Intervention de Janine Guespin, Professeure émérite à Rouen, France, membre de l’Association Espaces Marx et du réseau européen Transform !, lors de l’atelier Science et démocratie : quels sont les problèmes ? qui s’est déroulé au Forum Mondial Sciences & Démocratie, à Belèm, le 26 et 27 janvier 2009.
Lorsqu'il est élu en 1997, Tony Blair récupère un pays qui n'a jamais été aussi inégalitaire, en tout cas depuis que ces statistiques existent (1961). Les onze ans au pouvoir de Margaret Thatcher, marqués par une forte baisse des impôts, une dérégulation générale de l'économie et la perte de terrain des syndicats, ont largement remodelé et élargi l'échelle des revenus.
Le jeune chef de gouvernement travailliste, s'il ne souhaite pas revenir sur ces acquis, milite en revanche pour une richesse mieux répartie. Il ne parviendra jamais à réduire les inégalités à un niveau moindre de ce qu'elles étaient quand il a pris le pouvoir. Elles vont même continuer à s'accroître au début de son premier mandat. Mais, à l'époque, c'est parce que les plus aisés s'enrichissaient plus vite que les plus pauvres. Aux deux extrémités de l'échelle, le gâteau grossissait.
Depuis 2005, c'est différent : en termes réels, c'est-à-dire en tenant compte de l'inflation, les pauvres se paupérisent tandis que les riches s'enrichissent. Cela ne contribue pas à améliorer la popularité de M. Brown, qui s'enfonce dans les sondages alors qu'une élection est prévue d'ici à la mi-2010 et que son concurrent conservateur, David Cameron, est donné gagnant.
Il est vrai que les prix ont, en 2007 et 2008, augmenté plus vite que les salaires, mais cette perte de pouvoir d'achat s'est d'abord faite aux dépens des plus modestes. Ainsi, les 10 % les plus pauvres gagnaient en moyenne 156 livres par semaine en 2004-2005. En 2007-2008, ils touchaient 9 livres de moins. Les 10 % les plus riches, pour leur part, ont vu leur revenu hebdomadaire passer, sur cette même période, de 988 livres à 1 033 livres. Le revenu médian a lui aussi progressé, de 387 à 393 livres, quand le revenu moyen est passé de 472 à 487 livres.
Dans ce contexte, en 2007-2008, les 20 % les plus riches de la population détenaient 43,1 % des revenus disponibles, contre 40,9 % en 1996-1997. Une statistique que M. Brown ne manquera pas d'utiliser pour justifier la hausse de l'impôt de 40 % à 50 % à compter d'avril 2010 pour les revenus supérieurs à 150 000 livres par an, même si elle a d'abord été décidée pour limiter l'endettement du pays.
Cette évolution des revenus a aussi pour conséquence d'accroître le nombre d'adultes en âge de travailler qui vivent sous le seuil de pauvreté, celui-ci étant conventionnellement fixé à 60 % du revenu médian. En 2007-2008, ils étaient 11 millions dans cette situation, contre 10,7 millions l'année précédente et 10 millions en 2004-2005.
Le gouvernement pourra toujours arguer que ce chiffre est inférieur à ce qu'il était quand les travaillistes sont arrivés au pouvoir. Et ce d'autant qu'entre-temps la population britannique a augmenté de plus de 4 millions de personnes, pour atteindre 59,9 millions.
Mais il est un terrain sur lequel M. Brown aura du mal à se justifier, c'est celui de la pauvreté des enfants. Alors que Tony Blair avait promis que le nombre d'enfants vivant dans un foyer en dessous du seuil de pauvreté - ils étaient 3,4 millions en 1997 - serait réduit de moitié en 2010 et à néant en 2020, il semble aujourd'hui que cet objectif ne sera pas atteint. Selon les dernières données du ministère du travail, ils étaient encore 2,9 millions en 2007-2008, aussi nombreux que l'année précédente et 200 000 de plus qu'en mars 2005.
Le Monde - 09.05.09
Comme l’affaire se déroule au Portugal, pays délaissé par les médias, elle passe quasiment inaperçue. La même situation, en Grande-Bretagne, ferait pourtant la Une du Financial Times. La BPP, banque privée portugaise , prise d’assaut par ses clients, a décidé de garder porte close vendredi “en raison de l’absence manifeste de conditions de travail permettant de travailler en sécurité” affirme le communiqué.
Si cette banque d’investissements qui compte 3000 clients a été envahie, c’est évidemment parce qu’elle inquiète. Malgré un prêt de 450 millions d’euros garanti par l’Etat accordé par six institutions financières en décembre dernier, la BPP va mal. Très mal ? La société qui audite ses comptes l’affirme. De plus, la banque est soupçonnée d’irrégularités par la banque du Portugal et par les autorités boursières.
L’affaire risque de prendre une tournure politique. Le gouvernement, socialiste, affirme que les dépôts sont garantis mais qu’il appartient aux actionnaires de présenter un plan de sauvetage. Pour maintenant, la nationalisation semble donc exclue. Fin 2008, le gouvernement avait, dans un premier temps, refusé d’accorder une aide de 750 millions d’euros. D’où le prêt garanti qui a suivi.
Cerise sur le gâteau: la banque fait l’objet d’une polémique car un mois avant de demander l’aide de l’Etat, un dossier qui aurait dû recevoir l’aval de la Commissio européenne-, une fondation luso-brésilienne présidée par João Rendeiro, alors directeur de la banque BPP, a financé un voyage Bruxelles -Lisbonne en jet privé à Manuel Barroso (le président de la Commission, qui est portugais) pour lui décerner, ça ne s’invente pas, le prix “Politique et responsabilité”. La Commission reconnaît ce voyage en jet privé , révélé par un quotidien portugais et repris par 20 minutes mais affirme qu’il n’y a aucun lien avec la banque BPP, qui est l’une des principales sources de financement de ladite Fondation.
Le Monde - 09.05.09
The BBC’s American soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the “smart” people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold.
It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has been named “Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008”, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign as “an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force”. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser César Chávez – “Sí, se puede!” or “Yes, we can” – the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.
No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “Change you can believe in”, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful,” he often declared.
Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as “adroit literary creations, rich, like those Doric columns, with allusion . . .” (Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian). The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: “Many spiritually advanced people I know . . . identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who . . . can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”
In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not “persons”, and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of “defence”, Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, has been retained by Obama.
All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office.
In Afghanistan, the US “strategy” of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the “Taliban”) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely. Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing “a real threat” to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as “anti-nuclear”. It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new “tactical” nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.
Perhaps the biggest lie – the equivalent of Smoking Is Good for You – is Obama’s announcement that the US is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed US army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain “for the next 15 to 20 years”. On 25 April, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered – especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in.
Much of the American Establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing, and threatening, the onward march of America’s “grand design”, as Henry Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it. In advertising terms, Bush was a “brand collapse” whereas Obama, with his toothpaste advertisement smile and righteous clichés, is a godsend. At a stroke, he has seen off serious domestic dissent to war, and he brings tears to the eyes, from Washington to Whitehall. He is the BBC’s man, and CNN’s man, and Murdoch’s man, and Wall Street’s man, and the CIA’s man. The Madmen did well.
News StatesmanThe previous century now seems to be drawing away from us at an increasing speed, especially in the global society’s existing superabundance of communications. Readers of Monthly Review know that the basics have remained the same in the all too physical world of capitalism and neocolonialism, as much as they might have changed in terms of resistance and apparent alternatives. Still, as the graying of the 1960s generation continues, and the New Deal era draws ever further into a kind of archeology, a summing up of some points is useful and may even be fun.
My effort here runs parallel with nearly four decades of Monthly Review. The focus is personal as well: Marxist thought, the interpretation and guidance that Marxists provided and (at the local level) lived by, was my interest from the spring of 1964 when my first subscription began and when, by no coincidence, the antiwar movement began to reach my Midwest campus. (I could brag in 1966 that I read every Monthly Review Press book—there weren’t all that many yet.) My sensibility grew as I published the magazine Radical America for Students for a Democratic Society, and deepened with the collapse of the New Left, as I plunged into oral histories of the left-wing octogenarians, and continued on with my interviews and studies of the Hollywood Reds who seemed to have shaped some important zones of popular culture. It reflected, as well, my own engagements with local left movements, labor support and education, third world support blending into solidarity with the new immigrant waves, and so on through the passage of time.
What may surprise today’s younger readers of Monthly Review is that the dialogue about Marxism was so vital in the seemingly fallow years of the left in the early 1960s, with politics barely recovering from both the widespread repression and the despair at the revelations about the Soviet Union. Screenwriter Walter Bernstein remarked to me decades later that he and his friends, the “disorganized left,” high-powered intellectuals scripting television and films that touched my generation, had stayed within the wider boundaries of the Popular Front even while leaving the Communist Party. What they saw now was not Russia but rather, a community of peoples struggling against colonialism and neocolonialism. (Judy Ruben, the wife of one of his close friends, Al Ruben, actually worked in the Monthly Review office.) Marxism supplied the intellectual energy and also a sort of collective personal glue. People from afar were “comrades” on contact and even without direct contact. Culturally as well as politically, it seemed a new world was opening.
The same sensibility applied, without any particular theory of organizational apparatus, across generations. Shortly after I began to read Monthly Review, the campus scholar who brought the very first antiwar activities into existence had been, fifteen years earlier, a young Communist intellectual “industrializing” a factory near Chicago. Now she was probably fearful that the shadow of the past might catch up with her as a young academic, but she was nevertheless determined to make a statement and to make things possible for us youngsters. I gave her the first Christmas gift subscription that I had given anyone in my life—to Monthly Review, naturally. We had reached out to each other. Multiply this hundreds or thousands of times, vary the details, and you can envision all sorts of rapprochements and discoveries, often with subtle hints from the older generation before some past connection with the “subversive” left was to be revealed.
There was also much going on from a more rarefied intellectual standpoint. For instance, the debate of “Marxism versus Existentialism” was enormously fruitful. Only dogmatists would claim absolutes for either side; the two schools despised the social relations of modern capitalism for somewhat disparate reasons, but with no less intensity. This particular philosophical discussion was to fade beneath the vast popularity of Herbert Marcuse (and to a lesser degree, the more difficult members of the Frankfurt School like Theodore Adorno, no radical but lucid in his analysis of social norms), and the revival of Phenomenology. The translation and readings of the “Young Marx” seemed to bring it all to the surface, even when (or because) the interpretations of the significance were starkly different and sometimes bitterly opposed to each other. None of it was far from Marxism, as Marxism was steadily being reinterpreted.
And Marxism was definitely being reinterpreted. To my young eyes, Monthly Review was not only a venerable institution (I had only been five-years-old when it began!), but also a strikingly innovative youngster in a new way of Marxists seeing the world. Rosa Luxemburg apart, hardly anyone, not even Lenin, had seen imperialism as the salvation of capitalism, however temporary that might be. Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth was one of the books of revelation that knocked me on the head at a young age: it was hard and took many readings but the points were finally clear. Capitalism was a truly global system, as Marx had begun to elucidate, and no liberal or conservative theory of third world “backwardness,” whether based upon supposed particular histories or national psychologies, could explain why the West took the natural resources for its own purposes and left starvelings behind, to be ruled over and widely abused by the CIA’s favorites.
It might well be asked why this conclusion seemed so novel as late as the 1960s. Part of the answer is that the old Marxism remained fairly fixed, a doctrine that sooner or later, as capitalism failed or perhaps under some other circumstance, the American industrial working class would make a revolution, and the thing to do was to join them, organize them, and pull them leftward. Not that Communists and their left-wing critics or competitors disbelieved in U.S. imperialism—that view was left to Reinhold Niebuhr and the other liberals of the day, many of them former socialists who had made a career choice—but it was always a side issue, inflected further by the argument of the proper revolutionary party in the particular country involved.
The New Left emerging in the mid-1960s, which came to consciousness in and around the civil rights movement and/or the ban-the-bomb phase, fixed at once upon the African-American poor and the progressive, mostly white, middle-class students in the North. Consequently, it found little in common with the older views and left parties. Moreover, sclerotic and just plain conservative-bureaucratic leadership dragged the AFL-CIO ever downward, with no real interest in the growing, and largely female, clerical workforce and with the looming prospect of automation (no one yet talked of rust zones). No reform campaign seemed to make much of a dent, and a generation or two of industrial workers now looked increasingly toward retirement plans and health benefits. Indeed, the then-recent unionization of government workers was already the last successful major effort at spreading unionism, and it had the side effect of making the newly organized bodies rather scornful of the unemployed, and largely dependent upon political deals at every level. Notwithstanding the promising developments among hospital workers and the heartening efforts by and for agricultural workers, the only union representatives likely to be found at a campus rally far from New York were from the expelled unions, especially the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers. George Meany and his speechwriters demanded military-industrial jobs and as many wars as possible.
The problems of the older Marxism were evident, but the synthesis of anything like a new Marxism remained elusive. Harry Magdoff shed light on this in one of his luminous essays, observing that in the first half of the century (the half without MR, one might say), the eclipse of capitalism had been looked upon as a certainty, not only from the left but from many political standpoints. In the second half of the century, however, social contradictions continued to mount (including the danger of thermonuclear devastation) but the certainty of capitalist decline and collapse disappeared from view. (Magdoff later quipped to me that if capitalists were willing to risk nuclear war to preserve their power and profits, they would be willing to go over the edge of ecological devastation: it was their nature to do so.) Marxists faced a new situation with a successfully contained working class at the center of the empire.
Radical America rested much of its collective work on the thesis that the world revolution would continue but that at home, the working class was being transformed and the results of that transformation were definitely in the making. The industrial base was becoming more demographically black (a trend only arrested by factory shut-downs) as the office was becoming more demographically female. The two trends coincided in various sectors, including the post office. A synthesis to come would clarify the delays and deformations of the past radical movements. Or so we thought. As the New Left collapsed, it seemingly combined multiracial “power” movements, feminist, and gay liberation movements, and even the counterculture into a rough perspective. In a way, we were only thirty years early, because the immigration law changes of 1965 would complete a transformation of the working class—but by that time, our human synthesis had been shattered and so much lost that the New Left vision of Marxism would need still more drastic revision. Only a neo-traditional Leninism, and the short-lived romantic urban guerilla phenomenon, offered other alternatives upholding a vision of a future socialism.
C. L. R. James, arguably the last of the great Pan-African figures, was a great convenience as an idol of Radical America in those years. He had written The Black Jacobins decades earlier, he was a Hegelian, not to mention sports historian and critic, his collapsed following had upheld visions of black power and women’s power, and of the significance of wildcat strikes and other moves against existing bureaucratic union leaderships. He was also, in advancing old age, still hugely attractive as a public speaker and a persuasive personality at close range. We tended to hope that everything would work out, because the neatness of the Marxism was not matched by anything like tactical certainty. Having the proper view, we would see the situations as they arose and figure out what to do.
The optimism ebbed away by the Reagan years if not before. Radical America continued to uphold (until its demise in the early 1990s) something like the New Left or even Students for a Democratic Society version of Marxist ideas. By this time, deconstructionist adaptations of Marxism ruled in most higher zones of the academy, if rivaled in some places by the scholars of black studies, women’s studies, development studies, and so on. The invention of new and esoteric languages seemed to coincide logically with the hopelessness of the political narrative in whatever version of Marxism dependent upon actual organizing and mobilization. The projects involving support for Sandinistas or for the rebel movements in El Salvador, not to mention the final decade of struggle against Apartheid South Africa, might as well have happened in a different galaxy from this campus crypto-Marxism where straightforward prose had become an enemy of progress.
Nonetheless, important scholarly work on empire, often produced by partisans of Monthly Review, continued to count. Great personalities—to mention only three, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Edward Said—drove home the points in public forums of all kinds—and were often more influential outside, rather than inside, the United States. With the later 1990s, a new kind of Marxist scholarship took form on the inner empire of media communications, and it was not by accident that Robert McChesney would title his later magnum opus The Political Economy of Media. The apple had truly not fallen far from the tree.
The newer waves of repression, the familiar but technologically improved horrors of war and occupation, likewise the crises of capitalism, were all ahead. None would be exactly unexpected and much all too familiar. But Marxism in the United States had not survived a deeply disappointing twentieth century for nothing.
By the dawn of the new century, to come back to the examples closest to myself, a considerable majority of the organizations and personalities of those explored in the Encyclopedia of the American Left were gone, and even the list of living authors had been thinned. The living memories of the 1930s and 40s, the Great Depression, the New Deal, the young CIO, the Popular Front, the fight against fascism, and the onset of the Cold War—all these were becoming more dim. Hardly anyone could remember that feeling of certainty that the days of capitalism were numbered.
And yet the ideas banned in the 1950s, amid resurgent consumer capitalism and FBI raids, had sprung up in new form to be popularized continually in a thousand ways, from music to comic books, in the face of a resurgent empire, a resurgent capital, and where vaunted tolerance always turns out to be limited. Of course, the ideas changed in the process. We are left with no certainties. The realities of a collapsing ecosystem are as fearful as the threats of nuclear war in the first decade of MR’s existence. Still, there are lots of prospects in front of us and around the corner. Marxism, always unfinished, is going to be a big help in figuring out what they are and what to do about them.
Monthly Review - May 2009
Il n'y a pas que le piteux état de l'économie qui appelle à la comparaison entre la situation actuelle et les années 30. En effet, pour sortir de la principale crise économique depuis la Grande dépression, l'idée fait progressivement son chemin en Californie de mettre une nouvelle fois un terme à la prohibition. Des drogues cette fois.
C'est d'abord l'élu californien Tom Ammianoa qui a déposé fin février une proposition de loi pour légaliser et surtout taxer la vente de marijuana. Selon lui, une taxe de 50 dollars par once (environ 30 grammes) serait susceptible de rapporter à la seule Californie un pécule de 1 milliard de dollars par an. Il faut dire que l'Etat du sud-ouest américain est peut-être le principal producteur mondial de cannabis.
L'idée qui n'est pas tombée dans l'oreille d'un sourd. Selon le site Starpulse, la vedette de Traffic, la super-star Michael Douglas, a en effet invité la semaine dernière l'administration Obama à reconsidérer le système de prohibition des drogues, dans le même esprit qui avait présidé à la fin de la prohbition de l'alcool aux Etats-Unis dans les années 30 :
« Regardez, nous essayons de récolter énormément d'argent pour nos problèmes éducatifs et de santé publique et je me demande, en voyant tous ces gangs et en me rappelant le temps de la prohibition, si l'on ne pourrait pas aller explorer d'autres solutions.
« Rappelez-vous, avant la deuxième guerre mondiale, l'alcool était interdit et qu'avons nous eu ? Des gangs, et quels gangs ! C'est quelque chose qu'il faut prendre en compte. Officialiser l'usage de la marijuana, est peut être l'une des sorties d'accompagnement vers une issue économique et une réponse à certains problèmes de violence ».
Selon un récent sondage, 56% des Californiens soutiendraient la mesure. Peut-être la raison pour laquelle elle ne laisse pas certains politiciens indifférents. Personellement opposé à la légalisation de la marijuana dans son Etat, le gouverneur républicain de Californie et ex-acteur Arnold Schwarzenegger a ainsi dû concéder qu'il accepterait un débat sur la taxation :
« Le moment est venu d'en débattre. Je suis toujours favorable à un
débat ouvert sur des idées permettant d'accroître les recettes de
l'Etat. Nous devons dès maintenant étudier de près les pays qui ont
légalisé la marijuana et d'autres drogues, et voir exactement l'impact
que cela a eu sur leur population. »
Evidemment, le gouverneur risque d'être déçu puisqu'aucun pays au monde n'a « légalisé » et taxé la vente de cannabis pour la simple et bonne raison que les conventions de l'ONU l'interdisent. Aux Pays-Bas, c'est ainsi une simple circulaire policière qui garantit le système de large tolérance.
Reste enfin que la loi fédérale américaine continue à prohiber l'usage et la vente de la marijuana, ce qui constitue encore la principale épine dans le pied des antiprohibitionnistes californiens.
Rue89 - 09.05.09
Este tipo de decisões e discursos não é mais do que atirar gasolina para cima de uma fogueira que, por agora, ainda está controlada. Aos líderes políticos exige-se responsabilidade e honestidade intelectual. Desde logo, porque se sabe que os bairros problemáticos são hoje habitados, na sua maioria, não por imigrantes mas por cidadãos nascidos em Portugal, independentemente da cor da pele.
Palavras como as de Paulo Portas ou decisões populistas como a anunciada pelo Governo, tomadas em cima de acontecimentos como estes, só contribuem para o fomento de atitudes racistas, xenófobas e de intolerância que tornam ainda mais perigosa a situação, já de si explosiva, nos chamados bairros problemáticos. Há por isso que louvar a ordem dada às polícias, de total contenção, para evitar que a violência alastre a outros bairros. Ainda que haja intenção de evitar problemas complicados num ano politicamente muito importante, o que interessa é travar uma onda de violência, como a de França e Grécia.
Outra questão é saber as causas deste tipo de violência. Quando no final dos anos 80 se deu início aos planos de erradicação dos bairros de lata não se acautelou o essencial, social e arquitectonicamente, áreas onde a ideologia de esquerda dominava: a integração e inclusão dos habitantes desses bairros. O que se fez foi substituir as barracas de lata por barracas de betão. Como se vê, a política feita em cima do joelho nunca dá bons resultados."
do Editorial D.N. - 10.05.09
