The ideological divisions within Catholicism, and their political ramifications, is the under-reported Latin American story of the election year. IMHO.
This advertorial — hosted on Arcoiris.tv — for the Fé e Política movement here in Brazil, which supports the Landless Rural Workers Movement, will give you some idea.
Terra has the Brazilian take on the upcoming FOX film “Turistas” — but the comments on a fictional travel warning on the film’s fictional “blog” — I guess it is supposed to be, like, the blog of the characters in the film — are a bit more, er, direct:
I am brazilian and these things doesn’t happen in brazil like that, i am sure that USA is more violent than brazil…
shut up
bulshit
Which is a fair comment.
Bad things happen here like crazy, but not “like that,” and generally not to gringos.
It is much, much harder to kill rich gringos and get away with it than it is to kill poor Brazilians and get away with it.
Which is embarrassing and also a bit of a relief. There is that card you can play, if need be.
But it’s not just that.
Brazilians of all kinds actually tend to like us.
They don’t necessarily want us Yankees to go home, I think, as Neuza says is shown in the film.
Some of them — a lot of them — would just like us to behave ourselves a little better while we’re here, that’s all.
And in my case, the feeling is mutual — the liking of them, I mean.
It’s not that the myth of Brazilian congeniality is utterly false — Alckmin cited Gilberto Freire’s famous theory during his concession speech on Oct. 29 — and that the capacity for ultraviolence and the holding cheap of human life is absolutely true, even if São Paulo rush hour traffic can give you that impression.
Brazilians are, as a culture, an incredibly friendly and loving and generous and hospitable people who are capable of living with — or forced to live with — and sometimes engaging in, astonishing levels of savage ultraviolence.
What’s really astonishing to me, however, is the capacity for tolerating the savage ultraviolence committed on their behalf, and in their name, among the more “civilized” and “enlightened” sectors of the Brazilian population, in the name of the “democratic rule of law.”
By the way, to be fair, recently you are starting to see scattered incidents of the Rio “parallel power” — the Comando Vermelho and the Amigos de Amigos — singling out tourists as part of a strategy for globalizing its public relations message.
There’s a very funny and grim joke floating around here about a planned al-Qaeda attack on Rio gone wrong, in which, in the end, the terrorists decide to leave Brazil alone, and get Brazilian police & thieves to teach them how to really engage in random terroristic violence. Continue reading
Bad puns are the reusable code modules of the journalistic profession.
A Swiss Mystery at Euro Disney: I love DealBook, the NYT’s business blog, edited by this Sorkin fellow.
It’s a well thought-out approach to how a blog, which can be updated at any time during the publishing cycle — I actually produced PowerPoint for the bosses at my old job on this subject, believe it or not — can add to the paper’s own formal coverage to keep site visitors tuned in.
Acknowledge and link to the best work of your competition — the phrase “all the news fit to print” is an empty boast; other news operations invariably get to good stories that you don’t have resources to cover — while giving yourself a fair shot at keeping the reader on your Web site.
The selection of stories is right up my alley, too.
For example, today, the whole world is scratching its head about an investment group that was set to announce an $0.11 per share offer for Eurodisney, one of history’s greatest boondoggles, but then cancelled the press conference.
Just who is Center-Tainment? Disney said it has been unable to discover any information about its potential suitor, but Reuters quotes unnamed officials who said they repurposed a company named Orca as an acquisition vehicle to make a run at Euro Disney. A German company leads the group of 45 shareholders who together own 99 percent of Center-Tainment’s stock, according to an official. Few other details were provided about the shareholders, other than that some have experience with entertainment industries like indoor soccer.
Source: the idiots at Right-Magazine.com
Shift in Corporate Prosecution Ahead (WaPo): What could possibly move those anti-American radicals at the ACLU — donate today — to join forces with the good people of K Street?
Compelling evidence of politically motivated criminal prosecution of businesses by the Gonzalez Justice Dept., maybe?
Justice Department officials are revising controversial guidelines for criminal prosecutions of companies in response to pressure from business groups, civil liberties lobbyists and an influential lawmaker who is expected to introduce legislation on the issue early next week. The changes, which could require local U.S. attorneys to obtain input from high-level Justice Department officials before seeking corporate indictments, could be unveiled by Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty next month, according to sources briefed on the issue who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deliberations are not yet complete. The administrative revisions also may forbid government lawyers from forcing companies to stop paying attorney fees to employees ensnared in investigations, a move that was declared unconstitutional in June by a federal judge in New York.
The Constitution of the U.S. does not just protect hippies who do not like Wal-Mart or the current neocolonial military adventure very much, you know.
Even those sociopathic hornswogglers at Enron and those fascist propagandists and traitors to the American way of life at Google[=Goebbels] have 4th Amendment rights to due process of law and freedom from coercion.
There are wise observations for all you BRIC enthusiasts about the risks of doing business in Russia in this Google Video.
As Orwell might have said, some eXtensible markup standards are more eXtensible than others.
FSA ditches XBRL: Wow.
Coupled with the U.K. securities industry regulator’s recent negotiations of closer ties with the U.S. SEC — whose chair, Cox, was extremely enthusiastic about the XML-based business reporting markup language and its lobby-like-mad business ecosystem — this is quite an interesting story from a new market machines engineering and global open standards development point of view.
The UK’s Financial Services Authority has stated that it will not be introducing the eXtensible business reporting language (XBRL) format for filing of financial and regulatory returns.
This after Microsoft hard-coded XBRL publishing tools into the latest iteration of its Office productivity software suite, for example.
As actor Keanu Reeves is known for saying: Whoa.
From the Bicho Preguiça blogroll — one of these days I really am going to overcome my shame over my crappy Portuguese prose style and give equal blog-time to the fina flor de Lácio— the Tupiblogger at Breves Notas is part of my study of best practice in humorous blog mission statements. I plan to publish a 1,000-pp. monograph on the subject someday, using modern discourse analysis techniques.
BN wins the NMM Best Mission Statement Award for the Week.
Come collect your prize: All the Itaipava you can drink within a two-hour period at Pé pra fora. Guaraná Champanha from AmBev is the non-alcoholic alternative of choice for NMMers. All the fritas and linguiça dinamite you can eat with a toothpick.
O Breves Notas é uma obra organizada de um modo um tanto caótico e contém diversos trechos que foram incluídos simplesmente porque na hora o organizador achou que era uma boa idéia. Atualmente, temos cerca de uns 324 textos sobre os mais variados assuntos que, por fim, terminaram atraindo cerca de uns 32897 comentários, tudo confinado em meras 9 categorias. Qualquer que seja seu gosto, o Breves Notas tem o que você deseja. Eu não me orgulho disso.
Disney’s “Small World” attraction: Interchangeable robots dressed up in different stereotypical costumes. A metaphor for GVO’s pensamento único?
I get David Sasaki’s update from Global Voices Online every morning, but I hardly ever look at it.
Why not? After all, it offers an alluring proposition to the reader hungry for international news of a globalized world. Which I am, like, totally into, dude.
On Blogging Conflict Regions – As a subscriber to this newsletter, it can only be assumed that you have an interest in reading the thoughts and observations of writers whose voices and regions rarely catch the eye of mainstream media. Yet bandwidth and cost of access leave much of the world shadowed from the blogosphere as well. Joshua Goldstein laments this fact, but applauds the emerging bloggers describing the desperate situation in Northern Uganda and hopes they are only the beginning of a new movement.
He who assumes makes an ass of you and me.
Lamentations, applause and hope that someday everyone will get their news from blogs instead of the MSM: The usual salves to the conscience of the armchair liberal who wants to do good while doing well, with that self-congratulatory note worked in, to the effect that only the blog revolution — those corrupt, unionized rank-and-file journalists of the evil MSM are beyond redemption — can bring the truth to the masses.
I have explained my disdain for this brand of innovation journalism in a number of counterblasts from the point of view of traditional — I prefer the term “time-tested” — principles of public information quality assurance.
See “Fair & Balanced”: Harvard Law Bloggers Give Equal Weight to Disinformation, Brazilian Elections Post-Mortem: The Whole World is an Episode of “Crossfire”, GVO’s Innovation In Journalism: Edit the Ethics and Public Mission Out, and et etectera ad nauseam.
We really ought to get together and mount a formal, multilingual anti-GVO shadow government that tracks back to as many of their posts as we can stand to read, baixando o pau where they deserve it — which is often — and handing out grudging praise in the rare event that they earn it.
I submit to you that this is not a trivial exercise, or merely the product of a personal grudge on the part of this nasty little troll, yours truly.
Now that the U.S. State Dept. picks up GVO feed and channels it out to the huddled masses yearning to blog free as part of the Bush II approach to “democracy exportation” — Jack Abramoff … Now that it funds the iCommons and other “democratization of the media” projects … and given that so many of the key Berkman people have a background in government agencies like USAID, with long histories of questionable actions in the shadows that need clarifying …
Somewhere here on this quarter-terabyte metal box of data I brought with me I have the State “public diplomacy” plan that describes its plans for the increased use of “citizen media” and increased cooperation with NGOs for that purpose.
GVO does not exactly account for every dime it gets — did I read that Harvard may soon account more fully for the billions in government grants it gets? — but its activities do seem to fit the bill.
Not sufficient evidence for an indictment — one senses, but cannot confirm, the existence of funky confidentiality clauses in GVO’s contracts with the corporate and possibly government sponsors that it laments cannot be named — but definitely enough for a search warrant.
Take this item, which caught my eye today as a candidate for baixando o pau, for example: India: Cornershops in the era of big retail stores.
Wal-mart’s entry in India along with other big retail plans elicits quite a few reactions from those who feel it might threaten the traditional kirana stores (cornershops). The Indian Economy Blog on why that’s not likely. “A vast majority of middle class India still shops from one of the millions of tiny kirana stores for precisely these reasons. And there is no way Walmart or even the local big retailers like Foodworld, Big Bazaar or Reliance can lure away a chunk of the middle class big enough to make the kirana store go out of business for at least another few decades.”
Disparos en la Facultad de Medicina de la UABJO: Shots fired at the Autonomous University of Benito Juarez in idyllic Oaxaca, reports La Otra Tele, an online video service run by a senior editor of the La Jornada newspaper, published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
This man is not a blogger. He is a professional with a back file of reporting behind him that suggests he usually does a credible and complete job.
Which is why I tend to believe him. Especially what with the live on the scene pictures and interviews with the people involved and all.
Medical students and hold a press conference to report that paramilitaries have closed hospitals in the state, where hospital workers had joined the teachers’ strike.
More people “disappeared,” reports La OT.
A member of the UABJO faculty who participated in Radio Universidad, which supports the APPO movement, has been publicly threatened by a commercial radio station controlled by the state government and PRI, which is said to be broadcasting disinformation.
“Unpopular social movements demonstrate in Brazilian capital.” Charge is the PT-Br term for “political cartoon.” The pickets read “I want the Banco Central,” “more political appointments,” “give me Petrobras,” “I want the postal service,” “[more] autonomous regulators,”we demand three ministries” …
News item is that the president of Brazil will veto pay raises for public employees in the judiciary.
This was actually produced with friends of the Bicho-Preguiça in mind, but it has significant Zeitgeist implications as well.
Just joking: it’s another Cinelerra vlogging exercise of mine in the tradition of le facteur Cheval.
Euroclear to settle DIFX trades (press release).
For some reason, the DTCC did not get the job of settling accounts in the redrawn map of the Middle East.
Ungrateful bastards. After all we did for them.
Euroclear Bank and the Dubai International Financial Exchange DIFX jointly announced today an agreement whereby DIFX members will be able to settle cross-border DIFX securities transactions with Euroclear Bank clients. … This agreement signifies the first Euroclear Bank relationship with an exchange and central securities depository in the Middle East.
… the chairman, SAP, exploited their position to make sure that reform-oriented comments were excluded and debate was silenced. Overall the report reflects the opinion of a very small but controlling minority – and certainly no SMEs – while claiming to be representative”
Speaking of doing good for the underprivileged while doing well for oneself, consider this dispatch from the open-source Bloomberg box — essentially, the OSBB is GMail + Google News Alerts, or comparable services from other providers, but I have to say I am kind of a Google fan in this regard, in case you were wondering — on an allegedly nasty little power play at a recent EU patent confab.
A power play by a big corporation saying it was doing what it was doing “on behalf of SMEs.”
The flash brief comes to us from the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure and allied civil society network nodes.
Brussels, 29 November 2006 — A key report produced by a European Commission task force was written almost entirely by the patent industry and large firms, including SAP’s patent lawyers, US firms, and the European Patent Office, says the FFII.
Ethical Corporation magazine enjoys pride of place in the NMM “open-source Bloomberg box,” receiving the equivalent of USDA Prime because of its low bullshit content.
Take this recent column by Roger Cowe.
As every corporate executive worth his or her salt starts writing a blog, here is an opportunity for really engaging with company stakeholders and getting beyond tired corporate communications.
Yes, we are all familiar with that well-publicized proposition by now, including the exchange of views between Sun’s Schwartz and the SEC’s Cox, the GOP congressman from the land of the muni derivatives disaster of the century who now regulates the investment industry.
But here come the caveats:
Reuters, Microsoft among NASDAQ’s preferred partners in the Times Square multimedia meatspace of the virtualized global trading floor. Personal note: My work cubicle used to be right by one of those windows in the world’s biggest TV. Hysterical office scuttlebutt was that the radiation would make you sterile.
NASDAQ Completes Integration Of Its Press Release Newswire Service Renamed PrimeNewswire (press release):
Just as long-haired blogging tech CEO Jon Schwartz predicted.
See Blogging Exec on the Urge to Converge.
The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc. (NASDAQ®: NDAQ), today announced that it has fully integrated its newly acquired newswire and multimedia service. As part of the integration, PrimeZone Media Network has been rebranded and is now PrimeNewswireSM.
Crash of a Gol Boeing brings high anxiety to Brazilian aviation industry. We prefer the Embraer regional jets ourselves, btw, when we fly in Brazil: wider, more comfortable seats, with legroom. Slightly more expensive to operate, one reads, but sales indicate they are a competitive value proposition alongside the Anglo-European duopoly.
Aeroportos registram novos atrasos e cancelamentos (Terra): After a nasty fatal crash in the central jungles whose causes are still under investigation, Brazil is living through a nagging midsize crisis in commercial air travel.
A crisis that leaves a gringo of a certain age with a certain nostalgia for the Reagan era, when the Gipper fired the striking air traffic controllers.
Only in this case, the air traffic controllers are Air Force sergeants, because INFRAER, which runs both commercial and military aviation, is a “mixed corporation” in that sense, both military and civilian.
The clash between the code of military discipline and the labor rights of the sergeants — and international best practices for the workload of air traffic controllers — is an interesting debate to watch. The generals and the minister of defense have really gone at it over the issues involved.
Waves of delays and cancellations of flights in the major airports have settled into an almost predictable rhythm of good days and bad days. The Terra report explains:
O motivo para os atrasos seria o fato de um grande número de controladores ter estourado sua cota máxima de horas de trabalho no final deste mês, após realizarem horas extras e cancelarem folgas nos feriados dos dias 2 e 15 de novembro.
The reason for the delays may be the fact that a large number of air traffic controllers have exhausted their maximum quote of working hours before the end of the month, after working extra hours and cancelling days off for the holidays on November 2 and 15.
Coining new terminology unnecessarily — and ungracefully, at that — runs counter to the official NMM commitment to Occam’s Razor.
Item: Innovations In Emerging Markets: Philanthropreneurs and Companies Doing Good while Doing Well:
There’s nothing especially new in this specific incarnation of what is becoming a familiar meme — aside from the term the Emerging Market Innovators have termed for the phenomenon:
‘Philanthropreneurshipism’
What, are we turning freaking German now? A basic principle of coining new portmanteau words in English as she is spoke: Do not give a contruction to the new term that the original terms do not possess.
‘Entrepreneurship’ is a word, but ‘entrepreneurshipism’ is not, according to the dictionaries I normally consult.
Lose the ‘ism.’
Other than that, it’s just a clone of the usual disigenuous “what’s wrong with profiting while helping others?”
As if that were really the whole issue and nothing but the issue.
Take the argument pursued by this technology column today in the Mercury News: Network neutrality’ could hobble [digital inclusion] initiative.‘
The Zero Hunger program. Carlist colonels: “A corrupt, demagogic populist vote-buying scheme.” GOP New York City mayor: “We are studying Brazil’s program as a model for our own office of food policy.”
Speaking of Minister Dilma, an interesting item today from the O Globo newspaper tumbles into the inbox, bearing on what I think is really the crucial debate as Lula, claiming a mandate, sets his sights on deep administrative and political reforms
Namely: Whither the Brazilian quango state? And how best to govern it?
Context: The congressional opposition is setting up a CPI (congressional inquiry) on a set of cases of NGOs, contracted to provide services on behalf of various social programs, in whose accounts the TCU (the autonomous Ministry of Humorless Auditors, I guess you could say; think GAO) has reported irregularities.
Dilma: ‘Não é possível demonizar ONG’
“We cannot demonize NGOs”
It’s pronounced “or-COO-chee”
Orkut dá à PF “atalho” para barrar páginas: Orkut, the multinational global online community that found itself invaded and resettled by Brazilians like a latifundio taken over by the MST or a Rio hillside thronged with barracas, has provided the Brazilian federal police with a special user account that allows it to engage in law enforcement activities on the site itself.
And here’s the scoop: Google says the tool, which has been in use here for three weeks, will be rolled out worldwide, according to the report in the Folha de S. Paulo.
Does Second Life have a police force yet?
(And does it have a workable Linux client yet, for that matter?)
Or is it really the techno-utopia it’s cracked up to be?
Has anyone founded the first Second Life guerilla movement?
Has anything similar to the vigilante movement on Orkut developed? When will Second Life produce a Weegee of its very own? To document its seamy underbelly?
I do read the news from the Reuters bureau there, but as you would expect from a place where, like Heaven in the old Talking Heads song, “nothing every happens” — it’s all Green Zone, with no Red Zone, like a gated community in a William Gibson novel — it’s mostly laundered public relations. IMHO.
Em meio a ações do Ministério Público Federal, que o acusa de sonegar informações sobre criminosos da internet, o Google do Brasil criou uma ferramenta que permite à Polícia Federal vasculhar dados do Orkut e até retirar do ar páginas com “possíveis práticas de crimes” sem a necessidade de determinação judicial.
In the midst of actions brought against it by the Federal Public Ministry, which accuses it of concealing information on criminal activity on the Internet, Google Brasil has created a tool that allows the federal police to mine data from Orkut and even to pull pages from the site for “possible criminal activity,” without the need for a court order.
The Anti-Cheney: Rousseff was moved from making energy policy in Mines & Energy to the powerful Casa Civil, replacing Dirceu.
From the notebook of JORNALISTA DIEGO CASAGRANDE: Col. Ustra, leader of DOI-DOPSCODI in the first half of the 1970s, who is currently defending a civil suit from the family of persons allegedly tortured and “disappeared” under his command, calls Dilma Rousseff, the former guerrilla and current Minister of the Casa Civil, a “terrorist” and complains of the revanchismo — a desire for revenge — by the militant left.
Responsável entre 1970 e 1974 pelo Destacamento de Operações de Informações — Centro de Operações de Defesa Interna (Doi-Codi) de São Paulo, o coronel reformado Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra atacou a ministra da Casa Civil do governo Lula, Dilma Rousseff. Durante almoço em Belo Horizonte, em que Ustra recebeu o desagravo de 60 militares da reserva e simpatizantes, o coronel acusou Dilma de “revanchismo” e chamou a ministra de “terrorista”.
Responsible for the Intelligence Operations Detachment — Internal Defense Operations Center (DOI-CODI) in São Paulo between 1970 and 1974, retired Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra attacked the minister of the Casa Civil in the Lula government, Dilma Rousseff during a lunch in Belo Horizonte in which Ustra received the backing of 60 reserve officers and sympathizers. He accused Dilma of revanchismo and called the minister a “terrorist.”
“O que eles querem é acabar com a Lei da Anistia. Vão conseguir”, reclamou Ustra. Ele vem recebendo diversos apoios, e também participou de almoço de desagravo na semana passada, em Brasília. “Ela (Dilma) e eles não querem abrir todos os arquivos, porque os documentos provam todos os atos criminosos que eles cometeram”, desafiou.
What they want is to do away with the amnesty law. And they are going to succeed,” Ustra complained. He has been receiving support from various quarters, and also participated in a protest luncheon in Brasília. “She [Dilma] and they do not want to open all the archives because the documents prove all the crimes they committed,” he said.
NASD, NYSE Agree to Merge Regulatory Arms (Dealbook)
The new regulator will retain all of NASD’s 2,400-person regulatory team, as well as 470 of the NYSE Group’s operation. NYSE’s regulation chairman, Richard G. Ketchum, will serve as interim chairman of the combined operation for three years, while NASD’s chairman and chief executive, Mary L. Schapiro, will serve as C.E.O.
But NYSE Reg was part of the NYSE Group, somewhat controversially. What’s at the top of the new org chart? A board of directors, obviously. But of what? Is it a freestanding non-profit corporation this time? What the Brazilians call an autarquia?
Earlier this year, the Securities and Industry Association, Wall Street’s trade and lobbying group, said it favored eliminating duplication by creating one regulator with one set of rules and interpretations to govern the industry. The association also sought a seat for itself on the board of whatever regulator emerged.
To “put the self back into self-regulation,” as Marc Lackritz liked to say.
From the Global Voices Online readers mailing-list today: Italy ponders an Azeredo Amendment of its own, writes an excited activist, and calls upon the indefatigable champions of liberty for those that share the agenda of the folks that pay the bills to leap into Netroots action.
Proper disclosure: The Berkman Center receives funding from Google, it reports — though it does not disclose the terms, I think — and Google’s chief lobbyist worked for Berkman’s HP-funded Open Economies Project before taking his current job.
So I suppose this could be read as a heads-up to the lobbying brigade rather than an alert to the plastic fantastic exploding inevitable grassroots.
In which case it may have been posted to the wrong list.
Longtime readers — Hi, Mom! — know that I have been generally sympathetic to Google’s principled approach to such matters.
More sympathetic than GVO’s attack dogs were before one of its own got hired there, in fact.
But the headline here seems a little hysterical, coming from a citizen of a country run by a corrupt media monopolist like Berlusconi for so long.
Italians are used to sacanagens in high places, just like us Brooklynites and Brazilians, who tend to respond with satirical laughter rather than frantic prophecies of doom.
Because after you have lived through enough of these Chicken Little warnings of pending totalitarian moments, it usually turns out to be nothing more than the same old political palhaçada as ever.
On the other hand, I could be wrong. You will remember that the leverage applied to Google by the U.S. Dept. of Justice in order to get it to make user data available to government data-miners — CNET reported that Gonzalez later admitted in a meeting that the request “was for terror” — was precisely this: If you do not cooperate, we will go after you for facilitating child pornography and drag your name through the mud.
But let’s check out this Italy alert.
My first question, on the preliminary skim-through, would be: Where’s the fire?
Is there a specific law with good chances of passing on the horizon?
These kinds of “Internet danger zone” crusades seem to be the preferred mode of political posturing everywhere these days, yes, but help us understand the concrete political risk here, would you?
The “Google case” in Italy: one more excuse for censorship and repression
Alckmin: the paragon of accountability
PMs são suspeitos de simular tiroteio: the special patrol unit of the São Paulo military police investigated in Caco Barcello’s 1993 book Rota 66, are still at it, as we all know all too well.
13 years have gone by under Mario Covas, Alckmin (above), and Claudio Lembo, and the song remains the same:
Corregedoria e Ministério Público investigam policiais da Rota que teriam simulado o seqüestro de empresário para justificar duas mortes.
Internal affairs and Public Ministry investigate Rota police alleged to have simulated the kidnapping of a businessman to justify two deaths.
Investigação aponta que uma das vítimas teria sido presa quase duas horas antes do tiroteio relatado pelos quatro policiais
Investigation finds that one of the two victims was arrested nearly two hours before the shootout reported by the four police officers [in which the subject was killed in legitimate self-defense while resisting arrest — with two to the back of the head from point-blank range. I am guessing, but that would be a typical scenario.]
In case this sounds implausible to you — how could a police force behave in this way for decades with complete impunity? Who would put up with it?– in his book, Barcellos described in detail how this kind of thing is done, and how frequently.
His conclusions were based on a database of some 4,000 cases of this kind, in which the majority of victims had no prior criminal record.
Your customers are not delighted.
TeleSíntese | Procon de SP autua Telefônica por danos ao consumidor: Spain’s Telefónica, which provides Speedy ADSL to most of the city, gets sued by the local consumer watchdog for “multiple acts of abuse of the consumer.”
Procon are the same folks that probed the U2 show for price-gouging and funky ticket distribution practices — let’s just say that scalpers were doing great business while the ticket vendor’s Web site could not manage to stay online — when the standing room for the philanthropic Irish power trio’s show at Morumbi Stadium was going for more than a month’s minimum salary.
Neuza is able to tell me all about them because she is taking a cram course on administrative law for a competitive exam that might land her a federal public relations job.
I am reading over her shoulder and learning quite a bit.
Anyway, this is an appropriate item for us to note, given that Neuza has been waiting three days for a repairman to come explain why her Speedy service fails every time it rains.
Which in the summer here is every day. Monsoon-style rains.
Could it have something to do with the exploding Eletropaulo electrical transformers, maybe?
Not to mention the way their salespeople, as a manager admitted to me on the phone, are instructed to lie to you to the effect that the service will only work with Windows XP.
Which, of course, you can still buy on the Avenida Paulista for the cost of the CDs + a very reasonable markup.
There is a reason why the organization of Brazilian broadband users is called ABUSAR.
In this case, the alleged abuse is related to the company’s full menu of converging services: unilateral alteration of terms of service, charging for calls not made, installation of services not requested, double-billing on per-minute dial-up Internet access, and not honoring advertised offers.
I am just practicing my Cinelerra skills with this surrealistic movie — odds and ends from the OSBB Photo Agency — ripped using Quicktime for Linux.
It may not look like I am making progress, but I am. Really.
The Clementina de Jesus samba actually goes:
I live in the country
I’ve never lived in town
I buy the morning paper
To learn what’s going down
Brasil Wiki! — not to be confused with the Portuguese-language Wikinews — is one of a number of “citizen journalism” projects I have noted popping up down here in the jungles of Lusophone Latin America.
The other notable case being Terra’s VC [você=you, the] Repórter.
[update: GVO has a comprehensive, if treacly with consultantspeak and RTS, review of what commercial media, at least, are practicing the “I, Reporter” meme down here.]
(Terra and UOL are the principle portal businesses down here — the ones that sent AOL crying back home to mama, famously.
Both of them, I have to say, are really pretty good full-service first destinations for your Web browsing day, though we just happen to be a UOL family by tradition and inertia — and the fact that UOL has a semi-lock on Speedy ADSL services, which my wife subscribes to, much to her regret.)
Potential trademark dispute there?
BW’s logo (pictured above) has a very similar tagline.
First impression: If just rounding up the day’s news, cut and paste fashion, in one place made me a “reporter” — which seems to be the main “journalistic” activity on BW, as far as I have read — then this blog you are reading now would be a legitimate news source instead of what it mostly is.
Just another stupid blog.
Although, in my defense, I do translate original news items that you would not read about in the English-language press.
But only if I feel like it.
And when I report first-hand on my own activities, or my conversations with folks like our cleaning lady, Val — wait until I tell you the latest adventures of Val, who was last seen in these columns with buckshot wounds in her arm from trying to squat a vacant lot — then you might credibly say that I am gathering information from first-hand sources.
Which is an important component of what makes journalism journalism.
But still, in the main, as to its principle intention and function in my life and yours, this is not journalism. This is a blog.
So caveat lector.
Anyway, who are these BrasilWiki journalists that would rather start their own thing than support the Wikipedia Foundation‘s Wikinews with their zealous, selfless efforts?
From the Quem Somos page:
http://www.brasilwiki.com.br e os dominínios a ele vinculados são produzidos pela Editora MM Comunicação Integrada Ltda.
MM (for Muito Mais, ‘much more’) Communications is run by a fellow named José Aparecido Miguel in partnership with a former news director from the Estado de S. Paulo’s wire service named Eduardo Mattos.
One of those associated domains is BrasilNews, a press release newswire which appears to have some kind of working relationship with, oddly enough, CMP’a PR Newswire.
Can I get a copy of that contract?
JAM, as head of the PR agency, appears as “flack to contact” on press releases for clients such as the Associação Brasileira de Bares e Restaurantes. Which is, by the way, an industry — bars & restaurants — that we personally do our utmost to support. Just ask the waiters at our local boteco. Uma picanha um pouco aquém do ponto, moço.
“Journalist,” you have to understand, is a formal title in Brazil for anyone with a degree in “communications” — whether they work as journalists in the “fourth estate” sense or whether they work on the PR side of the great firewall.
Hence the monument to “Roberto Marinho, journalist” here in São Paulo.
If there was ever anyone who worked to destroy the conventions of journalism, as we inheritors of the Anglo-Saxon, civil libertarian, “no poncey crown-wearing dude is the boss of me” common-law tradition know it, with more gusto than Roberto Marinho, his name must be Murdoch.
But there you have it. A whopping monument to “the journalist, Roberto Marinho.” Go figure.
Anyway, MM’s previous venture, as a perfunctory Googling tells me, was a free news magazine for the university town of Campinas, in São Paulo state — breeding ground of the hard-drinking, chain-smoking, hairy-armpitted leftist feminist lesbian sociologists of cheesy 1970s talk shows, if you follow the TV Pirata/Casseta e Planeta ontology of Brazilian cultural stereotypes — called M+.
M+ claimed a circulation of 650,000, but discontinued publication in April 2005, in its first year.
Video of the mayor’s wife buying votes “não passa de uma truncagem,” says pissed-off Paraíba pol.
Whatever happened to the case of the Possible Paraíba Patiferias, involving chunks of cash in a suitcase seized by the federal police on the day of the October 29 elections here?
I have read nothing more about the case, but a new case along those lines has arisen recently, according to Globo’s Jornal de Paraíba:
In the city of Campina Grande, a video has shown up allegedly showing the mayor’s wife promising people jobs if they vote for the PMDB in the first round of the elections.
The local PRE (regional elections prosecutor) has referred the case to the federal police. Which is more than has been done with the infamous Maracutaia in Marília of 2004, we note.
A Procuradoria Regional Eleitoral (PRE) encaminhou pedido à Superintendência de Polícia Federal da Paraíba requisitando a instauração de um inquérito policial para apurar suposta compra de votos em Campina Grande. A denúncia foi feita pela assessoria jurídica da Coligação “Por Amor à Paraíba” em outubro passado, antes da realização do segundo turno. De acordo com a denúncia, um vídeo, gravado com uma câmera escondida no primeiro turno das eleições, a primeira-dama do município, Ana Cláudia Vital do Rego, e a médica Vilauba Morais Vital do Rêgo, esposa do deputado federal eleito Vital Filho (PMDB), estariam negociando emprego, ajuda de custo e casa para cabos eleitorais, para votar nos candidatos do PMDB.
Informatização de processos divide juízes: speaking of the role of technology in the legal profession, and more specifically the automation of legal case management, there’s this from the FSP’s Brasília bureau:
Judges divided on computerization of trials.
Technophiles:
“We’ll be able to take care of that awful backload that makes everybody blame us for the economic stagnation of the Nation!”
Those that “don’t get it”:
“Yes, but how are we going to make sure the process is secure, accountable and well-governed?’
The lede:
Os juízes brasileiros se preparam para deixar de manusear toneladas de papéis de processos judiciais e passar a trabalhar exclusivamente com a versão eletrônica dos autos. Projeto de lei em fase final de tramitação no Congresso define como será a informatização.
Brazilian judges are getting ready to stop handling tons of paperwork in their trials to start working exclusively with an electronic version of the proceedings. A bill in the final phase of consideration in Congress will define how the computerization gets done.
Now this is a classic “new market machines” story!
Gaspari: Still the NMMist’s trusted reality-check on myths of benevolent patriotic generals in a titanic struggle against waves of devious Communist supermen. Any other good books on the subject I should read?
The VOTOLULA blogger passes along the latest counterblast from Zé Dirceu’s “everybody pile on those slimebags at the Folha de S. Paulo” — which is an almost irresistible proposition, I have to admit, given the blatant professional misconduct of some of their senior people.
So, with the caveat that not everything, and not even most of what, the Folha publishes is junk — they have some excellent reporters working on some very important local and regional stories, and, I might add, a distinguished tradition of the same, within the rank and file — let’s do our share of piling on the Folha de S. Paulo for today.
But note that the newsroom did run a story today interviewing the local public prosecutor on the editorial (UOL subscribers only, sorry); the man said that claiming that the crime in question had a political dimension “is either ignorance or bad faith.”
Writes Zé, the former top aide to President Lula who has been dogged constantly over the years by insinuations that he ordered the murder of a PT mayor of a small city in Greater São Paulo:
A Folha assume hoje, em editorial, aquilo que fez durante esses últimos cinco anos: prejulgar e negar os inquéritos policiais.
In an editorial today, the Folha owns up to what it has been up to for the last five years: Prejudging and ignoring the results of police investigations.
O primeiro inquérito sobre o assassinato de Celso Daniel, acompanhado pelo Ministério Público de São Paulo e pela Polícia Federal – esta, a pedido do PT –, concluiu por crime comum e indiciou os assassinos, muitos presos e sendo julgados. A pedido da própria Folha, da família e do Ministério Público, houve outro inquérito policial, que confirmou o crime comum.
The first inquiry into the murder of Celso Daniel, carried out by the state Public Ministry and the Federal Police — this, at the request of the PT — concluded that it was a common crime and indicted the criminals, many of them now in prison or on trial. At the request of the Folha, the Daniel family, and the Public Ministry, there was another police inquiry, which confirmed the results of the first.
São cinco anos de investigações e não há nenhum indício (ao contrário do que diz a Folha), testemunha ou prova de que o crime foi político e por supostas razões ligadas à Prefeitura de Santo André ou a financiamento de campanhas do PT. Mas a Folha não se contenta em julgar e condenar o PT e substituir a polícia e o Judiciário. Quer reinterpretar a Constituição, substituir ou tomar o lugar do Supremo Tribunal Federal.
Five years of investigation have yielded not a single clue (contrary to what the Folha says), piece of testimony, or bit of material evidence of a crime that was political in nature and allgedly linked to the Prefecture of Santo André or PT campaign finance. But the Folha is not content merely to assume the role of the police and the judiciary in judging and condemning the PT. It wants to reinterpret the Constitution as well, taking over the role of the Supreme Court.
More notes on the construction of the open-source Bloomberg box, Latin American edition: The NGO Contas Abertas (‘open accounts,’ ‘open books’) is an implacable, nerdy vigilante auditor of the public coffers with a Web site hosted by the UOL portal, constituted under a late-FHC (2002) reform of corporations law that I need to study.
Kierkegaarde on the Hegelian school: “They build never-completed palaces of lofty principle but live in shantytowns beside them.”
Ironically enough, CA does not seem to have to publish financial statements of its own on its Web site — are they published elsewhere, on some obscure Brazilian e-gov site? — or list the pessoas físicas e jurídicas that support it.
Is it kind of equivalent to our own 503(c) non-profits? According to its “about us” page, Contas Abertas
É uma pessoa jurídica de direito privado, sem fins econômicos, e está em conformidade com a Constituição Federal e com o Código Civil (Lei no 10.406, de 10 de janeiro de 2002), no que couber. A Associação atuará em âmbito nacional, por tempo indeterminado e com sede, administração e foro em Brasília
As Wikipedia-PT defines the term:
São as associações, as sociedades, as fundações particulares, as entidades paraestatais (sociedades de economia mista: empresas privadas e empresas públicas), os partidos políticos e as ONGs (organizações da sociedade civil de interesse público).
ONG (PT)=NGO (EN).
Judicial reform is an issue I have been trying to follow more closely, so this is a significant broadside from the ranks of Brazil’s punk-rock accountantcy brigade today:
A tão prometida e desejada reforma do judiciário continua sem data para acontecer. Enquanto isso, os brasileiros continuam sofrendo com leis arcaicas e com a lentidão da justiça. Existe, no entanto, um outro tipo de reforma beneficiando esse poder. O Projeto de Lei do Orçamento para 2007 já reservou R$ 260,3 milhões para reforma, ampliação e construção de prédios do Judiciário em todo o país. O valor proposto é 31% superior ao dispêndio previsto para a “Modernização do Sistema Penitenciário Nacional”, que vive grave crise.
The long-promised, long-awaited reform of the judiciary remains without a date certain. In the meantime, Brazilians continue to suffer under archaic laws and the snail’s pace of justice. There is, however, another type of reform (reforma=’renovation’ a modest wordplay — Ed.) in progress that benefits this branch of the government. The federal budget bill for 2007 has already set aside R$260.3 million for the renovation, extension and construction of judicial facilities throughout Brazil. The amount proposed is 31% higher than the proposed outlay for the modernization of the national penitenciary system, which is experiencing a grave crisis.
In a related item, the federal supreme court is bidding to award itself a 30% pay raise — a move that under Brazilian administrative law sets the standard for all federal employees, one reads (in a column in the FSP by Eliane Cantanhêde yesterday.
At R$30,000 ($14,000) a month, or R$360,000 a year, for the Chief Justice, the salary would be 86 times the statutory minimum monthly salary of $R350.
That is enough to feed 200+ families of four — I think — for a year, according to a standard economic measure, the cesta básica, used here and elsewhere in Latin America. Very useful stat, that.
A US Supreme Court judge makes about $200,000, or a little less than 20 times the current statutory minimum wage of $5.15 per hour, based on a 40-hour week and a 50-week working year.
Hildebrando of Mexico: Candidate for “innovative” data management PPP strategy of the year.
Oficio de Papel, the weekly Web column of Mexican journalist Miguel Badillo, brings me some new shreds of insight into Hildebrando and ISOSA.
WTF, Colin? Why should I give a damn about ISOSA, whatever the hell that is?
I’m not saying you should.
But I’m telling you, its a fascinating case study in quango governance — it involves outsourcing of data-processing functions to a private firm founed and owned by the government minister responsible for the area in question — and hard-core investigative reporting.
I have translated offline in this case.
If you want to compare the translation with the original, follow the link and do it yourself. I’m not your volunteer butt-boy, viu?
But by all means, do double-check.
Because you will find it difficult to believe, no doubt, that in Mexico, Hank Paulson’s counterpart in Fox’s Treasury gets away with hiring a private firm he founded and still owns to process revenues from the customs duty collection service — in partnership with the same data processing firm, owned by Felipe Calderón’s brother-in-law, that processes elections data for IFE, the federal elections commission.
A private firm that does not account publicly for its financial operations, according to Mexico’s federal audit authority, which charges the firm with skimming off billions of pesos (hundreds of millions of dollars, with the dollar at about 11 pesos today) from the federal coffers.
It is hard to believe.
But it is true.
Another one of those proudly democratic Mexican public institutions whose integrity, Fox insists, with the backing of reputable businesses and EU delegations — Mexico, astonishingly, improved its TI corruption score this year — is beyond question. As he added to the script of this year’s grito, which was held under tight security in an undisclosed location:
¡Que vivan nuestras instituciones!
Yeah, right, whatever. Translation starts here:
Faced with negative public opinion of the private firm ISOSA (Integradora de Servicios Operativos S.A.) and the demand from civil society for transparent investigation of acts of corruption committed by a group of Treasury Dept. employees led by Treasury Secretary and ISOSA owner Francisco Gil Díaz, the firm began, in 2003, a “restructuring process” ostensibly to reorganize itself for more efficient performance; however, files from the archives of ISOSA, operations director Francisco Obel Villareal Ontelo, who was murdered on August 20, 2006, indicate that the real objecdtive was to quitely close the firm down before the end of the current federal government, a goal that the Vicente Fox administration managed to achieve, in part.
Secrecy News — one of my personal candidates for NMM’s semi-annual “best use of irony in a periodical title” award — has a startling and provocative thought to offer today, one that might bear on the analysis of SWIFT’s current difficulties, even:
Openness in government is a prerequisite to democratic self-rule and is the best available antidote to official corruption. Yet greater transparency, particularly on the international level, “is not an unmitigated good,” argues Kristin M. Lord in a new, somewhat contrarian book.
“In all likelihood, the trend toward greater transparency will be at once positive and pernicious,” she writes, particularly since some disputes are based on real conflicts of interest and are not simple misunderstandings that could be resolved through greater disclosure.
Right. A case in point, allegedly.
That’s the kind of situation that information markets are theoretically good at sorting out. Right? Continue reading
A propos the infographic of the week, I present a re-run of the quote of the day from June 22, 2006 on the Blogspot edition of The New Market Machines Business Continuity Plan as proof that I am not paranoid: the Edelmans are everywhere.
Teri Cox from the New Jersey-based Cox Communication Partners expressed similar enthusiasm in a September 2002 issue of Pharma Executive. Industry-patient ‘partnerships,’ she wrote, could ‘influence changes in healthcare policy and regulations to expand patient access to, and coverage for, earlier diagnoses and treatments . . . recruit participants for clinical trials’ and ‘speed the development and approval process for new therapies.’ Better still, an alliance with a non-profit group can deter inquisitive journalists. ‘Without such allies, a skeptical journalist may see a company’s messages as self-serving and describe them as such to their audiences,’ Cox wrote.”
The brand name also describes its import-export practices, say Brazucocops.
Grandes marcas são acusadas pela PF de fraudar importação. reports the Folha de S. Paulo today. That is, the Brazilian federal police are running an operation against tax evasion by multinational consumer brands, and charge that the same are using many of the same techniques as Paraguayan smugglers.
Grandes marcas são acusadas pela PF de fraudar importação
Major brands accused by FP of import fraud.
Elas usariam firmas desconhecidas para pagar menos impostos; empresas negam
Use obscure firms as cut-outs to lower tax burden; companies deny it
Relatório da Operação Dilúvio aponta esquema que importou de maneira fraudulenta R$ 1,1 bilhão nos últimos quatro anos
Report from Operation Flood points to a scheme that imported R$1.1 billion in a fraudulent manner in the last 4 years
The Terra portal’s “citizenship” page tries to link to a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the Web site of the Brazilian Ministry of Justice. The server returns:
HTTP/1.1 404 Object Not Found
The New Market Machines 
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