Out the window, through the slats
The highway roars on like sleepless America
Bright lights that cannot dim but only flash
intermittently
before they are– suddenly, it always seems –
empty and without purpose
Something to be put away or recycled
“…blessed is the fruit of thy womb…”

Words,
lacking meaning or substance
that isn’t gray and dark and veined with electricity
from nowhere
Into nowhere
“…deliver us from evil…”
The same sounds
Repeated and repeated and repeated
Emphasizing the same silence
The same sweaty boredom
Like bad attitudes and boring poems,
the tone never changes
Demands to be dealt with
with active verbs and passive stares

“…thy kingdom come, thy will be done,
on Earth, as it is in Heaven…”
In existence
someplace, always
the five-sided cube
All that is out must come in
To be digested, by force, if need be
Stare through the slats
at the life
at the night
at the life
at your walls
the walls behind you
Digest, in free will or forced
’til the fever takes hold of the words
in a sudden instant
“…now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

These “personas” were to have detailed, fictionalized backgrounds, to make them believable to outside observers, and a sophisticated identity protection service was to back them up, preventing suspicious readers from uncovering the real person behind the account. They even worked out ways to game geolocating services, so these “personas” could be virtually inserted anywhere in the world, providing ostensibly live commentary on real events, even while the operator was not really present.

When Raw Story first reported on the contract for this software, it was unclear what the Air Force wanted with it or even if it had been acquired. The potential for misuse, however, was abundantly clear.

A fake virtual army of people could be used to help create the impression of consensus opinion in online comment threads, or manipulate social media to the point where valuable stories are suppressed.

It’s kind of terrifying, as is the website for the company that created the software, Ntrepid. One page, nothing but an e-mail address. These kinds of corporations immediately strike me as dangerous and shady. Gonna keep searching for info…

Roger Agnelli of mining giant CVRD observed that Brazil and the U.S. have complementary economies that would stand to gain substantially from integration.

I wondered why he would even be there, so I looked up Agnelli and it turns out that in addition to the iron-ore business CVRD (now known as Vale), he also sat on the board of Petrobas, Brazil’s state-assisted oil company, and on Anadarko’s Global Advisory Board. Master Caution followers of the last few hours (all zero of you) will remember that Anadarko was one of the companies present at the 2008 meeting between U.S. oil companies and the Ambassador to Brazil that kicked off my interest in this subject in the first place.

That 2008 meeting, which took place just days after the price of oil topped $100 for the first time, also took place in a time of exciting oil discovery off the Atlantic Coast of Brazil. Two weeks later, Petrobas would announce the discovery of another enormous natural gas and oil condensate field nearby in the Atlantic, and energy pundits would wonder aloud in the coming months whether Brazil’s reserves would create a petroleum-independent Western Hemisphere.

“Pre-salt oil is like a pretty woman on a dance floor full of men,” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, put it bluntly. “Everybody wants a go.”

Flash forward to January 1, 2011, and newly sworn in Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff calls the oil and gas reserves off her Atlantic coast Brazil’s “passport to the future.”

I’m still having trouble connecting the dots here. I kind of feel like the U.S. government, in the form of vehicles like the U.S. Commercial Service and others, went down to Brazil over the course of the 2000s and pushed for more open trade policies because major U.S. oil companies told them to. My eyes hurt and I need more coffee and I’m not sure the story goes any further than that, nor am I sure that it’s all that interesting. U.S. companies meddling in South American politics for the benefit of energy companies: big deal, right? Still, it’s an interesting research project and it’s keeping my mind active while I wait to hear back about grad school applications.

More soon. Any help/comments/direction would be much appreciated.

I just want to see if anything came of it and what factors led up to it. So I’ve started searching, and just now found this. Check out point 8, about halfway down, titled “Brazil Cost.” This cable is from 2003 and apparently at that time the idea of investing in Brazil wasn’t quite as rosy (this was during negotiations and campaigning for the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a debate that still goes on today throughout the Western Hemisphere).

Although developed country protectionism is always cited as a major problem undermining Brazil’s competitiveness, so are internal problems sometimes called the “Brazil cost,” i.e., high costs associated with Brazil’s tax structure, outdated social security system, labor code, poor education, and, in general, bureaucratic obstacles to commerce. While the GOB is committed to social security and tax reform, it seems to lack faith it can lower the “Brazil cost” sufficiently in the near term to guarantee Brazilian competitiveness in the free trade environment an FTAA agreement would create.

So what happened between 2003 and 2008? Was the “Brazil cost” lowered significantly enough to where U.S. oil companies believed the Brazilian investment picture was “positive”? Or does this just point to a difference between the outlook in Brazil for oil companies vs. trade generally?

I started by looking through some cables that had come out at the time of various events like the first Gulf War. Then I just started chronologically reading different bits of this or that from a year picked at random (2004) and found a hilarious example of gossipy celeb-worship on the part of the U.S. diplomatic corps. All the while I noted the increased frequency of dispatches coming from Brazil, as I tried to remember news stories from 2004 that would warrant so much information coming from the U.S. embassy there. There was, of course, the Aristide situation, which Brazil helped to deal with from a U.S. diplomatic standpoint.

But then I found this, from 2008: a cable from Rio de Janeiro given the subject heading “U.S. OIL COMPANIES ON INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES IN BRAZIL.” It comes from a roundtable discussion Organized by the U.S. Commercial Service between then-Ambassador to Brazil Clifford Sobel and top-level executives from Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Devon Energy, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, and Hess Corporation. The meeting took place on January 8, 2008, six days after the price of petroleum hit $100 a barrel for the first time.

According to the cable, the executives called the climate for investing in Brazilian oil “positive,” and Ambassador Sobel offers to advocate for them to the Brazilian government and state-controlled petroleum entities. I decided to look back through the earlier cables from Brazil, and see if I could trace any of the activity from prior years and connect it to the favorable situation (as seen by the oil executives) in 2008.

After about an hour of hard reading and googling, I found this site, CableGateGame. The amount of information contained in the WikiLeaks cables is immense and daunting, and CableGate can help with summaries of complicated texts, but it suffers from an awkward format. It’s still hard to know where to start.

I’m going to keep searching through CableGate and WikiLeaks and see if I can turn anything up that would explain/illuminate the meeting between major American oil executives and the government of Brazil. Questions I have include: just how “positive” is the investment climate in Brazil? What changes have taken place in the last decade to bring this situation about? How much oil is in Brazil? How will it be gathered and who benefits the most from a favorable oil trade with Brazil? I have others, but that’s my starting point. I’ll try to keep updating as info comes in and I welcome any help from whoever out there sees this.

Happy hunting,

JD

The wind that rustles these woods
carries my thoughts elsewhere.
I cannot remain or focus here
in my present state:
the mental tempest of post-breakfast coffee.
But I am calm, I am at peace.
Time to let the storm out of her cage of cloud and sea,
to let her rise and find the peak stride of her wail,
as her voice breaks upon the land.

She will first be heard in the sandal-ed bungalows
of San Juan, over the clink of glass
and quash the stench of Citronella
with the pungence of her sea-stink.
Next she will make the run-up to her legal berth,
the land she is owed to.
A fateful jet of Azatlan spares
the black waters of the Gulf,
out of mercy or boredom or nothing.
My voice gathers speed persistently
like a jogger’s legs gaining comfort
with motion and impact.

At the end of dusk she sees it.
A blistering target in the darkness,
all gaudy trees and stucco,
outfits screaming louder than my voice
beg for destruction at her hands:
Miami.
She drools over this prey,
and as the wind begins to whip tree-perched geckos
into the concrete pools on South Beach—
naked, trembling, jets grounded—
it appears the neon nightmare is over,
and the sugar-free wetlands to the north
will awake to comb their hair in primal quiet.
But, seconds from landfall,
she pulls back in abject revulsion
and rolls out into the Atlantic to brood and
pick off hunting-ships as she wonders why.
My voice roves towards Titanic and Bismarck’s Lusitania,
stealing stories from the dark waters as she goes.
She hears of Blackbeard and his face of candles,
the hubris of Jim and James,
of the Ver E. Best taken
by that damned hill
and that odd idiot from Maine—
she falls desperately into hate.
If she tacks hard, she can make it to Norfolk
by next dawn and take the treasured Outer Banks
with her southern spiral arm.
And here she comes,
thumping along like a floor drum.
Keep moving. Go for speed.
Raise the wind-speed and blast through Richmond,
sweep the tail across Atlanta and don’t stop
until you hit the Ohio border,
where the bolt-work is more selective
and requires precision.
Leave absolutely everyone alive and homeless.

She reaches the banks.
No beach house she touches survives.
Even the homes she grazes
panic and flood their basements,
cowering,
destroying priceless relics of a bygone era they never belonged to,
like a dough-boy soiling his uniform.
But as she prepares to march blue flame
across the flattened South,
my voice hears the call of a fantastic white flute,
the tremble of a broken drum.
Spin-move.
She shifts north with the rising tide,
booming across shocked bays and flooded canals.
This is the black heart of the matter.
Deep up the river into the continent,
where the ivory lies
piled into obelisks and great mounds of bone.
There are too many banks.
Too many wild evasions of course.
The port is too well-placed,
it forces her to think too much.
Thoughts of other voices,
of fields and rivers where a wind may flow easily
through the unscathed brush and flirt with peace.
And when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.
She turns back— yet again confused
—to gain strength.

Right now she is milling around
the waters off northern Maine,
dunking otters and twiddling
with her favored osprey.
Get up off the mat, you little punk.
She contemplates circling down
past Rio de Janeiro,
keeping warm,
almost to the edge of Ghana,
then whipping back, south of the Jet Stream,
to slam full bore through the Black Gulf —
because why let guilt be a factor at this stage?
Pick up as much oil as you can and
coat their braying throats with it—
right up the Mississippi, losing steam,
clouds tearing off at the shoulders
as she destroys herself with the land,
muscle up as far as St. Louis,
swan-dive into the Great Lakes
for one last burst of low pressure and
stab the Mayor of Chicago in the heart
with a bolt of lightning and her final breath.
No, she thinks. Too personal.
Too many would feel excluded. And what of the West?

She begins idling down the coast,
officially pissed,
picking up water into mean-looking
gray-green clouds that just hang low and menace the beaches.
Occasionally she stirs up a waterspout
or snaps lightning at a passing ship,
but only to keep low, and black.
Low, and black.

Amble through the Boston piers.
Fuck with the traffic on 93
as the rubber-neckers gawk
at huge, towering evil blackness
that does nothing but drift past and ignore them.
Creep through the naval bases and party boats.
Cancel plans.
Death march into the crotch at Long Island.
Ignore everything. Put your head down and appear to sulk,
plant one foot at Wall Street and the other on Mermaid Avenue,
open your many scabbed mouths with a clap of energy.
Feel out for the bricks, the rust, the dirty gum,
the boredom, the angst, the irrepressible dissatisfaction,
become a mute wrath
Reach out for the dry earth, the hot skin and dying gardens,
dying for you,
open up and rain, rain, rain, and just… stay.
Flood everything old
Drown it all and start again
Never lose your strength, just let it out
and when the bough finally breaks
fall apart, find a northbound train,
get a meal at the meeting of the rivers
and hop the next barge west,
packing nothing.

There is evil in the world and we can feel it,
I think, as I flick away a spider and
seethe in my worsted wool.
But what I know of evil is mostly
itchy wool and spiders.
And what I’ve seen of evil is mostly
negligence and weak stomachs.
Spinalectomies. Unbalanced idiots
in need of a mother or a father
or a shower, not a babysitter.

Elsewhere there are flames, death,
the dusty dead. Here there are
unlit candles, repressed memories,
boxes of nothing that nobody wants–
but whose loss rips holes in
young mouths.

And what a bare floor we are on.
So many lines, cracks and boards,
aging scuffed wood.
All this disappears in my thought
and rearranges in my hope.
Such functional garbage, such
virile decay.
It creaks and moans at my thought,
it fidgets and whispers in my hope.

What beautiful sounds!
Gasoline explodes. Ridges
in a rubber tube stick
to the ridges in the road
and the night purrs with slick confusion
and the morning gasps its first breath.

And nothing works and we are treated
to such beautiful sounds.
The city awakes as I end my day.
What a lullaby! The wheeze of old activity
returning to its grooves, like rain
in dry river-beds. Such cozy beds.
They rumble and shake the foundations
but fit like tongues and never seem to age or change.
How long has it been since I have heard these groans,
these shrill rhythmic cries at the dying of night?

Each day begins with a funeral–
a wake, really.
A celebration of our lost life
and the dispersal of what’s left:
our waste that is us. Our husks.
The body-shell returning whence it came.
Who would trade this for silence, for crickets?
I wallow in it like a dumb pig this morning.

And quite suddenly sleep comes on
like an unheeded chaperone.
But I want to stay, my child mumbles.
I can make it, she offers,
voice falling.
I have found a battle in this.
It is personal and exists in so few places
that few can find it to win.
But we fight,
more from confusion than valor.
What’s next, the battle hymn.
What now, the march.
Yes but no, the waltz.
And ah, but ah, yes–
sleep has found me.