By TARSUS GENUS*

The Berlin Wall, the wall that separates the border between Mexico and the USA, the truth-containing wall of the oligopolitical media and the Mauá Wall in Porto Alegre

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the walls of the world began to have other meanings. Three of them, randomly, come to mind at this moment in Porto Alegre, when the rains seem to mitigate their destructive potential on the unprotected city: the truth containment wall, organized by the spontaneous political union of the oligopolitical media in the “global” world. ; the wall containing the poor on the border between Mexico and the United States, after centuries of US neocolonial exploitation of Latin America; and our Mauá Avenue Wall.

“Our Wall” — that of Mauá — can either be the symbol of a disaster caused by the strategic limits of our federated state power, to change the course of the environmental and social crisis of the 21st Century, or it can be the icon of a moment of redemption. You just need to want to: think, wake up and plan, taking advantage of both the energy of the “big guys”, who always want to make money from crises (modeling their action in a public interest strategy formatted by the national State) and placing at the center of political and technical planning, environmental protection, sustainability, new infodigital technologies and promotion of the social, cultural and economic interests of the poorest and poorest, ruined by the catastrophe.

The first wall that came to mind is the wall of truth, which the hegemonic media builds on significant political and military facts, which could erode their hegemonic power to form opinion in imperial-colonial globalization. It is a process that concentrates privileges and aims to dominate strategic territories for future wars.

A flagrant example of this wall of truth built by the media, it aims to transform the war that the neo-fascist government of Israel — not its people — is waging against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip into a war between a terrorist organization and a State, or that it is of just war between “two peoples” who seek to survive.

Just like in Timisoara massacre (Agamben) the corpses were (un)buried and “tortured” to justify — through the media — the massacres perpetrated by the avengers of the unearthed dead, to add simulated torture to them (the same methods that combined the Auschwitz experiments with the fire of the Reichstag), in the case of the “war against Hamas” the Israeli government makes — against the Palestinians — a new synthesis: between the devastation of Guernica and the US incendiary bombs dropped on the Vietnamese peasants.

The second wall that I remembered is the wall containing the poor built between Mexico and the United States, which occupies a border line of 3.140 km, nineteen times longer than the Berlin Wall. Its function is to detain the hungry with a brutality comparable only to the freedom of movement of speculative capital — between all regions and countries of the world — through which the flows of money are legitimized, both by organized crime on a global scale and by capital.” legal rights” for accumulation without work, supported by the budgets of indebted countries.

This wall of containment of the poor loses nothing to the Berlin Wall as an instrument of intercapitalist dispute, to reinforce the national power of central countries — no longer with the dispute between two models of society that have already historically failed — both in social and in environmental sustainability, but to maintain territories under occupation or influence, with their geopolitical dominance agreed upon through war diplomacy, in wars that they themselves promote, agree upon, and then resume in all corners of the world.

The third wall is our Mauá Wall. And it's not just about jumping over it, but understanding that after the humanistic help, in the first phase — and the reconstruction of the public and private heritage lost with the catastrophe (in the second phase) — it's not about rebuilding it, simply, but through it signal the construction of a new model of economic development with distinct characteristics for the State: a model that is capable of influencing Brazil, doing justice to our capacity to influence the world, as has occurred at present with the President Lula's foreign policy.

Anything less is empirical cowardice and conciliation with forms of delayed development without environmental sustainability, which have been destroying living conditions on the planet and which – due to a certain inertia in the democratic State's ways of deciding – facilitate the policies of authoritarian salvationists, Nazis and fascists, who maintain that only the strength of an authoritarian government can solve the problems left by savage capitalism.

The reconstruction of the flood protection system is, in fact, the key to the construction of this new model, through socio-environmental measures, educational projects, legal reforms, engineering works and reorganization of territories adjacent to the System, which combine planning and execution of buffer zones, water dispersion channels, expropriation of land for social interest for environmental protection parks, construction of protected popular housing, as well as — in these locations — encouragement for the allocation of companies to produce alternative energy, using new technologies which are available in the most developed countries in this area.

To build this model — the only one capable of signaling a new relationship between the community and the State with the environment — it is necessary to demonstrate socially and materially the ability of human beings to coexist with naturalness, in the place where they are. And it starts now and within the first two stages and phases already mentioned. A concrete example of these urgent measures is the imposition in financing contracts for the recovery of companies in the crisis production network, of a mandatory quota for environmental recovery projects, in the respective regions where these companies are located.

After the deadlines for maintaining the current state “reconstruction” structure, as decided on an emergency basis by President Lula, have run out, I think that the federal government should legally establish a High Authority, which will begin to coordinate, outside of the immediate political litigation, with the municipal and state governments to conduct, in agreement with global and national experts and particularly with our network of public and private universities, for a minimum period of six years, a major effort to build the new Rio Grande, for us and for Brazil : a Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and the world. Other than that, it's about cleaning up the ice and replacing privileges.

Tarsus-in-law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts). [https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I]

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