blitz in the 2006 mayoral race -- the mayor's reputation for truculence and crudity was addressed by the substitution of his actual likeness by a family values-friendly animated character (above) -- must have cost a fortune.

For those of you angered by our Supreme Court’s recent decision on corporate financing of political campaigns, Brazilian election law, on first inspection, might seem to be far more englightened than our our own.

In practice, however, it is extremely hard to make heads or tails of the jurisprudence generated by the system, which is considered highly politicized by its critics.

In the last presidential campaign, for example, one candidate was represented before the Supreme Elections Tribunal by his brother — a former minister (justice) of the selfsame Supreme Elections Tribunal. Some examples of jurisprudential oddities:

• TSE Clips Toucans Over Tirades, Cancels Communists
• Alckmin Campaign Accounts in Question
• The Wild and Wooly Saga of Brazil’s Election “Mini-Reform”
• Brazil: “The TSE Set The News Agenda”

Today, for example, the Folha de S. Paulo — continuing a notable pattern of prominently placing stories harmful to the public image of the current mayor, in whose election the Folha played an openly partisan role  – reports the mayor could lose his mandate over illegal campaign donations.

“Could”?

What kind of hard news story is pitched in the subjunctive mood?

Um parecer técnico contábil da Justiça Eleitoral de São Paulo indica que 33% do total arrecadado pelo prefeito de São Paulo, Gilberto Kassab (DEM), na campanha eleitoral de 2008 teve origem em fontes de doações consideradas ilegais pelo Ministério Público Eleitoral.

A technical accounting opinion from the São Paulo state elections authority indicates that 33% of the money raised by São Paulo mayor Gilberto Kassad (DEM-PFL) in the 2008 mayoral campaign originated in donation sources considered illegal by the elections prosecutor.

O laudo, concluído em outubro e obtido pela Folha, indica o risco de que Kassab seja condenado em primeira instância à perda do cargo. Em casos semelhantes, o juiz Aloísio Silveira, responsável pela ação, cassou o mandato de 16 vereadores da capital. Ele tem adotado como critério para condenar à perda de mandato contas de campanha que apresentem mais de 20% dos recursos provenientes de fontes vedadas.

The report, concluded in October and obtained by the Folha, suggest that Kassab runs the risk of being sentenced by the lower court to loss of his mandate.

Kassab, the vice-mayor of current governor José Serra — who ran for mayor in 2004 with the solemn promise he would not run for governor in 2006 — assumed command of the city when Serra assumed the governship in 2006, and therefore has no vice-mayor himself — the office must be filled by popular election.

The de facto second-ranking official in the city executive appears to be the coordinating secretary of subprefectures, Andrea Matarazzo (PSDB), but this office is newly created and not in line for legal succession to the mayor’s office, as far as I understand.

Kassab would, if removed by court order, be replaced by the recently reelected president of the city legislature, Antônio Carlos Rodrigues of the Republican Party (PR) — not to be confused with the PRB, the Republican Party of  Brazil, an ally of the ruling PT on the federal level.

If Rodrigues were removed, the vice-president of the Cámara Municipal, a member of the PSDB — the party that controls the state executive — would assume.

And Rodrigues does run some risk of removal:

Ele amarga condenação em primeira e segunda instâncias por mau uso de verba pública em processo no qual é acusado de ter contratado irregularmente uma empresa quando presidia a Empresa Metropolitano de Transportes Urbanos, em 92.

He has been convicted in the first and second instances for misuse of public funds in a case in which he is accused of the illegal contracting of a company in 1992, when he was president of the Metroplitan Urban Transportation Company (EMTU).

He was sentenced to loss of mandate, loss of the right to run for election for six years, a fine, and restitution of R$50 million to the state coffers.

A contract signed with an outsourcing firm for temporary workers during the state administration of Orestes Quércia was considered illegal by the State Accounting Tribunal (TCE). The sentence was upheld on appeal.

Before the last municipal election, the Folha ran a story saying that the STJ — roughly equivalent to the U.S. Court of Appeals — “could” bar Rodrigues from running for reelection.

Obviously, it didn’t.

He is said to be Kassab’s principal politcal ally.

In similar cases, Judge Silveira, who is hearing the case, ordered that 16 city councilmembers in the state capital be unseated. He has adopted as a criteria for the loss of mandate campaign accounts indicating that more than 20% of funding came from forbidden sources.

A execução de sentença contra os vereadores foi suspensa até que os recursos deles sejam julgados em 2ª instância pela Justiça Eleitoral de São Paulo.

The execution of sentence against the 16 councilmembers was suspended until their appeals could be heard by an elections court of the second instance.

A data ainda não foi marcada. Avisado pelos assessores sobre o risco de condenação, Kassab já desistiu da possibilidade de uma vitória em primeira instância e aposta suas fichas no Tribunal Regional Eleitoral.

No date for the appeals to be heard has been set. Warned by aides about the risk of conviction, Kassab has already given up on trying to win the case in the lower court and has bet all his chips on the Regional Electoral Tribunal.

Source: Ricardo Noblat, O Globo.

But what “illegal sources” are alleged?

Noblat has merely gisted a story from the Folha de S. Paulo, which hides the details behind the “pay to play” content firewall. Luckily my wife has a subscription to UOL.

According to the Folha, beancounters at the elections authority also recommended the rejection of the campaign accounts presented by the other two major candidates: Marta Suplicy ex-mayor and former federal tourism minister for the PT, and Geraldo Alckmin, ex-governor and former presidential candidate for the rival PSDB.

Apparently, however, the rejection of these campaign accounting disclosures does not carry with it a call for loss of the right to run for public office, the most serious punishment for non-incumbent violators. The Folha does not detail the deficiencies, or the seriousness thereof, alleged by auditors of those books.

Na representação contra o prefeito, o promotor indicou três tipos de fontes de doação que seriam ilegais. A primeira é a AIB (Associação Imobiliária Brasileira), entidade que, segundo Lopes, funcionou como fachada do Secovi (sindicato do setor imobiliário) para fazer doações a políticos.

In the charges filed against Kassab, the elections prosecutor described three sources of allegedly illegal contributions. The first is the Brazilian Real Estate Association (AIB), an organization that Lopes says is a front set up by Secovi, the real-estate industry syndicate, for the purpose of making political donations.

Pela legislação, as entidades sindicais não podem fazer contribuições eleitorais. O Secovi nega qualquer vínculo com as doações.

Under current law, business syndicates [and labor unions] cannot make campaign donations. Secovi denies having anything to do with the donations.

The rough equivalent to our 503(a), (b) and (c) organizations is the OSCIP, the “civil society public interest organization.” A long story.

O parecer da Justiça Eleitoral aponta que, segundo os critérios do Ministério Público paulista, a AIB doou ilegalmente R$ 2,7 milhões para Kassab.

The opinion points out that, under the standards set by the São Paulo state prosecutor, AIB illegally donated R$2.7 million to Kassab.

Para a Promotoria, também foram fontes ilegais de recursos construtoras que são acionistas de concessionárias de serviços públicos. A lei proíbe as concessionárias de realizarem contribuições para as campanhas.

Also illegal in the state prosecutor’s view were contributions from companies owning shares in public works contractors. The law prohibits such contractors from contributing to campaigns.

De acordo com o promotor, as empresas “não são diretamente concessionárias de serviços públicos, mas apenas integrantes, acionistas, investidoras, associadas em consórcio ou sob a forma de holding ou conglomerado econômico que, em derradeira análise, seriam os concessionários diretos”.

According to the prosecutor, these companies “are not direct holders of public-works concessions, but merely members, shareholders, investors or consortium associates, or associates of a holding company or economic conglomerate,  which, in the final analysis, would in essence be the direct concession-holders.

São apontadas na representação as empreiteiras Camargo Corrêa, OAS, Serveng Silvisan, CR Almeida, Carioca Christiani Nielsen, S.A. Paulista e Engeform. O levantamento da Justiça Eleitoral conclui que o total das doações dessas companhias foi de R$ 6,8 milhões.

Singled out in the document are public-works contractors Camargo Correa, OAS, Serveng Silvisan, CR Almeida, Carioca Christiani Nielsen, S.A. Paulista, and Engeform.

Outro doador considerado ilegal pelo promotor foi o Banco Itaú S.A. De acordo com a representação, ele não poderia fazer contribuições ao então candidato Kassab porque a Prefeitura de São Paulo efetua pagamentos para parte dos funcionários pelo banco.

Another donor considered illegal was the banking and financial services holding Itaú, S.A. According to the charges filed, it was barred from donating to then-candidate Kassab because the city government uses the bank’s services to pay its employees.

Em 2008, a instituição financeira doou R$ 550 mil para a campanha do atual prefeito, segundo o laudo da Justiça.

In 2008, Itaú donated R$550,000 to the mayor’s campagin, according to this report.

Kassab’s 2006 multimedia campaign was visibly brilliant, well-conceived, and very expensive, and was echoed and amplified, with the volume set to 11, by the local press and electronic media, the Folha among them.

I personally doubt that even the R$10 million in allegedly illegal donations reported on here would have covered the cost of the media blitz, but I confess I have no hard numbers to base that on.

Political whisperers continue to speculate about a reconquest of ground ceded to the DEM in recent decades by the São Paulo PSDB, with the former weakened by a national corruption scandal involving the governor of the federal district.

(Congress in Foco last year published a graphic ranking political parties by the number of corruption charges filed against them.

Of the four major parties, the DEM and its archrival, the PMDB, lead the way, with the DEM leading all comers in terms of corruption charges divided by the number of sitting elected officials.

The PSDB is third, and the ruling PT a distant fourth: At the time, only the four cases of members charged in the “big monthly allowance” scandal were counted against it, I think.

I personally think it fair to say that the PT and the genuinely “liberal” wing of the rival PSDB — both founded in the 1980s — are, in fact, vastly less corrupt than traditional political parties, some left over from the Vargas era and some, like the PMDB and DEM, left over from the military dictatorship.

I cannot really say why, but I have always had the impression that part of José Serra’s program of government would be — would have to be — the eradication of the Malufist legacy in the state, and the severing of the PSDB’s remaining ties to Malufism — of which Kassab is a prime example.

Leader of the pro-Maluf faction in the legislature during Maluf’s reign as mayor, Kassab was planning secretary for Maluf’s hand-picked successor, the late Celso Pitta of the PSDB.

Both of which roles have been edited out of his Wikipedia bio, by the way!

Both Pitta and Maluf have done jail time over some weird, byzantine municipal bond scam that I have never quite grokked fully. I do believe that after leaving office, Pitta made a living as a broker of municipal paper issued to himself.

Maluf, benefiting from a compassionate furlough — a commutation of sentence, actually — from prison when he turned 70, got himself elected to the federal legislature, where he now enjoys virtual paraliamentary immunity from prosecution on the teeming universe of charges against him dating back to his days as an appointee of the military dictatorship.

He never shows up to work, spending at least half of his time in Lebanon, where he has dual citizenship. The Manhattan D.A. issued a standing arrest warrant for Maluf for money-laundering, which as far as I know still stands.

Serra is often demonized by his political opponents — mutually assured demonization is pretty much the name of the game in S. Paulo politics — but I actually like the guy for some reason.

I guess I feel that his vocation for public service is genuine and sincere. I think of him as an old-fashioned South American liberal, without the “neo.”

In his inaugural speech, I thought I heard him fling down the gauntlet to the Cardoso-led faction of his party, which had turned visibly neocon during its time in the federal government.  …

Then again, I claim to understand absolutely nothing about politics here, mind you. Absolutely. Nothing.

"Go fsck yourself. You suck." Excerpt from the Gnome terminal session of a pissed-off end user.

This morning, I woke up with the blues and booted my computer:

“Woke up this mornin’ I believe I’ll boot my box …”

The boot took maybe 30 seconds, and when the Gnome desktop appeared, the indicator showed that my CPU frequency was being scaled properly.

With five or six major tasks going on at once, the processor was running at about 50% of capacity, maximum.

Then, maybe an hour later,  in the middle of the same session, once again, CPU frequency scaling failed, throttling the CPU down to half capacity and not allowing it to be raised to full capacity:

You may choose between 1Ghz and 1GHz: But there is no number between 1 and 1.

You may set your frequency between 1Ghz and 1GHz?

There is no number n such that n > n or n < n.

I think they establish that right there in the beginning of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Matematica. There is no equality that is also an inequality.

I reboot, which takes about 6 minutes this time.

The machine boots up with the CPU frequency stuck in the mathematically absurd 1Ghz to 1GHz range, just as it was doing last week (last month, last year):

This is really starting to piss me off.

I am a loyal Ubuntu early adopter — since Animated Anteater, practically — and I am used to the bugs and bothers of updating to the upstream kernel just to see what’s next.

But I have always been able to work out the kinks and leave my system in good working order for when I had real work to do.

Until now. Since Ubuntu compiled acpi-cpufreq into the kernel with the Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) release,  I have been unable to do that.

Okay, I have pissed and moaned about this before.

Finally, on the fourth reboot, I add the kernel parameter

pnpacpi=off

and it boots up properly.

This parameter,which I guess lets the BIOS handle “plug ‘n’ play” devices, is sometimes correlated with proper CPU frequency scaling and sometimes not. I have not calculated the standard deviations on this, of course. I majored in poetry.

I also notice that Ubuntu seems to be working toward addressing this problem. I find a new daemon in Synaptic called ppmd, or Power Policy Management Daemon.

I apt-get install it, find that it has no manual file, and submit a bug report. That the application is undocumented: I count that as a bug.

You?

The Ubuntu folks get back to me promptly with a link to a wiki page on Power Police Management, under the heading of mobile computers — I am on a Dell Latitude D620 with an Intel T2500 processor @2.0Ghz.

(I never unplug it from the wall anymore, to be honest.)

And I see that this feature seems not to have gotten very far past the drawing board phase — although, I mean, they have released code for it already, right?

This diagram outlines how the daemon is to work:

Mean anything to you? Actually, it does mean something to me. I can sorta see what they are driving at and I am glad they are working on it.

I have always thought that my problem might stem from some malfunctioning sensor input that was triggering a false thermal event and an accompanying policy crackdown by little fascist temperature robots that have not read the manual on my machine — which is built to run fine between 60° C and 80° C.   …

… Combined with the fact that the specifications of my processor are only sporadically read correctly by loadcpufreq, which I finally discovered runs five times during start-up. …

Oh, and like everyone else in the world, my sound — the time it took me to learn how to configure this properly in earlier releases! — and bootsplash don’t work in either Karmic or Lucid.

I won’t beat the subject to death.

Still a little mad at you, Ubuntu.

But I am glad to see you have already taken my advice and are busy fscking yourself.

"Boca de lobo"

Boca-de-lobo: sistema de captação lateral em que uma caixa apresenta-se coberta por uma tampa, em geral de concreto, e, abaixo dela, na altura da sarjeta, há uma abertura para a entrada das águas …

The Folha de S. Paulo reports today on the success, or rather the alleged lack thereof, of the city’s Córrego Limpo program — a clean-up of city creeks designed to prevent flooding.

The Sambodian daily obviously did not include our creek in the sample surveyed.

We have never had problems with flooding in the creek that flows past the foot of our street and along the recently renovated park. Dona Miriam, who was lived here since they still had cattle drives through the Praça Panamericana, remembers none.

In fact, no one can really explain why they spent so much time and money “renovating” when there seemed to be no problem. But to be fair, positive and effective steps were taken in the process.

Sabesp, the state sanitation company — NYSE: SBS (ADR) — came and tested our sewage installation, flushing colored liquids down all the johns to make sure our excrement was not being dumped into the creek.

The good news: We inhabit a First World dwelling, sanitation-wise. (We still lack piped-in natural gas or centralized water heating. We buy gas by the botijão and use one of the most dangerous-looking home appliances ever built for showering: The Lorenzetti electric shower head.)

The bad news: Universalization of sewage routing and treatment still has about half the city to go, I understand.

The park renovations near our place, meanwhile, are not doing as badly as they looked on first inspection. The main problem was the use of sand to border the brick walking paths — sort of like the soft shoulder on an asphalt highway.

This sand washes downhill every time it rains, accumulating at one end of the park.

During her daily dog walk, The News — my wife, Neuza — talked to the city worker assigned the Sisyphean task of shovelling all that sand back into place after each (daily, or even 2x-3x daily!) pancada de chuva.

The poor bastard says that the park was not designed to take into account the slope of the land at the site.

Córregos reformados pla Prefeitura de São Paulo na gestão Gilberto Kassab (DEM) com o objetivo de reduzir as inundações não ajudaram a resolver o problema das enchentes. A Folha visitou 13 Hey obras recentes do projeto Córrego Limpo, feito em parceria com a Sabesp, e constatou que, em alguns locais, a situação até piorou: casas que antes não alagavam agora passaram a inundar.

Creeks renovated by the city of São Paulo during the administration of Gilberto Kassab (DEM-PFL) for the purpose of preventing floods have not helped to resolve the problem. This newspaper inspected 13 recent projects of the Clean Creeks initiative, undertaken by the city in partnership with Sabesp, the state sanitation company, and found that in some instances, the situation has even worsened: Houses that were never flooded before are now being inundated.

Far be it from me to criticize anyone with a valid beef against the Kassab regime, but it seems to me the Folha is playing another one of its patented fuzzy number games here.

For example, it sampled 13 out of how many projects in the initiative? How did it choose them? By the fact that they are recent? How many projects of the initiative are “recent” and how many not? What cutoff date was used, if any? How many cases out of the thirteen constitute “some” cases? The article discusses three cases in detail, then says 10 of the 13 have problems different than the ones described..

In other words, the article does not defend itself well against potential accusations of cherry-picking the cases studied in order to accentuate the negative.

That, my friends, is a textbook “fuzzy numbers” lede. It might be justifiable if the fuzzy math were clarified in the body of the story, below the fold, but it’s not.

Para a urbanista que estuda políticas públicas para rios, Luciana Travassos, projetos têm pouco verde e muito concreto. Canalização da água também favorece as enchentes, diz.

Luciana Travassos, an urban planner who studies public policy on river management, says these projects have little “green” and lots of concrete. Channeling of water into underground pipes also contributes to flooding, she says.

O córrego Rio das Pedras, na Capela do Socorro (zona sul), ficou mais estreito no ano passado para dar lugar a um parque com pouco verde e muito concreto. O parque deveria funcionar como área de lazer e “barrar” a água do córrego que eventualmente transbordasse.

The Rio das Pedras Creek in Capela de Socorro (southern district) was narrowed last year to make room for a park with little greenery and much concrete.

Repetitious, that.

The park is supposed to serve as a lesiure area and to hold back any water that might overflow the banks of the creek.

Mas agora, quando chove mais forte, ele não suporta toda a água, que invade as casas. “Nunca vi isso aqui. Desde que eles diminuíram o córrego, alaga sempre”, diz Geraldo Egídio, 54, que tem um bar na rua Virgínia Maria da Conceição -um dos 68 novos pontos de alagamentos divulgados pela Folha no início deste mês.

But now, with heavier rains, the project is not holding back all of the water, which is invading residences. “I never saw this here before. Since they narrowed the creek, it floods constantly,” said a Mr. Egídio, 54 , owner of a bar on Virgínia Maria da Conceição St. — one of 68 new flooding points reported on by the Folha early this month.

Só em janeiro, quando houve recorde de chuvas fortes, os imóveis da rua inundaram seis vezes -a última no sábado.

In January alone, in which there was record rain, properties on the street flooded six times — including last Saturday.

Records have only been kept since the 1990s, I understand, so the historical series is not that meaningful. The worst flood on record was in 1929.

Na zona leste, campeã de chuvas no ano passado, as obras do córrego Cruzeiro do Sul-Mirim (em São Miguel Paulista) também estão prejudicando a população.

In the eastern district, last year’s rainfall champion, work on the Cruzeiro do Sul-Mirim in São Miguel Paulista is also having a negative effect on residents.

Uma parte dele foi canalizada, mas a tubulação não dá conta durante as chuvas mais intensas e a água vaza, com muita força, por tampas que ficam nas calçadas. A área no entorno do córrego ganhou calçadas novas, quadras e uma pista de skate. O cheiro de esgoto também diminuiu por causa das ligações feitas pela Sabesp.

Part of the creek was redirected into a channel, but the pipes installed have proven insufficient during intense rains, and water leaks out. The area around the creek received new walkways, playing fields and a skateboard lane. The stench of sewage has also been reduced thanks to the hookups performed by Sabesp.

Mas na chuva da última terça, a casa da fotógrafa Nadir Lima, 46, foi invadida pelas águas, que atingiram um metro de altura. Anteontem, ela decidiu aterrar a entrada da casa para deixá-la mais alta e dificultar a inundação. “Nunca houve isso aqui. Por fora está tudo lindo, mas por dentro está tudo errado”, diz. “Melhor era deixar tudo aberto, que a água ia embora.”

During last Tuesday’s rains, however, the home of photographer Nadir Lima, 46, was flooded with a meter of water. On Wednesday, she decided to pile up earth in front of the entrance to her home to make it more difficult for water to enter. “We never had this here before. It looks really nice on the outside, but the insides are all wrong,”she said. “Better to leave everything open, then the water would flow away.”

Our creek was left open, with some wooden pedestrian bridges crossing it.

A canalização de parte do córrego do Sapé, no Butantã (zona oeste), também trouxe dores de cabeça para os moradores. O cano que passa debaixo de uma praça não aguenta a água, que agora extravasa pelas bocas de lobo.

Anteontem, em uma nova enchente, o auxiliar de manutenção Fernando Pacheco, 39, fazia as contas do prejuízo causado pela chuva da última terça. “Perdemos estante, guarda-roupas, meu carro não funciona mais”, listava.

The redirection of the Sapé creek in Butantã into an underground channel also caused headaches for local residents. The pipe passing under the park there cannot handle the water, which now overflows through the … .

On Wednesday, in the midst of another flood, maintenance worker Fernando Pacheco, 39, was adding up the damage caused by Tuesday’s rains. “We lost shelves, dressers, my car no longer runs,” he said.

Muito concreto

Lots of concrete

“A ideia de fazer parques nas margens dos córregos é muito boa. Eles têm a função de reter a água. Mas quando o parque mal tem vegetação não resolve. É como construir uma avenida”, diz Luciana Travassos, ex-pesquisadora do Lume (Laboratório de Urbanismo da Metrópole), da USP, especialista em parques lineares.

“The idea of creating parks on the banks of creeks is an excellent one. They help retain water. But when the park has hardly any vegetation, the problem isn’t solved. It’s as though you built an avenue there,” said Travassos, a former researcher at USPs Metropolitan Urban Planning Lab (LUME) and a specialist in linear parks.

I guess our park is “linear” because it is longer than it is wide and naturally follows the várzea of the creek — although there have been some additions up the hillside, such stairways leading to a playing field — and the home of the Enigmatic Mermaid, our colleague and good friend.

A canalização, diz ela, é outro problema. “O córrego vira um tubo grande embaixo da rua. Chove muito, ele enche, a água faz pressão e volta pelo bueiro.”

Rechanneling, she says, is another problem. “The creek becomes a big pipe under the street. When it rains a lot, it fills up, the water creates pressure, and you end up with water flowing back out of the gutter drain.”

Os bueiros também se tornaram um problema depois da reforma do córrego Ponte Rasa, em Ermelino Matarazzo (zona leste). Lá não foi feito parque, mas duas bocas de lobo que levavam a água da rua para o córrego foram tapadas. A água da calçada não consegue mais escoar e invade ruas e imóveis.

Gutter drains have also become a problem after the renovation of the Ponte Rasa Creek in Ermelino Matarazzo (eastern district). No park was built there, but two drainage ditches that channel water from the street into the creek were blocked off. Water from the sidewalk can no longer drain away, and now invades streets and properties.

I am translating by the seat of the pants, you should know. A helpful article on all this terminology is here at Tupipedia.

But I am too lazy to research any urban hydraulics glossaries to do a decent job. Blogs: you get what you pay for.

A prefeitura também tapou a saída de outro bueiro, que passava embaixo de uma casa. Resultado: o solo ruiu e levou a parte dos fundos da residência.

The city government also blocked off the outlet of another gutter drain that passes underneath a home. Result: The soil collapsed, taking part of the house with it.

Now, an attempt to sharpen up the fuzzy numbers.

A half-hearted attempt.

Dos 13 córregos visitados pela Folha, dez tinham problemas, incluindo esgoto irregular, falta de manutenção e muros de contenção baixos -tudo isso contribui para enchentes.

Of the 13 creeks visited by the Folha, ten had problems, including irregular sewage removal, lack of maintenance, and low containment walls — all of which contribute to floods.

Did all the 13 have all those problems, plus the others mentioned? Or what, did all have at least one? And what steps did the Folha take to determine, for example, “irregular sewage removal”?

Did Folha reporters perform the flush test that Sabesp did on our toilets, for example? Who says the walls are too low? What records were thoroughly checked to determine that maintenance had not been performed?

What qualifies a Folha de S. Paulo reporter with nothing but a four-year diploma in journalism — with lots of courses on blogging and Newspapers 2.0, ofcourse — from Casper Líbero or Masters in Jornalismo to make such technical judgments?

How many Clean Creeks project had no problems, if any? How many Clean Creeks projects are there, anyway?

I don’t believe the Folha’s reporters did any of the work implied by the judgment calls made in this story.

I suspect there is an unacknowledged source of information behind all these factoids. Perhaps the USP drainage scholar mentioned provided some information, or accompanied the inspection and made the judgments.

Most likely, the USP scholar cited did all the work and the Folha reporter garbled it in the process of plagiarizing it.

If so, the Folha should say so. Its reporting on this issue would be made a lot more credible if it did.

Carroceiros on the job, São Paulo.

The Folha de S.Paulo features indignant neighbors of ours from the Vila Madalena district, and hammers hard on a — not very well sourced or documented — factoid that reflects badly on the current city government’s Cidade Limpa (“clean city”) concept.

A concept kicked off with a highly unpopular and sort of pointless crusade against the “visual pollution” of outdoor advertisements and shop displays.

The city is still not that clean.

It may look cleaner, but it really doesn’t smell any cleaner.

That the Folha has begun running regular coverage packages on civic issues that reflect badly on the current city government is seen by some keen-eyed press watchers as some sort of a political shift in the PSDB-DEM coalition that runs the state (PSDB) and the metropolis (DEM).

Apenas pouco mais da metade dos paulistanos têm coleta seletiva na porta de casa -os outros 5 milhões precisam transportar o próprio lixo até um posto de coleta.

Only a little more than half of S. Paulo city residents have sorted trash collection from their doorstep — another 5 million have to transport their own recyclables to a collection point.

Boa parte do lixo que o paulistano separa, lava e guarda pensando que será reciclado vai parar no aterro, misturado ao lixo comum.

And a good portion of the trash that S. Paulo city residents separate, wash and set aside, thinking it will be recycled, goes straight to the dump, mixed in with common garbage.

Ontem, a aposentada Ilka Piquet, 73, moradora da Vila Madalena (zona oeste), separava embalagens de vidro, papel e isopor para serem levados pelo caminhão de coleta seletiva.

Yesterday, retiree Ilka Piquet, 73, a resident of the Vila Madalena, was separating out glass, paper and styrofoam packages to be set out for the selective trash collection truck.

Mas, por uma sucessão de falhas e de falta de fiscalização por parte da prefeitura, uma parte desse material, em média 35%, não será reaproveitado.

But thanks to a series of failures and a lack of oversight by the city government, part of this material — 35%, on average — will never be recycled.

Muitos dos caminhões, por exemplo, fazem uma compactação excessiva do lixo, quebrando vidros e fundindo plásticos -o que impossibilita a separação. Além disso, alguns itens, como embalagens de xampu ou papel de presente, não têm compradores.

Many of the trucks, for example, compact the trash too heavily, breaking glass and melting plastics — which makes separating the two impossible. Some items, moreover, such as shampoo bottles or gift wrap, have no buyers.

Há mais falhas. Ontem, na Vila Madalena, bairro da dona Ilka, o caminhão da coleta seletiva não passou -o lixo foi levado pelo caminhão de lixo comum e, portanto, direto para o aterro.

There are many failures. Yesterday, in the Vila, where Ilka lives, the recycling truck did not make its run — recyclables were carted off by the regular garbage truck and therefore wound up in the dump.

The Folha has now said twice that there are “many failures.” In the course of this article, however, it will cite only three cases, and never explain how it arrived at its figure of 35% wastage of recyclable, “on average.”

Nor will it present a narrative tying together the supposed “series of failures”– or even present an organized list of them.

A concessionária Loga, responsável pela coleta, disse que o veículo de recicláveis saiu da rota prevista. Até o fechamento desta edição, a empresa desconhecia a razão, mas informou que haverá punição administrativa para os funcionários.

Loga, the concessionaire in charge of the collections, said the recyclables truck had not followed the scheduled route. As of the deadline for this edition, the company did not know why, but said employees would face administrative sanctions.

Mas, segundo moradores, o caminhão da coleta seletiva não passa por lá desde o início deste ano. “É uma grande sacanagem, o tempo que a gente perde para nada”, disse a farmacêutica Cilene Camiloti, 46.

According to residents, however, the recycling truck has not been by since the beginning of this year. “They are really jerking us around, the time we waste, allfor nothing,” said pharmacist Cilene Camiloti, 46.

O desperdício reduz ainda mais a margem de lixo reciclável da cidade, que em 2008 foi de 7% do lixo domiciliar passível de reciclagem e menos de 1% do total produzido.

The wasting of recyclables further reduces the city’s recyclable waste margin, which in 2008 represented 7% of household garbage and less than 1% of all gargage produced.

I wonder how that stacks up against other cities, Brazilian and abroad?

And so on.

In a sidebar, the city government promises to open more waste recycling centers, increasing the number of recycling collectives approved and monitored by Limpurb from 16 to 25 by year’s end.

No, wait, they say they will fund 25 more recycling centers — the main article was unclear on this point — at a cost of R$25 million. They had no comment on the 35% figure cited by the Folha — which never explains how it arrived at that figure.

The analysis that always accompanies this sort of coverage package is by an economist who led Limpurb during the city administration of Marta Suplicy (PT) — defeated by Gilbeto Kassab (DEM) in 2008.

Defeated with a lot of help from the Folha de S. Paulo, mind you, which served essentially as an extension of Kassab’s campaign.

The local term for the sort of blatant subservience to the political machine for which the Folha is notorious is chapa-branca.

There is some interesting information in this analysis.

An excerpt follows, outlining some of the history behind the attempt to organize homeless urban trash pickers — the carroceiros, after the horse- or man-drawn carts that mingle with the Toyota Hiluxes on S. Paulo streets, like vestiges of the Middle Ages (above).

… atualmente, porém, o marco ambiental vem sendo corretamente interligado ao marco social. De sua parte, os catadores passaram a se organizar, a partir da realização, em 1999, do 1º Encontro Nacional de Catadores de Papel, início da formação do Movimento Nacional dos Catadores de Materiais Recicláveis. Por sua vez, o poder público começou a criar centenas de projetos solidários, prevendo a inclusão dos catadores na coleta seletiva.

… currently, however, the environmental aspect is, quite correctly, being interrelated with the social aspect of the problem. For their part, the trash-pickers have begun to organize, starting with the 1999 National Conference of Trash Pickers, from which emerged the National Movement of Recyclable Materials Collectors. For its part, the public administration began to create hundreds of projects in solidarity, with an eye to including the carroceiros in recyling programs.

Mas em 2009 a crise mundial levantou a questão de que não eram mais suficientes as políticas que definiam os princípios, diretrizes e benefícios para uma gestão sustentável de resíduos, em níveis social, ambiental e político, pois, na ponta final, os valores dos materiais recicláveis continuavam a obedecer à lógica de mercado.

But in 2009, the global crisis raised the question of whether the policies defining the principles, directives and benefits of sustainable waste management were no longer sufficient, on the social, environmental and political level, for the bottom line is that the value of recyclable materials continues to obey the logic of the market.

O atual desaquecimento na economia mundial derrubou em até 70% o preço de muitas sucatas e materiais recicláveis, reduzindo drasticamente a renda de catadores e trabalhadores de cooperativas de reciclagem. Comprovou-se, assim, que, se por um lado, a tutela de políticas públicas funcionava, por outro, no contexto econômico, a diretriz continuava sendo mercantilista e liberal.

The current slowdown of the world economy has slashed prices of many recyclables by as much as 70%, drastically reducing the income of carroceiros and workers at recycling collectives. It is well established, therefore, that, if one hand public policy has show it can play a valuable role, on the other, in an economic context, the program remains market-oriented and neoliberal.

The PT is big on integrating workers from the informal economy into the formal economy. This is not necessarily a bad idea.

Stop and hail a singing Venetian oarsman: The Régis Bittencourt near Embu yesterday. Source: Folha de S. Paulo.

It never rains in California,
But girl, let me warn ya
Man, it pours,
Man, it pours …

Neuza — my wife, nicknamed “The News” — returns from the morning dog parade with some keen on-the-scene reporting along with some fascinating gossip from the vigia — the 24-7-365 watchman hired by the residents of the Av. das Corujas to keep an eye on things.

The vigia lives in a little guard shack across the creek from the park, and apparently collects rent from carroceiros — families of homeless trash pickers, with their little horse- or man-drawn carts, who live from recycling — who camp there. Among other things.

First of all, part of the Prefeitura’s million-R$ improvement of our park — adding walking paths, drainage, and stairs up to the playing field, and planting trees and bamboo groves — as already been wiped out by yesterday’s rains. It does not seem built to last.

Neuza promises to document the estrago photographically when she has time. She is racing around today trying to avoid a R$500 fine on our vehicle inspection, after our Celta was found to be missing a R$10 hose that no one has in stock. (Around deadlines, authorized inspectors suddenly have no more appointments open.)

“I wonder what the city will do about this?” muses The News to the vigia, eyeing the wreckage.

The vigia laughs and says, “You really think the city runs anything around here? If the Comendador doesn’t give the thumbs up, nothing gets done around here.”

Apparently, the reason there is no local bus service at the triple intersection — a natural place for a bus stop, and which really needs a stoplight, by the way — is that the Comendador, some sort of local AAA-league mafioso, had the bus route re-routed to stop in front of his house.

Or so says the vigia, with a wink and a forefinger laid alongside the nose. (I refuse to pay $R3 a month for “security” to the mano on a moto with the bogus paperwork who whistles up and down the street all night, but The News pays him behind my back. She is afraid not to.)

Even more interesting is the video The News mentions over breakfast, and promises to forward via e-mail, posted to You Tube by one of the major nightly news broadcasts, she says.

The News says a prominent engineer — I believe he is the same expert cited in a recent report by Vio O Mundo — affirms to a wide audience that no dredging work has been done on the Tietê River for the past 3 to 4 years.

Journalist Luis Nassif concluded as much recently, in a post titled “The Tietê was not being dredged.”

By this account, which still needs fleshing out, city dredging contracts for the Tietê got tied up in litigation over the competitive bidding process — exactly when is not clear — and the state water and power agency, the DAEE, finally issued a no-bid work order just last week, citing the present emergency.

In the Vio o Mundo piece, Conceição Lemes had claimed that the state found no private-sector takers for competitive bidding on a public-private partnership for ongoing dredging of the Tietê, announced in 2006 — possibly resulting in a nearly three-year stoppage of dredging work.

Who will now win the emergency no-bid contract arguably caused thereby?

Meanwhile, in Grande São Paulo:

Alagamento na Régis, na altura de Embu, interditou a pista sentido São Paulo por cinco horas e provocou lentidão de 20 km

Flooding on the Régis Bittencourt highway, near Embu, shut down São Paulo traffic for five hours and caused 20km of stop-and-go traffic.

I could be mistaken, but I believe Embu is where the major highways entering São Paulo — all of them outsourced, mostly to private Spanish concerns, I think – flow into the Maluf-built traffic complex that includes the Túnel Tribuna de Justiça. I am still learning the geography of this crazy cruciform city.

And meanwhile, in Mogi das Cruces …

Mogi is a grim little town in the Vale do Paraiba, whose only claim to fame is as a transfer point on the alternative route to the North Shore beaches. We avoid it like the plague. Not only is it a truly horrible place, but its municipal budget seems to rely heavily on a sort of web of electronic speed traps. And besies, the road that descends the Serra do Mar is a deathtrap.

We have already received two tickets in the mail, claiming we exceeded the speed limit in a 30 kph zone in Mogi as we looped back endlessly, looking for a way the hell out of Mogi.

The traffic signage in Mogi is Kafkaesque and, it almost seems, deliberately disinformative.

Today, the Mogi News reports: Local politicians and the state water and power agency (DAEE) say (1) that their dredging of the local river, the Jundiaí, was “satisfactory” and “an excellent job” that has spared the municipality the effects of this year’s rainy season, and (2) that the dredging of the local river may now have to be repeated.

Buried well below the fold is the fact that a forty-minute river cruise by local and state officials along the Jundiaí River ,apparently designed to generate a photo-op on how well flood-control was working in the area, took an hour and half and could not be completed due to obstructions in the river.

Mogi News also reports as follows in today’s online edition:

Caos: Os condutores tiveram de enfrentar mais de oito quilômetros de congestionamento ontem à tarde

Chaos: Drivers face more than 8km of traffic congestion yesterday afternoon.

Adding 1 +1, we get: As the city fathers and the state water and power agency tout the effectiveness of their flood control programs during a failed Potemkin Village cruise along the Jundiaí, in another part of town, drivers stuck in the mud and flood are “extremely angry.”

Mais uma vez a chuva trouxe problemas para a região do Alto Tietê. Casas e comércios foram invadidos pela água e motoristas ficaram ilhados no trânsito. Somente na divisa de Suzano com Mogi, o transbordamento de uma valeta de drenagem gerou congestionamento de mais de oito quilômetros.

Once again the rains brought problems to the Upper Tietê region. Houses and business were flooded and motorists were stranded in traffic. Along the border between the municipalities of Mogi and Suzano alone, the flooding of a drainage ditch caused traffic to back up more than 8km.

Alguns motoristas, cansados de esperar e com medo de atravessar a pista coberta pela água, se arriscaram passando sobre o canteiro que divide a via. Segundo relato de condutores, um trajeto que dura, em média, dez minutos, ontem, levou 40 minutos para ser concluído.

Some motorists, tired of waiting and afraid to traverse the flooded section of road, risked crossing over the median. Drivers reported that a trip that normally takes ten minutes on average took 40 minutes yesterday.

A chuva começou por volta das 14 horas e, em pouco tempo, a SP-66, que em Suzano recebe o nome de rua Doutor Prudente de Moraes e em Mogi avenida Lourenço de Souza Franco, ficou completamente alagada. Os motoristas ficaram revoltados. “Já estou há duas horas parado aqui e o meu carro não vai conseguir passar por esse trecho inundado”, comentou o economista Edson Brandão.

The rain began around 2:00 p.m. and in short order the SP-66, known in Suzano as Dr. Prudent de Moraes Street and in Mogi as Lourenço de Souza Avenue, was completely flooded. Motorists were extremely angry. “I have been sitting here for two hours and my car is not going to make it past this flooded stretch,” said economist Edson Brandão.

O superintendente do Departamento de Águas e Energia Elétrica (DAEE), Ubirajara Tannuri Felix, classificou como “satisfatória” a obra de desassoreamento de 8,39 quilômetros do rio Jundiaí, realizada pelo órgão entre junho e dezembro de 2008. Entretanto, após percorrer ontem um trecho de dois quilômetros do afluente do Tietê no distrito de Jundiapeba, ele admitiu a possibilidade de refazer o serviço ainda este ano.

DAEE superintendent Ubirajara Tannuri Felix has called the dredging of an 8.39 km strech of the Jundiaí river, undertaken by the agency between June and December 2008, “satisfactory.” However, after inspecting a 2km stretch of the Tietê River tributary yesterday in the Jundiapeba district, he admitted the possibility of redoing the work sometime this year.

Na avaliação de Felix, ainda existem trechos do rio que “merecem uma atenção especial do DAEE e da Prefeitura de Mogi, a fim de evitar um comprometimento da configuração do canal do rio”.

In Felix’s view, stretches of river remain which “deserve special attention from the DAEE and the Mogi city government, so as to avoid compromising the configuration of the river channel.”

Actually, this is a nominal clause: “a compromising of the configuration of the river channel.”

Plain Portuguese: to avoid flooding.

Segundo ele, em sete meses de trabalho, foram retirados 62.840 metros cúbicos de sedimento, o que equivale a 6.284 caminhões de 10 metros cúbicos. A previsão inicial era de que fossem retirados cerca de 50 mil m³ de sedimento.

According to the superintendent, in seven months of work, 62,840 cubic meters of sediment, equivalent to 6,284 truckloads of ten cubic meters, were taken out of the river. The original plan called for removal of some 50,000 cubic meters.

Say 210 days — including non-working days, to be sure, so the number is a bit skewed — and that is 300 cubic meters a day, or 30 truckloads.

“Foi um trabalho muito bem-feito. Afinal, o rio está tendo vazão para chegar ao Tietê e até agora suportou o volume de chuvas das últimas semanas sem causar alagamentos nas casas que ficam à margem”, avaliou. “Contudo, passado o período de chuvas, teremos de voltar aqui para avaliar a possibilidade de um novo serviço. Será um trabalho de monitoramento constante e, se houver necessidade, o DAEE está disposto a continuar essa parceria com a Prefeitura”, garantiu.

“The work was very well done,” he said. “After all, the river is dumping a heavy volume of water  into the Tietê, and so far has withstood the heavy rains of the last few weeks without flooding the houses on its banks,” he assessed.

If you go back to the news morgue, you will find that the city government of Mogi has been evicting residents from the flood plain of the Jundiaí for something like a year. So that there may no longer be any residents there to be victimized by flooding. Point requires follow-up.

“However, when the rainy season ends, we will have to come back here and evaluate the need for a new project. It will be a job of constant monitoring, and if needed, DAEE is ready to do this in partnership with the city government.”

Felix se refere ao investimento de R$ 2 milhões do governo do Estado para realizar a obra. O processo de licenciamento e bota fora dos sedimentos ficam a cargo da administração municipal.

Felix cites an investment of R$2 million by the state government in the project. The contracting and sediment removal is up to the city.

Ao percorrer o rio Jundiaí ontem com o prefeito Marco Bertaiolli (DEM), o superintendente chegou à conclusão de que ao menos cinco pontos do rio, entre a rua Indonésia e a ponte da avenida Japão, merecem uma limpeza profunda. Além de terra acumulada, o rio ainda concentra um grande volume de lixo doméstico. “Precisamos de um trabalho forte de educação ambiental com a população”, afirmou.

While cruising along the Jundiaí yesterday with Mogi mayor Marco Bertaiolli (ex-PFL/DEM), the DAEE superintendent came to the conclusion that there are at least five points along the river, between Indonesia Street and the Japan Avenue Bridge, that require an intense cleanup. Besides accumulated soil, the river also contains a great deal of household garbage.

The mayor of São Paulo — ex-PFL/DEM, who lists his profession sometimes as “economist,” sometimes as “construction and real estate entrepreneur” — has been criticized for scheduling fewer trash pick-ups, then explaining increased garbage volume in the rivers as the fault of irresponsible, uneducated residents whose piled-up trash has washed down into them.

(While raising property taxes 45% on businesses and 30% on residences, on average, citywide. A non-voter in Brazil, I do pay taxes here, and I really dislike this guy, I confess.)

Para Bertaiolli, o resultado do aprofundamento da calha do Jundiaí saiu a contento. “Não fossem as obras de desassoreamento, as chuvas dos últimos dias, aliadas ao volume de água que desce da represa (Jundiaí), essa região de Jundiapeba já estaria debaixo d´água e a Prefeitura com dificuldades para alojar as famílias desabrigadas”, afirmou o prefeito.

Bertaiollo says the deepening of the Jundiaí River bed yielded good results. “If it were not for the dredging work, the rains of recent days, combined with the volume of water coming down from the Jundiaí dam, would have left the Jundiapeba area underwater and the city government with the problem of housing people driven out of their homes,” the mayor said.

Again, apparently the city government had anticipated the floods, driving the residents out on its own initiative.

A expedição pelas águas do rio Jundiaí estava prevista para durar 40 minutos, mas, por conta de “imprevistos” no trajeto, o passeio durou pouco mais de 1h30. Duas árvores bloquearam a passagem das embarcações. A maior delas, com 12 metros de comprimento, estava na altura do Jardim Aeroporto. Os barcos tiveram de dar meia volta. O secretário municipal do Verde e Meio Ambiente, Romildo Campello, prometeu retirar as árvores e parte do lixo após o período de chuvas.

The expedition along the Jundiaí was scheduled for 40 minutes, but due to “unforeseen circumstances” along the way took a little over an hour and a half. Two trees blocked the path of the boats. The biggest, measuring 12m, was encountered in the vicinity of Jardim Aeroporto. The boats were forced to turn around and go back.  City environment secretary Romildo Campello promised to remove the trees and some of the garbage once the rainy season is over.

O presidente da Câmara Municipal, Mauro Araújo (PSDB), e mais cinco vereadores – Pedro Komura (PSDB), Expedito Ubiratan Tobias (PR), Carlos Evaristo (DEM), Osvaldo do Mercado Real (PPS) e Geraldo Tomaz Augusto (PMDB) também participaram da expedição.

The president of the city council, Mauro Araújo (PSDB), along with five councilmembers …. also took part in the expedition.

Beware of people with the first name Ubiratan or Ubiratã.

I’ll explain later.

In the meantime, consider this as another contribution to an ongoing study in “the political rhetoric of force majeure” that I am conducting.

Orwellian central proposition of this topos: “Our planning has yielded excellent results, except in the case of contingencies not planned for.”

The state has been run for the last decade — or more — by essentially the same political establishment, which hopes to win the presidency next year on a platform something like: “São Paulo: A model for Brazil.”

I say “or more” because the current mayor, Gilberto Kassab, for example, was a city councilmember leading the bloc supporting Paulo Maluf, from 1993 to 1997. He was then appointed secretary of planning by Maluf’s handpicked successor, Celso Pitta — both of these jobs left out of the mayor’s Wikipedia poltical bio — and finally vice-mayor to José Serra, assuming the mayor’s office when Serra won the state governorship in 2008.

(Both Maluf — appointed mayor of S. Paulo by the military regime in 1969 — and the late Pitta have been indicted on numerous corruption charges.

The PSDB loves to criticize its principal opponent, the PT, over its bargain with the devil — its national alliance with the PMDB, that is — but its own Faustian bargain with the forces of Malufism exudes more than a whiff of sulfur as well.)

Sabesp, notably, for example — the stock market-listed, state-controlled water company (NYSE ADR:SBS) — has been running an intense campaign of utopian TV advertisements touting the pay-off of its long-term development plan. Not a rain cloud in sight.

On a rainy day however,, if you happen to shift your glance from the window to the TV while one of these ads is running, you experience an effect very similar to the sudden transition from B&W to Technicolor in The Wizard of Oz.

Photo credit: Estado de S. Paulo

A strategically located tunnel in the Zona Sul (southern district) of S. Paulo is closed by floods for 38 hours thanks to a perfect storm of engineering fubars.

Ever since I started covering enterprise technology, I have developed a taste for massive systems failures of all kinds: stock market trading platform crashes, the Great Northeastern Blackout of 2003 — I personally had to walk back from the Port Authority to Fort Greene, Brooklyn — the credit card system outage on Xmas Eve here in Sambodia, things like that.

I love Six Sigma and all other methodologies– crackpot or otherwise — for staving off the Second Law of Thermodynamics long enough to recover one’s investment.

And here in the land of explosively privatized public utilities, rent-seeking behavior au go-go, and the exploding electrical transformer — it happens every time it rains, and if you are lucky, it happens in a cascading series — a man with a fetish like mine finds a lot of grist for his mill.

The Folha de S. Paulo reports.

Intriguing side note: They found two fish swimming in the tunnel. How did they get there?

A água invadiu o túnel rapidamente por volta das 2h de anteontem e chegou a atingir 2,5 metros de altura. Um carro ficou preso na enchente e foi totalmente encoberto pela água. Ele só pôde ser retirado ontem à tarde (leia ao lado).

The water invaded the tunnel suddenly around 2 a.m. on Thursday and rose to some 2.5m in depth. A car caught in the flood was totally covered by water and could only be extracted yesterday afternoon …

Segundo a prefeitura, o alagamento ocorreu após uma queda de energia, que paralisou as duas bombas que sugam a água que entra no túnel. Uma bomba reserva, que tem gerador próprio e é ligada três minutos após uma pane, não funcionou porque o painel que a aciona foi atingido pela água.

The city government said the flooding took place after an energy failure, which put two pumps, which suck up the water entering the tunnel, out of commission. A backup pump, which has its own generator and was turned on three minutes after the power went out, failed to function because the control panel that operates it got wet.

And now we hear from the most chronically pissed-off, put-upon and ulcer-plagued body of professionals anywhere in the world, perhaps: The Brazilian corps of engineers.

Para João Jorge da Costa, do Instituto de Engenharia, a enchente ocorreu por uma falha de projeto do túnel. “Tudo bem. Entrou uma quantidade grande de água, faltou energia, o gerador não ligou. Mas um quadro elétrico não pode ficar em uma área ao alcance da água. E, numa situação dessas, é preciso que exista um plano de contingência também, que determine as ruas que serão fechadas e por onde o trânsito será desviado”

In the view of João Jorge da Costa of the Engineering Institute, the flood occurred because of a design flaw in the tunnel. “Fine, a large quantity of water flowed in, the power was cut off, the generator didn’t work. But an electrical outlet should not be located in an area liable to get wet. In a situation like this, furthermore, there has to be a contingency plan that determines what streets will be blocked off and where the traffic will be re-routed.”

The normally diligent Brazilian Wikipedians — are there any more diligent? — have little to say about the affected structure:

O Complexo Viário Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de São Paulo é um importante conjunto de vias subterrâneas da cidade de São Paulo.

Period.

Where exactly is it located? When was it built? Who built it? Where is it located? Why is it “important”? What are its engineering specifications?

The Wikipedia entry appears to have been cribbed straight from the city government’s Web site, which is the only source cited. I would bet you that a city employee authored the post. Brazilian politicians engage in a whole lot of autohagiography by proxy on Wikipedia, I tend to find.

The usual quick, lazy google on “Túnel Tribunal de Justiça” +história turns up very little of the missing background.

The first question that tends to occur to one in such cases is, “Was it built by Maluf?”

Appointed mayor of S. Paulo by the military regime in 1969, Maluf, a vice-president at Eucatex who kept his day job while in office, famously had a viaduct constructed, on the public dime, between his home and his workplace, to ease his commute.

[searching ...]

Ah, here is something: The tunnel shows up on a list of tunnel projects using the NATM (New Austrian Tunnelling Method) that have suffered collapses during construction (in this case, in 1993):

Casos de colapso da estrutura na construção de túneis pelo método NATM são comuns em todo o mundo desde o início de seu uso na década de 1970. ….

Some context is provided by a blog called Motorized Apocalypse, critical of  automobile-centric urban planning:

A avenida Roberto Marinho faz parte da ligação viária entre o Morumbi e o centro da cidade.

Av. Roberto Marinho is part of the traffic interchange between Morumbi and the downtoan area.

Trata-se de um mega-projeto urbanístico-financeiro, implantado em parceria por especuladores imobiliários e poder público, com o objetivo de transferir o coração do capitalismo brasileiro para as margens do rio Pinheiros (e ganhar muito dinheiro com isso).

This was an urban planning and financial megaproject, undertaken in partnership with real-estate speculators and the public administration, with the goal of transferring the heart of Brazilian capitalism to the shores of the Pinheiros River (and making a lot of money in the process.)

O território rasgado pela avenida Águas Espraiadas era, até o final da década de 80, uma região residencial que misturava moradias de classe média com favelas. Muito longe “da cidade” para despertar algum interesse das construtoras.

The territory split by the  Av. Águas Espraiadas was, until the late 1980s, a residential area with a mix of middle class dwellings and shantytowns. Too far from “the city” to awaken the interest of construction companies.

A avenida foi inaugurada em 1996 por Paulo Maluf e custou R$600 milhões aos cofres públicos. A Águas Espraiadas era, na verdade, parte do complexo viário que incluiu a extensão da avenida Faria Lima, os túneis Ayrton Senna e Tribunal de Justiça e algumas passagens subterrâneas e viadutos por onde só passam carros e motos.

The avenue was inaugurated in 1996 by Paulo Maluf and cost the public coffers R$600 million. Águas Espraiadas was, in fact, part of a larger traffic complex that included the extension of Av. Faria Lima, the Ayrton Senna and Tribunal de Justiça Tunnels, and other underground passages and overpasses built exclusively for cars and motorcycles.

A construção dos túneis e avenidas foi marcada por uma enxurrada de denúncias de superfaturamento. Até hoje ninguém foi condenado, afinal a notícia “fulano condenado por superfaturamento no túnel Tribunal de Justiça”, como diria um colunista do jornal dos Frias, seria piada pronta.

The construction of the tunnels and avenues was marked by a flurry of accusations regarding overbilling [i.e., kickbacks]. To date, no one has been convicted. After all, the headline “so and so convicted for kickbacks on the Tribunal de Justiça Tunnel,” as a certain columnist for the Folha de S. Paulo might say, would be a cheesy joke.

The reference is to humor columnist Tutty “Buemba! Buemba! Buemba!” Vasquez.

Maluf –  the subject of a standing arrest warrant in New York for money laundering and foreign corrupt practices, or something like that, issued by Henry Morgenthau, the Manhattan D.A. — was mayor of S. Paulo in 1969-1971 (appointed by military dictatorship) and again in 1993-1996.

The ghost of a familiar scenario begins to form out of the mists of time.

Maluf.

Kickbacks.

Shoddy construction … watered cement ….

Maluf’s hand-picked successor, Celso Pitta, was recently arrested on corruption charges arising from activities during his mandate and subsequent shennanigans. He has subsequently died.

The current mayor, Gilberto Kassab, a real estate broker and construction entrepreneur, was Pitta’s Secretary of  City Planning after serving as a key member of the Malufist benches in the city council … facts, astonishingly, left out of his Wikipedia profile.

Adding a brief note in the Discussion section.

Elected vice-mayor along with José Serra in 2004, Kassab took over when Serra ran successfully for state governor in 2006, and was elected mayor under his own steam in 2008.

Kassab made two of his first official acts the  nomination of two of his brothers, both of them in the civil engineering business, to key posts at SPTrans (city bus authority) and the Metrô (the subway authority).

Motorized Apocalypse, a vehicle of the insanely courageous Critical Mass pro-bicycle movement in S. Paulo, finishes up with a jeremiad against the automocar.

Na Águas Espraiadas de hoje, lojas de carros, postos de gasolina, lanchonetes drive-through, vazios urbanos e algumas obras de condomínios de alto padrão. Trânsito? Nenhum. Ciclovias, calçadas decentes ou corredores de ônibus? Também não.

[....]

It is actually amazing how deep into the Google results you have to go before you start picking up bits of the context and history of this engineering project. Maybe one would have better luck on Google Scholar … academic studies of urban planning cases …

The main Google results are overwhelmingly dedicated to the breaking news story, repeated verbatim by dozens and dozens of news outlets.

I mean, isn’t that what Google News is for?

[still searching ...]

A forum at Skyscraper City includes a summary of the Faria Lima project, which created a sort of bargain-basement Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) in the middle of a surbuan middle-class residential neighborhood — which persists down to the present day, like crabgrass — along the banks, and inside the flood plain, of the foetid Pinheiros River.

Let us clip that summary of the 1993 Paulo “The Brazilian Robert Moses” Maluf traffic engineering plan quickly to the record for future reference:

Realização de todas as obras e serviços necessários referentes aos seguintes melhoramentos viários:

• Alargamento e prolongamento da rua do Sumidouro;
• Prolongamento da Av. Faria Lima;
• Alargamento e prolongamento da av. Helio Pellegrino;
• Alargamento e prolongameto da Rua Funchal e Olimpíadas.

Realização de todas as obras e serviços necessários à implantação dos seguintes equipamentos:

• Viaduto da Av. Bandeirantes, na confluência da Praça Roger Patti com as Ruas Guaraiúva e Ribeiro do Vale;
• Acessos viários e de passarelas do conjunto das pontes Eusébio Matosos e Bernardo Goldfarb sobre o Rio Pinheiros;
• Acessos viários e passarelas da ponte Cidade Jardim sobre o Rio Pinheiros;
• Novo Terminal de ônibus, para o remanejamento do existente nas proximidades do Largo da Batata.
• Construção de passagem em desnível nos cruzamentos da Av. Faria Lima com Av. Rebouças/ Eusébio Matosos e Cidade Jardim
• Execução na Av. Juscelino Kubitchek do túnel Tribunal de Justiça até a Av. Marginal Pinheiros, incluindo as conexões com a Av. Marginal Pinheiros sentido sul.
• Execução de intervenção de requalificação urbana do Largo da Batata.
• Execução e implantação dos termos da LAP da Operação Urbana Consorciada Faria Lima

My god, if you want to see an unholy mess today, drive through the Largo da Batata.

The postcard-friendly Roberto "Beyond Citizen Kane" Marinho, Journalist Bridge over the Pinheiros River. Note the oily sheen. Not pictured for the postcard: the persistent stench of human excrement and acrid petrochemicals.

If you were one of the lucky 500 Paulistas with private helicopters, you had no trouble returning from the beach after the 2010 — the year the monoliths invade Jupiter! — New Year celebration.

If not, you found yourself slogging through an entire Vale do Paraiba — the natural Rio-S. Paulo geographical corridor — flooded up to the wazoo and beyond.

The Estadão has good coverage of events in the entire region, I thought.

The Folha de S. Paulo, on the other hand, leads today with another deluge of hand-wringing, “oh, the humanity!”follow-ups to the deadliest incident so far — a landslide that wiped out a tourist pousada in Angra dos Reis, in Rio de Janeiro.

(Where the nuclear power plants are.)

When foreign tourists are terrified, stranded, and looking to flee the country, it’s bad for business, and therefore news.

When hix from the stix are, it’s just more of Nature’s cruel majesty and sincere expressions of compassionate social Darwinism.

Correspondents to the Blog do Nassif, and others, I imagine, were e-mailing in reports received by cell phone from cities isolated from their normal supply lines by the flooding. Requesting mattresses and food staples. If you are a HMMVV owner, here is your chance to shore up your ailing eco-reputation.

One small town — São Luiz do Paraitinga — is lamenting the destruction of its historic 19th-century cathedral. The Mogi-Bertioga highway closed, as did the Rio-Santos (BR 101) and, as we heard from G1/Globo yesterday, the spectacular Via Anchieta, the main route home from Boiçucanga, Caraguatatuba, Iguape and points beyond both north and south.

Boy are we glad we stayed home and watched subtitled episodes of “House” with the cats and dogs.

Meanwhile, in the Estadão, an interview with a USP geographer who recalls the history of the development of the Tietê and Pinheiros River flood zone.



A tragédia deixou “constrangida e indignada, mas não surpresa” a geógrafa paulistana Odette Carvalho de Lima Seabra. Autora de Os Meandros dos Rios nos Meandros do Poder: O Processo de Valorização dos Rios e das Várzeas do Tietê e do Pinheiros, apresentado como tese de doutorado na USP em 1987, a professora considera corretas as medidas tomadas nos últimos anos para mitigar as enchentes. Mas o sistema já está próximo de seu limite.

The tragedy left S. Paulo geographer Odette Carvalho de Lima Seabra “ashamed and indignant, but not suprised.” Author of The Meanders of the Rivers and the Meanders of Power: The Valorization of the Pinheiros and Tietê Rivers and Shorelines, presented as a USP doctoral thesis in 1987, the professor considers the measures taken in recent years to mitigate floods to have been the correct ones, but says that the system is already nearing its limit.

For várzea = shoreline, I had to look it up in a glossary of cartographic terminology.

A good Google on “+glossary +[subject of interest]” is often helpful.

The professor recounts the history of the development of the várzea areas of the two principal rivers of S. Paulo. As many have commented, the Jardim Pantanal — “Swamp Gardens,” appropriately — area in the eastern zone of our city was never fit for human habitation, but an unscrupulous city councilman encouraged squatting in the area anyway, and then city officials decided to urbanize the area with permanent infrastructure.

A common pattern: Squatting, development, and eventually ejection of the squatters, who lack title to their land — this is happening in the eastern district as we speak — and finally some fancy real estate arbitrage (in New York parlance, “flipping”) by unusually lucky insiders.

The professor recalls how Light, the Canadian power monopoly established in the late 19th century, claimed title to the entire várzea region of both rivers until the 1960s, when the dictatorship-era government “expropriated” the land at prices highly favorable to Light, in order to straighten the river course — both rivers are natural sinusoidal meanderers along a relatively flat planalto — and develop beltways inside the — checking the glossary again — “mean high water line.”

The lazy, Macunaimic Pinheiros River, 1929. In the 1960s, the generalíssimos finally forced it onto the straight and narrow path.

But first, starting in 1928, Light reversed the course of the Pinheiros River:

Isso foi em novembro de 1928. A inversão era para canalizar a água para uma represa que já funcionava no sopé da serra, em Cubatão. Pelos decretos, para compensar seus investimentos, a Light ganhava o direito de desapropriar imóveis de toda a várzea do Rio Pinheiros, “para fins de utilidade pública”. O que sempre foi prerrogativa do governo central. Essa área seria delimitada por uma tal “linha da máxima enchente”, que encontrei em mapas confeccionados no Canadá, ainda feitos de pano. Tomaram como referência a famosa enchente de 1929, a maior que houve em São Paulo. E tudo passou a ser da Light, de onde a água chegou até o leito do rio. Entendi nisso a demarcação de um território. E nós, que estudamos geografia, sabemos o que o território é: uma jurisdição de poder. Daí para a frente, um fiscal de terras passou a proibir as pessoas de usarem a várzea, fosse para jogar bola ou levar cabras para beber água.

This was in 1928. The redirection of the flow was in order to channel water to a [hydroelectric] dam already in operation in the foothills of the high plains, in Cubatão [near the port of Santos]. Light was favored with decrees, designed to compensate it for its investments, that allowed it to expropriate real property all along the shoreline of the Pinheiros River, “in the interest of public utility.” This had always been a prerogative of the central government. The area was bounded by the so-called “maximum flood line,” as I discovered on maps made in Canada, printed on cloth, no less. They used the infamous flood of 1929, the worst in history, as the benchmark. And all this land, from the benchmark down to the waterline, became the property of Light. This I understand as the demarcation of a territory, and we geographers know exactly what that implies: the jurisdiction of a constituted authority. From that point on, inspectors barred people from using any of this territory, whether for games of football or for watering the goats.

This benchmark would not fly by contemporary standards, I understand.

If I am reading right, a 19-year Metonic cycle (tidal datum epoch) would be taken. But to be honest, I just googled that up. Urban planners, set me straight on this, would you?

E como a companhia conseguiu o direito de revender essas terras de ‘utilidade pública’ depois?

And how did the company aquire the rights to resell these “public utility” lands later?

Eles fizeram acordos com os expropriados, sempre estipulando critérios e preços. Houve movimentos de resistência de moradores, que foram ao presidente Getúlio Vargas, até que ele se manifestasse contra. Mas a essa altura tudo estava sob litígio e começou o movimento dos advogados, ganhando cobres às custas dos expropriados.

They settledwith the people who had their lands expropriated, setting their own standards and prices. There was organized resistance by residents, who pressed their case with President Vargas until he expressed his opposition to the scheme. But by this point everything was tied up in litigation and the lawyers had taken over, making money at the expense of the original landowners.

A proximidade das pistas do leito dos rios nas marginais é muito criticada por urbanistas. Por que elas foram parar lá?

The proximity of the beltways to the riverbed is sharply criticized by urban planners. How did they come to be there?

Nos anos 60, com o Plano de Metas, foi preciso abrir espaço para circularem os automóveis. Tem início outro padrão e modo de vida. O Estado planejou as marginais e pressionou a Light: “Agora, vamos intervir, porque é preciso modernizar a estrutura de transporte do País”. Veja que, até então, em São Paulo andava-se de carroça, bonde ou barco – cerca de 500 deles transitavam no Tietê. Com a entrada da indústria automobilística, o transporte por rio desaparece e o ferroviário entra em declínio. Os bondes saíram de circulação não porque as pessoas não mais os quisessem, mas porque outra opção de transporte foi imposta goela abaixo.

In the 1960s, with the Plan of Economic Goals, it was necessary to open up spaces in which automobiles could circulate. The State planned the beltways and pressured Light: “We are now going to intervene because it is necessary to modernize the national transportation system.” Remember that until that time, paulistas got around by railway, tram and boat — nearly 500 boats worked the Tietê River. With the rise of the auto industry, river transportation died out and the railways started to decline. The trams were discontinued, not because people didn’t want them anymore, but because another transportation option was forced down their throat.

Just like Los Angeles, with its extinct Red Cars and incestuous aquifer oligopolies– as depicted in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.

I always tell Neuza that the main thing that creeps me out about S. Paulo is the degree to which it reminds me of Lost Angles — or better, of a sort of failed Los Angeles where the fantastic Metropolis-style cloverleafs in the sky are still under construction half a century later (the famous Rodoanel, slated for completion next year but unlikely to make it, they say.)

I grew up in L.A.

I never want to go back.

And yet, if for Jack Nicholson in Polanski’s film, the word expressing all that is ineffably perverse in the human condition was “Chinatown,” for me it is “Sambodia.”

The press has dubbed it the alagão, rhyming it with the apagão (chronic electricity shortages) of 2000-01 or so. Some wag has framed a neat little political satire here: The sign reads "The New Tietê River: a project of the state government of S. Paulo. Budget: R$1.3 billion."

Situations arise because of the weather
And no kinds of love are better than others
–The Velvet Underground

Twitter correspondent @Bringo hears tell that we are flood-ravaged and underwater here in S. Paulo.

Not quite true, although the Zona Leste (eastern district) community of Jardim Pantanal,– Swamp Gardens, appropriately –, pop. 60,000,  is receiving a lot of media attention.

The city plans to start removing residents from the persistently flooded area while registering them for a temporary rent subsidy and subsequent placement in public housing.

(Our old cleaning lady, Val, once commented that she would rather die than move out of her eastern district squatter’s shack into a COHAB.)

Political opponents of Mayor Kassab have been heard to use the phrase “ethnic cleansing.”

Meanwhile, in the Observatório da Imprensa, Luciano Martins Costa looks at the drabbest but most essential topic and the deluge of loaded language used to describe it in recent days.

Os jornais paulistas voltam a se ocupar das fortes chuvas e das enchentes que neste mês já fizeram quase duas dezenas de vítimas fatais. Novamente ocupam as primeiras páginas imagens fortes de cidadãos enfrentando a água imunda que cobre as ruas para tentar chegar ao trabalho ou voltar para suas casas.

The S. Paulo papers are once again focusing on the heavy rains and floods that have already claimed nearly two dozen lives this month. Once again we see the front pages occupied by powerful images of citizens coping with the filthy water that covers their streets, trying to get to work or return home.

Como sempre, os repórteres colhem depoimentos desalentados daqueles que são humilhados, dia sim, dia não, pelas circunstâncias da cidade onde tentam realizar seus sonhos. Como em todas as ocasiões anteriores, a imprensa faz o relato dos transtornos e dos danos, mas não consegue relacionar efeitos com causas.

As always, reporters are out collecting the same old eyewitness statements from residents humiliated by the state of the city where they strive to realize their dreams. As aways, the papers register the damages and havoc, but cannot manage to tie effects to their causes.

A  cobertura dos fatos é apenas parcial, pela impossibilidade de registrar todos os problemas que ocorrem na região metropolitana de uma cidade como São Paulo. Na Zona Leste da cidade, um bairro inteiro com mais de doze mil moradores permanece sob a lama há uma semana.

The reporting of the facts is merely partial due to the impossibility of recording all the problems that occur in the metro area of a city as large as S. Paulo. In the eastern district, an entire neighborhood remains buried under the mud a whole week after the storm.

Nenhum jornal se dispôs a levantar a história daquela comunidade, construída numa região inabitável por meio de loteamentos clandestinos promovidos por um vereador.

Not a single paper made the effort to uncover the history of that community, built in an uninhabitable area through illegal squats and actively promoted by a city council member.

Os números das vítimas não são precisos, porque os agentes da defesa civil simplesmente não conseguem chegar a todos os lugares atingidos pelas enchentes. E a imprensa, como se sabe, é alimentada pelas planilhas das autoridades.

Victim numbers are not precise because civil defense workers simply cannot get to all the locations hit by flooding. And the press, as we know, feeds on an exclusive diet of  spreadsheets from official sources.

Além disso, falta sensibilidade aos jornalistas que contam o sofrimento da população. Mesmo retratada parcialmente, a situação deveria ser classificada como muito mais grave do que expressa a palavra “transtorno”, usada pela Folha de S.Paulo, por exemplo, na edição de quinta-feira (17/12).

Moreover, journalists covering the suffering of the populace lack sensitivity. Even with the merely partial coverage, the situation out to be described as much more serious than the mere “nuisance” used by the Folha de S. Paulo in its December 12 edition.

Quem perde a casa, com todos os móveis e bens que custaram uma vida para conseguir, não pode estar sofrendo apenas “transtornos”.

Someone who loses their house, along the furniture and belongings that took a lifetime to collect, cannot be said to be suffering from a mere “nuisance.”

Talvez faltem também palavras aos jornalistas. A cada nuvem escura que sobrevoa a cidade, repetem-se os jargões, como se a permanência do drama obstruísse a imaginação dos repórteres.

Journalists also seem to find themselves at a loss for words. With each dark cloud that looms over the city, they mouth the same old ired jargon, as if the enduring and repetitive nature of this drama was clogging their imaginations.

As chuvas que atingem as grandes cidades do Sudeste brasileiro expõem também os limites do jornalismo.

The rains that hit the large cities of the Brazilian Southeast also expose the limitations of journalism.

Passadas duas semanas de tempestades intermitentes, os jornais seguem registrando recordes de índices pluviométricos. Quase todos os dias chove certa porcentagem acima do que supostamente deveria chover em tais ou quais períodos. E parece não existir ninguém capaz de relacionar efeitos a causas.

After two weeks of intermittent storms, the papers keep on recording the fact of record-setting rainfall. Almost every day it rains a little above the percentage expected of a given period. And there seems to be no capacity for relating effects to causes.

Dezenas de entrevistados citam as mudanças climáticas e autoridades empurram a culpa para o santo fundador da igreja católica. Urbanistas se referem à falta de planejamento das nossas cidades, mas nenhum jornal se dispôs a abrir o mapa e revelar os erros que ainda hoje estão agravando o problema.

Dozens of interview subjects cite climate changes, while officials push the blame off on the holy founder of the Catholic church.

There is a saying, much cited, that Saint Peter — on this rock-solid foundation I shall build the City of God! — is the patron saint of rain (as Saint Barbara, or her synergistic counterpart Iênsã, is the patron saint of thunder).

Urban planning experts cite the lack of planning in our cities, but not a single newspaper makes the effort to open up a map to reveal the errors that continue to aggravate the situation down to the present day.

Na terça-feira (15/12), a Rede Record de televisão transmitiu uma reportagem na qual três motoristas foram acompanhados em sua travessia da avenida Marginal do Tietê, num dia de chuva. Foram três horas de percurso, e o resumo da façanha revela claramente que o alargamento das pistas não irá solucionar o problema. Pelo contrário: especialistas já citados pela imprensa afirmam que as obras em andamento vão piorar o trânsito e espalhar a água contaminada do rio para novas vítimas que não têm sido afetadas pelas últimas inundações.

On Tuesday (December 15) TV  Record aired a segment that followed three motorcyclists in their trip along the the Tietê Beltway on a rainy day.

Os jornais não conseguiram ainda produzir um retrato por inteiro do problema, e fogem da hipótese de estar sendo construída às margens do Tietê uma verdadeira barragem longitudinal que pode dar mais espaço aos automóveis, mas tem grandes possibilidades de agravar o efeito das chuvas.

Ninguém mais contesta o equívoco da escolha feita décadas atrás, de estimular o transporte individual em detrimento do sistema coletivo. Mas hoje, quando não restam dúvidas quanto à necessidade de reverter essa escolha, é quase incompreensível que a imprensa siga fugindo da responsabilidade de questionar certas escolhas dos governantes.

Assim como na questão climática, esta é a geração que ainda pode evitar o caos urbano e entregar cidades melhores para as gerações seguintes.

All honor and glory to the mighty Black Pearl! (Also Vai-Vai and Gaviões da Fiel.)

Quem me vê sempre parado, distante garante que eu não sei sambar
Tô me guardando pra quando o carnaval chegar
Eu tô só vendo, sabendo, sentindo, escutando e não posso falar
Tô me guardando pra quando o carnaval chegar
–Chico Buarque

… Muncipal Law 1,276/1988, in Article 7, Paragraph VI, provides that “it is prohibited to guarantee exclusivity in the transmission of the parades via electromagnetic broadcasting of sounds and images.”

Brazilian Carnaval rocks the entire universe, no one can possibly deny this once they have actually pulado Carnaval.

Go rent Black Orpheus.

Between Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, Carnaval brings out the best and the worst of Brazilian civilization. I can hardly wait.

Still, one of the worst things about Carnaval may well be the contract granting exclusive WORLDWIDE distribution rights to the GLOBO NETWORK over images of the folia.

The contract, which includes what opponents claim is an illegal waiver of rights held by the city government of Rio, puts TV Globo in business with LIESA, the association of Rio de Janeiro carnival societies … an organization that would have long ago been the subject of a vast RICO case if it were headquartered in New York City, say.

See

• Carnage and Carnaval: New Newsflow on Rio Revelry Racketeering
• Rio: “Carnaval Judging System Was Tom(Jobim)foolery-Proof!”
• Rio: “Why Does Globo Monopolize Carnival?”
• Rio: Carnival of Indignation!
• Rio: Carnaval Carnage Goes on the Record
• Bingo! Hurricane Blows Up More Mafia Spreadsheets
• Rio Carnaval: Riotur, LIESA Contracts Probed

Leandro Colon of the Estado de S. Paulo notes today (via Blog de Noblat (O Globo) a possible connection between the follies of 2010 and the political corruption scandal of the hour, involving the political party of former Rio mayor Cesar Maia and his son, Rodrigo, leader of the DEM contingent in the federal congress:

O patrocínio do governo do Distrito Federal para a escola de samba Beija-Flor fazer seu desfile no carnaval de 2010, no Rio, virou uma disputa entre os deputados “mensaleiros”, o carnavalesco Joãosinho Trinta e o grupo político do vice-governador Paulo Octávio (DEM), responsável pelas festividades dos 50 anos de Brasília no ano que vem.

The sponsorship by the federal district government of the 2010 carnival parade by Beija-Flor has turned into a dispute among federal deputies accused of corruption; the carnival artist Joãosinho 30; and the political allies of vice-governor Paulo Octávio (DEM), all of them  responsible for the festivities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the DF in 2010.

Os parlamentares envolvidos no chamado “mensalão do DEM”, liderados pelo deputado Leonardo Prudente (DEM), atravessaram a negociação para superfaturar a verba e negociar propina com o governo do DF e uma das mais vitoriosas escolas de samba do Rio. “É um dinheiro maldito”, afirma Joãosinho Trinta, que também tentou ganhar dinheiro no negócio, mas foi passado para trás. Antes de entrar na negociação, deputados como Prudente – flagrado colocando nas meias propina do “mensalão do DEM” – criticavam publicamente o patrocínio à Beija-Flor, comandada pelo bicheiro Anísio Abraão David. Após as conversas com o governo e a escola, silenciaram.

The lawmakers accused in the “big monthly allowance of the DEM” scandal, led by Leonardo Prudente of the DEM party, monopolized the negotiations in order to inflate the budget and work out a series of bribes to DF authorities by one of the winningest carnival societies in Rio. “This money is cursed,” said Johnny 30, who also tried to make money on the deal but got cut out. Before the deal was made, lawmakers like Prudente — caught on video stuffing his socks with cash in the DEM slush fund scandal — publicly criticized the sponsorship of Beija-Flor, which is led by gambling king Anísio Abraão David. After talks between Beija-Flor and the district government, however, their criticisms ceased.

Carnaval aficionados are wont to deplore the commercialization of the festivities, with the entry of corporate sponsors now, but this argument tends to mask the continued influence of organized crime (including, in São Paulo, the PCC narcovarejo).

I am telling you, our local escola de samba worked out a great deal with the Bovespa stock exchange last year in which the exchange lent the school its image as an organization dedicated to fair play and market transparency.

The Ministry of Culture has been a bit ambiguous about efforts to clean this whole mess up, I thought — federal subsidies were introduced, but not enough to completely eradicate the need for outside funding.

But then again, the federal police tackled this Gordian knot head-on (to mix a metaphor) with its Operation Hurricane (high-ranking Rio and S. Paulo judges for sale to the gambling rackets).

A ofensiva dos parlamentares foi desencadeada numa reunião em setembro na casa de Prudente num bairro nobre de Brasília. Além do parlamentar, outros três colegas de Câmara Legislativa estavam presentes: Júnior Brunelli (PSC), notabilizado pela “oração da propina”, Rogério Ulysses (PSB) e Batista (PRP). Eles queriam dobrar o patrocínio negociado de R$ 3 milhões do governo à agremiação de Nilópolis, que vai contar na avenida a história dos 50 anos de Brasília.

The offensive by lawmakers was launched at a September meeting at the home of Prudente in an upscale Brasília neighborhood. Also present were Junior Brunelli (Christian Socialist), now notorious for the “bribery thanksgiving prayer,” Rogerio Ulysses (Socialist) and Batista ([never heard of this party]). They wanted to double the R$3 million grant negotiated with the carnival society, which will take to the avenue this year with the story of the first fifty years of the federal capital.

The “bribe thanksgiving prayer”: In a secretly videotaped meeting at which kickbacks were divided and distributed like the loaves and the fishes, one of the recipients, an evangelical pastor, called a prayer circle to thank Jebus for the bounty. The CNBB (council of Catholic bishops) went ape over that one!

Em troca, não usariam a Câmara Legislativa para atrapalhar a iniciativa. O encontro com os quatro parlamentares foi confirmado ao Estado por outros três personagens da conversa: o secretário de Cultura do DF, Silvestre Gorgulho, o subsecretário, Beto Sales, e o empresário Ricardo Marques, amigo de Joãosinho Trinta e responsável por um instituto que leva o nome do carnavalesco. A reunião ocorreu em setembro na casa de Prudente.

In return for a doubling of the budget, the lawmakers promised not to oppose the enabling legislation. The existence of this meeting was confirmed to this newspaper by three other parties to the conversation: the DF culture secretary, Gorgulho, his undersecretary, sales, and Marques, a businessman riend of Johnny 30 and head of an institute that calls itself carnivelesque. …

Good news: look how impeccably sourced this accusation is.

I have friends who consider the Estadão part of the so-called PIG — partido da imprensa golpista, or “political party of the coup-enabling press” — but I am telling you, the ESP, editorially conservative as it is, is worth the read. It does not gratuitously blend opinion and fact like the Folha, and it has consistently, if quietly, excellent reporting with a salutary civic-minded slant.

The Observatório da Imprensa was just today complaining about the abuse of anonymous sourcing by native journalists. Legal expert Dalmo Dallari:

O caso mais chocante de sigilo inconveniente, ou até mesmo contrário ao interesse público, é a publicação de opiniões, ocultando a identidade dos autores mas informando sua qualidade de juízes ou ministros de tribunais superiores, sobre problemas já submetidos ao julgamento de uma instância judiciária, ou que, por sua natureza e amplitude, apresentem grande probabilidade de questionamento perante o Judiciário. Desse modo, membros do Judiciário, imprudentemente, adiantam sua opinião sobre questões que poderão ser objeto de futuras decisões judiciais, inclusive questões que eles próprios poderão ser chamados a decidir, criando assim uma expectativa de decisão que poderá não ser confirmada – contribuindo, desse modo, para avaliações negativas do Judiciário.

[xxxxxx]

I, as a Martian anthropologist, have always found this pretty mind-numbing as well. See, for example,

• Nassif (The Thief?!) on Veja and the Leaky Police
• The Folha de São Paulo, Phreaked by Leak, Does Not Regret the Error
• Puta Sacanagem: Sampa Journalists Huddle with Capt. Edmilson of the Federal Police
• Mello Mans the Moral Megaphone

Note: the original monthly allowance (caixa 2=slush fund) scheme — allegedly set up by then Minas governor and now senator Azeredo (PSDB, opposition) and later made use of by situation (PT and allied) lawmakers, with both cases pending before the Supreme Court — is said to have used inflated ad budgets for state govt-funded cultural events like Rock in Rio, with kickbacks to pols laundered through the ad agencies of Belo Horizonte Badly Baldy.

Attribution to another publication … cannot serve as license to print rumors that would not meet the test of The Times’s own reporting standards. Rumors must satisfy The Times’s standard of newsworthiness, taste and plausibility before publication, even when attributed. And when the need arises to attribute, that is a good cue to consult with the department head about whether publication is warranted at all. –The New York Times, Guidelines on Integrity

The Lula administration here in Brazil had its first big showdown with the press, you may recall, over an article by Larry Rohter of the New York Times regarding the president and his alleged drinking problem.

Lula attempted to yank his journo visa, but then-Senator, now governor, Sergio Cabral of Rio de Janeiro (whose father, appropriately enough, was a founding editor of the epoch-making carioca satire rag O Pasquim) intervened to defuse the standoff.

(Larry has family in Rio — politically well-connected family, apparently — with children, so carrying out the eviction would indeed have been somewhat cruel and unusual, as I also tended to think at the time.)

I commented extensively at the time about the degree to which Rohter the Rooter in the comp0st heap of the Brazilian zeitgeist appeared to have gone Heart of Darkness native with respect to local yellow-journalistic malpractice: citing biased sources (when sourcing at all) and failing to run down controversial factual declarations, in order to produce, unintentionally on purpose, a roaring Lula is a Marxist drunk meme in the political blogosphere.

See, for example,

• Open Letter to the New York Times Public Editor on Larry Rohter
• Larry Rohter Leaves Brazil: “I Feel Like a Prostitute Lynched by Hypocrite

What goes around, comes around. Or, plus ça change, plus ça la meme chose. Or what have you.

In response to the release of a biographical film about the President (Veja magazine cleverly notes how the narrative structure of the film parallels that of the Gospel According to St. Matthew), the Folha de S. Paulo daily releases a full-page interview with a Labor Party dissident and former Lula comrade in which the man, César Benjamin, claims that Lula once confessed to him that he had forcibly buggered a cellmate while imprisoned by the military dictatorship.

Veteran journalist-editors Alberto Dines and Luis Nassif escalate the incident today, rebuffing the recommendations of the Folha ombudsman in the case as insufficient and roundly denouncing the interview in question as an exercise in Brazilian yellow-journalistic business as usual.

Than which there is no brighter yellow, in my experience.

I translate, as always, in haste pra inglês ver …

(… noting that the harshest critics of the Folha refuse in their criticisms to repeat the tasteless and baseless accusation. I underscore it simply in order to communicate the magnitude of tastelessness under discussion.

One takeaway is how the Lula administration reacted this time around. Lula II is a more avuncular, less truculent fellow, and fed the national press an expression of wounded bewilderment for its follow-up headline (buried on A-10 of the Folha).

Another is the theoretical debate over whether an interview represents opinion or factual reporting, and whether the interviewer assumes any responsibility for the factual accuracy of what the interview subject reports. Skip down for that part.)

<Pure Trash>, writes Alberto Dines of the (Ford Foundation-funded) Observatório da Imprensa.

Vamos criar uma igreja e deixar de pagar impostos? A manchete da Folha de S.Paulo de domingo (29/11) foi a mais comentada dos últimos tempos. Nem parecia ser o mesmo jornal que dias antes, na sexta-feira, produziu um lixo jornalístico dos mais repugnantes e que desde então está ocupando a seção de cartas dos leitores quase inteira.

Should we all go out and found a church to get out of paying taxes? The headline in the Sunday edition of the Folha was the most widely commented of recent times. It did not even seem like the same Folha of only days earlier, which on Friday produced a piece of journalistic garbage of the most repugnant kind, and which has occupied the letters section almost entirely ever since.

A propósito da estréia do filme Lula, o filho do Brasil, a Folha publicou um depoimento do seu colunista Cesar Benjamin, dissidente do PT, a propósito de um comentário cabeludo feito há 15 anos pelo então candidato à presidência Lula da Silva (FSP, 27/11, pág. A-8).

On the occasion of the release of the feature film Lula: Son of Brazil, the Folha published a piece of oral testimony by its columnist Cesar Benjamin, a PT dissident, about a wild comment made 15 years earlier by then-presidential candidate Lula da Silva …

Como foi constatado no dia seguinte, o comentário foi efetivamente feito mas em tom de troça, conversa de fim de expediente. A Folha rasgou e tripudiou sobre todos os seus manuais de redação, pisoteou 20 anos de trabalho dos seus ouvidores ao aceitar como verdadeira uma fofoca estapafúrdia sem qualquer diligência sobre a sua veracidade.

As noted on the following day, the comment was made in a basically joshing tone, the sort of thing that emerges as the interview winds down. The Folha tore up and shredded its editorial guidelines, trampling on 20 years of work by its ombudsmen, when it accepted as true a piece of shrill, without any effort to dig into the question of its veracity.

Não foi desatenção, erro involuntário, tropeço de um redator apressado: a Folha reservou uma página inteira para que o colunista contasse a sua saga nos cárceres da ditadura iniciada quando contava apenas 17 anos. Seu relato é impressionante, mas de repente, para desqualificar os 30 dias em que Lula passou no xadrez, Cesar Benjamin conta a sua anedota em três enormes parágrafos e com ela fecha o artigo.

This was no mere oversight, no involuntary error or slip-up of an editor pressed for time: The Folha reserved an entire page for the columnist to recount his saga of incarceration under the dictatorship, which began when he was only 17 years of age. His account in compelling, but suddenly, in order to disqualify the 30 days Lula spent in jail, Benjamin recounts the anecdote in question in three enormous paragraphs, closing out the piece.

The buggery claim, and attribution to Lula of the statement that he found it difficult to go without, ahem, pussy for that long a time.

À primeira vista, parece mais um golpe publicitário da família Barreto (que produziu o filme), em seguida percebe-se que a denúncia é a vera, fruto de um ressentimento pessoal que um jornal do porte da Folha, que se assume “a serviço do Brasil”, não tem o direito de perfilhar.

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A direção da Folha simplesmente não avaliou o tamanho do desatino. No dia seguinte, tentou consertar: mancheteou uma de suas páginas com o justo desabafo de Lula classificando o texto como “loucura” (FSP, 28/11, pág. A-10). No domingo, certamente arrependida, a direção da Folha providenciou a evaporação do assunto. Ficou apenas a reprovação do seu ouvidor Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva.

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Tarde demais. Já no sábado (28/11) o Estado de S.Paulo repercutia o episódio com destaque e, no mesmo dia, a Veja já o incorporara à sua edição. O Globo manteve-se à distância desta porcaria.

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Se o leitor não sabe o que significa “imprensa marrom”, tem agora a oportunidade de confrontar-se com este exemplo – em estado puro – do jornalismo de escândalos e achaques.

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Does the Brazilian media succeed in providing an objective account of the clash between Hugo Chavez and part of the Venezuelan media? When the purveyors of Globeleza do business with Venevisionaries, how could they?

We now return to posting observations on the Brazilian media and what it is like to fold, spindle, mutilate, digg, twitter, step in, get sloshed with, and in general consume it, pra inglês ver.

Not that it does us any economic good.

On the other hand, we have do a nice view of the Sambodian skyline from our designer desk and leather armchair.

And blogging with a Monte Pascoal Belicoso in hand in the walk-in humidor we had installed at the end of a winding stair atop our Vila Madalena loft is a pleasant past-time while we wait for our professional skill-set to become relevant again, or death, whichever comes first.

And yet, as you can see from the blog calendar, we have been out of blogging action since September.

This was unfortunately due to a bout of what William Styron once called, after Milton, the old darkness visible. The same diabolical malaise that occasioned our migration from Berkeley to New York City in 1996, in fact.

We seem to suffer these utter collapses every 13 years, but we are also happy to report that this time around a very good local doctor immediately suggested ECT at the excellent Hospital das Clinicas, up there at the headwaters of the Avenida Teodoro Sampaio, near all the good musical instrument stores.

And it is doing us a world of good, despite the stigma attached to it — you are going to blog about that? It will be on your permanent record for libelbots to discover! — and the surreal experience of it.

Especially surreal: Being treated for it in a foreign language. Count backwards from noventa e nove …

Another angle to this particular bout: facing the noonday demon while married.

All I can say is that I seem to have selected a damned good life partner … thanks to whom I am now an official Brazilian alien, with the supervisa to prove it.

The mind-bending bureaucracy of obtaining the imprimatur of the Estado Novo Novo provided quite a few of the exotic stressors that informed this season in hell, as a matter of fact.

For example, the (incompetent) attorney we hired to handle the case with the federal police was arrested by the federal police while handling the case, did I mention that?

The big-gold-bracelet-brandishing young Christopher Moltisanti lookalike was supposedly a bag man for the thriving mafia dos fiscais of Mooca and Bras — city inspectors getting paid off to let the illegal street vendor industry — which dwarfs the legitimate retail industry — stay in business.

Kassab voters, every one, I would bet you. Hizzonner has just released a 40% increase in property valuations for tax purposes under which a lot of lots are valued at an extreme premium to the market value of the properties erected upon them.

Cynics on the grapevine suspect the midnight mandate is a first gambit in building a caixa dois — a slush fund — for the next elections.

And you voted for this clown, even though he immediately named his brothers head of the bus system and subway, respectively, as soon as he took office! True story! Just because Marta the Pink Lady is too lipstick lefty for your Veja-educated tastes!

Idiots.

São Paulo: The degree to which this town is mobbed up to the gills cannot be exaggerated, the Polyannism of the local boosters notwithstanding.

A specimen case: Death-squads and police moonlighting.

We take a cab last evening to the swellest condo-embedded-in-a-Rodeo-Drive-grade-shopping-mall in town last evening — the Cidade Jardim, aka Laputa, Island in the Sky — for example.

We would have driven ourselves, but just as we entered our 2004 Celta with the 60,000 km on it, the neighborhood experienced a rolling wave of exploding transformers followed by an electrical blackout.

That meant we could not open or in any way operate our electric garage door opener.

It happens all the time. All hail AES Eletropaulo, poster child for shock-therapy privatization.

We see Inglorious Bastards … eat a slice of the Best Chocolate Cake in the World, which is not necessarily an exaggeration … buy the third volume of Stieg Larsen, Millenium, at the ingloriously overpriced Livraria da Vila … discuss price-trends in Cuban cheroots in the walk-in humidor at Caruso …

It features a breathtaking view of the telephone-book-cover Roberto Marinho, Journalist bridge … and the breathtaking stench of human feces and petrocarcinogens rising off the Pinheiros River that it bridges.

As we pull in to the taxi and loading zone, a car approaches the parking garage a little too quickly, it seems.

The military-policeman rent-a-cop pulls out his weapon and assumes the two-handed stance. He is ready to blow the driver out of his Havaianas.

Our cabbie, also a moonlighting cop, is utterly revolted and points out that the man is brandishing his service revolver (the .40 thundering hog-leg revolver is standard issue for the Men in Gray), which is illegal to carry off-duty.

Not long ago, another local cop-rentacop blasted a couple of middle-class motoboys out of their Kawasaki saddles at the Frei Caneca (aka the Gay Careca) shopping mall. They had knocked over an orange traffic cone while riding by in a group.

This happened. Isto, as the newsstands here all say, é.

The itchy triggers of the PCC-PM War of 2006 are still itching.

And the vast, shadowy international communist conspiracy, not Alckmin, is still responsible for that exercise in civic gran guignol. See

• Panic at COPOM: Radio Games During São Paulo’s PCC-PM Wars?
• The PM-PCC Wars, One Year On: Who Killed Lindomar?
• “It Was a Cold and Calculating Night”: Tognolli on Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt
• Panic in Sambôdia: From Crack City Nights To The New Light
• “Deconstructing Alckmin”: Books Cooked on São Paulo Bank Robberies
• “Resistance Followed By Death”: Truths, Partial Truths and Statistics

But I digress. …

Lacerda: Harangues on Radio Globo were factually challenged but vehement

Item: O arsenal udenista está de volta, o que poderá detê-lo? – Carta Maior

I remember some years back buying a copy of Veja magazine for a long bus trip. The issue had a password for access to online contents, and the password was an homage to CIA asset Carlos Lacerda: NOVALACERDA.

The leftist press and Internet here has begun to emphasize the historical parallel as well, as in this article from Carta Maior, “The UDN arsenal is back, so how do we stop it?”

The parallels with neocon style emotionalist “wedge issue” campaigning tactics devised by Pat Buchanan are interesting. (I have always thought Pat a Lacerdist figure in many ways.) The International Republican Institute, maybe. Any resemblance to Bolivian separatists and Honduran coup plotters may not be incidental. File under <the comparative literature of journalism ethics and information warfare.>

A moralidade de quase todos os grandes órgãos da imprensa brasileira está empenhada em corroer a candidatura Dilma Rousseff, custe o que custar. A observação de Gramsci sobre a “imprensa que adquire funções de partido político” se aplica como uma luva ao jornalismo praticado hoje no país. Carlos Lacerda (foto), caracterizado como “o Corvo” nas charges publicadas pelo jornal getulista Última Hora, manejava com maestria o ferramental de fraudes & ofensas, que hoje encontra aprendizes excitados nas redações.O artigo é de Saul Leblon.

The moralism of nearly all the major press outlets is fully deployed in a bid to corrode the candidacy of Dilma Rousseff for the presidency, at any cost. Gramsci’s observation about journalism as a political party fits the journalism practiced nowadays in Brazil like a glove. Carlos Lacerda, depicted as “The Crow” in the cartoons of Ultima Hora, the Varguist daily, was a masterful user of the toolbox of fraud and slander, which today we see employed by enthusiastic apprentices in the newsroom. The article is by Saul Leblon.

O método da calúnia é tão antigo no arsenal político da direita quanto o seu objetivo de alcançar o poder a qualquer custo, seja pelo voto, o impeachment, o golpe, a fraude ou uma mistura das quatro coisas simultaneamente, como fez a UDN nas eleições de 1955, na primeira chance real de chegar ao poder pelo voto, depois da tentativa de golpe abortado pelo suicídio de Vargas.

The systematic use of slander goes as far back in the political arsenal of the right as its objective of seizing power at any cost, whether by the vote, or impeachment, or coup d’etat, or a combination of the four, as the UDN did in the 1955 elections, when it had its first real chance of coming to power by the vote after the coup attempt foiled by the suicide of Vargas.

Não deu certo. Os udenistas Juarez Távora e Milton Campos tiveram 30% dos votos contra 36% dados a Juscelino. A vitória apertada, mas indiscutível da chapa que tinha como vice João Goulart, herdeiro político de Vargas, não desanimou os udenistas.

It didn’t work out. UDN candidates Juarez Tavora and Milton Campos had 30% of the vote versus 36% for JK. The close victory, but unquestionable one, for the slate with Joao Goulart as vice-president, a political heir to Vargas, did not discourage the UDN.

Derrotados nas urnas em outubro de 1955, desencadearam uma campanha agressiva para impedir a posse de Kubitschek, marcada para janeiro do ano seguinte. Na linha de frente do golpismo estava o jornal O Estado de São Paulo – alter-ego da UDN paulista. O mesmo que hoje lidera a pressão pela derrubada de Sarney em nome da “moralização” do Congresso e da faxina ética na política nacional.

Defeated at the ballot box in October 1955, the UDN unleashed an agressive campaign to prevent Kubitschek’s taking the oath of office, which was scheduled for January. On the front lines of the coup attempt was the O Estado de S. Paulo daily — alter-ego of the São Paulo UDN. The same paper that today pressures for the overthrow of Sarney from the presidency of the Senate in the name of moralizing congress and taking an ethical broom to national politics.

Não é preciso ser simpatizante da oligarquia maranhense para suspeitar que existe algo mais do que mau jornalismo no bombardeio que atribui a Sarney todas as malfeitorias praticadas no Senado, desde a sua criação em 1824, na primeira Constituição do Império. O que está por trás é a volta do arsenal “democrático” udenista em pleno aquecimento para 2010, quando o PMDB terá peso decisivo na sucessão de Lula, que cultiva o apoio da legenda num acordo de reciprocidade com Sarney.

One need not be a sympathizer of the oligarch from Maranhão to suspect that something other than bad journalism is at work in the barrage that lays all the undesirable practices of the Senate since its establishment in 1824 as the Imperial Senate at Sarney’s feet. That is what is behind the “democratic” UDN arsenal for 2010, when the PMDB will play a key role in choosing a successor to Lula, who cultivates the party’s support through a reciprocal deal with Sarney.

A ressalva é tão óbvia que chega a ser admitida nas entrelinhas de editorialistas espertos, funcionando mais como salvaguarda cínica do texto, do que uma crítica efetiva ao jornalismo praticado em nome da moralidade.

The caveat is so obvious that clever editorialists admit it between the lines, more as cynical way out than as effective criticism of journalism practiced in the name of morality.

A moralidade de quase todos os grandes órgãos da imprensa brasileira está empenhada em corroer a candidatura Dilma Rousseff, custe o que custar. A observação de Gramasci sobre a “imprensa que adquire funções de partido político” se aplica como uma luva ao jornalismo praticado hoje no país.

The moralism of nearly all the major press outlets is deployed in a bid to corrode the candidacy of Dilma Rousseff for the presidency, at any cost. Gramsci’s observation about journalism that takes on the functions of a political party fits the journalism practiced nowadays in Brazil like a glove.

Cada flanco que se abre nas fileiras do governo aciona pautas especiais; mini-editorias específicas; forças-tarefas montadas a toque de caixa. “Analistas” e acadêmicos são requisitados para teorizar sobre “a decadência irreversível do petismo”, ao mesmo tempo em que petistas hesitantes, e ex-petistas recorrentes, endossam a dissolução da pureza vermelha contaminada pelos vícios do poder.

Every exposed flank in the ranks of the government receives special reporting; specific mini-editorials; task forces set up on the spot. “Analysts” and “academics” are requisitioned to theorize about “the irreversible decadence of the PT,” even as hesitant petistas and the usual ex-petistas endorse the thesis that the purity of the party has been contaminated by the vices of power.

Desprovida de partidos de massa, a direita sempre teve nas campanhas midiáticas um valioso instrumento de intervenção na ordem institucional.

Lacking parties of mass appeal, the right has always used media campaigns as a valuable instrument of intervention in the institutional order.

Se desta vez a mutação flagrada por Gramasci ganha acentuação inédita é porque os resultados acumulados pelos dois mandatos de Lula deixaram um minúsculo campo programático para a coalizão demotucana se movimentar em 2010. O braço midiático deve compensar com denúncias a fragilidade propositiva.

If this time around the transformation observed by Gramsci is especially intense it is because the cumulative results of Lula’s two terms have left the Toucan-Demo coalition with very little room for a positive political agenda in 2010. The media arm of the coalition has to compensate for this weakness with accusations.

Malgrado as limitações da aliança que o sustenta, Lula superou a pior crise do capitalismo desde 1930, acentuando as linhas de vantagem do seu governo em relação à estratégia conservadora abraçada pelo PSDB e predominantemente apoiada pela mídia.

Despite the limitations of the alliance that sustains him, Lula overcame the worst crisis of capitalism since 1930, highlighting the advantages of his government over the conservative strategy embraced by the PSDB and mostly supported by the media.

A saber: o desastroso recuo do Estado em todas as frentes do desenvolvimento; o alinhamento carnal com os EUA na política externa e comercial; a terceirização dos grandes desafios sociais à “eficiência dos mercados auto-regulados”. Hoje esse cardápio se traduz na tentativa de desconstrução caluniosa da candidatura Dilma Rousseff; nas denúncias contra a Petrobras e na torcida mal-disfarçada com o êxito do país no pré-sal.

To wit: the disastrous retreat of the State from all fronts of national development; the incestuous alignment with the USA in foreign and trade policy; the outsourcing of major social challenges to <the efficient working of self-regulated markets>. This menu translates in contemporary terms to the slanderous deconstruction of the Rousseff candidacy, the accusations against Petrobras and the ill-disguised rooting against success in the pre-salt layer.

Tivesse o Brasil persistido nessa rota, seria hoje uma terra arrasada por desemprego e quebradeira, a exemplo do que sucede no Leste europeu – última fronteira de expansão do neoliberalismo e seu obituário mais dramático.

Had Brazil continued along this path, it would today be a nation mired in unemployment and bankruptcy, like the nations of Eastern Europe — the last frontier for the expansion of neoliberalism and its most dramatic obituary.

Ocultar esse flanco substituindo o principal pelo secundário, portanto, sobrepondo à transparência da crise o que o monopólio midiático pauta como relevante, é o recurso precioso de Serra para contrabalançar sua opacidade programática em 2010.

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Trata-se de uma das especialidades legadas pelo udenismo à política nacional. Carlos Lacerda, caracterizado como “o Corvo” nas charges publicadas pelo jornal getulista Última Hora, manejava com maestria o ferramental de fraudes & ofensas, que hoje encontra aprendizes excitados nas redações.

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Exemplos: dia 22 de agosto o comentarista político Fernando Rodrigues, classificou o senador Mercadante de “vassalo” do Planalto, com chamada na primeira página da Folha; antes dele, Danuza Leão comparou a ministra Dilma Rousseff , na mesma Folha, a um misto de pai autoritário e diretora “carrasca”. Analista das Organizações Globo, o que não significa apenas uma inserção profissional, Lucia Hippolito espetou no título de um comentário sobre o PT (Globo online) o vocábulo-síntese de sua filiação carnal ao udenismo: “a pelegada”.

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A fome dos petizes lacerdistas encontra fontes obsequiosas nas fileiras oposicionistas.

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Olhos, ouvidos e bocas de Serra na capital federal, ao lado de Virgílio, Agripino, Sergio Guerra e Jereissati, o senador pernambucano Jarbas Vasconcelos (PMDB-PE) definiu o PT, em recente entrevista, como uma sublegenda do “lulismo”. Na boa tradição udenista equiparou o “lulismo”, portanto o Presidente da República, aos “caudilhismos latinoamericanos, a exemplo do peronismo argentino”. O conservadorismo do senador evoca um tema recorrente no cardápio lacerdista, que inspirou violenta campanha contra Vargas nos anos 50, fartamente difundida pela rádio Globo, dirigida pelo jovem udenista, Roberto Marinho.

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Vale a pena rememorar esse “case” do modo udenista de abduzir a realidade e derivar daí vale-tudo de aniquilação dos adversários.

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Em abril de 1954, o governo Vargas sangrava. Uma ciranda de ataques descomprometidos de qualquer outra lógica que não a derrubada de um projeto de desenvolvimento nacionalista fustigava o Presidente que criara a Petrobras, o BNDES e aplicava uma política de fortalecimento do mercado interno com forte incremento do salário mínimo.

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O clima pesado de acusações e ofensas pessoais atingia Getúlio e sua família de forma indiscriminada. Lutero, irmão do Presidente, era tratado nas manchetes como “bastardo” e “ladrão”. O ministro do Trabalho, João Goulart, era reduzido a “personagem de boate”. Faltava, porém, um ponto de coagulação para transformar o tiroteio desordenado em míssil capaz de abrir um rombo na legalidade institucional.

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Em meio à radicalização, em março de 54 surge a denúncia de que “os caudilhos” Vargas e Perón planejavam um suposto “Pacto ABC” (Argentina –Brasil –Chile), cuja meta era “a integração sul-americana num arquipélago de repúblicas sindicais contra os EUA”.

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Carlos Lacerda, na Tribuna da Imprensa e na rádio Globo, e a Banda de Música da UDN no Congresso – um pouco como o jogral que hoje modula as vozes da coalização demotucana e da mídia “ética” – martelavam a denúncia incansavelmente, testando por aproximação as condições para o impeachment de Vargas.

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A notícia do pacto foi vigorosamente desmentida pela chancelaria argentina, mas um ex-ministro rompido com Getúlio, aliou-se a Lacerda para oferecer “evidências” das negociações entre o Brasil e Perón.

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A inexistência de provas – exceto a menção genérica de Perón à uma aliança regional — não demoveu a mídia que deu à declaração ressentida do ex-ministro contornos de verdade inquestionável, repetida à exaustão até acuar o governo.

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Vargas reagiu na única direção que lhe restava. No 1º de maio de 1954 anunciou o famoso reajuste de 100% para o salário mínimo num discurso marcado por elogios a Goulart, o ministro do Trabalho, mentor do reajuste, afastado pela pressão udenista.

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Ao conclamar os trabalhadores a se organizarem para defender seus próprios interesses, o discurso de 1º de Maio soava como um ensaio de despedida. Talvez até mais radical, na convocação aos trabalhadores, do que a própria Carta Testamento deixada quatro meses depois, quando o Presidente atirou contra o próprio peito para não ceder à pressão da mídia pela renúncia.

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“A minha tarefa está terminando e a vossa apenas começa. O que já obtivestes ainda não é tudo. Resta ainda conquistar a plenitude dos direitos que vos são devidos e a satisfação das reivindicações impostas pelas necessidades (…) Como cidadãos, a vossa vontade pesará nas urnas. Como classe, podeis imprimir ao vosso sufrágio a força decisória do número. Constituí a maioria. Hoje estais com o governo. Amanhã sereis o governo” (Getúlio Vargas, 1º de Maio de 1954).

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A dramaticidade do suicídio iluminou o quadro político gerando transparência e revolta diante do golpismo em marcha. Porta-vozes da oposição a Getúlio foram escorraçados nas ruas do Rio; uma multidão consternada e enfurecida cercou e depredou a rádio Globo que saiu do ar; veículos do jornal de Roberto Marinho foram caçados e queimados nas ruas da cidade. Para Carlos Lacerda não sobrou um centímetro de segurança em terra: o “Corvo” foi obrigado refugiar-se no mar, a bordo do cruzador Barroso.

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A determinação conservadora de arrebatar o poder, todavia, não esmoreceu.

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Poucas semanas depois do suicídio, em 16 de setembro de 1954, uma segunda “denúncia” associada ao Pacto ABC explodiria nos microfones da rádio Globo. Era a largada, com 12 meses de antecipação, para a primeira disputa eleitoral em vinte e quatro anos que não contaria com a presença divisora de Getúlio na cena nacional.

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O alvo agora era João Goulart, o herdeiro político do presidente morto e adversário certo da UDN no pleito de outubro de 1955. Na voz estridente de Lacerda, comentarista de diversos programas da emissora de Marinho, foi lida em primeira mão a “Carta Brandi”. Uma suposta correspondência do deputado argentino Antonio Brandi a João Goulart , apresentada como a prova “definitiva” da conspiração para implantar “uma república sindicalista no Brasil”.

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Na efervescência da guerra eleitoral, o escândalo levou o Exército a abrir inquérito imediatamente, enviando missão oficial a Buenos Aires para aprofundar as investigações.

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A conclusão oficial de que tudo não passara de uma grosseira fraude, forjada por Lacerda e alimentada pela imprensa anti-getulista, não abalou seus protagonistas. Lacerda rapidamente mudou o foco da denúncia, invertendo os termos da equação: fora vítima de uma cilada, uma isca arquitetada por adversários eleitorais para desmoralizar a democracia e acelerar a implantação de uma república sindical no país – exatamente como descrevia a (falsa) “Carta Brandi”.

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“(…) Se a carta não é verdadeira”, escreveu na Tribuna de Imprensa, um mês depois da derrota da UDN para JK e Jango no pleito de outubro de 1955, “seu conteúdo está de acordo, mais ou menos, com o que se sabe da vida política do sr. Goulart…”

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Qualquer semelhança com o malabarismo denuncista que povoa a mídia tucana nos nossos dias não é mera coincidência. Os mesmos objetivos, os mesmos métodos, a mesma elasticidade ética e democrática estão de volta.

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A vitória apertada de JK em 1955 foi tratada pelo udenismo como uma sintoma de “ilegalidade das urnas”. Inconformada, a chamada “imprensa da UDN” iniciou uma nova campanha, desta vez liderada pelo jornal Estado de São Paulo, que não poupou papel e tinta na luta para impedir a posse do presidente eleito Juscelino Kubitschek.

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Se chegaram a esse ponto contra JK em 1955 e fracassaram, muito se deve ao desbloqueio do discernimento popular causado pelo suicídio do estrategista genial que foi Getúlio Vargas. O arsenal udenista, porém, está de volta e seu partido midiático não disfarça a determinação de transformar 2010 na nova inflexão conservadora na vida do país. Resta saber que força poderá detê-los agora, a ponto de despertar na sociedade o mesmo efeito esclarecedor do tiro que sacudiu o país na manhã de 24 de agosto de 1954.

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