O NYTimes nao larga do pe' do Brasil: tambem, com todas essas manifestacoes bizarras...

Não dá outra, a cada dia que recebo o New York Times, lá está o Brasil, na capa, bem no meio, com alguma foto de manifestantes em alguma capital brasileira e o relato objetivo, fiel, pelo correspondente Simon Romero, que ainda assim transcreve, acriticamente, declarações de esquizofrênicos econômicos, como os do Movimento Passe Livre, sem agregar outras afirmações, de economistas não esquizofrênicos, por exemplo, para mostrar como a proposta é idiota, ou colocando em termos mais corteses, como ela é economicamente irracional e socialmente injusta. Enfim, como dizem que o NYT é o melhor jornal do mundo (eu também acho, mas ele é ligeiramente distorcido para a social democracia), aqui vamos lá, mas também vou procurar postar o que sai no Wall Street Journal, que eu considero, de fato, o melhor jornal do mundo, junto com o Financial Times, e o que pode sair na Economist, a melhor revista do mundo desde meados do século 19...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Despite Assurances by Brazil’s President, Protesters Stage Another Day of Demonstrations

By WILLIAM NEUMAN and SIMON ROMERO

The New York Times: June 22, 2013

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SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil braced for another day of demonstrations on Saturday, after many in the country’s sweeping protest movement angrily dismissed an effort by President Dilma Rousseff to address their broad demands.

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A bus stop was damaged by protesters in Rio de Janeiro.

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São Paulo Protesters Speak Out

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The Signs of the Brazilian Protests

• GRAPHIC: The Rising Cost of Living in Brazil

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• Brazil Tries to Calm Protester Concerns, Rebuking Violence(June 22, 2013)

• How Angry Is Brazil? Pelé Now Has Feet of Clay (June 22, 2013)

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People took to the streets in some cities on Saturday morning, with protests expected in more than 20, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and smaller state capitals in the Amazon, like Rio Branco. One of the biggest was in Belo Horizonte, where an estimated 20,000 people had gathered by early afternoon.

Ms. Rousseff initially remained silent as the protest movement grew, although she publicly embraced the protesters’ cause on Tuesday. Tens of thousands of people thronged the streets of São Paulo and other cities on Monday, and by Thursday more than a million demonstrators had turned out in dozens of cities.

In a speech on Friday night, Ms. Rousseff, a former guerrilla who fought the country’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, praised the demonstrators for bringing a new energy to Brazilian politics and said repeatedly that she would listen to “the voice of the streets.”

“If we can take advantage of the impulse of this new political energy,” she said, “we can do many things better and faster that Brazil has not been able to do because of political or economic limitations.”

But the proposals she offered in response to those voices were short on details, and included some programs for which she had been unable to garner support in the past. Ms. Rousseff said she would create a national transportation plan to promote mass transit, dedicate oil revenues to education and bring in foreign doctors to bolster the health care system.

Even as Ms. Rousseff’s recorded message was being broadcast on television, demonstrators continued to march, and many said they were unaware that the president was speaking to them.

“I don’t believe in her promises,” Sergio Mazzini, 65, said late Friday night during a protest in the São Paulo city center. “There have been too many promises for me to keep believing. We don’t know where all this is leading, but they are trying to fool us.

“They don’t live our reality, so it’s easy to talk about hospitals and schools when it’s us who are suffering for lack of investment in priorities.”

Felipe Possani, 20, an intern at a bank who was wearing a white mask in the style popularized by the hacker group Anonymous, had nothing but scorn. “She’s a joke,” he said. “She’s just faking.”

The protests were initially set off by demands for a rollback of transit fare increases, which officials in several cities agreed to last week. But citizens have also demanded action on an array of issues, calling for improvements in health care, public transit and education, lower taxes, gay rights and an end to corruption.

Another issue surging to the fore is a proposed constitutional amendment to limit the power of the Public Ministry, a body of independent public prosecutors.

Selena Mokdad, 19, a student, said she was deeply worried that the protest movement would lose its way by making too many diffuse demands, noting that there were no clear leaders to provide focus for the grievances.

“They’re fighting for everything and nothing specific, so they’re not going to change anything,” Ms. Mokdad said.

And while many protesters angrily rejected Ms. Rousseff’s proposals as empty promises, others said she should be given a chance.

“It’s a bit naïve to talk about Dilma all the time,” Ms. Mokdad said, adding that Ms. Rousseff had inherited a country with deeply ingrained problems, like corruption. “She’s not responsible for everything. She’s like in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t think the problem is her.”

At the heart of the movement is a rejection of traditional politics in Brazil. Protesters have expressed deep cynicism toward the main political parties and their leaders.

Ms. Rousseff is expected to run for a second term next year, but a poll of protesters in São Paulo by Datafolha, a top research firm, found that only 10 percent said they would support her for re-election. Aécio Neves, a leader of the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, received just 5 percent support.

But 30 percent said they would support Joaquim Barbosa, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who has won widespread admiration throughout Brazil for crusading against corruption and trying — until now, without success — to send political leaders convicted in a huge embezzlement and vote-buying scheme to jail.

Some prominent voices in Brazil have also begun lashing back at aspects of the protest movement. The Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Globo published a scathing editorial on Saturday in which it questioned the protesters’ repudiation of political parties.

“It is an illusion to think that in democracy political projects can be carried out on the margin of parties,” O Globo said.

And Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a former president of Brazil who broadly restructured the economy in the 1990s, warned that the protests could offer more jolts to political leaders.

“I have my doubts the parties are capable of capturing all this and at least transforming their message,” Mr. Cardoso said in an interview with the newspaper Folha de São Paulo.

Paula Ramón contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 23, 2013, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Despite Assurances by Brazil’s President, Protesters Stage Another Day of Demonstrations .

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June 21, 2013

How Angry Is Brazil? Pelé Now Has Feet of Clay

By SIMON ROMERO and WILLIAM NEUMAN

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — It has long been a source of unparalleled pride, a common bond uniting a disparate nation, something Brazilians could always point to — even in times of economic ruin or authoritarian rule — that made them the best in the world.

But these days, Brazil, the most successful nation in World Cup history, home to legends like Pelé and Ronaldo, is finding little comfort in “the beautiful game.”

In the most unexpected of ways, Brazil’s obsession with soccer has become a potent symbol of what ails the country. Ever since huge protests began sweeping across Brazil this week, demonstrators have taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands to vent their rage at political leaders of every stripe, at the reign of corruption, at the sorry state of public services.

The protests have grown so large and disruptive that on Friday, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, put forth measures to address some of the grievances.

But pointing to the billions of dollars spent on stadiums at the expense of basic needs, a growing number of protesters are telling fans around the globe to do what would once have seemed unthinkable: to boycott the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. In a sign of how thoroughly the country has been turned upside down, even some of the nation’s revered soccer heroes have become targets of rage for distancing themselves from the popular uprising.

“Pelé and Ronaldo are making money off the Cup with their advertising contracts, but what about the rest of the nation?” asked one protester, Gabriela Costa, 24, a university student.

Protesters lambasted both men after Pelé, whose full name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento, called on Brazilians to “forget the protests” and a video circulated on social media showing Ronaldo, whose name is Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, now a television commentator and sports marketing strategist, contending that World Cups are accomplished “with stadiums, not hospitals.”

With hordes of protesters rallying outside soccer matches, clashing with the police and setting vehicles on fire, FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, took pains to reassure the world on Friday that it had “full trust” in Brazil’s ability to provide security and had not considered canceling either the 2014 World Cup or the Confederations Cup, a major international tournament currently taking place in Brazil.

But the fact that soccer officials even had to address the issue was a major embarrassment to Brazilian officials, who had fought so hard to land international events like the World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games in order to showcase what a stable, democratic power their nation had become.

Now instead of being the culmination of Brazil’s rise, the events — and the enormous expense of hosting them — have become a rallying cry for the protesters to show how out of step their government’s priorities are with what the people want and need. While the government says it is spending more than $13 billion to prepare for the World Cup, including related construction projects, most of the stadiums are over budget, according to official findings.

“I love soccer,” said Arnaldo da Silva, 29, a supervisor at a telecommunications company supervisor, who celebrated back in 2007 when Brazil landed the World Cup but was also among the protesters in the streets this week, denouncing spending on stadiums when the infrastructure around those structures, like sidewalks, is crumbling. “It’s as if we’re divided between our heart and our head.”

As far back as the 1930s, fans here swelled with pride over the feats of players like Leônidas da Silva, a striker known as the Black Diamond who stunned European opponents with remarkably creative plays. Some Brazilian players like Sócrates, the hard-drinking doctor who was captain of Brazil’s 1982 World Cup team, transcended the sport by taking part in the pro-democracy movement against Brazil’s military dictatorship.

But while Pelé has been faulted publicly before for his stance on various issues and for his initial failure to acknowledge an out-of-wedlock daughter, the level of criticism against him and other soccer figures has changed. Now Brazil’s star players, even those speaking favorably of the current wave of protests, are suddenly finding themselves under scrutiny in new ways.

“Brazil, wake up, a teacher is worth more than Neymar!” thousands of protesters shouted at a demonstration this week outside the new stadium built in Fortaleza in northeast Brazil, referring to the wealth of Neymar da Silva Santos Jr., the 21-year-old star who recently joined Barcelona, the Spanish soccer club.

On the field, the national team finds itself in the doldrums, dropping to a historical low of No. 22 in the FIFA rankings. And at the Brazilian Football Confederation, which oversees the sport in the country, the longtime president, Ricardo Teixeira, resigned last year. He cited health reasons, but he had faced allegations of corruption.

Meanwhile, his successor, José María Marín, 80, has come under fire over his support for Brazil’s military dictatorship and being shown on video slipping a medal from a youth tournament into his pocket. Later, he said the medal was given to him.

“Brazil was coming into the preparations for the World Cup with a swagger from its growing economic clout,” said Alex Bellos, a Briton who has written widely on Brazilian soccer. “But there’s the sense now that the sport is beset by various problems, even before the protests erupted.”

In its bid to win the 2007 Pan American Games, Rio de Janeiro promised it would build a new highway, a monorail and miles of new subway lines, but none of those projects came to fruition. The games themselves were over budget, and a number of the venues were so poorly constructed that they are either being knocked down or rebuilt for the Olympics.

The Engenhão stadium, built for track and field and then used by Botafogo, a Rio soccer club, was to be the main venue for the 2016 Olympics. But that is now in doubt after technicians ruled the roof could collapse in windy weather and ordered it closed.

“I think Brazilians are feeling insulted to see that there was political will and large investments to construct big, FIFA-quality soccer fields,” said Antonio Carlos Costa, 51, a Presbyterian pastor and leader of Rio de Paz, a group that combats social inequalities in Brazil. “And when these stadiums went up, the people saw that there was not the same political will to use public funds to build the same standard of schools, hospitals, and public security.”

Outside the São Paulo construction site of a stadium being built for a local team, Corinthians, which will also be used for the World Cup, Ana Paula Pereira, 36, a fan and bar owner, was torn by the turn the protests had taken. She supported the demands of the demonstrators on the streets but did not think that it made sense to target her beloved team. “There has to be the World Cup, but there also have to be hospitals,” she said.

Andrew Downie contributed reporting from Salvador, Brazil, and Taylor Barnes and James Montague from Rio de Janeiro.