Current Content Downloads: Getting Down To Business

Remember I said I had a client who said they maybe wanted me to work as a local stringer, scouting debt and equity issuance, restructuring, changes of control, buybacks, and all those sorts of signals that companies might be for sale, or looking to go on a shopping spree?

Sure, I said. I am perfectly happy to spend my days scouring CVM disclosures and other official sources of corporate actions, the forward calendar of the competition regulator, the Official Diaries, the local business press (which mostly all cover the same exact stories: Pick a decent one and you have pretty much read them all, with only marginal exceptions). And what have you.

Now, this client thinks it might want me to actively pursue such leads rather than just digging them up. Produce “forward-looking deal intelligence.”

Reality-test market rumors.

Get acquisitive companies to point at their targets. Beard sovereign funds at the luggage carrel at the airport and ask them, “So, what are you going to spend all those yummy petrodollars on?”

Which sounds like a lot of fun, although I warned this client: I am not someone who brings a fat Rolodex to this beat. I would have to spend months handing out business cards to in order to build one.

And besides, the subscription newsletter Relatorio Reservado (Brazil) is already doing a pretty bang-up job of “forward-looking deal intelligence” here, I find. Today, for example, it reports:

Mal desembarcou no Gávea Investimentos, o Harvard Management Company já pensa em reduzir à metade sua parte na empresa de Armínio Fraga, em torno de 12%. A operação está ligada a um reposicionamento internacional do fundo.

Harvard Management Company has scarcely landed at Gavea Investments, the investment management firm of former central bank president Arminio Fraga, and is already thinking of reducing its 12% stake by half. The adjustment is a product of the fund’s international repositioning.

Didn’t I read in the W$J that the vast Harvard endownment — $35 billion, is it? — is now under new management?

Kenya: Mass Martrydom Narratives Drown Out The Beancounting Angle

The Kenyan contender claims victory, appeals for calm

Suspicions of fraud were fueled by unexplained delays in tallying and anomalies that included a 115% turnout in one constituency. —W$J today

Moral crusades advance claims about both the gravity and incidence of a particular problem. They typically rely on horror stories and “atrocity tales” about victims in which the most shocking exemplars of victimization are described and typified. Casting the problem in highly dramatic terms by recounting the plight of highly traumatized victims is intended to alarm the public and policy makers and justify draconian solutions. At the same time, inflated claims are made about the magnitude of the problem. A key feature of many moral crusades is that the imputed scale of a problem … far exceeds what is warranted by the available evidence. — Ronald Weitzer, “The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade,” Politics Society 2007; 35; 447

Too often, it is the media-created event to which people respond rather than the objective situation itself, as was the case when media provoked anxiety resulted in massive public rejection of food products reported as potentially related to an outbreak. Development of new approaches in mass communication, most recently the Internet, increase the ability to enhance outbreaks through communication. –Boss, Leslie P., “Epidemic Hysteria: A Review of the Published Literature” in Epidemiologic Reviews, Vol. 19, No. 2.

The following violations of the electoral code of conduct among other electoral malpractices form the core focus of the KNCHR election-monitoring project:

• Misuse and misappropriation of public resources by either side of the campaign (public offices and buildings, public finances);
• Participation of public officers (provincial administration, civil servants, heads of parastatals etc) in the campaigns;
• Incitement to violence, incidences of violence; and
• Use of hate speech particularly on ethnic and gender lines by politicians and the media.

–Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights report, December 2007 (PDF)

Daily Nation | LETTERS | This violence rocking Kenya could have been avoided: The first is of interest because it summarizes some factual claims that can be followed up on.

Particularly allegations of police involvement in electoral shennanigans of the lowest order:

The selfish greed of numerous police officers (silencing complaints by party activists), the Kenya Power and Lighting Company managers (who engineered the power cut), PNU party workers (who inserted fake ballot papers or figures) and ECK officials and commissioners who participated in the rigging of the results, which the ECK headquarters was unable or unwilling to identify and put right.

Those are serious claims that need careful investigation. Which press organizations are doing so at the moment?

The balance of international news reporting, as far as I can tell from a hasty canvas, continues to focus on terror, chaos and atrocities rather than on the mechanisms of the alleged fraud — most recently the burning to death of “dozens” in a church in Eldoret.

Sourced by the AP to “a police officer who was not authorized to speak to the press” who says that “several persons” burned to death. The W$J is citing “a Red Cross worker who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals” for a death toll of around 50.

In Brazil, Globo/G1 is citing a death toll of 30, based on AFP wire copy. Its value-add to that reporting was apparently to add the phrase banho de sangue (‘bloodbath’) to characterize the incident.

From FT.com: If it bleeds, it leads, in bigger type.

We are also reading that the press is not authorized to speak to police officers. Or anyone, for that matter. What is the AP doing to mitigate the risks to their reporter in this situation, I wonder?

Some 3,500 news reports listed in Google News under the topic of apocalyptic violence, many from anonymous, mainly official, sources or not specifically sourced at all.

News about international and domestic challenges to the technical legitimacy of the election: Some 250 news reports listed.

This is a very rough, back-of-the-envelope way to measure coverage, of course, given the limitations of Google News. But at least Google News collects coverage in one place so that one can at least try to clip a representative sample and conduct a hard count for oneself.

Your assignment, citizen journalist, should you choose to accept it: What is the predominant emphasis of this coverage?

By and large, as far as I can tell, it overwhelmingly follows the “If it bleeds, it leads” principle, and characterizations like chaos and bloodbath abound.

In general, the international news media seems to prefer to dwell on anxious signs of the impending Armageddon, and in particular on individual, dramatic cases of sectarian (Christian-animist or Christian-Muslim, North-South, rural-urban, or tribe-on-tribe; the fuzzy socio-political explanations vary) violence.

(An exception: This filing from the Grey Lady’s man in Nairobi just now, which also narrates a touching scene of intertribal reconciliation.)

That story is, of course, eminently newsworthy — if verified. But in the middle of a news blackout, and given the apparently ambiguous role of police in this whole situation, you have to wonder if it can really be reported with the painstaking detail and caution required in coverage of incidents with such incendiary potential. See also

• Kenya: “Death, Chaos, Extreme Emotion and Information Blackout”

What I really want to see is an overall assessment of the extent of the violence. Is it localized? Generalized? Are these cases isolated? Are they really and directly related to the electoral dispute? I have yet to read about a reporter walking up to a rioter and saying, “So, why are you throwing rocks at the cops, anyway?” (Kenyans reportedly do not get along well with their cops for a variety of reasons not necessarily related to politics, according to a Commonwealth report I am in the middle of reading.)

Remember the rumor, spread by a Rwandan radio station, that the Tutsis had already killed 300,000 Hutus?

Manhattan Connection: “Dantas Must Prove Bribery of Judge”

“Factual discovery shall be complete by May 1, 2008.” International Equity Investments, Inc. v. Opportunity Equity Partners, Ltd., et ano., Lewis A. Kaplan, presiding for the District Court of the Southern District of New York; Date filed: 03/10/2005; Date of last filing: 12/13/2007

The folklore of corruption is good business — for the corrupt. –Elio Gaspari

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” –Carl Sagan

Item: EX-PRESIDENTE DO STJ DESAFIA DANTAS (“Former federal judge defies, challenges Dantas.”)

Justiça de Nova York fixou os prazos pelos quais julgará uma ação que o Citibank move contra o banqueiro brasileiro, Daniel Dantas. E uma das decisões do juiz Lewis Kaplan, da Justiça de Nova York, foi exigir que Dantas desse as provas para a acusação de que o Citibank subornou o Ministro Edson Vidigal, ex-presidente do Superior Tribunal de Justiça do Brasil (clique aqui para ler “Juiz de NY quer provas de suborno de Dantas”).

A New York court has set a trial date for Citibank’s lawsuit against Brazilian banker, Daniel Dantas. One of the rulings by judge Lewis Kaplan was that Dantas must furnish evidence for his accusation that Citibank bribed Justice Edson Vidigal, former justice of [the Tupi equivalent of our federal Circuit Court of Appeals, kind of.]

A British court found Dantas had fabricated evidence and perjured himself in a related lawsuit with a former business partner, originally adjudicated in the Caymans. This according to what I read fromm CartaCapital — also alleged victims of alleged Kroll wiretaps. (“Perjured” may not be the precise term — we are talking about an alien judicial system with periwigged judges undergirded by an absolute monarch, after all, and IANAL — but let us just say, generally speaking, in a lay sense, “stated nonexistent facts based on fabricated evidence.”)

I will translate the interview with Mr. Vidigal below.

Let me set the stage here: Conversa Afiada is the Web log of political journalist Paulo Henrique Amorim, who believes that he was among the journalists, business competitors, and government officials illegally wiretapped by Kroll, at the behest of banker Daniel Dantas of the Opportunity Group.

Dantas was fighting to maintain control of Brasil Telecom, over the objections of pension funds with seats on the board and against Hobbesian competition from Telecom Italia. Before he was removed from the board, he inserted a clause that permitted Harvard Law professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger to continue to represent his interests on the board as his proxy or some such thing.

This entire grand guignol, which makes the antics of the Hewlett-Packard boardroom dispute look like a giggling pillow fight in the freshman dorms at Radcliffe, has produced some astonishing moments in the malpractice of journalism.

Among the most astonishing was Veja magazine’s publication, in May 2006, of a dossier suggesting that the head of the Brazilian federal police and senior government officials — including the president of Brazil and a prominent opposition Senator who is a former head of the federal police — have Swiss bank accounts containing bribe money they were allegedly paid by the Italians to (1) unduly favor Dantas’ adversaries and competitors and (2) mount a massive conspiracy to frame the MIT-trained venture capitalist.

See also

• Reading the CPMI dos Correios: Donald Segrettism au Go Go in the Sweltering Tropics
• Whatever Happened to the Secret Offshore Bank Account of Brazil’s Top Cop?
• The Persecution of Daniel Dantas: An Italian Opera in (?) Acts

It actually might be profitably compared in some ways to the so-called Clearstream II affair in France:

• France: That Other Dossier-Based, Media-Driven Factoid War

Prominent public personages. Bribe money in Swiss bank accounts. Phony dossiers. This soap-opera plot seems to have been globalized more thoroughly than Betty La Fea.

Firms controlled by Dantas were the largest depositors in the account of DNA Propaganda, focus of investigations into the Belo Horizonte Baldy money-laundering and political slush-fund case.

The partners in DNA and related ad agencies face more than 700 criminal charges in the so-called “big monthly” and “big monthly of Minas Gerais” cases — which seem to me like they are actually one and the same vast, ongoing funny-money maractuia, their separation into two cases looking like something of a prosecutorial fiction.

Criminal charges related to laundering illegal private donations and public money into political slush funds.

On which see also

• Brazil: New Notes on Belo Horizonte Baldy’s Plastic, Fantastic Pipeline of Invisible Money
• The Bald Man and the Bad, Bad Banker: Notes on the Contemporary Brazilian Meme Wars
• Brazil: “Perspective on Baldy and the PT Three”

Veja justified running the “Swiss bank account dossier”story by saying that, while there many signs that the “dossier” might be inauthentic — it did not tell us what those were — it nevertheless found the story plausible. See

• Veja (Brazil): Behind the Scenes of an “Exemplary” Investigative Report

Mexico: “Harvard Declares Redmond’s Enciclomedia Useless”

Microsoft “digital divide” project queried by congressional subcommittee: the gizmo has tended to fall off the back of the truck a lot, one reads, if you get my drift.

Comisión legislativa revela irregularidades en Enciclomedia; entrega informe a la SEP: The front page headline in La Jornada is “Enciclomedia is useless and excessively costly, Congress tells the Secretary of Education.”

The inside-page headline: “Congressional commission finds irregularities in Enciclomedia; hands over report to Secretary of Education.”

Harvard determinó que no hay evidencia de que el programa cause impacto en el aprendizaje

Harvard has determined that there is no evidence that the program has an impact on learning.

On June 5, 2007, The Guardian reported (“Mexican Digital Wave“):

A US academic who headed an external evaluation by the Harvard graduate school of education calls it “very positive”. An article in the Guardian in January gushed that it was “probably the world’s bravest, most imaginative and ambitious implementation of education technology”.

What was the name of that U.S. academic?

La mayor parte de los recursos se ha destinado a actividades administrativas no prioritarias

Most of the funds have been destined for non-priority administrative activities.

Bylined to Enrique Méndez and Roberto Garduño

La Comisión de Educación de la Cámara de Diputados, mediante la subcomisión especial que investiga a Enciclomedia, envió un informe a la secretaria de Educación Pública, Josefina Vázquez Mota, donde se revela que la Universidad Harvard determinó que “no existe evidencia empírica contundente que demuestre que el uso del programa en las aulas impacte en el aprendizaje”.

The Education Committee in the lower house of the federal congress, through the special commission investigating Enciclomedia, has sent a report to the secretary of Public Education, Josefina Vázquez Mota, in which it reveals that Harvard University determined that “there is no convincing empirical evidence to show that the use of this program in classrooms has an impact on learning.”

See also

• Mexico: “Harvard Role in Enciclomedia Fraud Scheme Denied”

The volume of oily “rhetoric of the technological sublime” with which this program has been anointed is really astonishing. Some of the most egregious examples:

• BBS: The Beeb 2.0 Touts Enciclomedia
• Redmond & Televisa: A Match Made in Tijuana?
• Bill Gates Preaches Revolution In Cartagena
• “Enciclomedia’s Shining Example” (Brazil)

TeleSíntese on Cisco and the Fisco

The switch-rich black-box jocks find that their diffuse network of “small pieces, loosely joined” has had its ups and downs lately.

A good moment, this, to rethink the idea of requiring that companies installed in Brazil — at the very least those that are publicly traded, but not exclusively — render accounts about their local operations. Even if 1% of $34.5 billion is next to nothing, as the corporate parent insists, its Brazilian subsidiary and other domestic and American firms have been bombarded with information and counterinformation whose sources and backing have yet to be presented adequately to the public.

Writing in TeleSíntese (Brazil), Lia Ribeiro (with reporting by Anamárcia Vainsencher) learns the lessons of Cisco’s troubles with the fisco. Lucidly, as always.

• As lições do caso Cisco

See also

• Cisco Brasil’s Fiasco With The Fisco: “What The Biz Press Missed”

For my money, Ms. Ribeiro, in her weekly column, regularly defies the common wisdom that the business press here “does not get the new paradigms.”

No ano passado, na comemoração dos resultados do exercício, na sede da Cisco Systems, em São Francisco (EUA), um quadro luminoso classificava o desempenho das subsidiárias da corporação. O Brasil estava no topo em matéria de expansão, ainda que respondendo apenas por 1% das vendas globais da companhia, cujo faturamento líquido foi de US$ 34,9 bilhões. Contudo, tanto a subsidiária brasileira da Cisco, como as de algumas dezenas de outras grandes corporações que atuam no país não divulgam os resultados de suas operações locais. Elas são, na esmagadora maioria, empresas de capital aberto, com papéis negociados em bolsas de valores, em seus países de origem.

Last year, in a celebration of its annual results at its headquarters in San Francisco, Cisco Systems shone the spotlight on the performance of its subsidiaries. Brazil was at the top of the list in terms of expansion, even though it still only accounted for 1% of Cisco’s global sales, with liquid revenues of US$34.9 billion. And yet Cisco’s Brazilian subsidiary, like those of dozens of other large corporations operating in Brazil, does not make public the results of its local operations. And the vast majority of these are publicly traded companies in their countries of origin.

Porém, aqui, a maioria dessas subsidiárias funciona como sociedade limitada, não anônima e, assim, não precisam divulgar seus balanços. Uma situação incômoda porque a falta de resultados auditados não só compromete a veracidade das informações prestadas, como a própria transparência da atuação das companhias em questão. Sem esquecer que as brasileiras que abrem seus dados reclamam do tratamento desigual.

Here, however, they function as limited partnerships, not corporations, and therefore are not required to publish their financials. It makes for an awkward situation, because the lack of audited results undermines not only the credibility of the information provided, but also the transparency of operations at the companies in question. Not to mention the fact that Brazilian companies that publish their data complain of unequal treatment.

Rio: “Militias Arrive in the Baixada Fluminense and Menace Farmers”

Publicly traded, goverment-controlled, multinational, socially and culturally engaged. Are paramilitary protection rackets trying to dump on the federal firm that controls the pump? Could prove to be a case for the Darwin Awards.

Milícia chega à Baixada e ameaça agricultores: the O Globo daily (Rio de Janeiro) reports that militias extorting rural producers are an emergent phenomenon in rural areas of the state.

I tend to approach this way of framing such stories with prior skepticism. See also

• Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: A History Lesson for O Globo

But let us have a read and see. And more power to O Globo reporters who are being allowed to cover such risky stories, in any event.

RIO – Agricultores da área rural de Nova Iguaçu, integrantes de um projeto de hortas comunitárias patrocinado pela Petrobras, estão sofrendo ameaças de uma milícia que se articula na região da Posse. A situação é motivo de preocupação na estatal e foi tema de reunião nesta sexta-feira. O projeto de agricultura orgânica, na comunidade Gerard Danom, é desenvolvido às margens de dutos de combustível. Segundo a polícia, o grupo miliciano poderia ter também agentes de segurança do estado. Seus membros exigem dinheiro em troca de “proteção” e, só esta semana, destruíram duas vezes plantações e instalações da comunidade.

Farmers in the rural districts of Nova Iguaçu, members of a community gardens project sponsored by the state-owned energy firm, Petrobras, are suffering threats from a militia that is emerging in the Posse region. The situation is a cause for concern at Petrobras and was the topic of a meeting held Friday. The organic agriculture project in the Gerard Danom community is being carried out alongside the routes of fuel pipelines.

Meaning that they are on federal property?

Providing a pretext for asserting federal jurisdiction?

Notes on the Brazilian New Economy: NMM(-TV)SNB(B)CNNBS

Notes on the Brazilian New Economy

“Brazil is insulated from the global panic”; Wagner Monte on narcocops in the Green Zone of Rio; behind the scenes at Google Brasil.

Mexico: “Ye Gon Attorneys Prepare Media Defense”

Ye Gon’s cash stash: the mother of all mountains of money.

At the same time, I sought the help of lawyers in various parts of the United States; the response was if I revealed the truth to the U.S. government and the news agencies, the U.S. government would not help me. Instead they would immediately extradite me to Mexico. … I thought my head was going to explode. –From the “Chinese tale” of Zhenli Ye Gon

Amenaza Ye Gon con videos y audios | El Universal: “Ye Gon threatens with videos and audio!” A related story reports that Ye Gon is preparing “a media defense” through his second U.S. attorney, this Ning Ye fellow.

The 17-pp. letter released this week (in Spanish translation but still, to my knowledge, not available in English except for my rough retranslation) was released by a new attorney with a track record of defending the Falun Gong religious movement. See

• Ye Gon: “To Whom It May Concern”
• “To Whom It May Concern,” Part II: Ye Gon’s Chinese Tale

El abogado de Zhenli Ye Gon anunció que este miércoles presentará audios y videos en defensa de su cliente, acusado por el gobierno mexicano de narcotráfico y lavado de dinero.

Zhenli Ye Gon’s attorney announced that this Wednesday he will present audio and videos in defense of his client, accused by the Mexican government of narcotrafficking and money laundering.

Ning Ye, defensor del empresario chino nacionalizado mexicano, dará una conferencia de prensa en la capital estadounidense a las 11:00 horas tiempo de México.

Ning Ye, defense attorney for the China-born naturalized Mexican citizen will give a press conference in the U.S. capital at 11:00 am Mexico City time.

En conversación con EL UNIVERSAL, dijo que el título de su exposición será “¿Narcotráfico o fraude?”, debido a que centrará la conferencia en esos temas para explicar el caso de su defendido. “No tengo mayor información para la prensa hasta la conferencia. Discúlpeme por favor, pero estoy en una presión extrema”, explicó Ning Ye vía telefónica.

In a conversation with EL UNIVERSAL, he said the title of his presentation will be “Narcotraffic or fraud?” due to the fact that the press conference will focus on these themes to explain the case of his client. “I have no further information until the press conference. Please forgive me, but I am in an extreme hurry,” he said over the telephone.

La conferencia tendrá el auspicio de la firma de abogados Martin S. McMahon y Asociados, y del Grupo de Abogados de Negocios Internacionales. El primer despacho, con oficinas en Washington, está especializado en la defensa de casos empresariales, lavado de dinero, fraudes comerciales, designación de personas dentro de la denominada “lista negra” del Departamento del Tesoro, entre otros.

The press conference will be held by Martin S. McMahon & Associates and the Translation Business Attorneys Group. The former lawfirm, with officies in Washington, specializes in defense work in business-related cases, money laundering, commercial fraud, the “blacklisting” of persons by the Treasury Dept., and other matters.

Badillo: “Oracle’s Mexican Tax Big Dig Gets Deeper?”

Business process management. Source: Oracle.com.

 Time will tell whether the emergence of the quasi government is to be viewed as a symptom of decline in our democratic government, or a harbinger of a new, creative management era where the purportedly artificial barriers between the governmental and private sectors are breached as a matter of principle. — Kevin R. Kosar, “The Quasi Government: Hybrid Organizations with Both Government and Private Sector Legal Characteristics” (Congressional Research Service, February 13, 2007)

Oficio de Papel is the weekly Web column of journalist Miguel Badillo, who has written extensively about the kinds of funky goings on in Mexican customs now brought back into the spotlight by the Ye Gon case.

This week, however he sticks to the story of an Oracle tech big dig gone awry (which is really more up my alley as well): a new technology platform for the Mexican tax authority that bogged down in that peculiar public-private partnership known as ISOSA — part of the controversy over which has to do with how it managed to hang on to cash collected from customs duties in a system run by Gil Díaz cronies and relatives.

E-week announced the project in August 2004 as “the biggest deal in [PeopleSoft’s] 17-year history.”  I translate for future reference and pra inglês ver only. So please: no wagering.

Una vez más la oscura estructura administrativa de la empresa privada ISOSA (Integradora de Servicios Operativos S.A.), creada por el exsecretario de Hacienda, Francisco Gil Díaz, vuelve a permitir al gobierno federal disponer de recursos fuera del presupuesto para enfrentar irregularidades y desvíos de recursos generados con el diseño y operación de la Plataforma Integral del Servicio de Administración Tributaria (SAT).

Once again the obscure administrative structure of the private ISOSA (from an acronym for the Spanish phrase “operational services integrator”), created by former Treasury secretary Francisco Gil Díaz, will enable the federal goverment to make use of out-of-budget funds in order to address irregularities generated by the design and operation of the tax authority’s “integrated platform.”

Rio de Janeiro: GatoNet Goes to Anatel Hell!

The paramilitary Netroots. Source: Bobagento, who suggests that the Traffic in Rio is running underworld ISPs. Reports suggest, however, that it is more likely the militias — who will shoot you if you try to shop around for another content provider.

PF estoura empresa clandestina de TV por assinatura (G1/Globo): Federal police and the Brazilian FCC (sort of), Anatel, bust another pirate TV operation in the shantytowns of Rio. This time it was satellite. Al-Jazeera and DirecTV, that sort of thing.

The blogger Bobagento is doing some blogging on the GatoNet phenomenon — including reporting on militia-controlled broadband Internet acccess. It echoes disinformation, I think. I will try to translate some of that, and see if I can find any other Baker St. Irregulars doing good clipping on the subject:

Rio – Depois do ‘GatoNet’ — desvio de sinal de TV a cabo — , uma nova modalidade criminosa com o uso de tecnologia está sendo explorada nas favelas: o fornecimento clandestino do serviço de banda larga da Internet. Se as TVs ilegais são mais operadas pelas milícias, a Internet, por sua vez, tem a participação do tráfico. Nesta quarta-feira, mais um ‘provedor’ clandestino foi localizado pela polícia, desta vez na Cidade de Deus, Jacarepaguá. Segundo a polícia, cerca de 400 assinantes usufruíam do ‘gato’.

After GatoNet — illegal tapping of cable TV signals — a new criminal business model for technology is being implemented in the shantytowns: underground ISPs. If the illegal TVs are more often operated by militias, the Internet is the province of the Traffic. Last Wednesday, another clandestine “ISP” was located by police, this time in Cidade de Deus, Jacarepaguá. According to police, the “cat” had nearly 400 subscribers.

Jacarepaguá is reportedly “the paradise of the militias,” however. Was this really the Traffic?

Probably not, I would say. Recreio dos Bandeirantes, after all, is where they “shredded the documents” on Inspector Tostes of the state police. See Rio: Tostes is Swiss Cheese on Toast.

Comments Bobagento:

É o tráfico ajudando o Governo no Programa de Inclusão Digital. Enquanto o primeira fornece banda larga o outro barateia os computadores.

This is the drug traffic helping the Government with its Digital Inclusion Program. The traffic provides broadband and the governments helps make computers cheaper.

The government recently rolled out a new program that forces ISPs to offer affordable Net access plans. See Brazil: Affordable Bandwidth Plan Announced.

RCTV: (Who) Really Cares (About) Television (in) Venezuela?

In the land of trash TV, the ham actor is king. Just ask Ronald Reagan.

Parlamento europeo critica decisión contra RCTV (La República, Lima, Peru): “EU Parliament criticizes RCTV decision.”

There were more than 700 abstentions, by the way. A little over 90% of the Europarliamentarians did not vote. (A fact that La República, despite its self-evident anti-Chávez bias, does not fail to report. Which is one reason why I continue to read it. It remains in touch with reality.)

Wake me when somebody shows credible signs of giving a damn, my dear.

When I taught writing and rhetoric to college students, I used to start out assigning my monsters — God love ’em — to write me an argumentative essay on a fairly innocuous topic they felt strongly about.

Not hard to find: When you are 18, you feel strongly about everything. Whether Lego blocks packaged in preset forms — the helicopter kit, the happy fire station kit — were destructive of the creativity represented by the old-style free-form kit, for example.

That was an especially heated and interesting debate. I always had a secret affection for the kids who pointed out that you could hack the prefab Lego kits by using their parts for other than the recommended purposes.

Then I would assign them a second essay, asking them to defend the contrary position with equal passion.

They were almost invariably shocked! shocked! Hey, that’s the art of the anticipatio elenchi, I’d tell them.

“Anticipating the contrary.” In politics, it’s called “oppo research.” In education, the theory is that anticipating possible counterarguments rather than suppressing them is part of a process that makes you smarter. Instead of borking Gen. Shinseki, you put him on the red team and try, fairly and squarely, to get him to admit he’s wrong. Duh.

So I suppose it would be only fair for me to assign myself the same task with respect to the RCTV controversy in Venezuela.

Up to now — and laboring under the same lack of objective information as everyone else — I have mostly defended the contrarian position: that a television network that invites coup d’etat plotters to use its studios to coordinate their coup d’etat might not necessarily deserve all that much sympathy, given that the “danger to the nation and the hemisphere” they were looking to overthrow was, for better or worse, a democratically elected “danger to the nation and hemisphere.”

The opposition, which had more than one-third of the vote in the last presidential elections — enough to block Constitutional amendments — did not have to boycott the congressional elections. What the hell is their problem? They really seem to be rolling the dice on an unhedged bet hear. That, it seems to me, is a sucker play.

These Venezuelan exiles hanging out with Tony Montana in Miami and jabbering about election fraud in Hugoland in the last election — on my taxpayer dime? — are full of gabbling nonsense.

And the smirk on the face of that State Dept. spokeman on that day in April 2002 did more to bolster the Chávez plurality into hyperdrive in one day, I continue to think, than decades of Soviet oatmeal shipments ever did for the Beard. Even the Folha de S. Paulo editorial pages say so.

Likewise for much of the embarrassingly propagandistic campaign of logic-chopping in support of RCTV: see Banana-Republican Fact-Check: CNN Español and RCTV, which again, only reinforces the message of Granier’s detractors: The corporate media lies for a living.

BBC Español actually did a nice “man in the street” survey on the range of public opinion in Venezuela itself on the subject.

As you would expect, there is more opinion distributed in the fat part of the bell curve — “it royally sucks, but people should just turn it off if they don’t like it” (closest to my own general attitude about such things, but then again I have cable) and “it worries me, yes, but they did try to overthrow the government, after all” (which I can also see the point of) — than you would think from reading, say, Global Voices Online:

… we seek to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak — and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.

Especially its corporate donors.

GVO’s report on the $100 laptop in Brazil, for example, simply ignored the existence of competing business models for popular computers being promoted by the Brazilian government itself. It gets money from Redmond, H-P, Google, Reuters, the State Dept. …

How much? Who knows? Does it matter? Not according to GVO, which has nondisclose contracts with its donors, I am guessing. It won’t say. The Second Superpower has its state secrets.

And the guy who wrote that GVO post bills himself as a Brazilian government spokesman on “digital divide” strategies, mind you.

On the whole, I cannot think of a journalistic enterprise more dedicated to the fallacy of false dichotomy — there are two and only two sides to every question — as a deliberate rhetorical strategy than GVO has proven to be since winning its award for “innovation in journalism.”

See, to take just one of many examples, Generalissimos or Constitutional Democracy: ‘A Partisan Issue.’

I have Chilean relatives. I read Chilean newspapers. I’m going to Santiago in July.

I have watched the aging Allendist in-laws having coffee with the aging ARENA-supporting in-laws while watching the Portunhol-speaking grandkids at play. And I’m telling you, the “he was corrupt but he got things done” take on Generalissimo Augusto is not as widely accepted as GVO would have you think.

Gen. Geisel, for example, was many things, but was not personally corrupt. And he despised Pinochet.

End digression.

La República, meanwhile, which has had a fierce battle on its hands defending its own editorial independence recently — see Peru’s La República: “We Are Nobody’s Punk” — by that token seems like an interesting source to look to for reporting on the official expressions of concern on the matter from various deliberative bodies and NGOs today.

El Parlamento Europeo calificó como un “precedente alarmante” la decisión del presidente Hugo Chávez de no renovar la concesión de transmisión al canal privado de televisión RCTV, y el ministro de Comunicación venezolano, Willian Lara, reaccionó con la advertencia de que “aquí nadie nos va a chantajear”.

The European Parliament characterized as “an alarming precedent” the decision by Hugo Chávez not to renew the broadcast concession of the privately owned TV channel RCTV, and the minister of communications of Venezuela, Willian Lara, reacted by warning that “no one is going to blackmail us.”

Bolivia: Morales Borks The Media!

Morales: Groovy Andean formalwear. At the last Mercosul summit in Rio, boasted of leaving other regional leaders in the dust on the Av. Atlantica beachside jogging track. Altitude training, he said, not Bolivian marching powder. So don’t even go there.

Evo diz que donos da mídia são os seus ‘principais inimigos’ (Estado de S. Paulo, Brazil): The president of Bolivia seems to be making a list and checking it twice.

He has been criticizing a major enemy of social progress, pan-Andean Socialist style, each day for the past several days.

First, the judiciary.

Yesterday, the Pope.

Today, the media.

Is nothing sacred?

LA PAZ – O presidente da Bolívia, Evo Morales, acusou nesta quinta-feira, 24, os proprietários de “alguns meios de comunicação” de serem seus principais inimigos políticos. No entanto, Evo deixou claro que a acusação é contra os donos das empresas e não contra os jornalistas.

The president of Boliva, Evo Morales, accused the owners of “some media” today of being his principal political enemies. However, Evo made it clear that his accusation applies to owners and not to journalists.

This seems to be a major Bolivarian talking point at the moment. We saw the President of Ecuador making the same point the other week, for example. See this NMM(-TV)SNBCNN Zeitgeist newsreel for those remarks.

And see Rede Globo Ratfinks Dissident Journos.

And Mexico: “Fired Televisa Reporter Vindicated Over Phony Bust”

And Murdoch Pledge on Journalistic Integrity.

And after all, the case of Vladimir Montesinos is public and notorious at the moment:

“The addiction to information is like the addiction to drugs,” Montesinos declared. He considered information the basis of his power. “Here you feel the need for information. … We live on information. I need information.” … He carefully monitored the media’s news reports to verify that the owners did comply with what they had agreed. “If we do not control the television, we do not do anything,” said Gen. Elesván Bello at a 1999 meeting involving Montesinos, high-ranking members of the armed forces and television executives.

Bashing the abysmal Latin American news media? It’s a political no-brainer, whether you’re and Andean Socialist or an undercover Chicago Boy. Just look at how the conservative Estadão recently borked Globo’s RCTV-style “we are the victims of censorship” campaign:

• “Não É Bem Assim”: Fact-Checking Globo’s Censorship Claim

Morales:

“Quase todos os jornalistas são ou militantes ou simpatizantes do Movimento ao Socialismo (MAS)”, afirmou Evo em referência ao seu partido.

“Almost all journalists are either activists or sympathizers of MAS (the Movement Toward Socialism),” he said, referring to his political party.

Enciclomedia: Gordillo Son-in-Law Summoned in Savior Machine Case

The Teacher: Batman villain-style henchman in high places in the Calderón government include elections commissioners, an anti-terror czar and the education bureaucracy.

Pide el Senado a la SEP informes sobre el programa Enciclomedia (La Jornada): You will recall that when attempts were made to block the nomination of Elba Esther “The Teacher” Gordillo’s son-in-law as underscretary of elementary education, she threatened to rat out massive corruption in the “digital chalkboard” program. See The Teacher Takes Rove to School for an early report.

Fox had contracted for the Enciclomedia on a massive scale with Microsoft and promoted it heavily as a “digital divide”-bridging “qualitative leap” for education.

See also

1. Enciclomedia: The Passion of the Savior Machine
2. Elba “The Teacher” Esther: The Rank and File Fester
3. “The Technical and Educational Failure of Enciclomedia”

On the other hand, the incoming Calderón government — or philanthropreneurshipists of the permanent institutional interregnum, perhaps, who really knows? —  immediately signed a new Enciclomedia contract, this time for satellite aDSL to be provided by Hughes.

Subsequently, program audit documents allegedly supressed by Fox’s education secretary were leaked to investigative journalists, and critics started howling “boondoogle!”

The SNTE she-cacique has boasted considerable success in naming collaborators to high posts in the Calderón government, cashing in election-season favors to PAN whose precise nature remains, er, the object of intense curiosity.

This is a principal reason, for example, why the investigative journalism weekly Proceso keeps roasting Calderón in his own juices.

This is a one-source political press conference story, of course, so take it for what it is worth. I’ll keep on clipping.

El subsecretario de Educación Pública, Fernando González, yerno de Elba Esther Gordillo, fue citado a comparecer en el Senado, a fin de que explique las irregularidades en el programa Enciclomedia.

Public Education undersecretary Fernando González, son-in-law of Elba Esther Gordillo was summoned to appear before the Senate to explain irregularities in the Enciclomedia program. 

Enciclomedia: The Passion of the Savior Machine

Microsoft “digital divide” project sinks deeper into a sea of mud.

Desplome de Enciclomedia entrampa a la SEP: “Collapse of Enciclomedia program corners Public Education” (El Universal, Mexico):

El desplome del programa educativo Enciclomedia coloca a la Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) en medio de reclamos de empresas, dudas de legisladores y señalamientos de que hubo procedimientos viciados en el proceso de licitación.

With the sudden collapse of the Encyclomedia educational program, the federal Public Education department is besieged by complaints from the private sector, questions from legislators and signs of irregularities in the contracting process.

I repeat:

you can read the government’s contract with the vendor on the project — Microsoft, represented by Maggie Wilderotter — here.

The undersecretary for basic education, appointed by Calderón, continues to defend the program.

The official in question is Gordillo‘s son-in-law.

Chacon Echoes Consultancies: “Telecom is Strategic”

Jesse Chacon, “minister of popular sovereignty for foreign relations and justice.”

Bloomberg Latin America‘s Alex Kennedy phones it in from Caracas:

Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) — Venezuela will make a “reasonable” offer for CA Nacional Telefonos de Venezuela as part of President Hugo Chavez’s plan to nationalize telephone and electricity companies, Telecommunications Minister Jesse Chacon said.

Note, again, that Telefonica is among the owners in question, according to the last annual report.

The Bolivarian bad boys originally contemplated selling the stake to Carlos Slim of TELMEX — who now faces promises by president Calderón of Mexcio, made shortly after huddling, as he often does, with Spanish bankers, to “open the Mexican market to competition.”

All of which reminds me of that warning to investors, after the coup d’etat in Thailand, to “avoid political stocks.”

Which is probably wise advice: Companies that cozy up to the government — or that are owned by government officials and get no-bid contracts from former executives — may be attractive in the short term but untenable for the long-term value investor.

The Thai king is now proposing lifting of martial law in 41 of 76 provinces.

You recall that at the center of the controversy was a telcom deal made by the deposed president’s family-owned holding company, designed to “open the market to competition,” proponents said.

“It will depend a lot on the attitude of the owners,” Chacon said during a televised news conference in Caracas. “If we don’t reach an agreement with the owners, we’ll apply the expropriations law and declare it a public utility. If the owners are willing to sell at reasonable terms, we’re open to that possibility.”

Kudos to Kennedy for explaining why nobody is reporting on how the transfer will be structured, or whether CANTV will delist, for example.

Chacon didn’t say what might constitute a reasonable offer or what terms might apply to an expropriation.

At least we know someone is asking, and have some implict recognition that these days, there are nationalizations and there are nationalizations.

Chavez said Jan. 21 that the government will not pay the “international” price for Cantv and will take over the company before paying compensation to shareholders. Chavez said Jan. 8 that the government will nationalize telephone and electricity companies because they are “strategic.”

Chacon is not repeating Chávez’s “Verizon was bugging my office” charge — or is not cited here as repeating it.

“Is it better that Cantv be in the hands of a private, transnational company that wants short-term profit or in the hands of the state that wants to expand telephone coverage,” Chacon said. “I prefer the state.”

Of course, some critics say that when Verizon agreed to assist the NSA in warrantless wiretapping, it essentially merged with the State.

Unclear on the Concept: XML in Lagos

THISDAY ONLINE (Nigeria) editorializes aganst resistance by Nigerian banks to “a special computer software known as the XML,” which will “enable them keep a close tab on suspicious transactions by their customers.”

Recent newspaper reports indicate that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has extended till March 31 the deadline for Nigerian banks to install a special computer software known as the XML which will enable them keep a close tab on suspicious transactions by their customers. The initiative is part of the effort to check money laundering — a malaise that had once blighted the nation’s banking industry.

“Had once blighted”? The pluperfect past tense? Really?

According to the EFCC Web site,

The computer soft ware is called the XML reporting format …

Could we be talking about XBRL here? Promoted heavily by the SEC but recently rejected by the U.K. Financial Services Authority as an XML-based standard for financial data processing?

For a harbinger of which, see MSFTML in Hell.

The EFCC Web site is a little vague on this point. They refer elsewhere to

… new version 1.8 standard XML reporting instructions and specifications, prepared by the United Nations in its war against money laundering requires the creation of compatible XML files using the provided XML schema for suspicious transaction reports (STRs) and Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs).

I am confused again. Perhaps if I could learn what vendor is providing this technology to Nigerian banks I could zero in on the details.

Another report does describe the change further as “a phase-out of Microsoft Excel in favor of XML.”

Oh, well, moving on.

PANdemonium in Guerrero

Diputado asesinado averiguaba irregularidades en alcaldías (El Universal, Mexico): A PANista legislator from the state of Guerrero, Mexico, who was, prosecutors charge, assassinated by the state leadership of his own party, was investigating corruption in his home district.

Here is some basic English-language coverage from the El-U on the alleged hitman who confessed and implicated the PANista chiefs.

CHILPANCINGO, Gro.- Amagos y amenazas de muerte recibió el legislador panista Jorge Bajos Valverde, 20 días antes de que fuera asesinado.

PAN legislator Jorge Bajos Valverde was the target of harassment and death threats 20 days before his assassination.

Ello fue en respuesta a su decisión de reactivar la revisión de las cuentas públicas de 2003 de los 77 municipios del estado que había en ese entonces -ahora son 81- y que inicialmente arrojaban un daño patrimonial cercano a los mil millones de pesos.

This came in response to his decision to reactivate an audit of public accounts for 2003 in 77 municipalities in the state — the number is now 81 — an audit whose initial results indicated a shortfall of over a billion pesos.

Las investigaciones de Bajos Valverde, asesinado el 4 de enero en Acapulco, han puesto al borde de la cárcel a tres ex presidentes municipales y evidenciado a 10 ex alcaldes priístas, perredistas y petistas que ahora son diputados en el Congreso local.

The investigations being carried out by Mr. Bajos, who was murdered on Jan. 4 in Acapulco, threatened three former mayors with prison and dug up evidence against 10 former mayors from the PRI, PAN and PRD, all of them current members of the state assembly.

More Legendary Louras de Assalto?

During the elections, a simple and attractive young São Paulo-Rio “law student for Alckmin” appears in a grassroots video on YouTube. After the elections, “an Internet law expert” whose affiliations are not fully specified appears on every commercial TV screen in Brazil. One clearly, and the other very likely, affiliated with Mr. Opice “The Brazilian Abramoff” Blum through his Fundação Getúlio Vargas-based mafia.

Remember the loura de assalto — that FGV-tied lobbyist that was making the rounds of the evening TV news reports saying that Telefonica could not technically do otherwise but block out the top-level URL of YouTube.com?

That is, who was lying massively to the viewing public?

I had the sudden feeling today that I have seen this woman before, during my personal study of “Netroots” and “astroturf” political media in last year’s national elections here in Brazil.

Was it here, in NMM-TV Newsreel No. 13: Notes from the Brazilian YouTube Underground?

I remember that it was a “testimonial” video, bearing the URL and logo of a Rio-based pro-Alckmin group.

Ah, yes, in Clip No. 2 of that newsreel: Is that the same Patty Hearst of the Brazilian Astroturf Brigade?

No.

The young woman in question here introduces herself as Marcela Levy, in a simple hand-held camcorder take, “a law student from Rio, here in São Paulo” who proposes to speak heart to heart with other students about why she supports Alckmin.

Principally, she says, because he is a deeply honest and competent man.

Is that not the same honey-blonde bombshell?

No.

And yet again, yes. Sort of.

No. 2. A São Paulo law student on why she will vote for Alckmin. Gist: “Looking at the example of other nations, such as, oh, say, the United States, I see that our nation is on the wrong course at the moment. Taxes are too high and are not being invested properly. It needs to combat corruption and elect an efficient manager. Alckmin is personally ethical and will put the house in order.”

A project managed efficiently by St. Alckmin, paragon of ethics and transparency. Source: Folha de S. Paulo.

More specifically, she says that she wishes Brazil had “a proper balance of power between the private sector and government, like the U.S.”

Which just makes you laugh.

Bitterly. But long and hard.

So what could possibly link “bank robber blonde” No. 1, who appeared during the elections, as a “law student,” in a prime specimen of how the Alckmin campaign used YouTube to distribute disinformation in defiance of orders from the election courts, and “bank robber blonde” No. 2, who appeared after the elections, as a “professor of Internet Law,” advocating Telefonica’s right to unilaterally censor YouTube under a court order that never existed?

More on Mexico’s 10 Billion Peso Mafia Macbeth

Preliminary sketch of a candidate hypothesis. Source: NMM-Tabajara Risk Management & Infotainment Almagmated (formerly Acme, but bought for a song after the famous case of Wile E. Coyote vs. Acme, et al.).

Item: ISOSA controló también el registro de vehículos: ASF (La Jornada).

If you have missed the crazy, mixed-up saga of Mexican business process automation powerhouse ISOSA — owned and operated as a personal fiefdom by the sitting treasury secretary under President Fox — as pieced together by enterprising Mexican investigative reporters, then you understand precisely bupkis about the “politically exposed persons” angle in the recent flap over the man’s appointment to the board of HSBC.

La Jornada adds another piece of the puzzle today — one that might, I think, even suggest where to start digging for a link between ISOSA’s Customs operations and that data-processing and privacy governance quango tango of the century, the ChoicePoint Affair.

I now proceed to violate their copyright in order to translate it for you — though note, I make no money with this blog.

So maybe I will get off with a slap on the wrist.

Which would be a small price to pay given that a lot of people doing this kind of work end up freaking dead.

Integradora de Servicios Operativos S. A. (ISOSA), la empresa fundada por Francisco Gil Díaz, que por más de 10 años obtuvo ingresos del cobro de un impuesto no enterado al erario, recibió del sector público no sólo personal, bienes e instalaciones sin costo, sino la administración del Registro Federal de Automóviles, reveló el titular de la Auditoría Superior de la Federación (ASF), Arturo González de Aragón.

“Operational Services Integrator” (ISOSA), the firm founded by Francisco Gil Díaz, which for more than ten years handled funds from the collection of taxes on behalf of the public treasury, not only received personnel, goods and facilities from the public sector at no cost, but was also assigned to managed the Federal Automobile Registry, revealed the head of a federal auditing agency (ASF), Arturo González de Aragón.

‘Ronaldo Lemos is iCommons’ New Chairman’

Putting the problem in charge of the “solution.”

Item: iCommons » Blog Archive » Ronaldo Lemos is iCommons’ New Chairman.

I am keeping an eye peeled to see whether my comment on this news item actually shows up there.

Lemos is the young FGV official in charge of the iCommons Rio farce, although I have never been able to find much more out about him. Funny, that.

What’s your name?
Who’s your daddy?
Is he rich like me?

Current cut-and-paste of my comment on the iCommons.org Web site.

1. Colin Brayton Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:31 am

This is a bit like putting Porfirio Diaz in charge of agrarian reform in Mexico, in my opinion, especially after Lemos’s shameful performance at iCommons Rio last year.

So congratulations ARE in order: To the media latifundiários who managed to infilitrate their man.

Shameless Advertorial of the Week

In Argentina, as elsewhere in Latin Ameria, The History Channel has an exclusive distribution deal with NET, a Globo and Carlos Slim-controlled “triple play” broadband empire in expansion. This post is going out over a NET Virtua connection, in fact, which costs some 4x more, relative to the local wage scale, as it does in New York. If we are lucky, and lobishomem activity in the neighborhood permitting. Argentina is making some Mercosul-busting noises at the moment, by the way. On which more soon.

In Brazil, which speaks a kind of Portuguese, The History Channel is known as “The History Channel.”

In Portugal, which speaks another kind of Portuguese entirely — I was listening to an inteview the other day on the TV with a guy from the 1966 Burtoogaw World Cup team that took out Pele in the first round, and what the hell was that guy saying, anyway? — it is known as “O Canal de História.”

Why is that?

I was just arguing with the Enigmatic Mermaid about this last night — about whether the bill proposed a few years back by Aldo Rebelo, president of the federal legislature here — sort of a Communist Tip O’Neill, this guy –to require Portuguese (Br) translations of foreign brand names and technical terminology was frivolous or not.

I tend to the “not” side. Very strongly.

Why? I would guess EU trade policy has a lot to do with it.

I think it has everything to do with, and matters very much in the scheme of, some very fundamental trade and governance issues that are still up in the air around here, as well.

All of which has quite a bit to do with that Cardoso II-era Constitutional amendment that let operations like the History Channel into Brazil in the first place.

Cardoso II itself being the product of an eerily Chavista constitutional amendment, of course, permitting a second presidential term where this was explicitly barred before.

This is a country where, before this amendment, not even Roberto Marinho could sneak Time-Life into a country run by generals — not even after all he did for the generals, and not even after all the help Time-Life gave him in starting up the Rede Globo

All documented in BBC 4’s 1993 report — still banned in Brazil, by court order upon the application of Globo itself — “Beyond Citizen Kane.”

No, wait, I have been consistently wrong about this point, according to the Wikipedia article:

The Marinho family bought the national rights to the documentary, and, by refusing to license it to other broadcasters or release it on video, curtailed its distribution in Brazil.

I consider consuming a pirated version of this content an act of civil disobedience against the private ownership of public history.

So I did it.

So go ahead: sue me back to the Stone Age.

If I have to, I will cart bricks for $R5 a day and spend it in the local LAN house. Typing. Typing.

Another for the growing file of business and goverance. cases related to the Areopagitica tradition and the infamous Fox-Monsanto “it is not illegal to lie to the public” case in Florida.

On the History Canal, from the Wikiographers in the fina flor de Lácio:

The History Channel (Canal de História em Portugal) é um canal de televisão por assinatura. A sua programação é voltada principalmente para a exibição de documentários de teor histórico. No Brasil, algumas pessoas criticam o fato do canal centrar sua programação apenas em História do esporte, automobilística e de confrontos e guerras além de, por vezes, uma inclinação aos Estados Unidos.

I translate the highlighted passage: “In Brazil, some criticize the fact that the channel focuses its programming exclusively on the history of sports, the automobile industry, and wars and conflict, and that it sometimes betrays a bias toward the United States.”

To strictly adhere to the NPOV rule, so as not to assume facts not in evidence — which is not to say that they do not exist — one would write “critics allege that” rather than “some criticize the fact that ,,,”

But how many people on Wikipedia these days really care about that sort of picky detail, right?

So I come home from having a beer with the EM and the HH yesterday and Neuza is glued to the HC/CdoH on our Gradiente flatscreen TV (one minimum monthly salary, or a little more) which is showing a fascinating, beautifully produced two or three-hour block of programming on the wonders of whiskey.

On Brazilian conspicuous consumption of which see, recently, here.

The whole thing, however, it strikes me immediately, is essentially an advertorial for certain brands — most especially Suntory, with a long and hagiographical bio of the founder of that fine chain of distilleries — and not others.

We even see a bunch of connoisseurs ostentatiously turning up their noses at Canadian Club and Wild Turkey.

Sure, Wild Turkey and Yukon Jack are basically marketed as Drambuie for trailer trash, but surely they will do in a pinch?

Especially if your girlfriend just left you for your hound dog, and stole your pickup truck with the gun rack in the bargain.

Now of course, this is an interesting story, as far as I am concerned.

I am a huge whiskey fan myself, and it was interesting to hear the flights of poetic fancy involved in describing the delights of Ardbeg, which I would not and do not take money to endorse, but will tell you freely and of my own volition that I have consumed with pleasure.

And I am always complaining, just ask my wife, of the difficulties I have in getting a good Islay single-malt or two — I know some good off-brand cheap ones that really do the trick for me, even — into the country for my estimable father-in-law, the Latin American poet-lawyer.

On the other hand, a nice Romeo y Julieta or Dona Flor Corona with a shot of Sagitiba Envelhecida — for export only, but you can still get it domestically, though a jeitinho — or Nega Fulô is nothing to be sneezed at, either.

Sometimes one is required to make lemonade with the lemons life hands one.

But for crying out loud: This was one of the most baldfaced examples of advertorializing I have seen in a long while.

Why am I paying NET Virtua — the Marinho family and Carlos Slim, et al. — top dollar for the privilege of being advertised to without proper disclosure?

Our NET “double play” subscription — Internet that regularly fails to live up to its SLA + the most basic of basic cable — costs 50% of a minimum salary here in Sâo Paulo.

In New York, our Cablevision “triple play” — NET, basic cable + a few premium channels, with PPVs, and VoIP — usually runs about 12% of a minimum wage monthly income.

And to get Cablevision rather than Time-Warner, please note, we had to be lucky enough to move into a Cablevision fiefdom.

This is really, really dishonest, even by the standards of the Fox NEWS-Intel “fake news” Act of Journalistic Scumbaggery of the Year Runner-Up — which Richard Rocha of TV Azteca (Mexico) wins, hands down.

On Brazil, Reuters Is Dead Wrong — Again

The only risk-management newsflow arbitrage box you will ever need — as long as you consistently bet against it when it comes to Brazil.

Another item from the NMM(-TV)SNBC memory banks to check off the list: Reuters: “Lula Is Soft on Crime” « NMM Business Continuity (November 2nd, 2006).

Back in November, I was reading a report from Reuters — proprietors of the Kondor global risk management content pipeline and newsflow arbitrage console — and noted the following bit of “news analysis” that, once again, shows how incredibly bad the local Reuters correspondents here are at providing a realistic and objective assessment of the political risk scenario.

Lula insists that crime will only decline sharply when faster economic growth narrows gaping social inequalities. His 26-page policy platform contained only three paragraphs explaining how he would fight crime. A spokeswoman for the national public security secretary said: “Lula will strengthen existing policies, but not create any new ones.”

Is it just me, or does that enthymeme imply that there has been complete inaction on the public security front here in Brazil?

Those “preexisting polices,” one might have gone on to explain — and I am hastily counting up the number of pages of readily downloadable e-government PDFs on this subject I have already read; it is already getting into the hundreds, and I have not even got beyond the executive summary PowerPoint yet — being the sweeping reforms of the integrated national public security plan (SUSP) that Lula I has been working on since the day it got into office.

Including starting up the office of the public security czar in the Ministry of Justice, unless I am not mistaken.

The kind of thing that the political enemies of Zé Dirceu, the first — and, it must be said, failed, according to the list of stuff he was hired to get done — superminister of the Casa Civil, have been fighting tooth and nail ever since.

Beware of Geeks Bearing Grifts From Greece

Athens 2006: Grifters, grafters, geeks and Greeks

Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon — Lord Byron

Item: Atenas 2006: Relatório de Viagem (Brazil, Ministry of Culture)

When I get a chance, I need to really zoom in the question of who is who and what is what in the area of Internet governance in Brazil at the moment.

This is a needful task because people like Murilo, whom we — readers of (Hearing) Global Voices Online, of the Berkman Center for the Intel-Inside Society, and Brazlian taxpayers alike, apparently; and how does that work, anyway? — ostensibly are to rely on for solid information on this score, do not seem very reliable, given their deep structural conflicts of interest.

Oh, and also the fact that “citizen journalist Roberto Marinho” Murilo recently flunked a fundamental NMM fact-check. Badly.

Never trust a grinning Brazilian legacy admission who says “Just trust me.”

Or a grinning anybody who says it, for that matter.

Especially if they are in the habit of inducing deep states of psychosis in themselves.

I would say that the Orkut and the YouTube cases should give you a solid clue that Brazil, under the various chefs that have a hand in stirring the stew, is moving very politely but firmly in a direction that it believes will best defend its “public intellectual property” (patrimônio) and it right to autonomous governance of its own information sphere, so to speak.

And it is not alone in taking this position.

Meanwhile, your Internet and trade policies, my American friends and compatriots, are being negotiated by Moonies.

I am telling you: the defenders of your interests abroad are way outclassed here. Time to pull the starter and send in the reliever.

Which I guess, in a way, Hank Paulson kind of is at Treasury.

On a more general level, I think there is an awareness that both India and Brazil — and France, too, for example, and many others — are generating significant momentum in this direction; that they have good, sound reasons for doing so (let’s face it, the emperor has no clothes), with good political will behind their rationale; and that the thing for foreign corporations who want a piece of the action in these markets to do now is sit down and deal straight.

Hard as you like, because Brazilians love to horse-trade.

(It sounds like a stereotype, I know, but if it is, it is one that a lot of Brazilians I know really do seem to promote with pride.)

But straight. From the top of the deck.

This is no longer the Barbary Coast of the Roaring Nineties.

See, to take some randomly annotated examples, Stateless Memes and the IBM exec who declared “the death of the multinational.”

Because when IBM corporate communications stops gushing endlessly about the future of this and the future of that, reality-based rhetorical radar operators sit up and take notice.

Some notes, in that light, on Murilo of the MiniC’s report from Athens:

Snap Translation Fsad Report: Algeria

I started watching this YouTube video from an Al-Jazeera television report on corruption in Algeria, the realized (1) that the report was in Arabic, and (2) I still basically understand what is being said.

This may have more to do with the crisp, precise fusha being spoken here than anything else — the Arabic equivalent of that standard BBC English that did such an enormous service for this crazy Anglo-Norman jabber of ours over the years.

No accident that the Al-Jazz band, many of them, are BBC alums.

Still, that I can still follow a fusha newscast — if not order pizza or cuss out of a bad driver in Al-Iskandariyya or Marrakesh– is encouraging. I spent 6 years learning Arabic but have felt it slipping away lately.

I will gist-translate for you. In the meantime, will somebody ship me my Hans Wehr from Brooklyn?

They Kill Nerds, Too: Notes from the ISOSA Watch

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.

NMM-TV Newsreel Vol. 2, No. 2a: Draft

Item: NMM-TV Newsreel: A Draft of Mexican History (2006) (Archives.org).

I am learning Cinelerra, but I am having a hard time getting the ripping and subtitling workflow down cold.

A self-taught amateur often has a klutz, or worse, for a teacher.

In the meantime, while I try rendering the thing into a functioning MPEG file that will play nice with the Gaupol subtitling gizmo, I thought I would post the un-subtitled draft and translate the narration on the blog.

Archive.org and Wikipedia are the only hosts for Ogg Theora video I know of. It’s an open source codec, as you know. You can download it while I figure out how to get it ripped into a format acceptable by YouTube-Google.

In this edition: First installment of an excellent documentary from Mexico’s canal seis de julio on democratic governance from Salinas to Calderón, in honor of the 2006 elections being declared “transparent” by the EU elections observer.

Mapacheria: still from the canal seis de julio production.

Spanish Christian Democrat to Rule Mexican Elections Kosher

IFE’s Ugalde: Gordillo’s boy.

Entregará misión de UE informe final sobre elección en México: El Universal reports that the EU election observers will deliver their final report on the July 6 Mexican elections tomorrow.

I will be looking to download that from the EU in English, French, German, Galego or Walloon.

The Mexico city daily makes no mention, however, of the ruckus in the European Parliament over the alleged partiality of the head of mission, an Aznar political ally from Spain, or of the sharp divergences from its preliminary judgment — “transparent and competitive” are the two key adjectives Salafranca plans to deliver, reports El Universal — by independent observers.

And none of that even takes into account the ChoicePoint affair.

El jefe de la misión de observación electoral de la Unión Europea, José Ignacio Salafranca, entregará el jueves al presidente del IFE, Luis Carlos Ugalde, el informe final sobre las elecciones del 2 de julio en México.

AMD ‘Computer’ Is Out of the PICture

AMD’s marmita: I have never seen one for sale. You?

Filed by IDG today under the somewhat hysterical eyebrow “digital exclusion”: AMD oficializa fim da produção de computador de baixo custo (‘AMD officially announces it will stop producing low-cost computer,’ the PIC).

It’s much the same story as the MIT $100 laptop after its stinging rejection by the Indian government, which seems to prefer developing low-cost computers in its own tech sector.

Brazil seems poised to make the same decision, despite last-minute lobbying, is the impression I have, with a plan for a US$300 machine using Taiwanese semiconductors in the legislative pipeline. The idea is to align the growth of the local IT industry with production for the internal market.

Brazil, which exports a lot of the key raw materials for semiconductors — rare earths, especially — hankers for its own chip fab capacity.
It seems a bit generous to call the PIC a “computer,” by the way. It is a device for consuming the Web — at dial-up speed — but not for producing it, as Club do Hardware noted last year:

Não espere fazer outra coisa com ele a não ser escrever textos, surfar a web e trocar e-mails. Jogos nem pensar. Ele tem tudo “on-board” como portas USB, vídeo, áudio e modem, mas curiosamente o protótipo demonstrado não tinha uma porta de rede, impedindo o uso do PIC diretamente em conexões banda larga, necessitando que o usuário compre uma placa de rede USB.

Civita is Civil with the Casa Civil

Mino Carta, gadfly of the Brazilian mass media, advises:

Engana-se quem aponta a edição de livros didáticos como o centro das pendências da Abril com o governo federal. Roberto Civita, boss da editora, mira em negócio muito mais fabuloso, a internet sem fio. Especialistas falam em centenas de milhões de reais. Outros, em bilhão.

If you think that textbooks are the focus of the Editora Abril’s pending business with the federal government, you’re wrong. Roberto Civita, the boss of the place, has in eye on a much more fabulous business: Wireless Internet. Some specialists talk about hundreds of millions. Others of billions.

Ao enredo: Civita tem tido conflitos recorrentes com os capatazes da revista Veja. Há alguns meses pede moderação em relação ao governo Lula. Reportagens contra o PT e a administração federal teriam sido engavetadas. Nos corredores da empresa, o boss arriscou-se a afirmar que contrataria Dilma Rousseff, ministra da Casa Civil, para administrar a Abril.

To our story: Civita has repeatedly clashed with his henchman at Veja magazine. Several months ago he asked for moderation in relation to the Lula government. Reports harmful to the PT and the federal administration were to be set aside. In the hallways of Abril, he even ventured to say that he would hire Dilma Rousseff, minister of the Casa Civil, to run Abril.

Tropical E-Proxy Coming To Sampa

Top story on the Gazeta Mercantil today: “The Internet can be used to allow foreign investors to participate in shareholder votes electronically.”

Imagine.

São Paulo, 27 de Outubro de 2006 – Internet pode ser usada para permitir que acionista externo participe de decisões com voto eletrônico. A crescente participação dos investidores estrangeiros nas ofertas públicas de ações nos últimos três anos tem sido fundamental para o desenvolvimento do mercado de capitais brasileiro. …

See, now here’s a true, blue, on-topic NMM story. The governance and technical parameters of electronic proxy voting are just the kind of thing that lights my fire, you know.

‘Beware Political Stocks’

Bangkok Post: “Beware political stocks” in the wake of the military coup.

Thai stocks closed down 1.42% yesterday, with bargain hunting by foreign investors helping to curb early losses as investor worries over the coup eased. The Stock Exchange of Thailand index fell nearly 30 points, or 4%, right at its opening to 673. Turnover was the heaviest in five months at 43 billion baht, with losers well outpacing winners at 345 to 53, and 56 stocks closing unchanged. The large-cap SET50 index closed down 0.95% at 487.04, while the MAI index dropped 1.91% to 159.96 points.

The Shin Group is the family firm that caused some to call the deposed leader “the Asian Berlusconi.”

Politically related stocks, including companies in the Shin Group and stocks held by the Shinawatra, Wongsawat and Jungrungreangkit families, were all big losers.

The KQED Forum on the coup was very informative, by the way. The deposed leader’s support for Bush, and opening of the telcom market to foreign influence, seem to have played a role here. And the leader of the coup is a Malay Muslim, we’re told — and why that matters.

The Thai coup is being cited as another factor in the nosedive of the BOVESPA as well. I need to understand why that might be.

Grassroots Hedgehopper

An interesting human capital item from the Lobby World column at TheHill.com:

Robert Tappan, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, has taken over the Washington office of Burson-Marsteller, as well as the firm’s affiliated grassroots shop, Direct Impact.

Спасибо большое и всего хорошего!

Putin of the KGB as Peter Weller in Robocop

Machine translation of the Russian peroration from a speech by SEC chair Chris Cox to The Other Russia Conference, a sideshow to this week’s G-8 summit festivities:

Thanks big and all good!

Two Basic Books

Click to zoom

Over on the NMM content warehouse and nutrition loading dock — my credenza-coffee table hybrid — I’ve been trying to sort the stacks into the bare essentials.

It’s something I do from time to time when I find my brain getting bogged down and I remember my high school football coach’s lectures about “returning to the fundamentals — a euphemism for extra bear crawls and live tackling drills in the rain.

My personal sorting algorithm has now identified the two slim volumes pictured above as the top emergent must-rereads, bearing as they do on the fundamental question on my mind these days about the governance of business ecosystems — the dominant management meme of the New Gilded Age.

Mexican Data Visualization Eldorado!

Sample visualization from the UNAM study. Click to zoom.

Pesquisa Google de blogs: Spanglish commentary on a mind-numbingly thorough academic study of PREP results from Mexico’s election commission, the IFE, by a professor at UNAM — the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

I swore I was going to leave this story alone until the fat lady has sung, but this really is quite a thorough piece of work; translated into English, it would make a classic case study for college stat courses …