BOLETIM FEBRACTA: Controladores de Tráfego Aéreo Brasileiros

BOLETIM FEBRACTA

Controladores de Tráfego Aéreo Brasileiros,

Há alguns dias que nossos colegas de Manaus ouviram a sentença condenatória da Justiça Militar. É apropriado revelar que, dos membros votantes nesta causa (4 oficiais militares, JUÍZES NÃO TOGADOS, e um único Juiz de Direito, TOGADO), o membro civil, O JUIZ TOGADO isentou aos controladores de tais acusações, o que nos anima a acreditar que, em instâncias superiores à militar, lograremos êxito. Estamos articulando os próximos passos, juntamente com os Controladores de Manaus.

Lamentamos, também, informar que o Carlos Trifílio, Presidente da FEBRACTA, foi preso em flagrante, na quarta-feira, acusado de insubordinação (Art. 163 do CPM). O Dr. Tadeu, protamene atuou para para desfazer mais este ato, contra o Presidente da FEBRACTA. Ontem, Quinta-feira, dia 24 de julho de 2008, foi determinada sua liberação, tendo sido considerada abusiva tal atitude.

Há uma longa história que culminou nesta prisão em flagrante, levando-o à condição de preso de justiça e recolhido a uma cela da Base Aérea de São Paulo. Tudo isto por ter se deslocado da Base Aérea de São Paulo ao SRPV SP, aparentemente, contrariando seu chefe. Imagine, estamos no século 21, a maioria das 'Polícias' já aboliram esta prática. No entanto...

O Trifílio está afastado desde dezembro de 2006. Ele e o Alves, da Bahia, são os precursores neste processo de perseguição que se estabeleceu contra os diretores de Associações de Controladores por todo o país, exceto, logicamente, a associação de Curitiba. Depois deles muitos outros se encontram 'soltos' em diversas organizações militares e setores diversos da burocracia. Em torno deste evento há muito o que ser explicado, o que um dia, certamente, iremos poder falar abertamente. Toda esta história já está sendo registrada por diversas pessoas.

Nós temos muito a lamentar. Entretanto, confiantes nos princípios constitucionais contemplados, principalmente no artigo 5º da CF - DOS DIREITOS E DEVERES INDIVIDUAIS E COLETIVOS, sabemos que chegará a hora em que todas as 'autoridades e instituições' responderão pelos seus atos, sejam pelas ações judiciais impetradas pela FEBRACTA e seus Diretores, seja pelo inevitável do infortúnio, das conseqüências dos muito equívocos que se cometem em tantas medidas desencontradas no ATC brasileiro. Infelizmente, um grave acidente aéreo amadurece nos porões do intangível mundo do ATC. E, nesse momento, inevitavelmente, mudanças acontecerão. Isto não é uma profecia e nem constitui vontade desta instituição, que é de privada, sendo nada mais do que uma perspectiva lógica, fruto de muitas medidas que enfraqueceram tecnicamente a competência técnica geral no ATC brasileiro.

Lembramos, também, que o Trifilio encontra-se ABANDONADO pelos controladores de São Paulo, a quem imputamos responsabilidade pela omissão e egoísmo, além de seriamente ADOENTADO (apresenta um quadro de debilitação fisiológica preocupante). Mas tudo isto não é o mais importante diante da missão que todos nós aceitamos, diante do senso de que, antes de qualquer qualificação de condição funcional, militar ou civil, somos todos SERVIDORES DO PAÍS, com o DEVER de fazer o que é correto fazer, independente das conseqüências imediatas, que podem ser desde a incompreensão DOS PRÓPRIOS CONTROLADORES de nossas equipes operacionais, mas também de quem mantém este estado de coisas. Atualmente, nas Organizações Militares, muito se fala que, antes de controladores, são militares. Nós concordamos com essa afirmação, acrescentando que é exatamente por isto inevitável mudar esta verdade. Quem controla os céus do país com tanta dedicação e entrega precisa de DEDICAÇÃO EXCLUSIVA, não significando, objetivamente, uma melhora ou piora das condições, mas é necessário DESMILITARIZAR o ATC, inclusive na INFRAERO. Não é possível conciliar escalas operacionais beirando o absurdo com atividades colegiais militares (marchas, escalas e formaturas militares, por exemplo).

O que nos move nisso tudo, é a lembrança do sofrimento daqueles que ficam sem seus parentes que se vão em cada acidente aéreo. Imaginem vocês, por um pequeno instante, o que significa perder a vida àqueles que pagam por um Serviço Essencial, esperando decolar e pousar com SEGURANÇA. Não podemos permitir que se esqueçam dos rostos daqueles que ficam consternados pelos aeroportos, esperando uma informação, esperando por uma explicação plausível sobre o que aconteceu. Mães e pais, amigos e toda a sociedade brasileira sofre. Quem se omite de atuar, de fazer o que é certo, pensando, tão somente, em resolver seus próprios problemas, de fato, contribui com a manutenção do atual sistema e semeia conseqüências a si mesmo ou ao colega que estiver ocupando uma Posição Operacional num dia desses.

Não queremos polemizar, mas contribuir para uma reflexão sincera sobre o que acontece no ATC brasileiro. Pensem, pois, um pouco mais no que você tem feito para melhorar a SEGURANÇA no ATC aí no seu órgão ATC onde trabalha. Pensem no que nós, PROFISSIONAIS, temos feito pelo sustento desta luta.

Será que temos feito o que, REALMENTE, podemos?

Procure uma associação ligada à federação e ofereça recursos intelectuais e financeiros. Atue com coragem, cumpra o seu verdadeiro DEVER!

AGÊNCIA FEBRACTA

Caetano Veloso: Between Fidel and the CIA (or, "The Thrill Is Gone" -- long gone!)

BLOG DO NOBLAT, enviado por Caetano Veloso, 21.7.2008, 11.03 h

Entre Fidel e a CIA

Eu disse que voltava ao assunto: na Europa todos os jornalistas me perguntam sobre o caso Fidel. Eles sabem apenas que Fidel ralhou comigo por causa de uma canção sobre Guatánamo.

Fico um tanto triste. Na verdade acho que Fidel não foi político ao me acusar de pedir perdão ao imperialismo americano e ao chamar a atenção para um trecho de entrevista onde aparece crítica a Cuba (e reconhecimento dos conseguimentos civilizatórios dos Estados Unidos), em detrimento da canção em si, que é o que devia contar mais.

Afinal, uma canção é imediatamente ouvida e assimilada por muitos; uma entrevista, mal e mal por poucos. No nosso caso, a canção mostrou-se forte, arrancando aplausos entusiasmados em todos os shows do Obra em Progresso e repercussão na imprensa e um forte boca-a-boca. Com o evidente potencial de, uma vez gravada, tornar-se enormemente conhecida e mesmo amada.

Já a entrevista nem era boa. Tive pequenos problemas com o modo como ela foi editada (sobretudo no que diz respeito à sucessão presidencial e à ausência de crédito a uma frase de Mangabeira Unger), mas não especialmente no que se refere ao caso Fidel/Base de Guantánamo. Quanto a isso, sei que fui eu a me expressar de modo afobado e daí obscuro.

Eu não queria receber aplausos fáceis da esquerda e ser tomado por um anti-americanista recém-saído do armário. Não sou Neil Young. Nem quero ser o Mick Jagger de "Sweet New Con Or Something": um inteligente neo-liberal (no sentido nobre do termo) como Jagger jogando para a galera num tom que, a despeito do acerto básico na apreciação da questão, soa demagógico. Minha "Guantánamo" não tem nada disso.

O próprio estilo despido e enxuto (diferente aliás, quanto a isso, embora não quanto à sinceridade, do de "Haiti", com que alguém aí, erradamente, a identificou) atesta uma atitude direta nascida de observação simples que levou a um estado de espanto indignado. Pareço um poeta concreto, fazendo boa crítica positiva do próprio trabalho? Ótimo. Adoro parecer um poeta concreto.

Se o risco de a crítica estar muito aquém da que os pobres produtores das obras podem apresentar, para quê falsa modéstia? Fidel poderia ter sido aconselhado por aqueles que, perto dele, ouvem música e pensam em cultura a calar o bico e deixar a canção fazer sua parte, com a entrevista relegada ao esquecimento. O resultado seria um renascimento da força afetivo-simbólica que a revolução cubana tem na mente da minha geração de latino-americanos. E até da imorredoura simpatia que a própria figura de Fidel arranca do nosso cerebelo. (Ou hipotálamo?)

Mas não. Ele transformou o episódio numa manifestação anti-Cuba. Os europeus não conhecem a canção, só a fofoca de celebridades velhas do folclore político da América Latina: o Comandante contra o "ex-revolucionário" tropicalista. A ignorância! Mas insisto em que um país onde as pessoas precisam de permissão especial para viajar ao exterior não é o melhor exemplo de respeito aos direitos humanos. Ir e vir é simplesmente o mais básico destes.

Deixa os frankfurtianos dizerem que a "busca da felicidade" é mais cruel do que o nazismo. Tou fora. Só espero que com essas declarações sinceras de amor (mesmo meio morto) pela revolução cubana, não venha agora ser a CIA a anotar que pedi perdão ao ditador. Mas acho que a CIA é menos grossa do que isso.

Blog post here: http://oglobo.globo.com/pais/noblat/#115169

Thomas L. Friedman on Mugabe, Mbeki, Putin, and China

So Popular and So Spineless

by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, July 16, 2008

Much ink has been spilled lately decrying the decline in American popularity around the world under President Bush. Polls tell us how China is now more popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the United States. I am sure there is truth to these polls. We should have done better in Iraq. An America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down.

But America is not and never has been just about those things, which is why I also find some of these poll results self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly. Friday’s vote at the U.N. on Zimbabwe reminded me why.

Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power? With America’s overextended military and overextended banks, that is the world into which we may be heading.

Welcome to a world of too much Russian and Chinese power.

I am neither a Russia-basher nor a China-basher. But there was something truly filthy about Russia’s and China’s vetoes of the American-led U.N. Security Council effort to impose targeted sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s ruling clique in Zimbabwe.

The U.S. put forward a simple Security Council resolution, calling for an arms embargo on Zimbabwe, the appointment of a U.N. mediator, plus travel and financial restrictions on the dictator Mugabe and 13 top military and government officials for stealing the Zimbabwe election and essentially mugging an entire country in broad daylight.

In the first round of Zimbabwe’s elections, on March 29, the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, won nearly 48 percent of the vote compared with 42 percent for Mugabe. This prompted Mugabe and his henchmen to begin a campaign of killing and intimidation against Tsvangirai supporters that eventually forced the opposition to pull out of the second-round runoff vote just to stay alive.

Even before the runoff, Mugabe declared that he would disregard the results if his ZANU-PF party lost. Or as he put it: “We are not going to give up our country because of a mere X” on some paper ballot.

And so, of course, Mugabe “won” in one of the most blatantly stolen elections ever — in a country already mired in misrule, unemployment, hunger and inflation. Some 25 percent of Zimbabwe’s people have now taken refuge in neighboring states. (I have close friends from Zimbabwe, and one of my daughters worked there in an H.I.V.-AIDS community center in January.) The Associated Press reported in May from Zimbabwe “that annual inflation rose this month to 1,063,572 percent, based on prices of a basket of basic foodstuffs.” Zimbabwe’s currency has become so devalued, the A.P. explained, that “a loaf of bread now costs what 12 new cars did a decade ago.”

No matter. Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, argued that the targeted sanctions that the U.S. and others wanted to impose on Mugabe’s clique exceeded the Security Council’s mandate. “We believe such practices to be illegitimate and dangerous,” he said, describing the resolution as one more obvious “attempt to take the Council beyond its charter prerogatives.” Veto!

Mugabe’s campaign of murder and intimidation didn’t strike Churkin as “illegitimate and dangerous” — only the U.N. resolution to bring a halt to it was “illegitimate and dangerous.” Shameful. Meanwhile, China is hosting the Olympics, a celebration of the human spirit, while defending Mugabe’s right to crush his own people’s spirit.

But when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, and his stooge at the U.N., Dumisani Kumalo. They have done everything they can to prevent any meaningful U.N. pressure on the Mugabe dictatorship.

As The Times reported, America’s U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, “accused South Africa of protecting the ‘horrible regime in Zimbabwe,’ ” calling this particularly disturbing given that it was precisely international economic sanctions that brought down South Africa’s apartheid government, which had long oppressed that country’s blacks.

So let us now coin the Mbeki Rule: When whites persecute blacks, no amount of U.N. sanctions is too much. And when blacks persecute blacks, any amount of U.N. sanctions is too much.

Which brings me back to America. Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. The U.N. vote on Zimbabwe demonstrates that this is not true for these “popular” countries — called Russia or China or South Africa — that have no problem siding with a man who is pulverizing his own people.

So, yes, we’re not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/opinion/16friedman.html

Um Heroi Brasileiro -- o Juiz Fausto Martin de Sanctis puts Daniel Dantas behind bars twice

A major row has broken out among Brazil's judiciary over a corruption probe that has seen a businessman arrested and freed twice in two days.

Each time, prominent businessman Daniel Dantas was ordered released by the president of Brazil's Supreme Court.

At least 130 members of the judiciary have signed a letter in support of the judge who ordered both arrests and who is himself now under investigation.

The Supreme Court chief said there was not enough evidence for the arrests.

The decision by Gilmar Mendes, the president of the Supreme Court, has also been criticised by the association of senior officers in the Federal Police and dozens of public prosecutors.

Bribery allegations

Mr Dantas was arrested earlier this week along with a number of other people as part of a wide-ranging corruption investigation.

Following an application by defence lawyers for habeas corpus, Mr Mendes ordered his release.

Mr Dantas was detained for a second time just a few hours later, amid allegations that some of his associates had tried to pay a bribe to interfere with the continuing police operation.

However, within 24 hours Mr Mendes again ruled that Mr Dantas should be freed.

The businessman was driven away from the Sao Paulo police station where he was being held.

Mr Mendes said in his ruling that he believed there was insufficient grounds for the arrest.

He also made clear he regarded the decision by a judge in a lower court that Mr Dantas should be detained a second time was an act of disrespect, and said copies of the judge's ruling should be passed on to the relevant legal authorities.

That decision caused considerable anger in legal circles, and at least 130 judges have now put their names to a statement in support of Judge Fausto Martin de Sanctis, who ordered both arrests.

The Federal Association of Judges of Brazil said Judge de Sanctis had done nothing more than exercise the role assigned to him by the constitution.

In a further bizarre development the office of the president of the Supreme Court was checked for listening devices after claims that the same judge had ordered the police to carry out surveillance.

Nothing was found, and Judge de Sanctis has denied this allegation.

The original police investigation is continuing, but of the 17 people arrested earlier in the week only one is still in custody.

For the moment the investigation's objectives seem overshadowed by the controversy which has engulfed the judiciary.

Link to BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7503600.stm

Bob Herbert: Cause for Alarm

by Bob Herbert, New York Times, July 5, 2008

Beaches, barbecues and flags as big as baseball fields. Fireworks as loud as thunder lighting the nighttime sky. Hot fun, as Sly & the Family Stone would say, in the summertime.

Friday was the 232nd anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Celebrations were ubiquitous. HBO offered a marathon telecast of its John Adams series. Bands of wildly varying quality, from one coast to the other, let loose with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

It was a July Fourth like many others. There was nothing overt to signal anything was wrong. The Red Sox had traveled from Boston to play a weekend series against the Yankees in the Bronx. In Washington, the National Independence Day Parade made its way along Constitution Avenue.

And yet, there was an undercurrent of anxiety in the land. Vacations have been curtailed because of the price of fuel. Since the holiday fell on a Friday, the monthly unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics were released a day early, on Thursday. They weren’t good. The Times summed things up with a Page 1 headline:

“Outlook Darker as Jobs Are Lost and Wages Stall.”

The high and the low were being buffeted. The bad news bears were loose on Wall Street, and the prospects for the summer employment of teenagers were abysmal. The national employment rate for teens in June was the lowest in 60 years.

But the anxiety seems more intense than the usual concern for a cyclical economic downturn. Something fundamental seems to have gone haywire. David Boren, a former U.S. senator who is now president of the University of Oklahoma, has written a short book that he called, “A Letter to America.”

His sense of alarm in the opening paragraph could not have been clearer. “The country we love is in trouble,” he said. “In truth, we are in grave danger of declining as a nation. If we do not act quickly, that decline will become dramatic.”

I couldn’t agree more. The symbols of patriotism — bumper stickers and those flags the size of baseball fields — have taken the place of the hard work and sacrifice required to keep a great nation great.

You know that matters have gotten out of hand when, as we learned this week, American instructors at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, gave classes on torture techniques used by the Communists to extract false testimony from American prisoners during the Korean War.

Talk about defining deviancy down! As Al Gore reminds us, this is the first time in American history that “the executive branch of the government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by Gen. George Washington during the Revolutionary War.”

There are signs galore of the nation’s turn for the worse. We are fighting a debilitating war in Iraq without any idea of how to pay for it — or how to end it. No one has any real idea about how to cope with the devastating energy crisis, or how to turn the economy around.

The airline industry is a first-class mess and the knees of the General Motors colossus have buckled. Locks are being changed on foreclosed homes across the country and working families lucky enough to meet their mortgages are watching the value of their homes decline.

We can build spectacular new stadiums for football and baseball teams (the Yanks, the Mets, the Giants and the Jets are all getting ready to move into staggeringly expensive new homes) but we can’t rebuild New Orleans or reconstruct the World Trade Center site destroyed almost seven years ago.

This year’s presidential election is the perfect opportunity to place the truth before the American public in the form of a realistic examination of the state of the nation, and an honest consideration of creative ideas for moving forward. Instead, we’re getting hour after hour and day after day of trivia: Who’s up? Who’s down? Who’s patriotic? Who’s not?

Mr. Boren believes that the combination of unrestrained partisanship and the corrosive influence of big money have all but paralyzed the political process. He worries about the neglect of the nation’s infrastructure, about the growing divide between the very wealthy and everyone else, and about “the catastrophic drop in the way the rest of the world views us.”

The U.S., with its enormous economic and military power, is still better-positioned than any other country to set the standards for the 21st century. But that power and leadership potential were not granted by divine right and cannot be wasted indefinitely.

Patriotism has its place. But waving a flag is never a good substitute for serious thought and rolling up one’s sleeves.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/opinion/05herbert.html