Today I bought Dracula by Bram Stoker

Tomorrow those that still live in Brazil have got to vote and choose the mayor to theirs cities. I live in Sao Paulo and it would be a pleasure to enforce the value of my citizenship and choose whom  I consider  the best politician to conduct one of the most important and complex social clusters of the world. But there is no option.

Sao Paulo is the fourth biggest city within the five ones identified as the greatest possibilities for business and for the sustainable development. With about 12M of inhabitants this city has to face big challenges through the next fifty years.

As someone that worked in an important task force to buy the best services and products with good prices for this city, I saw how difficult it is to end  with the mafia system of Sao Paulo City Hall.

The suppliers finance the politicians just to ensure the future of corruption scheme and stabilize the prices over the highest level of global prices and gain with extraordinary profit the bidding contracts. On the other hand, when some due diligence is made to identify the beneficial owners of those companies that own the bidding contracts, a big surprise is revealed: The owners are the same politicians that manage the city as secretaries and sometimes as the own mayor. They use a lot of front companies to hide their faces through what is known as “XY Participações Ltda” that has a percentage of many other companies that in the end of a chain are the companies that have the millionaire bidding contracts.

I was thinking all day long, I ended up looking for nothing on the online newspaper when, suddenly, I found an interesting picture (above) of the ministers of Brazilian Supreme Court Joaquim Barbosa and Ricardo Lewandowski, both judging the scheme of corruption called 'Mensalão", – the first one as adjudicator and the second as proof reader – that showed me clearily what hell situation we are living in Brazil.

At the same time, I remembered that today I bought the book Dracula written by Bram Stoker and there was no other philosophical thinking to explaining this catastrophic situation beyond but to associate, satirely, the Brazilian's ethic context with the literal universe of Count Dracula and compare him with Lewandowiski and the defenders of corruption. And I wrote then:

There couldn't be a better moment to read Dracula’s special edition in leather cover and printed in China, of course. "Joaquim, I will drink your noble black blood !" Said the Count Dracula aka Lewandowski.

 

By Fabio de Freitas